Long before I-80 cut a clear path through the state — and before any asphalt, rubber tires, railways or virtually any infrastructure existed to aid westward travelers — crossing the roughly 310 miles between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers was a long, arduous journey. The native landscape, wildlife and bacteria familiar to generations of indigenous people often proved deadly to white settlers.
Nonetheless, thousands made the journey across the land we now call Iowa in the 1830s. Westward migration was a nationwide trend following the Black Hawk War and escalating Indian removal policies championed by presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. More than 100,000 Native Americans were forced west onto reservations in unincorporated territory (mostly Oklahoma and Kansas) in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed more than 15,000 en route and saw millions of acres in the southeast U.S. claimed by wealthy white settlers and converted into cotton fields tilled by enslaved laborers.
Cue the Oregon Trail theme music.
The vast majority of the displaced tribes (most Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole) took paths that ran south of Iowa. They were followed closely by legions of white migrants pursuing Manifest Destiny along the Oregon and Santa Fe trails between 1836 and 1869. But one significant trail wove just north of Iowa’s modern border with Missouri, leaving wagon ruts, graves and towns that remain to this day and recall a religious exodus.
Fly or die
The Mormon Trail started just east of the Mississippi in Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had once again unsuccessfully attempted to establish a home base among fellow Christians who did not consider the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, to be a legitimate revelation from God. The new religious movement had moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, each time trying and failing to found the holy city their prophet Joseph Smith had envisioned.
In Nauvoo, Smith introduced several controversial doctrines, including baptism for the dead, Masonic-like societies with secretive rites and, most consequentially, plural marriage. While publicly claiming to be monogamous, Smith had taken as many as 40 wives, one just 14 years old. Smith’s followers, called “Saints,” were met with increasing violence from non-Saints, to which Smith was increasingly responding with more violence.
He was murdered in 1844, shot by a member of the mob that attacked the jail in Carthage, Illinois where he was awaiting trial for destroying the printing press a local paper used to spread what Smith considered anti-Mormon sentiment. The militant and amply bearded Brigham Young took over leadership of the Saints, and received a mission from above: head west to the Great Basin, and make a Zion there.
Like many religions, the LDS Church tends to romanticize the oppression faced by early adherents.
“It is difficult to imagine a successful Mormon Church without suffering, without the encouragement of it, without the memory of it,” wrote R. Laurence Moore in his 1986 book Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. “Persecution arguably was the only possible force that would have allowed the infant church to prosper.”
But the Mormon Trail is also distinctive for its relative safety compared to other 19th century migrations. Roughly 3.25 percent of travelers died on the trail, compared to 10 percent of those who took the Oregon Trail. It’s likely the common purpose shared by the Saints — who hailed not just from Nauvoo but also western Europe, where LDS missionaries had converted thousands — helped them avoid disasters.
“Perhaps their suffering seems less dramatic because the [Mormon] handcart pioneers bore it meekly, praising God, instead of fighting for life with the ferocity of animals and eating their dead to keep their own life beating, as both the Fremont and Donner parties did,” reads a 1956 piece in Collier’s Magazine by Iowa native Wallace Stegner, often called “the Dean of Western Writers.”
“But if courage and endurance make a story, if humankindness and helpfulness and brotherly love in the midst of raw horror are worth recording, this half-forgotten episode of the Mormon migration is one of the great tales of the West and of America.”
Hitting the trail
The first wagons left Nauvoo on Feb. 4, 1846 — exactly one year before the founding of the University of Iowa, for some context — and were ferried across the icy Mississippi River to Montrose Landing and the abandoned, original Fort Des Moines in Lee County. (It was at this same spot four years earlier that Joseph Smith had allegedly prophesied the Mormon exodus, saying they’d soon be “driven to the Rocky Mountains” by their enemies.)
Brigham Young led the maiden voyage of Mormon Trail pioneers, roughly 3,000 people in 500 wagons; a larger camp of 10,000 Saints would catch up later. They crossed the Des Moines River at the village of Bonaparte, then made their way to Richardson’s Point, located near the town of Milton in Van Buren County, where they stayed from March 7 to 19.
Iowa is among the most altered landscapes in the country, with less than .02 percent of its native prairies surviving to the 21st century. But some sites along the Mormon Trail are practically time capsules.
“You can still get a good idea of what it would have been like 175-plus years ago,” said Brad Klodt, president of the Iowa Mormon Trails Association (IMTA). “I’m a fifth generation in Van Buren County; it’s very rural, very rough. I can see where they would follow the high ridges to where the traveling was the best. I can see where they cross creeks and streams and add a solid limestone base to it so the wagons could get across easier.”
This tough terrain was exacerbated by the tough Midwest climate. “If you’re a homegrown Iowan or been here long enough, you realize how bad the spring weather can be. They hit freezing weather, snow, rain. The mud mired them down terribly. They would camp in certain spots for anywhere from a day to two weeks.”
“The first two or three recorded deaths on the Mormon Trail in 1846 happened there, and they were kind of prominent deaths,” Klodt continued. “One of them was Edwin Little, a 30-year-old nephew of Brigham Young, and the other a little 15-month-old boy. I think they basically got pneumonia.”
The pair were buried in crude coffins and unmarked graves in nearby woods. (Another eight adults and four children would die before the group reached Utah.) It wasn’t until 1981 that local historians found and marked the graves, and Klodt himself helped clear a path to them for visitors. The point was officially dedicated as a historic site in 2017 thanks to a partnership between the federal government, the LDS Church and the IMTA.
“One nice thing working with the National Park Service and the LDS Church and having the IMTA in the middle, we’re able to bring out a lot more history of smaller locations,” Klodt said. The association is dedicated to preserving trail sites and educating both Saints and secular explorers. Klodt himself is not Mormon, but is fascinated by the history.
