Location:
Council Bluffs
Distance: 265 miles from Nauvoo

Here was a major outfitting point for Latter-day Saints and countless others heading west during most of the overland emigration period. Across the Missouri River from Winter Quarters, it was one of the most significant Latter-day Saint settlements during the late 1840s and early 1850s.

Originally known as Miller's Hollow, the name was changed to Kanesville by the Latter-day Saints in honor of Thomas L. Kane, an influential ally during their darkest years in Nauvoo. Following the departure of the Saints, it was renamed Council Bluffs in 1853. Orson Hyde, Church Apostle and the leading ecclesiastical leader for the area, ran a newspaper in the community, the Frontier Guardian, that became an important source of information for thousands on the move to the West. Up to 90 Latter-day Saint settlements were scattered throughout Pottawattamie County, Iowa, of which Kanesville was the most significant.

It was from this location that the Mormon Battalion began their long march to San Diego in July 1846.

Mormon Battalion

Common consensus, both military and historical, says that never in American history has there been an equivalent march of infantry: 600 men, women, and children, recruited by the U.S. Army from a mass exodus of Latter-day Saints then struggling across the plains of Iowa fleeing religious persecution in Illinois. They never engaged in armed conflict, yet they played a key role in securing from Mexico much of what today is the modern American Southwest in their 2,000-mile march across half a continent.

Need for a Mormon Battalion

Encamped on the prairies of Iowa in June of 1846, the Latter-day Saints were met with an unlikely visitor with an unusual request. Captain James Allen, of the U.S. Regular Army, rode into the makeshift refugee camp at Mount Pisgah seeking 500 volunteers for the six-week-old war with Mexico. They would be paid standard fare for their services. Presently fleeing U.S. ambivalence—and even disdain—for the refuge of Mexican Territory, the approach was at first perceived by the Latter-day Saints as absolute affrontery. Yet Brigham Young, who had long sought redress from the federal government for losses sustained by his people while under its jurisdiction, saw in the action the hand of Providence.

Within a matter of months, and due in part to the efforts of the Battalion, the distant Salt Lake Valley would switch from Mexican to United States control. And through military pay the Latter-day Saints would have additional financial means to launch and sustain their new community.

Financial Reasons for the Battalion

The Mormon Battalion, though it extracted 500 able men from the body of struggling Saints, was a boon to the pioneers financially. Battalion members each received a $42 clothing allowance, paid in advance, for their one-year enlistment. The bulk of this money was contributed immediately to a general Church fund from which wagons, teams, and other necessities for the larger exodus were purchased. Actual wages paid out over the next year (collected frequently by Church messengers) came to nearly $30,000. Later, Battalion members returning from California, where they were instrumental in the initial discovery of gold at John Sutter's mill, contributed $17,000 in gold to the fledgling economy of the Great Basin settlement.

Accomplishments of the Battalion

Battalion members cleared the first wagon road across the southern desert to California; secured the presidio at San Diego; established a U.S. presence in Tucson, leading to the acquisition seven years later of the Gadsden Purchase (extreme southern New Mexico and Arizona); and contributed to the building of Ft. Moore (Los Angeles). Individuals in the Battalion later helped in the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, the blazing of a wagon road over Cajon Pass and of the route east from California to Salt Lake City.

Battle of the Bulls

Although Battalion troops effectively stared down and intimidated the Mexican garrison stationed at Tucson to retreat, their only armed engagement of the war was with a herd of cattle. On December 11, 1846, a number of wild cattle stampeded into the rear companies, jostling wagons and scaring the pack animals, whereupon a number of the Battalion's hunters opened fire on the beasts. The eventual toll from the skirmish, immortalized as the Battle of the Bulls, was "ten to fifteen bulls killed, two mules gored to death, three men wounded."

For Those Who Would Follow

While only 2,000 people crossed to the Salt Lake Valley that first year of the migration, thousands remained on farms set up in Iowa territory to plant crops, harvest, and prepare provisions for the coming migration. One entire village (Kanesville, now Council Bluffs, Iowa) was established with such "travelers' aid" a primary concern. In contrast to most other pioneer groups crossing the plains, the Latter-day Saints cleared roads, built sturdy bridges, erected way-houses and built and manned river ferries at numerous points along the trail.

Women and Children on the Trail

The Mormon Battalion's 500 soldiers were divided into five companies. Each company was assigned at least four laundresses—wives of Battalion members also on the payroll—and other aides. All told, 34 women and 51 children accompanied the Battalion when it left Ft. Leavenworth. Most of these were relegated to the winter camp at Ft. Pueblo, but four women and perhaps six children completed the grueling 2,000-mile march to the Pacific coast. All but one, who died following childbirth in San Diego, then completed the journey to Salt Lake City.

