History of Utah

The History of Utah is a description of the human history and social activity in the state of Utah, located in the western United States.

History
Archaeological evidence shows that humans first lived in Utah about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Early people lived near the swamps and marshes of the Great Basin, where they could find fish, birds, and small animals. Large animals such as bison, mammoths, and ground sloths were also drawn to these water sources. Over the centuries, these large animals died out. The Desert Archaic people then lived in the area, sheltering in caves near the Great Salt Lake. They depended more on gathering plants than earlier people had done. Their diet was mainly made up of cattails and other salt-tolerant plants such as pickleweed, burro weed, and sedge. Red meat seems to have been more of a luxury for them. They used nets and the atlatl to hunt waterfowl, ducks, small animals, and antelope. Objects they left behind include nets made from plant fibers and rabbit skin, woven sandals, gaming sticks, and animal figures made from split twigs. Around 3,500 years ago, lake levels rose, and the population of Desert Archaic people appears to have dropped sharply. The Great Basin may have been almost empty of people for about 1,000 years.

The Fremont culture, named after sites near the Fremont River in Utah, lived in what is now northern and western Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado from about 600 to 1300 AD. They lived in many of the same areas near water that had earlier been used by the Desert Archaic people, and they may have been related to them. However, the Fremont used new technologies, which make them a distinct culture. They used the bow and arrow for hunting, built pithouse shelters, and grew maize and probably beans and squash. They built adobe or stone storage buildings (granaries) above the ground, made and decorated low-fired pottery ware, and produced art such as jewelry and rock art, including petroglyphs and pictographs.

200px|thumb|left|Hovenweep Castle, San Juan River basin
The ancient Puebloan culture, also known as the Anasazi, lived next to the Fremont territory. Their culture centered on the present-day Four Corners region of the Southwest United States, including the San Juan River region of Utah. Archaeologists disagree on the exact time when this culture began, but development seems to have started around the beginning of the common era, about 500 years before the Fremont appeared. Most scholars agree that the cultural peak of these people was around 1200 CE. Ancient Puebloan culture is known for well-built pithouses and more complex adobe and stone dwellings. They were skilled craftspeople who made turquoise jewelry and fine pottery. Their way of life was based on agriculture. They planted and grew maize, beans, and squash and domesticated turkeys. They designed and built complex field terraces and irrigation systems. They also built special underground or partly underground structures known as kivas, which seem to have been used only for cultural and religious ceremonies.

The Fremont and ancient Puebloan cultures existed at roughly the same time and appear to have traded with each other. They shared several cultural traits, leading archaeologists to think that both cultures may have come from common roots in the early American Southwest. However, they remained clearly different cultures for most of their histories. Both groups appear to have been strongly affected by climate change and possibly by the arrival of new peoples around 1200 CE. During the next two centuries, the Fremont and ancient Puebloan peoples may have moved into other parts of the American Southwest, finding new homes and farmland along river systems in what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico.

Around the year 1200, Shoshonean-speaking peoples entered the Utah area from the west. They may have come from southern California and moved into the desert interior because of population pressure along the coast. They lived mainly in upland areas and followed a hunting and gathering lifestyle, using roots and seeds, including the pinyon nut. They were also skilled fishers, made pottery, and raised some crops. When they first arrived in Utah, they lived in small family groups with little tribal organization. Four main Shoshonean groups lived in what is now Utah. The Shoshone lived 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. At first there seems to have been very little conflict between these groups.

In the early 16th century, the San Juan River basin in southeastern Utah also saw the arrival of a new people, the Diné or Navajo, who were part of a larger group of Plains Athabaskan speakers that moved into the Southwest from the Great Plains. This language group also included the peoples later known as the Apaches, such as the Lipan, Jicarilla, and Mescalero Apaches.

The Athabaskans were hunters who at first followed the bison. Spanish accounts from the 16th century sometimes called them "dog nomads." During the 17th century, the Athabaskans expanded their range, moving into areas that the Pueblo peoples had left earlier. The Spanish first clearly mention the "Apachu de Nabajo" (Navajo) in the 1620s, describing people in the Chama Valley area east of the San Juan River and northwest of Santa Fe. By the 1640s, the name Navaho (Navajo) was regularly used for these people. The Navajo newcomers formed mostly peaceful trading and cultural relationships with some of the Pueblo peoples to the south, but they also had periods of warfare with the Shoshonean peoples, especially the Utes in eastern Utah and western Colorado.

