HISTORIC MARKER
During the winter of 1840-41, trapper Osborne Russell wintered with a group of mountaineers, their families, and several Shoshone lodges. They likely camped somewhere along the Weber River between Weber Canyon and Kaysville. Russell described the banks of the streams and rivers of the area as being timbered with Cottonwood and Box Elder and populated with wildlife.
In his journal, Russell told of hunting Bighorn sheep up the mountain from the encampment. 
After hanging his kill in a tree, he returned to his horse for the night. Upon returning the next morning, he confronted a wolverine sitting at the foot of the tree where the sheep had hung. The animal had devoured the carcass. Russell wrote: “The wolverine left nothing behind worth stopping for… all I could find of the sheep were a few tufts of hair scattered about on the snow.” Russell’s main purpose for climbing the 6,000 feet or so above the level of the Great Salt Lake where he hunted was to take a view of the lake water at sunrise. He was the first European to leave a recorded description of the valley from a perspective high on the Wasatch Range roughly above the Kaysville area. He identified Promontory point to the north and the Oquirrh Mountains to the south. Of the islands in the lake, he wrote of one, “which appeared to be a mass of basaltic rock with a few scrubby cedars standing about in the cliffs. The others appeared to be clothed with grass and wild sage, but no wood except a few bushes.”
Sources
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Russell, Osborne. Journal of a Trapper, Osborne Russell, In the Rocky Mountains between 1834 and 1843.
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The painting, Osborne Russell Meets a Wolverine created by Farrell R. Collett and commissioned for the nation’s bicentennial, is owned by the Weber State Storytelling Festival and shown by permission.
