The History Blazer, December 1995

Utah State Historical Society 300 Rio Gra~lde Salt Lake City. tTT84101 (801) 533-3500 FAX (801) 533-3503

December 1995 Blazer Contents In December 1895 Utahns Wondered Exactly When Statehood Would Come

Utah's Interurbans: Predecessors to Light Rail Sanpete Valley Has Attracted Both Ancient and Modem Move-ins Clarence E. Allen Was Utah's First Congressman A Fatal Snowslide in Provo Canyon

Singer-Actress Viola Gillette Won International Acclaim The Richest Little City in the World

A Young Woman's View of Community Dining in Orderville Alhandril Ferry Was a Key Link in Uintah County's Transportation System Jenny Barker Stanford Bridged the Mormon-Gentile Gap Ralph Ramsay Was a Highly Skilled and Influential Artisan Many Mormon Immigrants Delayed Their Journey to Utah The Shining Mountains Held a Treasure Trove of Minerals Elizabeth Randall Cumming and the Feminine West An Evening on the River with Major Powell, 1871 What Made the Mormon Landscape Unique?

Charles L. Walker, the Poet Laureate of Southern Utah An Echo in the Canyon Trading with the Nevada Mining Camps The Sego Lily, Utah's State Flower

NE11'S OF UTAH'S PAST FROAI THE

Utah State Historical Society 300 Rio Grande Salt Lake City. 'L'T 84101 (801) 533-3300 FA][ (801) 333-3503

In December 1895 Utahns Wondered Exactly When Statehood Would Come

ONSUNDAYEVENING,DECEMBER 8, 1895, JERROIJ) R. LETCHER of the Utah Commission left Salt Lake City for the nation's capital. He was carrying the official canvass of the November 5 vote on the proposed Constitution and a certificate issued by the commission attesting to the accuracy of the canvass. Both items had been printed on parchment corresponding in size and quality to the original engrossed copy of the Constitution to be presented to Grover Cleveland at the same time. Hoyt Sherman, another member of the Utah Commission, had entmined for Washington two days earlier to arrange for the official presentation of the documents to the president. Meanwhile, anxious citizens of Utah-no doubt spurred by continuous newspaper reports-wondered when Cleveland would actually proclaim statehood. Many hoped it would occur before the end of the year. On December 10 the Salt Lake Tribune noted a rumor that Letcher would not reach Washington for at least 10 days since he planned to visit relatives on the way.

By December 13, though, Letcher had arrived in Washington only to find everything on hold. Cleveland was on a duck hunting trip. Finally, on Monday, December 16, a delegation headed by Temtorial Governor Caleb W. West and including Letcher and Sherman of the Utah Commission, Delegate to Congress Frank J. Cannon, Isaac Trumbo, and Judge J. W. Burton made their official visit to the president. Following introductions, Letcher made his presentation: 'Mr. President:-in company with my colleague, Mr. Sherman, I wme on behalf of the Utah Cornrnission to lay before you the Constitution of the proposed State of Utah, pursuant to the order of the convention which framed it, together with a statement of the votes cast on the question of its ratification or rejection, and the certificate of our board as to the result." After a few additional comments, Cleveland accepted the documents and said he would study them 'at once." The Tn'bune speculated that the statehood proclamation could come as early as the following week.

However, the temtorial auditor and treasurer wanted statehood delayed until January 1 to settle accounts as did a representative of the temtorial courts. The chair of the Salt Lake City and County Republican Committee also favored January 1 since 'admission day will no doubt be one of the holidays of Utah, and if it should be a few days after New Year's" there would be three holidays in a row.

On December 19 headlines announced "Red Tape for Statehood." According to the Tribune, 'Utah's Constitution is going through the routine of red tape before the report upon its validity will reach the President. It is now in the hands of the Attorney-General [Judson Harmon], who is comparing it with the enabling act, and who, when he has finished his examination, will inform Mr. Cleveland that it is entirely in accordance with law. When this result has been (more)

received, the President will consider the question of the date of issuing the proclamation."

Governor West thought that probable dates might be the 23rd or 30th of December or the Monday after New Year's Day, The following day, December 20, the newspaper reported that Frank J. Cannon had visited the president and that the proclamation of statehood would almost certainly occur on January 1.

But two days later the Tribune reported that the attorney general had found the Constitution 'to be in all respects in accordance with the terms prescribed in the enabling act. Therefore the President will issue his proclamation January 4th next, declaring Utah a state of the Union." State officials were to assume their offices on the Monday following admission, January 6.

Still, press dispatches in Washington wnfused Cannon. On the day before Christmas he again called at the White House to ask Cleveland's private secretary if reports that the president would proclaim Utah a state on New Year's Day were accurate. Secretary Thurber assured him that the event would take place on January 4 as announced. Cannon nevertheless told the Tribune's Washington Burau that he was 'still of the opinion that the President will perform his ministerial duty in announcing the entrance of Utah into the sisterhood of States on the first day of the new year." With such confusion in the air it is no wonder that when the event occurred on January 4 the Western Union agent on Main Street in Salt Lake City ran out of his office and fired shotgun blasts into the air-the agreed signal-to inform the new state's officials and ordinary citizens that statehood had indeed wme.

And in retrospect it is just as well that statehood did not arrive during the Christmas season or on New Year's Day. The historic &te would probably have been lost amid the tinsel, caroling, advertising, and partying of the season. Falling as it does on January 4, it never became a 'holiday," but it has remained a day for remembering Utah's long struggle to achieve parity with the other states of the Union. For more than three decades the Utah State Historical Society has sponsored the official Statehood Day ceremonies. Interestingly, Jemold R. Letcher, the Utah Commission member involved in the final statehood procedures in 1895, became in 1897 'the one most responsible for the mstorical] Society's formation" during the heightened historical awareness generated by the Pioneer Jubilee of 1897 celebrating 50 years of settlement.

See Salt Lake Tribune, December 8-25, 1895; Glen M. Leonard, 'The Utah State Historical Society, 1897-1972," Utah Histm'cal Quarterly 40 (1972).

THE HISTORYBLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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Utah's Interurbans: Predecessors to Light Rail

LIGHT ~un IS . NOT NEW TO UTAH.During the heyday of America's interurbans, Utahns enjoyed the best in U.S.rail commuter technology. In 1891 Simon Bamberger bought several small steam engines and established his Great Salt Lake & Hot Springs Railroad from downtown Salt Lake City to Warm Springs four miles north. If it was a modest beginning, he had big plans: not just a commuter line between Salt Lake and Ogden but also a freight line to compete against Union Pacific's Ogden-to-Coalville coal hauler. The undertaking proved more difficult than he had envisioned. The Bamberger line (as it was popularly known) reached Bountiful in 1891 and Farmington in 1895 (where Bamberger drained a marsh and built the Lagoon resort).

Not until 1908 did his new, more powerful trains begin carrying passengers to Ogden. In 1910 Bamberger's son electrified the line to lower costs. GSL&HS's own substations ran trains at 750 volts, more powerfully than any other U.S. interurban of the time. The line's terminals (one stood where Symphony Hall now stands) had no turning facilities, so cowcatchers were installed on both ends of the trains. After his father was elected governor, Julian Bamberger constructed and shared a new Salt Lake terminal with the Salt Lake & Utah Company. Electric mass transit had become a Utah fixture. A few Utahns still remember the quiet, smooth ride from Layton to Salt Lake to shop or to Saltair Resort to dance to the big bands.

Nine years after the Bamberger line began, David Eccles started his Ogden Rapid Transit Company. Within a decade 24 miles of streetcar track wmbed Ogden City, with a branch to the mouth of Ogden Canyon and another to hot springs seven miles north of town. ORT eventually expanded west to Plain City and north to Brigham City. While students and adults steadily patronized._it, the line earned three times as much by freighting sugar beets and other f m products. In 1909 Eccles raced Bamberger in laying rails up Ogden Canyon to Bamberger's Heritage Resort. Eccles won, his grade never exceeding 4 percent. In 1915 he extended i t 10 miles farther to Huntsville, where he himself lived. In 1914 engineers recycled the old Utah Northern railbed from Brigham City around the north end of the Wellsville Mountains to Logan. Eventually this line even served Preston and other southern Idaho towns geographically and economically tied to Cache County. Eccles combined his lines in 1918 into the Utah-Idaho Central Railroad. One wuld now travel by rail from Salt Lake to Montana. While UIC's route paralleled Union Pacific's, both remained profitable because the bigger line disdained small-town stops.

A decade after Eccles founded his venture, a group of Utah Valley promoters recruited W. C. Orem to build a line from Provo to Salt Lake. Orem, a rail construction veteran, was able to (more) '

obtain $2 million from Boston and Portland backers, matched by local funds. In less than a year Orem had selected a route, bought and sumeyed the rights-of-way, prepared the grade, and strung an overhead catenary to carry 1500 volts. In another year he had built the roadbed, installed track, and erected costly ove@asses. Four UP&L substations powered the intaWbatI plus streetcars that connected Provo and the Brigham Young University campus. The plan was to extend the line to Nephi, meaning that the entire Wasatch Front would be spanned by electric mass transit. By 1913 four gas-and-electric trains per day were running from Salt Lake to American Fork. By the next year 800 passengers rode daily between Salt Lake and Provo. Each subsequent year brought expansion: 1915 to Springville, 1916 to Payson, 1917 a branch line to Magna. Eventually 26 trains ran daily.

What happened to tJ?di's interurbans? At first they were able to compete with automobiles-despite low petroleum prices and government highway subsidies-through superior service. But eventually equipment and railbeds needed costly maintenance. As early as 1925 the Orem line had cut back scheduling by one-third.

The Great Depression sent the Bamberger and Orem lines into receivership. Their demise was helped by an active campaign by oil and auto conglomerates to buy up interurbans only to shut them down. World War I1 brought a temporary boom to the Bamberger line, which owned the only spurs to Hill Field and the Ogden Arsenal. But after the war Utah railroads lost money, while their petitions to the Public Service Commission to shrink services and thus costs were rejected. In 1947 the last line ceased operation.

If only they had been able to hold on for a few more decades!

See Stephen L. Carr and Robert W. Edwards, Utah Ghost Rails (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1989). Information on mass transit history was also provided by the Utah Transit Authority.

