MILES GOODYEAR A N D T H E F O U N D I N G OF O G D E N * BY D A L E L. M O R G A N !
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LILES GOODYEAR'S STORY has a continuing fascination in the history of Utah. In a formal biography Charles Kelly and Maurice L. Howe called him the "First Citizen of Utah"'—a title subject to some qualification but suggestive of his significance. Modern Ogden has grown out of the trading post he established in 1846 near the junction of the Weber and Ogden rivers, and because "Fort Buenaventura" antedated the Mormon settlement in Salt Lake Valley by a year, Ogden has the distinction of being the oldest continuously settled community in the State.
The role Goodyear played in the settlement of Utah has made him, beyond most of his contemporaries among the mountain men, a subject of enduring interest. Miles Goodyear came to the Rocky Mountains as late as 1836, when the fur trade as the W e s t had known it was about to disappear; in retrospect it is fitting that he should have traveled in the party of Marcus Whitman and Henry Harmon Spalding, whose wives were the first white women to cross South Pass, symbolic of permanent occupation of the land. Because Goodyear is a figure of the transitional era, sometimes shadowy and indistinctly perceived, the details of his life have emerged slowly, but the more information that comes forth about Miles Goodyear, the more interesting he seems. 1 *This article was originally written for the Ogden Standard-Examiner, which published it under the title, "The Miles Goodyear Story," in its issues of July 18-26, 1952. Somewhat rearranged and with added material, it is now republished with the permission of the Standard-Examiner. fMr. Morgan is a recognized authority on Utah and the West. He is the author of several well-known volumes, The Humboldt, Highroad of the West (1943), and The Great Salt Lake (1947). A forthcoming biography of Jedediah Smith promises to be the last word on that great mountain man. Many earlier volumes of the Utah Historical Quarterly owe much to the research and literary skill of Mr. Morgan. 1 Mr. O. A. Kennedy, Ogden newspaperman, who is now in his 94th year, first delivered Miles Goodyear from out of the cloudland of fable; his
