41 minute read
Jest a Copyin'-Word f'r Word
Friends of the Utah State Historical Society: I have called my little talk tonight—
Jest a Copyin'- Word f'r Word
by JUANITA BROOKS
—because this was the apologetic statement of our local authority to his superior state officer as he explained what we were doing. As custodian of federal funds in Washington County, he needed to give an account; as a thrifty man, he did not wish to see money wasted. If we must collect these musty old things, we should scan them carefully and take out only the pertinent items such as dates of birth, baptism, ordinations, marriage, and death, arrange them, and summarize in orderly capsules the other events, so that they would be easily available to genealogists. Just to copy them, word-for-word, seemed a needless waste. "No one in the world will ever read them, except you and Nels Anderson," he said with scorn in his voice. This I will return to later.
Perhaps I should take time here for a thumbnail sketch of my background, and the reasons why I have come to have such an intense feeling of the value of handwritten records, especially ones which are kept dayby-day.
Most of you have already heard me tell—some of you many times— of my discovery of the journal of my great-grandmother, Sarah Sturdevant Leavitt, and how I became so completely absorbed that I forgot my assignment entirely.
I cannot overstate the impact of this record, its wrapping-paper pages, scissors cut and sewed together, its pasteboard backs covered with stitched-on cloth. Here was the real feeling of the people about the death of their prophet. Here also were characters I would meet again after many years and in many places: Dr. Vaughan, Brother Conditt (who was shot by John Gheen), Peter Maughn, and others.
During my eighteenth year, I borrowed the journal again and copied it word-for-word by hand into my mother's large record book, carefully preserving the spelling even when I knew it was incorrect.
My second original record was that of John Pulsipher, which began when he was nineteen and continued throughout most of his life. Here now was something really worthwhile. In the 1848 trek across the plains he drove the lead wagon in the first company. After his arrival he tells of various assignments, among them the Northern Indian Mission, the founding of Fort Supply, his service in the Utah War, and his call to Dixie. This is so eloquent that many historians have referred to it and quoted from it. It was in the home of my first husband, Ernest Pulsipher. Though I did not copy it at the time, I did read it and study it, and I had it copied for me. It was in my possession long before I became involved in the business of collecting. During these years I had also seen and read the diaries of Myron Abbott and Joseph I. Earl, both from the Virgin Valley.
After I had become a wife, a mother, and a widow in fifteen months, I decided to get my degree and make teaching in a high school or junior college my career. (Some day I'll do a story entitled, "Through College on a Shoe String." Illustrated, it could be supremely, screamingly funny. But I'll spare you that tonight.)
At last—-in 1925—I was graduated from the B.Y.U. and came that fall to teach at Dixie College. J. Will Harrison and his wife, Gladys, were also new on the faculty. She used to say that there was certainly no band out to greet us; in fact, she smarted some at the fact that we were ignored. We had this in common, so we became fast friends with each other. She did have a husband, so was eligible to be included in some of the local ladies' groups, but I don't think she was invited—at least to the ones she would have liked to join.
My case was different. I early learned that there is no place for a widow in Mormon society. Married groups have no need for an extra, and the youngsters do not want "old" company. But I didn't mind. I had my son, and always two or three brothers and sisters and cousins living in my home. I was busy teaching classes in English and debate, so my time was more than occupied.
I did have one wonderful woman who sought me out, and with whom I maintained a lasting friendship. This was Mabel Jarvis, who was working at the telephone office in 1925, later worked in the courthouse, and still later became a part of the Historical Records Survey. She had given up marriage to care for her aged parents. She was much sought after by youngsters who had to make tributes on "D" Day; indeed, there was scarcely a wedding, a missionary farewell, or a funeral without some of the poetry of Mabel Jarvis. Perhaps her finest contributions were the pageants dealing with the early history of Dixie. Her father, Brigham Jarvis, Sr., was widely known as a teller of tall tales, many of which remain folklore today.
