The National Weather Service seems to be shouting over the raging thunderstorm: “FLOOD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE….” My windshield wipers thrash frantically against the downpour. Major flooding is keeping me away from the Mississippi River town of Nauvoo, Illinois. Already five feet over flood stage, the dark river is still rising.
This is the turbulent starting point for the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail — the path of the harrowing exodus of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (or LDS), a new religious sect started in New York in 1830. It was led by 24-year-old Joseph Smith, whose translation of the Book of Mormon had just been published. Believers, referring to themselves as Saints, are often informally called Mormons. In the beginning, it was a dangerous identity.
They named this boggy river bottom Nauvoo, a Hebrew word translated as “beautiful.” In 1839, the industrious Mormons drained the swamp and built a town centered upon an impressive stone temple.[BJ7] Mormon converts from Scandinavia and England soon arrived. Within five years, the population swelled to nearly 10,000.
Others living nearby became increasingly alarmed. To their traditional Christian neighbors, Mormon beliefs and practices were suspect. New scriptures, an unknown prophet, foreign ceremonies. Rumors of polygamy. Baptizing the dead. It didn’t help relations that Mormons openly judged theirs to be the only true faith that hadn’t strayed from the teachings of Jesus.
Mainstream Christian settlers noted the very earthly dangers posed by Mormonism, as well. Gathered in such numbers, Mormons created economic competition for land, for goods, and for business opportunities. They constituted a large unified voting bloc, capable of electing themselves into positions of power.
Joseph Smith had been tarred and feathered for preaching his oftentimes unpopular message. State militias had forcibly removed Mormons from their homes. Vigilantes had slaughtered them in their settlements and burned their farms. Over and over — in New York, Ohio, Missouri — Mormons were met with distrust and violence, and were driven out.
ILLINOIS – The Murder Of Joseph Smith
By June 1844, Nauvoo rivaled Chicago in size. Joseph Smith had become the city's mayor, chief justice, and head of the local militia. Many people expressed concerns about this concentration of power into one man’s hands. And then, that same year, Smith declared he was running for President of the United States.
Covering this announcement, a local newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, sharply criticized Mormon doctrine, especially polygamy. Using his unilateral authority, Smith ordered the newspaper shuttered and the printing press smashed. The public was horrified by this attack on the free press, taking to the streets in protest. Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested, charged with inciting a riot. An angry mob soon stormed the jail, shooting and killing them both.
Traumatized by the murder of Joseph Smith and renewed violence against them, the Latter-Day Saints decided to leave the United States, making plans to seek safety far to the west, out beyond the borders of the United States at that time.
In February 1846, the Mormons' great migration began, directed by the LDS Church’s second president, 45-year-old Brigham Young. They did not yet have a firm destination.
IOWA – “Come, Come Ye Saints, No Toil Nor Labor Fear”
Mercifully, the rainstorms have abated. Iowa Highway 2 runs just above the Missouri border, a gray ribbon of pavement under gray skies. It roughly tracks the first stretch of the Mormon Trail, rising and falling over Iowa’s rich green hills. My old car’s transmission is struggling with so much gear-shifting, and I wonder if it will make it or if I’ll be calling for a tow. Coaxing it over the next crest, I try to imagine making this crossing with a wooden-wheeled wagon.
The Mormons fled in waves, traveling westward in guided companies. Advance parties led the way, making their initial campsites at places like Garden Grove into sheltered way-stations for those who followed. But it had been slow going for the wagon train in the deep mud of the spring thaw. What should have taken 10 days’ travel stretched into a month of misery. It would take them 131 days to cross Iowa’s 310 miles.
Mormon Trail marker in honor of those who died along the trek from Illinois to Utah Territory/Barbara Jensen
Off Highway 169, the dirt road up to Mount Pisgah is still muddy from the rain. A Mormon scout named this place for the Biblical hilltop from which Moses saw the Promised Land. The weather today continues to clear, and I find the gentle panorama before me soothing, with thick fluffy clouds in a soft blue sky, trees lining the creeks and fencerows crisscrossing the hills.
