Deseret (Mormon)

A state that applied for admission to the United States, was refused, and left its shape on the map anyway. Mormon settlers arrived in the Salt Lake valley in July 1847 after being driven successively out of Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, where Joseph Smith had been killed by a mob in 1844. The land was then Mexican territory and became American within a year. In 1849 Brigham Young's followers organised a provisional State of Deseret - the name is a Book of Mormon word for honeybee, and industry is still Utah's motto - and petitioned Congress for admission, claiming an enormous area running from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada and taking in a port on the Pacific at San Diego. Congress refused, creating the much smaller Utah Territory instead in 1850 and shrinking it repeatedly thereafter as Nevada and Colorado were carved out. Conflict with the federal government followed over theocratic rule and plural marriage: an army was sent in 1857, and the Mountain Meadows massacre of a passing wagon train happened that September. Statehood came only in 1896, after the church renounced polygamy. The settlement system built irrigated farming towns across a desert, and the church's colonising reach still shows in the distribution of Mormon populations from Idaho to northern Mexico. Salt Lake City remains the centre of the church and the Utah capital. The Deseret alphabet, a phonetic script commissioned by Young, was printed but never adopted. The state's proposed borders would have covered most of the Great Basin. The Bonneville salt flats and the lake itself dominate its geography.

• Existed: 1847 CE – present
• Type: Entity