Utah Centennial County History Series - Sevier County 1997

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SEVIER COUNTY Oouth-central Utah's Sevier County is a moderately populated county of 15,431, according to the 1990 U.S. Census. This ranks Sevier fourteenth in inhabitants out of twenty-nine counties in the state, just behind Summit County (15,518) and nearly three thousand people more than Duchesne (12,645) following.

Sevier County is part of a huge expanse. Like a great deal of Utah and the Intermountain West, it is an arid land. Anyone who has driven across modern-day Sevier County discerns its stern and demanding character. But at the same time the county offers a rough beauty which in many ways is moving and inspiring.

Eighteenth-century white explorers of the area helped create fantastic legends about the lands which they saw or had heard about.

The Spanish friars Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante traversed some of what is today is south-central Utah in 1776, reporting on "a combined lake [with] an outlet to the sea."1 Dominguez and Escalante's task was to find a route to California from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

They may have thought they had found just such a water-born 11