360 FRED LOCKLEY
said smite the Philistines, and he figured the Philistines was a misprint for the Mormons and he believed it was his religious duty to smite them. He believed they should be exterminated root and branch. He was a great hand to practice what he preached so he helped exterminate quite a considerable few of them. The Mormons had burned the houses and barns of some of father's folks. One of father's relatives was alone with her little baby when the Mormons came and she crept out of the window in her nightgown and had to walk thro' the snow four miles to a neighbor's while the Mormons burned her house and barn. That didn't make father feel any too friendly to the Mormons, so they run them out of Missouri and it wasn't long till they moved on and settled on the shores of the Great Salt Lake a thousand miles from anybody.
"In the spring of 1843 the first party of emigrants started from Missouri for the Willamette Valley in the Oregon coun- try. Next spring a lot more met at Capless Landing, near Weston, Missouri, and organized to cross the plains. Because father had been a captain in the Florida Indian war and because he had been a sheriff and had been in the legislature, and was a preacher, and because he was used to having people do what he wanted, they elected him the head officer.
'They organized like a regular military expedition. Father was made general and Michael T. Simmons was made colonel and four captains were elected R. W. Morrison, Elijah Bun- ton, Wm. Shaw and Richard Woodcock. Ben Nichols was chosen to act as judge and Joseph Gage and Theophilus Ma- gruder were to serve as judges with him. Charley Saxton was the secretary. Sublette, a trader among the Indians, and Black Harris, a mountain man, acted as guides as far as Fort Laramie. From Fort Laramie to Fort Bridger the train was guided by Jo Walker. I was five years old and I remember lots of incidents of the trip.
"There were two other emigrant trains came across the plains that same season, one commanded by Nathaniel Ford and the other by John Thorpe. From the Blue Mountains on
