Senator Reed Smoot 9/11(1 t i l 6
Mexican Revolutions BY A. F . CARDON
COURTESY A. F. CARDON
(1862-1941) Reed Smoot
Some time ago my wife came into possession of her father's diaries for the period of 1909 to 1928. Her father was Utah Senator Reed Smoot, for thirty years an influential member of the United States Senate. To me the diaries are absorbing. This was especially so when I began to discover names and events familiar to me. For example the Senator recorded April 20, 1912, that the Treasury Department of the government advised him that some guns seized by the U. S. Army should be held as evidence against the Shelton & Payne Arms Company, or against O. P. Brown who was endeavoring to smuggle them into the Casas Grandes Valley, Mexico, in time of war. That name Payne took me back to 1898 when Lorenzo Payne, of Colonia Dublan, one of the colonies in the Mr. Cardon is a retired government employee living presently in Los Altos, California. T h e diaries of Senator Smoot are soon to be published by the University of Utah Press. Whenever quotations from the diaries are used in this article, the dates are given. For example April 20, 1912, is given as ( 4 / 2 0 / 1 2 ) following the quotation.
