Utah

Native Americans have lived in what is now Utah for more than 13,000 years. The Paleoindian period began about 12,000 years ago and the hunter-gatherer Archaic period about 8,000 years ago; about 2,000 years ago Ancestral Puebloans lived in the Four Corners region, including the red rock canyon country of southern Utah, while the Fremont culture added farming. In the Late Prehistoric period, about 700 years ago, five cultural groups—the Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone, Navajo and Ute—made Utah their home.⁠[1]

Spain claimed what is now Utah from 1521 to 1821. Captain García López de Cárdenas, in 1541, is believed to have been the first Spanish explorer to enter the region, and in 1765 Juan María Antonio Rivera became the first European known to see the Colorado River. From about 1750 Spanish leaders in New Mexico allied with some northern Native groups, and the Ute and Navajo traded furs, hides, horses and captives for European tools and weapons; slave traders raided Paiute communities and sold young people into slavery in mission towns. The Old Spanish Trail ran about 700 miles from Santa Fe through present-day Moab to Los Angeles.⁠[2]

On July 29, 1776, a ten-man party led by the Franciscan priests Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante left Santa Fe heading north in hope of finding a route to the missions at Monterey, California, accompanied by three Ute guides; the cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco made the first map of the area. The party entered present-day Utah around September 11 and reached Utah Valley on September 22, where it was welcomed by the Timpanogots Utes. In October, with cold weather approaching, it turned back, crossed the Colorado River on November 7 at the place now called the Crossing of the Fathers, and reached Santa Fe on January 2, 1777, after about 1,700 miles.⁠[3]

After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, present-day Utah became part of northern Mexico for about 30 years. In the 1820s and 1830s British and American fur traders and explorers entered northern Utah, and their reports on the land and its peoples helped pave the way for American migration.⁠[4]

Jim Bridger came to trap in the Bear River country in 1824 and in the spring of 1825 followed the Bear River to the Great Salt Lake; Jedediah Smith explored the Bear River and Great Salt Lake regions in 1825; and Peter Skene Ogden of the British North West Company trapped the Bear River drainage in 1824–1825 and explored the Weber River and the Great Salt Lake in 1828–1829—the city of Ogden is named for him. Annual rendezvous of trappers, traders and tribal communities were held from 1825 into the 1840s. In 1844 Miles Goodyear established Fort Buenaventura on the Ogden River, the first permanent European American settlement in Utah, which later became the city of Ogden.⁠[5]

The first Latter-day Saint immigrants reached the Salt Lake Valley on July 22, 1847, after 111 days on the trail, and Brigham Young arrived two days later; Salt Lake City was founded that year by Young and a band of 148 Latter-day Saints. Between 1847 and 1869 thousands of pioneers crossed the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, a few groups pulling handcarts, and Young sent settlers to build communities across Utah, Idaho, Nevada and into California.⁠[6][7]

When the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the United States took Mexico’s northern territory, including present-day Utah. Forts and military force followed; more than 400 Shoshones were killed in the Bear River Massacre, and treaties that promised peace in exchange for food, goods and sometimes reservation land were often ignored by settlers, while groups such as the Timpanogos Utes near Provo were moved onto poorer reservation land.⁠[4]

In 1849 a constitutional convention proposed the State of Deseret, with Brigham Young as governor, covering parts of present-day Colorado, Nevada and Utah. This theocratic government led by Young served the region for almost two years without federal recognition; Congress rejected the bid for statehood because the proposed state was too large and lacked the required population, and it did not seat the state’s representative, Almon Babbitt.⁠[8][9][10][11]

The Compromise of 1850 created Utah Territory, and President Millard Fillmore appointed Brigham Young as its first territorial governor. During the territorial period (1850–1896), which lasted much longer than in other western territories, the governor and other officials were appointed, and could be removed, by the President; in 1868 the territory was reduced to the area of the present state.⁠[8][10][12]

In 1852 church leaders publicly acknowledged that some members practiced plural marriage. Settlers wrote another constitution in 1856 but chose not to seek statehood, and in 1862 Congress rejected a new constitution for Deseret and passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which prohibited polygamy in the territories and limited how much land the church could own.⁠[13][8]

Salt Lake City was the territorial capital from 1856 to 1896 and became the state capital in 1896.⁠[7]

