At its location on the south shore of the Great Salt Lake, the city is served by Interstate 80 and Utah State Route 36.

[5][6] John C. Frémont, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, was commissioned by the US Government to explore the Mexican territory west of the Louisiana Purchase with a special interest in the terrain and various routes that could link the Midwest to California.

In the summer of 1843 Fremont took a smaller team from his men and veered off the Oregon Trail at Fort Hall to the Bear River into its terminus at the Great Salt Lake.

[7] From 1843-1846 Fremont made several expeditions which included a route south of the Great Salt Lake and eastward to the Humboldt River in Nevada.

In January 1846, Fremont met with Lansford Hastings, another explorer military man who shared a passion for driving settlement in California.

[8] Fremont's detailed explanations of his most recent expedition south of the Great Salt Lake was received with much enthusiasm by Hastings.

The Donner Party were numbered among these same initial pioneers on the Hastings Cutoff, but were slowed down for a variety of reasons including road building activities.

Journal entries and interviews describe the Donner Party meeting the "Hastings Trail" on the south side of the Great Salt Lake in August 1846.

The location of this camp is present day Emigration Park in Lake Point with a Donner Party Trail historical marker.

The remainder of the Donner Party's passage through the Hastings Cuttoff would become infamous in highlighting the route's lack of water, its grueling heat, and unforgiving winter.

Brigham Young had studied the published maps and articles written by John Fremont which greatly influenced his route and destination for a new Mormon settlement.

On July 27, 1847, just 3 days later, Brigham Young and 16 other men set out to examine the Hasting Cutoff trail along the south side of the lake and to evaluate the water, soil, timber, and other natural resources of Tooele Valley.

[12] Similar to John Fremont, the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers ordered Captain Howard Stansbury to take his team to the Salt Lake Valley to gain better understanding of the land around the Great Salt Lake for purposes of supply and travel routes, and to document resources, indigenous peoples, and Mormon settlements.

In 1852 Settlement Canyon Fort, which included Peter Maughan's home, was dissembled and moved closer to present day city center in Tooele.

Upon hearing the plight of the people in the new settlement, Brigham Young permitted a committee of 6 men led by Maughan to explore Cache Valley for a new location.

[20][21] The first meetinghouse of the LDS branch was built in 1857, a small log building with a rough board floor, dirt roof, and two windows.

[23] Within 4 years, and two railroad companies later, John W. Young became president of the newly formed Utah Western Railway and Heber P. Kimball treasurer and superintendent of construction.

Numerous excursion trains are run from the city, and parties, some of them numbering upwards of a thousand, come to bathe, and dance, and roam the flowery hillsides together".

Looking southward from the south end of Salt Lake, the two northmost peaks of the Oquirrh Range are seen swelling calmly into the cool sky without any marked character, excepting only their snow crowns, and a few weedy-looking patches of spruce and fir, the simplicity of their slopes preventing their real loftiness from being appreciated.

Gray, sagey plains circle around their bases, and up to a height of a thousand feet or more their sides are tinged with purple, which I afterwards found is produced by a close growth of dwarf oak just coming into leaf.

Higher you may detect faint tintings of green on a gray ground, from young grasses and sedges; then come the dark pine woods filling glacial hollows, and over all the smooth crown of snow.