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William Henry Smart: Uinta Basin Pioneer Leader
William Henry Smart: Uinta Basin Pioneer Leader
BY KRISTEN SMART ROGERS
OLD BALDY?" the elderly statesman grinned. "Of course I remember him!"
No wonder. What old-timer of the Uinta Basin would not remember that austere countenance? Those steely eyes peering out of wire spectacles had shaken the soul of many a sinner. With that imperious beak-like nose and that tight-lipped, unsmiling mouth, the stake president commanded respect. If old-timers refer to him now as "Old Baldy," it is only because they can safely say it behind his forty-two-years-dead back.
Stern expression, unwavering eyes: this description does no wrong to William Henry Smart, for he was a severe man. It was a severity, however, born of a quality that characterized the building of Utah and made it unique among western states: an absolute, single-minded, selfless devotion to a cause.
Because of that devotion, there's a difference in the way Utah was built. One sees it in its towns, even today: towns built uniformly to a plan, with straight, tree-lined streets, square blocks, and standard-sized lots large enough for lawns, garden, and outbuildings; towns located not haphazardly where individual whim or fortune might dictate, but where, despite obstacles sometimes bordering on the hopeless, leaders in Salt Lake City felt they would serve the broader ends of the larger society.
It took severe, disciplined, dedicated men to build like that. William H. Smart was a classic example of such a man. His lifetime work in organizing and leading the settlement of the Uinta Basin offers a case study in how so much of Utah was built: through unquestioning obedience to higher authority and through tremendously energetic and farvisioned efforts, not for personal gain but for the long-range good of the communities he was building.
The source of such dedication was simple and strong. Smart, like so many others, was single-mindedly devoted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to its leaders. With this devotion came a conviction that he was destined to be an instrument for special service to the church. Burdened with this conviction, Smart began in his early twenties the keeping of a journal that he maintained throughout his life and that reached, at his death, forty-seven finely written volumes, and it is chiefly from this source that his remarkable life of service to the Uinta Basin is traced.
As the pages of his journal make so poignantly clear, Smart's whole life seems to have centered around service to and sacrifice for his religion.
His early years were ones of conflict between the flesh and the spirit of obedience. Time after time, the young man struggled to rid himself of his greatest weakness—tobacco. Time after time, the flesh would conquer, and the battle would be agonizingly renewed. During a proselyting mission to Turkey—itself a sacrifice involving leaving a pregnant bride and being himself plagued by illness—young Will Smart wrote in mental agony, ". . . sometimes I have become so utterly hopeless in overcoming smoking and thus rendered so despondent that I have sat hours and smoked one cigarette after another." And again the next day: "Being out of tobacco I made another resolve to refrain. I walked down to the grove, met a shepherd and broke my resolution in buying 10 para worth." He did finally conquer the habit in accordance with his desires, for, as he stated, "from my youth I have had an intense desire to work righteousness."
In sacrificing the weed on the altar of his devotion to the church commandments, Smart set the pattern for larger sacrifices that would characterize the rest of his life. How hard it might be for some to give up a lucrative business to move, at the call of church authorities, to a fresh and uncertain start in a place like Heber City. Smart, upon being called to be stake president there, never hesitated. He gave up interest in the highly successful Smart and Webster Livestock Company in Cache Valley and southern Idaho, a business he himself had formed and developed, and moved his family to Heber in 1901. It was as president of the Wasatch Stake that Smart first envisioned his future in the Uinta Basin.
Smart's association with the Basin was triggered by a broken treaty. At the turn of the century, the insatiable land hunger of western settlers began to focus on the Uinta Basin with a growing clamor that the government throw open the Uintah Indian Reservation to white settlement. The real drama of the situation lay not in still another breach of faith by the United States government, but in the conflict that the reservation opening was to cause between the ever-bickering factions of Mormons and non-Mormons.
Friction between the two groups was already intense when into the arena stepped William H. Smart, fervent supporter of the church hierarchy and hard-nosed believer in the ultimate triumph of the Mormon kingdom. As president of the LDS Wasatch Stake centered in Heber City, he actually held ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the reservation lands. Accordingly, he made a personal tour in 1903, inspecting the entire area on horseback. His heart must have been captured during that trip, for his journal records premonitions of a future involvement with the Basin. Finding seclusion in a grove of aspens at the summit between Heber Valley and the Uinta Basin, he petitioned that God whom he so often sought in prayer. "I was filled with peculiar feelings as I knelt down to pray here on the divide between the known and unknown country," he wrote, "and somehow I felt a responsibility ahead of me. I prayed for light and wisdom for the tour in the country."" Smart's own emotions at this moment were to mold his destiny as colonizer, promoter, and administrator of the Uinta Basin.
