Mormon Trail Center at Historic Winter Quarters

The pioneers who wintered here were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, forced by persecution and violence to abandon their city of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846. Under Brigham Young they set out across Iowa and gathered on both banks of the Missouri, intending to continue the following year to a new home far beyond the reach of their enemies, in the Rocky Mountain West.

The camp on the Nebraska side, Winter Quarters, became a substantial temporary town of hastily built cabins and dugouts. From here, in 1847, the first companies pushed on along what became the Mormon Trail to the Salt Lake Valley, blazing a route that tens of thousands more would follow over the next two decades. Winter Quarters was thus both a place of suffering and a launching point for one of the largest organized migrations in the nation's history.

The pioneers arrived late in the season, exhausted from the crossing of Iowa, and faced a hard Nebraska winter with inadequate shelter and dwindling supplies. Scurvy, malaria, exposure, and other illnesses swept the camp, and the death toll mounted through the cold months. Hundreds died at Winter Quarters, many of them children, and the survivors buried their dead on the bluff above the river.

The pioneer cemetery preserves that ground, and at its center stands a bronze sculpture of a grieving couple burying their child, one of the most powerful pieces of public memorial art in Nebraska. It gives a face to the abstract numbers, the human cost of a migration undertaken in the name of faith, and it moves visitors of every background who come to stand before it.

The pioneers were newcomers to a country already long inhabited. The bluffs and bottomlands along this stretch of the Missouri were the homeland of the Omaha, whose name the modern city carries, as well as neighboring nations. The Omaha and the Otoe-Missouria had lived, farmed, and traded along the river for generations before the wagon trains came, and the Omaha remain a living people with a homeland in Nebraska today.

The Latter-day Saints camped on this ground by arrangement with the tribes and the federal authorities, and their story here is one thread in the larger, complicated history of the Missouri River corridor, where Native nations, traders, and westward emigrants all left their mark. Understanding Winter Quarters means placing it within that older and wider human story of the river.

The Mormon Trail Center offers exhibits, reconstructions, and interpretive displays that recreate the daily life of the 1846 encampment, from the cramped cabins to the tools and hardships of the pioneers. The presentation is warm and welcoming to visitors of all beliefs, and guides help connect the objects and stories to the larger sweep of the westward trails.

Just beside the center stand the pioneer cemetery and a Latter-day Saint temple, giving the site a quiet, reverent atmosphere. The bluff-top setting above the Missouri is peaceful and reflective, and a visit pairs naturally with Omaha's riverfront and its other historic sites for a fuller day exploring the city's place on the great river road west.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.