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 [New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1996], 124.)

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. Then 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 [Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 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, British. . . . "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." 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.

For roughly 70,000 Latter-day Saint pioneers, it was not the context of 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. Reloading with newly arrived European converts, the trains 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

Summer 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."

(Richard Ballantyne, Journal, 1847-1848, photocopy of manuscript, HDC.)

William Thompson

July 17, 1848

"We crossed the Platte about six miles above Chimney Rock. This ford is about a mile across. We generally had to put on the strength of three wagons, as the falloes of each wagon generally buried themselves in gravel and sand. Commencing a little past five, we crossed one hundred and eighty wagons till dark all safe. The rest of my company or the company with Brother Henry Harriman, crossed next. Camped half a mile west of the ford and Pres. Young is three miles further west, on the Platte bottom. I consider that by crossing the river, six miles above Chimney Rock we saved about ten miles travel, and the road is much the best. Our wagons, oxen, and horses stand the journey well. The brethren and sisters feel well; they can realize that we have been blessed, and we are blessed."

(William Thompson, Journal, 17 July 1848, as printed in the Journal History, 24 September 1848, HDC.)

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 and 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."

(Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, in the series The American Trail Series, reprinted by Bison Book, 1992], 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 with he counted on cooking for soup. This almost make the rest of us leave. He had killed it with his cane and knew nothing about its peculiar means of defense."

(Richard L. Jensen, trans., "By Handcart to Utah: The Account of C.C.A. Christensen," Nebraska History 66 [Winter 1985], 337-43.)

William Henry Jackson

August 10, 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 near 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, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen [Glendale, Ca.: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1959], 64-65.)

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