As I’ve been driving to and from work in Salt Lake City recently, I have noticed a new public history campaign popping up on signs along the road that states: “Jim Bridger discovered the Great Salt Lake.”

Coincidentally, these signs began appearing in my peripheral vision just as I was diving into Elise Boxer’s recently published book, Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite. The juxtaposition of reading Boxer’s academic analysis of how settler societies frame Indigenous peoples while simultaneously driving past literal signposts of settler-centric history has been jarring. It has prompted me to think deeply about the words we use on our public monuments and what those words require us to forget.

The problem with the word “Discovery” in 2026

I recently had a conversation with a friend about these signs. I initially offered the statement, “So, do the people who designed this sign think the Indigenous peoples who lived here for thousands of years didn’t notice the big body of salt water, or do they just think Indigenous peoples don’t really count as people.” My friend offered a generous, relatively common defense of the wording: “discover” is a fluid term. In the 1820s, the globe was not as well-connected. Therefore, for Euro-American society, Bridger’s encounter with the lake was a genuine discovery. On an individual or culturally isolated basis, the word holds up. If I find a great restaurant downtown that is new to me, I might tell my friends I “discovered” it, even though the chef has been cooking there for years.

I understand this perspective. If we view the sign purely through the subjective, isolated lens of 19th-century Euro-American expansion, the word “discover” seems innocuous. I also understand that the purpose of these signs is likely for research on the impact of billboards, so the Reagan company can convince people to use their services (though the ever-present possibility that their contract will be terminated early to make room for a Julia Reagan remembrance sign probably isn’t helpful to their cause).

But public monuments and signs do not exist in the 1820s. They exist in the present day, speaking to our modern, shared society.

If the sign’s intent is simply to highlight Bridger’s contribution to Euro-American geographic knowledge, historical precision demands a qualifier: “Jim Bridger was the first recorded White man to see the Great Salt Lake.” We are no longer isolated from other societies. The knowledge, history, and wisdom of the Indigenous nations in Utah are highly accessible to us, including their intimate knowledge of the Great Salt Lake that stretches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years before Bridger was born.

When we leave a word like “discovered” unqualified in 2026, it only functions if we implicitly assume that our present-day society is entirely disconnected from Indigenous history—that their pre-existing knowledge is somehow irrelevant to the “official” record. Returning to the restaurant metaphor, if I were to place a plaque on the downtown restaurant, proclaiming that it was “discovered by Chad Nielsen in 2026,” that might be relevant information for my family, but the people who have been eating at the restaurant for the last few decades would find it to be nonsensical.

The Myth of the “Empty Land” and Settler Colonialism

This is where Elise Boxer’s work becomes highly relevant. Reading Mormon Settler Colonialism clarifies that these linguistic choices are rarely just innocent shorthand; they are part of a broader framework of ongoing settler colonialism. One of the primary tactics employed in settler societies is the creation of historical narratives that assuage guilt and distance us from the moral responsibility to engage meaningfully with sovereign Indigenous nations today.

For example, a foundational trope of American expansion is the myth of the “empty land”—the idea that the West was a pristine, untouched wilderness waiting to be claimed, mapped, and made useful by White settlers. The Bridger sign plays directly into this trope. It frames the landscape as though no one was already here to know about the lake.

Furthermore, as Boxer and other historians point out, settler fantasies often relied on the dehumanizing notion that Indigenous peoples were not utilizing the land “productively,” thereby rendering them unworthy of holding it. By refusing to acknowledge the historical perspectives and geographic authority of the Shoshone, Goshute, and Ute peoples (or the Fremont before them) who already lived around and utilized the Great Salt Lake, public markers like this perpetuate that erasure. Bridger didn’t discover a hidden body of water; he stumbled into the heavily utilized homelands of complex, established societies.

Reclaiming a Shared History in Utah

Words matter, especially when they are literally written in bold letters and planted in the earth. If we want to build a historical memory that is honest, we have to move beyond the pioneer-centric myths of “discovery.” We can acknowledge Jim Bridger’s place in Western expansion without pretending he was the first person to open his eyes in the Salt Lake Valley. A more measured, historically rigorous public memory doesn’t erase Euro-American history—it simply places it in its proper, shared context.