Steamboats, Carp and the June Sucker: Utah Lake's Strange History

Abigail Giordano Senior Writer, Provo.com

Utah Lake is the reason there is a city here, and it is the least understood large body of water in the state. It has been a fishery, a resort coast, a steamboat lake, an ecological disaster and a recovery program, roughly in that order. Almost none of that is on the interpretive signs.

Here is what actually happened to it.

Before it was Utah Lake

It was Timpanogos Lake. Early trappers and explorers used that name, and the river now called the Provo was the Timpanogos River. The lake was the organizing fact of life in the valley for the Timpanogos people, whose villages sat near it and near the river mouths that fed it.

The reason is simple and gets underplayed: this is a freshwater lake, one of the largest west of the Mississippi, sitting in a basin whose other famous lake is saltier than the ocean. It held thirteen native fish species. In a landscape where food security was the binding constraint, a reliable fishery is not an amenity. It is the whole proposition.

That continued after 1849. For the first hard years of settlement, fish out of Utah Lake was a primary food source, and settlers fished the lake and its tributaries — the Provo, the American Fork, the Spanish Fork, the Jordan — with no meaningful limits.

Thirty years to break a fishery

By roughly thirty years after settlement, the lake's most commercially valuable fish were collapsing. The Bonneville cutthroat trout, the prize of the system, had been fished down hard, and diversions were taking water out of the tributaries the fish needed.

So people went looking for a replacement — and the replacement is now the most consequential animal in the valley's history.

Two hundred fish

Common carp were being promoted across the United States by the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries as a hardy, fast-growing, agreeable table fish. Carp had been imported to North America in 1870, and the newly completed transcontinental railroad made it possible to ship live fish inland cheaply. Fish farmers pitched them as a cash crop.

A small stocking — most accounts say two hundred fish — went into Utah Lake.

The year is published at least four different ways, and this is a case where the disagreement is the useful fact:

• 1870s — Utah State University's Utah Lake research program
• 1880s — the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program, and the Utah Lake Legacy report published through the lake's own commission
• 1882 — a widely circulated Utah history account
• 1883 — an account that specifies two hundred fish and ties the stocking directly to the federal program

These are not fringe sources disagreeing with authorities. They are the authorities, disagreeing with each other. Anyone who gives you a confident single year for the carp is repeating one source and not checking the others.

What the carp did

Carp feed by rooting through soft sediment. In a lake that is enormous and only a few meters deep, that behavior is not a local disturbance — it is a redesign.

They tore out the submerged vegetation. That vegetation had been doing two jobs at once: holding sediment down, and providing cover where juvenile fish could hide from predators. Remove it and you get a permanently turbid lake with no nursery habitat, which is a very good environment for carp and a very poor one for almost everything native.

By the early 2000s, carp were on the order of 91 percent of the fish in Utah Lake.

The native fish did not survive that. Of thirteen species, two still live in the lake: the June sucker and the Utah sucker. The Utah Lake sculpin is extinct — not extirpated, not rare, gone. More than twenty non-native species have been introduced to the lake over the years, and several are self-sustaining, including white bass, black bullhead, channel catfish and walleye. Northern pike have arrived more recently and illegally.

The steamboat era, which was not the one you have read about

Here is a trap worth naming, because it catches almost everyone writing about Utah boats: the famous Utah steamboat stories are Great Salt Lake stories, not Utah Lake stories.

The City of Corinne — launched in 1871 before a crowd of nearly three thousand, 150 feet long, three decks, eight staterooms, a dance hall, later renamed the General Garfield — was a Great Salt Lake boat. The Timely Gull, whose wreck still turns up when water levels drop, was a Great Salt Lake boat. Search for Utah steamboat history and that is what you will find.

Utah Lake's own steamboat era was later, smaller, and much stranger, and it is documented principally by the Provo historian D. Robert Carter in the Utah Historical Quarterly.

The first steamer on Utah Lake was built in Salt Lake City in 1880 for John W. Lowell, hauled by rail as far as Pleasant Grove, and launched on the lake that October. It was twenty-four feet long and light enough that two or three men could pick it up and carry it without much trouble. It took six to ten sportsmen out for fishing and duck hunting. That is the founding vessel of Utah Lake navigation: a boat you could carry.

