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Lake Bonneville, its Name and History
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 26, 1958, No. 2
LAKE BONNEVILLE, ITS NAME AND HISTORY
By Rufus Wood Leigh
The first historical allusion to the Great Salt Lake is in the journal of the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition from Santa Fe in 1776. Their informants were Lake Utah Indians; but no member of the party came north actually to view the lake. It was recorded: ".. . its waters occupy many leagues, its waters are very harmful and very salty."
J Etienne Provot may have seen the lake as early as 1820.
Great Salt Lake was discovered by James Bridger late in 1824. He floated down the Bear River from the trappers' rendezvous in Willow (Cache) Valley in a bullboat to decide a wager relative to the place where the Bear debouches. He tasted the salty water of the Lake and reported his discovery upon his return to the rendezvous. It was then surmised that the salt water Bridger discovered was an arm of the Pacific Ocean.
In the spring of 1826 four of William Sublette's men, based at the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's rendezvous at the present site of Ogden, circumnavigated the Great Salt Lake in bullboats to determine any outlet and to make searching quests for new beaver streams. As a result of this exploration the myth concerning the connection of Bridger's "salt water" with the Pacific Ocean was dispelled.
Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, who had never seen the great salt sheet, and the account of whose travels was glamorized and published by Washington Irving in 1837, had the audacity to give Bridger's "salt water" his own name on revised maps of Madison and Gallatin. Bonneville's name did not adhere to the "salt water." However, Captain Bonneville was recompensed, posthumously, later in the century for this loss of desired fame.
John C. Fremont came north from the Rio Severo (Sevier River) into Utah Valley on May 24, 1844, and encamped on the bottoms of the Spanish Fork. Speaking of the Indian name of the principal affluent of Lake Utah, Timpanogo (Provo River), Fremont wrote: "It is probable that this river furnished the name which on the older maps has been generally applied to the Great Salt Lake; but for this I have preferred a name which will be regarded as highly characteristic, . . ." The distinctive qualities of the waters of this lake required and received a name truly descriptive, and it was John Charles Fremont who put the seal on the name on the maps, Great Salt Lake.
Captain B. L. E. Bonneville in his explorations and beaver pelt enterprises in the Northwest was more than once within sixty miles of Great Salt Lake while seeking beaver on the Malad River, but lacked sufficient interest to visit this phenomenal lake. He and his brilliant publicist, Washington Irving, deservedly failed in their attempt to give the lake his name. But Bonneville was a man of parts; his career during the trapper era was impressive; and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century his name was chosen by a great geologist for that of the immense extinct geologic lake of the Great Basin — Lake Bonneville. From this circumstance his name has currently become the mode in the Salt Lake Valley. Let us develop these historic elements.
THE TRAPPER ERA: 1820-1839
Into the vast Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest regions French-Canadian and American trappers and traders penetrated in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, primarily in pursuit of the pelts of the beaver. The economy dependent on this most interesting of Rocky Mountain fur-bearers was far-flung, ruthless, and lucrative. Beaver-inhabited streams were hunted for in this vast domain; when found, the beaver was trapped until extinct. Previously agreedupon temporary meeting places known as rendezvous were hives of activity at certain seasons for trappers, traders, and Indian associates. Here the trappers relinquished their stores of peltries and accepted therefor annual supplies for life in the mountains, including cheap whiskey for themselves and with which to debauch the helpless Indians. Rendezvous in Utah included: Brown's Hole on the Green, where the canyon widens to a small verdant bottom; Fort Du Chesne and Fort Rubedeau on the Uinta; Ogden's Hole on the Ogden River; another on or near the present site of Ogden; and those in Cache Valley, on the Malade, and on the upper Provot River. All these places are imprinted with personal and other names from the Trapper Era.
The trappers and factors of Hudson's Bay Company and later of the rival Northwest Company monopolized the tremendous Pacific Northwest and extended their suzerainty as far south as the Provot River and east to the Du Chesne and Uinta rivers in Utah.
