Brigham's Utah

In late September 1776, a Spanish exploratory expedition led by two priests of the Franciscan Order, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, entered the Utah Lake Valley.  After a few days spent exchanging gifts with the Timpanogos people who occupied the valley, they made a stop at a natural spring along the ancient highway that American Indians had used for generations to travel around the lake to the Juab Valley and further south to the southern regions of the Pahvant, the Paiute and the Navajo.  They were about 20 miles south from Utah Lake at a spring the Spanish priests named it Ojo de San Pablo , or the "Eye of Saint Paul."  They didn't tarry long.  The Utes called it "Punjun."  Punjun Spring, it is said, is without bottom, and sometimes, on the quiet nights, they could hear the sound of a baby's cry emanating from its depths.  2,188 miles to the east, the American Revolutionary War was raging, and 21-year-old Nathan Hale was arrested ...

45 minutes west from Beaver, Utah is a silent piece of rugged desert land in the foothills of Utah's San Francisco Mountains, out in the middle of nowhere.  14 miles one way is Milford, Utah, the population of which the United States Census Bureau estimates at 1,348 people.  61 miles the other way is Garrison, Utah, a 200-person town on the Nevada border.  All is wilderness in between.  Here in the San Francisco Mountain foothills in the Sevier Desert are the ruins of a once wild and bustling town called Frisco.  Frisco sprouted up in 1870s, fueled by the fabulously rich Silver Horn mine that yielded thousands of tons of ore worth tens of millions of dollars during its peak years from 1875 to 1885.  People came from all over the world in an attempt to claim their fortunes, make a half-decent living, or just to have a good time.  In the middle of a desert where no one would want to live for almost any reason other than potential riches, water had to ...

This account was made to me personally from Calvert Kimball, an 89-year-old lifelong resident of Washington County, UT who was born in Grafton.  His family left Grafton when he was still a small child.  He now resides on a ranch just south of Virgin, UT.  This piece has been recorded in his words and in his natural dialect: My grandpap, Charles Ackley Kimball, accompanied by his wives Dallas Foster and Kelly Housekeeper, the latter being my grandma, was one of the first families sent by the prophet Brigham Young to fulfill the Lord's mission in Zion's "Dixie."  Brother Brigham understood through the Lord's guid'nce that the red soils of the Virgin Valley were ideal for growin' crops like cotton and tobacco which would make the Saints self-reliant and free from the reliance...any reliance, that is, on the bid'ness of outsiders whose ways were not our ways.  The Lord blesses the righteous, and the crops of Utah's Dixie were as successful as King ...

On a fateful September 11th in 1857, about 140 people comprised of men, women and children were escorted a little over a mile through a tranquil, grassy canyon along the Old Spanish Trail.  They had spent the previous four days besieged within their circled wagons, during which time several of them were killed and more were wounded.  Before joining the escort, they had buried their dead inside the wagon circle.  They had run out of water and the ammunition for their defense.  Although they had largely been dismissed when not treated without outright hostility by the Mormon homesteaders within the month they'd spent traversing the Utah Territory, the Mormon militia escort from Cedar City (35 miles away) had promised safe passage under a white flag.  They were desperate, and they were in trouble. Two years later, U.S. Army Brevet Major James H. Carleton, who had visited the site soon after to investigate reported to the United States Congress of what he had fou...

On February 11, 1850, a contingent of the Nauvoo Legion under the command of Captain George D. Grant was pursuing a group of Timpanogos Utes that had fled into Rock Canyon just east of the Utah Valley after a brutal battle had killed 8-10 of their tribe beginning a few days earlier on the 8th.  There, not too far up, they found the native people they had been chasing, several of them lying dead from wounds sustained in the battle, in addition to sickness and exposure in the frigid winter air.  Among the bodies was the Utah Valley Timpanogos chief, Old Elk, sometimes called Big Elk.  Old Elk, who had been sick with measles and had been physically forced out of a Mormon home a couple weeks earlier after asking for medicines, likely died of illness while retreating with the sick and wounded to the canyon.  One among the militia, a notorious frontiersman and enforcer of sorts for the early Mormons called William "Wild Bill" Hickman,  recognized the chief and drew ...

A native elder of the Utah Valley whose true name is now lost to time, only remembered as "Old Bishop" or "Bishop Whitney", was murdered by three Mormon settlers on or around August 1, 1849*.  It's unknown whether they ever bothered to learn his name, but they called him Old Bishop because they saw a resemblance in his being to Newel K. Whitney, the Presiding Bishop of the Church.  The murderers names, however, are remembered, recorded and here follow: Richard A. Ivie, J. Rufus Stoddard, and Gerome Zabriskie.  The exact events immediately preceding the murder cannot be known, but most commonly it is described as coming down to a dispute over a shirt worn by the native man.  Richard Ivie claimed it was his and that Old Bishop must have stolen it off the clothesline, but when Old Bishop refused to give up the shirt, Ivie and his friends killed him.  Another tale of how the three men came to end Old Bishop's life is that the he came upon them as they were hu...