Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/343



progress, many were killed, others desperately wounded, families separated, women and children sick and dying for want of food, shelter and proper care. The oxen, which were their only teams, died of starvation. Disease and death daily claimed victims.

Mothers carried their starving children, themselves perishing with hunger and fatigue. The dead were thrust into rude bark coffins and sunk in the rivers. At last 1,200 emaciated people in all stages of disease and starvation reached the banks of the Mississippi River, where the strongest crossed. The people of Iowa and Illinois treated them kindly, furnished food and such shelter as was available. Their leaders had been captured, such as were not killed, and paraded from one jail to another, tormented in a manner that stamps their enemies as more cruel and barbarous than Indians. At Howe’s Mills twenty prisoners were confined in a log building, the door fastened and the mob, joining the State militia, fired upon the helpless prisoners through the crevices between the logs until all were killed or desperately wounded. One little boy, nine years of age, who had escaped the massacre at the log shop by hiding under a forge, was dragged out and murdered in cold blood, while the savage white men cheered and danced around the dying boy and the nineteen other victims.

These whites were the ancestors of the “Border Ruffians,” who, a quarter of a century later, invaded the Territory of Kansas and slaughtered her citizens in a war waged to spread human slavery; and in the Civil War, under the lead of Quantrell, murdered more than a hundred defenseless citizens of Lawrence in the presence of their families. The State authorities finally grew sick of the atrocities perpetrated by the militia that they were unable to control and permitted the escape of the survivors of the Mormon leaders, who finally reached the refugees who were finding shelter in Iowa and Illinois.

It was in the fall of 1838 that the Mormons were