THE HISTORY BLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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Sanpete Valley Has Attracted Both Ancient and Modem Move-ins

WHILEWARMLY WELCOMED, NEWCOMERS TO UTAHare fondly referred to in parts of the state as 'move-ins." Yet longtime residents know that their own ancestors were just one link in a long history of move-ins.

Take Sanpete Valley. The first occupants of central Utah were probably big-game hunters of the Late Pleistocene period. Ancient butchering camps indicate they traveled in bands of 10 to 15 extended family members. They not only hunted mammoths, sloths, camels, and bison using spears with fluted arrows but also gathered wild, edible plants from the valleys and canyons.

Theirs was the longest known occupation of Utah, brought to an end by the extinction of large game in the Bonneville Basin in about 8500 B.c.

Next came small-game hunters of the Archaic period: semi-nomads who developed a spear launcher called the atlatl, sometimes lived in caves (none of their huts have been discovered), and brought with them millstones and a variety of textiles. They remained 6,000 years, leaving for unknown reasons.

For 1,500 years Sanpete Valley was uninhabited. About 500 A.D. the Fremont Indians arrived to found Utah's first farms and villages. One of many Fremont towns remains southeast of Ephraim. Houses and turtle-shaped adobe granaries have been uncovered and pottery and gaming pieces as well as pendants, figurines, and metates. Bison, antelope, and deer bones were thrown into garbage pits. Corn fragments indicate the Fremonts raised crops in the bottomlands and canyon mouths.

Perhaps drought sent the Fremonts away after only eight centuries, or they may have been driven out by a new wave of move-ins: Ute hunter-gatherers. Some Utes acquired horses from the Spaniards and became horse-rustlers under Chief Wakara, roaming from Idaho to Mexiw and from the Colorado plains to California.

In 1849 yet another set of move-ins entered Sanpete Valley. The European settlers encountered 700 Timpanogot Utes encamped near Manti with tiny groups of Sanpitch Utes scattered throughout the valley.

For the Timpanogots Sanpete Valley was a second home and seasonal hunting ground. They were admired by early observers as handsome and hospitable with their life of stream and lake fishing alternating with berry, grass, and nut gathering in the Wasatch Mountains. They assembled each spring at Utah Lake for the 10-day Bear Dance at which they sang, horse-traded, gambled, wrestled, and foot-raced.

But the Sanpitch were described by early fur traders as 'the most miserable human beings (more)

we have ever seen. The bareness of their country, and scarcity of game, compel them to live by separate f d e s , either in the mountains, [or] in the plains." These Utes, according to early pioneers, 'had no guns & not a pony & no clothing nor beding save rabits skins soad together & no houses save what t6ey made out of sage & grease wood brush." Some whites were homfied to see them collect, roast, and eat grasshoppers, ants, and wasp eggs.

The appearance of a stranger so alarmed the Sanpitch that they would 'in an instant.. .vanish like a shadow" into bunows and caves. 'Sometimes they [would] venture out to offer newly born infants to whites in exchange for trifling articles." Adelia Cox Sidwell observed: 'The Saampitches were the veriest slaves to [the] more powerful tribe of Utes who treated them very cruelly.. .."

She meant literal slavery. In 1853 Mexican slave traders made one of their periodic trips through Utah Temtory to trade with Chief Wakara. When the Mormons refused to allow Indian-probably Sanpitch-children to be traded for guns and ammunition, violence almost erupted near Manti. A compromise was reached whereby the Mormons themselves gave horses and guns for the children, who were then cared for in Mormon homes. At one time the Indians 'brought so many youngsters that nearly all the older [white] residents in Manti had an Indian boy or girl. " Soon Timpanogots and Sanpitch alike would be displaced to the Uintah Reservation as white settlers dominated Sanpete Valley. The European occupation has so far lasted 150 years-a very brief period in the history of central Utah move-ins.

Sources: Joel C. Janetski, Z k Ute of Utah Lake (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991). Anthropological Papers, University of Utah No. 116; Sanpete County Commissioners, 2 7 Other ~ Forty-Niners: A Topical History of Sanpete Co., Utah, 1849-1983 (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1982).

THE HISTORYBLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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Clarence E. Allen Was Utah's First Congressman

h NOVEMBER 1895 UTAHNS UCTED CLARENCE EMIRALLEN, the Republican candidate, as their first congressman. He took his seat in the House on January 7, 1896, some days before the new state's two senators, Frank J. Cannon and Arthur Brown, were elected by the legislature.

Although Utah had been represented in Congress during the temtorial period by an elected, but nonvoting, delegate, Allen was the first Utah representative with full congressional privileges.

Emir, as he preferred to be called, was born on September 8, 1852, in Girard, Pennsylvania. He worked on his father's farm and attended local schools, but unlike most farm boys of that time he was college bound. He attended Grand River Institute, a college prep school, and Western Reserve University in Ohio, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1877. Despite his scholarly achiwement, he was more widely known for introducing the curve ball in Ohio as pitcher for the highly successful Western &SeNe baseball team. He claimed that a Pittsburgh player had showed him how to throw it. Allen's physics professor, who doubted that such a ball could be thrown, reportedly came out to the field to see it with his own eyes. After graduation Emir began teaching classics at Grand River Academy and married Corime Tuckerman. They were the parents of six children, one of whom, Florence, became the first woman appointed judge of a federal appellate court.

In 1881 Allen, who was ill with tuberculosis, moved to the drier climate of Salt Lake City where he had been offered a teaching job at the Salt Lake Academy, a Congregational school. His wife and children joined him when he decided to remain in Utah. Before long Allen began his association with Utah mining. According to a 1921 interview, Allen 'went to Bingharn with Liberty E. Holden, who offered me a job as assayer. I wasn't an assayer, but there was no job so big that I couldn't learn. Someone showed me how to regulate the furnace and how to weigh.. ..In my spare time I went through the mines with the superintendent, asking questions, and after assuming the responsibilities of the pay-roll and the boarding house, I finally became general manager of the Holden properties known as the Old Jordan Mining & Milling company and the Galena Mining company. That was in the days of the carbonates, lead and silver, when copper was not being considered." Allen continued his mine management career, eventually taking 'charge of all the mines and quarries of the [United States Smelting, Refining & Mining] company throughout the intermountain country. " Meanwhile, Allen became interested in politics. He served in the territorial legislatures of 1888, 1890, and 1894. In 1892 he was the Liberal party nominee for delegate to Congress. In 1893 he was admitted to the Utah Bar, but his practice was evidently not as successful as his other (more)

..

enterprises. He told a reporter, "I had a lot of probate work, but I barely made a living.. " Given his mining interests, it is not surprising that Allen aligned himself with the silver cause. As a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1896 he was one of those who walked out of the St. Louis convention when the gold standard was adopted. He backed William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president, rather than McKinley, 'because there has never been any doubt about my stand on silver. " Allen and his wife, also wllege educated, were both ardent supporters of public education.

Allen is credited with authoring a bill passed by the territorial legislature in 1890 that provided for free public schools for students age six to eighteen. Some have called him the 'Father of Utah's Free Schools." His wife's efforts were directed toward parent involvement in the schools and free public libraries.

A quarkr-century after his sewice in Congress, Allen redled two votes he considered significant. He worked to secure passage of Congressman Sperry's bill to establish free rural mail delivery, and he voted against granting railroad baron Collis P. Huntington a $200 million, 99-year loan for the Central Pacific. He voted against the CP loan, he said, because 'it was a time when many persons thought the United States treasury had been created expressly for their needs."

At age 70 and recently retired as general manager of U. S. Smelting, Refining & Mining Company, Allen told a reporter that his one regret was that he had never been able to fulfill his youthful dream of going to sea. 'As near as I can figure out my ancestors were all pirates," he said, and then added, 'I know that some of them were 'rum runners' from the West Indies in the early days of Rhode Island." Still, for a man who was so ill from tuberculosis that he was reportedly carried on a stretcher to his first lodging in Salt Lake City, Allen seems to have accomplished a great deal. He died on July 9, 1932, in Eswndido, California. His ashes were returned to Utah for burial in Salt Lake City's Mount Olivet Cemetery.

See Ben Hite, "How I Began Life: Clarence E. Allen, " in Deseret Nms, December 24, 1921; Allen Kent Powell, ed., Utah History Encyclopedia (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), Wain Sutton, ed., Utah-A Centennial

Histo'y (New York, 1949); Jeanette E. Tuve, First Lady of the Low: Florence Ellinwood Allen (Lanham,MD: University Press of America, 1984).

THE HISTORY B m is produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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A Fatal Snowslide in Provo Canyon

FROST AND SNOW COVERED THE GROUND THAT COLD MORNING near the Tellwide S c h d of Electrical Engineering at the mouth of Provo Canyon. That was normal for February 19, 1897, but something else bothered William Slick, a resident student of the school, as he arose from his bed and gazed out the window. Something was not as it should be. There was no sound of rushing water from the Provo River. In fact, there was no Provo River!

Will suspected a snowslide up the canyon had temporarily dammed the stream, and after br@ast he saddled a big black horse and with several others rode up the canyon to investigate.

Some miles up the gorge and just west of where the South Fork joins the main canyon a huge avalanche had tumbled down from the south slope. At it deepest point, the slide measured fifty feet, and it extended to the canyon walls on the opposite side, damming the Provo River. It also covered part of what was called Ferguson's Flat, a fairly extensive meadowlike area on the north side of the river. Slick noticed that the house and store of William W. 'Billy" Ferguson were nowhere in sight.

William Ferguson, one of the most colorful characters in the history of the canyon, had made it his home now for about ten years and had been the tollgate keeper for the Provo Canyon Toll Road Company during the last few years of its existence. He liked life in the canyon, and when the maintenance of the road was taken over by the county, he decided to stay and homestead the meadow where the last tollgate had been located. Ferguson lived alone in the canyon; his wife and grown children lived in the valley. He operated a halfway house and store where travelers could take a moment's rest from their journey, water their horses at the trough filled by the cold spring, and pass a few moments in conversation. They might decide to extend their stay and order a meal cooked by Billy himself. There was even an extra bed if it were a late hour and the wayfarer exhausted or the weather too intense to make travel safe or comfortable.

