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The Valley of the Bear River and the Movement of Culture Between Utah and Idaho
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 47, 1979, No. 2
The Valley of the Bear River And the Movement of Culture Between Utah and Idaho
BY CHARLES S. PETERSON
THE BEAR RIVER FLOWS from the Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah into Wyoming, back to Utah, and into Wyoming again. After a few miles it bears west into Idaho where it makes a major push north and west before taking its big bend and returning to Utah and to an ultimate rest in the dead waters of the Great Salt Lake. Like interlocking units of a giant mortise, the three major valleys of the Bear River's lower drainage extend from one state to another, joining them together. The metaphor here suggested has much to commend it in the physical sense, as the Bear River region provides resources common to the three states. By related developments the Bear River has influenced the cultural character of the three states as well. This paper will examine the Bear River as a border region in which homogenous and mutually accessible natural resources have drawn people and cultural influences back and forth across state lines—particularly those of Utah and Idaho—to relate those two states in a way no other two states are related and to give the Bear River region recognizable cultural characteristics. Observations presented here are incomplete and tentative but should serve to suggest that regions everywhere possess characteristics well worth continuing historical examination.
The Bear River is something of an anomaly. It rises in one of America's few east-west lying mountain ranges. More distinctive, perhaps, is the fact that its great bend conforms generally to the northeast rim of the Great Basin. Running its meandering course for more than three hundred miles within the Basin, it is America's most important landlocked river. Like the Humboldt River of Nevada, of which Dale Morgan wrote in the Rivers of America Series, the Bear River was a "Highroad to the West"—a natural feature that made the Oregon Trail and westward expansion possible. Within the ragged and inverted V of its great elbow, three major valleys lie across the Utah-Idaho border. From east to west these are Bear Lake Valley, Cache Valley, and the Bear River and Malad River arm of the Great Salt Lake Valley.
There is an irony in the fact that Utahn Dale Morgan chose to dramatize the desert miles of Nevada's Humboldt River and to throw the light of his brilliant scholarship upon it while leaving the Bear River to run its course in historical obscurity. But the Bear River's place in history was obscure long before Morgan turned his attention to western history. Indeed, the obscurity in which it has been shrouded was recognized in a general way even before Americans were aware the river existed. When James Monroe and Robert Livingston completed the negotiations by which the Louisiana Purchase became part of America, one of them expressed regret as to the obscurity of its boundaries. The great French minister, Tallyrand, is supposed to have answered: "I can give you no direction. You have made a noble bargain . . . and I suppose you will make the most of it." Although the obscurity to which Tallyrand referred encompassed the entire West in 1803, there were few regions where obscurity proved to have more lasting implications. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 fixed the international line between American and Spanish claims at the Forty-second Parallel which twice crossed the Bear River's northern loop. But in the Far West, boundaries were little more than abstractions of nationalism—vague at best and, in this case, subject to efforts to bend and reshape. As a consequence, Britons from Oregon, Mexicans out of Santa Fe, and Yankees from Saint Louis competed during the 1820s to establish claims to a country for which surveys were in the distant future. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, temporarily diverted attention from the Forty-second Parallel and the Bear River country when the border between the United States and Mexico was placed far to the south. Had the provisional state of Deseret proposed by the Mormons in 1849 been successful, it would have wiped the Forty-second Parallel out entirely as a boundary. But in the Compromise of 1850 Congress set the Forty-second Parallel, still an unsurveyed abstraction, as Utah Territory's northern limit. Later, Mormons argued that the northern ends of Bear Lake and Cache valleys were within Utah, but a boundary survey in 1872 finally fixed the line as it has since been recognized.
The establishment of that line was the last in a series of state-making episodes by which Utah was cut down to its present size and the corners of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah drawn so as to be mortised by the meanderings of the Bear River. In time, nine counties were defined along the course of the Bear—four in Idaho, three in Utah, and two in Wyoming. In addition, at least 114 towns and hamlets were established. Of these, 63 were in Utah and 46 in Idaho.
