August 20th to 26th

This week has gone by really fast. it only seems as last week we were in the MTC, and now we have been out 7 months.  A lot of the missionaries we have served with have gone home, and now at the Trail Center and Tabernacle we are the longest serving couple except the Directors.

The most unusual tour we gave happened a few weeks ago, it was a tour given to some teachers from the Iowa School for the Deaf.  Only one of them had a little hearing, all they could do was read the displays in the visitor center and at the Tabernacle. It would have been nice if we could sign, but we found out one of them did know about the church and was from Idaho.

Sunday night we had a tour given by the sisters to some of the members of the Temple Riders Motorcycle Association. These men were on a trip cross country.  They were members of a group that ride as a club to different Temples. They posed with the Sisters for a picture.

Story of the Rescue Brigham Young's first Rescue  attempt 1846,

On the very day the Nauvoo War broke out, several men volunteered to leave Winter Quarters and return to Nauvoo with teams to "bring up the poor Saints" as soon as their hay was cut, their lots surveyed, and cabins erected for their own immediate families. Orville M. Allen was appointed foreman of the first such relief company.

Said Brigham Young in his call for help: "I have felt sensibly there was a good deal of suffering among the Saints in Nauvoo, as there has been amongst us but the Lord God who has fed us all the day long, has his care still over us and when the Saints are chastened enough, it will cease. I have never believed the Lord would suffer a general massacre of this people by a mob. If ten thousand men were to come against us, and no other way was open for our deliverance, the earth would swallow them up."

In addition to Allen, James Murdock also set out to travel the 327 miles back across Iowa in express-like fashion with scores of spare teams of horses and mules with instructions to save as many as possible.

Their missions of mercy will ever stand tall in the annals of Mormon and Iowa history. On Oct. 7 Allen reached the so-called "misery camps" at Montrose where he found more than 300 men, women and children bivouacked on the western banks of the Mississippi subsisting on boiled and parched corn and river water. Some had died; others were falling victim to exposure, typhus and other fevers. Allen soon gathered up a company of 157 souls in 28 wagons.

Such set the stage for an incident that many saw as nothing less than miraculous. Thomas Bullock, official clerk to the Quorum of the Twelve and with a sick and starving family of his own there at Montrose, recorded the following:

"This morning we had a direct manifestation of the mercy and goodness of God. A large, or rather several large flocks of quails, flew into camp. . . . Some fell on the wagons, some under, some on the breakfast tables. The boys and the brethren ran about after them and caught them alive with their hands. . . . Every man, woman and child had quails to eat for their dinner and after dinner the flocks increased in size. . . ." Meanwhile, close behind, Murdock's rescue company finished what Allen had begun, bringing all that remained out of the poor camps of Nauvoo.

And so the winter came upon a dazed and disoriented people now hunkering down all across Iowa from Keosaqua in the east to Council Bluffs in the west and across the Missouri to Winter Quarters, making ready winter camps in wagon beds, sod huts, ground holes and flimsy cabins. Still uncertain of why it had all happened and where they would now go, these sudden refugees faced a bleak and uncertain future. Though some quit the Church, most stayed on in faithful hope of a brighter day and a better land. Perhaps Isaac Haight, one of their number, captured their determination best:

"Here we are exiled from the United States and without a home, dwelling in tents and wagons exposed to the inclemency of the weather. We are even like the Saints of old having no abiding city but are wanderers and pilgrims on the earth but we count the present suffering not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to his Saints."9

Sources: Article given in part at the recent Iowa Mormon Trails History Symposium in Des Moines. The more-expanded article will soon be published by BYU as "Dadda, I Want to Get Out of This Country."