The American fur trade was based at St. Louis. General William H. Ashley of that city was the pre-eminent leader of this economy on the Green, its tributaries, and the adjoining regions. His was the great name in the Utah valleys in the 1820's. Outstanding contemporary characters were James Bridger, Jedediah S. Smith, Peter Skene Ogden, William Sublette, and the famous voyageur, Etienne Provot — all of whom have given the region their names. Ashley put the stamp of his great personality on this decade, 1820-1830, as did Bonneville on the next, 1830-1839.
Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville was of French birth; he was a graduate of the United States Military Academy (1819) and a close friend of the Marquis de Lafayette. As a lieutenant in the United States Army he had been stationed at Indian outposts on the western frontier and had become enamored of the wilderness with its lure for fame and fortune, both of which definitely interested this young officer. In 1832 Captain Bonneville secured leave of absence from the army, ostensibly for exploration of the Far West, which the government encouraged; actually he was more interested in his private fortune. He was financed by New York friends and immediately undertook to get rich quickly by exploiting the fur trade. His exploits were on the upper Green, the Snake, the Salmon, and the Columbia rivers. He took geocraphic notes, redrew and adapted maps originally made by Madison and others of the inland mountain domain, and, although he had never seen fit to view the great salt sheet or explore it, applied his name to it on his revised maps of Great Salt Lake.
Grove K. Gilbert, geologist, in the Second Annual Report of the United States Geographical Surveys, 1874, writes: "Captain Bonneville, . . . traveling in the interest of the fur trade but with the spirit of exploration, took notes of geographic value (1833), which were put in shape and published after a lapse of some years by Washington Irving, and his map is probably the first which represents interior drainage."
It is true that Bonneville's lieutenant, Joseph R. Walker, with a detachment of rough men left him in 1833 at their rendezvous on the Snake and proceeded southwesterly. Walker skirted the northwest shore of the salt lake and continued on an historic exploration across northern Nevada. He entered the Humboldt River Valley a short distance east of the site of Elko; traversed the river to its outlet in the Sink; climbed the High Sierra northwest of Mono Lake; discovered Yosemite; then proceeded down the Merced into the San Joaquin Valley and on to Monterey, the seat of Mexican government in Alta California.
Thus, Walker certainly did not stay in the Salt Lake Basin to make any important observations, record notes, or sketch any maps of the lake shore, streams, or character of the terrain. When he left Captain Bonneville on the Snake, his association with the genial captain was permanently severed. Bonneville's later claim to vicarious exploration of the Great Salt Lake through his former associate was made after a lapse of several years; the claim was tenuous and undocumented. He did not relate to his gifted raconteur, Washington Irving, any directive to his supposed lieutenant, nor did he give the resultant details of Walker's exploration. Bonneville's claim, through Irving, of exploration of the Great Salt Lake by substitution must be viewed as Washington Irving literature, not as history. The cultivated Irving made Bonneville's claim of exploration of the Great Salt Lake Basin amply plausible, to the degree that forty years later the distinguished geologist, Grove Karl Gilbert, was unduly influenced by the narrative, for which there was no historical validity.
The definitive documentation of the naming of Lake Bonneville by Grove Karl Gilbert is as follows. Gilbert and Howell were geologists with the Wheeler Survey west of the one hundredth meridian in 1872, and in the published report of the survey Gilbert writes:
* Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (.New York, 1837, 1850).
Captain Bonneville was not scientific, as was Captain Fremont in the next decade, and his wanderings in the wilderness did not bring forth any new geographic facts of note. His proceeds from the fur trade were mediocre, due in a measure to the ruthless competition of the British interests in the Northwest. He failed to submit reports to his army superiors and overstayed his leave, with the result that his name was removed from the army rosters. Recent historical writers have attempted to rationalize the facts of Bonneville's long absence from the army, his removal from the officers' list, and his later reimbursement for emoluments lost during his stay in the wilderness, as indicative of his real mission in the disputed Oregon country — namely, as a covert agent of the Washington government. Bonneville's procedures, objectives, results, and the chronology of events do not warrant this assumption. His career in the disputed Oregon Territory cannot be compared with explorations in Mexican Territory by Fremont in the next decade, who received almost open subsidies from the government.