Only five or six communities were located along the Wyoming portions of the Bear River, a fact that suggests that the interlocking physical and social conditions that have bonded developments in Utah and Idaho have not existed to the same degree in Wyoming. However, it should be observed here that the southern part of Utah's Rich County with its two towns—Randolph and Woodruff- -and the home ranch of the vast Deseret Land and Livestock Company reflects marked physical and cultural affinity for the Wyoming counties of Uinta and Lincoln to which it is adjacent. By extension, south Rich County may be said to share the Wyoming cowboy and railroad culture that grew out of the post-Civil War era. In it, high meadow scenes abound. It is a livestock country in which Owen Wister's Virginian might well have been at home and into which the political muscle of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association sometimes extended. The stories of squaw men clustering around Fort Bridger, of the Mormon Indian mission to claim control of southwestern Wyoming in the mid-1850s, of Lot Smith's Utah War exploits, of the cattle empire of William A. Carter, and even of southwestern Wyoming's role as a refuge for Butch Cassidy need not detain us.
By contrast to the Utah-Wyoming relationship, it is distinctly apparent that the three valleys of the Bear River have served as a transitional linkage between Utah and Idaho. Cultural diffusion through these valleys has been varied and persistent. It began early and continues today. In part, this diffusion has been gradual and subtle. In other respects it has been forceful and abrupt, causing controversy and conflict. The influences behind this diffusion include social, economic, educational, natural, and religious forces that have moved both north and south to contribute to the story of both states.
Historically, the valleys of the Bear River lent themselves to this process in several ways. To the south a self-sufficient Mormon community was established early. It was characterized by determination to expand, communitarian impulses, and a strong will to follow its own practices and to reject others. Relative isolation, water, fertile lands, grazing grounds, fuel and timber, and developing markets for farm produce in the mining frontiers to the north presented invitations that drew thousands of Mormon settlers into Cache and Malad valleys without the mobilizing agencies of colonizing missions which were often necessary to call colonists into areas the church wanted to occupy in regions south of Salt Lake City. Although the Mormon community at Bear Lake was something of an exception, settlement in the valleys of the Bear was a natural expansion of Mormon society moving at its own pace under what may be called popular volition rather than the product of colonizing missions. Similarly, natural forces shaped the appeal Bear River made to Idaho's frontiersmen. The river's banks and surrounding terrain held little gold or silver. So, the region was bypassed by the frenzied rushes, camps, and mining development of the era. Except for the traffic from Utah to the mines in northern Idaho and Montana, transportation also skirted the region until the 1880s when the main stream of east-west travel finally pushed the Oregon Short Line Railroad through it. On the other hand, prospects did exist for government positions, trade, livestock, and timber and land speculation; but such opportunities attracted a smaller, more stable society than did the great mining and transportation bonanzas. Thus, settlement of the Bear River was part of both the Mormon frontier and the broader frontier of the West but lacked certain aggressive elements that characterized settlement in other regions of each frontier.
To trace this process of competing settlement with a bit more detail, it may be noted that Mormon colonization edged north toward the Bear River from the earliest times. But hard winters that froze government stock in 1850 and LDS church herds in 1855 and the outbreak of the Utah War in 1857 slowed northward movement. In the nearest thing to a land boom that early Utah history can boast, Mormon settlers rushed into southern Cache Valley in the years after the Utah War. Land hunger notwithstanding, habit and the threat of Indians caused them to settle in a pattern entirely consistent with established Mormon procedure. Soon, villages laid out in the characteristic Mormon grid were located at the canyon openings along the south and east portions of the valley. Franklin, now in Idaho, was the most northerly of these early towns. Irrigated farms lay in small plots adjacent to each town, the habits of irrigation were instilled among the settlers, and canal systems were etched in the landscape. Hay grounds and grazing commons extended beyond the village fields, but the presence of hostile Indians apparently curtailed expansion farther north and west.
