Rebuilding a Lost Geography in 19th Century Iowa

Brandon Plewe, Brigham Young University

In 1846, about 10,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temporarily settled in the Missouri River Valley near modern Council Bluffs, Iowa, exiled from their home in Nauvoo Illinois. While some soon continued West, thousands remained and built 50-60 new settlements complete with homes, roads, churches, and cemeteries. In six years, almost all of them had left for Utah, and today, no hint remains of most of these villages. Rediscovering this lost geography has been a challenging process, requiring the alignment of several non-spatial source documents. Notably, we correlated the households in the 1850 federal census with an 1852 state census; since a census tended to be recorded in a linear order of travel, we could reconstruct the travel routes of the census enumerators, allowing us to interpolate the locations of dozens of lost settlements between the few with known locations, rebuilding an almost complete map of an ephemeral geography.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 20. Making the West: Spatial Perspectives