Before the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum were interred, twenty thousand Saints filed silently past the velvet-covered coffins in a last gesture of homage. Throngs filled the cemetery to watch the pine boxes lowered into the melancholy graves, boxes from which the bodies had been secretly removed and replaced with bags of sand. Fearing desecration of the graves, ten men buried the corpses at midnight in the basement of the Nauvoo House and heaped broken stone and rubbish over the spot.
