PREPARATION, IOWA

This Monona County ghost town straddles the route of the 1850s Mormon migration to what would become Utah. The roots of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of course, stretch back two decades earlier and farther east.

Joseph Smith and his Eight Witnesses launched the Mormon faith in 1830 in central New York state but were soon on the move, building a string of settlements only to be driven away from each in turn by resentful and outright hostile non-Mormon neighbors, whom Smith termed