Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 47, Number 2, 1979

a CO CO

O

3 d w H to

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY ( I S S N 0042-143X)

EDITORIAL STAFF MELVIN T. SMITH,

Editor

STANFORD J. L A Y T O N , Managing M I R I A M B. M U R P H Y , Associate J A N E T G. B U T L E R , Assistant

Editor Editor

Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS T H O M A S G. ALEXANDER, Provo,

1980

M R S . I N E Z S. C O O P E R , Cedar City, S. G E O R G E E L L S W O R T H , Logan, G L E N M . L E O N A R D , Bountiful,

1981 1981

1979

L A M A R P E T E R S E N , Salt Lake City, 1980 R I C H A R D W. SADLER, Ogden,

1979

HAROLD SCHINDLER, Salt Lake City, 1981 G E N E A. S E S S I O N S , Bountiful,

1980

Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, a n d reviews contributing to knowledge of U t a h ' s history. T h e Quarterly is published by the U t a h State Historical Society, 307 West Second South, Salt Lake City, U t a h 84101. Phone (801) 533-5755 (membership), 533-6024 (publications).

Members of the Society receive the Quarterly, Beehive History, a n d t h e bimonthly Newsletter upon payment of the annual dues; for details see inside back cover Single copies, $2.00.

Materials for publication should be submitted in duplicate accompanied by return postage a n d should be typed double-space with footnotes a t the end.

Additional information on requirements is available from the managing editor. T h e Society assumes no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion by contributors.

T h e Quarterly is indexed in Book Review Index to Social Science Periodicals, America: History and Life, and Abstracts of Popular Culture.

Second class postage is paid at Salt Lake City, U t a h .

HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Contents SPRING 1979/VOLUME 47 / NUMBER 2 UTAH'S REGIONS: A VIEW FROM THE HINTERLAND

C H A R L E S S. P E T E R S O N

103

MELVIN T. SMITH

110

RICHARD C. P O U L S E N

130

F O L K L O R E O F U T A H ' S L I T T L E S C A N D I N A V I A . WILLIAM A. W I L S O N

148

FORCES T H A T SHAPED UTAH'S D I X I E : ANOTHER

LOOK

FOLK MATERIAL C U L T U R E O F T H E SANPETESEVIER AREA: TODAY'S REFLECTIONS O F A R E G I O N ' S PAST

REFLECTIONS ON A RURAL TRADITION: A PHOTOGRAPHIC

ESSAY

CAROLYN R H O D E S - J O N E S

167

P H I L I P F. NOTARIANNI

178

C H A R L E S S. PETERSON

194

UTAH'S ELLIS ISLAND: T H E D I F F I C U L T "AMERICANIZATION" OF CARBON C O U N T Y

T H E V A L L E Y O F T H E BEAR R I V E R A N D THE MOVEMENT OF CULTURE BETWEEN UTAH AND IDAHO BOOK REVIEWS

215

BOOK NOTICES

223

THE COVER The rural landscape seems to engulf the much-admired LDS chapel at Spring City in this photograph by Thomas R. Carter. On the back, the remains of the coal company office at Winter Quarters preside over the brush-covered hills of Carbon County, as photographed by A. Kent Powell. © Copyright 1979 U t a h State Historical Society This issue has been partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the Interpreting Local History project.

L I O N E L A. MALDONADO a n d DAVID R. B Y R N E .

The Social Ecology of Chicanos i n

Utah

RICHARD

ULIBARRI

215

JAY M. HAYMOND

216

California: The Search for a Southern Overland Route, 1540-1848 . S. L Y M A N T Y L E R

217

C H A D J . F L A K E , ed. A

O.

Mormon

Bibliography, 1830-1930: Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Broadsides Relating to the First Century of Mormonism HARLAN HAGUE.

The

Road

to

Books reviewed G E O R G E R. B R O O K S , ed. The

Southwest

Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to California,

1826-1827

.

T H O M A S F. ANDREWS

218

J O H N D E M O S a n d SARANE S P E N C E BOOCOCK, eds.

Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family . . . . M. G U Y B I S H O P

219

JANICE T. D I X O N and DORA D. FLACK.

Preserving Your Past: A Painless Guide to Writing Your Autobiography and Family

History

.

.

.

.

W I L L I A M G. H A R T L E Y

220

H . ROGER GRANT and C H A R L E S W. B O H I .

The Country Station

Railroad

in America

.

.

.

.

TEDDY

GRIFFITH

222

Utah's Regions, A View from the Hinterland

BY CHARLES S. PETERSON GUEST EDITOR

1 HIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF T H E

Quarterly grew from and is part of a National Endowment for the Humanities project focusing upon regional characteristics in Utah and neighboring states.

Initiated in 1977, the Endowment's Interpreting Local History project in concept grew out of the Bicentennial States and the Nation Series under which the identity and character of each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia were described. Directed by Utah State University and the Utah State HisLooking down Cache Valley toward Logan, USHS collections.

Utah Historical Quarterly

104

torical Society, Interpreting Local History is an effort to encourage thought and dialogue on the meaning of regions in Utah history. With this as a goal, the project consisted of a three-phase presentation. The first was a series of lectures, forty-three in all, dealing with regional topics. The second phase consisted of eight traveling exhibits coordinated with the lecture series. The third element is initiated with this publication in which five of the lectures and a pictorial essay developed from the exhibits give views of Utah's rural regions. A subsequent issue of the Quarterly will carry articles relating to Utah's urban regions.

Like the nation, Utah is made up of sections and localities in which life is recognizably different. In part, regional distinction is a matter of the physiographic framework within which the Utah experience has evolved.

In another way, distinction is historical and relates to the timing and development of settlement. In yet another, regional distinction is a matter of folklore, the commonly held and shared perception of local character.

Although readily apparent, Utah's regional variation has often been subtle and imprecise, making it more easily perceived and appreciated than measured and analyzed. Regions have been the object of a good deal of attention in Utah's history books and periodicals, but the effort has rarely been made to explain why regions are as different as they are but not as distinct as they might be.

With the prospect of fuller understanding in mind, this spring issue of the Quarterly deals with three regions entirely within Utah and with one that extends into two neighboring states. Dixie, or if you will, Utah's Dixie, lies in the state's southwest corner and conforms generally with Washington County. Sanpete-Sevier is located in the very center of the state in valleys formed by the San Pitch and Sevier rivers and, as the name suggests, includes both Sanpete and Sevier counties. Carbon lies in The Peterson Block in Richfield housed bank, store, offices.

USHS collections.

^ ^ * * ^

The

Hinterland

105

east central Utah and is a one-county locality. The valley of the Bear River, on the other hand, extends through nine counties in three states.

At their extremes these regions are spread over more than 450 miles. Two are in the Great Basin and two in the Colorado Plateau. The plateau regions, Dixie and Carbon, are characterized by broken deserts, drouth, mining resources, and remoteness. The Great Basin regions, Sanpete-Sevier and Bear River, are mountain valleys in a stricter sense and somewhat better watered. The Sanpete-Sevier valleys may be said to be internal, secluded from state boundaries and isolated physically by the canyons of the Colorado on the east and south, by the deserts of the Great Basin to the west, and, during early years, by Salt Lake City which in some degree served as a control point where Mormon leaders sought to exclude worldly influences. By contrast, the Bear River is characterized by four valley systems: the upper drainage, Bear Lake, Cache, and the northeastern corner of the Great Salt Lake Valley. Each of these lies across a state border and has served as a conduit through which cultural influences have moved from state to state. In this outward tending orientation Bear River is similar to both Carbon and Dixie: the former facing into the Colorado Plateau and ultimately to the state of Colorado, and the latter bordering Arizona and Nevada and at great distance relating to southern California and its culture.

In all four regions what may be termed the compartmentalization of valleys exists. In each case the valleys have tended to divide people and create within them an awareness of group as well as a keenly developed sense of place.

Historically, various regional comparisons could be made, but space dictates that observations here be limited to brief comparisons of settlement's timing and the relationship of communities. Sanpete-Sevier settleSt. George Temple, a symbol of Mormon pioneer skill and sacrifice. USHS collections.

*

nu iJiU • • *

L, %*<- f0"- ^*""*

*yj ! ! ! M

106

Utah Historical

Quarterly

ment extended through three decades, with Sanpete's colonization coming primarily in the 1850s while Indian threats postponed Sevier settlement until the 1870s. For several decades Sanpete County was one of the large population areas of Utah, ranking third in the territory in the 1860s.

Unlike some Utah regions, Sanpete has had no city whose dominant role is clear. Manti has enjoyed the county seat and the distinction of a Mormon temple, but Ephraim's population has been nearly as large and it has clearly been the educational seat of the region. Over the years various other towns have offered claims of their own for regional priority. In the Sevier country, Richfield's predominance may have been somewhat more clear, but Salina, located at an important junction, has had lasting vitality.

In Dixie the great years of colonization were the 1860s. The Cotton Mission was called and grape culture initiated. Washington, Santa Clara, St. George, and some two dozen other towns and villages were established.

Here, however, there was little doubt as to St. George's dominant role.

It was Brigham Young's winter home, location for a temple, and headquarters of a Mormon culture with a difference.

Like Dixie, the time of settlement for the Bear River valleys was mainly the 1860s, although towns grew both before and after. Cache Valley was settled after 1859 and could be reached by rail in 1872, but for decades Bear Lake was virtually inaccessible during the winters.

Ultimately, the canyons between Cache and Bear Lake valleys w7ere opened; the Oregon Short Line Railroad penetrated Bear Lake Valley, opening it to strong influences from the east and northwest. As the major outlet for the interior angle of the Bear River, the Logan River assured Logan an important economic and social role in Cache Valley where other towns enjoyed only the limited resources provided by small frontal drainages. Favored by natural influences and railroad transportation after 1882, Montpelier ultimately emerged as Bear Lake's foremost community.

