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Show Page 226 to march on the Mormon settlements. James Buchanan, the new president, had been rather shamefully misinformed that the Mormon people were being kept in bondage, that enforced prostitution was rampant in Utah, and that Brigham Young had established an obscene dictatorship in his mountain fortress. Most of these presentations came from the hazy mind of one W. W. Drummond, a Gentile official who had suffered Mormon coolness for two years. Buchanan responded by appointing a new governor accompanied by an infantry division. Orson tried to wind up all pending business as soon as possible, but there were delays to be expected in closing up such a detailed operation as the L.D.S. emigration office and the printing and missionary efforts. On October 14, he bade farewell to the British Saints, locked the Islington Street office, and departed aboard the "Baltic" in the company of Ezra T. Benson. With the overland route closed for the winter and occupied by the soldiers of General Albert Sidney Johnston, the two apostles had shipped for the seven-week voyage to California. Eleven days out of New York, Orson found himself in the tropics for the first time in his life. Catching the rail head on the northern coast of the isthmus, the apostles chugged the fifty miles south to Panama and the Pacific Coast. This was "Darien," the "narrow neck of land," and Orson found even the thinnest clothing stifling in the unbearable heat of equatorial America. This side of the world was Latin and defiantly torpid. "Sonora," the Mexican steamer that dragged its interminable way along the shore for two weeks, finally deposited Orson and Benson at San Francisco - thence with all haste southward to San Bernardino and the only passable access into the Great Basin at that season of the year. The little town on the Santa Ana was a Mormon outpost and it shook with the tremors of war when Orson arrived. He found the Saints, under orders, selling out as |
