Brigham Young and the Mormon Migration
A New Religion in a Hostile East
In 1830 a young man from upstate New York, Joseph Smith, published the Book of Mormon and founded a new church — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith claimed an angel had revealed golden plates with the lost gospel of an ancient American people. The new faith grew quickly, but it also collected enemies. Mormons believed they were God’s gathered people, voted as a bloc, refused to mix religion and the state in the way most Americans expected, and from the late 1830s a small minority practised polygamy. Each move — from New York to Ohio, then Missouri, then Nauvoo in Illinois — ended with their neighbours driving them out.
Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob at Carthage, Illinois on 27 June 1844. After a brief power struggle, Brigham Young emerged as the new leader and decided the Saints could not survive within the United States as it then was — they needed a place no one else wanted.
Brigham Young Takes Over
Smith’s death left around 12,000 Saints in Nauvoo facing a hostile state government. Brigham Young was a former carpenter and senior apostle. He was a brilliant organiser rather than a mystic, and within months he had a plan: leave the United States entirely and build a new society in Mexican territory beyond the Rockies. Young chose the Great Salt Lake Valley because the explorer John C. Fremont had described it as fertile but uninhabited, and because nobody else wanted it — it sat in a high desert with bitter winters and unreliable water.
The Mormon Trail, 1846–47
In February 1846 the Saints began crossing the frozen Mississippi out of Nauvoo. Young drilled them like an army. Wagon trains were divided into companies of fifty, each with a captain, and into groups of ten, each with a captain. He published travel rules, set times for prayer, food and rest, and ordered that crops be planted at staging posts so later companies could eat. The first 1846 winter was spent in temporary settlements at Winter Quarters on the Missouri, where more than 350 people died of cold, scurvy and disease before the camps closed in 1848. The advance pioneer party of 148 set out in April 1847 and reached the Salt Lake Valley on 24 July 1847. Young, ill with fever, lifted his head from the wagon, looked across the valley and famously said, “This is the right place. Drive on.”
The Mormon Trail ran roughly 1,300 miles from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley. Young’s organisation was strikingly different from the typical California-bound wagon train. Companies stuck together rather than racing each other. Sick travellers were cared for by the whole company, not abandoned. Tools, seeds and breeding livestock were shared. Crops planted at staging stops fed later groups. The trail kept moving for years — by 1869, when the railroad replaced wagons, around 70,000 Saints had crossed it. The collective discipline meant a remarkably low death rate compared with secular trails such as the Oregon and California Trails.
Building Deseret
The Mormons called their new home Deseret, a Book of Mormon word meaning ‘honeybee’ — an emblem of co-operative work. Within hours of arrival the pioneers were already digging the first irrigation ditches, redirecting mountain streams to soak the dry valley floor. Young laid out Salt Lake City on a strict grid, with ten-acre blocks, wide streets and a central temple square. Land was held by the church and assigned to families based on what they could work, not what they could pay; water rights belonged to communities, not individuals. New arrivals were directed to one of the satellite settlements (Ogden, Provo, Manti) so the colony could spread without fragmenting.
Crops failed in the first summer of 1848 when a plague of crickets devoured the wheat. According to Mormon tradition, vast flocks of seagulls arrived from the Great Salt Lake and ate the crickets, saving the harvest. Whatever the explanation, the colony survived, and by 1850 around 11,000 Saints were settled in Deseret. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had quietly transferred the territory from Mexico to the United States — the very government Young had hoped to escape was now once again his neighbour.
Three factors stand out. First, leadership: Young combined religious authority with practical organisation, so individuals followed orders during the trek and the early settlement. Second, unity: shared faith and shared persecution made the Saints willing to share land, water and labour. Most other migrant groups were collections of strangers chasing private profit, especially miners. Third, geography: the Salt Lake Valley was so isolated that no other settler group fought them for it for over a decade. Settlers on Oregon-bound trails arrived as individuals; Young arrived as a society.
The Mormon settlement worked because three things came together: tightly organised leadership under Brigham Young; collective ownership of land and water through the church; and the geographic isolation of a valley nobody else wanted — until 1848, when the United States acquired it from Mexico.
A Peace That Would Not Last
For the first decade Deseret was almost a separate country. Young served as territorial governor from 1850, and church and state ran together. But polygamy, theocratic government and the Saints’ refusal to obey federal officials produced steadily worsening relations with Washington. The story would end badly for some — the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 (covered in lesson 9) — and would force the United States to confront the question of whether religious community could trump federal law. For now, though, the achievement was unmistakable: in just three years, a community driven out of the East had built a working society in a desert.