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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…
Utopian Dreams: Russian Pioneers in Park Valley
A group of Russian pioneers sought a place to build their religious colony far from cities and government interference. Where else would they come but Utah? “Invest Dimes and Reap Dollars in Park Valley, Utah!” That was the promise of 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…
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…
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…
Vagabond Artist Everett Ruess
The wandering ways of a young artist and writer who mysteriously disappeared in 1934 into southern Utah’s rugged canyon country.Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyons of southern Utah, never to be seen again. Born in…
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…
Welsh Immigrants Recreate Their Lives in Utah
Welsh immigrants brought with them valuable skills that laid the foundation for Utah’s early mining industry. Like other countries in Europe during the 19th Century, Wales felt the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Rapid increases in…
To Utah by Stagecoach
The stagecoach is a legendary symbol of the American West, part of a transportation network that spanned the continent. How did Utah fit into this network? Traveling to Utah was difficult – to say the least – in the mid-19th Century. Major…
"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…
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…
The Crossing of the Fathers
One of the goals of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition was to find a northern route to the Spanish missions in Monterey, California from the Spanish colonial stronghold of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Led by two Franciscan friars named Silvestre Velez de…
My Life on Three Continents: Jewish Refugees in Utah
Utah has become home to people of many backgrounds and cultures since the first Mormon Pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. What brought these people to Utah? The convoluted journey of one family is told in Fred Linden’s…
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…
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…
Speaking American
Utah's pivotal 1919 Americanization Act impacted the state's vibrant immigrant population. When the thirteenth session of the Utah Legislature closed in March 1919, new legislation included a $4 million bond for new roads, a law preventing…
Nature's Newcomers
Plants and animals that made their way to Utah unleashed unintended consequences upon arrival.
People aren’t the only ones who make journeys. When people traveled from place to place, they introduced new plants and animals into the areas they…
Weathering the Road
Think about your daily travel routines. What would you do without well-maintained roads, air-conditioning, or ways to entertain the kids? Did you know that 86% of American commuters drive cars to work and spend an average 50 minutes each day on the…
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…
Prohibition Inspires Business Innovation in Ogden
Learn how Ogden’s families and business-owners used the prohibition against alcohol to invent new styles of work… and how law enforcement worked to stop them.July 31, 1917 marked the last night before Prohibition in Utah, a new law that banned…