Promised Land, Peculiar People
Moody and withdrawn, the [Great Salt Lake] unites a haunting loveliness to a raw desolateness.
—Dale Morgan, The Great Salt Lake
We’ll find the place which God for us prepared,
Far away, in the West,
Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid;
There the saints, will be blessed.—William Clayton, “Come, Come, Ye Saints”
My childhood was indelibly shaped by the land surrounding me, even though I grew up in the suburbs of Utah’s largest city, nestled on the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The mostly barren land had been sparsely settled by Native Americans prior to the arrival of Mormon pioneers in 1847. The American writer Wallace Stegner described my homeland as “The Land nobody wanted.” My pioneer ancestors settled there precisely because they thought nobody else would want it, and thus the land would serve as a refuge from the harassment they had previously experienced in the American midwest.
To me the land felt like a refuge, the Wasatch mountains to the east and the Oquirrh mountains to the west forming visual barriers reminiscent to me of the crenellated walls of medieval castles. The land shaped by aesthetics, my psychology, but also potentially my health.
Thirteen hundred miles west of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and roughly 4200 feet above see level lies the Great Salt Lake, one of the most peculiar sites in the American West. The serenely beautiful lake, itself more desert than the deserts surrounding it, had little value for mankind, except on the wetland fringes and in the exotic myths a mysterious salt lake—or was it an ocean inlet?—evoked in the the minds of early western explorers. This strange lake was a fitting home for the Mormons who in their own ways were as strange as the salty lake.
Although the Great Salt Lake was well known by the time the Mormons arrived in 1847, there remain interesting questions regarding which European first discovered the lake. In 1776 a Spanish expedition led by Fathers Domínguez and Escalante departed Santa Fe, New Mexico, looking for a northerly route to Monterey, California. Dominguez and Escalante travelled as far north as Utah Valley where they stayed with the Timpanois Utes living at the confluence of the Provo River into Utah Lake, some sixty miles south of the Great Salt Lake. The Timpanois told the fathers of another lake to the north.
The other lake with which this one comes in contact covers many leagues, so we were informed, and its waters are harmful and extremely salty, for the Timpanois assured us that anyone who wet some part of the body with them immediately felt a lot of itching in the part moistened. They told us that all around it here lives a numerous and secluded nation calling itself Puaguampe, which in our common speech means “bewitchers”; it employs the Comanche language, lives on wild plants, drinks from various springs or outlets of good water encircling the lake, and they have their small dwellings made of grass and sods—which must be the roofs of them. ^[Ted J. Warner, The Domínguez-Escalante Journal, p. 72]
But Domínguez and Escalante did not proceed north to explore, and after only a couple of days with the Timpanois departed, heading in a southwesterly course. If not the Santa Fe fathers, perhaps it was other, now forgotten Spaniards that discovered the lake. Based on a journal entry from the 1805 Lewis and Clark expedition, historian Dale Morgan concluded that some Spaniards must have discovered the Great Salt Lake, although the evidence is circumstantial and weak. In 1855 the French traveller Jules Remey wrote that the glory should go to a Frenchman, claiming that a cave near the southern end of the Great Salt Lake contained eighteenth century inscriptions by his unnamed compatriot. Unfortunately, Remey’s claim was uncorroborated by contemporaries and currently unverifiable, as the cave is now buried under slag heaps. However, since there is evidence of French explorers as far west as Colorado in the eighteenth century, the story is not inconceivable.
Historian Thomas Alexander concluded that the Etienne Provost party in 1824 were likely the first Europeans to see the Great Salt Lake, although they did not document this fact. In any case within weeks of Provost’s possible sighting, Jim Bridger rode a bullboat down the Bear River and into the Great Salt Lake. Soon after Bridger’s boat ride the lake became a common sight to trappers and explorers since northern Utah was near the convergence of the British, American, and the Taos trapping enterprises. By the 1840s most of the trappers had left the mountain west after having essentially annihilated both bison and beaver from the rocky mountains and had significantly reduced the herds of elk, moose, and deer^[Thomas G. Alexander, Utah, the Right Place, p. 65].
