Five years after the first settlement was made in Utah, at Salt Lake City in 1847, it became manifest to the settlers both there and at Manti that "cloudbursts" were of common occurrence in this region. Other settlements were made and gradually expanded on the steep alluvial fans of the mountain streams, and reports of cloudburst storms and their attendant floods became increasingly numerous as farms and homes were damaged by them.
In 1890 the theory was advanced that these floods occurred because the sheep and cattle had eaten off the vegetation in the hills, leaving nothing to hold the water back. This indictment of man's flocks and herds has become so common that during the past 20 years considerable study has been given to it. Most of the study, however, has been devoted to runoff from the catchment basins and factors involved in its control and little of it to an adequate scientific analysis of the relationship between physiographic and geologic features and the meteorologic phenomena involved in the storms