Undisguisedly enthusiastic, Smart reported to his superior, church president Joseph F. Smith, recommending that the church be ready for action when the rush for reservation lands began. Upon President Smith's approval, this frail stake president, throughout his life subject to poor health, went to work with energy. He made more trips in the Basin. He chose townsites. He charted irrigation systems. He had the soil tested. He did everything possible to prepare for a successful Mormon invasion and occupation. Yet for all this, he modestly wrote President Smith that he himself did not wish to "steady the Ark," only to do his small part under the direction of the church.
Smart in fact did not steady the Ark; instead, he practically sank it. He had formed the Wasatch Development Company, designed to prevent land-grabbing by "sharks" (the non-Mormon variety) and to establish what he frequently referred to as "our people" on the reservation lands.
The operation was innocent enough, and so was Smart. Unfortunately, he was also naive. He wrote letters to stake presidents and bishops throughout Utah asking for information on prospective settlers and hinting that the Wasatch Stake presidency could be of great assistance. The form letter read: "We are acquainting ourselves with tracts of land which we feel are most desirable for settlement, and which, through land office connections being formed by us, can be chosen by those who may be in touch with us."
At this, Mormon-Gentile antagonisms flared. "Land-grabbing!" and "Illegal dealings!" were only two of the epithets hurled at bewildered church authorities. In the heat of the battle, President Smart stoutly, but vainly, explained that the intention behind the letter was innocent. Before the matter cooled down, Smart had been called "insane" by Apostle John Henry Smith, Joseph F. Smith had been accused of being involved in the land grab, and federal land commissioner W. A. Richards had made a personal investigation. Overzealous, anxious Smart had, like a child whose helpfulness is often a hindrance, "helped" the church in an embarrassing way.
Despite the chagrin he must have felt, Smart was eager to oversee work in the Uinta Basin. In a letter to the First Presidency recommending that the reservation lands be reassigned to the Uintah Stake centered in Vernal, he further suggested that the Uintah Stake administration be changed to provide more dynamic leadership in these crucial times. After recommending a good man to succeed himself in the Wasatch Stake, Smart modestly declared his willingness to serve in any position. Fortunately for the Uinta Basin, Smart's thinly veiled hopes were realized, for in 1906 church authorities enlarged the Uintah Stake to include the reservation, and Smart was made president.'
What must have been his motivation for aspiring to his new office? Was it power? Or wealth? Or was it merely a need for a more challenging part in building the kingdom? The question is crucial to an evaluation of the integrity of Smart's lifework. The answer lies in the work itself.
Having lured Mormon homesteaders to the Basin and seen to it that they had a worthy leader, Smart set about the task of colonizing the country in an orderly fashion. After consulting with the ever-omnipotent First Presidency, Smart organized four realty companies to finance and control Mormon land investments. They were unabashedly Mormon, as stake presidency and high council members made up the directors, while at the helm of it all was President Smart, without whose approval nothing could be done.
It was appropriate that Smart should have control, for the operations were financed out of his own pocket. The investment was not for personal profit; Smart was completely dedicated to "building the kingdom." These realty companies, like his energy, time, and talents, were consecrated to that purpose. He donated so much of his personal money to these and similar projects that, although he arrived in the Basin a wealthy man, he left twenty-eight years later almost penniless.
In the early years, Smart was president of the colonizing companies, but he later turned the responsibility over to others. He confessed that he did not want the burdens of direct responsibility and that he was satisfied to hold only an advisory position. Of course, as it turned out, the company directors could not very well refuse the advice of God's chosen servant, especially when that servant was as strict and uncompromising as William Smart.
The new Uintah Stake administration thus occupied itself in settling people on the virgin lands and obtaining for them irrigation systems and water rights. Through it all, he constantly sought and followed the counsel of President Joseph F. Smith to whom he felt particularly close. The night of the Mormon leader's death, in fact, family members heard Smart pacing his room for hours. Thinking that their father's grief was overwhelming, they consoled him the next morning, only to discover that Smart had been mourning, not for the prophet, but for the church under the leadership of Heber J. Grant. Despite misgivings, however, Smart never swerved in loyalty to the new church president, any more than to the old. It was his very character that he uphold his leaders as divinely appointed, and this he always did.
