In the summer of 1846 thousands of Latter-day Saints driven out of Nauvoo reached the Missouri. Brigham Young's people tried a first camp at Cutler's Park and in September moved about three miles closer to the river. The ground belonged to the Umóⁿhoⁿ, the Omaha. Big Elk agreed to let the Saints stay, in part because they might stand between his people and the Lakota, and the federal government allowed it for a limited time in return for the 500 men of the Mormon Battalion. It was still Indian Country, and the arrangement frayed: the Omaha, reasoning that the Saints were trespassing, took many of their cattle, and Young's people judged it cheaper to feed the Omaha than to fight them.
By the winter of 1846 and 1847 about 4,000 people lived here in some 800 cabins, huts and sod dugouts. Scurvy, malaria and the camp illnesses they called the fever killed hundreds; the church's records list 359 burials in the cemetery, and other counts run well past 400. Young's advance company of 148 left on April 7, 1847. The Omaha lease ran out in 1848, and the camp was abandoned for Kanesville across the river, now Council Bluffs.
The cemetery on State Street holds Avard Fairbanks's 1936 bronze of a father and mother laying their infant in the grave, and a roll of the dead from here and Cutler's Park. The church's Mormon Trail Center next door tells the migration by wagon, handcart, ship and train. The town of Florence grew over the site in 1854.
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