Miles Goodyear's Gamble
Near Ogden, Utah
In the spring of eighteen forty-six, a twenty-eight-year-old Connecticut-born trapper named Miles Goodyear chose a spot just east of the Weber River's westward bend and started building. He cut cottonwood logs, raised four cabins in a square, added livestock sheds and corrals, broke ground for a garden, and called the whole enterprise Fort Buenaventura, meaning good venture in Spanish. When he finished, it was the first permanent Anglo-American settlement in the entire Great Basin.
Goodyear had come west as a teenager, joining Marcus Whitman's missionary party in eighteen thirty-six, but the missionary life did not stick. He took to trapping and trading along the Oregon Trail, and by the time the fur trade collapsed around eighteen forty-five he was looking for something more stable than beaver pelts. He chose the Weber Valley because the river ran clean, the mountain pastures were rich, and the trail traffic was steady. Emigrants heading to Oregon and California had to pass nearby. Goodyear had horses, provisions, and information to sell.
He was an optimist. He tried repeatedly to persuade the first Mormon wagon companies, arriving in the summer of eighteen forty-seven, to come down off their mountain route and settle in his valley. Brigham Young's party was not interested. But one November, that same year, the Mormon High Council of Great Salt Lake City sent a man named James Brown north with an offer. Brown purchased Fort Buenaventura, the surrounding land claim, and Goodyear's livestock for one thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars.
Miles Goodyear headed for California to try his luck in the gold fields. He died in eighteen forty-nine, thirty-two years old, in the Sierra Nevada of California. The fort he built was renamed Brownsville, and then, when the town formally organized, it was named for the fur trader who had visited long before Goodyear arrived: Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company, who never lived here at all.
A reconstruction of Fort Buenaventura stands today in a city park about two miles south of where you are. The original site is within the modern city grid.
