He said Webster's statement about coming to know God is most telling in such tales. Quoting historian Wallace Stegner, "If courage and endurance make a story, if human kindness and helpfulness and brotherly love in the midst of raw horror are worth recording, this half-forgotten episode of the Mormon migration is one of the great tales of the West and of America."

President Boyd K. Packer, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve, shared a story of his great grandmother, Christena Olsen Wight, whose family emigrated in different years from Denmark to America because they couldn't afford to come all at once. In 1857, Christena and her two sisters headed West with the seventh of 10 handcart companies that would cross the Mormon Trail to Utah.

Christena bought three pairs of shoes for the journey, determined not to walk into the valley barefoot. But after suffering with hunger and thirst, and having worn out two of her three pair of shoes, she decided to put on the third pair just before they entered the valley. When she tried to put them on, her feet were so swollen they wouldn't fit.

"I walked into the valley barefooted, and with each step I took, I left bloody footprints in the snow." She later wrote that she had suffered from weakness and health problems the rest of her life as a result of the journey, "but I never complained."

She and those like her made the journey because "they knew that there had been a restoration of the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . Nothing could deter them. They had then, as we have now, individual testimonies.

"In ways, our journey today is harder than theirs, and definitely more dangerous," President Packer said. "There are dark, ominous clouds ahead. Each one of us needs, and each can have, the same courage, the same assurance from the same source, the same testimony of the risen Lord."

The meeting concluded three days of celebration in Iowa City to mark the sesquicentennial of the first handcart company's departure for Salt Lake City on June 9, 1856.

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