Brigham Young's Ferry and the Business of Crossing

In the summer of eighteen forty-seven, Brigham Young led the first organized company of Latter-day Saint emigrants through this river valley and across the North Platte. When the pioneer company reached the other side, Young recognized an opportunity that transcended theology. The crossing was dangerous. Emigrants needed help. Someone was going to charge for that help.

Young left a small crew behind to operate a ferry. Within days they were pulling in more business than they could handle, not just from fellow Saints, but from Oregon-bound settlers, California dreamers, anyone heading west who arrived at the bank and looked at the water. The ferry charged per wagon. The fees added up quickly enough that the Saints used the proceeds to buy supplies they needed for the rest of the journey to the Great Salt Lake.

The Mormon Ferry operated at this location for roughly five years. It was a practical enterprise as much as a religious one, and it illustrated something that would repeat itself throughout the settlement of the West: the truly strategic positions were not mountain passes or gold-bearing streams but the crossings, the places where terrain forced everyone to stop and pay.

By the mid-eighteen fifties, the ferry had moved or been replaced by competing operations. But the logic of this location had been established. Where the Mormon pioneers had ferried, a French-Canadian trader named Louis Guinard would later build a bridge. Where the bridge stood, the Army would build a fort. And where the fort stood, a city would eventually grow. The geography that made this particular bend in the river indispensable in eighteen forty-seven had not changed. Every institution that followed was simply responding to the same fixed fact of the landscape.