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Show Page 227 fast as possible, while many of the less faithful jeered them - "San Bernardino is full of apostates and wicked men," the apostles reported, for they were fleeced, in the panic, of the largest part of their money to get a span of mules for crossing the desert. In addition, the settlement rang with the news of martial law in Utah and rumors that Gentiles had already been slaughtered in the iron-mining country near Cedar City. The two apostles faced the freezing Mojave with aplomb, for the road was crowded with Saints who, for all they knew, were heading into an apocalyptic massacre. Over the Cajon Pass and into Las Vegas, they found this settlement of the Saints virtually deserted; thence to the Colorado and Rio Virgen, they reached Cedar City not long after the first day of the year 1858. Here they undoubtedly heard the local version of the slaughter of the "Mericats," a group of Arkansas emigrants, at nearby "Mountain Meadows" - at that time, the incident seemed only a minor aspect of the crisis which had the entire West in uproar. Orson may even have passed, between Santa Clara and Cedar, over the mass grave of the murdered emigrants who would continue to haunt Mormon legends forever after. Orson staggered into Salt Lake City in mid-January, after a three months' journey from England through two oceans and the forbidding deserts of the Southwest. After he had rested for a day, the apostle George A. Smith, a heavy-jowled man with a voice husky from consumption, called on him to explain the latest developments in the crisis. The authorities had already parleyed with an army representative, buying enough time to prepare for the occupation sure to come in the spring. From the first, Brigham Young's policy had been to treat the federal troops as invaders; the Latter-day Saints had had enough of such treatment and would burn their own cities rather than be driven out of them. To this foreboding report, Elder Smith also related to Orson once again the incidents of his brother's death. |