National Utah Day Date in the current year: May 31, 2025

Utah is a landlocked state in the Western United States, bordered by Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Its official nickname is the Beehive State because Utah’s Mormon pioneers chose the beehive as a symbol of industriousness, hard work, and cooperation. Utah’s unofficial nicknames are the Mormon State, for obvious reasons, and the Crossroads of the West, highlighting the completion of the first transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869, when the Central Pacific Railroad and the first Union Pacific Railroad met at Promontory Summit.

The name Utah comes from the Ute tribe, which means “people of the mountains”. However, the Uteh call themselves Núuchi-u, meaning “the people”; the name Ute was probably given to them by the neighboring Pueblos and borrowed into English via Spanish, becoming Utah in the process.

When Europeans first arrived in what is now Utah, five Native American tribes dominated the region: the Navajo, the Goshute, the Paiute, the Shoshone, and the Ute. The first Europeans to explore the region were the Spanish, led by the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540.

The Spanish continued to explore the region in the following centuries, but did not attempt to colonize it due to its desert terrain. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, it claimed the region as part of Alta California. Parts of the region were explored by trappers and fur traders from Canada and the United States in the 1820s.

The settlement of Utah began in the 1840s with the Mormon Exodus. After the assassination of LDS founder and leader Joseph Smith in Navoo, Illinois, the new leader of the Church, Brigham Young, initiated the relocation of Mormons to the West. Led by Young, the first group of Mormon pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847.

The region was still part of Mexican territory when the first American settlers arrived, but the United States gained control of it the following year after defeating Mexico in the Mexican-American War. In the decades that followed, Mormon pioneers established hundreds of settlements in what is now Utah and its neighboring states.

The Utah Territory was formally organized on September 9, 1850. It encompassed a vast region that included all of present-day Utah and most of Nevada, along with parts of western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming, and small portions of southern Idaho and eastern California. Over time, as new territories and states were created, the Utah Territory was gradually reduced to its current state boundaries. The remainder of the territory was admitted to the Union as the state of Utah on January 4, 1896.

In 2017, National Day Calendar launched the National State Days project to celebrate the history and culture of each state in the order in which they joined the Union, beginning with National Delaware Day on July 13. In this cycle, National Utah Day is celebrated on May 31, which does not coincide with the actual anniversary of Utah’s admission.