James Brown's Purchase (2) Markers

Ogden traces its founding to a transaction. In 1847, Captain James Brown of the Mormon Battalion bought out the trading post that the mountain man Miles Goodyear had built on the Weber River — Fort Buenaventura, the only non-Native settlement in the region — for around two thousand dollars. The purchase gave the Latter-day Saints clear title to the Weber bottoms and seeded the town first called Brownsville, later Ogden. This marker remembers the deal. It's a tidier origin story than most Western towns get: a fort, a buyer, and a price.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ogden Union Station — 0.2 mi
  A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
• Snowbasin — 5.9 mi
  One of the country's oldest ski areas and a 2002 Olympic downhill venue — world-class terrain that somehow still skis uncrowded.
• Hill Aerospace Museum — 7.1 mi
  Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac
• Powder Mountain — 15 mi
  The largest ski resort in the United States by acreage — a famously uncrowded "PowMow" now remaking itself under Netflix's Reed Hastings.

More markers nearby

• Captain James Brown — steps away
• Jedediah Strong Smith - Ogden — steps away
• John Henry Weber — steps away
• Lorin Farr (2) Markers — steps away