THREE DAYS AFTER HE WAS MURDERED, RICHARD PRATT BEGAN TO FEEL MUCH BETTER...
A seemingly random act of violence propels Professor Richard Pratt into The Hereafter. It is a strange, muted, netherworld of the dead-a world in which he is forced to bear...
Salt Lake City was nothing like Billy had imagined. And not just because he was seeing it through the eyes of the newly dead.
Despite all his father had told him, he had not really understood the tension and anxiety afflicting the newly established Mormon haven. It had only been a very short decade since Brigham Young and his first band of refugees from religious persecution had descended Emigration Canyon—the same canyon where Billy had died. Brigham Young had entered the valley the same way that Billy had: ailing in the back of a wagon. But unlike Billy, he had survived, and had sat up in the wagon long enough to look over the valley, and proclaim, "This is the place."
A monument to those words stood on the site now, just a hundred yards from where Billy's mother had held him as he took his last breath.
The Mormons had entered the Salt Lake Valley as persecuted refugees, and they had immediately turned this valley into the haven they had long sought. But the scars of oppression never fade, and not for a moment in the decade that followed had they believed that their trials were over.
In the summer of 1855, grasshoppers had feasted on the young crops of the settlement in such numbers as to threaten their very survival. Only the hordes of seagulls which descended on the grasshoppers had saved them from starvation, and the reverence for the seagull endured forever more in the growing Mormon mythology.
The following year drought and famine came to the Saints, and the Church coffers ran so low that they could no longer support the steady stream of refugees. In a tragic decision, Church leaders encouraged the emigrants that fall to come anyway, even if it meant traveling with only handcarts, rather than wagons with teams of oxen. That year became known as the year of "the great handcart disaster," when over two hundred emigrants died in the early snows.
But by the summer of 1857, a more hopeful spirit was spreading through Salt Lake City. The famines had eased, and the prophet had led a religious reformation the previous year. Although sometimes brutal and controversial, it resulted in a renewed commitment to their faith. That is, by those who did not suffer and die at the hands of the most zealous of the valley's faithful.
Still, new threats were on the horizon, and Brigham Young was very aware that politics, and not the forces of nature, were now the greatest threats to the Mormon people.
He was right to be worried. As tensions between the Saints and the US reached a boiling point in the summer of 1857, the Prophet could see the writing on the wall. The "Amerikats" (as the Saints sarcastically called them) had assembled an army, and it was marching toward their sanctuary. They could be invaded before the winter arrived.
Brother Brigham put in place plans for a worst-case scenario, which might even entail abandoning their homes in Salt Lake City and taking to the surrounding mountains to the north and south to fight a guerrilla war against the United States. The Mormons built their own standing army and asked every family to contribute a son or husband to it.
Sometimes, what the church leadership asked was great indeed. And they would ask much of the Sowersby family.
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