From the 1850s Brigham City exerted some dominance over a vast salt flat and sagebrush hinterland that was challenged in early times by Idaho's Malad and more recently by Tremonton and Garland.

The Carbon region was settled in the 1880s when the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad built west and coal mines opened. Oriented to transportation and mining and with a multiplicity of ethnic groups, Carbon County broke away in 1894 from the more traditional Emery County.

Price dominated the new county from the first, although Helper has never fully acknowledged this preeminence. At times other boisterous mining towns played prominent roles in their own right.

The

Hinterland

107

Along with the accretions of history, time has brought mythology and images that help distinguish Utah's regions. In a rich degree this is apparent in the four regions of our consideration. Mythical Dixie, as its name implies, is at the south, its climate warm. In addition, its imagery is vividâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;color country, or what Gregory Crampton has described as "Standing U p Country." Sensing a brooding touch with geological and prehistoric epochs in its harsh deserts and tangled terrain, a succession of pioneers, scientists, prospectors, adventurers, and tourists have been attracted. At the other mythic extreme is Bear Lake Valleyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a frigid zone according to popular lore. Juxtaposed with Dixie it seems to betoken an almost hemispheric spread. Further emphasizing distinction, the shifting blues of Bear Lake and the multiple hues of the Bear River region's mountain scenery pale curiously in contrast to Dixie's vivid canyons.

T h e interaction of pastoral and industrial themes in America has been the object of considerable scholarly attention. In significant ways Sanpete-Sevier and Carbon partake of this dualism. Nestled on the west Mining brought the trappings of industry and the varied life-styles of immigrants to Castle Gate. USHS collections.

108

Utah Historical

Quarterly

slope of the Wasatch Plateau, Sanpete-Sevier shows clear evidence of the "garden"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;a blossom in man's effort to make the desert bloom. In it are mountain meadow7s reclaimed from wilderness, ordered villages, lazy farm lanes, gaunt and now unused hay derricks, and a population of yeomen. Across the mountain to the east the image of Carbon conforms much more naturally with the "machine." T h e railroad town, mining camp, and cosmopolitan population of the popular image suggest a harnessing of h u m a n and natural resources that goes beyond pastoral order to the productive discipline of the machine age.

In the articles that follow, these four regions are examined in closer detail. Touched with humor and insight, Melvin Smith's lead essay surveys the formative years in Dixie and concludes that natural and national influences played important roles. T h e premises upon which Mormon colonization rested, he suggests, were flawed; but in meeting reality Dixie's early inhabitants achieved an enduring success.

In a stimulating and readable change of pace, two articles apply the yardsticks of folklore to the myth and image that give the Sanpete-Sevier region a strong Scandinavian identity. Richard Poulsen is concerned with material culture, seeing h u m a n structures as symbols loaded with meaning. T h e very paucity of material culture with northern European origins suggests that Scandinavian immigrants paid dearly in terms of abandoned heritage and group identity. In an essay that deals with the spoken word of Scandinavian folklore, William A. Wilson also writes of costs. H e addresses first the cost of settlement, then the cost of faith, and finally suggests that the humor of polygamy and Scandinavian stories is a regional attempt to reconcile the costs of peculiarity.

T o her pictorial essay Carolyn Rhodes-Jones brings a sensitive touch for yet another kind of symbol. Working with photographs used in the project's exhibits, she portrays natural and cultural characteristics that have drawn the regional lines of rural Utah.

Philip Notarianni sees Carbon County as a port-of-entry through which new peoples filed. Here again, peculiarity had its costs. Ethnic groups simultaneously clung to old ways and worked to establish the new institutions and attitudes of labor. Thus set apart, as Notarianni notes, people in the Carbon region were subjected to pressures of Americanization that contributed to an interplay of accommodation and resistance that has molded and refined the region's character.

T h e final essay, my own, deals with the farflung, three-state character of the Bear River region. Through the valleys of the Bear River moved

The

109

Hinterland

many cultural elements, from land use and dry-farming practices to political and educational attitudes, that have created special relationships, especially between Utah and Idaho.

Thus it is that influences that fall generally into the realms of geography, history, and folklore unite and divide Utah's regions and in the process provide an almost infinite variety of overlapping and related themes that change constantly with the passage of time. As the essays in this issue make clear, each region has its own character and its own flavor yet articulates strongly to the whole. Considered comparatively, the regions of Utah provide a different and useful way of looking at state history.

Zion National Park and the Virgin River are part of a distinctively regional landscape. USHS collections.

^ â&#x20AC;˘ i i C .

Forces That Shaped Utah's Dixie: Another Look

BY MELVIN T.

SMITH

/

U T A H ' S DIXIE H A S DISTINCTIVE geographic and cultural features that set it apart from the rest of the state. Historically, the area has been subjected to numerous development forces, both non-Mormon and Mormon. Although the traditional historical approach has been to look at the Dr. Smith is director of the Utah State Historical Society.

•v?.:t \ *?. • v • ; > • « .

•

••v.cA\

v V-

j

•.K>^ •? : > : i v \ l

11 j

j i .»

\t:

112

Utah Historical Quarterly

region chronologically from the Mormon point of view, this paper will attempt, first, to review several national and regional forces that had an impact on Dixie and to look at Dixie's impact on the national movements; second, to look at the Mormon settlement forces seen from the perspective and objectives of the church leadership rather than from the settlers themselves; and, finally, to make some observations about these factors as forces in the area's development.

One begins the story by asking what Utah's Dixie is. Former President Harry S Truman, when referring to the development of the atom bomb and its use in World War II against Japan, spoke of that spot in western Utah where the bomber crews were trained, as Leftover, Utah, not a very complimentary term but yet a rather apt description of Wendover as the Nevada border. In some w7ays that term could be appropriately applied to southwestern Utah. Dixie is bounded on the east by the faulted cliffs of the Colorado Plateau; on the south by the Grand Canyon, dug according to folktales by a Scot who lost a dime in a gopher hole; on the west by the dry deserts of the Great Basin of which Death Valley is a major feature; and on the north by the south rim of the Great Basin, old Lake Bonneville, and the lava-coverecl Black Ridge.1 Prominent there too is the volcanic laccolith uncovered by millennia of erosion and named now Pine Valley Mountain. The black rocks between St. George and Santa Clara look like the clinkers of hell dumped by Beelzebub in stoking his numerous volcanic furnaces to raise the summer temperatures above 110 degrees in the shade. No wonder George A. Smith is credited with saying, "If I had a lot here and one in Hell, I'd sell the one in St. George."2 Dixie pioneers felt the heat. George Washington Brimhall referred to the lower Virgin River region as "Burnt Country.'" Joseph W. Young speculated that one could hatch eggs without a mother hen, since frying eggs in the sun w7as a cinch.1 Perhaps most descriptive was Rufus C. Allen's report that in June 1855 while exploring the Colorado River near Black Canyon, "the water boiled in their canteens and the metal stirrups on the saddles were too hot to keep their feet in."5 One questions reports, 1 Melvin T. Smith, " T h e Colorado River: Its History in the Lower Canyons Area" (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1972), chap. 1.

2 The quotation is credited to George A. Smith. See Juanita Brooks, On the Ragged Edge: The Life and Times of Dudley Leavitt (Salt Lake City: U t a h State Historical Society 1973) 7 pp. 74-75. ' '' s See report of George W. Brimhall to George A. Smith, December 10, 1865, in Archives Division, Historical Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Salt Lake City.

4 See letters of Joseph W. Young in Deseret News, August 29, 1868.

J Thomas D. Brown, "Journal of the Southern Indian Mission," n.p., typescript, Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Forces That

Shaped

Utah's Dixie

113

howrever, that Gila monsters actually roll over on their backs to cool their hot feet. Nevertheless, woe be to the novice who ignored the certain realities of desert heat, as the tragedy of the Davidson family below Beaver D a m so sadly illustrates. 0 Dixie is desert, dependent upon the waters of the mighty, muddy Virgin River and tributaries, which waters bloated the denizens while it fed their thirsty crops. Its tributaries en route to the Colorado River carved their ways across mountains and into the bowels of mother earth, leaving escarpments, mesas, cliffs, canyons, and formations of great variety and exquisite beauty, especially during sunrise and sunset. Its flora and fauna are varied but restricted. Its weather is mild. When it is cold in Dixie, they say, "That's a good place to spend the winter." Dixie is also capricious. Dixieites can have fresh corn for Thanksgiving but freeze their fruit in May. Dixie is also springs—warm ones, some of them •—sand and soil, and opportunity limited only by the will and labor and technology of those who live there.

But most of all, Dixie in the past has been out of the way: no harbor, no highways, no navigable rivers, no railroad, no space port— sort of leftover from the geography of the Colorado Plateau south and east and the Great Basin north and west. Getting to Dixie has always been a problem. Father Escalante related how cleverly their timid Pauche guide abandoned them at the crest of the Black Ridge. 7 Early Mormon settlers lamented their plight to Brigham Young. In effect, no one could build a road across the Black Ridge. Even Gentiles had sense enough to go around, choosing the route west from Cedar City to the Mountain Meadow7, Santa Clara Creek, Beaver Dam, and Vegas Springs on their wray to California. s Did that bother Brigham Young? Not at all! And Heber C. Kimball even less. Rapt in vision, the latter proclaimed: "I prophesy in the name of the Lord God that the saints will not only build a road across the Black Ridge, but will also build a temple to the Most High on the banks of the Virgin River. . . ,"!' And one thought there were problems before! So Mormons selected Peter Shirts to locate a route. He reported a good one along the east base of Pine Valley Mountain, except

"James G. Bleak, "Annals of the Southern U t a h Mission, Book A," pp. 469-73, typescript, Dixie College Library, St. George, Utah. James Davidson and his wife and son died from lack of water in June 1869 en route from the river to Mormon Wells.

