Chapter XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir. The cattle were driven out to water and pasture. While the men unchained the wheels and drew the wagons, the women cooked forty breakfasts over forty fires. The children clustered about the fires.

Again it was long hours of heat and dust, sage-brush and sand. No dwellings of men, neither cattle nor fences, nor any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that day.

We made about fifteen miles a day. At Fillmore the inhabitants were hostile, as all had been. They laughed at us when we tried to buy food.

The old man I have mentioned, the one with long, sunburnt hair who helped my father, rode close to our wagon and indicated the jaded horses.

“I guess they’re watching us, Laban,” was my father’s sole comment.

It was at Fillmore that I saw a man that I was to see again. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with all the evidence of good health and immense strength—strength not alone of body but of will. Unlike most men I saw, he was smooth-shaven. His mouth was unusually wide, with thin lips. His nose was large, square, and thick. So was his face square, wide between the cheekbones, and topped with a broad, intelligent forehead. And the eyes were the bluest blue I had ever seen.

It was at the flour-mill at Fillmore that I first saw this man. Father, with several of our company, had gone there to try to buy flour, and I, disobeying my mother in my curiosity to see more of our enemies, had tagged along unperceived. This man was one of four or five who stood in a group with the miller during the interview.

“Have you seen that smooth-faced rascal?” Laban said to father.

Father nodded.

“Well, that’s Lee,” Laban continued. “I’ve seen him before. He’s a regular bastard. He’s got nineteen wives and fifty children, they all say. And he’s crazy on religion. But why is he pursuing us in this God-forsaken country?”

The little settlements were from twenty to fifty miles apart. And at every settlement our peaceful attempts to buy food were vain. They denied us harshly, and wanted to know who of us had sold them food when we drove them from Missouri. It was useless to tell them that we were from Arkansas. They insisted on our being Missourians.

Cedar City was the last settlement. Laban, who had ridden on ahead, came back and reported to father. His first news was significant.

“I saw Lee as I rode in, Captain. And there are many men and horses in Cedar City.”

But we had no trouble at the settlement. They refused to sell us food, but they left us to ourselves. The women and children stayed in the houses, and though some of the men appeared in sight they did not enter our camp and taunt us.

This was the last Mormon outpost. Beyond lay the vast desert, with, on the other side of it, the dream land, the myth land, of California.

My father regarded me quizzically.

“You don’t like the Mormons, eh, son?”

I shook my head.

“When I grow up,” I said, after a minute, “I’m going to kill them all.”

“You, Jesse!” came my mother’s voice from inside the wagon. “Shut your mouth.” And to my father: “You ought to be ashamed letting the boy talk on like that.”

We made camp early that day, and everybody worked till nightfall. While some of the men mended harness others repaired the frames and ironwork of the wagons. Laban was sitting cross-legged in the shade of a wagon and sewing a new pair of moccasins. He was the only man in our train who wore moccasins, and I have an impression that he had not belonged to our company when it left Arkansas. Also, he had neither wife, nor family, nor wagon of his own. All he possessed was his horse, his rifle, his clothes, and a couple of blankets.

My awakening was like a nightmare. It came as a sudden blast of sound. I could hear near and distant explosions of rifles, shouts and curses of men, women screaming, and children bawling. When I began to rise, my mother pressed me down with her hand. Father ran into the wagon.

“Out of it!” he shouted. “Quick! To the ground!”

He wasted no time.

“Here, Jesse!” father shouted to me, and I joined him in digging a hole.

“Go ahead and make it deeper, Jesse,” father ordered,

He stood up and rushed away in the gray light, shouting commands as he ran.

“Lie down!” I could hear him. “Get behind the wagon wheels and burrow in the sand! Family men, get the women and children out of the wagons! Hold your fire! No more shooting! Hold your fire and be ready! Single men, join Laban at the right, Cochrane at the left, and me in the centre! Don’t stand up! Crawl!”

For a quarter of an hour the heavy and irregular firing continued. The Indians—for Indians Laban declared them to be—had attacked us and were lying down and firing at us. I heard father cried out:

“Now! All together!”

From left, right, and centre our rifles shot. Some Indians fell down. Their fire immediately ceased. The Indians ran away.

Under father’s directions the company began to work like beavers. All the children helped. There was no whimpering or excitement. There was work to be done.

At noon Laban returned from a scout. He had seen new Indians arriving from the south. It was at this time that we saw a dozen white men on the crest of a low hill.

“I see,” Laban said to father. “They made the Indians fight us.”

“They’re white like us,” I heard somebody complain to mother. “Why don’t they help us?”

“They are not white,” I said. “They’re Mormons.”

That night, after dark, three of our young men went out of camp. I saw them go.

“They are going for Cedar City to get help,” father told mother.

Mother shook her head.

