Utah Territory

The Territory of Utah was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from September 9, 1850, until January 4, 1896, when the final extent of the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Utah, the 45th state. At its creation, the Territory of Utah included all of the present-day State of Utah, most of the current state of Nevada save for a portion of Southern Nevada (including the metro area of the city of Las Vegas), much of modern western Colorado, and the extreme southwest corner of present-day Wyoming.

When the Mormon pioneers moving westward across the Great Plains began settling the Salt Lake Valley around the Great Salt Lake in 1847, they relied on existing institutions within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in lieu of secular civil government.

In September 1850, the Utah Territory was organized by an organic act of the United States Congress, approved by the newly succeeded 13th President Millard Fillmore, only two months after the former Vice President acceded to the higher office upon the sudden death in July 1850 of his predecessor Zachary Taylor. The bill was signed into law on the same day that the State of California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state. The organization of the Utah Territory marked the first time that the American Union had jumped across the North American continent to the opposite Pacific Ocean west coast.^{[clarification needed]} The territory was made from land in the southern portion of the Mexican Cession, which was acquired by the United States from the Centralist Republic of Mexico following the latter's defeat in the Mexican–American War. The creation of the new Territory of Utah around the Great Basin and the Great Salt Lake was part of the political Compromise of 1850, which sought to preserve the balance of power between Southern slave states and free states in the North.

The creation of the Territory, with no mention at all of the divisive issue of slavery in the documents, was partially the result of a petition sent by the Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young, the second church president. The petition had asked Congress to allow them to enter the Union as the State of Deseret, which had been organized the year before, with its capital as Salt Lake City and with proposed borders that encompassed the entire Great Basin and the watershed of the Colorado River, including all or part of nine current U.S. states in the southwest. The Mormon settlers had drafted a state constitution in 1849 and Deseret had become the de facto government in the Great Basin by the time of the creation of the subsequent federal Utah Territory.

Following the organization of the Territory, Young was inaugurated as its first territorial Governor of Utah. The first territorial capital city and capitol building was located in the small town of Fillmore, Utah, from 1850 to 1856. The town of Fillmore was named for the new 13th president Millard Fillmore, who had signed the organic act incorporating the territory. A small local government was set up in Fillmore, including the Territorial Assembly. Young, however, remained mostly in his Beehive House residence in Salt Lake City, traveling to Fillmore until his death in 1877. The capital of the Utah Territory was relocated in 1856 to the major and largest town of Salt Lake City, which built a new territorial capitol building for the government and housed its assembly and governor's offices for the next four decades. Salt Lake City would continue as the new state capital after statehood in 1896. The Utah State Capitol building was later constructed there.

During his governorship, Young exerted considerable power over the territory. For example, in 1873, the territorial legislature granted Young the exclusive right to manufacture and distill whiskey.

Mormon governance in the territory was regarded as controversial by much of the rest of the nation, partly fed by continuing lurid newspaper depictions of polygamous marriages practiced by the settlers. Polygamy had been part of the cause of their preceding flight from Nauvoo, Illinois, when they had been persecuted and forcibly removed from their settlements in several eastern states.

Although the Mormons were now the majority in the Great Salt Lake basin, the western area of the new territory soon began to attract many non-Mormon settlers, especially after the 1858 discovery of silver at the famous Comstock Lode ore deposits in the Virginia City area, east of the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges and Lake Tahoe. Only three years later, on the eve of the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, and partly as a result of this, with its importance of the recovered silver bullion for Federal Treasury coffers plus huge growth in population with the influx of prospecting miners (and assorted supporting commercial business interests) and with the subsequent intensive deep shaft industrial mining and drilling, the new Nevada Territory was then created out of the western part of the previous Utah Territory of a decade before.^{[incomprehensible]} Ten years after the first mineral findings along the American River in California, non-Mormons also entered the territory from the east during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, resulting in the discovery of gold at Breckenridge in the Utah Territory in 1859. In 1861, additional legislative action was taken by Congress and the new 16th president Abraham Lincoln to transfer a large portion of the eastern territory to the newly created adjacent Colorado Territory.