One night I called at the telephone office to wait until her shift was up so that we might go together to a wedding reception. There I discovered on the top of the roll-down desk, the four volumes of James G. Bleak's "History of the Southern Mission," Books A, B, C, and D. They were so large they looked like the crack of doom with St. Peter to open them. The black letters on the back were fully two inches tall on a white band. I needed only a few minutes to find that the Bunkerville records were in Book C; at least the beginnings were. After that I went to her office a number of times and copied some interesting notes on my home town. Then during the spring of 1927 a young man from the University, lecturing to an extension class, stated that the villages on the Virgin River were certainly the most inbred in the state, and perhaps in all the world. The prolific Leavitt families had doubled upon themselves until they would be a valuable source for a group study. During that summer (1927) I did my first attempt at research in a study of the town of Bunkerville, using Books C and D extensively. While this is not a pretentious work, it has preserved some early history, with charts of intermarriages.
It is important here only because I came to know these Bleak records so that later, when for many years they dropped out of circulation, I could still swear they existed. Still later, at the University of Nevada, in 1934, my brother, Francis H. Leavitt, was doing his master's thesis on the Mormon settlement in Clark County, Nevada. When I went to check the Bleak records, they were gone from the telephone office, but I found them in the basement of the temple.
These teaching years—1925 to 1933—were happy, fruitful years, in the midst of which I took a leave of absence to earn my master's degree at Columbia University.
Some of you remember the depression of the early 1930's and the sweeping actions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "First 100 Days," as he tried to set the wheels of industry turning again. I was not conscious of the FERA acts—the Federal Emergency Relief Act of March 31, 1933, or of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration of May 12 following. These put federal money into every state of the union. Marineer S. Eccles was in Washington, D.C, working on this, and since he knew that Utah had a high population on low incomes, he saw to it that we received a generous share. The money was dispursed under WPA, PWA, CWA, etc. This last, the Civil Works Administration, gave assistance to towns and cities for improving streets, roads, ditches, water systems, garbage disposal, all of which meant employment for men and boys. By the late summer of 1933 Washington County had received some FERA money, but none had reached the widow and her family, or any other unemployed women.
To Mr. Nels Anderson must go the credit for initiating this collecting and copying project. I had married the William Brooks family in May 1933. That fall Nels came with his wife, his son Martin, and a secretary. His family took lodging on the same block with us, just around the corner, the second house by sidewalk and through the kitchen by a shorter trail from his back door to mine. Mr. Brooks was still Sheriff Brooks, the man who knew every person in the county.
Many of the citizens of St. George remembered Nels as the little hobo who in 1908 had been kicked off a freight car in the long, empty stretches of Nevada, who found his way to the ranch of Lyman Woods in Clover Valley, and was taken in as one of the family. In 1909 he was baptized into the Mormon church; later he attended Dixie College and went on to the B.Y.U. where he was graduated in 1920. Now in 1933 he returned with a grant-in-aid from the Social Science Research Council and one from the Social Science Council of Columbia University. These were to help him collect material for a book to be written on The Last Mormon Frontier. It appeared as Desert Saints in 1942.
Nels found Sheriff Brooks a valuable source of information, especially in social matters like the part the wine industry had played in Dixie, the DeLamar Dust victims, the social regulations of the dances, and numerous other things. I had already had copies of the two diaries I have mentioned and knew of the contents and whereabouts of the basic histories of James G. Bleak.
As his work progressed, Nels wanted me to use my own family background and write an article on polygamy as I knew it from the experiences of my parents. Flattered by this offer, I set about to do it, but when I had finished, Nels was not satisfied.
"Make it less formal," he told me. "Just take an easy, conversational style and don't be too concerned with statistics. Bring in other families, too, if you can."
By this time Will had been made acting postmaster in St. George. Nels stopped at the office to say goodbye, wrote his name and address on a piece of paper, and left word for me to forward the article as soon as it was finished.
Will said he would tell me, slipped the address into his shirt pocket, and promptly forgot it. By the time it had run through my Maytag washer and wringer, it was completely illegible. Now with this improved second draft of my polygamy story finished, I had no place to send it. While I waited for Nels to get tired of waiting and write to inquire, I mailed it to Harper's Magazine. To my surprise, they accepted it and it appeared in the issue of February 1934.
