Spencer W. Kimball
"Perhaps of all prophecies ever made, none have been fulfilled more literally and more intensely and more devastatingly than this one from Mormon:
’But behold, it shall come to pass that they shall be driven and scattered by the Gentiles… .’ (Mormon 5:20.)
"And what a tragic and literal fulfillment those scriptures had.
"…The story of the Cherokees would melt the stoniest heart—driven at the point of a bayonet from their homes and lands, evicted from their country and sent to the swampy, mosquito-ridden area of Indian Territory. The prejudiced historian again said that the Indians were the culprits. Their suffering and death means little; their homes and gardens and farms were expropriated. The ‘white heroes’ evicted and expropriated for their own use (at the point of bayonets) the lands of the ’red demons.’
"We follow the Navajos from their exquisitely beautiful red sandstone lands of northeastern Arizona in their long, pitiful, painful march to central New Mexico, to Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River. We suffer and starve and freeze with them in the lonely four years, and then walk with them back to their homeland after signing their treaties.
"In recent times our attention was arrested by a double-page picture in Life magazine. It is the dead of winter. Plodding across the thousands of square miles of deep snow and the wind-scoured stubbly plain, two Indian women on their horses make a new deep trail through the snow. It is good that their horses can break trail; it is good that their warm skirts are long to their ankles; it is good that their blankets cover them well and their scarves cover their heads and faces, for the wind is bitter and the cold intense, and the way is long. Thank goodness they have a sense of direction, for if the horses failed, never would they be found alive. They have left in their hogans their children, so they might find food for their families. Their wagon is under a tree, a solitary tree; frozen sheep are here and there half covered in the snow. That frozen one that the boy is dragging is one of over half a million sheep, goats, and cattle that were stranded with no food save that from a lucky drop. They will have food for a few days but soon the carcasses will be spoiled beyond eating.
“Why do I return to a rehearsal of the indignities against the Indian? The answer is that we have a debt to pay. We are deeply indebted and we shall never have liquidated that debt until we shall have done all in our power to rebuild the Indian and give him back the opportunities that are possible for us to give him.” (Faith Precedes The Miracle, p. 340-2)