"It is on the site of an ancient Indian pueblo, some 15 miles east of the Rio dei Norte, at the base of a snow-clad mountain, and contains a little over 8000 souls.

L

wealth they possessed that was not iron, they had never even thought of giving up the instruments of this favorite band; and when the battalion was enlisted, though high inducements were offered some of the performers to accompany it, they all refused. Their fortunes. went with the Camp of the Tabernacle. They had led the farewell service in the Nauvoo Temple. Their office now was to guide the monster choruses and Sunday hymns; and like the trumpets of silver, made of a whole piece for the calling of the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps,' to knoll the people into church. Some of their wind instruments indeed were uncommonly full and pure toned, and in that clear dry air could be heard to a great distance. It had the strangest effect in the world to listen to their sweet music winding over the uninhabited country; something in the style of a Moravian death-tune blown at daybreak, but altogether unique. It might be when you were hunting a ford over the Great Platte, the dreariest of all wild rivers, perplexed among the far-reaching sandbars and curlew shallows of its shifting bed, the wind rising would bring you the first faint thought of a melody; and, as you listened, borne down upon the gust that swept past you a cloud of the dry sifted sand, you recognized itperhaps a home-loved theme of Henry Proch or Mendelssohn Bartholdy, away there in the Indian Marches!"

The summer camps of the Mormons formed an interesting spectacle. They were gay with bright white canvas, and alive with the busy stir of swarming occupants. In the clear blue morning air, the smoke streamed up from more than a thousand cooking fires. Countless roads and by-paths checkered all manner of geometric figures on the hill sides. On the slopes, herd-boys were seen lazily watching immense herds of cattle, sheep, horses, cows and oxen. Along the creeks-where they were sometimes pitched -women, in great force, would be washing and rinsing all manner of white muslins, red flannels, and parti-colored calicoes, and covering acres of grass-plat with their variously-hued garments. Groups of merry children were playing among the tents.

"The romantic devotional observance of the Mormons, and their admirable concert of purpose and action, met the eye at once. After these, the stranger was most struck perhaps by the strict order of march, the unconfused closing up to meet attack, the skillful securing of the cattle upon the halt, the system with which the watches were set at night to guard them and the lines of corral, with other similar circumstances indicative of the maintenance of a high state of discipline. Every ten of their wagons was under the care of a captain. This captain of ten, as they termed him, obeyed a captain of fifty, who, in turn, obeyed his captain of a hundred, or directly a member of what they call the High Council of the Church. All these were responsible and determined men, approved of by the people for their courage, discretion and experience. So well recognized were the results of this organization, that bands of hostile Indians have passed by

comparatively small parties of Mormons to attack much larger but less compact bodies of other emigrants.

"The most striking feature, however, of the Mormon emigration was undoubtedly their formation of the Tabernacle Camps and temporary stakes or settlements, which renewed in the sleeping solitudes everywhere along their road the cheering signs of intelligent and hopeful life.

"I will make this remark plainer by describing to you one of these camps, with the daily routine of its inhabitants. I select at random for my purpose a large camp upon the delta between the Nebraska and Missouri, in the territory disputed between the Omaha and Otto and Missouri Indians. It remained pitched here. for nearly two months, during which period I resided in it. It was situated near the Petit Papillon, or Little Butterfly River, and upon some finely rounded hills that encircle a favorite cool spring. On each of these a square was marked out; and the wagons, as they arrived, took their positions along its four sides in double rows, so as to leave a roomy street or passageway between them. The tents were disposed also in rows, at intervals between the wagons. The cattle were folded in high-fenced yards outside. The quadrangle inside was left vacant for the sake of ventilation, and the streets, covered in with leafy arbor-work, and kept scrupulously clean, formed a shaded cloister walk. This was the place of exercise for slowly recovering invalids, the day-home of the infants, and the evening promenade of all.

"From the first formation of the camp, all its inhabitants were constantly and laboriously occupied. Many of them were highly educated mechanics, and seemed only to need a day's anticipated rest to engage them at the forge, loom, or turning lathe, upon some needed chore of work. A Mormon gunsmith is the inventor of the excellent repeating rifle that loads by slides instead of cylinders; and one of the neatest finished fire-arms I have ever seen was of this kind, wrought from scraps of old iron, and inlaid with the silver of a couple of half dollars, under a hot July sun, in a spot where the average height of the grass was above the workman's shoulders. I have seen a cobbler, after the halt of his party on the march, hunting along the river bank for a lapstone in the twilight, that he might finish a famous boot-sole by the camp-fire; and I have had a piece of cloth, the wool of which was sheared, and dyed, and spun, and woven during a progress of over three hundred miles.

"Their more interesting occupations, however, were those growing out of their peculiar circumstances and position. The chiefs were seldom without some curious affair on hand to settle with the restless Indians; while the immense labor and responsibility of the conduct of their unwieldy moving army, and the commissariat of its hundreds of famishing poor, also devolved upon them. They had good men they called bishops, whose special office it was to

look up the cases of extremest suffering; and their relief parties were out night and day to scour over every trail.

