R. W. Sloan's 1884 Gazetteer: Boosting Utah's "Glorious and Imperishable Future"

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 40, 1972, No. 2

R. W. Sloan's 1884 Gazetteer:Boosting Utah's "Glorious andImperishable Future"

BY GLEN M. LEONARD

ALTHOUGH HE WAS ONE OF only three Salt Lake City undertakers listed in the Utah Gazetteer and Directory . . .for 1884, Joseph E. Taylor must have felt the competition keen enough to justify two full pages of advertising. His chief competitor had a name (Joseph William Taylor) and one full page of advertising similar enough in content to suggest that the two were either arch rivals in the business or cooperating relatives. The third Salt Lake City embalmer, William Skewes, did not advertise.

The Taylors wanted all to know they would respond promptly to every order. Both claimed expertise in shipping bodies worldwide. Individually they stocked large supplies of cloth-covered, metallic, and rosewood coffins and caskets, plus other "undertakers' goods." Joseph E. proclaimed himself the "pioneer undertaker of Utah," with twenty years' experience. His factory manufactured coffins and caskets; his warerooms stockpiled coffin handles, trimmings, and burial robes. He shared his building with the city sexton. Joseph William Taylor's selling points included low prices, reasonable terms, and a choice of hearses — black or white. His offices were "open day and night," and his specialty was "air-tight oak cases and caskets." The Taylors were just two of 201 Utah merchants, businessmen, manufacturers, and tradesmen who advertised in the pages of the fact-filled Gazetteer. Most businessmen bought onepage ads or less. The only company to equal Joseph E.'s extravagance was the Salt Lake Herald, whose city editor compiled the Gazetteer.

Twenty-nine-year-old Robert W. Sloan expected his Gazetteer to serve the territory's business community much as the yellow pages in a modern telephone directory do — by providing benefits for both the seller and prospective buyer. The Gazetteer was jointly dedicated to the area's economic interests and its citizens. It catered to those in Utah who, like Sloan, were "interested in the development of her resources and the establishment of a foundation that will insure her permanent prosperity." The publication's 636 closely printed pages bristled with commercially useful information. The advertisements, set in dozens of eye-catching type styles, were mere supplement, however, to the basic contents — alphabetical lists of names. Names of people were included, with each head of household's occupation and address. A directory of businesses for each community was painstakingly compiled. And finally, as if to qualify the publication as a "gazetteer" (or geographical directory), the work included thumbnail sketches on towns and counties. In all, these and other features provided a convenient guide to "who was what and where" in Utah of the middle 1880s.

Had the Gazetteer and Utah Directory of Logan, Ogden, Provo and Salt Lake Cities, for 1884 (its full caption) been no more than a dictionary of names and places, it would have fulfilled the promise of its title. However, Sloan included information not found in similar Utah guides. His desire to help promote commercial growth in his native territory went beyond encouraging an exchange of goods and services in the market place. For, as Sloan himself put it, he held an "abiding and unshaken faith in the future of Utah," which, in the process of assembling the directory, had "grown to a certain and immovable conviction." As an editor for the Gazetteer and Herald, Sloan believed that his own and Utah's interests would be better served if he could somehow awaken lackadaisical citizens to the opportunities of a virtually unlimited, untapped potential. In the exploitation of vast resources, Sloan said, "there awaits for Utah a glorious and imperishable future."

To fulfill his aim of boosting the economic development of the thirty-seven-year-old territory, Sloan expanded and revised his father's Gazet[t]eer of Utah, and Salt Lake City Directory, 1874, which was itself an updated version of Edward L. Sloan's original Salt Lake City Directory and Business Guide for 1869. The third gazetteer produced under the Sloan by-line borrowed ideas and materials from its predecessors — such things as a chronology of Utah history, updated to the late spring floods of 1884; a two-page "Sketch of Mormonism" composed in 1874; and corrected lists of government officials, telegraph stations, and post offices. The new publication contained much-expanded histories and descriptions of the churches, secret and benevolent societies, and schools of Utah. Also in the 1884 Gazetteer were descriptions of all twenty-four Utah counties and most towns. These were based on data provided by stake presidents and bishops of the Mormon Church. Featured in the publication was something earlier Sloan publications had not attempted — a complete business directory of Utah. The publishers said they gathered this information by visiting each settlement in the territory. Still a valuable reference, this detailed list of business houses and tradesmen may well have deserved its billing as "the most complete and accurate ever published."

