In the summer of 1776, the United States was being born on the far side of the continent. Out west, a small party of Spanish riders was setting out on a journey of its own.
Ten riders
On July 29, 1776, ten men left Santa Fe, then part of New Spain. They were led by two Franciscan priests, Father Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante. Their goal was to find an overland route to Monterey, a new Spanish settlement on the coast of California. Escalante kept a detailed journal, and a mapmaker named Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco rode with them to draw the country they crossed.
They rode north for weeks through what is now Colorado. Around September 11 they entered what is now Utah near present day Dinosaur National Monument. Ute men guided them west over the Wasatch Mountains, through Diamond Fork and Spanish Fork canyons.
The valley below
On September 23, 1776, the party came out of the canyon, climbed a rise, and saw the valley spread out before them with a large lake shining in the middle of it. 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, close to the name the people of the valley used.
Escalante was impressed. He described the valley's rivers, its meadows and its good soil, and he wrote that the lake abounded in fish, geese, beavers and other creatures. The people who lived around it, he wrote, lived on the lake's abundant fish, and other tribes called them the Fish Eaters.
This lake of Timpanogotzis abounds in several kinds of good fish.Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, 1776
The friars stayed a few days with the Utes. They talked about their faith and promised to come back. One young Ute guide, called Joaquín, stayed with the expedition all the way back to Santa Fe.
Turning for home
From Utah Lake the party turned south. In October, with winter coming on and no route to California in sight, they decided by casting lots to head home. They reached Santa Fe at the start of 1777. They never returned to the lake.
Why it mattered
Their journey still mattered. Escalante's journal and Miera's map were the first written record of Utah Lake and its people. On Miera's 1778 map, the lake appears as the Laguna de los Timpanogos, with villages drawn along its east shore, the shore where Vineyard sits today. Traders later followed the routes they mapped, and the expedition caught the attention of later explorers, including John C. Frémont.
In 1934 the painter Lee Greene Richards finished a mural inside the Utah State Capitol called "Father Escalante Discovers Utah Lake, 1776." In 2026, as the nation marks 250 years since 1776, Vineyard marks 250 years since its lake first appeared in the written history of the world.