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The surface of the ground upon which Nauvoo is built is very uneven, though there are no great elevations. A few feet below the soil is a vast bed of limestone, from which excellent building material can be quarried, to almost any extent.
Already, the prophet has sent able agents over the river; the Sacs and Foxes, the same tribe we have just spoken of as the much-abused nation of Wisconsin, and actually residing at about eighty miles North North West from Nauvoo, besides many others, are on a good understanding with the Latter-day Saints.
They at first presumed to dictate politically, and then actually began to consider themselves a separate political entity. One of their earliest pieces of legislation, under the act incorporating the city of Nauvoo, was an ordinance to protect the inhabitants of the Mormon communities from all outside legal processes.
Joseph and seventeen others were arrested, tried before a court in Nauvoo, and acquitted; but this did not satisfy the mobbers. On the advice of the United States judge for that district, Joseph and his brethren allowed themselves to be arrested again and have a trial before Justice Daniel H. Wells, then not a "Mormon." They were again discharged as innocent of crime.
My second wife, Nancy Bean, was the daughter of a wealthy farmer who lived near Quincy, Illinois. She saw me on a mission and heard me preach at her father's house. She came to Nauvoo and stayed at my house three months, and grew in favor and was sealed to me in the winter of 1845. My third and fourth wives were sealed to me soon afterward in my own house.
This year was one of special peril for, to the accustomed dangers from heat, hunger, and Indians, was added a new one the Mormons. They were still moving westward in their emigration from Nauvoo to the new Zion beside the Great Salt Lake. It was a time and a place to hear the black side of Mormonism. A Missourian hated a Latter Day Saint as a Puritan hated a Papist.
From those States they were expelled, and in 1840 they founded Nauvoo in Illinois. Their later experience, up to their permanent establishment in Utah, is recounted in the following narrative of the hardships endured and surmounted by this extraordinary people. But it should be added that the cause of the exodus was not, as is generally supposed, religious persecution.
Carthage was full of mobs, and the governor seemed to believe all they told him about the "Mormons." He organized the mobs into troops. Joseph asked the governor to come to Nauvoo and investigate the whole matter; but no: Joseph must go to Carthage. The governor said he would protect him if he would go. It was on the evening of June 22nd.
I could feel some of their despair, and my heart lifted to their heroism. Never had such a migration been made by any people with fewer of the concomitants of their civilization. Their arms had been taken from them at Nauvoo; they had bartered their goods for wagons and cattle to carry them; even the grain that they brought, for food, had to be saved for seed.
He appointed the commander of the Nauvoo Legion a master in chancery; and when a case came before him which involved interpretation of the act incorporating this peculiar body of militia, he gave a constructive interpretation which left the Mormons independent of State officers in military affairs.
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