The post–Civil War era saw a dramatic rise in transportation technology in the West, as railroad lines spanned the continent. Railroad men and financiers—not to be outdone by one another—pushed lines into territories where demand had not yet coalesced. Their large corporations, which were heavily subsidized by the American people, came to symbolize the grandeur of the age and American progress itself. Utahns needed railroads in the same way they needed other technologies like irrigation to move water about the landscape. For Mormons, the arrival of the transcontinental line in 1869 signaled the loss of political and economic hegemony in the Great Basin. Other lines soon followed, and no history of the state or region is complete without following them—a verita-
Thinking about these “marks of human passage” is the design of this issue, a reprint of four exceptional essays previously published in the Quarterly. We begin with Dale L. Morgan’s lively essay “Utah before the Mormons,” originally delivered as a keynote address at the 1967 annual meeting of the Utah State Historical Society and subsequently published in the January 1968 issue. Morgan plays with time scale “to
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If railroads became the major arteries of the West’s nineteenth-century transportation system, roads provided the connective tissue. Roads follow preexisting routes. Like water, they tend to follow the easiest path—through valleys, canyons, and low-level mountain passes—although some Utah routes cross the roughest terrain imaginable. They facilitate movement, curating how one travels across the landscape just as an exhibition curates historical information. Most roads are fixtures; others have outlasted their original economic or cultural purpose and have been reclaimed by the land. Before becoming a physical presence on the land, roads existed in imagination, revealing much about how generations, then and now, thought about the land and acted on it. As such, roads, like railroads, are cultural sponges—artifacts of earlier times. They are similar to what Wallace Stegner wrote of Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah, as “a palimpsest of human history, speculation, rumor, fantasy, ambition, science, controversy, and conflicting plans for use”—as “marks of human passage.”2
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ble spider web showing prominent nineteenthcentury destinations. Since railroads needed water and fuel, stations and towns cropped up in part to provide that service. Other communities serviced the trains, some of which had a striking impermanence on the landscape. But the threads of connection created by railroads had a more lasting impact. Transcontinentals and the lines they inspired became part of a network that helped to connect Utah and the American West with the rest of the country and the neighboring nations of Canada and Mexico.
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Utah is often known as the Crossroads of the West, and, however overused that name may be, it’s an apt term to describe the state’s cultural and geographic position in the American West. A crossroad is a place of intersection, but it also is “a central meeting place” or “a crucial point especially where a decision must be made.”1 For Native peoples in the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau, a web of migration and trade routes contributed to an exchange of people, goods, and ideas. Since Dominguez and Escalante’s expedition in 1776–1777, these groups had to deal with how the arrival and ambition of Europeans and Americans shifted the dynamic of power in the region. Missionaries, explorers, trappers, and overland migrants passed through, and in some cases lingered, on the way to somewhere else. When Latterday Saints decided on the eastern edge of the Great Basin as the place to plant their settlements, the land had already been traversed by generations of Native peoples, as well as by entrepreneurial trappers who relied on indigenous knowledge and who brought concrete cartographic knowledge of the American Far West. Faint mule trails, wagon ruts, and even the course of modern transportation corridors constitute evidence etched into the landscape of generational movement and travels.
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IN this issue
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