This is the spellbinding chronicle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' religious dawning and their beginning in the idyllic woods of New York state. It then follows their most challenging odyssey as they are driven out of their homes by great cruelty from four different states, and then finally completely out of the union itself. In the middle of the winter, women, children, and men were forced to cross the frozen Mississippi and head for their new home in the rocky mountains of Utah. After a year and a half of many trials on the trail, they finally made it to the great basin and settled alongside the Great Salt Lake to build a city. Fifty years later Utah became a most beautiful state of the union.