Pisgah; one hundred and fifty miles beyond this, they made a third settlement at Council Bluffs. While here resting from the fatigue of journeying, many were overtaken with sickness, which was the result of former severe privations. In the midst of their troubles, at a time when every man was required more than ever to watch over and protect his helpless wife and family from the hordes of savage Indians and wild beasts of the forest, with which they were surrounded, a message was received from the President of the United States, requesting five hundred men to enter the army and march against the Mexicans. This demand, though strange and heartrending, was complied with; five hundred men were thus taken from the camps of the Saints, leaving behind them fathers, mothers, wives and children in the midst of afflictions, many of whom were dwelling in miserable log huts, tents, and wagons, with scarcely the common necessaries of life.
A few months after their departure, their enemies still burning with rage, and finding the body of the Saints beyond their reach, made an attack on those remaining in Nauvoo, an account of which we extract from a general epistle of the Twelve, December 23, 1847:
In September, 1846, an infuriated mob, clad in all the horrors of war, fell on the Saints who had still remained in Nauvoo for want of means to remove; murdered some, and drove the remainder across the Mississippi into Iowa, where, destitute of houses, tents, food, clothing or money, they received temporary assistance from some benevolent souls in Quincy, St. Louis, and other places, whose names will ever be remembered with gratitude. But at that period the Saints were obliged to scatter to the north, south, east and west, wherever they could find shelter and procure employment. And, hard as it is to write it, it must ever remain a truth on the page of history, that while the flower of Israel's camp was sustaining the wings of the American eagle, by their influence and arms, in a foreign country, their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers and children were driven by mob violence from a free and independent State, of the same national republic, and were compelled to flee from the fire, the sword, the musket and the cannon's mouth as from the demon of death. * * *
