The Mormon Battalion’s Desert March — 1846, the Longest Infantry March

Summary

In the summer of 1846, with the United States newly at war with Mexico, the federal government asked the displaced Latter-day Saints — then encamped in misery on the Missouri after being driven out of Illinois — to raise a battalion of volunteers for the army's invasion of the Southwest. Roughly five hundred men, with a handful of wives and children along as laundresses and family, enlisted. What followed was one of the longest infantry marches in American history: some two thousand miles on foot, from the Missouri River through Santa Fe and across the deserts of present-day New Mexico and Arizona to the Pacific at San Diego.

The Mormon Battalion fought no battle against the Mexican army. Its real enemies were distance, thirst, hunger, and the country itself. Under the hard command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke — who took over after the original commander died — the men hauled wagons across waterless stretches, dug and chopped a road for the wagons through the rock of a place they called Box Canyon, and marched until their shoes and rations gave out. Their one "battle," near the San Pedro River in present-day Arizona, was against a herd of wild bulls that gored mules and men and wrecked wagons before being driven off.

Nearly all of them survived. The deaths — perhaps around twenty over the whole enlistment — came from illness, exhaustion, and exposure rather than combat, and many of the sickest were spun off into "sick detachments" sent to winter at Pueblo rather than die on the trail. When the survivors reached San Diego in late January 1847, Cooke issued an order that has become famous: "History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry." The road they cut became a wagon route to California used by gold-seekers within two years.

The march cannot be told honestly without its context. It was a campaign of the Mexican-American War, a war of conquest that would strip roughly half of Mexico's territory and bring the homelands of the Apache, the Tohono O'odham, the Pima (Akimel O'odham), the Yuma (Quechan), the Kumeyaay, and many other nations under United States control. The road the battalion opened was also a road of dispossession.

Timeline

The Setup

The Mormon Battalion was born of desperation on both sides. In 1846 the Latter-day Saints were refugees: driven out of Nauvoo, Illinois, their prophet Joseph Smith murdered, they were strung out in camps along the Missouri River, planning a mass migration to the Great Basin under Brigham Young. When the Mexican-American War broke out, Young saw an opportunity in an army recruiter's request — enlisting a battalion would bring badly needed federal pay into the destitute community and demonstrate the Saints' loyalty to a government that had done nothing to protect them. He urged men to volunteer. About five hundred did, mustering at Council Bluffs in July 1846, accompanied by some thirty-odd women (a number serving as laundresses) and a few children.

The original commander, Captain James Allen, fell ill and died not long after the battalion reached Fort Leavenworth, a loss that left the unit briefly leaderless and uncertain. They marched on to Santa Fe, newly occupied by the U.S. Army, where in October 1846 they came under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, a regular-army officer with no patience for amateurs but a genuine determination to get them through. Cooke's orders were to open a wagon road to the Pacific to support the conquest of California — a road that did not yet exist across the southern deserts.

From the start the battalion was as much labor force as fighting unit. Cooke, surveying his ragged command of farmers and tradesmen, sick men, and trailing families, made hard early decisions: he sent the least fit — the ill, the older men, and most of the remaining women and children — north to winter at Pueblo in two "sick detachments," reasoning correctly that they would not survive the desert ahead. The men who remained turned south and west out of Santa Fe in late October, into country no wagon had ever crossed.

The Disaster

The march that followed was an ordeal of thirst and exhaustion rather than gunfire. Cooke pushed the column down the Rio Grande and then struck west across the deserts of present-day southern New Mexico and Arizona, into long waterless stretches where men and mules suffered terribly between holes. Rations ran short and were cut, then cut again; the men ate their pack mules as the animals gave out, boiled rawhide, and at the worst marched on a few ounces of flour a day. Shoes disintegrated and were patched with rawhide; uniforms fell to rags. The journals of the soldiers — kept by men like Henry Standage and others — record the grinding sameness of dry camps and short rations and the constant search for the next water.

