For a thousand years, what is now Lincoln County in southeastern Nevada was dominated by the semi-nomadic Southern Paiute, who traveled with the seasons in localized areas to optimize use of scarce desert resources. In 1863 a Mormon missionary…

On December 20, 1854, siblings Lorenzo Snow and Eliza R Snow formed the Polysophical Society, where plays, poetry, music, orations, and other spectacles were performed. Eliza described that it was a “gathering for social, literary, and a general…

The Black Hawk War grew from severe tension between the Mormon settlers and the Native Americans in the Utah Territory. When the settlers arrived in the Utah Territory many drove the wild animals that the Natives hunted into the mountains, and…

Pioneers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began settling Utah in 1847 when they arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. In the following decades, church leaders sent settlers to various locations throughout Utah to form settlements,…

After establishing themselves in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sent missionaries across the globe to promote their version of the…

In the mid-nineteenth century members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, led by the prophet Brigham Young, settled in the Rocky Mountains. The saints shaped the history of the American West by building missionary outposts and…

Although the name of this historical Salt Lake landmark suggests that the Garden Park Ward is nothing more than a church building and grounds for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this is not the case. The Garden Park Ward has an…

In 1878, Sylvester Wilson and his family, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), settled what became Wilsonville, UT. A decade later, in the face of a prolonged drought, Sylvester and his son-in-law, Selar Cheney, moved…

In 1877, General Albert Sidney Johnston led US military forces into areas of the Utah territory in order to reassert federal control over the Utah territory. One of the occupied areas was Tooele County, an area already settled by members of The…

Miles Goodyear (1817 - 1849), who had been many years involved in the Rocky Mountain fur trade, built a post in 1846 on the Weber River about two miles above its junction with the Ogden River. He called it Fort Buenaventura after the mythical river…