And this was not something someone else believed was true. He knew it for himself. Nathan had not said a word about it, had not crowed about God’s intervention, as Joshua had expected. Neither had Derek. But he knew what they believed. They believed it was an answer to prayer. In their minds it was a miracle. It was miraculous, there was no disputing that. But miraculous was a more comfortable word than miracle. It was something anyone might say.
His mind turned back to the idea of witnesses. If one could think of events as witnesses, then Joshua had an infallible one. This was not something someone believed. It was not what someone had told him. This one he knew for himself. The memory of his shock and wonder as Nathan suddenly began to bargain with the Wellers was fresh and powerful.
Finally, totally frustrated with himself, he started back for the tent door. He sat down and pulled on his boots, careful not to knock any mud off them. And then, once they were on, instead of crawling back outside again, he stayed where he was, his eyes fixed on the book with the brown cover that sat on the small wooden chest.
The ladies found it best to stick to areas where the wagon wheels or the hooves of several hundred oxen and horses had not chewed up the ground and opened it up to the rain. It meant going quite a bit farther out of their way in many cases, but avoiding the miry mud was well worth the effort. Even with that, the bottoms of their skirts were soaked from the wet grass and black from those places where they could not avoid the open ground.
They started with that area of the camp that comprised the members of the trailing company. These were at the northeastern edge of the large camp. This company was different from the others in that it contained many of the newcomers to the Camp of Israel. They weren’t just the stragglers who had fallen behind but those who had left Nauvoo after the main groups had departed and who had caught up with them. The Steed women thought it worth a visit to see if anyone they knew might be among this group. To their pleasant surprise, almost immediately they found Abigail Pottsworth, her daughter Jenny—now Jenny Stokes—and Jenny’s two children, a boy three and an infant daughter.
It was a warm and happy reunion. The Pottsworths had been next-door neighbors to Derek and Peter Ingalls in Preston, England, and were converted to the Church at the same time. When mother and daughter came to Nauvoo, they happened to be on the same ship as Will Steed, who was returning to his family after an absence of nearly two years. Will had been smitten by the flaxen-haired beauty and was shattered when she decided she wanted a member of the Church and married Andrew Stokes. Andrew was not there, but they promised to bring him over in the near future because Sister Pottsworth wanted to see Derek again.
After the Pottsworths, they moved on again, stopping here and there to visit with former neighbors or longtime customers of the Steed dry goods store. About eleven o’clock they decided they had better start back. They were feeling guilty about being gone so long, and yet, at the same time, they were so buoyed up by the blue skies and the warm sunshine and the chance to be away from the demands of their children for a time, they could not resist postponing their return for just a little longer.
“Isn’t that the Markhams’ wagon?” Lydia asked. She was feeling the weight of the baby inside her and needed a place to sit down for a few minutes. They were still a quarter of a mile from their campsite.
“Yes, yes,” Rebecca said eagerly, “there’s Eliza Snow.”
“So it is,” Caroline said, laughing easily. “What say we, ladies? Are we up to one more visit before we return?”
“Yes!” Jenny, Jessica, Rebecca, and Lydia said it in perfect unison, which brought a peal of laughter from them all.
As they moved closer to the two wagons, picking their way carefully, Caroline, who was in the lead, suddenly stopped, holding up her hand. “What is that?” She lifted her head and sniffed the air.
The others followed suit. Rebecca’s eyes widened. “Can it be?”
“Fresh bread,” moaned Jenny in agonized pleasure. “It smells like fresh baked bread.”
“It can’t be!” Jessica breathed. “Not out here. How did they even find dry firewood?”
There was no answer to that question, but there was no mistaking the fact that Sister Markham was bent over a fire. She stood and turned at the sound of their voices, then waved. Eliza Snow, kneeling beside a kettle, also straightened, then waved happily.
As the five women joined the two at the fire, there were quick hugs and kisses on the cheeks, then a rapid series of questions about the state of their health, how they were doing without Brother Markham’s presence—he was leading the advance scouting party and was often away from his family—and how things were going in general.
Then Rebecca could stand it no longer. She looked around. “We had the strangest experience just a moment ago. As we started toward your camp, we thought we smelled fresh bread.”
Hannah Markham laughed merrily and turned and pointed to the wagon. There, lined up along the wagon seat, were three pans. The brown rounded tops of loaves of bread could be seen in all of them. “They’re just cooling now,” she explained. “I think they may be a little burned on the bottom—a Dutch oven is not as dependable as my brick one at home. But Sister Eliza and I were about to break out a bottle of raspberry preserves and see how we did. Would you like to join us?”
“I can’t believe it,” Jessica said, staring at the bread in astonishment. “You actually baked bread today?”
Eliza walked to the wagon, looking back over her shoulder. “Isn’t she a wonder?” She gingerly lifted one of the bread pans, turned it upside down, and let the loaf drop into her apron. “Yes,” she called back to Hannah, “it is burned a little, but only the crust.”
Jenny McIntire Steed leaned back against the small length of log she was using for a backrest. “What do we call this place?” she asked of no one in particular.
“What place?” Eliza Snow answered.
