Mormon Pioneer Memorial Bridge: Crossing into the West
Near Omaha, Nebraska
This bridge marks one of the most consequential crossings in American religious history. Beginning in eighteen forty-six, tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were driven from their settlements in Illinois and Iowa and set out across the Missouri River toward the Rocky Mountains.
They crossed the Missouri here, building their own ferries and flatboats in the brutal winter of eighteen forty-six and forty-seven. The temporary encampment they called Winter Quarters, just west of this crossing, sheltered several thousand people. Several hundred died there from cold and disease before the main migration resumed in the spring.
The Mormon Pioneer Trail they blazed from Nauvoo, Illinois, all the way to the Salt Lake Valley eventually became one of the great overland routes of the American West, used by gold-seekers and settlers for decades after.