7 Ted J. Warner, ed., The Dominguez-Escalante Journal, trans. Fray Angelico Chavez (Provo, U t . : Brigham Young University Press, 1976), pp. 77-78.

8 The sites mentioned describe the route of the Old Spanish Trail and a portion of the later Mormon-California Trail. s Bleak, "Annals," p. 15.

114

Utah Historical

Quarterly

for about two hundred yards. "What's there?" "A canyon!" " H o w do we get across?" You guessed it—that is Peter's Leap, up from Pintura a few miles. It could be called the precursor of the better-known Hole-inthe-Rock of 1879.10 (Despite what avid residents claim, Dixie is not the site of the original Garden of Eden, and when Jedediah Smith in 1826 called the Virgin the Adams River he meant John Quincy, not Father.)

T h e point is that Dixie is very much a part of the American Southwest and as such has been influenced by the peoples and by the social, economic, and political fortunes of the larger area. Several of these are noted briefly.

T h e Indians' heritage can still be seen there. T h e earliest inhabitants in past millennia were the Desert Archaic peoples and later the Anasazi. 11 T h e Lost City peoples, located near present-day Overton, Nevada, with their hundred-room house and settlements extending thirty miles along the Muddy River, were most impressive. They claimed the area from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 900. 12 Remnants of the old irrigation canals were reported by early Mormon settlers a thousand years later. These people appear to be the region's first growers of cotton and producers of dyed and woven cotton clothes. 15 Also contemporary with the Anasazi were the Fremont Indians to the north who gathered, hunted, farmed a little, and traded throughout the area. 11 T h e historic Indians consisted of the Paiutes who arrived about A.D. ld 1200 and the Navajo and Utes who resided peripherally but raided into the area. In time the Southern Paiutes, living lives of sheer survival, adapted to the deserts and canyons well enough to endure the slave raids of the Utes and the coming of the white men. Nevertheless, those with energy and determination perished in combat. Many who sought "peace in their time" were enslaved, or their children were. No wonder their heirs have such a limited legacy.

Next on the scene were the Spaniards who, less than fifty years after Columbus had—through Cortez, Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, and 10 Ibid., p. 36. Shirts's survey work was not completely acceptable. The " L e a p " west from Pintura can be seen today. " J e s s e D. Jennings, " T h e Aboriginal Peoples," Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (I960) • 210-21. " M. R. Harrington, "Ancient Tribes of the Boulder Dam Country," p. 2, reprinted by Lost City Museum, Overton, Nevada, from an article written by Mr. Harrington'while curator of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, California. See also, Byron Cummings, First Inhabitants of Arizona and the Southwest (Tucson: Cummings Publication Council, 1953), pp. 5-10.

13 Harrington, "Ancient Tribes," pp. 76-79.

14 Albert H. Schroeder, " T h e Archeological Excavations at Willow Beach, Arizona, 1950," p. 3, M S , Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Boulder City, Nevada.

13 Jennings, "Aboriginal Peoples."

Forces That

Shaped

Utah's

Dixie

115

Cardenas—reached to within a hundred miles of Utah's Dixie in their quest for gold, glory, and God. 10 How7ever, it was settlements in Alta, California, in the second half of the eighteenth century that brought Spaniards to Dixie. 17 During the summer of 1776 Padre Garces, a kind of Catholic Jacob Hamblin, explored a northern Arizona route between central California and the Hopi villages. His report mentions the "Pauches" living north of the Colorado, that is, in Utah's Dixie. 18 T h a t summer also two Catholic priests—Fathers Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante— led a small expedition north from Santa Fe, through southwestern Colorado into Utah's Uinta Basin, west to Utah Lake, and then south. Their destination had been Monterey, California, but a heavy snowstorm below present-day Delta, Utah, forced a change of plans. T h e new objective was to return to Santa Fe as quickly as possible across the Colorado River. 19 T h a t decision put Utah's Dixie on the m a p literally. Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco identified the Virgin River, Ash Creek, Pearce's Wash, and the Hurricane Fault—not by those names, how ever. Fathers Dominguez and Escalante also gave a good description of the mild climate of mid-October and of the Indians and their small farms. Devout Dixieites may wonder why the padres did not just stop and stay, especially with name potentials like St. George and Santa Clara for the area.

However, the party's condition was quite desperate, and the padres needed to make their report. O n their return to Santa Fe they discovered the old Indian crossing of the Colorado River, since known as the Crossing of the Fathers. 20 T h e next fifty years became a period of transition. Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1821 and claimed control of the area. Even so, Americans with and without their Mexican cohorts trapped west of Santa Fe for fortunes in furs. Three such expeditions had particular impact on Utah's Dixie. Coming from northern Utah, Jedediah Smith's group reached the Adams or Virgin River (over the Black Ridge) in the late summer of 1826. H e noted the Indian fields at Corn Creek ,,!

Smith, "Colorado River," chap. 4, provides a detailed review of the Spanish activities.

See Herbert E. Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1907), for this story. ]S Elliot Coues, ed., On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer: The Diary and Itinerary of Francisco Garces (Missionary Priest) . . . 1775-1776 (New York, 1900), 2 : 3 5 0 - 9 7 .

VJ Warner, Dominguez-Escalante Journal, pp. 7 3 - 7 5 . ' ' I b i d . , pp. 9 9 - 1 0 1 . See also David E. Miller, "Discovery of Glen Canyon, 1 7 7 6 " Utah Historical Quarterly 26 (1958) : 221-37.

17

116

Utah Historical

Quarterly

(Santa Clara) then continued west through the narrows of the Virgin River without the benefit of modern highways and nearly lost several horses in the quicksand there. Smith passed the Salt Caves further south and took some salt with him to California.~1 A second group of trappers left Santa Fe late in 1826, traveled west along the Gila to the Colorado River, and trapped upstream. In March 1827 they reached the Mojave villages (near Needles, California), wiiere a skirmish resulted in deaths to the Indians. Later that party divided into several groups. T h e James Ohio Pattie group probably crossed the Colorado River to the north side and turned east over the Shivwits PlateauMount Trumbull area, and on east. However, Pattie's account is difficult to follow at times. 22 A third group was led by Thomas "Pegleg" Smith. His party crossed the Colorado and appears to have trapped up the Virgin River into the St. George area. Apparently there was a confrontation with the Indians, since the party burned some Indian granaries and fields. Smith and his men continued north and eventually returned to Santa Fe.2" Later that summer Jed Smith again trekked south to Utah's Dixie for a second trip to California. T h a t time, however, he turned up the Santa Clara River and crossed the Utah mountains close to the present route of U.S. Highway 91. One "narrows" escape had been enough. O n the lower Colorado River, Smith and his men were ambushed by the hostile Mojave who were seeking revenge for their losses to the other trappers earlier that spring. 21 Several of Smith's men were killed, forcing the survivors to walk to California.

California continued to dominate both Mexican and American interests in the Dixie area. In the fall of 1829 Sehor Antonio Armijo led an expedition from New Mexico to California by way of northern Arizona, the Crossing of the Fathers, the Rio Virgin at St. George, and the lower Colorado River. 2 " His expedition, in effect, opened the Old Spanish Trail. During the next decade and a half annual caravans regularly 11 Maurice S. Sullivan. The Travels of Jedediah Smith (Santa Ana, Calif.: Fine Arts Press, 1934), pp. 70-75. " J a m e s Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie of Kentucky, ed Timothy Flint, in Reuben Thwaites, Early Western Travels. 1748-1846 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1905), pp. 131-40. ~:1 Sardis W. Templeton, The Lame Captain: The Life and Adventures of Pegleg Smith (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1965), pp. 5 5 - 5 8 . â&#x20AC;˘4 Dale L. Morgan, Jed Smith and the Opening of the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1952), pp. 237-40. ""LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles ...Including Diaries of Antonio Armijo and Orville Pratt (Glendale Calif.: Arthur H Clark Co., 1954), pp. 155-70.

117

Forces That Shaped Utah's Dixie

traded between Santa Fe and Los Angeles, however, not along Armijo's route, for geography and the hostile Mojave caused traders to look to better routes north from Santa Fe into Colorado, then west into Utah through Moab, Salina Canyon, Mountain Meadow, and on south and west where they picked up his trail on the lower Virgin River and Las Vegas Springs. The result was an effective bypassing of much of Utah's Dixie.

Still, traders and raiders had some impact on the region. Ute Chief Walkara and mountain men Bill Williams, "Pegleg" Smith, and others conducted frequent raids into California for Spanish horses.20 They and M Templeton, Lame Captain, p. 91. See also Paul Bailey, Walkara, tain (San Antonio: Publishing House of the Southwest, 1962), pp. 29-49.

Hawk

of the

Moun-

Indians conferred with federal officials near Virgin River in 1874.

Standing at left is Maj. John Wesley Powell. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

AS

0*+ >i< M* ' "-\*S '

**6*i

k-

.-.*•>• N.I-«..«!***.'

•J*

*y- \»ti-

'*-»

' •' • '

"

"

• % • • • *:#•

•••* ' - > .-;Vf^.. • £ . . . .v r ; 1 •* -Mi • :• .' &*&•••::

J - J *T

. ft " % ' '.».*£,*

;?;), *z.Mt*n *Km

WWJ i^ygjl

%•

nfifif

118

Utah Historical

Quarterly

the regular caravans also raided the small Southern Paiute bands for children to be sold as domestics or slaves in both California and New Mexico. 27 Not only did this slaving decimate the local Indian tribes, but in time it produced a reaction in the Mormon settlers that resulted in a territorial indentured servant law allowing Mormons to purchase Indian children and raise them in their homes, as many Dixie Mormon families did. Mormon men, including Jacob Hamblin and Dudley Leavitt, also married Indian girls so raised. 28 Quite incidentally, an additional Spanish influence was insinuated into Utah's Dixie. In about 1585 the Spanish monarch had sent the recalcitrant Hopi Indians some red-meated cling peaches which they planted and cultivated successfully. Some of their peach orchards can be seen today in the valleys below the mesas. When Jacob Hamblin first contacted the Hopi in 1858, he tried, as had Catholic clerics before him, to convert the Hopi. He, like they, was unsuccessful. But Jacob liked their red peaches and brought some back to Dixie and planted them. 29 And until the days of Interstate 15 one could occasionally purchase red-meated peaches under the sycamores in Santa Clara.

