48 minute read
Utah Before the Mormons
A map created by Antonio Vélez y Escalante in 1777, covering sections of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Pen-and-ink and watercolor, with relief shown pictorially.
Courtesy Library of Congress
Utah Before the Mormons
BY DALE L. MORGAN
I am going to begin by asking that you join with me in playing some tricks with time. On this twenty-third of September 1967, I would like you to go back with me in time exactly 120 years, to the evening of September 23, 1847, so that we may revisit Brigham Young.
The Mormon leader is returning to Winter Quarters after a summer during which his Pioneer party has hopefully established a gathering place for the Saints beyond the summit of the Rocky Mountains. Our day’s journey of 29 miles in Brigham’s company has been through the sandy eastern reaches of the Black Hills, the Laramie Range, and we have camped for the night at a point about 12 miles west of Fort Laramie, which we will reach tomorrow. Our party of 36 wagons and 108 men left the embryo settlement of Great Salt Lake City on August 26. Just west of South Pass, on September 3, we encountered the Mormon family emigration, which set out from Winter Quarters in June, two months in the rear of the Pioneer party, and we can estimate that these companies by now are winding down Emigration Canyon to join those members of the Pioneer party detailed to winter in Salt Lake Valley.
With Brigham, we reflect upon this new country seen during the summer, and its potential for the harried Saints; but we do so without relinquishing our vantage point of 1967. Let us shuffle together those two years, 1847 and 1967, 120 years apart, for purposes of dramatic demonstration, at one and the same time watching the stars above Laramie Peak and the yellow blaze of the electric lights which illuminate this room . . . .
So then, in Brigham Young’s presence we reflect upon the Prophet Joseph Smith, who (in a despairing moment shortly before his brutal murder) half-accepted the idea of fleeing to the Rocky Mountains and went so far as to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa. (The thought enters our minds: What would he have done had he come up here—sought employment as a clerk at one of the forts? Begun to hunt beaver in the impoverished twilight of the mountain fur trade? Taken up a mendicant life with one of the poverty-stricken Indian tribes of the Rockies? No, impossible! The Mormon prophet is inconceivable, except with a people around him.) The prophet was slain, we reflect, just three years ago last summer—that is to say, on June 27, 1964, a few weeks before the political conventions that nominated Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater for the Presidency. We reflect, too, on all the events that preceded the tragedy in Carthage Jail, crammed into so short a time as seventeen years: The Book of Mormon, which gave rise to all the striving, was published so recently as March 1950, three months before the furies of the Korean War were unloosed upon the world.
In this way we establish a Mormon time-scale, and also a chronological double exposure for Utah’s history before the Mormons. It was just a year ago last month that the Donner party hacked its way over the Wasatch to reach the open expanse of Salt Lake Valley, preliminary to going on to starvation and cannibalism in the far-off Sierra Nevada during the hard winter just past. John C. Frémont was in the Utah country only a little earlier. It was in the dogdays of September 1963, that he floated out on the waters of Great Salt Lake in his rubber boat to reach and give name to Fremont Island. After swinging around through Oregon and California, he rode north as far as Utah Valley in the spring of 1964, arriving there about a month before the murder of the prophet, then going on east to Bent’s Fort and Washington, D.C. All this we read with attention in his report, published in Washington two years ago. We also know that Frémont came back to the Utah country in the fall of 1965, but he is yet not home from that third expedition, and we have still to learn the details, which include his horseback visit to Antelope Island in Great Salt Lake from a base camp between the forks of City Creek—the same locality where we, the Mormon pioneers, recently decreed that a temple should arise.
How long since Utah was first traversed by emigrant wagons? The Bartleson party, making for California, passed around the northern side of Great Salt Lake six years ago, in August and September 1961, a few months prior to the chilling assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but about this Brigham Young knows little or nothing.
He does not know a great deal more about Jim Bridger, though last June, while bound for the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, he fell in with Bridger on the Little Sandy, west of South Pass, and had a long, rather confusing discussion with him, Bridger’s far-ranging knowledge of the West hard for a greenhorn to take in. Bridger has lived in this high country for a very long while; with some fellow trappers he first holed up for the winter in Cache Valley late in 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge.
And further back in time: it was during the summer of 1925, when a Lincoln Highway across the country was being vigorously promoted, that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed northern Idaho on their way to the Pacific. Still more remotely: In the summer of 1896, seven months after Utah achieved Statehood, Fathers Dominguez and Escalante made the Utah area at last visible to history by embarking upon their pioneering exploration northwest from Santa Fe.
In making my point so forcibly, I hope I have not labored that point excessively. I have been concerned, as you realize, to translate historical time into terms we can individually find meaningful. All these dates—1964, 1961, 1944, 1925, even 1896—have a personal significance for us that dates like 1847, 1841, 1824, 1805, or 1776 no longer command. Births, deaths, weddings, and graduations mix with the obvious public events to give such dates personal color, each date emotionally different for everyone alive. Nothing is truly real for most of us beyond the reach of our own experience, and coping with this fact is the recurring, often exasperating, problem of historians. This was brought home to me some years ago through a story told me by my brother Jim’s wife. Her eldest daughter, then a ripe eight years of age, came home from school one day to beseech: “Mama, tell me what it was like to live back in the olden times, when you were a girl.” Mary Beth was and is fast on her feet, and though it disqualifies her as a historian, she got out of that one, she told me, by exclaiming, “I’m not that old!”
