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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    Map showing the Mormon Trail

    The Mormon Trail was the route which was used by the Mormons, the adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), to travel out west to Utah from 1846 onwards. The trail ran originally from Illinois through Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming to Salt Lake City in Utah. The Trail was used by Brigham Young and the band of 143 individuals who first arrived to Utah in 1847. It was then used for several decades for upwards of 70,000 more Mormons to travel across the United States to Utah by 1869. It continued in a way after this as followers of the Church of LDS continued to move to Salt Lake City and other parts of Utah. In some ways the Mormon Trail became a longer route over time. It could be argued it extended all the way from New York to the Great Lakes and then overland to Utah, as many of those who were migrating to Utah by the last quarter of the century were people coming from overseas countries like Denmark and Norway where the Church of LDS had gained followers who wished to move to Utah. Thus, the Mormon Trail was responsible for the settlement of Utah in the nineteenth century.[1]

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    Mormon Trail chronology of eventsMormon Trail chronology of events

    Joseph Smith

    The Church of LDS was set up in 1830 by Joseph Smith, a highly unorthodox preacher living in the west of New York State who claimed that he had received visions from god. These inspired him to write the Book of Mormon as a reinterpretation of Christian theology. Amongst his more radical ideas was a belief that polygamy, through which men could have multiple wives, should be allowable. This ruffled a lot of feathers and Smith and his followers came under legal scrutiny and social pressure. Luckily for them, this was a period when the United States was expanding rapidly westwards and people who wanted to carve out their own individual communities could head out west and establish new settlements.[2]

    Over the next decade the Mormons moved a lot. They settled in Missouri by 1838, but they were ousted out of there after a brief conflict with the locals. Thereafter they moved to Illinois and purchased the town of Commerce, which they renamed Nauvoo in 1839. Over the next few years the Mormon movement grew substantially and Nauvoo had 12,000 inhabitants at its height. However, fresh clashes with non-Mormons led to Smith being arrested and then killed while in prison by a vigilante mob in the summer of 1844. The so-called Mormon War followed between the followers of the Church of LDS, now led by Brigham Young, and non-Mormons, whose numbers were growing in the state and who were supported by the federal government.[3] Eventually Young took the decision that the Mormons would leave Nauvoo and head out even further west, away from the prying eyes of the federal government.[4]

    The Mormon Trail is effectively the route which Young and his 142 followers travelled along in the course of 1846. They left Illinois in the early spring of 1846 and travelled west through Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming, stopping to establish a winter camp along the way. They continued their journey after breaking winter quarters and finally made it to the Great Salt Lake in what would come to be known in later times as Utah on the 24th of July 1847. This would become known as Pioneer Day in honor of Young and the original Mormon Pioneers arriving along the Mormon Trail to the place where they began settling Salt Lake City.[5]

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    The Utah War, 1857–1858

    Word was quickly sent back eastwards that the Pioneers had found a suitable place to establish their religious haven, a Zion or New Jerusalem. This triggered the process whereby thousands of Mormons began travelling along the Mormon Trail in the late 1840s and through the 1850s and 1860s to join the Church of LDS in Utah. The trail was over 2,000 kioometers from Illinois to Salt Lake City and ran through places like Richardson's Point in Iowa, Fort Kearney and Scott's Bluff in Nebraska and Fort Laramie and Rock Creek in Wyoming.

    The Mormon Trail suffered ups and downs. In 1857, as the federal government’s influence spread further westwards, war broke out again between the Mormons and the government. The Church of LDS was defeated and the Utah Territory was brought under federal rule, though the Mormons still managed maintained a huge amount of control over their own affairs in Salt Lake City, primarily because they were in such a majority in the region.[6] Utah would only belatedly become a state in 1896. By then, tens of thousands of Mormons and non-believers had travelled along the Mormon Trail.[7]

    The Mormon Trail mirrored other widely used travel routes used by migrants during the era of the American West, such as the more southerly Oregon Trail and California Trail that brought people to the West Coast from the years of the California Gold Rush onwards. Eventually, people who were not Mormons, but who were instead travelling towards the northwest of the country, to places like Seattle in Washington State, used the Mormon Trail to get from the Great Lakes out towards Wyoming and Utah before branching off in different direction. Notably, as a gold rush began in Montana in the 1860s, the Montana Trail developed as an extension of the Mormon Trail running off northwards into Indiana and then to Helena in Montana.[8]

    Extent of migration along the Mormon TrailExtent of migration along the Mormon Trail

    The very first party of pioneers that travelled along the Mormon Trail consisted of 143 Mormons led by the leader of the Church of LDS at the time, Brigham Young. They traversed it in 1846 and arrived to the Great Salt Lake in 1847 to establish the New Jerusalem there. Once the settlement was established, word was sent back and thousands more Mormons began travelling west along the Mormon Trail to Utah. An estimated 70,000 Mormons had migrated west by the end of the 1860s. The numbers continued thereafter. Thus, the Mormon Trail, while not entirely responsible for the migration, was the mechanism and route along which it occurred.[9]

    Demographic impact of the Mormon TrailDemographic impact of the Mormon Trail

    Salt Lake City around 1900

    The demographic impact of the Mormon Trail is fairly clear to see. It can be examined simply by looking at the federal census records for Utah over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. An estimated 11,000 people lived in Utah by 1850. This increased to 40,000 in 1860, then 86,000 in 1870, 143,000 a decade later, 210,000 in 1890 and 276,000 by the end of the century. Utah’s population would top half a million people by 1930 and stands at 3.3 million as of the 2020 federal census.[10] This marks it out as distinct from most of the other states in the region. Quite simply, the Mormon Trail brought more people to Utah than neighboring states. Wyoming is larger than Utah and had better agricultural land, and yet its population is much smaller, slightly less than 600,000. Thus, the Mormon Trail contributed to the development of a populous state in Utah, a region which is otherwise one of the most inhospitable states in all of the United States.[11]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Mormon TrailExplore more about the Mormon Trail

    References

    1. ↑ William E. Hill, The Mormon Trail: Yesterday and Today (Boulder, Colorado, 1996).
    2. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mormons-smith/
    3. ↑ John E. Hallwas, ‘Mormon Nauvoo from a Non-Mormon Perspective’, in Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 16 (1990), pp. 53–69.
    4. ↑ John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012).
    5. ↑ https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mormon-pioneer-trail-timeline.htm
    6. ↑ https://rsc.byu.edu/nineteenth-century-saints-war/church-utah-war-1857-58
    7. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mormons-utah/
    8. ↑ https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/trails-across-wyoming-oregon-mormon-pioneer-and-california-routes
    9. ↑ Hill, The Mormon Trail.
    10. ↑ https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/p/POPULATION.shtml
    11. ↑ https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/glad-you-asked/how-was-utahs-topography-formed/


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    APA citation (7th Ed.)

    Dr. David Heffernan. (2025, May 25). *Mormon Trail*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Mormon_Trail