readily as the most expert backwoodsmen of their
day.^^*
During the summer and autumn months of 1846, the Papillon camp, near the Little Butterfly River, in common with the others, was stricken with fever, and with a scorbutic disease which the Mormons termed the black canker. In the autumn drought, the streams that discharge into the Missouri at this point are often little better than open sewers, pestilential as open cesspools, and the river, having lost more than half its volume, flows sluggishly through its channel of slime and sedge. Of the baked mud on either bank is formed the rich soil on which lay the encampments, the site being called, in their own phrase, Misery Bottom. In the year previous the Indians in this neighborhood had lost one ninth of their number; and now that the earth was for the first time upturned by the plough, the exhalations from this rank and steaming soil were redolent of disease and death.
In the camp nearest to Papillon more than one third of the company lay sick at the beginning of August; elsewhere matters were even worse; and as the season advanced there were in some of the en- campments not one who escaped the fever, the few who were able to stagger from tent to tent carrying food and water to their comrades. For several weeks it was impossible to dig graves quickly enough for the burial of the dead,^^ and one might see in the open tents the wasted forms of women brushing away the flies from the putrefying corpses of their children.
Through all these months building was continually going on at Winter Quarters.^® The axe and saw were
-* ' There were among them many skilled mechanics, who could work at forge, loom, or turning-lathe. A Mormon gunsmith is the inventor of the excellent repeating rifle that loads by slides instead of cylinders; and one of the neat- est finished tire-arms I have ever seen was of this kind, wrought from scraps of old iron, and inlaid with the silver of a couple of half-dollars.' Kane's The Mormons, 36.
'-"At the camp situated on the site of the town of Florence, there were over 600 burials. Kane's The Mormons, 51.
^^ ' Here we suffered terribly from scurvy, for want of vegetables. I was a victim, and even my little children as young as three years of