If I may be permitted a geological image, 1847 represents a faultline in Utah’s splendidly varied history. Because of the continuity enforced by the patterns of Mormon experience, the long slope our way from 1847 seems shorter than that across the divide, where the cliffs of time plunge sheerly down past the 1830’s and 1820’s to the almost inaccessible 1700’s far below. It is exactly 191 years today since Fathers Dominguez and Escalante rode down out of Spanish Fork Canyon into Utah Valley, and 120 of those years belong to the Mormon era.
The very difficulty of exploring the other side of the divide adds to its fascination. Back of 1776 we have almost no written records to go upon. Captain Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, one of Coronado’s conquistadors, reached the southern edge of the Colorado’s mighty chasm as early as 1540, but that was in present Arizona. No one to our knowledge, no one capable of recording what he saw, got north and west of the Colorado for another 236 years—a chasm in time far exceeding anything known to geology. It is true that after Don Juan de Onate launched the colonization of New Mexico in 1598, some knowledge about the immense space west of the Rockies and north of the Rio Grande’s sources reached the Spaniards in New Mexico. Dr. S. Lyman Tyler could speak to your profit and mine until dawn on this period “Before Escalante,” for that was the topic of his doctoral dissertation some years ago—a contribution to scholarship that I, and doubtless he too, would like to see published before either of us gets very much older. In general, though, the knowledge about, or emanating from, Utah in the era before Escalante was ethnological, relating to the Ute Indians, from whom the Spanish chroniclers extracted no very useful fund of geographical information or anything like a true knowledge of the conditions of existence in present Utah.
Those 236 years before Escalante, in other words, are off any timescale we are interested in devising, whether 1967, 1847, or any other base year is chosen. There were no white men, no chroniclers or annalists, in Utah before 1776 to institute a written history, and I fear that for all their refinements in technique, the archaeologists are never going to be able to speak to us with real authority about the details of the life of the Indian peoples who occupied Utah during this period. A time machine is the only mechanism that ever seems likely to help us develop a detailed primordial history of the Utes, Shoshonis, Paiutes, and Navajos, and time machines seem to be easily devised only on television.
Out of prevailing historical murk, the single year 1776 rises like a revolving beacon of incredible candlepower. A great bicentennial for Utah is now only nine years away, and it is certainly none too soon to start thinking about a suitable observance. Utah shares Dominguez and Escalante with New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, but these explorer priests mean far more to Utah than to her sister states; here they represent a point of prime beginning in history, which is not the case elsewhere. The year 1976 will be a festive one generally, for at that time our nation will be observing its two hundredth anniversary. (We might remark, in passing, that Dominguez and Escalante originally intended to set out from Santa Fe on July 4, a date American history had not until then vested with emotional impact, but delays attended their preparations, and they did not actually get off until sixteen days later.)
I am not, tonight, going to retell in any detail the story of that gentle exploration by the two Franciscan priests. Herbert E. Bolton saw fit to title his account of their experiences, as published by this Society in 1951, Pageant in the Wilderness. This title is one to which I have always taken exception. For a pageant is a bloodless, I might say gutless, visualization of times past, something artificial and staged. The Escalante Expedition (so called because Silvestre Velez de Escalante kept the diary, though his associate, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, was the senior ecclesiastic)—the Escalante Expedition, I say, was no pale image of the real thing—it was the real thing, wrought from faith and piety, hard work and perseverance, suffering and frustration, hope and anticipation, and acquiescence to the will of God. The prime purpose of the expedition was to find, if possible, an overland route north of the Apache lands to connect the New Mexican settlements with those the Franciscans had been founding since 1769 in California. The fathers got as far north and west as Utah Valley, where they heard about, though they did not visit, Great Salt Lake, but no Indian trails or information even intimated that a likely route existed on to the coast of California. The ten-man party turned south down the Wasatch Front, eventually drew lots as a way of allowing God to decide whether or not they should give up the quest and make for the Indian pueblos south of the Colorado, and at last, after many adventures, reached Santa Fe in safety on January 2, 1777. The priests had been immensely impressed with Utah Valley, a paradise indeed to one freshly come from arid New Mexico, and they hoped that a mission could be established there to serve the Ute Indians. We shall always wonder how the history of Utah might have been changed had this project been undertaken and proved successful. But the resources did not exist for such a venture at the limits of the known world; we are not even sure that anybody in authority ever gave the idea a moment’s serious consideration.
