When Mormon pioneers trekked to the Great Basin in 1847, opening a new era of settlement in the land that was to become Utah, they were not coming to a country untouched by man.
The pioneering members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were only the most recent newcomers, laying their imprint atop thousands of years of human activity. Among those who preceded them:
The Indians
As many as 10,000 to 12,000 years before the birth of Jesus, Indians identified as the Desert Culture roamed the Great Basin. They were migratory people in constant search of game and edible seeds, generally traveling in groups of 15 to 30.
Skimpy remnants of their culture have been found, often in caves where they sought temporary lodging as they plied their continuous rounds. Such caves have been identified in several areas of Utah, and archaeologists have sifted some for evidence of how these prehistoric peoples lived.
In the period from 300 to 1300 A.D. a more advanced Indian civilization flourished in the eastern and southern portions of what became Utah. The Anasazi had mastered the rudiments of agriculture, which allowed them the luxury of settling in one location. In some Utah sites, their stone masonry buildings can still be seen, intriguing testaments to their ingenuity in coaxing a living from a challenging en-vironment.
The Anasazi and their contemporaries, the Fremont and Sevier Fremont cultures, left the Utah area abruptly in the late 1200s, possibly as the result of several years of drought.
When Europeans began to inhabit America's eastern shores, groups of the Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo nations occupied the Great Basin.
The meeting of whites and Indians was a historic collision that could only end in the destruction of the Indian lifestyle.
The Spanish
In the 1770s, alarmed by the southward migration of the Russians out of Alaska, territorial claims by the English and increasing encroachment by westering Ameri-cans, Spain determined it must do something to hold onto the vast territory it had claimed based on explorations dating from the 1500s.
Despite their claims, the Spaniards had been content essentially to neglect the Great Basin and the Pacific Coast, seeing little there to entice settlement. Cursory exploration of the lands west of the Rocky Mountains in the 1500s had resulted in little beyond giving the area a name - Teguayo.
But potential competition for the territory was a compelling spur to the Spaniards to take a second look. Leaders began to talk of a new missionary effort to spread Catholicism and establish settlements to cement their ownership.
Possibly the first written form of the word "Utah" was recorded by a Franciscan missionary, Father Geronimo de Zarate Salmeron, who phonetically interpreted it as Yuta, "as it came from the mouths of Indians."
One of the first activities undertaken by the Spanish in the Great Basin was a nefarious slave trade. The most peaceable and vulnerable of the Indian tribes, particularly the Paiutes, were raided for captives to be sold in Spanish settlements. Other Indians, including the Utes, who had by then acquired horses, found it lucrative to capture and sell humans. The practice continued into the mid-1800s, when Utah's ter-ritorial Legislature passed a law banning the slave trade.
In the 1700s, the Spaniards were intrigued by vague reports of a city to the north "so large that one cannot walk around it in eight days." It was reportedly ruled by a king "of such dignity and ostentation who neither looks or speaks to anyone, except very briefly, such is his severity."
Titillated by such myths and recognizing the inevitable colonization of California, the Spanish sought a land route between Santa Fe and Monterey.
On July 4, 1776, the date coinciding exactly with the break of American colonists with the English, two Franciscan friars set out under commission to search for a practical route.
Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante traversed much of present-day Utah and left journals providing excellent descriptions of the environment, terrain and native peoples they encountered.
A cartographer in their party of 14, Miera Y Pacheco, created a map showing 377 geophysical features and the boundaries of the various Indian nations.
On the shores of what became Utah Lake, which they prophetically predicted would be a good site for irrigation, the fathers taught their Christian religion to the Timpanogos Indians. They promised their converts that they would return to establish a mission. The Indians told them of another lake northward (Great Salt Lake), and the Spanish assumed a river flowed out of that lake westward to the ocean. Their map was proved wrong by later explorers who circumnavigated the inland sea and found no egress. But the myth of a water route that would carry travelers easily to the Pacific Ocean hung on for a long time.
Despite their promises to the Indians, Dominguez and Escalante never returned.
