They went in military style with due precautions against surprise by the Lamanites—­the wretched red remnant of Abraham’s seed—­that swarmed on every side.

Brigham Young was lieutenant-general; Stephen Markham was colonel; the redoubtable John Pack was first major, and Shadrach Roundy, second.  There were two captains of hundreds and fourteen captains of tens.  The orders of the lieutenant-general required each man to walk constantly beside his wagon, leaving it only by his officer’s commands.  To make the force compact, the wagons were to move two abreast where they could.  Every man was to keep his weapons loaded.  If the gun was a caplock, the cap was to be taken off and a piece of leather put on to exclude moisture and dirt; if a flintlock, the filling was to be taken out and the pan filled with tow or cotton.

Their march was not only cautious but orderly.  At five A.M. the bugle sounded for rising, two hours being allowed for prayers and breakfast.  At night each man had to retire to his wagon for prayer at eight-thirty, and to rest at nine.  If they camped by a river they drew the wagons into a semicircle with the river at its base.  Other times the wagons made a circle, a fore-wheel of one touching a rear wheel of the next, thus providing a corral for the stock.  In such manner was the wisdom of the Lord concerning this hegira supplemented in detail by the worldly forethought of his servant Brigham.

They started along the north bank of the Platte River under the auspicious shine of an April sun.  A better route was along the south bank where grass was more plentiful and the Indians less troublesome.  But along the south bank parties of migrating Gentiles might also be met, and these sons of perdition were to be avoided at any cost—­“at least for the present,” said Brigham, in tones of sage significance.

And so for two hundred miles they broke a new way over the plains, to be known years after as “the old Mormon trail,” to be broadened later by the gold-seekers of forty-nine, and still later to be shod with steel, when the miracle of a railway was worked in the desert.

To Joel Rae, Elder after the order of Melchisedek, unsullied product of the temple priesthood, it was a time of wondrous soul-growth.  In that mysterious realm of pathless deserts, of illimitable prairies and boundless plains, of nameless rivers and colossal hills, a land of dreams, of romance, of marvellous adventure, he felt strange powers growing within him.  It seemed that in such a place the one who opened his soul to heaven must become endowed with all those singular gifts he had longed for.  He looked confidently forward to the time when they should regard him as a man who could work miracles.

At the head of Grand Island they came to vast herds of buffalo—­restless brown seas of humped, shaggy backs and fiercely lowered heads.  In their first efforts to slay these they shot them full in the forehead, and were dismayed to find that their bullets rebounded harmlessly.  They solved the mystery later, discovering the hide on the skull of a dead bull to be an inch thick and covered with a mat of gnarled hair in itself almost a shield against bullets.  Joel Rae, with the divine right of youth, drew for them from this circumstance an instructive parallel.