What do most people think of when they hear the word “Utah”? In 2007 Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and the Utah Office of Tourism hoped that potential visitors and residents would relate to the new slogan, “Utah: Life Elevated, . . . a quick, easy way to remember what Utah does best: put you on high ground.” But describing Utah in two words was challenging. “The colors are so diverse, the mountains so majestic, the desert so mysterious. . . .We are summer. We are winter. We are historic. We are cultured. We are modern and progressive, but we...

On November 11, 1934, a young man wandered into the wild country near Escalante, Utah, and promptly vanished—presumably meeting his death, either by accident or foul play. Such events, while perhaps less common in the 1930s, are not that unusual. A 2005 New York Times article, using a phrase from park workers, described what they called “the disappearance season,” when young men (and it is almost always young men) venture out into wilderness areas on their own, without leaving any itinerary, and disappear. Sometimes their bodies are later found by search and rescue teams dispatched by concerned friends or...

The first time I remember seeing Blue Valley was in 1972. I was a college student and had just emerged from an astonishing backpack into the Maze section of Canyonlands, a paradise of creek and sandstone. Our group decided to spend the next night among the sandstone walls and apple blossoms of Capitol Reef. On the way there, we drove through Blue Valley, several miles or so of land along the Fremont River west of Hanksville, Utah.

It was without question the ugliest expanse of land I could ever imagine—only good “for holding the earth together,” as people sometimes...

On August 18, 2005, thirty-year-old Darla Woundedhead was fatally shot through the doorway into room 26 at the Dream Inn Motel at 1865 West North Temple Street in Salt Lake City. Five persons were charged with murder in the drug deal gone bad, most prominently Kerri Armant of Elko, Nevada, who pulled the trigger. Woundedhead was seven months pregnant when she was killed, and upon her arrival at the hospital, a baby girl was delivered by emergency cesarean section. Baby “Janie” was found to have traces of cocaine, opiates, and barbiturates in her blood. After a few months’ care, she...

I had gone to a reception at the home of a Harvard professor. I was vouched for by a youth ancestrally near to the Cabots and Lowells. Later in the evening our hostess, on her rounds among the freshmen, casually asked me where I came from—and three centuries of Boston Kultur kept her face expressionless at my answer. Thereafter she was at pains to be kind to me, visibly shielding me from the severities of Brattle street, Cambridge. But as I left, amazement triumphed.

“So people really live in Utah!” she exclaimed.

I could see pity in her eyes...

Brigham Young’s dream when he arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley was that the Mormons could be self-sufficient. He established home industries and businesses and asked church members to patronize them. But as often happens, reality outpaced the dream. The California gold rush, the Utah War, the stagecoach, the telegraph line, the Pony Express, and finally the railroad in 1869 linked Utah more closely to the rest of the nation. Despite the ties established in the nineteenth century, in 1900 Utah retained a residue of insular characteristics that reflected its religious heritage, its earlier experiments with economic separatism and...

World War II had a profound impact on Utah. At the outset of the war, several communities in the state were still feeling the pangs of the recent Depression, especially in the agricultural sector. For many Utahns, the World War II period marked the end of isolation and the beginning of a new era. Utah changed as the United States accelerated its preparations for combat through the establishment and expansion of wartime industries. New war-related businesses often meant different and more-widespread opportunities for employment as well as exposure to people and influences from around the country and the world. Utah...

In the late summer months of 1979, news that the deserts of Utah and Nevada had been targeted for the deployment of the MX (Missile Experimental) missile ignited a flurry of local activity bent on preventing the missiles and the proposed basing scheme from coming to these states.¹ A product of the nuclear arms race, the MX missile, containing ten nuclear warheads, was designed to inflict five times the destructive power of America’s most deadly nuclear weapon. It was proposed that the base would contain nine thousand miles of “racetrack” on which two hundred MX missiles would be constantly moving...

On September 21, 1937, the New York Herald Tribune carried an editorial on page eighteen, “The Mormons Show the Way.” It extolled the Mormon people for tackling the economic and social chaos spawned by the Great Depression in their own way. The Herald Tribune reported that in early 1936, eighty thousand Mormons were on federal relief. Now, it suggested, only a handful remained on the “government payroll”: those who preferred “to be supported in idleness.” The wisdom and foresight of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) was praised as its work and relief initiatives were reviewed....

In the 1910s, growing sugar beets was an important part of Utah’s economy. Sugar had successfully been extracted from beets in 1889 by the Utah Sugar Company, a corporation supported both financially and verbally by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By 1920 more than eight thousand farmers in northern Utah, southern Idaho, and central Washington were planting more than ninety-three thousand acres in sugar beets and harvesting in excess of nine hundred thousand tons of the vegetable. The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, one of two large sugar corporations headquartered in Utah (the other was the Amalgamated Sugar Company),...

