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 …
The Great Depression
John S. McCormick, Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 Utah was among the states hit hardest by the Great Depression of the 1930s. That claim surprises many people, who assume, for various reasons, that it was spared the worst. A few statistics make the point. In 1933 Utah’s unemployment rate was 35.8 percent, the fourth highest in the nation, and for the …
New Deal Agencies Built 233 Buildings in Utah
Becky Bartholomew History Blazer, June 1996 The Great Depression hit Utah even harder than most other states. From 1932 to 1940 Utah’s unemployment rate averaged twenty-five percent. In 1933 it reached thirty-three percent. Only three other states suffered more severely. Because of this, federal relief efforts were especially intensive in Utah. Soon the state ranked ninth among the then forty-eight …
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 …
Uranium Mining in Utah
Raye C. Ringholz Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District near Denver, Colorado. The ore was researched for fabrication of steel alloys, chemical experimentation and as pigments for dyes, inks and …
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 …