Miles Goodyear and the Founding of Ogden I

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. XXI, 1953, No. 3

MILES GOODYEAR AND THE FOUNDING OF OGDEN*

BY DALE L. MORGAN

I

MILES 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 West 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.

The forebears of Miles Goodyear came to Connecticut from London in 1638. His great-great-great-grandfather Stephen was a London merchant who became lieutenant-governor of the colony and served in that office for 17 years. Miles's own father, Andrew, engaged in the West India trade, but was ruined by the War of 1812. To him and his wife Patty Bradley six children were born, of which Miles was the fifth, born at Hamden, Connecticut, on February 24, 1817. The father died in 1819 and the six children were orphaned when their mother passed away in April, 1821.

The Goodyear children were scattered, "bound out" to such families as would keep them for their labor. Of Miles's own rearing, not too much is known. At the age of 10 he was bound out for six years to Ward Peck, a farmer of North Haven, and during that period of more or less involuntary servitude he seems to have picked up a hearty dislike of farms and farm life which to the end of his life he never entirely overcame. He learned, however, to read and write, and doubtless to cipher; he also developed a liking for poetry, which he committed to memory and tried to write himself. His term as a bound boy ended in 1833. During the next year he worked for a time at brickmaking in North Haven, but this was a labor more dull for him than farming, and he soon threw up the job. The circumstances of his life had been such as to give him a strong yearning for the fullest possible measure of personal liberty, and in the America of his time, freedom was West. In the spring of 1834 he left home in pursuit of the dream.

It took him two years to reach the jumping-off place, the boundary along the Missouri River where the Indian Territory began. On a May day in 1836 he fell in with the missionary company Marcus Whitman and Henry Harmon Spalding were taking out to Oregon. To William H. Gray, lay assistant in that company, we are indebted for a vivid picture of Miles Goodyear at the turning-point in his life.

"The third day in the morning," Gray tells us, "some forty miles from Fort Leavenworth, as we were about starting, a white boy, about sixteen years old, came into camp, having on an old torn straw hat, an old ragged fustian coat, scarcely half a shirt, with buckskin pants, badly worn, but one moccasin, a powder horn with no powder in it, and an old rifle. He had light flaxen hair, light blue eyes, was thin and spare, yet appeared in good health and spirits. He said he had started for the Rocky Mountains ... he had been without food for two days; he asked for some ammunition; thought he could kill some game to get along; the rain the night previous had wet him quite effectually; he was really cold, wet, nearly naked and hungry. He was soon supplied from our stores with all he wanted, and advised to return to his friends. . . . To this he objected, and said if we would allow him he would go with us to Council Bluffs, and then go with the fur company to the mountains. He agreed to assist all he could in getting along. He was furnished with a horse and made an excellent hand while he remained with the party. . . . His name was Miles Goodyear."

The undersized youth was older than he appeared to be; in the spring of 1836 he was in his twentieth year. Gray speaks of his hair as flaxen, and there is a later possible allusion to him which would picture his hair as light brown, flaxy at the ends. It may be that his hair burned redder as he grew older, but these are reminiscent accounts and perhaps mistaken, for after he reached the mountains the Snakes called him Inca Pompe, red head, and the Bannocks called him Mooritza, the red deer.

The journey of Whitman and Spalding to South Pass and beyond is a famous episode in Western history, and we will not describe it in detail. But Narcissa Whitman's description of the caravan with which Miles traveled to the mountains merits quoting, for in it is her only allusion to him by name.

"The Fur Company is large this year," she wrote home to her family; "we are really a moving village—nearly 400 animals, with ours, mostly mules, and 70 men. The Fur Company have seven wagons drawn by six mules each, heavily loaded, and one cart drawn by two mules, which carries a lame man, one of the proprietors of the Company. We have two wagons in our company; Mr. and Mrs. S., husband and myself ride in one, Mr. Gray and the baggage in the other. Our Indian boys drive the cows and Dulin the horses. Young Miles leads our forward horses, four in each team. Now . . . , if you want to see the camp in motion, look away ahead and see first the pilot and the captain, [Thomas] Fitzpatrick, just before him; next the pack animals, all mules, loaded with great packs; soon after you will see the wagons, and in the rear, our company.

Miles Goodyear Cabin

We all cover quite a space. The pack mules always string along one after the other just like Indians."

