Essential Heavyweight Map Tee

Whose Land
Land of the Omaha people on the west bank of the Missouri, settled under an agreement with the Omaha and Potawatomi tribes and U.S. Indian agents. The government allowed two years there, so by May 1848 the Saints had to be gone.

That First Winter
About 4,000 people. Another 1,700 Saints wintered in Missouri, mostly in St. Louis, and nearly 3,000 stayed in camps back along the Iowa trail.

The Temple
The Winter Quarters Nebraska Temple, Nebraska's first, went up on the hill on the south side of the pioneer cemetery. President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated it on April 22, 2001.

• September 1846: Surveying started on the 19th, and the first wagons pulled onto the tableland above the river four days later. The plat was a half-size version of Joseph Smith's City of Zion. A December count found 538 log cabins and 83 sod houses.
• Winter of 1846 to 1847: Food ran short, and scurvy, which the Saints called black canker, spread through the camp along with fever. Hundreds died, mostly the very young and the old.
• January 14, 1847: Brigham Young received the revelation now in Doctrine and Covenants 136, "the Word and Will of the Lord" for the move west. It set out companies with captains of hundreds, fifties and tens.
• April 5, 1847: Heber C. Kimball rolled out with the first six wagons. Brigham Young followed on the 7th, and on April 16 the pioneer company organized at its camp on the trail: 143 men, three women and two children, in 72 wagons.
• July 3, 1848: The last wagons left. With the lease on the Omaha people's land running out, the Saints who were not yet heading west had moved across the river into Iowa and named their new headquarters Kanesville.

1. The town of Winter Quarters filled the flat ground between the bluff and the Missouri, where the Florence neighborhood grew up after the Saints left. The plat ran about a mile along the line of the bluff and a little under half a mile wide. Sources describe the layout but don't fix it to today's streets, so the marker shows only the general area.
2. The Mormon Pioneer Cemetery is on the bluff just west of the old town, and the temple stands beside it. None of the early gravestones survive. Burial spots were worked out from the sexton's records. Avard Fairbanks's bronze Tragedy at Winter Quarters, in the cemetery, shows two parents who have lost an infant. President Heber J. Grant dedicated it on September 20, 1936. Just east of the cemetery, the Mormon Trail Center at Historic Winter Quarters, on State Street, was dedicated by President Hinckley on April 18, 1997. Its exhibits include a model of the 1846 settlement, and visitors can pull a handcart.

• Nobody is sure how many died. Thomas L. Kane said in 1850 there were "something over 600" burials. A later study of the sexton's records estimated about 323 in this cemetery and roughly 433 across the camps' three burial grounds.
• Omaha leased the cemetery to the Church for $1 a year from the mid-1930s. On April 1, 1999, the mayor deeded it over outright, for another dollar.
• After the Saints left, James C. Mitchell laid out a new town on the site and called it Florence. Omaha annexed it in 1917. The neighborhood still goes by Florence, and its 1856 Bank of Florence stands on North 30th Street.