—Back Cover: Juanita Brooks and son, undated. University of Utah Marriott Library, Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks Photograph Collection, 1928–1981, MSS C103
SUMMER 2022 I VOLUME 90 I NUMBER 3
—Front Cover: Mabel Pearl Frazer, Sunrise, North Rim Grand Canyon (1928), oil on canvas. Springville Museum of Art IN THIS ISSUE
History, Memory, and the Murder of Olivia Coombs
U of U Sexual Misconduct Case, 1937
Plat of Zion and Urban Development
Place Names and Photography
UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Utah Historical Quarterly (UHQ) is Utah’s journal of record, published quarterly on behalf of the Utah State Historical Society since 1928. The UHQ’s mission, from its earliest issues to the present, is to publish articles on all aspects of Utah history, as well as to present Utah in the larger context of the West. Even as UHQ continues its commitment to themes traditionally associated with Utah history, it challenges readers and authors to think across state lines to the forces of history, physiography, and culture that link Utah to a host of people, places, experiences, and trends beyond its geopolitical boundaries. UHQ seeks a regional approach, reflecting Utah’s geographic and cultural position at the crossroads of the West.
UHQ’s editorial style emphasizes scholarly credibility and accessible language. Manuscripts dealing with any aspect of Utah history will be considered. Submissions based on allied disciplines—such as archaeology, folklore, or ethnography—are also encouraged, so long as the focus is on the past.
For submission and style guidelines visit history.utah.gov/utah-historical-quarterly.
Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.
UHQ welcomes letters to the editor. Letters are published occasionally and online. We reserve the right to restrict word count and edit content.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Holly George — Co-Editor
Jedediah S. Rogers — Co-Editor
ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS
Rebecca Andersen, Logan
Brian Q. Cannon, Provo
Jennifer Macias, Salt Lake City
Kathryn L. MacKay, Ogden
Jeffrey D. Nichols, Mountain Green
Clint Pumphrey, Logan
John Sillito, Ogden
Stephanie Fuglaar Statz, Tooele
James R. Swensen, Millcreek
In 1897, public-spirited Utahns organized the Utah State Historical Society in order to expand public understanding of Utah’s past.
Today, the Utah Division of State History administers the Society and, as part of its statutory obligations, publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0 042-143X; eISSN 2642-8652), which has collected and preserved Utah’s history since 1928. The Division, which is part of the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts, also collects materials related to the history of Utah and makes them available online and in a research library; assists communities, agencies, building owners, and consultants with state and federal processes regarding archaeological and historical resources; administers the ancient human remains program; administers the Utah History Day program; offers extensive online resources; and assists in public policy and the promotion of Utah’s rich history.
UHQ is published quarterly in winter, spring, summer, and fall by the University of Illinois Press for the Utah State Historical Society. Members of the Society receive UHQ upon payment of annual dues: individual, $30; student and senior (age 65 or older), $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100. Visit history.utah. gov/become-a-member to join the Utah State Historical Society and receive your own copy of the journal. Institutional subscriptions are $40 for online only, $75 for print only, or $90 for both. To subscribe, see https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/uhq/subscription.html.
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POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.
For institutional subscribers, changes of mailing or email address, requests for back issues, or other business queries should be directed to University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak St., Champaign, IL, 61820; journals@uillinois.edu or by phone to 217-244-0626. Society members should direct changes of mailing or email addresses to Lisa Buckmiller, Utah State Historical Society 300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, UT 84101; lbuckmiller@utah.gov; or 801-245-7231.
UTAH DIVISION OF STATE HISTORY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
BOARD OF STATE HISTORY
Molly Cannon, Logan, Chair
Tara Beresh, Moab
John B. D’Arcy, Salt Lake City
Ken Gallacher, Riverton
Ignacio Garcia, Salt Lake City
Spencer Hall, Salt Lake City
David Rich Lewis, Logan
Margaret H. Olson, Park City
David Scott Richardson, Salt Lake City
ADMINISTRATION
Jennifer Ortiz, Director
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS
Leonard J. Arrington (1917–1999)
Will Bagley (1950–2021)
David L. Bigler (1927–2018)
Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981)
Juanita Brooks (1898–1989)
Olive W. Burt (1894–1981)
Eugene E. Campbell (1915–1986)
Everett L. Cooley (1917–2006)
C. Gregory Crampton (1911–1995)
S. George Ellsworth (1916–1997)
Austin E. Fife (1909–1986)
LeRoy R. Hafen (1893–1985)
A. Karl Larson (1899–1983)
B. Carmon Hardy (1934-2016)
Gustive O. Larson (1897–1983)
Brigham D. Madsen (1914–2010)
Dean L. May (1938–2003)
David E. Miller (1909–1978)
Dale L. Morgan (1914–1971)
William Mulder (1915–2008)
Floyd A. O’Neil (1927–2018)
Helen Z. Papanikolas (1917–2004)
Charles S. Peterson (1927–2017)
Melvin T. Smith (1928–2020)
Wallace E. Stegner (1909–1993)
William A. Wilson (1933-2016)
Thomas G. Alexander
James B. Allen
Maureen Ursenbach Beecher
Jessie L. Embry
Martha Bradley-Evans
Max J. Evans
Peter L. Goss
Michael W. Homer
Joel Janetski
Jeffery Ogden Johnson
Edward Leo Lyman
William P. MacKinnon
Carol Cornwall Madsen
Wilson Martin
Robert S. McPherson
Philip F. Notarianni
Allan Kent Powell
W. Paul Reeve
Richard W. Sadler
Gary L. Shumway
John Sillito
Gregory C. Thompson
Gary Topping
HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS
Kenneth L. Alford
Jill Mulvay Derr
Craig Fuller
Marlin K. Jensen
Stanford J. Layton
William P. MacKinnon
John S. McCormick
F. Ross Peterson
Linda Thatcher
Gary Topping
Richard E. Turley Jr.
Outside the Denver and Rio Grande Depot, 1910. Utah State Historical Society
180 Juanita Brooks’s Footnote History, Memory, and the Murder of Olivia Coombs By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
196 “Sure a Strong Devil” Mabel Frazer, A. B. Wright, and the University of Utah Art Department’s 1937 Sexual Misconduct Case By Emily Larsen and Heather Belnap
215 The Plat of Zion and Urban Development in Salt Lake City By Brenda Case Scheer
228 The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion Utah, Photography, and Daniel George’s Series God to Go West By James R. Swensen
DEPARTMENTS
179 In This Issue
245 Reviews
254 Notices
255 Contributors
256 Utah In Focus
REVIEWS
245 Frank J. Cannon
Saint, Senator, and Scoundrel By Val Holley
Reviewed by Kenneth Cannon
247 Utah and the American Civil War
The Written Record
Edited by Kenneth L. Alford
Reviewed by David Prior
248 Salt Lake School of the Prophets, 1867-1883
Edited by Devery S. Anderson
Reviewed by Chad Orton
249 Hayden’s Landscapes Revisited
The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey By Thomas P. Huber
Reviewed by Cassandra Mills
251 Alone on the Colorado By Harold H. Leich
Reviewed by Kaela Gardner
252 Singaway
Working and Playing for the National Parks, 1923–1972 By Ryan Paul and Janet Seegmiller
Reviewed by Nathan N. Waite
NOTICES
254 Ogden
The Charles Maccarthy Photographs By Sarah Langsdon
254 Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West
First in Line for the Rio Grande By David Stiller
254 The Grand Teton Reader
Edited by Robert W. Righter
In This Issue
In the opening essay of this edition of Utah Historical Quarterly, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich casts a critical eye on the memories handed down about the 1862 murder of Olivia Coombs in Beaver, Utah. Rather than dwell on the man who committed the crime, George Wood, Ulrich seeks to understand the episode through historical fragments and family stories. What emerges is a portrait of not only Olivia but also of her descendants, who struggled to remember and tell the unspeakable tale. Opening with Juanita Brooks’s brief if incomplete reference to the murder in The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950), Ulrich masterfully interrogates snippets of tangled family lore and relationships, the connection between memory and storyteller, and the circumstances that motivate the retelling of stories such as the Coombs murder.
The second essay introduces readers to Mabel Frazer and a sexual misconduct case directed against her male colleague in the University of Utah’s Art Department. Based on information that her own students had confided in her, Mabel Frazer approached university president George Thomas in 1937 with claims that A. B. Wright had engaged in improper sexual conduct toward women students. Emily Larsen and Heather Belnap carefully walk readers through the context and contours of the claims, including the gender power dynamics that then privileged—and continue to privilege—Wright’s version of events over Frazer’s. The authors also document the negative repercussions that
Frazer faced after filing the complaint with the university president.
A caution to readers that these two articles may contain content disturbing to some readers— the first for depictions of murder, in this case of a sexual nature, and the second for descriptions of sexual misconduct and reproductions of nude artwork.
The next two essays make varying associations between history and place. Brenda Scheer, a scholar of urban design and planning, contributes to the ongoing conversation in the pages of this journal about the configuration of Salt Lake City. Rather than look solely at the design and original layout, Scheer introduces readers to on-the-ground alterations within the city center. Based on the methods of urban morphology, which look at the elements of urban form and their changes over time, this piece provides compelling insights into what may be seen as disjuncture between original design and practical adaptations in Utah’s capital city.
In a somewhat like manner, James Swensen reflects on whether place names—in this case, biblical and LDS religious names—conformed to the realities and character of their associated towns or landforms. Swensen’s subject is Daniel George’s photographic documentary series God to Go West. Through the marriage of names, landscapes, and history, with Swensen as guide, readers will come away with deeply incised impressions of the “Mormon Landscape.”
Caroline and Jonathan Crosby, with their son Alma and niece Ann Louisa, from a damaged tintype. USU Special Collections, Pratt Family Photograph Collection, 1799–1900, USU_P0280, box 2.
Juanita Brooks’s Footnote: History, Memory, and the Murder of Olivia Coombs
BY LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH
This is a story about a long-forgotten murder, but it is not a whodunit. George Wood admitted that he killed Olivia Coombs.1 He did it in an old house in Cedar City, Utah, on July 28, 1862. At trial he pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. That might have been the end of the story. But less than three years later, Utah’s governor, responding to a petition signed by two hundred of the territory’s male citizens, granted Wood a full and complete pardon. Wood returned to his previous life as a pioneering ironworker, farmer, and merchant. He died in Cedar City in 1908 at the age of eighty-five. Today his log cabin, memorialized in 1928 by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, holds a place of honor in Cedar City’s Frontier Homestead State Park as the “fifth oldest structure still standing in Utah.”2
For Olivia Coombs there was no such redemption. The daughters she brought with her to Utah in 1858 grew up in the homes of strangers, their memories of their mother surviving only in the rippled recollections of their descendants. In 1926, one of those descendants, Olive Branch Millburn, composed a sketch of her mother’s life that offered basic information about her grandmother without saying anything at all about the murder.3
Twenty years later, Millburn gave a very different story to Juanita Brooks, who included it in a footnote to The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Millburn said her grandmother had been murdered because she had been too curious about the massacre.
She had come to Cedar City, a widow with two small daughters, and set up a school there. She acted too interested in this incident, asked too many questions about it. Word went out that she was collecting evidence and planned to publish her findings. At a small hotel next door, men gathered to visit and drink. One morning she was being discussed there as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending to teach their children while she tried to fasten crimes on their parents. In the crowd was George Wood.
Juanita Brooks and son, undated. University of Utah Marriott Library, Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks
He had been drinking, and became much excited by the talk. When someone suggested that his son was interested in her thirteen-year-old daughter, he stalked out, went to the door of the house adjoining, opened it, and shot the mother twice before the crowd realized what had happened.
Brooks presented Millburn’s story as one of “many legends” that had come down from the period immediately after the killings at Mountain Meadows. She wrote that “though Wood was cut off from the church he was never brought to civil trial.”4
When William Rees Palmer, a respected local historian, criticized her for failing to mention that Wood had been tried and pardoned, Brooks apologized: “The Wood story I gave just as it was told to me. This I should not have done. I should at least have looked up the court case and trial.” She corrected her error in the second edition, citing the brief account she had found in state records.5 She did not elaborate. Nor did anyone else pick up on the story. There was little incentive to do so. In this era, men like Palmer urged people to emphasize “the greater, better side” of their ancestors’ lives, a practice Palmer followed in a 1943 radio address on the life of George Wood that led with testimonials from men who remembered Wood’s kindness and generosity to the poor. Palmer did not mention the murder. Nor did Millburn’s younger sister Irene Keller in a family sketch published in 1960.6
Forty years later, a revival of interest in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, stimulated in part by the activism of massacre descendants, facilitated the rediscovery of Olivia Coombs’s story. In 2002 Clayton J. Wray, a Coombs’s descendant who had grown-up in California with little knowledge of his Utah ancestors, logged onto an online forum for Mountain Meadows Massacre descendants. Bolstered by the authority of Brooks’s footnote, he identified himself as the great-great-grandson of a person killed in “the second murder in Iron County.”7 In 2012, genealogist Richard H. Bullock published an online history of the Coombs family that included transcriptions of newly available documents about the murder as well as an array of Coombs family legends. Although he had
been unable to find any direct link between Coombs and the massacre, he was certain that both stories affirmed the willingness of church leaders to cover-up crime. Participants in popular genealogical websites soon took notice. Using Bullock’s account, they memorialized Olivia Coombs as a brilliant teacher and devoted mother, excoriated Wood as her murderer, and denounced his pardon as a “travesty of justice.”8
I knew none of this when I encountered references to Olivia Coombs in the diary of Caroline Barnes Crosby during a period in the 1850s when she and the Coombs family were in San Bernardino, California. In A House Full of Females, published in 2017, I devoted a page and a half to a brief episode involving Olivia.9 Shortly before publication, I came across stories about the murder. Although I was intrigued by the story, it was not central to my project so I set it aside for another day. That day came when I was invited to deliver the Juanita Brooks Lecture at Dixie State University in 2021.
This article is a revised version of my lecture. It begins with an account of the murder based on sources unavailable to Juanita Brooks at the time she was writing her book. I then set the portrayal of Coombs in those sources alongside what I learned from a fuller exploration of Crosby’s diary. Finally, I return to Brooks’s footnote, not just to reassess Millburn’s claims but to learn more about the context in which she told her story.
History is always a dialogue between present and past, between the assumptions and experiences historians bring to their projects and the documents they are able to discover. Juanita Brooks was a consummate detective who not only listened to the whispered legends of her region’s old-timers but trekked up and down the Great Basin looking for letters and diaries to verify or challenge their stories. She also banged on the doors of resistant archives, including those held by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to which she belonged. There is no evidence that she ever read Caroline Crosby’s diary, which was still in private hands, but I think she would have appreciated its woman’s-eye view of an unsettled world.
The Confession, Trial, and Pardon of George Wood
Historical records affirm two elements in Millburn’s account of her grandmother’s murder— that she was a newcomer to Cedar City in 1862 and that she was the mother of daughters. In 1862, those daughters were Olive, 6, Elvira, 7, Arabella, 10, and Emily who, contrary to Millburn’s recollection, was 16. Two other children, Charles Marion, 22, and Helen, 20, lived in California. Olivia was 44 years old in 1862. There is no evidence that she came to Cedar City to set up a school.10
Nine days after the murder, Cedar City’s bishop, Henry Lunt, wrote Brigham Young that on the morning of July 28, 1862, George Wood’s daughter came to his house to say her father wanted to see him. Thinking there was sickness in the family, Lunt hastened to Wood’s house, where he was joined by his counselor, Isaac Haight. Wood told them “that his son Joseph and a certain girl down in the Old Fort had committed adultery, and that the girl had seduced Joseph. He said that he had been told that morning by two women who . . . saw them in the very act.” When Lunt urged him to calm down, telling him there was safety in counsel, he retorted, “I don’t ask for any counsel, neither am I going to take any. My mind is made up what to do.” He then stormed out of the room and, before they realized he wasn’t coming back, mounted his horse and took off in the direction of “the Fort.”11
Because Wood was on horseback and Lunt and Haight on foot, their effort to catch up failed. They soon saw him approaching from the opposite direction. “Bishop,” Wood said, “I have killed two women and I want you to see that they are buried.” He added, “by the eternal Gods anyone who interferes with my family again, I will serve them in the same way.” A small crowd had gathered around the house of Ezra Higby by the time Lunt and his companion reached the site. Olivia Coombs, the woman they knew as Higby’s wife, was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Emily, who had apparently attempted to flee after surviving a shot, had been beaten.12
Lunt told Young that a bullet had entered Olivia’s “right thigh, about mid-way between her knee and hip, passing in the direction of her
body, coming out of the groin and immediately entering the body just above the pubic bone in the region of the bladder.” He added that she had “two frightful wounds on her head, fracturing the skull in one place, caused by blows from the pistol. The daughter, a girl about 16, had a bullet wound in her right thigh and four dangerous wounds on her head.”13 The direction of the shots affirmed the sexual nature of Wood’s charges against his two victims. Apparently after his pistol had jammed he had attempted to finished the job with the butt of his gun.
Lunt also summarized what he had learned about Olivia’s history. He told Young that she was a sister to Theodore Curtis, a man well known for his missionary service. Referring to her as “Mrs Higby,” he then summarized her marital history.
She was formerly the wife of a man named Coombs and they came from California in 1858. She was again married to Solomon Chamberlane but lived with him a short time; she afterwards moved from Beaver to Santa Clara and was there married to Thomas Hunt, who I believe is now in Salt Lake City. This last spring she married again to Ezra Higby who is now in this place attending Bro. E. Snow’s carding machine.14
Young probably didn’t need further details to grasp the implications of that list. Lunt concluded with the improbable claim “that all is in a prosperous condition, both spiritually and temporally in this Ward.”15
By the time Lunt completed his letter, the Iron County Probate Court had already convened a special session to consider the results of the coroner’s inquest. In the midst of emerging legal proceedings, George A. Smith, a church apostle with major responsibility for southern Utah, wrote two letters crucial to the case—the first to the accused murderer and the second to the judge who would preside at his trial. Addressing Wood as “Dear Brother,” he reminded Wood that his situation was “one of a very grave and serious character” but assured him that he had friends who would aid him. Smith cautioned Wood “to keep cool and quiet,” lest some act of his “inflame the public mind.” He signed
himself a “Friend and Well Wisher.”16 Smith was much more direct in the letter he wrote the same day to the judge, his cousin Silas Smith. He urged him to postpone the trial until September and, “in the absence of a county jail,” to grant Wood bail. He concluded: “I think the killing of such a whore benefits the community enough to render the case bailable.”17 Thus, over the course of nine days, Wood’s awkward charge of “adultery” between two teenagers and his claim that Olivia’s daughter had “seduced” his son had become a full-blown claim that the mother was a “whore.”
There is no mention of any of these charges in the brief trial record. Although Judge Smith did delay the trial and release Wood on bail, he was firm in pronouncing the sentence. Wood was to be taken to the state penitentiary “to be confined to hard labor for life.” Judge Smith added the pro forma coda: “May the example thus made be a warning to prevent others from the unlawful shedding of blood.”18 But Wood’s “friends” prevailed. In the end, he served less than three years of a supposed lifetime sentence.19
George Smith was deeply involved in arranging his pardon. The prosecuting attorney created a draft petition at his request.20 The first signature affixed to the petition was Smith’s. Perhaps in an effort to reassure Utah’s federally appointed governor, it began by pointing out some discrepancies in legal procedure. But it also justified the crime by casting aspersions on the victim, claiming that she had “for some time previously kept a house of ill fame in the town of Beaver, and that just before the aforesaid occurrence, had established a similar place to decoy away youth, in the town of Cedar, in Iron County.” It argued:
The forenamed Olive Higbee did entice, and by the aid of her daughter, who was also engaged in the same disreputable business, beguile and lead away his (the said Wood’s) son, a boy of eighteen years, for wicked and adulterous purposes, and that upon information to that effect being supplied to the aforesaid George Wood, he in the heat of passion, did pursue the said Olive Higbee, keeping the house of ill fame, and did shoot at her
with a revolving pistol, the effect of which shot did on the day following cause her death.21
Both the emphasis on seduction and the claim that the crime was done in the heat of passion relate to the concept of “mountain common law,” as promulgated by George A. Smith in a landmark case from the early 1850s.22 In that case, Smith argued that “the principle, the only one, that beats and throbs through the heart of the entire inhabitants of this territory, is simply this: The man who seduces his neighbor’s wife must die, and her nearest relative must kill him!”23 Smith’s so-called “mountain common law” was a version of a so-called “unwritten law” that was especially prominent in the United States and in Britain in the nineteenth century. In the United States juries simply refused to convict men accused of killing a wife’s presumed “seducer.” What was unusual about Wood’s case was the gender of the victim.24
Henry Lunt, LDS bishop in Cedar City. Lunt detailed the murder in a letter to Brigham Young. Church History Library, PH 5962, box 1, fd. 12
Wood’s remarkable claim that his son had been seduced by a younger girl is astonishing except that his own language and that of the petition for pardon so closely reflect the terms in which contemporaries defined crimes susceptible to acquittal or pardon under the “unwritten law.”25
Such cases not only addressed supposed violations of sexual order but assaults on male honor.26 Wood highlighted the importance of honor when, in confessing to the murder, he told Lunt that he would treat anyone who attempted to interfere with his family in the same way. Although he claimed to be addressing the crime of adultery, he was also reaffirming his own authority not just over his son, but over a presumed disorder in the community—a disorder that Smith’s petition associated with a woman powerful enough to beguile a young man. That term came straight out of Genesis 3:13, where Eve, confronted by God for having partaken of the forbidden fruit, replied, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.”27 The petition placed Olivia Coombs in the role of Satan.
The reverse side of nineteenth-century celebrations of female purity was a deeply grounded mistrust of female sexuality, a theme that played out in contradictory portrayals of “fallen women” in popular literature of the time.28 There has been little scholarship on prostitution in Utah, perhaps because most historians assume that, in contradistinction to other western territories, there was little of it. But there was plenty of anxiety over female sexuality. No amount of surveillance by town gossips or church authorities could totally prevent sexual encounters between teenagers or between local women and passing soldiers or teamsters.29 George Smith’s petition exploited those fears.
Caroline Crosby’s diary shifts attention from male leaders to the little-understood social worlds of early Latter-day Saint women.
Caroline Crosby and “Sis. Combs”
Diaries describe events one day at a time. Names dropped in one entry may disappear or expand bit by bit into full-fledged stories. Caroline’s encounters with Olivia became such a story, though not a story about murder. Rather, they became a story about a woman married to a much older man, a mother with too many
children, even though she loved them all, and an individual struggling with depression or perhaps addiction. The portrait of Olivia that develops in Caroline’s diary is of a woman trying to make sense of her life and the choices available to her.
Caroline’s patient accounting of family life among Latter-day Saints in San Francisco, San Bernardino, and Beaver portrays the miseries of monogamy as well as the trials of polygamy. In San Francisco, Caroline attended church with Eleanor McLean, a respectable wife and mother who fled her alcoholic husband to become Parley Pratt’s ninth wife. In San Bernardino, Caroline testified in a contentious divorce trial between Mary Hamilton and Quartus Sparks, a one-time church leader who lived openly with a prostitute. In Beaver, she comforted a weeping mother who had no breast milk for her newborn baby and whose husband went to the stockyard to get away from its crying. The distraught women who shared their stories with Caroline suffered from anxiety, abuse, discontent, and sheer exhaustion as they struggled to hold life together in a seemingly endless succession of makeshift settings.30
Caroline’s own wandering extended the geography of early Mormon history. She and her husband, Jonathan, joined the Latter-day Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, where their only child was born, a son named Alma. They made do in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa before joining a wagon train to the Salt Lake Valley where they hoped to settle. In 1850, they responded to a call from Brigham Young to join Caroline’s sister Louisa and her husband Addison Pratt on a mission to French Polynesia. After eighteen months in Tubaii (Society Islands), they returned to the San Francisco Bay area, where they first encountered Olivia Coombs. Olivia had done her own wandering, from her birthplace in Connecticut to Long Island, where she and two siblings became Latter-day Saints, and then in 1846 with her husband Abraham and three children to California on the ship Brooklyn. 31
Olivia first appeared in Caroline’s diary on July 18, 1855. It had been a busy day for Caroline with a string of visitors coming to the house, most on their way from one place to another. The last to arrive was “sister Coombs from Napa with her
little girl and infant baby.” The baby was Elvira, born four months earlier in Napa. “I gave them a little dinner and they left in search of Sister Woodbury,” Caroline continued, referring to her cousin Elvira Stevens by her married name. Little Elvira was about to meet her namesake, a twenty-three-year-old woman who had already had more trials and adventures than most women have in a lifetime.32 Orphaned on the overland trail, she had married at eighteen, spent a year in the Sandwich Islands with her missionary husband, and was now struggling to support herself in San Francisco while waiting for him to rejoin her so they could return to Utah.33
“Sister C said she had promised to let her little girl go through to the valley with sister Woodbury,” Caroline wrote. Given the rigors of such a journey, Olivia’s “little girl” is more likely to have been Helen, age twelve, or Emily, age nine, than Arabella, age three.34 Olivia explained that she and the rest of her family planned to leave soon for San Bernardino, the newly established Mormon colony in southern California. Although this was the first time Caroline had met Olivia, the two women had a connection. In the 1840s, Jonathan Crosby had operated a carpentry shop with Ross Ransom Rogers, whose wife Helen was Olivia’s younger sister. They were now living in Utah.35 The Crosbys also knew Olivia’s older brother Theodore Curtis, who had recently come to San Francisco from Salt Lake City to serve a mission. Theodore’s wife, Margaret, a skilled seamstress, had set up a “sewing shop” where she sometimes employed church members.36
On September 15, 1855, Caroline described an interesting encounter at a Sunday meeting between Olivia’s friend Elvira and her brother Theodore. This must have been a “testimony meeting” where members spoke when moved by the spirit. Caroline wrote that in the public meeting “Brother Curtis threw out some insinuations, which sister Woodbury thought applicable to herself, and accordingly replied to them.” A third speaker then “qualified some of his sayings,” and a fourth man “bore testimony that he believed they had spoken by the spirit of God.” Although it is impossible to know the nature of Theodore’s “insinuations,” Elvira obviously had the confidence to speak for herself. Perhaps there had been gossip about her
leaving her missionary husband in Hawaii. Perhaps Olivia’s brother was simply commenting on the recent death of her sister in San Bernardino. Whether barbed or not, the exchange caught Caroline’s attention.37
Elvira and John Woodbury soon left for San Bernardino, as did Olivia and Abraham Coombs and their children. In November 1855, the Crosbys followed. Caroline was not surprised to find Olivia at the Woodbury house when she visited on New Year’s Day.38 On April 1, Caroline helped Elvira Woodbury finish a wagon cover in preparation for their journey to Utah. “We had a social time,” she wrote, then continued on a somber note. “[Elvira] told me some things which made me feel sad and caused me to marvel.” That comment presaged news Elvira sent from Salt Lake City two months later: “she had been to bro. Young and got released from her husband.” Caroline affirmed the finality of the divorce when she referred to Elvira as “[Sister] Woodberry, or rather Stevens.”39
By the end of the summer, thirteen-year-old Helen Coombs had become Caroline’s household helper. On December 16, she brought news that her mother “had got an addition of another daughter to her family.”40 Baby Olive was only two months old when Olivia told Caroline that she was thinking of going to the mountains above San Bernardino to cook for the men at the sawmill. When a month later Olivia confirmed that she was indeed thinking of leaving her husband, Caroline advised her against it.41 The reasons aren’t hard to imagine. It was one thing for a young and childless woman like Elvira Stevens to become single again, especially in Utah where no-fault divorce was readily available to women. But Olivia was in a totally different situation. Although divorce was possible in California, the process was adversarial and without any guarantee that a mother would get custody of her children. Olivia now had five daughters to support. (Her son had remained in northern California.)
The next day Helen returned from a brief visit with her family to report an unfolding disaster. Olivia had been drinking, and when Caroline reached the house she found her “prostrate on the bed, her babe crying by her side,” with three little girls “standing around, looking very sad and forsaken.” Caroline “seized the babe
and the one next to it and brought them home,” telling Emily to take care of Arabella and come to her house if they got hungry. From that point on, without any kind of formal arrangement, Caroline became the emergency back-up for the Coombs family. A few days later “immediately after breakfast” Emily came to the house with little Elvira, saying “her mother sent her to me to get her breakfast, as they had nothing but bread and water for her.”42
It is impossible to know whether the lack of food in the house was caused by Abraham’s difficulty in earning enough to support them or Olivia’s inability to function. When Caroline offered to take Elvira full time and “do a mothers part by her,” both parents appeared to consent. Caroline was delighted when Elvira seemed happy at her house and “ate heartily.” She was even more pleased when her friends “admired my babe much.” Caroline had in recent years cared for several children, most recently a little boy whose parents had become separated on the journey to the United States. Perhaps this time she thought that her longtime desire for a daughter was about to be fulfilled.
