Mormon Battalion Historic Site

This guide to the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in San Diego follows soldiers who marched nearly two thousand miles from Iowa in the winter of 1846 and 1847, arriving to find their war already ending, and picking up trowels instead of muskets to fire the town's first bricks. It traces how the small brick building they raised as a town hall instead became the county courthouse, and the 1852 case against a man the town called Yankee Jim, accused of stealing a boat off the waterfront. Robinson reportedly laughed through much of the hearing, certain it was theater meant to rattle him.