A History of Salt Lake County

The World Is Welcome Here, Pre-History To 1847

T h e bronze statue of Brigham Young, aged by verdigris, topped its pedestal where Main and South Temple streets crossed in down-town Salt Lake City. Under sunny morning skies, Brigham over-looked yet another parade on July 24th celebrating the entry of the first white settlers, Mormon pioneers who had arrived in 1847. For centuries the valley had been a natural crossroads; for these colonists it became a haven of hope. Within a half decade, the valley represented a county seat and a territorial capital; equally fast, an influx of non-Mormons with typically American expectations clashed with the Mormons' ideal of Zion, and their conflict perplexed and provoked the nation. Brigham's stance amid the modern traffic in 1994 was familiar and assumed, just as his outstretched hand symbolized his first view from an overlook and the words that became a touchstone: "This is the right place, drive on." Many, not his followers, agreed with his assessment for their own reasons, contributing mightily to the growth, enterprise, cultural richness and diversity, and religious her-itage of life in Salt Lake County. Yet even as it became a metropolitan hub in the Intermountain West, both capital and valley pivoted in any interchange upon iden-tity with Mormonism, "the master condition of [its] differentness. The church was the instrument of its creation, and church and city have lived in the most intimate of symbiotic relationships." Not only was the bustling domain, extending far beyond Brigham's gesture, long offered by the church as the best evidence that "Mormonism works," but to that founding the valley owed "its status as a world capital, with roots implanted deeply in nearly every country."' In fact, gathering below Brigham's bronze hand in 1994, the parade proclaimed the theme, "The World is Welcome Here," and the entries displayed an unusual diversity. The historical Brigham might well have been surprised, for he had wielded his considerable clout to secure this stronghold from native peoples, from the United States Army, from non-Mormon merchants, from miners, and from federal officials. In the 1990s the theme welcoming the world gained a frenetic tone as boosters and politicians triumphed in scheduling the 2002 Winter Olympics in the Salt Lake Valley. In the process, this mainly urban county that sparkled-on clear days-between Rocky Mountain ranges and the Great Salt Lake received worldwide expo-sure, which would increase to an extent never before known. By 2002 when the games arrive, the population of nearly 800,000 residents in 1990 will likely reach one million, distributed over 808 square miles that include fast-incorporating cities south of the capi-tal. In some ways the county will remaine a Mormon center, yet it is re-visioning itself as a cosmopolitan place, equipped and eager to embrace the international games along with the revenue, revelry, and scrutiny they inevitably will stimulate. Perhaps Brigham would have understood the enthusiasm. After all, he and other church leaders quickly had established a system to transport converts by the thousands from northern Europe, shep-herding them across the Atlantic Ocean and a continent's breadth to reach and reinforce the Mormon fold. Too, he had welcomed the financial windfall that goldseekers brought as they hurried toward California. Like the prospective Olympic athletes and fans, the gold-seekers had spent their money in the valley and moved on. The traditional July 24th parade in Salt Lake City honors the first Mormon settlers' entry into the valley. Furthermore, Brigham had delighted (just as Salt Lake City's first female mayor did in 1994) in entertaining the dignitaries who mar-veled at the "instant citym2th at, within a decade of its founding, had hummed with enterprise and seized upon innovation. Almost at once, those first colonists had commenced pioneering the valley to the southeast and then to the southwest. Some settle-ments, bolstered by forts and surrounded by farms, became agricul-tural and transportation centers; many burgeoned into mining towns, soon linked to the nation by rails. From the beginning, the valley's eastern communities-so near the canyons and their creeks-had found preference over the western areas when it came to development. This favoritism of east over west continued for more than a century, producing a tension that ran the valley's length. The north-south dichotomy differed. Throughout both the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, Salt Lake City retained a magnetic hold on governance, culture, and commerce despite politicians' cycli-cal efforts to combine city and county services for the sake of effi-ciency and fairness. Although bona fide cities thrived south of the capital only a few decades after settlement, the common parlance reflected Salt Lake City's dominance. References to "the city" meant the capital; "the county" meant every place outside the capital's boundaries. The terms persisted despite the illogic, even after the pre-ponderance of the population flowed from "the city" into "the county" in the last half of the twentieth century. Important county and state buildings and prime conference and recreational facilities continued to rise in downtown Salt Lake City even as the fast-grow-ing municipalities to the south flexed new muscle. Those issues, however, were minor compared to the nineteenth century's concerns about Indian bands and, later, the polarization around oversight by federal armies and officials. The latter arrived knowing that if the Salt Lake Valley could be turned from the Mormons' Kingdom of God into another mainstream county, the entire Utah Territory would gradually align. In contrast to nineteenth-century conflicts that split the valley and inflamed national opinion, federal connections became increas-ingly valuable to Salt Lake County during the twentieth century. The forced dependence on government aid during the sparse years of the Great Depression became a heavy commitment to military industry during and following World War 11. From that time on, valley lead-ers aggressively sought to attract other business, industry, and investors to Salt Lake County. Yet Brigham's instinct also survived to isolate and protect a people who had lost homes, a city, and loved ones to religious persecution. For more than a century, church, political, and civic leaders had perpetu-ated resistance to the world and its ways, despite this new welcoming. The most recent legislature to convene on Capitol Hill, for instance, remained mostly men for whom civic and ecclesiastical roles were sleeves of the same jacket. The lawmakers in 1994 had shown them-selves nearly as reluctant to liberalize the sale of alcoholic beverages as their progenitors. While this might seem a small point, the confusion around procuring and enjoying liquor had long been a