Unfortunately, Olivia and Abraham were divided over what to do with Elvira. On May 15, 1857, Olivia sent a note saying that she and Abraham expected to leave soon for northern California and wanted to take all of their children with them. On paper she sounded decisive, but when she came to the house she “appeared much dejected and sad.” Olivia admitted that though Elvira was probably better off with Caroline than with her, she was “very unhappy without her.” Caroline told her “to pray and get the mind of the Lord on the matter.” Olivia said she had never done that and had been mostly driven “by her impulse.” With a bit of nudging, she left Elvira in Caroline’s care for another day while she considered her decision. Helen soon informed Caroline that her mother had gone home, sent Emily to the store for “a bottle of brandy,” and began drinking.43
At that point, Jonathan Crosby stepped in. Abraham admitted that “to make reconciliation” with his wife he had given her permission to bring Elvira home, but he said that her behavior so worried him “that he did not know what course to pursue.” Jonathan told him that he needed to make up his mind. Unless he
was willing to bind Elvira to the Crosbys, they did not wish to keep her any longer. Jonathan told Helen that she too had to make a decision. She could stay with the Crosbys after her parents left, or she could leave immediately. Helen chose to leave. When she came back with Emily to pick up her clothing, Caroline, deeply worried about the fate of the younger children, gave both girls “a charge to be kind to their little sisters and take good care of them when their mother was in her helpless state.” When they left, she admitted that she felt relieved.44
On January 1, 1858, Caroline, Jonathan, and their son Alma joined the migration to Utah. They lived for several months near Cedar City, then in November 1858 moved north to Beaver.45 What happened to the Coombs family during that period is difficult to determine. Family sources say they visited relatives in Napa, California, left Helen there, and then took separate routes to Utah in 1860. Public records show that Olivia was in Beaver well before that. On August 25, 1858, she filed a petition for divorce with the Beaver County Probate Court, echoing the language of Utah’s liberal divorce statue by claiming that her feelings were “entirely alienated from Mr. Combs,” that she could not “have peace and union with him,” and that her “welfare requires a separation.” Three days later the probate judge granted the petition, giving Olivia custody of her children, all the “household furniture,” and half of a wheat crop then standing in the ground.46 Nobody knows who planted the wheat. Abraham may have come and gone as a teamster driving cattle from California. His descendants say he contracted pneumonia on the trail and died shortly after reaching Beaver.47
Olivia may have come to Beaver because her sister Helen Rogers was there. Helen’s husband, the Crosby’s “old friend R R Rogers,” was then serving as postmaster of the town.48 Although the Crosbys reconnected with Helen and Ross Rogers shortly after arriving, it was almost six months before Caroline mentioned Olivia in her diary, and the news was not good. On April 17, 1859, Ross paid the Crosbys a visit to continue a conversation begun at church that morning. He asked whether they would “take the child again, we once had given to us by bro Combs, now deceased; that he expected they would be under necessity of taking them
from their mother, in consequence of her evil habits, and bind them out.” Jonathan told Caroline the decision was hers. She thought for a few minutes, then agreed to take Elvira under the same condition they had agreed to in San Bernardino.49 Nothing appears to have come of that. Six months passed before Caroline again mentioned Olivia or her children.
In the meantime, Ross and Helen Rogers left Beaver for their old home in Provo. The Crosbys did all they could to help them get on their way. Jonathan traded a pair of oxen with Ross for two cows and some wheat. Caroline helped Helen by stitching a wagon cover, frying doughnuts, and baking mince pies and cookies for their journey. She said nothing about the presence or absence of Olivia in these preparations.50 When Olivia reappeared in the diary, she had become the wife of Solomon Chamberlain, a man the Crosbys had known briefly in California and perhaps earlier in Nauvoo. Not long before, he had asked Caroline for help milking his cows. Other sources suggest his wife had recently divorced him and had gone to Harmony to join John D. Lee’s plural family.51
This perhaps desperate marriage did not go well. On February 23, 1860, Caroline wrote that “Sister Chamberlain” had come to the house “in deep distress.” She said an evil and false report was in circulation about her, which made her feel “very bad” and that “she wished to leave this place, as no one had any confidence in her here.”52 Three months later, Caroline recorded a competing story from her husband: “Old Man Chamberlain . . . was in awhile entering grievous complaints against his wife Olivia. Stated that she had threatened his life, and actually struck him with a stick of wood on his head, causing blood to run freely. Said he had applied for a divorce from the county judge and would never live with her as a wife anymore.”53 Although Caroline carefully recorded these complaints, she offered no judgment on either.
A month later, Olivia’s daughter Emily unexpectedly showed up asking “to borrow a book for her mother.” Caroline gave her a copy of the Millennial Star. Since Caroline was herself well-known in the town as an avid reader of and sometime agent for illustrated eastern periodicals, that may have been a subtle hint that Olivia should pay more attention to church
publications. Later that day, when an ailing neighbor asked Caroline to “try to get her a girl to wait on her,” she sent word of the position to Emily Coombs “by Father Chamberlain.”54 Neither Emily nor her mother showed up again in person in Caroline’s diary, probably because they soon relocated to another part of Beaver. The U.S. Census in Beaver in July listed Olivia Coombs, age 42, as a “Washerwoman” with three daughters: Arabella, 8, Elvira, 5, and Olivia, 4. There was no sign of Emily either in the Coombs or Chamberlain household.
Caroline’s diary indicates that sometime in the late winter or early spring of 1861, Chamberlain moved to Santa Clara, Utah. If family stories are to be believed, Olivia and her children had also moved there. In January 1862, Santa Clara was struck by a cataclysmic flood that still ranks as one of the worst in Utah history. In an uncharacteristic allusion to prophecy, Caroline observed, “So we see the saints do not escape the judgements entirely that are coming on the earth.”55 That disaster was a prelude to the horror that engulfed Olivia and her children six months later in Cedar City. On August 2, Caroline received the chilling news. The details she recorded in her diary mirror the indictment issued by the Grand Jury just three days before. News had traveled fast. (Perhaps because she had so seldom referred to Olivia by her first name, Caroline wrote “Gloria” rather than “Olivia.”) “Heard of the murder of mother and daughter (Gloria and Emily Coombs), in Cedar, by a man by the name of George Wood of that place. The former was lately married to a man by the name of Higbee, who tends the carding machine. Great excitement prevails.”56 Caroline did not describe that “excitement.” Nor did she offer any reflections on Olivia’s character or on her own failed attempts at rescue.
Her diary nevertheless offers compelling evidence of how small twists and turns led toward tragedy. It documents Olivia’s struggle with alcohol in San Bernardino, her unhappiness in her first marriage and disappointment in the second, her propensity to move from one bad situation to another, and perhaps most importantly, her determination to keep her daughters even when she recognized her own inability to care for them. Olivia’s complaint that no one in Beaver had confidence in her was a sad prediction of a looming disaster.
Remembering and Forgetting the Murder of Olivia Coombs
In 1950, Olive Millburn told Juanita Brooks that her grandmother was murdered because she asked too many questions about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Buried in that story was another—that the immediate impetus for the murder was a suggestion by one of George Wood’s drunken friends that his son “was interested in” Olivia’s daughter.57 In retrospect, the allusion to the massacre seems like an overlay on this less mentionable story.
No one knows what happened in 1862 between sixteen-year-old Emily Coombs and nineteenyear-old Joseph Wood. Was it a teenage romance? A rape? An exchange of sexual favors for money or food? A scandalous tale spread by two women? Whatever happened precipitated a crime so barbaric and blatant in its sexual marking of the victims’ bodies that it is difficult to see how it could possibly have been provoked by anything Olivia Coombs could have said about the massacre, even if she had been repeating inflammatory gossip gathered from the federal soldiers who passed through Beaver in 1859 or from fellow settlers in Santa Clara.58 It also seems odd than a man concerned about his reputation would shoot a woman in broad daylight in the presence of witnesses unless such an announcement was a way of avoiding conviction for a crime, as it turns out to have been under so-called “mountain common law.”59
Further research on Wood, the men who signed the petition for his reprieve, and on the operations of criminal law in early Utah may provide additional insight on the murder. In the end, however, Brooks’s footnote tells us less about the murder itself than about its historical repression and recovery in the century that followed. Brooks did not date her interview with Millburn, nor did she explain how she came to know her. She simply identified her as a granddaughter of Olivia Coombs and a resident of Salt Lake City. Both statements were true, but Millburn was also a close relative of Will Brooks, Juanita’s husband. William Brooks’s grandfather, William Henry Branch, was Millburn’s father. Millburn’s mother was Elvira Coombs, the child Caroline Crosby had attempted to rescue. Branch married Elvira in the St. George Temple in 1877, several years after the death of his
first wife. He was then fifty-seven years old and the father of several grown children, including Will’s mother, Cornelia. Eliva, who was twenty, had a young son, apparently born out of wedlock, whom Branch adopted.60
Although Olive Millburn was only three years older than Will Brooks, she may not have known him well, since she grew up in Price and he in St. George. But she was present at “a great fruit feast” held at the home of “Mr. and Mrs. William Brooks” during a Branch family reunion in St. George in 1921. The “Mrs. Brooks” in that account was Will’s first wife, Nellie, who died in 1932.61 Will married Juanita Pulsipher a year after Nellie’s death. Juanita, who had a son by her first husband, gave up teaching at Dixie State College to become a stepmother to Will’s four sons. She and Will added four more children in quick succession, although she somehow managed to continue her research and writing.62
She probably encountered Millburn in Salt Lake City sometime in the late 1940s. Aside from any affinity through Will, they had much in common. Although Milburn was twenty years older, she too had been married twice and had lived for a time as a single parent.63 They also had a common interest in history. Millburn was hard at work on the history of her father. In 1942, Juanita had published a history of her own grandfather, Dudley Leavitt, and in the same footnote in which she recorded Millburn’s story, she included one by him.64 Brooks could have met Millburn at an archive they both frequented or at a public event of common interest.
The two women also shared a common concern over stirring up trouble by sharing unsavory details uncovered in their research. After agreeing to speak in June 1947 at a writing seminar sponsored by the Latter-day Saint periodical, The Improvement Era, Brooks wrote a friend, “I am glad for this opportunity to demonstrate that I am a member of the church in good standing. It has been so easy for some to point the finger and scream, APOSTATE! at any one whose views are not the accepted and traditional ones on any subject. I shall try to make my discussion such that the ones who are there will feel that I am sincere, at least.”65 In the light of that tension, a comment at the
end of her footnote summarizing Millburn’s story about her grandmother seems telling: “Mrs. Millburn herself is a loyal member of the church, a guide on Temple Square. She does not blame the church for this.” Millburn was indeed a loyal member of the Church. At the age of 71, she accepted a call to serve in the California Mission. In the April 1950 Improvement Era, she is pictured on the front row in a photograph of departing missionaries.66
Although Millburn’s 1926 account of her grandmother’s life avoided any mention of the murder, it freely acknowledged the suffering her children experienced after her “early death.” Millburn wrote that Cedar City officials initially gave Elvira to an “old English schoolteacher” who “whipped her on every pretense, nearly starved her,” and often shut her “in a potato pit under the floor all night.” When the woman’s son reported this abuse, the town gave Elvira to Richard and Jane Birkbeck, a middle-aged couple with no children who kept her out of school to work on their ten-acre farm but allowed her to participate in choir and amateur theatricals.
In an undated account later published by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Millburn’s younger sister Irene Keller added two details to this story that the Birkbecks were happy to have Elvira because they had previously “given up a child of the Mountain Meadows massacre” and that when the Birkbecks formally adopted Elvira, she changed her name to Ella Coombs Birkbeck.67
Ella’s daughters may or may not have known that in 1916 their mother shared the story of the murder with church historian Andrew Jensen. Jensen’s typed summary, attributed to “Mrs. William Branch of Price, Utah,” claimed that in July 1862, “George Woods shot a woman (Mrs. Coombs) and beat her daughter at Cedar City. The mother died, while her daughter recovered. The mother’s name was Olive Olivia Coombs. Mr. Wood beat the daughter over the head with the butt of his revolver until she was insensible from the effects of which she suffered from temporary insanity the rest of her life.” Although Ella may not have revealed her own connection to the victim, she was perfectly
William H. Branch Sr. William married Ella Coombs Birkbeck in 1877 and was the namesake of Will Brooks, Juanita Brooks’ husband. University of Utah Marriott Library, Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks Photograph Collection, 1928–1981, MSS C103, box 2, fd. 1, no. 4
Ella Branch (formerly Elvira), Olivia Coombs’s daughter and Olive Branch Millburn’s mother. BYU Special Collections, George Anderson Collection, GEA 12111
clear about the name of the perpetrator and the date. Beneath her story, Jensen pasted a clipping from a 1862 Deseret News article containing the glowing description of Cedar City that Lunt had included in his letter to Brigham Young.68
In their family histories, Millburn and Keller both described their grandmother as an educated woman, skilled in languages. Keller even claimed that before her marriage Olivia “became acquainted with Parley P. Pratt and attended the University of New York with him.”69 Both women also emphasized their grandmother’s connection to Erastus Snow and asserted that he called her to teach both in Santa Clara and in Cedar City. But until Brooks interviewed Millburn, no one claimed that she aroused fears in Cedar City because she asked questions about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or because as an educated woman she might be capable of publishing what she found.
It doesn’t take much effort to see that this profile also described Juanita Brooks as Millburn
knew her. Although it would have been impossible for Olivia Coombs to have attended New York University, an elite, all-male school in the 1830s, it was quite possible for Juanita Pulsipher, a young widow who supported her son by teaching, to go to New York City in 1925 to complete a graduate degree at Columbia University. Furthermore, Millburn was well aware of Brooks’s research and was probably also conscious that it was suspect in some quarters.70 I am not arguing for a self-conscious attempt on Millburn’s part to merge two narratives. I am simply pointing toward a perhaps unacknowledged affinity between a storyteller and her listener—a common recognition that a woman who showed too much interest in a taboo subject might raise suspicions in her community. In any case, Millburn’s encounter with Brooks allowed her to claim a place in history for the long-repressed story of her grandmother’s murder. Brooks’s example may also have given her permission to do so.
Attention to Millburn’s life also points toward a seeming anachronism in the story she gave Brooks. She suggested that next door to the school her grandmother was preparing to open was “a small hotel” where “men gathered to visit and drink.” Although there is no evidence of a hotel, least of all a hotel with a bar, in Cedar City in 1862, there were plenty of drinking establishments in Park City, the town where Millburn grew up in the late nineteenth-century. In her 1926 history, she described her mother struggling to raise her children as Latter-day Saints in a rough town with “the majority of the population consisting of cowboys, sheep men, freighters, Indians, soldiers and in a railroad town with the regular transient outsider.” In 1905, her own father-in-law, a Civil War veteran who was proprietor of one of the earliest saloons in Price, was shot and killed in a drunken brawl in front of his own establishment. Although Millburn said nothing about that event in her published family history, it was part of the life experience she drew upon in interpreting her grandmother’s unresolved tragedy and her mother’s enduring resilience.71
In a poignant essay about a child returned to his relatives in Arkansas after the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Will Bagley observed that “historians must handle memory—especially
Olive Branch (latter Millburn) as a young woman. Olive’s account of the murder of her grandmother was the basis for Juanita Brooks’s footnote on the subject in The Mountain Meadows Massacre. BYU Special Collections, George Anderson Collection, GEA 10658
personal memories—as ruthlessly as detectives compare, interrogate, and match their sources against each other.”72 I would add that historians should interpret those memories not only in the context of the world they purport to describe, but in relation to the storyteller’s own life. Family stories, if carefully interpreted, stretch the boundaries of historical narratives, showing how the hopes and aspirations of different generations are often layered one atop another.
Notes
I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Barbara Jones Brown and Melanie Sturgeon, each of whom shared important insights and documents from their own research. Sturgeon will soon publish an article on the life and death of Olivia Coombs.
1. Her name appears in various forms on genealogical sites, often as “Olive Olivia,” apparently an attempt to reconcile two forms of her name used in period sources. I have chosen to refer to her by the name that appears on the California censuses of 1850 and 1852, the Utah census of 1860, and at Ancestry.com.
2. Janet Burton Seegmiller, A History of Iron County: Community Above Self (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1998), 50, 98, 193, 224, 238; Inez S. Cooper and Zelia B. Matheson, “First Home of Cedar Families,” Spectrum (Cedar City, Utah), November 6, 1980; Frontier Homestead State Park Museum, https://stateparks .utah.gov/parks/frontier-homestead/exhibits/.
3. “Ella Coombs Branch, Written by Mrs. Olive Millburn March 10, 1926,” in Olive Branch Millburn, A History, Diary and Genealogy of William Henry Branch, Sr. (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, n.d.), 79–80. Although A History, Diary and Genealogy of William Henry Branch, Sr. is undated, a handwritten note on the front cover of the copy now in the LDS Family History Library is marked “Gift: Author Mar, 1953.”
4. Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1950), 136 n4.
5. Juanita Brooks to William Palmer, St. George, August 14, 1952, in Juanita Brooks, The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks, ed. Craig S. Smith (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 147; Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 164–65 n4. Brooks cited “Executive Book B, 171, Utah State Historical Society files.” The current citation of the pardon is “Pardon of George Wood,” March 4, 1865, p. 171, box 1, vol. B, Executive Record Books of the Territorial Secretary of State, Series 242, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah.
6. Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), 114, 184–85; “George Wood,” typescript, box 3, fd. 31, William Palmer Collection, Dixie State University, St. George, Utah; Irene Branch Keller, “The Coombs Family,” Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 3, ed. Kate B. Carter (Salt Lake City: Daughter of the Utah Pioneers, 1960), 522–24.
7. Clayton Wray comment, July 20, 2002, Mountain Meadows Association Archived Guest Book, accessed
December 3, 2021, www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com. For his discussion of the murder, see Clayton Wray, “The Story of the Second Murder in Iron County, Utah. Olive Olivia Curtis Coombs,” 2002, MS 18990, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. According to online obituaries, Wray died in 2006 at the age of 81.
8. Richard H. Bullock, Ship Brooklyn Saints: Their Journey and Early Endeavors in California (Sandy, UT: n.p.). Bullock’s book received a short notice in the Journal of Mormon History 38, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 174–76, with a note that the second volume was available online at www.shipbrooklyn.com. Although that link has now expired, a typescript labeled “The Ship Brooklyn Story—Volume 2—The Coombs Family” along with variants of the same material can be found at familysearch. org under Olive Olivia Curtis Coombs tree/person/ memories. The website FindAGrave.com is full of stories based on this material.
9. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2017), 219–20. The earliest volumes of Crosby’s diary have been published as No Place to Call Home: The 1807–1857 Life Writings of Caroline Barnes Crosby, ed. Edward Leo Lyman, Susan Ward Payne, and S. George Ellsworth (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2005). The complete diary with a typed transcription of the unpublished portion is at the Utah State Historical Society. In this paper, I will use the label CBC to refer to the published portion of the diary and CBC typescript to refer to transcription of the unpublished part.
10. I base these ages on the census records cited in note 1 above and on confirming information in Crosby’s diary. I have not found extant birth records for the children.
11. Henry Lunt to President Brigham Young, Cedar City, Iron County, August 6, 1862, box 69, fd. 13, Brigham Young Office files 1832–1878, LDS Church History Library, as cited in Bullock, “The Ship Brooklyn Story –Volume 2 – The Coombs Family.”
12. Lunt to Young, August 6, 1862
13. Lunt to Young, August 6, 1862
14. Lunt to Young, August 6, 1862.
15. Lunt to Young, August 6, 1862.
16. George A. Smith to George Wood, August 6, 1862, p. 157, Vol. 2, Historian’s Office letterpress copybooks, 1854–1879, 1885–1886, CR 100 38, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
17. George A. Smith to Silas S. Smith, August 6, 1862, p. 158, Vol. 2, Historian’s Office letterpress copybooks, 1854–1879, 1885–1886.
18. Iron County Probate Court, Special Session, July 30, 1862, Adjournment, September 8, 1862, Sentencing, September 9, 1862, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah.
19. “Legislative Proceedings,” Deseret News, December 17, 1862. See habeas corpus case file concerning George Wood, reel 12, box 9, fd. 126, Probate Court Civil and Criminal Case Files, 1852–1887, Series 373, Salt Lake County Archives, West Valley City, Utah. On the general practice during this period, see Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal States, 1776–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 84–86.
20. Edward Dalton to George A. Smith, March 23, 1864, in Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat-
ter-day Saints, CR 100 137, March 23, 1864, p. 1, citing to History of Brigham Young, 1864, p. 187.
21. Quoted in Bullock, Ship Brooklyn Saints, which cites to “Utah State Historical Society, Governor James Duane Doty- Utah Territorial papers, Film A-703, record number 2249–2256” as the source of the petition. Unfortunately, the original document had not been found in the archives of either the Utah State Historical Society or, the more likely location, the Utah State Archives.
22. Kenneth L. Cannon II, “‘Mountain Common Law’: The Extralegal Punishment of Seducers in Early Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 51 (Fall 1983): 308–27.
23. Deseret Evening News, November 15, 1851, cited in Cannon, “‘Mountain Common Law,’” 312, 313.
24. K. J. Kesselring, “No Greater Provocation? Adultery and the Mitigation of Murder,” Law and History Review 34 (February 2016): 199–225.
25. Emily was probably born in 1846, about six weeks after the arrival of her parents in San Francisco on the Ship Brooklyn
26. This theme is powerfully developed in Carolyn Strange, “The Unwritten Law of Executive Justice: Pardoning Patricide in Reconstruction-era New York,” Law and History Review 28 (November 2010): 891–930.
27. See note above and revised version of Cannon’s essay in the 2021 spring edition of Utah Historical Quarterly, which includes three essays and additional citations on later uses of the “unwritten” law to defend women accused of murdering a seducer.
28. Patricia Cline Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett (New York: Knopf, 1998), 302. See also Cohen, “The Helen Jewett Murder: Violence, Gender, and Sexual Licentiousness in Antebellum America,” NWSA Journal 2 (Summer 1990): 374–89. On the contrast between romanticized images of western prostitutes as independent women and the difficulties of their lives, see Melanie Sturgeon, “‘Belgian Jennie’ Bauers: Mining Town Madam,” Journal of Arizona History 48 (Winter 2007): 349–74.
29. Jeffrey D. Nichols, “Polygamy and Prostitution: Comparative Morality in Salt Lake City, 1847–1911,” Journal of Mormon History 27 (Fall 2001): 1–39; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Runaway Wives, 1830–1860,” Journal of Mormon History 42 (April 2016): 1–26.
30. Ulrich, House Full of Females, 322–27; Ulrich, “Runaway Wives.”; CBC typescript, p. 838 (August 16, 1859).
31. Ulrich, House Full of Females, 13, 312–15, 221; Crosby, No Place to Call Home, 17, 28–32.
32. See “Elvira Stevens Barney,” in The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saints Women’s History (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017), at churchhistorianspress.org, and in August Joyce Corcheron, Representative Women of Deseret (Salt Lake City: J.C. Graham, 1884), at gutenberg.org/50958.
33. Technically, I think she was Caroline’s “first cousin once removed.” Elvira’s father was Caroline’s first cousin. See “Family of Joseph Stevens and Dolly Sawyer,” CBC, p. 12.
34. The 1852 Census for Napa, California, lists Emily, age six. In her diary dated April 22, 1857 (CBC, p. 456), Caroline referred to Emily as ten.
35. As Caroline became better acquainted with Olivia, she occasionally added her own letters to those Olivia sent Rogers in Utah. “Memoir,” CBC, pp. 54–55, 513 n24, and diary references on pp. 398 and 451 (April 1, 1856, and February 14, 1857).
36. References to Sister Curtis and her sewing operation are on pp. 347–48 (August 29, 1855). See also the reference to “T. Curtis. Sewing Factory. 145 Sansome,” in Bogardus and Labatt, San Francisco City Directory (San Francisco: Whitton, Towne, and Co., Printers, 1856), 40, at https:// archive.org/details/sanfranciscocity1856harr/page/40. For Curtis’s 1851 journey to San Francisco, see “Dr. Margaret Roberts, a biography,” typescript, at FamilySearch. org.
37. CBC, pp. 343, 345, 347, 351 (August 10, 17, 21, 28, and September 22, 1855).
38. CBC, pp. 346, 369, 380 (October 3, 4, and November 17, 1855; January 1, 1856)
39. CBC, pp. 400, 412 (April 1, and June 22, 1856). The variant spelling of Elvira’s name is in the original.
40. CBC, pp. 430, 435, 438, 441, 448, 449 (October 20, 26, November 23, and December 16, 1856; January 19, 26, 27; February 1, 1857). On Charles Marion Coombs, see Bullock, “The Ship Brooklyn – Volume 2 – The Coombs Family.”
41. CBC, 450, 456, 457 (February 11, and March 22, 1857).
42. CBC, pp. 456, 457, 458 (March 23, 29, 30, 31, and April 1, 1857).
43. CBC, pp. 466–67 (May 15, 16, 1857).
44. CBC, pp. 466–67 (May 15, 16, 1857)
45. CBC, p. 508 (January 1, 1858); CBC typescript, p. 788.
46. Olivia Combs vs Abraham Combs, pp. 7–8, Beaver County Probate Court Record Books, Utah State Archives, Series 17893, Reel 1. Many thanks to Melanie Sturgeon for sharing this source.
47. Millburn, History of William Branch, 79; Keller, “The Coombs Family,” 522.
48. Martha Sonntag Bradley, A History of Beaver County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Beaver County Commission, 1999), 51, 66; Juanita Brooks, Mountain Meadow Massacre, 115–16.
49. CBC typescript, pp. 789, 803, 805, 816, 818–19 (November 19, 1858; January 18, February 1, and April 7, 17, 1859).
50. CBC typescript, pp. 852–53 (November 21–28, 1859).
51. CBC typescript, pp. 823–25 (May 18–27, 1859); Juanita Brooks, John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer, Builder, Scapegoat (1961; Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1992), 235, 246.
52. CBC typescript, pp. 864–65 (February 23, 1860).
53. CBC typescript, p. 872 (April 23, 1860).
54. CBC typescript, p. 877 (May 23, 24, 1860). On Caroline’s interest in eastern periodicals and her work as an agent, see pp. 829, 839, 843, and 862.
55. CBC typescript, pp. 893, 918, 959 (October 5, 1860; May 24, and December 30, 1861); Todd Compton, “The Big Washout: The 1862 Flood in Santa Clara,” Utah Historical Quarterly 77 (Spring 2009): 108–25.
56. CBC typescript, p. 974 (August 2, 1862).
57. Brooks, Mountain Meadows Massacre, 136 n4. See full text connected to note 3.
58. On the presence of federal troops in Beaver and their interactions with Beaver residents, see CBC typescript, pp. 820, 824, 830, 831 (April 19, 30, May 23, and July 1, 12, 1859).
59. See the spring 2021 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly for recent work on judicial pardons.
60. Olive Branch Millburn, born in 1878, was Elvira’s oldest daughter, but not her oldest child. She had a son born out of wedlock whom Branch adopted. Millburn, William Henry Branch Sr., 71–72, 82–83, 89; 1880 US
Census for Mohava, Arizona Territory, William Branch household, ancestry.com.
61. Millburn, William Henry Branch Sr., 93–94.
62. Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 89–115.
63. Millburn, William Henry Branch Sr., 85. Her marital history is a bit mysterious. She married Herbert Millburn in 1896 at the age of 18, but though he didn’t die until 1942, she was listed as a widow living with school age children in Salt Lake City in 1930. She married Martin Horton Graham in 1933. She died a year later. There must have been a divorce, but I have not been able to confirm that. She is buried next to her first husband in Price.
64. Peterson, Juanita Brooks, 480–81.
65. Peterson, 199.
66. Brooks, Mountain Meadows Massacre, 165; Improvement Era, June 1950, p. 535 https://archive.org/stream/improvementera5306unse /improvementera5306unse_djvu.txt; Millburn, William Henry Branch, p. 47.
67. Millburn, William Henry Branch Sr., 79–84; Keller, “The Coombs Family,” 522–24. In her own Social Security application, Millburn listed her mother as “Ella
Birkbeck.” Olive Branch Millburn, Social Security Application and Claims index, 1936–2007, ancestry.com.
68. “Statement made by Mrs. Wm. Branch of Price, Carbon County, Utah, June 26, 1916,” in Cedar Ward, Parawon Stake, Series 2, LR 1514, Manuscript History of the Church, LDS Church History Library. Melanie Sturgeon kindly shared this reference with me; Robin Jensen and Scott Marianno sent me a photograph of the entry and shared their knowledge of Andrew Jensen’s methods.