Larger pleasure craft only caught on from the mid-1880s, once beach resorts opened around the lake and the success of tourist boats on the Great Salt Lake and the Jordan River made the idea obvious. In 1886, Eastmond & Sons of American Fork built and launched the steamer Eastmond in front of a crowd of about six hundred.

And the era's best story is its worst day. In the spring of 1931, a crowd gathered on the south bank at the mouth of the Provo River to watch the launch of the hull of the largest boat ever to sail on Utah Lake — the vessel that became the S.S. Sho-Boat. The hull went down the greased rails, water came through the gaps between the wooden slats forming its bottom and sides, and the largest boat in the lake's history settled onto the shallow river bottom in front of everyone who had come to watch.

When Utah Lake was a coastline

The boats existed because there was somewhere to take people. This is the most thoroughly forgotten chapter of the lake's history: for roughly a century, Utah Lake had a resort economy.

More than twenty resorts operated around the lake at one time or another, according to material published through the lake's own commission. The big three were Saratoga, Geneva and Provo Lake resorts. Others included the Utah Lake Resort — better known as American Fork Resort — the Lehi or Murdock Lake Resort, and Provona Beach. The business was competitive enough that it was ordinary for a resort to close and then reopen under new management with a new name.

The anchor was Beck's Saratoga Springs, on the lake's northern shore. The land around the warm springs was bought in 1860 by John Conrad Naile of Lehi and later sold to John Beck, a mining entrepreneur who had made money at the Bullion Beck mine in Eureka. Beck established the resort in 1884, with the first building going up around 1885, and named it after the famous spa town of Saratoga Springs, New York. A period advertisement in the Lehi Banner offered two large plunge baths and six hot tub baths for twenty-five cents, with the claim that the water would cure rheumatism, skin disease and "that tired feeling."

It grew for over a century: a dance hall, bath houses, a baseball field, indoor pools, an arcade, food stands, a restaurant, amusement rides and eventually a 350-foot water slide nicknamed the Kamikaze. A 1968 fire destroyed the dance pavilion and the main building, with damages put between $50,000 and $100,000 and a minor chlorine tank explosion, and no one injured.

Two details tie the resorts back to the boats. Frank H. Eastmond, who ran the Geneva resort on the east side of the lake near what is now Lindon Marina, bought an interest in Saratoga in 1930 — the same Eastmond family name as the American Fork firm that built and launched the steamer Eastmond in 1886. And a large pleasure boat ran daily trips between the Geneva and Saratoga resorts, with the Saratoga pier extended out into the lake so excursion passengers could board more easily. For a while, the way you crossed Utah Lake was by boat between two amusement parks.

The end came from flood damage off the lake and from simple decline in popularity, and the site was dismantled in the mid-1990s. The dates published for the resort's closure do not agree — one widely used reference gives an operating span ending in 1993 in its summary and then says the structures came down in 1995 in its own text. Development of the modern city of Saratoga Springs began on the ground afterward.

The springs themselves are still there, and still confusing: despite the city's name, they sit just outside the modern Saratoga Springs boundary, which we cover in our guide to hot springs near Provo.

The June sucker

The fish at the center of the modern story is one most Utahns have never seen and could not identify.

The June sucker lives naturally in exactly one place on Earth: Utah Lake, its feeder streams and the adjacent Provo River. It is named for when it runs upstream to spawn.

Three things make it unusual:

• It is not a bottom-feeder. Most suckers point their mouths at the substrate. The June sucker's mouth is oriented forward, and it feeds on zooplankton in open water — an odd job for a sucker, and the reason it occupied a niche nothing else did.
• It is long-lived. Individuals can pass forty years. Typical adults run roughly 17 to 24 inches.
• It was once the abundance story of the lake, numbering in the millions, and a major food source for both Ute bands and early settlers during lean years.

Its wild population fell to an estimate below one thousand. It was added to the endangered species list in 1986.

The twist most write-ups skip

The fish that was listed and the fish that is recovering may not be quite the same animal.

