The History of Utah is an examination of the human history and social activity within the state of Utah located in the western United States.
Native history Archaeological evidence dates the earliest habitation of humans in Utah to about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Rich people lived near the Great Basin's swamps and marshes, which has a history of fish, birds, and small game animals. Big game, including bison, mammoths and ground sloths, also were attracted to these water sources. Over the centuries, the mega-fauna died, this population was replaced by the Desert Archaic people, who sheltered in caves near the Great Salt Lake. Relying more on gathering than the previous Utah residents, their diet was mainly composed of cattails and other salt tolerant plants such as pickleweed, burro weed and sedge. Red meat appears to have been more of a luxury, although these people used nets and the atlatl to hunt water fowl, ducks, small animals and antelope. Artifacts include nets woven with plant fibers and rabbit skin, woven sandals, gaming sticks, and animal figures made from split-twigs. About 3,500 years ago, lake levels rose and the population of Desert Archaic people appears to have dramatically decreased. The Great Basin may have been almost unoccupied for 1,000 years.
The Fremont culture, named from sites near the Fremont River in Utah, lived in what is now north and western Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from approximately 600 to 1300 AD. These people lived in areas close to water sources that had been previously occupied by the Desert Archaic people, and may have had some relationship with them. However, their use of new technologies define them as a distinct people. Fremont technologies include: use of the bow and arrow while hunting, building pithouse shelters, growing maize and probably beans and squash, building above ground granaries of adobe or stone, creating and decorating low-fired pottery ware, producing art, including jewelry and rock art such as petroglyphs and pictographs.
The ancient Puebloan culture, also known as the Anasazi, occupied territory adjacent to the Fremont. The ancestral Puebloan culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the Southwest United States, including the San Juan River region of Utah. Archaeologists debate when this distinct culture emerged, but cultural development seems to date from about the common era, about 500 years before the Fremont appeared. It is generally accepted that the cultural peak of these people was around the 1200 CE. Ancient Puebloan culture is known for well constructed pithouses and more elaborate adobe and masonry dwellings. They were excellent craftsmen, producing turquoise jewelry and fine pottery. The Puebloan culture was based on agriculture, and the people created and cultivated fields of maize, beans, and squash and domesticated turkeys. They designed and produced elaborate field terracing and irrigation systems. They also built structures, some known as kivas, apparently designed solely for cultural and religious rituals.
These two later cultures were roughly contemporaneous, and appear to have established trading relationships. They also shared enough cultural traits that archaeologists believe the cultures may have common roots in the early American Southwest. However, each remained culturally distinct throughout most of their existence. These two well established cultures appear to have been severely impacted by climatic change and perhaps by the incursion of new people in about 1200 CE. Over the next two centuries, the Fremont and ancient Pueblo people may have moved into the American southwest, finding new homes and farmlands in the river drainages of Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico.
In about 1200, Shoshonean speaking peoples entered Utah territory from the west. They may have originated in southern California and moved into the desert environment due to population pressure along the coast. They were an upland people with a hunting and gathering lifestyle utilizing roots and seeds, including the pinyon nut. They were also skillful fishermen, created pottery and raised some crops. When they first arrived in Utah, they lived as small family groups with little tribal organization. Four main Shoshonean peoples inhabited Utah country. The Shoshone in the north and northeast, the Gosiutes in the northwest, the Utes in the central and eastern parts of the region and the Southern Paiutes in the southwest. Initially, there seems to have been very little conflict between these groups.
In the early 16th century, the San Juan River basin in Utah's southeast also saw a new people, the Díne or Navajo, part of a greater group of plains Athabaskan speakers moved into the Southwest from the Great Plains. In addition to the Navajo, this language group contained people that were later known as Apaches, including the Lipan, Jicarilla, and Mescalero Apaches.
Athabaskans were a hunting people who initially followed the bison, and were identified in 16th-century Spanish accounts as "dog nomads". The Athabaskans expanded their range throughout the 17th century, occupying areas the Pueblo peoples had abandoned during prior centuries. The Spanish first specifically mention the "Apachu de Nabajo" (Navaho) in the 1620s, referring to the people in the Chama valley region east of the San Juan River, and north west of Santa Fe. By the 1640s, the term Navaho was applied to these same people. Although the Navajo newcomers established a generally peaceful trading and cultural exchange with the some modern Pueblo peoples to the south, they experienced intermittent warfare with the Shoshonean peoples, particularly the Utes in eastern Utah and western Colorado.
