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Five Hundred Good Men

Brigham Young knew it would not be easy to enlist the five hundred men, who would become known as the Mormon Battalion. From Council Bluffs he hurried back to Mount Pisgah, where he was able to convince sixty-six men to volunteer. There, on July 7, he wrote a letter to President Samuel Bent and his Council at Garden Grove. After explaining the call for men to assist in the war against Mexico, he wrote: "The thing is from above, for our good, has long been understood between us and the U. S. Government."

There were many among the Saints who saw the source of the request to be more earthy. As Zera Pulsipher, one of the first Seven Presidents of the Seventies saw it: "Five hundred of our young men were demanded by the general government through the influence of old Tom Benton, who was a noted mobber in the first Missouri persecutions, and was then in the Senate. This left the Church with old men, children and many poor women, while their husbands were fighting the battles of the United States."

Sergeant Daniel Tyler, who joined the battalion in response to Brigham Young's appeal at Mount Pisgah, explained years later the feelings of many of the Saints:

It may well be imagined that many of the Saints hesitated about responding to this call. It was not from lack of courage either. The danger of such an expedition would never have caused them to shrink or falter; but they had been deceived so many times by those who held authority in the nation that they looked upon this new requisition with distrust.

The Saints were in peculiar circumstances. They were scattered all the way from Nauvoo to Council Bluffs, and even west of there, for some had crossed the Missouri. They were destitute, having been forced to part with nearly every available thing to procure breadstuffs. The poor and sick and helpless who had been left in Nauvoo were looking to those in advance camps to help them, and many of the latter were under promise to do so. Responding to the call would prevent the pioneer company, which for several days previously had been making preparations to start, from pushing forward to the mountains that year. How would the helpless women and children do if the fathers and brothers, upon whom they had depended for support and protection, were taken away? These were questions that were bound to arise.

Zera Pulsipher's condemnation of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton may not have been entirely groundless. Zera had led a caravan of sixty-five wagons in the exodus from Kirtland and had experienced some of the worst of the Missouri mob actions that drove the Saints into Illinois. He was probably well acquainted with the part Thomas Hart Benton had played in the mob and would not hesitate to blame him for the call of the Mormon Battalion.