The Mormon migration by handcart lasted five years, from 1856 through 1860. In total, ten handcart companies containing 2,962 converts and 653 handcarts crossed the wilderness of the great prairie and the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake City.
The converts, mostly young women from England and Scandinavia, bent their backs in heart-bursting toil to pull the handcarts through the wilderness. Meager food rations and fierce storms falling upon the unprotected people added to the misery. Many weakened and died and were buried on the prairie.
The most terrible loss of life occurred in the fifth handcart company. The company was poorly organized and started late from Iowa City, Iowa. Dressed in summer clothing, and with their food gone, the Mormon converts became stranded by a winter snowfall in the high mountains far north of Salt Lake City. Three out of every ten people perished from exhaustion, hunger, and the cold before a relief party of young Mormon men, sent by Brigham Young from Salt Lake City, could reach them.
The handcart companies of 1856, 1857, and 1858 began in Iowa City. The journey was 1,300 miles and took approximately four months. With the completion of the railroad to St. Joseph, Missouri, in February 1859, the route was shortened to 1,000 miles and took about three months. The Mormon immigrants organized at St. Joseph, then caught riverboats up the Missouri River to begin their handcart trek from Florence, Nebraska. (Florence is now part of Omaha.)
The Mormon Church halted the use of handcarts after 1860. Thereafter the new immigrant converts traveled by wagon train, until the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. The journey that had required three to four months of great hardship could then be accomplished in relative comfort in less than two days.
The construction of the Salt Lake City Temple was completed in 1893 and became the center of the far flung Mormon Religion.