But how long did they hesitate?  Scarcely an hour; it was the call of their country.  True, they were even then leaving the national soil, but not of their own will.  To them their country was and is the promised land, the Lord’s chosen place, the land of Zion.  “You shall have your battalion,” said Brigham Young to Captain Allen, the muster officer, “and if there are not young men enough, we will take the old men, and if they are not enough, we will take the women.”  Within a week from the time President Polk’s message was received, the entire force, in all five hundred and forty-nine souls, was on the march to Fort Leavenworth.  Their path from the Missouri to the Pacific led them over two thousand miles, much of this distance being measured through deserts, which prior to that time had not been trodden by civilized foot.

Colonel Cooke, the commander of the “Mormon” Battalion, declared, “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry.”  Many were disabled through the severity of the march, and numerous cases of sickness and death were chronicled.  General Kearney and his successor, Governor R. B. Mason, as military commandants of California, spoke in high praise of this organization, and in their official reports declared that they had made efforts to prolong the battalion’s term of service; but most of the men chose to rejoin their families as soon as they could secure their honorable discharge.

But to return to the Camp of Israel:  A pioneer party, consisting of a hundred and forty and four, preceded the main body; and the line of the migrating hosts soon stretched from the Missouri to the valley of the Great Salt Lake.  Wagons there were, as also some horses and men, but all too few for the journey; and a great part of the company walked the full thousand miles across the great plains and the forbidding deserts of the west.  In the Black Hills region, the pioneers were delayed a week at the Platte, a stream, which, though usually fordable at this point was now so swollen as to make fording impossible.  Here, too, their provisions were well nigh exhausted.  Game had not been plentiful, and the “Mormon” pioneers were threatened with the direst privations.  In their slow march they had been passed by a number of well-equipped parties, some of them from Missouri bound for the Pacific; but most of these were overtaken on the easterly side of the river.  Amongst the effects of the “Mormon” party was a leathern boat, which on water served the legitimate purpose of its maker and on land was made to do service as a wagon box.  This, together with rafts specially constructed, was now put to good use in ferrying across the river not alone themselves and their little property, but the other companies and their loads.  For this service they were well paid in camp provisions.

Thus, the expatriated pioneers found themselves relieved from want with their meal sacks replenished in the heart of the wilderness.  Many may call it superstition, but some will regard it as did the thankful travelers—­an interposition of Providence, and an answer to their prayers—­an event to be compared, they said, to the feeding of Israel with manna in the wilderness of old.