"Non-the-less," says one writer, "he [Bonneville] gave the seal to the fourth decade of the century in breaking the unknown areas, as Ashley had to the third, and after him, as Fremont to the fifth." Bonneville demonstrated much adroitness and self-sufficiency.in traversing the virgin land; he was popular with his followers and was a most successful conciliator of the Indians. Following his exploits on the Snake- Columbia drainage during the fourth decade, he received more glamorous publicity than any trapper, trader or explorer. As has been stated, without much effort of his own Captain Bonneville won acclaim through his raconteur, the famed writer Washington Irving. The explorer's notes and maps, after a lapse of several years, were edited by Irving, whose publication, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West, made for the captain a name with which to conjure. Bonneville's modified map of the Great Salt Lake indicating interior drainage, a basin, was the first to be published, but it remained for Fremont in the next decade to give to the world a clear concept of the Great Basin. Hiram Chittenden, historian of the American fur trade, says of the genial captain: "After all it will not be far wrong to say that the greatest service which Captain Bonneville rendered his country was by falling into the hands of Washington Irving." By extension, the present writer adds — and posthumously into the arms of the learned geologist, Grove K. Gilbert, nearly a halfcentury later.
As mentioned above, although Bonneville (and Irving) failed to impart his name to the great salt sheet in the Great Basin, it was perpetuated as the name of Great Salt Lake's predecessor lake of the Ice Age by the eminent government geologist of the area, Grove Karl Gilbert, in 1875. Gilbert's monograph on the Pleistocene Lake Bonneville is the authoritative classic on the subject.
PLEISTOCENE LAKES OF THE GREAT BASIN
In some semiarid regions not covered by the ice sheet, the climate of the Pleistocene, or Glacial Epoch, seems to have been more moist than at present and before glacial times. This fact is brought out by a study of the Great Basin. Great Salt Lake is a remnant of a Pleistocene lake which was many times larger. This fossil, or geologic, lake extended westward from the base of the Wasatch Mountains, covered all of Utah west of the present lake, or the region known as the Great Salt Lake Desert, and extended southward, including the Sevier Desert and Lake, with arms to the west in White Valley and in Snake Valley at the Nevada line. From the Sevier Desert a long arm extended far south to cover the Escalante Valley in Beaver and Iron counties; an eastern bay included Lake Utah and Valley, connected to the main body by a narrow neck at Jordan Narrows; while to the north the Cache Valley Bay extended 130 miles to Red Rock Pass in southern Idaho. Lake Bonneville at its maximum size covered an area of 17,000 square miles and was 1,000 feet deep. During the epoch of moisture and at the lake's maximum, there was a tremendous breakout from its basin. Red Rock Pass afforded this outlet into the Portneuf River, a branch of the Snake- Columbia drainage into the Pacific. Through the pass a torrent flowed, cutting away the alluvium deposits to a sill of solid rock. The lake level was then without oscillations for some time: intake became equal to evaporation. Toward the end of the Glacial Epoch there was a return to an arid climate and intake subsequently became less than evaporation, with consequent shrinkage of the former body of fresh water to its present area and maximum depth of only fifty feet, i.e., Great Salt Lake. As the lake shrank all the soluble salts of the larger lake, as well as those brought into the lake basin since that time, have accumulated to form the present exceedingly saline waters. The salt density is about seventeen per cent — three times that of the ocean. Thus, not only Great Salt Lake and brackish Sevier Lake, but also fresh water Lake Utah are remnants of the former geologic lake — Bonneville.
The Bonneville terraces, marking stationary levels of Lake Bonneville, are conspicuous features of the Utah landscape. The two most important shorelines are the Bonneville and the Provo, the former marking the maximum depth of the lake. The outpouring torrent through Red Rock Pass drained the lake down to the Provo terrace, or shoreline, and reduced the lake's area by one-third; there was a vertical drop of 375 feet. The Provo level remained stationary for a considerable period, producing the most marked shore terrace; it is conspicuous because it is strangely sculptured. There are many terraces less well marked than the Provo which record shorter stationary periods in the lake's area and depth. These terraces are colloquially called "benches." The terraces are well marked on the north end of the Oquirrh Mountains where the present lake shore approaches the mountain. As one floats in the brine of the present lake he may observe these Oquirrh shorelines.
