WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1858
524
the Rio Grande. You should leave artillerists enough for the pur- pose of keeping the arms and ordnance in order; but you may withdraw the three thousand infantry, cavalry, and dragoons, and appropriate them to the necessities of the Mormon war, or whatever service you please. The more men you send to the Mormon war the more you increase the difficulty. They have to be fed. For some sixteen hundred miles you have to transport provisions. The regiments sent there have found Fort Bridger and other places, as they approached them, heaps of ashes. They will find Salt Lake, if they ever reach it, a heap of aches. They will find that they will have to fight against Russia and the Rus- sians. Whoever goes there will meet the fate of Napoleon's army when he went to Moscow. Just as sure as we are now standing in the Senate, these people, if they fight at all, will fight des- perately. They are defending their homes. They are fighting to prevent the execution of threats that have been made, which touch their hearths and their families; and depend upon it they will fight until every man perishes before he surrenders. That is not all. If they do not choose to go into conflict immediately, they will secure their women and children in the fastnesses of the mountains; they have provisions for two years; and they will carry on a guerrilla warfare which will be most terrific to the troops you send there. They will get no supplies there. You will have to transport them all from Independence, in Missouri. When the fire will consume it, there will not be a spear of grass left that will not be burnt. In addition to that universal desolation, they have canons, they have ravines, and they have turbulent rivers to cross. A hundred men on the sides of these canons can roll down rocks enough to keep the army engaged a week in getting them out of the way, and there is no place to put them. I am told by persons who have traversed it, that the passway is a mere space between precipitous and high mountains barely sufficient for the passage of a wagon. In times of rain a little rivulet courses its way through, and there they have made a road of width sufficient for the passage of one wagon only. How long would it take to throw obstructions there that would render it impassable? How long could they delay your army in that \Vay? and when they arrived at Salt Lake, exhausted, worn down, without supplies, and munitions, in what situation would they be to take to the mountains and to pursue these men in their fastnesses where ten men could resist a thousand? When the troops are in these canons the rocks could be hurled down on them; and it could easily be done, for they
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