The atmosphere at Ferguson's Flat was casual with entertainment furnished by Billy and his menagerie. His love for animals was obvious. He kept an assortment of dogs and cats on the ranch in addition to a fleet of pigeons. He would whistle a certain way and coax his pigeons to land on his head and shoulders. It is reported that even wild birds could be lured to eat from his hand. One of his dogs, Belle, was quite a dancer. Billy would play a lively tune on the guitar and say, 'Come on now, Belle-let's see what you can do." Belle would prance round and round on her hind feet just as proud as her owner.

But Billy was not playing his guitar now, nor was Belle prancing. They were trapped somewhere in that mass of snow, rock, and twisted trees. Will Slick went to Provo to notify (more)

Ferguson's family and raise a rescue party. The other men from the power plant school got picks and shovels and went to work trying to locate Billy's house.

The avalanche had come from a canyon to the south and slightly west of the flat. The deepest snow backed u$ across the river and the meadow, but some had run up the north slope of the canyon and rebounded onto Ferguson's house. The fury of the rebounding slide had swept the frame house off its rock foundation and d e d it some distance to the northeast. The roof and walls of the cabin were crushed. The avalanche seemed not to be satisfied until. it had buried its human prey, for just fifteen feet from the cabin the snow was only two feet deep.

Will Slick had taken the river bottom road toward Provo as fast as conditions would permit.

On the way he notified farmers and the Ferguson family of the tragedy. He continued on into the center of Provo recruiting help as he rode. He returned to the canyon accompanied by some 500 men. By the time they reached Ferguson Flat, the workmen from the power plant had already found what was left of the room in which Ferguson had spent his last night. With the reinforcements adding fresh vigor to the search, Billy was soon found on the shattered remnants of his bed. A rafter from the roof lay across the right side of his head, and a five-inch pole lay across his chest. Billy, it seems, had died instantly. So had his faithful dog Belle whose crushed body was found in the same room. The search for more bodies was continued, but none was found.

It appears that at least one man delayed his final appointment with fate by deciding not to stay at Ferguson's that miserable night in February. Years later a man named Will Richmond told Ferguson's daughter that he had traveled down the canyon that evening. He had stopped at Billy's, had supper, and had almost been persuaded to stay. After considering for a moment, however, he had decided to brave the chill and travel on to Utah Valley that night. This decision saved his life.

Billy's body was put in a wagon that evening of February 19 and taken to Provo by Fred Ferguson, his son, and Thomas John. Billy was buried on February 21.

Sources: Daily Enquirer [Provo], Febnuuy 20, 1897; Salt Luke Herald, February 20, 1897; Salt Lake Ttibune, February 20, 1897; DaiEy Herald [Provo] April 15, 1955; "Tollgatein Provo Canyon," MS A1973, Utah State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City.

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Singer-Actress Viola Gillette Won International Acclaim

AT THB TURN OF THE CENTURY THE NEWYORKTIMES wondered if there was something in the mountain air in Utah to produce exceptional actresses and singers. Seven Utah women had their names in lights on Broadway, the newspaper noted: Maude Adams, Emma Lucy Gates, Viola Gillette, Hazel Dawn, Margaret Romaine, Ada Dwyer, and Julia Dean. The question cannot be answered, of course, but one singer and actress often returned to her mountain home for extended visits and at the end of her stage career settled into a graceful and active retirement in Bountiful.

Viola Pratt was born in Salt Lake City on October 7, 1871, to Milando M. and Elizabeth Rich Pratt. A granddaughter of two prominent LDS leaders, Orson Pratt and Charles C. Rich, she became one of the leading light opera singers and comediennes of her time, starred opposite A1 Jolson and other famous actors, and entertained at the White House. Early in her career she married George Gillette, who apparently died several years later. She retained the name Viola Gillette throughout her career.

Viola began her vocal studies in Salt Lake City with Evan Stephens, J. J. McClellan, and Willard Weihe, and in 1889 made her debut. She sang in local productions of The Daughter of the Regiment, 7 k Bohemian Girl, and Lo Traviata. Encouraged by her teachers to go east for further study, Viola earned the money to do so while attending the University of Utah. She told reporters in 1949: 'I was teaching simultaneously in 10 different schools. I gave a half-hour lesson at one, then got in my buggy and drove to the next, until I had covered all 10." When ready to go east she raffled off her 'horse at a dollar a chance. The luclq winner later complained, she joked, that the horse wanted to turn in at every school it passed.

After two years of vocal study in New York she joined a light opera company at the Chevy Chase Theater in Washington, D. C., and then she toured U .S. cities and in England with Victor Herbert's group. She briefly formed her own opera company. By the turn of the century she was receiving rave reviews. Although sometimes called a mezzo soprano and even a soprano, her voice was usually described as a glowing contralto with an exceptional range. In the theatrical tradition of that day she often appeared as a young man; Prince Charming in The Sleeping B e a q was one of her famous roles. According to George D. Pyper, the Salt Lake Theatre impresario, her appearance in male attire 'rather shocked her Puritan home folk. " In 1902, when Viola was starring in this role in Chicago, she celebrated her birthday by having her mother come to see her as Prince Charming.

According to a newspaper article, members of the Chicago Yacht Club also planned to attend the performance, and Viola was described as an "enthusiastic Yachtswoman." The reporter wryly noted that the famous star was 'disinclined to state just what anniversary of her birth Tuesday will mark." (more)

One of the highlights of her career occurred during the administration of President McKinley when she was invited to sing at a private concert in honor of the Austrian ambassador. 'Everything was glorious!" she wqote to her parents. "I was treated like a queen. * The morning after the concert she received an inscribed gold bracelet and a thank you card from the wife of the ambassador, who later sent her carriage to pick up the singer for a luncheon at the White House.

What comes across in newspaper accounts about the singer is her zest for life and her downtwarth attitude. She frequently returned home after a season on the stage to visit her family. One feels sure she was trying hard not to laugh when she described her enormous family to a reporter.

Her grandfathers, 'old-school Mormons," with their numerous wives and children now had a huge group of descendants, she said. Then she described a reunion in Salt Lake City attended by some 2,090 family members who had to camp out in tents for lack of hotel accommodations. She never lost her quick wit or her love of the outdoors. In 1927 she told a reporter that she planned to visit the scenic wonders of southern Utah and Yellowstone. Her first trip through Yellowstone, she said, "was on horseback, with pack mules carrying camping equipment, and now I want to try it in the up-to-date automobile. " In 1912 Viola was part of a Gilbert and Sullivan revival. She toured the country on a special train with the Gilbert & Sullivan Festival Company, called 'the greatest gathering of opera comedians brought together in many years." The tour was a huge success, and Viola got rave notices as Little Buttercup in H.M.S. PiMfre. The Son Francisco Chronicle said she had received "the adulation of the foremost musical critics of the country," and the New Orleans Picayune said 'she lived up to the reputation her talents had already [garnered and]. ... won encore after encore. " She married another star in the company, baritone George J. MacFarlane. They continued to perform together frequently and were hits in a vaudeville act that George wrote. He later became a Hollywood producer, and she appeared in several silent movies. But Broadway was her milieu.

Viola played opposite A1 Jolson for three years in the 1920s and again in the 30s. She was on tour with him in 1932 when she received word that her husband had been killed by an automobile while crossing the street to mail her a letter. Jolson immediately sent her to California and kept paying her salary, generous acts she would never forget.

In 1937 the singer ended her international career and sought the quiet of Utah. She had planned to live temporarily in Bountiful with "Grandma" Martha Clark Burnharn, but they enjoyed one another's company so much that the arrangement became permanent. She devoted her energies to teaching music to Davis County youngsters and participating in Bountiful music circles, s e ~ n ag term as president of the Bountiful Arts Guild. Her alma mater recognized her by making her a member of the University of Utah Emeritus Club; she served as its vice-president. When reporters visited her in Bountiful she was as likely to recall a disaster on stage as a triumph. She told, for example, of singing Ortrud in Lohengrin. Supposed to die at the end of the act, she got a wrong cue and 'died too early." The chorus had to step over her body to exit.

The "famous mocking-bird of musical comedy" died of cancer on April 1, 1956.

See Viola MacFarlane clipping file in Utah State Historical Society Library.

l l m HISTORYBLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

951206 (MBM)

ArEI.l'SOF LTAH'S PAST FROJITHE

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The Richest Little City in the World h o w 100 MILBS SOUTHEAST OF SALTLAKE C ~ lies Y Fountain Green, gateway to Sanpete Valley. While perhaps not sleepy, the town is quiet--except on Lamb Day when thousands of visitors converge for the talent show, livestock competition, free lamb sandwiches, and Mammoth Parade (as it is billed with deadpan humor). Most days the only noise comes from bleating sheep and traffic speeding to Snow College, the Manti Temple, or the 1-70 cutoff. An occasional car stops at one of two convenience stores for gas and ice cream, but otherwise the commercial district is vacant and decaying, and away from Main Street the sidewalks have disintegrated and many roads are unpaved.

Recently, Fountain Green has become a suburb of ProvoJOrem. A few citizens still ranch and farm, there is a carpentry shop, and another few raise their own meat, produce, and dairy products as well as home-school their children. Over the years newcomers have bought and restored those old Victorian cottages not yet replaced by new brick rectangles. Clean water laws have forced a sewer system and culinary water upgrade on the town. But with a population of about 800 Fountain Green is still quiet.

It was not always so. At the turn of the century Fountain Green was known both as the 'Wool City of the West" and 'The Richest Little City in the World." Not only did it produce more and better quality wool per capita than any other Intermountain market, but it had its own flour mill, hydroelectric plant, adobe brickyard, and railroad depot.

In 1859 a father and son had been called by Brigham Young to settle the town. Within two years Fountain Green had a school/meeting house, store/hotel, post office, and brickyard in addition to its cluster of log cabins. Within seven years the flour mill was in operation, along with a cooperative livestock herd of 600. By 1875 a narrow-gauge railroad ran from Nephi to the coal mines of Wales, Ephraim, and Morrison. After the mines played out the line stayed busy carrying livestock and bricks to the East.

Each decade brought progress. The first sheep flocks totalled 3,000 Spanish Merinos which produced only three to six pounds of wool per head. Fountain Green women sheared for four cents per head, and the wool sold for 6.5 cents per pound. In the 1880s sheepmen, as an improvement on winter-feeding their herds in corrals, began taking them out on the west desert to forage. The land and water rights they acquired at that time in Juab and Millard counties are still exercised today.