Developments after 1863 radically altered the picture. On a bitter January morning Col. Patrick E. Connor massacred some three hundred Indians in the so-called Battle of Bear River, and a rich mining boom in northwest Idaho and Montana provided markets for Utah produce and created a business in freighting and trade in which Mormons and non- Mormons interacted. Malad was soon settled as what Idaho historian Merle Wells has called a "toll road community." It also became the county seat of Oneida County, a far-flung jurisdiction that corresponded in size to the state of Vermont. Cache Valley quickly became known as Utah's granary; and freight outfits passed to and from it, trading for livestock, what, and perishable goods. Trader-stockman Alexander Toponce, who drifted into Utah from the Montana gold fields in 1863, later recalled an 1866 trading trip through Cache Valley:
But his eggs were still good and brought $2 a dozen on the Montana market. On another occasion Toponce purchased a 600-pound pig for $36 in one of the Utah settlements, hauled it to Montana and sold it for $600 —a tidy profit even for the freewheeling Toponce.
In time the freight roads became well traveled, and numerous stations, towns, and ranches sprang up along them. Ultimately, these routes were traveled by thousands of Utahns, some of whom worked in the mines or homesteaded along the way; and many carried attitudes and ideas about life, farming methods, and economic activities back into Utah. Among those who followed the freight roads to fortune was William Jennings, who by 1865 had become well-to-do and had far-flung livestock and freight interests as well as Salt Lake City's finest store—the Emporium. Far more characteristic was a young Mormon named Frank Wyatt of Wellsville, who worked on the railroad through southern Idaho in the late 1870s, freighted to Montana in the mid-1880s, and then left Wellsville's tight village confines to buy part of James Haslam's homestead between Wellsville and Logan. There he lived on a ranch more typical of the general frontier than early Mormon Utah, yet his was a modified village experience.
By the early 1870s commercial prospects between Utah and the northern mines led Latter-day Saints in northern Utah to depart from their introverted, self-sufficient economy to the extent that they undertook to build the Utah Northern Railroad to Montana. Although this intent suggested that the free enterprise of the mining trade was infiltrating the Mormon community, the comment of one Wells Fargo Company agent suggested that the Mormon towns along the Bear River had partaken only modestly of business influences. "One Gentile," he reported, "makes as much business as a hundred Mormons and the Utah Northern has found out that a well settled Mormon community will not furnish business enough to run a railroad." By the mid-1870s Logan's Moses Thatcher and other local promoters had sold their interests in the Utah Northern to Jay Gould of the Union Pacific Railroad, thus suggesting that they lacked the necessary cultural attributes—not the least of which was financing—to carry on this kind of enterprise.
Colonel Connor's defeat of the Bear River Indians also had other repercussions. Regarding it to be his duty as a Union commander to reduce Mormon control over Utah and bring the territory into fuller support of the North's cause in the Civil War, Connor promoted mining and supported dissidents, including the Morrisites. Led by Joseph Morris, the Morrisites had fanned much bitterness among the Mormons and had run athwart of territorial law, with the end result that a posse had killed Morris and one or two others in a bungled attempted arrest shortly before Connor arrived in Utah in 1862. Although Soda Springs at the big bend of Bear River was out of his jurisdiction, Connor wasted no time after his victory over the Indians in establishing a military camp there. Offering the leaderless Morrisites asylum, Connor located them near this new outpost in a place called Morristown. Not surprisingly, Morristown was a hotbed of anti-Mormonism, and while it did not flourish it did set a pattern of hostility toward Mormons that became an article of political faith in Idaho for many years.
Spurred by Connor's colonizing efforts, the Mormons immediately initiated a move north. Brigham City, the oldest community in Bear River's drainage area, was strengthened numerically and by the initiation of the cooperative movement under Lorenzo Snow's careful supervision. Under Charles C. Rich, settlers moved into Bear Lake Valley. E. T. Benson and William Preston located villages in the northern part of Cache Valley, and, as we have seen, Malad was founded along a major spur of the freight road north. Cooperative herds from Farmington and elsewhere in Davis County were also moved into the areas where Plymouth, Portage, and Howell were later founded.