“There’s plenty of Mormons near the camp,” she said. “But they won’t help us.”

“But there are good Mormons and bad Mormons—” father began.

“We haven’t found any good ones,” she said.

In the morning I heard of the return of the young men. The news was sad. One man was shot down. The others escaped. So the whites were behind the Indians.

There were occasional shots into camp, but the morning passed quietly. So we were comfortable enough.

It was hot that afternoon. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, and there was no wind. In the mid-afternoon of that day we saw Lee again. He was on foot, crossing diagonally over the meadow to the north-west.

“Here, Jesse,” father said to me, tearing a strip from the sheet and fastening it to an ox-goad. “Take this and go out and try to talk to that man. Don’t tell him anything about what’s happened to us. Just try to get him to come in and talk with us.”

But Lee refused to talk.

Half an hour after our return Laban attempted a scout under a white flag. But he had not gone twenty feet outside the circle when the Indians opened fire on him and sent him back.

Thousands of shots must have rained in on us. Two of our men were wounded. Bill, Silas and a baby were killed.

Next morning, the third day, it was hotter and dryer than ever. We awoke thirsty, and there was no cooking. So dry were our mouths that we could not eat. The men began digging the well.

The children were complaining for water, and the babies. Robert, another wounded man, lay about ten feet from mother and me. Some of the women were raving against the Mormons and Indians. Some of the women prayed and sang gospel hymns.

The situation grew worse in the afternoon. The sun made a furnace of our hole in the sand. Four men were wounded, and one of them very badly.

Father came in and sat for a few minutes alongside mother and me without speaking.

“Jesse,” he asked, “are you afraid of the Indians?”

I shook my head emphatically.

“Are you afraid of the damned Mormons?”

“Not of any damned Mormon,” I answered.

I noted the little smile that curled his tired lips for the moment when he heard my reply.

“Well, then, Jesse,” he said, “will you go with Jed to the spring for water?”

I was all eagerness.

“We’re going to dress you up as girls,” he continued, “so that maybe they won’t fire on you.”

I insisted on going as I was, as a male human that wore pants; but father suggested that he would find some other boy to dress up as a girl.

“Go slow,” father cautioned, as we began our way. “Walk like girls.”

Not a shot was fired. We made the spring safely, filled our pails. With a full pail in each hand we made the return trip. And still not a shot was fired.

I cannot remember how many journeys we made—fifteen or twenty. We walked slowly, always going out with hands clasped, always coming back slowly with four pails of water. Jed and I were heroes. The women wept and blessed us, and kissed us and mauled us.

Nothing happened all morning. Not a shot was fired. Only the sun blazed down through the quiet air. At noon Will Hamilton took two large pails and started for the spring. Not a shot was fired, nor was any fired all the time he continued to go out and bring back water.

About two o’clock, after we had eaten and felt better, a white man appeared, carrying a white flag. Will Hamilton went out and talked to him, came back and talked with father and the rest of our men, and then went out to the stranger again. Farther back we could see a man standing and looking on, whom we recognized as Lee.

The women were so relieved that they were crying and kissing one another, blessing God. The proposal, which our men had accepted, was that we would surrender and be protected from the Indians.

“We had to do it,” I heard father tell mother.

“But what if they intend treachery?” mother asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

Some of our men were unchaining one of our wagons and rolling it out of the way. I ran to see what was happening. Lee himself came in, followed by two empty wagons, each driven by one man. Everybody crowded around Lee. He said that they had had a hard time with the Indians keeping them off of us.

But what made father and Laban and some of the men suspicious was when Lee said that we must put all our rifles into one of the wagons so as not to arouse the animosity of the Indians. By so doing we would appear to be the prisoners of the Mormons.

Two of our wounded men who could not walk were put into the wagons, and along with them were put all the little children. Jed and I were large for our age; so Lee told us we were to march with the women on foot.

So the march began, the two wagons first. Lee kept along with the women and walking children. Behind us came our men. We could see the Mormons just a short distance away. They were leaning on their rifles and standing in a long line about six feet apart. As we passed them I noticed their solemn faces. They looked like men at a funeral. The women noticed this too, and some of them began to cry.

I walked right behind my mother. All happened when our men were just abreast of the Mormons. I heard a loud order, “Do your duty!” All the rifles of the Mormons went off at once, and our men were falling down. I turned quickly to see how mother was, and she was down. Right alongside of us, out of the bushes, came hundreds of Indians, all shooting. When the little boy that was I was running the blackness came upon him. All memory there ceases, for Jesse there ceased, and, as Jesse, ceased for ever. The form that was Jesse, the body that was his, being matter and apparitional, passed and was not. But the imperishable spirit did not cease. It continued to exist, and, in its next incarnation, became the residing spirit of that apparitional body known as Darrell Standing’s which soon is to be taken out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all apparitions go.