The Mississippi River is a recurring geographical threshold in the book’s account of Nauvoo and the Latter-day Saints: Joseph Smith chose its Illinois shore for a city intended as the capital of God’s Kingdom, and crossings of the river later marked both his flight from Nauvoo and the beginning of the Saints’ mass departure west. The river’s role shifts from setting a settlement apart to carrying people away from it.

Nauvoo on the River

A month after escaping jail in Missouri, Joseph Smith surveyed a bend in the Mississippi River and chose its Illinois shore for the planned capital of God’s Kingdom. The site was a low promontory on the river’s east bank, a malarial swamp so wet that passage on foot was difficult and ox teams could not get through. Its advantages were that it was nearly uninhabited and that its owner would sell land to the Saints on credit.

Settlement transformed the riverbank site into Nauvoo. Within five years, more than fifteen thousand Saints lived in and around the city, making it Illinois’s second-largest municipality. Its unusual charter, passed by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840, gave Nauvoo exceptional sovereign powers; the city on the bend of the river was not merely a place of refuge but the center of a distinctive theocratic polity.

A Crossing into Flight

In June 1844, amid rising hostility after the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor press, Joseph Smith declared martial law and mobilized the Nauvoo Legion. On June 23, instead of surrendering to face charges in Carthage, he and his brother Hyrum Smith crossed the Mississippi River at night. Their bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, rowed them into Iowa, from where they intended to make their way toward the Rocky Mountains.

The crossing did not become a permanent departure. The next day, while the brothers waited for horses, Joseph received a letter from Emma Smith urging him to return. A messenger also told him that some Saints considered his flight an abandonment of the church. Ashamed, Joseph crossed back into Illinois to face prosecution. The river thus briefly offered an escape from danger, but the appeal from his community drew him back across it.

The Exodus Begins

The Mississippi River became the departure route again in February 1846, this time for a collective migration. A warrant for Brigham Young’s arrest, on charges of harboring counterfeiters, prompted the Saints to leave Nauvoo earlier than planned. On February 4, the first platoon of Mormon emigrants boarded flatboats at the Nauvoo dock, crossed the dark, near-freezing river, and reached the Iowa shore. That crossing launched the great exodus.

Unlike Joseph Smith’s temporary flight, the emigrants’ passage formed the opening movement of a mass evacuation. The river separated the departing Saints from the city they had built and placed them on the first leg of their journey west. In the book’s narrative, it serves both as the physical setting of Nauvoo’s founding and as a threshold whose crossings register sharply different departures: an attempted escape, a return, and finally a migration away.