“I’ve got [a surviving structure] about two miles from me. A little barn that was built in 1846, right on the trail,” he said. “It saw a lot in its time, and it’s still standing. An Amish family uses it every day.”
The IMTA meets every three months at the Prairie Trails Museum in Wayne County, which also houses a Mormon Trail exhibit.
Morale and manpower
“With death always comes life and with life, there’s usually joy and peace,” according to Klodt.
Along with the first deaths, Richardson’s Point also saw babies born and bands formed. Nauvoo bandleader William Pitt gathered Pitt’s Brass Band to cheer up fellow travelers in the evenings. They’d also dip off-trail for three days at a time to play for locals and earn money for supplies.
One of the most important hymns in the LDS Church was written on the Iowa Mormon Trail in 1846. William Clayton, a former clerk and scribe for Joseph Smith, penned “Come, Come, Ye Saints” during a particularly muddy night at the Locust Creek Campsite in Wayne County, right after learning his wife had successfully given birth back in Nauvoo. The lyrics were set to the English folk tune “All is Well.”
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!
The route’s next major stop was Garden Grove, roughly the midway point on the Iowa stretch of the Mormon Trail. Today, it’s a tiny Decatur County town with a population around 175, but in the winter of 1846/47, it was a refuge for about 600 Saints, who made a permanent settlement on lands belonging to the Potawatomi.
(Garden Grove is included in the small Mormon Trail Community School District, established in 1959. The district has an angel mascot, complete with wings, halo, sneakers and a slingshot.)
“A large amount of labour has been done since arriving in this grove: indeed the whole camp are very industrious,” wrote Orson Pratt, one of the faith’s first theologians. “Many houses have been built, wells dug, extensive farms fenced, and the whole place assumes the appearance of having been occupied for years, and clearly shows what can be accomplished by union, industry, and perseverance.”
Garden Grove, the Mount Pisgah settlement just northwest of it—where several thousand acres of corn, peas, cucumbers, buckwheat, potatoes, beans and squash were planted — and the Grand Encampment near Council Bluffs became way stations. Way stations were towns that essentially served as both short- and long-term residences for Mormons travelers.
“A lot of forethought went into this,” Brodt said. “These way stations were quite a good way of looking out for people. They keep wood cut up for fires and they’d have cabins built … If a woman was pregnant and getting ready to give birth, they would stop at the way station until she had the child and was recuperated enough where she could travel, or if there were people that were sick or people couldn’t afford to keep going, they could stay at the way stations. An awful lot of people just got in Iowa where they knew it was safe and homesteaded, got jobs.”
The fastest Mormon trailspeople reached Council Bluffs (then called Kanesville) by June 1846, where they wintered before embarking on the second leg of the 1,300-mile journey from Nauvoo to Brigham Young’s chosen destination. The first Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, commemorated annually as Pioneer Day in the church.
In 1852, Young, now the governor of the newly formed Utah Territory as well as the president of the LDS Church, called all Saints lingering in way stations and waiting overseas to hurry west, and most obliged. Between 1855 and ’57, thousands of converts immigrated to New York or Boston before riding the rails to their western terminus in Iowa City. While preparing for the trail — which included building handcarts that were cheaper and faster than ox-drawn wagons — many camped in an area west of the Iowa River near Hawkeye Recreation Fields, later designated Mormon Handcart Park. The nonprofit Johnson County Historical Society was originally formed in 1963 to erect a monument on the site and designate a nearby road Mormon Trek Boulevard.
The hive survives
Beehives have been an essential symbol in LDS sermons, art and architecture for nearly 200 years. Young even considered naming their new state in the west Deseret, a synonym for “honeybee” mentioned in the Book of Mormon. That didn’t happen, but a beehive has always sat at the center of the Utah state flag. To Saints like Young, beehives represented an orderly kingdom built from nothing, an industrious society capable of transforming a desert into a garden — and stinging their enemies, if necessary.
More than 80,000 Saints would ultimately follow Young to Utah, which became the headquarters of a world religion roughly 7 million strong. As the first governor of the Utah Territory and president of the church from the death of Joseph Smith until his own death, Young formally banned Black men from priesthood, practiced plural marriage (he had 56 wives in his lifetime) and precipitated a string of violent conflicts, including the massacre by a Mormon mob of some 120 migrants passing through Mountain Meadows, just 10 years after the first Saints crossed Iowa.
Back east, an LDS movement separate from Young took root. Known as the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and renamed the Community of Christ Church in 2001 — the scholarly faith was led by Smith’s eldest son, Joseph Smith III. In 1870, he bought 3,000 acres near Garden Grove and established the town of Lamoni, where the RLDS Church’s Graceland University was established. (Lamoni, Iowa was also the birthplace of the Hy-Vee grocery store chain. Founders Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg were RLDS members.)
The church takes an “all are called” approach to membership and the priesthood. Women and LGBTQ people are ordained. Members are encouraged to study LDS history. In the past couple decades, the Book of Mormon has become largely absent from worship, according to Pastor Rob Heverling of Council Bluffs’ Community of Christ Central Church.
“We’re pretty radically different [than the LDS Church],” he said. “For some members, there’s a lot of pride in church history. And I think for some members, it’s kind of like a stumbling block. It’s something we have to overcome.”
For this community of roughly a quarter million, the Mormon Trail was less about blazing a path to the Promised Land than finding your hive along the way.
“There’s a theme of journeying, you know, from Joseph Smith and all the struggles of the early church, bloodshed, wars, being run out of communities. That’s a journey. It’s a very physical journey, but it’s also a very theological journey,” Heverling said. “And so maybe it fits really well with where we are in the Community of Christ, because we have journeyed as an organization, as individuals — we are on our own faith journey.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s April 2024 issue.
