Location:
Chimney Rock: Life on the Mormon Trail
Distance: 718 miles from Nauvoo

The Latter-day Saints, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans and immigrants in the mid- to late 1800s, crossed the Great American Plains and the Rocky Mountains in their quest for a better life in the West. But surely this was the most unusual group to make the journey: organized in companies, with captains, committees, and choirs, they sang, danced, and worshiped their way across half a continent, building bridges, planting crops, and erecting shelters in an orchestrated effort to ensure a better passage for those who would inevitably follow.

Perhaps the most significant landmark on the overland trail, Chimney Rock is a finger of Brule clay jutting nearly 500 feet into the western Nebraska sky. Emigrants were constantly amazed that it appeared so close, while the distance from first sighting to actual arrival seemed to take so long. Not only did emigrants write about it in their journals, but many painted or sketched it, and often they would carve their names and dates of passage in its soft flanks. A lightning strike in August of 1992 blasted five feet from the top of the famous landmark.

Organization

In January of 1847 Brigham Young announced that those crossing the plains were to be organized into companies of hundreds, fifties, and tens, with their respective captains. Individuals without families (women without husbands and children without fathers) were adopted into a family for the journey.

"Special committees were designated for hunting, trail marking, and road improvement. Everyone had an assignment, everyone felt personally essential to the company's higher purpose. Taking everything into account, the Pioneer Company was probably the best-supplied, best-armed, and most trail-experienced group to go west up till then. Even so, being led by a determined man armed with a dream probably made all the difference" (Arthur King Peters, Seven Trails West [1996], 124–125).

They Did Dance!

"One of Father's [Brigham Young] most outstanding qualities as a leader was the manner in which he looked after the temporal and social welfare of his people along with guiding them in their spiritual needs. On the great trek across the plains when everyone but the most feeble walked the greater part of the way, the Saints would be gathered around the campfire for evening entertainment, if the weather was at all favorable. There songs would be sung, music played by the fiddlers, and the men and women would forget the weariness of walking fifteen miles or so over a trackless desert while they joined in dancing the quadrille. It was his way of keeping up 'morale' before such a word was ever coined" (Clarissa Young Spencer, One Who Was Valiant [1940], 162).

Communities on Wheels

Quite unlike the majority of people migrating west in the mid-1800s—most of them men, seasoned in farming or in the trades—the Latter-day Saints were a polyglot lot that mostly defied definition. Entire families, even extended families; single adults; orphaned (but soon-to-be-adopted) children; lawyers, doctors, piano builders, seamstresses, architects, masons, mathematicians; rich and poor; American, Scandinavian, Welsh, and British made the journey. "These tens of thousands," wrote J. Reuben Clark in 1947, "were the warp and the woof of Brother Brigham's great commonwealth . . . all gathered from the four corners of the earth . . . all to the glory of God and the up-building of his kingdom" (In Conference Report, Oct. 1947, 159). On the Trail, they moved with a social cohesion unknown to others. "As communities on the march," wrote historian Wallace Stegner, "they proved extraordinarily adaptable. When driven out of Nauvoo, they converted their fixed property, insofar as they could, into the instruments of mobility . . . and became for the time herders and shepherds, teamsters and frontiersmen, instead of artisans and townsmen and farmers. When their villages on wheels reached the valley of their destination, the Saints were able to revert at once" to their former interests and occupations (The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail [1964], 6).

For roughly 70,000 Latter-day Saint pioneers, it was not a common background that brought them together, but the vision of a common future.

The "Down and Back" Wagon Trains

Perhaps no other effort better demonstrated trail efficiency and pioneer cooperation than the organization of the "down and back" wagon trains of 1861–1868. These six-month round-trip trains departed Utah in the spring, traveling "down" to the Missouri River, loaded with flour to be sold in the East. The trains were reloaded with newly arrived European converts, and brought them "back" to the Salt Lake Valley in the fall. Virtually every Utah settlement contributed to the cause with supplies (wagons, teams, and food) or men (captains, teamsters, commissary chiefs, clerks, and guards). Escaping arduous summer farm work for the adventure of living on the plains was hardly a sacrifice for the young men sent on the "down and back" trains. Neither was the good fortune of being among the first to meet new young single emigrant women.