The originally described form, Chasmistes liorus liorus, is thought to have been possibly extinct as early as 1935. The surviving form, C. l. mictus, appears to have arisen through hybridization with the Utah sucker — hybrid speciation, driven by exactly the population crash that made the fish rare in the first place.

That is a genuinely uncomfortable and genuinely interesting fact. The collapse did not just reduce the June sucker. It changed what a June sucker is. Recovery programs are working to save a lineage that the crisis itself partly reshaped, and hybridization with the more numerous Utah sucker remains one of the ongoing threats to it.

The recovery, and the numbers behind it

Targeted carp removal began in 2009 under the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program, on a straightforward theory: you cannot restore the vegetation or the nursery habitat while carp dominate the biomass.

The scale is unusual. The program reports more than 29 million pounds of carp removed; Utah State University researchers describe the same effort as more than 13,000 metric tons. Those are the same quantity expressed two ways, which — given how much of this article is about sources contradicting each other — is worth noting as a case where they line up exactly.

Alongside removal: hatchery production, tributary work, and the reconstruction of the Provo River delta, which is the largest habitat project in the system and has its own ongoing story. We cover it in our Provo River delta update and summer 2026 report.

On February 3, 2021, the June sucker was downlisted from endangered to threatened — one of a small number of fish ever to move in that direction. It is a downgrade in assessed risk, not a delisting, and the program continues.

Why the lake looks the way it does

Utah Lake's reputation problem is that it looks like dirty water. The appearance is mostly the interaction of two facts: the lake is very large and very shallow, so wind mixes sediment across the entire basin, and carp keep that sediment in motion by rooting through it.

Official sources say two things about the water that sit awkwardly together, and both appear on the same state-partnered site: that the lake is classified as impaired for total dissolved solids and carries high phosphorus levels, and that despite its muddy appearance it maintains high-quality water. Those are not quite contradictory — turbidity, nutrients and dissolved solids are separate measurements — but they are presented without reconciliation, and a reader is entitled to notice.

The practical version: cloudy water is not by itself evidence of contamination here, and Utah Lake's turbidity is substantially a physical and biological condition rather than a pollution readout. Seasonal algal bloom advisories are a different matter and are issued separately — check current advisories before swimming rather than trusting any page's general reassurance, including this one.

The fight over what the lake should become

The most recent chapter is a political one, and it is unresolved.

In 2018 the Utah legislature passed H.B. 272, the Utah Lake Restoration Act, which created a mechanism for the state to dispose of public trust land in the lakebed in exchange for a privately financed restoration project. The proposal that came forward under it would have dredged the lake and built islands on it, housing a substantial population, with the dredging pitched as the restoration.

Opposition was heavy and came substantially from scientists working on the lake, whose argument was essentially that the restoration was already underway and working without it: carp biomass down by around 80 percent, river flows restored through agreements with agricultural water users, wastewater plants upgraded to cut nutrient loading, native plants returning along the shoreline, algal blooms decreasing, and the Hobble Creek and Provo River delta projects delivering both habitat and public access. Their position was that the islands proposal solved a problem that the existing program was already solving, at the cost of the lakebed itself.

We are not going to score that fight here, and the legal and legislative situation has continued to move. What is worth carrying away is the shape of it: Utah Lake has been remade by confident, well-intentioned interventions twice already — fish it out, then stock a hardy replacement — and both looked reasonable to the people making them.

What to take from it

Utah Lake is not a degraded version of a pristine lake. It is a lake that was rebuilt, twice, by decisions that looked sensible at the time: fish it hard because people need to eat, then stock a hardy replacement because the fishery is gone. The second decision has outlasted everyone who made it by a century and counting.

The recovery work is the third decision, and it is the first one being made with the whole record in view.

For visiting the lake today — access points, boat harbors, fishing, birding and the sunsets it is genuinely famous for — see our Utah Lake guide. For what is actually catchable now, see fishing near Provo. And for how the lake shaped the settlement in the first place, see a short history of Provo.

Abigail Giordano

Senior Writer

Abigail Giordano is a senior writer at Provo.com covering student life, family resources, and community events across Utah Valley. Her writing focuses on making Provo more accessible and navigable for newcomers, students, and families — the practical guides that help people feel at home faster.