After separating into independent herds, in 1908 sheepmen organized again as the Fountain Green Woolgrowers Association and expanded in both numbers and quality. They developed a pool (more)

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of 100,000 Rambouillet sheep which produced the so-called Jericho Wool Clip commanding the highest prices paid for western wools. Shareholders became wealthy, and yellow brick mansions began to intersperse with the red brick Nauvoo-style homes of the 1870s and 80s and the tiny adobe cottages of the kheepherders.

The early 1900s were a golden age for Fountain Green. The Big Springs was enclosed and piped, a hydroelectric plant built-and the city had lights. After 1922 a larger plant also supplied power to Moroni, Wales, and Levan.

A bank went up on Main Street. In 1917 cement sidewalks, a public drinking fountain, and community amusement hall were added. By 1918 so many residents owned automobiles that three men started a garage still in business today. By 1923 the city had a mercantile, theater, ice cream parlor, and large new elementary school soon joined by a junior and senior high school. As late as 1930 Fountain Green was expanding its railroad depot and installing the first dial telephone system in Utah.

But the Great Depression inhibited further development of America's nual communities. By the 1940s Fountain Green was in decline. Its young people left to attend college and build careers elsewhere in the state and nation. The dance hall, theater, and bank closed; many of the homes became vacant as their elderly owners passed away; and the sidewalks fell into disrepair. If not for the turkey cooperative the town might had died altogether, but that's another story.

Sources: Daughters of the Utah Pioneen, History of Sanpete County (Manti, 1947); Stephen L. Carr and Robert W. Edwards, Utah Ghost Rails (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1989); interviews with Fountain Gmn senior citizens by

Becky Bartholomew, 1991-92.

THEHISTORY BLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant fiom the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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THE HISTORY BLAZER A'EM'S OF UTAH'S PAST FROM THE

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A Young Woman's View of Community Dining in Orderville IN 1878 CHARLES N. CARROILMOVED HIS FAMILY to Ofderville in present Kane County and joined the United Order. His daughter Emma, who grew up there, felt that 'the United Order left a wholesome influence" on her life. As an adult she wanted to preserve the history of Orderville and set about collecting information from former residents and original records of the United Order.

These, plus her own vivid recollections, she wove into a delightful memoir published in 1939. Her description, excerpted below, of community dining-has a special charm.

Perhaps the most unique thing among us was community eating. It excited more curiosity, incited more ridicule and brought more aspersions upon us than any other one thing and much more than was warranted. The dining hall was in the center of the enclosed square, with the kitchen to the north and bakery in the basement immediately under it. About three hundred pounds of flour was made into bread each day, mixed in a large wooden mixer seven feet long by two and one-half feet wide. Occasionally a few children lingered to watch the bread mixing process which was usually left until the last thing before closing up at night. Vegetables such as potatoes, squash, etc., were baked in large quantities, as well as meats and occasionally pies, cookies, and puddings; these were a real treat, however, as they did not come often. The kitchen was a large room the west side of which was partitioned off for the furnaces. There were three standing side by side, made of brick, on which were three immense boilers. A good sized log of wood was none too much for each furnace.

How would you like to see three bushels of potatoes cooked in a great boiler and a corresponding quantity of meat and vegetables in another and a third full of gravy-water gravy? It required one whole boiler of hulled corn or hominy for supper.

There were six women cooks who changed off each week till all had had a turn. But there were several weeks between turns so that the work was not over burdensome. The intervening weeks gave the ladies time for home duties and other lines of community work. There was an invariable air of cheerfulness in the kitchen. In cases of illness or disability, food was sent to the home. My father joined the Order in May of 1878. My mother was very much disinclined to eat at the 'Big Table" so we children carried her meals to her. Later they came to sit in family groups at the table. My mother consented then to go.

Three rows of tables extended the length of the long dining hall. Six waiters were employed at a time; three senior and three junior girls. Each set of waiters served, as did the cooks, a week at a time. Their duties were to set and to wait on the tables, set the food on the tables as it was passed to them through the slide, clear the dishes when the meal was done and pass them back to the cooks to be washed. On busy days the senior girls helped with the dishes. There were no tablecloths so the (more)

tables were thoroughly washed after each meal; the benches were washed as often as needed, and the great dining room floor was scrubbed twice a week.

At the age of about eleven or twelve, a girl was eligible to appointment as a junior waiter; thus privileged she had-reached the acme of her desires. The thrill of partnership with a senior waiter, aroused emotions almost bewildering. It was a supreme moment; a real affection grew up between senior and junior girls. As a junior waiter I was placed with Lucy Spencer, pretty, jolly, and very kind to me. We had the center row of tables as our charge.

I have heard my sister Kezia say that she with the other senior girls would often in summer time arise early, before the time for duty at the dining room and gather the wild roses from the creek bank, placing a twig with a single rose bud under each plate. It required several hundred. The fragrance of the flowers was noticeable on entering the room.

In the beginning the adults ate first, then the children were called to a second table; but hter it was arranged for f d e s to sit together. Tables had to be set twice to accommodate all. Many grotesque mental pictures have been drawn of this phase of our community life. One report was that food was run into troughs from the table of the adults to the children who eagerly ate up whatever might be left! I suppose there was a humorous side to those looking on; so many people living differently from those about them, and indeed we found humorous situations ourselves. As a group of people working together and becoming so well acquainted a little practical joking was irresistible.

Brother Kingsbury, widower, a tall soldierly looking man, was always early to the table. The waitresses noticed that he always seated himself where there was a large plate. For a time they set a certain large plate in the same place until he became accustomed to seating himself in that precise place; then one day the plate was moved to the end of the table. He sat down as usual but noticing the small plate, quickly cast his eyes about, spied the larger plate and in haste moved thither while the seat was still unoccupied. Then a day came when a carving knife and fork, a preserving spoon and the largest plate that could be found in the kitchen was drawn into service, and without giving particular attention he sat down as usual, the plate being turned over the knife and fork as was the practice then. The ends however, protruded from either side of the plate; as he glanced down and discovered the trick-well the storm broke. The girls got their reprimand, but had had their fun!

One of the girl waitresses confided this: On a special occasion there was rather a sumptuous repast; fiied fresh pork, mashed potatoes, vegetables, pickled beets and two molasses cookies each.

She spotted a most delicious piece of meat on the platter nearest her; her fork was ready as soon as the 'Amen" to the blessing was said, she reached out and the coveted piece of meat was hers!

After the discontinuance of community eating, garden products were apportioned to families according to numbers; there was not always enough of a kind to furnish the amount a family would use if it were available. I remember a day each individual received as his portion two green gage plums. I have mentioned this on different occasions and people have laughed, and yet we do the same thing in our individual families today if the supply of a given thing is not large. It is just the difference of dividing between a half dozen people and a whole community.

Source: Emma Carroll Seegmiller, "Personal Memories of the United Order of Orderville, Utah," Utuh Historical Quarterly 7 (1939).

THE HISTORYBLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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Alhandra Ferry Was a Key Link in Uintah County's Transportation System

THE ALHANDRA FERRY AND STAGE STOP SOUTH OF JENSEN, Uintah county, Were constructed in 1905 by the Uintah Railway as part of a toll-road connecting the populace of the Uinta Basin with the railroad at Watson, Utah. Residents traveled by stagecoach (later by automobile) along the road from Vernal to the Alhandra ferry. From the ferry they passed two additional toll stops, known as Kennedy Hole and Ignacio, prior to connecting with the Uintah Railway terminal at Watson some 55 miles southeast of Vernal. The railroad continued on through Dragon, Utah, over the Book Cliff Mountains to Mack, Colorado. The train to Mack gave travelers a never-to-be-forgotten ride over 8,437-foot Baxter Pass with mile after mile of 7.5 percent grades and 65-degree curves through the Book Cliffs.

At Mack one wuld connect with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and go to Denver or Salt Lake City. This system of stage, ferry, and rail became the fastest and most reliable form of transport for both people and freight entering or leaving the Uinta Basin. It greatly accelerated the settling of some parts of the Basin. The speed and reliability of the system-except in the worst winter weather-made it the Basin's primary economic artery and connected remote towns with the major economic centers of Denver and Salt Lake City and beyond.

The ferry consisted of a built-up landing crib on each side of the Green River, a cable stretched across the river, and a "dead-man" on either side to hold the cable. The ferryboat was approximately 60 by 20 feet and could carry up to 200 sheep or two wagons and a four-horse team. The stage stop included several buildings, none of which is extant. The largest structure served as a boarding house and living quarters for the ferryman and his family. Other buildings included a root cellar, a bunkhouse, a livestock shelter, and a storehouse for grain. Here travelers wuld refresh themselves and horses could be watered and fed before continuing their journey.

The stagecoach line from Vernal to the Alhandra ferry may have been one of the last stage routes to operate in the United States. As a method of transportation it was well suited to the rugged terrain of the desert country that it crossed. As automobiles and trucks gradually became more common in Utah they replaced stagecoaches and freight wagons, and the state's system of roads was gradually upgraded.

The ferry operated until 1919. It was one of five known femes that crossed the Green River in northeastern Utah. Although slower than the bridge that replaced it, the Alhandra ferry sewed Basin residents well as a safe and reliable method of river crossing-far superior to fording the river, particularly during high water. The ferry carried livestock, agricultural produce, wagons (more)

loaded with freight items, the U.S. Mail, numerous travelers, and even the bricks that were used to build the old Bank of Vernal (the so-called Parcel Post Bank).

The completion of the bridge at Jensen, coupled with the development of the internal combustion engine, heralded the end of the Alhandra ferry. Later generations of travelers in eastern Utah can cross the Green River at highway speeds without ever giving a thought to the past difficulties, hazards, and adventure of river crossing.

See the Alhandra Ferry and Stage Stop National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form in the Utah State Historical Society Library fifes and George E. Long, "Rails over Baxter Pass," Beehiw History 25 (1989).

Please note: the ferry and stage stop ~lre not listed in the National Register; little remains at the site.