69. Lorin K. Hansen, in “‘Every Book . . . Has Been Read Through’: The Brooklyn Saints and Harper’s Library,” BYU Studies 43, no. 4 (2004): 46, who used this claim to bolster his argument that passengers on the Brooklyn were well-educated, cites the sketch by Millburn’s sister, Irene Keller, that appeared in Carter’s anthology.
70. Peterson, Juanita Brooks, 31, 78–80, 83.
71. Millburn, William Henry Branch, Sr., p. 83; “John B. Millburn Shot Down,” Eastern Utah Advocate (Price, Utah), October 12, 1905.
72. Will Bagley, “Touching History: A Grandson’s Memories of Felix Marion Jones and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” Utah Historical Quarterly 84 (Fall 2016): 295–311.
“Sure a Strong Devil”: Mabel Frazer, A. B. Wright, and the University of Utah Art Department’s 1937 Sexual Misconduct Case
BY EMILY LARSEN AND HEATHER BELNAP
On May 22, 1937, Mabel Pearl Frazer, an assistant professor of art at the University of Utah, filed an official complaint with the university president regarding a pattern of sexual misconduct toward women students exhibited by her colleague and department chair, Alma Brockerman (“A. B.”) Wright. Frazer’s letter to President George Thomas begins with the reminder of a prior conversation they had regarding this matter, stating: “I told you in substance that for three years reports had been coming to me that I felt it in my duty to pass on to you . . . that two of these girls, Miss Williams and Miss Bartlett, had personally told me their own stories, but that the others had come to me through third persons.”1 She went on to detail the allegations against Wright that students had shared with her and other women faculty members, which included sexual harassment, retaliating behavior for resisting sexual advances, and even sexual assault.
While Mabel Frazer’s report generated enough concern to convene a hearing by university administrators, both the investigation and the hearing were surprisingly brief. The day after this meeting, a letter was issued absolving Wright “from all charges, allegations, inferences, or anything that was deleterious to his reputation and character.”2 The punishment of Frazer, though, for leveling these accusations was swift and harsh. President Thomas censured her for filing the report, forcing Frazer to disavow her statements and to issue an apology to Wright or face dire consequences. He sternly warned: “The Art Department is more important than the art teachers and, if you continue to pursue the policies of the past, your retirement must, of necessity, follow.”3 For the remainder of her tenure at the University of Utah (she retired in 1953), Mabel Frazer would pay a heavy price for serving as her students’ advocate. She was not granted a rank promotion for well over a decade after this incident, and despite the fact that she was the senior faculty member in the department, Frazer never held a leadership role in it.
Although this event has entered the annals of local lore, it has been mentioned only in passing, and approached with a glibness more in keeping with supermarket tabloids than historical writing. In such historical retellings, the “eccentric” and “frugal spinster” Mabel Frazer wrongfully maligns the charismatic, debonair A. B. Wright, who was once seen as
one of Utah’s most important artists.4 Wright, the so-called “bad boy of Utah art”—a descriptor that glorifies his problematic reputation and behavior—has elicited a kind of admiration in these writers, whereas Frazer is met with exasperation, dismissal, and even scorn.5 Past discussants of the Wright affair have neither delved into the extant primary sources that illuminate its complexities nor approached it with the degree of gravity warranted by the nature of these allegations.
Making extensive use of primary source material, including official university reports, correspondence, student yearbooks, class catalogs, newspaper articles, government records, family histories, and artworks, this article will demonstrate that claims of A. B. Wright’s sexual improprieties against women students at the University of Utah had substance and that Mabel Frazer’s role as whistleblower had undeniable professional consequences for her. It will demonstrate the systemic sexism under which Frazer and her female students and colleagues had to operate, where male perspectives were
privileged, male positions were protected, and male power maintained. Indeed, the Wright affair throws into sharp relief the governing politics of gender within the university and reveals just how fraught the experience of gaining an art education and developing a career as an art professional in late 1930s Utah could be for women. Importantly, both Frazer and Wright were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and its cultural hegemony serves as a critical overlay in the developments of the Wright affair; for while patriarchal authority has always been a cornerstone of the religion, the era witnessed a retrenchment of the progressivism that had characterized LDS women’s activities in the public sphere in the previous few decades.6 In fine, the University of Utah Art Department’s 1937 sexual misconduct affair can be read as a case study that is representative of cultural norms surrounding sexual harassment of women within American academic and ecclesiastical communities at this time.
Without a doubt, Mabel Frazer (1887–1981) was not a conformist. Displaying a keen interest in
Mabel Frazer faculty photograph, ca. 1947. University of Utah Historical Faculty Files, ACC 0526, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
Alma Brockerman Wright, Self Portrait in Studio, ca. 1935, oil on canvas. Springville Museum of Art Permanent Collection
art at a young age, she made the most of her resources in her hometown of Beaver, Utah, and went on to become one of the first students to graduate from the University of Utah with an art degree.7 Teaching stints at local secondary schools financed the continuation of her studies in New York, where Frazer trained at the New York Evening School of Industrial Art, Beaux–Arts Institute, and Art Students League. In 1920, she was hired at her alma mater; Frazer reports that she was recruited for this position after LDS church apostle John A. Widtsoe and his wife discovered her copying a Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.8 For the next three decades, she was a mainstay in the University of Utah’s Department of Art, teaching a wide array of courses in studio, design, and art history.9
Refusing to comply with the expectations of Mormon spinsterhood, which meant possessing an unassuming demeanor, being dependent upon others, and showing deference to patriarchal authority, Frazer lived on her own terms. She took solo trips across the Southwest, as well as to Egypt, the Yucatan Peninsula, the British Isles, and Europe, and she became an active participant in Utah politics. In addition to leading an independent life as a single Mormon woman, other aspects of Frazer’s personality went against the grain of gendered cultural expectations. Frazer’s sister, Madeleine F. Waldis, recounted that when Mabel was on her deathbed, she apologetically told her nurse: “I really have a lot of love in my heart, but I also have a lot of damn-it-to-hell.”10 This “damn-itto-hell” attitude became a key element of Frazer’s reputation, and Utah art aficionados and historians, including Glen Warchol, Tom Alder, and Jeff Nye, have continued to cast her as a difficult old-maid type, emphasizing her idiosyncratic behaviors and demanding personality.11 Though viewed negatively by her critics, these traits, which were perhaps developed in response to the chauvinistic treatment she had experienced personally and professionally, also enabled her to speak out against the systemic sexism around her.
Despite being heavily involved in the mid-century Utah arts community—serving as vice president of the Utah Art Institute, chair of the Utah Chapter of the American Artists’ Congress, and chair of the art section for the
Utah Educational Association—and exhibiting widely throughout the state, Frazer stood outside the inner circle of the Utah art elite.12 She was at odds with several of its leading figures, including the most powerful of them all, Alice Merrill Horne, whom Frazer characterized as one of her “most bitter enemies.”13 In contrast, A. B. Wright (1875–1952) was considered one of the luminaries of Utah art, possessing all the necessary bona fides for the moniker of “great artist” and the networks for achieving his lofty professional aims. Wright was even born and raised in the right neighborhood: he was a member of the influential Twentieth Ward in Salt Lake City, which counted the well-known Utah artists Mahonri Young, Lee Greene Richards, and Jack Sears among its congregants.14 In his youth, Wright took lessons from the state’s top artists, J. T. Harwood and George Martin Ottinger, and was a key figure in the elite Society of Utah Artists (an organization that excluded women from membership).15 Wright was also part of the second generation of Utah artists who had studied in Paris, and he could boast of having artwork accepted at the prestigious French Salon.
Furthermore, Wright was granted important commissions, including murals for several LDS temples and the Utah State Capitol building. Local newspapers championed his travel abroad, traced the changes in his artistic philosophy, and praised his accomplishments.16 Writers frequently commented upon Wright’s accomplishments in boxing and fencing, suggesting that being a “man’s man” was a central component to his public persona (fig. 1).17 In 1929, Horne nominated Wright for the top ten greatest living Utahns; at that time, he was the head of the art department at LDS University (LDS Business College) and his career was garnering laudatory articles in the local papers.18 Only one year after joining its faculty, he was named the head of the University of Utah art department.
Frazer’s very act of making claims of immoral behavior against Wright—a well-known congregant of the Twentieth Ward, LDS temple muralist, and member of the church’s priesthood organization—was transgressive, due to the nature of the accusations and the status of the accused. To be sure, Frazer was an intensely devout Mormon. She penned numerous essays
Figure 1. A. B. Wright, “Fencing: A. B. Wright of Atelier Dubois, Paris France, Instructor,” n.d., ink and watercolor. Apparently he offered fencing lessons when a student in Paris and also at the Deseret gymnasium in Salt Lake City. A. B. Wright Papers, MS 1394, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.
on art and religion for women’s church publications, and she was a key figure in the woman-led Gospel of Beauty movement in the LDS church, which espoused the power of art to bring people to Christ.19 She also created devotional art; she likely considered Christ Among the Nephites (1954), a work commissioned by the bishop of the Thirty-Third Ward for their chapel and now part of the Springville Museum of Art’s collection, to be her greatest artwork.20 The only thing that superseded art in Frazer’s life was her religious devotion.21 Yet despite these testaments to her faithfulness, as a woman Frazer would not have possessed anywhere near the same kind of religious standing as A. B. Wright within the local Mormon community.
It is clear that her students at the University of Utah held Frazer in high regard. Known as a dedicated mentor, Frazer supported exhibitions of student artwork, held meetings of the student art guild in her home, and was lauded for her generosity in advising students.22 They also saw her as honorable and trustworthy. Waldis records:
Her students were inspired by her teachings. As one young man expressed it: “Mabel gave us so much more than training in art, she taught
us the real meaning of life, and we were all greatly enriched through our association with her.” No one ever questioned her integrity. Her word was gold; her promises made to be kept. “She gave so much to her students,” commented another. But in no way dared they infringe on her time with petty grievances. She seemed to be instinctively aware of their needs and was always ready to advise or counsel them.23
When Frazer retired in 1953, newspaper notices declared that “students flocked to her classes,” and described her as a “beloved teacher.”24 Over the course of her career, Frazer displayed a remarkable degree of commitment to her students.25
Their admiration notwithstanding, Frazer was at a disadvantage within the ingrained sexism that governed academia. Advocating for her students took courage. Previous chroniclers of Frazer’s report of Wright’s sexual improprieties in 1937 have argued that it was made out of malice and vengeance, because in 1932 she was not promoted to the head of the department and thus began a campaign to ruin Wright’s life and career.26 But surely Frazer recognized that making such claims would pose serious risks to her reputation both in the art community and at the university. Furthermore, if her lack of promotion motivated her actions, it would not have made sense for her to wait five years to fabricate or bring these allegations to light. Frazer’s own words, as rehearsed in the opening lines of this essay, provide a more likely motivation: the reports from students became so troubling that she felt compelled to file an official complaint. Despite the risks to her career, Frazer took seriously the accusations regarding Wright’s behavior toward students in the art program.
Frazer’s May 1937 report of Wright’s sexual misconduct to university president George Thomas set in motion a series of correspondence. After meeting in person, Thomas asked Frazer to prepare an official written statement delineating the details of confidences shared by students.27 In it, Frazer declared that over the last few years a number of students had come to her to share their concerns about Wright’s behavior, rehearsing specific incidents of his
misconduct. Frazer’s report mainly focused on two current students: Marjorie Williams and Alice Bartlett. Williams had first encountered Wright as a fifteen-year-old freshman at the LDS University, where he was teaching. Wright had asked the young woman to pose for a portrait, and Williams, flattered by the request, had agreed to sit for him. While there, as Frazer wrote, “instead of painting he forced his attentions on her, she resisted, and finally, too late to get much done, he did commence a canvas. She posed in a fancy costume and when it came time to change to her street clothes there was more trouble before she finally got him to leave the room so she could.”28 Williams “thought she had convinced him she was not that sort of girl, [and] she returned for a second sitting.” Again, Williams experienced the same thing, and thereafter she refused to pose for Wright.
Wright’s frustrated advances had negative implications for Marjorie Williams when she went on to a year of undergraduate work at the University of Utah. While there, Williams wanted to take a course in interior design, but to do so had to take a prerequisite life-drawing class from her former professor, who now headed the university’s art department. Two female students told Frazer that, in his life-drawing class, Wright “made it very unpleasant” for Williams and gave her a “D” course grade. Williams later corroborated the details to Frazer. Frazer was catalyzed into action when another student, a Mr. Cannon, implored her for help, claiming he was very “worried over Marjory [sic] Williams’ very desperate state of mind. He told me that she was talking of suicide.” At this point, Frazer approached Myrtle Austin, the Dean of Women at the University of Utah, and shared the allegations and her concern for Williams’s well-being.29
The other student named in Mabel Frazer’s report, Alice Bartlett, was a native of Roosevelt, Utah, whom Frazer described as “hard working, kindly, most willing to help everybody, quite young, a country girl in much need of social training—brilliant in art, but flounders in talking.”30 Bartlett had paid for school via the New Deal National Youth Administration (NYA) program, which provided student aid through work study. Bartlett worked as an assistant to Wright and was placed in charge of his
NYA group. Frazer recalled that she “first got a hint of [Bartlett’s] situation last fall when one of her friends told me she was in a very difficult plight and asked me to have her transferred to my group.” Frazer initially denied the request, but she became concerned when Wright called Bartlett out of Frazer’s class, then apologized to Frazer for the disruption and cast aspersions on the student, “explaining that the Dean of Women had wanted [Bartlett] and intimating there was something amiss in regard to NYA.”31
Frazer got a fuller picture when Bartlett eventually came to her home and confided in her. Frazer’s account contends two attempted assaults on Bartlett by Wright. Although referred to euphemistically (as expected in that day, especially by single women narrating such events), the words paint a vivid picture of physical struggle when Bartlett went to meet with Wright on university business. The shaken student reported that Wright “was sure a strong devil, but that she was pretty strong herself. That the door was sure awful to get open, I mean it takes both hands at once and all you got.”32 Afraid to tell her family because she “feared her father would do something violent,” and reluctant to share this with anyone at the university for fear that she would not be believed, Bartlett said nothing. And given that she “was desperately in need of the money she was earning . she went back, and the experience was repeated.” It appears that Wright had even proposed using university funds to pay Bartlett for sexual favors, telling her to “count the theatre work on the NYA and he would take care of her over in his department.” Frazer asked Bartlett “point blank if he had the nerve to offer her money and she said that he had not come right out and stated it that way, and of course the only way she had to protect herself had been to act so dumb that she couldn’t understand what he was talking about.”33 Wright subsequently punished Bartlett for resisting his sexual overtures by demoting her to “the meanest tasks” and failing to give her work for her allotted hours—feigning dumb did not actually protect her. Bartlett was then accused of lying on her timecard, and “one month her work was so manipulated that she received no check at all.”34
The experiences of these women are typical in cases of sexual misconduct. Wright preyed upon students who were young or socially or
economically disadvantaged, and thus especially vulnerable. It was no coincidence that Bartlett was a rural girl with limited social experience—Frazer made a point to mention that Bartlett wore coveralls her freshman year as a testament to her social naïveté and that Williams was an impressionable girl of fifteen at the time of her alleged assault. These were atrisk young women who, having grown up within the patriarchal structures of Utah Mormon culture and possessing little understanding of or power within the university institution, were easy to manipulate.
Although it was Frazer who brought the claims of harassment and attempted assault of Alice Bartlett and Marjorie Williams before the university administration, she was not the only faculty confidante and advocate for these students. In a statement to the Council of the Deans of the University of Utah dated May 31, 1937, adjunct art faculty member Caroline Parry corroborated Frazer’s claims. Parry verified that Bartlett had also confided in her about “her unfortunate experience with Mr. Alma Wright.” She also documented complaints from two other students, recollecting that “the first girl who came was in tears because of a proposition that she considered an insult of serious proportion. The second girl was not in tears but was very angry over a similar experience.” Although Parry uses veiled language, her statement clearly shows that she too had known about Wright’s pattern of harassment of young female students in the art department. Parry concludes: “What Mr. Wright’s intentions were I will not presume to judge, but I feel that any student in a University should feel absolute security in the private office of any faculty member. These girls did not feel that and so thereafter took a companion with them when it was necessary for interviews.”35
Caroline Parry’s statement of student grievances supports Frazer’s narrative and is a critical source illuminating the Wright affair that has never been mentioned in published accounts. Together, the two women’s statements show a pattern of Wright’s abuse of students in the University of Utah’s art department. It seems improbable that Parry would have fabricated an account of two additional students or validated Frazer’s recounting of Bartlett’s troubling tale
if these did not have substance; in making such allegations of an eminent figure in the community and the chair of her department, Parry risked her own status within the university, especially because Parry was contingent faculty.
Although not a University of Utah student, Olive Belnap Jenson (1888–1979) experienced similar intimidation when under Wright’s tutelage. In 1914 Olive had been approached by the president of Ogden’s Weber Academy to teach art. After hearing of her concerns about adequate preparation, he advised her to observe a few of Wright’s classes at the LDS University. In the few short weeks she attended his classes, Belnap claims she was a target of his advances. In her personal history, she relates her ordeal—which deserves to be quoted at length, as it speaks to Wright’s practice of singling out and grooming female art students under his supervision:
I commenced the work at the L.D.S. College. Mr. Wright proceeded with his various classes while I worked at one side on a model in still-life. As I remember, not anything was said to me by way of help or criticism till after the other students had filed out of the last class. Then he proceeded to give ME and my work personal attention, which continued longer than I anticipated, and I did not know how to extricate myself from his devoted instruction as I perceived that we were quite alone in a large school building. As dusk approached and artificial lighting became necessary, I became apprehensive, even though I was in a church school building with a teacher highly recommended by our church school principal. At length the lights had to be turned off for the night, the entire building being vacant. The problem now was how to proceed in total darkness to the front entrance, which was impossible for me to do, making his assistance necessary. I was assured by him that he had the key to the building in his possession, the building now being closed for the night, but we left with my feeling really concerned. The ride on the bus
gave ample time for my concern to develop and upon my arrival at my sister Marion’s home where I was staying, I gave vent to my suppressed feeling in an explosive manner and used the expression that I had returned from a trip to Europe to come in the shadow of the Temple in a church school building to find concern. This brought voluminous instruction from my sister who felt that I was assuming too much to suppose that this noted instructor would have any concern with an insignificant student on her first visit. From then on I arose and left when the other students filed out of the room.36
As a college professor, Wright was in a position that gave him access to young women. In at least these three cases, evidence of Wright’s repeated sexual improprieties directed toward women students is clearly documented.
In a follow-up letter to Frazer’s initial statement dated May 24, 1937, President Thomas pressed Frazer for more details on the rumors surrounding two other individuals, Myrtle Hansen and Lucille Winters.37 Myrtle Hansen was employed by the University of Utah as an art department model, although it is possible that she modeled exclusively for Wright.38 Lucille Winters was a former student, whose relationship with Wright allegedly caused his separation from his wife.39 Frazer explained that she wanted to focus on the allegations of her students that she could substantiate, and though she was aware of the rumors, “I confined myself to the things that could be traced.”40 Frazer related some rumors she had heard from students and employees in the department but reiterated that she only had second- or third-hand knowledge of these events. Significantly, it is an incident of Wright and Hansen being caught in a compromising situation that has endured in the historical annals of the Wright case, due in part to the salaciousness of the rumors and his numerous depictions of Myrtle preserved in Utah’s public art collections.41 There was much to their relationship that could provide grist for the university gossip mill, including tales of them being seen by students and neighbors in various states of undress in university studios as well as a pregnancy scandal.42
Wright’s nude sketches and paintings of Myrtle Hansen and other models produced during the time of the reported episodes of misconduct provide evidence of his sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. While representations of the nude are, of course, not in and of themselves problematic, the ways Wright renders his subjects are suggestive of a troubling disposition toward his models. Wright’s class notes, public lectures, and publications speak to a sexualization of the act of painting and a fixation on the nude—a common trope in modernist male artists and their approach to art, to be sure, but certainly not in Mormon Utah. The mid-century art scene in the state was decidedly conservative, with vocal opposition to the avant-garde artistic trends seen back East and in Europe. To him, it seems that such an artistic focus was not about capturing correct proportions or anatomy, or even to better understand the human body, but to bring out those characteristics that turned women’s bodies into objects. Wright’s nude imagery, as well as his writings on the subject, are indicative of a culture of toxic sexuality in Wright’s professional relationships and serve as corroborating evidence of the allegations made against Wright by female students and faculty.43
This specific and sexualized view of women’s bodies is particularly evident in Wright’s art produced in the 1920s and 30s. Even in his more academic studies, like an untitled sketch of a semi-reclining female nude (fig. 2), he positions his models in titillating and objectifying manners. Lying on her side but twisting her torso and resting on her arms so as to display her breasts, the model is placed in a strained and unnatural pose. By doing so, Wright accomplishes two things: one, he boasts of his ability to manipulate a woman’s body into assuming whatever position he desires, and, two, he ensures that much of the model’s body is presented to the viewer.
Many of Wright’s studies of Hansen are reminiscent of the seductive images of 1930s film stars such as Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, and Marlene Dietrich popularized in Hollywood culture and constructed for the heterosexual male gaze (fig. 3).44 In fact, Wright’s nude renderings seem to draw more from the representational schemata of a pinup girl or pornographic imagery than an académie drawing.45 For example, in the
the right side of the canvas cutting off her trunk just before the pubis area.
Utah Museum of Fine Art’s Untitled painting by Wright, Myrtle lies prone, her heavily madeup face of red lips, rouged cheeks, and colored eyelids, along with her upper torso pressed into the bed suggestively (fig. 4). The rendering of the rest of her body is even more provocative: the model’s lower abdomen is shown twisting and opening up in the direction of the viewer,
Wright’s provocative painting, Myrtle: The Artist’s Model, which dates to the same time that charges of sexual misconduct were levied against the artist, follows the age-old tradition of the reclining nude (fig. 5). Here, her recumbent body twists enticingly in a game of voyeuristic hide-and-seek, and her face assumes an expression of sensual reverie. While it, too, takes a cue from Hollywood’s construction of desirable femininity, it also aligns with the visual rhetoric of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French boudoir scenes. In this genre, women are shown in their private chamber, typically in the act of bathing, dressing, sleeping, or preparing to entertain lovers. Wright would have been well acquainted with this mode of painting, as he had spent many years studying the art collections in Paris in 1902, 1913–1914 and 1929–1930.46 Famous boudoir paintings at the Louvre, such as François Boucher’s The Brunette Odalisque (ca. 1745)
Figure 2. A. B. Wright, Reclining Female Nude, dated ca. nineteenth century by the UMFA; here dated ca. 1935 by the authors, charcoal on paper. Friends of the Art Museum Collection; James, Mariam “Mimi” Broun, D.T. and Annie, from the Permanent Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
Figure 3. Marlene Dietrich (Los Angeles, 1930–1939), photograph. Deutsche Kinemathek, Marlene Dietrich Collection.
Figure 4. A. B. Wright, Untitled, n.d., oil on canvas. Gift of Robert N. Sears, from the Permanent Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s The Grand Odalisque (1814), are exemplary of this tradition, which continued to flourish well into the twentieth century (see, for example, Henri Matisse’s Odalisque: Harmony in Red, 1927–28). It is not difficult to imagine that Wright, an avowed Francophile, envisioned producing such a work in his Myrtle: An Artist’s Model. The personal accouterments scattered across the canvas add narrative interest: the bedclothes are pulled to the bottom of the bed and below them are her cast-off slippers. On the adjacent table is a tea cup and clock whose face indicates that it is late afternoon—the time of day dedicated to lovers’ rendezvous in France. Wright’s painting is not staged as a studio scene, but rather as a bedroom tableau.
Furthermore, Wright’s sketches and studies reveal a sexualization typically not seen in traditional academic studies and certainly absent from the work of his contemporaries in Utah. Many of his colleagues, including B. F. Larsen, Mahonri Young, Lee Greene Richards, and even Mabel Frazer, count representations of the female nude in their corpus of works. Young’s Seated Nude Examining Foot (n.d.) represents a standard trope in academic studies that translates into a genre scene (fig. 6), and Larsen’s Seated Nude (1929) is a study that manages to be fastidious in its delineation of the body while respecting the model’s subjectivity (fig. 7). Frazer’s undated Untitled (Nude) (fig. 8) and Greene Richards’ Reflections (1915) (fig. 9), in which the figures are shown from behind, manifest a sense
of respect for the psychic and physical space of the women modeling. Unlike Wright’s treatments of the nudes, the poses and expressions in his colleagues’ depictions do not follow the visual rhetoric of the movie starlet or pinup girl that had developed in the 1930s. Their bodies are not contorted and fetishized for the pleasure of the heterosexual male gaze; none of these women are endowed with a seductive “come
Figure 5. A. B. Wright, Myrtle: The Artist’s Model, ca. 1937, oil on canvas. Springville Museum of Art Permanent Collection.
Figure 6. Mahonri Young, Seated Nude Examining Foot, ca.1897-1957 estimated, crayon on paper. Gift of Carlyle Burrows, from the Permanent Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
hither” glance to the viewer found in much of Wright’s nude imagery. Rather, the studies of the female form of Utah artists Larsen, Young, Richards, and Frazer uniformly indicate an interest in formal issues such as line, value, and form. The subjects of these works are positioned in natural, everyday poses and with heads turned and faces obscured, giving them the anonymity customarily accorded to studio models. In these studies, a sense of the dignity of the individual pervades. In sum, there is a distinctively different approach to the female nude in the work of these other Utah artists that suggests a fundamentally different approach to women and their bodies than that of A. B. Wright.
In Wright’s sketches and paintings, the women are rendered sensuously, even erotically. It
should be noted that there is nothing inherently problematic per se with the performative sexuality of Wright’s models—or the movie stars or reclining nudes they mimic. However, these representations of the female nude are rather provocative for an artist who worked for the LDS church for years painting temple murals and teaching at the LDS University. Moreover, they seem not just to play to a generalized heterosexual male viewer, but to one in particular: the artist himself, especially because these are mostly preparatory sketches and studies that would not have been shown publicly. When viewed in light of the contemporaneous accusations of sexual misconduct lodged against Wright, these also contribute to the establishment of the artist’s proclivities.
Thanks to Frazer’s reporting of these student allegations, the University of Utah’s Administrative Council called a hearing and summoned both Mabel Frazer and A. B. Wright. The meeting commenced on May 28, 1937, and on the evening of June 1, the proceedings were
Figure 7. B. F. Larsen, Seated Nude Women, 1929, charcoal. Springville Museum of Art Permanent Collection
Figure 8. Mabel Frazer, Untitled [Nude], n.d., oil on canvas. Gift of Robert A. Larkins, from the Permanent Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
conducted. The council included President George Thomas, the deans and directors of the colleges, and a group of ten to twelve faculty representatives.47 While all standing council members were men, Thomas invited two women to attend the special hearing: Myrtle Austin, Dean of Women, and Professor Rose Homer Widstoe of the Home Economics department. Unfortunately, the minutes of the meeting do little to illuminate the proceedings—there are no indications of what evidence was brought forward, which questions were asked, or who spoke, beyond Frazer and Wright.48
As part of the hearing, Wright’s wife, Alice Hooper Wright, who had been living separately from her husband since at least 1930, wrote a letter to Thomas denying the suggestion that her husband’s behavior toward Lucille Winters was the cause of their separation. Alice Wright rebuked any criticisms of his character and decried the possibility of any wrongdoing on his part. “The reasons for our living apart,” she penned, “are matters of private arrangement between him and me and concern no one else.”49 While Alice Wright’s letter claims that it was neither the alleged rape nor the case with
Lucille Winters that caused their separation, it does not address the complaints made by Bartlett and Williams. Her claim that “during all that time [38 years of marriage] no breath of scandal ever attached to his name, nor was there ever in his conduct anything to arouse such suspicions” was clearly untrue. Frazer and Parry’s letters attest to Wright’s pattern of sexual misconduct, and one must surmise that talk of these experiences circulated amongst the students, staff, and faculty in the University of Utah’s art department, if not elsewhere. Having resided in California for at least the last seven years prior to this incident, Alice Wright would not have been privy to local gossip unless it was reported to her and therefore would not have been a reliable character witness.50 And certainly, it was in Alice Wright’s best interest to minimize any possible scandal related to her husband’s conduct that could have been damaging to herself or her family.51
The hearing, which was conducted in the evening and seems to have lasted less than an hour, ended when the administrative council chose to exonerate him of any wrongdoing.52 It appears that the council made their decisions
Figure 9. Lee Greene Richards, Reflections, 1915, oil on canvas. Gift of Vivian (Mrs. Richard) Whittmore, from the Permanent Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
based solely on statements made by Frazer and Wright. Students Williams and Bartlett were invited to testify at the hearing, but, as might be predicted neither elected to attend. The nature of their confessions, made in private to trusted female faculty, already indicated the shame and embarrassment they felt at the situation. Frazer’s written reports recounted how they dared only speak of their experiences in veiled, coded language, with hushed tones and the fear of judgment from family and friends ever present. To rehearse these incidents before a tribunal of older male university administrators who, broadly speaking, resembled Wright would have been intimidating or even traumatizing. Even today, victims often do not prosecute or report sexual harassment.53 This left Frazer to speak on behalf of the aggrieved students, and the administrative council determined that she did not present enough incriminating evidence. Indeed, they were, as Thomas wrote in his letter to Wright, “thoroughly convinced” that he was innocent.54
While some might argue that the presence of Myrtle Austin and Rose Widtsoe in the meeting guaranteed a fair trial for these women students, it is important to consider gender dynamics in such scenarios. These women faculty were invited guests but not members of the administrative council. They did not wield the same power or influence as its male members, and likely did not have a vote in the matter.55 While the minutes do not indicate who, beyond Professors Frazer and Wright, spoke at the meeting, it would not be surprising if neither woman spoke. A body of emerging research on women in professional settings suggests that if women do not constitute at least half the members in a meeting, they do not speak up.56 The inclusion of two token women on the panel was not enough to combat the gendered power dynamics at play. And it is likely that the message these two women administrators received from such a perfunctory proceeding was that future charges such as these would not be taken seriously by the university’s administration.
