Text by Janell Tuttle photographs from the Utah State Historical Society Aerial of Alta and Snowbird Alta is nestled in the Wasatch Mountains of Little Cottonwood Canyon. When silver was discovered in 1864 people moved to the area and the area grew until the 1880s. At this time the value of silver declined and the population of the town decreased …
Coalville
Martha Sonntag Bradley Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 Summit County’s early history is largely defined by a trail. The road through Echo Canyon taken by a series of immigrant groups, some famous for the disasters that befell them, others for the success of their colonization efforts, became the line that drew history in this mountainous canyon to the northeast of the …
Utah’s “Ugly Duckling” Salt Flats
John Cobb’s Railton Special, 1947 Jessie Embry and Ron Shook Utah Historical Quarterly 65 Fall 1997 In the United States, the Bonneville Salt Flats had an inauspicious start as a racecourse. In 1896 travel promoter Bill Rishel crossed the flats while helping locate a coast-to-coast route for a bicycle race. He discovered the salt flats were not bicycle friendly as …
Utah State Historical Society
Glen M. Leonard Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 On 22 July 1897, in response to a call from Utah’s first state governor, twenty-seven citizens led by journalist-lawyer Jerrold Letcher organized the Utah Historical Society in Salt Lake City, with Franklin D. Richards as president and Letcher as recording secretary (1897–1915). Created on the fiftieth anniversary of Mormon arrival, the society set …
Draper Irrigation Canal
By Adam R. Eastman, PhD Excitement and optimism defined the local outlook in Salt Lake and Utah counties a century ago. New irrigation projects and cash crops combined with new processing plants and transportation infrastructure to create an agricultural boom in Utah. Bluffdale and the Jordan Narrows were at the epicenter of those developments. The Salt Lake and Utah electric …
History to Go
For over twenty years History to Go has been a rich source for Utah history, mined by teachers, students, researchers, and the public. We are pleased to report that History to Go now has a new online home under the banner of the Utah Historical Quarterly. All content is reorganized according to the latest scholarly thinking. Content is more …
Native Americans in Utah
David Rich Lewis Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 Long before Euro-Americans entered the Great Basin, substantial numbers of people lived within the present boundaries of Utah. Archaeological reconstructions suggest human habitation stretching back some 12,000 years. The earliest known inhabitants were members of what has been termed the Desert Archaic Culture—nomadic hunter-gatherers with developed basketry, flaked-stem stone tools, and implements of …
The Paleoindian Period
by Daron Duke, Ph.D. No one knows exactly when the first people arrived in Utah, but when they did, they saw a verdant and colorful version of what we know already to be a diverse and visually stunning landscape. They arrived near the end of a period of Earth’s history referred to by scientists as the Pleistocene, sometimes called the …
Shoshone Indians
Brigham D. Madsen Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 At the time of major white penetration of the Great Basin and the Snake River areas in the 1840s, there were seven distinct Shoshoni groups. The Eastern Shoshoni, numbering about 2,000 under their famous Chief Washakie, occupied the region from the Wind River Mountains to Fort Bridger and astride the Oregon Trail. Their …
Paiute Indians
Ronald L. Holt Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 The Southern Paiutes of Utah live in the southwestern corner of the state where the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau meet. The Southern Paiute language is one of the northern Numic branches of the large Uto-Aztecan language family. Most scholars agree that the Paiutes entered Utah about A.D. 1100-12. Historically, the largest …