Utah

THERE IS ARCHAEOLOGICAL evidence that Native Americans lived in Utah as long ago as 10,000 b.c.e., with Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a Spanish explorer, visiting the region in 1540. The major settlement of Utah did not take place until 1847 when some 11,000 Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) arrived at Salt Lake City after having fled from Illinois following the death of their leader Joseph Smith. At that time, Utah was a part of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848 saw Utah become a part of the United States. Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormons after the death of Joseph Smith, became the first state governor.

On January 4, 1896, Utah was admitted to the Union becoming the 45th state, with Heber Manning Wells elected as its first governor. Wells, a Republican, a prominent Mormon born in Salt Lake City, had lost the election for mayor of Salt Lake City in 1892. During his first term as governor, Wells introduced legislation, including a law for the use of the secret ballot. At the end of his first four-year term, in 1900, Wells was elected, defeating James H. Moyle of the Democratic Party. Although he initially wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, he was persuaded to run again for governor in 1904, he lost to John C. Cutler.

There had already been controversy over Senate elections in Utah with the state legislature choosing the senators, a practice that was to be terminated by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.

In 1899, when the Republican Frank J. Cannon's term expired, the Democrat-controlled Utah legislature failed to elect a senator, and in the following year the Republicans had been able to use the legislature to split the state Democratic Party.

Cutler had been born in Sheffield, England, and was 18-years-old when he and his parents left for Utah after having become a Mormon. In the 1908 gubernatorial elections, Republican William Spry, managed to defeat Democratic Party candidate J. William Knight, in spite of James A. Street of the American Party making a strong showing. As with his predecessor, Spry was born in England, his family becoming Mormons before moving to Salt Lake City. In the election campaign, Spry had promised to introduce governmental reforms, but these were rejected by the state legislature. He did, however, get authorization to build the state capitol, and, in 1912, was re-elected, defeating John F. Tolton from the Democratic Party, and Nephi L. Morris of the Progressive Party.

In the gubernatorial elections in 1916, Democrat Simon Bamberger won the elections. He was born in Germany, migrated to the United States at the age of 14, and later moving to Salt Lake City. Although he was not a Mormon (Bamberger was the second Jewish person to be elected as a governor in the United States), during the 1916 election campaign, Bamberger gained the support of Brigham H. Roberts, a member of the Council of Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Roberts wanted to stop supporting people solely on the basis of church affiliation, and this helped Bamberger defeat a Mormon, Alfred W McCune, a wealthy mine owner, in the Republican primary.

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