The glory days of Spain in the New World were coming to an end. Struggles within the Catholic Church and the gradual loss of Spain's claims in North America signaled the end of that country's influence. But the 158-day Dominguez-Escalante expedition had provided a bounty of useful information for later explorers.
Trappers and explorers
Beaver felt hats, the stylish thing for well-dressed Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, were significant to the opening of the western United States. As the waterways of the Pacific Northwest and farther north into Canada and Alaska were trapped out, the fur companies sent parties south to scout out new streams, including those in the Great Basin.
By the early 1800s, trappers from the noted British Hudson's Bay Company had plenty of competition from equally dedicated groups of Americans, French Canadians and Russians. Unwittingly, these hardy outdoorsmen scrapped for an industry that was about to die with the vagaries of fashion. But in the process, they scouted much of the American West and Northwest and prepared it for more lasting settlement.
With beaver pelts bringing $10 each in St. Louis, it was an exciting prospect for adventurous young men who felt too confined, even by frontier civilizations. They were eager to respond to ads such as that placed in the March 20, 1822, edition of the Missouri Republican of St. Louis by William H. Ashley: "The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years."
Among those thus enlisted were some of the most famous of the mountain men to leave their mark on Utah - Jedediah S. Smith, Jim Bridger, William L. and Milton G. Sublette, John H. Weber, Moses Harris and others.
One of the most notorious confrontations between British and American trappers occurred near Mountain Green on the Weber River. A British contingent led by Peter Skeen Ogden was camped at the site at the same time a group of American trappers was searching for pelts along the Wasatch Mountain range after having spent time in the Cache Valley. Members of the two groups met, and the Americans told some of the British trappers they could get better prices for their pelts by selling them to the Americans. The Americans plotted to attack Ogden's camp and rout the British trappers out of the area.
On May 23, 1825, a contingent of Americans, waving flags and headed by Johnson Gardner, confronted the British and told Ogden he was on American territory and must leave or be driven out. Ogden responded that the territory was jointly claimed by the United Kingdom and Mexico and that he did not intend to leave. But he stopped short of provoking actual hostilities. As some of the British trappers defected, there were two tense days of stand-off before Ogden decided it would be prudent to decamp for the Snake River. He lost 23 men with 700 pelts.
It was Jim Bridger who, on a bet, explored the Bear River to its emptying in the Great Salt Lake. He returned to the Cache camp to proclaim he had found a body of salt water, no doubt an arm of the Pacific Ocean. Four trappers in a bull boat later paddled around the lake and found no outlet, smashing his theory.
John Fremont, who further explored the Great Salt Lake on one of his historic expeditions for the U.S. government, boiled salt out of the water and killed several antelope on Antelope Island.
In a story titled "A Trapper's Christmas, 1840" in the November/December issue of Pioneer Magazine, LDS Church archivist Bill Slaughter recounts from the journal of Osborne Russell the Christmas season the trapper spent in the Ogden area. Camped on the Weaver (Weber) River, along with a party of Indians and French, Russell and others decided to prepare a Christmas feast. Seated cross-legged in the most spacious of the lodges, with a fire in the center, they ate venison, boiled flour pudding with dried fruit topped with four quarts of fruit sauce, cakes and strong coffee, the mountain man recorded. The principal topic of conversation was "the political affairs of the Rocky Mountains," relationships among tribes and the reputations of the most famous warriors and chiefs. After dinner, the squaws and children removed the remains of the meal and had a "sociable tete-a-tete" over the remains. Target shooting finished out the day.
Annual rendezvous continued for a time, but by 1840, the steam had gone from the fur trade, and the romantic era of mountain men ebbed away. But its legacy was a more detailed understanding of the West. The reports of such men as Jedediah Smith, who called the Salt Lake Valley his "second home," provided the information upon which pioneers relied. One historian bemoaned Smith's death on May 27, 1831, at 32, at the hands of a Comanche hunting party. The untimely death was a great loss to the ultimate settlement of the West because of the accuracy of his maps, the historian said.