The state’s southern red rock country serves as a cinematic backdrop for movies about 19th century cattle drives, crime and justice, and cultural conflicts that play out in California, Wyoming, Arizona, and Texas, but almost never in Utah. Few fans of the Old West realize that outlaw Butch Cassidy, leader of the infamous Wild Bunch and subject of a popular 1969 movie, was the Utah-born son of Mormon handcart pioneers. The grand themes and iconic images of the West — covered wagons on the windblown prairie, thundering buffalo herds, bluecoats and plains warriors, frontier forts, wild and woolly boomtowns—touch on other places, not here. Utah’s most legendary names, native peoples, and core stories, even the astonishing account of Brigham Young going toe-to-toe with the U.S. Army, are little known beyond state boundaries.
