The Early Challenges. It was the heart of a bitter winter in February of 1846, and the mighty Mississippi River was threatening to freeze. Along its eastern shore, nearly 12,000 men, women, and children huddled in their homes awaiting word of their fate.

Click on the map to see a larger version of the Pioneer Trail

    As members of the fledgling Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known back then as Mormons), they had suffered too many times in too many places at the hands of angry mobs who did not understand them.
     Even though their Church had been founded only 16 years earlier in New York, many of the Saints had already been driven from town to town, state to state. Their farms had been burned and their animals stolen. When they arrived at this place, a village of their own making called Nauvoo, Illinois, there had been great hope. They had built the town into one of the major centers of the Midwest, rivaling Chicago in population seemingly overnight. For a while it seemed they had found their long-sought refuge. But their time was up.

    A New Leader Emerges. In the hot summer of 1844, the Latter-day Saints’ leader and founder, Joseph Smith, was brutally murdered by an unruly mob in Carthage, Illinois. Suddenly, the senior Apostle, Brigham Young, was thrust into a role he had not sought.
     Perhaps no one then alive could have accomplished what Young would accomplish over the next three decades. Under his leadership, the story of the Mormon pioneers would be one without parallel in American history.
     In Nauvoo, the Latter-day Saints once again were forced to abandon their homes and property. But they were determined that it would be for the last time. Church leaders were committed to find a place of safety and opportunity where their people could raise their families and worship without fear.

Brigham Young

     In Nauvoo, Brigham Young pleaded with the mobs for extra time for the Saints to assemble wagons, grow food, and get supplies for the long journey west. Young promised that as soon as grass grew in the spring—sufficient to feed their draft animals—they would be on their way to a new land, a largely uninhabited quarter of the far western frontier known vaguely as the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.
     But the mobs would not wait. As their children shivered with fright and frostbite, Brigham Young led his people down Nauvoo’s Parley Street, the "Street of Tears," and into the little-known wilderness of the American West.
     Wherever Church members gathered, their enemies resisted them. Reasons were not hard to find, though in today’s more tolerant age they are difficult to understand. The proclamations of living prophets, modern revelation and new scripture called the Book of Mormon, were seen as heretical and offensive by some. For others, the popularity of the Church was unnerving. Within the span of a mere decade, the fast-growing body of Latter-day Saints moved from humble beginnings in the Finger Lakes region of western New York to Kirtland, Ohio, then to western Missouri and finally to western Illinois. New converts were flocking to the Church by the hundreds.

    The Long March. Although leaving Nauvoo was a difficult decision, anxiety grew from the moment the first steps were taken in the 300 miles across Iowa. Bad weather and lack of preparedness took its toll on the Saints’ stamina, courage, and provisions.

    Walking through sleet, blizzard, and mud early in the journey, it became apparent to Brigham Young that the long trek to the Rocky Mountains would require a considerable effort indeed. Travelers were sick, wagons were in disrepair, and feed for draft animals had to be purchased—and at exorbitant prices. The Church leader initiated a plan of assigning certain individuals to develop way stations along the way: building bridges, erecting cabins, and planting and fencing crops for the benefit of those who would later follow. It was at one of these camp farms, Mt. Pisgah (Iowa), that the Latter-day Saints would receive a visit that would change the entire course of the migration.

Leaving Nauvoo

On June 26, Captain James Allen of the United States Army rode into the refugee camp with an authorization from U.S. President James K. Polk to seek 500 volunteers for the six-week-old war with Mexico. What at first seemed an audacious request was in fact met with gratitude by Brigham Young. Although the prolonged absence of 500 able-bodied men would severely challenge the exodus to the West, Young recognized that the promised military pay, clothing, and supplies (some payable on enlistment) would be of great benefit to isolated pioneers wresting a new life from the untried soil of a yet-distant home.
    When, on July 20, 1846, the newest contingent of the Army of the West marched out of Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), Iowa Territory, under the command of Captain Allen, the 513 recruits were accompanied by 34 women and 51 children. For many who had already forfeited nearly everything they owned, families were part of the deal. Over the next five months this Mormon Battalion would complete the longest march of infantry in American history, neither firing a shot nor losing a single life in battle.
     By autumn, several thousand Saints were still scattered across Iowa. In consideration of everything, Brigham Young established Winter Quarters on the banks of the Missouri River, near what is now Omaha, Nebraska. The layover would give them time to prepare wagons, gather foodstuffs, and gather in the stragglers. The Rocky Mountain entry would have to be postponed until the following summer.
     Owing to the rigors of their journey under such trying circumstances, by the end of that first winter more than 700 pioneers had died of exposure or disease in the scattered refugee camps.
     On April 5, 1847, Brigham Young set out for the Salt Lake Valley with an advance company of 143 men, 3 women, and 2 children. They traversed the hot, sandy grasslands of the Great Plains (in today’s Nebraska) and then leaned into the forbidding landscape of the Rockies (today’s Wyoming).

