USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -The Mormons, as they were commonly known, had moved west to escape religious discrimination. After the murder of founder and prophet Joseph Smith, they knew they had to leave their old settlement in Illinois. Many Mormons died in the cold, harsh winter months as they made their way over the Rocky Mountains to Utah.

Detailed explanation-2: -Sidney Rigdon, an Ohio preacher who learns of Smith’s religion through missionaries, embraces Smith as a new prophet and urges the New York group to migrate to Ohio. In January 1831, Smith leads his family and about seventy-five followers west to Kirtland, Ohio.

Detailed explanation-3: -The well-organized wagon train migration began in earnest in April 1847, and the period (including the flight from Missouri in 1838 to Nauvoo), known as the Mormon Exodus is, by convention among social scientists, traditionally assumed to have ended with the completion of the First transcontinental railroad in 1869.

Detailed explanation-4: -The Mormons also had other reasons for moving: The Gentiles persecuted them. In 1846 Brigham Young (by now leader of the Mormons) told the US President, James K. Polk, that the Mormons had decided to leave the country for the sake of peace .