Daily Iowa State Democrat. [volume] (Davenport, Iowa) 1856-1859, 1858-01-26

Tue way III WHICH uley were uAseiiue
at our last adyiccs, and it was said tha'
their picket-guard declared they woult
not watch.
If the soldiers knew the facts in thu
case As their officers do, they would
probably nearly all leave the army
but the officers keep the soldiers in the
dark. The last report is, that the Off
GERS had been telling the men that
had written a very favorable letter Ia
Col. Alexander, and that they were in
tending to come In.
When ! think, are they in your
houses, are they in yonr fields! | can
answer, no, they are in the mountains,
they are in the cold and in the snow,
and if they continue. as those officers
appear to intend to, upon the side of
despotism and mobocracy, they justly
out to be served a We would serve all
mobocrats. But we are here, and we
are free, as DR.. Kimball has said, just
as free, in one sense, as We ever shall
be.
Col. Alexander breaches to me a
title, stating in his letter, 81 warn you
that the blood shed in this contest will
be upon your head but that warning
gave me no thought. But ifthe blood
Of those soldiers is shed it will be up
on the heads of their officers.
What they will do | neither know
nor care, for it will be inst as the Lord
God wills it. If He sees that we need
their substance, He will tnrn thing. to
that end; and if He designs them to
be wiped out, He will either cause them
to undertake to come here, or will over
rule some other plan to accomplish
hat end.
Another year, / am going to pre-
pare for the worst, and | want You to
prepare to cache our grain and "lay
waste this Territory" for | am deter
mined, if driven to this extremity, that
our enemies shall find nothing but
heaps Of ashes and ruins. We will be
SO prepared that in a few days all a
be consumed. l shall request the
Bishops to see that the people in their
wards are provided with two OF three
years provisions. There is enough
already raised in many places this sea-
son to supply the people from two to
three years, and | wish them to take
care Of it, though l expect that IN all
probability We will raise a great many
crops before our enemies again come
here to disturb us; and | expect that
we are fully able to defend ourselves,
and that our enemies will not 81 able
to come within a hundred miles of us.
| know that ten men such as ] could
name and select, could stop them be
fore they got to Laramie. And if we
had seer fit to have sent such men this
season, they alone could easily have SO
stopped our enemies that they never
would have got through the Black
Hills. | count five such men equal to
twenty-five thousand, and believe that
two of them could put ten thousand to
flight, | believe that we are now
where that could be done. | will take
five or ten such mel as | can name,
and if two can put ten thousand to
flight | am sure that ten arc perfectly
able to do it.
Our enemies in the last treaty they
made with us, should have stipulated
that we should have gone only a short
distance, so that we could not have
been out of their reach. They had
better have made that stipulation, but
they did not have wisdom, or they
would have stopped US from going SO
far away. They drove us away from
their society and allowed us to travel
ST far owe the sage plains, that it is
impossible for an army to bring pro-
visions enough to last them here.
I have been told that the first artil-
lcry company, upon its arrival at Lar
annie, loaded up all the grain they
could haul to feed their mule teams,
and when they reached the Devils
Gate, they sent forward after their
grain from their freight trains, and
then they had not enough to last them
to Hams Fork. 1t is impossible for
them to load the teams with sufficient
forage to last them to Green River;
and the more men they send the more
there arc to eat up what the mule and
OK trains haul, and the consequence is
that the more men they send, the
worse it is all the time.
If they undertake to send fifty thou
sand men to Utah, l will venture to
say that they cannot raise so large a
company in the United States but
what would cat each others threats |
before they travelled a thousand miles
across the plains, to Say nothing about
any other persons molesting them.
They would be cursing, damning and
bowling all the way. l know that
the comparatively few scattered here
and there over the country and in the
mountains, can spoil their march before
ann ~o< or