Mormon Trek Across Iowa

 

The Burlington Hawkeye didn’t have a high opinion of the Mormons. They wrote, “Wherever they go and grow strong, there springs up dissensions and violence between them and other citizens. The crimes charged upon them are without number.”

As examples, they pointed to the Hodges brothers, who were involved in the murders of John Miller and Henry Leisi, and to the murderers of Colonel Davenport who took shelter with the Reddens, who were also Mormons.

 

It is easy to understand why they felt the way they did. The main troublemakers in Lee County, and elsewhere in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois had up to that time been Mormons. 

 

“The Mormons caused bitter rivalries and discord wherever they went,” observed Jacob Van Der Zee. Before being expelled from Illinois, they were thrown out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Their home base in Illinois centered on the temple in Nauvoo and some other property they owned in Keokuk and Montrose in Iowa.

 

Benjamin Gue, in his landmark History of Iowa, said the Mormons had to go because “their religion and peculiar social practices were so obnoxious to their neighbors.” Unlike Jacob Van Der Zee, he didn’t talk about the crimes or depredations committed by the Mormons, but more about their religion and polygamy. That’s what he thought other citizens found peculiar about the Mormons.

Things came to a head after the murder of Joseph Smith. In the late fall of 1845, Brigham Young promised his neighbors that the Mormons would leave Illinois, “so soon as the grass would grow, and the water run.” All he asked in return was that the persecution and house burnings would end.

The Mormons spent that winter selling off their property to secure provisions for the exodus. They built hundreds of wagons and loaded them with necessary supplies.

Brigham Young led the Mormon Trex across Iowa

The first emigrant train, comprising five hundred wagons crossed the Mississippi River into Lee County, Iowa in February 1846. The pilgrims camped on Sugar Creek, waiting for the snow and bitter cold to end. Temperatures fell as low as twenty degrees below zero while the winter winds whipped the snow into their wagons.

 

The unique thing about the Mormon exodus from Illinois was the planning they put into it. As they traveled, the Mormons built way stations along the route. The first was at Richardson’s Point, some fifty-five miles west of Nauvoo. They left there in March and traveled to Appanoose County where they built another way station. They erected a third station at Locust Creek in Wayne County.

 

Historian Jacob Van Der Zee said those first few months were the easy part of the journey. Even though the roads were rough or barely outlines, there was some sort of trail they could follow. After this, the Mormons were on their own. There were no roads or trails; they needed to construct them as they went. Often that slowed travel to two miles a day, or less.

 

Each time a party was sent out to blaze a trail, another group stayed behind and built a farm. The first farm was started at a location the Mormons named Garden Grove. It would provide food and shelter for the next group of emigrants who passed through.

 

After that, the Mormons headed northwest toward Union County. They built another settlement called Mt. Pisgah near the middle fork of the Grand River. From there, the Mormons traveled north toward Adair and Cass County. In mid-June, the pilgrims rested for a short period near Council Bluffs, then crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska. 

Mormon wagons blazing a trail across Iowa

By July 1846, fifteen thousand Mormons, thirty thousand head of cattle and horses, and three thousand wagons dotted the Mormon Trail across Iowa.

 

Of course, travel then wasn’t anything like it is today. The Mormons froze in the winter snow, and in spring and summer when it rained incessantly everyone had to jump out of the carts when the wheels sunk into the mud and yuck. Then every man, and sometimes the women too, had to pitch in and push and pull the wagons along.

 

There were so many deaths along the way that no one bothered with fancy funerals or making wooden coffins. The Mormons stripped the bark from the green trees, wrapped the bodies in it, and buried them in shallow graves. If they put up a marker, it was a wooden post. Four hundred Mormon pilgrims died on the trail during 1846—1847, alone.

 

Many more would follow them to their graves over the next several years.

The Mormons built way stations and farms along the way to feed the next group

After Brigham Young left Illinois with the first batch of emigrants, Nauvoo became an armed fortress. “Every man within its limits is under arms,” wrote The New York Herald. “Many of the boys are bearing huge pistols and knives upon their persons—numbers of the women, it is said, are keen for the fight, and express themselves ready to bear arms should it become necessary.”

 

By mid-May 1846, serious trouble was brewing in Mormondom. The Mormons weren’t leaving Nauvoo as quickly as they promised to, and the citizens of Adams, Hancock, and McDonough counties were losing patience with them. They had organized themselves “with a view to compel the Mormons” to leave. The Burlington Hawkeye expected another Mormon war within a month.

 

Five hundred men from the Anti-Mormon faction camped outside Carthage, Illinois on April 27. They had six cannons, plenty of ammunition, and were waiting for reinforcements so they could coordinate their attack.

 

The Anties (Anti-Mormon faction) were prepared to battle to the end. Their movements were directed by “the right sort of men this time.” On the Saturday before the fight, men from both sides were observed scrounging arms and ammunition in Burlington, Fort Madison, and Keokuk. It was obvious both sides were “armed to the hilt with muskets, pistols, sidearms, and dirks.” On August 28, the Anties forces numbered 950 men—600 at Carthage, and another 350 at La Harpe.

