Utah History

In an effort to make well-reasoned determinations of cultural affiliation for Utah's state NAGPRA law, a number of radiocarbon accelerator mass spectrometry dates were run on human remains that had been recovered from state and private land in Utah.  Several of these human remains date to the Archaic time period (ca. 8000 - 2500 B.P.).  In addition, through a cooperative effort between the Antiquities Section and the University of Utah, radiocarbon dates were obtained from several sets of human remains recovered from Deadman Cave by Elmer Smith (Smith 1952).

Water resources, their use, and their administration have been at the center of attention for much of Utah's history. This thesis seeks not only to record the emergence of the public policies, agencies, and institutions, which are utilized to administer Utah's water resources, but to explain the forces which created them.

        The aim of this study is to outline the evolution of the legal and social institutions involved in the state of Utah's water resource administration and management. The method of analysis will be to examine successive time periods in Utah's history, to identify the forces that produced changes in social and legal water institutions, and, within this context, to evaluate the success or failure of the changes. The purpose is not to suggest alternative methods or to criticize particular laws or institutions, but to explain the process of administration as it moved toward the present system. The year 1847 marked the beginning of permanent settlement and the management of water resources. This thesis begins with that year. By 1947 the essential components of the system in present use (1989) had been developed; this study concludes at that date.

This paper discusses a little-known chapter in the history of southern Utah.  The first organized expedition south of Utah Valley, with a view to colonize what became known as the "Mormon Corridor" — roughly the area traversed by US Highway 89 and I-15, was made by the "Southern Exploring Company," in late 1849 and early 1850.

This colonizing effort by Brigham Young and his Mormon people was necessitated by the California gold rush of 1849-1850. Brigham Young had brought his people from their city Nauvoo, on the banks of the Mississippi River, across plain and mountain range to escape further persecution, after the murder of their prophet-leader, Joseph Smith, and armed attacks upon their city.

They built a settlement in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Because those who had, shared with those who had not, the little settlement nearly starved during the first winter. Before the colony had a chance to build up its strength, thousands of "Argonauts" came from the eastern states to seek their fortunes in the gold fields of California.

Realizing that some of those gold rushers, not finding their fortunes, would be tempted to settle on the peaceful and inviting streams in the valleys of what the Mormons called the Provisional State of Deseret, Brigham Young sent out exploration parties and then colonizing companies to take possession of all the settle-able places before others could.

The first major exploration of the territory to the south of Utah Valley was the Southern Exploring Company. The place they identified as the site for the first major settlement in the southern part of the territory was on the Little Salt Lake. After a couple of ultimately-discarded choices, the new settlement was named Parowan.

Not long after Parowan was initially settled in 1851, a group of men from the community set out to explore the territory to the east and to the south along the Virgin River. This paper discusses that expedition.

In September, 1857, one of the worst tragedies in the history of the Westward Expansion took place at Mountain Meadows in southwest Utah Territory. John D. Lee, on the orders of his leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, lead approximately fifty Mormon priesthood holders and a few Paiute allies to massacre 120+ men, women, and children. Events like this do not happen in a vacuum. Utilizing both LDS and non-LDS sources and historians, Matt McCune examines some of the contributing causes of this tragedy. He examines a combination of religious, political, and economic circumstances that came together to create conditions that resulted in poor, and frequently persecuted, Mormons attacking a wealthy and well equipped non-Mormon wagon train attempting to pass peacefully through their territory on the way to California.

On the shores of the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, there once sat a series of disjointed metal structures that for nearly six decades defined a valley, an economy, and helped create a perception of the American West.  Named at various times Geneva, the Geneva works, the Geneva plant, and Geneva Steel, these structures formed the largest integrated steel mill west of the Mississippi River.  First built as a means to help win the Second World War, the Geneva steel mill helped spur the growth of the surrounding communities of Provo and Orem and served as a stable force in the Utah Valley economy for nearly five decades.  Only later, during the 1970s and 1980s, did the Geneva plant lose some of its luster. No longer contributing to the economic viability of the cities it helped grow and making their air unusually thick during winter inversions, the Geneva steel mill fell silent for the last time in 2002 and disappeared from the skyline in 2004.