Among the other distinctive features in Robert Sloan's book was a thirty-five-year statistical overview of immigration, undoubtedly a reflection of his interest in the flow of people to and from Utah and his desire to discourage the outward drain of talented youth. The 2,090 immigrants arriving in Utah during the first full year of permanent settlement were listed by name. But these were the only arrivals who could be called "pioneers" according to the strictest definition of the word as used by the editor. Following the short statement on immigration was a sevenpage section on business statistics for 1883. With these up-to-date figures, the publication took on a freshness lacking in the eight-year-old statistics cited throughout the analytical articles elsewhere in the Gazetteer.

All the lists and figures were preceded by Sloan's lengthy essays on Utah's physical conditions, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, trade and commerce, and railroads. It was in these articles — and in the pages dealing with counties, recreational attractions, and churches — that Sloan developed his argument for boosting Utah's commercial future. Although the comments were written for Utahns twelve years before statehood, these insights into Utah's problems and potential are not without value in the 1970s.

The Gazetteer and Directory of 1884 was the joint venture of Robert Wallace Sloan and D. C. Dunbar, co-workers at the Salt Lake Herald. As was mentioned earlier, Sloan served the newspaper as city editor. Dunbar was treasurer and manager. In later years, the two gained further prominence in separate journalistic ventures. In the year following publication of the Gazetteer, Dunbar leased the job printing and bindery departments of the Herald. Sloan branched out in 1889 when he purchased the Utah Journal, renaming it the Logan Journal and continuing as editor until it became a Republican organ in January 1892.

Both sponsors of the Gazetteer were tutored by their fathers. Edward L. Sloan and William C. Dunbar were co-founders in June 1870 of the Herald, where they served as editor and business manager, respectively, the same positions they had held earlier with the Salt Lake Daily Telegraph. The sons followed the specialities of their fathers. While the Dunbars managed the businesses, the Sloans of both generations wrote.

The senior Sloan, an Irish convert to Mormonism and a minor poet, served his journalistic apprenticeship as a corresponding essayist for the Millennial Star of Liverpool, which was then under the editorship of Edward W. Tullidge. Sloan went into the Star office when Tullidge left, then several years later, in 1863, followed his mentor to America. Sloan was soon assistant editor for the Deseret News. His publication of the City Directory in 1869 and founding of the Herald one year later "brought him to the pinnacle of journalistic fame in Utah," according to Tullidge, who also eulogized Sloan (who died in 1874) as "incomparably the ablest newspaper man that has risen from the Mormon people." He is "a man of extraordinary genius."

Tullidge also thought well of Robert Sloan, whose early training was as a typesetter rather than a writer. It was 1878 or later before Sloan gained the post of local editor at the Herald and began to produce the articles which prompted Tullidge to describe him as "an apt and interesting writer in the line of journalistic correspondence." Robert's honors included the George A. Meears prize at the 1881 Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Society fair for an essay outlining the ideas he later developed in the pages of the Gazetteer. Sloan also used his pen to defend Mormonism and served as a Utah legislator. In retrospect, it would seem his historically important role in life was like that of the executive secretary of a modern chamber of commerce. Much of Sloan's writing conveyed an attitude of boosterism, and that attitude was still evident in The Mountain Empire: Utah, published after the turn of the century.

Robert Sloan's philosophy of progress for Utah industry and commerce developed from long experience with the business community of the territory. During the decade or so preceding the appearance of the 1884 Gazetteer, he tested his ideas in the pages of the Herald, and in turn was influenced by others on the newspaper's staff. The paper gave "a large portion of its space to Utah affairs, Utah industries and Utah enterprises." Like the directory which grew from it, the newspaper paid special attention to mining, without, however, neglecting manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce.

