The hurried evacuation from Nauvoo of Brigham Young's Camp of Israel companies in February 1846 is well known. It was the subject of last week's Church News article in this series.
But what about the rest of the exodus story, the four segments not part of the Camp of Israel's venture? Segment Two was the massive spring exodus. Its numbers dwarf the Camp of Israel's size. The vast majority of Nauvoo and Illinois Saints left according to the original plan - in springtime when "grass grows and the water runs."By early May, 1846, Elder Orson Hyde and other leaders publicly dedicated the Nauvoo Temple, a ceremony hundreds of Saints attended, before leaving. Some 9,000 people, including families of Elder Hyde, Elder Wilford Woodruff, Newel and Lydia Knight, and Mary Fielding Smith, left Nauvoo individually in groups of two or 12 or 20 during April, May, and June, heading for Brigham Young's encampments by the Missouri River.
Nauvoo baker Lucius Scovil was one of many who looked back longingly at Nauvoo for the last time from the Iowa bluffs. He expressed his feelings in simply a rhyme, part of which reads:
And when I cast my eyes
To the great far fam'd City
I wonder and am surpriz'd
And say Alas! What a pity
That the Saints of the last days
Should have to leave Nauvoo
And dwell in tents and caves
While their journey they pursue.
LDS spring traffic flows were heavy. "We could look forward for miles & behold the prairie spotted with waggons, cattle horses & sheep men women & children," Newel Knight wrote in May. Amos Fielding, approaching Nauvoo on June 1, said that in three days of travel he counted 902 westbound Mormon wagons. The spring groups followed several better roads and routes than the Camp of Israel did, so they crossed Iowa in a month instead of three, with but slight sufferings.
Segment Three is the September forced evacuation of the last few hundred Saints from Nauvoo, mostly too ill or ill-equipped for the trek, or both. At their "Poor Camps" on the Mississippi's west shore, they received unexpected food when flocks of exhausted quail flopped into their campground and tents - an event known as "The Miracle of the Quail." LDS rescue teams from western Iowa retrieved half of these forlorn people, the others departed on their own.
Of all who left the Nauvoo area in 1846, between 2,000 and 3,000 stopped along the way in Iowa or in Missouri. Many lacked food, funds, good wagons and teams, or decent health, so they sought temporary housing and jobs, and did not reach the LDS camps at the Missouri River for months or even years.
Segment Four of the exodus story involved Saints in the New York area who planned to gather to Nauvoo. Instead, they were told in November 1845 to join the exodus west but by sea and not via Nauvoo.
"Be determined to get out of this evil nation by next spring," Apostle Orson Pratt instructed. "We do not want one Saint to be left in the United States by that time." These eastern Saints went to the Old Slip on the East River and boarded the sailing ship "Brooklyn" on the same day the first Saints left from Nauvoo - Feb. 4, 1846. The "Brooklyn Saints," led by Samuel Brannan, included 70 men, about 60 women, and 100 children. They sailed around the Americas via Cape Horn, stopped in Hawaii, and disembarked in Yerba Buena (San Francisco) on July 31, 1846. There they waited a year or more, until they learned where the Church was settling, whereupon many gradually moved to Utah.
A fifth segment of the exodus story attaches to the Mormon Battalion. By early July 1846, two weeks after the Camp of Israel and hosts of others had reached the Missouri River, federal army officers entered their camps with instructions to let the Saints enlist soldiers for duty in the newly declared war with Mexico.
The timing was bad - the Saints needed their manpower to push hard for the Rocky Mountains - but the benefits were good - soldiers' pay would bless the migrating Saints and government dollars and equipment would move several hundred LDS men west at no dollar cost to the Church. Initially about 500 soldiers marched off for southern California via Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. Sick detachments took some to Pueblo, Colo., and the rest proceeded on to Santa Fe, Tucson and San Diego by January 1847. Within a year or two most of these soldiers went to Utah or returned to the Iowa area to rejoin their families and then proceed to Utah.
The forced departures of the Saints from the United States scattered the Church's membership. Nauvoo's population, like fallen Humpty-Dumpty, was fragmented. Year by year, as soon as they were able, the uprooted and scattered Saints joined wagon trains bound for Utah. Some lagged behind too long, mostly within 50 miles of the LDS city of Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), Iowa, where converts from Europe also were stopping.
Responding to a pointed First Presidency order in 1851 for them to "gather to Zion," these Saints all but created a traffic jam on the plains in 1852 involving some 10,000 American and European Saints. This large movement in 1852 essentially completed the LDS exodus from Nauvoo and the Midwest to Utah; it closed the last chapter of the massive and dramatic story of a forced mass-exodus that started in 1846.