From 1846 to 1852, Mt. Pisgah served as a Mormon pioneer way station in Iowa after Latter-day Saints, driven from their homes by armed mobs, stopped there on their westward trek and named the place after the Biblical Mount Pisgah. They cleared thousands of acres, built buildings and log cabins, dug caves for shelter, and planted crops, using a natural year-round spring and the Grand River for water, but inadequate food and shelter brought severe hardship and death, and between 300 and 400 pioneers perished there. The settlement became a stopping place for a great stream of westward-bound Mormon pioneers until 1852, when the last Latter-day Saints left and Henry Peters bought the site and named it Petersville. Soon after the settlers arrived, Chief Pied Riche welcomed them and said that the Pottawattamie Indians too had been driven from their homeland in what is now Michigan, urging mutual help and faith that suffering would not last forever. The original community stood on the slope and flatlands east of the site, its cemetery extended across the nearby hill, and although the headstones were later lost or destroyed, a monument was erected in 1888 in memory of those buried there. Mt. Pisgah was also part of the larger Mormon Pioneer Trail, the difficult migration that began in February 1846 from Nauvoo, Illinois, crossed southern Iowa to Kanesville, continued after wintering near present-day Omaha and Council Bluffs across Nebraska and Wyoming, and ended in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.