More about Fort Cameron

The Sheratt Library at Southern Utah University has a few interesting items related to Fort Cameron in their digital collection.  See them here, here, here, and here.  The first is a sketch of the fort in its heyday.  The other three are prose descriptions of the fort’s founding, its physical plant, its garrison, and its abandonment. 

All the items are from Monuments to Courage: A History of Beaver County, published by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers and Beaver County.

Forts Cameron and Thornburgh

This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm
© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant formally authorized the creation of a permanent US Army garrison near Beaver named Fort Cameron.  Built to protect white settlers from the perceived threat of Indian attacks, the fort was laid out in a rectangular shape with walls enclosing barracks, a hospital, parade grounds, a bakery, and stables, with the local mountains supplying the black lava rock for the buildings and exterior walls.  Once the fort was finished, however, the soldiers stationed there had little to keep them occupied, besides guarding John D. Lee who had been jailed at the fort for a brief time in advance of his trial for participating in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  The soldiers and the mostly Mormon townspeople didn’t always get along, but relations between the two groups were relatively warm until the post closed in 1883 when the arrival of the railroad made it obsolete.  More than a decade later, the LDS Church, which had purchased the property from the federal government, turned the fort into a southern branch of the Brigham Young Academy.

Equally important on Utah’s military frontier was Fort Thornburgh, which was first established in 1881 near present-day Ouray and then moved to the mouth of Ashley Creek, near present-day Vernal, less than a year later.  Following what some have called the Meeker Massacre, where Ute Indians killed a handful of whites near Colorado’s White River Indian Agency, the Uncompahgre and White River Utes were forced to trek from their lands in Colorado to Utah’s Uintah Basin.  Believing that an army installation would be needed to keep the Utes quiet, the Secretary of War ordered the creation of Fort Thornburgh.  When the fort was finished a detachment of thirty men was left to garrison the fort.  When Congress wouldn’t approve new funds to improve the fort, it was abandoned and superseded by Fort Duchesne as the symbol of American military might in the Uintah Basin.

Sources: 

See Thomas G. Alexander and Leonard K. Arrington, “The Utah Military Frontier, 1872-1912: Forts Cameron, Thornburgh, and Duchesne,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (Fall 1964): 330-354.  Also see Linda Bonar’s and David Schirer’s respective entries on Forts Cameron and Thornburgh in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/.

The Dominguez-Escalante Journal Online

The Dominguez-Escalante journal can be found online here.  Many scholars, claim that the expedition crossed over into what is now Utah between  September 11 and September 13, 1776.  The Rio San Buenaventura mentioned in the September 13 entry is likely the Green River.

The Dominguez-Escalante Expedition

This episode originally aired September 8, 2006.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm
© 2006 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

In 1776, the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed, a group of Spanish explorers entered present-day Utah Valley.  Led by two Franciscan friars named Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Francisco Dominguez, the expedition was launched to find a northern path from New Mexico to one of Spain’s newest colonies, California.

Dominguez and Escalante left Santa Fe in July, traveling north.  By the time they reached what is now Colorado, they’d recruited 12 other Spaniards and two Ute men, members of the Timpanogots band that lived on the shores of Utah Lake, to join them.  The two Native Americans agreed to guide the Spanish to Utah Valley.  Their trail from Colorado took them near what is now Dinosaur National Park, up the Strawberry River, and down Spanish Fork Canyon.  On September 23, they climbed a hill near the present-day Spanish Oaks Golf Course, and were treated to a panoramic view of the pristine valley below them, with its sparkling emerald lake and ring of steep mountains.  Intending to push on to California, the Spaniards recruited a new Timpanogots guide and turned southwest.  But their guide didn’t stick around for long and by October they were marching through snow, so they revised their plans and headed back to New Mexico.

The Dominguez-Escalante expedition illuminates the competing claims people made to the land we now know as Utah.  The territory remained on the fringes of the Spanish Empire even after word of the expedition got out.  Occasional trading, trapping, and slaving expeditions made their way through the region, but few if any Spaniards chose to settle here.  Still, the Spanish and the Mexicans—who won independence from Spain in 1821—claimed the area as theirs.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war between the United States and Mexico in 1848, legally turned the region over to the American government, but older traditions and claims still remain.  When Mexican immigrants talk about crossing the border into the United States, they often don’t refer to the name of the nation into which they’re moving.  Instead they call the land “El Norte”—the North—or the piece of the American West that was once part of the old Spanish and Mexican empires.

Sources:

See Thomas G. Alexander, Utah: The Right Place 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 55-57; and Ted J. Warner, The Dominguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition Through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995). Also see Bernice M. Mooney’s entry on the Catholic Church in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.