Salt Lake County History

Though much of Salt Lake County’s history is obscured by Brigham Young and his Mormon Church pursuits, the history of the area begins long before contact with white settlers.

The pre-Columbian people of this area of Utah that we now call Salt Lake County were the “Fremont People” or Fremont culture, whose sites were discovered by the local Indigenous peoples of the area, the Navajo and the Ute, who determined that the Fremont People’s pictographs found all over archaeological sites in Utah were made from people who lived before the flood, (a narrative predominate in many different cultural mythologies and tells of a great flood that destroys civilization).

The land that Salt Lake County now occupies in the Salt Lake Valley has long been a meeting place for many different Indigenous tribes. The University of Utah, in its Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, informs that the land is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes and has long been a crossroads and meeting place for the Indigenous peoples of the region.

The county encompasses the area that includes part of the Great Salt Lake, and it was called Ti’tsa-pa, or “bad water” by the western Goshute Tribe.

This highly-salinated, non-potable body of water did not deter settlers from flocking to the region in droves. Many of them were followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) who were coming to settle the region as Brigham Young instructed, seeking an area where they could escape the violent persecution they were experiencing in practicing their religion.

There were also many other non-LDS settlers too, however, who were drawn to the area for its good mining prospects.

All settlers worked hard to irrigate the region, and as a result, agriculture was flourishing, the population was growing, and Utah eventually became a state after some turbulence.

Salt Lake County was officially organized in 1850, and at the time, was home to around 11,000 residents. Congress then organized the Utah Territory out of the “State of Deseret” and the government began to install openly anti-Mormon officials.

The Utah War followed when the country was up in arms about Utah’s practice of polygamy. But, by 1896, the government and the LDS Church seemed to have ironed out their differences when Salt Lake City, the largest city in Salt Lake County, became the capital of the state that was finally to become “Utah”.

The Great Salt Lake

Salt Lake County is named for the Great Salt Lake, an anomaly when it comes to large, landlocked bodies of water. Leftover from Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric lake that covered much of western Utah, the Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world.

There are many reasons for the lake’s annual fluctuation in size, but it has recently been falling to its lowest recorded levels ever. The Weber, Jordan, and Bear Rivers flow into the Great Salt Lake, but having no outlet other than evaporation, these highly-mineralized waters contribute to the lake’s salinity.

Salinity measurements of the lake are highly variable, but for comparison, the average salinity of the ocean is 3.5%, and the average salinity of Gilbert Bay, the lake’s main basin, is 5-27%. Only the Dead Sea is saltier, with a measurement of 33.7% salinity.

Needless to say, securing land in Salt Lake County near the Great Salt Lake comes with an opportunity for incredible buoyancy. (Just shower off afterward because the salt is itchy.)