In the Utah War of 1857–1858 between Latter-day Saint authorities and the federal government, President James Buchanan removed Brigham Young and sent Alfred Cumming to Utah with 2,500 soldiers.⁠[8][12]

Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States (1861–1865). Born to a frontier farming family in Kentucky, he had less than a year of formal schooling, taught himself law, and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before winning the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1860. During the Civil War he preserved the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.Open the full entry created the Uintah Reservation by presidential proclamation in 1861, and by 1870 several Ute bands had been forced to move there. After the White River Utes of Colorado were defeated in 1881, they too were forced onto the reservation; the Uncompahgre Utes were then forced to move, and Chief Ouray secured them a separate reservation, which was merged with the Uintah in 1886. In 1905 the government opened reservation land to white homesteaders, and later carve-outs for mining, a reservoir and a national forest have left the reservation one-quarter of its original size.⁠[14]

Under the Pacific Railway Act, signed by Lincoln in 1862, the Central Pacific built east from Sacramento, California, and the Union PacificUnion PacificUnion Pacific Corporation is an Omaha-based U.S. railroad holding company whose Union Pacific Railroad runs freight trains in 23 western states. In 2025 it agreed to merge with Norfolk Southern.Open the full entry west from Omaha, NebraskaNebraskaNebraska is a state of the United States bordered by South Dakota to the north, Iowa and Missouri to the east, Kansas to the south, and Colorado to the southwest, with its panhandle bordering Wyoming to the west; its capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha. It was admitted to the Union on March 1, 1867, as the 37th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 1,961,504.Open the full entry, over about 1,500 miles. The two lines were joined at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when officials drove four ceremonial spikes; thousands of workers from southern China were the backbone of the Central Pacific’s labor force, while the Union Pacific employed Irish workers.⁠[15]

The railroad linked Ogden with Salt Lake City, new lines reached mining districts such as Alta and Park City, farmers could ship crops to distant markets, and immigrants arrived from Italy, Greece, Finland and Great Britain. Before 1869, 91 percent of EuroAmericans in Utah were Latter-day Saints; by 1890 church members made up 66 percent of the population. Settlers also claimed land on which Indigenous peoples relied, leading to starvation.⁠[15]

In early 1870 the territorial legislature unanimously approved women’s suffrage, about two months after Wyoming’s law of December 1869, making Utah the second territory to give women the vote; Utah women voted in local elections that year, before Wyoming’s women did, and the schoolteacher Seraph Young is identified as the first woman in the United States to vote. The Edmunds-Tucker Act passed by Congress in 1887 took away Utah women’s voting rights after seventeen years.⁠[16]

Congress passed the Poland Act in 1874 to strengthen prosecutions of polygamists, and in 1879 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal anti-polygamy laws. The Edmunds Act of 1882 made polygamy a felony, prohibited “unlawful cohabitation” and removed polygamists’ rights to vote and hold office, and in 1885 federal officials arrested many polygamist men. The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 disincorporated the church, allowed the government to seize its assets and required wives to testify against their husbands.⁠[8][13]

In 1890, after a Supreme Court ruling allowed the seizure of church property, church President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto advising members against “illegal marriages,” clearing the way toward statehood, and in 1891 the Democratic and Republican parties replaced the People’s Party and the Liberal Party. In 1904 President Joseph F. Smith issued a binding decree excommunicating anyone who performed or entered a plural marriage after that date. Utah petitioned for statehood seven times over forty-five years.⁠[13][8][11]

Commercial mining began in Utah in 1862. By 1912 the state had 88 mining districts producing gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc, of which Bingham Canyon, Park City and Tintic were the most profitable, and large corporations and investors from outside Utah or outside the United States drove the industry’s growth. The first miners came largely from northern Europe (Ireland, Cornwall and Wales); from the 1890s to the 1920s waves of immigrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe, Japan, Korea and China, people from 26 countries lived and worked in Carbon County alone, and the Greek labor agent Leonidis Skliris recruited thousands of Greeks to work in Utah, Wyoming and Nevada.⁠[17]

President Grover Cleveland signed the enabling act for Utah on July 16, 1894, with a pen now displayed with a plaque noting that he signed it “10 m. before midnight”; the act set the requirements for statehood, including a ban on polygamy in the state constitution.⁠[9][8]

