"TheVery Land Itself. . .
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PREHISTORY AND
RICHCOUNTY T h e history of Rich county, Utah, is two-fold. ~t is obviously the history of people-both Native American and later immigrants-their communities, social life, and customs, but tied closely to the people is the land itself. And the inhabitants of Rich County, in any given historic period, have come to identify strongly with their environment. The Shoshoni viewed Bear Lake Valley with the same sort of spiritual reverence that Randolph resident Mildred Hatch Thomson expressed nearly one-hundred years later. We greet "the morning sun," Thomson wrote, "over the tall peaks of the Crawford Mountain, its face . . . jagged and almost perpendicular . . . sparsely timbered with cedar and pine wears a purplish, blue hue.'" The history of human habitation is not much more than a blink of the eye when compared to the entirety of geologic history. For close to 500 million years, throughout the greater portion of Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods, Rich County was covered by an inland sea. Rich County occupied part of what geologists refer to as the "cordilleran geosyncline." This down-sloping area of North America allowed a great sea to encroach inland, leaving behind
