William Grant Bagley (May 27, 1950 – September 28, 2021) was a historian specializing in the history of the Western United States and the American Old West.
Bagley wrote about the fur trade, overland emigration, American Indians, military history, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and Utah and the Mormons.
His younger brother Pat Bagley became the notable Salt Lake Tribune editorial cartoonist[1] and they are the uncles of professional surfer Dusty Payne.
[citation needed] He considered an integral part of his education a trip he took in 1969, on a homemade raft built of framing lumber and barrels, down the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to New Orleans.
In 1982 he abandoned music and hard labor to take a writing position at Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering computer graphics firm.
[3] In September 2014, the Utah State Historical Society granted Bagley its most prestigious honor as a Fellow, joining "the ranks of such luminaries as Dale Morgan, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and Leonard Arrington.
During the 2008 academic year, he and author Stephen Trimble served as Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellows at the University of Utah's Tanner Humanities Center.
[15] An academic public health panel selected a local historian, Will Bagley, to speak on “The Woman's Face of Medicine in Frontier Utah”.
[16] Historian Bagley, "whose great-great-grandparents lost seven children in three weeks to whooping cough", discussed Utah's medical history and women who "dealt courageously with diphtheria epidemics of 1864, 1872, 1891, 1900, and 1947.
"[17] In lock step with pioneer women in the fight against communicable disease, Bagley reviewed a historically based novel by Amy C. Wadsworth who researched her gg-grandfather Bailey's Mormon polygamy and 1878 loss of seven children to diphtheria: “...
[20] Will Bagley was a former member of the Board of Directors of the Utah Rivers Council,[21] Westerners International,[22] the Oregon-California Trails Association.
The press eventually expanded into a consulting business that has handled book design and typesetting, publishing, historical research, and contract writing.
[26] The press has worked with the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Marriott Library, the History Channel, and PBS.
The New York Review of Books described the study as "an exhaustive, meticulously documented, highly readable history that captures the events and atmosphere that gave rise to the massacre, as well as its long, tortuous aftermath.
[32]"As usual, Bagley delivers hard truths in shimmering prose, lifting the veil of romance that surrounds so much of the American West," The Salt Lake Tribune commented shortly after its release.