Although Wright very well could have been guilty of sexual misconduct with women students and staff in the art department, the gendered cultural conventions regulating and judging behavior meant that there really was a blind eye to such practices. This majority male council would not
have viewed this affair in the same way as their women colleagues, who not only heard their students making such confessions, but also operated on a daily basis within the confines of institutionalized sexism, where power and authority were understood as male. The council members were more likely to have sympathized with Wright, one of the members of the “Utah Hall of Fame,” rather than with an outspoken woman professor whose very presence underlined the increasing threat posed by ambitious and professional women to the current economic, political, and social orders. Such individuals would have also been upending current social norms during the Great Depression, taking away employment from a man providing for a family (even one who was separated).57 The council would have viewed the employment of Frazer, a single woman without any dependents, as much more expendable.
The ramifications of filing these claims came hard and fast for whistleblower Mabel Frazer. On June 3, 1937, the day after the official statement acquitting Wright was sent out, the aggrieved professor wrote to Thomas with the recommendation that Frazer be retired from the art department.58 Recognizing that she would have to try to make amends or lose her position at the university, she quickly wrote to Thomas (and sent a carbon copy to Wright). In this letter, Frazer noted the embarrassing situation in which she now found herself and issued an apology to both men. That said, she did not retract or deny the allegations of her students. Affirming that she “acted in this case from conscientious motives and without malice,” Frazer maintained that she “was appealed to by these girls and given their confidence which they said that they would verify to the President. I felt that it was my duty to the University to call the matter to the attention of the President. It was not my intention the matter should go beyond the President and those immediately concerned.”59 According to Administrative Council records, Thomas convened the hearing at the request of Professor Wright.60
Wright’s campaign against Frazer continued unabated, and Thomas soon jumped on board.61 In a follow-up letter from Thomas to Frazer dated June 7, he again sharply reprimanded her for bringing these charges against the department head, writing that there “was not the least foundation which to base such allegations
against Professor Wright”—this despite the first-hand testimony of her students, which was confirmed by her colleague Caroline Parry and had also been at least partially admitted to by Myrtle Austin.62 In this memo, Thomas also chastised Frazer for being a constant source of contention, determining she was “practically the sole cause of the difficulty in the department.” And to finally put Frazer in her place, Thomas instructed that she must get behind Wright as the head of the art department, declaring that “if you cannot support him you should resign.” It seems likely that in course of the hearing, it had been suggested that Frazer had trumped up these claims because she resented being passed over for the position of department chair, as Thomas reiterated that Frazer was deemed incapable of assuming this responsibility: “It is still the opinion of the President and the Administrative Council that, as between you two, he is much better qualified to head the department than you. That is the opinion of the people who are placed in a position to decide the matter.”63 And so began the framing of this case as a matter of Frazer’s professional jealousy, a leitmotif in the historical treatment of this affair.
Thomas’s final demand of Frazer was calculated. He stated, “If you desire to receive a contract for next year, you can give an undated resignation to be placed in the hands of the President, who will not accept it in any event unless it is first presented and approved by the Administrative Council.”64 Frazer was thus put on alert: those administrative bodies that had refused to see Wright’s pattern of abuse would be watching her closely. It was obvious that the president of the university shared Wright’s desire to have her leave the institution; another undated letter from Thomas to Frazer has survived in the university’s file on this case that further expressed his support of Wright’s cause. Thomas indicated that, because of the trial and the unsatisfactory working relationship between the two professors, one of them must retire but that “it would not seem logical to ask [Wright] for a resignation” given the council’s decision.65 He referred to this as being an ongoing process but stated that “until this is determined, no contract for future service will be issued.”66 The aftermath of this hearing, in which Wright was absolved of any misconduct
and Frazer was accused of falsifying claims to ruin Wright and take over as department chair, was devastating for Frazer. Accounts of this affair speak of the way that it ruined Wright’s reputation but never offer consideration of the toll it took on Frazer’s standing at the university and in the broader community.
While the Administrative Council and President Thomas displayed unadulterated support for Wright’s innocence, another letter in this file, penned by University of Utah Board of Regents member John R. Carver and dated June 21, 1937, indicates that the Board had misgivings about the procedure and findings of this trial. In fact, just a few weeks after the charges against Wright were heard the board even presented the possibility of reopening the case. Did new evidence come to light that corroborated Frazer’s allegations? For Thomas, it did not matter. In his response to Carver, he conceded that “[s]ince the last Board Meeting, I have been carefully considering the case of Miss Mabel Frazer and the suggestions that different members of the Board made in respect to the case.” However, Thomas went on to implore Carver not to pursue the matter any further, suggesting that its reopening would be injurious to the university as a whole. What kind of precedent might be set if the Board voted contrary to the president of the university and its administrative council, he queried?
Once it becomes known by the faculty that faculty matters are to be taken out of the hands of the President and handled by the Board directly, I am sure you can see that immediately the President loses his influence with the faculty. If a mistake was made in the case of Miss Frazer by the President and twenty members of the faculty after a hearing, I am sure it would be well to consider if it would not now be a greater mistake to reverse the decision . . . A reversal of the decision would very soon become common knowledge to the effect that the Board is not sustaining the President and the Administrative Council in their decisions.”67
In the end, the preservation of his power and authority as university president was more
important than protecting women students from sexual misconduct at the hands of a professor and department chair. It appears that Carver and the Board of Regents acceded to President Thomas’s entreaties to leave the case closed.
Although these charges were dismissed in June, the situation was still generating controversy among the university administration in the fall of 1937. A letter from Thomas to Wright written in September explained that he had recently talked to Myrtle Hansen who asked if the president had forbidden Wright from talking to her. Thomas denied making such a demand and then gave an enjoinder of sorts to him, asking that Wright “please do not repeat” the claim that he was preventing contact between the artist and model. In the course of their conversation, Thomas did make an important disclosure, admitting: “I did tell her that I have decided there should be no female models used this year.”68 Although Thomas and his council had found Wright innocent of any wrongdoing the previous spring, there was clearly enough concern over the possibility of inappropriate behavior to warrant banning the use of women models at the university.
In the middle of the semester of 1937, A. B. Wright abruptly resigned his post at the University of Utah and left Salt Lake City. Some chroniclers have characterized his resignation as “forced.”69 However, there is nothing in university records to indicate that the administration demanded this action.70 Some days after he left Utah, Wright informed Thomas that he was in France. His letter does not represent the vengeful and scorned perspective some have cast on this incident (one chronicler alleged that his last words to a student dropping him off at the train station were “I’m going where I will be appreciated”).71 Instead, this letter of resignation reads as a confessional, albeit a begrudging one. Wright asked Thomas to understand, “to some extent, at least, that I suffered greatly,” thus centering his own pain and making himself the victim of the situation. Tellingly, Wright’s last paragraph and closing words read as an admission of guilt of inappropriate behavior: “You will certainly believe that I deplore the circumstances to which I admit having willingly contributed and it would be a relief
for me to know that you will nevertheless keep the memory of my better qualities during my association with the university. With sincere apologies and highest respect, A. B. Wright.”72
While Wright’s sudden resignation and departure must have given Frazer some solace, the remainder of her tenure at the University of Utah bore the imprint of this case. Although Frazer had been with the university for decades and had the training, experience, and expertise to serve as the new department head, when the search for Wright’s replacement was announced, she was not viewed as a viable option. Thomas wrote to Frazer: “Either this year or next, we have got to come to a point where we have a head of a department; and regretful as it may be, I just could not put you in. Now you may feel that this is not fair or just, but it is one of the limitations which cannot be overcome.”73 Not only was she deemed unfit for the position of department chair, she was also denied rank promotion to associate professor until 1949, despite a stellar record of teaching and mentoring, along with strong letters of support from her colleagues. Fellow art professor Jack Sears lauded Frazer’s contributions to the department, declaring: “In my opinion—measured by her sincere and able teaching which has always been in the interest of her students rather than for self-interest— Mabel Frazer has accomplished more than any art instructor there.”74 While there may have been other contributing factors to her failure to be promoted, the letters from Thomas to Frazer in 1937 and 1938 suggest that her role in this controversy was one of these. Tellingly, it was not until there was new leadership within the art department, college, and university (namely Dean Avard Fairbanks, Department Chair LeConte Stewart, and University President Ray A. Olpin) that Frazer received rank promotion.75 In his authoritative history of Utah art, Olpin acknowledged the exploitation of this woman professor, writing: “To remain a female ‘Assistant Professor’ for some 42 seasons before promotion to ‘Associate’ just three years previous to her retirement at the age of 65, Frazer ‘did it all’ for the department for years.”76
Mabel Frazer herself characterized the challenges she faced as a woman professor even more candidly. In a 1947 letter addressed to University Dean Jacob Geerlings, she declared:
“I came to the university with the equivalent of a Ph.D. to teach the life classes . . . But I was a woman in a man’s institution. I was forced to turn over my wonderful classes to a succession of men with half my training, and take any subject they did not want or could not teach.”77
Waldis draws a clear connection between Frazer’s lack of advancement and her role as a whistleblower in the Wright case, concluding:
Her life on the faculty was far from happy at times. She was nearly fired because of her concern for the safety of several young women who reported to her the immoral conduct of one of the staff who refused them credit unless they conformed to his demands. They were fearful of having to report to him for an interview. When she reported the situation to President Thomas he flatly refused to investigate her complaint and said she was deliberately trying to undermine the man’s character because of personal conflicts.78
For Wright, despite allegations of sexual misconduct, mid-semester flight to France, abandonment of family, and admission of culpability for needing to leave the university, he remained a local celebrity. Wright continued to show his work in Utah exhibitions, where he was referred to as “a Utah artist now in Paris, France” and his foreign residency (he remained abroad until his death in 1952) characterized as “an extended trip abroad.”79 During WWII, there were statements to the effect that Wright had become a prisoner of war—a rumor that seems to have stemmed from a line in the 1945 Salt Lake obituary of his wife, which read: “Her husband, who is serving in the armed forces, was seized by the Nazis after the fall of France and Mrs. Wright had no word of him until this year, when a letter from him reached through the Red Cross.”80 These unsubstantiated claims that cast Wright in the role of war hero and an artist whose greatness necessitated his leaving provincial Utah in favor of pursuing a career in the center of the art world have contributed to the eclipsing of the serious allegations leveled against the University of Utah professor and department head.81
Scholars, journalists, and other writers should acknowledge the personal and professional
ramifications for those, like Frazer, who bring harassment and abuse to light and demand investigation and accountability. Frazer suffered the consequences of advocating for her grievously wronged students. Her experience is indicative of larger gender dynamics in higher education and the arts, and it illustrates the challenges women continue to face in the workplace. The fear of ostracization and retaliation continues to keep women from speaking up about sexual harassment or reporting sexual assault.82
The realities of A. B. Wright’s alleged sexual misconduct and Mabel Frazer’s advocacy for its victims echo the refrains of modern-day narratives regarding men who abuse positions of power. As pointed out in recent exposés about public figures, there may be hushed rumors about men in power and a general consensus among associates that something is amiss, but it is difficult to hold them liable for their sexual misconduct.83 In recent years it has sometimes taken the experiences and testimonies of dozens of women who have been harassed and assaulted by such a male authority figure to obtain justice. It is no surprise then that in 1937, a period in which such allegations were more likely to be disbelieved than believed—and even seen as a blight on the victim’s virtue—this was also the case.
In the era of the recent phenomenon of the #MeToo movement it is more important than ever to tell these types of histories, which demonstrate the deeply entrenched sexism and sexual harassment in higher education and the acute challenges faced by women who make these experiences public. The recent tragedy involving Lauren McCluskey, a University of Utah student athlete who was murdered by an ex-boyfriend on campus, is a case in point. Despite having made numerous complaints to campus police regarding his abusive behavior and threats, they failed to protect her.84 Narratives like those of women students in the University of Utah’s art department in the late 1930s are important to recount. They show that the experiences of students like McCluskey have a long history at the university and are not isolated incidents but part of larger, structural problems. While the rehearsal of such devastating events will not bring justice to its victims, the righting of the historical record may contribute to dismantling these systemic issues
and construction of a more equitable and empowering environment for women in higher education.
Not only did the institution mishandle the Wright allegations, so, too, has history. Those who have casually related this story and emphasized salacious details in the interest of impressing their audience have failed to take these disturbing allegations seriously. Only recently have claims of sexual harassment and assault in academia and the workplace been treated with the kind of weight these deserve. To talk about the Wright sexual misconduct case lightheartedly is to continue to trivialize the trauma experienced by Wright’s students and the real consequences that reporting these incidents had on Frazer’s career. Furthermore, it suggests to those who hear this event discussed cavalierly that such claims will continue to be met with disbelief and derision. Approaching such allegations with anything other than earnestness in ascertaining the truth and obtaining a just outcome fails the thousands of women who have faced situations similar to Frazer and her students. History must do better.
Notes
The authors would like to acknowledge grants from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Women’s Research Initiative Grant at Brigham Young University, along with the Utah Museum of Fine Art and J. Willard Marriott Library’s Fellowship in Collection Engagement at the University of Utah, for supporting the research for this article, which grew out of their current book project, tentatively titled “Artistic Frontiers: Women and the Making of the Utah Art Scene, 1880–1940.” We are grateful for the assistance of staff in the Special Collections departments at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University and the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, and want to give a special thanks to David Buhler at the University of Utah Archives, Nicole Sandberg at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Ben Whisenant at the LDS Church History Library, and colleagues Kif Augustine-Adams, Laura Paulsen Howe, Michael B. Jenson, and Maggie Leak for their research assistance. We are also grateful to the many others who provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, including respondents at the 2021 Mormon History Association’s annual conference, members of BYU’s Global Women’s Studies faculty research group (WSTAR), professors Alexander Hyres, Matthew Basso, and Paul Reeve at the University of Utah, and the anonymous reviewers and editors at Utah Historical Quarterly
1. Mabel Pearl Frazer to President George Thomas, May 22, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, George Thomas Presidential Records, 1921–1941, ACC 0017, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter GTPR).
2. Thomas to Frazer, June 2, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
3. Thomas to Frazer, June 7, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
4. Russel F. Fjeldsted’s characterization of this case as “a bizarre accusation by a woman art professor” is typical. In a paper given at the 2012 Utah State Historical Society conference, he argued for the innocence of Wright. A transcript of this paper can be found in the History of Utah Artists Files, Mae B. Huntington Research Library, Springville Museum of Art, Springville, Utah (hereafter Artists Files).
5. The most extended account of the incident is Glen Warchol’s “A. B. Wright: ‘Bad Boy’ Utah Artist Garners New Attention,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 30, 2011. It is also recounted in Tom Alder, “Around the Block: A. B. Wright,” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine, January 18, 2007, http://artistsofutah.org/; and Vern G. Swanson, Robert S. Olpin, and William C. Seifrit, Utah Painting and Sculpture, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1997), 129. Although Swanson, Olpin, and Seifrit are not as cavalier as these other writers, and even admit that Frazer almost lost her job over this incident, their discussions gloss over the seriousness of the allegations against Wright and the impact Frazer’s involvement in this case had on her career.
6. See Colleen McDannell, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 53–64, as well as the excellent biographies on two key Progressive-era LDS women: Dave Hall, A Faded Legacy: Amy Brown Lyman and Women’s Activism, 1872–1959 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015), and Carol Cornwall Madsen, An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870–1920 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2006).
7. Frazer is quoted as saying: “I was the first student to graduate [with] a major in art. . I had a battle with the school authorities to be allowed to do it, but I did it.”
See “The Girl with Original Ideas,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 29, 1928.
8. Madeline F. Waldis, “Mabel Pearl Frazer: Biographical Sketch (1984),” 12, Artists Files.
9. Robert S. Olpin, Dictionary of Utah Art (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Art Center, 1980), 94.
10. Waldis, “Mabel Pearl Frazer,” 1.
11. Her eccentricity is emphasized in writings like Warchol, “A. B. Wright”; Tom Alder, “Mabel Pearl Frazer” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine, February 5, 2007, http:// artistsofutah.org/; and Jeff Nye, “Mabel Pearl Frazer,” Utah Art Magazine, September 1974. Many scholars have challenged this perception by emphasizing her success and contributions to the Utah art scene. See Carma De Jong Anderson, Mabel Pearl Frazer: Professor of Art, Brigham Young University Harris Fine Arts Center, October 1980, exhibition catalog, Artists Files; Richard Christenson, “Mabel Frazer’s Legacy,” Deseret News, May 29, 1982; and Erika Doss, “I Must Paint: Women Artists of the Rocky Mountain Region,” in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945, edited by Patricia Trenton (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with the University of California Press, 1995).
12. Mabel Frazer biography, box 4, fd. 2, Works Progress Administration (Utah Section), Bio Sketches, ca. 1930–1941, MSS B 289, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
13. Mabel Frazer to Jacob Geerlings, January 14, 1947, box 20, fd. 54, University of Utah Historical Faculty Files,
Mabel Frazer, ACC 0526, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
14. For a discussion of the famous Twentieth Ward artists, see Stan Margulies, “Maybe ‘Twas Air That Made Them Artists,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 5, 1946, 47; and Alder, “Wright.”
15. See Emily Larsen, “Continued under Her Good Efforts: Utah Women Artists, Societies, and Social Clubs,” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine, January 30, 2020, http:// artistsofutah.org/. According to the last dated record of the Society of Utah Artists held at the University of Utah (1931), the bylaws forbidding women’s admission remained unchanged. Society of Utah Artist Records, ACC 0883, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
16. See “A. B. Wright: Artist, Athlete and Detective; Utah Painter Noted for Mural Decorations,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 3, 1928; “Prominent Artist Here,” Park Record, May 18, 1924; and “A. B. Wright Art Exhibition Praised by Colony’s Sponsor,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 21, 1930.
17. Two hand-made posters advertising fencing lessons can be found in box 2, fd. 7, A. B. Wright Papers, MS 1394, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
18. “Noted Artists Picked in ‘Greatest Utahns’ Lists,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 21, 1930, 2. See, e.g., “Art Head Plans Year Among Old Masters,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 1929.
19. Examples of Frazer’s contributions to LDS churchsponsored publications include “Art Appreciation,” Young Woman’s Art Journal 26 (December 1915): 755–57; and “The Art Value of Bee-Hive Symbolism,” Young Woman’s Art Journal 31 (October 1920): 558–60. For more on the Gospel of Beauty movement, see Heather Belnap Jensen, “Aesthetic Evangelism, Artistic Sisterhood, and the Gospel of Beauty: Mormon Women Artists at Home and Abroad, c. 1890–1920,” in Beyond Biography: Sources and Contexts for Mormon Women’s History, ed. Rachel Cope, Amy Easton-Flake, Keith Erekson, and Lisa Olsen Tait (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), 141–66.
20. She is known to have stood before this work every Sunday and proudly discussed its meaning with fellow ward members—and was devastated when, a number of years later, it was taken down for cleaning and not rehung. Mabel Frazer, interview by Richard Oman and Arlene Wilson, February 1977, Richard G. Oman Series of LDS Artists, 1972–2009, CR 100 899, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
21. Waldis, “Mabel Pearl Frazer,” 5.
22. See, e.g., “Utah Paintings on Exhibition,” Daily Utah Chronicle, February 3, 1928; “Waffle Supper Given,” Daily Utah Chronicle, January 13, 1922; “Girls Entertain,” Daily Utah Chronicle, October 31, 1922; “Art Exhibit Shows Unusual Work By Students,” Daily Utah Chronicle, May 5, 1938; and “Art Guild Parents Hear Talk,” Daily Utah Chronicle, February 28, 1936.
23. Waldis, “Mabel Pearl Frazer,” 20.
24. Beatrice Duke, “Mabel Frazer Plans a Busy ‘Retirement,’” Salt Lake Telegram, April 15, 1953.
25. Many women artists who studied with her would later credit her influence. Lura Redd, a talented Utah artist from Brigham City, especially benefited from Frazer’s mentorship. Frazer took Redd on sketching trips to southern Utah, and as Redd launched her career,
teaching art at Box Elder High School and exhibiting in local shows, she often mentioned Frazer’s impact. Another student, Vern Lamoreaux, specifically cited her studies with Frazer as influential when she unveiled a monumental sculptural relief of Christ for the Waterloo Ward. See “36 Paintings to be Shown Here,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, February 6, 1949; Viella B. Thornton, “Exhibit of Paintings by Lura Redd to be Presented in Ogden, Opening Sunday,” Box Elder News-Journal, February 4, 1949; and “Recently Unveiled,” Daily Utah Chronicle, October 29, 1929.
26. See Warchol, “A. B. Wright”; and Fjeldsted, unpublished manuscript, Artists File.
27. Thomas to Frazer, May 19, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR. President Thomas’s letter also mentions another student, “Neff,” who was most likely Ellen Neff. Frazer does not provide further details in her correspondence about Ms. Neff.
28. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
29. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937. Myrtle Austin’s university records do not have any notes about these allegations or conversations. See box 61, fd. 14, Dean of Women Files, GTPR, and box 3, fd. 13, Historical Faculty Files, Myrtle Austin, ACC 0526, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
30. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
31. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
32. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
33. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
34. Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
35. Caroline Parry to the Council of the Deans of the University, May 31, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
36. “The Life of Olive Christiana Belnap Jenson,” 12–13, compiled by Michael B. Jenson, unpublished family history, 1994. Emphasis in the original.
37. Thomas wrote: “Finally my notes record the statement that it was either rumor or generally understood that Mrs. Hansen had undergone a Cesarean operation last summer, that Professor Wright was responsible for her condition, and that he had paid the bill.” He also reminded Frazer that she had spoken of a rumor that “Professor A. B. Wright either seduced or raped [a woman named Lucille Winters], and upon the information of this case it caused a separation” with his wife— and he wondered why she had not elaborated upon these matters in her letter. Thomas to Frazer, May 24, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
38. Although university records on Myrtle’s employment are spotty, a July 1937 document ascertains that she was married to a “Melvin C. Edgar.” This record has enabled us, thanks to the genealogical detective work of Kif Augustine-Adams, to establish a better profile of Myrtle Hansen (as she is known in the literature on Wright). In historical records, she is variously referred to as Alma M. Hansen, Myrtle Reese, Myrtle Edgar, Alma Edgar, Alma Myrtle Edgar, Elma Myrtle Hansen Edgar, and Mrs. Melvin C. Edgar. She was born in 1910, married Melvin Edgar in 1928 and divorced him in 1956 (on the grounds of mental cruelty), and was killed in an auto-pedestrian accident in 1975.
39. In her initial statement, in regards to Lucille Winters, Frazer included only a few sentences on what she had heard, emphasizing that she did not know her or her current married name: “The Lucile Winters’ episode was reported to have occurred during her attendance at the L.D.S [LDS University], not on our campus. I was
told that the case had been hushed up by her family for her sake, that she was now married and living in Logan. I do not know her, her married name, nor any of her family.” Mabel Frazer to George Thomas, May 22, 1937. Thomas asked her for further details, especially to affirm that this event caused the separation of A. B. Wright and Alice Hooper Wright, which Frazer did not elaborate on. Thomas to Frazer, May 24, 1937; Frazer to Thomas, May 25, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
40. Frazer to Thomas, May 25, 1937.
41. Oftentimes in its narration, it is Frazer herself who finds Wright with Hansen, a scenario that appears wholly imagined. Warchol describes the incident writing, “In the spring of 1937, Frazer claimed she surprised Wright, who was 57 at the time, in a ‘compromising situation’ with a student who was posing nude. The woman is believed to have been the subject of Wright’s ‘Myrtle the Model,’ painted the same year.” Warchol’s retelling gets several key facts wrong: Frazer never reported finding Wright in a compromising position, and Myrtle Hansen was a model, not a student at the time. Tom Alder likewise erroneously described the situation, writing, “It was Frazer who discovered the art department chair, A. B. Wright, and his model, Myrtle, together in Wright’s studio as reported in last month’s column.” Alder, “Mabel Pearl Frazer.”
42. Thomas to Frazer, May 24, 1937; Frazer to Thomas, May 25, 1937.
43. In an address that was likely delivered at a local club or association meeting, Wright spoke at length on the nude in art. A passage from the commentary not only reveals a focus on the subject, but also a kind of naughty delight he took in the act of disrobing the figure: “Now while it remains true that figures painted not entirely nude but partly draped may stimulate our sense of touch, yet drapery is a hindrance and at the best only a way out of a difficulty for we feel it masking the really significant which is the form underneath. . . . But how much more clearly will this significance shine out, how much more convincingly will the character manifest itself, when between its perfect rendering and the artist nothing intervenes, and this perfect rendering is to be accomplished with the nude only.” Box 2, fd. 2, Wright Papers. Class and lecture notes, along with formal expositions on art, can also be found among the Wright Papers. See also his remarks in “The Questionist,” Deseret News, May 19, 1923; and “A. B. Wright Artist, Athlete and Detective; Utah Painter Noted for Mural Decorations,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 3, 1928.
44. See Elisabeth Bronfen, “Seductive Departures of Marlene Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in The Blue Angel,” New German Critique 89 (Spring 2003): 9–31; and Barbara Kosta, Willing Seduction; The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).
45. See Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-up Grrrls: Femininity, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
46. For a chronology of Wright’s career and biography, see Kirk Henrichsen, “Detailed Chronology on the life of Alma Brockerman Wright,” Artists Files.
47. Bulletin of the University of Utah, 1936–37: Catalogue Issue 27 (August 1936), in J. Willard Marriott Digital Library, https://collections.lib.utah.edu/. The “Dean of Women,” Myrtle Austin was not a dean of a school, and therefore would not have been a part of the administra-
tive council.
48. “Minutes of Administrative Council, June 1, 1937, 7:00 p.m.,” box 1, book 4, Administrative Council Minutes, 1915–1947, ACC 008, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. Present at the meeting, as recorded in the minutes were “President Thomas, Deans Bennion, Leary, Beal, Ketchum, Daines, Cowles; Director Horsfall; Professors Wahlquist, Maw, Ericksen, Marshall, Beeley, Taylor, Tugman, Quinn, Ritter, and Cottam; and by invitation, Prof. [Rose] Widtsoe and the Dean of Women, Miss Austin.” Though Frazer reports that Myrtle Austin was aware of these incidents, and that both Frazer and her students had confided in Austin, Austin’s university records do not delineate or record any of these meetings or incidents. Her files from these years mostly contain logistical and administrative correspondence. See Dean of Women Files, GTPR; and Myrtle Austin, Historical Faculty Files.
49. Mrs. A. B. Wright to Thomas, May 30, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR. The artist Olive Belnap Jenson reported that in 1914 Wright had confided in her the state of his marital relationship: “He had explained that he and his wife had not been congenial for years, and that he wished to go to Europe to study.” “Life of Olive Christiana Belnap Jenson,” 13. This testimony of her husband’s strong character, solicited before the hearing, has been used by Fjelsted and Warchol to falsify Frazer’s allegations and to absolve A. B. Wright of any misconduct. See Warchol, “A. B. Wright.”
50. U.S. Census records reveal that A. B. and Alice Wright had been living apart since at least 1930 when Alice’s residence was recorded in California with her son. 1930 U.S. census, San Francisco County, California, p. 4A, enumeration district 0183, Alice H. Wright, Family History Library microfilm 2339936.
51. Interestingly, Alice declared her marital status as divorced in the 1940 Census, although there are no extant records to substantiate that claim, and she was referred to in her 1945 obituary and other press coverage as Mrs. A. B. Wright. See 1940 U.S. census, Richmond, Contra Costa, California, p. 6B, enumeration district 7–71, Alice H. Wright, roll m-t0627–00198.