However, my attention is drawn to the large white obelisk placed “In memory of those members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day saints who DIED in 1846, 1847, AND 1848 During their exodus to seek a home beyond the Rocky Mountains.” Multiple names are engraved on the four-sided pillar. Many travelers, weakened by exhaustion, malnutrition, and the distress of their forced departure, fell dangerously ill by this point in the journey. Mount Pisgah became a final way-station for hundreds of Saints buried beneath its slopes.
Yet despite the constant hardships, hopeful voices emerged. One emigrant named William Clayton composed the now-famous Mormon anthem ‘Come, Come, Ye Saints,’ a song of several verses “written one miserable, muddy night in south-central Iowa … in honor of the birth of his son,” according to the National Park Service’s Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide. It begins:
Come, come, ye Saints, no toil nor labor fear;
But with joy wend your way.
Though hard to you this journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day.
‘Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive;
Do this, and joy your hearts will swell –
All is well! All is well!
Looking out over Mount Pisgah takes me back to the years when I did street outreach to people living unhoused, sleeping outside or in their cars – homeless. Our society often doesn’t understand “those” people, the ones who are not like “us.” It strikes me that the Mormon pioneers, traveling west into the unknown, were a wagon train of the homeless. A slow-moving, unwelcome tent city.
All is well, I remind myself as my car chugs noisily up another Iowa hill, heading toward Council Bluffs above the Missouri River. I used to rest assured that if I broke down, someone would help me. But these days, I’m more uneasy about “us” versus “them.”
NEBRASKA – “Why Should We Mourn, Or Think Our Lot is Hard?”
At the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters, located in Omaha, Nebraska, LDS Sister Fors gives me a guided tour. She explains that by the time the first companies finally reached the wide Missouri, it was too late in the year to attempt going on. Instead, they hunkered down on both sides of the river, erecting shelters for nearly 7,000 people, divided between the Grand Encampment on the east bank and Winter Quarters on the west bank. Thousands more camped along the trail at places like Mount Pisgah and Garden Grove. Crowded together, disease spread rapidly. Hundreds of Mormon pioneers died during the winter of 1846-47.
Sister Fors shows me a handcart piled high with household goods. “These were made available for people traveling later, people who maybe didn’t have the means to purchase a wagon.” I’m reminded of used backpacks and tents and donated bikes given to people on the streets. She explains how two adults, pushing against a crossbar, would together pull a 500-pound, two-wheeled wooden cart loaded with all their worldly possessions. From Illinois to Utah – 1,300 miles. My mind pictures mounded shopping carts on city streets across the country. So much desperation, met with so much distrust, condemnation, and aversion. Then and now.
I take a side trip to Homestead National Historical Park near Beatrice, Nebraska. The car is running rough, and I’m feeling tired. I need to remind myself what the Mormons were struggling toward.
Here, I stand in a quiet doorway, looking inside a small, weathered-gray log cabin on the site of the first land claim filed under the Homestead Act of 1862. Simple but solid, this little house on the prairie is a home – built by hand, with a stout door for safety, and windows full of sunlight and warmth. Restored native tallgrasses and flowers bob cheerfully behind the rail fence.
In the spring of 1847, the Mormons pushed on, with Brigham Young’s advance party in the lead. The 500-mile stretch of trail that followed the Platte River across the Nebraska prairie was considered by many travelers the easiest part of the journey. I drive I-80, following both river and trail from Grand Island across most of the state, a smooth flat grade for which I am very thankful. In those Missouri River hills, I had switched to manually shifting my automatic transmission; how much farther my modern covered wagon will go without breaking down is anybody’s guess.
Because I know what’s coming, even if the Mormon pioneers did not. The land has been rising imperceptibly. And this is just the beginning.
As they followed the North Platte fork, a pale sandstone pinnacle, solitary as a lighthouse — Chimney Rock — would confirm their course. The Mormon guides had learned where the passage through the mountains was to be found. And Brigham Young had heard of a valley on the other side that they might finally call home.
