The author detailed the travels of the Van Valkenburg family as they emigrated from Canada to a small Iowa town in the mid-1800’s. We learned particularly of the exploits and achievements of the 17 year old Catherine Van Valkenburg, a dynamic young woman who blazed many trails herself.) Upon arriving in Lee County, Iowa, from Canada West in 1846, the family of Joseph and Margaret Van Valkenburg was enmeshed in criss-crossing and interwoven ropes of voluntary and forced migrations, only two of which are touched on in this paper. A fairly prosperous farm family, they emigrated from Canada West to a small town in southeastern Iowa at a time when the last of the Native American nations living in Iowa were being forced to move even farther west than the U.S. Indian Removal policy had originally demanded, and land in the Black Hawk Strip, a purchase to punish the warrior Black Hawk when he attempted to regain his tribe’s most important village, was open for white settlement. New frontier towns had been established to be the setting for new colleges that emphasized evangelical religion and social reforms, chief among them the abolition of slavery. Catharine Van Valkenburg, seventeen years old when the family emigrated, would attend two of those colleges in the mid-nineteenth century—Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and Oberlin College in Ohio, where she earned a degree with honors. And in 1846 and 1847, members of the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints were streaming westward across Lee County in carts and wagons, thereby blazing the Mormon Trail to the Great Salt Lake where they aimed to found and build a millennial kingdom called Zion with Brigham Young. This was the richly diverse and dynamic context for Catharine Van Valkenburg’s late teen years. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln summoned Charles Waite, Catharine’s husband, to the Utah Territory to sit as a federal judge in Salt Lake City, or Zion, and to help put down the Mormon rebellion against United States authority. The tale of crossing the Platte River and the traveling on the Mormon Trail (much abbreviated) to the Great Salt Lake Basin, along with a cursory treatment of the family’s first months in Zion, are also covered.