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History
Grand
Encampment:
SW Iowa Catch Basin for LDS Refugees Fleeing Mobs in Illinois
Grand Encampment, so
named by Hosea Stout, former police captain in Nauvoo, Illinois, was
three miles east of the Missouri River. It started with great
covered wagon squares on hills east and north of present Iowa School
for the Deaf. That was what now is at either side of Highway 92 at
the southeastern edge of Council Bluffs.
Each newly arrived wagon
train -- perhaps 60 wagons and maybe 250 men, women, and children --
parked on a hilltop further east. By the time Hosea Stout arrived
in early July to coin the name Grand Encampment, he said it
stretched east nine miles. Its population then must have approached
its zenith of about 10,000 impoverished, exhausted, and often ill
refugees.
Two neutral observers
reported on them. United States Indian Sub-Agent R.B. Mitchell
of Point aux poules or Traders Point, eight miles south, notified
the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis.1
Mitchell said the Mormons (Latter-day Saints)2 were very
correct in their contacts with the Pottawattamie/Ottawa/Chippewa to
whom he was assigned. Mitchell, who had the power to call in
federal troops if needed, said there apparently was no cause for
concern.
Philadelphia lawyer
Thomas L. Kane visited Grand Encampment. He had hand-carried War
Department orders to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory. The plan
was to attempt to recruit four or five companies of Latter-day
Saints to serve in the American Army during the War with Mexico.
His father, John Kintzing Kane, was a federal district judge and
confidant of United States Pres. James K. Polk.
Thomas L. Kane, not long
before released for health reasons as an attaché in the American
Legation at Paris, France, may have come among the Mormons as a
government “observer.” He was impressed with the order of the wagon
squares, the busy air about the camps, and the friendly reception he
received. In a talk March 26, 1850 to the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania, Kane said:
“…on the east side of
the (Missouri) river, were crowded with covered carts and wagons;
and each one of the Council Bluff hills opposite was crowned with
its own great camp, gay with bright white canvas, and alive
with the busy stir of swarming occupants. In the clear blue morning
air, the smoke streamed up from more than a thousand cooking fires.
Countless roads and by paths checkered all manner of geometric
figures on the hillsides.
Herd boys were dozing on
the slopes; sheep and horses, cows and oxen, were feeding around
them, and other herds in the luxuriant meadow of the then swollen
river. From a single point I counted four thousand head of cattle
in view at one time. As I approached the camps, it seemed to me the
children there were to prove still more numerous. Along a little
creek I had to cross were women in greater force than blanchisseuses
upon the Seine, washing and rinsing all manner of white muslins, red
flannels and parti-colored calicoes, and hanging them to bleach upon
a greater area of grass and bushes than we can display in all our
Washington Square…..
“There was something
joyous for me in my free rambles about this vast body of pilgrims.
I could range the wild country wherever I listed, under safeguard of
their moving host. Not only in the main camps was all stir and
life, but in every direction, it seemed to me, I could follow
‘Mormon Roads,’ and find them beaten hard and even dusty by the
tread and wear of the cattle and vehicles of emigrants laboring over
them. By day, I would overtake and pass, one after another, what
amounted to an army train of them; and at night, if I encamped at
places where the timber and running water were found together, I was
almost sure to be within call of some camp or other, or at least
within sight of its watch-fires. Wherever I was compelled to tarry,
I was certain to find shelter and hospitality, scant, indeed, but
never stinted, and always honest and kind. After a recent
unavoidable association with the border inhabitants of Western
Missouri and Iowa, the vile scum which our own society, to apply the
words of an admirable gentleman and eminent divine, ‘like the great
ocean washes upon its frontier shores,’ I can scarcely describe the
gratification I felt in associating again with persons who were
almost all of Eastern American origin, -- persons of refined and
cleanly habits and decent language…..
“It was during the
period of which I have just spoken, that the Mormon Battalion of 520
men was recruited and marched to the Pacific Coast.” 3
Headquarters of Grand
Encampment was east atop the hill from what now is Harry Langdon
Blvd. in Council Bluffs on East 29th Avenue. Some call
that Redemption Hill. Others call it Taylor-Pratt Hill after
members of the Quorum of Twelve who founded it. A bridge on the
east side of the hill, called the Lower Mosquito Creek Bridge,
linked the headquarters to the main part of Grand Encampment.
Grand Encampment,
largest of any Latter-day Saint camp in the Middle Missouri Valley,
had a short life span. With thousands of head of livestock, that
great collection of refugees needed great quantities of wood, water,
and grass. Wagon masters in a few short weeks after their arrival
in mid-June at the Missouri River began looking for isolated areas
of wood, water, and grass sufficient to last their separate parties
through the winter, if needed.
Choice locations near
rivers and creeks were found and one wagon train after another
abandoned Grand Encampment. Eventually, about 90 settlements were
made, mostly in the Iowa side of the Missouri River. Those new
communities stretched about 80 miles west to east, and about 80
miles north to south, leaving Grand Encampment nothing but a
well-developed system of roads and by paths.
by Gail Holmes August 2006
1. Affidavit of R.B. Mitchell with 21 July 1846 Journal History.
2. Saints as defined in the Apostle Paul’s letters to the
Corinthians (1st Cor. 1:2)
and to the Colossians (Col.
1:2).
3. Albert L. Zobell Jr. 1965, Sentinel in the East, Nicholas
G. Morgan, Sr. publ., Salt
Lake City, Utah pp. 25-27.
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