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Joseph,
Joseph, Joseph
The Temple Has Returned to Nauvoo
Photo Essay 3—Nightfall at the Nauvoo Temple
Photography:
Scot Facer Proctor
Text: Maurine Jensen Proctor
Note:
Click any images below to enlarge.
They built this
temple believing that the ordinances they received here would strengthen
and compensate them for the wilderness journey ahead. It must have
been an odd sight-a glorious temple rising on the hill built at
great expense and effort, while on the Nauvoo flats the people scrambled
to find the means to journey west.
A reporter from
the Daily Missouri Record wrote, "As a stranger passes
through, he will find himself frequently beset mostly by women and
children with inquiries, 'Do you wish to purchase a house and lot?
Do you wish to buy a farm?'" Then the stranger would "be pressed
and entreated to go and examine, and all the advantages [and] cheapness"
of the property would "be fully explained."
Still the work
on the temple continued. The reporter further observed, "Many of
them are going with poor teams, and an amount of provisions insufficient
for their subsistence for two months, if so long...If they should
fail to make a good crop this year, at the stopping place, it cannot
be otherwise than that many of them, especially and women and children
and the aged and decrepit, must be sorely pressed by starvation;
if many of them do not literally perish from famine on the plains...Of
those whose condition is calculated to arouse sympathy are a number
of women, many of whom have large families of children, inadequately
provided with provisions, and without the assistance of protection
of any male person. How they expect to get through the journey,
we cannot conceive."
Like Priddy
Meeks, many abandoned their possessions. "I had a small flock of
sheep which I had not time to sell. These I left, together with
my house and lot, the former containing my furniture and books."
They packed
and re-packed wagons, trying to make room for keepsakes that would
give them some sense of civilization in a new land. Some, in an
optimistic gesture, hid their china in the bottom of privies, hoping
they might someday come back to reclaim it. They never did.
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© 2002 Meridian
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