Utah Territory

Territory of Utah
Organized incorporated territory of the United States
1850–1896
Flag Territorial coat of arms (1876)
The Utah Territory upon its creation, with modern state boundaries shown for reference
Capital	Fillmore (1851–1856) Salt Lake City
Government
• Type	Organized incorporated territory
Governor
• 1851–58	Brigham Young
• 1858–61	Alfred Cumming
• 1875–80	George W. Emery
• 1880–86	Eli Houston Murray
• 1886–89, 1893–96	Caleb Walton West
Legislature	Utah Territorial Assembly
History
• State of Deseret	1849
• Utah Organic Act	9 September 1850
• Colorado Territory formed	February 28, 1861
• Nevada Territory formed	March 2, 1861
• Wyoming Territory formed	July 25, 1868
• Statehood	4 January 1896
Preceded by Succeeded by State of Deseret Utah

The Territory of Utah was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from September 9, 1850, until January 4, 1896, when the final extent of the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Utah, the 45th state. At its creation, the Territory of Utah included all of the present-day State of Utah, most of the current state of Nevada save for that portion of Southern Nevada (including the metro area of the city of Las Vegas), much of modern western Colorado, and the extreme southwest corner of present-day Wyoming.

History

When the Mormon pioneers moving westward across the Great Plainsbegan settling the Salt Lake Valley around the Great Salt Lake in 1847 and for many years afterward, they relied on existing institutions within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon church) or the secular civil governments.

The Utah Territory was organized by an Organic Act of the United States Congress, approved by the President, in September 1850, on the same day that the State of California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state (and the first time the American Union jumping across the North American continent to the opposite Pacific Ocean west coast). Plus the original larger New Mexico Territory in the Great Southwest was added from the southern portion of the Mexican Cession in 1849 of former Centralist Republic of Mexico lands, (which amounted to the northwestern one-third of their country) following their defeat in the Mexican–American War.of 1846-1848. The creation of the new Territory of Utah around the Great Basin and the Great Salt Lake was part of the elements of agreements in the political Compromise of 1850 made in the national capital of Washington, D.C. that sought to preserve the balance of power between Southern slave states and free states in the North. With the exception of a small area around the headwaters of the upper Colorado River in present-day Colorado, the United States had acquired all the land of the territory from Mexico after the negotiations and ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, following several additional battles resulting in the occupation of the Mexican capital of Mexico City by Invading American military forces and their surrender with the end of the brief war. The peace treaty later passing in Congress in the upper chamber of the U.S. Senate, (which approves all foreign treaties according to the U.S. Constitution) and the lower chamber of the House of Representatives voted in the subsequent supplemental legislation in favor of organizing the Territory of Utah, 97–85.

The creation of the Territory with no mention at all of the divisive issue of slavery in the documents, was partially the result of a petition sent by the Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young (1801-1877, served 1847-1877), the second church president. The petition had asked Congress to allow them to enter the Union as the State of Deseret, {which they had already organized the year before) with its capital as Salt Lake City and with proposed borders that encompassed the entire Great Basin and the watershed of the Colorado River, including all or part of nine current U.S. states in the southwest. The Mormon settlers had drafted a state constitution in 1849 and Deseret had become the de facto government in the Great Basin by the time of the creation of the subsequent Federal Utah Territory.

Following the organization of the Territory, Young was inaugurated as its first

During Brigham Young's governorship, he exerted considerable power over the territory. An example being that in 1873, the territory legislature gave to Governor / President Young the exclusive right to manufacture and distil whiskey..

Mormon governance in the territory was regarded as controversial by much of the rest of the nation, partly fed by continuing lurid newspaper depictions of the polygamy marriage practiced by the settlers, which itself had been part of the cause of their flight from their previous homes and center back East in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the United States, trekking westward to the Great Salt Lake basin after being persecuted and forcibly removed from their settlements in several Eastern states.

