The Mormon Trail

The company Brigham Young led up the north bank in 1847 was small and mostly men. It left Winter Quarters on April 5 with 143 men, among them three African Americans and eight members of the Quorum of the Twelve, plus three women and two children, in 73 wagons carrying a year's supplies. Scouts entered the Salt Lake Valley on July 21 and the main party on July 22. By December more than 2,000 Latter-day Saints had reached the valley. The handcart years came later: from 1856 to 1860, ten companies, almost 3,000 people with 653 carts.

What the plaque says

The Mormon Trail For thousands of Mormons, the great pioneer trail along the north bank of the Platte which paralleled the river about a mile south of here was an avenue of escape from persecution and a roadway to a new life. Brigham Young led the first mass migration over the Mormon Trail to the Great Salt Lake in 1847. The north bank of the Platte was chosen to avoid contact with the travelers on the heavily-used Oregon Trail that followed the south bank of the river from near Kearney westward. Among the ex- peditions which followed, were several so poor that pioneers walked and pulled handcarts. The trail became one of the great roadways to the west, used by Mormons, military expeditions, gold seekers and settlers. The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 ended extensive use of the trail as the railroad tracks followed essentially this same route. Today, the Lincoln Highway (highway 30) follows this great roadway to the west. Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer — 24 mi
  Edward Durell Stone's island pavilion in Grand Island and an 1890s railroad town of moved buildings, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905.
• Genoa U.S. Indian School Museum — 28 mi
  The surviving trades building of a federal boarding school that ran from 1884 to 1934 on the Pawnee Nation's last Nebraska land, where at least 86 children died and the cemetery is still lost.

More markers nearby

• Lone Tree — steps away
• Heber Hord House — 1.3 mi
• Siloa Cemetery — 12 mi
• Village of Polk — 12 mi