While the physical form of the Geneva plant no longer exists, historians can benefit from the study of its origins, operation, and demise because of the unique mix of powers and entities that directed the path of Geneva.  The people that envisioned the plant and organized its construction and operation came from places as diverse as Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Provo.  Accordingly, their visions for Geneva reflected their regional, economic, and political backgrounds.  The story of Geneva helps historians understand the importance of understanding that federal, regional, and local power in the American West interact to form a unique human landscape that mirrors both private capitalism and state sponsored economics. The history of the Geneva plant helps historians understand that the complex interaction between federal, local, and private power defines the American West as something more complicated than just a ‘plundered province’ or a capitalist utopia.  Geneva helps historians remember that federal power interacted with regional and local power in the American West in a way that local and private entities interpreted, shaped, or sometimes ignored exactly because of the local conditions and attitudes.  Geneva reminds historians that they cannot ignore these forces and successfully address the nature of the American West.  The West never functioned in a vacuum and the best way for historians to interpret federal involvement and local reaction is to gauge both sides of the story and analyze how each power interacts to create a uniquely Western result.

This thesis argues that that the Geneva plant, from construction to destruction, illustrates the particularly Western mixture of federal, regional, and local influence, including industrial, political, and economic processes, that defines the American West as a place where historical actors made choices in context of their place of power: local, regional, or federal.

Today few members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and perhaps none of the converts to its doctrines know the exact nature of Joseph Smith Jr. and early Church involvement with Freemasonry. It is an issue wrapped in legends, opinions, gossips and dark clouds. Mormon and anti-Mormon publications alike present two extremes of the Mormon-Masonic history, the subject where an inexperienced student of history is likely to get lost in a vain effort to find objectivity and compromise.

Peter Shirts Project:  Application of Methods from Forensic Anthropology, Archaeology and Osteology.
Matthew Bond

Though the Peter Shirts Project is still underway, this paper/presentation will illustrate the methods and current findings involved in the exhumation conducted in March 2013. The purpose of the Peter Shirts Project is the comparison and subsequent confirmation or contradiction of the information contained on a grave marker in Kirtland, New Mexico. Peter Shirts is a dynamic and enigmatic historical figure that was heavily involved in the Mormon pioneer migration and the subsequent colonization, surveying, and mineral interest identification of current day Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Amid varying narratives concerning Shirts’ life, the greatest riddle of all is associated with the time, place, and manner of his death. According to oral accounts, Mr. Shirts was exhumed in 1961 though no report was given nor is the identity of the excavators known. As a result of conflicting histories, inaccurate death records, and vague funerary/interment documentation – further measures were desired by the Tuft family (descendants of Mr. Shirts) to establish the identity of remains buried in Kirtland, New Mexico under the name of Peter Shirts. The Peter Shirts Project was a privately funded and small-scale excavation that was conducted in March 2013 in Kirtland, New Mexico with the purpose of building a biological and DNA profile with the interred remains that could then be compared against historical and living profiles provided by family histories and living mitochondrial DNA. Currently a full inventory has been taken of the remains, and the excavation processes have been documented and are being organized. Finalized interpretations will be reached upon the completion of in-depth identification and verification of osteological and taphonomic markers. Ultimately an authoritative confirmation or contradiction will be established with the results from DNA testing on viable osteological remains derived from the exhumation.

This is the second edition of the first paper I wrote on the possibilities of the original 1830 Book of Mormon having within its pages complexed cipher. In this revised edition look for the section on "The Rod of Iron" and "coal-train" (19) which you might find interesting. I am once again starting to revise and publish more of my finding in the hope that those of us who understand these types of manuscripts can come together and brake the cypher.

I hope you find this paper as interesting as the last. Thanks for all the feed back on the first paper, and YES the paper needs an editor who can fix the misspellings and grammatical mistakes as there are many.

But on the other hand, writer Hugh Nibley had a fit because an editor went through his work and made a few minor changes which in turn changed the format and word placement in his work. So as bad as it is spelling and grammatical is, it might just be that the paper itself might be a cypher of sort itself.

It is what it is...

And lastly, but not lastly, my work on this subject is, and will forever be, free of charge to those who would like to take the time to read my papers. If it is freedom you seek and ask for then freely you should give. I have decades in the study of the occult.  Its a personal choice and path that each and everyone will address at some point in their lives.

