The first Anglo-European men to arrive in Ogden Valley were trappers led by Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company in May 1825, accompanied by local Shoshone and mostly Iroquois trappers known as Freemen, whose indebtedness to the company left them far from free. Finding the valley untouched by other trappers, Ogden called it New Hole, using hole to mean a sheltered place such as a valley, and it later became known as Ogden Hole. In 1854, the first wagon entered the valley by way of the North Ogden pass with a company led by David Moore, who used ropes to lower the wagon over cliffs; Charles F. Middleton recalled that no mules or oxen hauled it, that he steered it, and that the men held it with ropes to keep it from breaking loose on the steep incline, after which it was left in the valley. In 1856, the valley first served as a natural summer range for cattle, its ring of mountains forming a natural corral with grass and water for the herds. The first home in Eden, a log cabin for summer herdsmen Erastus Bingham and Joseph Hardy, was built in 1857 about 1½ miles east of the formal settlement. The first permanent settlers came through the North Ogden Canyon pass through Liberty, including Joseph Grover, Sidney Teeples, Stephen Wilbur, Peter Geertsen, Josiah Ferrin, Francis Clark, Elisha Wilbur, the Moffets, the Farrells, and others, and the first informal community was established in 1859 when 15 families moved in from Liberty's North Ogden pass. By 1863 the settlement had a population of 250, and by 1870 it had 1,051. In 1865, during Utah's Blackhawk War, President Brigham Young urged communities across the territory to move closer together, and the town of Eden was surveyed as nine blocks of six acres each, divided into eight lots per block around a central public square. The area was laid out under the direction of Richard Ballantyne and named Eden for its beauty and pleasant situation, and the community's official founding was marked by a large dedicatory celebration on July 15, 1865.