The single most dramatic episode was not a battle in any conventional sense. In December 1846, near the San Pedro River in present-day Arizona, the column was charged by herds of wild cattle — descendants of stock gone feral on the abandoned Mexican ranchos. The bulls gored mules, overturned wagons, and tossed men; the soldiers fought them off with muskets in what became known, half in jest, as the Battle of the Bulls, the battalion's only "combat." Several men were injured and animals killed, but no soldier died.

The march's hardest physical labor came at a place the men called Box Canyon, in the mountains of present-day southeastern California, where the only passage for the wagons was a cleft too narrow to admit them. Rather than abandon the wagons, the battalion went at the rock with axes, picks, and their bare hands, widening the canyon walls until the wagons could be hauled and levered through. It was the kind of feat — opening a wagon road by main force across desert and mountain — that made the march matter strategically, and it cost the men dearly in sweat and worn-out bodies.

The Ordeal

By January 1847 the battalion was strung out across the last deserts of southern California — including the dreaded crossing toward the Colorado River and the waterless stretch beyond it — marching on starvation rations and disintegrating shoes. Men collapsed and were carried; mules died in the traces; the column moved by sheer accumulated discipline and the knowledge that the Pacific was finally close. The deaths along the whole route, perhaps around twenty across the enlistment, came in ones and twos from illness, dysentery, exhaustion, and exposure — not a single man killed by an enemy soldier. The sick detachments sent to Pueblo had already removed many who would otherwise have died on the trail.

The ordeal also depended on guidance and the grudging knowledge of the country. Frontiersmen and scouts — among them the experienced mountain man Pauline Weaver, who helped guide portions of the route — and the water and trail knowledge of the Indigenous and Mexican inhabitants of the desert were what allowed a column of footsore farmers to find water across country that could have killed all of them. The Pima (Akimel O'odham) and Maricopa villages along the Gila River, in particular, traded food to the famished soldiers, a kindness that several diarists recorded with gratitude and that materially helped the battalion survive its hungriest stretch.

On January 29, 1847, the lead elements of the Mormon Battalion marched into San Diego, having covered some two thousand miles on foot. They had arrived too late to do any fighting — California was already largely in American hands — and their service became one of garrison duty, building, and occupation. But the road they had opened, and the simple fact that they had crossed at all, was the achievement. Cooke, in his order of the day, paid the men the tribute that would define them: that history could be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry, made through deserts where for half its length there was no road, and where the men had hewn a wagon passage through living rock and across burning sand.

Rescue & After

The Mormon Battalion's war service ended almost as soon as it began. Reaching San Diego after the fighting in California was effectively over, the men spent the rest of their enlistment on garrison and construction duty — making bricks, digging wells, and building in the small Pacific towns — before being mustered out in July 1847. Most then set out to rejoin their families and the main body of the Saints, who by then had reached the Salt Lake Valley. Some of the discharged soldiers, working in California in early 1848, were present near Sutter's Mill when gold was discovered, and a number took part in the earliest days of the rush.

The road they had opened outlived the war. Cooke's wagon route across the southern deserts became one of the principal southern emigrant trails to California, traveled within two years by thousands of gold-seekers who never knew the men who had cut the passage through Box Canyon and found the water holes across the Gila country. The march's military significance was modest — no battle, late arrival — but its engineering legacy, a usable wagon road to the Pacific, was real and lasting.

It remains, in the honest accounting, a story with two faces. For the Latter-day Saints it became a treasured chapter of endurance and faith, commemorated to this day at the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in San Diego. But the march was an instrument of the Mexican-American War, a war of conquest that transferred vast territory — and the homelands of the Apache, Tohono O'odham, Akimel O'odham, Quechan, Kumeyaay, and other nations — to the United States. The same road that carried five hundred footsore volunteers to the Pacific also helped open those homelands to dispossession. The endurance was extraordinary; the cause it served was not innocent.

Lessons

References

• Mormon Battalion Wikipedia
• Philip St. George Cooke Wikipedia
• Mormon Battalion Historic Site Wikipedia
• Mexican–American War Wikipedia