How Utah Got Its Name Instead of Deseret, the Honeybee

The settlers of Utah wanted to call it Deseret, a word from the Book of Mormon for honeybee, but Congress named it for the Ute people instead. One name came from scripture. The other came from a people the Spanish were already writing about in the 1600s, and both of them stuck around.

The State of Deseret

Early in 1849, according to H. H. Bancroft’s 1889 History of Utah, the Mormon settlers held a convention in Salt Lake City. They wrote a constitution and set up a provisional government “under the name of the State of Deseret.” It was huge: it claimed land from latitude 33° up to the Oregon border, and from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada, plus a piece of southern California.

Bancroft explains the word in a footnote. “Deseret” comes from the Book of Mormon, from the book of Ether, about people who crossed the ocean from the Old World: “And they did also carry with them ‘deseret,’ which, by interpretation, is a honey-bee.”

Congress says Utah

Congress had other plans. On September 7, 1850, as part of the famous compromise over slavery, the Senate passed a bill that, in Bancroft’s words, reduced “the self-constituted state of Deseret” to a territory “under the name of the Territory of Utah.” The House passed it two days later, and the President signed it. Bancroft quotes “Senator Seddon of Virginia,” who remarked that the desert part of the Great Basin “had been abandoned to the Mormons for its worthlessness.”

Yutas, Eutaw, Utah

The name Congress picked was much older than Deseret. “The word Utah originated with the people inhabiting that region,” according to a footnote in Bancroft. When the Spanish started talking about New Mexico early in the 1600s, the Yutas were one of the nations they mentioned most often, along with the Navajos, the Apaches, and the Comanches. Bancroft says the Ute nation belonged to the Shoshone family and was made up of many groups, including the Pah Utes, the Gosh Utes, and the Uinta Utes. Pah means water, he adds, so the Pah Utes were the Indians “that live about the water.”

The spelling wandered. The Spanish friar Escalante wrote “Yutas” in 1775, and Bancroft thinks that “might be called the proper one.” Later came Youta, Eutaw, Utaw, and finally Utah. As for what the word means, you won’t get much help from Henry Gannett, the government geographer whose 1905 book tracked down the origins of American place names: “The meaning is unknown.”

Deseret didn’t vanish, though. By the time Bancroft was writing, Utah had the Deseret News and the University of Deseret. The settlers had even tried out a Deseret alphabet of their own, but Bancroft says it soon fell out of use and was “remembered only as a curiosity.” Congress got the name you see on the map, but in Bancroft’s day the honeybee still had the newspaper and the university.

Sources & further reading

• H. H. Bancroft, History of Utah (1889). The word Utah from the people of the region; the Yutas with the Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches in the early 1600s; the Shoshone family and the Pah Utes, Gosh Utes, and Uinta Utes; pah, water; Escalante’s “Yutas” (1775); Youta, Eutaw, Utaw, and Utah (pp. 34–35); the 1849 convention, “the State of Deseret,” its claimed boundaries, and the footnote on the Book of Ether and the honeybee (pp. 440–441); the Senate vote of September 7, 1850, “the Territory of Utah,” the House vote two days later, and Senator Seddon’s remark (p. 453). Escalante as one of “two Franciscan friars” (pp. 7–8); the first Deseret News, June 15, 1850 (p. 326); the University of Deseret (pp. 322–323, 709–711); the Deseret alphabet, adopted in 1853 and later “remembered only as a curiosity” (pp. 712–714).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 308. “…named for the Ute Indians. The meaning is unknown.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Utah’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1455989).