On Day 98 of the journey they crossed into what would someday be the state of Utah and began the arduous trek over the rugged heights of the Wasatch mountain range.
     A weary Young entered the remote Valley of the Great Salt Lake on July 24, 1847. After surveying the area for a moment he announced with satisfaction, "This is the right place. Drive on." The date is celebrated each year by Utahns as Pioneer Day.
     That fall, more than 2,000 pioneers followed Brigham Young into the valley, their new mountain refuge.

    Other Early Explorers to Utah. When the Mormon Pioneers entered the basin of the Great Salt Lake that blistering July of 1847, they settled in a land that had only a few human footprints, most of them transitory.
     A number of Native American Indian tribes—Shoshone, Ute, Paiute, and Goshute—occupied areas to the north (Bear River and Cache Valleys) and south (Utah Valley), but the Salt Lake Valley had been largely ignored for centuries, owing primarily to its aridity.
     One of the earliest known historical accounts of the area was compiled by Catholic Friars Escalante and Dominguez in 1776. Seeking an overland route from Santa Fe (in today’s New Mexico) to the Pacific coast of California, where associates had recently established a post of entry for goods shipped from Spain and southern Mexico, they crossed into the Utah Valley (today’s Spanish Fork and Provo) in late September. The natives told the clerics stories of a huge lake of wonders only two days journey to the north. The explorers nevertheless headed south, and were caught in October snows some 80 miles south of Utah Lake where they abandoned their quest for the ocean and returned to Santa Fe.
     Beginning as early as 1820, mountain men working as fur trappers began to crisscross northern Utah. Among them were the legendary Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith and Peter Skeen Ogden. A city and river to the north of Salt Lake City are named in honor of Ogden’s early exploration.
     In 1843 and again in 1845 John C. Fremont explored the area and created a map that was used by Brigham Young and his associates less than two years later on their trek westward.
     Within days of entering the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, Brigham Young had initiated community irrigation projects that would soon be replicated at scores of locations across the arid West. Potatoes, corn, wheat, and beans were planted within the first week. Having arrived so late in the season, however, it was expected the first year's harvest would be scant—and it was.

By the following spring, nearly 6,000 acres of furrowed, sown, and irrigated ground textured the Salt Lake Valley. But all portent of a successful harvest was soon threatened when vast swarms of crickets began descending on and devouring the young crops in late May. Diarists report the mountainsides and fields being blackened by their numbers, in the thousands. These crickets began to destroy all hope of there being a harvest at all that year, a year in which an additional 3,000 immigrants reached the Valley. But suddenly in early June, clouds of white seagulls from the Great Salt Lake began lighting on the threatened fields and consuming the insects. Numerous reports describe the birds eating dozens of crickets, regurgitating, and then eating more until the fields were cleared of the pests. Although diminished, there was a harvest that year.
     Since referred to as "the miracle of the gulls," the rescuing California gull became the Utah state bird and, in 1913, the focus of a beautiful monument erected on Temple Square.

    Encounters with Native Americans. Any group of people migrating to the far American West in the mid 19th century was sure to meet sooner or later with the Native American, or Indian, tribes that occupied much of it. Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints, with clear intentions of settling in a basin of the Rocky Mountains, thus endeavored to formulate both a plan and a policy for dealing with the earlier inhabitants. Theirs was an approach derived both from pragmatics and from theology.

     First, the Indians enjoyed relatively free run of the American Plains—the route that would carry the Latter-day Saints to the Rocky Mountains, and scouting reports confirmed that they inhabited or hunted areas both to the north and the south of the Great Salt Lake. But equally important in the minds of most Church leaders was the belief, derived from the Book of Mormon, that the Native Americans were direct descendants of the ancient Americans whose story is told in that book, and thus they were a covenant, favored people of God.
     In their traverse of the Great American Plains, the Latter-day Saints experienced very little trouble with American Indians. Once in the Rocky Mountains, Brigham Young used various peaceful means for dealing with them, not least of which was frequent personal contact. He also sent colonists to live among them as a kind of peace corps.
     Utah was made an official U.S. territory in 1850, with Brigham Young as its first governor. With that federal recognition, Brigham Young was also named Indian superintendent and given ample freedom to direct such affairs. His policy was simple: "We have found it cheaper to feed than to fight them. . . . Thus we shall gain their love, and by keeping our worth with them hold their respect."
     With few exceptions, such as the brief Walker War of 1853, relations were peaceful. The Latter-day Saints were even successful in teaching agricultural techniques at a number of Indian farms. But when federal troops were dispatched to Utah in 1857 to put down the so-called Utah War, Brigham Young was relieved of his territorial control. From that point onward, conciliatory policies toward the control of Indian destinies were forfeited. Soon a federal reservation for the Indians was established in the Uintah Valley.
     Brigham Young’s federally-appointed successor was well aware of his success, however. In a letter to his superior, O.H. Irish wrote: "Brigham Young . . . has pursued so kind and conciliatory a policy with the Indians that it has given him great influence over them. It was my duty and policy, under your instructions to make use of his influence for the accomplishment of the purposes of the Government."
     After watching more than a decade of federal stewardship of Utah Indian matters, the famous American author and artist George Catlin wrote Brigham Young with his own observations. Said Catlin: "Your people have been the friends of the poor Indians, who have now no other efficient friends on the earth."