KEOKUK, Iowa -- Mike Foley says he's found the paths of wagons where thousands came and continued on to Utah 150 years ago. He's also found row upon row of unmarked graves showing where hundreds came and never left.
Last Monday in a Keokuk antique store, Foley showed his discovery to the world by placing an exhibit depicting what he believes to be the site of the Sugar Creek camp.Foley, who in 1996 directed the Iowa Mormon Trails Association's wagon train re-enactment, has been working with a team of volunteers to explore what he believes to be the site of the first major camp along the trail some 14,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took from Nauvoo, Ill., to the West.
Using divining rods -- metal rods that cross and uncross as the person holding them walks across the ground -- Foley and the other volunteers say they've found a branch leading away from the main trail and the site of what may have been cabins, dormitories and a bowery.
Foley, director of the Iowa Wesleyan College design center, said he wanted something for his students to create a brochure about.
While using his divining rods to locate the trail route for the 1996 re-enactment, Foley said he found a branch leading away from the main trail near where the Mormon settlement of Ambrosia had once been.
The side trail led to fields near a house his nephew was renting, so he went there to visit. As he walked along the driveway, his rods crossed and uncrossed at regular intervals.
"This is a grave," Foley remembers saying.
Students of LDS Church history had long speculated about the location of a camp near the banks of Sugar Creek in central Lee County. The camp had been referred to in the diaries of some of the pioneers bound west from Nauvoo, Ill. But accounts varied as to exactly where it was.
Foley contacted Michael Zahs, an Ainsworth, Iowa, history teacher who was the first to explore what is believed to be the site of the Garden Grove settlement in south central Iowa.
Garden Grove was the next major way station along the Mormon Trail, and Foley said Zahs pointed out the similarities between the two sites down to details like the locations of cabins and outhouses.
" This is really eerie, because it's so much like Garden Grove," Foley said.
Former state historian Loren Horton, now on the faculty at the University of Iowa, said the first 3,000 or so pioneers hit the trail Feb. 4, 1846. By April 24 of that year, the first group had reached Garden Grove.
A second wave of refugees, about 10,000 people, made their way across in the spring. Horton said probably few of them stayed very long at the Sugar Creek Camp.
But the last group to cross the Mississippi River from Nauvoo were unlike those who came before them.
The about 1,000 who came last were mostly poor, the elderly and the infirm, Horton said. Many were pregnant women.
In September 1846, the Illinois Militia rousted those settlers out at bayonet point, forced them onto boats and unceremoniously dropped them off at Potter's Slough near Montrose, Iowa.
Word was sent to Garden Grove and another camp farther ahead, and a rescue party returned eastward. Horton said it's likely they all stayed the winter at Sugar Creek.
Horton said it's unknown whether those structures were built by one of the first two waves of migrant Mormons or whether they were constructed by the last group for the winter that lay ahead.
"These people couldn't go on to Garden Grove where they had planted crops and constructed cabins," Horton said.
Because those in the final group were in the poorest health, Horton said, it's likely that many of the nearly 900 graves the volunteers have identified are those of the pioneers who came last.
Mike Trapp, an LDS Church historian from Nauvoo, would like to see the team from Iowa Wesleyan use some more conventional methods before fully embracing the discovery. But he is researching diaries in an effort to see if anything corroborates what Foley believes he's found using divining rods.
"I'm not ruling it out, of course, because there are a number of people who feel that it works," Trapp said.
Even if the college volunteers really have found something, Trapp said, the camp may not have been built in 1846.
More likely, he said, it was built by a group of Scandinavian converts who came through Keokuk in 1853 and wintered in Lee County before continuing on the trail to Utah.
Foley's exhibit will include topographical maps and photographs of the site.
He defends his methods, citing recent archaeological work at Garden Grove he says provides proof that what was found through divining really is the site of the former Mormon camp.
But he acknowledges there are doubters -- including one man who recently told him divining is a sin.
Foley said he wants to dig or to use electronic methods to see what lies underground, but both of those methods cost money that he doesn't have.
He also wants to see if there is something in the diaries of those who went west that will prove he's looking in the right place.
The place Foley says was the site of the Sugar Creek camp is about three-quarters of a mile from the town of Ambrosia, where 109 LDS settlers lived until the 1846 exodus.
Historian Stanley Kimball wrote the Sugar Creek campsite was "part of this scattered community."
The Mormons of Ambrosia were led west by George W. Gee in 1846. Foley hopes one of Gee's descendants or a descendant of someone who went to Utah with Gee will be able to lead him to a diary or other written proof of where the Sugar Creek camp may have been.
In the meanwhile, Foley said he'll keep researching the find that he says is important to Mormons and non-Mormons alike.
" We're Iowans researching Iowa history," Foley said. " These were pioneers no matter what their affiliation."