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Valley of the Bear River 195 ultimate rest in the dead waters of the Great Salt Lake. Like interlocking units of a giant mortise, the three major valleys of the Bear River's lower drainage extend from one state to another, joining them together. The metaphor here suggested has much to commend it in the physical sense, as the Bear River region provides resources common to the three states. By related developments the Bear River has influenced the cultural character of the three states as well. This paper will examine the Bear River as a border region in which homogenous and mutually accessible natural resources have drawn people and cultural influences back and forth across state lines—particularly those of Utah and Idaho—to relate those two states in a way no other two states are related and to give the Bear River region recognizable cultural characteristics. Observations presented here are incomplete and tentative but should serve to suggest that regions everywhere possess characteristics well worth continuing historical examination. The Bear River is something of an anomaly. It rises in one of America's few east-w7est lying mountain ranges. More distinctive, perhaps, is the fact that its great bend conforms generally to the northeast rim of the Great Basin. Running its meandering course for more than three hundred miles within the Basin, it is America's most important landlocked river. Like the Humboldt River of Nevada, of which Dale Morgan wrote in the Rivers of America Series, the Bear River was a "Highroad to the West"—a natural feature that made the Oregon Trail and westward expansion possible.1 Within the ragged and inverted V of its great elbow, three major valleys lie across the Utah-Idaho border. From east to west these are Bear Lake Valley, Cache Valley, and the Bear River and Malad River arm of the Great Salt Lake Valley. There is an irony in the fact that Utahn Dale Morgan chose to dramatize the desert miles of Nevada's Humboldt River and to throw the light of his brilliant scholarship upon it while leaving the Bear River to run its course in historical obscurity. But the Bear River's place in history was obscure long before Morgan turned his attention to western history. Indeed, the obscurity in which it has been shrouded was recognized in a general way even before Americans w7ere aware the river existed. When James Monroe and Robert Livingston completed the negotiations by which the Louisiana Purchase became part of America, one of them expressed regret as to the obscurity of its boundaries. The great French minister, Tallyrand, is supposed to have answered: "I can give you no 1 Dale L. Morgan, The Humboldt, Highroad to the West (New York: Farrar and Rinehart. 1943).