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Preface

In this, the 150th anniversary of the exodus of the Latter-day Saints from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, it is fitting that a new religious history be attempted of that unforgettable chapter in American history. The trails and details, the chronologies and genealogies of that trek have been told and retold so many times and by so many gifted writers that one might think there is nothing noteworthy left to say. Such worthy predecessors as Hubert H. Bancroft, Andrew Jenson, B. H. Roberts, Preston Nibley, Dale Morgan, and more recently Wallace Stegner, Leonard J. Arrington, and Stanley Kimball have each contributed to our appreciation of the history and meaning of the exodus, of the gathering to Zion, and of America's modern Moses-Brigham Young. The story has also been widely heralded in song and poetry, in art and drama. And well it should be, for the coming of Brigham Young and his band of faithful followers was a defining moment in the history of Mormonism, of the state of Utah, and of America.

Each new generation, however, must wend its own way across the landscape of history and see and feel for itself what previous generations of writers saw and interpreted for their own time and place. While so much has been written, the surprise is that so much of the story has never been told. New manuscript sources continue to come to light, demanding not only a retelling but also a reinterpretation.

This work, I submit, is not so much a study of the trail or of the trek but of a religious exodus of one of the 19th century's most persecuted and despised groups of religionists-the Latter-day Saints-who were bound neither for Oregon nor for California but either for survival or extinction. This was not just another march westward "across the wide Missouri" in fulfilment of America's Manifest Destiny; rather, it was a destiny in motion yet to be made manifest, for it was not at all certain that this enterprise of Joseph Smith Jr.-The Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-day Saints-would ever survive to live a new day. The story of the Mormon exodus is that of a religion in torment desperately seeking to save itself from persecution, to rid itself of its own detractors and obstructionists, and to find itself in some unknown valley "far away in the West." It was Mormonism in the raw and on the move-forging a new identity while seeking a safe refuge in the tops of "the everlasting hills."

Missing in most earlier studies, for all their worth, is that peculiar yet essential combination of contemporary uncertainty amidst uncompromising conviction, the immediate risk of the moment, the fears and doubts of a faithful people wondering where they were going and whether or not they would survive the getting there. These 12,000 sick and bedraggled believers would either make it to wherever their new and untested leader took them or they would perish by the thousands in the wilderness and abandon their faith in a misspent expenditure of religious conviction.