Comments on "San Juan: A Hundred Years of Cattle, Sheep, and Dry Farms' 95
Hardy Redd
Chas Peterson has done a delightful job collecting information, putting it together, and interpreting the result. I agree with almost all he says. I am particularly delighted by such expressions of his as "a few like Harv Williams became Mormons, and more located in Moab or in neighboring Colorado towns where most of them became the relaxed channels through which Texas and Mormon customs evolved." As a preface to my comments, I would like to relate what Chas has said about San Juan County in another essay, "Cowboys and Cattle Trails," published in 1979 in a companion volume to this book, Emery County: Reflections on its Past and Future. In comparing Emery, Grand, and San Juan counties, Chas writes: The village and cooperative pattern of settlement gave a distinct Mormon flavor to the San Juan area. The character of the Moab, La Sal, and Castleton district was more consistent with the general frontier. It was not that Grand County was without Mormons. Indeed, people who affiliated in some way with the church constituted a majority of its population. But taken with the other settlers they did not add up to a Mormon community the way the San Juan Mission did. With few exceptions Grand County Mormons had come unbidden, prompted by their own ideas of opportunity rather than by the mission call by which Mormon colonizing was so often carried out.
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