Eliza R. Snow Spends a Crowded Winter Night in Exile

"We were two days on our way to Far West and stopped overnight at what was called the Halfway House, a log building perhaps twenty feet square, with the chinkings between the logs minus [missing] -- they probably having been burned for firewood -- the owner of the house, Brother Littlefield, having left with his family to escape being robbed; and the north wind had free ingress through the openings wide enough for cats to crawl through. This had been the lodging place of the hundreds who had preceded us, and on the present occasion proved the almost shelterless shelter of seventy- five or eighty souls. To say lodging would be a hoax, although places were allotted to a few aged or feeble, to lie down, while the rest of us either sat or stood or both, all night. My sister and I managed so that Mother lay down, and we sat by (on the floor, of course), to prevent her being trampled on, for the crowd was such that people were hardly responsible for their movements.

"It was past the middle of December, and the cold was so intense that, in spite of well packing, our food was frozen, hard, bread and all, and although a blazing fire was burning on one side of the room, we could not get to it to thaw our suppers, and had to resort to the next expediency, which was this: The boys milked, and while one strained the milk, another held the pan (for there was no chance of putting anything down); then, while one held a bowl of warm milk, another would, as expeditiously as possible, thinly slice the frozen bread into it, and thus we managed for supper. In the morning, we were less crowded, as some started very early, and we toasted our bread and thawed our meat before the fire.

"But, withal, that was a very merry night. None but saints can be happy under every circumstance. About twenty feet from the house was a shed, in the center of which the brethren built a roaring fire, around which some of them stood and sang songs and hymns all night, while others parched corn and roasted frosted potatoes, etc. Not a complaint was heard -- all were cheerful, and, judging from appearances, strangers would have taken us to be pleasure excursionists rather than a band of gubernatorial exiles.

(Tullidge, _The Women of Mormondom_, pp. 145-6)