Currier & Ives’ Great Salt Lake, Utah provided Easterners with their first glimpse of a very young city and its dramatic lakeside and mountain setting. The commanding view is from the Bonneville bench, the original lakeshore elevation of the prehistoric Lake Bonneville.

Salt Lake City was established in 1847 by Brigham Young and a group of Mormon pioneers. The 1849 Gold Rush brought many fortune-seekers along the Mormon Trail and through Salt Lake City; the small settlement prospered and grew by selling provisions to those heading West.

In 1869, the Golden Spike was driven 80 miles northeast of Salt Lake City to complete the transcontinental railroad. One year later, the growing city was captured in this view.

Near the center of the image, we may see the Mormon Temple in its early stages of construction. Begun in 1853, the towers of this now soaring architectural gem were not completed until 1892.

About Currier & Ives

The high-quality, hand-colored lithographs of American scenes by Currier & Ives are the images by which Americans and the world came to know the rapidly growing America of the last half of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Currier began his career as an apprentice lithographer in 1828. By the mid-1830's he established his own firm on Spruce Street in New York City. In 1857 James Ives became a partner in this flourishing business that produced more than 7,000 lithographs in half a century. Currier & Ives' enormous productivity was accompanied by consistently high standards of printing and hand-coloring — and by their ability to commission original works by many of the finest American genre painters of the era, including C.R. Parsons, Fanny Palmer, Louis Maurer, George Durrie and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait.