Fort Buenaventura: Miles Goodyear's Gamble
Near Ogden, Utah
Two years before the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Great Basin, a lone trapper named Miles Goodyear built a small trading post on the Weber River and called it Fort Buenaventura. It was eighteen forty-five, and Goodyear, a Connecticut-born mountain man, believed he could profit by selling provisions and livestock to westbound emigrants. He was the first non-indigenous person to establish a permanent settlement in what is now Utah.
Months after Brigham Young's advance party arrived in July eighteen forty-seven, Captain James Brown, acting for the Mormon high council, purchased Goodyear's fort and the surrounding land for one thousand nine hundred fifty dollars, and the site became the nucleus of Ogden. Goodyear took the money and headed to California, where he died in eighteen forty-nine in the Sierra Nevada. A reconstruction of the fort stands in Ogden's Fort Buenaventura State Park.