Richard Ballantyne

15 July 1848

"Camped opposite Chimney Rock. . . . Here the scenery is remarkable, interesting and romantic. It produces an impression as if we were bordering on a large and antiquated city" (Journal of Richard Ballantyne, 1847-1848, 2 vols., 15 July 1848, Family and Church History Department Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [microfilm], 2:15).

William Thompson

17 July 1848

"The camps moved off at nine o'clock, President Kimball's company taking the lead. Stopt at noon to water & feed six miles west of Chimney Rock. As we come forward President Brigham Young's camp moved off & part of Brother Snow's company commenced crossing the river at this point. President H.C. Kimball's company commenced a little past 5 and crost one hundred & eighty wagons to dark; all safe, except one wagon of Brother Howard Egan tipt partially over on the side; nothing injured; a few things wet. This ford was considered one mile across. We generally had to put on the strength of three wagons as the fellows of each wagon generaly burried themselves in gravel & sand. We found our corells on the south bank of the main Platt & set out our guards as usual. No wood; poor grass; plenty of muddy water" (Journal of William Thompson, 17 July 1848, as reprinted in the Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 24 Sep. 1848, 70:33–34).

Oliver Huntington

"As soon as we had struck our wagon in the corral, unyoke the cattle, gather wood, or buffalo chips for cooking, and usually to save fuel, dig a hole in the ground about 3 feet long, one wide, and 6 inches deep. This prevented the wind from blowing the heat away. . . The next thing was to get the cows (they were drove all together clean behind all the company) and milk, then drive stakes to tie the cattle to an about this time the drove would come in and then get the cattle and tie them.

"These were regular and sometimes as many more, according to camping ground, sometimes have to go a mile and a half for water and sometimes had to dig wells. Each ten herded their cattle and every man and boy able to do it took their regular turn according to the number of the ten. In the ten I was in there was an increase until the number of wagons amounted to 24 and 25 persons to herd, and it came each ones turn once in 5 days taking 5 to each days company.

"The guarding of the camp fell on each man proportionally once in 7 and sometimes 6 nights, and then half the night, only. The herding and guarding together with my daily tasks kept me beat down and wore out all the time. The women were as well drove beat down as the men.

"Sundays were scarcely a day of rest nor could it be if we travelled Monday" (As quoted in Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail [1964], 203).

C.C.A. Christensen

"Our costumes would look fine at one of our so-called 'Hard Times Balls.' Our hats . . . assumed the most grotesque shapes. . . . Ladies' skirts and the men's trousers hung in irregular trimmings. . . . The ladies [were not] particular about whether their skirts could hide their poor footwear, if indeed they were well enough off to own a pair of shoes. . . .

"A very old man, who had completely lost his sense of smell, came into camp one day, after the rest of us had things somewhat in order, with a skunk which he counted on cooking for soup. This almost made the rest of us leave. He had killed it with his cane and knew nothing about its peculiar means of defense" ("By Handcart to Utah: The Account of C.C.A. Christensen," Richard L. Jensen, trans., Nebraska History, Winter 1985, 342).

William Henry Jackson

10 August 1866

"The Mormon corral presents a lively, interesting scene. Three hundred men, women and children grouped within the space occupied by the encircled wagons very naturally making it so. A few of the families have small tents that are put up both inside and outside the corral; the rest sleeping either in their wagons or under them. The whole outfit is divided into messes of convenient size, and, as soon as camp is located, the first thing to do is to start the fires; those whose duty it is to provide fuel foraging around in every direction for 'chips,' sage brush, or any other material available, and soon forty of fifty bright little fires are twinkling inside and outside the corral, with coffee pots, frying pans, and bake ovens filling the air with appetizing incense. From a little distance one of these encampments, at night, resembles an illuminated city in miniature, and as one approaches nearer there is usually the sound of revelry. In every Mormon train there are usually some musicians, for they seem to be very fond of song and dance, and as soon as the camp work is done the younger element gather in groups and 'trip the light fantastic toe' with as much vim as if they had not had a twenty mile march that day" (The Diaries of William Henry Jackson: Frontier Photographer, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen [1959], 64–65).

Journal photographs courtesy of Infobases, Inc.