Item Detail
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32760
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0
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10
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English
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Driving Utah's Rivers: Working Water in the West
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Utah Historical Quarterly
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2022
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90
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2
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Utah State Historical Society
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24-46
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"In the arid West, water is the essential element. In addition to providing sustenance, the West's rivers were also important highways of timber commerce and trade-- working water that facilitated territorial settlement and economic development. Yet in Utah's story, this fascinating aspect of water history has long remained obscured. Log driving originated in Europe, and immigrants to North America brought the practice with them. Wood was a vital, indispensable resource and early pioneers used it to build, roof, and heat their homes and cabins; fence livestock in (or out); construct furniture; raise barns; tie railroads; make charcoal in kilns and for smelters; timber mines and road tunnels; fabricate bridges; and erect temples and stores and buildings. It was the fabric of life. In the Central Rocky Mountain West, white settlement and the coming of the railroad expanded tie and log driving in part because rivers were a logical and inexpensive timber conduit in a region devoid of significant roads. It should come as no surprise that tie- and log-driving enterprises-- the business of acquiring this elemental commodity-- were crucial to the personal and fiscal success of some early settlers. While historians have documented extensively the boom-and-bust economies of the West's other extractive industries such as mining, ranching, timber, and railroads, the centrality of the tie and log drive economy to the development of the interior West has garnered only passing mention, if at all. Yet as the history of the Weber River-- as well as that of the Provo, Bear, Blacks Fork, Green, and numerous other rivers throughout Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho-- demonstrates, between the 1850s and 1900 especially, tie and log drives were fundamental to the settlement success of the region. This, then, is the story of the Intermountain West's other extractive economy. And a river runs through it." [Author]
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