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Show Page 73 46 New York City the year before. The crisis was not without its casualties; Orson Pratt's eight-month-old daughter Lydia wasted and died on August 18. Her father had preached that morning upon "the order and plan of creation," but in the afternoon and evening, the suffering father and the twenty-two-year-old mother stood vigil as the baby expired. The frail life of this infant girl encompassed and embodied the bleakest era of the Mormon people, and with her death the epidemic ebbed - the Church of the Latter-day Saints had been brought to its nadir in the sufferings of the Pratts multiplied by thousands. From here, Orson looked to England. The mission field was his natural habitat, and he longed to be going. Leaving his wife and little Orson in the charge of the Prophet Joseph Smith, he and Parley, along with Elder Hiram Clark, began the long overland journey to Detroit, where they would engage a boat to New York City. As they traveled over the early September prairies of Illinois, they rejoiced to be once again on the Lord's errand and free from the depredations of "the land of Middoni." |