chief irritant for the valley's visitors and even for residents not staunchly LDS. When it came to this and far larger issues, church and state had separated in the valley gradually and unevenly. Mormon bishops, for instance, were no longer civic judges as they had been in Brigham's The balance of church and state is captured in this view south past the State Capitol and LDS Church Office Building. day. Public schools no longer met in LDS wardhouses, instructed by teachers appointed by the church. Yet the valley had recently wit-nessed a double flurry in the courts over LDS prayers offered in val-ley high schools and in city council meetings. While the valley's politics and trends eagerly synchronized with the nation in the first half of the twentieth century, certain social issues since, including the civil, equal, and reproductive rights move-ments, had waged battle in this valley more intensely than elsewhere in the state, sometimes drawing national attention. Here, some laws entered the public canon in direct conformance with current LDS policy; and here-increasingly in recent decades-strategies formed around certain issues with the intent of impacting the political land-scape of the United States. In these ways, the valley remained both center and stronghold. Although the valley's proportion of LDS residents had dropped to less than half the population in 1930, that figure rose to 64.3 percent by 1990 despite an influx of business people, who were often non- Mormon. Still, that proportion was 7.5 percent lower than in the state as a whole, where thirteen of twenty-nine counties were more than 80 percent LDS, and one 90.9 percent.' Statistically, then, with a white majority of around 92 per~ent,~ Salt Lake County had not become cosmopolitan despite its increas-ing sophistication. Although precise figures were not kept, the county probably enjoyed its most cosmopolitan decades during the early twentieth century when racial and ethnic minority sectors, bur-roughs, and villages flourished in the heyday of mining and smelt-ing. Currently, however, the media captures the diversity maintained by small numbers and broadcasts images of varying cultures, lifestyles, and religious ideas throughout the Intermountain West. Within the Salt Lake Valley, one might observe shabbat with the Congregation Kol Ami, soar on the exultant hymns of the Calvary Baptist Choir, accept Roman Catholic communion in congregations speaking Spanish or Vietnamese, or meditate at the Wasatch Zen Center. One could cheer a soccer team sponsored by the Fraternidad El Salvador, enjoy Samoan cricket matches, sign up for lessons in karate or kung fu, toast the latest triumph of the Utah Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, or socialize at the gay and lesbian community's Stonewall Center. The University of Utah enhanced the valley's sophistication con-siderably, although only in 1991 would the institution hire a presi-dent who was truly an "out~ider."S~i nce statehood in 1896, and on a limited basis even before, the university not only promoted academic achievement but also encouraged a variety of intellectual and cultural pursuits ranging from medical and scientific research to the visual and performing arts. Brigham, who had enjoyed an evening at the theater as much as anyone, would no doubt approve of the contem-porary valley's symphonies and its dance, opera, and theater compa-nies, whether internationally known institutions based in Salt Lake City or accomplished groups performing in suburban cities. The inevitable conflicts arising within a society at once homoge-neous and democratic were well known to Brigham also and to the valley's peoples ever after. The very difficulties that had propelled the Mormons from one intended haven to the next in the nineteenth cen-tury had taken root in this valley, becoming in the twentieth century "the singular internal tensions which still shape [the valley's] life." At least since recorded time, paradox lay intrinsic to the valley's striking and exploitable landscape. Its mountainous frame was often described as alpine, while the salty sea to the west ranked as one of Earth's natural wonders. The Utah River, soon renamed the Jordan, ran north instead of south and emptied fresh water into a sea saltier than the ocean. Thus the valley offered easy access to refreshing canyons, powdery ski slopes, and briny waves. Yet the landscape also ensured serious environmental problems for an industrial society. A toxic haze capped the long, narrow valley on calm days, turning foggy in winter until winds or storms skimmed it away. Of course the landscape was not entirely responsible for pollu-tion woes. Salt Lake County had contributed heavily to the world's supply of copper, silver, and other metals for more than a century, adding oil refining and the manufacture of explosives, ammunition, and missile parts in more recent decades. Such enterprises not only bolstered the economy and offered employment, but tainted the air, the land, and the water to degrees that currently attract the attention of federal regulators. Additionally, as automobiles had revolutionized the early twentieth century lifestyle and suburban cities mushroomed in its latter decades, the valley provided the central sector of the cor-ridor through the populous Wasatch Front. By 1994 the valley's free-ways and main arteries clotted during the workweek with commuters, and exhaust fumes rose around each creeping vehicle as evidence of its occupants' frayed nerves. Every mile of progress had its price, a truth learned earlier by the peoples who had frequented the valley before settlement. During the effort to attract the 1996 Winter Games, Olympic boosters contacted the Ute Indian Tribe, seeking its involvement. Since Europeans and Asians evidenced a consummate curiosity about Native Americans, committee members traveled to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. Late one night of powwow drumming and dancing, they presented tribal chairman Luke Duncan with a formal invitation and an airplane ticket to an Olympic meeting in Japan. After accepting, the Ute leadership thought further about its involvement in the Olympic plans. The snow created artificially for the Wasatch ski slopes left a gummy residue in the eastward flow of air, a residue that fell on reservation lands. The profits the games gen- erated would mainly enrich the cities of the Wasatch Front. Also, the glory of hosting the international games would bless the descendants of the intruders who had pushed their way west, demolished many native cultures, and established their own way of life. The Utes returned the airplane ti~ket.