The Mormon Trail Across Iowa

The road you're near today was part of one of the great forced migrations in American history. In the winter of eighteen forty-six, well over ten thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fled Nauvoo, Illinois, after the murder of their founder, Joseph Smith. They crossed Iowa in brutal cold, traveling roughly three hundred miles to reach the Missouri River.

They did not go straight through. They stopped, built roads, planted crops for the next wave of emigrants, and established a series of camps that became small towns. This part of southern Iowa was a corridor of movement and mutual aid. The church called it the Camp of Israel. Within two years the trail carried tens of thousands westward to the Salt Lake Valley, permanently shaping the settlement pattern of the American West.