The Whitman party abandoned the heaviest of its two wagons at Fort Laramie, but stubbornly kept on with the other. Beyond Green River, the labor occasioned by taking a wagon where wagons had never gone before fell primarily on Whitman and Goodyear, and by the time they reached Fort Hall, the redheaded youth had had enough. After all, he had never intended to go to Oregon; he wanted to become a mountain man. Gray tells us that Miles parted from the missionaries on good terms. He "was furnished a couple of horses, and the best outfit the missionary party could give him for his services, and allowed to remain or go where he might choose. In his conclusions he was influenced by the stories he heard about the treatment he might expect should he reach the lower Columbia. His idea of liberty was unlimited. Restraint and obedience to others was what he did not like at home; he would try his fortune in the mountains; he did not care for missionaries, Hudson's Bay men, nor Indians; he was determined to be his own man, and was allowed to remain at Fort Hall." Gray adds, with as much of poetry as solid fact, that at Fort Hall Miles "joined a party that went with the Bannock Indians, and became a member of that tribe, and, as near as we can learn, married a native woman (some say three), and is using his influence to keep the tribe at war with the United States. Of this we have no positive knowledge, though if such is the fact he may have been a deserter from Fort Levenworth."

Matt Field provides all the information that has yet come forth with regard to young Miles's initiation to mountain life, obtained from Goodyear himself in the summer of 1843: "Miles, during his first year in the mountains had 2 horses, and was wintering at Blackfoot Creak, at a point about 40 miles from Fort Hall, when a man from the fort offered him two good guns for a horse. Miles gave his horse, and the guns were to be sent to him, but they not arriving, he set off on foot to get them. When about 2/3rd of the way himself and companion gave out, and turned back A miles to get water. They reached the creek at 9 at night<—willow banks piled 20 feet high with snow—cut their way down an old buffalo trail gathered a few dry willow twigs, and while Miles sat striking a light, cross-legged, his feet frozel 10 pounds of ice on each snow shoe—didn't know his misfortune until thawing off his snow shoes, and then, when the fire touched the frost in his flesh, his involuntary scream of agony startled the midnight solitude! plunging his feet in snow and icewater of the creek gave some poor relief and he law [lay] in the snow all night, bur [n] ing, as if in fire. But the resolute boy started off the next morning, though each foot was bigger than his head, (it was either travel or starve and freeze!) and he made his way to Fort Hall, where he got his horse again but no guns!"

After this winter Goodyear drops out of sight for 5 years. As a greenhorn he may have attached himself to one or another of the roving bands of trappers, or lived among the Snakes or Bannocks. It would appear that by 1839 he had sufficiently established himself that he could obtain trading goods and supplies at Fort Hall, and that during the next three years he ranged widely in all directions from the British post on the Snake. His travels assuredly brought him south into the Utah country, for at some time during this period he took to wife a squaw said to have been named Pomona, daughter of the chief Pe-teet-neet, whose band lived in the vicinity of present Payson. Pomona had borne him two children by the summer of 1842, so it may be inferred that he had taken her into his lodge by 1839. Matt Field who met her in 1843, pictures her as "a fat squaw with a broad, glazed leather St. Louis fireman's belt around her waist, marked 'Central' in large gold letters!" Pomona reduced herself to more svelte proportions or observers appeared capable of looking to the beauty within, for in July, 1846, the young Swiss immigrant Heinrich Lienhard spoke of her as "a beautiful Indian woman" not above doing the family wash.

For reasons unexplained, in the spring of 1842 the redheaded young mountain man shifted his base of operations from Fort Hall to Antoine Robidoux's Fort Wintey, on the Whiterocks River in eastern Utah. The aged Methodist preacher, Joseph Williams, returning from Oregon with three other travelers, was guided to Jim Bridger's new post on Blacks Fork by Goodyear and one other mountain man, oddly described by Williams as "two Frenchmen and their women." Bridger had left for the States before the little party reached his fort, and the trail via South Pass and Fort Laramie was regarded as so dangerous this year because of the temper of the Cheyennes and Sioux that it was decided to head for Robidoux's fort. In crossing the Uinta Mountains, Williams says, "The wife of one of the Frenchmen was our pilot. She had two children along; one tied to a board, and hung to the horn of the saddle, and the other in a blanket, tied to her back." It is an odd usage that the Connecticut Yankee, Goodyear, should have been described as a "Frenchman," but Williams definitely identifies one of his two Frenchmen as "Mr. Miles," and it was quite likely Goodyear's squaw who guided the party across the mountains to Ute country.