Within a decade or so, village settlements similar to the earliest Cache Valley towns were established throughout the three valleys of the Bear. Although Mormon influence was strong in the three valleys, each was different. Bear Lake was isolated. Its climate was cold, timber abundant, and log and frame buildings far more dominant than elsewhere. Until after 1880 it was not on the road to anywhere. Timbermen like James Nounan cut ties on neighboring slopes, but the valley nevertheless long remained the preserve of an isolated Mormon society in which people came as near living up to the church's ideal of self-sufficiency as anywhere. In the earliest years, Bear Lake was the most Mormon of the three valleys. But this notwithstanding, Mormons there apparently took themselves a good deal less seriously than those in Cache Valley, and they lacked the egocentric certainty of some Malad groups. In a degree, Bear Lake's tolerant spirit may have been the product of leadership. Charles C. Rich appears to have been less given to the exercise of authority than Cache Valley's E. T. Benson, Peter Maughan, and William Preston; and Rich was certainly less given to social experimentation and cooperative economic activity than Brigham City's Lorenzo Snow. But experience at Bear Lake, as well as in Utah's Dixie, suggests that there may also have been qualities of isolation and hardship that produced tolerant if not irreverent characters who influenced their own communities as well as Mormon society at large.
Such a figure was Joseph Rich, Charles C. Rich's son, who created the myth of the Bear Lake monster as some kind of whacky publicity stunt in 1868. In a community very conscious of the name "Rich," the story was soon branded a "rich tale." But sightings of the monster were reported from time to time, and the story was argued for years by pranksters and sober reporters alike. Later, Joseph Rich became a lawyer and businessman and spent a long career as a moderating influence between the Mormon and Gentile communities—a role that won him neither fame nor fortune nor the admiration of his own people. Even more indicative of Bear Lake society's capacity to view itself and life generally in relaxed terms was J. Golden Kimball whose determination not to yield to sober piety made him one of the most loved figures in Mormon history.
Less insulated from the intrusions of the world, Mormon Cache Valley produced its humorists as well, but when looking for figures who characterize the mood of the valley one hardly comes up with humorists —far from it. One is more apt to look to Clifton's dedicated and revered church president, Harold B. Lee, or that zealous American Ezra Taft Benson.
Continuing our consideration of features that set the valleys apart, it may be noted that the Bear River portion of the Great Salt Lake Valley produced the high point in the Mormon cooperative movement at Brigham City under Lorenzo Snow. By contrast, Malad's spirit appears to have been a complex and unlikely combination of religious zealousness, lusty and sometimes venal free enterprise, the deep group consciousness of Welsh and Danes and, for a time, a stubborn determination to overlook differences in controlling Oneida County. A strong group of Reorganized Latter Day Saints carried on an aggressive missionary program there. Welsh Mormons asserted their relative prominence with ethnic confidence. Bankers and traders looked for a profit in the mining trade and profiteered from the functions of county government. Democrats and Republicans flailed angrily at each other. Yet, an adroit politician named Benjamin Franklin White straddled all issues to draw liberal Mormon votes, fuse Republicans and Democrats, and control the county for years before changing times fixed anti-Mormonism as an insurmountable element in Idaho politics.
As it influenced Idaho, this acrimonious spirit of intolerance was the direct result of the exchange that took place as two differing cultural frontiers met in the valleys of the Bear River. Anti-Mormonism in Utah was in turn strengthened by this confrontation. Although it took far longer than Patrick E. Connor had hoped when he established Soda Springs (originally Morristown) as a "refuge for all who desire to leave the Mormon church, and have not the means to emigrate farther," developments in the region ultimately contributed to basic changes in the society of the two states.
