Illinois to Winter Quarters · 1846–1847
The Exodus from Nauvoo
In February 1846, families began crossing the Mississippi out of Nauvoo, Illinois, starting a migration that would end in the Salt Lake Valley.
Nauvoo had been, briefly, one of the largest cities in Illinois. After years of escalating conflict and the killing of Joseph Smith in 1844, its residents agreed to leave. The first wagons crossed the Mississippi in February 1846, some of them over ice.
The route ran west across Iowa in bad weather over ground that had no established road. Way stations such as Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah were planted so that later companies would find crops already in the ground. By that summer, thousands were camped along the Missouri River at Winter Quarters, in what is now Nebraska.
The winter at Winter Quarters was brutal — scurvy, exposure, and hundreds of graves. The first company reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Tens of thousands followed over the next two decades, by wagon and, from 1856, by handcart.
In The Wooden Sisters, this is the stretch where the two families come closest to each other without knowing it: separate companies, the same river crossings, the same weather.