As nearly as I can tell now, a letter from Nels dated November 1, 1934, marks the inception of the idea that collecting diaries and original manuscripts might be done under a government project. I quote:
As a result of his letter to Dr. Nyswander of the University of Utah I had a letter from her dated November 10, in which she gave the idea her approval, and passed it on.
1 took her advice. The man in charge of the FERA funds was Mr. William O. Bentley, who was also stake president. Since I had been made stake president of the relief society on September 19, 1933, we were both conscious of the needs of some of our families. Whatever up-state connections he set up, I do not know. I know only that I offered my guest bedroom rent free as a place to work. It had an outside door, so workers could come and go without disturbing our family privacy, and was spacious enough—with the rug and all the furniture out. We put in a long table, some typewriters, a manuscript file, and a small table at which I could work, and were in business right away.
Remember that this was strictly a relief project to make work for families in desperate need. Women who could type or who had daughters who could were set at copying diaries. Others were sent out to take interviews with the older people of the areas. They were instructed to get the important dates of birth, travels, marriage, positions held, and so on, and to fill in with details of home management on the frontier, social activities, important events. They were to encourage reminiscences, impressions of visiting church leaders, of local leaders, of the polygamy raids, of anything in which the informant was interested. They would take notes, write them up as best they could, return to visit the person and read what they had written, supplement or change the story as needed, and finally bring it to us to be typed in a preliminary form before we made the final copy with carbons.
Not all of these were literary masterpieces, but collectively they did form a good base of local history, and the wages—$30.00 a month to begin with, later raised to $32.00, and then to $36.00—were a literal godsend.
I collected the diaries. We announced in a general stake conference that this project was beginning, that if people who had diaries or other original records in their possession would bring them in, we would copy them free of charge and return the original and a copy to the owner. In every case I received the original, gave the owner a receipt for it, and returned it in person with a typed copy in a manila folder. I followed leads in all parts of the county and into Iron County as well. On one occasion I was traveling with Vivian Leavitt Palmer, who was in some way connected with a government program in Cedar City. We were going to Virgin, I in search of a reported manuscript, she to visit several families. Just before we entered the town we had to cross the Virgin River. It wasn't exactly in flood, but the water was far too high to drive a car into. We sat on the bank and considered; finally, not willing to go back now that we were here, I pulled off my shoes and stockings and waded across, the water above my knees in some places, After a little hesitation, Vivian followed suit.
Fully dressed, we walked into town. I found the home I was looking for, knocked, gave my name and my reason for coming to the woman who answered the door. She seemed not to comprehend quite just what I was after. "Who did you say you wuz?" she asked. "I'm Will Brooks's wife—Sheriff Brooks, from St. George," I explained.
"Why didn't you say that in the first place?" she wanted to know, holding out her hand. "Come right in, come right in. Anything I can do for Sheriff Brooks's wife, I'm more than glad to do."
From that day on, I always introduced myself as the wife of Will Brooks, and always had a warm reception. We found a great deal more material than I would have thought existed.
Again Nels proved helpful. He wrote through the list of officials asking to borrow my carbons for study as source material in his research, until finally Dr. Luther H. Evans of the Library of Congress learned of our project and asked me to send copies of all I had done to him. He was so impressed that he called a statewide meeting to be held at Salt Lake City for July 10-11, 1936. I was asked to attend. He had brought with him the results of our work, and had conceived the idea of enlarging upon it. In the meantime the Federal Writers' Project had been started in Colorado and, I believe, in Utah, but its purpose was different. The employees were doing creative writing. Our project was expanded to become the Historic Records Survey. In setting this into motion, many people were evidently asked for suggestions. Dr. Evans had prepared a questionnaire of a number of questions upon which we were asked to give our opinions. I quote my answer to Question No. 3, which had to do with privately-owned diaries, because it is still my feeling on the subject:
From that day to this, my policy has been to copy, word-for-word, without deleting anything. When family members say, "Why did you put that in?" I can only answer, "I didn't put it in. I left it in."