THEHLSTORY BLAZERis prduced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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Jenny Barker Stanford Bridged the Mormon-Gentile Gap

MUCHws BEEN WRFTEN mom MORMON-GENTILE c o m a in early Utah. But at least one non-Mormon came, saw, and conquered the hearts of her pioneer Mormon friends. Jenny Barker was born in London in 1850. Her law-clerk father, after release from debtor's prison, abandoned the family, causing it to break up. Jenny, the youngest, was placed in a private home where she was well treated and educated. When grown she 'went out" as a governess to British families posted throughout Europe. The other siblings became domestics and apprentices, having little or no contact. John, seven years Jenny's senior, was working at a Southampton hotel when he converted to Mormonism. Preparing to emigrate, he said his last farewells to his mother. Two sisters refused to see him. He could not locate Jenny before sailing in 1862.

But nine years later John received a letter from Jenny, then 21. Upon their mother's death she had learned his whereabouts. This began a correspondence that lasted 19 years. Jenny saved her brother's letters, bringing them with her when she finally visited Utah. In almost every letter John urged her to come to Utah, portraying it as a place of glowing opportunity (although at times he gave her "both sides of the picture" so she would not be disappointed should she actually come). He even sold his half-interest in a mining claim to pay her fare.

Jenny was ambivalent. Once she responded that she had raised half the passage and wanted John to assure her of a position with an expatriate British family. But in a later letter (she was then living with her older sister, Fanny, who was against her going) she wrote that she "was perfectly content." She was self-supporting and enjoying the most practical and interesting of educations-travel. One position took her to the Austrian Tyrol, another to Rome and Venice, still others to Ireland and Germany.

The letters show an affectionate, frank relationship between Jenny and John. He once teased her: 'We were going to name the baby Jenny but as you seemed to think it one too many, Susan had it named Lucy. We think different here about large families than most people do.. . In another letter she chastised him for 'his feelings against England and his friends there." He apologized, adding that his new loyalties were natural, America having given him so much.

In May 1879 he told of attending the April LDS Conference but did not reveal that while there he had taken two plural wives. Not until 1888 did he tell Jenny the truth: "I.. .have failed to inform you. ..for fear that in your want of understanding of the principle you might condemn me.. " He described his daughter 'Myrinda 8 years old who often says 'Father, why don't Aunt Jenny remember me as well as Jennie & Birdie.. .?'" and his expectation of being imprisoned at any time for cohabitation. (more)

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It is not clear why Jenny finally decided to visit. She had grown tired of travel. Most of John's children were now grown, and his first wife gone; perhaps she felt it was then or never. In June 1890 John ecstatically sent a money draft through Mormon emigration officials for her passage. That fall Aunf ~ennyarrived in Newton, Cache County. Her nieces and nephews finally met the source of aII those loving gifts and letters.

John had warned her that only in Salt Lake or Ogden could she obtain the employment she knew. So after a while Jenny moved to Salt Lake City as a companion to Mrs. Jennings, 'wife of a mining magnatew-probably William Jennings, Salt Lake mayor, businessman, railroad developer, and gold dealer. Mrs. Jennings would have been one of his two wives: Jane Walker Jennings or Priscilla Pead Jennings, both ex-Britons. The Jennings family occupied the former Staines mansion (renamed the Devereaux House for Jennings's boyhood home) where they entertained a U.S. president and many other dignitaries.

J e ~ traveled y again, certainly to Alaska and no doubt also to the West Coast. In Salt Lake she made friends with the Jennings's horticulturist, Stephen Stanford. Two years later they were married-in two ceremonies, one Mormon, one Church of England. Now a matron, continued to win over friends and family as "a gentle, refined lady, kind and generous." The marriage endured until Stephen's death in 1909. That is the year John took a mission to England, probably to escort Jenny home. She died in 1934.

Jenny Barker Stanford was not just the bridge between a family tom apart by custom and religion, but one of many bridges between Mormons and gentiles.

Source: "Letters of John H.Barkern in Kate B. Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, vol. 4 (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneem, 1961).

THE HISTORYBLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

951210 (BB)

THE HISTORY BLAZER ATEI1'SOF UTAH'S PAST FROM THE

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Ralph Ramsay Was a Highly Skilled and Influential Artisan

THERALPH RAMSAY HOME AT 57 EAST 200 NORTHin Richfield, Sevier County, in addition to being an excellent and well-preserved example of a Utah pioneer home, is also significant because its builder and owner was one of the West's most talented and well-known artisans.

Ralph Rarnsay was born on January 22, 1824, near Ryton, Durham, England. His family moved four times before he was bound as an apprentice to William Hobbs, a wood turner and carver on September 14, 1839. After about four years in Hobbs's shop near Newcastle on Tyne, Ramsay was given his indentures. He was employed in several shops in the area and in London during the next few years, moving on primarily on account of a depressed economy. In July 1849 he joined the Mormon church. He then engaged in missionary activity for the church and continued his wood-carving career. Meanwhile, his wife and child died within months of each other in 1852. He married Elizabeth Bums and with her and their children left England for Utah in March 1856 on the ship Enoch Train.

At Iowa City the skilled woodworker helped to build the handcarts to be used in Brigham Young's new plan to bring European immigrants to Utah at the lowest possible wst. The Rarnsay family left Iowa on June 11, 1856, with the first group of pioneers to make the 1,400-mile handcart trek to Utah. The D. D. McArthur company arrived in Salt Lake City on September 26.

Although they reached Utah before the snows that would trap the Martin and Willie companies that were following them, their journey was not without suffering and tragedy. Two Ramsay children were buried along the trail, one a newborn.

Ramsay remained in Salt Lake City until October 1872 when he was called by Brigham Young to move to Richfield to build houses and furniture for the settlers of the Sevier Valley. His own home, built during 1873-74, is not readily classified among the common architectural styles of the time. That the most prominent wood carver and turner in territorial Utah would want to display his exceptional skills in his own home rather than imitate a common style might be expected. The home is significant as an individual expression of design in both its general plan and decorative elements.

The two-story structure employs a Greek cross plan-a very unusual departure from the common rectangular and 'T" plans that prevailed in the 1870s and 80s in Utah. The cross (+) is formed by joining two gabled rectangles at right angles so that each of the four wings has its own gabled end. This arrangement permits the owner to use any of the four gabled sides as the front or street side of the home. The rich ornamental detailing Ramsay created for his home sets it apart (more)

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from other homes of the period. Outstanding features include fancy bargeboard and gable pendant on the front gable, intricately carved mantel piece and brackets in the living room, w e d foliated scroll brackets and egg and dart motif on the mantle and fireplace frame in the family room, uniquely designed and handcrafted stair railing and balusters, and a variety of furniture made by Rarnsay and preserved by the family. The second story was used as a workshop by the master carver, and in one room he stored the pine boxes of various sizes that he made for burials. His wife, the community's nurse, operated a pill and herb-remedy dispensary in a small room on the main floor.

Ramsay's work and influence are found all over the Mormon West. Much of the furniture in the homes of Brigham Young was made by him. Millionaire William Jennings hired him to create the elaborate woodwork found in Devereaux House. A large, ornate mantel was so prized by his wife Priscilla Jennings that she taok it with her when she moved. Some wood features such as the carved banister and newel post were crafted from the wood of wagon beds used by Jennings to freight goods to Utah.

Ramsay also did carving for the Salt Lake Theatre, the Beehive House, the Lion House, the Salt Lake Temple, and for the elaborate casing of the famous Tabernacle Organ. His carving of an ox was used as the pattern for baptismal fonts in several LDS temples. But his most visible and famous work was the eagle placed on top of the gated entrance to Brigharn Young's estate.

Patterned after an eagle killed in nearby City Creek Canyon by Truman Angell, it measured 11 feet fkom tip to tip. Ramsay often had to make his larger carvings from several pieces of wood (his favorite woods for carving in Utah were quaking aspen, red cedar, and black walnut). The eagle, for example, required five separate pieces of wood, one for the bird's body, one for the neck and head, two for the wings, and one for the small beehive on which the bird was mounted. A Utah landmark since its completion in 1859, Eagle Gate has been restructured several times to accommodate changing needs at the busy intersection of South Temple and State Street. After 30 years on its perch, Ramsay's eagle was sent to Chicago to be copper plated in 1889 and then replaced on the remodeled gate in 1891. The original caved wood eagle is now housed in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City, and a cast metal bird sits atop the famous Eagle Gate.

In the 1880s Rarnsay was called to St. Johns, Arizona, and in 1885 went with the first Mormon colonizing groups to Mexico. He died on January 25, 1905, in Snowflake, Arizona. His unique home in Richfield is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

See National Register nomination form in Preservation Office, Utah Division of State History, Salt Lake City; Robert S. Olpin, Dictionary of Utah Art (Salt Lake City, 1980).

THEHISTORY BLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

941211 (MBM)

THE HISTORY BLAZER I

ArElt'S OF LVAH'S PAST FROM THE

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Utah State Historical Society 300 Rio Grailde

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Many Mormon Immigrants Delayed Their Journey to Utah AT THE END OF HHR VOYAGE TO AMERICA, contemplating whether to continue to Utah or remain in Iowa for a season, Welsh pioneer Priscilla Merriman wrote: '[My husband was offere4 Ten Dollars a day to work at his trade of iron roller, but money was no inducement to us.. .." The Evans put together an 'oudit* (wagon, oxen, and supplies) and headed across the Plains. Priscilla justified this decision by writing, 'Many who stayed apostatized or died of Cholera." This sentiment was expressed in a number of pioneer journals. The result is a misconception that the Mormon immigration-both sea and plains crossing-was a uniform experience accomplished under uniform arrangements.

Actually the immigrants' paths were much more diverse. A study of 100 British Mormon women who immigrated between 1838 and 1888 reveals that only 54 percent 'went on" to Utah the year they arrived in America. The others tanied in the Midwest or eastern states for a year or longer before gathering to Zion.

Take Isabella Wade Allred's father. He initially turned down a railroad job from Jim Boyd, instead buying a modest oudit and starting his family to Utah. But a few weeks into the trek he changed his mind, accepting work as section foreman on the transcontinental railroad. AAer two years, having accumulated $3,000 for a more comfortable outfit, the family continued west.

Eliza Dorsey Ashworth and her husband tarried in St. Louis long enough for two more children to be born to them. After four years they still had not been able to go west, largely because of the expense of burying the two babies and caring for a crippled son. When they had fmally saved enough, Eliza was seven months pregnant again and her husband wanted to delay another year. This time Eliza said, 'No .... Maybe if we wait we will be unable to make the trip for many years."

