Miles Goodyear and Fort Buenaventura

Miles Goodyear and Fort Buenaventura

Miles Goodyear fur trapper was born in Connecticut in 1817. Orphaned at age four, he was bound out to a family at age 10 and obligated to work until age 16. When his indenture ended. Goodyear left Connecticut and headed West. He joined a wagon train traveling to Oregon. It stopped at the rendezvous of 1836. In Horse Creek, Wyoming, where Goodyear met mountain men about whom he had read and heard. When the wagon train reached Fort Hall, Idaho, Goodyear remained and began life as a trapper. He also sold and traded horses to travelers enroute to Oregon and California.

When the fur trade ended, Goodyear turned solely to horse trading. In the early 1840s, he moved to Fort Bridger, Wyoming, where he could obtain a better price for his horses. While there, he heard about a new route to California promoted by Lansford Hasting called Hasting's Cut-Off. Knowing the Salt Lake Valley was uninhabited, Goodyear moved there and established Fort Buenaventura, the first permanent Anglo settlement in the Great Basin.

Mountain Man Miles Goodyear built Fort Buenaventura in 1846. A change in hat styles - fromÊ Beaver to Silk - brought the fur trapping era to and end in 1840. This forced Mountain Men to look for other employment. Miles Goodyear decided to build Fort Buenaventura.

It was to be, as the Missouri Western Expositor explained in September, 1845, "a sort of halfway house between this (the East) and Oregon and California, where the companies may stop and refresh themselves and obtain re-supplies."

The fort never served its intended purpose. In 1847, the Mormons settled Salt Lake Valley and purchased Goodyear's property on the Weber River. Under the Mormons, Fort Buenaventura was renamed Browns Fort, after James Brown who bought the fort from Goodyear. The city that grew from Goodyear's settlement later was named Ogden in honor of Peter Skein Ogden, an early explorer of the area.

Goodyear eventually ended up at the California gold fields. He died on November 12, 1849, at the age of 32, and was buried in Benicia, California.

1. Miles Goodyear was born in ____ in 1817.

New York
Pennsylvania
Connecticut
Rhode Island

2. In the early 1840s Goodyear made the move to Fort Bridger, Wyoming where he could got a better price for ____ .

buffalo hides
horses
supplies
silk hats

3. Goodyear built Fort ____ as half-way stop between east and west.

Buenaventura
Laramie
Apache
Brown

4. In 1847 the ____ settled the Salt Lake Valley.

trappers
Ogden Company
Jesuits
Mormons

5. Miles Goodyear died at the age of ____ in the California gold fields.

32
42
39
49

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