Goodyear spent at least the summer and early fall in the Uinta Basin, for he was at Fort Wintey at the end of October when Marcus Whitman arrived there on his celebrated winter journey back to the States. The far wanderer seized the opportunity to send home his first letter in eight years; in it he said that for three years past he had been trading with equipments derived from the Hudson's Bay Company. If he had not made his fortune, he had acquired property, horses, beaver, and $2,500. Next spring he intended going to Santa Fe. If his life was spared and fortune favored him, perhaps in a few years he might come home.

Possibly Miles Goodyear did visit Santa Fe in the spring of 1843, as his letter forecast. But from this time until Goodyear established himself on the site of Ogden in the late summer of 1846, those who met him in the mountains encountered him in the vicinity of Fort Bridger. He was at that fort in late July, 1843, when a party of Arapahoes and Cheyennes made a spectacular descent upon the horse herds of mountain men and Snakes who had the misfortune to be in the vicinity at the time, and he greatly distinguished himself in the pursuit and partial recovery of the stolen horses.

Let Matt Field relate this story, for he tells it more graphically and in more detail than anyone else, in one of his sketches published in the New Orleans Daily Picayune, February 23, 1844:

Some forty lodges of Snake Indians were located about half a mile below the fort, and a number of hunters and trappers had their leather dwellings stretched upon poles in the immediate vicinity. The loose horses of all these people, together with those belonging to Captain Bridger, were grazing in a band near the fort, when, in the settled stillness after noontime, the furious onset yell of the Cheyennes suddenly arose, and the alarm of a stampede at once startled all who were within two miles of the spot. Seventy or eighty Cheyenne Indians had cautiously approached the place, by stealing along among the dwarf willows that grew upon the edge of the stream, and when they were near enough to the horses, they gave the war scream, and in an instant were flying over the prairie, driving all the animals of the fort and the Snake village before them.

Only a few squaws and children were in the village at the time, the men being all out "surrounding" antelope; but, luckily, they happened to be returning with their meat, and were now within a few miles of the fort. As chance would have it, the marauders drove the horses they were in this manner stealing, exactly in the direction in which to cross the view of the Shoshonee hunters, who knew their own animals at once, and understood the nature of the affair at a glance. Mounting the freshest horses at hand, the Shoshonees darted after the robbers. In the meantime those about the fort who had managed to get hold of a steed of any kind, were off in hot haste after the thieving Cheyennes. Among these was Miles Goodyear, a young trapper from Yankee Land .... He was soon far ahead in the pursuit, his blood boiling for vengeance, having witnessed the spearing of a woman and a boy as the Cheyennes made their wild rush past the Shoshonee village. His steed was in good condition, and he soon swept on past several of the Cheyennes who were left in the rear upon tired horses, his aim being, if possible, to reach and turn the frightened animals that the Cheyennes were driving away. In his eagerness he had quite forgotten that he had far outstripped his companions, and was now entirely alone, in full chase of eighty Indians. The acute Yankee, however, was not long without discovering his error, and his wits were at once at work to provide for trouble that now seemed inevitable. Half a dozen of the Cheyennes turned and dashed back toward Miles, poising their lances and threatening him with instant death. He never paused in his career, but made a sign as if calling on five hundred white men behind him to hurry up, and the Indians, stricken with alarm, turned from him again and made off in the utmost terror.

The horses of the Cheyennes began to tire down, and many began to lag in reach of the pursuers. One desperate looking rascal, finding his steed was completely worn out, at length jumped to the ground and continued his flight on foot. As Miles came thundering up behind him, he turned round, grinding his teeth with rage, and almost pale through his bronze skin. He lifted his gun and took deadly aim at Miles, but the cock snapped harmlessly, and the next moment the Indian fell with a horrible death howl as an ounce ball from the rifle of Miles sped through and through his body.

By this time the plundered Shoshonees began to gain upon the robbers so rapidly that many of the latter began to abandon the game and seek safety in various directions. These Cheyennes carried spears and white shields, the last being made of two thicknesses of buffalo skin, tightly stretched on a round frame and dressed purely white. It is asserted that these have been made strong enough to turn a bullet. Whether this be true or not, the fine appearance made by these marauders, flying with their shield slung upon their backs and their spears pointed in the air, may be imagined. It was a rare spectacle, too, when the Cheyennes, hotly pressed, at length began to throw away their guns, shields and spears, to lighten themselves and escape from the rifles of the American trappers and the arrows of the Snakes.