In a sense, the 1844 expedition of John C. Fremont east from California along the Old Spanish Trail represented the end of the mountain men's era, for Fremont's maps and reports incorporated much of their information into an important government document that was much used by later western travelers and settlers. His expedition also harbingered the demise of the Old Spanish Trail and American dominion in the Southwest. For Dixie, he named the river Rio Virgin; he identified the hazards of the narrows, and he proclaimed the merits of the Santa Clara Mesa (Mountain Meadow) for recruiting the stock of travelers passing through the region. ! " By 1846 American Manifest Destiny had begun to annex the Mexican Southwest. Mormon men participated in the process by enlisting in the Mexican War. T h e Mormon Battalion marched west through Santa Fe and into southern California. T h a t venture exposed them to

2 ' Joseph J. Hill, "Spanish and Mexican Exploration and Trade Northwest from New Mexico into the Great Basin, 1765-1853," Utah Historical Quarterly 3 (1930) : 16-17. "s Brooks, On the Ragged Edge, pp. 93-95. "'Hamblin made several trips to the Hopi Indians between 1858 and 1863. See James A. Little, Jacob Hamblin...

(Salt Lake City, 1881), pp. 5 7 - 8 7 ; and Pearson H. Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, the Peacemaker (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1952), pp. 157-58.

30 John C. Fremont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains . .

1842 ... (Washington, D . C , 1845), pp. 249-70.

Forces That Shaped Utah's Dixie

119

Spanish culture and economiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;adobe building and irrigation of arid landsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and to the potential of the country itself."

By 1848 the nation's claims had been staked. Dixie w7as American territory. However, it was the discovery of gold in California that fully unleashed the forces of nation building. First came the westward rush of gold seekers, some of whom passed by on portions of the Old Spanish Trail in lower Dixie. Next came the political organization of the conquered area as the state of California and as the territories of New Mexico and Utah. Three years later transcontinental railroad surveys passed by to the south and to the north of the area,32 as did the pony express and telegraph lines (north) a few years later.

During these years federal policy generally viewed the Indians as antagonists and sought to keep them as quiescent as possible. However, both Indian and Mormon unrest on occasion brought the United States Army into the area. With troops there, the federal government looked for new and better supply lines and saw the Colorado River with an overland route through Dixie as one possibility. Lt. Joseph C. Ives's survey of the lower river at the time of the Mormon War (1857-58) had that as one of its objectives. He also produced an excellent report on the condition of the lower river.1!

The decade of the 1860s brought many new conditions to the region.

Mining amputated the western part of Utah's domain as the territory of Nevada in 1861, and brought Nevada statehood in 1864. More mining, along the Colorado River and later at Pioche and Panaca, Nevada, brought steamers above the great bend of the Colorado River (1866). 34 For similar reasons Arizona Territory was carved out of western New Mexico in 1863. These manipulations brought a changing and confusing political climate to Utah's Dixie.33 It was gold that was speaking, and it was gold that Mormon settlers lacked most of all.

::1 "Journal of Robert S. Bliss with the Mormon Battalion," Utah Historical Quarterly 4 ( 1 9 3 1 ) : 8 3 ; and "Extracts from the Journal of Henry W. Bigler," Utah Historical Quarterly 5 (1932):53.

2 " LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Central Route to the Pacific by Gwinn Harris H e a p (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1957), pp. 5 2 - 6 3 ; Lt. R. S. Williamson, Report of Exploration in California for Railroad Routes in Reports of Explorations and Surveys . . .

1853-54 (Washington, D.C., 1856), 5 : 7 - 8 ; and Grant Foreman, ed., A Pathfinder in the Southwest . . . ( N o r m a n : University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), pp. 147-279. ""Joseph C. Ives, Report upon the Colorado River of the West ( 1 8 6 1 ; reprint ed., New York: D a Capo Press, 1969), pp. 5-100. :|4 Richard E. Lingenfelter, Steamboats on the Colorado River, 1852-1916 (Tucson: U n i versity of Arizona Press, 1978), p p . 73-103. ""Donald Bufkin, " T h e Lost County of Pah-Ute," Journal of Arizona History 5 (1964) : 219-40.

120

Utah Historical

Quarterly

The major forces developing the American Southwest at that time were the United States Army, mining, and freighting and merchandising.

Dixie was only peripherally allied, if at all, with any of these forces. In fact, both her ideology and geography worked against such an alliance.

Utah was not a force in national politics in 1860, nor was Dixie looked to as an alternative cotton supplier to northern factories. And, with the end of the Civil War the transcontinental railroad soon made New Orleans a better supplier for Salt Lake City than St. George because, again, southern Utah was bypassed by the railroad.

But there came on the scene a man of vision. His name was John Wesley Powell, surveyor of the Colorado River canyons and connoisseur of Mormon watermelons. Powell was fascinated with the arid West, its climate, its native peoples, and its potential. His exploration in Utah's Dixie helped him sense some of the West's unique problems, such as the need for a land policy beyond the 160-acre Homestead Act. He saw that irrigated farming required not large land holdings but rather secure water supplies for intensively farmed acres. Powell sensed also that major projects to harness the turbid waters of western rivers to reclaim the desert were beyond the potential of individuals or even small, cohesive communities like the Dixie Mormons. 50 "a John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries, titled Canyons of the Colorado (New York: Dover Publications, 1961).

formerly

Designed by Truman O. Angell, the St. George Temple was built of stuccoed stone during 1871-77. USHS collections.

So-called Mormon couch and hand-made pine bed in the restored Jacob Hamblin home. USHS collections.

Forces That

Shaped

Utah's

Dixie

In addition, Powell was fascinated with the American Indians. Using Jacob Hamblin and other Mormon guides, he explored both the Indians' lands and culture. This early research was basic to the study of the American Southwest Indians and to the founding of the American Ethnological Society.

Powell's work in the Dixie area also led to additional topographical surveys and to the establishment of the Bureau of Reclamation, so much a part of the American West today.'""7 His own work in the region was succeeded by Lt. George Wheeler whose men surveyed into the area in 1869 and up the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon in 1:7 Wallace E. Stegner, Beyond the Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Opening of the West (Boston: Houghton 1954). See also John Wesley Powell, Report Lands of the Arid Regions of the West. . ., (Washington, D . C , 1879).

Below: Deseret Telegraph Office, Rockville. R i g h t : Monument on the grave of John D. Lee, Panguitch.

USHS collections.

100th Second Mifflin, on the 2d ed.

121

122

Utah Historical Quarterly

1871. From Wheeler's report it is obvious that he was much more impressed with the Mormons than with the environs.38 During the next two decades, the primary non-Mormon economic force in the area continued to be mining, which would bring steamers up the Colorado to the mouth of the Virgin River for salt and produce.39 Gold at nearby Silver Reef and in neighboring Nevada brought some ephemeral markets to Dixie Mormons.10 However, in general, the region remained isolated from the mainstream of American history.

Post-Civil War America produced a lot of dreamers and entrepreneursâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Edward Harriman, to name a few. Further west a man by the name of Frank Brown dreamed of running a railroad from Denver to Grand Junction, Colorado, and then down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California with a trunk line to San Diego and the Pacific. And while he envisioned cargoes of agricultural goods, minerals, and paying passengers, one of his major freight items would be coal. Californians needed Utah energy even then, and so did Japan. Brown planned to reach Utah's coal-laden Kaiparowits Plateau with a trunk line from the mouth of the Virgin and upriver through St. George to the coal fields. But Frank Brown drowned in Marble Canyon in 1889. His chief engineer, Robert B. Stanton, tried to continue the project, but could not do it.11 What a scheme though, and if one changes railroad tracks to power lines, the project has a modern quality.

Mormons had their dreamers also, and certainly most, if not all, of the early Dixie Saints dreamed of having a railroad there. George A. Smith, church leader for the southern colonies, proposed running a railroad south from Nephi into Sevier Valley, then to Kanab and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon where a suspension bridge would cross the canyon. Then tracks would continue south to join the Southern Pacific's main line along the Gila River.12 Some dream!

This review of non-Mormon forces affecting Utah's Dixie is incomplete; nevertheless, the major elements have been outlined briefly.

For a number of reasons their impact on Mormons in the region was less "s George M. Wheeler, Report upon Geographical and Geological Explorations and Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian, 6 vols. (Washington, D . C , 1875), 1 : 1 5 1 - 6 3 ; and George M. Wheeler, Preliminary Report Concerning Exploration and Survey Principally in Nevada and Arizona (Washington, D . C , 1872), pp. 1-20.

39 See Phoenix, Arizona, Gazette, April 10, 1895, in which John A. Mellon discusses his river experiences; and Lingenfelter, Steamboats.

40 Alfred Bleak Stucki, "Historical Study of Silver Reef, Southern U t a h Mining T o w n " (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1966). "'Dwight L. Smith, "Robert Stanton's Plans for the Far Southwest," Arizona and the West 4 (1962) : 369-80.

42 Letter of George A. Smith, December 2, 1874, in Daily Union Vedette, October 9, 1875.

Forces That Shaped Utah's Dixie

123

than one would expect for American settlers. First of all, Mormons generally viewed the federal government, the military, miners and mining, and Gentiles as adversaries. Alliances of any kind with them were not easy steps. Secondly, the Indians were a force to be played off against the federal government, if such action were needed. But, finally, Mormons in Dixie between 1849 and 1889 were Americans who heard quite a different drumbeat, a beat determined primarily by Mormon church leaders.

