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Show 76 is impossible to introduce a large army into this Territory. They cannot bring sufficient food to last them more than one year, and if the grass is destroyed, how will the cattle subsist? We will also destroy all the timber, and everything suitable for fuel, and when they come to the mountains and canons for something to cook their scanty meals with, they will find Mormon mountaineers there, and perhaps a thousand and one red men to pick them off on the right hand and on the left. The Mormons were successful in slowing down the advance of the army to some degree. Running off the government cattle and burning the supply trains made some rations a bit scanty. Because of these raids, coupled with an early winter and a late start from Leavenworth, the federal troops went into winter quarters on Black's Fork near the burned-out ruins of Fort Bridger which the Mormons had burned to keep from falling into their hands. An early storm caused 3,000 head of army cattle to perish in mid-October with others dieing every day. And by November temperatures on the high plains were dipping below zero, Charles A. Scott, a U.S. soldier, wrote in his diary that the thermometer dropped to sixteen below on the night of of November 7.^2| The expeditionary force received a morale boost about this time when Colonel (later General) Albert Sidney Johnston arrived on the scene with additional troops to take command of the army. But the going was to get worse before it got better, and through the hard times the soldiers' hate and bitterness toward the Mormons multiplied. Scott wrote in his diary on January 1: "Rather tough times now, not enough to eat and blest with a ravenous appetite. Intensely cold weather. Sentinels have to be relieved every hour to keep from being frost bitten, as it is, when they come off post, they look like venerable patriarchs, their breath being froze in their beards, eyebrows and even eyelashes."^3 The New York Herald of July 2, 1858 reported: "If there is one thing that would please this little |