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Show Page 238 CHAPTER X CITIES OF THE EAST "If the bishops wish to do their duty, let them raise means enough to help the poor Saints who are going away. Orson Pratt and Erastus Snow are poor..." Brigham Young announced on a September morning in I860.1 Two weeks later, these two apostles cleared the Parley's Canyon on a fateful mission; they were to evacuate all the emigrants in the East, for it appeared that the hour of judgment would come down hard upon the impending presidential election. Armed and ready not just for snow and Indians, but also for the bloody rebellion that could explode any time, they achieved Florence, Nebraska, the same day the voters chose Abraham Lincoln to preside in defiance of Southern threats to secede from the Union. The two apostles passed Election Day poking through weeds in the old Winter Quarters Cemetery, "yearning to see any trace of our 2 little departed ones there laid away," but the winds of the Missouri had beaten the epitaphs into blank boards. Picking up new rail connections, the apostles could now by-pass the fever swamps of the Mississippi and steam directly east by Chicago to New York. The great city they found in financial panic over the secession crisis; martial talk was turning to reality as armies marched the streets of Boston and Philadelphia, and Orson wrote horn, "For the great American republic, her death-struggles have come, and they will be long and terrible." No surprise to Orson, the outbreak of civil war seemed a matter of course, a natural consequence of America's abuse of the Latter-day Saints. Moreover, Orson himself had published in The Seer six years before Joseph Smith's prophecy that "the^puthern States shall be divided against the Northern |