"At this time, say two months before the final expulsion from Nauvoo, there were already, along three hundred miles of the road between that city and our Papillon Camp, over two thousand emigrating wagons, beside a large number of nondescript turn-outs, the motley make-shifts of poverty; from the unsuitably heavy cart that lumbered along mysteriously, with its sick driver hidden under its counterpane cover, to the crazy two-wheeled trundle, such as our poor employ for the conveyance of their slop barrelsthis pulled along it may be by a little dry drugged heifer, and rigged up only to drag some such light weight as a baby, a sack of meal, or a pack of clothes and bedding.

"Some of them were in distress of losses upon the way. A strong trait of the Mormons was their kindness to their brute dependents, and particularly to their beasts of draught. They gave them the holiday of the Sabbath whenever it came round; I believe they would have washed them with old wine, after the example of the emigrant Carthaginians, had they had any. Still, in the slave-coast heats, under which the animals had to move, they sometimes foundered. Sometimes too they strayed off in the night, or were mired in morasses, or oftener were stolen by Indians, who found market covert for such plunder among the horse-thief whites of the frontier. But the great mass of these pilgrims of the desert was made up of poor folks, who had fled in destitution from Nauvoo, and been refused a resting-place by the people of Iowa. It is difficult fully to understand the state of helplessness in which some of these would arrive, after accomplishing a journey of such extent, under circumstances of so much privation and peril. The fact was they seemed to believe that all their trouble would be at an end if they could only come up with their comrade at the Great Camps. For this they calculated their resources, among which their power of endurance was by much the largest and most reliable item, and they were not disappointed if they arrived with these utterly exhausted.

"Beside the common duty of guiding and assisting these unfortunates, the companies in the van united in providing the highway for the entire body of emigrants. The Mormons have laid out for themselves a road through the Indian Territory, over four hundred leagues in length, with substantial, well-built bridges, fit for the passage of heavy artillery, over all the streams, except a few great rivers where they have established permanent ferries. The nearest unfinished bridging to the Papillon Camp, was that of the Cornea-Cerf, or Elkhorn, a tributary of the Platte, distant, may-be, a couple of hours' march. Here, in what seemed to be an incredibly short space of time, there rose the seven great piers and abutments of a bridge, such as might challenge honors for the entire public spirited population of lower Virginia. The party detailed to the task worked in the broiling sun, in water beyond depth and up

to

their necks, as if engaged in the perpetration of some pointed and delightful practical joke. The chief sport lay in floating along with the logs, cut from the overhanging timber up the stream, guiding them until they reached their destination, and then plunging them under water in the precise spot where they were to be

secured.

"After the sorrowful word was given to halt and make preparations for winter, a chief labor became the making hay; and with every day-dawn brigades of mowers would take up the march to their positions in chosen meadows-a prettier sight than a charge of cavalry, as they laid their swaths, whole companies of scythes abreast. Before this time, the manliest, as well as most general daily labor was the herding of the cattle-the only wealth of the Mormons, and more and more cherished by them with the increasing pastoral character of their lives. A camp could not be pitched in any spot without soon exhausting the freshness of the pasture around it, and it became an ever recurring task to guide the cattle, in unbroken droves, to the nearest places where it was still fresh and fattening.

"Inside the camp the chief labors were assigned to the women. From the moment when, after the halt, the lines had been laid, the spring wells dug out, and the ovens and fireplaces built, though the men still assumed to set the guard and enforce the regulations of police, the empire of the tented town was with the better sex. They were the chief comforters of the severest sufferings, the kind nurses who gave them in their sickness those dear attentions with which pauperism is hardly poor, and which the greatest wealth often fails to buy. And they were a nation of wonderful managers. They could hardly be called housewives in etymological strictness, but it was plain that they had once been such, and most distinguished ones. Their art availed them in their changed affairs. With almost their entire culinary material limited to the milk of their cows, some store of meal or flour, and a very few condiments, they brought their thousand and one receipts into play with a success that outdid for their families the miracle of the Hebrew widow's cruse. They learned to make butter on a march, by the dashing of the wagon, and so nicely to calculate the working of barm in the jolting heats, that as soon after the halt as an oven could be dug in the hillside and heated, their well-kneaded loaf was ready for baking, and produced good leavened bread for

supper.

But the first duty of the Mormon women was, through all change of place and fortune, to keep alive the altar fire of home. Whatever their manifold labors for the day, it was their effort to complete them against the sacred hour of evening-fall. For by that time all the out-workers, scouts, ferrymen or bridgemen, roadmakers, herdsmen, or haymakers had finished their tasks and come into their rest. And before the last smoke of the supper fire curled up reddening in the glow of sunset, a hundred chimes of cattle