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"It Would Take Years to Reach the Mountains"

Across Iowa and the Enforced Winter Quarters

In a few days I start with my brethren, the Twelve, and as many more as can get ready as pioneers to find the place where a stake of Zion shall be located over the mountains, leaving all our families at this place [Winter Quarters], with the anticipation of returning here to winter and taking our families over one year hence.1

So wrote Brigham Young in late March 1847, just days before setting out from the Missouri River toward the Rocky Mountains. Simple and direct though this statement was, it had taken months of deliberation, debate, and even divine revelation to make it so. The Latter-day Saint's plan of exodus was late in arriving in its final form and was refined only in the final few days leading up to their inevitable march. The purpose of this chapter is to review those events that brought them to the Missouri from their Nauvoo home on the Mississippi and postponed their march to the mountains until the spring of 1847.

It all was to have happened in 1846. The fundamental reason Brigham and his Company of the Twelve quit Nauvoo in the bitter cold of February 1846 was to allow sufficient time for an express company of "expert men" and pioneers to reach the better climes of a safe Rocky Mountain Zion later that summer, in time to put in crops both there and at selected way stations along the trail. Once the decision to leave Nauvoo for good had been made, it became their overriding imperative and Brigham's personal passion to find their new home as quickly as possible. The longer the membership lay stretched out tenuously from river to river and from bluff to bluff, the more exposed it would be to sickness, death, criticism, and defection. He seemed to never tire of saying that the one and only reason they would make such a perilous exodus was "for the salvation of the Church."2

With good late winter weather and cold solid ground they believed they could make it across Iowa Territory and reach the Missouri, only 300 miles away, in four to six weeks at even the moderate rate of seven and a half miles per day. After that they would establish one or two way stations or farm acreages at Council Bluffs or Grand Island and perhaps another near Fort Laramie. Meanwhile, that much-talked-about "express company of pioneers" of some 300 or more men, freed from the daily cares of camp life, would then make it "over the mountains" to some valley of the Great Basin in ample time to secure their new mountain home "far away in the West." This was their plan.

The rest of the Saints would come on as health and strength, provisions and teams would permit. Those who could not leave in February would do so at intervals during the late spring and early summer to reach any one of the proposed farming stations. Others might have to go to St. Louis and other Missouri River towns by steamboat. And finally a trio of hand-picked negotiators, the Nauvoo Trustees, would stay behind to sell off as many Church and private properties as possible, and at as fair a price as the deteriorating market would allow, to help meet the daunting costs of emigration.