At the time when Europeans began to expand into the area, starting with Spanish explorers traveling north from Mexico, five main Native American peoples lived in what is now Utah: the Northern Shoshone, the Goshute, the Ute, the Paiute, and the Navajo.

European exploration
The Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado may have entered what is now southern Utah in 1540 while searching for the legendary Cíbola.

In 1776, a group led by two Spanish Catholic priests, often called the Domínguez–Escalante expedition, left Santa Fe to look for a route to the California coast. The expedition traveled as far north as Utah Lake and met the Native American people living there. All of what is now Utah was claimed by the Spanish Empire from the 1500s to 1821 as part of New Spain (and later as the province of Alta California), and then claimed by Mexico from 1821 to 1848. In practice, Spain and Mexico had very little permanent presence or control in the region. However, modern Utah still has many Spanish-language place names, such as San Juan County, Sanpete County, and the cities of Escalante, Salina, Santa Clara, and La Verkin.

Fur trappers, also known as mountain men, including Jim Bridger, explored some parts of Utah in the early 19th century. The city of Provo was named after Étienne Provost, a trapper who visited the area in 1825. The city of Ogden, Utah was named after Peter Skene Ogden, a brigade leader of the Hudson's Bay Company who trapped in the Weber Valley. In 1846, a year before the arrival of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Donner Party passed through the Salt Lake Valley late in the season. They chose not to spend the winter there and instead continued toward California, with tragic results later in their journey.

Settlement by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Emigrant members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called Mormon pioneers (and known today as Mormons), chose to settle in the Great Basin and the Great Basin Desert. They were encouraged by the positive descriptions of the Great Salt Lake and the surrounding Salt Lake Valley written by western explorer, surveyor and United States Army officer John C. Frémont (1813–1899). Brigham Young and a group of pioneers traveled west across the Great Plains from Missouri and Illinois and first entered and centered their settlement in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.Millennial Star, 12:177

At the same time, during the Mexican–American War, the United States Army was moving west in an expedition into Santa Fe, the long-time capital of the Spanish and later Mexican territory of New Mexico. The American forces then moved farther west into California, and a naval squadron in the Pacific Ocean also helped to invade California. The United States quickly captured the northwestern Mexican provinces of Alta California (Upper California) and New Mexico in this short war of 1846–1848 and planned to keep them. Separate American army and naval forces also invaded Mexico from the east along the Gulf of Mexico coast, marched inland, fought several battles, and then occupied Mexico City. New territories, including the future Utah Territory and state, officially became United States land in the Mexican Cession (about one-third of Mexico's area) after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. The United States Senate ratified the treaty on March 10, 1848.

When the Mormon pioneers led by Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, they found that there were no permanent Native American settlements in the valley itself. Other parts of the Wasatch Range were occupied at that time by the Northwestern Shoshone and nearby groups such as the Gosiute. The Northwestern Shoshone lived in the valleys on the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake and in nearby mountain valleys. Some years after the Mormons arrived and began to settle in many parts of what is now Utah, Native Americans asked for payment for the land that had been taken and used. Heber C. Kimball, first counselor to Brigham Young, replied 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 said that the United States had treated this land as public domain. The court held that no aboriginal title of the Northwestern Shoshone had been recognized by the United States or ended by treaty with the United States.[(http://altlaw.org/v1/cases/384679) 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[(https://archive.org/details/americanindianso00wilk/page/141)  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
When they arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormons had to build a new community from almost nothing. They built irrigation systems for the dry desert land, laid out farms, and built houses, churches, and schools within only a few years. Access to water was extremely important. Almost immediately, Brigham Young began to look for and claim additional places for communities. It was hard to find large areas in the Great Basin with reliable water and long enough growing seasons to produce essential crops, but new settlements still began to appear.