During these decades, Mormonism was theocratic rather than democratic and did not support American traditions of separation of church and state. For most Mormons, church leaders were the final authority to be heard. Mormons obeyed the law of the land but believed the law of God might, and often should, override the law of majority rule. For example, although the majority of Americans did not approve of polygamy, Mormons practiced it in defiance of the law of the land.13 Mormons believed strongly that the "earth was the Lord's and the fullness thereof" and that the Saints were His select stewards for whom God could and would temper the elements.11 Jesse W. Crosby wrote from Los Angeles, California, in 1863 during a very difficult time in Dixie (the people w7ere nearly starving) about that beautiful city with orange orchards covering the nearby hills. He declared that if the Gentiles could do that well, just think what the Mormons could have made of it. After all, look how they had made Salt Lake Valley bloom.ir' Church leaders taught that it was the Saints' mission to set up the kingdom of heaven on earth and to usher in the Second Coming and millennial reign of Jesus Christ. Even the inspired American Constitution was a means to that end. Mormons preached that Zion was being established in the tops of the mountains as an ensign unto which all nations would come for the law and the word of the Lord, a sort of Mormon version of American Manifest Destiny.10 Mormons believed also that God was perfect, that His plan for mankind was perfect, and that man himself could become perfect through faith and work and obedience. Their way to perfection included a special 43 Gustive O. Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1971), is an excellent study of these issues.

44 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 26.

45 Jesse W. Crosby to Brigham Young, November 24, 1863, LDS Archives.

40 Charles S. Peterson, "Settlement of the Little Colorado, 1873-1900: A Study of the Processes and Institutions of Mormon Expansion" (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah 1967) DD ; 11-12. ' ' n"

124

Utah Historical

Quarterly

alphabet, a distinctive cooperative economic system, polygamy, political theocracy, and, hopefully, political autonomy and economic independence. 47 Church leaders, members of the Council of Fifty, and the Saints generally, set about their tasks with a will. However, they were continually kept off balance by national events.

By July 1847 when the first Mormons arrived in Utah, the Mexicans had been defeated, and by February 1848 the region was officially United States territory. Obviously there would be no separate, independent Mormon nation. Next best would be the near autonomy of statehood. In March 1849 the Mormons petitioned for entry into the Union as the state of Deseret and set about to explore the vast region they had defined.18 Again the nation said no. It was U t a h Territory with a lot less land.

T h e area to the southwest had its attraction for church leaders, especially as an all-weather route to the Pacific over which immigrants and freight might come to Zion. l9 Parley P. Pratt had reported on Dixie's mild climate in 1849-50. By 1850 Parowan had been settled, and the following year a group of Mormons founded an outpost of Zion at San Bernardino. Almost immediately, the Southern Indian Mission brought the Mormons into Dixie: John D. Lee to upper Ash Creek in 1852, Jacob Hamblin to Santa Clara in 1854, and Rufus Allen and William Bringhurst to Las Vegas in 1855. T h e missionaries discovered, incidentally, that cotton would grow. Wives came to Santa Clara and settlers to Washington in 1856 and 1857. An experimental cotton farm operated one year later at Heberville, above present Bloomington. Settlements sprang u p along the river during the next three years as the Indian Mission gave way to the Cotton Mission. " W h a t did all this mean to Mormon leaders? First of all, Dixie provided an opportunity to convert the Indians, the Lamanites. Secondly, it reinforced their hoped-for safe route from California to Salt Lake City. It also promised economic independence in such items as grapes for wine, tobacco (for Gentiles, presumably), and for cotton. Their plans for economic security extended even furtherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to the Sandwich Islands of the South Pacific for sugar plantations.' 1

47

Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom.

D a l e L. Morgan, " T h e State of Deseret," Utah Historical Quarterly 8 (1940) : 67-239.

4 " Letter of Brigham Young, December 5, 1864, in Millennial Star 27 (1865) : 4 1 .

5,1 A. Karl Larson, / Was Called To Dixie: The Virgin River Basin, Unique Experiences in Mormon Pioneering (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1961).

51 Leonard J. Arrington, "Inland to Zion: Mormon Trade on the Colorado River, 18641867'," Arizona and the West 8 (1966) : 239-50. ,s

Forces That

Shaped

Utah's

Dixie

125

President Young caught the vision and, with the prospect of Civil W a r ahead, called three hundred additional settlers to the Cotton Mission. They came and settled St. George. Church leaders saw7 the move as more than a colonizing opportunity; it was an important economic mission as well. I n this the Cotton Mission was not unique, as the Iron Mission to Cedar City had preceded it by a number of years.

However, there were some important new dimensions to the Cotton Mission. For one thing, it was a venture in commercial agriculture rather than basic subsistence farming, typical of most early Mormon settlements.

Not only that, the agriculture was based on the use of relatively sophisticated irrigation technology, that is, diversion dams in the Virgin River and a complex of canals, laterals, and ditches to supply water to the cotton fields.'2 Mormons h a d the know-how to divert the water and to turn it to their thirsty crops. But the rains came. Water from the slickrock of present Zion National Park flooded the fields, silted the ditches, and wrashed out the dams. Of course, more labor produced other dams; but often, in the meantime, crops perished in the hot sun. No crop, no sale. No sale, no food and near starvation. Even livestock suffered.

Conditions in Dixie were desperate in 1863 and 1864; yet, these Saints w7ere still asked to send their share of men, teams, and wagons to assist the "poor to Zion." r ! Conditions were desperate in the whole nation in 1864â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Civil W a r hung on, and Indians raided trains westbound across the plains. Some Mormon emigrants were routed through C a n a d a to avoid trouble. Church leaders believed God was, with the Civil War, judging and punishing a wicked nation that h a d persecuted His people. More than ever, Dixie looked like a needed haven both for growing cotton and as an important station on a passenger and freight line into Zion. T h e steamers on the Colorado seemed to be the answer.

Based on these presumptions, church leaders late in 1864 sent Anson Call to build a landing at the high point of Navigation (Callville). Settlers were called to Millersburg (Littlefield) and Saint Thomas (near Overton) to establish way stations and to raise cotton the next ycar. ni T h a t same season work was begun in Washington, Utah, on Brigham Young's cotton factory.'" ''' Larson, / Was Called to Dixie. '"' Ibid. See also A. Karl Larson, Erastus Snozv: The Life of a Missionary and Pioneer for the Early Mormon Church (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h Press, 1971). "*' Melvin T. Smith, "Mormon Exploration in the Lower Colorado River Area," in The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson (Provo, U t . : Brigham Young University Press, 1978), pp. 29-49.

53 A. Karl Larson, Red Hills of November (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1957).

Then suddenly, in April 1865, the Civil Wrar was over and the picture changed dramatically. The transcontinental railroad was abuilding, and before long it was more expensive to get Dixie's cotton or factory goods to markets in Salt Lake City than it was from the defeated South. The venture to freight goods up the Colorado River was promptly abandoned

by Mormon merchants in Salt Lake City. It was the Gentiles who finally steamered a few goods to the site in October of 1866."° 58

Smith, " M o r m o n Exploration."

Forces That Shaped Utah's Dixie

127

During the last half of the 1860s most of Mormondom was experiencing economic and political stresses. Gentile merchants were competing with Mormon merchants for consumers. This economic integration and dependency alarmed Brigham Young who promptly instituted ZCMI and other cooperatives to keep Mormons trading with Mormons. He w7ent even further to consolidate Mormon economic commitment to the kingdom by establishing a number of United Orders. Dixie's was one of the first. It is said that those who hesitated to join were rebaptized "in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and into the United Order."57 Of more direct benefit to Dixie Saints was Young's effort to erect several buildingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the courthouse, the tabernacle, and the temple (all still standing in 1979). These projects had a kind of public works impact, especially where tithes and money came in from other Mormon stakes to subsidize local efforts.

While there is much more that could be said about Mormon leaders' perspectives and about the forces that settled Utah's Dixie, space permits only this brief picture. From it several valid observations may be drawn.

In all of his efforts to support, sustain, and direct the Cotton Mission, Brigham Young did not attempt to cooperate with the Gentiles, nor did he seek active church exploitation of the region's mineral wealth, with 57 Larson, / Was Called to Dixie, pp. 292-93. See also Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1976).

Opposite: Type of Indian corn mill used by early settlers in Utah. Below: Horn Saloon and James H. Low der's store at Silver Reef. USHS collections.

128

Utah Historical

Quarterly

the exception of the lead mines near Las Vegas in 1857. ,s His efforts to develop the Colorado River as a freight and passenger route proved to be shortsighted and ephemeral; and when Brigham Young finally visited the lower Virgin River area in M a r c h 1870 he permitted the Saints there to abandon the mission. 9 I n nearly every instance, church leaders' judgments of the national scene and its implications for the Dixie Mormons were lacking. T h e Civil W a r was not the end. Dixie cotton production remained marginal at best, even in the St. George fields. For Mormons on the lower Virgin it wras less than that. Dixie wine prospered during the decade of Silver Reef but presented Mormons themselves with a multitude of problems.

I n time the cooperatives gave way to direct capital merchandising such as the firm of Woolley, Lund, and J u d d ; and the United O r d e r was soon replaced with private enterprise.

It should be noted also that although Brigham Young gave little support to promoting the Deseret Alphabet, he did through all these years defend tenaciously the principle and practice of polygamy which, along with Mormon theocracy, kept the Saints in an antagonistic political position with the federal government and the nation. These policies forced Mormons to do most of what they did on their own rather than seek natural alliances with the larger community. But then that practice seems to be in line with Young's concept that labor was the primary source of wealth anyway.

