Introduction
WAVES OF MIGRATION: UTAH COUNTY HISTORY IN PERSPECTIVE
U
tah has experienced several migrations of people across its landscape. Although the influence of these migrations was not always as large as or as significant to Utah County as it was to the rest of the state, it generally has been replicated in the county to some degree. Some may assume that before permanent European settlement, the m o u n t a i n s a n d valleys of Utah were u n c h a n g i n g and quiet. Nothing could be further from the truth; many events over t h o u sands of years—some geological, others human—helped shape the land and its people. The last major sculpting of the land, however, took place in the waning millennia of the Pleistocene era when glaciers in the Wasatch a n d Uinta M o u n t a i n s withdrew. And Lake Bonneville, a vast freshwater lake which formed as a consequence of the cooler and wetter clime of that ice-age era and covered about 23 percent of western Utah, finally broke through the natural dam at Red Rock Pass n o r t h of Logan a r o u n d 13,000 years ago. The lake dropped dramatically as a consequence, leaving physical evidence of its higher elevation etched on the slopes of the Wasatch Range. Changes in climate, a general warming and drying, continued the xm
