When you run migrations rails keeps track of these by matching each migration in db/migrate folder with an entry in schema_migrations table that includes timestamp for all the migrations that rails has already run for that environment in versions column.
Reason is to allow you to migrate incrementally.
Earlier versions of rails had a strong philosophy of having a down migration as well to go back in time. However, that has been left as a choice now.
Your complaint is because it was not able to create schema_migrations table. My suggestion is to allow it to do so by running rake db:migrate on a fresh db.
If you have data in the tables on this instance run it on another database and then just copy across the versions table.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/migrations.html