Mormons -- members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- were driven out of Ohio, out of Missouri, and out of Illinois by mobs to ultimately settle in the once remote Great Salt Lake Valley.   Even today the church is labeled by a dwindling chorus as a “cult.”

Why the early violence?  Why the continuing whisper campaign labeling Mormons a cult? The doors of the church are open, and visitors are not only welcome, but encouraged to  attend sacrament, women’s Relief Society meeting, men and boy’s priesthood meetings,  young men’s, young women’s, and primary age children’s meetings, as well as the scouting programs of the church.  (The first scouting program in the United States was organized by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)  Many do visit and/or participate, and are welcome.

Can the teachings of the church be at fault?  Is it the Mormon assertion that revelation is as common today as it was in Old and New Testament times?  Is it because the Book of Mormon is used by the church as much or more than the Bible by members and by its missionaries?   Take a look at these basic teachings of the church:

•  Mormons believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in his son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.  They believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.

•  Mormons believe the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel  are:  first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of Hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.

•  Mormons believe a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer the ordinances thereof.         

• Members believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; they also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

• Mormons believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and they believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.

Mormon (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) migrations, 1846-1853; 1856-1860; 1861-1866; 1867-69, through what now is the greater Omaha area were floods as compared to the quiet Mormon return here in the early 1900s.

About 13,000 1846-53 wagon train pioneers, driven out of west central Illinois and south-eastern Iowa by mobs, paused in this area from one to seven years to rest, recover health, or earn enough money for food, tools, and supplies for another 900+ miles of travel to the Rocky Mountains.  Close to 19,000 more came through here from other parts of the United States, Canada, the British Isles and Europe 1848-53.  There were drop outs who stayed here.

Nearly 3,000 European converts pushed handcarts from the then end of the railway at Iowa City, Iowa 1856-1860 and through here on their way to Utah.  There were drop outs.

Down-and-Back-Wagons brought flour and other produce from Utah to sell in Florence and Omaha,1861-66, before picking up and carrying about 7,000 European converts to the Great Salt Lake Valley, without charge.  But, a few of the converts decided to drop out and stay here.

Thousands of Mormon converts from the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world wagon-trained west from here along the transcontinental railway, then being built – or down-and-back-wagons from Utah came and picked up those who rode part way to their Utah destinations on the new Union Pacific Railway, until its 1869 linkage with the west coast railway in Utah.  There were almost no drop outs, 1867-69.

The church was organized by Joseph Smith Jr. in 1830 at Fayette, New York with six members.  When the great exodus from Illinois to Utah began in 1846, membership numbered about 70,000 – less than half in the United States and Canada and a little more than half in the British Isles and Europe.  There was a sprinkling in other parts of the world.  Today there are more than 14 million, with less than half in the United States and Canada.  More than half are in organized churches in more than 160 countries, speaking more than 80 different languages, around the world.

Don’t hold me to it, but I think semi-annual General Conference is broadcast now in about 40 different languages for world-wide listeners.  There are about 52,000 volunteer (self-financing) missionaries world-wide.  The church is organized as it was by Jesus, with prophets, apostles, elders, priests, teachers, and deacons – all unpaid.

There are no statistics on which to calculate the number of persons who dropped out of those early Mormon migrations.  My guess is that a total of about 700 dropped out in the  Middle Missouri Valley, but that is based on the best of flimsy evidence.  That figure would                     include some pioneers who decided to leave the desert valley settlements in the Salt Lake country and return to this fertile area. 

Some drop outs said they left the church because their leaders and prominent members  practiced polygamy.  That practice was introduced in Nauvoo, Illinois just as Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, revered Old Testament leaders, did it in the Holy Land more than two thousand years ago.  The practice was ended by the church when the Supreme Court in 1890 declared plural marriage illegal in the United States. 

The Mormons established more than 60 communities in southwestern Iowa and the eastern fringe of Nebraska in the 1840s.  The American frontier was rapidly moving west-ward.  These migrants, while thinking about the Salt Lake Valley, nonetheless, built thousands of miles of roads, bridges, and ferries in the Middle Missouri Valley, with volunteer labor.  They established four and possibly five counties in southwestern Iowa.  They built at least ten saw and/or grist mills in the same area. 

