Twelve Mormon Homes : Twelve Mormon homes visited in succession on a journey through Utah to Arizona.

Twelve Mormon Homes, page 028

English people. He had prospered so well in Utah, however, that the family had now made overtures of reconciliation, and a bachelor "Uncle Lillivick" was coming to make Nephi a visit. The Steerforths were among the first Mormons who came out to Utah. Only a select band of one hundred and forty-three men, headed by Brigham Young in person, had preceded them. These pioneers had planted posts along their route with rough boxes nailed to them, containing information regarding the distances to wood, water, and grass; and these guide-posts were slowly tracked out and followed by the long train of ox-wagons, freighted with the exiles from Nauvoo, women, children, and invalids. There were a few men who drove and acted as guards, but the teamsters were principally women and young boys. Our government had invited the Mormons, as a test of their loyalty, Mrs. Mary said, to furnish volunteers for the war then going on with Mexico. The Mormons raised a battalion, five hundred strong, containing most of the young men who should have escorted the helpless ones; and they were gone twenty months, reaching Salt Lake Valley, she told me, from the then almost unknown California.20 Some found that their wives and 201t is most interesting to trace the history of the calling of the Mormon Battalion. It has been generally portrayed (even in a fourth grade textbook as late as the 1960s) as a further act of persecution by a hostile government against a much per- secuted and maligned "chosen people." In fact the call of troops to aid the United States in the war against Mexico was the direct result of a petition to President Polk by the Mormon leaders in which Jesse C. Little sought the assistance of Thomas L. Kane and his father, a judge, who had political connections in Wash- ington. The Mormons wanted to enlist one to two thousand men or more in order to draw their pay and ingratiate themselves with the government in Washington. But somehow the legend of a vindictive government oppressing a religious people has become part of the tradition of Utah that is difficult to correct. A recent text- 28