1847 by Turtle Bunbury

Author:Turtle Bunbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill Books

And yet, while ‘a great many of my men are wholly without shoes … worn out’ and ‘eating their last four ounces of flour’, Cooke marvelled at their continued good cheer. On 17 January, for instance,

the men who, this morning, were prostrate, worn out, hungry, heartless, have recovered their spirits tonight and are singing and playing the fiddle.14

On 25 January the battalion stood guard just east of Temecula, California, while a party of Luiseño Indians gathered up the bodies of nearly 40 of their dead, killed in the first days of 1847 during a vicious ambush by a combined force of Californio (Spanish-speaking Californians) militiamen and Cahuilla Indians.15

The Mormons’ long march finally concluded when the remaining members of the battalion, together with the four women, tumbled into the small village of San Diego in southern California, utterly exhausted, bedraggled and bleeding, on the drizzly afternoon of 29 January. Captain Cooke wrote that,

the buildings being dilapidated, and in use by some dirty Indians, I camped the battalion on the flat below. There are around us extensive gardens and vineyards, wells and cisterns, more or less fallen into decay and disorder; but also olive and picturesque date trees flourishing and ornamental. There is no fuel for miles around, and the dependence for water is some rather distant pools in the sandy San Diego, which runs (sometimes) down to the ocean. The evening of this day of the march, I rode down, by moonlight, and reported to the General in San Diego.16

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