The consequence is that “After Escalante,” for forty years or so, we confront another essentially blind period in Utah history. The brilliant beacon has been extinguished, and the murk is penetrated only, now and then, by a little star-shine. We appreciate, nevertheless, that Dominguez and Escalante have got Utah history on a meaningful time-scale; after 1776 we do have glimpses of things happening in Utah, however brief and tantalizing our glimpses of these events. Symbolically, the priests brought back with them to Santa Fe what they called a Laguna Indian—that is, a Ute from Utah Valley. We have to suppose that in the course of time this Laguna Indian returned home. It may well be that some trader went with him. If not, there were traders to venture out on the path of the fathers, now that the way was known beyond the Gunnison River in western Colorado.
Getting at the history of this period nevertheless presents many and grave difficulties. One problem is, from the New Mexican end, that only official expeditions tended to produce the written records that yield the patterns we call history. With scarcely an exception, only the priests, officials, or army officers, could read and write, and these were the very men who stayed out of New Mexico’s distant north, sufficiently burdened with responsibilities at home. Those who did follow the padres to the remotest Ute lands were rough men who in all their days never learned to read or write. Only on the rare occasions when one of them was hauled before an alcalde for some infraction of law or polity was a written record ordinarily made of their activities.
Brigham Young, in his camp in the shadow of Laramie Peak in September 1847, knew nothing of these forerunners of civilization in the Great Basin. It is only since 1921, when Joseph J. Hill began to publish his researches respecting the Spanish Trail, that we have known of our unexpected good fortune, that some details concerning an otherwise lost era in Utah history are preserved in the Spanish archives of New Mexico. Hill established to our satisfaction that in the thirty years after Dominguez and Escalante returned home, various traders developed a routine of going off to live with the Utes for months at a time, thereby succeeding where church and state had failed—in establishing meaningful and workable relations with the more distant Ute bands. (We should not forget that through the 1860’s and even later, the Utes ranged through northern New Mexico and western Colorado, as well as northeastern Utah; the Utes are by no means the exclusive historical property of the state that has taken their name.) Something concrete in the way of information comes out when a new governor of New Mexico, Joaquin de Real Alencaster, writes on September 1, 1805, concerning a certain Manuel Mestas (declared to have been a Ute interpreter for fifty years):
In the short time that I have governed this province, he has recovered from the aforesaid heathen [that is, the Utes] eight horses which he himself searched for and brought back. In the month of July he went back to the country of the aforesaid people and not only succeeded in bringing back eleven mules and horses, but according to the report of other Yutas, called Jimpipas, shortly started out on a trip of about a month’s duration for the purpose of retaking, not only the aforesaid eleven animals, but also twenty mules and eight horses, which among other things, had been stolen from men of this province last year in the country of the said Jimpipas, by Comanches, and were retaken by the Yutas Timpanoges during a war with the aforesaid Comanches.
These remarks need some elucidation: Yutas Timpanoges were those dwelling in Utah Valley; and Comanches in this instance would be the Shoshonis or Snakes, cousins of the Comanches proper. (In a New Mexican document of 1828 we find them referred to as “Comanches Sozoni,” which is enlightening enough.) I would hazard the suggestion that the Jimpipas of this document were the Yampa Utes, dwelling in northwestern Colorado and at times ranging into the Uinta Basin. Contact with the northern Ute bands is clearly implied in this document of 1805, and trade with those bands may have become commonplace.
At this juncture, because we have reached the year 1805, I would like to abandon our New Mexican vantage point briefly so that we may look at Utah from another direction: in fact, from eastern Idaho, where the Columbia-bound Lewis and Clark Expedition has just crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass.
With my Utah orientation, shared by most of you who listen to me tonight, when I first read the original journals of Lewis and Clark, the passage in those journals most exalting to my imagination I found in William Clark’s carefully written notes for August 20, 1805, set down just twelve days before Governor Alencaster made the remarks about Manuel Mestas that we have been discussing. Lewis and Clark were somewhat perplexed about the best route to pursue now that they had left Missouri waters, and sought advice from Snake Indians on whom they had fortunately chanced. They were told of the impossibility of descending the Salmon River, and of a possible route through Nez Perce country farther north. An old man also had a fund of information about the country to the south, and it is this which catches our eye: that old Indian’s viewpoint as he faces in the direction of Utah. Let me quote Clark’s entry in the original journals, with some interpolated comment of my own.
This country to the southwest, Clark observed, the old Snake Indian “depicted with horrors and obstructions scarcely inferior to that just mentioned, he informed me that the band of this nation to which he belonged resided at the distance of 20 days march from hence not far from the white people with whom they traded for horses mules cloth metal beads and the shells which they woar as orniment being those of a species of perl oister.”
As will become apparent shortly, the old man’s band lived on Bear River, and here we have an astonishing picture of quite extensive direct commerce with New Mexican traders, not simply through Ute intermediaries. Clark continues:
With very little distortion, this is a quite reasonable account of the country south to Utah’s borders, and accords with our understanding that a normal route from the Bear River toward New Mexico would be up the Bear to some point between present Cokeville and Evanston, then southeast across the Bear River Divide and on via Browns Hole on the Green River, where twenty years later William H. Ashley found a large band of Snakes had wintered. Unfortunately, the light of the old man’s understanding did not penetrate into the Utah area proper, glimmering out almost at Utah’s borders; from a Utah point of view, we more especially glean from this account that the Valley of the Great Salt Lake did not loom so large in the Snake cosmos of 1805 as in ours of 1847 and 1967.