Brigham Young's programs for early Dixie did not look forward to the twentieth century and certainly not to the twenty-first. Rather, they turned inward to Zion, not outward to integrate with the world. Whether or not what he did wras best for that time and for Dixie today is speculative. But there are some questions one should ask. Would it not have been better for Dixie settlers to have early developed livestock enterprises or at least other subsistance agriculture? Would not Mormons in the long run have prospered best by prospecting in Pioche, Panaca, and Silver Reef, if not individually, at least under the auspices of the Mormon church? And should not Mormons have worked both as laborers and entrepreneurs so that the wealth of those mines could have come into the kingdom? Why should the Gentiles have had all the good things anyway? Would not that approach have hastened Dixie's move to a modern, prosperous economy, such as it has today? "s Andrew Jenson, comp., " T h e Flistory of the Las Vegas Mission," Nevada State Society Papers, 1925-26 ( R e n o : Nevada State Historical Society, 1926), 5 : 2 7 0 - 7 6 .

58 James Liethead, "Journal," p. 9, typescript, Lee Library.

Historical

Forces That

Shaped

Utah's Dixie

129

People's perspectives of what is significant differ. People's measurements of value also differ. After all, what is success? And, wdiat is important anyway? And, if one uses other criteria—the impact of these Mormon church leaders on people's lives, by which they gave them the faith, the hope, the commitment to build the kingdom, to settle Dixie—then history judges them much more kindly.

Utah's Dixie does have many qualities that are distinct, qualities that have been sustained by her "leftover" geography. Nevertheless, it was the settlers who actually hammered out the pragmatics of survival. It w7as they who tamed the desert and made it bloom. T h e day-to-day heroics of settlement came from the pioneers themselves: Jacob Hamblin riding a caving bank into the raging Santa Clara flood; Daniel Bonelli writing with eloquence to Brigham Young that irrigation water from Santa Clara Creek passed the Swiss settlements' orchards, vineyards, and gardens unused, only to sink into the streambed before reaching the fields; schoolteacher M a r t h a Spence Heywood accepting tuition payment in the form of cow7 pats to fertilize her garden; Brother Nielson donating his hardearned dollars to buy windows for the new tabernacle; George Hicks lamenting his call from Cottonwood; Charles Walker recording his hope for a better life in Dixie.

Yes, and John D. Lee administering to a dying child, George W. Brimhall praying for rain, or Dudley Leavitt giving up his horse to be killed for food as Jacob Hamblin's party returned from the Hopi Indians or his wife "Aunt M a r i a h " Leavitt racing by buggy to deliver another baby. And what about George Brooks, Miles Romney, Erastus Snow, Orson Pratt, Jr., the Gardners, the Gublers, the Hafens, the Toblers, the Stahlis, the Iversons and Sprouls, the Larsons and Jolleys, Bishop Covington, and all the others.

Certainly some of them complained, as well they might. As one family man with three hard years down on the Muddy River asked after abandoning the place, " W h a t did we get out of t h a t ? " And then answered his own question, "Well, I guess we got experience."

T h e pioneers came, they stayed—that is, the tough ones did—and finally they succeeded. These were the people who gave Dixie a special character. And although Mormon church leadership inspired the sacrifices settlement demanded, it did not provide the blueprints for the future. Those came from the national forces. T h e prosperous Dixie of today came only after her geographic barriers had been breached by Interstate 15 and her people had sought alliances with the larger communities of the nation.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; ^ 3

..,."

1,

Fig. 7. Carved stone in facade of Spring City schoolhouse.

Folk Material Culture of the Sanpete-Sevier Area: Today's Reflections of a Region Past

BY R I C H A R D C. P O U L S E N

&W

/ \ R E C E N T L Y READ A S T A T E M E N T by anthropologist Clifford Geertz that began a revolution and a rejuvenation in my perception and understanding of folk material culture. According to Geertz, "meanings can only be stored in symbols." 1 When applied to folk material culture this suggests that the meaning and significance of folk artifacts lie beyond what we normally perceive as history; that u, the discrete items of folk material culture have meaning outside the historical mainstream that produced Dr. Poulsen is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University.

1 Clifford Geertz, "Ethos, World-View and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols," Every His Way, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N . J . : Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 303.

Man

Folk Material

Culture

131

them; they represent thoughts, reactions, and feelings as much as they represent historical movements or processes. Without understanding the symbolic meaning of cultural artifacts, we cannot come to an adequate understanding of the past since these items embody a vitality and immediacy unattainable by the printed word, or even the spoken word in stories, yarns, and facts narrated by the teller of history. T h e symbolic immediacy of folk artifacts is of quintessential importance to our understanding of Utah's past and, in particular, the past and perhaps present of the Sanpete-Sevier communal chain. 2 Man's need for and use of symbols is very likely the single most important element that distinguishes him from the animals. My central thesis here is that the material culture of the folk is a direct product of the symbolic process and that these symbolic artifacts represent much more than simply houses, barns, gravestones, wagons, or other material art forms; they, in fact, represent the latent desires, aspirations, and hostilities of communal human beings. In Utah this is perhaps especially true among the Scandinavian settlements of Sanpete and Sevier counties.

According to S. I. Hayakawa, "the symbolic process permeates h u m a n life at the most primitive and the most civilized levels alike. There are," he continues, "few things that men do or want to do, possess or want to possess, that have not, in addition to their mechanical or biological value, a symbolic value."'However, for h u m a n beings the symbols of value are constantly changing and fluctuating according to societal pressures, family wants and needs, religious changes and discoveries, and, indeed, any influence that works a change in our basic perceptions of reality.

Let me illustrate this fluctuating symbolic process by discussing an item of material culture found in Spring City, Utah. T h e building in Spring City, known now by residents as the Old Rock Schoolhouse, 1 was built of local limestone in 1870, apparently as a schoolhouse. Because of three symbolic signs that were c a n e d in a shaped stone in the front facade (fig. 1), the building was also knownâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and still is by some, I might addâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; as the Endowment House. These symbols from left to right were of the square, the beehive, and the compass: symbols of transcendent impor2 I use the term communal chain quite literally, since the region is bound together by the north-to-south string of towns and hamlets.

J S . I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (New York: Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1972), p. 22.

4 Cindy Rice, "Spring City: A Look at a Nineteenth-Century Mormon Village," Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975) : 267. The school was also called the First West Schoolhouse and the John Frank Allred Schoolhouse. Ms. Rice, I think, adequately makes the point here that the building was definitely built for and used as a school. See pp. 266-67.

132

Utah Historical

Quarterly

tanee in Mormonism as well as in Masonry. T o early Mormon settlers the beehive symbolized industry, as in the work of the bee. T h e compass and square are significant not only as marks in the Mormon temple garment but as symbols in the Mormon temple ceremony, representing truth, moral accuracy, a n d "unbending" obeisance to the Lord and his gospel.

Sometime within the last few years, someone effaced the compass and the square from the structure. Interestingly, the beehive was left untouched. This "symbolic" act raises some important and at the same time difficult questions. Why was the symbolic beehive allowed to remain untouched, and why did the symbolism inherent in the square and the compass cause embarrassment, even anger and indignation, in the minds of zealous moderns, when these very symbols had obviously proven a source of civic pride to these people's progenitors in the last century? It seems important to add again that these marks were set in a building evidently intended as a schoolhouse, not a religious edifice.7' Likely, the answers to these questions are twofold: first, the square and compass were destroyed because of their importance in the Mormon temple ceremony, while the beehive, which has little symbolic significance in the ceremony itself, was allowed to remain; second, because of a cultural lag from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, these vernacular symbols, openly displayed, have proven a profanation to some twentieth-century Mormons. As Mark Leone has written, Artifacts from the past symbolize attitudes a n d behavior of the past, symbols motivate behavior. Therefore, the artifacts (symbols) of the past m a y conflict and even impede new a n d different behavior. 0

Whereas the square and compass may have outwardly symbolized accuracy and precision (thus their placement on a school building) during the last century, they have now come to represent highly esoteric, secret rituals that may only be seen and discussed within the confines of a Mormon temple. When viewed in this light, the destruction of these symbols is understandable. 7 " Allen Roberts, current coowner of the "schoolhouse," speculates that Orson Hyde may have used the building for religious purposes during his later years in Spring City. However, there seems to be strong evidence, as both Roberts and Rice note, that the building was constructed for and used as a school. See Roberts's article, " T h e 'Other' Endowment House," Sunstone 3 (July-August 1978) : 9-10. O n p. 10 Roberts notes that the square and compass could "just as easily represent principles of exactness and accuracy in education as they might represent aspects of temple ceremonies." His point is well taken, but he underplays the importance of cultural symbols: their function is specific and limited. Symbols only represent what their culture dictates. " M a r k Leone, "Why the Coalville Tabernacle H a d to Be Razed," Dialogue 8 (Snrine 1973):31.

V P S 7 When I read a version of this paper in the fall of 1977 at Snow College, a member of the audience, who is a temple worker at the Manti Temple, volunteered the information that

Folk Material

Culture

133

This single instance of symbolic destruction has larger meaning for the folk material culture of the Sanpete-Sevier region than we might expect. Many have wondered why this region, settled and populated by Scandinavians fresh from their motherlands, is so leanly endowed with Scandinavian artifacts. Such musings are based in fact; for, beyond the cemeteries of the two counties, which are richly supplied with markers bearing the names of deceased Scandinavians, Scandinavian material influence is not abundant. 8 T h e architecture of the region, for example, is largely ScottishEnglish, except for log construction, which probably h a d its genesis in northern Europe. T h e reasons, I think, for the conspicuous lack of Scandinavian folk material culture in the Sanpete-Sevier region can be traced to a loss of symbols, a loss conditioned by an earlier loss of language.

According to Hayakawa, "of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated." 9 Indeed, without language the process of abstraction would be virtually impossible; and without abstraction there is no symbolism, since symbols always embody more than the things they represent.