~ For a number of years, however, the Utes participated in the July 24th parade, sending a delegation from the reservation to file below Brigham's hand and sometimes win a prize. Ute history, too, was mixed by human impulses. In 1994, when the Days of '47 pro-claimed its welcome to the world, the parade entries represented people of many races and cultures along with the usual floats cele-brating pioneer settlement. In a sense the world already lived in Salt Lake County and always had, if the term indicated people who were not defined by a century's majority. The heritage of the present Indian tribes included the Fremont, the Desert Gatherers, and peoples alive in unrecorded time. African-Americans had been among early explorers and had arrived, free and slave, with the first Mormon wagons. The fast-growing city had fast attracted business, and with non-Mormon merchants came families and then clergy, hoping to augment, oppose, or convert the Mormons. The railroads fed communities such as Little Syria, Greektown, Japanese Town, and Chinatown's Plum Alley. Sports, recreation, holidays, and the arts all encouraged mingling between peoples; by the 1990s festivals displayed a range of talent and tradi-tion that helped to compensate for small minority communities. As Salt Lake County approached its sesquicentennial, it set about redefining, through its Olympic bid, its colorful, conflicted, and unique identity. While the focus lay on recreation and celebration, the effort required solving old problems and dealing with longstand-ing conflicts as well. Even as the valley pushed confidently into a new century, it reenacted certain elements of its past, for its common legacy encompassed desperation and triumph, conflict and change, optimism and conservatism. Perhaps the Mormon pioneers could not have chosen a better geographical setting than the Salt Lake Valley. They were not the first to marvel at its potential or its contradictions. Viewed from any From the earliest sightings, the Great Salt Lake captivated and mystified explorers, swimmers, and sailors, and frustrated those who tried to tame or exploit its power. The Municipal Boat Harbor is pictured here ca. 1940. (Utah State Historical Society) canyon overlook, the vista was breathtaking. To the east, the Wasatch Range rose precipitously, with canyon streams lacing the semiarid but fertile valley below. To the west, the Oquirrh Range, thickly forested, had been named by Paiutes as they watched the "shining mountains" catch the first morning rays? The Utes called the valley a grasslands area; although early Mormon historians later painted it a barren desert, it abounded with plant and animal life and had long sup-ported humans. In fact, the valley-approximately twenty miles at its widest by forty miles at its longest-rested on the sands of an ancient sea, bisected by the Wasatch Fault. Yet on this geologically shaky ground, the Mormons would construct the intended Kingdom of God. Feeling themselves loyal and wronged Americans, the colonists had entered Mexican Territory, which, in 1848, was ceded to the United state^.^ The Great Salt Lake delighted, mystified, and defeated human visitors. Roughly seventy-five miles long and fifty miles wide, its heavy waters hosted no life but algae and brine shrimp; yet numer-ous species of bird and waterfowl swarmed its marshes. Deer, ante-lope, and other animals populated its islands, inspiring Indians to swim over and hunt. The salty waters glittered in the sun, mirrored vivid sunsets, warmed cold airflows-encouraging clouds to unload their moisture-and unleashed mighty waves when stirred by the wind. Human settlement, mining, and recreation would affect the lake only slightly. Its shallows determined its borders in a rhythm that eluded human ken. Repeatedly it rose and swept away piers and resorts, or retreated and left miles of stinking mud in its wake.'' The lake's power and majesty bespoke its heritage as the child of the legendary Lake Bonneville, which once covered 20,000 square miles in what are now Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. For centuries, more than one thousand feet of water had surged over what became the Salt Lake Valley. Yet even Lake Bonneville had not appeared until rel-atively late in the geological drama. The earliest dated rocks extended back two billion years before Lake Bonneville swelled over the west-ern continent, and the rocks held hints of Earth's oldest secrets." One billion years before human reckoning, the precursor to the Pacific Ocean had lapped against a shore that would become the Great Basin. Then 400 to 500 million years ago, small marine life teemed in this shallow sea, including fish, clams, sponges, and snails. Had a scientist lived then to draw an imaginary line and call it an equator, it likely would have crossed these warm waters due to the slow drift of entire continents. This era extended over more than 500 million years. Then, over several million years more, mountains rose above the waves, and dinosaurs roamed the swampy flatlands, leaving a history of bone in the mud. Later still, about 50 million years ago, huge upheavals created the Uinta Mountains and the Uinta Basin to the east; still later, the Colorado River began cutting its way through the plateau. Relatively late in the complicated faulting of the Utah thrust, which occurred 140 to 50 million years back, the Wasatch Range appeared. By then-about 10 to 15 million years ago-Lake Bonneville lay enclosed by the Greater Salt Lake Basin. As mountains shifted and faults developed, volcanoes left a legacy of mineral wealth. About 10 million years ago, the recognizable outline of the Great Basin began to appear as earthquakes, and the resultant faults, zip-ping between huge blocks of earth, began to form its topography. At 800,000 B.c., the Ice Age saw glaciers creep from the north, possibly accompanied by wet weather. Throughout, Lake Bonneville etched its varying height in benchmarks along the eastern foothills. Little Cottonwood Canyon to the south was scooped into being as ice mountains crashed toward the lake. By 100,000 B.c., the glaciers had retreated, and by 12,000 B.c., Lake Bonneville was shrinking. Before long, in geological time, humans hunted the meadows and forests for large mammals includ-ing the mastodon and mammoth, the camel, musk ox, and horse. Clovis and Folsom spear points would be named by anthropologists centuries later when they deemed these the first people known to have roamed the continent. As the wet period continued, the great beasts and even the camels and horses died off; scientists would debate whether Clovis man had overhunted the mammals to extinc-tion or, more likely, whether the environmental shifts challenged the large mammals beyond their capacity to adapt. Smaller mammals survived, and grasses offered their seeds and bushes their berries to humans. The forces of nature continued to engrave the mountain ranges and shift the level of the lake. When the waters fell, the caves the lake had carved along its shores sheltered people who then left their own record in the land. The modern tribes of the Great Basin regarded earlier peoples and their ways