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Mormon Migration
A paisley shawl brought by Eliza Kittleman from Philadelphia to Utah on the Ship Brooklyn, 1849.

A paisley shawl brought by Eliza Kittleman from Philadelphia to Utah on the Ship Brooklyn, 1849.

While most Mormon pioneers crossed the Great Plains, 238 of them began their journey to refuge in the West with a twenty-four-thousand-mile sea voyage on a chartered Yankee trading ship. These travelers included Eliza Kittleman, the owner of this paisley shawl. The Brooklyn group, led by Samuel Brannon, departed New York on February 4, 1846, the same day Mormons in Illinois began to depart Nauvoo traveling west across the Mississippi. The ship’s hold contained not only the 238 people but water barrels, crates of chickens, two cows, forty pigs, tools for eight hundred farmers, two sawmills, a gristmill, and a printing press. Over the next six months, storms blew the passengers eastward almost as far as the Cape Verde islands before they sailed successfully around Cape Horn to Chile’s Juan Fernandez islands, and then to the Hawaiian islands, eventually landing in San Francisco just three weeks after the American flag had been planted there at the end of the Mexican-American War. About two-thirds of the Brooklyn migrants stayed in California, founding the town of New Hope. The remaining third traveled eastward to Utah in 1847 to reunite with the other Mormon settlers.

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Citation Information
“Paisley shawl owned by Sagamore Camp of Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Centerville, Utah,” Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/item/4a9edf1de23f3053a3c8a5ebbe9cd431.
Note: These citations are programmatically generated and may be incomplete.
Courtesy of University of Utah - J. Willard Marriott Library via Mountain West Digital Library.

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Item 6 of 15 in the Primary Source Set Mormon Migration

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An 1846 map by Augustus Mitchell “of Texas, Oregon and California, with regions adjoining.”
An excerpt from a report from Illinois Governor Thomas Ford reporting on “Mormon difficulties,” December 1846.
A letter from Eliza R. Snow to Elizabeth Ann Smith Whitney and Vilate Murray Kimball, June 30, 1846.
A plan of Winter Quarters, Nebraska, during the winter of 1846 to 1847.
An excerpt from the trail diary of Mormon pioneer William Snow, 1850.
A paisley shawl brought by Eliza Kittleman from Philadelphia to Utah on the Ship Brooklyn, 1849.
An excerpt from a roster for Company A of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican-American War, 1846.
An 1897 map of the route of the Mormon pioneers from Nauvoo to Salt Lake.
An excerpt from William Clayton’s booklet, “The Latter-day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide,” 1848.
A trail roadometer designed and used by William Clayton, 1847.
A color lithograph from 1866 called The Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing the Plains.
An illustration showing a view of the Utah Valley in 1850.
A printed page showing the Deseret Alphabet, around 1850.
A photograph of Zion’s Commercial Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) in Salt Lake City, with Native Americans on horseback, 1869.
A photograph of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, May 10, 1869.

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