Mormon Pioneer Trivia
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88 free Mormon Pioneer trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Between 1846 and 1869 some 70,000 Latter-day Saints crossed the plains to the Salt Lake Valley by wagon, handcart and on foot. These LDS pioneer trivia questions cover Brigham Young's vanguard company, the odometer William Clayton built on the trail, the buried piano, the ship Brooklyn's voyage around Cape Horn, the handcart plan and the Willie and Martin tragedy, and how July 24 became Pioneer Day. Every answer is sourced, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
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Q 01Roughly how many people made the pioneer journey to the Salt Lake Valley?
About 70,000
About 70,000 Latter-day Saints made the trek over two decades, and the first companies broke and planted prairie at way stations in Iowa so those following could harvest the crops.
Q 02Which country governed the Salt Lake Valley when the exodus was planned in 1846?
Mexico
Mexico still claimed the Great Basin, so the Saints were leaving the United States behind, only for the valley to become American soil in 1848, months after they arrived.
Q 03Historians usually say the Mormon pioneer era ended with the arrival of what?
The transcontinental railroad
The transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, cut a wagon journey of several months to a few days, so converts who came by rail aren't usually counted as pioneers.
Q 04From which Illinois city did the Saints depart in 1846?
Nauvoo
Nauvoo's exodus began in February 1846, months earlier than planned, after church leaders agreed to leave before spring to hold off mob violence.
Q 05In which Missouri town's jail was Joseph Smith held through the winter of 1838–39?
Liberty
Liberty Jail held Smith for more than four months, until guards taking him to another county for trial that April let him and his companions escape to Illinois.
Q 06In which Illinois town were Joseph and Hyrum Smith killed by a mob in 1844?
Carthage
Carthage Jail was holding the brothers on charges that followed the wrecking of an opposition newspaper's press when the mob stormed it on June 27, 1844.
Q 07Which Missouri governor issued the order expelling Mormons from the state in 1838?
Lilburn Boggs
Lilburn Boggs's 'extermination order' stayed on Missouri's books until 1976, when Governor Kit Bond rescinded it and expressed the state's deep regret.
Q 08Brigham Young is sometimes called the American what, for leading the migration?
Moses
Moses was the model the Saints chose themselves: they travelled as the 'Camp of Israel', organised like the biblical Israelites into companies of hundreds, fifties and tens.
Q 09Which non-Mormon Philadelphian won federal permission for the exiled Saints to camp on Indian land in 1846?
Thomas L. Kane
Thomas L. Kane stayed a lifelong ally: in 1858 he travelled to Utah by way of Panama, at his own expense, to negotiate an end to the Utah War.
Q 10Which Jesuit missionary familiar with the Great Basin did Brigham Young consult in 1846?
Pierre-Jean De Smet
Pierre-Jean De Smet stopped at the Saints' camp in late 1846 on his way home to St. Louis after years of mission work in the Rockies, and church leaders questioned him closely.
Q 11How did the vanguard company's Platte River route avoid Oregon Trail traffic?
It kept to the north bank
It kept to the north bank in hope of better grazing and fewer run-ins, until bluffs in Wyoming forced the company across the river to share the Oregon Trail after all.
Q 12Which hymn, written on the trail across Iowa in 1846, became the anthem of the Mormon pioneers?
Come, Come, Ye Saints
Come, Come, Ye Saints was first called 'All Is Well': its author wrote it on learning that his wife, left behind in Illinois, had given birth to a healthy boy.
Q 13What name did the pioneers give the vast state they proposed in 1849?
Deseret
Q 21What did nine men of the 1847 vanguard company stay behind to run on the Platte River in Wyoming?
A ferry
A ferry: Oregon-bound travellers were paying $1.50 a wagon to be carried across, so Young left the nine behind to keep it earning for the migration.
Q 22Which mountain man met Brigham Young on June 28, 1847, to discuss routes into the Salt Lake Valley?
Jim Bridger
Jim Bridger, heading east from his own fort, camped overnight with the company and praised the corn and pumpkins raised by tribes near Utah Lake, though he feared cold nights would stunt crops.
