The LDS Legacy in Southwestern Iowa
The pioneers played a key role in the Middle Missouri Valley. Research shows how broad their influence was

Gail Geo. Holmes, “The LDS Legacy in Southwestern Iowa,” Ensign, Aug. 1988, 54

Thirty years ago, you couldn’t find even one LDS listing in the telephone directories of the Greater Omaha-Council Bluffs-Bellevue area. The Church itself had only three little branches that met in small buildings purchased from other churches or in government facilities on Offutt Air Force Base, Bellevue, Nebraska. Few non-LDS historians knew much about LDS history in the Middle Missouri Valley.

Today, things are much different. Council Bluffs, Iowa, recently named its rerouted main thoroughfare Kanesville Boulevard, in recognition of the name the Latter-day Saints first gave the settlement which, in 1853, became Council Bluffs. Both Council Bluffs and Omaha, Nebraska, have set aside public land at the sites of the Mormon Battalion Mustering Grounds and Cutler’s Park for LDS historical markers. Busloads of school children visit Mormon Pioneer Cemetery and Information Center in north Omaha.

Replica of a typical cabin at Winter Quarters. The cabin and its accompanying historical signboard [formally stood, a replica now stands into the Mormon Trail Center at Historical Winter Quarters]two hundred feet south of the Mormon Pioneer Information Center.

Why the dramatic change in interest? One reason may be that the Church has grown significantly in eastern Nebraska and in southwest Iowa. Today there are two stakes in Greater Omaha and one in nearby Lincoln. Tourist trade from Church members interested in their heritage has grown considerably. Then, too, more and more nonmembers are learning about the prodigious productivity of the Saints during their seven-year stay here, from 1846 to 1853.

Many are stunned to discover that the Saints built at least fifty-five widely separated communities and farmed as much as fifteen thousand acres in southwest Iowa alone (1).  One amazed Iowa official said at a Western Historic Trails Center meeting, “Can you imagine those Mormons building, in less than a month, a log tabernacle [in Kanesville] capable of holding a thousand people?” This year the University of Illinois Press has published a volume of pioneer emigrant reports noting that Kanesville/Council Bluffs was the principal jumping-off point for westward pioneers from the Missouri River, 1852 to 1866 (2).

French explorer-traders in the early 1700s and Spanish fur trappers and traders in the late 1700s recognized the importance of the area as a crossroads to the West. The Saints, coming nearly 150 years after the French started working the area, found a large French village there. LDS journals referred to Point aux poules as Trading Point (3).  They said the village had several blocks of residences and at least three trading houses. Bellevue, just west across the Missouri River, consisted of about twelve cabins, a trade post, and a U.S. Indian Agency.

Not until the Saints entered the area, though, were any substantial settlements established. In the winter and spring of 1846, the Saints struggled across the raw prairies of Iowa in wagon trains. Coming through southwest Iowa, they built, on an average, one bridge per day (4).  Of those bridges, Thomas L. Kane later said they were no ordinary bridges—they could bear heavy artillery (5).  When the Saints reached the Missouri River 14 June 1846, they were in old Council Bluffs, a district that stretched roughly from present-day Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, to Glenwood, Iowa.

The Saints occupied five successive headquarters sites from 14 June 1846 to the spring of 1853: Grand Encampment, Cold Spring Camp, Cutler’s Park, Winter Quarters, and Kanesville. (See accompanying map.) Grand Encampment was a catch basin for wagon trains completing their trek across Iowa. The later the wagon trains arrived, the farther east they camped. Hosea Stout observed that the wagon encampment stretched east about nine miles—almost to what today is Treynor, Iowa (6).