Mormon Pioneers and the First Colony Outside Salt Lake
Near Provo, Utah
In March of eighteen forty-nine, a company of about one hundred and fifty Mormon settlers organized to do something that had not been done before: establish a colony beyond the Salt Lake Valley. They were heading south to Utah Valley, where the Timpanogos lived and where Spanish and trapper accounts had described good farmland, freshwater, and an abundant lake. They did not arrive without conditions.
Near the Provo River, a group of Timpanogos men stopped the column. The settlers promised that they would not drive the Indians from their lands or deprive them of their rights. With that pledge given, they were allowed to continue.
Fort Utah went up in April of eighteen forty-nine, built on the bank of the Provo River. It was the first Mormon settlement in Utah outside of Salt Lake, a distinction that still defines the city's sense of itself. Within months, the community had a grid of streets, fields under cultivation, and a mill.
The fort's location was strategic but also provocative: it sat directly on the grounds the Timpanogos had used for their annual spring fish gathering. The city that grew from Fort Utah was incorporated within a few years of settlement. By the eighteen sixties it was functioning as a regional center for commerce and church administration throughout central Utah.
The fort is gone, but the grid those first settlers laid down, the straight streets, the wide blocks, is still the skeleton of modern Provo.
