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Show Page 280 Latter-day Saints knew nothing of those days but what they heard in the stories of old men, and he proposed to Taylor a new project: to reconstruct the past, to take affidavits, and to evalute the remains of Mormonism's bloody trail, withal to record that story before the witnesses disappeared forever. Taylor approved, and assigned the young Apostle Joseph F. Smith to accompany him - an appropriate choice, for Smith, the nephew of the Prophet, had been born on the run forty years before during the Missouri drivings. Together they planned an itinerary intersecting the pathways of Mormon exile; from thence, Orson would go to Britain on a final mission to complete the unfinished publication of the scriptures. In reverent preparation for this pilgrimage, he 31 renounced tea and coffee for the duration of the journey. On September 6, 1878, Orson Pratt descended at the railway station in Kansas City, not far from the spot where, decades before, he and Parley had starved together in a cabin on the frontier of Zion. Orson looked about him. The revelations still stood, annotated and foot-noted, and this was still to be the New Jerusalem, the site of Christ's millennial capital. But Kansas City and its suburb, Independence, buzzed with stockyards and the grimy steam of locomotives; the Missouri festered, a great slough from the sewage and drought that afflicted the city, and the arbored wilderness of five decades before had given way to tiny ramshackle plots and gardens in every direction. The two apostles strolled over to the site of the millennial temple; once a beautiful grove, there was now not even a stump in sight among the little dwellings which sat insouciantly on the very spot where Christ's earthly kingdom would one day be promulgated. On inquiry, Orson learned the land belonged by tax deed to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a schismatic group under the |
