Free Faith and Betrayal by Sally Denton Page B

after the months on the water. “The next discovery I made,” Jean Rio wrote, “was that I wanted a cooking stove, which I purchased with all the utensils belonging for fourteen dollars.” Her children immediately scouted the neighborhood for playmates, enjoying themselves “finely in their rambles about the town and the open country beyond.” She stocked her kitchen from the many markets that opened at four a.m. every day. “All kinds of meat, poultry, and fish are very cheap. The fresh meat is good, but not so large and fat as in the English markets. Vegetables and fruit are abundant and of great variety.”
    She was amazed by the ever-changing weather. “This, I am told, is the general character of American springtime.” On one day there could be a heavy fall of snow and freezing temperatures necessitating fires in all the fireplaces, and the very next day she would “throw open the windows.”
    Of particular interest to her in bustling St. Louis were the dozens of churches of every denomination, all “magnificent buildings” and all sporting steeples. “The Catholics have three churches, each surmounted with a large gilded cross, the Presbyterians three, the Baptists four, the Episcopalians and Independents several each,” she noted. Then there are the Methodist and Lutheran and Swedish churches, so that religions are as plentiful as can be wished. The poor sons of Africa, too, have a little church to pray and praise the Lord in, but it is only lately that their masters have allowed them this privilege.” She attended several services, primarily to hear the music, and found the orchestral bands and tenor soloists up to professional standards.
    On Palm Sunday she went to Mass at a Catholic church, marveling at the rich velvet and satin coverings of the altar and at the carved walnut rails polished to a deep sheen. “On each side are seats for the scholars and Nuns of the adjoining convents. Strange-looking beings, these last. They wear black woolen shawls reaching down to the hem of their coarse black Camelot gowns, a close bonnet made of black glazed cambric, and black crepe veils reaching to the knees.” The priests too donned long black gowns with a hemp cord around the waist upon which hung a rosary and crucifix. The vestments, customs, tapers, incense, Latin hymns, confessional boxes, holy water, and religious icons were foreign to her; they had been absent from the Church of England since the Protestant Reformation. She found the confessionals gloomy and mysterious, cloaked with dark green curtains and ornamented with “finely executed oil paintings but horrible to look at, being all of them representations of the martyrdom of different Saints.”
    Over the next two or three weeks she reviewed the list of required provisions itemized by Mormon leaders, and set out to acquire them. She purchased four wagons and eight yoke of young oxen, or sixteen animals, for the wagon-train journey across the plains, a steer for beef, and two dairy cows so that her children would have fresh milk and cheese along the way. The church list included one thousand pounds of flour, a musket or rifle for each male over the age of twelve, one pound of gunpowder, four pounds of lead, one pound of tea, five pounds of coffee, one hundred pounds of sugar, ten pounds of rice, numerous spices, cooking utensils, tents for sleeping, furnishings for the wagons, twenty-five pounds of salt, thirty pounds of dried apples and peaches, twenty-five pounds of grain, twenty pounds of soap, fifteen pounds of iron and steel, pulleys and ropes for river crossings, farming and mechanical tools, fishhooks and line for all in the party, and sundry additional items. One of the wagons was specially built to carry her square grand piano and delicate finery, the wagon itself covered with tar to protect it from the rain and dirt.
    She then bought passage on yet another steamboat, the
Financier,
which would take her and her family, along with her