As for myself, I choose writing and poverty. Its more of an obsession than anything. The quest for spiritual light and the freedoms that come with it are not free.  Nothing is really ever free. You pay for this, that, or the other thing, in one way or another. And the ultimate freedom is that of spiritual freedom and let me tell you we are capable of a lot more when it comes to the intellect than you will ever know.

They say we can not explain the unexplainable when it comes to this type of spirituality.  But the truth is a vast majority of it could be explained in simple words.  But... The profane have a book that they explain the unexplainable when it comes to true ritualistic spirituality wherein temples are involved and the book is called "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders- Fourth Edition" simply put their is no such thing as spiritual manifestation and or the conjuring of real spirits of a tangible kind.  this is perhaps the biggest reason they keep their spirituality closely guarded, fear of being stereotyped as this, that, or the other thing.

If by chance you where to ask a rich and elite such as Mitt Romney: "do you ever hear voices in your head?" you know what the answer would be.     

Feel free to write me if you have any questions in regards to these papers. as you'll always find my in the shelfs of any given library.

And to end this paper I will say that this is just the beginning

The name White Pocket actually refers to two areas. On the topo map there is a tall butte about 500 feet high that can be seen from miles around. I'll refer to this butte as the White Pocket Monolith or Butte. Conversely, photographers use the term White Pocket to refer to the area of white and coral colored cauliflower (aka brain) rock to the east of the White Pocket Butte.

The Paria Plateau is the central geographic feature of Vermillion Cliffs National Monument; a remote, sandy area 20 by 20 miles in size bordered by Buckskin Gulch and the Paria River to the north, the cliffs themselves to the east and south, and House Rock Valley to the west. Some parts are flat, others gently sloping, and the area is crossed only by rough tracks, most requiring a 4WD vehicle due to long stretches of deep, soft sand. Dotted across this generally featureless region are numerous small outcrops of the underlying Navajo sandstone, eroded to form unusually varied shapes, generally colored white or red but mixed with layers of many other shades.

The largest and best known formations are the Coyote Buttes, in the northwest corner of the plateau, including the famous Wave, while the second most visited site is six miles southeast - this is White Pocket, a group of domes and ridges covering an area of one square mile, below a larger mesa lined by similar rocks.
A pocket, in this sense, refers to a relatively small area of land markedly different to its surroundings, which here, like most of the plateau, are sandy plains sparsely covered by bushes and small trees. White, or light grey is the dominant rock color, in contrast to the red of the Coyote Buttes, but the general features are similar - swirling, thin-layered strata, adjacent layers of contrasting color, and curious erosive features. Other colorful pockets are found further south and east on the plateau, some also with an official name but most unrecognized.
There are several dozen locations, all with the potential to have photogenic formations.

Photos and letters written by Lieutenant R. T. Kowallis and his wife Norma Jensen Kowallis while he was stationed in the Pacific during World War II in 1945. A higher resolution version of this book is available from the author upon request.

Tie Cutting in the Uinta Mountains of Utah left a unique and temporally changing imprint upon the landscape between 1867 and 1939. This paper analyzes some trends in the architectural changes over two distinct periods in the industry's history.

The prevailing belief among historians is that the settlement of early Utah’s towns and villages was chiefly a result of hiving off from the mother settlement in “Great Salt Lake City, Great Basin, North America.”  As it turns out, the actual cause of the early diaspora of settlements in Utah had not so much to do with the natural process of growth as it did with other factors which caused that settlement process to begin far earlier than it otherwise would have done.
A half-century after that initial colonization of the geography of Deseret, there was another major colonization process in Utah — at least in Box Elder County, located in the far Northwestern corner of the state.
This paper, based in the research of the author for his 1999 book, A History of Box Elder County discusses those two colonizations, particularly as they relate to the settlement and growth of Box Elder County.
The original edition, published by the Utah State Historical Society, was heavily edited — due in large part to requirements that the volumes not exceed 450 pages — and was significantly truncated from the author’s original submitted manuscript.  The project was actually a first in the United States. It was the first time that any state had authorized and published a series of book-length volumes on every county in the state, at one time.
That original volume is out-of-print, now, seventeen years after its publication.  A new edition, bearing the title, Box Elder County: a History, is subtitled “author’s original text edition.”  The new addition contains the entire, unedited text of the author’s original manuscript, as written. As such, it contains material which did not find its way into the 1999 published volume.
The material covered in this paper is taken from that larger manuscript.

