Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "William B. Smart's extensive journals, which amounted to some ten thousand written pages--a monumental personal record of Mormondom and its transitional period from nineteenth-century cultural separation into twentieth-century national integration."--Jacket.

Utah toponyms, or place names. Where are they? What istheir history? Their importance? Over thousand toponyms are listed alphabetically, marking the passagesof peoples and cultures from earliest times.

The chronicle of Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez's remarkable 1776 expedition through the Rocky Mountains, the eastern Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau to inventory new lands for the Spanish crown....

In 1822, before Jedediah Smith entered the West, it was largely an unknown land, “a wilderness,” he wrote, “of two thousand miles diameter.” During his nine years as a trapper for Ashley and Henry and later for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, “the mild and Christian young man” blazed the trail westward through South Pass; he was the first to go from the Missouri overland to California, the first to cross the length of Utah and the width of Nevada, first to travel by land up through California and Oregon, first to cross the Sierra Nevada. Before his death on the Santa Fe Trail at the hands of the Comanches, Jed Smith and his partners had drawn the map of the west on a beaver skin.

In this comprehensive history, David J. Weber draws on Spanish, Mexican, and American sources to describe the development of the Taos trade and the early penetration of the area by French and American trappers. Within this borderlands region, colorful characters such as Ewing Young, Kit Carson, Peg-leg Smith, and the Robidoux brothers pioneered new trails to the Colorado Basin, the Gila River, and the Pacific and contributed to the wealth that flowed east along the Santa Fe Trail.

Father Escalante, who was born in Treceno, Cantabria, Spain around 1750, became a Franciscan in the Convento Grande in Mexico City at the age of 17. In 1774, he came to present-day New Mexico in the Mexican province. He was first stationed at Laguna pueblo and then in January 1775 assigned as a minister to the Zuni. In June 1776, he was summoned by Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, who had arrived in Santa Fe on March 22, 1776, for the expedition to California and remained in New Mexico for two years following the expedition. Father Escalante died at the age of 30 in April 1780 in Parral, Mexico, during his return journey to Mexico City for medical treatment. Author Herbert Eugene Bolton, who was well-known for his books on the Southwest and Spanish Americas, here recounts in detail the story of Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante on his expedition to the Interior Basin in 1776. Bolton also includes translations of Father Escalante’s expedition itinerary and personal journal, in which Escalante described the expeditions he went on. He also includes a translation Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s report to the King of Spain dated October 26, 1777, as well as two maps. “This dynamic story of Father Escalante’s trek into the Great Basin, by Dr. Herbert E. Bolton, represents the results of a long lifetime of interest, writing, and exploration in Spanish activities in the great Southwest.”—Preface