Great Salt Lake: A selected bibliography with annotations

Explorers began to push into the vast uncharted areas of the West in 1804, when Captains Lewis and Clarke ascended the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains into the headwaters of the Columbia River, and followed that stream to the Pacific Ocean. The honor of being the first white man to see Great Salt Lake is claimed for a number of explorers and trappers who visited the region in the twenties and thirties of the Nineteenth Century. Among these were Etienne Provot and James Bridger, who were in the region in 1824–25, each quite unaware of the other's activities and discoveries.

In 1833 Captain B. L. E. Bonneville dispatched a party from his camp at Green River, Wyoming, for the purpose of exploring Great Salt Lake. This party attempted to make a circuit of the lake, chart its outline, and trap all the streams en route, but the attempt was abandoned because the great barren salt plains west of the lake were so hazardous that the party was in grave danger of perishing.