Our First Visit to Winter Quarters [July 24, 1993]

I remember well our first visit to Winter Quarters. It was a part of a two-week, fifteen-state road trip to deliver a daughter to school in North Carolina. My journal entry for Saturday, July 24, 1993, recorded the event:

Today is Pioneer Day, a state holiday in Utah celebrating the 1847 arrival of the Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley. Appropriately, having spent much of the night more or less following in reverse the route of the Mormon Pioneer Trail across Nebraska, we arrived at Winter Quarters before breakfast and just after the night’s rains stopped and the skies cleared. We were here to visit the pioneer cemetery and visitors’ center at Winter Quarters. By evening we would reach Nauvoo, Illinois, where the pioneer trek originally began.

Winter Quarters was a temporary settlement built on Indian lands on the west bank of the Missouri River. The town site was surveyed in October 1846 and laid out in a grid with streets and blocks and individual lots. The houses ranged from two-story log homes to sod huts. Most were single-story log cabins. The settlement housed almost 4,000 Latter-day Saints by December 1846.

Upon orders from government officials concerned about settlement on Indian lands, the Saints vacated Winter Quarters in 1848 to go either to the Salt Lake Valley or back east across the river.

On January 14, 1847, President Brigham Young received at Winter Quarters the revelation now pub­lished as section 136 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which contained “the Word and Will of the Lord concern­ing the Camp of Israel in their journeyings to the West” (D&C 136:1).

There was a peaceful, sacred feel­ing in the lovely little hillside cemetery where many of the pioneers were laid to rest. Historians tell us that some 2,000 Latter-day Saints died near these settlements on both sides of the river between June 1846 and October 1848—with still more on the pioneer trail as it snaked its way west from here. What a terrible price was paid for the legacy of faith that we now so comfortably enjoy!

Ten-year-old Eliza wrote of our visit to Winter Quarters: “We went to this place. We saw a 20-minute video, then we went to a grave yard. It was weird! They listed all the names of people who died and were buried there. There were two Elizas. One was 3 years old and the other 27 years old. We saw a wagon and a handcart and a log cabin. (Oh, this was all in Nebraska.)”

Sixteen-year-old Talmage added, “We went to Winter Quarters and saw a little cabin, wagon, and handcart. More importantly, we saw the memorial for all the people who died at Winter Quarters for their faith. It was heart touching. We also saw a 20-minute film about Winter Quarters and the Mormon pioneers.”

After we finished breakfast on the picnic tables at the visitors’ center, we got back on Interstate 680 and immediately crossed the Mormon Bridge over the Missouri River and entered Iowa. In nearby Council Bluffs, on the Iowa side of the river, there had also been pioneer settle­ments during the early years of the exodus to Utah, home to another 8,000 or more Saints. It was in this area that the Mormon Battalion left in 1846 on its historic trek to Santa Fe and San Diego and the First Presidency was reorganized in December 1847 with Brigham Young as the second President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.