So it was that when Joseph F. Smith in 1907 advised the new settlers to gather together into towns, Smart threw himself unreservedly into the work. So deeply committed was he to the building of towns that he often neglected his family to explore the Basin in his familiar white-topped buggy, seeking out and comparing possible townsites. This to him was a spiritual mission in that townsites should be chosen with an eye to the Lord's will and not to temporal gain. "I endeavor to approach all these matters in the spirit of what always appears best for the public good," he wrote. "But I cannot say that I always succeed." Even town names should please the Lord, reasoned Smart; for instance, he felt the name Myton, so called after a disreputable Indian agent, should be changed. Towns and all that pertained to them were to Smart an important part of the Mormon kingdom in the Basin.
The great expectations Smart had of these tiny towns seem ludicrous today. Despite the remoteness, poverty, and aridity of the Uinta Basin, this man always thought of it as a vital and potentially powerful part of the Utah empire. To him, each town was a future center of culture and commerce—temporally great and spiritually pure. The time and thought Smart devoted to choosing a site for a Mormon temple that never has materialized illustrates his zeal. Even the dusty town of Ouray merited his attention as a possible temple city. Instead of progressing, most of the Uinta Basin towns have remained much as they were in the days of this energetic stake president. Still, Smart's over-optimism was, in part, what enabled him to accomplish so much. Without such faith, how could he have freely given so much to such a hopeless cause? If the Uinta Basin did not measure up to his vision of it, still, it became through his efforts an important, if not prosperous, eastern anchor of the Mormon empire.
As settlers began to fill reservation lands and townsites, Smart saw the need to modernize and commercialize the embryo communities. Adding to his rigorous stake duties, he took an active role in public affairs by organizing and financing needed businesses and civic enterprises.
His motive was still the same: to strengthen the church. "Much to the discredit of the basin," wrote Smart to President Smith, non- Mormons had become prominent and powerful. Thus, moving in as representative for the church, Smart set about obtaining greater financial power and influence for Mormons, as well as improving living conditions for all.
Smart's early moves to change the power structure were deliberately and exclusively Mormon. For example, a meeting of his newiy formed Uintah Telephone Company, created in 1907 to bring the first telephones to the Basin, might as well have been a stake high council meeting. It was generally the same with other ventures: the flour mill, electric power plant, Vernal water works, Vernal amusement hall (for "moral" entertainment of youth), and agricultural experiment station. All these were organized under the influence of the Uintah Stake Presidency for the benefit of the people as determined by the Mormon leadership.
By 1910 Mormon settlement of the Basin had reached a point where the Uintah Stake was divided. Smart was made president of the newiy formed Duchesne Stake and moved his home to Roosevelt. After ten years, he would become president of the new Roosevelt Stake. In each case he was sent to that section of the Basin that needed the kinds of development Smart had stimulated in Vernal. In each case he repeated his organizational civic efforts.
Education was one area that received much of Smart's attention. He was responsible for the building of the Uintah Stake Academy in Vernal in 1910. Two years later, the W'asatch High School was opened in Roosevelt. Not only did the stake president see that the new school was complemented by a "theological seminary" to teach church doctrines, but he did everything possible, including petitioning the Lord, to ensure passage of a bond proposal to erect the building. He instructed his people to do the same, and in one meeting he "spoke of importance of high school bond election to be held next Saturday and expressed the thought that we should desire the will of the Lord to obtain whether for or against, and that I wished the audience to join with me in suplicating [sic] the Lord to that effect. I then knelt and presented the matter in prayer pleading with the Lord to give the victory to the side that will be best for the people—still asking that if it be possible that the affirmative be for the best."
The issue passed by a narrow margin, presumably because it was for the best. Opposition to the bond had centered in the predominantly non- Mormon town of Myton, which had objected to the proposal since it had Smart's support and since the building was to be erected in Smart's insulferably pure pet town, Roosevelt.
Smart later supported education by promising to raise money personally to keep the floundering high school open during the hard years of 1920-21. He succeeded, although the debt he incurred plagued him for years afterward.