Feature:

America's Longest March

by Clayton C. Newell

"History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry."

Colonel Philip St. George Cooke

When Captain James Allen of the U.S. Army rode into the makeshift refugee camp at Mount Pisgah (near present-day Thayer, Iowa) on June 26, 1846, he was met with something less than enthusiasm. Perhaps 15,000 men, women and children, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were filtering through this encampment, driven from their homes and farms in or around Nauvoo, Illinois by a citizenry that had turned vicious and a government—right to the top ¹—that had turned the other way.

When Allen presented a request for 500 able men to join U.S. forces in the war with Mexico, he was regarded with something between ambivalent distraction and outright disdain. But within days, Allen had his five companies, plus laundresses, helpers and a passel of kids. Thus the United States Army's "Mormon Battalion" was born on the desolate prairie soil of the Iowa frontier, a region yet six months away from official statehood. And Captain James Allen had very little to do with it.

A Place of Safety

Months before, in the dead of winter, Church leaders in Nauvoo had sent an epistle to U.S. president James K. Polk offering to build "block houses and stockade forts"² along the trail to Oregon and California for the benefit of all future travelers. The possibility of removing to "a place of safety . . . away towards the Rocky Mountains"³ had been on the minds of Church leaders since 1840. With the mounting violence in Nauvoo—including the 1844 assassination of church prophet Joseph Smith—that time had clearly come. Yet given the nature of Church membership in this era—thousands of recent European immigrants and others now bereft of most of their possessions—the Latter-day Saints were largely destitute. If the U.S. government would compensate for their efforts, the Saints would build, then politely abandon, a string of secure shelters on their way out of America.

That January of 1846, Polk gave the offer little thought.

To win over what they perceived to be a question of trust, the Saints then testified as to their patriotism: "We also further declare, for the satisfaction of some who have concluded that our grievances have alienated us from our country, that our patriotism has not been overcome by fire, by sword—by daylight, nor by midnight assassinations, which we have endured—neither have they alienated us from the institutions of our country. Should hostilities arise between the government of the United States and any other power, in relation to the right of possessing the territory of Oregon, we are on hand to sustain the claims of the United States government to that country." ⁴

Still Polk demurred.

Then on May 12, the U.S. declared war on Mexico. Polk confided in his diary of June 2, 1846, "Col. [Stephen W.] Kearny . . . authorized to receive into service as volunteers a few hundred of the Mormons who are now on their way to California, with a view to conciliate them, attach them to our country, and prevent them from taking part against us." ⁵

Although the prolonged absence of five hundred able- bodied men would severely challenge the exodus to the West, Brigham Young recognized that the promised military pay, clothing and supplies—which Battalion volunteers would be entitled to keep—could be of great benefit to isolated pioneers wresting a new life from the untried soil of a yet-distant home. From the historical record it appears that Brigham Young's overriding intent with the offering of peacekeeping force, however, was to win the confidence of—and independence from—a capricious and to-date uncaring U.S. government. (As it worked out, the move bought them very little in this regard; Albert Sidney Johnston's army marched to quell the highly publicized but patently imagined "Utah War" barely a dozen years later.) To Allen, Brigham Young replied: "You shall have your men, and if we have not enough men we will furnish you women." ⁶ Brother Brigham got enough men; it took him three days.

The March Is On

According to Brigham Young University historian Larry C. Porter, 513 men mustered in on the Battalion rolls July 16, five of them appointed captains of companies. When, four days later, the newest contingent of the Army of the West marched out of Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), Iowa territory under the command of Captain Allen, it was accompanied by 34 women and 51 children, some of them employed as laundresses. For many who had already forfeited nearly everything they owned, families were part of the deal.

