Beginning in February 1846, the vanguard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled across southern Iowa from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Kanesville, Iowa, on the way to their New Zion in the Rocky Mountains. The journey tested the endurance of people, animals, and equipment as a frozen Iowa landscape turned into nearly impassable mud and muck, but faith and determination sustained them and thousands reached the Missouri River under extremely difficult conditions. After wintering in the present-day Omaha/Council Bluffs district, they continued across Nebraska and Wyoming to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This route later became closely paralleled by a marked 1,624-mile auto tour route, tracing a path across the Iowa prairies, the Great Plains of Nebraska, South Pass in Wyoming, and the Rocky Mountains to the Great Salt Lake Valley of Utah. At this site, the original Nishnabotna River bed was crossed by a ferry, and the nearby Ferry House was occupied by ferry operator Samuel "Harlow" Tefft and his family in the 1850s, though river straightening in the 1920s left it no longer at the river's edge. Many groups passed here: the road had been a Pottawattamie Indian Trail in the 1830s, the Mormon Pioneer Trail of 1846 followed the ridge nearby, California gold seekers came through in 1849, and Mormon handcart companies traveling west from Iowa City joined the road east of Lewis in 1856-57. In 1851, the road was surveyed as the state road from Des Moines to Indiantown across the Nishnabotna. Mormon handcarts, generally six or seven feet long and made entirely of wood, carried about 500 pounds of flour, bedding, clothing, cooking utensils, and a tent. Pioneer journals recall the long and tedious miles, men fainting from exhaustion, and the determination to keep hold of the handcart, while a marching song captured the shared labor of pushing and pulling on the way to the Valley.