Browse Items (31 total)

Who has a right to water? How you answer that question likely reflects your cultural concept of water ownership. It’s no surprise that ideas about how to fairly allocate this precious resource vary wildly – both today, and in the past. It's…

The historic settlements underneath Willard Bay were submerged twice - first by years of dirt, dust, and debris and then again by a flooded reservoir.Buried under the Willard Bay reservoir on the northeast end of Great Salt Lake is not one but two…

Do you know about the mysterious food poisoning that gave Box Elder County’s Malad River its name?Throughout the nineteenth century, Northern Utah’s Malad River was the site of a mysterious illness affecting fur trappers. Rumors about the water…

Southern Utah’s unreliable Virgin River prevented settlers from achieving their dream of taming the land to grow cotton. Believing they could “make the desert blossom as the rose,” Mormon settlers expanded into southwestern  Utah in the 1850s…

Stocking Utah’s waterways with sport fish is a practice that goes back more than a century – so long ago that many people may think these introduced species are native. Find out how this impacts Utah’s true native fishes. Setting up beside a…

Utah Lake was once an important and abundant source of fish and wildlife for the Timpanogos Ute people. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Utah Lake’s native fish species had almost completely vanished. Prior to Mormon settlement in 1849,…

Making use of the Sevier River for agriculture required some ingenuity after early Mormon settlers discovered that irrigation was more complicated than simply digging a ditch. Learn how an unconventional surveying tool nicknamed “Old Scraggen”…

In the late 19th century, the town of Newton, Utah was almost abandoned. Crops died, there was no water for animals or people… So how did the town survive?  Settled in 1869 on the broad plain of Utah's Cache Valley, the fledgling town of Newton…

When Mormon pioneers tried to settle along the banks of the Virgin River, raging waters kept them from getting too comfortable. Learn about the ghost town of Grafton and its losing battle with the River. Utah has little regular rainfall, so…

Known for its history as a settlement for displaced Japanese-Americans during World War II, this ranching, mining, and farm town in Wasatch County was buried by the Jordanelle Reservoir. If you’ve ever been to the Jordanelle Reservoir, you may not…

A map of the United States is a familiar sight in Utah’s classrooms. But if we had listened to one of America’s most visionary scientists more than one hundred years ago, Utah’s state borders would look totally different today. Maps shape how…