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Immigration to Nauvoo

Kenneth W. Godfrey

Fleeing north and east in late November 1838, Israel Barlow and other Mormons lost their way and arrived at the Des Moines River in Iowa Territory. There these religious refugees discovered some abandoned barracks and met their owner, Isaac Galland. They began negotiations to purchase land in Iowa known as the Half Breed Tract as well as land and buildings across the Mississippi River in Commerce, Illinois, that Galland seemed eager to sell.

While Barlow and others conferred with Church leaders, Galland began promoting the Mormon cause among the Illinois citizenry, including his friends Attorney Genesis Van Allen and Gov. Robert Lucas. Assured that the Mormons were welcome in Illinois, Joseph Smith, then imprisoned, sent Bishop Edward Partridge a letter instructing him to purchase Galland's lands. After escaping from Missouri officers, Smith arrived in Quincy, Illinois, in April 1839, joining his exiled family and hundreds of his followers. Within a week, he had met with Galland and acquired title to three parcels of ground in Commerce. By the summer of 1839, Smith had purchased available land on behalf of the Church and had plotted a city to be named Nauvoo, a Hebrews name connoting "beautiful place." More than 1,000 Latter-day Saints fled their temporary Quincy quarters and in the summer and autumn of 1839 emigrated to Nauvoo preparing to acquire land, build homes, and participate in establishing a new Zion. By letter, Church leaders encouraged members still scattered as far east as Kirtland, Ohio, to hasten to Nauvoo.

Even as Smith and his followers labored to establish a city from land that included a large swamp, he called the Twelve Apostles to leave on a mission to England. Leaving behind ill, impoverished families, these men, traveling largely without purse or scrip, reached Great Britain before the end of September 1839. Proselyting during the winter of 1839-1840, these missionaries baptized hundreds. They subsequently prepared these new converts for emigration to Nauvoo.

William Clayton, an English convert, set sail for America in September of 1840. His diary records that the whole company became ill. One young girl became so frightened in the midst of a gale that she lost her reason, and died three days later. The company captain, Theodore Turley, read the burial service, and the body was committed to the deep. Six days later, another child died. Turley instructed the Saints to be clean and to take care of the sick. One Mormon in Clayton's company caught a shark and another went swimming in the ocean on a calm day. At times Clayton writes of neglected meetings and of some Saints stealing water when it had to be rationed. On October 11, 1840, Clayton's feet touched American soil and his first purchase was an apple, which cost him a penny. Traveling by river, the Mormons traversed the state of New York, finally landing in Chicago before traveling by wagon to Rock Island, Illinois, 130 miles north of Nauvoo. Here they boarded a boat, finally docking in the Mormon capital on November 24, 1840, having traveled 5,000 miles in 11 weeks and 10 hours.