Clark says that he thanked the old man for his information and advice “and gave him a knife with which he appeared to be much gratifyed. from this narative I was convinced that the streams of which he had spoken as runing through the plains and that on which his relations lived were southern branches of the Columbia, heading with the rivers Apostles [San Juan] and Collorado, and that the rout he had pointed out was to the Vermillion Sea or gulph of California.”
In the main Clark was correct, save that he accepted the idea of a great river flowing parallel to the Snake, which later he decided was connected up with the Willamette River of Oregon, and displayed on his map as the Multnomah, a ghost stream of early western cartography. Clark says:
Now let us leave Lewis and Clark to find their way to the Pacific as best they can while we turn back to our New Mexican eyrie. Eight years pass, to 1813—just thirty-four years before the Mormons reach Utah, or back in the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by our special time-scale—and the New Mexican archives yield a clutch of documents with an astonishing fund of information about the Utah country, so distant, so nearly lost in time, since Escalante’s day, a generation past. Again we are indebted to Joseph J. Hill for the facts. As he relates, he found in the New Mexican archives a document giving “an account of a trading expedition to the Timpanogos, and the Bearded Yutas west of the Sevier River in the year 1813. The company consisted of seven men under the command of Mauricio Arze and Lagos Garcia.” They left Abiquiu, a still-existing village north of Santa Fe, on March 16, 1813, and returned July 12. In September the governor of New Mexico ordered the members of the party to appear before an alcalde and report what had taken place on the trip, for which he has our gratitude. (Here I would interject that these seven visitors of 1813, Manuel Mestas in 1805, and the ten men of the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, eighteen altogether, are the only Spanish visitors to Utah that we are able to name during the entire duration of the Spanish empire in America, a period of some three centuries.)
Nothing was said in the testimony about the route taken to reach the lake of the Timpanogos—that is to say, Utah Lake—which implies that by now it was well known. The company remained three days at Utah Lake, trading a little and waiting for other Indians to arrive. When all were on hand, a council was held, but it appears that these Ute Indians would trade nothing but Indian slaves—“as they had done on other occasions,” the affidavits add. When the Spaniards refused, the offended Indians began to kill the horses of the traders, nine animals being slaughtered before the chief could quiet his people. The Spaniards prudently collected their remaining horses, and after standing guard over them all night, set out next day for the “Rio Sebero”—the Sevier River, as we suppose, and the first appearance of this name in history. On the Sevier the traders met a Yuta of the Sanpuchi or Sanpete nation, who agreed to conduct them to a place where they could trade with a tribe of Yutas new to them. Two of the company were left in charge of the pack train while the other five, guided by the Sanpuchi, set out to the west. Three days’ travel brought them to a tribe of Indians characterized as having heavy beards, clearly the bearded Indians encountered by Dominguez and Escalante. In 1776 these Indians had been described as very gentle and affable, but now they presented themselves with “their arms in their hands, saying their trade would be arrows.” They were quieted, and arrangements were made to trade next day. But that night the Spaniards overheard the Indians plotting an attack upon them. Accordingly, the Spaniards made off, “traveling stealthily all night and day until they reached the place where their companions and pack train were.” Thence they took the road to the Rio Grande—the Colorado, as we suppose; it is vexing that no details of the route are furnished, for the river might also have been the Green at present Green River—and there found what is described as “the rancheria of Guasache, who was waiting on the road to trade with them ‘as was his custom.’”
As before, the Spaniards were at first received cordially, only to have the Indians take offense when they refused to trade for Indian slaves. Having profited by experience, this time the commandant gave his men permission to purchase the slaves, “in order not to receive another injury like the first one.” Twelve slaves were bought, and the Spaniards came home without further adventures except that a mule and a horse were drowned in crossing the “Rio Grande.” The traders also acquired on this journey 109 pelts, described as “but a few,” most likely deerskins.
I have retold this episode at some length, for the obvious importance of the facts, and because the facts are far from well known, notwithstanding their republication in the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1930. The adventures of the Arze-Garcia party are interesting in themselves and revealing with regard to the corrupting effect of Spanish peonage—in plain words, Indian slavery—for hundreds of miles around Santa Fe. After this episode history’s spotlight shifts north again. Indeed, there had been some arresting developments on the Idaho side for two years preceding this time. Lewis and Clark had come triumphantly home from the Pacific in the summer of 1806, and very soon thereafter traders began making determined efforts to exploit the fur riches of the Louisiana Purchase and the country to the west that would soon become known as Oregon. Some pressed up the Missouri and the Yellowstone; still others made for Santa Fe; and in New York John Jacob Astor conceived his Pacific Fur Company to exploit the Columbia Basin from a base to be established at Astoria. It is the latter enterprise that chiefly concerns us. One division of the Astorians went out to the Columbia by sea, around Cape Horn. Another, under Wilson Price Hunt, crossed the continent in the summer and fall of 1811. The latter reached Henrys Fork of the Snake in October, and before going on toward the Columbia, detached Joseph Miller with four hunters and four horses to go beaver-trapping. These five men have come down in history as the Detached Astorians, and their wanderings the subsequent winter make them more than worthy of note, difficult as it may be to follow their wanderings in the light of the scanty available information. It is definitely known that they got as far south and west as the Bear River, which accordingly became known to the Astorians as Miller’s River. Escalante possibly alluded to the Bear in his journal, and William Clark most certainly alluded to it in his own journal, but both at a distance, and on the basis of Indian information. The Detached Astorians are the first white men we can unequivocally say reached the banks of this river. It seems doubtful, however, that the Detached Astorians descended the Bear far enough to enter present Utah.