Place names, too, reveal much about the way a region develops. In the Bear River valleys they reflect the common heritage of the three localities. Towns were named by settlers, people who in the main planned to stay in the region and wanted to raise monuments to themselves and identify their towns with certain causes and movements. The Mormon conflict may be seen in terms of names, with both groups showing an unimaginative penchant to name towns for luminaries among themselves. Examples that come quickly to mind include Saint Charles and Georgetown in Bear Lake Valley which did honor to Mormon stalwarts as did Woodruff, Hyrum, and Brigham City elsewhere. Similarly, Nounan, Morristown, and Bothw r ell reflect Gentile leaders from one walk or another. A few names reflected aspirations or covenants held by the bestower. Such a one was Bloomington which Charles C. Rich hoped to tie to the "blossom as a rose" tradition of the Mormons.
Other towns took their names from physical features. Among these were Soda Springs, Mink Creek, and Logan, whose name derives from the largest affluent of the Bear River which was apparently named for early mountain man Ephraim Logan. Like Logan, the names Bear River, Bear Lake, Cache Valley, and Malad all hark back to fur trade days. Trappers found one of the West's greatest population of bears along the stream's course and at the lake. This fact ultimately outweighed the inclination to set the lake apart from the neighboring salt sea by naming it Sweetwater Lake. Cache Valley, of course, superseded the earlier Willow Valley after a cave collapsed upon a mountain man while he was digging to cache furs. And Malad City takes its name from a stream dubbed by French trappers when beaver meat trapped along its course afflicted all those who ate it with an extreme but passing malady.
Notable by their absence are Indian names. Washakie honors a great Shoshone chief and Battle Creek is a melancholy reminder of Connor's massacre. Otherwise, Indians were largely ignored. This stands out in strong contrast to southern Utah which has a rich sprinkling of Indian place names, including a favorite threesome: Kanab, Kanosh, and Koosharem.
If Indians were neglected as a source of names, place of origin and previous experiences were not. Montpelier is said to honor the town of the same name in Brigham Young's native state of Vermont, and, of course, does the great colonizer honor at the same time. Bern and Geneva in the Bear Lake country, on the other hand, reflect the homeland of Swiss settlers. Paris, however, is a corruption of Perris, the name of one of its founders rather than a reflection of French settlers or the city of Paris. This notwithstanding, multiple influences may be conjectured in some place names. Would Hyde Park, for example, reflect the prominence of founder William Hyde, the English origins of many of the town's inhabitants, and the role of London's Hyde Park in Mormon missionary lore?
Like towns, farm and livestock districts came to have names. Toponce Creek was named for the prominent freighter and stockman, while Gentile Valley took its name from early stockmen who made a determined effort to exclude Mormons that included the establishment of a post office that would not accept mail addressed to Mound Valley—the Mormon name. This was apparently as much a reaction of ranchers against squatters as it was non-Mormons against Mormons. As latecomers, sheepmen, too, were sometimes made the butt of jokes that manipulated place names. The object of such a story was Frank Robertson, a western writer who in his youth herded sheep in the Bancroft area west of Soda Springs. His cowboy brother never ceased to needle him and frequently related a story in which a stranger met Frank and asked "where are you from Shep?" "Baa-a-ancroft," young Robertson is supposed to have replied. "Well, where are you going now?" "Baa-a-ck" was his response.
By and large, Bear River place names are utilitarian. Chosen to give character to communities, they lacked color and imagination and suggest that, at the point of town-making at least, the opening of the Bear River country was serious business indeed. It would appear that Gentile and Mormon, squatter and cattleman, and land agent and freighter alike responded to similar impulses when they named their towns. If village names reveal a difference in community character, it is geographic rather than social. Bear Lake's tendency to take itself a little less seriously is apparent here as well as in the people it produced. Who could imagine, for example, Cache Valley lowering its decorum, even if there were reasons valid and substantial, to name towns Pickleville and Dingle? If one doubts that Cache Valley might have balked at such names no matter how valid the reason, we may refer him to Preston where early developers changed the name from Worm Creek.
