Mormon Trail Memorial

One of many historical markers erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution and other female heritage organizations in the early 20th century. While most featured only descriptive text, this is one of several that included bas relief sculpture to illustrate local history. Artist Paul Fjelde depicted a man and his son driving a covered wagon.

The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a colonial heritage organization, was actively involved in marking western migration routes in the early 20th century. Many of those markers consisted of bronze plaques mounted on large boulders. Most featured only brief historical narratives of the sites that they marked. But several also included bas relief artwork on those bronze plaques. This one marks the end of the Mormon Trail through Iowa.

Artist Paul Fjelde depicted a man and his son driving an ox team that draws a covered wagon. This imagery was typical of DAR and other overland trail monuments in the 1910s and 1920s. The armed man on horseback echoes contemporaneous monuments to solo pioneer men conquering the wilderness.

The mounted, armed man who dominates Fjelde’s relief emphasizes the arrival of white American power to an untamed wilderness, a common theme in several prominent male pioneer sculptures erected around the time of World War I. This bronze relief was part of the DAR’s efforts to link all western trails to white settlement of the West and the building of the American nation, indicating that the exclusive DAR was willing to include migration along the Mormon Trail—if not exactly the LDS faithful—within their broad conception of the westward march of white civilization.

Council Bluffs--then known as Kanesville--was a major jumping-off point for the Mormon, Oregon, and California trails in the 1840s and 1850s. Overlanders stopped at Kanesville/Council Bluffs to outfit themselves for the overland journey.

The Iowa DAR also erected a bronze historical marker mounted on a boulder to mark the site of the Handcart Brigade Camp in Coralville in 1936.

Daughters of the American Revolution. Twenty-Second Report of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution: March 1, 1918, to March 1, 1919. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921, 146.