Soon after the first group arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, the community of Bountiful was settled to the north. In 1848, settlers moved onto land bought from trapper Miles Goodyear in what is now Ogden. In 1849, the towns of Tooele and Provo were founded. Also in 1849, at the invitation of Ute chief Wakara, settlers entered the Sanpete Valley in central Utah and founded Manti. Fillmore, Utah, which was intended to be the capital of the new territory, was founded in 1851. In 1855, missionary work among western Native American peoples led to settlement outposts at Fort Lemhi in Idaho, Las Vegas (in what would later become Nevada), and the Elk Mountain area in east-central Utah.

Reports from members of the Mormon Battalion who returned from military service also helped guide new settlements. On their march to California, Mormon soldiers had identified reliable rivers and fertile valleys in Colorado, Arizona, and southern California. As the men later traveled back to rejoin their families in the Salt Lake Valley, they passed through southern Nevada and eastern parts of southern Utah. Jefferson Hunt, a senior Mormon officer in the Battalion, actively searched for good settlement sites, minerals, and other resources. His reports supported the 1851 settlement in Iron County, near present-day Cedar City. These southern explorations eventually led to more Mormon settlements in St. George, Utah, Las Vegas (in Nevada) and San Bernardino, California, as well as communities in southern Arizona Territory.

Displacement of Native Americans
Before the Oregon and California trails were established and before large Mormon settlement, Native Americans in and near the Salt Lake Valley lived by hunting buffalo and other game and by gathering grass seeds from the rich grasses of the area, as well as roots such as those of the Indian Camas. By the time the Mormons arrived, and even before 1840, buffalo had already disappeared from the valley. Later, hunting by settlers and grazing by their cattle greatly harmed the Native Americans' food supply. As settlement spread into nearby river valleys and small fertile areas, Native American tribes had a harder and harder time gathering enough food. Brigham Young advised his followers to feed hungry tribes, and sometimes this was done, but often it was not enough. These tensions formed part of the background to the Bear River massacre, carried out by California militia stationed in Salt Lake City during the American Civil War. The site of the massacre is just inside what is now Preston, Idaho, but people at the time usually believed it was in Utah.Pages 6 to 24, 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, 

State of Deseret (proposed)
In 1849–50, Mormon leaders asked the United States Congress to create a state named Deseret. The proposed State of Deseret would have been very large, including all of what is now Utah and parts of what are now Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, and California. The name Deseret, which appears in the Book of Mormon, was favored by LDS leader Brigham Young as a symbol of industry and hard work. Congress rejected the petition, and Utah did not become a state until 1896, after the Utah Constitutional Convention of 1895.

Utah Territory

In 1850, the Utah Territory was created as part of the Compromise of 1850, and Fillmore (named after President Millard Fillmore) was chosen as the capital. In 1856, Salt Lake City replaced Fillmore as the territorial capital.

Slavery

The first group of Mormon pioneers brought African slaves with them, making Utah the only place in the western United States where African slavery existed.Negro Slaves in Utah by Jack Beller, Utah Historical Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4, 1929, pp. 124-126 Three slaves, Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, came west with this first group in 1847. Settlers also began to buy Native American slaves in the already existing Indian slave trade, and they also enslaved some Native American prisoners of war.) In 1850, there were 26 slaves recorded in Salt Lake County. Slavery in Utah Territory did not become officially recognized in law until 1852, when the Act in Relation to Service and the Act for the relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners were passed. Slavery ended in the territory on June 19, 1862, when Congress outlawed slavery in all U.S. territories.

Utah War

Tensions between the Mormon settlers and the federal government grew after the public became aware of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' practice of polygamy. The practice of plural marriage was widely known by 1854 and became one of the main reasons why Utah was refused statehood for nearly 50 years after the first Mormon settlers arrived.

Once news of Mormon polygamy spread, many Americans saw members of the LDS Church as un-American and rebellious. In 1857, after rumors of possible rebellion circulated, President James Buchanan sent U.S. troops on the "Utah Expedition" to suppress what he believed might be a revolt and to replace Brigham Young as territorial governor with Alfred Cumming. This conflict is often called the Utah War.