When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived in the Great Basin, their leaders formed a theocracy called the State of Deseret, whose proposed boundaries included all of Nevada and extended to the Pacific Coast. Those ambitious arrangements did not last. Instead, Congress took control, made Utah a territory, and progressively trimmed its size. Countering Congress’s assumption of sovereignty, Mormons in Utah Territory asserted their right to control the moral climate and discourse of their communities; in the process, they violated the constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property of some outsiders and apostates whom they...

This chapter examines (1) public opinion as well as (2) political culture and (3) religion in Utah. Through statistical analysis, it compares Utah to other states in these three areas. An historical perspective then shows the ways that the cultural and religious dominance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affects Utahns’ public opinions.

Two key terms with regard to public opinion are partisanship and ideology. Partisanship means the ways citizens align themselves with political parties. Ideology reflects the way they align themselves along a conservative/liberal spectrum. There are various ways to measure partisanship and ideology. One method,...

In 1956 Utah’s attorney general barred Indians living on reservations from voting. Utah’s enforcement of this prohibition developed relatively late, but it grew out of legal strategies and reasoning that many states had used to disfranchise Native Americans. As political scientist Glenn Phelps has observed, “Indian reservations and the Indians who live on them introduce unique ingredients into the political mix surrounding voting rights.” State and federal officials employed four main arguments rooted in constitutional or legal requirements to deny Indians the right to vote. Some argued that unassimilated Indians were unqualified to vote. Using this rationale, the state constitutions...

On the evening of August 12, 1913, a dozen men broke up an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) street meeting in downtown Salt Lake City. It was not a spontaneous act but one they had planned in advance. “Wobblies” were radical critics of the existing economic and political system who indicted capitalism for its exploitation of workers and called for its replacement with a fundamentally different system. The preamble of their constitution clearly expressed their point of view: that it was the “historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” “The working class and the employing...

In the 1970s, Cindy Orton and A. LeGrand (Buddy) Richards purchased a home near the Franklin Elementary School in downtown Provo, Utah. The area had always been a blue-collar, working-class neighborhood; many residents had worked as laborers, on the railroad, or in the steel industry. By the time that the Richardses moved to the area, most of these residents had retired. Over the years, the older people had passed away, and their homes had been torn down and replaced by businesses or apartments. Often the historic homes that remained became rental properties.

As the Richards family grew, they elected to...

Over the course of the twentieth century, Utah’s population multiplied eightfold, rising from 276,749 in 1900 to 2,233,169 in 2000. The number of residents swelled every decade, due partly to high birthrates. The most dramatic gains occurred from 1900 to 1910 (31.3 percent) and during the 1940s (25.2 percent), 1950s (29.3 percent), 1970s (37.9 percent), and 1990s (29.6 percent). People moved to the state to take advantage of expanding economic opportunities during the first decade of the century (dryland farming, irrigation, mining, and smelting) and the 1940s and 1950s (defense industries and installations associated with World War II and the...

As the people of Utah know well, public education costs. At the end of the twentieth century, in fact, it accounted for about 42 percent of all state and local expenditures. Little wonder that eyebrows are raised, tempers occasionally flare, and major, sometimes acrimonious, debates occur each time someone makes a new proposal for more school funding. This chapter attempts to summarize the major challenges, controversies, and accomplishments relating to public education in Utah from 1945 to the end of the century. The emphasis is twofold: the perennial problem of school finance and the dilemmas of educational reform.

Funding for...

Water development has been a key to Utah’s history and the success of its desert communities. During the twentieth century, the state’s farmers, municipal water providers, and politicians lobbied the federal government for larger water projects. These projects provided needed water but also came with consequences. As Utah interests pushed for the “Cadillac” of Utah water projects—the Central Utah Project [CUP]—the high economic and environmental costs of large-scale water development heightened existing concerns and anxieties. As a result, the CUP faced numerous legal and political challenges that delayed its completion and altered its design, scope, and beneficiaries. The...

When President Bill Clinton stood on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in September 1996, after informing Utah’s congressional delegation and governor only twenty-four hours earlier, local and state reaction to the announcement nearly reached a breaking point. Certainly aware that some people in the local communities would not be pleased with the designation, the president could not fully have anticipated the maelstrom that followed and the controversy that the establishment of the monument continues to provoke. State officials and local residents of the sleepy communities in southern Utah balked at the move,...

Utah’s population increased by 1 million people between 1980 and 2006. Of the 2.5 million people in Utah in 2006, nearly 2 million lived on the well-watered Wasatch Front, the narrow stretch of land on the foothills of the mountains from Brigham City on the north, through Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Provo, to Santaquin on the southern boundary of Utah County. It was not surprising that the outlying twenty-four counties of the state, with only 500,000 people altogether, did not command a lot of attention.

In the late twentieth century, however, two of those distant “colonies,” Cache Valley on...