52. Thomas to Frazer, June 2, 1937.
53. See Chelsea Spencer, et al., “Why Sexual Assault Survivors Do Not Report to Universities: A Feminist Analysis,” Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Science 66, no. 1 (May 2017): 166–79.
54. Thomas to Wright, June 2, 1937.
55. See box 1, book 4, Administrative Council Minutes, 1915–1947.
56. Olga Stoddard, Chris Karpowitz, and Jessica Preece, “Strength in Numbers: A Field Experiment in Gender, Influence, and Group Dynamics,” IZA Discussion Paper No. 13741, https://papers.ssrn.com/. See also Brittany Karford Rogers, “When Women Don’t Speak,” BYU Magazine (Spring 2020), https://magazine.byu.edu/.
57. During the 1930s and Great Depression, working women were seen as taking work from men, even when they had to turn to work to supplement family incomes. For more context on U.S. and Utah women working in this era, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Colleen McDannell, “Edged Out,” Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 53–64; and Miriam Murphy, “Gainfully Employed
Women, 1896–1950,” in Women in Utah History: Paradigm or Paradox, ed. Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005), 183–222.
58. Wright to Thomas, June 3, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
59. Frazer to Thomas and the Administrative Council, June 3, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
60. See box 1, book 4, Administrative Council Minutes, 1915–1947.
61. Wright to Thomas, June 3, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
62. Caroline Parry to the Council of the Deans of the University, May 31, 1937. In her first letter to Thomas, Frazer wrote, “A friend took her over to get council [sic] from Miss Parry. Miss Parry sent her to me. I took her [Ms. Bartlett] to the Dean of Women” and “I asked Miss Williams if she would tell the Dean of Women what she had told me. She did so in my presence, and at that time said she would also tell you.” See Frazer to Thomas, May 22, 1937.
In these notes President Thomas also brings up a situation a decade earlier where Frazer had alleged sexual impropriety of the school nurse, Blanche Henderson. Her main complaint reveals she was upset about the way Henderson was teaching students about masturbation. Thomas conflates the two incidents and uses this to further chastise Frazer. See Thomas to Frazer, June 7, 1937, and Thomas to Frazer, November 3, 1926, box 37, fd. 1, GTPR.
63. Thomas to Frazer, June 7, 1937.
64. Thomas to Frazer, June 7, 1937.
65. Thomas to Frazer, undated, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
66. Thomas to Frazer, June 7, 1937.
67. Thomas to Dr. John E. Carver, June 21, 1937, box 79, fd. 5, GTPR.
68. Thomas to Wright, September 28, 1937, box 83, fd. 4, GTPR.
69. Wright’s resignation is described as forced in Olpin, Seifrit, and Swanson, Artists of Utah; and “Utah Impressionism,” Evening for Educators Lesson Plan, Artists Files. In his summation of the case, noted art historian (and later chair of the University of Utah’s art department) Robert S. Olpin adds another layer to the plot when he mentions a subsequent development: “Frazer was (after she almost lost her own job over it) instrumental in the departure of Chairman Wright for France—for the rest of his life—after a secret campus investigation of Wright’s conduct around department models, and just preceding the appearance on campus of an irate, life-threatening Salt Lake City husband.” While not certain, it seems likely this individual was Melvin C. Edgar, the husband to model Myrtle Hansen. Robert S. Olpin, “Tradition and the Lure of the Modern: 1900–1950,” in Utah Painting and Sculpture, 129.
70. While Wright’s resignation is documented in the minutes from the Board of Regents’ November meeting, there is no official reason given for his sudden departure. See Board of Regents Meeting Minutes, 1937–1939, J Willard Marriott Digital Library, https://collections .lib.utah.edu. See also box 1, book 4, Administrative Council Minutes, 1915–1947.
71. See Kirk Henrichsen research files on Wright in Artists Files; and Fjeldsted’s unpublished manuscript.
72. Wright to Thomas, November 18, 1937, box 83, fd. 4, GTPR.
73. Thomas to Frazer, April 1, 1938, box 83, fd. 4, GTPR.
74. Jack Sears to Dr. Jacob Geerlings, March 24, 1947, box
75. Frazer’s official letter of promotion acknowledged that she had “served the university for a number of years without advancement beyond her present rank,” but offered no explanation for why this was the case. See LeConte Stewart to President A. Ray Olpin, April 18, 1949, box 20, fd. 54, Historical Faculty Files, Mabel Frazer.
76. Olpin, Dictionary of Utah Art, 94.
77. Mabel Frazer to Dean Jacob Geerlings, January 14, 1947.
78. Waldis, “Mabel Pearl Frazer,” 20.
79. See “Galaxy of ‘Home Artists’ Exhibits Clever Work in New Horne Art Show,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 16, 1939, 50; and “Oil Paintings on Display in Provo,” Daily Herald, October 21, 1945, 13.
80. “S.L. Woman Dies; Buried on Coast,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 11, 1945, 14.
81. Olive Belnap Jenson’s recollections of this era shed light on conversations surrounding Wright’s departure from Utah: “The real separation from her [wife Alice] did not come till years later, however, when he was at the height of a career as head of the Department of Art at the University of Utah and his private work sought after. At this time startling headlines appeared in the paper that A.B. Wright of the Art Department of the University of Utah could not be located. A number of years later LeConte Stewart came to my home wanting a snapshot of the snow scene which we had purchased. I inquired of him if A B. Wright had ever been located. He replied that at the time of his disappearance he had sacrificed all in his profession which he had worked for for a woman model of such a caliber that he could not marry and introduce into the society to which he belonged, and had fled to a place in Austria.” The Life of Olive Christiana Belnap Jenson, 13.
82. Recent studies include University of Missouri–Columbia, “Gender Perceptions of Sexual Harassment Can Influence Workplace Policy Effectiveness: Organizations Could Benefit from Sexual Harassment Training that Acknowledges the Gender Dynamics of Harassment,” ScienceDaily, October 5, 2020, https:// www.sciencedaily.com/; M. E. Bell, A. E. Street and J. Stafford, “Victims’ Psychosocial Well-Being After Reporting Sexual Harassment in the Military,” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 15, no. 2 (2014): 133–52; and the well-cited 1982 study about sexual harassment by D. J. Benson and G. E. Thomson, “Sexual Harassment on a University Campus: The Confluence of Authority Relations, Sexual Interest, and Gender Stratification,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (February 1982): 236–51.
83. See examples like Sarah Ellison, “‘Everybody Knew’: Inside the Fall of Today’s Matt Lauer,” Vanity Fair, November 30, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/; “Harvey Weinstein: Did Everyone Really Know?,” BBC News, October 12, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/; and Andrea King Collier, “Editorial: Let’s Admit Bill Cosby’s Secrets Were in Plain Sight,” NBC News, October 9, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com/.
84. See Courtney Tanner, “University of Utah Police Officer Showed Off Explicit Photos of Lauren McCluskey to His Co-Worker,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 17, 2020, https:// www.sltrib.com/, and Courtney Tanner, “University of Utah Agrees Lauren McCluskey’s Murder was ‘Preventable,” Will Pay Her Parents $13.5 Million,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 22, 2020, https://www.sltrib.com/.
The Plat of Zion and Urban Development in Salt Lake City
BY BRENDA CASE SCHEER
Salt Lake City has one of the most unique origin stories of any city in the United States. Not only is the story unusual and well documented, but the plan and layout of the city remain one-of-a-kind. Any observant visitor will note the unusual width of the streets and sometimes hear the persistent myth, attributed to Brigham Young, that they were designed to be large enough to turn around a team of oxen.1 But Salt Lake City has many other unique qualities in its physical plan, which are hard to discover without research. These include its vast extent, the very large blocks, and the very large initial lots, which were driven by religious intentions as well as the model of the Plat of Zion.
While many have written about the city’s history and even about its plan, inspired by Joseph Smith’s 1833 Plat of the City of Zion, I employ the specific technique of urban morphology, which is the analysis and study of the elements of urban form and their changes over time. Urban morphologists compare the current and historical physical form of cities as a way of understanding or verifying urban change, including economic, social, and environmental transformation. This methodology is commonly used to study historic urban plans or buildings, but the methods are also used in contemporary, urban design contexts.2
This paper tries to fill out the record by analyzing maps, rather than documents, to follow the subsequent development of Salt Lake City and the impacts of the original plan. Changes in urban form are often an indicator of changes in the broader society, which may include social, economic, and technological transformations. The built form is another record that, in addition to written records, can be consulted to learn about the history of places and people. The concrete existence of urban form, which often is still observable, can be an important counterpoint to misleading or self-promoting documents. The purpose of this study is to help explain the current form of the city and how that form is a result of decisions made in its earliest history. This analysis reveals fascinating patterns of adaptation and preservation, including the persistence of Salt Lake City’s famously large streets and extensive grid to the present day. Other adaptations to
the original plan are just as common, but were unexpected by the pioneers, like the haphazard lot subdivision or the development of smaller streets inside the large blocks. Many of these changes are positive accidents for the current city’s growth, but some are difficult for present-day planners.
The origins of Salt Lake City date to 1847 with the arrival of a small band of pioneers led by Brigham Young in the Salt Lake Valley. There, in isolation from their detractors, pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) laid out a beautiful city “foursquare” to the world. It was to be a righteous place to invite the “gathering” of the faithful from all over the world in the last (latter) days before the second coming of Christ.3
The geographical calling of the religious sect of Latter-day Saints had been the establishment of a place they called the “City of Zion,” a concept that was both physical and metaphysical. Zion was to be the center of a series of cities and villages organized as righteous and wholesome places where the Saints could live out the principles of their faith.4 In the decades following Great Salt Lake City’s founding, Young and his successors orchestrated the establishment of some four hundred settlements across a large swath of the West, stretching from Canada to Mexico.5
The location in the mountain West was a kind of spiritual compromise. Although Smith had located the City of Zion very specifically in Independence, Missouri, by divine revelation, the Saints were unable to settle there, due to the violence that frequently erupted when they encountered more traditional Christian settlers. After Smith was murdered by a mob, the Saints, then located in Illinois, determined to find a safer venue for Zion. The highly isolated territory on the western frontier became a suitable alternative to gather the faithful and organize a settlement system. The initial difficulty of reaching the location and its ecological hostility to settlement (a high desert) formed a layer of protection for the persecuted religionists. It also required that pioneers were reliant on and bound to their community, with little support or trade with the outside world.
When the earliest pioneers and their leader Brigham Young arrived at the edge of the Salt
Lake valley in July 1847, they lost no time in establishing a settlement. Within days they had scouted the land for miles around and identified a place for their new city, laying out first Temple Square and then another 134 blocks in a 9x15 grid, oriented along the cardinal directions (Fig 1a). The primary influence of the grid design was the “Plat of Zion” (Fig 1b), an ideal plan for a mile-square city of 20,000 residents, drawn fourteen years earlier under the supervision of Joseph Smith and intended for Missouri.6 The plan set the dimensions and orientation of blocks, streets and lots, and a central location for temples and other public buildings, but no commercial streets. Smith’s “Plat of Zion” was designed to be compact and dense, with small town lots, closely surrounded by agricultural fields that were meant for a daily commute. Smith had designed the City of Zion to hold up to 20,000 people on just one square mile, a density that would require ten to twelve residents for every half-acre house lot.
At the time Salt Lake City was founded there were about 17,000 Mormons waiting beyond the Rocky Mountains to follow Young into the Great Basin. Had Young followed the compact Plat of Zion plan, most of them would have been accommodated in the city proper. Instead, the first plat (Plat A) of Salt Lake City was 2.5 square miles, instead of one, but was planned with only 1,080 lots. Plats B and C were laid out the following year. Young greatly altered the dimensions of the lots in the Plat of Zion to reduce the density of the settlement, which would allow more agricultural uses in town. He kept the large dimensions of the blocks and streets, but divided the 10-acre blocks into much larger lots (8 instead of 20) so that each lot was 1.25 acres. This turned out to be a crucial decision. Figure 2 compares the size of blocks and lots in the initial plat of Salt Lake City to the Plat of Zion.
In the Plat of Zion, Temple Square was to be located in the center of town. Due to the topography of Salt Lake City, however, Temple Square was not geographically at the center but on the far north where the valley floor meets the foothills to the north and where City Creek divided into two streams. This is apparent on what is believed to be the initial surveyors’ working sheepskin document, recently acquired by the Library of Congress
Figure 1. Plat A of Salt Lake City (a) compared at the same scale to the Plat of Zion (b). Note the variance in lot sizes and the smaller size of the area reserved for the Temple (dark squares). The grey blocks were initially public space. Each block is 660 x 660 ft. Figures courtesy of the author
Figure 2. The subdivision pattern of Salt Lake’s initial blocks (a) compared to the Plat of Zion (b) blocks. Same scale.
after years of languishing in the attic of a pioneer’s descendant.7 Initially, 40 acres (four blocks) were reserved for the temple, storehouses, and other public use. This was quickly scaled back to one city block.8
Plat A is a uniform grid of 660 ft x 660 ft blocks (40 rods). Streets, including 20 feet set out for sidewalks on both sides, are 132 ft wide (8 rods). (The street widths were designed to follow the Plat of Zion and not for turning oxen, though the latter was perhaps a practical consequence of the design.) Each block was initially subdivided into eight equal-size lots of 1.25 acres, which is unusually large for a western settlement.9
In Salt Lake City, city founders prized self-sufficiency, permitting the planting of vegetable gardens and fruit trees in the early years and erecting barns and animal holding areas, which was a departure from the Plat of Zion directives. As planned, the lots were to contain a single house centered on the lot and set back a uniform distance of 20 feet from the street. Very early regulations also called for shade trees to be planted along the frontage of all lots.10 Plat A allocated three blocks as open spaces, subsequently developed as West High School, Pioneer Park, and Washington Square, the location of the City and County building. These may have been inspired by the squares in William Penn’s plan of Philadelphia, which was an important influence on town planning in the United States.
In addition to the unusually large dimensions of the blocks and the lots, another remarkable characteristic of the plan is the orientation of the lots. Similar to the original Plat of Zion, the lots were oriented in different directions on every block, creating a basket weave pattern. The intention was privacy for the inhabitants, so that instead of houses facing each other across the street they would face their side yards, presumably planted in garden, providing a green aspect.11
After the initial 135 blocks were laid off and distributed, rapid immigration caused two more large plats—Plat B (1848, 64 blocks) and Plat C (1849, 85 blocks)—to be developed in the same pattern.12 In addition to town lots, large agricultural lots (“the Big Fields”) were laid out to the south and west, fulfilling the notion of the agricultural village. Salt Lake City’s big fields consisted of five-acre allotments within a large
forty-acre block. To the south, it was located between 900 South and 2100 South in present-day Salt Lake City. Figure 3 is a map showing the first three plats and the Big Field to the south, as they existed in about 1855. The initial street plan of the Big Field is reflected in the present-day location of through streets in the Sugar House and Liberty Wells neighborhoods.
In the 1870s the church’s grip on the city’s development was weakened with the influx of new arrivals brought by the transcontinental railroad and mining and commercial opportunities.13 At the same time, the emigration of religious settlers began to wane as church leaders downplayed the “gathering.” Consequently, the city began to accommodate its layout to new peoples and urban uses. These changes can be tracked using the methodology of urban morphology.
Urban Morphology
The method of urban morphology first examines maps of a particular place and then compares that place with itself over time (diachronic analysis) or with other places built in similar time periods (synchronic analysis). The primary data used for urban morphological analysis are maps and field surveys. In this analysis of changes to the form of Salt Lake City I compared individual blocks across time—for example, Block 70 in 1850 to the same location in 2019. I also compare Salt Lake City at its founding in 1847 to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1802 and Waco, Texas, in 1848. The latter comparison helps to illuminate just how unique Salt Lake City’s dimensions and extent were compared to other cities in the United States.
The data for this work include historic maps and surveys, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, and contemporary GIS data, plans and Google aerial photos.14 These were used to compare the urban form—buildings, lot lines, and streets—in three different blocks of Salt Lake City as it changed over time. The blocks represented different land uses and forms at the end of the study (2019), but would have been identically laid out when first planned. The analysis identified patterns of change that repeatedly occurred in most of the original blocks, and briefly compares them to the Big Field, originally intended for agricultural uses but later developed as suburbs.
Three blocks were selected for study. Like all the blocks in these plats, they changed substantially over 160 years. Block 70 is in the densest part of downtown along Main Street, which became the commercial heart of Salt Lake City. Block 47 and Block 22 in Plat B were less intensively developed, being outside the current definition of downtown (images from the analysis of Block 22 are not included here.) These blocks were selected to be compared to each other in order to identify common patterns of adaptation in the early plan. Finally, for these blocks and the others in Plats A and B, the term “Mormon” blocks is used, even though the dimensions and configuration of these blocks were used only in a few other places in other Mormon settlements in the West.15
Block 70
Block 70 is located along Main Street two blocks south of Temple Square (Fig. 4). Today it is a very central area of downtown, with several high-rise buildings. It was a desirable location even in the first years after the settlers arrived.
Figure 3. Plat A, B, and C and the “Big Field” of Salt Lake City, ca. 1850. Meridian and Base Line of the Public Land Survey are highlighted (South Temple and Main Streets). In the evolution of the Big Field (now Sugarhouse and Liberty Wells), the through streets still respond to the pattern of the initial plat, with odd number streets as the only north–south streets, and streets every four blocks (Ninth, Thirteenth, etc.) as the only east–west through streets.
Despite the formal and sacred nature of the ideal plan, the pioneers do not appear to have adhered to it with much religious rigidity, as befits a struggling community. Examining recreated allotment maps of the era it seems that about 25 percent of the large lots were subdivided before being built on.16 This was more common closer to Temple Square. Like all the Mormon blocks, Block 70 originally was surveyed with eight equal lots, but three of the eight lots were subdivided almost immediately (Fig. 5, 1850). Brigham Young himself claimed one of the subdivided lots. Main Street developed quickly into a commercial street, despite the lack of planning for such a use. One year after the initial plat, commercial development was indicated by the subdivision of one of the larger lots into several narrow lots facing Main Street. This pattern is repeated throughout Plat A, and is evident in bird’s eye views created in 1870 and 1890.17
Thus the Salt Lake City plat lost cohesion from the very beginning. Instead of small houses on large lots surrounded by orchards and barns,
the center of the city became urban within a few years, with small lots and multi-story buildings. Certain other plan adaptations began to take shape here that would be constant in all the Mormon blocks, although the areas outside downtown were not as dense. These adaptations are best seen in the 1884 map. Whereas the lots originally created are still visible as subdivisions of the block, the subdivision of the two original lots facing Main Street is more in accordance with commercial patterns prevailing in mid-nineteenth century US cities—lots approximately 25 to 50 feet wide and 165 feet deep. For example, urban lots in Cincinnati created in the same era were 25 feet wide and about 180 feet deep, which allowed for a rear yard.
Another pattern is the creation of internal streets on the blocks, which is common on all the plats. On the interior of Block 70 a new, smaller street then called Commercial Street (now Regent Street) essentially doubled the valuable
commercial frontage (Fig. 4, 1884). There is even a small alley which runs between the new street and State Street (Plum Alley, Salt Lake City’s Chinatown). The frontage has also developed intensely along all the other sides of the block, with less continuity on State Street, probably because of its greater distance from Main Street.
Thus the block, only a scant forty years from surveying, has been made over from the agricultural village ideal into a dense, urban place. This corresponds to the timing of the transcontinental railroad and to the growth of mining in the region, both of which brought non-Mormons as well as a new influx of Mormon emigrants to the rapidly growing frontier city.
By 1911, the block was completely built out and somewhat redeveloped from 1884, with a new theater and even a “motion picture” house on State Street. Between 1911 and 1950, the eastern half of the block changed little—though a
Figure 4. The evolution of Block 70 in downtown Salt Lake City, 1850 to 2019.
few lots were cleared in the center of the block for parking, the unavoidable twentieth-century land use. On the Main Street half, several smaller buildings were cleared to make way for a large department store and a substantial bank building and a few other tall office structures, as structural steel and elevators rapidly transformed urban buildings across the country.
By 1969, the center of the block was replaced with parking and the State Street half of the block was almost obliterated and vacant, with only two substantial new buildings constructed. This coincided with a decades-long decline in Salt Lake City’s downtown prior to its current redevelopment.
By 2013 the block added a very large central parking garage, but still had some surface parking and a fast food restaurant. An old theater burned and its façade was rescued as a false front for a parking garage. Since 2010 the block has been in active redevelopment so that the map in 2019 includes a 22-story office tower and a 2,500 seat live theater, both located on the north end of the Main Street side of the block. Notably, this very large development is contained within only two of the original lots.
Regent Street, being a more intimate scale than any of the original wide streets, was redesigned as a comfortable street for pedestrians and re-opened in 2017. Construction of a 39-story
Regent Street (formerly Richards Street) in Block 70 is an example of how the small streets internal to the blocks can be used to support more pedestrian activity. GSBS Architects, Struck, and Voda, design team. Used by permission
luxury residential tower has started on the southeast corner. Some historic buildings from the 1880s survive along Main Street, and tiny Plum Alley can still be found.
Block 47
Block 47 in Plat B was platted in 1848, only one year after the initial plat. It was also planned with eight lots. Being further distant from the center of town, as defined by proximity to Temple Square, it was slower to develop any substantial density. Consequently, the transformation of the block has been different from Block 70. The patterns observed in this block are very common to all the blocks in Plats B and C.
It was necessary from the very beginning to adapt the eight-lot block configuration, because the rapid growth of the city required far more house lots than originally planned. By 1889, we see the first adaptation in all but a few of the Plat B blocks—the subdivision of the outside four lots into many smaller lots, defeating the intended opposite orientation in the original design. These new smaller lots were far closer to standard city lots of the era, although still developed as single family homes, not the urban rowhouses common for US cities. The lots subdivided in this manner had greatly varying widths and sizes with new houses built in different styles after the lot was divided off by its owner. Despite regulation, uniform setbacks were not observed (Fig. 5, 1889).
By 1898, the other four lots on the block were also subdivided into narrow, very long lots, leaving much unusable land for urban development in the inside of the block. In subsequent decades, beginning no later than 1911, this problem was handily solved by creating what could be termed “mews”—short dead-end streets with small houses on either side, all within a single original lot. There are many examples of these alleys or mews in the historic plats of Salt Lake City, almost all of them surviving into the late twentieth century and many still extant, although not on this block.
In the twentieth century, the automobile began to dominate urban form everywhere. In the Mormon blocks, surface parking areas were often created in the center of the blocks. About the same time, some older houses were destroyed to make way for larger, non-residential uses and apartment blocks, also using the vast interior of the block as parking. Scattered retail strip centers also replaced houses. Many of the smaller, less well-built houses on mews were also destroyed, consolidating lots for larger twentieth-century uses. Although the lack of development pressure kept Block 47 residential
Figure 5. Evolution of built form in Block 47, east of downtown Salt Lake City.
ing sizes and ages of all types, including a few houses surviving from at least 1898. Like most blocks it also has an internal street—in this case north–south through the block, which evolved over time by joining two dead end alleys.
National Comparisons
If we compare Salt Lake City with two square grid cities developed in the same era, Waco and Cincinnati, we find another unique quality of the initial plan, which is its very large extent. Waco, Texas, was founded in 1846, just one year before Salt Lake City, on the Brazos River. In contrast to Salt Lake City, Waco’s initial blocks (165 ft x 165 ft) and lots were quite small
Figure 6. Comparison of the size of the blocks and extent of Plat A of Salt Lake City, Utah, with Waco, Texas, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Same scale. Waco and Cincinnati were not extended for many years, but Salt Lake Plat B and C more than doubled the size of the city within two years.
(see Fig. 6). By the late nineteenth century the building lots had been combined and were, like Salt Lake City, very dense. In Cincinnati, founded in 1802 on the Ohio River, the square grid was 400 ft x 400 ft. Like Salt Lake City, the lots were subdivided, not combined, to make a dense fabric by 1890. These two places are more in keeping with the proportions of gridded cities founded in the nineteenth century18. Figure 6 is a startling reminder of both the scale of Salt Lake City’s grid and its initial extent. The size of Plats A, B, and C was 1,415 acres, while Cincinnati’s original plat was 288 acres, and Waco was only 118 acres (Table 1).
Within the Mormon cultural landscape, much larger blocks and streets than in other American
Table 1. Comparison of three cities: Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, and Waco.
cities were common, but these grids seldom followed the dimensions of Salt Lake City or the Plat of Zion.19 Other Mormon settlements more commonly had the grid and street dimensions of Nauvoo, Illinois, which were about half the size of Salt Lake City.20 No initial Mormon plat or foundation was as large as Salt Lake City’s.
Order and Urban Design in Salt Lake City
The plan of Salt Lake was designed to create a sense of order. In certain respects, the plan was successful in this regard—and still is. On the other hand, the grid alone cannot create an orderly and gracious pattern of development. For example, people expect a planned city to have recurring patterns of buildings along a street or in a neighborhood, which together create a similar rhythm and feel. This is known as typological continuity, referring to the way houses, for example, are often about the same size, shape, material, setback, and distance apart from neighbors. This was clearly the intention of the Plat of Zion.
Instead, Young’s large lots encouraged a freefor-all of disorderly subdivision, so that the envisioned genteel agricultural village was destined never to be built. In addition, the plat scale was overwhelming in nearly all respects, as seen in the comparison between cities established in the mid-nineteenth century. Salt Lake City’s future was embedded in the rigid block pattern and overly wide streets, coupled with unusual and ill-fitting lot subdivision. These have been troublesome throughout its history, but there are some unexpected benefits.
The huge extent of the monotonous grid, for example, is both a blessing and a curse. Usually,
cities build out over time with a series of smaller extensions that show a variety of street widths, block sizes, and orientations, often as an adaptation to evolving land uses. Good examples of this include urban developments in New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Denver. In contrast, Salt Lake City’s blocks and streets are, for many square miles, all the same. They are undifferentiated in size, and the streets are the same thoroughfare-dimensioned width, in both directions, with no hierarchy. Accordingly, blocks do not organize into identifiable districts, and within the very large plat, only the cardinal street names provide a sense of orientation.
On the other hand, the extent of the plan is also an advantage. Many American cities were initially surveyed with a relatively small grid (a mile square was common). Subsequently, growth occurred more haphazardly, with discontinuities in the grid that were exploited to build railroads and, later, highways. In Salt Lake City the generous size of the initial three plats (6.3 square miles) and the Big Field (another 6.5 square miles) has been an accidental blessing that created an extensive, easy-to-navigate, legible framework that still accommodates a very large percentage of the developed area of the city. The continuity of the grid also proved resistant to the destructive overlay of highways and railroads that gutted most American cities in the twentieth century, including Cincinnati and Waco.
However, the very large block size has historically been a problem. The large lots within them were subdivided into a very heterogeneous, uneven pattern, with many tiny, ad hoc internal streets. The variation in lot sizes and building sizes, the long period of initial development, and the irregular configuration resulting from
many adaptations left the Mormon blocks vulnerable to redevelopment of great variety. Outside of downtown, in the area of Plat B and Plat C, it is not uncommon to find gas stations next to nineteenth-century cottages, or modern high-rise hospitals or schools adjacent to apartment complexes. Almost no block front has a consistent frontage of similar types. The blocks are characterized by multiple land uses and a wide variety of building types, ages, and sizes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a large part of the city’s central section has no consistent block orientation and no consistent building types, resulting in a hodgepodge along the street and confusing disorder.
Still, unlike cities with much smaller grids in North America, the generous ten-acre size of the Mormon blocks has proven more adaptable and flexible in the higher density downtown setting, where very large contemporary building types can easily overwhelm the scale of smaller frameworks in other cities. In Salt Lake, even a large basketball arena can easily fit
on a city block, with room to spare, and a generous convention center required the closing of only one street-block. Office buildings and shopping malls are accommodated easily, while there is room for surface parking and parking garages in the blocks’ interior.
More recently, the area outside of downtown is under extreme redevelopment pressure as Salt Lake City finds itself in a housing boom. While historic districts in the area provide some protection, heterogeneous twentieth-century development is currently being supplanted by five- to seven-story mixed use apartments with retail. These projects often are made feasible by the original large size of the blocks, even while incorporating the smaller mews streets.
The street network also has advantages and disadvantages. The 132-foot wide streets create a rapid and unimpeded flow of traffic, but they are uncomfortable and very difficult to cross for pedestrians, which they must have also been in the nineteenth century. The 660-foot block
State Street in 1938. The wide streets of Salt Lake City were always uncomfortable for pedestrians. Utah State Historical Society Classified Photo Collection, photograph no. 27427.
dimensions tempt pedestrians to jaywalk. Wide streets encourage speeding, causing accidents and endangering bicyclists.
