## The Conversion and What It Meant
The event that set Biddy Mason’s life on its improbable course from Mississippi to California was Robert Smith’s conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Missionaries reached the Smith household in 1847 and converted the family to Mormonism. For Robert and Rebecca Smith, the conversion had a practical implication: the Mormon leadership under Brigham Young was calling converts to gather and settle in the American West, and the Smiths prepared to follow.
For Biddy Mason, the conversion meant something different. It meant she would go west, not because she had any choice, but because her enslaver was going west and she and her daughters were his property. She had no voice in the decision. Whether she was baptized into the LDS Church herself is not known from surviving records, though some sources raise the possibility.
The Mormon migration of the late 1840s was one of the most organized and substantial mass movements of people in American history to that point. The Church had established a migration system through what became Council Bluffs, Iowa and Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and tens of thousands of converts moved west along the Platte River route toward the Salt Lake Valley over the course of several years. The Smith party departed from Winter Quarters, Nebraska, on July 3, 1848, as part of a large wagon train.
The timing matters. The Mormon westward migration in 1848 was taking place in a country that had, in the same year, concluded the Mexican-American War and acquired an enormous swath of the Southwest, including the territory that would become California. The world these people were moving through was being remade at the same moment they were crossing it.