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Show Page 240 Two towns, St. George and Grafton, were laid out in a morass of red mud and gravel. While the cotton planting proceeded, it became clear that Pratt and Snow were not to make a viable partnership - Erastus was the practical spirit, Orson more interested in the inspirational needs of the people, and the result was a private warfare. Orson may also have suspected that his brother apostle was under orders to keep him out of the way and out of trouble, for the friction, usually carefully hidden, ran high. When a theft was reported in St. George, Orson offered a curse on the thief and a cow as a reward to his discoverer, but Snow ridiculed the 8 curse and the reward to Orson's face. While Snow built the cities, Orson made his melancholy circuit of the settlements, plotting and surveying, 9 living in a tent near Grafton for over a year. Orson Junior, who had moved south when his father did, observed all this with some bitterness. Utah's "Dixie" returned Orson to a new state constituent assembly in December 1862, providing him with an escape from the hardscrabble existence of the desert. Once in Salt Lake, Orson was elected speaker of the assembly - he had only to hear Governor Stephen Harding's insulting speeches a few times before personally signing a House resolution to 10 Lincoln requesting Harding's removal. Lincoln, otherwise occupied, complied without any trouble. The President was less tractable when it came to sponsoring Utah's statehood, and the new constituent assembly remained only a "shadow" state government for many sessions to come. While presiding "with much ability"11 over the legislature, Orson strained his aging frame to scratch some spring vegetables out of the soil of his Salt Lake garden - on a false April morning with the apricots and peaches in bloom, he threw off his flannels to sweat over the earth a few hours. The over-exertion and briskness of the air told his weakened condition, and he fell "very sick indeed."12 Wilford Woodruff and others |