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Show Page 160 member of the advance camp of Israel re-asserted his chosen position in the sight of God. Hundred-degree heat and whirlwinds visited the camp, as did mortality - while the camp palavered with some Indians one afternoon, a three-year-old boy, Milton Thirlkill, tumbled into city creek dam and drowned at the bottom. The first death in the promised land palled the Saints, and Orson delivered "a beautiful and affecting prayer" at the grave. Though he could not have known it, he too had lost a little boy. At Winter Quarters, eighteen-month-old Vanson succumbed on July 28 to the blackleg disease, after having scrapped his way across the muddy Iowa 2 wilderness with his mother. At length Orson's work of measurement was completed - the city was staked out in the desert. Wheat and corn were showing faint green heads. It was time to go back the way they had come and guide the Latter-day Saints into their promised land. As it is common the mountains for summer to end abruptly - August 30 was gloomy and cold as Orson and a hundred sixty others bade farewell to the few who remained - they traveled considerably faster on the return route. Tottering along in the nineteenth wagon, Orson spent his time calculating and jotting, double-checking the observations he had made for the guide Clayton planned to publish for the use of emigrants. He celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday on the South Pass, after having preached to the camp at Pacific Springs. While still several hundred miles from Winter Quarters, the returning pioneers glimpsed a vast assemblage of wagons, nearly six hundred of them, toiling up the Platte. This proved to be the beginning of the deluge - Parley P. Pratt and John Taylor were heading up thousands toward the valley. There was a good deal of celebration, though Parley found himself shrinking beneath Brigham's scolding - the camp seemed too disorganized to him. This advice came from one who had seen the trail, and who recognized as fatal |