AI Tutor
Imagine packing your entire life into a single wooden wagon and walking over a thousand miles across rugged plains and steep mountains. What would make thousands of families leave their homes to take such an exhausting journey?
Geographers and historians explain big moves like this using two simple ideas.

Push and Pull Factors

A push factor is a problem that drives people away from where they live, like danger, unfair laws, or hunger.
A pull factor is an attraction that draws people toward a new home, like safety, cheap land, or personal freedom.
So what kind of trouble was strong enough to push tens of thousands of people completely out of eastern cities?

The Push: Religious Persecution

In the 1830s and 1840s, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced intense religious persecution, which means being mistreated or attacked simply for your religious beliefs.
After the church was founded in New York, members moved westward to escape hostility, but neighbors in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois also grew suspicious of their beliefs and growing political influence.
In Missouri, conflict escalated until Governor Boggs issued Executive Order 44 (the Extermination Order of 1838), legally ordering church members to be expelled from the state.
Angry mobs burned pioneer farms, destroyed their printing presses, and in 1844, killed church founder Joseph Smith in Illinois.