More than one hundred photographs of the country between Nauvoo, Illinois and the Great Salt Lake accompany an account of the fifteen-hundred-mile search for Zion undertaken, more than a century ago, by Brigham Young and his followers.

"Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail argues that as the Latter-day Saint community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space transformed. Initially, nineteenth-century Mormons believed that they must literally gather together in their new Salt Lake Zion-their center place. They believed that Zion was a place you could point to on a map, a place you should dwell in to live a righteous life. Later Mormons had to reinterpret these central theological principles as their community spread around the globe. They began to make such claims as "We should spiritually gather together" and "Zion is wherever the people of God are." But to say that they simply spiritualized concepts that had once been understood literally is only one piece of the puzzle. Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel these principles. And so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone. They develop

The story of the Mormon Trail and the migration of Mormons to their new settlement at Salt Lake City.