" While the people for the most part were ill with chills and fever," says Wells, "quail fell into camp and were picked up with ease.^' This supply was looked upon as miraculous by the half- famished people. So long had they been lashed by the fierce winds of misfortune, that now they accepted with gratitude this indication of providential care.
Wagons were sent from Winter Quarters for the removal of the people from Poor Camp; and gradually all reached the various stations in which the Mormons had gathered.^^
Of their long journey many painful incidents are recorded. Weakened by fever or crippled with rheu- matism, and with sluggish circulation, many were severely frost-bitten. Women were compelled to drive the nearly worn-out teams, while tending on their knees, perhaps, their sick children. The strength of the beasts was failing, as there were intervals when they could bo kept from starving only by the browse or tender buds and branches of the cotton-wood, felled for the purpose.^
At one time no less than two thousand wagons could be counted, it was said, along the three hundred miles of road that separated Nauvoo from the Mor- mon encampments. Many families possessed no wag-
^" ' Ou the 9th of October, while our teams were waiting on the banks of the Miss, for the poor saints. . .left without any of the necessaries of life,. . .and nothinij; to start their journey with, the Lord sent flocks of quail, which lit upon their wagons and on their empty tables, and upon the ground within their reach, which the saints, and even the sick, caught with their hands until they were satisfied.' Hmt. B. Young, MS., 1847, 9. This phenome- non extended some 30 or 40 miles along the river, and was generally observed. The quail in immense quantities had attempted to cross the river, but it being beyond their strength, had dropped into the river boats or on the bank.' Wells, in Utah Notc.'i, MS., 7.
^8 See 7'/ie Mormons: A Ducoiirse delivered hpfore the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, March 26, 1S50, by Thomas L. Kane. Philadelphia, 1850. A copy of it will be found at the end of Orson Pratt's Works, and in Mackay's The 3formons, 200-45. The story of the Mor.mon exodus, as handed down to us by a man of Colonel Kane's powers of observation, would have been a valuable record were it not plainly apparent that truth is too often sacrificed to diction. Among Mormon writers we find no detailed narrative of this exodus, and among others little that is not borrowed from the coloners dis- course.
^^ Snow's Biogr