The robbers drove from the fort nearly three hundred horses, and the gallant pursuers succeeded in turning back all but forty, among which latter number were the three belonging to our express.

Stroke and counterstroke added up to one of the big events of the mountain year, and the details enliven the journals of many travelers who reached the Rockies this summer. The attackers, as the facts subsequently emerged, were a mixed band of Cheyennes and Arapahoes, and of the seven or eight killed, all but one were Arapahoes; it also developed that the affair had been instigated by two French-Canadian halfbreeds, Tesson and Rivy (or Riviere), a circumstance to stir the wrath of all the mountain men. Particularly galling was the fact that the horses the raiders got off with—estimated at from 20 to 60—were the property of the whites. But the hero of the occasion, beyond all doubt, was the red-headed mountain man from Connecticut. When leading the chase after the Cheyennes, it was related, on coming up with the rearmost of the red rascals he had thundered, "You're dead men, every one of you—hundreds of us will be upon you in a moment, and we'll kill you and eat you—dogs, we'll eat you!" It made just as good conversation that when the horse of the Cheyenne Miles was pursuing gave out, the Indian had turned and fired; his gun had snapped, and in the next instant Pochecan, a noted Snake warrior, had driven an arrow into the man's heart.

The losses of the pursuers included the woman and boy who had been killed in the first onslaught and a Snake brave who had been speared by two men at once when he attempted to head the stampeding herd. Goodyear had endeared himself to the Snakes through his conduct during the fight, but he made an utter conquest by cutting his lodge in two as a token of respect for the man who was lost.

Less spectacular, but also less well known is another episode of the summer in which Goodyear figured. In view of the fact that the Connecticut mountain man from this time figures prominently in Western history as a dealer in horses, the details are worth preserving.

The English nobleman, Sir William Drummond Stewart, who had spent the better part of five years in the mountains between 1833 and 1838, and who was made the central figure in Bernard DeVoto's fine book, Across the Wide Missouri, this summer was making a last visit to a country which had meant much to him. The brave days of the fur trade were already gone, but Sir William could undertake to commune with at least a few ghosts of the recently dead past through the medium of an elaborate pleasure excursion to the Green River Valley. Returning to the site of the rendezvous of 1837, and going on up to the lake at the head of Piney Fork which his artist, Alfred Jacob Miller, had depicted for him in many lovely paintings, Sir William sent an express to Fort Bridger inviting such mountain men and Snakes as might be there to join him in his pleasures. Miles Goodyear and Uncle Jack Robinson were two who accepted the invitation.

In the thirties Sir William had brought horses to the mountains to pit them against the best animals of the trappers and the Indians, and the sporting blood still ran strong in him. This spring he had brought up from Missouri a bay horse, Chieftain, he was anxious to put to the test. Added entries for a notable race were William L. Sublette's chestnut horse, Tom, and Lieutenant Richard Graham's mare, Brown Bess. To uphold mountain honor, two horses stepped forth, Jack Robinson's chestnut horse, Siskeedee, and Goodyear's gray mare, Mountain Devil. A famous rider, Goodyear rode his own horse, but Robinson mounted on his chestnut a wild-eyed Snake Indian named Tom, naked save for a red cotton handkerchief tied around his middle. The Green River Sweepstakes were run off August 15, 1843, the purse made up of a dozen of champagne, a dozen of hock, six leather shirts, one pair of pistols, Indian trinkets of every description, and two fine mules, the whole valued at something like $500.

Our racing correspondent, Matt Field, reports (via the New Orleans Daily Picayune of January 16,1844) that from the starting post a mile out the nags all got off finely, "mad Tom" on Siskeedee darting into the lead at the first jump with a piercing scream:

The sight from the judges' stand was grand and strange to an enchanting degree. First a cloud of dust arose, that had as much the semblance of smoke, out of which came darting a group of wild figures, whipping and yelling, and with arms and legs flying like a band of very fiends. . . . The dust rolled after the riders in a huge cloud, and little could be seen of the parties in the contest until the whole crowd passed the half-mile mark, when mad Tom was seen flying twenty yards in advance, while the others were huddling along in no particular distinction of position, at just that distance behind the victorious Siskeedee. One remarkable feature of the scene was the furious riding backward and forward of the Snakes, as they with willing eagerness abandoned themselves to the excitement of the sport. On, on came the nags, the gap perceptibly widening between Siskeedee and his pursuers. They entered the last quarter, and then the positions of all the competitors could be distinguished. Brown Bess was leading those behind, stepping forward at a merry pace, but evidently with no chance of making up matters with Siskeedee, while Mountain Devil appeared next, making a tremendous effort to get in front. The Chieftain and Tom, the sorrel, were doing their best in a small way, but it was clear that there remained no further use of their breaking their necks in hope of winning the stakes.

No finer sight was ever witnessed upon a race course, than the passing of the judges' stand by the Indian upon Siskeedee. Mad Tom seemed to rise in his stirrups, though he had none, and with head thrown back over his right shoulder, looking at those behind him, his left arm tossed gracefully in the air, the slender bridle, the only piece of gearing about the horse, grasped firmly in his right hand, he made a picture of wild grace and grandeur that threw us all into loud shouts of admiration. . . . Siskeedee passed the judges' stand thirty yards ahead of the field, running as if the mad Indian never intended to come back with him, while the rest of the crowd came up in the following order, all distanced by the victor. Miles Goodyear, on his Mountain Devil, was first in after Siskeedee; Brown Bess was one length behind; the Chieftain next made his appearance, emerging from the run home, and Tom kept the last company in pretty close fashion.

The winner was clocked at 2:05.

On August 17, Sir William headed back for the States. Goodyear did not go with him. Instead he moved on west across the Bear River Divide, and in the Bear River Valley was encountered two weeks later by various Oregon-bound travelers, of whom Theodore Talbot, accompanying Fremont's baggage train, is most informative. On the evening of September 2, Talbot says, "we met Miles a freetrapper, who had formerly been in employ of the North West Company. He camped with us. He had his squaw, two children, Le Meuse a half breed Iroquois indian, and a band of horses."

Talbot's meeting with Goodyear is the last entirely definite account of him for two years, though John Minto, bound for Oregon with the immigration of 1844, has a curious story to tell. On reaching Fort Bridger, Captain Robert W. Morrison, with whom Minto was traveling, traded his plow irons and one of his cows for flour brought from Taos. "The man he was dealing with," Minto goes on to say, "was very different from those here apparently on show. He was receiving the different parts of the plow from Morrison and talking to him about its now being late in the season for us to get to Oregon, and said he had been in the country about Salt Lake the preceding fall (1843), and thought it would be good country to settle in. While he was thus talking and tying up the plow irons, a party passing stopped and asked what he was going to do with them. He replied, 'I am going to try farming a while down at Taos.' "

"This man, whom I afterwards identified from his photos as Kit Carson, interested me. He was a man five feet nine or ten inches at the most, but strongly framed in breast and shoulders; light brown hair, flaxy at the ends; eyes steel blue, or gray. ... I saw the man throw the plow irons down at camp close by the trail. ... a very comely woman, evidently not a full Indian, was saddling and packing two of the finest mules I ever saw. (Many years afterwards I concluded this was the Mexican wife of Kit Carson, recently married, and they were now going to farm on her inheritance, near Taos, New Mexico.) "

If there is anything of substance in these recollections (they were written over 35 years later), the man John Minto saw at Fort Bridger about September 1, 1844, must have been Miles Goodyear; the known facts of Carson's life make it impossible that he could have been at Fort Bridger at this time and under these circumstances. The farming operation would more reasonably have been projected for the Great Salt Lake country than for the vicinity of Taos; on the other hand, there is no evidence that Miles Goodyear ever plowed so much as a furrow on the ground where Ogden stands today, so that what became of the plow irons is an interesting question.

None of the overland travelers of 1845 have anything to say about an encounter with Miles Goodyear, and the reason has only lately become evident—he made a visit that summer to the States, his first in nine years. Late in September, 1845, the Independence Western Expositor had this to add to Goodyear's personal history:

On Tuesday last, a Mountain company under the charge of Miles W. [M.] Goodyear left our place. The number with him does not exceed 6 or 8 men. His goods, which were mostly purchased in St. Louis, were taken out on pack animals—'as these were considered best and safest to get along among the mountains. He trades most usually with the Snake Indians, and one or two other tribes, who are friendly to the Americans.

