Industry: the word on the seal and the economy that grew under it

The word Deseret comes from the Book of Mormon, where a verse in the book of Ether (2:3) gives it as the word for honeybee in the language of the Jaredites, a people described as led to the Americas after the Tower of Babel. Brigham Young, governor of Utah Territory from 1851 to 1858 and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 to 1877, wanted it as the name of a state. He liked the bee as a figure for industry and self-sufficiency, which he thought members should have.

The settlers moved fast. A constitution for a provisional State of Deseret, modelled on Iowa's, was drafted on March 6, 1849 and took effect on May 10, 1849, with a legislature of 17 senators and 35 representatives, Young as governor and Heber C. Kimball as lieutenant governor. The territory claimed ran from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies and took in present-day Utah and Nevada, eastern California, most of Arizona and pieces of Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Oregon. Congress said no. On September 9, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850, it created Utah Territory out of the northern part of the proposal, and the settlers waited 46 more years for statehood. The name lost; the bee survived on the seal, on the flag and, later, on the highway shields.

Young was a businessman before he was a theorist of cooperation, and the two things were never separate for him. Wikipedia's list of the enterprises he founded or directed runs to a wagon express company, a ferryboat company, the Utah Central Railroad that tied Salt Lake City to the Union Pacific transcontinental line, mills for lumber, wool, sugar beets and iron, a liquor manufactory, the Salt Lake Gas Works, the Salt Lake Water Works, an insurance company, the Deseret National Bank and a gold mint that ran from 1849 to 1861. The historian Rodman W. Paul credited him with directing the founding of 350 towns in the Southwest in the 30 years from 1847 to 1877. He died in 1877 with an estimated personal fortune of $600,000, about $18.1 million in 2025 money, and was the wealthiest man in Utah.

The economic doctrine came in stages and it came as instruction. In 1865 he urged members to do business only with other members. In 1867 the School of the Prophets, a council of leading men, was reconvened to consider new economic policies. The problem in front of them was the railroad, due to reach the territory in 1869 and expected to bring outside merchants with it, and the fear, as the Deseret News put it in a 2018 retrospective, was price gouging by those merchants. The answer was a cooperative.

Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution was organised in Salt Lake City in October 1868 by Young and a group of Latter-day Saint merchants; the Deseret News dates the formal organisation and funding to a meeting at City Hall on October 15, Wikipedia gives October 9. It was incorporated in 1870 under a renewable 25-year charter. Young made the first purchase himself on March 1, 1869, $1,000 of goods for his large family. Each branch carried a sign over the door reading "Holiness to the Lord". By 1870 there were 150 cooperative branches across the territory and into Idaho, Nevada, South Dakota and Wyoming, and through the 1870s the network grew to several wholesalers and hundreds of smaller stores. The Salt Lake store became a department store in 1876 behind a three-storey cast-iron facade that stood for 130 years.

The claim that this was America's first department store was a slogan for many years, and Wikipedia treats it as one. The Deseret News traces it to a 1933 reference book, Famous First Facts, and lists five other contenders, Macy's and Marshall Field among them; its argument for ZCMI is that the store mirrored the Paris model of the 1850s, in which several merchants pooled their stock under one roof. That is a fair description of a cooperative. Whether it is a department store is a matter of definition, and the definition was written by the marketing department.

The end was ordinary retail. After losses in two consecutive years, the Church sold its controlling interest in December 1999 to the May Department Stores Company of St. Louis, which had 402 stores in 33 states and $13.1 billion in 1998 sales. May paid about $52 million for a chain with $238 million in sales. The name came off the buildings in April 2001.

