Sonny's Corner
"Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.
Prairie Fire has always respected the religious beliefs of others.
We support both freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Accord ingly, in 2008, when we forecasted an attack on one or more of the presidential candidates’ religious credo, we offered the Mormon Church space to educate our readership as to the history and practice of Mormonism. Our offer was declined. With the emergence of two practicing Mormons as credible 2012 presidential candidates, we renewed our offer to church officials in Salt Lake City. They referred us to the Nebraska contacts and our offer was accepted. The following essay appears as an original work prepared for Prairie Fire.
Mormon Pioneer Migrations through Today’s Omaha Area—and Their Return
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the fourth-largest denomination in the United States today with over six million members. It is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world with over 14 million members residing in 176 countries and territories.
Mormons—members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—were driven out of Ohio, Missouri and Illinois by mobs to ultimately settle in the remote Great Salt Lake Valley. Even today a dwindling chorus labels the church 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 meetings, men and boys priesthood meetings, young men’s, young women’s and primary-age children’s meetings. Scouting is also a sponsored program within the church since 1911. (The Church of Jesus Christ is first in number of scouting units registered with the Boy Scouts of America.) Many people 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 church uses the Book of Mormon with the Bible by members and by its missionaries? Take a look at these basic teachings of the church:
- Mormons believe in God, the Eter nal 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 of the church believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; they also believe the Book of Mormon—another testament of Jesus Christ—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—that came through what now is the greater Omaha area were floods as compared to the quiet trickle of Mormons returning to the area in the early 1900s.
Between 1846 and 1853 about 13,000 wagon train pioneers, driven out of west-central Illinois and southeastern Iowa by mobs, paused in this area. They stayed from one to seven years to rest, recover health or earn enough money for food, tools and supplies for another 900-plus miles of travel to the Rocky Mountains. Some stayed on and settled in the Omaha area.
From 1856–60 nearly 3,000 Euro pean converts pushed handcarts from the end of the railway at Iowa City, Iowa, and through here on their way to Utah. Some chose to stay in the area.
Down-and-back wagons brought flour and other produce from Utah to sell in Florence and Omaha from 1861–66, before picking up and transporting passengers. About 7,000 European converts made their way—without charge—to the Great Salt Lake Valley on these wagons. But a few of the converts decided to 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, which was still under construction. Some rode partway to their Utah destinations on the new Union Pacific Railway prior to its 1869 linkage with the West Coast railway in Utah. There were almost no dropouts from 1867–69.
Joseph Smith Jr. organized The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830 at Fayette, N.Y., 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. Today there are more than 14 million, with less than half in the United States and Canada. The remainder lives in more than 176 countries/territories in the world, speaking more than 80 different languages.
There are about 52,000 volunteer (self-financing) missionaries worldwide. The church is organized as it was by Jesus, with prophets, apostles, elders, priests, teachers and deacons.
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 dropouts said they left the church because their leaders and prominent members practiced polygamy. That practice was introduced in Nauvoo, Ill., just as Abraham, Jacob and Moses, revered Old Testament leaders, did it in the Holy Land more than 2,000 years ago. Mormons abandoned the practice of polygamy late in the 19th century.
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 westward. 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 10 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 a weekly newspaper called The Frontier Guardian in Kanesville, the city later named Council Bluffs. In 1848 businesses boomed and farm prices shot up to equal those in St. Louis, Mo. Hyde sold his newspaper before moving to Utah in 1852. 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.
Council Bluffs lawyer Hadley D. Johnson, a Mor mon, was influential in persuading 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. 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, Neb., 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 make Kansas a territory free of slavery.
Word quickly spread throughout 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 dropouts from the Gold Rush, too, when men saw the tremendous prosperity in that 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 dropouts 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 gravestones, 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 Pottawatamie 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 Pottawatamie included all of southwest Iowa, until other Mormon counties were, one by one, organized within the Pottawatamie boundary.
Business and other opportunities brought a trickling of Mormons back into 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, Neb., to organize a branch about 1930. An Omaha district was soon organized to include Fremont and other branches of the church.
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 meetinghouses 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 (MTC) 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.
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 they are members of a cult!
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