Nor can Utah quite claim that party of Returning Astorians led east next year by Robert Stuart. Coming from the Columbia, much of the way traveling what would eventually be established as the Oregon Trail, the Returning Astorians reached the Bear at its great bend in September 1812, and journeyed up the river as far as Thomas Fork before veering north in an unsuccessful effort to escape the ardent attentions of Crow horse thieves. Stuart and his companions afterward went on east via Teton Pass and South Pass, wintered on the North Platte, and made it safely through to St. Louis in April 1813.
The eastward passage of the Returning Astorians late in 1812 and the troubled passage of the Arze-Garcia party through the Ute lands in the spring of 1813 effectively close the history of Utah in what we might call the proto-historical period. It is not a very extended record we have to work with; and unfortunately, the prospects are not very bright that scholarly ingenuity will significantly enlarge that record. Utah’s history before the Mormon era, as a promising field of scholarship, must primarily be concerned with the twenty-eight years before the Mormons plowed their first furrow in Salt Lake Valley.
We have already emphasized the shortness of that time span, equivalent to the time that has elapsed since the German invasion of Poland touched off the Second World War, and most of that history dates from a time commencing five years later, equivalent to the period since the Battle of the Bulge marked the last German offensive, twenty-three years ago.
The critical significance of the year 1819 we have begun to appreciate only in the past sixteen years, as the Hudson’s Bay Company archives in London have yielded up some of their treasures, for it was this year, as we know beyond all question, that British trappers first reached Utah from the north.
The circumstances require explanation. At the same time Astor’s people were establishing themselves at Astoria, and at various points in the broad basin of the Columbia, the North West Company was thrusting westward across Canada with the same objective. When the outbreak of the War of 1812 seemingly doomed the Astorian enterprise, the field partners sold out to the Canadian concern, which thereby remained in sole possession of the field. Some of the Astorians entered the service of the North West Company, and one of these men was Donald Mackenzie, who eventually was given the job of revitalizing the interior trade.
Mackenzie established an inland base among the Nez Perces near the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia—this in the summer of 1818—then, during the fall, pushed southeasterly into the great watershed of the Snake River. It was at this time that most of the southern tributaries of the Snake received their names, including the Malheur, the Owyhee, the Bruneau, Raft River, and the Portneuf. The precise circumstances are not known, but we infer that in the late winter or spring of 1819 one detachment of Mackenzie’s party, led by Michel Bourdon, pressed on south to trap the stream the Astorians had called Miller’s River. Our authority is the journal of Peter Skene Ogden, at the head of a later British trapping party. In April 1825 Ogden commented:
Peter Skene Ogden’s map of the Great Salt Lake and the Snake River areas. It also shows Ogden's 1828-1829 route, when he discovered the Humboldt River. Carl Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West, vol. II. —
USHS
Ogden’s clerk, William Kittson, in a diary entry of the same date, added the valuable information that “the Deceased Michel Bourdon named Bear river from the great number of those animals on its borders.”
Subsequently, on May 9, 1825, having reached Cache Valley, Kittson spoke of encamping on a fork, “one that Michel Bourdon called Little Bear and it has three others falling into it before it enters the Bear River main Branch.” Two days later Kittson told of putting up on the borders of “Bourdon or middle Fork”—known to us today as Blacksmith Fork, south of Logan (a name subsequently applied by American trappers). Nearly four years later, in March 1829, Peter Skene Ogden again was in Cache Valley with a fur brigade, and at that time he observed:
By so narrow a margin, Michel Bourdon failed of becoming the discoverer of Great Salt Lake. He was killed by Blackfeet in 1823, so did not survive to relate his experiences in a later day. Until 1951, when the Ogden journals of 1824–25 were published, we knew nothing of Bourdon’s special distinction in Utah history.
The North West Company merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821, the combined firm taking the name of the British concern. By this time a Snake Country Expedition had become a settled tradition in the Columbia Department, and in 1823 the six-foot four-inch Finan McDonald led the Hudson’s Bay Company brigade south as far as Bear River, then apparently went up the Bear and across the divide to the Green River. He established to British satisfaction that the Bear was not “the Spanish River,” as had been supposed since Bourdon’s foray of 1819. McDonald may have led his whole party, or sent a detachment, as far down the Bear as Cache Valley, which is what Ogden thought of in 1825 as the Bear’s “upper part.” But again this year Great Salt Lake eluded discovery.
