Mormon Handcart Brigade Camp Marker

Historical marker including text and bas relief sculpture telling the history of the Mormon Handcart Brigade. Converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encamped near here to construct handcarts to carry their belongings on the overland journey from Iowa to Utah.

The Iowa Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) placed this historical marker to mark the Mormon Handcart Brigade camp in Coralville in 1936. Like many other historical markers placed by the DAR and other women's heritage groups in the early 20th century, it features a bronze plaque installed on a large boulder. The plaque includes text honoring European immigrants to constructed handcarts at the site before continuing their journey westward pushing and pulling those handcarts in 1856. It also features a bas relief of a handcart company.

The use of handcarts was unique to the Mormon migration. Whereas non-Mormons traveled overland as families and companies at their own expense, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sponsored the mass migration of Saints from the eastern United States and Europe to Utah through its Perpetual Emigration Fund. Due to financial setbacks, the emigration fund was unable to pay passage across the Atlantic, railroad fare to the end of the line in Iowa, and also provide wagons and ox teams for the many poor European immigrant converts. Beginning in 1855 the Church instead organized companies that would push or pull wooden carts from Iowa City to Salt Lake City. 

Five handcart companies set out during the 1856 travel season. Three companies arrived safely, but due to their late start, the last two companies suffered through harsh winter conditions, and more than two hundred people (nearly a quarter of the emigrants) perished. Despite those difficulties, additional handcart companies successfully crossed the Plains in 1857, 1859, and 1860, before the church abandoned that model.

Many late-nineteenth-century Mormons, beset by discrimination and economic hardship, appeared eager to forget the handcart brigades. Handcart stories, like that of the Donner Party in the mainstream migration to the West Coast, evoked tragedy, poverty, and perhaps an element embarrassment. But that began to change in the early twentieth century, as Mormons increasingly assimilated into mainstream American culture. 

This marker's bas relief--in contrast to later monuments--accurately depicted both men and women working side-by-side to pull the handcarts. But it does not show children assisting, nor does it show anyone pushing the handcarts from behind. Moreover, it depicts the handcarts with tall wagon covers like those used on larger ox-pulled covered wagons. The resulting handcarts closely resemble more standard covered wagons, except that it substitutes married couples for the teams of oxen that typically pulled the larger covered wagons.

Originally installed on the edge of downtown Coralville, Iowa, at the corner of 5th St. and 10th Ave., the marker was later moved to S. T. Morrison Park.

This historical marker echoed a 1918 bas relief plaque mounted on a boulder in Council Bluffs as a tribute to those who migrated across the Plains from Council Bluffs by covered wagons pulled by oxen.

Lyndia McDowell Carter. “The Mormon Handcart Companies.” Overland Journal 13, no. 1 (1995): 2–18.

LaRene Porter Gaunt and Linda Dekker. “Go and Bring Them In - Ensign Dec. 2006 - Ensign.” Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.lds.org/ensign/2006/12/go-and-bring-them-in?lang=eng.

William G. Hartley. “The Place of Mormon Handcart Companies in America’s Westward Migration Story.” Annals of Iowa 65 (Spring/Summer 2006): 101–23.

Elizabeth Cannon Porter. “A Monument to the Handcart Pioneers.” Improvement Era July 1925.

Don H. Smith. “Leadership, Planning, and Management of the 1856 Mormon Handcart Emigration.” Annals of Iowa 65 (Spring/Summer 2006): 124–61.