May 20th -May 26th

We have had a week of rain and thunderstorms some of them severe.Some woke up to lawns covered with hail, even enough to shovel! Flooding is back, some freeways are closed that are next to the river. We love it here, but this spring reminds us of the spring of 1846.

In February 1846, the first party of Mormon pioneers faced nearly 300 miles of winter-bare prairie stretching between Nauvoo and the Missouri River gateway to the Oregon Trail. Those immigrants who left Nauvoo in a panic were poorly equipped for the trek, and few carried enough feed for their draft animals. Lacking spring grasses along the established roads, Young’s company traveled poorer tracks close to the Missouri border in order to trade with the Missouri settlements for livestock feed and supplies. Bad weather made travel more difficult. As rain set in and the ground thawed, narrow wagon wheels mired axle-deep, bringing wagons to a halt. Families waited miserably in camp as the men fanned out across the lightly settled territory to work for food and pay, and trade teams, crossing cautiously into unfriendly Missouri to bring back needed supplies. The Camp of Israel spent a month crossing the first 100 miles, a distance that should have taken but 10 days.

The pioneers comforted and helped each other along: those who had food, bedding, and shelter shared with those who had none; those with musical or literary talent tried to cheer and inspire the camp. Their hardships brought the people together, forging their faith, group identity, and sense of destiny. The spirit of these Mormon pioneers rings in the lyrics of their now-famous anthem, “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” written one miserable, muddy night in south-central Iowa by emigrant William Clayton, in honor of the birth of his son.

Two months on the trail, battling mud and mishaps across half of Iowa, exhausted the Camp of Israel, depleted its food supplies, and threatened to unravel Brigham Young’s loose-knit plan to reach the Rocky Mountains that summer. Many emigrants were too ill or too poorly equipped to continue west. Church leaders worried, also, for the thousands of faithful who followed. The Mormon wagon train stopped far short of the Missouri River on April 19 to build a temporary way station called Garden Grove. Almost overnight, the pioneers dug wells, built houses, bridges, and fences, plowed and planted. Several hundred emigrants settled in to rest, heal, and prepare for the final push to the Rockies. If their crops were successful, they would also help feed the later Nauvoo wagon companies that would soon be arriving. Garden Grove was good farming country, but it was infested with rattlesnakes. It was not the entire solution to their problems. The main body of the company rolled on.On May 16, a scout selected a beautiful site that he named Mt. Pisgah, after the hilltop from which Moses looked upon the chosen land. The Latter-day Saints built more cabins and dugouts there, and they plowed and planted a thousand acres of prairie. At least 200 emigrants stayed there, and the population grew to about 700 as later arrivals joined them over the summer. Despite the beauty of its setting and the promise of its name, however, Mt. Pisgah was a place of sorrow. Several score of people, forced from their homes and weakened by exposure, exhaustion, and poor nutrition, would die there over the coming months.Meanwhile, the bulk of the Camp of Israel moved on once more, finally reaching the Missouri River Valley on June 14, 1846—too late for even a “swift company” to start across the Great Plains and over the mountains. On the Iowa side of the river they established a “Grand Encampment,” which continued to receive incoming immigrants through the summer. By winter, some 2,500 Mormons would be settled into make-do shelters along the east bank of the Missouri River. Thousands more fanned out from the Grand Encampment, ultimately establishing over 90 cluster settlements

within a 40-mile radius of Council Bluffs.

Edward Phillips said

It was over three hundred miles along rough, muddy roads from Nauvoo to temporary church headquarters set up on the banks of the Missouri River. “Travelling through Iowa and the season being very wet, it was very laborious to get through,” said Edward. “We had to travel the ground three or four times over to help each other.”49 The Green and Phillips families were fortunate to arrive in Winter Quarters before cold weather set in, giving Edward time to find housing for his wife and children. 50 Some families were reduced to living in tents until more permanent accommodations could be constructed, but even the hastily built log cabins, with their sod roofs and dirt floors, did little to protect their inhabitants against the elements.

As the weather is so bad with heavy rain, hail, and Tornado's, those same things happened in the spring of 1846. I really love the quote when Haber J Grant dedicated the statue in the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery in 1936
"This has sometimes been called the Tragedy of Winter Quarters. But there was no tragedy here, for tragedy spells disaster; this was the Victory of Winter Quarters, or here was faith, hope, and charity raised to their loftiest pinnacle, while greed and selfishness were brought low."

Some pictures of our week