With the organization on a state level and its headquarters at Ogden, I was relieved of my responsibility. My letter to Dr. Evans dated April 20, 1937, says that I am being released, and, after requesting that copies of the diaries of Esias Edwards, Myron Abbott, Levi M. Savage, and Levi Savage, Sr., be returned goes on to give my evaluation of the work:
Although I was "out," I still remained active in locating and sending in diaries; in fact, I considered myself as a Quorum of One to follow up any lead that I found. The staff in our area was now limited to only three or four, and of them, Mabel Jarvis continued long after the others had found more lucrative employment. She was the local correspondent to the Salt Lake Tribune, and as a part of her other assignments she did short histories of every settlement in the county and of every L.D.S. ward in the St. George Stake, which extended at that time to include all the southern Nevada settlements. Many of her stories of historic buildings, celebrations, and obituaries are preserved.
During the next years I became acquainted with Dale L. Morgan, who more than any other person influenced my work and my thinking. I had been interested in doing a biography of Jacob Hamblin, but my father ordered me to do one of his father, Dudley Leavitt, instead.
"Everybody talks about Jacob Hamblin," he said, "but my father was with him on his hardest expeditions, and when he had one too hard, he sent Dudley Leavitt and Ira Hatch to do it. That was the trip to Las Vegas when they both nearly lost their lives."
He reminded me that, as the Jacob Hamblin group were returning from their first mission to the Indians across the Colorado, it was Dudley Leavitt who had sacrificed his horse that the men might have food. Camped in the snow at Pipe Spring, they faced literal stravation.
Dudley's family had lived on the frontier and moved so many times that he had little schooling and could hardly sign his name. This was all the more reason why his story should be written.
I had been trained to obey my father; I did so now, working at the manuscript between home duties and carrying it, a chapter at a time, through the block to the local printer. I was not especially proud of it at the time, through I did collect some good folklore from all the living children, the last one of whom died a few months ago. Since that time I have found new material about my grandfather, some pertinent references to him and some accounts of his activities which make me feel that I should like to rewrite the story which appeared in the small volume in 1941.
In the meantime I had become a pen pal of Dale Morgan. We exchanged long letters on a number of subjects, and from the first he astounded me with the scope of his knowledge, with his exact and precise and unerring memory. It was as if he had a photographic mind which stored neatly every scrap of information and promptly brought it forth upon demand.
A never-to-be-forgotten experience was when I kept an early morning appointment with him at Cedar City and drove with him over the Old Spanish Trail route to the Mountain Meadows. The road was not marked at that time; we became lost in the mazes of the Lytle corrals, and finally had to come back to St. George and get my husband to take us back to the place. We had both been there in 1932, when the present monument was dedicated.
The next day Dale and I went through the settlements up the Virgin River toward Zion Park. But from Rockville we took the pioneer road to the top of the plateau, visited the Canaan Ranch, Pipe Spring, and located the site of the Berry massacre near Short Creek—the early Maxwell Springs area. The old cottonwoods along the sandy creek looked much as they must have done when Father Escalante passed.
This trip put new meaning into my work on the early history of this area. I had already known of Hamblin's first trips there, and as I began working on the John D. Lee material, I was led over this terrain many times. A third significant trip with Dale was down US Highway 91 to the point where the Old Mormon Trail intersects it, about seven-tenths of a mile above the Utah-Arizona line. We had timed it perfectly; the straight white line stretched to the horizon clear enough to photograph.
Not only was Dale stimulating and helpful and critical (as at times he had to be), but it was he who opened the next door of opportunity for me. He was living in Arlington, Virginia, doing research in the Library of Congress. Among his good friends was Darel McConkie, who had employment in Washington, D.C, in the Department of Agriculture. In late January of 1944, Dale wrote that Darel had attended a party the night before, at a home there in Arlington, where the secret, supposedly carefully guarded, was whispered: "The Henry E. Huntington Library has purchased from the descendants of Col. William Nelson the diaries of John D. Lee. They paid a fabulous sum. Exact amount unknown."
Dale suggested that I write the library telling them I understood that they had acquired the diaries of John D. Lee, and asking if I might see them if I were to come down.