However, when one leaves the straitlaced Mormon villages and the boostering Gentile towns, one finds place names that suggest that in offhours, when self-consciousness was relaxed by remoteness, not even Bear River's settlers were entirely void of color in their names, But in the north, as in southern Utah, it was the "standing up country," the mountains, that reaped a rich harvest of racy names while the valleys below plodded along burdened with pedestrian monikers. Birds and animals of both the domestic and native varieties were a prime source. Indeed, Noah himself might have found a happy hunting ground with names like Dog Spring, Deer Lick Spring, Buckskin Fork, Bear Wallow Spring, Beaver Mountain, Hummingbird, Porcupine, Hawks Roost, Horselake, Rattlesnake Canyon, Skunk Springs, Bug Lake, and Goat Knoll, all of which appear at random in the mountains between Cache and Bear Lake valleys.
Specialization also shows up. In one small area Swan Peak, Swan Creek, and Swan Peak Pond lie close to each other. In another, Hog Hole, Pig Hole, Sow Hole, and Boar Hole Spring follow- each other across the landscape like a herd of shoats. Plant life, too, has its day in Old Juniper, White Pine, Red Pine Spring, Chokecherry, Mahogany, Sagebrush Flat, Willow Valley, Cedar Canyon, Clover Knoll, Huckleberry Spring, and numerous Cottonwoods. Church functions tended to concentrate names. This was especially true in Logan Canyon where names such as Tab Hollow, Wood Camp Canyon, and a half-dozen separate applications of "temple" proceed up the canyon like a chronology of architectural development. Mill names dot the mountains, and a town cooperative or united order was hardly worth its salt if a roll off for logs or a mountain trail were not named for it.
In terms of nationalities, the Danes left the clearest imprint in the mute evidence of Copenhagen Meadow, Danish Pass, and Danish Dugway. The Chinese and Dutch follow with China Wall and China Hill and Dutch Canyon and Dutchman's Canyon, while in French Hollow a token of France's role in settling the West seems to remain. The mountain itself might be addressed in the feminine, but female names are comparatively few. Yet, Norma Springs, Maggie Hopkins Spring, Pearl Creek, Marie Spring, and Harriet Spring suggest that, although Abraham Lincoln may have been correct in referring to the Mississippi as the "father of the waters," ladies had a reasonably good claim on watering holes in the Bear River region. Amazon Mine w r as named to signify the richness of a particular deposit of ore and Hattie's Grove in Logan Canyon is reputed in Cache Valley lore to have been the rendezvous of a girl named Hattie who was caught spending the night there with a boyfriend.
A few "fun" names remain. The origin of such unlikely appellations as Black Gut, Hoodoo Knoll, Fiddlers Canyon, and Ox Killer's Hollowis unknown. One can speculate that crawling things gave Wiggler Lake its name and that Ranger Dip was named for a Forest Service dipping vat rather than its merits as a swimming hole for off-duty rangers. Fortunately, local lore throws some light on Logan Canyon's Cow Cut where a cow being led to the Temple Mill commissary is said to have given out and was straightaway slaughtered. Likewise, tradition holds that Danford's Dive in Logan Canyon was named for the death-defying leap one rowdy young teamster made as his load of lumber tipped into the river while the Logan Temple was under construction.
To such cultural insights as might be garnered from the above may be added the observation that the Utah portion of the mountains between Cache and Bear Lake valleys was the most intensively named area in the region, if Forest Service and United States Geological Survey maps provide an accurate index. This in turn suggests three observations that bear upon the question of cultural diffusion. First, the terrain itself invited names. Second, the Utah mountain area was more intensively used than Idaho forests of the region, a fact borne out by early Forest Service surveys and more recent grazing and watershed studies. And third, it suggests that once out from under the shadow of responsibility cast by townmaking, Bear River settlers were also subject to the gift of nomenclature.