on an ancestral continuum as direct as the white set-tlers viewed the Magna Carta. The Desert Gatherers, who lived con-temporaneously with the Basket Maker culture to the south, traversed the canyons, plateaus, and valleys subsisting on nuts, berries, insects, and small animals. Their skills were continued by the populous Fremont culture that followed; the Fremont displayed a remarkable versatility in adapting fully to a varied environment that included semiarid desert, canyons, marshes, and meadows. So adaptable and versatile were the Fremont, in fact, that they would raise more questions for scientists than the artifacts they left behind could answer. Some were farmers, others nomads; or perhaps groups simply moved from one climate and region to another. The people who left behind clay pipes, animal snares, cattail mats, bone harpoon tips, corrugated pots, and horned figurines decked with feathers elude a strict definition. Fremont, in fact, became "a generic label for a people who, like the land in which they lived, are not eas-ily described or ~lassified."T'~h ey gleaned the varied harvest available to a people willing to move and adapt. The banks of the Jordan River, its delta at the Great Salt Lake, and the surrounding wetlands offered the Fremont fish, waterfowl, and numerous plants including pickleweed, bulrush, mustard, prickly pear, elderberry, and serviceberry. The Fremont carried and stored these and other supplies in woven baskets and clay pottery. The people not only gathered flora but snared rabbits and hunted ante-lope, deer, and bison as well. Not only did they take advantage of the caves beside the great lake, but they built shallow pithouses or pole and brush huts. Their bone knives and needles were finely wrought, and they left behind grinding stones and other tools as well as gaming pieces, figurines, and polished stone balls that hinted at unknown sports and rituals. A characteristic gray pottery came to identify the Fremont, though it, too, varied. These people were also known for their one-rod- and-bundle baskets as well as moccasins constructed from a deer hock or mountain sheep leg.13 When scientists unearthed the artifacts of the Fremont, they found those of a people they named Promontory lying closer to the surface and intermingling, somewhat, with shards that indicated a Pueblo-like culture. The Fremont and the Anasazi in the pueblos to the south were known to share certain traits, though the Anasazi favored larger social groups and systems. Perhaps the Promontory bison hunters displaced or dispersed the Pueblo-like culture. Perhaps the Fremont blended into other existing groups. Perhaps scientists' need to categorize and classify simply did not fit the adaptability of the early peoples.'* More definable and closer to sunlight in those caves lay evidence of the Shoshonean tribes of the Great Basin, linked to one another by lan-guage and kinship. Leaders and healers representing Shoshonean tribes would join anthropologists in the early 1990s in seeking to protect the burials that were becoming exposed at the edge of the shifting Great Salt Lake. Whether the remains had been Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Ute, or their predecessors made no difference; these burials must be respected and guarded by the descendants.15 Not only did the tribal leaders and healers address lawmakers about the need to protect these burials physically-a task the anthro-pologists also supported-but they also emphasized the need to administer to them spiritually in laying them once again to rest. In 1993 the legislators funded $60,000 for an Indian burial repository to contain those remains, located at This is the Place State Park at the mouth of Emigration Canyon.16 The parley in the capitol between lawmakers and tribal leaders echoed many such encounters. Although the intermountain tribes were affected later than many by the Spanish and mountain men, by the nineteenth century such incursions became numerous from a rel-atively new group-Americans who envisioned their land as span-ning a continent. These were not explorers who would travel through or trappers who would do business, but armies that galloped beneath a striped banner and wagon trains that unloaded people intent on changing everything. The Utes were the first affected among the Shoshonean tribes. "To the European intruders, the Ute land seemed very large," wrote a modern Ute historian. "To the People of the Ute bands, the land was sufficient."17 The Ute tradition held no migration story, for their identifica-tion with the land was infinite. Ute homeland extended over most of what would become Utah and Colorado, dipping into northern Arizona and northern New Mexico. The Utes had occupied this area since being named the Noochee, or the People, by their creator. "Of the people remaining . . . Senawahv said, 'This small tribe of people shall be Ute, but they will be very brave and able to defeat the rest.""* The Utes did not occupy their land in a permanent sense, but moved through it in extended family groups called bands, who found it largely unnecessary to demand yield from the soil. They followed a food supply that changed with the seasons; they sought sanctuary from both winter's cold and summer's heat, worshiped at sacred sites, The Utes lived in extended family units called bands, migrating through the Rocky Mountain region with the seasons, mingling with and sometimes raiding other tribes, and gathering for business and social reasons. (LDS Church Archives) found refuge from raiding neighbors, and met in traditional areas for interband or intertribal councils and ceremonies. Yet they did not consider the land unoccupied or available in the way that settlers, who by definition stayed put, owned the land and made it produce later would. To the contrary, the Utes considered this land their home. The Utes, like other Shoshonean tribes, were gatherers, fishers, and small game hunters, according to the migration pattern of each band. They built willow screens and tied them to cottonwood poles stuck in muddy river banks, then scooped up the fish that swam into the skein. In spring, "as hundreds of birds began to blacken the sky, women knew the gathering season had begun. Families would leave their winter villages and go out into moist hills and desert valleys."19 Brush and willow houses were built for summer, for breezes provided natural air conditioning; yet the homes could be quickly warmed by a fire built just outside. Berries, seeds, barks, grasses, and even cactus leaves were dried and cached in storage pits for winter along with rabbit skin cordage for making blankets. The Utes also hunted deer and elk and sometimes buffalo, and their sojourns through the Rockies exposed them to the ways of plains tribes. Hides were stretched into tipis; after a successful fall hunt, dried game was stacked on the willow racks at the top of the tipis, just below