The Mormon Corridor: Interstate Fifteen as the Old Pioneer Road

Interstate Fifteen, from Las Vegas north to Salt Lake City, runs almost exactly on top of the Old Mormon Road. Brigham Young sent settlers south from Salt Lake beginning in the eighteen fifties to establish what he called the Mormon Corridor, a series of agricultural communities that would supply the Utah settlements and provide a route to the Pacific. The road ran through the same river valleys and desert passages that the highway follows today because water and grade made no other route practical.

The settlers who came south on that road faced something that is easy to underestimate from inside an air-conditioned car: temperatures above one hundred ten degrees in summer, stretches of a hundred miles without reliable water, and the constant threat of a wagon axle failing in the kind of terrain where no help was coming for a week. The Paiute people had managed this corridor for generations by knowing where the water was and when to be where. The Mormon settlers often did not know, and relations with the Paiute were mixed.

The relationship was complicated in ways that both sides have read differently in the historical record. Interstate Fifteen now runs through this corridor at eighty miles per hour past the same red-rock mesas and dry washes that stopped wagon trains. The towns along this stretch, Mesquite, Beaver Dam, Saint George, Cedar City, were originally Mormon settlements and the church remains a major presence in them.

The religion organized the landscape.