Cooperation in a store was the mild version, and there was a stronger one, because the idea underneath ZCMI was older than the railroad and older than Utah. On February 9, 1831, five days after naming Edward Partridge the first bishop, Joseph Smith announced a revelation setting out the law of consecration, under which members deeded their property to the Church and received back a stewardship sized to the needs of their household, with the surplus going to those who had less; the aim, in the language of the revelation, was that members be equal according to their circumstances and wants and needs. The Church gave up the full practice by 1857 under federal pressure and kept tithing instead. Young revived the stronger form as the United Order of Enoch, beginning in St. George on February 9, 1874, 43 years to the day after the revelation, and the plan was tried in at least 200 communities, most of them rural settlements away from the Salt Lake core. Most held out for two or three years and went back to ordinary trade. By Young's death in 1877 most of the orders had failed; Bunkerville, Nevada, one of the last, was founded in 1877 and dissolved in 1880 under pressure from limited water and, in Wikipedia's phrase, a lack of individual dedication and initiative. By the end of the century the orders were essentially extinct. The cooperative stores went the same way more slowly, dwindling under the anti-polygamy legislation of the 1880s and the depression of the 1890s, and in the early twentieth century Church leaders turned what was left of the principle into a welfare programme. The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it recurs in this essay: a collective economy was built for isolation, it worked for as long as isolation held, and it came apart as soon as the railroad, the federal government and the price of wheat arrived from outside. The beehive on the seal is a memorial to a system that was mostly gone by the time the seal was adopted.

The cooperative economy is gone, but the Church kept the habit of owning businesses, and it holds them today through Deseret Management Corporation, a private holding company founded in 1966 under President David O. McKay for the Church's tax-paying, for-profit entities. Its board can include the First Presidency, rotating members of the Quorum of the Twelve and the Presiding Bishopric. Jeff Simpson has been its president since November 2023, when he replaced Keith B. McMullin; Sheri Dew, who in 2002 became the first female chief executive of Deseret Book, is its chief content officer.

• Deseret Book: origins in 1866, formed by merger in 1919, 38 stores across the western states in 2026, with the Shadow Mountain imprint.
• Bonneville International: formed September 4, 1964, with radio clusters in Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, Sacramento and Seattle plus KSL-TV; it bought San Francisco stations for $141 million in August 2018 and sold that cluster in October 2025. KSL radio has broadcast since 1922.
• Deseret News Publishing, Temple Square Hospitality, Beneficial Financial Group and Deseret Digital Media.
• Outside DMC, the real estate arm Property Reserve built City Creek Center, which opened on March 22, 2012 across 23 acres and three downtown blocks with 890,000 square feet of retail; the Deseret News reported the cost at $1.5 billion. The Church said no tithing money was used; a whistleblower disputed that in 2019, and a federal appeals court ruled in 2025 that the Church had not misrepresented the funding.

The numbers that matter are not the stores. Ensign Peak Advisors, the Church's investment manager, was reported by a whistleblower in December 2019 to hold about $100 billion, and Wikipedia's page on the Church's finances gives estimates of $265 billion in total net worth for 2023 and $293 billion for 2024, with $206 billion of that in investments. Bonneville and Deseret Book are a rounding error against that. They persist, I think, because they are the last living pieces of the 1868 idea: members buying from an institution members own.

The state built on a boycott of outside merchants now sells itself as Silicon Slopes, a name coined by Josh James, the founder and chief executive of Domo, to brand the Utah technology scene. The lineage is short and well documented. Evans & Sutherland, the first computer graphics company, started in 1968. Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian incorporated Satellite Software International in September 1979, renamed it WordPerfect and sold it to Novell in 1994 for about $700 million in Novell stock apiece. Omniture, the second wave, went to Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. SAP paid $8 billion for Qualtrics in 2018. In the first nine months of 2014 the average venture deal in the region was $51.3 million, the highest in the country. Forbes ranked Utah third for business in 2019 and U.S. News put its economy first in 2021. Larry H. Miller, in a different trade, opened a Toyota dealership in Murray on May 1, 1979, sold 172 cars in his first month, had 42 dealerships and the tenth-largest dealer group in the country by 2007, and his family sold the dealerships to Asbury Automotive for $3.2 billion in 2021.

The hive is a collective. The founder is not. Utah kept the symbol and changed the meaning.

So the honest answer is that a founder culture came out of Utah, and that it came out of the beehive only by translation. The cooperative economy taught a population of 3.5 million people (2025), slightly over half of them members, to work for an institution, to distrust outside capital and to trade with each other, and none of that describes a venture-backed start-up. The parts that carried over are thinner and more personal: the expectation of work, the habit of running things without pay, the two-year mission that this site treats elsewhere, and a state small enough that the founders know each other. The word on the seal was chosen for a people building a commonwealth. It turned out to fit a people building companies, which is a different thing, and Utah has never had to choose between the two meanings. It may have to yet.