Browse Items (47 total)
- Collection: Beehive Archive - Utah Journey Stories
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"Alfred Packer the Man-Eater": Choose Your Travel Companions Carefully
The tale of a doomed gold-seeking trek that started in Provo and ended in cannibalism. In 1873, a man by the name of Preston Nutter traveled to Utah with a friend after hearing rumors that miners in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains were striking it…
"One Vast Contiguity of Waste": Ute Relocation to the Uinta Basin
Learn about the forced relocation of Ute people from lush central Utah to the remote Uinta Basin. In the mid-19th Century federal Indian policy shifted from Indian Removal toward the reservation system. The result for many Native groups,…
"This is the Right Place": Mormon Migration to Utah
The belief that there was no future for the LDS Church in the East motivated the Mormon exodus West, to the far side of the Rocky Mountains. But how did the Mormons know where they were going?
The Mormon migration that began in 1847 has…
"Tieing" Utah Together
Utah’s mountain ranges were raided and its rivers put to work in order to build the national railroad system. When the transcontinental railroad came to Utah in 1868 and 1869 – and as branch lines later spread through the territory – railroad…
Adventures of an Early Hot Rodder
In the early days of motoring, traveling by automobile was all about adventure. America’s love affair with the automobile began with young men like Alva Matheson. Born in Cedar City in 1903, Alva Matheson began hankering for a car at age…
Alien Registration Act of 1940
The United States has a long history of limiting immigration and managing migrants once they are here, including a campaign to register non-citizen immigrants living in Utah. Imagine you're a non-citizen living in Utah. When you open up your…
Chipeta: She Didn't Want to Come to Utah
Ute leader Chipeta – her search for peace meant the loss of her home and her way of life. Chipeta was the wife of Uncompahgre Ute leader Ouray and acted for years as a peacemaker between her people and the United States government. She stood…
Christina McNeil Walked to Utah
How one young Scottish woman journeyed 4,536 miles to Utah as part of “the most remarkable travel experiment in the history of Western America.”
Christina McNeil was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1831 into hard economic times. She began…
Defying Expectations: Elizabeth Randall Cumming's Journey to Utah
Elizabeth Randall Cumming came to Salt Lake in 1858 as the wife of Utah’s first non-Mormon Territorial Governor. Her expectations of the journey were defied every step of the way. Believing the Mormons were in rebellion in the late 1850s, the…
Edwin Bryant's Mule Ride
Nine men riding mules journeyed across the Great Salt Lake Desert in a single scorching August day. On August 3, 1846, Edwin Bryant woke up at 1:30 a.m. The silence around him seemed ominous. Camped this night on the Cedar Mountains at the…
Exile at Topaz
Thousands of Japanese Americans were forced into exile in the Utah desert during World War II. Two months after the December 1941 attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 mandating the…
Illustrating the West
They say a picture is worth a thousand words... Artists got people moving West by idealizing both the journey and the destination. The mapmaker for the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, created the first known map of Utah…
Intermountain Indian School
The “I” is fading fast on the mountainside above Brigham City, Utah. Winter snows threaten to erase it for good and with it, the memory of one of Utah’s more significant stories: The Intermountain Indian School, a federally-run Native American…
Iosepa: An Unlikely Hawaiian Home
The voyage of Hawaiian Islanders to the windswept desert of Skull Valley could only have happened in Utah. Once established in Utah in 1847, the Mormon Church drew thousands of new converts who came to build a new home in “Zion.” By the…
It's a Bird! It's a Plane!
Airplanes played a pivotal role in attracting tourism to one southern Utah town. On September 27, 1920 the first airplane cast its shadow over Cedar City, Utah. Who was flying it? And why were they flying there? In the early 1920s,…
Jewish Pioneers of Clarion
On September 10, 1911, twelve Jewish families arrived in Gunnison, Utah, to establish a Jewish agricultural community. The group was part of the “Back to Soil” movement, which believed Jews needed to leave the city and live on farms. The…
John Charles Frémont: Ad Man for Manifest Destiny
Explorer John Charles Fremont’s belief in “Manifest Destiny” paved the way for Western migration. By the early 1840s, US leaders in favor of Western expansion lobbied for better surveys of the territory and reliable maps. The US government…
Joseph Hansen: Right-Hand Man of Leon Trotsky
The 1940 assassination in Mexico City of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky has an odd Utah connection in Joseph Hansen, whose journey took him from a childhood in Richfield, Utah, to the deathbed of one of the most important leaders of the 20th…
Martha Sharouk’s Journey to America
The journey of Martha Sharouk – a young wife who left Lebanon and travelled to Utah to begin a new life – did not quite go as planned… In the winter of 1913, a young Lebanese woman stepped off the train at the Denver and Rio Grande station in…
Modern Refugees to Utah
How would you feel if you were a refugee and had to flee your home and move to another country? Meet two Utahns who did just that. Utah has long been a destination for immigrants motivated by the search for a better life. In the late 20th…