State of Deseret

In 1849, two years after reaching the Great Salt Lake valley, Latter-day Saint leaders drew up a constitution for a state they called Deseret, a Book of Mormon word for honeybee. Its proposed borders were enormous: nearly all of present-day Utah and Nevada, most of Arizona, slices of California, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon, and a corridor to the Pacific at San Diego. Brigham Young was elected governor, and a provisional government began making laws from Salt Lake City.

Congress had other plans. As part of the Compromise of 1850 it created a much smaller Utah Territory instead, with Brigham Young as its first governor, and Deseret's General Assembly voted itself out of existence in April 1851. A shadow Deseret legislature kept meeting into the 1870s, and Utah would not win statehood until 1896. The name lives on in the Deseret News and in the beehive, which appears on Utah's state seal and highway signs and gives Utah its nickname, the Beehive State.

• Utah
  The Beehive State, red rock and the Great Salt Lake became part of
• Salt Lake City
  Capital of Utah, below the Wasatch Range capital
• Great Salt Lake
  The largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere related
• Nevada
  The Silver State, the driest in the nation related
• Temple Square
  The ten-acre heart of the Latter-day Saint faith in Salt Lake City related
• The Basin and Range
  The stretched crust of parallel desert ranges and valleys related