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Brunson's men were marching along, shivering in the cold for it was a dark, cloudy morning late in October, 1838 we saw a company of horsemen some three miles away. We concluded they were Missourians, and made for them at full speed. They halted and appeared willing to fight.
The balked Missourians were excessively mortified, especially when Henry told them if they had kept quiet he would have killed meat enough in ten minutes to feed their whole party. Our friends, who were at no great distance, hearing such a formidable fusillade, thought the Indians had fired the volley for our benefit.
Out of two thousand men, the Missourians lost three hundred and thirty-one in killed and wounded, and the Arkansas brigades, of equal strength, one hundred and forty-two. Within a few minutes of the time when our whole line became engaged, an officer came to inform me that General Walker was wounded.
But from one encampment two faces were missing until late Banion and Jackson of the Missourians. Sam Woodhull, erstwhile column captain of the great train, of late more properly to be called unattached, also was absent.
There their sad condition evoked for a time general commiseration. The press of the state denounced the treatment of the people by the Missourians and vindicated the character of the "Mormons" as peaceable and law-abiding citizens.
Of course the Saints could not join with these wicked people in their horse racing, Sabbath breaking, idleness, drunkenness, and other things which the Missourians took delight in. Most of the Saints were from the Eastern and Northern States and did not believe in slavery.
They worked hard, and as the land produced good crops, they were soon prospering, while their idle neighbors remained in poverty. All this naturally led the Missourians to hate the "Mormons," and as early as the spring of 1832 they began to molest them by throwing stones into their houses, etc.
Before long the Missourians foolishly began to persecute them, and then the Mormons settled at Nauvoo, in Illinois, where they built their second temple, far more magnificent than the first at Kirtland. But here again their unwise neighbors began to molest them, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were thrown into jail. A mob attacked the jail, and the Smiths were murdered.
Pocket-politics allowed Congress to trade all of the Louisiana Purchase south of thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, excepting Arkansas, in exchange for the Floridas and how much chance, how much lot and part had the Missourians in a country so far away as Florida? The South led us to war with Mexico in order to extend our territory, but what did the South get?
Essentially a slave-State constitution of the most pronounced type, containing the declaration that the right of property in slaves is "before and higher than any constitutional sanction," it made the right to vote upon it depend on the one hand on a test oath to "support this constitution" in order to repel conscientious free-State voters, and on the other hand on mere inhabitancy on the day of election to attract nomadic Missourians; it postponed the right to amend or alter for a period of seven years; it kept the then existing territorial laws in force until abrogated by State legislation; it adopted the late Oxford fraud as a basis of apportionment; it gave to Calhoun, the presiding officer, power to designate the precincts, the judges of election, and to decide finally upon the returns in the vote upon it, besides many other questionable or inadmissible provisions.
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