Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/348



for shelter, while breaking up the prairie to raise crops upon which to subsist when they should resume their march. This settlement they named Garden Grove and here several hundred made a temporary home for such, as were worn down by suffering. When the high bluffs of Grand River were reached, in what is now Union County, on the 17th day of June, seven hundred of the Mormons determined to stop and raise crops to supply provisions for themselves and those who were to follow them. They selected a ridge on the east side of Grand River, covered with a beautiful grove of oak and elm and gently sloping into the broad valley. Here they built log cabins and dug caves on each side of the long street on the summit of the ridge.

A mill was built by their mechanics; native bowlders were dressed into mill stones and the machinery run by horse power. They erected a tabernacle in the grove and provided a cemetery in which their numerous dead were buried. A great spring on the east slope of the ridge furnished an abundance of pure water for the entire population of “Mount Pisgah,” the name they gave to this rude city in the wilderness. During the two and a half years the Mormons occupied this place, thousands of their brethren found it a most welcome stopping place on their journey to Kanesville and westward. The remnant left at Nauvoo was persecuted beyond endurance by the people who had flocked into the city after the main body of the Mormons had left, and on the 17th of September they were driven out. Crossing the river under the lead of Heber C. Kimball, wagons and hand carts were procured and in October they started West.

Poorly equipped for such a journey over the unsettled prairies, the women and children suffered greatly from insufficient clothing and food. Traveling by day over the trackless prairie, fording unbridged and swollen streams, amid floating ice and fierce snow storms, camping nights on the snow-covered ground, protected only by tents, their