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The Missouri River Valley
Gail Geo. Holmes
The breadth and depth of Mormon farming and community development in southwest Iowa, 1846-1853, created a watershed in the history of the Middle Missouri Valley. From the early 1700s the region had sustained little except Indian fur trade with the French, then with the Spanish, and finally with the Americans.
Delays that hampered the 1846 Mormon Exodus from western Illinois and southeast Iowa to Salt Lake Valley proved a blessing to southwest Iowa. Mormons cut roads through its beautiful loess hills and built bridges and ferries over streams in Iowa and Nebraska. Thousands of acres of sod were broken. The Saints developed productive farms and established schools, churches, mills, blacksmith shops, large supply houses, hotels, newspapers, and related businesses.
Latter-day Saints organized town and county governments for the 16,000 to 18,000 original refugees. Several thousand more immigrants arrived from other parts of the United States and Canada. Additionally, more than 8,000 came from Europe. Mormons held elections, organized courts, and kept careful property records long before a federal land office was opened in Council Bluffs in 1853. In 1848 all southwest Iowa became Pottawattamie County. Soon, other counties were carved out of Pottawattamie.
In 1849, 10,000 California Gold Rushers opened a huge market for the more than 80 southwest Iowa communities. In succeeding years, steamboats brought merchandise to Emigrant Landing at Council Point to supply mercantile houses booming in Kanesville and other towns. Dozens of LDS communities traded grain, wood, and leather products besides engaging in milling, blacksmithing, tinsmithing, and wagon making.
Three Indian tribes occupied the Middle Missouri Valley when the first LDS wagon trains arrived at the Missouri River on June 14, 1846. Chiefs of about 2,250 Pottawatomie-Ottawa-Chippewas, in five scattered villages of southwest Iowa, had agreed just weeks before in Washington, D.C., to sell their lands and to move to the northeastern part of Kansas territory. About 1,300 Omaha and 930 Oto-Missouri Indians lived west of the Missouri River in five or six villages clustered near the confluence of the Platte and Missouri rivers. U.S. Indian agents at Bellevue and Point aux poules did not object to the amicable LDS presence, nor did the Indians themselves.
LDS officials, before continuing west, seem to have left city and county records in Iowa. A few of these carefully handwritten records are still available in Pottawattamie County. Significant gaps exist, however, in city and county records throughout southwest Iowa. When the Mormons left, town and even street names were changed by new owners, new squatters, claim jumpers, and, in most instances, new officials. There followed even periods of no government at all. As a result, city and county governments today cannot find consistent records from before 1853.