But so was good behavior. As his "parting blessing," Brigham Young charged the recruits to ". . . live your religion, obey your officers, and . . . hold sacred the property of the people, never taking anything that does not belong to you . . . always spare life when possible; if you obey this counsel, attending to your prayers to the Lord, I promise you in the name of the Lord God of Israel that not one soul of you shall fall by the hands of the enemy."⁷

By the time the Battalion reached Fort Leavenworth, Captain Allen found the unusual demographic makeup of his entourage the least of his worries. He reached the fort waning from sickness and died within days. From Leavenworth, Lieutenant Andrew Jackson Smith pushed the Battalion onward to Santa Fe. Presumably annoyed with the nature of his force, Smith employed frequent forced marches and other inequities with a dictatorial demeanor. One chronicler of the events stated that any other body of people not already accustomed to being herded from one place to the next "would have mutinied rather that submit to the oppressions." ⁸ In fact, by the time the Battalion was within Mexican territory, three "sick" detachments were sent north to Fort Pueblo, Colorado, first from western Kansas and later from Santa Fe. Against the contentions of many that families were not to be separated, these detachments included most of the women and children. ⁹ Fortunately for the remaining volunteers, there was a new commander awaiting their arrival in Santa Fe: Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke.

Thus 340 men, four officers' wives (the wives were all commissioned as privates), and a few children continued and completed the grueling 2,000-mile, 6-month desert march to California, reaching San Diego on 29 January 1847. Along the way they mapped the country (an effort which played prominently in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853), opened a wagon road and established a U.S. presence that would, two years later, be officially recognized with the annexing Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Of their exploits Commander Cooke offered this example: "The garrison of four presidios of Sonora concentrated within the walls of Tucson, gave us no pause. We drove them out, with their artillery, but our intercourse with the citizens was unmarked by a single act of injustice,"¹⁰ fulfilling the challenge given months earlier by Brigham Young.

Of the women who completed the journey, only one never returned to join the Saints in Utah. Lydia Hunter, wife of Company "B" Captain Jesse Hunter, died in California only four months after completing the trek and two weeks after giving birth to a son. He was named James Diego.

The Mormon Battalion's only "battle" was the Battle of the Bulls, the result of a wild cattle stampede that resulted in the death of fifteen bulls (shot), two mules (gored), and three wounded men. When the Battalion completed its march, 15 men turned around and escorted now-General Kearny back to Fort Leavenworth, 81 reenlisted, and the rest (about 245) were discharged. Six of the latter were at Sutter's Mill when gold was discovered January 24, 1848.

The Long Road to Refuge

Though it never fought a battle, the Mormon Battalion earned a place in the history of the West. Perhaps its accomplishments were best catalogued by its commanding officer, Colonel Phillip St. George Cooke, in his official summation of the journey for his commanders:

"History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry. Half of it has been through a wilderness, where nothing but savages and wild beasts are found, or deserts where, for want of water, there is no living creature. There, with almost hopeless labor, we have dug deep wells, which the future traveler will enjoy. Without a guide who had traversed them we have ventured into trackless tablelands where water was not found for several marches. With crowbar and pick and axe in hand, we have worked our way over mountains, which seemed to defy aught save the wild goat, and hewed a pass through a chasm of living rock more narrow than our wagons. Thus, marching half naked and half fed, and living upon wild animals, we have discovered and made a road of great value to our country."¹¹

	There are literally scores of Mormon Battalion trail markers* between Mt. Pisgah (Iowa) and San Diego, where the largest and most extensive Mormon Battalion monument is the Mormon Battalion Memorial and Visitor Center in Presidio Park, 2510 Juan Street, Old Town, San Diego, California. Two additional "post-San Diego" sites in California are also significant. The first is an enormous monument near city hall in downtown Los Angeles, where the Battalion erected Fort Moore; the second is found 12 miles northwest of San Bernardino, just off state highway 138 at the foot of Cajon Pass, where 25 recently-discharged Battalion soldiers blazed a wagon trail across the Sierra Nevada in their journey back to their families and their new refuge of faith in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. *The best trail guide for Mormon Battalion markers is Stanley B. Kimball's Historic Sites and Other Markers Along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails, University of Illinois Press, 1988.

A country, ironically, from which the main body of Latter-day Saints now huddled in dugouts and crude shelters along the frozen banks of the Missouri River were currently fleeing for their own safety. The majority of Saints now gathered at Winter Quarters, Nebraska Territory, were in fact European converts (as were a number of the Battalion soldiers). Their eventual refuge, the Great Salt Lake Valley, lay 950 miles and seven hard months to the west. On this January 29 of 1847, that distant refuge was in Mexican Territory. One year later almost to the day (2 February), and owing in large measure to the success of the Battalion, it would be American. (And another 48 years would pass before Utah would be granted statehood.)

