Why do we have to leave it?

Nauvoo Temple

When the Saints realized that they would be turning their backs on Nauvoo, members asked Parley P. Pratt why it was necessary for them to keep turning their backs on their belongings and land. What was Parley’s response?

 a.      It was the Lord’s way to weed out the faithful

b.      We have never lived where the God of Israel wants us to live

c.       To leave a monument of the Saints virtue and industry

d.      Riches can only lead to damnation

Yesterday’s answer:

 a.      Reptiles

Ann Howell Burt has left us with a lengthy and vivid description of life in such a dwelling [dugout]. A native of Glamorganshire, Wales, Ann immigrated to America as a child in 1851, came west to Utah in 1852, married, and found herself living in a dugout in summer 1863. “The neighbors,” she recorded in her journal, “call it the Castle of Spiders and it is well named, for I never saw so many reptiles and bugs of all kinds.” She continued: “For several mornings I was puzzled to find my milk-pan skimmed; could not understand what could have done it. So the other evening I sat down behind the door, with my knitting, to watch proceedings, and what was my surprise to see a huge bull-snake come crawling out from the head of our bed and swaying gracefully toward my crude cupboard, began to skim my cream. Now I cover my milk tightly.”

Things did not improve over the course of the summer, as subsequent entries indicate: “This is a hideous place. Some days ago, I killed a rattlesnake with my rolling pin, as he came crawling down the steps. I was just cooking supper and the baby was on the floor or rather the ground, for we have no other floor. I was badly frightened. . . . A few days ago, while keeping the flies off the baby’s face as he slept on an improvised bed on the floor, I discovered, to my horror, a large tarantula crawling toward the child, I seized the broomstick, thrust the end of it at the tarantula and when it took hold of the thing which was provoking it I hurriedly put it into the fire.

Ann’s last journal entry about her dugout experience speaks volumes: “We are going to move away from here,” she wrote. “I am wary from fighting all these reptiles.”

Nearly Everything Imaginable, Walker, Ronald W., Doris R. Dant ed., (Provo, Utah: BYU Press, 1999), 121.