100 Sioux City Academy of Science and Letters. 
During this summer Thompson went to St. Louis to 
buy more printing material and a mill, going by team to 
southeastern Iowa, and the rest of the way by boat, stop- 
ping at Nauvoo to moralize over the sins that had caused 
the downfall of that settlement; he returned by the same 
route. 
Affairs at Preparation were not at all harmonious. 
The first year a new settlement is hard at best, and add 
to this a sort of surrender of independence and an 
acknowledgement of Thompson’s authority and the pay- 
ing in of one-tenth of all one’s earthly possessions and 
services, required the spirit of a saint; and those that had 
paid in would criticise those who had not, and some who 
had been prominent in organizing the colony seceded, 
and in the Kanesville paper denounced Thompson as an 
impostor and tyrant, and that none but fools would allow 
themselves to be controlled by him. 
An unexpected difficulty had presented itself in the 
maiter of the land; when they first came to Preparation 
the land there had been surveyed by the United States 
authorities, but was not all subject to private entry and 
could only be taken by actual settlers under pre-emption 
laws, and they intended to claim two congressional town- 
ships and had filed pre-emptions on the pieces that were 
timbered, but the General Land Office had ordered the 
land thrown into market and it would be publicly offered 
for sale in September, 1854, when speculators would en- 
ter the land. At that time, this was sure to be the case, 
especially as bounty land warrants for soldiers in the 
Mexican and other wars, had been issued by the United 
States and were bought up for this purpose by capitalists 
who located on such lands, and the land would have te 
be taken in some valid form to hold it, for this colony. 
So Thompson announced that while it had not beeu 
originally intended to open up the third degree in the 
school of work until the August Solemn Assembly of 
1856, yet he now advised all to anticipate that period and 
to enter a new order of sacrifice, which, while not strictly 
obligatory, and would not exclude from the Presbytery 
those who did not join it, yet would sanctify those who 
entered it. The order of sacrifice was that each one 
should surrender to Thompson, the Chief Steward, all 
their property and enter into bond to work for him two 