“Here. Where we’re camped.”
“Richardson’s Point,” Caroline volunteered.
“I say we change the name,” Jenny, who knew the name as well as anyone, said with a smile. “I say from now on we call it Bread Loaf Point.”
That won her a laugh. “No, no!” Rebecca spoke up. “I have one better. How about—” Her eyes half closed. “How about, Paradise Creek?”
“Or Dutch Oven Heaven,” Lydia laughed, getting caught up in the game.
Hannah Markham was embarrassed. “Oh, you,” she said, waving her hand at them. “It’s not that good.”
“It’s absolutely wonderful,” Jessica answered back. “And out here? It’s a miracle.”
Still blushing slightly, Sister Markham explained. “When I got up this morning and saw that it had stopped raining and that it was going to be a clear day, I said to myself, ‘I feel like baking bread today.’ So I did.”
“Well, it was delicious, and we are very glad that we stopped by at just the right time,” Caroline said. Then she turned to Eliza Snow. “Have you been writing any poetry lately, Sister Eliza?”
Eliza Snow was about forty now, Lydia guessed. A small woman with piercing dark eyes and fine features, she was beloved of all who knew her. And she was a gifted poet and writer. Now it was her turn to blush. “No, not much lately.”
“You wrote those verses at Sugar Creek Camp,” Hannah Markham corrected her.
“Well, yes, but that was two or three weeks ago.”
Caroline laughed and spoke to the others. “Only Eliza Snow would think one poem in two or three weeks wasn’t much.” Then she turned to Eliza. “Would you read it for us?”
Eliza’s color deepened. “It was just something I wrote in my journal,” she demurred.
“I’ll get it for you,” Hannah said, starting to rise.
Eliza pulled her back down again. “You know I always carry my journal with me.” She patted the pocket of her apron.
“Then read it for us,” Rebecca cried. “Please, Sister Eliza. I love your poetry.”
“Yes,�
�� Jenny pleaded. “Really. We do all want to hear what you wrote.”
Eliza looked around at the eager faces, then finally nodded. “All right.” She brought out the leather-backed notebook and opened it, leafing back a few pages. “As Hannah said, I wrote this while we were still languishing at Sugar Creek.”
She opened the book wider, then looked around at their faces once more. “I think I’ll call it, ‘The Camp of Israel.’ ” Then she began to read.
Altho’ in woods and tents we dwell,
Shout, shout, O Camp of Israel;
No Christian mobs on earth can bind
Our thoughts, or steal our peace of mind.
Tho’ we fly from vile aggression,
We’ll maintain our pure profession—
Seek a peaceable possession
Far from Gentiles and oppression.
Eliza looked up from her journal for a moment. “That last stanza is a chorus that comes after each verse,” she explained, “but I’ll just read the rest of the verses now.” She looked back down and continued.
We better live in tents and smoke
Than wear the cursed gentile yoke—
We better from our country fly
Than by mobocracy to die.
We’ve left the City of Nauvoo
And our beloved Temple too,
And to the wilderness we’ll go
Amid the winter frosts and snow.
Our homes were dear—we lov’d them well,
Beneath our roofs we hop’d to dwell,
And honor the great God’s commands
By mutual rights of Christian lands.
Our persecutors will not cease
Their murd’rous spoiling of our peace,
And have decreed that we must go
To wilds where reeds and rushes grow.
The Camp—the Camp—its numbers swell,
Shout, shout, O Camp of Israel!
The King, the Lord of Hosts, is near,
His armies guard our front and rear.
She closed the book and lowered it slowly. There was silence around the circle. Then Lydia said what they all were feeling. “Thank you, Eliza. Thank you for reminding us of who we are, why we are here, and who it is that leads us on.”
Chapter Notes
The scripture which Joshua reads in the Book of Mormon is now Alma 34:30–33.
In her journal entry for 11 March 1846, Eliza R. Snow, who was traveling with Stephen and Hannah Markham, recorded, “My good friend Sis. M[arkham] brought me a slice of beautiful, white light bread and butter, that would have done honor to a more convenient bakery, than an out-of-door fire in the wilderness.” Assuming the bread was baked that same day, that seems a little odd, since the eleventh supposedly had heavy rain. One possibility is that, since Hannah Markham apparently baked eleven loaves of bread on the ninth of March, on the eleventh she may have given Eliza a slice from one of those. (See Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, ed., The Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995], pp. 118–19.) In any case, for the purposes of the novel this incident has been placed on the following day, 12 March, once the weather had cleared.
Eliza R. Snow was sealed to Joseph Smith as a plural wife in 1842. Sometime after the Prophet’s death, she was married to Brigham Young for time so that he could care for her. However, Brigham had taken several other women to care for them and had a large company traveling west with him. He asked Stephen Markham, a trusted friend of Joseph’s, to take Eliza with his family and care for her. The poem cited here was written in her journal under date of 19 February 1846 (see Beecher, ed., Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow, pp. 113–14).
