During his stay, information was communicated to him, that there was a number of persons who were desirous of leaving the Territory, but unable to do so, considering themselves restrained of their liberty.  Accordingly, on the following Sunday, he caused notice to be given from the platform in the Tabernacle, that he assumed the protection of all such persons, and desired them to communicate to him their names and residences.  During the ensuing week, nearly two hundred persons registered themselves in the manner he proposed, and a greater number would undoubtedly have been glad to follow their example, but were deterred by the surveillance to which they were subjected by certain functionaries of the Church before being admitted to his presence.  Those who were registered were organized into trains, with the little movable property they possessed, and dispatched towards Fort Bridger.  They arrived there in the course of May,—­as motley, ragged, and destitute a crowd as ever descended from the deck of an Irish emigrant-ship at New York or Boston.  The only garments which some possessed were made of the canvas of their wagon-covers.

Many were on foot.  For provisions, they had nothing except flour and some fresh meat.  It is a fact creditable to humanity, that private soldiers, by the score, shared their own abridged rations and scanty stock of clothing with these poor wretches, and in less than a day after their arrival they were provided with much to make them comfortable.

On that same Sunday, the Governor made a speech to the congregation, being introduced by Brigham Young.  He reviewed the relations of the Mormons to the Federal government; assumed that General Johnston and the army were under his control; pledged his word that they should not be stationed in immediate contact with the settlements; and gave assurances, also, that no military posse should be employed to arrest a Mormon until every other means had been tried and had failed.  At the close, he invited any of their number to respond.  Various persons immediately addressed the audience in almost frantic speeches, concerning the murder of Joseph and Hiram Smith at Carthage, the persecution of the Saints in Missouri and Illinois, the services rendered by the Mormon Battalion to an ungrateful country during the Mexican War, the toils and perils of the migration to Utah, and the character of the Federal officers who had been sent to rule the Territory.  Personal insults were heaped upon the Governor, and a scene of the wildest confusion was the result, which was quieted with great difficulty by Young himself.  It was manifest that the mass of the people, overconfident of their capacity to resist the troops, were not fully prepared for the capitulation the leaders were willing to make to save their own necks from the halter; and, at a second meeting during the afternoon, Young yielded somewhat to the popular clamor.