Miles Goodyear

Miles Goodyear, with his Ute wife, Pomona, and their children, Eliza and Willie, established Fort Buenaventura here in 1846 as the first cabin and trading post in the Great Basin. With a stockade and cabins, the family raised vegetables, fruit trees, cattle, goats, sheep, horses, and a cat. Goodyear's adventurous life began in Connecticut in 1817; orphaned as a toddler, he completed his indentured servitude at age 16 and then headed west seeking freedom and fortune. At 19, he left Missouri with missionaries, the Whitmans and Spauldings, and the first white women, joining a supply pack train led by Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick across South Pass to the 1836 Fur Trade Rendezvous at Horse Creek on the Green River. From Fort Hall he began his fur trapping career, traveling trails to Santa Fe, Yellowstone, Los Angeles, and Sacramento while trading horses, hides, and furs. At Fort Bridger in 1843 he won distinction for courage by retrieving stolen horses and attended a special rendezvous with Sir William Drummond Stewart at Horse Creek. In 1846 he guided and traded with John C. Fremont, and on July 10, 1847, near Bear River, he met and advised the Mormon Vanguard Pioneers. During the U.S. Mexican War, he drove more than 200 horses from California to Fort Leavenworth and back, covering more than 4000 miles. In the California Sierras, he discovered gold on the Yuba River, where a sudden illness ended the life of Miles Morris Goodyear on November 12, 1849.

Ogden, Utah · United States