Chapter 8
By the time Mary Ann returned to the wagons, Joshua had all the bedding out to dry and was sorting through the boxes and bags and barrels in his wagon—something he had not yet had a chance to do since making the trade for the wagon and all that was in it. He looked up and smiled. “They do you in?”
She sat down on a log beside the cold campfire, shaking her head. “If I had even half that much energy, I could pull the wagons to the Rocky Mountains all by myself.”
“Are they all right?”
“Yes, Josh is with them. And Rachel and Emily. They’re fine. It feels so good to them to be outside and running again. I’m not even sure they know I’m gone.” She patted the log beside her. “So come and sit for a while. It looks like you’ve been busy. Did everyone run off and leave all this for you?”
He replaced the lid on a barrel of beans and tapped it into place with the heel of his hand, then looked around. Their camp looked like a strong wind had hit in the middle of laundry day at the river. “No, actually it was my idea. The men went to see to the stock, you had the children, so the women decided to go visiting.”
Her face fell slightly. “Oh, I would have loved to be with them.”
Finished, he moved over to sit beside her. “Maybe you can go out this afternoon.”
“It does feel good to have sun again, doesn’t it?” she murmured, tipping back her head so the sunlight fell full upon it.
“It feels great. And if the weather holds, I think we’ll be able to roll out of here by tomorrow afternoon.”
“I hope so. I hate the waiting. Don’t you want to be up and going, getting on with it?”
He nodded. “But in a way this has been good. We would never have caught them by now if they had kept moving.”
She smiled at him. “I am so glad you went back, Joshua. It feels so right to have Caroline and the children here with you.”
“Yes. It does, doesn’t it? I’m still not sure it’s wise to pack them up and move them out to nowhere, but I didn’t feel good about leaving them in Nauvoo.”
She clucked reprovingly at him. “Nowhere? Just because we don’t yet know where the Lord has in mind doesn’t mean that we’re going nowhere, Joshua.”
He laughed easily. “Oh, Mother. Sometimes I envy you your simple faith.”
“Faith is simple,” she retorted. “You just believe.”
“Right,” he said, a little wistfully.
She leaned away from him enough that she could look directly at him. “Well, it is simple. Look what happened to you. You had the faith to decide to bring Caroline back with you and—”
He shook his head. “That wasn’t faith, Mother. I was just worried about them.”
“Faith is nothing more than taking action when you don’t have any evidence that something is true or that it is the best thing to do. Why did you choose to come out here? If it was just worry for your family’s safety, why not take them to Chicago or back to Georgia?”
“Because we wanted to be with the family.”
“That’s part of it, no question about it. But if you thought you were taking your family into great danger, you wouldn’t have done it, family or not.”
“Probably not.”
“So, you had faith that coming with us was the best thing, even though you had no proof of it.”
He laughed. “I can think of a lot of people who would hoot right out loud to hear you use faith in the same sentence with Joshua Steed.”
“Let them hoot,” she said easily. “It’s true. And look what happened as a result of your faith. You were able to make a wonderful trade and get the things you needed. That’s pretty simple, I would say.”
“And you think the two are related?” He was openly skeptical.
“Of course.” She leaned forward, very earnest now. “Joshua, what happened to you out there was remarkable.”
He remembered his choice of words earlier. “No, it was incredible.”
“Then what greater witness do you need?”
He stiffened a little. “What did you say?”
“I said, what greater proof can you have than what happened to you with those two families? It is a marvelous—”
“No. You didn’t say ‘proof.’ ”
Puzzled by his sudden intensity, she thought back. “I said, what greater
witness can you have? Why?”
He was staring at her, remembering the words that had jumped out at him this morning. Again his first thoughts were of some benign conspiracy. Had his mother somehow known he would see the Book of Mormon? Had she and Lydia—? Again he had to reject it. There was no possible way. Finally, he leaned back, visibly relaxing. “Nothing. I . . . I just thought it was an odd choice of words.”
“Well, odd or not, that’s faith. And it is simple. When you believe enough to act in certain ways, then wonderful things happen. Take this thing with your family. Doesn’t it feel good to be together again, to have Caroline right here beside you?”
“You know it does.”
“Then just extend that to the next life. Think how sad you’d be if you were to be separated from her again, only this time forever. You don’t want that, do you?”
“Well, I—”
“Do you?” she persisted.
He finally shook his head. “You know that my family is the most important thing in the world to me now, Mama. Losing everything in these past few months—my businesses, the stables, all my money—has just made that all the clearer.”
“So you hope that this idea of an eternal marriage is true. You have no proof that it is, but you want it to be. So all faith is, is a willingness to act on that hope, to do things which will move you toward that goal. That’s what the Apostle Paul meant when he said, ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ ”
He shook his head. “That sounds pretty lofty to me.”
“No, Joshua. Listen. When you decided to bring your family back with you, you hoped that you would be able to find a way to care for them, but you had no evidence that you could. In fact, you had every reason to think you couldn’t find the supplies you needed. But you went ahead and acted. On what basis? Knowledge? No, faith. In other words, faith was the substance, or the assurance, of what you hoped for. It was out of faith that you acted.”
“All right, I see what you’re saying. I’m not sure I would use those words, but go ahead.”
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