Day 25 -- Oceola, Iowa to Nauvoo, Illinois -- 183 Miles

Today turned out to be kind of a catch-up day. If you read yesterday's blog you know we burned the candle at both ends, and a few spots in the middle as well. We stopped so often we only actually drove for an hour all day long. Of course, that made for lots of things to write about. Well, today we swapped ends on that scenario and did more driving then stopping. Consequently your roving reporter doesn't have much to tell you about.

Now what I haven't mentioned is that we spent much of the day on Iowa Route 2 crisscrossing, overlapping, and generally zig-zagging along the route once traveled by the Mormons when they left Nauvoo, Illinois, and began their long trek westward, first to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and finally to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah.

Most of the morning we just rolled along enjoying the farm country festooned with red barns and Victorian Houses and had no intention of stopping anywhere unless a photo op proved irresistible at some point. Actually, Route 2 across the bottom of Iowa is so narrow that pulling over for any reason other than an emergency would be out of the question. So we listened to the last tracks of our Lincoln and His Generals disks and set our sights on making some mileage. Occasionally we'd slow down for some quietly decaying town where the glory days occurred when Lincoln was President, but most of the time we set the cruise control and just drove.

As noon approached we started keeping our eyes out for a park or other good stopping place to pull over. So it hardly took any discussion when just before lunchtime we came across an absolutely HUGE Pioneer Trails Museum in the town of Corydon. Although Concetta and I were trying to hold off visiting museums for awhile least the memories of the ones we've already seen begin to blend into each other, we decided to spend just a few minutes seeing what the museum had to offer in the way of Mormon information. Then we could have our lunch in their parking lot and be on our way.

Well, we hadn't even paid our entrance fee when I got into a discussion with the docent taking the money about the Mormon trail and just what ancestors I was trying to track as we visited city after city devoted to the Mormon trek west. I was in the process of telling her when the museum's director came over and the three of us and Concetta got into quite a lively discussion about my ancestors and the inexplicable things that happened in their lives.

"Take my 2-times great grandfather's brother, Stephen," I told them. "He and my descendant were supposedly left behind in Nauvoo when my 3-times great grandfather left in 1846, but the record doesn't say why. Then, in the summer of 1847, Stephen supposedly dies in Nevada, which I consider completely ridiculous information since no Mormon was in Nevada that August of 1847.

That's when the two women from the museum looked at each other, then back at me. Then the museum director said something that sent me reeling. She said, "you know there are other places called Nevada that aren't actually the state of Nevada."

Mentally slapping my forehead, I said, "Of course, that has to be it." And I told them that I knew there was a Nevada, Iowa, up on the old Lincoln Highway, today's Route 30.

"Yes," the docent added, "And there's also a Nevada, Missouri."

I was stunned that I had been so certain that the Mormon record was just wrong, and there could be no way that Stephen Daley had died in Nevada, especially since he had not been a member of the Mormon Battalion. The Mormon Battalion consisted of 500 men recruited in the Mormon camp of Mount Pisgah where we visited yesterday. Their job was to help the U.S. Government fight the Mexican War, and at the same time, leader Brigham Young thought, give the people of the United States a more positive view of the Mormons.

Brigham Young's hunch worked. The Mormon Battalion never actually was used in battle, but the fact that the Mormons were willing to support the united States spoke volumes about their willingness to be good citizens. I actually have an ancestor who was in the Mormon Battalion, a man named John Buchanan. Not many people know that it was actually members of the Mormon Battalion who were working for John Marshall in 1849 when gold was discovered in the mill race of John Sutter's lumber mill near the present town of Coloma, California. Some of the Battalion had traveled back to join their families after they mustered out, while some remained in California to work and earn money before treking over the Sierra and on to Utah where the Mormons had only recently arrived.

Concetta and I spent the next hour exploring the museum, which just seemed to go on and on. There was so much material to take in that we ended up just focusing on areas of history that interested us, and passed by the rest. I especially liked the little town they set up that was complete with individual furnished shops. There was everything from a photo studio and a beauty parlor, to a gas station and a furniture store.

Before we left, I handed over a check to the museum director who had informed me that she was a member, the treasurer in fact, of the Mormon Trail Association that had been described to us yesterday by Bob Brown. Bob had suggested that I join, and the museum director was more than happy to take my check for dues. Encountering that degree of serendipity is just surreal. So now that I'm a member I'll be able to keep track of the work they're doing in Iowa and maybe someday in the future the organization will help me figure out some of my family's mysteries.

The remainder of the day we just drove and drove and we finally arrived at our camp in Nauvoo about 4:30 p.m. We hadn't made any reservations -- we almost never do -- and fortunately they had about three left of the maximum of ten available. We booked the spot for two nights so that we can spend all day visiting the town of Nauvoo where my 3-times great grandfather's family was living in 1846 after being kicked out of Missouri around 1839 or 1840 (I think).

Tonight I'm feeling just a tad poorly, so I'm going to be a little more brief than I would like. But I nevertheless wish you Happy Travels.