Forging a Faith

Pioneers with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founded Winter Quarters, the first city in Nebraska, at present-day North Omaha. Built as a refuge from the violent persecution they faced in Illinois, Winter Quarters marked a new chapter in their tribulations, as what was supposed to be a temporary stopping point became, for many, a final resting place.

Disease ravaged the pioneer settlement. So many people died along the banks of the Missouri River in 1846 that the gravediggers couldn’t keep up. “You might see women sit in the open tents keeping the flies off their dead children, sometime after decomposition had set in,” wrote Thomas Kane, a friend of Church leader Brigham Young.

Little remains of Winter Quarters today except its cemetery, filled with hundreds of graves whose headstones have long since crumbled away. However, these pioneers didn’t die in vain. Their comrades’ resolve was steeled during this time of suffering. It was from Winter Quarters that the pioneers launched the final stretch of the exodus to their Promised Land in Utah, a journey that more than 70,000 of their fellow pioneers would retrace in the years to come.

Nebraska very well could have been the place where the Saints fell apart. Instead, it was the place where they came together.

When Brigham Young set out with the first wagon train on their westward migration, their destination wasn’t Nebraska or Utah. In fact, they didn’t know where they were going; they just knew they didn’t want to be in Nauvoo, Illinois.

The members of The Church of Jesus Christ (commonly called “Mormons” at that time) had settled in Nauvoo in 1840 under the leadership of the Church’s prophet and founder, Joseph Smith.

Within a few years, Nauvoo had grown to 12,000 people, comprising most of the membership. By 1844, Smith had many followers, but also many enemies. Neighboring non-members disagreed with the new brand of Christianity, resented the power he amassed and took exception to his practice of plural marriage.

Smith was arrested after ordering the destruction of the offices of a newspaper that criticized him. While Smith was in jail awaiting trial, an angry mob stormed the building, shooting and killing him.

With their prophet martyred, the Saints were in turmoil. Brigham Young, a carpenter originally from Vermont, stepped into the leadership void. Young was one of the Church’s earliest members, and he was the head of its Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He and the rest of the Saints realized that the animosity toward them did not end with Smith’s death. They were justifiably afraid vigilantes would shoot them down in the streets of Nauvoo, or that the U.S. Army would be sent in against them.

Young started organizing their escape. He held a meeting in January 1846 to gauge his people’s readiness to load their possessions into wagons and set out at a moment’s notice. He was aware, he wrote in his journal, that “evil is intended toward us,” and that their safety depended on departing “before our enemies shall intercept and prevent our going.”

The greatest anti-Mormon sentiment was reserved for the Church’s leaders, so Young reasoned that he and the rest of the Quorum should leave first. They wanted to cross the plains, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and Nauvoo.

Perhaps they would go to California, or Vancouver Island, or “some good valley in the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains,” Young wrote. Young’s lead contingent, more than 3,000 strong, crossed the frozen Mississippi River into Iowa in February 1846. They were soon followed by thousands more men, women and children, traveling in covered wagons and hoping to reach the Missouri River within three weeks. It would take them four months to cross Iowa.

The spring unleashed torrential rain, which turned the Iowa roads – barely existent in good weather – into thick, impassable mud. Fevers broke out in the wagon train, and people started dying. Bereaved family members could only give their loved ones a quick burial before pressing forward. Despite such hardship, the pioneers’ morale remained surprisingly high. It was on this brutal slog through Iowa that poet William Clayton wrote “Come, Come Ye Saints,” which remains one of the most popular Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint hymns. The lyrics speak to the emigrants’ optimism in the face of relentless adversity:

Young got his first glimpse of Nebraska on June 14, 1846 when the wagons reached the banks of the Missouri River near present-day Council Bluffs, Iowa. There he met Peter Sarpy, the French-American fur trader who had built outposts on both sides of the river. Sarpy’s ferry was the only way to get across the river, but there was no way he could transport the thousands of pioneers who wanted to cross. They decided to camp on the Iowa side and build a ferry of their own.

