The People of the Weber

Long before any road or rail crossed this valley, the Weber River ran through it the way it always has, cold and fast out of the Wasatch mountains, bending west toward the Great Salt Lake through stands of cottonwood and willow. The people who knew it best called themselves the Northwestern Shoshone, and by the time European explorers arrived in the eighteen twenties they had been living along this river and in these mountains for at least five centuries.

They were not a single unified people in the way that phrase sometimes suggests. Three distinct bands occupied the northern Utah region. The group living in Weber Valley itself was sometimes called by their neighbors the Weber Utes, a name applied by outsiders that does not reflect what they called themselves. They were Northwestern Shoshone. They hunted in the mountains above, fished the Weber and the Ogden rivers for cutthroat trout, and gathered seeds, roots, and pine nuts. The Great Salt Lake marshes to the southwest offered duck eggs and waterfowl. The land between the Wasatch and the lake was not a harsh desert to these people. It was a highly organized larder.

Peter Skene Ogden, a fur brigade leader for the Hudson's Bay Company, traveled through this valley in the winter of eighteen twenty-eight and eighteen twenty-nine, trapping beaver along every tributary. He noted Shoshone camps throughout the valley in his journals. Within two decades of that visit, Mormon settlers had arrived, purchased the first Anglo trading post, and begun the process that would displace the Northwestern Shoshone from the land they had used for generations.

The river still carries the name Weber, named for the fur trapper John Henry Weber. The people who did live here left their own record in the mounds near the confluence of the Weber and Ogden rivers, documented by archaeologists in the twentieth century. What you are driving through was their home first.