Richard Saunders has written widely on American history topics. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition. He wrote me recently to say that “We are now within the bicentennial years of Utah's position in the fur trade, the activity which gave the name to a little place called Cache Valley, and involved a minor character named Ephraim Logan, and a more important character out of Taos, Etienne Provost. Within a year or two we'll be marking the bicentennial of James Bridger’s discovery of the Great Salt Lake and the first rendezvous. It seems to me that it would be worth thinking about an occasional series of discussions about those events.” We’ll talk about the history of the fur trade in the American West today.
Richard L. Saunders is a librarian at Southern Utah University. He is the author of Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition, Eloquence from a Silent World: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Published Writings of Dale L. Morgan; and edited Morgan’s writing in Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849–1869, and Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works, 1938–1970.
