History of the Saints

Railroad, Relief society, and Retrenchment

"That the Church may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world" was a revelation given to Joseph Smith in March 1832; it received a renewed emphasis among the Latter-day Saints in the decades of the 1860s and 1870s. Self-sufficiency became the call, and the Saints responded. However, there were challenges to that ideal. One of the greatest of those was posed by the coming of the railroad. With the railroad as a catalyst, a series of events followed that proved a great blessing to Latter-day Saints across the world.