The answer came with amazing promptness. It made no reference to my question, but assured me that they did have a copy of the testimony at the John D. Lee trials, which was open to scholars. "There are other reasons why we should like to have you visit our library," he wrote, and added that he had seen my little book on Dudley Leavitt, and that his family was connected by marriage.
In less than a week, I was facing the first footman at the Henry E. Huntington Library. The pass Mr. Bliss had sent me gave instant permission to examine the Lee Diaries, upon condition that I should not mention the fact that they had them, and I was appointed to act as a "Field Fellow" for them in the collection of Mormon materials.
Thus the door of opportunity was opened for me. I've often said that "Heaven is doing what you would be glad to do for nothing and getting paid for it." I still think that is true.
For the next four years we had a family project. Mr. Brooks was as interested in it as I was. Even the children became involved with the Henry W. Bigler Diary, which had been used as a scrapbook, each page fully and carefully pasted over with recipes, sentimental poems, fashions, or suggestions. At first sight I said, "I cannot read a sealed book," and then we proceeded to un-seal it a page at a time. We tried razor blades and kitchen knives, and at last settled on steaming towels. How excited we would be as we peeled off the newspapers and the purple ink came through bright and clear of the account of Bigler's trip south with the Jefferson Hunt party of forty-niners, some of whom gave Death Valley its name. So, page by page we read it, until even the children became interested, while Mr. Brooks was completely wrapped up in the project.
This Field Fellow appointment was really a rich experience for us all. "We trust your integrity; we trust your judgment," Dr. Cleland told me. "We know that you cannot hit pay dirt every time, but if you know of a document anywhere in these United States that you think is worth going after, feel free to go for it."
I began by retracing my steps to gather the originals I had already seen. This business of having them preserved as they were, with clear photographs, sometimes enlarged for easier reading, seemed as a blessing from heaven. As a beginning, I gave in my own grandmother's diary, the one which had so impressed me as a child, and accepted in return this photographic reproduction securely bound. I carried it with me wherever I went. Then came the descendants of Martha Cox, whose wonderful record each wanted in the original. The Library, at my suggestion that it might be good publicity, sold them copies for $25.00 each. This program, however, could not be continued.
People were so pleased with this arrangement that they passed the word around. One of my best unpaid agents was Brother James Blackburn, whose father, an early bishop of Provo, had kept a large and clearly-written ledger. So happy was he with the copy that he took it under his arm to a different ward each month on Testimony Day and used it as a showpiece from which to speak of the experiences of our pioneers. Many letters came asking if I would look at their records.
I found the real tragedy when I came to retrace my steps and gather the items I had used just ten years earlier. So many had disappeared— the owners, some of them dead, the children, most of them indifferent.
"After we got the nice typewritten copy, we didn't care so much about the other one. It was so ragged and hard to read. I don't know where it did go," one lady told me. Again and again when I asked for a record, they brought out the typewritten copy I had made under the FERA program, and when I insisted that I was interested only in the original, they would look at each other and ask, "Whatever DID happen to that? Did Henry's wife take it? Or was it Minerva?"
Though I was bitterly disappointed at the loss of these, I was grateful for the fact that copies were preserved, imperfect though they were. For me, the photographic reproductions have been so wonderful. The chance to go back to the actual handwriting clears up so many things. For though the typed version is made as exact as possible, there is no way to see the significance of the sentence evidently inserted between the lines, of the corrections made by the writer himself. Sometimes the penmanship which looked like one word to you before now stands out clearly as another. For me, the existence of a photographic copy to which I can go is a constant reassurance.
For a good part of this program, I was tied up with the B.Y.U. through Professors M. Wilford Poulsen and N. I. Butt. Since Huntington Library could not afford to give free photostats, I carried with me a sample of the typed copy, all carefully indexed and fastened into a manila binder. I warned the owner that it would take some time to get this copying done but that the original would be safe at B.Y.U. until it was finished, and then I myself would return it. Best of all, there would be no charge for all this work. This program has been a wonderful advantage to everyone concerned.
