In his youth Will Bagley took a raft fourteen hundred miles down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1971, he farmed in North Carolina, played country music throughout the Rocky Mountain West, and held a journeyman.s card in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. During the 1980s he managed publications for Evans & Sutherland, the firm usually credited with pioneering computer graphics.

As an independent historian, Bagley has written and edited twenty-five books on overland emigration, railroads, mining, the invention of LexisNexis (the world.s first search engine) and violence in the American West. He has won Best Books awards from the Western History Association, the Denver Public Library, two "Old Joes" from Westerners International, three Western Writers of America Spur Awards, and a Wrangler. In 1997, the Arthur H. Clark Company launched a documentary history, KINGDOM IN THE WEST: The Mormons and the American Frontier, with Mr. Bagley as series editor. Journal of the West called the award- winning series "one of the happiest events in recent Western publishing." He is working on the last of its sixteen volumes, The Whites Want Every Thing: Native Voices from the Mormon West. He has completed two of the three volumes of "Overland West: The Story of the Oregon-California Trails, 1812-1912." The first, So Rugged and Mountainous, was The Atlantic's Editor's Choice in September 2011, which said "such careful archival research yields vivid storytelling, and Bagley's account is fascinating in its details."

Mr. Bagley has appeared in dozens of films and documentaries, including the American Experience's "The Mormons." The Salt Lake Tribune featured more than 220 of his columns and articles from 2000 to 2004. In 2009, he was a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah and the Archibald Hannah Jr. Fellow in American History at Yale University.s Beinecke Library. He was chosen as a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society in 2014.