National Trails Mormon leader Brigham Young and his followers were forced to leave Nauvoo, Illinois. His people were already at work digging irrigation ditches and planting crops for the oncoming emigration. Main Command TRAIL DATE 20 Mar 1847 DEDICATION DATE before 2008 GPS COORDINATES 33° 36.464’ N 117° 41.612’ W WGS84 by Michael Kindig, 22 June 2008 Mormon Battalion Marker Sycamore Park, Mission Viejo, Orange County, California Description This rectangular rock and concrete marker bearing a bronze plaque, flanked by an PO Box 728 Description. In 1847 members of the Mormon Battalion were honorably discharged at Los Angeles, California from their service in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. The Mormons followed and improved their track over the most rugged 116 miles of the entire westward journey. The historic Mormon Trail developed in two stages: (1) from Sugar Creek across Iowa to Council Bluffs in the winter and spring of 1846, and (2) from Winter Quarters near Council Bluffs to the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1847. Today, the Mormon Trail is a part of the United States National Trails System, known as the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail. Pioneer Companies that Crossed the Plains 1847-1868 . Many folks wonder what a national historic trail actually is. Other projects are organized by year of departure. Across the monotonous, undifferentiated, rolling central lowlands of Iowa, the Mormon Trail of 1846 generally followed primitive territorial roads as far as Bloomfield, Davis County, and then vague Pottawattamie Indian and trading trails along ridges from one water source to another, always within fifty miles of the present Missouri state line. The original 1846-1847 Mormon Trail went from Nauvoo, Hancock, Illinois to Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah. Most of the pioneer families either followed the Oregon-California Trail or the Mormon Trail. Those leaving from southern California blazed the trail that came to be called the Mormon Trail to southern California. Thanks to this added information and the previous summer’s experience, the second leg of the journey would be flawlessly executed. [The Mississippi Saints were a group of 14 families and slaves mostly from Mississippi that followed the Oregon Trail through They apparently turned north at the canyon mouth, then headed west, crossing Red Butte Creek a… On April 5, the first Mormon wagon train rolled out of Winter Quarters. The previous year, the California-bound Donner-Reed Party had gone this way and grubbed a new wagon track through the Wasatch Mountains to reach the Salt Lake Valley. THE MORMON TRAIL. Mormon Trail, in U.S. history, the route taken by Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Salt Lake in what would become the state of Utah.After Mormon leader Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob in 1844, church members realized that their settlement at Nauvoo was becoming increasingly untenable.Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, proposed a 1,300-mile (2,100-km) exodus to the west. The Mormons, due to persecution and suffering, left Nauvoo in 1847. Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail 87504. The Mormon Trail starts from Nauvoo, Illinois, which was the major settlement of the Latter Day Saints from about 1839 to 1846, to Utah's Salt Lake City, which was settled by their leader Brigham Young and his followers beginning in 1847. This would be the primary route for Mormon emigrants over the next two decades, and within a few years it also would become the preferred route of non-Mormons heading west. 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