Tithes were brought
to him personally, and he rendered no accounting. He gave the strong men
of his hierarchy power and opportunity, played them against each other
to keep his own lead, and made holy any of their misdeeds which were not
directed against himself.
The early months of 1846 witnessed a third Mormon exodus. Driven out of
Illinois, these Latter-day Saints crossed the Mississippi in organized
bands, with Council Bluffs as their first objective. Through the winter
and spring some fifteen thousand Mormons with three thousand wagons
found their way from camp to camp, through snow, ice, and mud, over the
weary stretch of four hundred miles to the banks of the Missouri. The
epic of this westward migration is almost biblical. Hardship brought out
the heroic in many characters. Like true American pioneers, they adapted
themselves to circumstances with fortitude and skill. Linn says: "When a
halt occurred, a shoemaker might be seen looking for a stone to serve as
a lap-stone in his repair work, or a gunsmith mending a rifle, or a
weaver at a wheel or loom. The women learned that the jolting wagons
would churn their milk, and when a halt occurred it took them but a
short time to heat an oven hollowed out of the hillside, in which to
bake the bread already raised.
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