POOR CAMP. 23;f
latter part of September, and nearly all were pros- trated with chills and fevers;^^ thereat the river bank, among the dock and rushes, poorly protected, without the shelter of a roof or anything to keep off the force of wind or rain, little ones came into life and were left motherless at birth. ^* They had not food enough to satisfy the cravings of the sick, nor clothing fit to wear. For months thereafter there were periods when all the flour they used was of the coarsest, the wheat being ground in coffee and hand mills, which only cut the grain; others used a pestle; the finer meal was used for bread, the coarser made into hominy. Boiled wheat was now the chief diet for sick and well. For ten days they subsisted on parched corn. Some mixed their remnant of grain with the pounded bark of the slippery elm which they stripped from the trees along their route.
This encampment was about two miles above Montrose on the Mississippi, and was called the Poor Camp. Aid was solicited, and within three weeks a little over one hundred dollars was collected, mostly in Quincy, with provisions and clothing, though the prejudice against them was deep and strong.^^ Some of the people were crowded into tents, made frequently of quilts and blankets; others in bowers made of brush; others had only wagons for shelter. They suffered from heavy thunder-storms, when the rain was bailed out with basins from their beds. Mothers huddled their children in the one dress which often was all they possessed, and shaking with ague or burning with fever, took refuge from the pitiless storms under wagons and bushes.^^
'^ While at Montrose, Heber C. Kimball writes thus in his journal of the condition of his family, his wife having a babe a few days old, and he himself ill with ague. ' I went to the bed; my wife, who was shaking with the ague, having two children lying sick by her side;. . .the only child well was little Heber Parley, and it was with ditiiculty he could carry a two-quart pail full of water from a spring at the bottom of the hill. '
'* ' Such deaths occurred from exposure and fright in Nauvoo. The camp journalist recorded: Effect of jjcrsecution by the Illinois mob.'
'^ The trustees from Nauvoo also di.^tributed clothing, and molasses, salt, and salt pork. Hht. B. Young, MS., 1846, .383.
^^ Mr6 Clara Yuun'/a Experience, MS., 3.