Church President Heber J. Grant, whose own parents walked across those bitter plains, spoke of the episode more than 70 years later:

"When the Latter-day Saints were being driven from their homes . . . driven from the confines of the United States onto Mexican soil, the [U.S.] government called on Brigham Young for 500 men to help fight Mexico. Show to me, if you can, in all the history of the world another case of a people being expatriated, being driven from their own country, from their own lands which they had purchased . . . the last remnant of them crossing the Mississippi River in the dead of winter, on the ice, nine babies being born during the night of that terrible expulsion, with no shelter . . . going forth on their journey of a thousand miles in the wilderness, after having appealed to the president of their republic, who could only say: "Your cause is just, but we can do nothing for you" (see Endnote 1)—show me another people, I say, who under like circumstances would have furnished 500 men to fight their country's battles! Show me greater patriotism and loyalty to country than this! It can't be done."¹²

And yet it could not have possibly been loyalty to country that impelled many of the Mormon Battalion soldiers, wives and children. They walked half a continent. They blazed a road. They etched their names in history.

But this was a conquest of faith.

END NOTES

1. When approached by Joseph Smith in 1839 seeking financial redress for the injustices suffered by the Saints in Missouri, President Martin Van Buren replied, "Gentlemen, your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you. If I take up for you, I shall lose the vote of Missouri." Documentary History of the Church, 4:80.

2. Letter published in Times and Seasons, vol. 6, no. 21, Nauvoo, Illinois, Jan. 15, 1846.

3. Ronald K. Esplin, "A Place Prepared: Joseph, Brigham and the Quest for Promised Refuge in the West," Journal of Mormon History (1982): 90.

4. Times and Seasons, vol. 6, no. 21, Nauvoo, Illinois, Jan. 15, 1846.

5. Polk, James K. Polk, the Diary of a President: 1845-1849, ed. Allan Nevis (London, 1929),109.

6. Quoted by Heber J. Grant, in Conference Report, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1919, 33.

7. Life of a Pioneer, Being the Autobiography of James S. Brown, (Salt Lake City, Utah: Geo. Q. Cannon and Sons Co., 1900), 28.

8. Daniel Tyler, A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War: 1846-1847, 1881, (Chicago, 1964).

9. The following spring, Battalion Company "C" Captain James Brown led these Saints north and then west, ushering them into the Salt Lake Valley on July 29, 1847, just five days after Brigham Young's party.

10. "Official Announcement Of The Battalion's Arrival On The Pacific Coast," Orders No. 1, January 30, 1847.; in B. H. Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church, 3:119.

11. "Official Announcement Of The Battalion's Arrival On The Pacific Coast," B. H. Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church, 3:119; also in Cooke's Conquest of New Mexico and California, 197.

12. Conference Report, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1919, 33.

Abner Blackburn

July 1846

"Arrived at Council Bluffs. Here Coronel Allen, a goverment officer, was enlisting volunteers for the Mexican War. Brighams folks did not want me to enlist for I had been with them as chief cook and bottle washer, or as a necessary evil. . . . I told them I was going and all the kings oxen could not hold me. There was five hundred enlisted in this place. [They were] called [the] Mormon Battalion and started to Ft Leavenworth to fit out for the war."

(Will Bagley, ed. Frontiersman: Abner Blackburn's Narrative [Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1992], 39.)

William Hyde

"The Government of the United States were at this time at war with Mexico, and not being satisfied with either having assisted, or by their silence acquiesced in driving and plundering thousands of defenseless men, women and children, and driving them from their pleasant and lawful homes, and of actually murdering, or through suffering causing the death of hundreds, they must now send to our camps, (While we, like Abraham, by the commandment of Heaven were enroute for a home, we knew not where; and after having expelled us from their borders), and call upon us for five hundred young and middle aged men, the strength of our camp, to go and assist them in fighting their battles. When this news came I looked upon my family, and then upon my aged parents, and upon the situation of the camps in the midst of an uncultivated, wild Indian country, and my soul revolted. But when I came to learn the mind of the Lord, and on learning the offering had to be made, or the sequel was not yet opened between us and the Government; when our beloved President came to call upon the saints to know who among all the people were ready to offer for the cause; I said, 'Here am I, take me.'"

(The Private Journal of William Hyde [1962], 18.)

Zadok Judd

"This was quite a hard pill to swallow—to leave wives and children on the wild praries, destitute and almost helpless, having nothing to rely on only the kindness of neighbors, and go to fight the battles of a government that had allowed some of its citizens to drive us from our homes, but the word comes from the right source and seemed to bring the spirit of conviction of its truth with it and there was quite a number of our company volunteered, myself and brother among them."

(Zadok Judd, Autobiography, Typescript, HDC.)

Journal photographs courtesy of Infobases, Inc. [an error occurred while processing this directive]