The Church Historian’s Press has announced the release of a new book titled Saints at Devil’s Gate: Landscapes along the Mormon Trail. The book showcases fifty-two landscape paintings of the Mormon Trail, the 1,300-mile route from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City, Utah, that tens of thousands of Latter-day Saint pioneers traveled in the 1800s.
The paintings were created from 2011 to 2016 by award-winning Latter-day Saint landscape artists John Burton, Josh Clare, and Bryan Mark Taylor. Each painting is paired with quotations from the original journals and reminiscences of pioneers who made the journey.
The pairing of the paintings with historical quotations allows today's readers to share in some of the feelings that Mormon pioneers experienced while traveling west. For example, Bryan Mark Taylor’s Looking Back, which depicts Nauvoo as seen from across the Mississippi River in Iowa, is paired with a May 1846 excerpt from Wilford Woodruff’s journal: “I left Nauvoo for the last time perhaps in this life. I looked upon the temple & city of Nauvoo as I retired from it & felt to ask the Lord to preserve it as a monument of the sacrifice of his Saints.”
The new book accompanies an exhibit of the same name at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City. The free exhibit is open to the public and will run through August 2017. We hope you'll visit the next time you're in the area.
Saints at Devil’s Gate: Landscapes along the Mormon Trail, by Laura Allred Hurtado and Bryon C. Andreasen and featuring the artwork of John Burton, Josh Clare, and Bryan Mark Taylor, is available for purchase at the Church History Museum store and at Store.LDS.org.
The Church Historian’s Press has announced the release of a new book titled