Ironically, the greatest sense of order and urban design in the cityscape comes from the very wide tree lawns and ancient trees bordering many of the streets. The wide streets also offer some twenty-first century redevelopment options that take advantage of the excess width. Some streets have been converted into boulevards with wide landscaping in the center. A system of bicycle lanes has been carved out of many of the wide streets, and a few have parking islands in the center. The city’s light rail lines run in the center of some streets, bringing a more human dimension without seriously compromising traffic. As these encouraging options play out, the streets become more comfortable for pedestrians and bikes, while at the same time becoming more and more distinct from each other.
The presence of small streets and alleys created by early settlers to better utilize the interior of the large blocks creates another opportunity. Because of the basket-weave pattern of the original lots, these streets are discontinuous from block to block, since they almost always form in the north-south or east-west orientation of the original middle lots. Some do not extend through the block, or have a noticeable break in the center. Over 150 of these short streets, mostly public, exist in the area of Plats A and B.
These mid-block walkways and streets were unique to Salt Lake City—a separate, secret system overlaying the large streets. Historically and today, they offer pedestrian-scale places that seem a world apart from the wide streets. Partly in response to this research, these have recently been recognized and protected through planning guidelines.21 New mid-block walkways and streets are also encouraged throughout the extent of the original Plats A, B, and C.
Conclusion
Even in 1847, it should have been clear to Brigham Young and the early pioneers that the large size of the blocks was unworkable for a city destined to be more than an agricultural village of several hundred. Making do with the size of the lots as given, further subdivisions were common even in the first allotments, despite Young’s directive to keep the lots whole.
Although the agricultural village concept was successful in much smaller towns across Utah, at least in the nineteenth century, Salt Lake City quickly developed into a dense urban area.22
Furthermore, the pioneers had prior experience of town planning in Nauvoo, where the initial platted lots were smaller, as were the blocks and streets. Even these smaller lots were frequently subdivided in the few years that Nauvoo grew into a thriving city. Young himself had visited England and New York City and understood the nature of towns and cities. Joseph Smith greatly admired New York, passed through Cincinnati in the 1830s, and apparently was acutely interested in the creation of a great city.23
The Salt Lake City founders’ persistence in the overly generous and unworkable street, block, and lot dimensions is puzzling under these circumstances. By 1859, a new plat in the city (a distinct district now called the Avenues) was created with blocks and streets half the dimensions of the original blocks (330-feet square, with streets sixty-six feet wide). The Avenues’ blocks were initially divided into four lots of 0.6 acres each, very similar to the plat of Nauvoo. It is possible that the slope was a factor, but the haphazard practice of subdivision in the earlier plats probably had an influence in laying out the Avenues. It should be noted that subsequent subdivision of the Avenue’s lots was also ubiquitous.
The Plat of Zion remains an ideal vision, a compact city surrounded by green fields, all in service to a notion of a close community based on a religiously inspired work ethic, moral code, and communal economy. One might also add that, by modern standards, it would also be a sustainable community: walkable, green, self-sufficient, and dense. But creating the ideal central place of Zion clashed with the immediate and pressing need to accommodate thousands of new residents. The large lots of an agricultural village were never suitable for either purpose, being perhaps a remnant of Young’s own discomfort with urbanity.
Had Brigham Young actually used the Plat of Zion lot dimensions, there would probably have been more orderly development, since those lots were more in keeping with the cottages of the mid-nineteenth century. We cannot know. Instead, in the Salt Lake City plats, the initial
lots were much too large, initiating a frenzy of irregular subdivision that created the internal small streets and irregular buildings of multiple sizes, land uses, and orientation. And because the initial development was not very dense, the extent of the new city had to be expanded dramatically in response to immigration.
But it has come to pass that what may have been an ill adaptation in the city’s first century and half may now be called advantageous in certain respects. The unique plan of Salt Lake City offers both flexibility and possibility within its rigid and enormous extent. The blocks and small alleys easily accommodate the tremendous growth in the twenty-first century. The wide streets have proven adaptable to a range of multiple public uses, and more may evolve to make the place a walkable, attractive environment. Salt Lake City is a very young city in the scheme of things and its evolution is only beginning. On the whole the plan has offered what all good plans do: a sound framework to guide the evolution of an interesting and varied place.
Notes
1. The idea that the city’s street width was related to turning either oxen teams or horse teams is not substantiated in the historical record but likely persists because residents (then and now) need an answer to inquiries about the wide streets.
2. Vítor Oliveira, Urban Morphology: An Introduction to the Study of the Physical Form of Cities (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016); Brenda Case Scheer, “The Epistemology of Urban Morphology,” Urban Morphology 20, no. 1 (2016): 5–17; Karl Kropf, The Urban Morphology Handbook (London: Wiley, 2018).
3. Steve Olsen, The Mormon Ideology of Place: Cosmic Symbolism of the City of Zion, 1830–1846 (Provo, UT: BYU Press and the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter Day Saint History, 2002).
4. Martha Bradley Evans, “Constructing Zion: Faith, Grit and the Realm of Possibilities,” Utah Historical Quarterly 89 (Winter 2021): 63–78; C. Mark Hamilton, Nineteenth-century Mormon Architecture and City Planning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13–14.
5. Olsen, Mormon Ideology, 89; Mario S. De Pillis, “Christ Comes to Jackson County: The Mormon City of Zion and Its Consequences,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 23 (2003): 27–31; Leonard Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (1958; Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993); John William Reps, Cities of the American West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 313.
6. “Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early June–25 June 1833,” p. [1], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed January 25, 2022, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary /plat-of-the-city-of-zion-circa-early-june-25-june -1833/1.
7. Rick Grunder and Paul Cohen, “The Founding Document of the Mormon West,” Utah Historical Quarterly 87 (Summer 2019): 182–96.
8. Richard H. Jackson, “The Mormon Village: Genesis and Antecedents of the City of Zion Plan,” BYU Studies Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1977): 6.
9. Jackson, 10.
10. Stephen William Schuster, “The Evolution of Mormon City Planning and Salt Lake City, Utah, 1833–1877” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1967), 89
11. Jackson, “Mormon Village,” 6.
12. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom.
13. Marilyn Reed Travis, “Social Stratification and the Dissolution of the City of Zion in Salt Lake City, 1847–1880” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1995).
14. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Salt Lake City, 1884, 1898, 1911, 1950, 1969 (Library of Congress); Google Earth aerial photography (1992 to 2019), https://earth.google.com; US Geological Survey Topographic Map, Collection of Salt Lake County, 1885, https://slco.org/globalassets/1-site-files/surveyor /mapping-services/1885_slc_topo.pdf; Thomas Bullock, “Plan of Salt Lake City, Utah,” in Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California (1861); Salt Lake County Assessor, GIS Interactive Mapping and Open Data (2013 to 2021), https:// gisdata-slco.opendata.arcgis.com; Nicholas Morgan, Salt Lake City: Emigrant Routes P.1, [1950], photograph no. 21479-A, at https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278 /s6zc8ck6.
15. Samuel A. Smith, “The Cities of Zion? Mormon and Non-Mormon Town Plans in the U.S. Mountain West, 1847–1930,” Journal of Historical Geography 50 (October 2015): 1–13; Jackson, “Mormon Village,” 9.
16. Nicholas Morgan, Pioneer Map: Great Salt Lake City, Great Basin, North America, compiled by Nicholas Morgan, map work by J. B. Ireland, ca. 1951. Copy in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, accessed January 24, 2022, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/15818486. This map was reportedly based on an early plat in the Salt Lake County files.
17. Augustus Koch, Bird’s eye view of Salt Lake City, Utah Territory 1870 (Chicago: Chicago Lithographing Co., 1870), available at https://lccn.loc.gov/75696611; Henry Wellge, Salt Lake City, Utah (Milwaukee, WI: American Publishing Co., 1891), at https://www.loc.gov /item/75696616/.
18. John William Reps, The Forgotten Frontier: Urban Planning in the American West before 1890 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1981); Richard H. Jackson and Robert Layton, “The Mormon Village: Analysis of Settlement Type,” Professional Geographer 28, no. 2 (1976): 136–41.
19. Jackson and Layton, “Mormon Village,” 136.
20. Smith, “Cities of Zion?”
21. Salt Lake City Planning Division, The Downtown Plan: Downtown’s Story from Tomorrow, p. 18, adopted May 24, 2016, accessed January 14, 2022, http://www.slcdocs .com/Planning/MasterPlansMaps/Downtown.pdf.
22. Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1952).
23. Richard L. Bushman, Making Space for the Mormons: Ideas of Sacred Geography in Joseph Smith’s America, vol. 2 in the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 9.
Figure 1. Daniel George, Ephraim, UT, ca. 2017–2019. Photograph.
The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion: Utah, Photography, and Daniel George’s Series God to Go West.
BY JAMES R. SWENSEN
From 2017 to 2019 the photographer Daniel George traveled across the state of Utah exploring the rich connections between name and place. The result of this investigation, a photographic series titled God to Go West, represents a significant addition to the understanding and representation of this place once called Deseret. While George’s series provides insight into the scriptural names, both Biblical and from LDS scripture, found across the Intermountain West, its most significant contribution is how it provides a much-needed photographic investigation into the “Mormon Landscape” and its ongoing evolution since the nineteenth century. By analyzing George’s work throughout Utah, this essay situates the series within a photographic documentary tradition and explores what the photographs reveal about this distinctive place in the American West. Moreover, it investigates the aesthetic that the photographer employed in the documentation of this landscape that highlights more pedestrian elements yet strives to find visual passages of interest, irony, and even beauty. Ultimately, it seeks to offer insight into the deep connections and meanings that exist between place, name, and image.
Utah place names are rich and varied, but for his study George limited his investigation to photographing landmarks and towns with biblical names or nomenclature derived from the distinctive scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rather than pursuing commemorative names honoring early LDS church leaders like Brigham Young or George A. Smith, the namesakes of Brigham City and St. George, respectively, he chose to focus his attention on what are termed inspiration names or, as the historian Jared Farmer explained, “names that invoke the greatness of a place or celebrate the promise of a place.”1 These include names derived from scripture, either from the Bible or LDS scripture like the Book of Mormon or the Pearl of Great Price. To help him with his project he consulted maps, as well as John Van Cott’s Utah Place Names (1990), a significant inventory that proved invaluable to George’s research.2
For two years he visited more than sixty sites across Utah, which not only enabled him to see how earlier citizens of Zion employed names but also to read these places and what they have become in the hundred and seventy years since the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, came west (fig. 1). Through this process George encountered a multivalent landscape that formed, as he wrote, a “vital part of [the] individual and collective memory and identity” of the Intermountain West.3
An investigation of place names is only one of the important results of George’s project. Crafting a list of place names provided the parameters of the project and, as so often happens with good photographic projects, presented limitations that opened up new possibilities. “Creation within the strict limitations of the medium,” Ansel Adams once argued, “is the basic law of pure photography.”4 The pursuit of places with scriptural names brought him to locales not necessarily of his choosing and put the photographer into contact with a broad swath of the state, providing an opportunity to visually explore urban areas, small rural towns, and places that seem to exist in name only. For this series George needed to embrace chance, never knowing exactly what he would find once he arrived on site. It also took him to places that would not normally be photographed. He did not retrace the footsteps of earlier photographers like William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan as the Rephotographic Survey Project did in the late 1970s.5 Rather, by following place names he often worked in locales that did not have a significant photographic history. Furthermore, his travels offered a direct encounter with ever-changing landscapes, which he recorded through a distinctive style that adroitly balances documentary and art photography.
Daniel George was born in Omaha and attended college in Idaho and Georgia. Prior to this series he had never lived in Utah, although he maintained deep ties to the state and its dominant culture. The photographer, like most Mormons, has connections to something or someone in Utah, yet he was leery of his work being typecast. “I didn’t want to make religious art,” he insisted, “but I was interested in making art about my religion.”6 Being both insider and outsider, he was able to document
a landscape that was both foreign and instinctively familiar. Together this enabled him to see and embrace the particular and peculiar elements of the state, while creating a portrait that resonates with the history and places of the Mormon world.
For more than seventy-five years historians and geographers have labored to identify and categorize the distinctive elements of what is called “the Mormon Landscape.” Foremost among scholars are the geographers D. W. Meinig and Richard Francaviglia who outlined the characteristic markers of the Mormon West, including its wide streets, grid system, “Mormon” hay derricks, and exposed irrigation ditches running through towns and villages.7 Other, albeit less common, markers of this landscape are its distinctive Mormon names.8 Indeed, towns like Moroni, Manti, Nephi, and Enoch represent what Wallace Stegner called “the nomenclature of Mormondon” and are not found anywhere else.9 More recently scholars like Paul F. Starrs and Richard Jackson have continued to explore the ways in which the “Mormon cultural region” has evolved while remaining a distinctive entity in the American West.10
Photographers have played an important role in documenting the “Mormon Landscape” and its changes. George’s series links him with others like Dorothea Lange, who created a dynamic and extensive portrait of Mormon Utah during the Great Depression and again, in 1953 with her friend Ansel Adams, as part of their Three Mormon Towns collaboration.11 It also connects George to other contemporary photographers like Vicky Sambunaris, a keen observer of the state, and Steven B. Smith, a native of Utah who for two decades has insightfully documented the subtleties and contradictions of urban sprawl along the Wasatch Front and throughout southern Utah.12
The sense of place has always played an important role in Mormon history. According to William Mulder, “While other millennialists set a time, the Mormons appointed a place.”13
Locations like Jackson County, Missouri, Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois, became their places of aspiration, hope, and refuge. Even before their mass migration to the West, Mormons envisioned a place that they could possess and where they could grow. According to early leader
Parley Pratt, “We want a country where we have room to expand, and to put into requisition all our energies and the enterprise and talents of a numerous, and intelligent, and increasing people.”14 When Mormon pioneers began their westward journey they saw their actions in biblical terms and themselves as the new children of Israel in search of their new promised land.15 The prolonged drive of a people to the Great Basin was their exodus guided by Brigham Young, their “modern Moses.”16 Their epic migration, however, was also seen through the lens of their scripture, namely the Book of Mormon, which furthered their understanding that their land of promise would have to be created out of a “wilderness of . . . affliction.”17
One of the key places in the process of Mormon expansion is Ensign Peak. More rocky hill than mountain peak, it is located along the foothills north of Salt Lake City. From its summit one can look south and take in the full length of the Salt Lake Valley. To the West one looks over the southern breadth of the Great Salt Lake and the first hints of the Western Desert. It is, both physically and spiritually, the epicenter of the Mormon West. It was here, two days after the arrival of the vanguard party, that a group Mormon elders including Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff hiked to its summit and placed a banner, or ensign, to the world. For them this was a fulfillment of the prophecy. The biblical prophet Isaiah wrote of lifting an “ensign on the mountains” that would call to all nations.18 The word ensign appears throughout the writings of Isaiah and was later adopted by the church and used across its platforms and activities.
It was this name, or term, that lured George to this site (fig. 2). His photograph, taken with a large format camera near the last gentle push to the summit, shows the rocky trail leading to the large stone monument marking the place where more than a century “a banner was unfurled.”19 George’s view does not place the peak in connection with the lofty mountains that surround it. Nor does he show the spectacular view from its summit. Rather, he shows a place void of romance, where, on any given night, a visitor is just as likely to find church youth groups on its summit as marijuana smoke wafting through the air. For early Latter-day Saints, Ensign Peak signaled their expansionist impulses to create a “refuge for the good”20 and to make the desert “blossom as the rose” through labor and divine assistance.21
Naming formed an important part of the blossoming desert. “Church chronology,” Farmer wrote, runs “through a canonized set of place names: The Sacred Grove, Hill Cumorah, Kirtland, Independence, Hahn’s Mill, Nauvoo, Carthage Jail, Winter Quarters, Emigration Canyon.” Yet, he argues, “sacred narrative-by-names advances to the Great Basin, then stops.”22 This is not entirely accurate. Once Mormons arrived in the West, the “narrative by name” only expanded, fanning out like a “starburst” across the Great Basin and creating a new and peculiar geography for a new Zion.23
Few groups in American history employed the levers of manifest destiny more than the Latter-day Saints. They believed that they were a promised people given a divinely ordained promised land. Like other Americans, they believed that subduing the West was practically a “providential ordinance,” a religious act sanctioned by deity.24 When Mormons came to the West, they believed that it was virtually a blank spot on the map. In reality, the region was not void of place-names. Rather, a rich complex of Native names given by the Shoshone, Ute, Paiute, Navajo, and other Indigenous peoples were already connected to the land, and often brushed aside by newcomers. Spanish names from the distant echoes of a different colonialist past were also found.25 “There is a cultural imprint in naming,” photographer Mark Ruwedel observed. It is “an agent of imperialism,” and the “first thing conquering people do is rename all the places and redraw all the maps.”26
Figure 2. Daniel George, Ensign Peak, ca. 2017–2019. Photograph.
While some names remained, most did not, as Mormons enthusiastically employed an Adamic right in renaming their new home in the West.27 This was a place where they could construct a symbolic landscape of their own, newly won country.28 In their eyes, God had truly come west with them.
The Mormon’s lofty zeal to name, however, often encountered difficulties when applied to the land. Like other religious groups across the United States, Mormons saw nature as second scripture.29 And like any scriptural text, the landscape was filled with features both angelic and demonic. When the Latter-day Saints arrived, they found that their heaven-on-earth was more akin to a wilderness that was dark, gloomy, and nightmarish.30 Satan and his lair became the inspiration for places that Mormons could not use or explain.31 Thus, names like Devil’s Slide, the Witches, Hell’s Backbone, and Devil’s Gate were common.32 Making the desert bloom was to be a struggle between good and evil. “We are pilgrims in a strange land, among strangers,” the pioneer Levi Savage recorded in his journal.33 Yet, this contact with a wild and savage West only sharpened Mormons’ connections to the divine. Soon they employed loftier names for their towns and geological features. LDS scripture gave these early settlers a “treasure-trove” of new names, and, as Van Cott noted, they applied biblical names as often or even more than other
“tradition-bound” Christian communities.34 Through naming they found irresistible parallels with other sacred landscapes, especially Palestine, as reflected by the naming of the Jordan River and the dirt road to Jericho.35 It would possess, moreover, a dirt road to Jericho, which seems in George’s photograph to be just as isolated and desolate as the one described in the New Testament (fig. 3).
The road to Jericho began in Jerusalem, the symbolic center of Christianity. Mormons, too, as Francaviglia has pointed out, embraced “Jerusalem in both memory and imagination” and, more than most religions, strongly connected to it “as both a real and abstract place called ‘Zion.’”36
Nineteenth-century visitors to Salt Lake City like Sir Richard Burton were quick to mark it as the “New Jerusalem”—a “Latter-day Jerusalem” in the West.37 Almost as soon as they entered the Great Salt Lake Valley, however, the new settlers decided to give their capitol its more prosaic name.38 The earlier practice of applying pretentious names to their places had gotten Mormons in trouble in Missouri and elsewhere, which they did not want to repeat.39 As the desert began to yield fruits, however, they increasingly saw a promised land and named it accordingly.
While names can cause friction, they can also create connections. Utah has its Jerusalem, just as Arkansas and New York have theirs. LDS settlers felt it important to connect with a larger
Figure 3. Daniel George, Jericho, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
Christian world even if the name Jerusalem was not given to its largest city. Rather, Jerusalem, Utah, is a small agricultural community located in the center of the state. No longer on official maps, the former town, as one resident noted, now consists of around six homes (four occupied) and ten denizens.40 The town exists, as George found, as little more than a name on a sign (fig. 4). It represents, however, yet another example of the desire to conflate, in the words of Francaviglia, “Mormon’s Zion with its Old World inspiration.”41
Utah’s nomenclature also reflects an ongoing struggle. Not all of the names that George traced were given by early pioneers. Jerusalem, for example, was founded in 1871. Indeed, the process of naming Utah continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is especially true decades after 1847 when many Mormon communities zealously sought to create an even more consecrated Zion. Located six miles north of Cedar City, the town was originally called Elk Horn Spring and then Johnson’s Ranch.42 Following skirmishes with local Native tribes it became Fort Johnson in 1854. Thirty years later it received the name of Enoch when local membership united to form a United Order that required them to have “all things in common,” following the pattern, it was believed, of Enoch’s ancient people.43 The town eventually abandoned the United Order and, as George documented, embraced fences and private property as it grew (fig. 5). Even after Utahns struggled to gain statehood and the official practice of polygamy ended, place naming continued to be a
way to maintain the state’s unique character, as reflected on the state’s current map.44
George’s photograph of Enoch, however, reveals another important element of this series. The view of a seemingly mundane location was made by careful design. Indeed, God to Go West reflects the sophistication and depth of an artist-photographer.45 At this stage in his career George’s work may be characterized as “New Topographic”—a particular photographic style that seeks to capture the realities and complexities of place, especially in the “new” American West. The style coalesced in the highly influential exhibition “New Topographics and the Man-Altered Landscape,” which was curated by William Jenkins for the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in 1975. The exhibition featured a cadre of young photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, and Frank Gohlke.46 Together they shared a different approach to landscape photography that was not interested in perpetuating an idealized view of the West but showed a region that was altered and even tarnished by habitation. Instead of pristine peaks and untrammeled nature, they photographed tract housing, pavement, and seemingly endless utility lines. Thus, they embraced a different view of the world than that of photographers like Ansel Adams and Elliott Porter, who projected a vision of western landscapes that was picturesque and pristine. Rebellious, New Topographic photographers even claimed to be “anti-Ansel.”47 These photographers were also influenced by nineteenth-century survey photographers like
Figure 4. Daniel George, Jerusalem, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
Figure 5. Daniel George, Enoch, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
O’Sullivan who did not mask their presence or avoid signs of contemporary life in their work.48 The telephone lines, rulers, roads, and railroad tracks that appear in their work mirror details found in the same landscapes more than a century later.
For those who have spent considerable time in the American West, however, the work of the New Topographic photographers should not come as a surprise. The West has always been a place of contradictions—a place where the real and ideal coexist. While their work may be closer to reality, it was not void of interest or form. Indeed, they embraced the incongruities and ironies present in the modern landscape and often found a subtle beauty in the New West.
Within a few years the aesthetics of New Topographics became one of the most important and influential forces in landscape photography.49 Well into the twenty-first century it became a mainstay of university photography programs and was embraced by museums and galleries across the world. Yet, even as this style was applied to places all over the globe, an essential subject of this far-reaching style is still the American West where exploitation and encroachment are not easily hidden. It is a place of road trips and, seemingly, where vast regions are yet to be fully explored with a camera.50 While not exclusive, the West is still the center and the heart of New Topographics.
George completed his bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University Idaho and a Master of Fine Arts from Savannah College in 2011. It was in college that he became enamored by the practice and potential of photography and decided to make it his career. Through his studies he was also introduced to the work of New Topographic photographers and taught to see and record the contradictions of the American landscape.51 A strong indebtedness to New Topographics is clearly evident in George’s series and dominated his vision as he worked around the state.
Although seemingly commonplace, George’s photographs are not made at random. Rather they reflect a keen eye for organization and composition, as seen in George’s photograph of Enoch’s back yards. His elevated vantage point enables a detailed survey of this western place that is far more complex that it may appear. A
central element of the composition is the riding mower that sits, lonely and still, in the foreground. Like everything else in the photograph, it maintains its form and holds its place. Raking shadows draw the viewer’s eye to the left to a middle ground with a soccer net and trampoline and then to the distant street which link back to a series of interconnected fences and trees. Why can’t a perfect picture be made of something prosaic? As Robert Adams posited, there is no such thing as simple space.52 Through George’s lens, a real-world beauty can be found in back yards and vacant lots.53 This is especially true in locations like Enoch where a sense of order was central to the town planning and a Mormon ideal of how settlements should look and behave. It is also important to note how George made his photographs. Even as he uses similar tools—a large format camera and tripod—he does not make work that looks like mid-twentieth-century modernism; this is “definitely not Ansel Adams’s high-contrast vision of the West.”54 Instead, George employs a full range of grayscale that treats everything within the photograph equally—a sort of visual democracy that does not privilege one object over another.
God to Go West not only reflects the look of New Topographics, but it also employs its dead-pan humor. George was drawn to the town of Moroni, located just east of Jerusalem, because of its name derived from a Book of Mormon prophet. Like other Utah towns located in tranquil valleys, Moroni has a particular small-town charm. However, George’s photograph does not present a view of picturesque mountains or photogenic fields (fig. 6). Rather, it presents a completely
Figure 6. Daniel George, Moroni, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
man-altered landscape of uniform lawns and property lines. Even in this “typical” view of a small Utah town, there is a delightful strangeness found in unexpected details like two lawn swans swimming along a chain-link fence paddling away from a painted saguaro cactus. This work, like the rest of George’s series, requires viewers to be more circumspect of what an idealized landscape is, and what it leaves out.
Although it was the pursuit of names that took George across Utah, he may be at his best when he employs New Topographic sensibilities to highlight the contradictions of particular places. In the various landscapes where he worked, he admits that one of the essential elements to his series is the pursuit of their “ironic relationships.”55 This pursuit is perfectly illustrated in his photograph of the idyllically named town of Eden. Few names are as bound to the notion of the idealized, perfected landscape as the Garden of Eden. When thrust out of Eden, Adam and Eve were resigned to a “real world” of thorns, thistles, and sorrow where they were to work and toil. Undoubtedly, they dreamt of their erstwhile garden, which became the embodiment of a perfect landscape—a place of beauty and harmony now only found in fragments.
Early settlers were fortunate to end up in this Eden. Lush, green, and surrounded by mountains covered in scrub oak, Eden is located in
Ogden Valley, one of the more idyllic valleys in Utah. An early surveyor suggested its name in the late 1850s.56 Over the next century and a half it began to move away from its agricultural past. A lot of the land is still farmed, but with the completion of Pineview Dam in 1937 and three ski resorts nearby, Eden increasingly became a recreational destination, a “quintessential western landscape.”57 Today it is filled with cabins and acts as a bedroom community for Ogden and other points along the Wasatch Front. These changes have come at a cost, as they have for places across the West where the “bargaining for Eden” continues.58 According to the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, “We lost Eden by staying in it, creating mines, timber mills, dams, highways, cities, suburbs, and parking lots.”59
George knew that with a name like Eden it would be hard not to romanticize this site. As Deborah Bright pointed out, most photography in the “Ansel Adams/Sierra Club tradition” has been used to “convince us that Eden still exists.”60 Clearly not created using “a celebratory light,” George’s photograph of Eden reveals another side of the community than the typically glossier depictions issued by the local chamber of commerce (fig. 7).61 Instead of snow or water skiers, it depicts a typical residence, a pile of refuse, and the ubiquitous utility pole that ties everything together visually with its wires. A sign protesting the always thorny issue of water
Figure 7. Daniel George, Eden, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
rights suggests regional conflicts that are common to the West, and not, one can imagine, in the Garden of Eden.62 True to his aesthetic, George finds visual interest in the mundane. But it is the incompatibility of the photograph and the name that gives this work its power. It requires one to see, as George insists, “the incongruity of idealism and reality.”63 It forces viewers to contemplate what has actually happened to Eden.
Once his work began, George continued to encounter contradictions across the state. Most scriptural place names originated during the pioneer settlement era when the state was primarily rural. Formerly rural places tend to retain scriptural names. Take the town of Lehi, located in Utah Valley and named after the Book of Mormon patriarch who lived a peripatetic life.64 When Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White visited Utah Valley in 1940, she found and photographed what she believed were typical American small towns.65 The once-rural farming community of Lehi has since become one of the fastest growing cities in the state and a center point of the state’s tech industry, known as “Silicone Slopes.” Driving south along Interstate 15, past a disappearing “Point of the Mountain” that marks the boundary between the Salt Lake and Utah valleys, it is difficult to distinguish Lehi from the suburban sprawl of Bluffdale, American Fork, Lindon, and other cities. In the midst of this expanding suburban sprawl is Thanksgiving Point with its neon-clad water tower that greets a growing number of commuters. Built for local communities and tourists by Karen and Alan Ashton, the founder of WordPerfect, the site features a farm, gardens, and museums. During his investigation one of George’s key pursuits was discovering the “distinct characteristics of [a] particular place.”66 In Lehi this took him from the city’s traditional downtown to its new heart and center, Thanksgiving Point, which hugs the interstate. Instead of main street, he turned his camera toward the Museum of Ancient Life with the outline of a massive Tyrannosaurus Rex stretching across its façade (fig. 8). The art critic Lucy Lippard observed that the “ever-metastasizing metropolitan West is full of contradictions and geographical ironies.”67 This is certainly true in a place where a dinosaur and a Book of Mormon prophet can conceivably share the same space.68
There are few words as distinctive to the Mormon West as “deseret.” The term, meaning “honeybee,” comes from the Book of Mormon (Ether 2:3) and was adopted by Brigham Young as the name of the 1849 proposed “State of Deseret.”69 Although Congress did not accept “deseret” as a place name, Utah became known as the “Beehive State” and its state motto became “Industry.” Traditional corbelled beehives, moreover, are found on its flag, seal, and signage. Unofficially, stylized hives are found everywhere in Utah from places of business to “every conceivable interior-decoration.”70
As part of his investigation George traveled to Deseret, a small community located in western Utah and next to a place called Oasis (fig. 9). Founded in 1860 the town took its name from Fort Deseret, once a lonely adobe outpost in the desert.71 The region has been a center of beekeeping since the early twentieth century when Nephi Miller recognized its potential. By 1920 Millard County beehives were producing more than 13,000 pounds of honey.72 Deseret, and nearby Delta, at the center of the honey and bee industry in Utah, are home of the Utah Beekeepers Association and several local families like the Stoddards who have been in the apiarian business for generations. In George’s photograph several box hives are scattered among sagebrush in the expansive landscape of western Utah. These are not the traditional-looking beehives like the one found on the state’s flag. Rather, they are modern Langstroth hives designed to be practical, efficient, and easily stacked for transportation. These hives
Figure 8. Daniel George, Lehi, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
belong to the Dutsons, who have maintained hives and produced honey since 1935. In keeping with modern apiarian practice, much of their business comes not through the collection of honey but by shipping hives across America to pollinate fruit and nut crops like California’s massive almond industry, which requires hundreds of beekeepers to truck in millions of bees to pollinate their arboreal blossoms. In George’s view of Deseret, hives are in a state of use and disuse. Some are broken up while others sit neatly stacked on palates awaiting transport. Once again, George shows the realities of Utah places and practices. Industry may be the state’s motto, and the sleek, yellow beehive its symbol, but this is what the modern industry of “deseret” looks like.
