UTUtah History

Utah applied to join the United States six times and was refused six times. The first application, in 1849, was for a state called Deseret that would have stretched from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies and reached the Pacific through a corridor to San Diego. The last, in 1895, came from a convention that had written a permanent ban on plural marriage into its constitution because Congress would accept nothing less. The 47 years between those two documents are the story of the state.

Fremont fields, the Nuche, and two friars in 1776

Farmers of the Fremont culture grew corn along the Wasatch front and in the eastern canyons for roughly a thousand years, and Ancestral Puebloans built and then left the cliff sites of the San Juan country, both traditions winding down around 1300. The peoples present at contact were the Ute, who call themselves Nuche and whose name the state carries, the Southern Paiute in the red rock southwest, the Goshute in the west desert, the Eastern Shoshone to the north, and the Diné in the southeast. The first documented Europeans arrived in September 1776, when the Franciscans Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante came north from Santa Fe hunting an overland road to Monterey, were fed by Ute villagers in Utah Valley, and cast lots on whether to continue before turning for home. Traders on the Old Spanish Trail followed, and Jim Bridger reached the Great Salt Lake in the winter of 1824, tasted it, and concluded he had found an arm of the Pacific.

A wagon company arrives in Mexico, 1847

Joseph Smith was killed by a mob at Carthage, Illinois in June 1844, and the Latter-day Saints abandoned Nauvoo in February 1846. Brigham Young's advance company entered the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, which is why that date is still a state holiday. The valley was Mexican territory at the time, and the United States was at war with Mexico as they arrived. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, moved the settlers into the United States without their traveling another mile. What they built was unusual for the West: not a mining camp but a planned agricultural colony, watered by diverted creeks, laid out on a grid, and directed from a single office. Converts recruited in Britain and Scandinavia came by ship and rail and then on foot, including the handcart companies of 1856. By the late 1850s several hundred settlements ran from southern Idaho to San Bernardino.

Deseret refused, and the war that followed

The provisional State of Deseret drafted a constitution in 1849 and sent it to Washington. Congress declined and instead created Utah Territory as part of the Compromise of 1850, with Brigham Young as governor. Federal appointees sent to serve under him kept leaving and reporting rebellion. In 1857 James Buchanan ordered roughly 2,500 troops west without notifying Young, who declared martial law and had militia burn forage and supply wagons to slow them. In the middle of that panic, on September 11, 1857, a territorial militia at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah killed about 120 members of the Baker-Fancher emigrant party from Arkansas after promising them safe conduct. Only John D. Lee was ever convicted, and he was executed at the site in 1877. The Utah War ended with a presidential pardon in 1858 and a non-Mormon governor. Eleven years later the two railroads met at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, and the territory's isolation ended for good.

The polygamy fight and the price of statehood

Congress attacked plural marriage for three decades. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 outlawed it, the Supreme Court upheld that law in Reynolds v. United States in 1879, the Edmunds Act of 1882 stripped polygamists of the vote and of public office, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church as a legal corporation, seized its property, and abolished woman suffrage in the territory, which Utah had granted in 1870. Church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto ending new plural marriages in 1890, and the church's political party dissolved the following year so that members would divide between the national parties. Utah was admitted as the 45th state on January 4, 1896, under a constitution that banned plural marriage irrevocably and restored the vote to women. That November Martha Hughes Cannon, a practicing physician, was elected to the state senate and became the first woman state senator in the United States, on a ticket that included her own husband as an opposing candidate.

Copper, steel, fallout and snow

In 1906 Daniel Jackling proved at Bingham Canyon that low grade copper ore could pay if it was mined by the mountainside, and the resulting pit is now more than half a mile deep and over two miles across, worked across the century by Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mexican and Serbian crews. The Second World War found Utah useful for the same reason Congress had once found it remote. The federal government built Geneva Steel at Vineyard in 1942 precisely because it was hundreds of miles from any coastline, expanded Hill Field and Dugway Proving Ground, trained the crew that would fly the Enola Gay at Wendover, and opened the Topaz camp near Delta, where about 8,000 Japanese Americans were confined behind wire. Between 1951 and 1962 above ground nuclear tests in Nevada carried fallout across southern Utah, and the cancer clusters among the people known as downwinders led Congress to pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990. The last transformation was the pleasant one. Ski resorts in the canyons above Salt Lake City grew from a postwar novelty into an industry, and the 2002 Winter Olympics gave the state the airport, roads and reputation it now runs on.

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