The trap on the Jordan River

Fifteen trappers were killed in an ambush by the river

In October 1824, Étienne Provost's party was lured into an Indian camp somewhere along the Jordan River, north of Utah Lake. The people who set the trap were avenging an earlier, unexplained attack by other trappers. Provost's men did not see it coming.

Fifteen of them were killed. Provost got away. He was a French-Canadian fur trader. He was one of the first white men known to have crossed this stretch of the valley. The ambush is the earliest recorded violence tied to the ground under modern South Jordan. The river valley that killed his men would sit mostly empty of permanent settlement for another 35 years.

A farming town gave way to sprawling planned subdivisions

South Jordan, Utah was founded in 1859 by Latter-day Saint settlers, who turned the valley floor along the Jordan River into farmland. For more than a century it stayed an agrarian town, small and quiet, its fields watered by the same river that had swallowed Provost's men.

That changed fast. Kennecott Land began building the master-planned Daybreak Community. It stretched across the western half of the city. The population climbed toward its current count near 89,000. The streets and cul-de-sacs of ordinary subdivisions now surround this stretch of 2810 West. They are the latest layer laid over ground that spent its first recorded moment in blood.

A freight train killed twenty-three students in dense fog

Fog sat low over the tracks north of the river on the morning of December 1, 1938. A school bus loaded with students tried to cross the rails. A freight train called the Flying Ute hit it broadside. Twenty-three students died. The driver died too. Sixteen more were hurt. It remains the worst school bus crossing disaster in American history. The wreck happened a little less than a mile from where Provost's men had bled more than a century earlier. They died on the same stretch of valley floor.

A labor martyr died in the same river valley

Joe Hill wrote songs for the Industrial Workers of the World, the labor union known as the Wobblies. He was convicted of murder in Utah on evidence his supporters called thin and political. He was executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City in November 1915. His death turned him into a martyr for the labor movement. His name was carried into union halls and picket lines for decades after. He never lived in South Jordan. But his death sits in the same valley, on the same river system, as the earlier violence upstream and down.

A farm town built the world's first double temple city

The farming town that settlers raised out of the valley in 1859 stayed small for well over a century. Then it built something no city on Earth had built before. South Jordan became the first municipality anywhere to hold two temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The two temples were the Jordan River Utah Temple and the Oquirrh Mountain Utah Temple. Fields that had grown hay and grain gave way to spires. The town that once buried fur trappers and farmhands under its silence now had two buildings built to be seen from miles off.

A high school rose on former farmland and pasture

Itineris Early College High School opened in 2004, a little under a mile northwest of the river bend. It let students earn an associate degree from Salt Lake Community College while still in high school. The school moved to a new building nearby in 2014. It sits on ground that spent its recorded history as farmland, then as ambush, then as pasture, before anyone thought to put a classroom there.