This project led naturally to a grant for me to study the Mountain Meadows massacre, the result of which was the book by that title which appeared in 1950. There were a number of interesting developments in connection with that work. I knew that Professor William J. Snow had been commanded to leave the subject alone and that Dr. LeRoy R. Hafen also had learned early that here was forbidden ground. So I made no mention of the fact that I was doing research on the subject—I was just interested in the history of southern Utah during its earliest years, and in the lives of the men who helped to shape that history. The diaries of Christopher J. Arthur, of Isaac C Haight, and of Jesse N. Smith were of great significance. I learned of the existence of others, possibly even more relevant, which I have not yet been able to secure.
I had great respect and love for President Heber J. Grant, but I knew his sensitivity on this subject, and how he had gone in person to Phoenix to protest the naming of the bridge at Marble Canyon. He did not want it named "The Lee's Ferry Bridge" because he did not want that man's name perpetuated.
For many reasons I said nothing of the project upon which I was working, not even to my family and close friends. I had already learned that what they did not know about, they would not question me about or discuss with anyone else.
I shall not go into detail on this project, more than to say that the book was finally published by Stanford University Press through the efforts of Dr. Wallace Stegner. An advance order from Miss Ettie Lee of one thousand copies with check enclosed speeded up the process. Here again I must acknowledge the help and encouragement of Dale L. Morgan, who, in long letters, discussed with me the different angles. Then, as he had given me the initial impetus by learning of the existence of the Lee Diaries, so he gave me at the close the most important item in the whole book—the letter from William C. Mitchell. This provided the names of all members of the Arkansas company. Dale had found the hand-written original among the papers of the Indian Agency for Utah. It had arrived in Washington, D.C, too late to be included in Senate Document 42, so had been slipped in among the original papers. It came to me after the book was in the press, so I had to add it as a footnote to Chapter Three.
As soon as the Mountain Meadows Massacre appeared, the Historical Society of Arkansas sent a representative to the Library of Congress to verify this letter. This, in turn, resulted in their building a monument on the courthouse grounds at Harrison, Arkansas, and sending me an invitation to attend the dedicatory services. This, too, is another story. I felt that to represent the murderers in that situation was a great challenge, indeed, but the people treated me with respect. The man in charge, Mr. J. Kenner Fancher, was a Christian gentleman, with whom I formed a deep and lasting friendship. He passed away a few months ago.
With this book out, and his own, This Reckless Breed of Men on the press, Dr. Cleland was ready to edit the John D. Lee Diaries. But he had waited too long. The work was scarcely under way when he suffered a stroke. His secretary, Mrs. Winnifred W. Gregory, carried on, and he directed as he could from his wheel chair.
Always an advocate of copying "word-for-word," I now saw this put into practice with scrupulous care. Not only did the expert typists at the Henry E. Huntington make their copies word-perfect, but line-perfect also, so that the copy could be compared with the original quickly and accurately. My chief business at first was to compare the typescript to the photograph, enlarged for easier reading. I recognized such words as haunes intended to be haimes; I knew the felloes, the king-bolt, the ex, the single-trees, and double tree. It took my husband to explain that shaunts of berries mean a great abundance, and manather of horses, a herd of cattle, flock of sheep, covey of quail, hive of bees, etc. I well knew the meaning of unboalted flour and smutty flour and unsalted curd, of a burr mill compared to a roller mill. In the same way I was familiar with many frontier folkways. In regard to differing interpretations, I remember that in one record an inserted parenthesis in pencil had been interpreted (went to seed store to buy). Without knowing this I saw it as (went to see a stove to buy) and by checking and by noting that the date was in January and there was snow, I decided that the latter was correct. The item tells also that stoves were available and that he might be able to buy one.
In transcribing these diaries, there is always the problem of the punctuation or lack of it. Much may be said in favor of dividing the sentences by placing in periods and capital letters where they belong, or where it seems that they belong. Yet I have found so many times when the meaning was completely changed that I have come to the point where I leave it out unless it is placed in brackets.
You have all heard examples where punctuation has been misread, as "What do you think? I will shave you for nothing and give you a drink!" which was punctuated as "What! Do you think I will shave you for nothing and give you a drink?"
