Miles Goodyear was a mountain man during the last years of the fur trade who built and occupied Fort Buenaventura in what is now Ogden, Utah. Goodyear was born in Hamden, Connecticut, on 24 February 1817 and was orphaned at the age of four. After serving much of his youth as a "bound Boy," or indentured servant, he determined to travel west to seek his fortune. In 1836, when he was nineteen, he joined the Whitman-Spaulding missionary party traveling west on the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri. Goodyear was described by his fellow travelers as "thin and spare," with "light flaxen hair, light blue eyes." As time passed, Goodyear's hair turned red. At Fort Hall, Goodyear decided to leave the party (which had brought the first white women west on the Oregon Trail). William H. Gray described Goodyear as he left them: "His idea of liberty was unlimited. Restraint and obedience to others was what he did not like at home; he would try his fortune in the mountains; he did not care for missionaries, Hudson's Bay men, nor Indians; he was determined to be his own man . . . ."

In July 1847 Goodyear visited with the first Mormon company traveling west on the Bear River west of Fort Bridger, and he tried to entice them to settle on the Weber River. He was unsuccessful, but in November 1847 James Brown was authorized by the Mormon High Council of Great Salt Lake City to purchase Fort Buenaventura. Brown and Goodyear agreed on a price of $1,950, and the fort, the outbuildings, and all of the animals except Goodyear's horses became Mormon property. The settlement was soon called Brownsville and, later, Ogden.

During the next two years, Goodyear was engaged in horse-trading and gold mining in California. He acquired land at Benecia and made a rich discovery of gold on the Yuba River at "Goodyear's Bar." At the age of thirty-two he became ill and died in the Sierra Nevada on 12 November 1849. He was buried at Benecia, California.

See: Charles Kelly and Maurice L. Howe, Miles Goodyear (1937); Dale Morgan, "Miles Goodyear and the Founding of Ogden," Utah Historical Quarterly 21 (July 1953); William Critchlow III and Richard W. Sadler, Miles Goodyear's Fort Buenaventura (1978).