That discovery was made at last in the fall of 1824 by American trappers, who after so long a time had penetrated finally to the very heart of Utah. Jim Bridger is usually credited with the discovery, but my personal conviction is that Etienne Provost saw the lake some weeks— even, perhaps, some months ahead of Old Gabe, who wintered in Cache Valley with members of John H. Weber’s company in 1824–25, and may not have descended the Bear to determine its course and settle a bet until late in the winter.
William Marshall Anderson, who visited the Rockies in the summer of 1834, has something interesting to say on this subject, in The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson, a book edited by myself and Eleanor T. Harris lately published by the Huntington Library. On August 28, 1834, after encamping on the North Platte below Ash Hollow, Anderson recorded in his trail diary: “The great salt lake at the termination of Bear river, which has been claimed to be discovered by Genl Ashley & which in the U.S. bears his name, I am informed by good authority has never been seen by him. False ambition often doubtless prompts to false assertion! Tis believed the credit, if there is any in the accidental discovery of a place, is due to Weaver or Provost.” After he got back to Kentucky, Anderson expanded his trail diary into a journal, and fortunately the extension of remarks included this particular entry. In the expanded version he says:
These remarks by Anderson are the more interesting in that Provost was trail boss for the very party he was accompanying down out of the mountains. We are not sure that Provost spoke English; but on the other hand, Anderson was facile in French. We would give much to have heard the discussion in camp that night. Indeed, any night’s discussion in almost any camp during these years is part of our irrecoverable history.
Etienne Provost we must view as the first American trapper to enter Utah, whatever the merits of the claim that he first laid eyes upon Great Salt Lake. Eleanor Harris and I have provided a considerable account of him in our Anderson book, so I shall be content tonight to say that he was born in Canada about 1782, and appears to have first entered the fur trade in 1814. He trapped in the southern Rockies with the Chouteau-De Mun parties between 1815 and 1817, knew the inside of a Santa Fe jail for a while as a trespasser on Spanish territory, and after the opening up of New Mexico to American trade, was among the first to go out to Santa Fe from St. Louis in 1822. He acquired a partner, Leclerc, and by the summer of 1824 the two had made their way into the Uintah Basin, setting up a base camp on the banks of the Green near the mouth of the White River. Early that fall Provost led a party west across the Wasatch Mountains—as far, I believe, as the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. In October, probably on the Jordan River, a band of Snakes treacherously attacked his party, killed eight, and forced Provost with the only other survivor to flee back to the base camp on the Green. Undeterred, he recrossed the Wasatch in the spring of 1825, this time descending the Weber River, where, near present Mountain Green in late May, he encountered the men of John H. Weber’s party.
Etienne Provost, 1782–1850, the hunter, trapper, and trail guide for whom Provo, Utah, is named. —
USHS
Utah’s history during that spring of 1825 is incredibly complicated, and we would still be here when the sun rises tomorrow morning if I were to unravel the whole story for you. It must suffice us that five entirely distinct trapping parties converged upon the Weber River during May and June. There were the Ashley free trappers led by John H. Weber, who had crossed South Pass from the Big Horn River the previous summer. These trappers eventually reached the Bear and wintered in Cache Valley (Bridger was one of this group). There was Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Expedition, which had made its way south from Flathead Post in northwestern Montana. There was Jedediah Smith’s seven-man party which had got as far as Flathead Post in the fall of 1824, by way of the Green and the Snake, and which had accompanied Ogden most of the way south to Bear River (after which, seeing signs of Weber’s presence in the country, they followed down the Bear to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake to come up with their compatriots near the site of Ogden). There was Provost’s party, making its second penetration of the Great Salt Lake Basin. And finally, a little behind the others, William H. Ashley himself, who had brought a substantial party to the mountains during the winter and divided it into four detachments to trap in different directions (one of which was expected to seek out Weber and Smith). He himself took a party down the Green River in a voyage of exploration through the canyons the river has knifed around the Uinta Mountains. Ashley had reached the mouth of the Duchesne by May 23, when the other parties collided in the valley of the Weber. He subsequently met Provost, returning to the Green, and by him was guided over to the Provo River, across Kamas Prairie to the Weber, and eventually back into Wyoming by way of Chalk Creek, in the wake of Weber and Smith, who had set out to rendezvous with him near the mouth of Henrys Fork of the Green.
Thus briefly we account for the different parties, but we must note also that near Mountain Green Ogden’s British brigade ran afoul of Weber’s Americans, who rode up the canyon to intercept him. The Americans prevailed on some two dozen of the British trappers to desert, an extraordinary episode of clashing nationalisms and revolt against economic exploitation. In the sequel Ogden was forced into headlong flight, back to the Snake River, and he did not again venture into Utah until the winter of 1828–29. During that time the American trappers were left in almost undisturbed possession of the Utah country—actually, Mexican land, had anyone desired or been able to determine where the boundary ran (identical with the present boundary between Utah and Idaho). During this time, from 1825 to 1828, the first great rendezvous of the fur trade were held in Utah—in 1825 at Henrys Fork, in 1826 in Cache Valley, and in the summers of 1827 and 1828 at the south end of Bear Lake. After that, the beaver having been trapped nearly to extinction in Utah, the fur trade’s center of gravity moved north toward the Blackfoot country; most of the later rendezvous, down to 1840, were held in Idaho and Wyoming.