Some of the most important changes to the Mormon Landscape over the past seventy-five years have come through tourism. Indeed, Utah has become a popular destination for travelers across the world, with its national parks and wide-open spaces attracting millions of visitors each year. In 1945 the Utah Department of Publicity and Industrial Development excited (or maybe warned) Utahns: “Here they come! . . . The tourist vanguard is already over the horizon!”73 To meet demand highways and interstates opened up across the state, and with them came a new host of hotels, motels, and restaurants. For some locals tourism offered new sources of needed revenue and expanded opportunities. Others, however, lamented the “devil’s bargain” that tourism presented to communities—economic benefits come at a
cost.74 Commenting on how tourism was transforming southwestern Utah, Lange, in 1953, bemoaned: “St. George becomes a highway town . . . Raucous, paved, treeless, harsh competitor, garish imitator of all the others. Its history buried. Its tradition silenced.”75
Possibly no place in Utah has been as transformed by tourism as Moab, a name of biblical origin that implies “the land beyond the Jordan.”76 Permanently settled in 1878, Moab remained a sleepy frontier town in Utah’s southeastern corner until a uranium boom woke it up in the 1950s. After the boom went bust, the town looked to tourism to help its sagging economy. With its proximity to some of the most stunning red-rock landscapes in the world, including Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Moab quickly became a major draw for hikers, dirt and mountain bikers, and what Edward Abbey sardonically labeled the “mechanized tourists” and “Wheelchair Explorers” who never have to leave their car to see spectacular scenery.77 Ironically, what was once the edge of the Mormon frontier is now a major center of the state’s tourism industry with an international reputation. Despite being remote, it is no longer peripheral. Yet by the twenty-first century the explosive growth of tourism was placing real strains on Moab’s residents and infrastructure. Beyond dealing with the challenges of increased traffic, a lack of water, inadequate sewers, pollution, and the COVID19 virus, in recent years locals are faced with the challenge of maintaining community identity in the face of such changes.
Drawn to eastern Utah by a name, George’s photograph of Moab provides an insightful view into the town at a time of important transition (fig. 10). The subject of George’s photograph is the Slickrock Campground, one of the older tourist establishments in Moab, located on what once was the northern edge of town. Its pool, which sits right off of U.S. Highway 191, the town’s primary thoroughfare, was clearly designed to attract those, like the two young swimmers in the photograph, looking to escape the heat. Its enlarged sign, “Camp,” was also designed to pull in those looking for reasonably priced accommodations. With each year, however, Moab’s hotel industry continues to change. Marriott hotels, in all their varieties,
Figure 9. Daniel George, Deseret, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
overtake older establishments that typically need more to compete than a sparkling pool and cheap rates. Indeed, it is often what is happening to the area outside of the photographic frame that is also important. Already from a bygone era, the Slickrock Campground is surrounded by a host of newer national chain hotels and fewer and fewer empty lots.
Few places in Utah are as beautiful or as popular as Zion National Park. Early Mormon settlers like Isaac Behunin called their home among the majestic sandstone cliffs “Little Zion,” but upon his visit Brigham Young insisted that this was not Zion. It was too small, isolated, and agriculturally unproductive to be “the center place.”78 Later, John Wesley Powell reported that the Paiute of southern Utah called the future national park Mukuntuweap, or “straight canyon,” and did what he could to restore this name.79 In 1909 Mukuntuweap National Monument was created and maintained the moniker for nine years until the name was returned, again, to Zion. It became a national park one year later in 1919.
One of the key aspects of New Topographic photography is that it typically focuses on banal landscapes and leaves the grandeur of nature to others. New Topographic photographers tend to focus on landscapes filled with parking lots, rather than the grand scenery of the national parks. Yet, in reality the parks are highly
controlled and manicured spaces, and are not immune from encroachment. Moreover, as photographers like Len Jenshel and Terry Falke have shown, they are also not as pristine as advertised. Rather, they can be an overrun “half wilderness” where human intrusions are often evident.80 Jenshel likens the parks to “museums or Disneyland.”81 Like a theme park they are designed to keep visitors happy and safe, employing miles of railings and barriers to keep them from falling off of real cliffs or into bubbling hot geysers.
For George’s view of Zion, he chose the climatic terminus of the Overlook Trail (fig. 11). Most visitors go right up to the railing to get a better vantage point, exposing themselves to a vertiginous view straight down into Pine Creek gorge. Zion is full of tourists who stand at the same spots in an attempt to take the same photographs of undefiled nature, envisioning, to a degree, that they can capture a unique view. For George, on the other hand, the railing is a central part of his photograph. Captured in the setting sun, quiet, still, and lonely, it speaks of the vast and largely unseen infrastructure in the parks which are designed to keep visitors safe and to control their movement. More than exposing the trappings of tourism, it adds a complexity to the scene through the basic, but elegant, geometries of metal, chain link, and shadow. As such it provides a formal contrast with the organic forms of the canyon, where
Figure 10. Daniel George, Moab, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
even the looping road (Utah Highway 9) in the distance, leading to Zion’s famed tunnels, seems to be made by nature.
In truth, there are places that stretch and strain a New Topographics aesthetics. In Zion, or the Grand Canyon, it is more difficult to take a banal photograph of a landscape so stunning. The landscape of these places tends to make anything occupying the foreground seem trite in comparison. When the pioneer photographer C. R. Savage visited Zion Canyon in 1870 he acknowledged that it “surpasses in grandeur and sublimity of rocky grandeur any place I ever saw.”82 Yet he was put off by the place, calling it a “lonely and unattractive . stone box” and “a good place to visit, and a nice place to leave.”83 Savage, too, seemed to lament the fact that Zion Canyon was more “skyscrape” than landscape. Like Savage, George may have wanted to expose the realities of the place but was equally drawn into its sublimity. No amount of debris or modern distraction can take away from what is arguably the most beautiful and complete skyscrape on earth.
George continued his exploration of Zion National Park by visiting Kolob Canyon located in the park’s annex on its northwestern side (fig. 12). Kolob is another particular and peculiar Mormon name designating a major feature in Mormon cosmography: the center of the universe and the star closest to the throne of
God.84 This earthly Kolob is located near I-15 and known for its soaring and sublime redrock towers, which most experience from their cars along a crimson road with “banked curves, deep cuts and heavy fills” that culminates in a spectacular overlook.85 As seen in George’s photograph from the lookout, this Kolob is not inhabited by heavenly beings but by a constant mismatch of polyglot tourists. This is a truly strange perigee, indeed. Additionally, in the photograph the trappings of tourism seem to be in direct competition with its famous skyscape. In photographing tourists against the backdrop of the national parks, George follows in the tradition of Roger Minick whose “Sightseer” series for decades playfully documented
Figure 11. Daniel George, Zion, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
Figure 12. Daniel George, Kolob, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
the looming presence of tourists in renowned landscapes.86 George, likewise, records their “almost ritualistic fashion to see for themselves a ‘view’ which, ironically, had been chosen long ago for its ‘scenic value’ by some committee or road survey chief.”87 George’s series in Zion also reminds viewers that the national parks need to be seen like other landscapes in the West whose “whole geography” is both “natural and manmade.”88
Even before tourists came to Utah for its natural scenery, the state was an important draw for LDS church members. No longer required to move to “Zion” as they did in the nineteenth century, its members still made pilgrimages to places important to church history. Salt Lake City was, as Burton and Lange suggested roughly a century apart, their mecca, the place where Mormons continue to visit.89 They also make pilgrimages to other sites important to Latter-day Saints, like the Hill Cumorah in upstate New York, or Nauvoo, Illinois, where, in the summer they could enjoy large pageants put on by hundreds of volunteers from local congregations and other church communities around the United States. Until they were cancelled in 2019, these pageants were an important part of the Mormon experience. Typically, they retold stories from church history and reenacted narratives from the Book of Mormon for both members and non-members.
The Mormon Miracle Pageant was performed at the base of Temple Hill in Manti, Utah, since 1967. Like other pageants it featured a cast of hundreds drawn from the local community and beyond and reflected a long legacy of Mormon presence in the area. Settled as early as 1849, Manti was earlier named Copenhagen in honor of the prominent community of Danish emigrants that began settling the area in the 1860s.90 Its Book of Mormon moniker was later given to the settlement, which denoted a town located on the wilderness fringe and in close contact with “Lamanites,” which Mormons interpreted as Native Americans.91 A central feature of this community became its temple, crowning a hill, that was to be a “pathway to the just.”92 Designed to be “unique theological statements in stone,” LDS temples differ from regular meetinghouses and are exclusive places of worship for card-carrying faithful, who must be vetted by their local ecclesiastical leader
before they can enter.93 They are also, as Starrs and others have pointed out, distinct markers of a growing Mormon landscape that is no longer limited to the Intermountain West.94
One of four pioneer temples in Utah, the Manti Temple was designed by architect William Folsom and built of cream-colored oolitic limestone quarried on the site. Completed in 1888, it was and is considered one of the church’s most beautiful and unique structures.95 While traveling through the area in 1948, Ansel Adams photographed the symmetrical façade of the temple, which he included in his first portfolio.96 For him, the temple, along with its grassy hill, perfectly balanced shrubs, and crowned gate, served as an interesting play of form and shape. Seventy years later George photographed it for very different reasons. When he visited Manti, George documented a scene awaiting the pageant, complete with large riggings for sound and light that march across the picture plane, and five artificial platforms along the hillside, which were designed to look like stone (fig. 13). From the hill the temple seems to emerge in a gauzy splendor that makes it almost appear as if a massive, elaborate prop. Although not one person is to be found in the photograph, in a number of hours this scene will be filled with a cacophony of spectators and participants.
It is, however, the chairs in the foreground that may be the most important feature of the photograph. Folding chairs may not be a common feature of the Mormon landscape, but they are a part of the Mormon experience. Setting up
Figure 13. Daniel George, Manti, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
and taking down chairs is a common occurrence for most Latter-day Saints. Due to the church’s lay ministry, members are required to prepare for Sunday services and other meetings by, among other tasks, setting up and removing chairs in classrooms and overflow areas. (If gaining access to heaven was predicated on how often these activities were performed, Mormons would certainly have an in.) Each ward house, moreover, possesses its own fleet of chairs (and folding tables too), which can, if needed, be borrowed and hauled away for a variety of functions. This has, over time, produced a battered and diluted group of portable furnishings typically stored on a variety of wheeled carts. In George’s photograph rows of standard “Mormon chairs,” which the church purchased in stunning quantities, sit on the lightly trampled grass facing the natural stage with the names of various wards of origin stenciled on the back of a few. Looking deeper, there is a profound symbolism to be found in the quiet cavalcade of chairs that seem to stand as proxies for those soon to arrive. In near perfect rows and columns, they seem to sit in rapt attention awaiting the festivities. A few anomalies dot the metal congregation, and near the back the regimented order starts to slacken and dissipate.
Pageants may reveal what is important to a particular religion; they are events engineered to show off and shine. Yet, it may be argued that
the planning and preparations are more revelatory. As such, George has not just photographed the scene of a pageant, but a synecdoche of the Latter-day Saints.
One last example illustrates the complexity and beauty of George’s work across Utah in pursuit of a religious name. Just up the road from Manti, he photographed Manasseh, or, more specifically, a quiet ranch gate that is worth deeper investigation (fig. 14). In the book of Genesis it is recorded that Joseph, the son of Isaac, had two sons which he named Ephraim and Manasseh, who would later give their names to two key tribes of Israel. A world away in Utah, Manasseh was to be the sister-town to Ephraim in the Sanpete Valley.97 Ephraim flourished, while Manasseh did not. Like Jerusalem, Utah, all that remains is a small agricultural community that does not exist on state maps. It may also be fitting that the meaning of Manasseh is “forgetting.” A typical traveler along Utah’s backroads passes hundreds of similar gates, never giving most a second glance. Few, however, are as attuned to the subtleties of landscape as a photographer with a good eye. Many of those who follow a New Topographic approach to landscape photography assert that something of worth can still be found in even the most battered landscape. True art, Robert Adams argues, “asserts that nothing is banal.”98 George may have come to this place because of its name, but he came away with a photograph of quiet beauty.
Figure 14. Daniel George, Manasseh, UT (2017–2019), photograph.
Stegner once argued that “[b]ecause the Mormons have never been an imaginative people, they never noticed much about the landscape they settled except that the sagebrush growth was sturdy or thin.”99 There is also the notion that much of Utah was wasteland, an “uncertainly subdued land, instinct with hardship,” where “life does not come easy.”100 Its “loveliness is a desert loveliness,” it was argued, “unyielding and frequently sterile,” and its “beauty is not wholehearted; always there is something withheld.”101 George’s photograph confronts both of these ideas. Like the rest of the God to Go West series, it is a work of insight and imagination. Despite a sign on the fence warning visitors of trespassing, George’s image invites the viewer in to see this unique world through the frame of the gate and the photograph. Furthermore, it expresses a wholehearted appreciation of the Utah landscape—all of it—where even a lowly ranch entrance can possess something monumental, and a tangle of cheatgrass maintains its form and presence. A profound, even transcendental, stillness is crystalized by the reflection of the water found in old tire ruts, which also acts to unify the disparate forms and patterns of the scene. While this photograph may not be the first one that viewers may take notice of, it may easily be the best of the series.
Utah names have always provided insight into the aspirations and beliefs of the people who made this place their home. This was certainly true of the Mormon pioneers who bestowed many names on sites connected to their faith and, consequently, from their scriptures. Thus, it was possible to visit Jerusalem in the American West or Nephi in one of the state’s fertile valleys. It was these names from the past that drew the photographer Daniel George into the Mormon landscape. Through his series God to Go West, he documented places like Moroni, Eden, and Manti, carefully recording in a matter-of-fact way what these places look like decades after they were established. Often these sites offered contradictions, ironies, and insights into the subtle beauty of the state. They all provide a glimpse into the changing nature of the Mormon West. In many ways his work demonstrates how the Mormon landscape has come to look like other places across the United States. It is just another variation, or, in the words of Thomas Carter, “an American
landscape of difference, not of otherness.”102 As the state continues to evolve it will increasingly lose its distinctive characteristics. The unique names of Utah will live on, but they will require greater explanation as the population becomes increasingly urban and less bound to the state’s dominant religion. This increased dislocation is also true of Utah’s distinctive landscapes, which still maintain distinct references to the past. Moreover, as the more stunning landscapes of Utah become increasingly crowded and overrun, it will be the more pedestrian places that will attract attention. Francaviglia observed that Mormons connected the past and future with place.103 The same may be said of George’s series. Names may have provided an entrée to his investigation, but it was George’s photographic skills and eye that created one of the most significant and timely visual investigations of the Utah landscape.
Notes
1. Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 243.
2. John W. Van Cott, Utah Place Names (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990).
3. Daniel George, “A Pointed Lens: God to Go West, an Interview with Glen Nelson” (New York: Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, 2019). Hereafter cited as George interview.
4. “Realism with Reverence,” Time, June 4, 1951, 71.
5. For more on the Rephotographic Survey Project, see Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester, and JoAnn Verburg, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984).
6. George interview.
7. D. W. Meinig, “Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (June 1965); Richard V. Francaviglia, “The Mormon Landscape: Definitions of an Image in the American West,” in Association of American Geographers: Proceedings 2 (1970): 59–61.
8. Richard H. Jackson, “Mormon Wests: The Creation and Evolution of an American Region,” in Western Places, American Myths, ed. Gary J. Hausladen (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003), 135; Richard V. Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a Unique Image in the American West (New York: AMS Press, 1978), 7.
9. Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 192.
10. Paul F. Starrs, “Meetinghouses in the Mormon Mind: Ideology, Architecture, and Turbulent Streams of an Expanding Church,” Geographical Review 99 (July 2009): 330–32, 348.
11. See James R. Swensen, “Dorothea Lange’s Portrait of Utah’s Great Depression,” Utah Historical Quarterly
70 (Winter 2002): 39–62; James R. Swensen, In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Town Collaboration, 1953–1954 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018).
12. See Vicky Sambunaris, Taxonomy of a Landscape (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2013); Steven B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West, introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Steven B. Smith, Your Mountain is Waiting (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2020). For other photographers working in Utah and under the broadening notion of the Mormon Landscape, see Tillman Crane, A Walk Along the Jordan (Camden, ME: Sterling and Hurst, 2009); James R. Swensen, “Utah : 800: Christine Armbruster’s Photo-essay and the Continuing Documentation of Small Town Utah, 2010–2016,” Utah Historical Quarterly 86 (Fall 2018): 350–65; Mark Hedengren, The Mormons (Hong Kong: Red Finch Publishing, 2010).
13. William Mulder, “The Mormons in American History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 27 (January 1959): 68. See also D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 3 Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 104.
14. “Conference Minutes,” Times and Seasons 6, no. 16 (November 1, 1845): 1010–11.
15. Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 151.
16. Mulder, “Mormons in American History,” 66.
17. 2 Nephi 3:1.
18. Isaiah 18:3; Isaiah 5:26. See also Isaiah 13:2; 2 Nephi 23:2.
19. Joel H. Johnson, “High on a Mountain Top,” Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985), 5.
20. Johnson, 5; Malachi 4:5; George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place Naming in the United States (New York: Random House, 1945), 260.
21. Isaiah 35:1. See John A. Widtsoe, ed., Discourses of Brigham Young: Second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1978), 346.
22. Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 247–48.
23. Richard Lyman Bushman, Making Space for Mormons: Ideas of Sacred Geography in Joseph Smith’s America, Vol. 2 in the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 5.
24. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 41.
25. See Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 191–94.
26. Mark Ruwedel, Mark Ruwedel (Göttingen, Germany: Stiedl, 2015), 207.
27. See Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 92.
28. John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6.
29. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 29.
30. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, xvi.
31. See Mark Ruwedel, Pictures of Hell (Los Angeles: RAM Publications, 2014).
32. In truth, some of these names may have preceded the Mormon migration.
33. Levi Savage Journal, 1885, p. 37, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
34. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, xviii; Federal Writers’ Program (WPA), Utah: A Guide to the State (New York: Hastings House, 1941), 7. See also Stewart, Names on the Land, 262.
35. See Alexander Evanoff, “The Turner Thesis and Mormon Beginnings in New York and Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 33 (Spring 1965): 157, 168–70.
36. Richard V. Francaviglia, The Mapmakers of New Zion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015), 15–16.
37. See Richard V. Francaviglia, Believing in Place: A Spiritual Geography of the Great Basin (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003), 143; Francaviglia, The Mapmakers of New Zion, 81–82. See also Sir Richard F. Burton, City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1861; Santa Barbara CA: The Narrative Press, 2003), 151, 156.
38. The name “Great Salt Lake City” was adopted on August 22, 1847. The “Great” was dropped twenty-one years later. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 327.
39. See Stewart, Names on the Land, 261.
40. Perry Christensen, text message to author, March 30, 2020.
41. Francaviglia, Believing in Place, 134.
42. Janet Burton Seegmiller, A History of Iron County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1998), 170.
43. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 128–29; 4 Nephi 4:3; Moses 7:18.
44. For more on this important period of change, see Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 3–15.
45. For more on George’s work, visit www.danielgeorge photo.net, accessed March 15, 2020.
46. For more on New Topographics, see William Jenkins, New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscape (Rochester: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1975); Britt Salvesen, New Topographics: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicolas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr. (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2009).
47. William Jenkins, recorded interview by Britt Salvesen, Center for Creative Photography, June 30, 2006.
48. Max Kozloff, “Wilderness in a Box,” Artforum 14, no. 2 (1975): 56–57; Mark Klett, “Afterward,” Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest by Mark Klett, essays by Patricia Nelson Limerick and Thomas W. Southall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 164.
49. See Allison Nordström, “After New: Thinking About New Topographics From 1975 to the Present,” in New Topographics: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicolas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr. (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), 69–80.
50. See David Campany, The Open Road: Photography & The American Road Trip (New York: Aperture, 2014).
51. Daniel George, email correspondence with the author, April 8, 2020.
52. Robert Adams, “Introduction,” in The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography, ed. Daniel Wolf (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 1.
53. Adams, 3.
54. Shawn Rossiter, “Daniel George’s Photographs Examine the Romantic Promise of Utah’s Scriptural Place Names,” 15Bytes/Artists of Utah (November 4, 2019), http:// artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/daniel-georges -photographs-examine-the-romantic-promise-of -utahs-scriptural-place-names/, accessed March 15, 2020.
55. George interview.
56. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 124.
57. Stephen Trimble, Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 40, 190.
58. In Bargaining for Eden (2008) photographer, historian, and activist Stephen Trimble uses Eden, Utah, as an actual example of a contested western landscape, while playing off its symbolic nomenclature.
59. Limerick, Revealing Territory, 8–9.
60. Deborah Bright, “Paradise Recycled: Art, Ecology, and the End of Nature [sic],” Afterimage 18 (1990): 10.
61. George interview.
62. See Trimble, Bargaining for Eden, 197.
63. Trimble, 197.
64. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 224.
65. Bourke-White and her husband, the writer Erskine Caldwell, documented various locations in Utah County including Provo during their visit to Utah circa 1940. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Say Is This the U.S.A.? (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 56.
66. George interview.
67. Lucy R. Lippard, “Finding Her Way into the New West,” in Michelle Van Parys, The Way Out West: Desert Landscapes (Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2008), 83
68. Rossiter, “Daniel George’s Photographs.”
69. Stewart, Names on the Land, 285.
70. Utah: A Guide to the State, 7.
71. Rufus Wood Leigh, Five Hundred Utah Place Names: Their Origin and Significance (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1961), 18; Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 108; Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 201.
72. Edward Leo Lyman and Linda King Newell, A History of Millard County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1999), 240.
73. Quoted in Lisa-Michele Church, “Early Roadside Motels and Motor Courts of St. George,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80 (Winter 2012): 33.
74. Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 57.
75. Dorothea Lange, Field Notes, n.p., Dorothea Lange Archive, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California.
76. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 253.
77. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968; New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 61.
78. See Bushman, Making Space for Mormons, 10; Doctrine and Covenants 57:3.
79. See Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 266.
80. Finis Dunaway, “Beyond Wilderness: Robert Adams, New Topographics, and the Aesthetics of Ecological Citizenship,” in Reframing The New Topographics, ed. Greg Foster-Rice and John Rohrbach (Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2020), 22; Terry Falke, Observations in an Oc -
cupied Wilderness (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006).
81. Len Jenshel, Travels in the American West: Photographs by Len Jenshel (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 6.
82. Charles R. Savage Diary, March 8, 1870, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
83. C.R. Savage, “A Trip South with President Young in 1870,” Improvement Era 3 (April 1900): 435.
84. See Abraham 3:2–18; Rufus, 47–48.
85. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 57.
86. Andy Grundberg, “Photography,” New York Times, December 6, 1981, 11.
87. Roger Minick, email correspondence with author, November 27, 2007.
88. Lewis Baltz, “The New West,” in Lewis Baltz Texts (Göttingen: Steidl, 2012), 35.
89. Burton, City of the Saints, 151; Dorothea Lange, Field Notes, [3], Lange Archive.
90. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 244. See also Thomas Carter, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
91. See Alma, chap. 58. In the Book of Mormon, Lamanites were a fallen race from what a divinely guided group that left Jerusalem and arrived in the Americas around 600 B.C.E. For more on Lamanites and Mormon beliefs about their connection with Native Americans, see Howard Christy, “Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon Indian Relations in Utah, 1847–1852,” Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978): 216–35; See also Sondra Jones, “Saints or Sinners? The Evolving Perceptions of Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah Historiography,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Winter 2004): 19–46; W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
92. Lorenzo Snow, “Dedicatory Prayer,” Manti Temple, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/details /manti-utah-temple/prayer/1888-05-21?lang=eng, accessed March 15, 2020.
93. Chad F. Emmett, “The Evolving Landscape of the 21st Century,” Geography, Culture and Change in the Mormon West, 1847–2003, ed. Richard H. Jackson and Mark W. Jackson (Jacksonville AL: National Council for Geographic Education, 2003), 59.
94. Starrs, “Meetinghouses in the Mormon Mind,” 329–32.
95. C. Mark Hamilton, Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture and City Planning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49–51; Starrs, “Meetinghouses in the Mormon Mind,” 331.
96. See Ansel Adams, The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), Portfolio I, Plate 4.
97. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 242.
98. Robert Adams, “Truth and Landscape,” in Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (New York: Aperture, 1996), 15.
99. Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942), 348. See also Swensen, In a Rugged Land, 72–75.
100.Utah: A Guide to the State, 8.
101. Utah: A Guide to the State, 8.
102. Carter, Building Zion, 17.
103. Francaviglia, Mapmakers of New Zion, 227.
REVIEWS
Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, and Scoundrel
By Val Holley
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xii + 369 pp. Cloth, $60.00, Paper, $29.95
The long wait for a full-length biography of Frank J. Cannon is over. Val Holley’s lively, well-written, and carefully-researched Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, and Scoundrel brings Frank to life in vivid, controversial colors, making up for the deficiencies of Cannon’s political autobiography, Under the Prophet in Utah: The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft
Holley provides the full chronology of Frank’s fascinating life with important detailed information and analysis. Holley describes the profound influence on young Frank by two senior leaders in the LDS church—his father, George Q. Cannon, and apostle Franklin D. Richards, to whom Frank was closely related through his mother and for whom he was named. Frank went to live and work with the Richards family in Ogden when he was thirteen years old (George Q. later regretted his decision to permit this) and he ever after claimed Ogden as his home town. There, Frank fell in with a relatively tough crowd from whom he learned bad habits but also became best friends and close political compatriots with Ben E. Rich, a strait-laced Mormon. Frank’s first wife, the lovely Martha Anderson Brown (Mattie), was also from Ogden.
Holley reviews Frank’s education (he studied under a strict German as a child and graduated from the University of Deseret with B. H. Roberts, James Henry Moyle, and Martha Paul [later Hughes Cannon]). We learn of minor political offices Frank held, his creative campaigning, his assignments to Washington (largely at his father’s instance) to lobby as a young monogamous Mormon, and his crucial role in preparing the country and Utah for Utah’s statehood. Frank played a central part in the end of the People’s Party and the development of the Republican Party (and thus the two
national party system) in Utah. He ran for territorial delegate twice, winning the second time, and had the good fortune of being delegate when Utah became a state, which paved his way to the U.S. Senate. Cannon’s entrepreneurial activities and his financial representation of the LDS church in the 1890s are chronicled at some length.
Along the way, Holley unflinchingly describes some of Frank’s peccadillos—an illegitimate son with his daughter’s nanny in Logan, his periodic carousals with prostitutes that would last for days, and his drunken assault on a prosecutor who Frank believed had been overly aggressive in interrogating a wife of George Q. Cannon.
Frank emerges as a resourceful, clever political campaigner and office holder, and talented business booster. He developed into an outstanding, persuasive orator, perhaps the best Utah has ever seen, and a powerful editorialist. Holley describes the “Oedipal” 1896 Senate election which included the half-hearted late entry of George Q. Cannon into that race against Frank at the request of LDS prophet Wilford Woodruff. Holley tracks Frank’s election and his three-year term, during which he bolted the Republican Party over the silver issue and helped found the Silver Republican Party.