As fear of invasion grew, some Mormon settlers persuaded a group of Paiute Indians to help in a Mormon-led attack on about 120 emigrants from Arkansas. The attack was made to look like it was carried out only by Native Americans. The killing of these emigrants is known as the Mountain Meadows massacre. The Mormon leadership had taken a defensive position that included a ban on selling grain to outsiders in case of war. This hurt emigrant parties traveling through the area, who could not buy the supplies they needed. A dispute between some of the Arkansas emigrants and Mormons in Cedar City helped lead a few local Mormon leaders to secretly plan the massacre. Scholars still debate how much, if at all, Brigham Young was involved.Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr, Glen M. Leonard. Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 184-185. Krakauer, Jon. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Print. Only one man, John D. Lee, was ever convicted for the killings, and he was executed at the massacre site.

Express riders carried word more than 1,000 miles from the Missouri River settlements to Salt Lake City in about two weeks as the army began to march west. Fearing the worst as 2,500 troops (about one-third of the U.S. Army at that time), led by General Albert Sidney Johnston, moved toward Utah, Brigham Young ordered the residents of Salt Lake City and nearby towns to prepare to burn their homes and move south to Utah Valley and southern Utah. Young also sent small units of the Nauvoo Legion (which had about 8,000–10,000 men) to slow the army. Most of the Mormon forces were sent into the mountains to prepare defenses or south to get ready for a possible scorched-earth retreat. Mormons captured and burned some army supply wagons and ran off herds of army horses and cattle, but there was no large-scale fighting. The army had started late in the season and lacked supplies, so U.S. troops spent the harsh winter of 1857–58 near the burned remains of Fort Bridger in what is now Wyoming. Negotiations involving peace envoy Thomas L. Kane, Young, Cumming, and Johnston led to a peaceful transfer of control over the Utah Territory to Governor Cumming, who entered a nearly empty Salt Lake City in the spring of 1858. Under an agreement with Young, Johnston placed the army at Camp Floyd (later Fort Floyd) about 40 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, rather than inside the city itself.

Transcontinental telegraph
Salt Lake City became the final link in the First Transcontinental Telegraph between Carson City, Nevada and Omaha, Nebraska in October 1861. Brigham Young, who had helped speed up construction, was among the first people to send a telegraph message, along with President Abraham Lincoln and other officials. Soon after the national line was completed, the Deseret Telegraph Company built its own network that connected settlements in the territory to Salt Lake City and through it to the rest of the United States.

Civil War

Because of the American Civil War, federal troops were pulled out of Utah Territory and their fort was sold at auction. This left the federal territorial government without army support until General Patrick E. Connor arrived with the 3rd Regiment of California Volunteers in 1862. Connor and his troops, who had hoped to fight in the eastern war, were unhappy with their posting in Utah. Connor built Fort Douglas about three miles (5 km) east of Salt Lake City and encouraged his often bored soldiers to search for mineral deposits to attract more non-Mormon settlers to the territory. Minerals were found in Tooele County, and some miners began to move in.

Connor also tried to end Native American resistance in Cache Valley by drawing the Shoshone into a midwinter battle on January 29, 1863. The fight quickly turned into a one-sided slaughter as discipline among the soldiers broke down. Today most historians call this event the Bear River Massacre instead of a battle. Between 200 and 400 Shoshone men, women, and children were killed, along with 27 soldiers. More than 50 soldiers were wounded or suffered from frostbite.

Beginning in 1865, Utah's Black Hawk War became the deadliest conflict in the territory's history. Chief Antonga Black Hawk died in 1870, but fighting continued until more federal troops arrived to stop the Ghost Dance movement in 1872. The war was unusual among Indian Wars because it was a three-sided conflict. Mounted Timpanogos Utes led by Antonga Black Hawk fought against both federal troops and local Utah militia.

On May 10, 1869, the First transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake. The railroad brought many more people into the territory, and several businessmen became wealthy there.

Polygamy

During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. Congress passed federal laws against polygamy and sent federal marshals to enforce them in Utah. In the 1890 Manifesto, the leaders of the LDS Church officially ended their support for polygamy, saying that this change came by divine revelation. After the church stopped encouraging plural marriage, Utah again applied for statehood in 1895 and this time was accepted. Utah became a state on January 4, 1896.