During his stay on the plains he purposes building a kind of a fort, and cultivating a portion of ground, more as an experiment than anything else, and if possible make it a sort of half way house between this and Oregon and California, where the companies may stop and refresh themselves, and obtain re supplies, for he expects to have the coming summer all kinds of vegetables, and plenty of Indian corn and wheat, which they may pound up or grind into flour and meal. It is his intention upon his return to the States in a year or two, to bring in with him all kinds of flower seed and rare shrubbery that the prairies may furnish, as well as everything in the curious line of the animal, vegetable or mineral kingdom—success to him.

Clearly Goodyear appreciated the significance of what he had seen on the Western trails the last three years, the immigrant wagons in ever-increasing numbers making for Oregon and California. The streams of the West were nearly trapped out, and trade with the immigrants was bound to replace trade with the Indians, particularly west of South Pass where the buffalo had all but disappeared. Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez had shown the way, trading fresh stock for worn, providing the blacksmithing services immigrants were so much in need of by the time they reached Pacific waters. Now Miles would go Fort Bridger one better; he would undertake to provide the food immigrants needed to see them through to the Pacific.

Most plans in life require some accommodation to reality, and the "Half Way House" was no exception. In the summer of 1845, Goodyear might have hoped to be in business by the time the next year's immigration reached the Rockies, but the overland travelers of 1846 found him still in the vicinity of Fort Bridger. Heinrich Lienhard, who was impressed with his courteous manner, wrote in his journal on July 24, 1846 (and it is clear that it is Goodyear he is talking about): "The red-haired mountaineer lived near the fort and had taken a beautiful Indian woman as his wife. . . . He was the father of a boy, perhaps three years of age, who was practicing at shooting with a small bow and arrow. This man seemed to have definitely settled here; he owned a small flock of sheep, among which there were also two kids of tamed mountain sheep. . . . He had acquired not only sheep but also a small herd of cattle, and we exchanged with him our two cows for two young oxen."

Even as Lienhard was writing these observations in his journal, Goodyear was reaching a decision about a location for his trading post. Until the summer of 1846, establishment of a post in the valley of the Great Salt Lake had not been practical, for it was well off the line of travel of the immigrants it must seek to serve. But on July 20 Lansford W. Hastings had set out from Fort Bridger with a sizeable company of California immigrants in an attempt to shorten the California trail by a new route south of Great Salt Lake. This cutoff, it was declared, would reduce by several hundred miles the distance to California. If so, from this time on immigrant wagons would be rolling through the valley of the Great Salt Lake in imposing numbers. The elevation of Fort Bridger was too high for the farming operation Goodyear had conceived. A post near the salt lake, however, had attractive possibilities.

The focusing of Goodyear's attention on the valley of the Great Salt Lake is recorded by James Frazier Reed of the tragically famous Donner Party, who reached Fort Bridger on July 27. Before embarking upon the new Hastings Cutoff on July 31, Reed wrote a last letter home. With much else that is interesting, Reed wrote, "There are two gentlemen here—one of them an Englishman of the name of Wills, and the other a yankee named Miles—who will leave here in a few days to settle at some favorable point on the Salt Lake, which in a short time will be a fine place for emigrants to recruit their teams, by exchanging broken down oxen for good teams."

This information can be taken as conclusive for the date of Miles Goodyear's post on the Weber River. Had such a post existed already, Reed's letter would have been phrased differently. The settlement that was to become the city of Ogden was founded sometime in the early fall of 1846, after the last travelers on the Hastings Cutoff had passed by. But out of Ogden's pre-history a certain amount of undergrowth and dead wood in the way of legend and conjecture requires to be cut before the facts can emerge in clear view.

Like most other forts in the West, Goodyear's establishment on the site of Ogden has been dated much too early. The legend, as it first took shape in the eighties, was that in 1841 a certain "Miles M. Goodyier, an Indian trader," had obtained from the Mexican government a grant for a tract of land "commencing at the mouth of Weber Canyon, and following the base of the mountains north to the Hot Springs; thence west to the Salt Lake; thence south along the shore to the point opposite Weber Canyon; thence east to the point of beginning." As historians worked at the problem, it became evident that the story of a Mexican grant had no foundation, and that no post could have been built on the Weber River before the winter of 1844-45. Within the past 15 years, a succession of discoveries has pointed ever more inexorably to the probability that the fort was not commenced before the early fall of 1846. A single statement, however, down to the present has been relied upon to prove that a rude structure of some kind existed on the site of Ogden before the era of the Hastings Cutoff.

