Why Cedar City Has No Cedars

The trees around Cedar City are not cedars. They are junipers, trees native to the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau, belonging to a genus only distantly related to the true cedars of Lebanon and the Himalayas. When Mormon pioneers arrived in eighteen fifty-one, they came from the eastern states and Europe, places where a scraggly dark-green tree with aromatic wood might reasonably get called a cedar. They called what they saw cedars, and the name propagated across the landscape: Cedar City, Cedar Breaks, Cedar Canyon.

This kind of misidentification happened throughout the American West with remarkable consistency. Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Creek: in many cases, the tree in question is a juniper or an arborvitae, not a true cedar. The Western pioneers who did the naming were taxonomically flexible in a way that later botanists quietly corrected in textbooks while leaving the place names intact.

The Southern Paiute people who had lived in this landscape for centuries had different names for the trees and knew them as resources. The small waxy blue berries that junipers produce were a food source. The bark was used for insulation and weaving. The wood, which burns hot and smells exactly like a cedar chest, was used for fuel. The tree was not a decorative backdrop but a working part of the high-desert ecosystem. The pioneers who misnamed it were at least correct about one thing: it does smell like cedar, which may explain everything.