Salt Lake City is the home of three major professional sports franchises: Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer (football), the Utah Hockey Club of the National Hockey League (NHL), and the Utah Jazz of the National Basketball Association (NBA). After relocating in 1979 from New Orleans (hence its team name), the Jazz, under the direction of Jerry Sloan—who coached the team from 1988 to 2011—became one of the most consistently winning teams in the NBA. The capital also boasts a minor league baseball and a minor league hockey team.

Although Weber State (of the Big Sky Conference) and Utah State (Western Athletic Conference) have had consistently strong men’s basketball programs, the focus of interest for most college sports fans in Utah are teams that represent the University of Utah (Pacific-12 Conference) and Brigham Young University (independent in football; West Coast Conference for most other sports). For decades both schools have been frequent participants in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball championship tournament, and both are also gridiron football powers. Utah’s football team was especially prominent in the early 21st century, but Brigham Young’s tradition of excellence dates from the tenure of coach LaVell Edwards (1972–2000) and includes a string of outstanding quarterbacks, among them Steve Young, Jim McMahon, Robbie Bosco, and Ty Detmer.

Salt Lake City was the site of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. An appreciable portion of northwestern Utah was involved in the Olympics, as the sporting venues were located not only across the Salt Lake City metropolitan area but also as far afield as Provo, Park City, and Ogden. Auto racing at the Bonneville Speedway, on the Bonneville Salt Flats, has gained international importance. The Mormon church sponsors competitive team sports involving thousands of players, with basketball, softball, and golf tournaments that are among the largest in the country.

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Utah’s national forests and other undeveloped areas offer unspoiled tracts of land for hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, skiing, and snowmobiling. Other natural attractions include Arches, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Zion, and Canyonlands national parks; Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park; Cedar Breaks, Dinosaur, Natural Bridges, Timpanogos Cave, Rainbow Bridge, and Hovenweep national monuments; Flaming Gorge and Glen Canyon national recreation areas; and the Golden Spike National Historic Site, at Promontory, which commemorates the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, in 1869. There are 45 state parks.

On July 24 communities across the state celebrate Pioneer Day, a state holiday commemorating the entrance of the Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake valley. Festivities include parades, fireworks, rodeos, orations, musical recitals, and reminders of Utah’s early settlers.

Native American communities hold a number of annual events. Notable gatherings of the Ute on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation are bear dances in the spring, sun dances in July and August, and powwows throughout the year. The Northern Navajo Fair, held in Bluff in mid-September, is also popular.

Media and publishing

Several daily newspapers are published across the state. The Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune, both published in Salt Lake City, are the major papers; other dailies are located in Logan, Ogden, Park City, Provo, and St. George. A number of locally produced magazines cover statewide and regional news and events. The University of Utah Press in Salt Lake City and Utah State University Press in Logan have been productive outlets for writers and scholars in the state.

Prehistory and European exploration

As early as 10,000 bce, small groups of Paleoindian hunters and gatherers lived in caves by the great inland sea, prehistoric Lake Bonneville. By about 8000 bce, Utah’s ancient people had developed a local version of the widespread Archaic culture. Known as the Desert culture, these people used more diverse foods and implements than their Paleoindian forebears. Their way of life persisted until between 2500 and 2000 bce. Utah’s first true farmers are referred to as members of the Fremont culture (perhaps 2500 bce–400/600 ce). The Fremont culture eventually gave way to the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) culture, which entered Utah from what are now the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. These Native Americans constructed superb communal cliff dwellings and raised corn (maize), squash, and beans. Although they left Utah about 1250 because of an extended drought, their Pueblo Indian descendants continue to live in the region.

When European and American explorers and settlers went to Utah in the 18th and 19th centuries, they encountered speakers of the Southern Numic languages—the Southern Paiute, Gosiute, Shoshone, and Ute—some of whom raised corn and pumpkins by irrigation. The Ute in eastern Utah lived in a region of higher precipitation; having acquired horses from the Plains tribes, they centred their nomadic life on the buffalo. (See also Great Basin Indian.)

Two Franciscan fathers, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, explored Utah in 1776, and afterward Utah was visited by occasional Spanish trading parties. Fur trappers and immigrants to California and Oregon were in the region in the 1820s and ’30s. The first 4 of some 16 annual rendezvous between trappers and buyers were held in Utah from 1825 to 1828, indicating the early importance of the area to the fur trade. The “mountain men” who explored and established trading posts included Jim Bridger, who first visited the Great Salt Lake in 1824, and Jedediah Smith, who first traversed the state from north to south and west to east in 1826–27. Explorers sent by the government included John C. Frémont, who led expeditions to northern Utah in 1843 and the western Great Salt Lake area in 1845.

Mormon settlement and territorial growth

The period of settlement and territorial status is notable for the ending of the quest (1845–47) for a Mormon homeland, the settlers’ wrestling with an arid environment, the contest for sovereignty between Utah and the United States, and the conflict between settlers and Native Americans over the use of the land.

When wagonloads of Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young first entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1847, they were determined to transform the arid valley land into a green and wholesome “kingdom of God.” From Salt Lake City (until 1868 called Great Salt Lake City), settlers were directed to colonize in all directions until they had developed a prosperous and stable economy and political structure. They were told to settle a territory that was originally 210,000 square miles (540,000 square km) in area, stretching from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada and from the Columbia River in Oregon to the Gila in Arizona. The towns were to be spaced a day’s ride apart, forming a spokelike pattern radiating from the capital; the Mormon church referred to this area as the intermountain empire, or Deseret, the latter the name of a proposed state that incorporated most of present-day Arizona and Nevada, portions of Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and approximately one-third of California. Immigrant converts continued to stream into Utah from Europe (especially from Scandinavia and the United Kingdom) and the eastern United States; they were organized into colonizing parties on the basis of allocations of skills and leadership abilities and sent out to build the territory. By 1860 more than 150 self-sustaining communities with a total of 40,000 residents had been established, irrigating crops with water from mountain streams carried through canals to the alluvial valley lands. Utah’s place in the national scene was symbolized by the driving of the golden spike at Promontory in 1869, uniting the eastward- and westward-reaching lines of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad.

Conflict with the Native Americans, whom the Mormons referred to as Lamanites and favourably regarded as descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, was held to a minimum until the colonizers became more and more ubiquitous, and local Native Americans began to raid the settlements. The Ute were eventually placed on a reservation in the Uinta Basin and the Southern Paiute and Shoshone on smaller reservations; later, the lands south of the San Juan River were incorporated into the Navajo Reservation.

The propensity of the Mormons to establish their own political and social system and the incompetency of federal territorial officials led to an era of conflict with the federal government. In 1857, following the so-called Mountain Meadows massacre, when more than 100 non-Mormon settlers were murdered by a combined force of Mormons and Native Americans, Pres. James Buchanan, believing the Mormons to be in a state of open rebellion, ordered some 2,500 soldiers to Utah to replace Young, who had served as governor during the early years. This episode is referred to as the Utah War, although no armed clashes occurred. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, a new camp was established east of Salt Lake City under the command of Col. Patrick Connor. Connor openly supported his troops in prospecting for minerals and sought to “solve the Mormon problem” by initiating a miners’ rush to Utah. A substantial enclave of non-Mormon miners, freighters, bankers, and businessmen arrived, and there ensued three decades of conflict between Mormons and non-Mormons.