Truly the punctuation is as important as the words; sometimes it is more important. I think of some of the lists of names where no commas have separated them. This poses a problem where the typist must stop and take time to separate and identify each, inserting the bracketed comma between.
I am particularly emphatic in insisting that nothing be omitted. The researcher has a right to see the complete manuscript. In his use of it, he may delete as he pleases, since much will not be pertinent to his work. One writer will cut an item that is of supreme importance to another. For example: Paul Cheesman in writing of Joseph Smith's account of the first vision as recorded by Alexander Neibaur, used a very short excerpt, and did not mention that the story was being told to one Mr. Bonney. I had been looking everywhere for this man, Bonney, so that this had a special significance for me. I copied the entire entry for the day, line perfect and word perfect from the original and thought it much more emphatic than the shortened and punctuated one of Mr. Cheesman. Then, as I said before, I found in this source an item of great value to me that had meant nothing to him.
I have often told the incident of our work in the FERA, when the girl who was copying the diary of Myron Abbott came to open rebellion: "I wish you would give me something else to copy. I'm sick and tired of this," she said. "I can well believe this whole project is just a waste of government money, if this is the kind of thing we are trying to save. This man does nothing but work on the dam. He tells every day about the brush and rocks that are put into it. Ditto, ditto, ditto, for two weeks now. Then an entry or tw 7 o about other things, and now the dam is gone again and the ditch broke in fifty-two places."
She had her point. Myron Abbott was the watermaster, whose business it was to record the work on the dam. A few years after the copy was made, a government engineer told me that this little record was worth its weight in gold as the only real history of the Virgin River anyone had found. Though it covered only a few years, it did give tangible and accurate proof of the floods of that time. Truly "one man's meat is another man's poison." What a blessing it is that now no longer must copy these on a typewriter, but may have xerox or photostatic copies made, which are as good as the original. With these available research takes on a whole new dimension. There is no need to argue about what was written, when the actual handwriting is reproduced.
But the research scholar still has a challenge. Perhaps the person who wrote the manuscript was in error. If it were done years after the event, there is always the possibility of unintentional distortion. Perhaps you have seen, as I have, stories grow by retelling. One case in point is the account by John L. Ginn of his trip through Utah soon after the massacre at the Mountain Meadows. He insists that he was with the first company over the ground after the tragedy, yet in a letter published in the Valley Tan, we learn that he did not leave Salt Lake City until November 6, and traveling with a wagon train could not have arrived there before late November, more than two and a half months after the massacre. Before this time at least six other people had written descriptions of dismembered bodies and scattered bones, with many wolves at their ghastly work. Ginn declared that "none of the bodies had been mutilated or disfigured by decay, the weather being cold, with a few patches of snow on the ground." The best answer to his account is found where he declares that:
My contention is that the person handling an original document is honor-bound to reproduce it accurately, whether he thinks it is true or not. He may bracket his opinions at the end, but not change by any "jot nor tittle" the work of the author, for this manuscript may be used by many people searching for different facts.
I am especially suspicious of the three dots. . ., and so on, as my dictionary interprets them. They are so indefinite; one never knows how much deletion they represent. I shall never forget the shock which I felt when I read the whole of the John Quincy article so often quoted; "It is by no means improbable that some future text-book for the use of generations yet unborn will contain a question something like this: 'What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen?' . ..." It sounds as if he were ready for instant baptism. Yet, by the same use of these three dots placed at the beginning, it could read that the writer thought the Mormons were all demented, cheerfully mad, like the inmates of a mental hospital he had recently visited.
Likewise, I am troubled by a "Mormon Scholar" who will declare spurious a document which he admits has been accepted at face value for over a half a century, and will then proceed to quote from this false and spurious document phrases which prove the point he wishes to make, studiously ignoring a statement three paragraphs beyond and just over the page, which would throw serious doubts over his whole thesis. The inference is that in setting out to PROVE a point, only material which will support the thesis should be used.
