As to various persons who met death while leaving the valley, opinion was divided on the question of their ultimate salvation.  For it was announced concerning these, as their bodies were discovered from time to time, that the Indians had killed them.  This being true, they had died in apostasy, and their rejection from the Kingdom was assured.  Yet after awhile the Saints at large took hope touching the souls of these; for Bishop Wright, the excellent and able Wild Ram of the Mountains, took occasion to remark one Sabbath in the course of an address delivered in the tabernacle:  “And it amazes me, brethren, to note how the spirit has been poured out on the Lamanites.  It really does seem as if an Injun jest naturally hates an apostate, and it beats me how they can tell ’em the minute they try to sneak out of this valley of the Lord.  They must lie out in them hills jest a-waiting for apostates; and they won’t have anything else; they never touch the faithful.  You wouldn’t think they had so much fine feeling to look at ’em.  You wouldn’t suspect they was so sensitive, and almost bigoted, you might say.  But there it is—­and I don’t believe the critters will let many of these vile apostates get beyond the rocky walls of Zion.”  Those who could listen between the words began to suspect that the souls of such apostates had been duly saved.

Yet one apostate the very next day was rash enough to controvert the Bishop’s views.  To a group of men in the public street at high noon and in a loud voice he declared his intention of leaving for California, and he spoke evil of the Church.

“I tell you,” he said, in tones of some excitement, “men are murdered here.  Their murder is planned by Bishops, Priests, Elders, and Apostles, by the President and his Counsellors, and then it is done by men they send to do it.  Their laying it on to the Indians don’t fool me a minute.  That’s the kind of a church this is, and you don’t ketch me staying in it any longer!”

Trees had been early planted in the new settlement, and owing to the care bestowed upon them by the thrifty colonists, many were now matured.  From a stout limb of one of these the speaker was found hanging the following morning.  A coroner’s jury hastily summoned from among the Saints found that he had committed suicide.

Another whose soul was irrevocably lost was Frederick Loba, who had refused to take more than one wife in spite of the most explicit advice from his superiors that he could attain to but little glory either in this world or that to come with less than three.  He crowned his offense by speaking disrespectfully of Brigham Young.  Orders were issued to save his soul; but before his tabernacle could be seized by those who would have saved him, the wretched man had taken his one wife and fled to the mountains.  There they wandered many days in the most inclement weather, lost, famished, and several times but narrowly escaping the little band that had been sent in pursuit