the adjustable smoke flaps. Explorers had contact with the Utes as early as 1550, and word of these strangers may have spread to the bands in northern Utah. A greater impact on Ute culture during these centuries, however, came from the Spanish priests and colonists ruling the pueblos in north-ern New Mexico. Ute children who became servants in Spanish homes were sometimes allowed to return to their people as adults, providing friendly contacts for the Spanish and bringing with them new skills and customs. In 1638 eight Utacas were captured and forced to labor in work-shops in Santa Fe. As Ute slaves became weavers and tanners, new techniques infiltrated their own culture. Most important, from the Ute point of view, they gained access to the Spanish colonists' horses. In 1680 the Pueblo Revolt ousted the Spanish from the area for a dozen years. Ute slaves and servants were freed, and Spanish horses became available in large numbers to southern bands and tribes; as a prime item for trading and raiding, the horse spread to tribes and bands farther north.*O The desire of the Spanish for Indian servants and slaves brought another impact, for it provided an outlet for an intertribal slave mar-ket. The mounted and business-oriented Utes became notorious for stealing the children of the unmounted Paiutes and Goshutes. The captives were not always sold to the Spanish, but sometimes they were brought to Ute camps where they and their descendants were gradually absorbed into the band. By the late sixteenth century and during the seventeenth, the Northern Utes were a power in the West. Their horses sped them to the plains where they traded with, learned from, and competed with the Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, Pawnee, and Sioux tribes.*' Then in 1776 even as the thirteen colonies on the far side of the continent declared their independence from England, Ute guides led to the Great Basin two of the colonizing Spaniards, fathers Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, and a dozen followers. This expedition was fueled by high ambitions-to open a commercial trail to California from tenured Santa Fe and to establish Indian missions. As far as the Gunnison River, the priests followed the journal of Don Juan Rivera who had made the trek eleven years earlier. Then their guides, whom they named Silvestre and Joaquin, led them along Indian trails north to Utah Lake." There they met the Tumpanawach band, a "powerful force in the area in terms of numbers and organi-ati ion."'^ Living at the lake's edge, the Tumpanawach had an ample food supply readily available. Their affable community charmed the padres, who listened to their hosts' tales of another band which lived near a great salt sea to the north. Escalante recorded, "The other lake . . . covers many leagues, and its waters are noxious and extremely salty." The Tumpawanach assured their guests that "a person who moistens any part of his body with the water of the lake immediately feels much itching in the part that is wet."'* The Tumpawanach also described Puaguampe, or "witch doctors," who lived near the lake, spoke the "Cumanche" language, lived on herbs, and were considered friendly to the Tumpanawach-but with the caveat that they had killed one man. The Utes may have been describing an actual band or a separate tribe, or they may have been teasing their wide-eyed guests and ingratiating themselves. In any event, the priests decided not to view the salty sea. Instead they left, promising to send other padres who would live among the Tumpanawach and teach them to farm. A century later, the descendants of the Tumpanawach, then known as the Timpanogos Utes, rode into Great Salt Lake City and suggested that the Mormon leaders fulfill that promise. Despite the intentions of the Catholic priests, no missions were established so far north. Politics were changing dramatically with a revolt from Spain in 182 1 and the establishment of Mexico. With this development, "the lands of the Ute People were opened to the fur trade," a Ute historian explained, adding, "initially, the Ute People were also able to take advantage of the intruders who came into Ute territory in search of furs. . . ."25 Simultaneously with the upheavals to the south, other explorers were entering the Great Basin, including African-American fur traders James P. Beckwourth and Jacob Dobson. Louis Vasquez, Etienne Provost, and Jim Bridger were separately credited with "dis-covering" the Great Salt Lake in the 1 8 2 0 ~N.o~n~e of these early explorers recorded a band of witching Indians on the lake's shores. Throughout the years from the 1820s through the 1840s, explo-ration, surveying, and mapping of the Great Basin continued with maps and descriptions circulating widely. In 1826 Jedediah Smith launched his first exploration from the annual mountain men's ren-dezvous on the Green River and directed a party of fifteen men through the Salt Lake Valley, continuing southward. By the time the group returned, they had made a wide, arduous circle and crossed the salt flats west of the lake.27 In the 1840s Kit Carson and John C. Fremont were among those exploring the Great Basin. Carson found the lake a disappointment. He carved a large cross in stone on Disappointment Island, later renamed for Fremont. In these decades, however, the Old Spanish Trail being cut to the south was more significant to the indigenous peoples than the non- Indian forays into the Great Basin. The Ute bands observed the trail from various vantage points. When it opened in 1829, they saw it as a highway bringing business, for it crossed the lands of the Kapota, Weeminuche, Tumpanawach, and Pah Vant bands. By 1830 the Utes were charging wagon trains a tribute, and Wakara, leader of the Tumpanawach, was gaining a reputation and becoming wealthy.28 Throughout the 1830s the Utes kept up a brisk trade with the travel-ers; their animal pelts secured blankets, weapons and ammunition, utensils, and trinkets. But the newcomers left their mark just as Carson had in the stone, for they mapped and publicized the routes, raided for buffalo and other game, and erected trading forts. The forts centralized the growing relations between the Americans and the Utes. They offered the native people liquor and vice as well as trade and exposed them to diseases to which they had no immunity. Also, the Utes grew increasingly dependent on the con-venient utensils and goods available to them at the forts and expected a steady business flow. Thus when beaver hats went out of style and the market crashed, they could not understand why their pelts were turned away. In 1844 they expressed their frustration by burning sev-eral trading forts in eastern Utah.29 Still, explorers, surveyors, trappers, and traders had far less impact than would those for whom they opened the way. The routes they discovered, the roads that opened, and the maps and reports depicting adventure and lush, open country found an eager audience in the states. Soon followed "the people who stayed. These were the people who wanted the land of the Utes for themsel~es."