The Friars and the Valley

The expedition was led by two Franciscan priests, Father Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante. They left Santa Fe, in what was then New Spain, on July 29, 1776, hoping to find an overland route to Monterey, a new Spanish settlement in California.

There were ten men in the party. Escalante kept the journal. A mapmaker, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, drew what they saw. They rode north through Colorado for weeks and crossed into what is now Utah near today's Dinosaur National Monument.

Guided by Ute men who knew the way, the party crossed the Wasatch Mountains through Diamond Fork and Spanish Fork canyons. On September 23, 1776, they came out of the mountains and saw a broad valley and a large, clear lake.

They named it the Valley of Our Lady of Mercy of the Timpanogotzis, after the Virgin Mary and the Timpanogos Utes who lived there. The lake they called the Laguna de los Timpanogos, the same basic name the people of the valley used.

Escalante wrote that the lake abounded in good fish, geese, beavers and other creatures, and that the people who lived around it lived on its abundant fish. Other tribes, he noted, called them the Fish Eaters.

The friars stayed with the Utes for a few days, talked with them about their faith, and promised to return. Then they turned south toward home. They never came back, but Escalante's journal and Miera's map put Utah Lake into the written record of the world for the first time.

Utah Lake appears on Miera's 1778 map as the Laguna de los Timpanogos, with Ute villages drawn along its east shore, the shore where Vineyard sits now. Traders later followed the trails the friars had mapped, and the expedition drew the attention of later explorers like John C. Frémont.

In 1934 a mural titled "Father Escalante Discovers Utah Lake, 1776" was painted inside the dome of the Utah State Capitol. In 2026, the nation marks 250 years since 1776, and Vineyard marks 250 years since its lake entered recorded history.