History

By: Lynn Arave and Ray Boren Newest book in Arcadia's Images of America series. Great Salt Lake is bleak yet beautiful, mysterious and alluring, an endangered "dead sea" vital to life. Explorer Jedediah Smith, surrounded by a vast wilderness, realized...

Utah's Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area offers breathtaking natural resources, powerful historical drama and intriguing cultural traditions. This rich legacy is built on old-world values of cooperation, industry, ingenuity and true grit--as well as a miracle or two. From frontier...

Copublished with the Tanner Trust Fund, J. Willard Marriott Library.Robert Smithson’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson built...

By Dalton Gackle Settled by miners and Mormons after the Civil War and incorporated in 1884, Park City grew into one of the world’s most prestigious mining camps. Known primarily for its richness in silver, Park City miners also extracted...

The Salt Lake City Cemetery was established in September 1847 when George Wallace, who arrived with the first company of Mormon pioneers two months prior, buried his young daughter on a picturesque hillside above the Salt Lake Valley. It has...

Between 1890 and 1930, Salt Lake City experienced some of the most rapid and profound changes of any city in U.S. history. In its pioneer period, from the beginning of white settlement in 1847 to about 1890, the city struggled...

By: Harold Schindler One of the old West's most intriguing and mythic figures, Orrin Porter Rockwell stirs strong emotion even today. Saint or cold-blooded killer - the evidence is in your hands. Other Information: Published: 1993 Pages: 417

In the 1840s, land west of the Missouri River was a new frontier for courage, adventure, freedom and true grit. During this era and the decades that followed, Utah became the focal point for many brave settlers yearning for a...

Ghosts Towns of the West is filled with photographs, maps, history, and detailed directions to find the best ghost towns to linger in the wake of the Old West. Ghost Towns of the West blazes a trail through the dusty crossroads and...

This well-researched biography of the life and controversial death of Robert LeRoy Parker, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy, is a journey across the late-nineteenth-century American West as we follow Cassidy's exploits in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, where he made his name as...

Images of America Series. Coal Camps of Eastern Utah Nestled between the Wasatch Plateau and the Book Cliff Mountains, hundreds of feet underground, vast coal deposits make up the heart of Utah's coal country. This high-grade bituminous coal attracted the...

The Story of Clear Lake, Utah By Venetta Bond Kelsey This book tells the story of a little railroad, farming & ranching community situated in the middle of the Black Rock Desert and Pahvant Valley of south central Utah.  Clear...

By: D.C. Beard Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties presents lively, step-by-step tutelage on building all types of temporary and long-term accommodations from both natural and man-made materials. Originally published in 1914, this practical classic is as essential a guide for today's...

By: Elijah Nicholas Wilson & Charles A. Wilson First published in 1910, The White Indian Boy quickly became a western classic. Readers fascinated by real-life cowboys and Indians thrilled to Uncle Nick Wilson's frontier exploits, as he recounted running away...

By: Charles L. KellerWhen the first company of Mormon settlers arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, it was immediately apparent that their survival depended upon what resources they found in the mountains surrounding them. The Great...

Gilsonite is a solid hydrocarbon mined in vertical veins in southern Uintah County, Utah. It is found in veins anywhere from a foot to twenty-two feet in width, and a depth of a few feet up to 2,000 feet. The...

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling biography of the legendary Sioux warrior Red Cloud: “a page-turner with remarkable immediacy…and the narrative sweep of a great Western” (The Boston Globe).Red Cloud was the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States...

Salt Lake City’s oldest residential historic district is a neighborhood known as the Avenues. During the late nineteenth century this area was home to many of the most influential citizens of Salt Lake City. Built from 1860 until 1930, it...

“John Wesley Powell: explorer, writer, geologist, anthropologist, land planner, bureaucrat. Which one do we focus on?” This is the question author James M. Aton poses at the beginning of his biography of Powell, though he soon decides that it is...

The Pony Express stands out in the history of the American West, memorable and captivating for the romance and adventure it evokes. The image of the intrepid young rider on a fast horse, crossing mountain and desert with his precious...

By: Barbara Fifer and Martin KidstonThis rare collection of Wanted Posters is from the American West, found in the basement of the Missoula, Montana, County Courthouse, is a historical treasure. The book's nearly 150 original wanted posters, fugitive notices, and...