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Show Page 37 to travel together into the "eastern countries," with the assurance that 21 the Lord would be "with them also, even unto the end." With the exception of a few weeks in Kirtland on business, Orson spent the period from February 1832 until April 1834 proselyting in the villages of New England and the cities of New York state. Penniless and with one change of clothing, Pratt and Johnson walked from Ohio through Pennsylvania, up the Lackawanna Valley, where they baptized four, through New Jersey, New York City, and finally to Long Island. Here Pratt found his brother and quondam companion, Anson, baptized and confirmed him near the end of March, and then made a stopover at Canaan to visit his parents. But the little mountain states of Vermont and New Hampshire became Orson's principal burden on the two-year ordeal, his first extended mission. This part of New England was changing brutally in the 1830s. The settlers faced ecological disaster, the result of over-harvesting and de-foresting; a cholera epidemic in 1832 only added to the misery as many Vermonters and New Hampshiremen filtered westward by the new watery roadways. Moreover, New Englanders found in President Jackson a bitter enemy - their feeling of disenfranchisement resulted from what seemed to them a policy of deliberate sectional neglect. In consequence, Mormons and other evangelical groups brought to New England the promise of "salvation from the social and personal dilemmas of disunity" of the 1830s. Pratt and Johnson spent the spring and summer of 1832 in the Connecticut River valley dividing the two states. They found particularly fruitful the county of Grafton, New Hampshire, baptizing fifteen within a month's time, among them a later apostle of Mormonism, Amasa Mason Lyman. Crossing the river, the two elders made Charleston, Vermont, their base for a few days in May, where Orson was confronted with a test of his belief in |