Vermilion is both a brilliant red or scarlet pigment, originally made from the powdered mineral cinnabar, and the corresponding color. It is commonly used in Hindu culture, primarily by women, and was widely used in the art and decoration of Ancient Rome, in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, in the paintings of the Renaissance, and in the art and lacquerware of China, during the time it was said that China was the home land of Dragons.

The word vermilion came from the Old French word vermeillon, which was derived from vermeil, from the Latin vermiculus, the diminutive of the Latin word vermis or worm, wormlike creature like a snake or winged and flying serpent, as a dragon.
The name originated because it had a similar color to the natural red dye made from an insect, Kermes vermilio, which was widely used in Europe. The first recorded use of "vermilion" as a color name in English was in 1289.
The term cinnabar was used interchangeably with vermilion until the 17th century, when vermilion became the more common name. Now the term "cinnabar" is used in mineralogy and crystallography for the red crystalline form of mercury sulfide HgS. Thus, the natural mineral pigment is called "cinnabar", and its synthetic form is called "vermilion". In ancient times, the term "cinnabar" could also be applied to red lead.

Among the petroglyph figures of faceless men within Horseshoe Canyon in Utah, the Holy Ghost stands seven feet high and dominates the others. It is the only figure that is a rebus, whose details comprise syllabic letters from Old European, a Finnish script. The figures date from 9000 to 7100 BC, when Folsom tribes populated the region. The inscription is an epitaph that says, “From his circle in the ground, eternal peace. Eheys and the fine spark of wizards disposed together in a hole.”

In 1917, Charles G. Patterson, a Utah attorney, spearheaded the organization of the Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers (IASBG) to serve as an advocate for beet farmers in the Intermountain West. With the advent of the First World War, the price of sugar had gone up, but Patterson believed that sugar companies were not passing the increased profits on to farmers and that someone needed to look out for the growers' interests. He had previously published pamphlets castigating leaders of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, many of whom were also high leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which held a large amount of stock in the company. Believing that Utah-Idaho Sugar leaders were using their ecclesiastical connections to force Latter-day Saint farmers into growing beets for the company for whatever price the corporation dictated, Patterson wanted the IASBG to fight for fairer beet prices. Although other organizations such as the U.S. Farm Bureau already represented farmers' interests in matters such as beet prices, Patterson believe they had largely been co-opted by sugar interests and that an independent organization was necessary. Born in the midst of a battle over beet prices in 1918, the IASBG lasted only a few years before folding. This was in part because it was painted by ecclesiastical and business leaders as a radical socialistic organization--a depiction that prevented it from ever gaining much influence over farmers. Yet even though it operated for only a brief period of time, the agitation the organization made over beet prices pushed Utah-Idaho Sugar to increase the amount it paid farmers for the crop. Its brief history thus provides a window into power relationships between farmers and industry in the 1910s and 1920s--relationships that were complicated in Utah and Idaho by the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the sugar industry. It also suggests that even farmers' organizations not heavily supported because of their "radicalism" could have an impact on the well-being of agrarians.

The Commodity Flow Model is an effective method for predicting the composition of late nineteenth and early twentieth century household assemblages. By utilizing a supply-side economic perspective, observed archaeological patterns are firmly linked to the culturally derived variable of market access, increasing our understanding of the spatial distribution of household consumer goods. Through an alternate application of the model, a new and successful method for determining changes in consumerpreference for locally manufactured household goods is demonstrated. By way of intersite comparisons, a new pattern of changes in the national market is revealed. Primary data come from two early twentieth century trash deposits located in Salt Lake County, Utah (Seddon 2001).

From 1889 to 1917, Pacific Islander (mostly Hawaiian) converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lived, worked, and worshipped at Iosepa, a remote desert settlement in Utah’s Skull Val- ley. An examination of the settlement’s design and layout, together with an analysis of petroglyphs at the site, reveals ways this religious community actively negotiated traditional Hawaiian cultural practices and newly adopted Latter-day Saint beliefs in shaping and maintaining their unique religious identities; a process that continues among their descendants today.