It is a well-documented fact that in the early days of the Mormon settlement in U t a h the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints actively campaigned against the retention of the mother tongues and folk customs of Scandinavian immigrants. A letter from the F'irst Presidency of the church dated as late as April 4, 1903, stated: T o the Swedish Saints: Instructions . . . in R e g a r d to the H o l d i n g of Meetings, Amusements, Social Gatherings, etc. . . . T h e counsel of the C h u r c h to all Saints of foreign birth w h o come here is t h a t they should learn to speak English as soon as possible, a d o p t the m a n n e r s a n d customs of the American people, fit themselves to become good a n d loyal citizens of this country, a n d by their good works show t h a t they are true a n d faithful L a t t e r - d a y Saints. 1 0

the symbols were effaced by local brethren at the order of Ezra Taft Benson. This admission affirms admirably, I think, my notion that we are unable to live with certain historical symbols, or with those symbols whose contexts have become socially unacceptable. s Thomas R. Carter, doctoral candidate in folklore at Indiana University, has been studying the folk architecture of Sanpete County for over a year under the auspices of the U t a h State Historical Society. Carter has found that although most of the county house fagades are of EnglishScottish traditional form (with some exceptions), a number of the floor plans may have Scandinavian antecedents. If this is true, it seems to me we are dealing again with the repression of symbols. If Scandinavian builders had to cover their tracks, so to speak, with the accepted, outward forms of the dominant culture, then they were perpetrating their building traditions behind a negative symbol. Symbolically, this has much in common with the schoolboy who cuts his hair to please his parents, or the principalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;without changing his belief in the goodness of long h a i r : what the cut itself represents is not cleanliness but repression in the mind of the boy.

0 Hayakawa, Language, p . 24.

10 Deseret Evening News, April 4, 1903.

134

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Earlier, the Deseret News, speaking of " T h e Scandinavian Element," had complimented these Utah immigrants on "the facility with which theyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the younger portion especiallyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;acquire the language and customs of the country." 11 T h e message seems clear that U t a h Scandinavians were to abandon mother tongue and liuropean folkways.

In my opinion, this severe acculturation of the Scandinavians led to a highly structured loss of symbols that I call the vernacular regression.

It may be diagramed as follows: [church, social pressures] M o t h e r County (cultural identity)

Utah Acculturation (loss of (loss of symbols) language)

Loss of culture (loss of identity) 12

By acculturation I mean simply a process of intercultural borrowing between diverse peoples, resulting in new and blended patterns. With these new7 and blended patterns, of course, arise symbols that are adopted from the blending culture. With the U t a h Scandinavians the process was not organic but forced and severe, resulting in an abrupt abandonment of culture rather than a slow loss.

If one proceeds from north to south, say from Fairview to Richfield, one experiences a noticeable loss of symbols in historical artifacts. This is especially evident in the material culture of burial. T h e cemetery just west of Fairview is rich in symbols; numerous footstones accompany a large share of the markers (fig. 2 ) , and the lamb as a burial motif is present on many of the stones. T h e picture of the grave of Robert Briggs shows not only the accompanying footstone but a burial mound to the west (fig. 3 ) . Many primitive cultures heaped mounds of earth or stones over the final resting places of their departed dead, and the practice is still evident in parts of U t a h today.

Footstones, which bear only the initials of the deceased, are almost always placed to the east of the headstone. This reinforces the symbolic 11 William Mulder, "Scandinavian Saga," The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: U t a h State Historical Society, 1976), pp. 180-81.

12 W h a t the diagram suggests is that despite the fact that most of the Scandinavian immigrants were Mormons, recently converted by American missionaries, when they arrived in U t a h they were still part and parcel of the mother country, and thus enjoyed a cultural identity.

But immediately after arrival (and I might add this has been true in other Scandinavian settlements, such as the Icelandic group in Spanish Fork, U t a h ) , a rapid loss of the mother tongue began, which is to lie partially expected when a group of people is transplanted to another culture with a different language. However, this loss of language was hurried and made critical by pressure from the Mormon church and subsequent social pressures from the dominant group. With the loss of the mother tongue and the assimilation of English, the Scandinavians began to acculturate, which produced a loss of symbols, both linguistic and material. With the loss of symbols came a loss of Old World culture with a subsequent loss of identity as a discrete folk group. Thus, in a vernacular sense, the group has regressed.

Folk Material Culture

135

Christian burial: face to the cast to greet the morning of the resurrection. The traditional shapes of grave markers, which have come to us from antiquity, are virtually unstudied. But the significance of the grave markers is largely if not exclusively symbolic, since they are monuments to those who have ceased to be, who have gone back to the earth. To my knowledge, there is no widely used set of symbols that represents living, or birth, or the notion of a prelife, like the gravestone represents death.

Interestingly, our most abstract and symbolic use of languageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;poetryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; is concerned largely with death. It is no surprise then that folk material culture in Utah and elsewhere reaches its most abstract and profound statements when connected with the dead; and in the cemeteries, cut in stone, etched in cement, and carved in wood, one sees depicted man's concern with what he feels is most important, most mysterious, and most terrifying.

As mentioned, a prevalent burial symbol in the Fairview cemetery is the lamb. Pictured here (fig. 4) is a set of lamb stones. Lambs and doves are prevalent burial motifs throughout Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; but to say that the lamb reliefs in Fairview have definite Scandinavian antecedents would be conjectural. It is true, however, that as one proceeds from north to south into Sevier County the lamb as burial symbol becomes less and less frequent.

The most ubiquitous burial symbol in Mormon cemeteries of the West is the handclasp motif. However, the handclasp motif does not predominate in the Fairview cemetery. But as one moves to the south the handclasp becomes the dominant symbol, as it is in most Utah-Mormon cemeteries. This provides a graphic representation of the loss of native burial symbols, accompanied by a subsequent adoption of the symbols of the dominant culture: one manifestation of the vernacular regression.

This highly metaphoric symbol, the handclasp, represents the Mormon burial in much the same way the winged death's-head connotes Puritan burial. About Puritan burial symbols Alan I. Ludwig has noted: By creating symbolic gravestones and the rituals surrounding them, the Puritans wanted to take a more d r a m a t i c role in bringing the eternal closer to a realization in form and thereby infusing the symbol with some of its power. T h e y did so in an act of piety which significantly took place outside the a p p a r a t u s of the institutionalized church. 1 "'

Unlike the Puritans, Mormons have retained the act of piety (evident in the handclasp symbol) within the institutional church. I recently heard '"Alan I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving 1815 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), p. 52.

and its Symbols

1650-

136

Utah Historical

Quarterly

a Mormon convert from New York express the surprise he experienced while strolling through one of the traditional cemeteries in U t a h County.

H e found it very curious that nineteenth-century Mormons h a d openly displayed "their tokens" 11 in a place open to public scrutiny. This is prima facie evidence that Mormons, at one time at least, institutionalized their burial symbols; that is, they were an important part of the religious life of the community. Like the winged death's-head in Puritan New England burial, wdiich represented the flight of the spirit from the soul, the handclasp motif among Mormons is a symbol of transformationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;of transcendence.

14 By "tokens" he meant simply the handclasp motifs. In the Mormon temple ceremony the handclasp is extremely important, and is, in various configurations, referred to as "tokens." What my informant was doing, of course, was judging a nineteenth-century burial motif through twentieth-century eyes, which is precisely what was done in Spring City in the Old Rock Schoolhouse affair.

Fig. 2. Marker and accompanying footstone in Fairview cemetery.

All photographs are by author.

Fig. 3. Robert Briggs's grave with headstone and footstone. Note burial mound in background.

Folk Material

137

Culture

This interesting symbol persists in the north-south movement from Fairview to Richfield and represents the adoption of non-Scandinavian symbols for the graphics of death. One variant in the large cemetery west of Spring City (fig. 5) bears the inscription "we hope to meet again," verbalizing the hoped-for reunion inherent in the handclasp itself. An ornate stone in Manti (fig. 6), unlike the previous example, does not portray the index finger extended. There are three or four stylistic variants of the position of the index and middle fingers in burial handclasps in Utah.

Another burial motif found occasionally in Mormon cemeteries is the open Book of Mormon. One marker in Gunnison (fig. 7) portrays the book as symbol of Benjamin Franklin Christensen's belief in the doctrines of the Mormon church, but the open Book of Mormon on P. O. Hansen's

M

Fig. 4. Group of lamb markers in Fairview cemetery.

Fig. 5. Handclasp on gravestone in Spring City cemetery. â&#x20AC;˘

Utah Historical

138

Quarterly

grave in Manti (fig. 8) represents an achievement, that of translating the book into Danish, and thus has little symbolic value. T h e difference between these two markers becomes clear if one remembers the distinctions C. G. Jung made between sign and symbol. According to Jung, the sign (seen here on P.O. Hansen's grave) is less than or simply equivalent to the concept it represents—in Hansen's case the open Book of Mormon simply represents his prowess as a translator. Jung went on to explain that the symbol, unlike the sign, always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning—in Christensen's case the book represents his conversion, the revelation of the spirit, which cannot be quantified.1" T h e kinds of stones some may find most interesting are often those 7 w ith limited symbolic value—merely signs. Two stones, one found in a tiny cemetery on the east side of Spring City (fig. 9) and the other located in Manti (fig. 10) simply tell the onlooker that the dead were killed by Indians.

Popularly, folk housing is probably the most conspicuous segment of material culture in the Sanpete-Sevier region, and log housing is the most ,1 " See Carl G. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious," Man and His Symbols, Jung (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 55.

ed. Carl G.

Fig. 7. Gunnison headstone displays Book of Mormon.

Fig. 6. Handclasp motif on Manti cemetery marker.