At the time of European expansion, beginning with Spanish explorers traveling from Mexico, five distinct native peoples occupied territory within the Utah area: the Northern Shoshone, the Goshute, the Ute, the Paiute and the Navajo.
European exploration
The Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado may have crossed into what is now southern Utah in 1540, when he was seeking the legendary Cíbola.
A group led by two Spanish Catholic priests—sometimes called the Domínguez–Escalante expedition—left Santa Fe in 1776, hoping to find a route to the California coast. The expedition traveled as far north as Utah Lake and encountered the native residents. All of what is now Utah was claimed by the Spanish Empire from the 1500s to 1821 as part of New Spain (later as the province Alta California); and subsequently claimed by Mexico from 1821 to 1848. However, Spain and Mexico had little permanent presence in, or control of, the region. Modern Utah nonetheless has many Spanish-language place names (e.g., San Juan County and Sanpete County; and the cities of Escalante, Salina, Santa Clara or La Verkin).
Fur trappers (also known as mountain men) including Jim Bridger, explored some regions of Utah in the early 19th century. The city of Provo was named for one such man, Étienne Provost, who visited the area in 1825. The city of Ogden, Utah is named for a brigade leader of the Hudson's Bay Company, Peter Skene Ogden who trapped in the Weber Valley. In 1846, a year before the arrival of members from the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints, the ill-fated Donner Party crossed through the Salt Lake valley late in the season, deciding not to stay the winter there but to continue forward to California, and beyond.
Settlement by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Emigrant members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormon pioneers, (and today as the Mormons) were encouraged in their choice to settle in the Great Basin and the Great Basin Desert by the favorable descriptions of the Great Salt Lake and surrounding Salt Lake Valley that had been written by Western explorer, surveyor / mapmaker and United States Army officer John C. Frémont. (1813-1899), Brigham Young and an accompanying group of pioneers traveling westward across the Great Plains from Missouri. and Illinois and first centered the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.Millennial Star, 12:177 At the time, the U.S. military with simultaneous Army expedition from the east into Santa Fe, the longtime provincial capital of Royal Spanish colony, then later independent Centralist Republic of Mexico's major town of New Mexico. The American army column moved later further west into California plus a naval squadron from the west anchored offshore in the Pacific Ocean to invade California. So quickly did the U.S. already captured the northwestern Mexican provinces of Alta California (Upper California) and New Mexico in this brief Mexican–American War of 1846-1848, and planned to keep them. Further south separate joint American army and naval units invaded Mexico from the east on the Gulf of Mexico coast marching inland and after some spirited battles, occupied their capital of Mexico City upon their later surrender. New territories, including the future Territory and later State of Utah, officially became United States territory in the Mexican Cession (of the northwestern one-third of their country) on the peace negotiations and signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, February 2, 1848, which was subsequently ratified by the United States Senate a month later on March 10, 1848.
Upon arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon pioneers led by Young found no permanent settlement of Indians. Other areas along the Wasatch Range of mountains were occupied at the time of settlement by the Northwestern Shoshone and adjacent areas by other bands of Shoshone such as the Gosiute. The Northwestern Shoshone lived in the valleys on the eastern shore of Great Salt Lake and in adjacent mountain valleys. Some years after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley Mormons, who went on to colonize many other areas of what is now Utah, were petitioned by Indians for recompense for land taken and occupied. The response of Heber C. Kimball, first counselor to Brigham Young, was that the land belonged to "our Father in Heaven and we expect to plow and plant it."Pages 6 to 10, 29, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre, Brigham D. Madsen, foreword by Charles S. Peterson, University of Utah Press (1985, paperback 1995), trade paperback, 286 pages, The citation of the quoted material from Heber C. Kimball is to Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, July 31, 1847 A 1945 United States Supreme Court decision found that the land had been treated by the United States as public domain; no aboriginal title by the Northwestern Shoshone had been recognized by the United States or extinguished by treaty with the United States.NORTHWESTERN BANDS OF SHOSHONE INDIANS v. UNITED STATES. United States Supreme Court, April 9, 1945 89 L.Ed. 985; 65 S.Ct. 690; 324 U.S. 335 Pages 141 to 165, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice, David E. Wilkins, University of Texas Press (1997), trade paperback, 421 pages
Colonizing the desert Upon arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormons had to make a place to live. They created irrigation systems, for the dry desert lands, laid out farms, built houses, churches, and schools within just a few years. Access to water was crucially important. Almost immediately, Brigham Young set out to identify and claim additional community sites. While it was difficult to find large areas in the Great Basin where water sources were dependable and growing seasons long enough to raise vitally important subsistence crops, satellite communities began to be formed.