In the sense that a reasonably connected and reasonably detailed pattern of events can be worked out, Utah’s history before the Mormons effectively dates from the fall of 1824 and covers a period of just twenty-three years. Many of the events are dramatic, like Jedediah Smith’s first and second journeys to southern California in 1826 and 1827, down through the heart of Utah to the Virgin River, and thence to the Colorado. Some are pathetic, like the death of a man killed while constructing a cache, which gave Cache Valley its enduring name. Nearly all are tantalizing, like the exact sequence of events by which the Spanish Trail came into being, first connecting central Utah with New Mexico’s frontier settlements, later evolving as a feasible caravan route from Utah across the Vegas and Mojave deserts to Cajon Pass.
Very slowly and very reluctantly has the record for this bare quarter-century yielded to the industry of scholars-and, I may say, to their prayers, for there is a necessary element of good luck in the emergence of every fresh detail that extends that history. A great deal remains to be learned, but we have learned so much, every year bringing something new, that I have every confidence the pre-Mormon history of Utah will have been incredibly extended before most of us here tonight lose interest in earthly things.
Broad areas of this history I have not even begun to mention—overland emigration between 1841 and 1846, for example, which has interested this Society very much. In 1951 the Society published J. Roderic Korns’s West From Fort Bridger, which was centrally concerned with the trail-making of 1846 (and characteristically printed a newly available diary by James Frazier Reed of the Donner party, among many other documents of prime importance). More information has appeared since, some of it incorporated into my Overland in 1846, which was published four years ago. I might add that I have myself given a great deal of attention to the pioneering Bartleson party of 1841, which passed around the north side of Great Salt Lake en route to California, and in the quite early future I expect to publish all the source narratives relating to this episode, including several new diaries. We are by no means done with John Charles Frémont yet; indeed, it may be said that the Utah phase of his explorations of 1843–45 has not even had a thorough first examination. On Frémont, too, fresh information keeps emerging.
This happily burgeoning record of Utah’s pre-Mormon era becomes richer each year. I think it very interesting that the story of the redheaded mountain man, Miles Goodyear, whose Fort Buenaventura, founded in the late summer of 1846, marks the true beginnings of Ogden, has had to be rewritten half a dozen times during the past fifty years. It has been constantly expanded to assimilate fresh information. At this very moment Charles Kelly is again addressing himself to Goodyear, in association with Robert Greenwood. Among the latest developments in the Goodyear saga, we have a letter he wrote from the Mojave River in May 1848, extraordinary for the details it adds to the history of agriculture in Utah. At his fort in 1847, Goodyear says in this letter, his men “succeeded in raising a mess of beans some radishes, hills of corn, cabbages and greens. A greater variety I could tell but to raise this much I assure you I had to work well, apropos, A few peach and plum trees in the garden grew which I am in hopes will do well if not hurt by frost or mountain dew.” If this sounds like verse, that is exactly what it is; Goodyear naturally expressed himself in rhyme that is more quickly apparent to the ear than to the eye.
The Miles Goodyear cabin, Ogden, Utah, as drawn by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1968. —
Courtesy Library of Congress
Everywhere we turn, we find an ever richer history emerging out of the blue haze of the distances beyond the Mormon fault-line, a territory we can map in increasing detail, and ever more confidently. So pronounced are the advances that we may be led to exclaim in wonder: Is there more to be found out? After so much time, dare we hope for more? Consider that to Escalante’s journal of 1776 we have now added Ashley’s diary of 1825, Ogden’s of the same year, and all that has survived of Smith’s record for the years between 1822 and 1828. For a long while we had no reason to expect that an Ashley or a Smith record of the kind existed, even. We now have both. Perhaps that thins out the lode, less remaining in the vein to be recovered.
But I have seen so much of enduring importance emerge into the sunlight just in the last thirty years, that I am disposed to argue the probability of further advances—letters and diaries by more Ashley men, maybe; diaries kept on the Spanish Trail, for instance. I would hesitate to say what form the new discoveries may take; ten years ago, I would never have dreamed that this coming year I would be publishing a detailed account by a British botanist, Joseph Burke, who from a Fort Hall base traveled widely through northern Utah in the spring and fall of 1845. There seems no limit to the possibility of fresh discoveries. And for us, that is the abundant life! New sources, dedicated scholars to labor with them, an audience like the Utah State Historical Society membership to appreciate them! The prospect is enough to bring a sparkle to any man’s eye.