The California Gold Rush, which started in 1849, brought them great prosperity in the Missouri Valley.  Presiding apostle in Iowa, Orson Hyde, started, 1849-1852, a weekly newspaper called The Frontier Guardian in Kanesville, the city later named Council Bluffs.  Businesses boomed and farm prices shot up to equal those in St. Louis, Missouri.  When Hyde sold his newspaper, before moving to Utah, to a publisher outside the church, another Mormon, Joseph Ellis (J.E.) Johnson started a second weekly, 1852-1857, called, originally, Council Bluffs Weekly Bugle.  Johnson later also published The Oracle newspaper at Crescent, Iowa about 10 miles north of Kanesville. 

When Council Bluffs Mormon lawyer, Hadley D. Johnson, persuaded Congressional leaders in Washington to break the North-South deadlock over the admission of new states, the  1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed and Kansas and Nebraska territories were added to the Union.  Very soon, along came the City of Omaha.  The first newspaper in Omaha was J.E. Johnson’s Omaha Arrow, printed in Council Bluffs but circulated throughout the United States as coming from Omaha, Nebraska territory. 

Slave-holding Democrats in Missouri were convinced they could make Kansas another slave state and keep an even number of pro-slavery votes to tie up the U.S. Senate.  Little did they know then about Col. Jim Lane or bulldog John Brown, who helped to keep Kansas territory free of slavery.

Word quickly spread through the United States that the Mormon Trail through Iowa and  west along the north side of the Platte River was the way to go to California, Oregon, Colorado, or Montana.  It is estimated that 10,000 Gold Rushers crossed the Missouri River at Kanesville, heading west, in 1849 alone.  There were drop outs from the Gold Rush, too, when men saw the tremendous prosperity in that Mormon city by the Missouri River, then the western boundary of the United States.     

Prosperity throughout the Mormon communities in southwestern Iowa brought floods of settlers to crowd into and later take over the old Mormon communities.  Some of the stay-behind Mormons clustered in towns like Galland’s Grove, Macedonia, and Woodbine, Iowa.

Many drop-outs organized new churches of their own, the most popular one being called The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

In most areas, town and street names were changed.  Cemeteries were cleared of grave  stones and new settler dead were buried on top of previous Mormon burials.  The State of Iowa, long after the Mormons in 1848 organized the first counties in southwestern Iowa, has published that all counties in southwestern Iowa were organized in 1847. 

Orson Hyde’s newspaper The Frontier Guardian, in 1849, grumbled that citizens in extreme southwestern Iowa – now Fremont County -- refused to pay tax to Pottawattamie County “because we will soon have a county of our own.”  They were Missourians living north of the true State of Iowa border.  The 1848 boundary of Pottawattamie included all of southwest Iowa, until other Mormon counties were, one by one, organized within the Pottawattamie boundary.

Mormon communities within southwestern Iowa would each decide on a date when they would, town by town, organize a wagon train and head west across the Missouri River for Utah.   That was as early as 1847 and as late as 1852.  The 1853 wagon train west was a volunteer rescue effort for those who were less able to make the move.

Business and other opportunities brought a trickling of Mormons back to the Middle Missouri Valley as early as the late 1800s, but there weren’t enough to organize branches  of the church.   After some missionary work in the Missouri Valley, there were enough members in Fremont, Nebraska to organize a branch about 1930.  An Omaha district was soon organized to include Fremont and other branches of the church. 

When branches and district are replaced with wards and stake, the permanency of the church in such an area is considered reached.   That occurred in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa in 1960.

Today there are about 23,000 members of the church in the greater Omaha/Council  Bluffs area.  The church has about 60 congregations in Nebraska.  Now the church has built many meeting houses to replace rented homes and halls where members used to meet.  A temple was built in Omaha in 2001, saving members long bus trips to the Denver, Chicago, or St. Louis temples.

A Mormon Trail Center in northeast Omaha draws from 60,000 to 80,000 visitors a year to see historical displays, films, and to conduct historical or genealogical meetings, etc.   The MTC has had visitors from every state in the Union and from many foreign countries.  In fact, one volunteer missionary serving there several years ago was a young woman from Russia.   About the same time, two young ladies from Mongolia were serving as Mormon missionaries in the Omaha area.

What this all means is that the Mormons have returned to the Omaha area in great numbers.  And those numbers will continue to climb.  They are still scratching their heads about whispers that their Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not Christian but  a cult!   

 Gail Geo. Holmes C 10/15/2011