The Mormon Trail: America's Most Extraordinary Religious Exodus

Joseph Smith was 24 years old when he published the Book of Mormon in 1830 and organized what he called the restored Church of Jesus Christ. He was 38 when he was shot dead by a mob in Carthage, Illinois in 1844. In the fourteen years between, he had founded one of the most consequential religious movements in American history, gathered tens of thousands of followers, been driven from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, and generated a level of hostility that would culminate in his murder by men who included off-duty militia members.

What happened after his death is, in some ways, more extraordinary than what came before.

The New American Religion

Mormonism was, and is, an entirely American religious creation. Unlike every other major world religion, which emerged in the ancient world, Mormonism was born in upstate New York in the 1820s — in the same Burned-Over District that was hosting the Second Great Awakening — and its founding story is set in the American landscape.

Smith claimed to have been visited by the angel Moroni, who directed him to golden plates buried in a hillside in Palmyra, New York. The plates, he said, recorded the history of an ancient civilization that had lived in the Americas and been visited by Jesus Christ after his resurrection. Smith translated them into the Book of Mormon.

The theological claims were extraordinary. So was the community Smith built around them. The early church was intensely communal — members pooled resources, built cities, and followed Smith's revelations with a organizational discipline that attracted both devoted converts and alarmed observers.

The observers' alarm was not purely theological. Mormons voted as a bloc, which made them a political force wherever they settled. They claimed divine authority that superseded civil law in some instances. And Smith introduced the doctrine of plural marriage (polygamy) to a 19th-century American audience that found it unacceptable on every level.

The Expulsion

The pattern repeated in every place the Saints settled: initial tolerance, then friction, then violence, then expulsion.

In Missouri, Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an extermination order in 1838 — literally ordering that Mormons be treated as enemies and exterminated or expelled. In Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Saints built a city of 12,000 that briefly made it the largest city in the state, the tensions culminated in Smith's murder.

After Smith's death, Brigham Young — a carpenter from Vermont who had become one of Smith's apostles — consolidated leadership and made the decision that defined Mormon history: they would leave the United States entirely.

In 1846, the decision was made. They would go west, beyond the sovereignty of any American state or territory, to find a place where they could practice their faith in peace.

The Walk

The Mormon Trail began at Winter Quarters, Nebraska (now Omaha) and ended at the Great Salt Lake Valley — 1,300 miles through terrain that killed thousands.

The first pioneer company of 148 people, led by Brigham Young, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847 — now celebrated as Pioneer Day in Utah. Young reportedly looked out at the alkali flats and said: "This is the place."

What followed was one of the most sustained organizational achievements in American frontier history. Between 1847 and 1869 — when the transcontinental railroad made the wagon journey unnecessary — roughly 70,000 people made the overland trek. The Church organized wagon companies with military precision: captains of hundreds, captains of fifties, captains of tens. Supply caches were positioned along the route. Rescue parties were dispatched for those who fell behind.

The most heartbreaking chapter was the handcart companies of 1856. Two late-season companies — the Willie and Martin handcart companies — pushed two-wheeled carts rather than wagons to save money, and were caught by early winter storms on the Wyoming plains. Of the approximately 1,000 people in the two companies, between 150 and 200 died. The rescuers who went out from Salt Lake City to save them — driving wagons through October blizzards — performed acts of courage that became foundational stories in LDS tradition.

What They Built

The Saints who arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley found an arid, alkaline desert. They turned it into a functioning agricultural society through communal labor, irrigation engineering, and the organizational discipline their faith had produced.

Salt Lake City was designed from its founding as a New Jerusalem — wide streets on a grid, temple at the center, every block carefully planned. The Temple, begun in 1853 and completed in 1893, took forty years to build and remains one of the most recognizable religious buildings in America.

Utah became a US territory in 1850, which ended the Saints' hope of escaping American jurisdiction. The federal government's decades-long campaign to end polygamy — including the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the Church and confiscated its property — constituted one of the most aggressive interventions against a religious group in American history.

The Church abandoned polygamy in 1890, under a revelation by President Wilford Woodruff. Utah became a state in 1896.

The American Religion

Mormonism is the only major world religion founded in America, and it carries America's fingerprints throughout. Its theology is democratic and optimistic — salvation is available to all, human potential is infinite, even God was once a man who progressed to divinity. Its organizational culture is efficient and community-minded. Its history is inseparable from the American history of westward expansion, conflict, and eventual accommodation.

Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven explores Mormon history through the lens of contemporary fundamentalist violence, generating controversy that itself reflects the ongoing complexity of the tradition. Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History, written by a niece of LDS President David O. McKay who was later excommunicated, remains the most consequential secular biography of Joseph Smith.

Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has 17 million members worldwide — more members outside the United States than inside. It is the fastest-growing American-born religion in history.

The people who pushed handcarts through Wyoming blizzards to reach the Salt Lake Valley could not have imagined it. They were only trying to find a place where they could pray in peace.