Holley argues that few remember Frank Cannon’s contributions to statehood because he was blackballed after turning on the LDS church. I am not so sanguine that Frank’s central role has been forgotten any more than others’: the crucial parts played by Isaac Trumbo, Morris Estee, James Clarkson, Joseph Rawlins, and Hiram B. Clawson, to name a few, have been largely forgotten without any decree from Joseph F. Smith. Even George Q. Cannon, who most deserves the title “father of Utah statehood,” is not often remembered today by non-historians.
As Holley recounts well, Frank eventually fell out with Joseph F. Smith and the LDS church
after his father’s death and his days as agent for the church ended. Frank reacted with furious journalistic attacks as editor of the Salt Lake Tribune on Joseph F. Smith and Reed Smoot after Smoot was elected senator in 1905. Holley does not fully describe several of Frank’s meanest attacks. His vicious editorials ultimately resulted in his excommunication in March 1905.
As we are told, behind the scenes, Frank also led the opposition to Smoot’s being seated in the Senate, working with his close friend, Senator Fred Dubois of Idaho.
Holley effectively tells how badly former Senator Cannon and soon-to-be former Senator Dubois reacted in February 1907 when the Senate voted 43–27 (with 20 not voting) to let Reed Smoot retain his seat. Not long after, ever-suffering Mattie, who remained a member of the LDS Relief Society General Board through all of this, got sick and quickly died at the age of fifty. Suffering two profound losses and needing a change of scenery, Frank moved to Denver.
Soon Frank was attacking corruption in Colorado politics at Denver newspapers. He befriended Judge Ben V. Lindsey, who wrote an exposé of political corruption in Colorado in a book called The Beast, co-written with Harvey J. O’Higgins. Through Lindsey, Cannon was introduced to O’Higgins and became part of a remarkable collection of progressive reformers and intellectuals living in Denver.
O’Higgins, a gifted New York-based writer, was fascinated by Frank Cannon’s sad story of alienation and expulsion from the LDS church and saw parallels between Ben Lindsey’s crusade against Colorado corruption and Frank Cannon’s crusade against Joseph F. Smith. Frank collaborated with O’Higgins on Under the Prophet in Utah. The popularity of the work launched Frank onto the national lecture circuit.
After an eight-year run lecturing to hundreds of thousands of fascinated listeners on the dangers of the still-polygamous “Modern Mormon Kingdom,” Frank moved on. He spent his last decade dabbling in entrepreneurial activities such as mining and maintaining his absolute belief that bimetallism would solve many of the world’s economic woes. His work on the silver issue briefly brought him back to some national attention before his death in 1933.
Frank J. Cannon is an engaging, well-written biography. It provides important new insights and analysis into Frank’s life. There are some holes, however. Holley does not attempt to account for Frank’s apparent victory over alcohol—the last mention in the book of his drinking was in 1898, though he went on a drinking dive into Salt Lake City’s red light district after his excommunication from the church in 1905. This appears to have been an important change in his life and the reasons for the change, if they could be divined, are important. It would also be interesting to learn more about Frank’s personal life with Mattie and May and his children, his mother, his dozens of siblings and scores of cousins, with Ben Rich and other political friends, and with so many others. This is likely limited by historical sources but more personal details may have permitted us to better understand the complicated Senator Cannon.
To Holley, Frank J. Cannon was a fearless, eloquent, and gifted crusader against corruption wherever he encountered it, whether in Mormon leadership or Denver politics. Frank was all of these things and, at times, was well compensated for his work. As to his attacks on the Mormon hierarchy, some might argue that Frank’s animus was more personal than ideological or moral. He was frustrated by his loss of station after his father died. He had made pledges in the late 1880s to U.S. government officials that the LDS church would end polygamy and political domination (though Frank exaggerated the details of those promises when he described them later). These pledges helped Utah achieve statehood but were not fully kept by many church leaders and members. Frank knew about new polygamous marriages, polygamous couples continuing to live together, and the church continuing political involvement, but did not express outrage or crusade against them until after his estrangement from the church. Holley does not spend much time on the “scoundrel” part of Frank Cannon other than his illegitimate son and his early drinking and associations with prostitutes. Frank could be extraordinarily vicious and this part of his personality is not particularly well developed.
Holley quotes Bernard DeVoto to argue that Frank may have made an extraordinary
statesman for Utah for decades. DeVoto was brilliant and could turn a wonderful phrase but was hardly an unbiased judge of the Mormons and Utah. Frank’s instability was not the usual grist of statesmanship. He was a member of at least five different political parties between 1889 and 1906 and could not play politics well enough to be reelected once, let alone for many terms. He was, however, an enormously talented, charismatic, and complicated man and through the excellent Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, and Scoundrel we know and understand him much better than we ever have.
–Kenneth Cannon Independent Historian
Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record
Kenneth L. Alford, ed.
Norman, Oklahoma: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2017
Professional historians and lay readers alike will be glad to have this 800-page documentary collection compiled and edited by Kenneth L. Alford. If in ways atypical for its genre, the volume will be helpful to scholars who need quick and nearly comprehensive access to official Union correspondence pertaining to Utah and the surrounding region for the years of the Civil War. Since the Civil War, western history, and Mormon history attract popular readerships, the book will also no doubt delight some looking for fine-grained, firsthand accounts, even if it will prove too bulky for beach reading on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
The volume contains two main sections as well as a detailed opening summary of Utah’s history during the Civil War, an introduction to the sources and method of compiling the volume, and a series of appendices. The first main section, the larger of the two, consists of material culled from the massive series, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, or OR for short. Originally produced by the federal government, OR is a compendium of Union and Confederate government documents and correspondence concerning the war and is a familiar resource to most historians of the Civil War. OR is publicly available in digitized format and
the editor and his team have used a cluster of search terms related to Utah and Mormons to extract 504 sources from thirty different volumes of OR. Skilled researchers will be able to find many of these sources on their own, especially since, as Alford’s tabulations make clear, a majority of them reside in volumes 48 and 50 of Series 1 of OR. But researchers will still benefit from the ease with which they can read these alongside related sources otherwise scattered across the original series. Alford offers some brief, helpful editorial comments throughout, as well as citations to OR for each source.
The second section is shorter but integral to the volume and its value. It contains 155 sources focused on the efforts by the Utah territorial government, federal forces, and Mormon leadership to help protect the overland mail route from banditry and Native American attacks and to otherwise manage a fraught relationship. The editor and his team of researchers have transcribed many of these sources from original manuscripts in the territorial militia records of Utah and federal records excluded from OR, including post returns from Camp Douglas. They also draw from the Daily Union Vedette and the Mormon-run Deseret News. The result, especially when combined with the sources from OR, is a fairly thorough compilation of official and semi-official records of Utah’s strategic and logistical role in the Civil War, which was peripheral without being negligible.
The sources in these two main sections are eclectic in nature and will be of interest to historians working on a variety of topics. Many of the sources in the volume showcase Utah as a rugged setting for complex and scattered interactions among Mormons, Union officials, soldiers, mountain men, traders, and diverse Native American groups. This includes multiple confrontations, including the battle against and then massacre of Native Americans camped on the Bear River (see especially 208–12). The active role of the leadership of the Mormon Church is also apparent in the volume, which contains several letters to and from Brigham Young, as are the efforts by the Union to gauge that leadership’s commitment to the Union cause (see especially 353–57). Still other sources, especially in the first main section, pertain to the broader attempt by the Union
government to secure control of the West and the rumors circulating there during the secession crisis. This is particularly evident in the several sources expressing anxiety over the loyalty of Mormons in San Bernardino, California (see, for example, 94–96) and another linking polygamy in Utah with peonage in New Mexico as twin relics of barbarism (117–19). The volume should spur on the now well-established scholarly interest in the connections between the Civil War and the Far West.
The volume is open to at least three criticisms. First, the decision to use keyword searches to compile the first main section of the volume is sensible in and of itself, but also renders a large number of sources that are of unclear significance to any major historical theme. A sensible researcher will of course rely on the volume’s excellent index and Appendix H, which lists senders and recipients, to jump in and out of the volume. Still, the editor could have excluded some sources without much detriment. Second, compared to benchmark documentary editing projects, the editorial commentary and cross-referencing around in this volume will feel brief at points. Finally, one may ask whether a digital project would not have made more sense, all the more so since many of these sources are already online and word-searchable. These minor points noted, we are fortunate to have this volume.
–David
Prior University of New Mexico
Salt Lake School of the Prophets,
1867–1883
Devery S. Anderson, ed.
Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018. lvii + 640 pp. Cloth, $47.95
In December 1867, Brigham Young oversaw the opening of a School of the Prophets in Salt Lake City that existed until June 1874. Nine years after that school was disbanded, John Taylor briefly reconvened the Salt Lake School of the Prophets, which only lasted from August to October 1883.
These schools have received less attention than the School of the Prophets established by
Joseph Smith at Kirtland, Ohio, in the 1830s. However, the publication of this volume brings long overdue attention to them. The little known and little used minutes that were produced during these meetings present a fascinating and unique record of issues of importance to leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to Latter-day Saints living in Salt Lake City during the years the school was in operation. The minutes also provide an insight into the personalities of those who “stood at their head” (vii), as Young and Taylor directed the operation of their schools differently. In the case of Young, many of those who think they know him might be surprised with the individual revealed in the minutes.
The impending coming of the railroad, coupled with concerns about national politics and growing anti-Mormon sentiments, and conflicts with indigenous residents, prompted Young to organize Schools of the Prophets throughout Utah Territory. Of these schools, the Salt Lake School of the Prophets was preeminent because a who’s who of church leadership regularly participated. Unlike Smith’s School of the Prophets, however, Young’s school was not simply a meeting where a select group of “first elders” gathered to be trained in clearly-defined doctrinal topics. Instead, it differed in both curriculum and the fact that for a period of time it was open to all Latter-day Saint adult males in the community and its membership at one time exceeded a thousand.
Young viewed the establishment of Schools of the Prophets as an important aspect of his efforts to unite church members in thought and action, to create a unique culture where theological and secular issues merged, and to build a Zion society. Embracing the Latter-day Saints scriptural declaration that individuals should be instructed in “all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:78), the Salt Lake School of the Prophets provided a forum for discussions on a wide range of theological, political, economic, and social issues. Topics not only ranged from the so-called Adam–God theory to the Word of Wisdom, but could, as was the case on September 2, 1871, include discussions upon the need for individuals to create a will—with Young’s will being read as an example, “leaving out
names & figures”—and the benefits of replacing outhouses with “dry earth closets” (215–16).
A major focus of Young’s school was setting the table for the introduction of economic cooperatives among the Latter-day Saints. With the establishment of United Orders in 1874, Young dissolved all the Schools of the Prophets throughout the territory.
When Taylor reintroduced the Salt Lake School of the Prophets in 1883, it was more in line with Smith’s school in terms of curriculum and membership. The minutes of the August 2, 1883, organizational meeting presents an overview of previous Latter-day Saint Schools of the Prophets.
The volume also includes appendices that contain the rules for Young’s school drafted in 1868; minutes of the 1869 trial of William Godbe and Elias Harrison for apostasy; minutes of the 1874 organization of the Salt Lake United Order recorded in the same volume as School of the Prophets minutes; minutes of the 1883 St. George School of the Prophets that operated at the same time as the Salt Lake School of the Prophets; and the December 1867 discourse by Young that opened his School of the Prophets.
While the strength of the volume lies in the fact that it brings together into one source documents associated with the Salt Lake School of the Prophets, a weakness is its index. In a work where topics are of primary importance, not all topics that were discussed are indexed. There are also instances where individuals mentioned did not make the index, and other instances where individuals did make the index, but only comments on some topics did. The volume does contain a helpful biographical register of “selected members,” as well as a limited number of footnotes.
Taken altogether, this volume and its treasure trove of Latter-day Saints thinking is worthy of note, particularly by anyone interested in the era of Latter-day Saint and Utah history when these minutes were created.
–Chad Orton Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Hayden’s Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey
By Thomas P. Huber
Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2018. Open digital access at Haydenslandscape.com
When we think of the history of places, we usually think of the people or events that took place there, rather than the landscapes themselves. Landscapes, however, contribute to those histories, and can be shaped by the events or people associated with them. Landscapes leave an impression on viewers across time, and the changes of these places can be traced throughout history. Thomas P. Huber’s Hayden’s Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey examines the past and present of Colorado landscapes through locations visited by the Hayden Survey between 1869 and 1876. The book is published completely open access through a free website maintained by the University Press of Colorado. Huber is a physical geographer rather than a historian, and his work highlights the importance of including place and landscape in historiographic analyses. The Hayden Survey offers a jumping off point to explore the landscapes of Colorado within contexts of history, geology, and geography.
The Hayden Survey, published in Annual Reports and the Geological and Geographical Atlas of Colorado and Portions of Adjacent Territory (also referred to as the Colorado Atlas) in 1877, covered land area in Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, South Dakota, Kansas, and Montana before turning to Colorado as the primary subject matter in 1869. It was led by prominent geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, and the team included popular western artists like Thomas Moran. The survey produced geologic identification of mountain and rock formations, soil identification, drawings of different locations throughout Colorado and surrounding territories, and the geographic atlas. Huber examines the drawings, reports, and final publications from the survey, and selected specific drawings based on geographic coverage area, representation of Colorado and elegance, accessibility to reproduce the image photographically, and places that had the most information
included in the Annual Reports or the Colorado Atlas. The end result is a detailed analysis of twenty-eight drawings of nineteen locations paired with a geographical and geological history of these landscapes (Prologue).
The book is broken into nine parts, including a prologue, introduction, parts I–VI, and postscript. The prologue explains how Huber connected with the Hayden Survey drawings, selection criteria, a website overview, and Huber’s ultimate goals of accessibility for all. The introduction provides a brief historical context for Hayden’s Survey along with the other geographical surveys initiated by the U.S. Congress at the time, an overview of Hayden’s career, and a primer for the geological and geographical concepts he will discuss. Parts I through VI are organized by geographic region: Front Range, Central Colorado, Elks and West Elks, Southwestern Colorado, San Juan, and the Plateaus. Each part is broken up into sections that cover a location—for example, Part III Elks and West Elks includes sections for Central Elks, Teocalli/ Italian Peak, and East River/Gothic Peak—and feature a quote from the Annual Reports or the Colorado Atlas, drawing(s) of the location, and modern photograph of the location. Each section presents a brief history of the area, some survey events at that location, an analysis of the drawing, and a description of the geographic and geological importance of each location. Sections also include historic photographs taken by the survey teams when available.
Huber’s presentation of each drawing and photograph paired with historic and geological vignettes is compelling and accessibly written. He is able to describe complex geological processes in plain language and impart the importance of these locations, as well as the landscape of Colorado as a whole, to the history of the region. For example, Huber explains the bog advancement occurring in the Twin Lakes in Lake County, Colorado, as something that was recognized and recorded both during Hayden’s survey and presently.
Huber’s methods of analysis demonstrate things historians or other scholars should look for when reviewing historic landscape drawings or recreating them through photography: depictions of existing vantage points, landscapes drawn to be more dramatic than
they actually exist, and the omission of vegetation and settlement. This is especially true for the sections on Boulder Cañon and Mount Holy Cross, both of which feature drawings by Thomas Moran. Huber argues “Moran rarely met a dramatic natural scene that he did not want to ‘enhance’” and includes a quote by Moran indicating he was more interested in the “true expression” of these landscapes rather than accurate topography (Part I: Boulder Cañon). Many of Moran’s drawings for the survey were completed through looking at photographs rather than actually visiting these locations, and the drawings were often paired with sections of the Annual Reports discussing unrelated geographical areas.
However, Huber’s selection of photographs presents another form of this juxtaposition as well. He selected photos he felt were the “most representative” and “most artistically elegant,” which causes the inclusion of some drawings that contradict his other criteria: selecting places that Hayden had given the most information for in the survey (prologue). While the drawing of Boulder Cañon was included in Huber’s book, the Annual Report containing the drawing did not reference Boulder Cañon at all and included very few references to Boulder Creek, which runs through it. Huber’s inclusion of the drawing serves as an example of artistic license in landscape rendering but diverges from his goals of using landscapes with the most information in the Hayden survey. Huber’s focus on geological processes in each section is paired with a more superficial analysis of human interactions and history within these spaces, as well as little to no analysis of how humans have contributed to changing landscapes and climate change processes referenced (see Part II: Twin Lakes). A greater emphasis on how human interactions with the landscape developed in these spaces would make a stronger case for the consideration of landscapes as a historic source.
The largest contributions of Huber’s book to western American historiography are the inclusion of landscapes as historical sources and the incredible accessibility of the work. Huber provides coordinate locations for every drawing and photograph so that readers can visit these locations and see these views for themselves, has made the drawings and photographs clickable
and allowed for enhancement like zooming in on maps and figures, and breaks down each region into more specific locations. This makes the website a great resource for geography or location-based history lessons for schoolteachers. The website is intuitive to navigate and the reading level for each piece is great for upper elementary levels, such as fourth or fifth grade, through high school. He highlights the intimate relationship between peoples of the past, historical events, and peoples and processes of the present, such as global warming, industrial development, and settlement. The book is accessibly written and available freely online through the accompanying website, demonstrating Huber’s commitment to bringing science and history to the public sphere.
–Cassandra Mills University of Nevada, Reno
Alone on the Colorado
By Harold H. Leich
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xvii + 188 pp. Paper, $19.95
In Alone on the Colorado, Harold H. Leich recounts his westward journey along the Colorado River in the summer of 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. Although his memoir was not published during his lifetime, Roy Webb and the University of Utah brought his recollections into print in 2019. The foreword by Roy Webb describes in what ways the landscape enjoyed by Leich changed over time, while also emphasizing how it remained the same. The first-hand account narrates Leich’s journey through the upper portion of the Colorado River, the wreckage of the boat he built himself, and his on-foot journey to find salvation in the Utah desert. Alone on the Colorado serves as a rich primary source worthy of scholarly and public attention.
Leich’s story of his time navigating the Colorado River captivates a casual audience, as well as provides significant historical insights for academics. In order to aid the reader, the editor has included contemporary maps of the areas in which Leich traveled. Moreover, Leich took a multitude of photographs during his journey, and many of them are included throughout
the book, adding interest for a casual reader. Although many of these photographs are similar in composition and only include Leich, his boat, and the river, they help the reader understand the severity of the rapids navigated by Leich and other river runners. There have been several secondary works published about different river runners along the Colorado River, such as Hell or High Water: James White’s Disputed Passage Through Grand Canyon, 1867 by Eilean Adams and Rough-Water Man: Elwyn Blake’s Colorado River Expeditions by Richard E. Westwood. However, these sources detail explorations of the Colorado River in 1867 and the 1920s respectively. Therefore, Leich’s account provides a unique historical contribution as his journey occurred during a later period than previously studied by historians.
Furthermore, Leich’s account may give historians a better understanding of Utah during the Great Depression. Leich’s account includes ranchers, farmers, and miners, and therefore provides a snapshot of Utah’s labor force. Additionally, Leich notes that “hoboes” frequently rode illegally on freight trains to travel, due to economic necessity exacerbated by the economic downturn (31). Leich himself participated in long journeys via freight trains at first by choice, and then by necessity. Taken together with Errol Lincoln Uys’s Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move in the Great Depression, Leich’s account can help historians better contextualize who rode on freight trains during the Great Depression and, more importantly, why. However, it is important to note that Leich and his family did not face the same economic hardships as others who rode trains, as he repeatedly asked his “father for more money” during the course of his journey (98). In fact, Leich’s experience is not shared with most other members of the communities he describes, which may be a detriment to the utility of his account as a primary source.
Throughout his account, Leich romanticized the West, an indication of his own education in American history. For example, Leich is fascinated by “flakes of free gold” along the Colorado River “that led to the settlement of the American West” (77). Additionally, he notes that a sheriff “looked like a storybook character off the cover of a Wild West pulp magazine”
(119). Because he grew up in Indiana, Leich viewed the West as a place for adventure, and he only went west to postpone “a family and a career in the federal civil service” (175). After completing his journey, Leich settled in the East and never returned to the West. Therefore, Leich’s account of his journey may help historians understand how people residing in the eastern United States viewed the West during the Great Depression. On the other hand, Leich’s romantic version of the West is problematic as it expresses an etic view rather than an emic view. This is best exemplified by Leich’s interactions with settlers in Moab, Utah. Leich describes Moab as “a giant hot house” that sustained an “abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables,” but residents may not have agreed (121). In fact, the Dust Bowl likely affected agriculture production in this area, and thus Moab was not as prosperous as Leich attests. Therefore, when utilizing Alone on the Colorado as a primary source, historians must be aware of Leich’s outside perspective as his account does not necessarily describe the region as residents would themselves.
Another weakness of Leich’s account is its format. Alone on the Colorado is a recollection of Leich’s adventure, rather than a journal written in the summer of 1933. Therefore, it is possible that Leich did not remember everything correctly, or omitted crucial details because he didn’t record them in his initial journal. Leich himself admits that “things happened so fast that I could not have given a detailed account . the next day,” much less decades after the events occurred (111). Nonetheless, Leich does provide a detailed account based on his memories and own documentation of the events via photographs and journal entries.
Ultimately, Alone on the Colorado is a primary source with remarkable value to both scholars and casual readers. The foreword by Roy Webb provides crucial historical context, while Leich’s account and photographs offer a fascinating story about river running in Utah during the Great Depression. Although readers must recognize the biases present in Leich’s account, it undoubtedly provides new avenues for historians to understand the Great Depression in Utah.
–Kaela Gardner University of Nevada, Reno
Singaway: Working and Playing for the National Parks, 1923–1972
By Ryan Paul and Janet Seegmiller
Springdale, UT: Zion National Park Forever Project, 2020. xxiv + 168 pp. Paper, $45.00
The first time I saw a picture of the swimming pool in front of the Zion Lodge, I couldn’t believe it. I have been to Zion National Park at least annually for nearly forty years, and despite the crowds, the park is still a symbol to me (and millions more) of natural wonder and wilderness solitude. The image of that swimming pool, which was decommissioned and buried in the 1970s, hinted at a secret past—a hidden side to the national park experience that has largely disappeared, one that emphasized convenience, culture, and collective entertainment.
Singaway opens the door to that hidden history. In its large-format, richly illustrated pages, the book traces the human experience at Zion, Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks, and the North Rim of Grand Canyon as seen through the eyes of Utah Parks Company employees. For five decades, the UPC (a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad) provided a luxurious, all-inclusive vacation to well-healed vacationers, catering to their every need and want from the moment they stepped off the train in dusty Lund, Utah, and traveled to the lavish El Escalante Hotel in Cedar City, and all along the way during their “grand circle tour.” This was not camping; it was a “glamorous adventure” featuring elegant dinners with formal dress, live bands, and fine china (xxi).
The book opens with an introductory essay giving background to railroad boosterism, national parks concessions, and UPC employment opportunities, which ranged from cooks and housekeepers to waitstaff and “gearjammers,” the tour bus drivers who also functioned as in-transit entertainers. Over its fifty-year life span, the UPC “employed more than 40,000 young men and young women ages 16 to 26, mostly college students” (v). Many of these employees came from nearby southern Utah communities, of course, but the company recruited from across the nation, giving employees exposure to new people and lifestyles. Though the photographs clearly show a lack of racial diversity among the staff, more than
one interviewee pointed out opportunities they had to overcome prejudice, and another stated that “the Parks Company was at the forefront of hiring people with disabilities” in the 1950s and 1960s (144). Regardless of what an employees’ day job was, he or she often participated in entertaining the visiting “dudes,” including evening programs and the “singaways,” where the whole staff gathered in front of the lodge to sing humorous and nostalgia-inducing songs as the tour buses left for the next park.
The majority of the text comprises excerpts from oral histories and memoirs by former employees. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the employee experience, from recruiting and job duties to dorm life and social activities. Two of my favorite sections were “Dude Stories,” filled with tales of the clueless things city folk say and do in national parks, and “Pranks and Practical Jokes,” which will remind many readers of their own teenage years. The topical arrangement was the best choice for the book, though a downside is that quotes and sections are sometimes repetitive, and it is hard to follow how things changed over the decades since excerpts are not arranged chronologically.
What stand out are the funny and poignant stories, heartwarming instances of summer romances blossoming into decades of marriage, and reflections on growing up and learning the first lessons of adulthood. The illustrations are an absolute delight, and every time I looked for a photograph of something described in an interview, there was a photograph. All the material comes from the extensive Utah Parks Company Collection at SUU’s Sherratt Library, and much of that collection is digitized and available online.
This book will certainly appeal to anyone who worked for the UPC or took the grand circle tour, but beyond that, it is a memorable and detailed look at a unique place and time in Utah history. Readers gain insights into prices, technology, transportation, and ways of life in mid-twentieth-century southern Utah, and there are fascinating asides about local history, such as the pumphouse at Roaring Springs that for decades provided electricity and fresh water to the North Rim Lodge, 3,800 feet above. Along the way there are hints at the larger stories of these decades, from World War II to the downwind effects of nuclear testing.
–Nathan N. Waite
Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Ogden: The Charles Maccarthy Photographs
By Sarah Langsdon
Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2021. 128 pp. Paper, $23.99
The latest offering of Arcadia Publishing is a volume of reproduced images from the Charles Maccarthy collection housed in the Special Collections at Weber State University’s Stewart Library. In this volume, carefully curated by the head of Special Collections at Weber State, Sarah Langsdon, Maccarthy’s photographs capture scenes in and around Ogden during the first half of the twentieth century. Photographs of the Maccarthy family, city streets and buildings, Ogden Canyon, public events, and the railroad (Charles was a longtime railroad employee) make up the bulk of the collection. Langston adds informational captions, which add texture to the snapshots in time.
Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West: First in Line for the Rio Grande
By David Stiller
Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2021. 288 pp. Paper, $45.00
In this history of agricultural water use in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, David Stiller seeks to understand his “valley’s water habits” and “to answer how agriculture came to dominate the river in my valley and so many others in the West” (xii). San Luis is Costilla County’s largest
town, settled by Spanish pobladores in 1849 and built on irrigated farming and ranching, which supported and in turn benefited from the region’s mining activities. Stiller follows the development in the San Luis Valley of water law and practice, infrastructure, and irrigation districts, as well as the Rio Grande Compact of 1939 and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in 1967. Also addressed are recent conflicts between urban and environmental uses and over increasing water scarcity, which threaten long-established practices.
The Grand Teton Reader
Edited by Robert W. Righter
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2021. Xx+270 pp. Paper, $19.95
As the latest addition to the University of Utah Press’s series highlighting writings of selected national parks, The Grand Teton Reader offers selections of the best writings to come out of Grand Teton. The earliest is Nathaniel Langford’s account of his accent of Mount Hayden. In addition to Langford, this volume reproduces other riveting stories of adventure and exploration, notably a piece by Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson returning late at night after a weary day on the mountain, and another by the accomplished Elizabeth D. Woolsey bivouacking on Mount Moran. Todd Wilkinson rounds out the selections with a plea to conserve what wild remains in the Greater Yellowstone region before it is overwhelmed by development, tourism, and climate change.
CONTRIBUTORS
HEATHER BELNAP is an associate professor of art history & curatorial studies and directs the European Studies program at Brigham Young University. She has presented and published widely on women in art from 1750 to the present. Her latest book, Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-Century France (co-authored with Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee), will appear with the University of Illinois Press this fall.
EMILY LARSEN is a Utah based curator, arts administrator, researcher, and collage artist. She currently works as the Associate Director at the Springville Museum of Art. She is passionate about Utah’s art history and loves working with local Utah artists. She has an M.A. in U.S. History from the University of Utah. Her research and writing focuses on Utah artists and the Utah art scene from about 1880 to 1950.
BRENDA CASE SCHEER, FAICP, FAIA, is professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the theory of urban form and urban design.
She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has served on multiple community boards, including her current appointment to the Salt Lake City Planning Commission.
JAMES R. SWENSEN is an associate professor of art history and the history of photography at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography and In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange’s Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, winner of the Juanita Brooks Best Book in Utah History from the Utah State Historical Society in 2019, and co-author (with Farina King and Michael Taylor) of Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School.
LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH retired from Harvard University in 2018 and now lives in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. She received the 2017 Evans Biography Award for A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870
UTAH IN FOCUS
Women jurors in police court, April 4, 1930. When Shipler commercial photographers took this image in 1930, most of the states in the Union still forbade women from serving on juries: English common law considered women unfit for jury duty on the basis of sex, and that principle was carried into America law. Utah gave women the right to serve on juries in 1898, but it was evidently still a novelty in
1930. That January, the Utah League of Women Voters hosted a class for women on civic duty and jurisprudence, and June M. Dern, the first Salt Lake City woman to head a jury, assured reporters that women were well suited to the task and would not be swayed by “sob stories.” See Salt Lake Telegram, January 3, 9, 1930. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 27709