 

The New York Herald told its readers: “There is under arms, in active drill, and armed to the teeth, a company of women eighty strong, who are in uniform, and who, if an attack is made upon the sacred city, are to be placed in the front ranks, each one being sworn to die on the ground before the Anties shall enter the city.” The newspaper suspected that if even one drop of the women’s blood was spilled, it would buy sympathy from every quarter for the Mormons.

Fighting outside the Mormon Temple in Nauvoo

Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois was less than helpful. He ordered Major Parker and ten troopers to Nauvoo to keep the peace. If the situation called for it, Parker had the authority to call for help—if it didn’t cost the state any money. Compare that to 1832 when Governor John Reynolds called out and paid 2500 militiamen to defend citizens from Indian depredations during the Black Hawk War.

 

Despite all the readiness and tough talk, the correspondent for The New York Herald predicted there would be no bloodshed because “one [side] is afraid and the other dare not.”

 

Circumstances would soon prove him wrong.

 

Major Parker watched the battle of September 11 from the dome of the temple. When the Anties were within two miles of the temple, the Mormons rose and fired a volley from their rifles. The Anties discharged blast after blast of grapeshot from their cannon and continued moving forward. The Mormons returned their fire, but it had little effect. Their homemade cannons did not have the power to do any damage.

 

Another writer agreed; the Mormon cannon fire had little impact on the Anties. Altogether, nearly two hundred cannon shots were fired. “Those from the Mormons were entirely harmless... The fire of the Anties raked the city, rattling and crashing through those temporary Mormon buildings.”

 

The Mormon cannons may not have been effective, but their small arms made up for that. They had a sixteen shooter they made themselves. The guns would “discharge sixteen times without reloading. At a short distance, they are very effective.” The fire from them scared the bejeezus out of the Anties. Not that there was much for them to worry about. By this time, the Mormons were dangerously low on ammunition and other supplies.

 

Things became so desperate in the Mormon camp that the women and children ran back and forth picking up spent cannonballs they could recycle and fire again.

 

On Friday morning, September 13, Colonel Singleton, the leader of the Anties, sent a letter demanding that the Mormons surrender. He told the Mormons they were to turn over their arms and leave Nauvoo as soon as possible. Five agents could be left behind for no more than sixty days to finish disposing of the Mormon’s property, but everyone else had to go.

Crowd watching the Mormon Temple in flames

The Mormons readily agreed, but the other anti-Mormon officers rejected Singleton’s agreement. They wanted to settle the score—once and for all.

Saturday morning another battle raged from one o’clock to almost five o’clock. Three Mormons died in the fighting and six more were wounded. One Anti died in the fighting and several more suffered injuries. 

 

The New York Daily Tribune didn’t understand. The battle was so loud and vicious it mystified them more people weren’t killed or injured. All they could think was that the “gunners must have been poor marksmen or so terribly frightened at the smell of gunpowder that they could not take aim with any degree of precision.” The correspondent for The New York Herald agreed. His only comment was, “The small arms are said to have made very pretty music for half an hour.”

 

 

Across the river, Iowans shook their heads in wonderment, trying to figure how things had come to this state.

 

The Burlington Hawkeye couldn’t believe the apathy Iowans displayed toward the Mormon Wars. “Our people seem to act as if it were no business of theirs—as if these terrible transactions were nothing but a mere sham fight. Our merchants supply the belligerents with powder and lead and take money for it and think no more of such trade than if they were selling a piece of calico or a dozen pounds of sugar.”

 

It was a long-winded way of calling their fellow citizens war profiteers. 

 

The paper was sure none of the fault belonged to Iowa. “It is wrong,” that the Mormons are pouring into Iowa. “The suckers invited them to their state. The Hawkeyes never did any such thing. The suckers then have no right to send them among us.” The week before, the same paper complained, “We think the people of Illinois have no right to crowd upon the people of Iowa such an undesirable class of population.”

 

It was a good thought, but fifteen thousand Mormons were getting ready to pass through the state. The Iowans could not stop them if they tried.

 

When it was over, the Ottawa Free Trader said no property had been destroyed yet, but many of the Anties wanted to “destroy the temple.” They were afraid it served as a “beacon light to lure the Mormons back.” 

 

It took a while, but someone made sure the temple would never lure the Mormons back. At four o’clock in the morning on October 9, 1848, the citizens of Montrose watched in awe as flames shot two-hundred feet into the air from the spire of the temple. Papers reported that the building was likely the victim of an arsonist.

 

Nearly everyone agreed that burning the temple was a senseless crime. The Mormons had been gone for two years, and the Home Missionary Society had recently signed a fifteen-year lease so they could turn the building into a college. Besides, the Mormon Temple “twas a sight well worth the trip to see it.” If you could get over the fact, “it stood [as] a monument of the dark and hellish designs which man may conceive against his fellow man.”

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