Q 23Whose year-old trail did Brigham Young's 1847 vanguard company follow through the Wasatch Mountains?
The Donner–Reed party
Deseret, a Book of Mormon word for honeybee, stretched from Oregon to San Diego on paper, but Congress created a smaller Utah Territory in 1850 and dropped the name.
Q 14From which settlement on the Missouri River did the 1847 vanguard company set out for the Rockies?
Winter Quarters
Winter Quarters, in present-day Omaha, stood on tribal land the Saints had promised to leave within two years, so it was abandoned in 1848 as families moved west or back across the river.
Q 15What sound woke the 1847 vanguard camp at five each morning?
A bugle
A bugle called every man to prayers at five and sounded again at 8:30 p.m., when all were to pray in their wagons and be in bed by nine.
Q 16Who served as the vanguard company's scribe and later wrote an emigrants' guide?
William Clayton
William Clayton logged the distance between landmarks and campsites day by day, then published the figures the next year as a guide for the companies that followed.
Q 17What device did the 1847 vanguard company's scribe and two companions build to measure distance?
A wagon-wheel odometer
A wagon-wheel odometer of wooden cogs replaced the scribe's first method, which was to walk beside a wagon and count every turn of its wheel.
Q 18Why did Brigham Young urge 500 men to join the US Army's Mormon Battalion in 1846?
To fund the exodus
To fund the exodus: the men handed over wages and clothing allowances, then marched nearly 2,000 miles to San Diego without fighting a battle.
Q 19Which birds are credited with saving the pioneers' 1848 crops by gorging on swarms of crickets?
Seagulls
Seagulls from the Great Salt Lake fed on the crickets for weeks, though early accounts worried just as much about late frosts; the gull is now Utah's state bird.
Q 20Which trading post did the 1847 vanguard company reach after six weeks on the trail?
Laramie
Laramie, a fur-trade fort in today's Wyoming, was where a party of Mississippi converts who had wintered at Pueblo had been waiting two weeks to join the company.
The Donner–Reed party had hacked that road through the Wasatch a year earlier, a struggle that cost it more than two weeks and helped strand it in the Sierra snows.
Q 24Which illness struck Brigham Young and others after they crossed the Green River in 1847?
Mountain fever
Mountain fever, probably the tick-borne Colorado tick fever, left Young so ill that he fell behind the main company and reached the valley days after his own scouts.
Q 25Which two scouts of the 1847 vanguard company were first to enter the Salt Lake Valley?
Erastus Snow and Orson Pratt
Erastus Snow and Orson Pratt made a twelve-mile circuit of the valley before reporting back, and Pratt wrote that they could not hold back 'a shout of joy' at the view.
Q 26What were the first crops the 1847 pioneers set out to plant in the Salt Lake Valley?
Potatoes and turnips
Potatoes and turnips came first, to save the seed: within hours of making camp the men had rigged three ploughs and begun damming a creek to flood the ground for planting.
Q 27Who was driving the wagon from which Brigham Young first saw the Salt Lake Valley?
Wilford Woodruff
Wilford Woodruff later recalled turning the carriage so the ailing Young could take in the view, and hearing him say: 'This is the right place. Drive on.'
Q 28Which summit was Brigham Young said to have seen in a vision before reaching the valley?
Ensign Peak
Ensign Peak got its name two days after Young arrived, when he and other leaders climbed it and judged it a good place to raise an ensign, a banner to the nations.
Q 29Four days after reaching the valley in 1847, Brigham Young marked the site for which building?
The Salt Lake Temple
The Salt Lake Temple was a long time coming: its cornerstone was laid in 1853 and it was dedicated in 1893, forty years later to the day.
Q 30Through which broad Wyoming gap did the Mormon, Oregon and California trails all cross the Continental Divide?
South Pass
South Pass is a sagebrush saddle so broad and gentle that one forty-niner could hardly believe he stood on the dividing ridge: it seemed more like rolling prairie.