As an alert journalist seeking objectivity, Sloan surveyed all areas of the local economy. He found weaknesses. He spotlighted specific strengths. And he heralded Utah's potential for growth as unlimited. Among the problems emphasized in the Gazetteer was an attitude of indifference which Sloan found among Utah's "young blood." They believed the West was filled and the day of opportunity past. Overpopulation had deadened the pioneering zeal of conquest. Evidence of this filling-up was everywhere apparent in a city which had doubled its population in a decade. Industry seemed to have reached a plateau, while farms pushed out into marginal lands. The younger generation was turning to more lucrative fields abroad and exhibited little willingness to expend more than a minimal effort in improving Utah. The pattern which Sloan observed in 1884 promised no spectacular boom for the future. As far as he was concerned, the twenty years following publication of his Gazetteer produced no appreciable change in the situation. He looked back in 1904 somewhat disappointed but with an attitude of faith in ultimate triumph:

It has been characteristic of the people of Utah to make haste slowly [he wrote]. While there is a repugnance to all boom movements as ephemeral and dangerous, there is, nevertheless, a serious desire for as rapid a growth as may be consistent with safety. Hence it comes that there is a steady gain from year to year — in population, wealth, manufactures and values generally.

Utah capitalists suffered the malady of conservative economic policies along with all other businessmen, Sloan said. The men of wealth refused to sponsor poor but able men who had skills in manufacturing. Sloan decided that manufacturing had flourished in Utah only where it served the region's basic needs: flour, woolen products, lumber, lath, shingles, bricks, and charcoal. Nothing in this list provoked the imagination. Nothing qualified for export.

In agriculture, as in manufacturing, unimaginative minds had allowed the balance of local production and consumption to create what seemed to the editor an artificial plateau. He challenged the assumption that production had reached its maximum by speculating that of the 600,000 acres reported under cultivation by the census only two-thirds was actually productive. Utahns, he found, had adopted an attitude toward irrigation agriculture which would persist well into the next century. Water ditches were an agricultural handicap, and farmers viewed the Great Basin climate as imposing an insurmountable limitation on output. In food production, as in manufacturing, Sloan assessed the market situation in 1884 as stale.

Even had there been surplus products available for export, Sloan was not certain commerce would have succeeded. The sluggish attitude he diagnosed within the territory was only half the problem. The two factors he found responsible for Utah's economic backwardness were "internal indifference and foreign opposition backed by large railroad interests." The national railroads profited most from long hauls. It was not unreasonable from their own perspective to hesitate to encourage exports from the inconveniently located Utah. Sloan, however, interpreted this as open hostility. He bluntly criticized the Union Pacific and Denver and Rio Grande Western for policies of "unfailing opposition to the material welfare of the Territory; a tendency to crush inherent independence, and a determination to choke the life out of home enterprises." The lamentable history of railroading in Utah held for Sloan but one bright spot. That was the Mormon-built Utah Central, an independent railroad applauded by Sloan for resisting subjugation. The line had accepted only minimal attachments to the self-serving trunk lines in order to provide external shipping connections for its clients, and for this it received the editor's warm praise.

While frank in exposing weaknesses, the compiler of the Gazetteer did not neglect Utah's assets. Sloan's descriptions glowed with the vision of future possibilities. "It can be no worse," he said of commerce, reflecting his attitude in all fields of the economy. "Any change . . . must be for good."

Perhaps the greatest possibilities he saw were in mining. "In the resources of Utah," Sloan believed, "may be found the 'promise and potency' of her future." The most abundant resources to be found were iron and coal. Already, in the southern counties, Utah had "the greatest and grandest iron mines in the world. . . . There are absolutely mountains of solid iron," the editor reported, "of every variety known in the world." Coal was so plentiful, he enthused, it would take a full century just to open up the veins. Natural resources in Utah were not limited to iron and coal. Sloan added many others to his list of ores which were so plentiful he could find no point "anywhere in the Territory from which the eye could not rest upon vast mineral desposits, great in variety, endless in extent."

