Fort Douglas and Clem

Fort Douglas was founded on 26 October 1862, when Colonel Patrick E. Connor marched his California and Nevada volunteers to a bench above Salt Lake City and set up Camp Douglas, named for Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The soldiers were there to guard the overland mail and telegraph lines and to keep watch on the territory’s Latter-day Saint leadership. In January 1863 Connor’s troops attacked a Shoshone encampment on the Bear River under Chief Bear Hunter, a massacre that is memorialised in the fort’s cemetery and remembered by the Northwestern Shoshone. The camp became a regimental post and was renamed Fort Douglas in 1878.

The fort grew with the railroad and the army. It trained troops for the Spanish–American War and the two World Wars and held German and other prisoners; its cemetery, still maintained, contains soldiers, Bear River casualties and prisoners of war. The army closed it on 26 October 1991, and most of the property passed to the University of Utah. The Fort Douglas Military Museum now fills two stone barracks built in 1875 that at various times served as a mess hall, fire station, post office and storage. The fort is a National Historic Landmark.

The best-known ghost is a soldier called Clem. The name was reportedly given by a local Boy Scout troop after a night in the museum. Curators and volunteers describe a stocky man with dark hair and a beard in a blue Federal uniform; he is said to breathe on people’s necks, climb the stairs with heavy footsteps, and move objects. He is also said to wander as far as the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. The museum holds an annual October event in Clem’s honour. Accounts disagree about who he was: some call him a Civil War veteran who died at the fort, in some tellings by his own hand, while others treat him simply as an unnamed soldier of the nineteenth-century garrison.

Other legends are told of the fort: a young woman in white said to haunt the fort’s old Carlson Hall, a girl in the officers’ housing, a woman in purple in Chapel Glen and footsteps in the cemetery. None of them is attached to a documented witness or date in the sources consulted. The tales sit alongside a documented, solemn history, and museum staff treat the fort’s dead, including the prisoners of war and those killed in the nineteenth-century Indian wars, with respect.

A stocky, bearded man in a Federal uniform, breath on the back of the neck, footsteps on the stairs with nobody there, objects moving in the museum, an elevator that malfunctions, and a woman in white or purple in other buildings.

The Fort Douglas Military Museum’s barracks buildings, the University’s Carlson Hall, Officers’ Circle housing, Chapel Glen and the fort cemetery.

Clem is celebrated each October at the museum and appears in KSL, ABC4 and Salt Lake Magazine Halloween lists and in Legends of America’s Utah pages. The fort’s cemetery and the Bear River Massacre are also the focus of memorial events.