William H. Smart was a man of action, an organizer, a dedicated worker in all worthy causes, as can be seen. Yet his influence did not stop at a few schools and modern utilities. In every way, Smart was determined to establish Mormon rule in the Basin.
From a stalwart Mormon leader's point of view, the Uinta Basin was a dangerous place in the early 1900s. Here, isolated from church headquarters and surrounded by influential anti-Mormons, a church member might easily slip into inactivity or be subverted by ideas in conflict with official doctrine. Deliberating on the problem, Smart decided that he must employ all forms of influence to combat worldly doctrines. Accordingly, he began to buy up and form newspapers which he, as ecclesiastical authority in the Basin, could control.
Smart felt firmly—and rightly—that the press could be an instrument for good or bad. An election in Vernal on Prohibition had been lost, he complained, because of propaganda in the Vernal Express. Shortly after the election, in 1910, he bought the paper through his Uintah Realty and Investment Company. The paper was placed in the church's hands because, in Smart's eyes, "the Lord is moving in these things." In the matter of newspapers, as in all other affairs, devout Smart acknowledged his Maker's hand: "I thank the Lord for his preserving power and give Him glory for all the good done, and will share the blame with the Prince of darkness for the rest."
Subsequently, the Lord apparently saw fit to establish church newspapers in the prominent towns of Roosevelt and Theodore (Duchesne) in the forms of the financially disastrous Uintah Advocate, renamed the Standard, and the Duchesne Messenger. Next in line was the notoriously Gentile Myton, where the Uintah Chieftain, a liberal Socialist paper, had appeared in 1908. To Republican Smart, of course, the Chieftain was intolerable. He bought the paper in 1909.
Always, Smart was guided by prayer. It was only after consulting with deity that he decided to consolidate these three mediocre papers. "One good paper will be better than three poor ones," he reasoned and, after some negotiating, the consolidation was accomplished in 1910. The Duchesne Record, as the paper was called, was published at Myton. With these combined forces, Mormon control must surely have been strengthened. Smart was not oblivious, however, to the many non-Mormons who would be affected. What he did, he wrote, was "for the good of the whole country and for all people." In his own mind at least, he built church power not for clannish reasons, but because he sincerely felt it would benefit both member and nonmember.
The energy and talent Smart devoted to the Basin people seem almost unlimited. He even edited the Record himself for a period. In this case, however, he was motivated by a dwindling bank account. All the years of his work in the Basin, he had been, in effect, unemployed, living mostly off his savings. Now he needed some income. Before he could earn much as editor, though, he again, characteristically, sacrificed his own interests for the sake of the church. Understandably, Smart's prominence in public affairs had aroused opposition and enemies; therefore, he thought it best to retire after less than a year of editing lest his influence as stake president be weakened. The abdication was only for appearance, as the ubiquitous Smart continued to control the paper's business and editorial policies.
Perhaps no other area better illustrates Smart's personality, his motivation, and his methods than that of banking. Just as his people needed the moral support newspapers could provide, Smart realized they required financial support in their efforts to subdue and civilize the Basin. He saw to it that citizens' banks, owned and managed by local people, were established.
The first of these was to be in Vernal. Originally owned by Coloradoan non-Mormons, the local bank had been a thorn in Smart's side since his advent into the Basin. When in 1910 certain citizens announced plans to promote a new bank, Smart made his move, reasoning that it was "the trials and hardships and privations and labors of the pioneer stock in the last quarter century that had made banking even possible and I concluded that this was the stock to have something to say about banking and . . . they would have a say." Whether or not the pioneer stock wanted their say, Smart set out to obtain it for them.
His method was to take aside one of the bank's promoters, Edward Samuels, and appeal to his spiritual nature. Samuels was a Mormon, but inactive, and Smart sought to help him see the error of his ways:
As a result, the formerly unfriendly bank directors asked Smart to dispose of three-fifths of the stock, to join the board of directors, and to become bank president. Certainly Smart must have had a way with words.
Unfortunately for the new Uintah State Bank, Smart was soon called to the presidency of the Roosevelt Stake, which did not encompass Vernal. The president's efforts immediately focused on his new area of jurisdiction, and he supervised the formation of a new bank in Roosevelt. Yet he kept himself from active participation, even though he was urged to become president, fearing that his own prominence might arouse opposition and thus undermine his other duties. His "mission," as he saw it, was not to become wealthy or financially influential, but to help others.
