The Mormon Trail is the 1,300-mile (2,100 km) long route from Illinois to Utah on which Mormon pioneers traveled from 1846–47. Today, the Mormon Trail is a part of the United States National Trails System, known as the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail.
Echo Canyon, Utah on Mormon Trail
Route of the Mormon pioneers from Nauvoo to Great Salt Lake
Mormon Battalion Trail Marker in Oatman Flats, Dateland, Arizona
Historic Information along the National Historic Trail
The Mormon pioneers were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Latter-day Saints, who migrated beginning in the mid-1840s until the late-1860s across the United States from the Midwest to the Salt Lake Valley in what is today the U.S. state of Utah. At the time of the planning of the exodus in 1846, the territory comprising present-day Utah was part of the Republic of Mexico, with which the U.S. soon went to war over a border dispute left unresolved after the annexation of Texas. The Salt Lake Valley became American territory as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war.
An engraving published in Le monde in 1874, based on an 1868 drawing of Mormon pioneers by Adrien-Emmanuel Marie.
The Handcart Pioneer Monument, by Torleif S. Knaphus, located on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah
This painting by Duncan McFarlane, shows the ship Brooklyn off Skerries Reef, which is off the north coast of Anglesey, North Wales.
The Mormon Pioneer Memorial Monument in Salt Lake City