Great Salt Lake, Utah: Named for Its Salt, Once Lake Timpanogo

In 1776, two Spanish friars heard of a lake so salty its water made your skin itch, and that salt is the whole story behind the name Great Salt Lake. Nobody we could find signed for the name. It shows up in the fur trappers’ letters and journals of the 1820s as if everyone already said it.

A lake that made you itch

The friars were Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, looking for a road from Santa Fe to Monterey. In September 1776 they were camped by Utah Lake, and the Ute people there told them about another lake to the northwest. H. H. Bancroft’s History of Utah translates Escalante’s diary: its waters “are injurious and extremely salt,” because anyone who “wets any part of his body with this water, immediately feels an itching in the wet part.”

The friars never went to see it. Still, Bancroft calls this “the first account we have of the Great Salt Lake,” and he prints the Spanish too: “estremadamente saladas.” Salt was in the very first account anyone wrote about the lake.

Jim Bridger takes a sip

Bancroft gives the honor of discovery to James Bridger. In the winter of 1824-25, he says, trappers camped in Cache Valley got into a bet about where the Bear River went. Bridger followed it, saw the lake, “and when he went to the margin and tasted the water he found that it was salt.”

Bancroft is honest about the doubts. He lists other claims, including one that a man named Vazquez found it first and called it “an arm of the ocean because the water was salt.” His verdict: “That no white man ever saw the Great Salt Lake before Bridger cannot be proven,” but Bridger’s is “the only well authenticated account.”

“Great Salt Lake” in a trapper’s letter

So when does the name itself show up? The earliest written use we could read is a letter from Jedediah Smith to William Clark, the federal superintendent of Indian affairs, dated July 17, 1827. Smith wanted to report on “the country S.W. of the Great Salt Lake,” and he says he set out in August 1826 “from the Great Salt Lake.” Harrison Clifford Dale, who published the letter in 1918, says the Missouri Republican printed it in full that October.

The trappers clearly used it as an ordinary name. Peter Skene Ogden, the Hudson’s Bay Company man whose name the city of Ogden got secondhand, wrote in his journal on December 28, 1828: “Here we are at the end of Great Salt Lake.” The fur trader William Ashley didn’t stick to the script. In an 1829 letter he called it “the grand Salt Lake.”

Lake Timpanogo on the maps

Older maps had another name. In 1836, as Dale quotes him, Albert Gallatin wrote that “the Lake Timpanogo” had been found and “is known to Americans as Great Salt Lake.”

John C. Frémont had a theory about that older name. Back at Utah Lake in May 1844, he wrote that the main river feeding Utah Lake was the “Timpan-ogo,” which he said meant “Rock river,” and “it is probable that this river furnished the name which on the older maps has been generally applied to the Great Salt lake.” Frémont kept “Timpan-ogo” for the river only. Decades later, Bancroft was still writing “the Timpanogos or Provo River,” and you can read how that river got its other name in the story of Provo.

The old name still hangs on in the federal place-names database, which lists “Timpanogas” as a variant. Oddly, the book it cites for that spelling is Oregon Geographic Names.

One explorer even tried to put his own name on it. Bancroft says Captain Bonneville’s “vanity prompted him to give his own name to the lake, although he had not a shadow of title to that distinction.” That name didn’t last.

Frémont boils the lake

Frémont saw the lake himself on September 6, 1843, after camping on what he called Weber’s fork and climbing a butte on a peninsula. He called it “the Inland Sea,” but the sketch map in his 1845 report is titled plainly “The Great Salt Lake.” His party paddled a linen boat out to an island he named Disappointment Island. Salt had been one of their “greatest wants lately,” he admits, so back in camp they boiled five gallons of lake water and got “fourteen pints of very fine-grained and very white salt.” If you wanted proof the name fit, there it was, boiled down over the fire.

The city kept half of it

When the Mormon pioneers named their new settlement in 1847, they called it the City of the Great Salt Lake, and as our story on Salt Lake City explains, the word Great was dropped in 1868. Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal list of place names sums up both: the city was “named from Great Salt Lake,” and the lake was “named from the salinity of its waters.” The federal record made the lake’s full name official by a Board decision in 1943.

You can taste the reason for the name, the way Bridger did, and you’d come to the same conclusion as the Utes who warned the friars about it back in 1776.

Historical Sources & References

• Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Utah, 1540-1887 (1890). Escalante’s report of the salty lake and the itching (p. 15), the Spanish original and “the first account we have of the Great Salt Lake” (note 21, p. 16); Bridger’s bet and taste of the water, Vazquez’s “arm of the ocean,” and “cannot be proven” (pp. 19-20 and note 2); Bonneville’s attempt to give the lake his name (note 12, p. 25); “the Timpanogos or Provo River” (p. 308).
• Harrison Clifford Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations (1918). Ogden’s journal entry of December 28, 1828 (pp. 46-47); Ashley’s 1829 letter with “the grand Salt Lake” (p. 172); Jedediah Smith’s letter of July 17, 1827, and its printing in the Missouri Republican (pp. 186-187); Gallatin’s 1836 text on “the Lake Timpanogo” (pp. 305-306).
• John C. Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1845). First view of the “Inland Sea” on September 6, 1843 (p. 151); the sketch map titled “The Great Salt Lake” and Disappointment Island (pp. 155-156); the shortage of salt (p. 155) and the salt boiled from five gallons of water (p. 157); the “Timpan-ogo” and the older maps (pp. 273-274).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The lake “named from the salinity of its waters” (p. 143) and Salt Lake County and City “named from Great Salt Lake” (p. 272).
• GNIS feature 1441459, Great Salt Lake (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: official name by Board decision of 1943 (in the Utah names file), and the variants Salt Lake and Timpanogas, the second cited from Oregon Geographic Names (5th ed., 1982).