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Map of Bear Lake area.
Section 4, Chapter 9 -The Bear Lake Valley
Chapter 9:
The Oregon Trail in Bear Lake Valley
Bear Lake and Bear River
Early Settlement of Paris
Utah or Idaho?
Montpelier
Geology
Phosphate Mining History

The Oregon Trail in Bear Lake Valley
 The Oregon Trail entered Bear Lake Valley near present Montpelier and followed the valley of the meandering Bear River. Travelers remarked on the abundant flowers, berry bushes and mosquitoes on this stretch of trail, in distinct contrast to the dry and windy sagebrush plains of Wyoming.

Osborne Russell comes to Bear Lake Valley
On the 2nd of July, 1834, Osborne Russell, traveling with Nathaniel Wyeth's band of trappers left Ham's Fork, Wyoming, crossed a high range of hills (the Preuss Range), and

"fell on to a stream called Bear River which emptied into the Big Salt Lake. This is a beautiful country. The river which is about 20 yards wide runs through large fertile bottoms bordered by rolling ridges which gradually ascend on each side to the high ranges of dark and lofty mountains upon whose tops the snow remains nearly the year round. We traveled down this river northwest about 15 miles and encamped opposite a lake of fresh water about 60 miles in circumference which outlets into the river on the west side." Haines (1965, p. 3).

Bear Lake and Bear River
The Bear River was named in 1818 by Donald Mackenzie and a party of trappers. Bear Lake is shallow, about 20 feet deep at most, but it overlies up to ten thousand feet of lake and marsh deposits. The lake at the south end is fed by streams from the nearby mountains, and not by the Bear River, which flows north of Bear Lake, and into which the Lake formerly drained. Today water is pumped out of the lake through a series of canals controlled by Utah Power and Light Company and several irrigation companies.

Bear Lake, looking east toward Bear Lake fault scarp and Bear Lake Plateau. Fault line scarp is plainly visible on the steep front of the hills on the east side of the lake, (October, 1985). 

Early Settlement of Paris
 Charles C. Rich and a group of Mormon settlers founded Paris on Sept. 26, 1863. A young man named Frederick Perris surveyed the town and left for California. The town was named after him, and the incorrect spelling was used. Robert Price, one of the leaders in Paris after 1870, built a sawmill at the mouth of Paris Canyon, designed to provide building material for all the settlements in the Bear Lake region.

Utah or Idaho?
Unfortunately for the early Mormon settlers, the newly formed communities of Paris, Saint Charles and the country around the north end of Bear Lake were not in Utah, but in Idaho. Nonetheless, the 1,925 residents of Bear Lake County were included with the Utah Territorial census of 1870. The location of the boundary was in dispute until it was surveyed in 1872. Bear Lake County was established in 1875 with Paris as county seat, broken out of what had been Oneida County. For several years in the 1880s, C.C. Rich served in the Utah legislature and his son in the Idaho legislature, though they both lived in Paris.
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