~~ While Wakara (anglicized to Walker) and the mounted Utes received a vivid press in the United States, the native peoples encoun-tered most often by immigrants through and to the Great Basin were the unmounted tribes-the Paiutes, Goshutes, and Shoshones. Long before the years of settlement, these bands centered life around the nutritious nut of the pinon pine which blanketed much of the Intermountain West. As with the Utes, the Paiute culture was spiritually based. The first day's harvest was preceded by a dance beginning at sunset and continuing through the night. "A wise elder, a woman, exorcised any lingering ghosts, then scattered the nuts over the ground . . . ,>> demonstrating gratitude for nature's abundance. "As dancers slowly revolved around the campfire in shuffling steps, they sang in grati-tude."" Hunters as well as gatherers, Paiutes drove jackrabbits into long nets made of twisted fiber cordage, then clubbed them. While the meat roasted, the skins were cut into continuous lengths which were Bands of Paiutes inhabited much of what became Utah and Nevada, migrat-ing with the seasons, gathering pinon nuts and hunting rabbits and other small game. This group shows the effects of acculturation as its poses for an early photographer. (LDS Church Archives) then twirled into furry strands. These ribbons were woven into robes and blankets. Even mice were skinned for cordage; one blanket, dis-covered in 1924, had been woven from the skins of six hundred meadow mice and remained in perfect shape decades later.32 The early encounters between the Shoshonean peoples and the white immigrants engendered fear on both sides. In one area of the West and then another, various bands and then entire tribes were using guerilla warfare to resist the incursions into their homelands and the disruptions of their lifeways. Atrocities occurred on both sides and were much reported. Those who journeyed west to build new homes felt both justified and vulnerable in their quest; the native peoples felt not only outrage at the invasion but a profound disori-entation. Although the whites' fear of the mounted tribes prompted respect, they derided the unmounted Paiutes, Goshutes, and Shoshones as "Diggers," so called for their custom of digging with sticks for roots, a main component of their diet. Journals of the day referred to them as "wretched, degraded, and despicable" people, invisible by day but emerging at night to steal food and livestock. When the travelers "heard a suspicious noise, they shot in the direc-tion of its source, and at dawn they often found a dead Indian lying nearby." Since the body might belong to a man, woman, child, or elder, "the travelers' stories circulated this information as proof that all 'Diggers' were skulking thieves, no matter what age or sex."33 One Murray settler, Gottlieb Berger, recalled that his father had moved two wagons of household goods plus cows and oxens to the Salt Lake Valley. The heavily loaded wagons laboring along rough trails became stuck easily, and the immigrants threw items over-board. Berger recalled hearing that his father cast aside four or five hundred pounds of sea biscuits. "It was only a little while until the Indians had gathered them all up. No one had realized that the Indians were near, but just as soon as the biscuits were thrown out, squaws appeared from all sides."34 These bands, nearing starvation as their migration patterns were disrupted, must have viewed the wagon trains as a fearsome bonanza. Unlike the Utes (or the Mormons confronting the goldseekers a few years later), they were in no position to do business. Some of the bolder youngsters, "who naturally blamed the intruders for overrun-ning and destroying their food-gathering grounds and polluting their waterholes, saw no wrong in helping themselves to one or two of the emigrants' cows. . . ."35 This, of course, was unacceptable to the cows' owners, and the Indians "lived in mortal dread of the stream of trigger-happy white travelers who shot at them as if they were rabbit^."'^ The trails that first opened for westward caravans in the vicinity of the Great Basin were intended to go through not to the Salt Lake Valley. The first required squeezing through the nearly impassable Weber gorge to the north of the Salt Lake Valley. In 1846 several groups tried a southern route into the valley, traveling around the tip of the salty lake and continuing west. Regardless of the route taken, the first glimpse of the valley and the salt sea was frequently recorded in glowing terms. One traveler, Heinrich Lienhard, wrote: The land extends from the mountains down to the lake in a splended inclined plane broken only by the fresh water running down from ever-flowing springs above. The soil is rich, deep black sand composition doubtless capable of producing good crops. The clear, sky-blue surface of the lake, the warm sunny air, the nearby high mountains, with the beautiful country at their foot, . . . made on my spirits an extraordinarily charming impresion. The whole day long I felt like singing and whistling, and had there been a single family of white men to be found living here, I believe that I would have remained. . . . . . . The morning was so delightfully warm and the absolutely clear water so inviting that we soon resolved to take a salt water bath. The beach glistened . . . and on the shore we could see the still fresh tracks of a bear, notwithstanding which we soon had undressed and were going down into the salty water. We had, however, to go out not less than half a mile before the water reached our hips. Even here it was still so transparent we could see the bottom. . . .37 The last train through the valley in 1846 held the most signifi-cance for the Mormon settlers who would enter the valley the fol-lowing year. The Donner Party found Parley's Canyon impassable and so stopped to climb Little Mountain and cut a road through the heavy brush in what became known as Emigration Canyon. By the time these travelers emerged into the valley, they were weeks behind schedule. Unknowingly, they had eased the way for the next year's Mormon emigrants, but their delay would bring them a horror of exposure, starvation, and cannibalism when autumn snows trapped the company in the Sierra Mountains to the west. Indeed, the Mormon pioneers and others who made the west- ward trek felt indebted to the explorers, traders, map-makers, and emigrants who preceded them into what they considered a danger-ous but inspired adventure. Unlike most pioneers, the Mormons moved west as a people, a dispossessed city, a devout religious group. Their last attempt at building the Kingdom of God had established Nauvoo, the second largest city in Illinois, boasting a population of ten thousand