The Sanpete Valley may have been traversed or inhabited as long as 32,000 BP by small bands of hunters. This habitation may have continued for about 20,000 years when the extinction of larger game animals forced a change. About 8,500 years ago, different groups (characterized by use of
atlatls, millstones and textiles) came onto the scene. These also departed the area about 2,500 years ago, for unknown reasons, after which the area does not seem to have been visited by humans for 1,500 years. Archeological evidence indicates that the
Fremont people appeared next on the stage (from about 1-1300 CE), the first inhabitants of the area to domesticate crops and create relatively large communal settlements. In this county, the best-known Fremont site to date is "Witch's Knoll" SE of Ephraim. Around 1300 AD the evidence of Fremont habitation also ceases. The most recent groups of indigenous Americans in the Sanpete region are the
Ute,
Paiute,
Goshute, and
Shoshoni, who appeared in Utah about 1300 and "perhaps they displaced, replaced, or assimilated the part-time Fremont hunter-gatherers." The Utes, Paiutes, Goshute and Shoshone share a common language family called
Numic.
Mormon pioneers arrived in the
Great Basin in the summer of 1847. The first few years were spent establishing a base in the Great Salt Lake Valley, then groups were sent, usually by the directive of the church leaders, to settle the more outlying areas. In 1849 two Ute chiefs traveled from what is now Sanpete County about north to the Salt Lake Valley to request a Mormon settlement be established. The chiefs,
Walkara and Sowiette, asked Mormon leader
Brigham Young to settle a group of his people in the valley of Sanpitch. According to
William Bright, the name comes from the Ute word
saimpitsi, meaning "people of the
tules". The county boundaries were adjusted more than a dozen times during the 19th century. These adjustments often shrank it from its previous size. As of 1880, the county of Sanpete included the area of what would later become modern-day Carbon County, as well as some of Emery, Uintah, and Grand Counties. An adjustment in 1913 and refining of the county boundary definitions in 1919 brought Sanpete County to its present configuration. The
Sanpete County Courthouse, completed in 1935 by the
Works Project Administration, is on the
National Register of Historic Places. ==Geography==