This statement was by John R. McBride, in some reminiscences published in Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine for July, 1884. McBride's parents were Oregon immigrants of 1846, and in these reminiscences he tells us that on reaching Fort Bridger that summer, they were given a glowing account of the potentialities of the Great Salt Lake country. Although insufficiently impressed to turn aside from Oregon, McBride says, when the company of immigrants reached Soda Springs, they sent a party on horseback down the Bear River to look over the valleys adjacent to the Great Salt Lake. McBride claims to have been one of that party, and goes on to say that in the course of their reconnaissance they encamped one night "at the crossing of the Ogden River, in the delta between the Ogden and the Weber. At the camp was a cabin built of cottonwood logs. It had been occupied the year before by a trader whose name was known and mentioned by our trapper friends [at Fort Bridger], but he had gone north, they stated, to the Yellowstone."

In McBride's recollections there are indications that he was capable of drawing upon his imagination, but down to the present we have had no reason to doubt his account of this remarkable reconnaissance. Recently, however, it has developed that the Oregon Historical Society has another and entirely different memoir by McBride concerning the journey of his family to Oregon in 1846, and this has nothing whatever to say about having visited the Valley of the Great Salt Lake a year ahead of the Mormon Pioneers. There is no suggestion that a settlement in that valley was recommended to the McBride party, and the journey west from Fort Bridger is described very differently: "From Bridger we changed our course to Northwest, crossing the present line of the Union Pacific Railroad near Carter's Station, Wyoming, passing up the stream now called Muddy Crossing, the divide between the waters of Bear River and the Colorado, and striking the former just above the mouth of Smith's Fork. . . . Our next point of interest was Soda Springs on Bear River." And now, not a remarkable reconnaissance into the little known country south, but simply: "About sixty miles from Soda Springs brought us to Fort Hall." There is, in short, no mention whatever of a reconnaissance into the Great Salt Lake country that summer by McBride or any other member of the company, and we are left to wonder whether the account of 1884, written at a time of violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah, may not have been colored by a desire on McBride's part to get in a dig at the Saints in their historic role as pioneers. Eventually historians may be able to settle this question, for the reminiscences in the Oregon Historical Society several times quote from the manuscript diary of McBride's father, actually written on the trail in 1846, and if this diary is ever found, it will determine whether a detachment was sent southward to have a look at the valleys rimming the Great Salt Lake.

Goodyear's partner in his undertaking, referred to by James Frazier Reed as an "Englishman of the name of Wills," after more than a century still remains a good deal of a mystery. A Mormon diary entry made in August, 1847, speaks of him as "a man by the name of Wells who had lived a number of years among the Spaniards in New Mexico." Other than this, all that is known about Captain Wells comes to us from the diary of one of the immigrants of 1846, Edwin Bryant. Bryant was one of a small party mounted on mules which headed westward from Fort Laramie on June 28, 1846. Five days later, Bryant recorded in his journal, "We were joined to-day by Capt. Welles and Mr. McClary, the first a mountain-trapper, intending to accompany us as far as Fort Bridger, and the last an emigrant bound for California. Capt. Welles, as he informed us and as I was informed by others, had once held a commission in the British army. He was in the battles of Waterloo and New Orleans. He was a man of about sixty, vigorous and athletic, and his manners, address, and general intelligence, although clothed in the rude buckskin costume of the wilderness, confirmed the statements in regard to him, made by himself and others." With Bryant's party Wells presumably reached Fort Bridger on the night of July 16. It does not seem entirely probable that Goodyear first made his acquaintance at this time and within two weeks found him so congenial as to have settled upon him as a partner, but the facts of their relationship defy closer definition as yet.

When the last of the year's immigration to Oregon and California had passed by and trading was suspended for another year, Goodyear must have gathered around him his flocks and herds, his squaw, his flourishing posterity, and his retainers, and in almost patriarchal majesty followed the new wagon road over to the Bear River, across the divide to Echo Canyon, and on down into the valley of the Great Salt Lake through the canyon of the Weber.