Historically, the first recorded observations of these former shores were made by Captain John C. Fremont in October, 1845, as he passed around the southern shore of Great Salt Lake and headed across the Salt Desert toward Pilot Peak. No one in the Mormon community saw any geologic history in these conspicuous terrain "benches." But in 1849-50 Captain Howard Stansbury in making his exploration and survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake observed older, higher shorelines marked by driftwood; and farther back and much higher he noted lines of erosion and, in some areas, deposits which marked with certainty ancient shorelines.
All along the east side of the Great Salt Lake Valley from Brigham City southward, and particularly at the southern end of the valley at "the point of the mountain" or the traverse spur of the Wasatch, the terraces are well marked. An observant eye will discern them on outlier buttes on the Sevier Desert and on one near Franklin, Idaho. These lines are in some places made by deposits of gravel and in others by notches cut by the waves in hard rock. The Great Bar at Stockton, on the west base of the Oquirrh Mountains, was thrown across the strait between Tooele Valley — a bay of the main lake — and the small Rush Valley bay to the south, by the oscillations of the waters at this narrow pass. The Stockton Bar elicits the attention of laymen as a great manmade embankment or dyke. A similar but less discrete, and thus less noticeable, deposition of lucustrine gravel is found at the Jordan Narrows between the main lake in the Salt Lake Valley and the lesser Utah Valley bay.
Lake La Hontan in northwestern Nevada was the sister lake of Bonneville during the Glacial Epoch. This geologic fresh water lake in the Great Basin occupied an immense, very irregular area. Lake La Hontan spread out through most of the lower valleys; the mountain ranges stood as islands or peninsulas, and the shore outline was thus a veritable labyrinth. In outline Lake La Hontan was more irregular than any other lake, recent or fossil. La Hontan was deepest at the present Pyramid Lake, five hundred feet above the present water surface. La Hontan had no outlet, as did Bonneville temporarily; its waters were dissipated entirely by evaporation. This geologic lake left several residual or remnant lakes in northwestern Nevada: Pyramid, Winnemucca, Humboldt, Carson, and Walker. The Humboldt River, in its lower course, meanders in the bed of this ice-age lake for a hundred miles southwestward from the lake's eastern crest near Golconda.
This extinct Nevada lake was named by Clarence King of the United States Geological Survey in honor of Baron La Hontan, a noted early explorer of the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Thus the United States Geological Survey named the two Pleistocene lakes of the Great Basin for explorers of French birth, neither of whom explored the Great Basin. This is analogous to the naming of the Humboldt River by Fremont for the great German geographer, Baron von Humboldt, who had never been on the North American Continent.
BONNEVILLE —THE MODE
This is the story of Bonneville, the lake name. Thus in exploration, in geography, in geology, in history, in literature, in contemporary life in the Salt Lake Basin as well as on the Snake-Columbia system, the name Bonneville is permanently fixed and amazingly on the ascendancy.
Captain Bonneville's explorations and exploits were on the Snake- Columbia drainage, not in the Great Salt Lake Basin, so historically it is fitting that his melodious French surname should be applied in that area. Bonneville is the name of a town in Wyoming on the Green River drainage where Captain Bonneville first engaged in the fur trade. On the upper reaches of the Snake River in eastern Idaho is Bonneville County, of which Idaho Falls is the seat; in that city is the Hotel Bonneville in which a first-rate portrait and a sketch of Captain Bonneville are on the wall. On the lower Columbia River, upstream from Portland, is Bonneville Dam with its shipping locks and fish ladders — one of the greatest reclamation dams in the United States. Back of the dam is Bonneville Lake, which extends for many miles upstream in the Columbia River gorge.
Manifestly, as a local Salt Lake Valley style there is a popular trend toward the displacement by Bonneville of the hallowed though commercialized name Deseret. The euphonious French surname has been applied in general to the terraces of the ancient lake, to the renowned automobile speedway on the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert, to a chemical refining company of that area, to a Salt Lake City public school, to a street, to a golf club, a dinner-lecture club, a Mormon chapel and administrative unit, a hotel dining-room, and a motel. Does the name Bonneville cast a hypnotic or commercial spell, that its use is so common as to be almost nonsensical ?
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