Their farms throve; their boundaries increased; their settlements became many.
With foolhardiness, but also with desperation, with dauntless effrontery, with infinite pluck, they defied the United States and her army, using the tiny handful of Mormon soldiery in a way that makes one's mind run back to the story of Thermopylæ.
Such was the blood that settled Ogden.
It was such inhabitants that Brigham Young, in 1850, advised to "put up good dwellings, open good schools, erect a meeting-house, cultivate gardens, and pay especial care to fruit raising," so that Ogden might become a permanent settlement and the headquarters for the Mormons in the northern portion of the Territory.
So well was his advice carried out that in 1851 the city was "made a stake of Zion," divided into wards, and incorporated by act of legislature.
From the very first, everything connected with the city seemed to have a spice and dash about it.
Away back in 1540, Father Juan de Padilla and his patron, Pedro de Tobar, went on an exploring expedition. On his return the priest spoke of a large and interesting river he had found in that "Great Unknown," the Northwest.
The account so fired the hearts of his brother Spaniards that Captain Garcia Lopaz de Cardenas was sent to explore further into that wonderland. He returned telling of immense gulches, of rocky battlements, and of mountains surrounding a great body of water. Many believe that in that far distant time, about the time that Elizabeth ascended the throne of England, before Raleigh had done himself the honor of his discoveries and settlements in Virginia, Signor Cardenas was simply taking a little vacation trip through Utah.
But however fabulous that may be, we know of a surety that on July 29, 1776, two Franciscan friars set out from Santa Fé to find a direct route to the Pacific Ocean. In their wanderings they strayed far to the north, where they came across many representatives of the Utes, who proved to be a loving, faithful, hospitable people. From their lips the Spaniards heard the first description ever listened to by white men of the region of country containing the present site of Ogden. "The lake," the Utes said, "occupies many leagues. Its waters are injurious and extremely salt. He that wets any part of his body in this water immediately feels an itching in the wet parts. In the circuit of this lake live a numerous and quiet nation called Puaguampe. They feed on herbs, and drink from various fountains or springs of good water which are about the lake, and they have their little houses of grass and earth, which latter forms the roof."