Walk to the end of almost any street in Vineyard and you reach the water. It is easy to take it for granted. It is also the oldest thing in town by thousands of years, and the last living piece of something enormous.
An inland sea
During the last ice age, a lake called Lake Bonneville filled the valleys of western Utah. At its largest it was nearly the size of Lake Michigan. Its waves worked against the mountains long enough to cut flat benches into them, and those old shorelines still run across the foothills today, a few hundred feet above the valley floor.
The geologist G. K. Gilbert studied the great lake in the 1800s and named it for Benjamin Bonneville, an army officer who explored the West. Scientists have been reading its story in rock and mud ever since.
What the ice left behind
As the climate warmed, Lake Bonneville drained and dried. Smaller lakes survived in the lowest parts of the old basin. The Great Salt Lake is the largest. Utah Lake is another. Geologists who studied cores from the lake bed date the beginning of Utah Lake as a lake of its own to about 8,000 years ago.
The lake came first. It is still the heart of the place.
The two survivors could hardly be more different. The Great Salt Lake turned salty. Utah Lake stayed fresh, fed by rivers running down from the Wasatch Mountains, including the Provo River, which reaches the lake right beside Vineyard. It is broad and shallow and covers more than a quarter of Utah Valley. Its one outlet, the Jordan River, carries its water north.
Fresh water in a dry land
Fresh water in a dry country draws life. Birds crowded the marshes. Thirteen kinds of native fish lived in the lake, among them the Bonneville cutthroat trout, a descendant of the trout of Lake Bonneville itself, and the June sucker, a fish that lives nowhere else on Earth. Early accounts describe cutthroat that could weigh fifteen or sixteen pounds.
And where there was water and fish, there were people. For a very long time before anyone wrote anything down, families came to this shore for the spring fish runs at the river mouths, the plants of the wetlands and the game in the mountains behind. By the time the first written record arrived, the lake was the center of the Timpanogos Utes' world.
Everything else in Vineyard's story, the friars, the pioneers, the grapevines, the dairies, the steel mill and the new city, happened on the edge of this water. The lake came first. It is still the heart of the place.
