espect; and their opposition to our
indissoluble solidarity changed to regard when they saw us devoting our
strength to purposes of which they could approve. But now, in the midst
of our contentions, the aspect of splendor in their legal authority had
something baleful in it, for us; and we saw our own defiance set with a
halo of martyrdom and illumined by the radiance of a Church oppressed!

There was more than a glimmer of that radiance in my thoughts as I made
the railroad journey from Utah to the East. The Union Pacific Railway,
on which I rode, followed the route that the Mormons had taken in their
long trek from the Missouri; and I could look from my car window and
imagine them toiling across those endless plains--in their creaking
wagons, drawn by their oxen and lean farm cows--choked with dust, burned
by the sun of the prairies, their faces to the unknown dangers of an
unknown wilderness, and behind them the cool-roomed houses, the moist
fields, the tree-shaded streets, all the quiet and comfort of the
settled life of homekeeping happiness that they had left. My own mother
had come that road, a little girl of eight; and my mind was full of
pictures of her, at school in a wagon-box, singing hymns with her elders
around the camp fires at night, or kneeling with the mourners beside the
grave of an infant relative buried by the roadside. Our train crossed
the Loup Fork of the Platte almost within sight of the place where my
father, a lad of twenty, had led across the river at nightfall, had been
lost to his party, and had nearly perished, naked to the cold, before
he struggled back to the camp. I could see their little circle of wagons
drawn up at sunset against the menace of the Indians who snaked through
the long grass to kill. I could feel some of their despair, and my heart
lifted to their heroism. Never had such a migration been made by any
people with fewer of the concomitants of their civilization. Their arms
had been taken from them at Nauvoo; they had bartered their goods for
wagons and cattle to carry them; even the grain that they brought,
for food, had to be saved for seed. They felt themselves devoted to
destruction by the people with whose laws and institutions they had come
in conflict, and they went forth bravely, trusting in the power of the
God whom they were determined to worship according to their despised
belief.

Now they had built themselves new homes and meeting-houses in the
fertile "Valley