Browse Items (11 total)

It might be easy to think that the production of folk art isn’t really “work.” But whether or not folk artists make a living through their creativity, their labors require hard-earned mastery of skills. Learn about two Utah women whose art was…

The voyage of Hawaiian Islanders to the windswept desert of Skull Valley could only have happened in Utah.   Once established in Utah in 1847, the Mormon Church drew thousands of new converts who came to build a new home in “Zion.”  By the…

The 100-mile summer bike ride of William Rishel and Charlie Emise across the Great Salt Lake Desert almost ended in disaster.  In 1896, to promote his growing chain of national newspapers, publisher William Randolph Hearst cooked up a wildly…

Nine men riding mules journeyed across the Great Salt Lake Desert in a single scorching August day.   On August 3, 1846, Edwin Bryant woke up at 1:30 a.m.  The silence around him seemed ominous.  Camped this night on the Cedar Mountains at the…

A seemingly non-descript cave in Utah’s west desert holds the key to understanding Utah’s ancient past.To the untrained eye, Danger Cave near Wendover, Utah, is utterly unremarkable. But ask any archaeologist about this dusty desert cave and…

Salt Lake City mayor, Ab Jenkins, was known for his fearless racing speeds along the Salt Flats in Tooele County.On Labor Day 1950, Utah native Ab Jenkins broke a bundle of national and world speed records on Utah's salt flats.  He was 67.Born in…

A typical rural Utah boy, Mervyn Bennion became a war hero during World War II. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service on Pearl Harbor.Born to a large Tooele County family in 1887, Mervyn Sharp Bennion, by all accounts, lived…

A mysterious traveler, T.H. Jefferson published a map of the California Trail in 1849. The map contained valuable information about the waterless stretch of desert west of the Great Salt Lake.In 1849, a map of the California Trail was published by a…

A site near present-day Grantsville provided temporary relief to the Donner party before their dangerous push across the Great Salt Lake Desert.In 1846, a series of overland parties found relief at a site on the south end of the Great Salt Lake near…

In 1945, the world's first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the crew of the bomber Enola Gay. Most of us have been taught about the destruction that occurred from the atomic blast, but did you know that the tiny Utah town of Wendover…

Goshute Indians in Utah were vocal resisters of the draft during World War I. In 1917, a little less than a month after the United States entered the maelstrom of World War One, a bill passed Congress requiring all male residents of the country…