| 624 five men penetrated Missouri's wilds, and traveled on foot from St. Louis to Independence, Jackson county, wading in snow to the knees the greater part of the way for 300 miles; and all this as may be said, without money or friends, except as they made them. These are the first footsteps ever made in that state by Latter Day Saints-these first placed their feet upon that holy ground, where shall stand the great temple of our God, the resort of the nations, and the joy of the whole earth.
Of those five men, Peter Whitmer is now in his grave, two are turned away from the fellowship of the church, and the other two, F. G. Williams and myself are yet alive, and blessed with the grace of God we are yet counted worthy of a place among you. Thus I find myself a monument of mercy, spared like an oak amid the tempest, and to God be ascribed all the glory; for were it not for his peculiar longsuffering and goodness I might now have been an outcast from the commonwealth of Israel, or cut down by untimely death without beholding in this life the establishment of Zion.
But O! how many scenes of joy and sorrow, of trail and suffering, of meeting and parting, of life and death, have we been called to pass through since that time. How many have been the travels, the toils, the sufferings, the hopes, the fears, the feelings, the disappointments, the blessings, the glories, the signs, the wonders, the deliverences [deliverance's] experienced by the servants of the Most High God. There has the entire church been disinherited, plundered and driven-and their settlements been broken up. Time and again has the deadly weapon been aimed at its leaders, and some of them slain.-All these things have I seen with my eyes-yea they have fallen on my right hand and on my left, wounded, bleeding, dying for the cause of Zion, and yet not a bone of mine has been broken, though part of my blood has been shed; yea prisons, chains, and dungeons have compassed us round about, the cold ground has been our lodging place, and murderers and demons have kept watch over our slumbers, and lulled us to sleep with songs of blasphemy; recounting with horrid triumph their thefts, whoredoms, rapes and murders. Yet out of all these things the Lord has delivered us, and has caused the nations of the proud to tremble before us, and the meek of the earth to hail us as the messengers of salvation.
Two years have scarcely elapsed since I took leave of Nauvoo and of the society of the saints in the west, and never shall I forget the scenes of suffering through which they were then passing; houseless, and pennyless[penniless], dwelling in tents, in wagons, or under the trees; sick and dying. The majority scattered abroad through persecution, and the Nauvoo meeting of a Sabbath, scarcely bringing together one hundred people, and not 30 dwellings in the town.
But what is the astonishing news which now salutes my ears. "Shall the earth bring forth in a day, or shall a nation be born at once, for as soon as Zion travailed she brought forth her children." I am now informed that about 1200 houses are erected in Nauvoo and hundreds more in progress; and that the earth is cultivated for miles in every direction as the garden of Eden, where two years ago all was desolate loneliness, and that the walls of the temple are now erecting.
Dear brethren, while you are prospered by the hand of God in doing so much at home, the same spirit has wrought mightily in us, in lifting an ensign to the nations and a standard to the people far abroad, and the ships of Tarshish are beginning to bring thy sons from afar and thy daughters from the ends of the earth. Already something near one thousand souls have been gathered to Zion from the isles of the sea, and thousands more are preparing to come shortly.
Sept. 12th. Dear brethren, the many duties of life have thus far prevented me from finishing this communication; it is now Sunday morning, and the pleasantest morning I ever saw in England. The sky is clear, the sun bright, the weather warm and pleasant-I take a few moments before going to meeting, to finish this epistle; in a few hours I shall be in the Hall with some five hundred saints and friends, many of whom will never see it again; for on next week Monday, the ship Tyrean will sail from Liverpool for New Orleans with 204 passengers bound for Nauvoo. Near one half of these are from Manchester and vicinity, and are our old friends here; but their places are fast filling up with new converts: thus you see our mission is of a nature calculated to subject us to important changes,
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