Jordan River (Utah) - History

History

The first known inhabitants of the banks of the Jordan River were members of the Desert Archaic Culture, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers. A 3,000-year-old archaeological site, called the Soo'nkahni Village, was uncovered next to the Jordan River and over 30,000 artifacts have been excavated. The next recorded inhabitants, between 400 A.D. to around 1350 A.D., were the Fremont people, composed of several scattered bands of hunters and farmers living in what is now southern Idaho, western Nevada and most of Utah. The disappearance of the Fremont people has been attributed to both changing climatic conditions, which put an end to favorable weather for farming, and to the arrival of ancestors to the present-day Ute, Paiute, and Northwestern Shoshone. Although there were no permanent Native American settlements when European settlers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, the area bordered land occupied by several tribes, such as the Timpanogot band of the Utes in Utah Valley, the Goshutes on the western side of the Oquirrh Mountain Range and the Northwestern Shoshone north of the Salt Lake Valley.

In 1776, Franciscan missionary Silvestre Vélez de Escalante was trying to find a land route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Monterey, California. His party included twelve Spanish colonials and two Utes from the Utah Valley Timpanogots band who acted as guides. On September 23, 1776, the party entered Utah Valley at the present-day city of Spanish Fork. The local Timanogots villagers hosted them and told them of the lake to the north. In his journal, Escalante described Utah Lake as a "lake, which must be six leagues wide and fifteen leagues long, extends as far as one of these valleys. It runs northwest through a narrow passage, and according to what they told us, it communicates with others much larger." The Great Salt Lake was described as the "other lake with which this one communicates, according to what they told us, covers many leagues, and its waters are noxious and extremely salty."

The next group of Europeans to see the Jordan River was the party of Étienne Provost, a French Canadian trapper. In October 1824, Provost's party was lured into a Shoshone camp somewhere along the Jordan River, where they were attacked in retaliation for the murder of a local chief. In truth, the murder was committed by a member of Peter Skene Ogden's party. The men were caught off guard, and fifteen perished, but Provost and two others escaped.

On July 22, 1847, the first party of Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, and five days later another party led by Brigham Young crossed the Jordan River and bathed in the Great Salt Lake. The River Jordan drains the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea in a way which the settlers found remarkably similar to the way the as-yet-unnamed local river drained Utah Lake into the saline Great Salt Lake. This similarity influenced the eventual name of the river, and on August 22, 1847, a conference was held and the name Western Jordan River was decided upon, although it was later shortened to the Jordan River. By 1850, settlements were established along the Jordan River, Big Cottonwood Creek, Little Cottonwood Creek, Mill Creek, Parley's Creek and Emigration Creek. In 1850, Captain Howard Stansbury of the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers traveled the entire length of the Jordan River, surveying and making observations of the wildlife.

Around the year 1887 at Bingham Canyon in the Oquirrh Mountains, low-grade copper deposits were discovered and mining claims were filed. Bingham Canyon is a porphyry copper deposit where magma containing copper, molybdenum, gold and other minerals slowly moved its way to the surface and cooled into rock. By 1890, underground copper mining had started, and in 1907, Kennecott Copper Mine started open pit mining. In the early 20th century, mills were established near the Jordan River in Midvale and West Jordan to process ore. As of 2010, Kennecott Copper Mine's open pit is 2.8 miles (4.5 km) wide and 0.8 miles (1.3 km) deep.

Throughout the 19th century and up to the 1940s, water from the Jordan River watershed sustained the agrarian society of the Salt Lake Valley. In 1950, Salt Lake County had 489,000 acres (198,000 ha) devoted to farming. By 1992, however, the rapid urbanization of the Salt Lake Valley had reduced the amount of land devoted to farming to 108,000 acres (44,000 ha), which was further reduced to 82,267 acres (33,292 ha) by 2002.