An important element in the development of the Bear River valleys was the confrontation of two distinct land systems and the penetration of each into adjoining states. As we have seen, one development in the valleys of the Bear River was the establishment of Mormon villages with their small irrigated farms. Challenging this land system were the more conventional land practices of homesteading, preemption, and squatters' rights. The Mormon village had proven itself as an effective means of occupying new regions, but it was limited in its potential in regions where it faced stiff competition for land, such as in the Idaho portions of the Bear River valleys. This was particularly apparent in Cache Valley. One of the Mormon system's weaknesses grew from the fact that land was originally distributed by church authorities and held only by right of occupancy. Thus, as Idaho homesteaders, stockmen, and speculators engrossed land under the federal land policy, Mormons were in very real danger of losing the claim occupancy gave them. With farms much smaller than the 160 acres of the homestead maximum, Mormon settlers undertook to meet this challenge by purchase under the Preemption Act or by having some agent landholder homestead in behalf of the other farmers who occupied a quarter section. Most townsites and village farms were apparentely secured, but the system failed to retard the growing challenge of Gentile settlers who became increasingly hostile toward Mormons.
As the Gentile movement onto the land continued, it drastically modified Mormon land practices. In places like Weston in the Idaho portion of Cache Valley the village system had originally prevailed, but individuals soon found the urge to exercise their homestead rights to be almost overwhelming. The Mormon church continued to denounce scattering onto homesteads until at least 1882 but nevertheless failed to be consistent in the application of the policy, and many Weston Mormons homesteaded, forsaking their village lots for scattered farmsteads. The village continued to exist at Weston and elsewhere, but Mormon farmers lived scattered among Gentile neighbors and lost much of the internal clannishness incident to village life.
This process of cultural diffusion began in Idaho, but after federal land laws became applicable in 1869 it penetrated Utah as well. By 1874 disenchanted Mormons began to move out of Cache Valley's towns to homesteads on the west side and elsewhere. Responding to the freight road that crossed into the valley at Beaver Dam and moved along the west side toward Oxford, many settlers located near the road in what became a string settlement. Others located in farming districts at Petersboro, Trenton, Cornish, Lewiston, and the railroad stop of Cache Junction. Even in the south of the valley, one observer commented that villages lay with scattered homesteads extending from them along roads and section lines like arms reaching from one town to embrace the other. In time the trend to scattered homesteads got an unexpected lift from the LDS church itself. This occurred under the aegis of Brigham Young College which for many years held forth in Logan. Endowed by a land grant of 9,600 acres in the bottom of the southern part of Cache Valley, the college first secured revenues by leasing land to individual farmers and later by selling the land to them outright. This practice resulted in the establishment of scattered farming districts in southern Cache Valley.
Not surprisingly the southward spread of the homestead system did not stop in Cache Valley. However, the impact of change was much greater in the northern parts of Utah than in the south. As geographer Wayne Wahlquist has shown, competition with the village system was always strong in the Wasatch Front counties. With homesteading's advent, the new system was superimposed upon the old village communities, the process of which Wahlquist has traced in Brigham City, Kaysville, and American Fork.
South of Provo the federal land system's impact was much less apparent. Although homesteading was a common practice there, as it was in the north, it did not alter the village system as noticeably. Sanpete Valley, for example, was slow in developing homestead districts or string settlements. Indeed, Lowry Nelson found no families living on scattered farms at Ephraim as late as 1950. The same held true for Escalante in Garfield County.
The physical character of the Bear River also contributed to changing methods of land and water utilization in Utah's Box Elder County. Small streams had been developed to found Brigham City and Malad, but the Bear River itself had been beyond the ability and capital of early settlers to develop. In the years after 1887 private capital and land speculators undertook to dam the river where it leaves Cache Valley and to construct vast canal systems on both sides of the river. The new district was promoted in the Midwest and Europe as having great promise for orchard husbandry. A variety of problems beset the promoters until 1902 when Utah and Idaho Sugar Company acquired all assets, introduced sugar beets, and successfully distributed land to a great number of farmers. Although Garland, Bear River City, Tremonton, and Bothwell were among the new towns that developed, many people settled on farms and in string settlements extending along the Wellsville Mountains and elsewhere. A group of Iowa immigrants located along one strip in the middle of the valley, resulting in a Garland road that is still called the Iowa String. Although too much can be made of this Bear River land and water project, as an extension of cultural patterns from one state to another, it was among the foremost of a great many speculative projects in the 1890s and early years of this century and was more akin to Idaho's Snake River water developments of this century than to earlier Mormon irrigation projects.
