Utah’s Latest Listings on the National Register of Historic Places

The Crockett House (Logan), the Forest Dale Historic District (Salt Lake City) , and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Factory (West Jordan) are Utah’s newest additions to the National Register of Historic Places.  For more information on these historic properties, visit the Utah State History website.

The National Register of Historic Places is the federal list of properties that are historically or architecturally significant.

What’s in the Spring 2009 Utah Historical Quarterly?

For readers interested in Utah military history, check out Bob McPherson’s “Soldiering in a Corner, Living on the Fringe: Military Operations in Southeastern Utah, 1880-1890″ in the latest issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly.   Bob has been writing for many years on the history of southeastern Utah and its native peoples.  His book, The Journey of Navajo Oshley (USU Press, 2000), is a must-read for those interested in understanding the everyday lives of Utah’s Navajos.

Other articles in the recent UHQ issue:

• “The Big Washout: The 1862 Flood in Santa Clara,” By Todd M. Compton
• “Friends at all Times: The Correspondence of Isaiah Moses Coombs and Dryden Rogers,” By Sandra Dawn Brimhall
• “Did Prospectors See Rainbow Bridge Before 1909?” By James H. Knipmeyer

Book reviews in the recent issue of UHQ:

• Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen E. Leonard. Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, Reviewed by Melvin T. Smith
• Shannon A. Novak. House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Reviewed by Richard E. Turley, Jr.
• Stan Hoig. The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade, Reviewed by John D. Barton
• Jay H. Buckley. William Clark Indian Diplomat, Reviewed by H. Bert Jenson

Happy reading!

How Antelope Island Got Its Name

© 2009 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In the fall of 1845, the famous American explorer John Charles Fremont crossed over the Rocky Mountains into what’s now eastern Utah bound for the Great Salt Lake.  Two years earlier, he and a small party of men had probed the lake’s brackish waters in a rubber boat, camping on the island that bears his name.  Now he was headed back, intending to discover more about the body of water he called “the Inland Sea.”

Upon reaching the lake the second time, Fremont set about investigating the region’s ecosystem.  He marveled at what he called the “incrustations of fine white salt” that practically covered the lake’s southern beaches and the insect larvae that called the salty beach mud home.

Perhaps the most interesting story to come from Fremont’s 1845 visit to the Great Salt Lake, however, comes from the explorer’s trip to the long, almost peninsular island near the lake’s southeastern margins.  Area Native Americans had told him he could easily ride his horse across the sandbar that linked the island to the shore.  Taking them at their word, Fremont took his guide Kit Carson and a few men and rode “across the shallows to the island,” recording later that the water never reached “above the saddle-girths” and that the “floor of the lake was a sheet of salt resembling softening ice, into which the horses’ feet sunk to the fetlocks.”  When they finally reached the island, the party found grass and water, as well as a considerable herd of antelope, a few of which Fremont and his men killed for food.  When they at last left the island and returned across the sandbar, they were accosted by a local Indian man who claimed all the antelope on the island were his and that they would have to pay for the animals they had shot.  Fremont, not wanting to anger the man, gave him some cloth, tobacco and a knife to make up for the dead antelope—and to the island he gave the name of the beasts that roamed it.  It became Antelope Island. 

Sources:

John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California (Buffalo: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1852), 198-208; John C. Fremont, Memoirs of My Life (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, and Company 1887; reprint, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 430-432; Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 140-145 and 149-150; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 153-170 and 257-261.

The Box Elder Tabernacle Fire

© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

On February 9, 1896, LDS worshippers were just assembling for a morning meeting in the Box Elder Stake Tabernacle when the cry of “fire!” rent the air.  Someone had smelled smoke, causing a few intrepid worshippers to check the basement where they found the tabernacle’s furnace and wooden ducting engulfed in flames.  Soon the inferno spread to the timbers and up into the sanctuary.  Congregants scattered.  According to the local paper, the Box Elder Bugler, it took only a half hour for the tabernacle to turn into “a mass of furious, crackling flames.”  By 2:30 in the afternoon, the building was nothing more than a smoking, blackened hulk.  The fire had even stripped the plaster from the walls, and floating embers from the blaze had touched off other fires around town.

Naturally, Box Elder Mormons grieved for their lost spiritual center.  Only a little over five years had passed since LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff had dedicated the building; now it was gone.  The damage was valued at $12,000, but because the church carried no insurance on the building, it seemed like there would be no way to rebuild.  But area Latter-day Saints weren’t demoralized.  Within a matter of weeks, the membership of the Box Elder Stake had decided to restore the tabernacle despite a less-than-ideal financial situation: not only was the nation still in the throes of the panic of 1893, but the local experiment in cooperative manufactures known as the Brigham City Mercantile and Manufacturing Association had failed years earlier leaving the city in a depressed economic state.  Church general authorities couldn’t help much as they too were still feeling the effects of the 1893 downturn. But they did send a letter to local church officials encouraging members to donate to the Box Elder cause.  By March of the following year, work on the tabernacle had wrapped up and the restored building was dedicated by George Q. Cannon.

Sources:

See the Brigham City Bugler, 15 February 1896, and 27 March 1897; and Frederick M. Huchel, A History Box Elder County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Box Elder County Commission, 1999), 123-145.