people.'" The Mormons built Nauvoo after troubles with their neighbors had forced them from Kirtland, Ohio, the site of their first temple and after a miserable experience in Missouri. They were not the only group in nineteenth-century America to find it simpler to relocate than to try to reconcile differing beliefs and customs with others. Civil liberties were undeveloped in the United States courts or in the public tolerance. Freedoms designated in the Bill of Rights were ideals that protected few who differed significantly from the national norms. More than any other place in their pressured migration west-ward, Nauvoo had encompassed the Mormon dream of a refuge both godly and powerful. Its politics, press, finance, and culture all were synchronized and directed by church leadership. That very solidarity ultimately reduced Nauvoo to ashes and its people to refugees, for it translated to outsiders as an undemocratic and cultist threat. The communal lifestyle and religious dependence on a prophet led to bloc voting, a private militia, and alarming rumors (essentially true, though officially denied) of polygyny, the taking of more than one wife. When the Mormons settled beyond the Rockies, they brought the same beliefs and intentions they had defended in Nauvoo, deter-mined to try again. Plural marriage, commonly called polygamy, was acknowledged shortly after the Saints reached the far side of the Rockies and was practiced mainly among the lay priesthood leader-ship. Though their church was less than two decades old, the Mormons entering the Salt Lake Valley carried a legacy of mob vio-lence, rape, and bloodshed. As Mormon historian B. H. Roberts described one scene in Missouri: The mob was now let loose upon the unarmed citizens of Far West, and under the pretext of searching for arms they ransacked every house . . . destroyed much property, and shot down a num-ber of cattle, just for the sport it afforded them. The people were robbed of their most valuable property, insulted and whipped; but this was not the worst. The chastity of a number of women was defiled by force; some of them were strapped to benches and repeatedly ravished by brutes in human form until they died from the effects of this treatment.39 Eventually the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, Jr., had been assassinated. During the years when trappers and explorers delved into what would later be dubbed "Mormon country," this uniquely American religion had been developing a continent away. In 1830 Joseph Smith, Jr., known roundabout for his accounts of visionary experiences and the publishing of the Book of Mormon, founded a six-member church in Harmony, Pennsylvania. Like many of his neighbors, Smith was fascinated by the Indian burial mounds common in the East, which contained artifacts. Smith said he translated the Book of Mormon from divinely-received gold plates that bore a record of ancient cultures whose descendants included the American Indians. In the Book of Mormon and his later scriptural writings, Smith essentially re-visioned the Christian tradition and placed it in the New World. His interpretation of the Bible led him to reinstate the Old Testament practice of polygamy. By then Smith had been hailed as a prophet by a rapidly growing congregation, and he laid revela-tion as the church's cornerstone. Spurned by established Christian denominations, the Mormons quickly saw themselves as a modern chosen people. They needed a promised land in which to build a "new Jerusalem" and prepare for Christ's second coming, which they felt was imminent. That vision not only attracted certain Americans but also appealed to many Europeans in the crowded and polluted cities of the nineteenth cen-tury. Charismatic, energetic, and sometimes poetic, Smith reached his apex in Nauvoo. Not only did he serve as mayor and general of the Nauvoo Legion, but he declared himself a presidential candidate. As his influence grew and the Mormons' earlier troubles in Ohio and Missouri caught up with them, Smith was jailed on various unproven offenses and finally charged with treason. On 27 June 1844, he and his brother Hyrum were shot to death when a mob attacked the Carthage Jail where they and other church leaders were being held. Joseph Smith's death in his prime predictably left the Mormons in disarray and caused schisms within the fold. His legal wife, Emma Hale Smith, eschewed and denied the practice of plural marriage. She and others claimed her young son as his father's rightful successor. They returned to Kirtland." Ultimately Brigham Young, president of the Council of Twelve Apostles, led the largest body of the Saints west, where he would be officially named church president. Hyrum Smith's widow Mary Fielding Smith made the trek, and her progeny would become prominent in the leadership of the "Utah church." As Smith's close associate and great admirer, Brigham Young embodied this eventful and difficult past when he roused himself from his wagon sickbed for a look at the Salt Lake Valley. Within days he and his counselors climbed a peak north of the future city and, inspired by the sight that lay before them, raised a banner. Tradition held that this was the Stars and Stripes, but actually a handy yellow handkerchief with black polka dots was waved to express that initial impulse, then replaced by the American flag and due ceremony. When the Stars and Stripes did rise above the valley, so did a second flag-the flag of Zion, the banner of the Kingdom of God." The church leaders established a site for the temple, designated natural resources as common property, laid out the city on a stan-dard grid they called the plat of the City of Zion, and gradually dis-tributed untitled land. Within four months, nearly 1,700 people lived in the valley, and by its first anniversary the population stood at nearly five thousand, twice the number needed for urban status.42 The land, of course, was at issue first and last-this grassy cross-roads, banked by mountains beside a salty sea that lapped at caves and their ancient secrets. Even as differences arose between native peoples and the colonists, between the federal government and the Mormons, between those who chose to live in the city or homestead south of it, between longtime residents and newcomers, the land began to have its way with the people. Wagon trains transported colonists to western states prior to the transcon-tinental railroad. The Perpetual Emigrating Fund shepherded thousands of European immigrants, who converted to Mormonism, into the valley. (LDS Church Archives) Like the Indian bands, the colonists settled near the waterways but diverted them to serve agricultural needs. They sought refuge from summer's heat in the nearby canyons and "forted up" in close quarters for the snowy winters. In desperation some of them, too, became "diggers," surviving for a time on the roots the Paiutes, Goshutes, and Shoshones