Dry-farming, too, was very much a development of the Bear River valleys. As in much of Idaho to the north, rainfall here was a little more abundant than in Utah generally. Without the cultural affinity that was attached to irrigation in Mormon Utah, dry-farming was quickly accepted in Idaho's Bear River country. When John A. Widtsoe became a great advocate of scientific dry-farming at Utah State Agricultural College, his efforts to promulgate the new science extended north as well as south. Trains especially equipped to teach the rudiments of the new science toured the Bear River counties in Idaho as well as Utah. In a real way, however, Widtsoe's efforts carried a transitional mode of farming from the northern wheat belts south into irrigated Utah. In time, the growth of dry-farm districts, like the irrigated farming communities that preceded them, extended across the borders of the two states, linking them as to landscape and culture as well as population.
Evidence suggests that Idaho farmers of the Bear River valleys have also been more responsive than their Utah counterparts to other innovations in irrigation. Somewhat more inclined to depart from the revered principles and practices of early irrigation, they have apparently influenced Utah farmers to follow suit. Among other things, Idahoans have been less inclined to regard water resources as adequate than Utahns. Perhaps as a result, nearly twice as many have developed wells to take advantage of underground supplies. In modifying irrigation systems in the last twenty years they have also been quicker to change to sprinkling systems, while until very recently, Utahns have been more apt to refine conventional irrigation systems by improving canals and distribution systems. Abstracted from data gathered by Utah State University's Institute for Social Science Research on Natural Resources, this information would support a visual impression that sprinkling is an irrigration development that caught on more quickly in Idaho and is now migrating south with its greatest impact areas located in the north of Utah rather than the south.
As a final note on the cultural relationships of the Utah and Idaho portions of Bear River's three valleys, one should refer to Preston. By 1940 it was county seat of Franklin County and a Saturday marketplace for people from the farming districts throughout the county and to some degree from the scattered communities in neighboring Utah as well. Although Logan had long been a center for Utah's Cache Valley, its domination of retail outlets and services was by no means as great as was Preston's. In a fashion consistent with supply centers throughout farming America, Preston was a social as well as a business and political center. In it, the entire county met. Although Utah towns and cities such as Logan, Brigham City, Nephi, and Richfield served as market and social centers, the Preston experience fixed it more firmly in the broader national tradition. It is a topic worthy of continuing study.
These rather far-ranging observations yield a number of suggestions about the movement of people and culture in the Bear River region. Perhaps most important is the fact that regional variety exists. Comparative examination of these valleys and other localities promises rich insight into the wonderfully varied experience that has been American life. In a more specific sense, it may be observed that the valleys of the Bear River have been at once conduits of change and chambers of conservatism. In the one sense, they are separate environments whose mountain walls turn back interaction. As a result, each has characteristics that are recognizably its own. In the other context, they are rather wellwatered and fertile avenues through which people, values, and customs moved from one cultural area to another. Mormon influence moved from Utah into Idaho. Conversely, the influence of the broader frontier penetrated Utah through them. One result was a long tradition of social and political conflict that helped mark the region. Another was a sharpening of internal and contending elements within each of the two societies involved in the confrontation. In the general sense, this phenomenon shows clearly in the strong, conflicting Mormon tendencies to be "as American as apple pie" yet to withdraw from the world. Through the valleys of the Bear River also moved customs relating to land use, water distribution, and the layout and function of both towns and farms. Through these valleys moved political and educational attitudes and practices. Through them were reached important regional markets, and through them the dry-farming practices of the wheat belt extended into Utah. All told, the Bear River's interlacing valleys resulted in important cultural developments that have done much to make the relationships between Utah and Idaho what they are and to give the West a distinctive subregion.
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