With the summer already upon them, it seemed unlikely they could reach the Rocky Mountains before cold weather returned. Still, with rumors circulating that the Army might be coming to stop them from going any further west, Young wanted to put at least one more river between the members and their persecutors. Complicating the matter was the fact that the Nebraska side of the river was the territory of the Omaha and Otoe tribes, and the emigrants would need government permission if they were to stay there.

The pioneers were thinking primarily of their own troubles when they left Nauvoo, but the timing of their exodus thrust them into the thick of war and international intrigue. While the members were crossing Iowa, the United States declared war on Mexico. Simultaneously, the United States was teetering on the brink of war with Britain over control of the Pacific Northwest.

The U.S. government was worried about the influx of 10,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into the frontier. Many members were angry with the government for not protecting their constitutional right to practice their religion, and U.S. officials feared they might join up with one of the nation’s enemies. In the sparsely populated West, Church members were a huge force that could potentially tip the scales in the international balance of power.

A solution to the Church’s and government’s worries came about unexpectedly. Envoy Jesse Little, who had been sent to the East Coast to drum up government support for the westward emigration, met Thomas Kane, a lawyer whose father was friends with President James K. Polk. Kane had read newspaper accounts of the harsh treatment Church members had received. He wanted to help them, but he also wanted to help the United States in its war against Mexico.

Kane and Little came up with a proposal to pitch to the president: The Church would send some of their men as soldiers to help the war effort against the Mexican territory of California, and in exchange the United States would lend assistance to their exodus. The president agreed.

When Army recruiters showed up on the banks of the Missouri to gather what became known as the Mormon Battalion, many members were aghast. Why should they fight for a country that treated them so poorly? Young, on the other hand, was delighted to help the Army – but he agreed to raise the 500-man battalion only after the government agreed to let his people settle for two years on Omaha and Otoe territory in Nebraska.

The Mormon Battalion brought countless benefits: The land deal gave the Saints a place to stay; serving the nation in time of war was great for public relations; the Army, instead of hindering the emigration, was now paying Church soldiers to go west; and much of the soldiers’ pay could be funneled back to their families to buy provisions.

Not long after the Mormon Battalion bid their families goodbye on July 21, the ferry across the Missouri started taking settlers and wagons across the river into Nebraska. Young’s initial plan was to wait until they had all crossed and then take the Great Platte River Road to Grand Island and spend the winter there. Gradually, Church leaders realized that their people were too exhausted to go further that year, and the spot on the bluffs near the river had good water and plenty of grass for their 10,000 head of cattle. They would winter on the Missouri at a place they named, simply enough, Winter Quarters.

The pioneers were on Omaha and Otoe land, but the tribes welcomed them. “We heard you are a good people,” Omaha Chief Big Elk said at a peace meeting. “We are glad to have you come.” It seems the Indians felt a kind of kinship with these whites, as they all felt mistreated by the government. They were also more favorably disposed to the Saints because the settlers did not intend to stay long.

August was spent cutting hay from prairie grasses – as much as 2,000 tons of it – to keep their cattle fed through the winter. Beef, bacon and cornmeal was about all the pioneers had to eat, and many had to use coffee grinders to turn the dried corn to meal. Young decided to build a grist mill, and he used his experience as a carpenter to oversee its construction. Though the internal workings are long gone, the exterior structure, now known as the Winter Quarters Mill Museum, still stands in North Omaha’s Florence neighborhood.

Winter Quarters started out as a collection of tents and covered wagons, but it soon grew into a bona fide city. The original plans called for 41 blocks and 16 named streets. A bishop was in charge of each block, helping to manage and take care of the people there.

Buildings were erected using timber felled nearby, though some people made do with sod houses or even caves dug into the bluff. By the end of 1846, Winter Quarters had nearly 3,500 people living in 538 log cabins and 83 sod houses. The population later reached a peak of 4,000 in 800 total houses. When emigrant Hosea Stout moved into a crude shanty on Nov. 24 he wrote that it was the first time his 7-month-old child, born on the journey across Iowa, had ever been inside a house.

The citizens of Winter Quarters lived Spartan existences, but they were able to buy essentials shipped in from St. Louis – textiles, hardware and other goods – from Bishop Newel Whitney’s store. Many people tended cattle or worked in the mill, and there was even a small industry making baskets out of reeds. People usually bartered. One doctor who helped a pregnant woman was paid in bushels of turnips, buckwheat and beans.

