SYRACUSE — There’s a home where the buffalo roam and where people from all over the country come to play. For the past 50 years, Antelope Island has been a popular spot to check out wildlife, the Great Salt Lake and more.

Here’s a look back at the island’s history and how it became Utah’s largest state park in 1969:

How Antelope Island got its name

First of all, the island existed well before it was first mapped by John C. Fremont in 1843. It’s believed Native Americans lived there centuries before that. According to the Utah Department of Natural Resources, human use of the island could date as far back as 6,000 years ago.

Fremont named it in 1845 when he further explored the islands in the Great Salt Lake. One island is named after him, while another received its name by how disappointed he was when he reached it. Antelope Island got its name from, well, the antelope on the island.

Specifically, Fremont and his crew trekked out to the island when Native Americans told him he could ride his horse across a sandbar that linked the mainland with the island. When they reached the land, the group found a good amount of antelope, which they killed some for food according to a quick history of the trip compiled by Utah Humanities’ Beehive Archive.

As the history notes, that act angered one Native American man who claimed he owned the antelope on the island. Fremont gave the man cloth, tobacco and a knife as reparations. The name Antelope Island made sense from there.

The antelope later disappeared but were reintroduced in 1993.

Where the bison came from

If you’ve visited the island recently, it seems like it would make more sense to name it after bison. Those entering the park first see a bison statue and the hundreds of American bison around the park. However, they weren’t on the island at all back in 1845.

According to the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program, a good chunk of bison in the valley had been killed off by expedition groups in the 1830s and weren’t around by the time Mormon pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

The bison were reintroduced to the state when William Glassman, a local politician, thought to bring back the species in 1891 — though things didn’t go quite as planned. As noted in excerpts from “East of Antelope Island,” a book commissioned by Daughters of Utah Pioneers in 1948 and published in the Deseret News in 2006, Glassman visited friends in Texas and saw bison grazing in the fields owned by a man that went by “Buffalo Jones.” Glassman was so intrigued, he bought a dozen of them and sent them to Ogden.

For whatever reason, the bison were accidentally delivered to a small town in Tooele County instead. They remained there until they were eventually purchased by the White & Sons Company in 1893 and relocated to Antelope Island, the book says. The same company added elk the following year, but the elk were later killed off by vandals.

More bison were added to the island in 1911, park officials state. By then, it had become one of the largest herds in the country. The Antelope Island herd was even featured in the 1923 film “The Covered Wagon.”

Today, somewhere between 500 and 700 bison remain on the island, and 100 to 200 calves are born into the herd each year, as reported by Utah State Parks.

Oil wells and mining

A few years after bison were moved to the island, at the turn of the 20th Century, Antelope Island became a go-to spot for mining and oil drilling. Citing news reports from the era, park officials wrote that businessmen eyed the island for gold and copper prospecting in 1899. Five years later, oil wells were built on the island.

In 1917, a Wyoming geologist even theorized the best oil wells in the west existed between the island and Farmington, according to a history compiled by the park. Now the area is known for recreation more than anything else.

A state park

Antelope Island State Park officially opened on Jan. 15, 1969, after the state purchased 2,000 acres of the northern portion of the island. It wasn’t until 1981 that the state purchased the southern 26,000 acres of the island.

Newspapers at the time credited Davis County commissioners for starting work on a road to the island back in 1964. The road was completed shortly after the park opened in 1969.

Reports also credited Syracuse resident Bill Holt and Harold Tippetts, a man who started work turning the island into a park while working as a Davis County planner before he became an activities director for Utah Parks and Recreation.

“We predict it will soon be the routine of many Davisites to take a leisurely drive to the island in the evening and sit at an overlook as the blazing sun dives behind the hills. They will return again and again to watch the glowing reds turn to clouds of gold,” the Davis County Clipper editorial team wrote in the Jan. 10, 1969, edition of the paper. “Yes, the road through Syracuse will have many more cars on it in future days. Thousands will enjoy an area known only to a few in past years.”

And their prediction has held strong for the most part. However, massive flooding made things difficult in the 1980s. In fact, the state closed the park after the causeway flooded in 1983 — the same time Salt Lake City’s State Street became a makeshift river. In 1987, as the lake reached record levels, large pumps were added to pump water to the west desert, according to the park officials.

The causeway was rebuilt in 1992 and the park reopened the following year.

Since then, the park has once again become a popular destination as one of the state’s most-visited parks. Nearly 500,000 people visited the park during the 2017-2018 fiscal year, according to Utah State Park visitation figures.

After 50 years as a state park, there’s no indication visitation will slow down in the future either.

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