Clues to the Crossing

As discussed in my last post, our August event near Nauvoo, Illinois will include finding the crossing of Alma and his army as recorded in Alma chapter 2.
In order for the search of this crossing to be successful, there are certain elements that must be studied to understand where this spot exists. The first clue is the Robert E. Lee survey.

Traveling up and down the Mississippi River was pretty common by the early 1800’s but crossing it was a bit dangerous. There is a place along this river called the Des Moines Rapids that lies between Nauvoo, Illinois and Keokuk, Iowa. The Des Moines Rapids limited steamboat passage because of the “dangerous, sharp, rocky bottom” as noted by Swedish novelist, Fredrika Bremer, who in 1850, was taking a trip down the Mississippi from St. Paul.   Gate City Newspaper

In 1937, a group of Army Corps of Engineers led by Robert E. Lee (the same Robert E. Lee who was the confederate general in the War Between the States) was a cartographer which most people did not know. Robert E. Lee and his group took a survey intending to cut a channel through the rapids, but after three months of trying along with budget cuts, the project was canceled. Nauvoo The Beautiful

The Army Corps of Engineers did another survey of the same Des Moines rapids in 1866, just after the War Between the States.  This time Lieutenant Colonel James H. Wilson was in charge of  making this survey. Colonel Wilson's survey was even more extensive than Lee's with more information.

 The Heartland Research Group realized Robert E. Lee’s original survey matched up with the description in the Book of Mormon of the River Sidon that helped pin point an approximate location from over a 2,000 mile distance of the river down to a few acres. Lee’s survey marks the point on a chart that shows where the flow of the river's water at harvest time would have been sufficiently low so as to allow an ancient army to cross the large river.

The second clue to the whereabouts of this crossing has to do with the river’s first and biggest dam built in Keokuk, Iowa in 1913. The town of Keokuk was named after the famed chief of the Sauk tribe who met with Joseph Smith back in 1841 in Nauvoo but that is a story for another time.

What is interesting about the dam in Keokuk, is that all water flowing down the river has to pass through the dam each day and there is no water being stored as in other hydro power projects. That’s a lot of water passing through so it could be that all the evidence of that army crossing was washed away. Reportedly, the Keokuk Dam pond is filling with sediment due to slowing of the river in that area which would make searching for Alma’s army crossing location more difficult because if may be covered in sediment. The more we study this area, the more difficult the finding of this location sounds.

In the late 19^th century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employed as many as 1,000 workers to build the Des Moines Rapids Canal near the dam. In that project, they blasted as much as a million tons of limestone rock on the west bank. The obvious question is what will be the effects of this blasting on finding the immediate area that is associated with the Battle of Zarahemla.

Another clue we need to study is the trail of the Mississippi River. The Des Moines River flows into the Mississippi River just below Keokuk, Iowa.  For approximately 25 miles before this river reaches the Mississippi River, it had served as a state boundary line between Iowa and Missouri. If we looked at a map from early 1800, we would see the meandering of the river trail. But now this boundary does not follow the current Des Moines river channel because it has migrated from its early 1800s path, albeit a few hundred feet in one way or the other. In some places it is the same with the Mississippi River. Over the years it has changed its course somewhat through meandering which increases the challenge to those searching for the crossing place of the Nephite and Amalicite armies. With the study of the river, we have found however, that the geologic structure of the Des Moines Rapids area has restricted channel meandering.

With these clues and many others put together by historians, engineers and scientists, we believe we will be successful in finding the crossing that will lead to even more clues to the city of Zarahemla’s location.