and they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois.  They prospered there, and built a temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe.  But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors.  All the proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of the neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that polygamy was practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of everything that was bad.  Brigham returned from a mission to England, where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him several hundred converts to his preaching.  His influence among the brethren augmented with every move he made.  Finally Nauvoo was invaded by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed.  A Mormon named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and government, in Smith’s place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two.  But a greater than he was at hand.  Brigham seized the advantage of the hour and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will, hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself.  He did more.  He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he pronounced Rigdon’s “prophecies” emanations from the devil, and ended by “handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand years”—­probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois.  The people recognized their master.  They straightway elected Brigham Young President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in their devotion to him from that day to this.  Brigham had forecast—­a quality which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed.  He recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be moved.  By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired!  They camped, several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want, hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many succumbed and died—­martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have been.  Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely choosing a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the hated American nation.  Note that.  This was in 1847.  Brigham moved his people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall again.  For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham’s refuge to the enemy—­the United States!