Although the Mormons were now the majority in the Great Salt Lake basin, the western area of the territory began to attract many non-Mormon settlers, especially after the discovery of silver at the Comstock Lode in the Virginia City area (of present-day Nevada) in 1858. Only three years later, in 1861, partly as a result of this, the new Nevada Territory was created out of the western part of the previous Utah Territory of a decade before. Non-Mormons also entered the opposite side in the easternmost part of the territory during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, resulting in the discovery of goldat Breckenridge in Utah Territory in 1859 (ten years after the first mineral findings along the American River in California, resulting in the phenomenal California gold rush of 1849-1855 there). So also in that same year of 1861, additional legislative action was taken by the Congress and the President to take a large portion of the eastern area of the Utah Territory to be separated and added to as part of the newly created adjacent Colorado Territory further east.

In 1869, the territory's legislature approved and ratified women's suffrage. This allowed women to vote in all territorial elections (although both make and female residents in American territories had no voice or vote in Federal elections back East).

46 years elapsed between the organization of the territory and its admission to the Union in 1896 as the State of Utah, long after the admission of territories created after it. In contrast, the Nevada Territory, although more sparsely populated, was admitted to the Union in 1864, only three years after its formation, and Colorado was admitted in 1876.

The evolution of the Utah Territory from its creation by Congress in 1850 to 1896, when statehood was granted

Coat of arms

The Utah state coat of arms appears on the state seal and state flag. The beehive was chosen as the emblem for the provisional State of Deseret in 1848 and represents the state's industrious and hard-working inhabitants, and the virtues of thrift and perseverance. The sego lilies on either side symbolize peace.

Population

Historical population

Year	Pop.	±%
1850	11,380	—
1860	40,273	+253.9%
1870	86,336	+114.4%
1880	146,608	+69.8%
1890	210,779	+43.8%
Source: 1850–1890

In 1850, nine churches with regular services in the Utah Territory were unclassified by historian Edwin Gaustad in his Historical Atlas of Religion in America (1962), but were probably LDS churches. In the 1890 United States census, 25 counties in the Utah Territory reported the following population counts (after seven reported the following counts in the 1850 United States census):

1890 Rank	County	1850 Population	1890 Population
1	Salt Lake	6,157	58,457
2	Utah	2,026	23,768
3	Weber	1,186	22,723
4	Cache	–	15,509
5	Sanpete	365	13,146
6	Summit	–	7,733
7	Box Elder	–	7,642
8	Davis	1,134	6,751
9	Sevier	–	6,199
10	Juab	–	5,582
11	Emery	–	5,076
12	Millard	–	4,033
13	Washington	–	4,009
14	Tooele	152	3,700
15	Wasatch	–	3,595
16	Beaver	–	3,340
17	Piute	–	2,842
18	Uintah	–	2,762
19	Iron	360	2,683
20	Garfield	–	2,457
21	Morgan	–	1,780
22	Kane	–	1,685
23	Rich	–	1,527
24	Grand	–	541
25	San Juan	–	365
	Indian reservations	4,645	–
	Utah Territory	11,380	210,779

See also

• Historic regions of the United States
• History of Utah
• Territorial evolution of the United States

Further reading

• (1994) "Coins and Currency" article in the Utah History Encyclopedia. The article was written by Leonard J. Arrington and the Encyclopedia was published by the University of Utah Press. ISBN 9780874804256. Archived from the original on March 21, 2024 and retrieved on April 12, 2024.
• (2017) Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory by Brent M. Rogers, University of Nebraska Press.

External links

• Utah in 1851, with the text of the 1850 Act of Congress to Establish the Territory of Utah, Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
• Utah's Role in the Transcontinental Railroad, Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
• Utah State History Archived April 20, 2021, at the Wayback Machine Utah Office of Tourism Official Website
• Henry Sommer, Watercolors and Pencil Drawings Related to the Utah Expedition. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.