To exploit this mineral wealth, Sloan recommended government assistance in the form of professorships in mineralogical fields, a geological museum, and a bureau of mining statistics. This last suggestion grew from difficulties he had experienced in trying to accumulate data for the Gazetteer. Available mining statistics, he had decided, were inaccurate and unreliable, but local mining engineers did help him assemble an impressive digest of mines and mining districts.

Sloan had no ready answer for the lack of a transportation system favorable toward exporting Utah goods. Despite the poor balance of trade, however, he steadfastly maintained — with a certainty bespeaking the future — that Utah was geographically situated at the center of a natural distribution center for the West. To achieve that potential, the Utah booster offered an obvious solution: new local industries should be created to fill the need for articles being imported. This would halt the outward flow of an estimated twelve million dollars annually. At the same time, Sloan argued, miners, manufacturers, and farmers should pro- duce materials for export. He challenged agriculturists to double production and said it could be accomplished with no increase in water supplies if only a little effort were applied to the task. He envisioned outside markets for dried fruit, cereals, and wine. In addition, he foresaw great opportunities for Utah as a pasture for raising horses. If only Utahns would improve existing opportunities, Sloan promised that the territory would soon claim "commercial preeminence among the rising young commonwealths of the mountains."

The Utah commonwealth held potential for exploitation beyond the major commercial spheres. The territory's scenic, recreational, and religious opportunities and programs caught Robert Sloan's eye for their aesthetic — and commercial — value. In mountain scenery, for example, he discovered aesthetic satisfaction which he freely translated into loquacious prose. His interests were with Wasatch mountain canyons, though, and he did not dwell upon the "wild and weird" formations south of the rim of the Great Basin. In his beloved pine and aspen forests, and in nearby mineral springs and salt ponds, Sloan saw value — both medicinal and economic. For local citizens and visitors alike, Sloan prescribed more "out-of-door living, tramping, and camping which so quickly renovates a broken-down nerve apparatus." He wondered why the mineral springs had not been used to supply the world with health-inducing drinking and bathing water. "The indifference of persons interested is something shameful," he said, employing a favorite approach.

The same is true of the Great Salt Lake, of world-wide reputation, both as to pleasureable and to healthful effects resulting from bathing in its dense waters, and yet inadequate and few accommodations are offered those who might reside months every year on its shore, were surroundings made pleasant and comfortable.

The optimistic editor admitted to his critics that Utah's climate was less than ideal. Nevertheless, he supposed it was not bad enough to keep away visitors, or drive away the disappointed offspring of original settlers. In an expression about the environment which reflected equally well his attitude toward the economy, Sloan noted, "There is hardly ever a cloud in the skies of Utah through which the sun is not looking."

In his blunt admission of local shortcomings, Sloan avoided controversial social issues. It had been Herald policy to defend Mormonism against the caustic jabs of non-Mormon editors, thus winning from critics the titles "Organ of the Lesser Priesthood" and "The Church Echo." But the paper also tried to avoid being zealously pro-Mormon. This policy of friendly secularism was successfully aimed at winning friends on both sides of the hassle over polygamy. So in explaining Mormon teachings, the Gazetteer mentioned circumspectly the Latter-day Saint belief "that marriage, whether monogamic or polygamic, is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled, when such marriage is contracted and carried out in accordance with the law of God." In addition, Edward Sloan's republished short history of Mormonism credited the church with becoming, "in the short space of fifty odd years," both an organization of "power and influence" and a "society which is the greatest problem of the century."

Elsewhere in the Gazetteer -—in a short directory of Utah churches — Robert Sloan found that it was convenient to bolster his thesis by praising the Mormons for their building program. The "church works," he said, had created a veritable industry in communities throughout the territory. Although designed for non-productive devotion, meeting houses, tabernacles, and temples were an economic asset. Their construction won Sloan's commendation, because the wages paid to workers fostered the flow of capital.