On March 4, 1895, delegates from Latter-day Saint and non-Mormon communities met in Salt Lake City to write a new constitution, whose Article 4 gave women the right to vote and to hold office. The territorial census of 1895 counted 247,324 residents, eight in ten of them American-born and nearly nine in ten Latter-day Saints.⁠[8][11][18]

President Grover Cleveland issued the proclamation admitting Utah “on an equal footing with the other states of the Union,” and Heber Manning Wells became the first governor, serving until 1905. At statehood Salt Lake City had about 50,000 people and Ogden about 15,000.⁠[8][11][19][18]

On May 1, 1900, an explosion in the Winter Quarters No. 4 coal mine near Scofield killed 200 or more workers through the blast or toxic gases, many of them immigrant miners; it was then the deadliest mining disaster in U.S. history, and the company eventually agreed to pay burial costs and $500 to each widow. An explosion at Castle Gate in 1924 killed 171 more miners.⁠[20]

During World War II the Department of Defense built or expanded Utah military installations including Hill Air Force Base and Dugway Proving Grounds. During the Cold War, Thiokol Chemical Corporation built a plant near Brigham City and made the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, the main missile produced in Utah, bringing about $3 million a month into the local economy for around ten years; by 1962 the Hercules Powder Company, Sperry Rand Corporation and others were making missiles in Utah.⁠[21]

The Topaz Internment Camp opened near Delta in September 1942 and held mostly Japanese Americans from the San Francisco area, brought by train from a temporary site at the Tanforan racetrack in California; more than 11,000 people lived there under armed guard. In 1943 a guard killed James Wakasa, a 63-year-old internee. The camp closed in October 1945, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the incarceration.⁠[22]

From December 1944 the 509th Composite Group, about 1,500 men, trained in secret at Wendover Air Base, practicing with dummy bombs over the Utah desert; its commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, was the one who understood the whole mission. On August 6, 1945, Tibbets piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, where it dropped the atomic bomb.⁠[23]

The U.S. government exploded its first test in southern Nevada on January 27, 1951; fallout from tests in the 1950s drifted into southwest Utah, livestock died, and residents later became sick, some fatally, and by 1953 sheep in Iron County showed symptoms of radiation poisoning. The Atomic Energy Commission assured residents that the testing was safe and falsified investigation reports, which a Congressional investigation exposed in 1979. Affected residents call themselves “Downwinders,” and in 1990 Congress passed a bill that apologized and provided compensation to survivors.⁠[24]

David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland founded Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation in 1968, and in December 1969 the University of Utah became the fourth university on ARPANET. Alan C. Ashton began developing WordPerfect at Brigham Young University with the student Bruce Bastian in 1978, and it was released for the IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry PC by 1982; BYU computer science students formed Novell in the early 1980s. The Utah Valley technology area was called “Software Valley” in the early 1990s and became known as “Silicon Slopes” in the 2000s.⁠[25]

On December 1, 1982, at the University of Utah Medical Center, the Seattle dentist Barney Clark became the first person to receive a total artificial heart, the Jarvik-7 developed by a team led by Willem Kolff; he lived 112 days after the surgery.⁠[26]

The International Olympic Committee chose Salt Lake City in 1995 to host the 2002 Winter Olympics. In February 2002 athletes from 77 countries competed in 78 events over 17 days; spending from 1996 to 2003 totaled $3.5 billion, Interstate 15 was widened, the Utah Transit Authority built the TRAX light rail system, and more than 26,000 people volunteered.⁠[27]

The 2020 census apportionment results released on April 26, 2021, showed Utah as the fastest-growing state since 2010, with growth of 18.4 percent. It kept its 4 seats in the U.S. House, with an average of 818,813 people per seat, and accordingly has 6 electoral votes in the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections.⁠[28][29][30]

Utah’s constitution dates from statehood in 1895; it protects basic personal freedoms, bars sectarian control of public schools and prohibits “polygamous or plural marriages,” and it models state government on the federal system, with an elected governor, Senate and House of Representatives. The governor and other elected executive officers serve four-year terms; the governor may veto bills, and a two-thirds majority in each house can override a veto. The Senate has 29 members serving four-year terms and the House 75 members serving two-year terms, and the legislature meets annually in 45-day sessions. The Supreme Court has five justices serving ten-year terms. The state has 29 counties.⁠[31][10]

