Mormon Trail

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Course of the Mormon Trail

Mormon Trail or Mormon Pioneer Trail is the name given to the path the Mormon pioneers took in North America in the mid-19th century to find a country where they could practice their religion free from persecution.

history

They have been persecuted in the eastern United States since their founding by Joseph Smith in 1830, which is why they moved Church headquarters first to Ohio, then to Missouri, and, for further severe persecution, finally to Nauvoo , Illinois , near the western border of the then populated United States. However, their homes there were burned down, their leader Joseph Smith arrested and shot, and they decided to leave the United States entirely. In February 1846, the first 600 believers left for the west. After an arduous journey, they arrived in July of the following year after a hike of over 2,000 kilometers at the Great Salt Lake in what is now the state of Utah . Their new leader, Brigham Young, promised them a Promised Land . They found the destination of their hike in a valley on the shore of the salt lake. They were formally on Mexican territory, but far beyond the reach of state authority. The land was extremely difficult to work and you had to dig irrigation ditches before anything could be grown.

Mormon Trail Monument in Bridgeport, Nebraska

Trail

Now an “advance command” determined the route and set up interim storage facilities with farms to supply the following travelers. These included Council Bluffs and Fort Bridger (which was bought for this purpose by the trapper Jim Bridger and later burned down by the Mormons in the Utah War in order not to provide a shelter for the US Army). 148 people of this advance detachment reached the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847 and founded the end point of the Mormon Trail, the place Salt Lake City . Among them was Brigham Young, who later became governor of the Deseret territory , which later became the US state of Utah.

Over the next two years, another 10,000 Mormons, who had been driven out of Nauvoo, followed on the previously defined and marked trail, as well as several 10,000 converts from the Eastern States and Europe over about two decades until the transcontinental railroad was completed. Most of them traveled with covered wagons or walked alongside, but some groups also came with handcarts. Two of these handcart pulls tragically ended in a very early onset of winter, and several people froze to death shortly before arriving in Utah.

The area in which they settled came to the United States after the war with Mexico in 1848. Today the Mormon Trail is a tourist route and part of a system of historic roads in the United States called the National Trails System .

literature

  • Elaine Landau: The Mormon Trail , Scholastic Library Pub, 2006, ISBN 0-516-27904-1
  • William E. Hill: The Mormon Trail: yesterday and today , Utah State University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-87421-202-2

Web links

Commons : Mormon Trail  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files