When the US went to war with Mexico, in 1846 President James K. Polk authorized Col. Stephen W. Kearney, Commander of the Army of the West, to enlist a battalion of 500 Mormons to help the U. S. Army in the war. Brigham Young and the governing Council of the L.D.S. Church urged men to join, and over 500 men were mustered in to the Mormon Battallion and began the longest march in military history, over 2,000 miles from Council Bluffs, IA to San Diego, CA. Some returned to the Salt Lake City area over the Old Spanish trail, which began being called "the Mormon Trail" instead. Others stayed in Southern California and became settlers.

After the Treaty of Hidalgo in 1848 made California a US territory, and gold was discovered, more Mormon families settled in Southern California, again mostly taking the Mormon Trail. Today the inclined rocks in the Cajon Pass are called the Mormon Rocks after the settlers who first wrote of them.

In 1855 the first permanent non-native settlers in the Las Vegas Valley were Mormon missionaries who built an adobe fort along Las Vegas Creek. They farmed the area by diverting water from the creek. (Today, the site is a park that includes a remnant of the original adobe fort, used as a visitor center.)

Then in 1857, President James Buchanan tried to replace Brigham Young as governor of Utah Territory, and ended up sending the U.S. Army to enforce his order. As the soldiers approached Utah, Brigham Young instructed the Mormon settlers in San Bernardino, along with other outlying settlers, to return to Utah; most traveled by the Mormon Trail through the Mojave Desert.

The leaders in Utah and the government in Washington ended up negotiating a settlement without bloodshed, and Mormons again began to settle the west. (Those taking the trail out of Utah into California began calling it the "California Trail.") Today the imprint of their desert pioneering spirit is all through the Eastern Mojave.

For more information about the Mormon Trail, see The Arduous Road: Salt Lake to Los Angeles, The Most Difficult Wagon Road in American History (2001) by Leo Lyman and Larry Reese [see bibliography].

Last update 12:47 PM Fri. 27-Feb-2004 by ABS.