| OCR Text |
Show Page 282 met them in barrooms and restaurants, always with others present; finally, he assented to talk to them in their hotel room. A shrewd man who had been plagued with attacks and misrepresentations all his life, Whitmer had learned not to discuss his "Witness" experiences without witnesses of his own, and so he brought with him a journalist acquaintance from Chicago and several other friends. Despite this, Orson launched into his questions, whitmer did not know the date of the restoration of the Melchizedek Priesthood, but remembered seeing the Golden Plates, the Brass Plates, the Sword of Laban, and many other "Nephite" relics on a table. "I saw them plain as I see this bed," he intoned, striking the bed with his hand, "and I heard the voice of the Lord as distinctly as anything I have ever heard in this life." Whitmer also regaled them with the story that a "Nephite" had plowed his land one night so that he might be free to help Joseph - the "Nephite" had been a heavy man wearing brown woolens, with hair and beard white "like Brother Pratt's." Traveling north, Orson took Joseph F. Smith to the place of his birth at Far West. The apostles were shocked to find the once-flourishing town a ghostly litter of bleached foundations overgrown with hay. One house still stood nearby, and, upon inspection, turned out to be the farm of a Whitmer nephew - this worthy turned them and their questions away abruptly and made it clear that he wanted them off the land. Elder Smith supported his aged companion back to the road - they surveyed once again the temple lot where Orson had met his brethren one night forty years before to fulfill the word of the Lord. From here the great foreign missions had begun, and a hundred thousand souls been claimed, for the Restoration. A ferry debarked the two Mormons at Quincy, Illinois, a day or so later, where Orson reminisced over the bloody scenes of exile in 1839. By train |