Rachel Price's family was another that 'stopped in St. Louis to work and buy supplies."

When sever sunstroke disabled Mr. Price, even the couple's eight-year-old found work to help support the family. Finally Price was able to return to wal mining with his 12-year-old son working alongside him. In this way the family saved enough to cross the plains.

The Dunfords spent 10 years in St. Louis, Mr. Dunford working in a men's clothing store and serving as president of the area's LDS Conference. Martha Hughes Cannon (later a Utah state senator) lived in New York City from her fourth to sixth years, the family being unable to continue the journey west because of her father's ill health.

Mary Nixon Bate and her husband had temporarily settled their seven children in St. Louis when Mr. Bate took ill and died. Mary was overwhelmed with grief and despair: 'No friends, (more)

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relations, alone with 7 children, we did not know anything about making a living.. .." But she learned and within three years acquired a half-sized wagon plus team. Her wagonmaster taunted, 'What do you Londoners h o w of driving a team?" Mary retorted, 'My faith is that I can do it" and do it she did, leading her oxen by the reins all the way to Salt Lake Valley.

The father of Margaret Ballard was counseled by Mormon Apostle Franklin D. Richards not to go to Utah in 1856 with the Martin handcart company, for which 'we were afterwards very thaddbl.. .. There were many of [that] company who froze that year.. .." The Ballards went with a wagon company three years later.

Another family who declined to travel by handcart were the grandparents of LDS Church President David 0.McKay. Thomas Evans helped build carts for others but concluded 'he would not take the chance of subjecting his wife and family to undue hardships." They remained in Iowa until he could ouKit them in greater comfort.

Felicia Raynor Astle's father was explicitly counseled by a mission leader to find factory work in Philadelphia rather than go west the same season they arrived in America. Two years later they joined a wagon company west.

Pioneers who completed the immigration in one season seem to have had one of three advantages: the resources to pay cash for a good outfit, countrymen already established in Utah who would act as their patrons, or a husband's or father's leadership position which entitled the family to church assistance. Most others used the "pay-as-you-go" plan, making the journey in stages.

Sources: Rebecca Bartholomew, Audacious Women: Early British Monnon Immigrants (Salt Lake City: Signature

Books, 1995); Utah State Historical Society Library.

THE HISTORYBLAZERis produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a g m t from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone 533-3500.

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The Shining Mountains Held a Treasure Trove of Minerals

GOLDSEEKERS LIKE THE DONNERPARTYpassed right by the Oquirrh Mountains on their way to California. Ironically, they overlooked one of the richest mountain ranges in the world.

The Oquirrhs extend approximately thirty miles. The northern portion of the range reaches into the Great Salt Lake. The southern part ends in small hills northwest of Utah Lake.

Their location makes them one of the first of the Great Basin ranges to reflect the sunrise.

Noting this beauty, the Paiute Indians named the range the Oquirrhs (pronounced O-kers), meaning the 'Shining Mountains. " The 10,000-foot-high mountain peaks geologically speak of a violent beginning. The interaction of temperature and chemistry during the Mesozoic Era produced fifteen square miles of minerahtion, making it a deposit of extraordinary worth. Millions of years passed and weathering began to expose some of the ores. But when the pioneers entered Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they only saw the range's dark green forest and ruddy soil.

In August 1848 brothers Sanford and Thomas Bingham herded cattle and horses onto the high land around the mouth of the main canyon of the Oquirrhs. They tended stock there for two years, and they noticed the rich minerals in the mountains and reported their find to Brigham Young. The president of the Mormon church was not interested in mining. So the Bingham brothers returned to ranching in the mountains. Later they moved to Ogden. The legacy they left behind was their name, Bingham, on the canyon.

President Young was not opposed, however, to harvesting stands of timber on the Oquirrh mountainsides. Archibald Gardner built a saw mill in the south end of Salt Lake Valley in 1853.

The trees were cut and hauled from Bingham Canyon and milled on this site. It is claimed that some of the timber was used to build the Tabernacle on Temple Square.

In the 1860s the Civil War and national policy brought a contingent of military forces headed by Col. Patrick E. Connor into the Salt Lake Valley. He and his men constructed Camp Douglas upon benchlands between Emigration and Red Butte canyons. Later, with time on their hands, Colonel Connor encouraged his soldiers, many of them miners, to prospect the country.

The wealth of the Oquirrhs was soon discovered.

It took the linking of the Union and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory in 1869 to make mining profitable. At last the ores could be cheaply transported to refineries on either coast.

And it took the imagination of Enos A. Wall to see the value in copper.

Colonel Wall was a visionary who thought fortunes could be made mining the metal. He discovered and claimed many locations around the Oquirrhs. He tried to disguise his copper (more)

mining by furnishing waste material from his dumps for road construction. To mine on a profitable scale Wall needed capital investment. As he 'struggled to raise money the project languished.

The gifted metallurgist Daniel Cowan Jackling felt that Wall's porphyry copper deposit at He obtained necessary financial backing and then came up with the Bingham had great idea of using steam shovels to mine the ore so the ground could be worked in a series of terraces.

In 1909,as the area of the excavation increased, the open-pit system of mining became the established method for the Utah Copper Company.

Now, after nine decades of producing copper, the giant mine of Kennecott Copper is more than 2.5 miles across and .5 miles deep. This huge bite out of the Oquirrhs is visible from eastern areas of the Salt Lake and Utah valleys. Reportedly, the astronauts even observed it from space.

The Bingham copper pit is the largest man-made excavation on earth.

Today the denuded, scarred Oquirrhs "shine" best at night. They are trimmed with electrical lights. Pulsing beacons guide airplanes over the tops of the peaks. Homes sparkle from an Inky distance around the foothills. And up the sides of the mountain range Kennecott's worb look like glittering Tinker-Toys. e

See Lynn R. BaiJey, Old Reliable=A History of Bingham Canyon, Utah (Tucson: Westemlore Press, c. 1988); ?he

Valley of the Ieat Scrlt Luke, reprinted from Utah Historical Quarterly 27 (July 1959), 3d ed., 1967; Jack Goodman, "A View of the Mountains of the Valley," Utah Historical Quarterly 3 1 (Summer 1963, centennial mining issue).

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Elizabeth Randall Cumming and the Feminine West

hu ~m 1800s PROFESSIONU m E R m R S tagged behind military expeditions and sent back reports of their progress to eastern newspapers. Their letters were often colorful while showing little concern for journalistic accuracy. Among the camp followers were also civilians whose letters to family and friends were occasionally published in hometown papers. Some of these private correspondents were women, including Elizabeth Randall Cumming.

A great-granddaughter of Samuel Adams, Elizabeth married into a prominent Georgian family. Alfred Cumming had earned a reputation as a compassionate Augusta mayor, honest Army sutler, and fair Indian agent before he was appointed the first non-Mormon governor of Utah Temtory President James Buchanan had been told the Mormons were in rebellion against the government, so the U.S. Army's Fiftieth and Tenth Infantries, Second Dragoons, and Fourth Artillery were assigned to escort Cumming and other federal appointees to Utah. So it was that Elhbeth, 46 and childless, joined the Utah Expedition of 1857-58. Fifteen of her eighteen surviving letters tell of crossing the Great Plains by carriage, pony and wagon, and then spending the winter in tents in southwestern Wyoming. She called it the happiest and healthiest time of her life.

Her letters give insight into the conspiracy by some members of the expedition to defeat her husband's peace efforts. But they have another interesting facet. The taming of the West is portrayed in history and art as a masculine endeavor. In Elizabeth's letters we not only get a rare feminine view of the frontier but glimpse some of the women she encountered during her journey.

For instance, she wrote to her sister-in-law: 'There are two [other] ladies in the camp-one from the Fifty Infy...one in the Tenth Infy...as ladies, of course, we do not care to walk about in camp, unattended.. .[so] we see each other very little but send frequent & polite messages-books, some treasure of a couple of turnips & such like."

Elizabeth would prove tolerant of Mormon peculiarities, but her perceptions of Indian women reveal there were limits to her cultural understanding: 'We passed a tolerable night, & in the morning were surrounded by the most disagreeable looking Indian I have ever seen.. .. Two or three squaws were with the party, who looked idiotic, yet fierce & miserable.. .." While crossing the Weber River her party met another Indian group that she described with slightly greater appreciation: "An Indian squaw was nursing her child on the bank-the only pretty Indian baby I have seen-the only one which smiled."

While the anti-Mormon literature of the time claimed the transcontinental road east was (more)

.

crowded with disenchanted Mormons, factual references to female dissenters are rare. Elizabeth mentioned some: "I have had many callers today & have been obliged to see several Mormon women on business (there are some hundreds here now since Alfred declared peace)." This is a welcome backup to historian Orson Whitney's statement that 52 women responded to Governor Cumming's offer of a military escort out of Utah.

Elizabeth's Utah letters show a rare ability to separate personal antipathy to Mormon customs from her official role. 'The side [of Utah culture] that touches y~,"she wrote, was that the cities were clean, quiet, with few oaths heard and little public intoxication. Private Mormon mine," even though she felt such practices, she commented, were "their own business, practices resulted from ignorance and superstition. Perhaps most interesting is her recounting of conversations with pluml wives. Once her husband was judged to be fair, Elizabeth was invited into Mormon homes. She visited with Mary Ann Angell, Brigham Young's first living wife, two or three times a week, even being honored with a tea party attended by other wives. She was very impressed by the women's faith: 'The Mormon ladies talk a great deal about their religion. They live it. They feel it.. . They talk much of their happiness in having the only true gospel--of their past sufferings in Nauvoo, & during their exodus.. ." Even the numerous poor women, she said, preferred to suffer privation in Zion than plenty elsewhere.

Her fmal letter describes a memorable conversation with "a first wife who praised polygamy." Elizabeth asked, "If a woman loves her husband, how can she help suffering when me] takes another wife?" The Mormon lady answered that jealousy and confusion belonged 'only to m h l v love-& had better be quite laid aside, as useless & childish." Continued the lady, a first wife 'does suffer but her suffering is only for world.. .. We.. .gain another & a better by our self abnigation. " Her observant, intelligent, and objective reports ensure Elizabeth Cumming an enduring place among the most literate men and women of her time.