Speaking again of the work of reproducing the manuscripts, I find that the copyist must also use her reasoning in the use of dates. I think of an example of my own. In copying the account of John M. Higbee—signed Snort, we found a clear and accurate narrative, with the exact wording of the "Orders" which he himself had carried to Lee. There followed a discussion of reasons why the men who had been innocently drawn into this could not stand trial. Clearly the article was written immediately after the first trial of John D. Lee. The story fills eighteen pages of an ordinary notebook; the handwriting is clear and deliberate, the wording studied. This man blames the approaching army for the hysteria which spread throughout the territory and aroused all the Mormons to arm and drill and sing battle songs. According to him, the Indians were all the more inflamed, angry and eager for revenge for wrongs they had suffered at Holden. He may not have known—-he did not mention it if he did— that Jacob Hamblin had taken ten or twelve Indian chiefs north with him for a conference with President Brigham Young. The "Journal History" reports their being there on September 1, and Brigham Young's Diary carries this very significant entry for the same date:
Higbee says the Indians were out of hand, angry and threatening; he tells of the various messengers and quotes verbatim the orders which he himself carried from Isaac C. Haight to John D. Lee—orders from the colonel commanding, William H. Dame, in his own handwriting. The story is told in all its horror. The recent trial is referred to as being managed by "irresponsible hoboes," who knew nothing of the conditions. It all rings true to the times. But the date at the end is clearly 1894. Every person who has seen it has been prompt to say that is right, even with a magnifying glass the same is true. We left it. In this we erred. We should have followed with [1874], the true date.
In somewhat the same way, in the Diary of Tommy Gordon published in the Spring 1967 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly the distance between the two graves is given as 150 yards. One needs only to be on the ground to see that here is an error. With the exception of Nephi Johnson who in his account said, "After marching along for some time," all others used the terms "a half a mile," "about a half a mile," "a half a mile or more." Either Tommy expected to write 750 yards or 150 rods, both of which would be a little less than the half mile stipulated by all other reporters, I use these to show only that no matter how vigilent we try to be, we can not avoid some errors.
I was asked to talk tonight about some of my experiences and contributions in the field of collecting and preserving manuscripts. The temptation has been strong to describe individual items which have brought into focus some of our early practices—like quoting George Laub on the Law of Adoption, or Oliver B. Huntington on the activities of his brother Dimick in the Danite Band, or John Pulsipher on the winter campaign against Johnston's Army, or George W. Bean on the fourth of July celebration in Las Vegas. Instead, I have chosen to try to express my general philosophy in the handling of these records. Like Carlyle, I want to see each steadily and see it whole. I want to preserve the author's personality, his experiences, his contributions. I want to see him as a person as well as a Saint. I want to pass on his contribution honestly, so that others of the future may make their interpretations from an honest reproduction.
I have made only a small beginning myself, but libraries throughout the nation are continuing to collect and preserve these documents. And I feel that for all of us the first and best procedure is just to copy, word-for-word, the original. Then, weigh and consider our evaluations, presenting them fairly and honestly, without taking material out of context or trying to shape it to prove our point. These people should stand by their records. We shall be fortunate to do as well.
I have tried, as I went along, to acknowledge the help and encouragement of my family and my many friends. I must add to the list Dr. A. R. Mortensen, who first goaded me into writing an article on the Southern Utah Parks for the July 1958 issue of the Quarterly, and later persuaded me to leave Dixie College and come to work at Historical Society headquarters, editing the Diaries of Hosea Stout—and then set me to do the Centennial Issue on the Dixie Cotton Mission for the Quarterly. I owe Dr. Mortensen very much indeed. Then, following him is Dr. Everett L. Cooley who permitted me to finish the Stout records and has given me constant encouragement.
Over and above everything else, I am grateful that events far away and not of my making have made possible much of my work: the discovery of the Mitchell letter by Dale Morgan which seemed a good reason for the long delay in getting the Mountain Meadows Massacre off the press, and the action of reinstating John D. Lee by the L.D.S. church authorities at the end of a similarly long delay by the Arthur H. Clark Company in bringing out John Doyle Lee.
For all these things I am grateful—and most of all for your presence here tonight. It is a humbling thing for me to have any come so far, but to have so many—
I THANK YOU.
For full citations and images please view this article on a desktop.
