their people, many of the Latter-day Saints set out from Iowa,
where railway facilities had their termination, with hand-carts
only as a means of conveyance. Today there are living in the
smiling vales of Utah, men and women who then as boys and girls
trudged wearily across the prairies, dragging the lumbering carts
that contained their entire provision against starvation and
freezing. Such handcart companies were organized with care; a
limited amount of freight was allowed to each division; milch
cattle and a very few draft-animals, with wagons for conveying
the heavier baggage and to carry the sick, were assigned. The
tale of those dreary marches has never yet been told; the song of
the heroism and sacrifice displayed by these pilgrims for
conscience sake is awaiting a singer worthy the theme. Wading
the streams with carts in tow, or in cases of unfordable streams,
stopping to construct rafts; at times living on reduced rations
of but a few ounces of meal per day; lying down at night with a
prayer in the heart that they wake no more on earth, a prayer
which had its fulfilment in hundreds of cases; the dying heaving
their parting sighs in the arms of loved ones who were soon to
follow, they journeyed on.

The inevitable catastrophes and accidents of travel robbed them
of their substance. Hostile savages stampeded their cattle, or
openly attacked and plundered the trains. But on they went,
never swerving from the course. These later companies needed no
chart nor compass to guide them over the desert; the road was
plain from the marks of former camps, and yet more so from the
graves of friends and loved ones who had started before on the
road to the earthly Zion and found that it led them to the
martyr's entrance to heaven, graves that were marked perhaps but