Women's suffrage

The "Mormon question" made the status of women in Utah a subject of national debate. In 1870, the Utah Territory, which was under Mormon political control, gave women the right to vote. In 1887, Congress took away that right with the Edmunds–Tucker Act. From 1867 to 1896, many eastern activists supported women's suffrage in Utah as a way to test the idea of votes for women and also as a tool to weaken or end polygamy. Many of these activists were Presbyterian and other Protestant reformers who believed that Mormonism was a non-Christian cult that badly mistreated women.Sarah Barringer Gordon, "The Liberty of Self-Degradation: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of American History Vol. 83, No. 3 (Dec., 1996), pp. 815–847 [(https://www.jstor.org/stable/2945641) in JSTOR] Mormon leaders, in turn, supported woman suffrage to counter the stereotype of oppressed Mormon women. After the 1890 Manifesto removed polygamy as a central public issue and cleared the way for statehood, Utah's 1895 state constitution restored women's right to vote. Congress admitted Utah as a state with that constitution in 1896.Beverly Beeton, "Woman Suffrage in Territorial Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly, March 1978, Vol. 46 Issue 2, pp 100–120

Vigilante violence
Although Utah had fewer cases of mob violence than some other intermountain territories and states at the time, several lynching murders for alleged crimes took place in Utah Territory at the hands of vigilantes. Recorded lynching victims include the following, with ethnicity or national origin noted where given in the sources:

William Torrington in Carson City (then in Utah Territory) in 1859; Thomas Coleman (a Black man) in Salt Lake City in 1866; three unidentified men at Wahsatch in the winter of 1868; a Black man in Uintah in 1869; Charles A. Benson in Logan in 1873; Ah Sing (a Chinese man) in Corinne in 1874; Thomas Forrest in St. George in 1880; William Harvey (a Black man) in Salt Lake City in 1883; John Murphy in Park City in 1883; George Segal (a Japanese man) in Ogden in 1884; Joseph Fisher in Eureka in 1886; and Robert Marshall (a Black man) in Castle Gate in 1925.

Other lynchings and massacres in Utah Territory include multiple cases of mass murder of Native American children, women, and men by White settlers. These include the Battle Creek massacre (1849), the Provo River Massacre (1850), the Nephi massacre (1853), and the Circleville Massacre (1866).

20th and 21st century
In the early 20th century, with the creation of national parks such as Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park, Utah became better known for its natural beauty. Southern Utah grew popular as a filming location for dry, rugged landscapes, and natural features such as Delicate Arch and "the Mittens" in Monument Valley became widely recognized. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, construction of the Interstate highway system made it easier for visitors to reach southern Utah's scenic areas.James B. Allen, Still the Right Place: Utahs Second Half-Century of Statehood, 1945–1995 (2017).

Starting in 1939 with the opening of Alta Ski Area, Utah began to gain fame for skiing. The dry, powder snow of the Wasatch Range is considered some of the best in the world. Salt Lake City won the right to host the 2002 Winter Olympics in 1995, which strongly boosted the state's economy. Ski resorts grew in popularity, and many of the Olympic venues along the Wasatch Front are still used for sports. The Olympics also helped lead to the creation of the light rail system in the Salt Lake Valley, known as TRAX, and to major rebuilding of the nearby freeway system.

During the late 20th century, Utah's population grew quickly. In the 1970s, some suburban areas grew especially fast. Sandy was one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States at that time, and West Valley City became the state's second most populous city. In the early 21st century, many regions of Utah continue to grow rapidly. Northern Davis County, southern and western Salt Lake County, Summit County, eastern Tooele County, Utah County, Wasatch County, and Washington County are all expanding quickly. Transportation and urbanization have become major political issues as new development covers former farmland and wild areas.

In 2012, the State of Utah passed the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, which sought to gain state control over a large part of the federal land in Utah based on language in the Utah Enabling Act of 1894. The state did not plan to use force or to limit access to the land while trying to assert control. Instead, Utah leaders planned a long-term, step-by-step strategy of education, negotiation, legislation, and, if needed, litigation to seek state or private control over the lands after 2014.