.

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Source: Ray R. Canning and Beverly Beeton, eds., The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumrning, 1857-1858 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1977).

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An Evening on the River with Major Powell, 1871 '1 STARTED OUT AT 9:00 WJTH hrlAJ. POWELL], Fred [Dellenbaugh], and Jack [Hillers], and went up Bear [Yarnpa] River for a couple of miles. We had a most delightful time, there being a bright moonlight and Venus just showing herself over the edge of a tall cliff. Now we came to a place where the rocks overhung the water and again we flitted by some beautiful green island. We bent and twisted here and there while every now and then we would hear some beaver slide off the bank into the river. The Maj. sang and recited poetry and said how Morris would have enjoyed such a ride, and I thought how much the folks at home would have enjoyed such a ride away out here in the very heart of a wilderness. There are 5 high buttes that rise up from the shore and one that looks for all the world like Brigham Young's 'Tabernacle' at Salt Lake City. After we had rowed up we floated down. 'Oh, but my soul was filled with joy.' We reached camp at 10:30 and after a smoke and talk we went to bed to dream of home." So wrote Clem Powell in his journal entry for June 26, 1871. Historian Charles Kelly prepared Clem's journal for publication and a brief biography of him, excerpted below.

Waltcr Clement (Clem)Powell was born January 31, 1850, perhaps in northern Kentucky, though the exact place of his birth is not known. His father was Walter Scott Powell, a brother of Reverend Joseph Powell, the father of Maj. John Wesley Powell; hence Clem was a first cousin to the Major. Both of his parents appear to have died before Clem reached the age of six. He and his sisters Minnie, Belle, Lily, and Ada, and brother Morris were given a home by Reverend Joseph and Mary Powell. Clem attended school in the elementary division of Illinois Institute, later known as Wheaton College.

Clem was selected by his cousin as assistant to E. 0.Beaman, official photographer of Powell's 1871-72 expedition, who made the first photographs of the Green and Colorado rivers through their canyons. Dry plates and film had not yet been perfected; photographs were made by the wet plate process, which necessitated carrying chemicals, developing trays, water, and a dark tent in which glass plates could be sensitized and developed on the spot. This equipment was packed in a box that Clem was required to carry wherever Beaman went with his camera. He frequently calls this box 'that infernal mountain howitzer," and since the Major often wanted pictures taken from great heights above the river, carrying the 'howitzer" became one of the most strenuous tasks required of any man in the party.

It was understood that Clem was to learn photography and would then become a permanent member of the Major's staff, accompanying his various expeditions to survey and map the unknown West. While the young man seems to have applied himself to this task, he never quite (more)

mastered the art, due perhaps in put to Beaman's opposition. When the expedition went through the Grand Canyon in 1872, he was still an assistant, Jack :-Iilers having replaced Beaman.

Clem's diaries of the Powell expedition consisted originally of four closely written pocket notebooks, but only the first, second, and fourth of these survive. Fortunately the three volumes cover all the river journey. The particular charm of this record lies in the fact that Clem Powell, an impressionable young man, was more interested in personalities than in geology, topography, or photography. Recording his thoughts exclusively for the eye of his brother, Moms, he wrote with unbounded spontaneity and no thought of future publicity. One may find more of the scientific side of the expedition's labors in other journals, but the human side, giving us our fullest understanding of the day-to-day joys and sorrows, achievements and frustrations, is nowhere so richly developed as in Clem's words.

See Charles Kelly's 'Walter Clement PoweIl(l850-2883)" d ''Journal of W. C. Powell "in ?he Expibration of the Colorado R i m and the High Plateaus of Utah in 1871-92, published as volumes 16 and 17 (1948-49) of Utah

Historical Quarter&.

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What Made the Mormon Landscape Unique?

WHAT DISTINGUISHED (OR AT LEAST USED TO)A MORMON VILLAGE frOm other westem towns? According to Richard Francaviglia in his book T%eMormon Lmdrcape, a primary element was domestic architecture-house design. In contrast to the smaller, hip-roofed, frame houses that dominated the rest of the West, large and sturdy brick houses were the traditional architecture of Mormon towns. The brick might be fned or adobe, red or yellow, but the floor plan was almost uniformly symmetric, of the central-hall type called the Nauvoo style. They were Old Worldly in feel and usually boasted a gabled room with chimney at either end. Many also sported two front doors-seen by some obsuvers as a sign of polygamists, although Francaviglia states that double doors were common in the East during the mid-1800s.

Even smaller Mormon pioneer houses had this strong if simple English appearance because of neo-Grecian cornices making heavy roof lines. It was not until about 1900 that Victorian-style houses began to be built by wealthier families. These homes had more complex floor plans, hipped roofs, and ornate bay windows, cornices, and porches.

Another uniquely Mormon town feature is the strict north-south grid with the LDS chapel as the focal point, the unusually wide streets (as much as 88 feet), and city blocks divided into four lots of about an acre each with a house on each comer. While many lots were later subdivided and the wide road shoulders left unused, many rural Utah towns retain a wide open feel. Dominating this spaciousness is the LDS chapel. Pioneer chapels were often sited in the central public square, appropriate to their function as the secular and religious focus of the community. Those built since 1950 almost uniformly boast rambling wings and tall steeples but no crosses or other conventional religious symbols. Buildings of other denominations are seldom seen. In some towns a separate Relief sdety' hall or bishop's storehouse remains from pioneer days.

'One more unpainted, crooked element in an already cluttered landscape" is how Francaviglia describes Mormon fences. Because the one-acre city lots were mini-farms with many uses, much fencing was needed-fences often built out of a medley of whatever materials and woods were available, including cedar, juniper, and even wagon wheels.

A few decades ago piped and pressurized imgation systems replaced pioneer irrigation systems. Now even the empty ditches are disappearing as culinary and sewer upgrades require excavation and fill. But the ditches were once omnipresent, flowing along every street and byway, with diversion gates that directed a main stream into private orchard, garden, or pasture.

Guillotine-like headgates controlled the larger channels. All were once a source of endless recreation for children. The ditches furnished the lifeblood to settlements entirely dependent on (more)

mountain snowpack for s u ~ v a l .

Poplar planting was so widespread in early Utah that the ubiquitous olive green trees still line irrigation ponds and canals. Along with steeples, the poplars direct the eye toward heaven, helping to form the baiic horiu,ntaVvertical composition of a Mormon landscape.

Francaviglia lists other elements of the Mormon townscape: the simple rectangular barn with pitched roof and adjoining shed on one or both sides; open hay barns, 'usually the most dilapidated structu~in the farmyard"-leaning at a slight angle or even propped up by hay; weathered granaries; innercity corrals and woodpiles; the distinctive Mormon hay demck; the protective barrier of mountains behind almost every Utah town.

Those weed-ridden road shoulders, unpainted barns, and rustic fences create a genteel shabbiness that sometimes inspires beau tifiation wmrnittees to urge residents to mow their weeds and paint their houses and fences. Other Utahns-including many an artist-hope the villages will never change. But Utah's rural landscape changing, as new brick rectangles replace the adobe houses. In time it will be gone except for those buildings preserved by a few loving keqxrs.

Source: Richard V. Francaviglia, Il.te Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a Unique Image in the American West (New Yo& AMS Press, 1978).

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Charles L. Walker, the Poet Laureate of Southern Utah

BORNNOVEMBER 17, 1832, XN STAFFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND, Charles Lowell Walker was destined to become one of Mormonism's great diarists and to be called by the settlers of St. George the poet laureate of Dixie. His family had wnverted to Mormonism in Manchester, and at age 17 Charles left England for America, following the example of his older sister AM Agatha.

Charles and a friend arrived in St. Louis in 1849. His parents and another sister came the following year.

In 1855 Charles came to Utah, working as a teamster for his passage. As a member of the Sixth Ward in Salt Lake City, he was active in church callings, sang in a choir, played in a brass band, and began to write verse. He had begun to keep a journal in St. Louis in 1854.

Called to the Cotton Mission in 1862, Charles settled in the 'barren looking place" that became St. George. He became a strong force for good in the community, devoting much of his energy to 'ministering to the poor, the sick, and the lonely. " He also entertained the people with his talents as an actor, musician, and poet. He died on January 11, 1904.

His journals and poems recorded the events of his time, including Utah's long struggle to achieve statehood, the crusade of federal marshals to arrest polygamists (Walker himself was captured in August 1892, taken to Beaver for his trial, and fined six cents), an appreciation for nature and the Dixie settlers' struggles with its extreme rampages, and his own spiritual journey. A popular song of his, 'St. George and the Dragon," written in the late 1860s, was sung on many occasions by Walker and others.

ST. GEORGEAND THE DRAGON Oh, what a desert place was this When fvst the Mormons found it; They said no white men here wuld live And Indians prowled around it.

They said the land it was no good.

And the water was no gooder, And the bare idea of living here, Was enough to make men shudder.

Chorus (more)

Mesquite, soap root, prickly-pears and briars, St. George ere long will be a place That every one"admires.

N o w green lucerne in verdant spots Bedecks our thriving city, Whilst vines and fruit trees grace our lots, With flowers sweet and pretty.

Where once the grass in single blades Grew a mile apart in distance, And it kept the crickets on the go, To pick up their subsistence.

Chorus The sun it is so scorching hot, It makes the water siz, Sir. The reason why it is so hot, Is just because it is, Sir. The wind like fury here does blow, That when we plant or sow, Sir, We place one foot upon the seed, And hold it till it grows, Sir. See A. Karl Larson and Katherine Miles Larson, eds., Diary of Charles Lowell Walker, 2 vols. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1980); Allan Kent Powell, ed., Utah History Encyclopedia (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994); "Song, 'St. George and the Dragon,'" Utah Historical Quarter& 19 (1961).

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An Echo in the Canyon HENRY AUGUSTUS SQUIRES RAN FROM WAGON TO WAGON, tent to kilt, trying to find a pin

to fasten clothing around his newborn daughter. Like every new father he was excited, but unlike most new fathers he was also desperate. And although births were common along the immigrant trail to Utah, this birth was anything but normal. Snow lay deep upon the ground; the air was frigid. The approximately 400 immigrants in camp lay in various stages of starvation and with frozen limbs and exhausted bodies. They were being cared for by their rescuers, a large group of men who had risked their lives, wagons, and teams to save them when they had become stranded in Wyoming snowstorms. For several weeks they had inched their way west and had at last been able to make it to the head of Echo Canyon, leaving over 150 in graves along the trail. But new life had demanded entrance onto this bleak scene. It was the early morning of November 27, 1856, when Echo Squires was born.

