Bear River City: Called by the Church

Bear River City, Utah owes its existence to a church assignment and a river named by a French Canadian trapper. Michael Bourdon gave the Bear River its name in the early eighteen hundreds for the black, brown, and grizzly bears he found along its banks. In eighteen sixty-six, a group of Scandinavian Mormon converts was called by the Latter-day Saint Church to leave Brigham City and settle new land along the river, developing an irrigation project from the Malad River's waters.

Their first homes were dugouts dug into the west bank. By the fall of eighteen sixty-seven they had built more permanent structures within a fortified enclosure for protection. The town incorporated in eighteen eighty-five.

It remains a quiet agricultural community in Box Elder County, a reminder of how systematically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints organized the settlement of the Great Basin.