I didn’t see The Journey West in person. Like so many works that find me, it came glowing from the surface of my phone late one night, an image too cinematic to scroll past. Mark Maggiori paints the American West as both dream and memory, a place where landscape becomes theology. His skies swell with revelation, his clouds like scripture written in vapor. Below them, a wagon train moves forward through the dust, determined yet diminished by the immensity around it. I felt something stir, a tug older than nostalgia, almost genetic, and I realized I was seeing not just a painting but a reflection of my own bloodline.
My great-grandfather John Christopher Armstrong left Carlisle, England, in the 1840s after converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He crossed an ocean, then a continent, part of the Abraham O. Smoot / George B. Wallace Company that departed the Elkhorn River on June 18, 1847, “to journey into the wilderness.” Those words, recorded by company clerk J.C. Kingsbury, read now like liturgy—half-logbook, half-book of Exodus.
“Tuesday June 22nd Left Platte River with all the companies of the camp of Israel to journey into the wilderness.”
A simple sentence, yet it carries the full gravity of faith acted out on the land. “The camp of Israel”—that was how they saw themselves: modern pilgrims reenacting the great biblical crossings, walking westward toward a promised valley. I have often wondered what part of that message spoke to him. What fire must have burned in an English craftsman’s heart to make him sell everything, gather his family, and follow a fledgling church into the unknown?
By July 30th, the journal records the company’s arrival at one of the great icons of the American Plains:
“Went over the bluff & encamped at night above Chimney Rock. The feed here is excellent.”
That was the line I stood over, a century and a half later, on my own drive west. I stopped at Chimney Rock, stepped out into the Nebraska wind, and read that sentence aloud from a printed copy of the Smoot diary. The simplicity of it undid me. No sermon, no hymn, just the plain language of movement and survival. And yet beneath that understatement lies the full weight of hope, exhaustion, and belief. He was there. My ancestor camped in that place, looked at that same spire of earth, and felt both the nearness and distance of God.
Maggiori’s painting reminds me of that horizon. It makes real the mingling of faith and dust, the endlessness of both. His light feels devotional, the kind that sanctifies distance. Watching his travelers press onward beneath a sky vast enough to swallow them, I can’t help thinking of the 1840s religious ferment that pulled men like Armstrong westward. It was a time of awakenings and fractures, when the Industrial Revolution collided with spiritual longing. The old cathedrals of Europe no longer held the certainty they once promised. In their place arose the raw energy of new revelation: the sense that the divine might speak again, not through priests, but through prophets and plains.
For many converts, Mormonism offered precisely that: a new geography of meaning. Zion wasn’t a metaphor; it was a map. To follow it was to believe that redemption could be drawn into physical space. The Book of Mormon spoke of a covenant people on a promised land, and in the imagination of the 1840s, that land lay west of the Mississippi, beyond the reach of persecution, government, and doubt. Armstrong’s conversion was not simply doctrinal, it was kinetic. Faith moved him, literally.
And yet, faith is not forever. In time, the same church that inspired his journey declared him dead and excommunicated him. He reemerged under a new name, Drewer Iverson, and fought for the Union during the Civil War. He lived in Ohio, then Pennsylvania, remarrying, rebuilding, reinventing. What intrigues me is that even after his excommunication, he didn’t return to stillness. Movement remained his language. The westward road had taught him that transformation requires motion.
When my brother and I visited his grave in Pennsylvania, it felt as though we were closing a circle. Standing there, reading the weathered inscription, I thought about the courage and contradictions that shaped his life. From the cathedrals of England to the tents of the wilderness; from Zion to the battlefields of America—he had crossed oceans, nations, and identities. His journey became a map of the 19th-century soul: restless, searching, and ever remade by belief.
Maggiori’s painting, though contemporary, seems to understand that spirit. His west is not simply a direction but a disposition, the faith to go when the outcome is uncertain. Beneath his monumental clouds, human figures are small, but they endure. That is what moves me most: not triumph, but persistence. The painting holds the same paradox I see in Armstrong’s life and, perhaps, my own. In how conviction and doubt travel together, how belief becomes geography, and how each generation must cross its own wilderness in search of meaning.
Faith, after all, is another kind of migration. It begins with a call, a rumor of a place where life might be made whole again. But the true journey, the one that binds ancestor and descendant alike, lies in the walking.