The Indigenous Peoples of the Salt Lake Valley
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The Salt Lake Valley was not empty when Brigham Young's advance party arrived on July twenty-second, eighteen forty-seven. It was a borderland, the contested zone between two major territorial ranges. To the north, the Shoshone people, including the Northwestern Shoshone bands whose winter camps were in the Bear River valley, had used the region for hunting and gathering for generations. To the south and east, the Ute people, whose territory stretched across the eastern Great Basin and into the Colorado Plateau, moved through the valley seasonally. The Goshute people occupied the western desert. The Paiute lived to the south.
None of these nations had ceded their lands when the pioneers arrived. The federal treaties that would attempt to extinguish their land claims came later: negotiations with the Shoshone, Bannock, and Goshute in eighteen sixty-three, and with the Ute and Southern Paiute in eighteen sixty-five. Even those treaties were obtained under conditions historians describe as coercive, and the provisions regarding reservations were implemented unevenly and often badly.
The Goshute refused removal to either the Fort Hall or Uintah reservations and maintained their west-desert territory until a small reservation was established for them in the nineteen-teens. The Northwestern Band of Shoshone was not federally recognized until nineteen eighty-seven. The Ute Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation pursued claims against the United States government over the dispossession of their homeland, and won financial awards in later decades.
Today, eight federally recognized tribal nations have connections to Utah. Their relationship to the land the city was built on is ongoing, not historical. The Great Salt Lake that is disappearing was, and is, a sacred landscape to multiple Indigenous nations, not merely a scenic backdrop.
