Last month while I was in Utah I tried to get a photograph from the view that George Ottinger captured 150 years ago in the painting I chose for the cover of my book. I think I got fairly close, although I wasn’t lucky enough to catch the amazing purple sunset that Ottinger painted.
The mountains in the background haven’t changed much, but Ottinger would be astonished to see what the Salt Lake Valley looks like in 2021. The 1870 census counted 12,854 people in Salt Lake City with about 6,000 more in the valley. Currently the city has nearly 200,000 residents, with just over a million people living in the Salt Lake Valley.
The red brick buildings in the foreground are part of what’s left of Camp Douglas (later Fort Douglas), but they date from after Ottinger’s painting. The original buildings are visible in a photograph by Ottinger and his partner Charles R. Savage, taken from the opposite perspective, looking away from the city.
I was surprised how much the Tabernacle dominated the Salt Lake City skyline around 1870—the Temple was still twenty years from completion, and none of the city’s meetinghouses or public buildings were particularly tall. The Tabernacle, completed in 1867, was a brand new addition to the skyline when Ottinger painted it. Now the Tabernacle and the Temple are are mostly obscured from that vantage point by the Hotel Utah (now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building), which opened in 1911.
The most surprising thing I learned researching this work, though, was that Ottinger likely painted it while he was imprisoned at the camp. More on that next time!