The Mormon Battalion's March to the Pacific

Nearly six months after leaving Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the summer of eighteen forty-six, five hundred exhausted men arrived in San Diego on January twenty-ninth, eighteen forty-seven, completing what their commanding officer said history might be searched in vain to equal. They had walked two thousand miles. They had crossed the Sonoran Desert in midsummer heat, built a wagon road through terrain that had never seen a wheeled vehicle, fought a skirmish with wild cattle in Arizona, and emerged here, at the Pacific, having lost men to illness and heat but none in combat. Their road through the desert would become a trade route. Their arrival would help confirm United States control of California during the Mexican-American War.

What makes the Mormon Battalion historically singular is what it was: the only United States Army unit ever organized exclusively from members of one religious community. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was in crisis in eighteen forty-six, expelled from Nauvoo, Illinois, and moving its entire population west toward an unknown destination. The United States government offered them a deal. Provide five hundred soldiers for the war with Mexico, receive federal pay that could fund the migration, and earn a measure of official legitimacy. Brigham Young accepted.

Those five hundred men were quartered, when they arrived in San Diego, near the old Catholic mission that sat at the edge of what is now Old Town. The irony of a United States Army unit composed entirely of one Protestant denomination being billeted beside a Catholic mission appears to have gone unremarked at the time. They stayed through the spring, did garrison work, and mustered out in July eighteen forty-seven. Some remained in California. Others joined the main body of the church heading for the Salt Lake Valley.

Their road through the Southwest outlasted the war that prompted it. A version of it became Interstate Eight.