The Great Salt Lake lies at the boundary between delight and desolation. East of the lake lie the Wasatch Mountains with soaring granite^[Granite will play a significant role in health, as will the peaks.] peaks, lush, wooded canyons, alpine lakes, and sparkling year-long rivers and creeks. West of the Great Salt Lake is the Great Salt Lake Desert with mud and salt flats, barren creak beds, and dry valleys, punctured by beautiful but barren mountain ranges, a pattern repeated regularly across the rest of what is known as the Great Basin, stretching west from the Wasatch to the Sierra Nevadas
This unimaginably desolation was experienced in 1827 by Jedediah Smith and two companions, Robert Evans and Silas Goble, as they traveled from California to that year’s annual trappers’ rendezvous at Bear Lake. The first Europeans to cross the both the Sierra Nevada and then the Great Basin, the Smith party found the last leg of their journey across the Great Salt Lake Desert to be unbearably harsh.
Assuming that they were closer to the Great Salt Lake than they actually were, Smith, Evans, and Goble filled up their water horns at a small mountain creek and started to push through the salt-encrusted desert. Two days later they had not run across any more water and were getting desperate. Early in the morning, Jedediah started off on his own to scout for water; climbing a small hill he got a disappointing view. The only signs of water were snow covered peaks at least fifty miles off. In his journal Jedediah recorded, “When I came down I durst not tell my men of the desolate prospect ahead, but framed my story as to discourage them as little as possible.”
Nonetheless, Evans and Goble were discouraged, as was Smith, but after slaughtering a failing horse for food, they pressed on. Smith told them that “in all probability we would soon find water,” but in reality “the view ahead was almost hopeless.” Late that afternoon under the shade of a solitary cedar tree they dug holes in the ground and laid down in them in an attempt to cool off their bodies. After an hours rest they pressed on, desperately seeking water until near ten o’ clock that night when they quit for the day. Their sleep was haunted by their desperate need for water. Smith wrote,
Our sleep was not repose for tormented nature made us dream of things we had not and for the want of which it then seemed possible and even probable we might perish in the desert unheard of and unpitied.
The next day, three days after they had last found water, they started off again. “in the same unhappy situation pursuing our journey over the desolate waste now gleaming in the sun and more insuportably tormenting than it had been during the night.” At ten that morning Evans quit, lying under the shade of a cedar tree unable to proceed. Smith and Goble left him, proceeding on in the hope of finding water near enough that they could save Evans’ life. Thankfully some three miles later they found water.
Saved and rejuvenated by this fresh water, Jedediah reflected in his journal that night:
I have at different times suffered all the extremes of hunger and thirst. Hard as it is to bear for successive days the knawings of hunger yet it is light in comparison to the agony of burning thirst.
Two days later, they finally spotted the Great Salt Lake off in the distance and another days journey beyond that brought them to the southeast edge of the Great Salt Lake at the estuary of the the fresh water river flowing from Utah Lake. Smith wrote in his journal
Those who may chance to read this at a distance from the scene may perhaps be surprised that the sight of this lake surrounded by a wilderness of More than 2000 Miles diameter excited in me those feelings known to the traveler, who, after long and perilous journeying, comes again in view of his home. But so it was with me for I had traveled so much in the vicinity of the Salt Lake that it had become my home of the wilderness.
Sanctuary
South of the Great Salt Lake, nestled is the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, a rich land recognized as desirable by both the early mountain men, such as Jedediah Smith, and Mormon leaders seeking refuge from the persecutions in the Midwest. Thick, tall prairie grass covered the whole extent of the valley. Clear mountain creeks originating in the towering Wasatch mountains to the east flowed into the valley, their beds lined with cottonwoods and other trees. Summer temperatures are hot, frequently topping 100 degrees.
Perhaps surprisingly, the valley was devoid of human habitation. The Great Salt Lake Valley was, in the words of Dale Morgan, “strangely a neutral ground” between the various native tribes with the Shoshonies to the north rarely descending south of the Bear River and the Utes typically not traveling north of Utah Valley. ^[Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, p. 39.]
In late September 1848 Welcome Chapman, aged 42, his wife Susan Amelia, aged 40, and their six children stumbled into the Great Salt Lake Valley as part of the Brigham Young Company that had left Winter Quarters, Nebraska, three and a half months earlier.
Despite their unquestionable relief at arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, Welcome and Susan, like the rest of the Mormon pioneers, were settling in Utah reluctantly, with expectations that it would be a short-term exile before they returned to Missouri, which they viewed as their true homeland. Nonetheless Welcome and Susan’s descendents were still in Utah 120 years later when I was born in Salt Lake City.