As winter arrived, Young still hadn’t announced the final destination of their cross-continental trek, but the Church leader’s decision was made a bit easier with the late November arrival in Winter Quarters of Pierre-Jean De Smet, a French Catholic priest returning from missionary work in the Rocky Mountain West. De Smet had lots of information about the Great Basin and the Salt Lake Valley. “They asked me a thousand questions about the regions I had explored,” De Smet later wrote, and his description of the Salt Lake Valley “pleased them greatly from the account I gave them of it.”

Another visitor was Thomas Kane, the non-Church member ally who had been so instrumental in securing their refuge at Winter Quarters. Kane and Young became fast friends, and would remain close the rest of their lives. Young named the settlement on the Iowa side of the river Kanesville in his honor.

Unfortunately, Kane contracted one of the fevers that continued to devastate the camp. He spent a month recovering, while all around him others suffered with similar illnesses. Kane heard mothers lamenting over their dead children. One sick man’s pathetic groaning became so unbearable to listen to that Kane – to his shame – felt glad when the man died.

The malaria and other illnesses of the summer months gave way to diseases of malnutrition during the winter. Winter Quarters was particularly hard hit by a malady known as “black leg” or “black canker” – most likely scurvy brought on by the lack of fruits and vegetables in residents’ diets. Of the recorded deaths in Winter Quarters, nearly half were infants age 2 or younger. All told, about 600 of the members lost their lives in Nebraska; between 10 and 15 percent of the pioneers who set out on the great exodus never made it past Winter Quarters. Even so, Kane was amazed by the Saints’ resilience. “They could make sport and frolic of their trials, and often turn right sharp suffering into right round laughter against themselves,” he wrote.

As spring neared in 1847, Young prepared to lead an advance party to find their new home somewhere in the Great Basin in what is now Utah. In April, 143 men set out on the trail. Meanwhile, the rest of the members – about 4,000 in Nebraska and 7,000 across the river in Iowa – continued improving their settlements and waited for word on their next move.

When Young’s party reached the site of present-day Salt Lake City in July, he declared: “This is the place.” He returned to Winter Quarters in late 1847 to lead his people to their Promised Land. While he was back on the banks of the Missouri, he was elected president of the Church – a role that had remained unfilled since Joseph Smith’s death.

Winter Quarters, the de facto capital of the Church’s movement at a critical point in its history, was abandoned by the end of 1848. The outpost on the Iowa side remained occupied for another few years as a way station for the huge numbers of emigrants who followed. By the 1860s, the path Young forged across the plains was followed by more than 70,000 pioneers.

They moved on from Winter Quarters, but the trying experience there has remained an integral part of their lore.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later returned to the area to build a temple and the Mormon Trail Center at Historic Winter Quarters, a museum where people can learn more about their journey. The most powerful reminder of the hard road they traveled is at the adjacent Mormon Pioneer Cemetery, where a large bronze sculpture depicts a mother and father gazing down in sorrow into the grave of their dead child.

Church members continue to make pilgrimages to honor their forebears at Winter Quarters. At the Mormon Trail Center, Elder Dave Tervort of Utah told of his ancestors’ sorrows on the road to Nebraska. Both parents in the pioneer family died on the way, as did several of the children.

The family’s 10-year-old son dragged his mother’s body across the frozen Missouri on a makeshift sled to be buried in the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery. The extended family of the orphaned children, who weren’t members of the Church, wanted the youngsters to return with them back East, but the children refused. Other member families took them in, and they went on to thrive in Utah, where Tervort and his family remain to this day.

It’s natural for Church members to be proud of the sacrifices their pioneer ancestors made on their exodus, said Elder Jay Crandall, the Mormon Trail Center’s director. However, he thinks mere reverence isn’t the best way to honor their spirit.

“These pioneers would be grateful we are proud of them,” Crandall said. “But the bottom line that we stress is that they would be happier if you did something with the opportunities they gave you, whether it’s Mormon pioneers or other pioneers. Now it’s your turn.”

This article was originally published in the July/August 2015 issue of Nebraska Life.