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Expansion Along the Wasatch Front

Dean L. May

On July 22, 1847, the pioneer company of Latter-day Saints colonizing the Rocky Mountain West began settlement of what geographers now call the Wasatch Oasis, a series of narrow crescents of arable land rimming the western flanks of the Wasatch Mountains from present-day Brigham City southward to Nephi. The first site occupied was the northeastern part of the Salt Lake Valley. On July 22, 1847, before Brigham Young himself had entered "The Valley" (as they then and forever after called it), the pioneer company began plowing and planting. Within a few weeks they had explored the valley and its surrounding canyons, participated in a ritual rebaptism to sanctify their new beginning in the West, constructed a fort with adobe walls on three sides to enclose the rustic log cabins they were building, surveyed a city of 135 ten-acre blocks, harvested salt from the lake, put a whipsaw into operation, built a boat, hewn out a canyon road, set up a blacksmith shop, and established an adobe yard. By December 7, they had planted 2,000 acres of fall wheat, looking to the need to feed the nearly 2,000 people who already had arrived, as well as those who would be coming the next season. Great Salt Lake City, as it was then called, had been founded--the first Mormon settlement in the Great Basin, the future capital of Utah, and still a mecca for Mormons throughout the world.

The new arrivals immediately began seeking sites to settle both north and south of the city along the Wasatch Front. On September 29, 1847, Peregrine Sessions claimed land in the area that became Bountiful, directly north of Salt Lake City, making it the second oldest Mormon settlement in the region. The next year others moved farther south in the Salt Lake Valley to settle Sugarhouse, Millcreek, and South Cottonwood; and north, occupying favorable sites at Centerville, Farmington, and Ogden, the latter including lands along the Weber River recently purchased from mountain man Miles Goodyear.

The most dramatic aspect of 1850 settlement was the further spread into the Utah valley, the site of six of nine new colonies founded that year--Alpine, American Fork, Lehi City, Payson, Pleasant Grove, and Springville. The other three were near already established towns between Salt Lake City and Ogden.

The year 1851 represented the apogee and the culmination of the Wasatch Front period of settlement. In that year, 15 new settlements were established, far more than in any year until 1859. They included Brigham City and Nephi, framing Wasatch Front expansion on the north and on the south. Also in that year the southern Utah outposts of Parowan and Cedar City were founded.