WYOMING – “Fresh Courage Take, Our God Will Never Us Forsake”
“Were you going to the top today?” the BLM ranger asks, stepping beside me on the bridge over the wagon ruts.
“To the – up on the rock?” I say, intrigued. “You can climb it?”
“We’re going up now, if you want to come along.” The young man smiles affably, nodding at the middle-aged woman in a BLM vest who is already on the trail.
This is how I find myself scrambling to the top of another major trail landmark — Independence Rock, a rounded mass of granite 1900 feet long by 850 feet wide, standing 136 feet above the Sweetwater Valley. Noticeable. The footpath encircling it is a mile long.
Seeing Independence Rock on or before July 4th didn’t only mean you’d made it to the Sweetwater River, another reliable water source to follow – it meant you had enough time to get over the mountains before the snow. Independence Rock meant you might just make it. Filled with renewed hope, thousands of emigrants climbed up here and carved their names into the rock.
Devils Gate in Wyoming, cut by the Sweetwater River, along the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail/Barbara Jensen
This was an old fur trapper’s route: up the North Platte into Wyoming, then follow the Sweetwater River to South Pass, a 20-mile-wide, relatively manageable route over the Continental Divide. South Pass became the gateway to the West, key to the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, the Pony Express and the transcontinental telegraph. Along the Sweetwater, all the trails combined until Parting of The Ways, a junction before the Green River.
The story goes that somewhere west of the Great Divide, Brigham Young and his scouts met up with mountain man Jim Bridger and asked him about the Salt Lake Valley. He recommended it for grazing, fishing, and timber, but was less confident about farming in the cold valley. Bridger reportedly made a $1,000 wager against the Mormons growing corn there, and advised Young that if he was taking the bet, he should also take the new road that led from Fort Bridger directly into the valley.
UTAH – “We’ll Find The Place Which God For Us Prepared”
It was Hastings Cutoff, a rough-cut trail used the prior summer by the ill-fated Donner Party headed through Utah to California. The cutoff led them into the Wasatch Mountains. Here Brigham Young fell ill with “mountain fever,” his body aching with terrible chills and high fever.
Leaving a few people to nurse Young, the scouts determinedly led the rest of the company down narrow, sheer-walled Echo Canyon. At a lower pass, they rested, a place now marked as Camp Grant. Then on to Big Mountain Pass, where the emigrants would have caught their first glimpse of the valley in the distance.
The trail that leads to Mormon Flat in the Wasatch Range just east of Salt Lake City/Barbara Jensen
I stop for the view. Walking a portion of the overgrown hiking trail leading toward Mormon Flat below, my feet slip repeatedly on the steep gravel path. I think of easing oxen and wagons through these tight, forested canyons, or riding sick in the back of a wagon as Brigham Young did, over Little Mountain Summit, into Emigration Canyon, and finally, down over Donner Hill, arriving in July 1847, 111 days after leaving Winter Quarters. The Mormons would be homeless no more.
They called their new territory Deseret, meaning Beehive. Working together as they had in Nauvoo, they began building a new community for themselves, intending to establish an independent Mormon commonwealth. Six months after their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, however, the Mexican-American War ended, with Mexico ceding the Great Basin and desert Southwest to the United States. This included the Great Salt Lake area. According to the trail travel guide, “Within three years, the proposed Mormon State of Deseret would become Utah Territory, with Brigham Young appointed as territorial governor. Latter-Day Saints who had fled the U.S. were once again a part of it….” Another storm was brewing, as secession and civil war threatened the nation.
The Mormon Pioneer National Historical Trail preserves a unique legacy. It also offers us a path circling right back to some fundamental questions we’re still grappling with in this country, issues like freedom of speech and beliefs and also respect for differences. Finding safety and security through reasonable compromise and inclusion. Who belongs here, with “us.” And who is “other.
The Salt Lake Valley in the distance from Big Mountain Pass in the Wasatch Range east of Salt Lake City/Barbara Jensen
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