It took a long time to create the Great Salt Lake Valley as a refuge for the Mormon pioneers. The oldest exposed rocks in Utah are over two billion years old. Over the subsequent billions of years a variety of oceans, lakes, swamps, and dry land masses have lived and died, each depositing a variety of sediments and organic material that, over time, metamorphosed into quartzite, sandstone, siltstone, limestone, and shale.
Once the raw materials were laid out, the massive forces of plate tectonics started building mountains. Roughly 120 million years ago the Sevier Orogeny began, raising mountains from Canada to Mexico over a 70 million year period. Following this orogeny was a short period—only a few million years—of volcanic activity, laying down another variety of rock from which to form mountains, hiding mineral wealth in the rocks, and further lifting up mountains from the pressure of underground lava flows. Roughly seventeen million years ago a new earthquake fault began, creating the Wasatch Mountains and the particular environment for the Mormon pioneers to settle in.
Starting in southern Idaho, the Wasatch Mountains run nearly due south until terminating at their highest point, Mount Nebo, near present-day Nephi, Utah. The mountains rise abruptly, frequently creating a cliff-like appearance, at places reaching up to over seven thousand feet from the valley floor. The Wasatch captures Pacific moisture passing over the Great Basin and packs this moisture into snow and ice that provides life-sustaining water in year-round creeks. In spring, the melting ice and snow flow down the steep mountain slopes, eventually accumulating in mountain creeks. But even in their spring time fullness, these creeks are mere remnants of the rivers and glaciers that flowed from the mountains during the recent geologic past.
Thirty thousand years ago, the water flowing from the Wasatch fed into Lake Bonneville, which, at its peak roughly fifteen thousand years ago, was a thousand feet deep with a surface area of nearly twenty thousand square miles. New drainage paths and climate changes shrunk Lake Bonneville, leaving small remnant lakes, most significantly the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake, inhospitable salt flats, and valleys, some barren, others fertile and hospitable, such as the Great Salt Lake Valley.
Overall, harshness dominates the Utah landscape, and human life clings to the edges of habitable zones. The earliest evidence of human habitation in what is now Utah is found around the marshes bordering the Great Salt Lake and the other remnants of Lake Bonneville. Later civilizations, such as the Anasazi in southern Utah, built long-lasting civilizations, but they were still limited to clinging to the cliffs carved by the Colorado and San Juan rivers as well as their smaller tributaries, the cliffs providing a natural defense mechanism and the river marshes, like those around the lakes, providing a steady source of fish and fowl. Despite hundreds of years of successful living, the Anasazi were forced out of Utah around 1100 A.D., probably due to an extended dry period. The Anasazi’s northern contemporaries, the Fremonts, suffered a similar fate. Even at its best, life was never robust for these early peoples.
As the Anasazi and Fremont peoples receded out of Utah, a loosely related group of natives flowed in from southern California. What drove them from California is unknown. The various tribes—the Shoshone, Paiutes, Gosiutes, and Utes—adopted a rather hand-to-mouth existence, largely living by gathering seeds, hunting small game, capturing crickets and grasshoppers, and catching fish, where available. When the Mormons arrived in 1847, the Utes maintained territorial dominance, controlling most of eastern and central Utah, with the remainder of the state divided between the Paiutes in the southwest, the Gosiutes in the west, and the Shoshone in the north. (The extreme southeast part of the state was occupied by the Navajo, a linguistically distinct tribe that had emigrated from western Canada in the 1600s.) The most important Ute tribe was the Timpanogite Utes living in the Utah Valley along the edges of the creeks feeding Utah Lake. Even as a prosperous group in Utah, however, the Timpanogites were small; the pre-European native population in the entire Mountain West area is thought to have never exceeded twenty thousand. When the Mormons arrived at the Great Salt Lake Valley, Walkara was the most important leader of the Timpanogites. Walkara had formed alliances with other tribes, learned Spanish and English to facilitate trading, and had organized horse raiding parties as far away as the San Bernardino area of southern California.
What are some of the potential health impacts of the land
The preceding narrative contains several pieces of information that relate to how the geography geology of where I grew up could impact my health. What are some of them that you can identify?