| 173 subordinated to politics and government; in regard to the Mormons, in spite of the Constitution, politics and government were subordinated to religion.
"And in regard to the late occupants of the place, the last of the Mormon host that now lay huddled to the number of six hundred and forty on the western bank of the river in sight of the city: if the first departures from Nauvoo escaped extreme hardships, not so these. It was the latter part of September, and nearly all were prostrated with chills and fevers; there at 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."-Pages 226-233.
To close this chapter we here present the graphic description of the abandoned city, the fleeing exiles, and their despoilers, from the pen of Colonel Thomas Kane, as follows:-
"A few years ago, 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 Half-Breed 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
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