Peter Skene Ogden

The man whose name blankets this valley — city, river, canyon, peak — never settled here. Peter Skene Ogden was born to a family of Loyalist judges who fled the American Revolution for British Canada, and he abandoned their law books for the fur trade, becoming the Hudson's Bay Company's toughest brigade leader in the contested Snake Country. In May 1825, just east at Mountain Green, American trappers ordered him off ground both nations claimed; twenty-three men deserted with their pelts. He withdrew, but his name stayed. Pleasant View sits in the country he mapped.

What the plaque says

Peter Skene Ogden, son of a loyalist of the Revolutionary War day who fled to Canada as a British sympathizer, was one of the most courageous and gallant of the fur trappers, traders, and explorers of the early west. In the struggle between the United States and Great Britain for supremacy in the Rocky Mountains Ogden was chief field captain for the powerful British-owned Hudson's Bay Fur Company. He was charged with overtrapping the Rocky Mountains to discourage the westward advancing Americans. In May of 1825, a party of American trappers confronted Ogden at nearby Mountain Green, informed him (falsely) that he was on American soil, and ordered him to leave. Ogden stanchly defended his rights in this yet unceded territory, but was forced to withdraw when 23 of his men deserted with approximately 800 beaver pelts. Unusual among trappers, Ogden was literate and left an excellent journal of his struggles in Utah where Ogden City, Ogden Canyon, and Ogden Valley now honor his name Utah State Department of Highways

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ogden Union Station — 8.2 mi
  A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
• Snowbasin — 12 mi
  One of the country's oldest ski areas and a 2002 Olympic downhill venue — world-class terrain that somehow still skis uncrowded.
• Powder Mountain — 13 mi
  The largest ski resort in the United States by acreage — a famously uncrowded "PowMow" now remaking itself under Netflix's Reed Hastings.
• Hill Aerospace Museum — 15 mi
  Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac

More markers nearby

• Stage Coach Station — 1.6 mi
• Pioneer Cabin — 3.9 mi
• Martin Henderson Harris — 3.9 mi
• North Ogden — 4.0 mi