As of November 2026 the governor is Spencer J. Cox, Utah’s 18th governor, who was sworn in on January 4, 2021. Born and raised in Fairview, a town of 1,200, he attended Snow College, Utah State University and the Washington and Lee University School of Law, served as a city councilmember, mayor, county commissioner and state legislator, and was appointed lieutenant governor in 2013.⁠[32][19]

At the Four Corners in the southeast, Utah meets Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona at right angles, the only such meeting of states in the United States. The state contains the Great Salt Lake and parts of the Middle Rocky Mountains and the Uinta Mountains, and its western third is a broad, desertlike area; about 70 percent of the land is owned by the federal or state government. It is 350 miles long and 270 miles wide.⁠[12][33]

On a 2010 census basis, Utah has a total area of 84,897 square miles (219,882 km²), of which 82,170 square miles (212,818 km²) is land and 2,727 square miles (7,064 km²) is water, making it the 11th largest state. The highest point is Kings Peak in the Uinta Mountains, in Duchesne County, at 13,528 feet (about 4,123 m), and the lowest is Beaverdam Wash in Washington County at 2,000 feet (about 610 m).⁠[34][33][35]

Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates put Utah’s population at 3,538,904 on July 1, 2025, compared with 3,502,983 on July 1, 2024; its growth rate of 1.0 percent ranked 5th among the states, and growth came mainly from natural change, as net international migration, the largest contributor the year before, slowed.⁠[36]

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data put Utah’s nominal GDP at $319,178.6 million in 2025, $302,630.2 million in 2024 and $282,093.8 million in 2023.⁠[37]

Livestock products provide almost three-fourths of farm income. The Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine has produced more copper than any other mine in the world; Utah is also one of the major western coal producers, the only state that produces gilsonite, and the world’s largest producer of beryllium. Major manufacturing sectors include printing and publishing, food processing, petroleum refining, transportation equipment, computer hardware and software, and rocket engines, while business, military and government services and tourism are growing fastest; the state has more than a dozen ski resorts, several of them near Park City.⁠[38][12]

The University of Utah was founded in 1850 as the University of Deseret and in 1895 had 500 students under President James E. Talmage; Utah State University was founded in 1888 as a land-grant school, and Westminster College in 1875 as a nondenominational private institution; and Brigham Young University, operated by the Latter-day Saint church, is the largest church-related university in the country. The free public school system began in 1890; schooling is now mandatory from ages 6 to 18, and more than half of tax-funded state spending goes to education.⁠[31][18]

Utah’s nickname is the “Beehive State,” its motto “Industry” and its emblem the beehive. The state bird is the California gull, the state flower the sego lily, the state tree the quaking aspen, the state animal the Rocky Mountain elk, the state fossil the Allosaurus, the state gem topaz, the state mineral copper and the state rock coal; the state song is “Utah, This Is The Place” and the state hymn “Utah, We Love Thee.”⁠[33][39][40][41]

The original state flag, adopted by the Legislature on March 9, 1911, and now called the historic state flag, bears the state seal, with an eagle, a shield marked “Utah” and “1847,” six arrows, the motto “industry,” a beehive, sego lilies, honey bees, two American flags and the date 1896. In 2022 Governor Spencer J. Cox and Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson launched the “More Than A Flag” campaign, which drew more than 7,000 submissions, including 5,702 flag designs; Cox signed S.B. 31 of the 2023 General Session on March 21, 2023, and the new Beehive Flag became official on March 9, 2024, Utah State Flag Day, with the former flag becoming the historic flag, to be flown with the new one as a set on state holidays.⁠[42][43]

On the new flag the blue field represents the skies and lakes and values such as faith and freedom, the white mountain stripe the snowy peaks and the Tribal nations who have lived there for generations, and the red canyon stripe southern Utah’s landscape and perseverance; the gold-rimmed hexagon represents prosperity and unity, the beehive within it Utah’s history, community and motto, and the five-pointed star hope and the year of statehood.⁠[42]

Utah.gov: Official website: https://www.utah.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[44]

Governor Spencer J. Cox: Official website: https://governor.utah.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]