The Gathering of Zion, The Story of the Mormon Trail

This is the story of the great Mormon trek in 1846-1847 from Nauvoo in Southern Illinois, over the Iowa plans, along the Platte River across Nebraska into Wyoming, and down from the mountains to a new Zion in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah - and the steady migration of tens of thousands of Mormons that followed for nearly a quarter of a century. An adventure of Old Testament proportions, marked by hardship, disease, and sudden death, the Mormon migration is distinguished from all other parts of the American movement westward by its discipline, order, and group solidarity. This detailed account-drawn from the carefully preserved diaries of the migrants themselves-begins in 1844 with the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and ends with the driving of the Golden Spike joining the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways at Promontory, Utah, twenty-five years later. It is one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of the American West. Wallace Stegner is a distinguished novelist and short story writer, a professor of English, and formerly director of Stanford University's Creative Writing Program. His faction includes the Big Rock Candy Mountain, All the Little Live Things, and Angle of Repose. His books dealing with Western history are Mormon Country, the Hundredth Meridian, and the semi-autobiographical Wolf Willow.