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State nickname: Beehive State | |||||
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Other U.S. States | |||||
| Capital | Salt Lake City | ||||
| Largest City | Salt Lake City | ||||
| Governor | Olene Walker | ||||
| Area - Total - Land - Water - % water |
Ranked 13th | ||||
| Population - Total (2000) - Density |
Ranked 34th | ||||
| Admittance into Union - Order - Date | |||||
| Time zone | |||||
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Latitude |
37° to 42°N | ||||
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Width |
435 km | ||||
| ISO 3166-2: | US-UT | ||||
Utah is a western state of the United States, in the Rocky Mountains region. The name Utah is from the Southern Ute language. The Paiute and Goshute nations also inhabit portions of the state. Residents are called Utahns.
Native Americans have lived in Utah for several thousand years; most archeological evidence dates such habitation about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Some left petroglyphs and pictographs which exist throughout the state.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado may have crossed into what is now southern Utah in 1540, when he was seeking the legendary Cibola.
A group led by two Roman Catholic priests--sometimes called the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition--left Santa Fe in 1776, hoping to find a route to the California coast. The expedition travelled as far north as Utah Lake and encountered the native residents.
Fur trappers--including Jim Bridger--explored some regions of Utah in the early 1800's. The city of Provo, Utah was named for one such man, Étienne Provost, who visited the area in 1825.
Mormon settlers first came to the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. At the time, Utah was still Mexican territory. As a consequence of the Mexican-American War, the land became the territory of the United States upon the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, February 2, 1848. The Treaty was ratified by the United States Senate on March 10.
Utah's bid for statehood was accepted January 4, 1896, after over forty years of initial request and struggles. The delay was largely due to disputes between the Mormon inhabitants--who had settled in the area in 1847 and were pushing for the establishment of the state of Deseret. The western half of Deseret was admitted to the Union after the discovery of silver, but was split off from Utah as Nevada in 1864. The US Government which was reluctant to admit a state the size of the proposed Deseret into the union, opposed the polygamous practices of the Mormons taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and observed that the region lacked the necessary 60,000 voters required for statehood. One of the conditions to granting Utah's statehood was that a ban on polygamy be written into the Utah Constitution. This was a condition required of other western states that were also admitted later into the Union.
The capital and largest city is Salt Lake City.
Utah is one of the Four Corners states and is bordered by Idaho and Wyoming in the north, by Colorado in the east, by Arizona in the south, and by Nevada in the west.
One of Utah's defining characteristics is the variety of its terrain. The Wasatch Mountains run a center spine of the state, and the Uinta Mountain range in the north-east (the only east-west running mountain range in North America) includes the highest point in the state, Kings Peak at 13,528 feet. The Great Salt Lake lies to the immediate west of the Wasatch Mountains, beyond which the Bonneville Salt Flats stretch to Nevada. All land west of the Wasatch Mountains is within the Great Basin, while everything to the East drains into the Colorado River system.
Much of the scenic southern landscape is sandstone, more specifically Kayenta sandstone and Navajo sandstone, cut and shaped by the Colorado River or its tributaries.
Western Utah is mostly arid desert with a basin and range geology. Northeastern Utah (from the Wasatch Mountains eastward and from the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Lake Powell, Flaming Gorge, Jordan River, Colorado River, Green River, Lake Bonneville, Wasatch Mountains, Uinta Mountains, Great Basin, National Parks, Four Corners and the Colorado Plateau.
The desert plateaus of Southern Utah contain five national parks:
National Monuments in Utah include:
In addition, Utah contains several notable state parks and monuments:
Utah's major highways are Interstate 15, which runs the length of Utah; Interstate 70, which enters the state from Colorado and terminates at I-15 in central Utah; Interstate 80, which crosses from West Wendover, Nevada on the west through Salt Lake City and eastward through Evanston, Wyoming; and Interstate 84, which runs southeast to northwest from I-80 to the Idaho border.
The population of Utah as of 2000 is 2,233,169. Much of the population lives in cities and towns along the Wasatch Front, a metropolitan region that runs north-south with the Wasatch Mountains rising on the eastern side. Most of the rest of the state is rural or wilderness.
Aside from the capital Salt Lake City, other major cities outside of the Salt Lake City area are Provo-Orem, Ogden, Logan and St. George.
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