man emigrants and English emigrants arrived in Canada at the same time in a perfectly healthy state. The Chief Secretary for Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in the towns to which they repaired. The Emigrant Society of Montreal paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not easily to be forgotten:

"From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled heap-no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone down to their graves!"

This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the year 1847 closed. There were not many of us who would not have given our lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible way-but no way was visible.

MIGRATIONS OF THE MORMONS

A.D. 1848

THOMAS L. KANE

Among the numerous religious bodies that have grown up in the United States, the sect of Mormons, officially called "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," is perhaps the most unique in its origin and organization, and the most singular in its history. The sect was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, of Vermont. He declared that he had discovered one of its authoritative writings, the Book of Mormon, at Cumorah, New York. This book, he said, was found by him buried in the earth at a place revealed to him by an angel. According to the Mormons, the book, written in mystic characters on golden plates, is a record of certain ancient people-" the long-lost tribes of Israel," Smith declared-inhabiting North America. This book is said to have been abridged by the prophet Mormon, and translated by Smith. By antiMormons it is supposed to be based on a manuscript romance written by Solomon Spaulding.

The Mormon Church is governed by a hierarchy with two orders of priesthood, a president, two counsellors, twelve apostles, and elders and other officers. Peculiar as their polity appears, it has proved remarkably successful in the development of their church and community, notwithstanding stern hostility and widespread disapproval. They present an impressive example of shrewdness, thrift, and administrative skill, resulting in great material prosperity. Besides their separate books, they accept the Bible as authoritative, and many of their doctrines and rites resemble those common to the Christian sects. More than anything else, their teaching and their practice of polygamy have brought them into collision with "Gentiles" and with the United States Government.

The first Mormon settlement was at Kirtland, Ohio, the next was in Missouri. 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. The leaders of the sect at Nauvoo had set up a bank without capital and passed thousands of its worthless notes upon the unsuspecting farmers and traders; and it was this and other crimes that exasperated the inhabitants of that region to the point of driving away the whole community of Mormons.

ONCE, while ascending the upper Mississippi in the autumn,

when its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the rapids. My road lay through the "HalfBreed Tract," a fine section of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land titles had appropriated as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers, and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands.

I was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings set in cool green gardens ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill which was crowned by a noble marble edifice whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable evidences of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty.

It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff and rowing across the river landed at the principal wharf of the city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one: I heard no movement; though the stillness everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the ripples break against the shallows of the beach. I walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness from which I almost feared to wake it. Plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing in the paved ways and rain had not washed away the prints of footsteps in the dust.

Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty ropewalks, workshops, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his workbench and left his sash and casing unfinished. Fresh bark was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh

chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal-heap and ladling-pool and crooked water-horn were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday. No workpeople, anywhere, looked to know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady's-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples—no one called out to me from any opened window; no dog sprang forward to bark an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered, I found dead ashes cold upon the hearth, and had to tread on tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.

On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard. But there was no record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the hardly dried lettering-ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot hard by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been torn down, the still smoldering embers of a barbecue fire that had been constructed of rails from the fencing around it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed grain lay rotting ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their rich harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away-they, sleeping too in the hazy air of autumn.

Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. In the southern suburb the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These challenged me to render an account of myself, and to tell the reason why I had

had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of their band.

Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told me the story of the "dead city": that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over twenty thousand persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in the ruined suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point of the sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day's bombardment.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which, having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had as matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed sites of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design. Besides these, they led me to see a large and deeply chiselled marble vase, or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come: that here parents "went into the water" for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers: that thus the great vase came to be associated with all their most cherished memories, and was therefore the chief object of all others in the building, upon which they bestowed the greatest degree of their idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where

E., VOL. XVII.—7•