Postscript: Dale Morgan and the Elements of Utah History
By Richard Saunders
Salt Lake City native Dale L. Morgan (1914– 1971) came to the study of Utah’s exploration and trails during his services as editor for the Historical Records Survey in the late 1930s. He soon became director of the Utah Writers’ Project, superintending publication of Utah: A Guide to the State in 1941. Over the next three decades, Morgan’s incredible memory and facility with words made him an influential researcher, writer, and reviewer, one whom virtually every major historian of Mormonism or the American West (and many enthusiasts) relied upon for advice or critical review at some point. As a longtime employee of the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Morgan produced historical studies on overland migration, mapping, and exploration that are still outstanding examples of readability, documentary accuracy, and historical insight.
Morgan’s casual presentation style in this article obscures the years he had devoted to studying the details of movement and interaction across the early West. The names, dates, locations, and details he cites corrected the work of earlier writers, the outgrowth of careful study and comparison in hundreds of original sources. He had begun exploring (and correcting) information about the fur trade and Utah’s settlement while working for the HRS. Morgan put that knowledge to work producing the Utah Historical Trails Map for a state agency in 1949 and ghost writing West from Fort Bridger in 1951 for close friend Roderick Korns. By 1967 he had become the acknowledged expert on westward exploration during the American fur trade and on westward migration between 1841 and the 1860s.
Bobbs-Merrill published Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West in 1953; the book remains
in print now over six decades later, but his great masterwork on the fur trade was The West of William H. Ashley (1964). Morgan’s work on overland trails included Overland in 1846 (1963) and The Overland Diary of James Avery Pritchard (1958), which included a massive table tracing the movement of every known diarist or letter across the main trail in 1849, the first year of the California gold rush. Morgan is perhaps less well known for the incredible works he did not manage to complete. The southern route of 1849 would have been covered in a compilation of journals. He put off and never managed to complete a documentary collection on Robert Campbell, which was intended as a companion volume to the Ashley book. Morgan expanded his work on explorer and fur trader Jedediah Smith with Carl Wheat, but he never managed to find time to complete (or even begin) a revision to his 1953 biography or to edit and correct the tangled chronology and stories of James Beckwourth’s important memoir of the fur trade. At his untimely death from cancer in 1971, Morgan had retired from the Bancroft Library to embark on a second Guggenheim research fellowship, granted for a massive study which would have documented and contextualized the entire North American fur trade, from the French withdrawal in 1767 to 1870.
Approaches and interest in history continually change, and it may remain that Dale Morgan’s dedication to his field will make him the only person capable of such a broad and inclusive feat of Western scholarship—yet his accomplishments may be the more remarkable because he was completely and irreversibly deaf. Robbed of his hearing by meningitis as a teenager, thankfully his conversation tended to be conducted through the clicking voice of his typewriter. His enormous manuscript collection (Morgan wrote or received more than twenty thousand letters over his shortened career) provides a body of research and clues for generations of future scholars to mine. In the days before photocopiers made duplication a matter of push-button simplicity, he compiled a positively massive personal collection of painstaking transcripts. The Bancroft Library collection was enriched by his eager and consuming interest in diaries, letters, reports, and microfilm and in Photostats of relevant material in the holdings of other institutions. Mentor to
Juanita Brooks, reader and advisor to fellow Utahns Wallace Stegner, Fawn Brodie, and Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan is the common link that binds Utah’s influential mid-twentieth century historians, encouraging their reconstructions of western and Mormon history.
The seed for this particular article was a story written for the Salt Lake Tribune titled “Utah’s Years Before the Beginning,” which Morgan had assembled in the summer of 1941. The text you read here in print he adapted from a presentation made to the Utah State Historical Society annual meeting on September 23, 1967. Morgan’s goal was clearly to put the exploration and pre-settlement history of the state into a personal context for his hearers. To do so, he resets Utah’s past into a contemporary context by shifting the calendar forward exactly 120 years. He begins “playing tricks with history” in the article by discussing exactly what Brigham Young was doing on September 23, 1847, and then working backward, placing everything on to a timeline of contemporary events, temporal distances his hearers could identify personally. It is very effective. Everyone knew the Mormons came in 1847—or rather 1967. Morgan can thus talk about Fremont’s bobbing circumnavigation of the Great Salt Lake during “the dog-days of September, 1963” rather than 1843. When did emigrant wagons first cross Utah? Only a few months before the Kennedy assassination. Jim Bridger himself wintered in Utah for the first time in 1944. The Dominguez-Escalante expedition happened coincident with Utah’s statehood. Seen this way, the distant abstractions of history become a contemporary and very personal exercise; his listeners and reader could think “I remember what I was doing on that date myself, and if not, I know someone who does.”
Now certainly, in most of the article Morgan talks through important historical points without resorting to this trope, dealing with Britishand American-employed fur trappers, Indian and Spanish slaves, federal exploration of the West, and American emigrants, right up to the Donner party’s fateful delay in the Wasatch Mountains and harrowing crossing of the Salt Desert in 1846—or rather, last summer, in 1966. Imagine how the state’s past might translate into our own personal calendar. Doing so, as Dale Morgan does very effectively here, makes the sweep of the past very much a part of now.