taught them were edible. Like Wakara and other Ute chiefs along the Old Spanish Trail, Brigham Young would exact a toll on main thoroughfares. Like native peoples, the Mormons believed the land was theirs-but to subdue not to traverse-and felt they had been chosen to live on it by their creator. Interestingly, as the Mormon leaders designed the State of Deseret, they drew a circle beyond the valley as far-reaching as the lands the Utes claimed, though including less of Colorado and extending toward the west coast. Had Congress given the nod, Deseret would have become the largest state in the Union and likely would have flown two flags-the Star Spangled Banner and the flag of Zion. That proposition, however, was highly unrealistic and did not occur. The future of the Salt Lake Valley with all its conflicts and tri-umphs waited to unfold. Crossroads it had been and remained; cen-ter it fast became; but its destiny as a capital county would be hard won. And long before the valley posted an official welcome, the world would begin to come. 1. Dale L. Morgan, "Salt Lake City, City of the Saints," in Ray B. West, ed., Rocky Mountain Cities (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1949), 187. 2. This term was coined and applied to Salt Lake City, among others, by historian Gunthar Barth. 3. Population Profiles of Utah Counties, Mountain States and United States: 1990 (Logan: Population Research Laboratory, Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology, Utah State University). 4. U.S.A. Counties, compact disk (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census Data Users Services Division, 1994). County minority ratios are computed by city and area for Salt Lake County by Anne Mathews and Lili Wright, Salt Lake Tribune, 20 March 1994. 5. Arthur K. Smith, who became president September 1, 199 1, was not technically the first non-Mormon, for Joseph T. Kingsbury (1897-1916) considered himself non-Mormon. However, Kingbury's close ties to LDS leaders identified his administration closely with the church. Other presi-dents were attracted from posts outside Utah but were LDS. 6. Morgan. "Salt Lake City," 187. 7. Author's observation of the Uintah-Ouray powwow (Fort Duchesne, July 199 1). Follow-up interview with Larry Cesspooch, director of public relations and media, Ute Tribe (Salt Lake City, March 1992). 8. Lynn R. Bailey, Old Reliable: A History of Bingham Canyon, Utah (Tucson, Arizona: Westernlore Press, 1988), 1 1. 9.One-third of Mexican Territory became the southwest sector of the present United States following the Mexican War (which began in 1846) and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. This area's population was estimated at 250,000. 10. Vivid histories of the Great Salt Lake include Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), and Peter G. Czerny, The great Great Salt Lake (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1976). 1 1. For detailed geographical information, see Donald K. Grayson, The Desert's Past: A Natural History of the Great Basin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 68-69, or Jess D. Jennings, Prehistory of Utah and the Great Basin, University of Utah Anthropological Papers no. 98 (Salt Lake City, 1978), 3-4. 12. David B. Madsen, Exploring the Fremont (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Natural History Museum, 1989), 2. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Author's observation of legislative lobbying in State Capitol (Salt Lake City, 199 1). Steven R. Simms, "Native American Burials in the Great Salt Lake Marshes: Problems and Solutions" paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Utah Statewide Archaeological Society, Salt Lake City, 199 1. 16. Salt Lake Tribune, 24 April 1995. 17. Fred A. Conetah, A History of the Northern Ute People (Fort Duchesne, Utah: Uintah-Ouray Ute Tribe, 1982), 19. 18. Ibid., 2. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Ibid., 28-29. 2 1. Ibid., 30. 22. Herbert E. Bolton, Pageant in the Wilderness: The Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin, 1 776 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1972), and Fray Angelico Chavez, trans., Ted J. Warner, ed., The Dominguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition Through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995). 23. Conetah, Northern Ute People, 25. 24. Deseret, 1776-1 976: A Bicentennial Illustrated History of Utah by the Deseret News (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing Co., 1975), 13. 25. Conetah, Northern Ute People, 3 1. 26. Historians disagree on the lake's discoverer. Dale L. Morgan chal-lenges Louis Vasquez's claim in his The Great Salt Lake. Jack B. Tykal writes in Etienne Provost, Man of the Mountains (Liberty, Utah: Eagle's View Publishing, 1989) 49, that Provost "had a good claim" as "the discoverer of the lake from the American side of the fur trade, for it is quite possible that Donald MacKenzie of the British Northwest Company saw the lake while trapping the Snake and Bear Rivers in the years 18 18 to 1822." It is clear that by this era both European and Anglo-American explorers traversed the Great Basin and were familiar with the lake. 27. For a rich description, see Dale L. Morgan, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953). 28. Conetah, Northern Ute People, 33. 29. Ibid., 33-34. 30. Ibid., 35. 31. David Hurst Thomas, et al., eds. The Native Americans: An Illustrated History (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, Inc., 1993), 38. 32. Ibid., 38-39. 33. Ibid., introduction by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., 13. 34. Murray Bicentennial History Book Committee, The History of Murray City, Utah (Murray: Murray City Corporation, 1976), 456-57. 35. Thomas et al., The Native Americans, 14-16. 36. Ibid. 37. Quoted in J. Roderick Korns, ed., "The Journal of Heinrich Lienhard," in Utah Historical Quarterly 19 ( 195 1): 134, 139. This informa-tion is revised and updated by Will Bagley and Harold Schindler, eds., West from Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of the Immigrant Trails Across Utah, 1846-1 850 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994). 38. See James B. Allen and Glen Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), or Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), for detailed histories. 39. B.H. Roberts, The Missouri Persecutions (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1900), is quoted for modern readers in Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 126. 40. For a differing perspective, see Linda King Newel1 and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith (New York: Doubleday, 1984). 41. Ronald W. Walker, "A Gauge of the Times: Ensign Peak in the Twentieth Century," Utah Historical Quarterly 62 (Winter 1994): 5-1 0. 42. Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing Co., 1984), 2.