In 1920 the Roosevelt bank was on the verge of collapse. Smart tried to secure a loan but found it impossible. Next he asked his wealthy brother Thomas to help the struggling bank but was refused. When William H. Smart met failure, nothing else could be done, and the bank was closed.
Smart had hated to neglect his other duties to rescue a failing bank, but he felt an obligation to his people, expressed in a letter to Thomas:
The statement may have been flowery, but it was no exaggeration. Smart had so thoroughly taken over public affairs in the Uinta Basin that the people automatically turned to him in times of stress. They knew he would bear their financial losses if he could; in fact, he would do anything to prevent the failure of the Lord's work. Perhaps Smart's idealism was used against him in this way.
Again, in the formation of a new Roosevelt bank, it was Smart who took charge. He sold the stock, allowing Coloradoans to carry the majority because of the Basin's financial weakness, and got a loan from Utah State Bank using personal collateral. With the bank back on its feet—-but out of Mormon control—Smart turned to other matters: chiefly that of buying a bank in Duchesne.
Actually, in 1920 a new stake president had been assigned to the Duchesne area, so Smart had no direct interest in the bank there. He had, however, been trying since 1914, the time of the county division, to promote a citizens' bank in Duchesne. That bank had never been formed, but an outside bank, headed by D. L. Dean, had served the town. It was this bank that Smart now had a chance to control.
Dean, anxious to return to his Kansas homeland, was selling his stock in the Duchesne Bank. After negotiation, Smart was able to buy 100 shares for $15,000, which he promptly sold to others. He had procured a loan from Utah State Bank to aid others in buying the stock. Once more Smart succored the citizens of the Basin by obtaining a bank for the people. And he insisted that the institution be connected with the LDS bank in Salt Lake. It seemed that another triumph for the kingdom was assured.
Fate—or the Lord's will—would have it otherwise. Within a year the bank had closed its doors. Although Smart never explained in his journals why the bank failed, his son Thomas Lawrence Smart, at the time a grown man, claims that Dean had tricked the buyers by borrowing some securities and bonds which he returned after the sale of the bank. When the bank examiner came around later, he declared the bank bankrupt. Smart was stuck, therefore, with the staggering task of getting the stockholders to pay off the loan he had procured for them. In many cases, he himself was forced to pay, which he did by selling his stock in the Utah State Bank and the Beneficial Life Insurance Company. After all, as he said, "dollars must not stand between me and my brethren.
Money had never stood between William Smart and his people. He gave freely of his material wealth, as well as his time and best thought. For the sixteen years of his presidency in the Basin, the focus of his life was to build in that region an acceptable, holy stake of Zion. His ultimate goal was to train his people to "finally stand the government of God wherein He shall stand at the head of all both spiritual and secular."
As far as the church was concerned, no other could have filled the time and place so well, as a stake associate remarked at the time of Smart's release in 1922. Smart expressed no regret at being released from his influential position but said to his associates, " I would rather serve as a doorkeeper in God's House than to sit upon the greatest regal throne." He further wrote privately at the time, "may our Father's blessings be upon all that has been done, and may I be blessed not to return to inactivity but that in the own way of the Lord be able to be active throughout my days."
He did remain active, of course; such a man could not sit back uselessly. He served in the state legislature and even fulfilled another mission for the church. Eventually moving to Salt Lake, he lived out his days in respectable poverty, still serving the Lord as a temple worker— almost a "doorkeeper in God's House."
One can picture the old man—still very stern and forbidding, especially to his grandchildren—as he strictly maintained his own peculiar mode of life. He continued to take long walks, usually climbing Ensign Peak, where he built an altar and spent his time in meditation and prayer. He continued his habit of lengthy fasting, broken only with a little bread and milk. He continued other idiosyncracies, such as the forbidding of pickles in his household. And he continued true to his faith and religion.
It was, appropriately, while serving in the temple that he was stricken with the pleurisy that took his life in 1937.
So left this life, at age seventy-five, a remarkable man whose work so characterized the hard, self-sacrificing pioneering that went on in Utah long after the so-called pioneering period was ended. Though few remain who realize it—the old-timers are about gone—the Uinta Basin, under the veneer of its modern oil boom, bears unmistakably the stamp of his labors. Putting his trust in the Lord and in the General Authorities, William H. Smart had set out to claim the Uinta Basin for the LDS church and in the process had himself become a powerful influence in "all both spiritual and secular."
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