Montrose

We were given a tour of Montrose, Iowa. Montrose is directly across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo. There was a Mormon settlement called Zarahemla right next to Montrose. When the Saints left Nauvoo, many of the people living in Zarahemla went with them. Montrose is important because a year after the exodus from Nauvoo, the only people left were poor immigrants from Europe who had spent every penny they had getting to Nauvoo. Once there, they found the Saints had left. They were very poor and since they were Mormons, living in Nauvoo, the mobs came to clean the city out. They wreaked havoc. They burned homes, went into the temple and broke up the furniture, broke windows, destroyed the baptismal font with its 12 carved oxen. Then they turned on the poor people and demanded that they leave. They couldn't go anywhere, so the mobbers picked women and children up and literally threw them into the river and told them to swim. There were a few barges left and so the people escaped with only the shirts on their backs. When they got to Montrose, there was no food. Then the Miracle of the Quail. Just as the children of Israel were fed quail in the desert, quail appeared and were easily caught and the people did not starve to death. It took a while for news to travel to Winter Quarters (near Omaha, Nebraska) but when Brigham Young heard about it, he sent wagons to rescue the people and bring them to Winter Quarters.

Our tour guide taught us about dowsing. He said he has found wagon tracks by dowsing and cemetaries full of the dead by dowsing. No one knows how it works, but it does. He had dowsing wires for each of us and we tried it.