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people.
    The curious inhabitants came out of their houses to stare at the Saints as they passed, making fun of their awkward carts and joking with their neighbors. “It’s the Mormons. Lock up your daughters,” said one, and another called, “My ox is named Joe Smith!”
    “I thought all you Mormons had gone to hell,” one man called, and Ephraim answered him gaily, “The Lord has made no such requisition.”
    Several well-meaning villagers begged the Coopers to winter there, telling them that they had started out too late in the year and would run into snow before they got to the Salt Lake. “You’d better say your prayers if you keep on, Mormons,” one called. He was rebuked by Sutter, who retorted, “Your Babylon has no claim on us.”
    Many of the people were friendly, and despite Thales’s warning, Jessie sometimes stopped to exchange a word with the onlookers. A woman sold her a pail of milk for a nickel. Another offered a glass of buttermilk when the Coopers stopped to repair a broken spoke. Sutter and Jessie had tied the broken ends together with a rag, intending to replace the spoke later with a tree branch, but a farmer offered a seasoned piece of wood that he said would work better. And because they knew the green wood used to build the cart was the source of their troubles, they accepted.
    Thales came along then and reprimanded the two, saying, “We need no help but that which we receive from God.” The Coopers and the farmer smiled at one another, and after Thales moved on, Sutter said he considered the farmer an instrument of the Lord and the lumber a gift from God, and he placed the board in his cart.
    “We have a preacher here. He, too, has the misfortune of doubling for the Almighty,” the farmer said, and they all laughed.
    Jessie heard the songs of birds over the creaking of the carts, songs she could not identify, and looked for the birds that made them. She found wildflowers that grew among the prairie grasses, coarser and taller than the grasses at home, and picked up rocks that intrigued her, putting them into the cart. When it was Sutter’s turn to pull, he threw out the stones, remarking that Thales would contend the three had gone over their allotment of seventeen pounds each.
    Sutter had been the one who had balked at going to America. Looking across their familiar English farm, he had said to his brother and sister, “We’ve made this the best farm for miles around. Why should we give it up?”
    Jessie and Ephraim were taken with the idea of starting life in a new land among other Mormons, however, and they believed that despite their efforts, the farm was worn-out. Thales had talked as much about America as he had about religion, and Jessie was convinced the land was as rich as Eden. When their brother resisted the move, Jessie and Ephraim did not talk about Sutter’s soul or the church’s call to Zion. Instead, Ephraim asked, “You want to work this piece of land for the rest of your life? Don’t you intend for nothing more than that?”
    Jessie added, “Supposing you or Ephraim should marry. You’d have to divide the farm.”
    “Or Jessie,” Ephraim said. “By rights, she should have a third.”
    “By rights, but not by law,” Sutter replied, correcting him.
    “You’d deprive her?”
    “No, I would not. I’m just pointing out the fact of it.”
    “And if you had a wife, would she agree to let Jessie have a third of the land?”
    “This is the sort of argument we’ll get into one day if we stay here,” Jessie said.
    Their arguments made Sutter doubt the wisdom of remaining, he told his sister later on. He admitted he’d asked himself if he really wanted to repeat each day’s chores for the next thirty or forty years. One morning when he went out to slop the hogs, he came back inside to tell his sister that the thought of staring into the face of a pig for the next ten thousand days was daunting. He didn’t want to feel the chill that went into his bones