There is little enough information extant about the building of the new fort, which is not even named in any contemporary record thus far found; it is from the tradition preserved in the Goodyear family that the name "Fort Buenaventura" is recovered. The origin of the name is obvious enough, for maps of the West for a generation before this time showed a Buenaventura River flowing to the Pacific, its sources entangled with those of the Green and Colorado. Miles may have remembered the name from his school geographies and applied it as a pleasantry, but he was just romantic enough to have liked the name and all it stood for.

The fort was located on the Weber River about two miles above its junction with the Ogden, a little south of what is now 28th Street, east and slightly north of a large sand mound. The site was magnificent, the rugged scarp of the Wasatch rising immediately to the east, and the broad Weber Valley sloping gently west to the distant band of shining water that was the Great Salt Lake. The fort consisted of about half an acre enclosed with pickets; as usual with the forts of the West, a log house stood at each corner of the enclosure, with adjoining corrals for the horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. This at any rate describes the fort as it existed in the fall of 1847, though some of the improvements may have been the product of a full year's labor.

Fort Buenaventura has its own place in the history of Utah, and too much must not be claimed for it; it was neither the first fort built in Utah nor the first establishment occupied by white men the year round. These priorities rather, belong geographically to the Uinta Basin and historically to the era of the fur trade. The second great rendezvous of the fur trade was held in Cache Valley in the summer of 1826; it is not known whether any log structures were erected to accommodate traders and trappers, but it is at least interesting that a license to trade with the Indians, granted to Smith, Jackson and Sublette on March 26, 1827, should have specified as a location for trade "Camp Defence, on the waters of a river supposed to be the Bonaventure." ("Defence" may have been a clerical error; later licenses have it "Defiance.") More tangibly, as early as 1834-35 some log structures are known to have been built by wintering trappers at the junction of the Green and White rivers in eastern Utah, for they are mentioned in the journal of Warren A. Ferris and depicted on his remarkable map. These log cabins may date back a year or more before Ferris saw them, for Kit Carson speaks of having wintered in 1833-34 "on the mouth of the Wintey" with one of Antoine Robidoux's trapping parties. Historians have spoken even more loosely about the dates of Robidoux's posts in the Uinta Basin than about Goodyear's fort, at times declared to have been founded as early as 1824, but his winterings upon the Green were casual, and he seems not to have turned to serious fort-building in Utah until the fall of 1837.

Before this time Robidoux must have established his wellknown post on the Uncompahgre River in western Colorado. There is no definite information to fix the date, but it may have come into existence late in 1836; Warren Ferris evidently knew nothing of such an establishment up to the time he left the mountains in the summer of 1836, and Robidoux would have begun to feel the pressure from the new posts which by 1837 had broken out like a rash on the South Platte. Fort Davy Crockett in Browns Hole, it seems possible, was founded in the fall of 1837 as a riposte to Fort Uncompahgre, and Robidoux's new post in the Uinta Basin was his reply. At any rate, a most interesting inscription exists, carved in the face of a sandstone cliff near Westwater, Utah: "Antoine Robidoux passe ici le 13 Novembre 1837 pour etablire maison traitte a la Rv. Vert ou Wiyte." Some archeological evidences have been found of an adobe fort at the junction of the Green and White rivers, and it has suited the convenience of historians of the fur trade to call this establishment Fort Robidoux. Robidoux quite possibly may have commenced a post here only to be flooded out the ensuing spring. It was then, presumably, that he built the most celebrated of early Utah fur trading establishments, Fort Wintey (or Winte or Llintah or Robidoux) on the Whiterocks River, a branch of the Uinta.

A detailed history of Fort Wintey, with due attention to rival posts and the evolution of the fur trade, has yet to be written. Even the fact of its abandonment in the winter of 1844-45 has been universally misstated on the authority of a hasty footnote added to Fremont's report; it was not Fort Wintey but Fort Uncompahgre that was attacked by the Utes that winter; and Fort Wintey itself was abandoned rather than destroyed—this in the spring of 1845. According to Robidoux, Fort Wintey was eventually burned by the mountain man Jim Baker, no doubt to avert the possibility of renewed competition for the trade with the Utes. All this must be the subject of some future study; our point, merely, is that Antoine Robidoux anticipated Miles Goodyear by nine years in maintaining a year-round post in Utah. But 18 months after Robidoux cleared out of eastern Utah, Goodyear founded Fort Buenaventura; the new post was fortunately located, and in consequence Ogden will always have a farther reach back in time than any other Utah community.

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