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Show 70 church officials were sent throughout the Territory to organize the resistance and stir up the brethren to vigilance. Apostle George Albert Smith was dispatched to southern Utah in August. His presence was hardly necessary, as when he arrived in Parowan on the 6th, he found the Iron Battalion on alert and drilling on the town square. "They were willing any moment to touch fire to their homes, and hide themselves in the mountains, and to defend their country to the very last extremity," claimed the Apostle.28 The news of the invasion had only preceded Smith's arrival by four days. Smith found the Saints in Cedar City similarly vigilant, the troops being on parade there too. On Sunday Smith addressed the people. It seems that the ,six foot six inch, three hundred pound Apostle became caught up in the spirit of the occasion. "In spite of all I could do," affirmed Smith, "I found myself preaching a military discourse," and "whenever I got up to preach, I was full, and it seemed as if I could not stop. "29 Such was the enthusiasm in the South. Apostle Smith, however, was bothered by a spirit of vengeance he found among some of the brethren in the southern settlements for the cruelties inflicted upon them in the States. This caused considerable concern to Smith. He returned to Salt Lake City and made a report of his visit to southern Utah in the Bowery on September 13. Unbeknown to Apostle Smith, however, was that just two days before, the people he had just left in Iron County had committed one of the most lamentable trajedies In Utah history. In the unusually fervent war hysteria in the South, the Iron County troops and a band of Paiutes massacred a company of 120 Arkansas immigrants camped at the Mountain Meadows forty miles west of Cedar City. To the participants ,in this calamity, it was only the opening round of the general conflagration that they perceived to be descending upon them. It is ironic that the first blood of the Utah War was shed on a lonely meadow more than four hundred miles from the | anticipated scene of conflict |