During a debate at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

 World War II 

Families in Utah, like families across the country, worked hard to support the war effort during World War II. Tires, meat, butter, sugar, fats, oils, coffee, shoes, boots, gasoline, and canned fruits, vegetables, and soups were rationed at the national level. School days were shortened and bus routes were reduced to save fuel and other resources so that more supplies could be sent to soldiers overseas.

Geneva Steel was built to increase U.S. steel production during the war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had first suggested building a steel mill in Utah in 1936, but the idea was dropped after a few months. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war, the plan was revived and construction went forward. In April 1944, Geneva Steel shipped its first order, which included more than 600 tons of steel plate. The plant created thousands of jobs in Utah. Many men from Utah were serving in the military, so women filled about 25 percent of the positions at the mill.

Because of Utah's and Geneva Steel's contributions during the war, several Liberty ships were named in honor of Utah figures and places, including the USS Joseph Smith, USS Brigham Young, USS Provo, and the USS Peter Skene Ogden.

One of the beach sectors used in the Normandy Landings on D-Day was code-named Utah Beach, and United States Army troops carried out the amphibious landings there.

It is estimated that about 1,450 soldiers from Utah were killed in the war.

Related pages

History of African Americans in Utah
History of the Colorado Plateau
History of the Rocky Mountains
History of the Western United States
Territorial evolution of Utah

Notes

References
May, Dean L. Utah: A People's History. Bonneville Books, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1987. .

 Writings on the subject 
 Alford, Kenneth L. ed. Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record (2017)
 Allen, James B. Still the Right Place: Utahs Second Half-Century of Statehood, 1945–1995 (Provo: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 2017). 661 pp.
 Arrington, Leonard J., Brigham Young: American Moses; University of Illinois Press; , (1985; Paperback, 1986).
 Baldridge, Kenneth W. The Civilian Conservation Corps in Utah, 1933–1942: Remembering Nine Years of Achievement (2019) [(http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56225) online review]
 Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Utah (1890) [(https://books.google.com/books?id=j8nTDwAAQBAJ&dq=utah+history&pg=PA1) online].
 Campbell, David E., John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. Seeking the promised land: Mormons and American politics (Cambridge UP, 2014).
 Ching, Jacqueline. Utah: Past and Present (Rosen, 2010).

 Flores, Dan L. "Zion in Eden: Phases of the environmental history of Utah." Environmental Review: ER 7.4 (1983): 325–344. [(https://www.jstor.org/stable/3984175) online]
 Iber, Jorge. "El Diablo Nos Esta Llevando': Utah Hispanics and the Great Depression." Utah Historical Quarterly 66 (1998): 159–177.
 May, Dean L. Utah: A people's history (U of Utah Press, 1987).
 Peterson, Charles S. and Brian Q. Cannon. The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. , scholarly survey
 Peterson, Charles S. Utah: A history (WW Norton & Company, 1984), popular survey.
 Poll, Richard D., and William P. MacKinnon. "Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered." Journal of Mormon History 20.2 (1994): 16–44. [(https://www.jstor.org/stable/23286598) online]

 Rogers, Brent M. Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (U of Nebraska Press, 2017).
 Saunders, Richard L. "Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History." Utah Historical Quarterly 87.3 (2019): 218–237. [(https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/utahhistquar.87.3.0218) online]
 Scott, Patricia Lyn, and Linda Thatcher. Women in Utah history: Paradigm or paradox (University Press of Colorado, 2005). [(https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&context=usupress_pubs) online]
 Tetrault, Lisa. "When Women Won the Right to Vote: A History Unfinished" Utah Historical Quarterly 89.3 (2021): 180–197. [(https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/utahhistquar.89.3.0180) online]
 Turner, John G. Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Belknap, 2012).
 Woodbury, Angus M. "A history of southern Utah and its National Parks." Utah Historical Quarterly 12.3/4 (1944): 111–222. [(https://www.jstor.org/stable/45057626) online]

Historiography
 Topping, Gary. Utah historians and the reconstruction of Western history (U of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
 Topping, Gary. Leonard J. Arrington: A Historian's Life (Arthur H Clark, 2008) on Mormons.


Utah
Category:History of the Rocky Mountains