Historically, prostitution and other unsavory occupations have been connected to the reputations of women in the Wild West. The reputation of women living in Virginia City was no exception. Several sources reported that “there was always a large…

In 1858, W.L. Jernegan and Alfred James published a local newspaper in a former Mormon colony, Mormon Station (later renamed Genoa) in the then Utah Territory. This paper, The Territorial Enterprise, later became the first newspaper in Nevada…

Located just off I-80, thirty miles from Evanston, Wyoming, lies the historic site of Fort Bridger. Fort Bridger has a long history of being involved with the American fur trade, western overland migration, and military involvement against the…

By 1862, the relationship between settlers and the Shoshone and Bannock tribes had deteriorated. According to Indian Agent Luther Mann’s report in 1862, “Large numbers of the Shoshones, in conjunction with the Bannocks, who range along the southern…

In 1861, the Eastern Shoshone Native American tribes and mixed bands of Shoshone and Bannock tribes were combined into a new agency, the Fort Bridger Indian Agency. Previously, federal agents supervised these tribes from Salt Lake City, but due to…

The mid-1850s relationship between Latter-day Saints (or Mormons) and the United States government, who felt that they were growing too powerful, was tense. In response to the growing power of the leaders of the LDS Church in Utah, the federal…