"Utah has long ceased being an agrarian society of a "peculiar people." Although still predominately Mormon, many cultures have contributed to its unique essence in this lost domain of the Indians. Only a few Spanish priests in 1776 and, later, explorers and trappers had briefly entered that varied, spectacular realm. Within their ancestral boundaries, the Gosiutes, Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos had sovereignty over plains of acrid sagebrush and alkaline wasteland, the Great Salt Lake and its surrounding desert, fresh lakes and rivers, the Wasatch and Uinta mountains, and the red-earth country with its awesome monoliths. Their great chiefs, Washakie, Wakara, and Kanosh were known far beyond these borders; and Indian life flowed in orderly, rigid observance to the laws of nature, to blood ties and mores, and with proper esteem or terror for near and distant tribes."
Published by the Utah State Historical Society - 1976
