Welsh Saints on the Mormon Trail

The little-known history of the nineteenth-century Welsh Mormon pioneers’ adventures in the Wild West. Between 1847 and 1869, about 4,500 Welsh pioneers crossed the USA on the Mormon Trail by ox-cart, walking through much of the history of the early west. On their journey across the Great Plains and the Rockies to Salt Lake City, they traveled alongside the ‘49ers’. They were passed by the first transcontinental stage coaches and the Pony Express. They witnessed the first telegraph wires being strung across the land and the first transcontinental railroad tracks being laid. They saw the beginnings of the Indian Wars and the end of the Civil War. Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok rode the same trails and Calamity Jane and Crazy Horse have a place in their story. Mark Twain and H M Stanley wrote about them. The development of the trail and the experiences of those pioneers are traced year by year, using the hundreds of diaries and biographies that their Church urged them to write, and which are now stored in the Mormon Church History Library. We meet colorful characters from gun-runners and mass murderers to a girl who grew up to be the first female state senator in the USA and the greatest missionary in the history of the Mormon Church. Featuring c.70 photographs.