Utah History Books

For thousands of years, Great Salt Lake has played a surprisingly central role in the lives of humans and animals throughout the American West and across entire continents. Once a destination for wellness seekers, the lake’s alarming disappearance is already affecting skiing, tourism, and...

Award-winning journalist Zak Podmore brings to life the magnificent terrain and complex politics of the Colorado River, its dying reservoirs—and the surprising revelation that the inevitable loss of Lake Powell could be a turning point for more a sustainable future.   After decades of...

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 a masterpiece from local...

By Eileen Hallet In the late 1840s, the new frontier west of the Missouri River opened its floodgates to opportunity and adventure. In a new land, where men were lonely and women scarce, prostitutes poured in to ply their trade wherever they could--under trees,...

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 Lake town was situated...

By Tiffany Taylor Step back in time and experience the breathtaking beauty of Zion National Park through the lens of history with the Zion National Park Historic Postcards collection from Images of America. This captivating compilation, published in 2008, offers a unique glimpse into...

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park...

From the earliest days of settlement, South Temple was Salt Lake's most prestigious street. In 1857, William Staines built the Devereaux House, Salt Lake's first of many mansions. The once-bustling Union Pacific Depot eventually found itself increasingly isolated. Downtown's "gleaming copper landmark" overcame numerous...

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 contains a mix of...

Charles Leerhsen brings the notorious Butch Cassidy to vivid life in this surprising and entertaining biography that goes beyond the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to reveal a more fascinating and complicated man than legend provides.For more than a century the life and death...

Stretching some 160 miles, from Nephi on the south to Grace, Idaho, on the north, their elevations rise to nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. Mount Nebo, at the range’s south end, is a mammoth, triple-peaked monolith at a top elevation of 11,928 feet,...

The Book With the release of this book, the search for the lost Rhoades Mine is narrowed to a few square miles of real estate due east of Kamas, Utah. This gives promise that the greatest of all gold deposits including remains of Montezuma's...

Representing lawmakers and lawbreakers, artists and adventurers or scholars and activists, the women of Utah defied stereotypes. At the crossroads of the West, they found new challenges and opportunities to forge their own paths. Emma Dean explored the Rocky Mountains with her famous spouse,...

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 mossy cemeteries of the...

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts.In time for the centennial of the United States’s entry into World War I, this collection of seventeen essays explores the war experience in...

Winner of the Juanita Brooks Prize in Mormon StudiesFrontiersman, colonizer, missionary to the Indians, and explorer of the American West, Jacob Hamblin has long been one of the most enigmatic figures in Mormon history. In this defining biography, Todd Compton examines and disentangles many...

By Mr. Tim Dumas Readers interested in the founding, innerworkings, and incredible process of mining will thoroughly enjoy reading about the history of one of the largest excavations in the world, Bingham Canyon Mine. The history of Bingham Canyon Mine began in 1863 with...

The author of the controversial bestseller Brain Trust brings his scientific expertise to the chilling true story of unexplained phenomena on Utah's Skinwalker Ranch -- and challenges us with a new vision of reality.For more than fifty years, the bizarre events at a remote Utah ranch...

Includes The Phantom Hitchhiker of American Fork Ogden's elegant haunted hotel Activity at Salt Lake City's This Is the Place Heritage Park Ghost children at Mercur Cemetery The White Lady of Spring Canyon Bizarre creatures, including Sasquatch, Utah Lake's Black-Eyed Monster, and the Moon...

By Colleen McDannell In 1776, two Mexican Franciscans trekked into what is now the state of Utah. While they said the rosary and offered litanies to the saints, they did not linger in what was to them unknown territory. It would take almost 100...