With high hopes the Squires family, consisting of Henry, Sarah, and their five young daughters, the oldest only eight years old, had left London, England, in May 1856. Sarah was pregnant with another child they hoped would be born after they arrived in Salt Lake Valley. At Liverpool they had boarded the ship Horizon and after five weeks at sea landed in Boston. With more than 800 other Mormon immigrants, the Squires family herded their little daughters onto the train for the journey to Iowa City where they would be outfitted for the trail.

This being the first year for the Mormon handcart experiment, the family was given a twowheeled cart that Henry would pull with his wife's help instead of purchasing a wagon and oxen.

The youngest children would ride, but the three oldest would have to walk. After much delay, the Martin handcart company, with which the Squires family was traveling, left from the campground to cross Iowa. Approximately a month later, they reached Florence, Nebraska, where they were resupplied. The immigrants considered staying in eastern Nebraska but rejected the idea in their enthusiasm to reach Utah that year. Though it was now dangerously late in the season, they voted eagerly to go on, not understanding the hazards ahead-the long distance, the climate in the mountains, the fatigue, and the insufficient supplies. They could not have envisioned the horrors of being caught in an early and severe winter. Day by day the journey took its toll on the men and women who pulled the carts. Sarah would undoubtedly have become progressively more drained by the child growing within her, and Henry would have begun to wear out with ovenvork.

In eastern Wyoming, Captain Martin realized that their food would run out long before Utah was reached. Therefore, the rations were cut. Daily the people became weaker, and it was necessary to lighten the carts to keep moving. Clothing, bedding, and anything heavy or (more)

nonessential was discarded. Food rations were reduced to almost nothing. On they plodded, until the last crossing of the North Platte was reached in mid-October. As sleet fell on them, they waded the frigid river. Barely had the company crossed, when the snowstorm hit. During the next few days they made only a few miles, and then had to give up. In camp at Red Buttes they waited for help or death.

Many died during the next several days before word was received that there was relief at Devil's Gate. The people forced themselves fonvard. Reaching Devil's Gate they found relief wagons from Utah, but there were so few for so many. The weather was too severe to move.

Using the bedding, bits of clothing, and scant supplies received from the rescue wagons, the people waited in Martin's Cove for several more days, the camp a scene of death and suffering.

Sarah, the expectant mother, became snowblind. On November 9 they at last pushed westward, leaving many carts behind. Sarah had to be led by the hand. A few days later they met more relief wagons, and by the time they reached South Pass enough wagons had arrived so that all the handcart immigrants could ride; the last carts were abandoned. The Squires family probably huddled together in one of the Utah wagons. Each night the blind mother would pray with her family and sing hymns to keep up their spirits.

At last on the night of November 26 they reached Echo Canyon. Camp was made in a small side canyon running into the main canyon from the north. The baby would wait no longer.

Henry used a frying pan to scrape away the snow so a tent could be pitched for his wife. Bedding was laid and during that bitterly cold night another daughter was added to the family. They named her Echo in honor of the place of her birth. In light of the circumstances, mother and baby did remarlably well. There was no clothing to wrap the tiny infant in, but one of the men of the rescue team took off his wool flannel undershirt and offered it for the baby's use. Most likely the father never did find a pin in that destitute camp; nevertheless Echo was wrapped securely. Three days later, after fighting their way through the snow-clogged Wasatch Mountains, on Sunday, November 30, 1856, a relieved father, a happy mother, five cold and hungry little girls, and tiny Echo reached Salt Lake City and were at last in their desired home.

Sources: "Echo Squires Kirkham DeLee: A Short Sketch of the Life of Our Mother," ca. 1938 by her seven children, typescript in LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City; LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Handcans to Zion (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1960); William V. Haight, "Biographical Sketch," in Joel E. Ricks Collection, MS 8237, item 49, LDS Church Archives; John Jaques, "Some Reminiscences," Salt Lake Daily Herald, December 22, 1878; Patience Loader, "Recollections of the Past," typescript, Harold B. Lee Library Special Collections and Archives, Brigham Young University, Provo.

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Trading with the Nevada Mining Camps

THERICH ORES OF PIOCHE, NEVADA, WEREDISCOVEREDas early 1864,but the camp developed rather slowly at first. About 1870 a Frenchman named F. L. A. Pioche came in and began development in earnest. The camp was named for him. Soon two other men, William Raymond and John Ely, began working the Raymond-Ely section of the camp. Outlaws, gamblers, saloon men, claim jumpers, and bad men and wild women of every kind swarmed in, and Pioche soon became the wildest, bloodiest, most lawless camp in the whole West-rivaling even Tombstone, Arizona. Murders were almost weekly occurrences, and it was a dull week when there were no killings. Most occurred in the saloons and gambling dens. Reportedly, there were 72 killings before there was one natural death.

Pioche was the hungriest camp within the range of southern Utah, and peddlers from Millard, Beaver, Iron, and Washington counties went there. Usually they did well in spite of the risk The Nevada mining camps were the market places for about all the surplus commodities produced by southern Utah farmers. Taking hay, grain, flour, hams, bacon, poultry, young pigs, lumber, shingles, mine timbers, butter, cheese, and many other things to supply Pioche, Bullionville, and other camps, peddlers were on the road almost constantly. Utah producers appreciated having such a good cash market for their commodities. Loads of lumber, shingles, and mine timbers were bought outright by mine companies and lumber dealers. Most other commodities were sold door-to-door. Peddlers who were honest in their dealings and carried good grade merchandise had little difficulty in selling out their loads.

Established stores in Pioche suffered a loss of business to the produce peddlers. The merchants thought they had a right to a wmmission on all goods sold by outsiders in their temtory. The wmmission idea was not accepted by the Utah peddlers, but they made a wmpromise proposal. They proposed to sell their loads on a wholesale basis to the stores. If they wuld unload in one place it would save a day or two of time on each trip and the unpleasant task of house-to-house canvassing. For a time, as long as dealer and peddler dealt fairly with each other, the system benefited both.

But a time came when the Pioche stores began to squeeze the peddlers. The produce, of course, was not of uniform quality nor had it ever been, and this was used to beat down prices.

Also, the dealers became 'choosey" and instead of buying out the entire load as they had agreed, they would take only what they wanted. Some Utahns tried to beat the dealers' 'racket" by returning to door-to-door peddling, but it proved hazardous. The unscrupulous dealers set up a 'goonn squad, and somewhere out in the woods on his way home the peddler would turn the point (more)

of a hill and find himself looking down the barrel of a gun in the hands of a highway robber.

Under such circumstances it was healthier to give up his money than fight for it. So the Utah fanners were forced to freight their produce to the mining camps and take the best prices the dealers would pay Prices dropped to two cents a pound for grain-about one-half or one-third of what they should have been.

Brigham Young spent the winter of 1873-74 in St. George and learned firsthand about these conditions. Times were hard, for the Panic of the 1870s was at its worst in Utah. There had also been heavy crop losses from frosts and insect pests, and the people were very discouraged. Young saw that in the final analysis the mining camps were almost wholly dependent upon the Mormon settlements for a large part of their necessities. There were no other feasible suppliers. Young said, "This is a two-edged sword the mining camps are swinging against us. They are as dependent upon us as we are upon them. We will make the sword cut the other way until they recognize that their game can be played by our side too." He organized the southern settlements into United Orders and told the people to stop hauling their produce to the mining camps for awhile and see what happened. Then he appointed an agent in every town to deal with the camps when they came to Utah to buy, as he knew they must do sooner or later. He also suggested the prices they should ask.

When the Mormon peddlers stayed home, conditions soon became desperate in Pioche, with no hay, grain, dairy, or poultry products to be had. The dealers were forced to come to Utah and contract at Mormon prices for the produce they must have. They were glad to contract on a delivered basis at four to six cents a pound for the grain they had extorted from the peddlers at two cents a pound. The grain was paid for, freight included, in advance. The Mormon freighters delivered the goods, and, since they carried no money, the holdups stopped.

Source: William R. Palmer, 'Early-day Trading with the Nevada Mining Camps," Utah Historical Quanerly 26 (1958).

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The Sego Lily, Utah's State Flower

THESEGOLILY IS A SACRED P U N T in Native American legend. Sego is a Shoshonean word thought to mean 'edible bulb." The flower thrives in desert-like conditions. It blooms in May and June. There are about seven variations of the plant in Utah. The white flower species displays three large, waxy petals. Each petal, on the inner surface, shows a distinctive crescentshaped, purplish marking with a fringe of bright yellow hairs. The plant's leaves, withered by flowering time, appear grass-like and sparse.

The pioneers of 1848-49 ate the sego lily bulb to help ward off starvation. Some bulbs were as large as walnuts, but most were the size of marbles. The bulbs were best fresh-cooked because they turned thick and ropey when cool.

By the 1880s those early settlers who had eaten the bulb felt it set them apart from newcomers to the Salt Lake Valley. The old-timers thought that to have suffered through the hard times of the early Utah colonizing showed their tenacity and righteousness. For those pioneers it became a badge of virtue to have been a 'bulb eater."

On March 18, 1911, the Utah State Legislature designated the sego lily as the state flower.

Early in 1913 the LDS General Relief Society Board chose it as their official emblem. During the First World War the flower became a symbol of peace. Karl E. Fordham's poem "Sego Lily" portrayed the plant as an image of home, mercy, freedom, and peace for the men and women of Utah who were serving on the battlefields of Europe.

Few Utahns today have eaten a sego lily bulb. Instead, people harvest the flower by taking pictures of it in its harsh, Utah desert setting. Others just look at the flowers and store memories of the sego..lily's beauty of springtime blossoms. Today, the delicate bloom nourishes the senses and the 61.11.

Sources: Brian Q. Cannon, "The Sego Lily, Utah's State Flower," Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (1995);Hayle Buchanan, WildJIowmof Southwestm Utah: A Field Guide to Bryce Canyon, Ccdar Breaks, and Surrounding Plant Cinnrnunitie (c. 1992).

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