Likened by the boastful editor to the "great public works" of the ancients "now famous for their grandeur and magnificence," the buildings produced by this program evoked a special literary rendering from Sloan. For example, Sloan wrote concise pen pictures of the Mormon temples.

He portrayed the edifice at Logan as "an eternal sentinel to watch the peaceful habitations of men at its feet." The whitewashed structure at St. George seemed to him "grand, solemn, silent and white as the driven snow in contrast to the red mountains by which it is surrounded." Only these two temples had been completed by 1884. Another was in process of construction on a hill in Manti: "It . . . presents a noble sight," Sloan wrote, "as, grandly and solemnly, it rises from the hill top in lonely magnificence." And after more than thirty years? the granite walls of the Salt Lake Temple had finally risen above surrounding buildings. Sloan's disappointment in the aesthetic outcome of this multi-generational effort has been echoed in succeeding decades. Comparing this urban monument to other Utah temples, he found it

unlike the rest in one respect. It does not, and never will command the marked attention that the others do. It is a larger and vastly more imposing structure, [but] its size is not so noticeable, for the reason that it is not elevated above the surrounding country as are the Logan and Manti, while it does not stand alone in a plain, in solemn and imposing whiteness, as does that at St. George. It is in a city filled with large buildings; but is much sought by the stranger and always will be.

The peculiar people of Utah, like the buildings, conveyed distinctive regional qualities to those who edited the Gazetteer. Along with his local informers, Sloan sensed that a special difference characterized each community of people. The highlights were captured in the delightful thumbnail sketches of Utah towns and counties. In Ogden, for example, the editor found "public spirited, energetic, busy citizens," the kind who might be expected to respond most enthusiastically to the Gazetteer's positive suggestions. The possibilities in the newly-settled Logan area must have seemed a bit less certain, since here was the "young blood" Sloan had found so pessimistic about Utah's future. In Davis County's agricultural areas were "a peculiar, quiet, pastoral people," and in Provo, said the editor, history must yet be written

without reference to any spasmodic display of energy. All improvements have been of slow, but absolutely permanent growth; every step was taken when fully considered, only. There has never been occasion to retrace; an industry once planted or commenced, became fixed. Slowly and sure; "they trip that run fast," has ever been the motto of Provo City, and of Utah County.

Sloan did not discourage even the slowest of progress among his fellow citizens. Yet, he was a booster. He dreamed of better days. As a general characteristic, he found Utahns of his day indifferent in economic matters. Because of this, the territory would be slow to reap the vast potential Sloan could see for it. The young editor did not wish to dwell on past inadequacies. His role was that of a catalyst for the future. "It is not a question of what Utah has been," he once wrote, "but what she is and what she will become." He believed the territory's natural resources were ample to ensure a glorious future. Utah was located in a prime geographic center and would someday serve an intermountain empire. It was a central purpose of his Gazetteer and Utah Directory . . . for 1884 to help spur action, to encourage the realization of that possibility. "The future of the territory," Sloan was convinced, "depends upon the awakening of the people to these opportunities."

CLIMATE.

Perfect climate, like perfect humanity, is perfect nonsense. The most desirable climate is that which, while still calculated to promote health, is also adapted to outdoor employment the greatest possible number of days in the year. Generally, however, climate is considered excellent, according to the proportion of deaths among those who live in it. The climate of New Zealand is considered par excellence, because of the prevailing health of the people; in fact, it is called the "Sanitarium of the World," the proportion of deaths to the population being so extremely low. And yet if people living in Utah were subject to the terrible rains that are of common occurrence there, or should be forced to endure one of the long, strong and steady winds which blow, with such force as to carry clouds of gravel when it is not raining, they would pronounce the climate the most abominable under the sun. The climate of Utah is not perfect, it is too hot in summer for the most cold-blooded, too cold in winter for those of warmest blood; and yet during the greater part of the year it is delightful. (R. W. Sloan, Gazetteer, 188-89.)

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