U-mHi •J

'"••PB

>.' it.. f**4

>• f ..*- M .- *...'•* J , . . . W K ^,

•/ *..

a

Folk Material

Culture

139

complex, yet understudied, subgroup. Evidently, true corner notching or timbering (i.e., where the notches at the ends of the logs are selflocking) originated in the Mesolithic with the Maglemosian culture, centered in Denmark, southern Sweden, and northern Germany. 10 Although it is then correct to assert that horizontal log construction sprang up in Scandinavia, it would be a mistake to claim that the log buildings of Sanpete-Sevier were built by Scandinavians who brought the art from the mother country. T h e Irish, Scottish, and English practiced no traditional log architecture in their native lands; nevertheless, they were quick to adopt the Germano-Scandinavian introduction in the early days of United States settlement, 17 and the art spread rapidly and was developed highly by these people.

Besides floor plan, height, and placement and size of rooms, log buildings are also identified and classified on the basis of corner notching used and whether or not the logs are shaped and hewn. O n e Spring City cabin (fig. 11) displays some rather primitive features. Although the logs a,i See C A. Weslager, The Log Cabin in America (New Brunswick, N . J . : Rutgers University Press, 1969), p. 8 5 ; and Fred Kniffen and Henry Glassie, "Building in Wood in the Eastern United States: A Time-Place Perspective," Geographical Reviezv 56 (January 1966) :58.

11 Kniffen and Glassie, "Building in Wood," p. 65.

Fig. 10. Manti marker notes Indian casualty.

. 8. Stone rks grave of nish translator.

Fig. 9. Victim of Indian wars, Spring City.

W0>1&

*VB O 6 1KB t k

' in c 1 z*.

140

Utah Historical

Quarterly

are partly hewn, the corner notching is V, and the ends of the logs are protruding (fig. 12). According to Fred Kniffen and Henry Glassie, "Prehistoric horizontal log construction was universally characterized by round logs notched on the top or on both sides, a foot or more from the end of the log." 18 Most scholars agree that this type of notching, generally called saddle notching, is the most primitive. 19 Two log buildings, the Nathaniel Beach cabin in Manti (fig. 13) and a small log house in the Gunnison city park (fig. 14), display distinct English building tradition with the use of the external chimney. 20 The wide interstices between the logs on the Beach cabin are typically American, 21 but the closely hewn and fitted logs in the Gunnison cabin may mirror Scandinavian influence.22 A fine example of artistic log construction, found in Indianola (fig. 15), with its full dovetail corner notching and carefully hewn logs, may also represent Scandinavian log architectural influence, although such assertions must remain tentative.

1S

Ibid., p. 58.

See, for example, Weslager, Log Cabin, p. 165.

20 Henry Glassie, "The Types of the Southern Mountain Cabin," found in Jan Harold Brunvand's The Study of American Folklore (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), pp. 347-57.

21 See Warren Roberts, "Folk Architecture," which is chap. 13 of Folklore and Folklife, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1972), p. 290. "' Glassie, "Southern Mountain Cabin," p. 345.

10

Fig. 11. Spring City log cabin.

Fig. 12. Detail of notchins on fie. 11.

Folk Material

141

Culture

A structure built partly of logs, the half-stone barn, is a prominent architectural type in the Sanpete-Sevier area.2"' As a type, the barns are English, 21 usually with two levels. The barns are quite common from Fairview to Manti. One barn in Fairview (fig. 16) with a roughly square floor plan was built half of logs, as was another rectangular barn (fig. 17).

T h e fact that these Sanpete barns follow English folk architectural plans is significant in a place settled largely by Scandinavians and supports my contention that the vernacular regression among Scandinavian 83 I have seen other barn types in the state with rock foundations and walls. Charles S. Peterson recently informed me that barns, seemingly made partly of stone, are found in Davis and Cache counties adjacent to the mountains. However, the raised-loft hay barns in Cache County are not strictly analogous to the Sanpete-Sevier types.

24 Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), pp. 133-41.

Fig. 13. Nathaniel cabin in Manti.

Fig. 14. Log house in Gunnison city park.

Beach

142

Utah Historical

Quarterly

immigrants can be seen in the absence of Scandinavian architectural symbols.

T h e same can be said of folk housing in the area. 2 " Although the region is rich in architectural styles of the folk, there is little obvious Scandinavian influence. An imposing stone house just south of Fairview (fig. 18) is a central-hall house, generally called an I or a Nauvoo house. 20 T h e type was an outgrowth of Georgian architectural influences that profoundly affected American folk architecture. However, like the barns of the area, the I house is an English type.

A stone L house 27 in Manti, besides representing the bisymmetry of Scottish-English and American folk architecture (fig. 19), displays an architectural oddity often seen in U t a h : the second-story door that seems to lead nowhere. Notice here, however, that there are vestiges of a small balcony that once protruded over the ground-level door. Austin Fife has explained this trait (tongue-in-cheek) as a place for witches to land, 28 since the doors do not lead anyw r here obvious. However, I believe the upper-level door served some utilitarian purpose. 29 At any rate, the secondlevel door is not a Scandinavian oddity.

An impressive bisymmetrical house in Manti (fig. 20), which is apparently comprised of two identical modular units, is called a polygamy houseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if only because of the two front doors. 30 Such bisymmetry is common statewide, as is the supposed architecture of polygamy.

2 " See footnote 7, however, where I discuss Carter's work.

20 For a discussion of the I or Nauvoo house in U t a h see Richard C Poulsen, "Stone Buildings of Beaver City," Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975) :283. See also Glassie's Pattern, pp. 49, 6 5 69.

2 ' The L house is Austin Fife's term for an I house with a perpendicular, gableend addition. See his "Stone Houses of Northern U t a h , " Utah Historical Quarterly 40 (1972) : 11.

23 Ibid., p. 15.

20 For an explanation of some possible uses and alternatives for the door see my "Stone Buildings of Beaver City," p. 283.

30 For a discussion of the architecture of polygamy see Paul Goeldner, "The

Fig. 15. Artistic log structure in Indianola.

Folk Material

Culture

143

Another folk architectural oddity seen in other parts of Utah, such as Beaver and Willard, is the rubble facade on cither the front, back, or side of a structure. There is no obvious preference of direction or placement of the fagade in the rubble wall construction, and with other U t a h folk architectural anomalies this building trait likely came from the British Isles. Henry Glassie explains the rubble facade as a persistent folk architectural trait in parts of Scotland and Ireland. A "typical" Manti stone house (fig. 21) shows the rubble facade. 31 Architecture of Equal Comforts: Polygamists in U t a h , " Historic Preservation 24 ( J a n u a r y March 1972). Goeldner claims that there was nothing architecturally unique about polygamous housing (p. 14). However, folk belief has it that each of the doors in these bisymmetrical structures was for a different wife, so they would not have to meet each other going and coming. ::1 Notice that the stone in the front fagade has been carefully cut and coursed, while the stone in the south gable facade is of random size and placementâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or rubble. According to William A. Wilson, Henry Glassie explained in a lecture at Indiana University in 1973 that the rubble facade was a persistent folk architectural trait in parts of Scotland and Ireland.

Fig. 16. Bam in Fairview.

Fig. 17. Rectangular barn of log and stone.

144

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Although folk houses in the Sanpete-Sevier area vary widely in architectural style, many of them display motifs common to other parts of the state. These motifs are seen in such embellishments as brick trim above windows. One small Fairview house is embellished with a brick trim (fig. 22) prevalent in other parts of Utah, such as American Fork. A similar trim on a Manti house (fig. 23) is of the same basic motif, displaying again an absence of positive Scandinavian symbols, since similar trim is prevalent all along the Wasatch Front.

Many other folk artifacts, such as hay derricks (fig. 24), some of which are still operable in the Sanpete-Sevier area, deserve further study, not merely as items of material culture but as symbols of the values of a past generation. 32 It must be noted again, however, that the folk material culture of the area does not overtly display distinct Scandinavian influ32 As a typology of western hay derricks, Austin L. Fife and James M. Fife's " H a y Derricks of the Great Basin and U p p e r Snake River Valley," is admirably done. See Western Folklore 7 (July 1948) : 225-39. The authors provide a solid distribution study as well as dealing with morphology. There is, however, little discussion of what the derricks may have meant (and mean) symbolically.

Fig. 19. Stone house in Manti with second-story door.

Fig. 18. Central-hall house south of Fairview.

Folk Material

Culture

145

ences, and that the symbols used in burial and housing are symbols of the dominant English-Mormon culture, not the Scandinavian subculture.

I am not suggesting in my theory of vernacular regression that the Scandinavians of Sanpete-Sevier were a downtrodden, exploited groupâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; although that is always partially true of a subordinate group that tries to exist within the confines of the dominant culture. Whatever the reason or reasons for their loss of native symbols, the Scandinavians were quick to adopt new modes of living and new styles of building as part of their process of adapting to the Mormon frontier.

For the Scandinavians of Sanpete-Sevier, the loss of native symbols made impossible a life that focused on the mores and habits of northern

Fig. 21. Typical stone house in Manti.

146

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Continental Europe. But in place of the old symbols came the new, for without the language of symbol man cannot achieve communication with the world. 33 Central in this idea is the notion that folk expression, although seemingly highly structured and strictured, becomes a liberating force in the lives of people. In repetition, in the establishment and reestablishment of order, the universe becomes vibrant and fulfilling rather than limiting and oppressing.

It is therefore somewhat disturbing that most of the work done in Utah in the recent past with Victorian housing focused almost exclusively on the mansion. These buildings were designed by professional architects and paid for by millionaires whose only relation with the area was exploitation of, rather than cohabitation with, the land and the region. The buildings symbolized only the power of money and greed, nothing of the human spirit, the need for symbolic repetition of forms.

What the study of folklore, and perhaps folk material culture in particular, can do is solidify and explain our cultural roots, the symbols of our progenitors, as well as our own in-group, esoteric symbols. Thus 33 See Mircea Eliade, Myth and |New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 143.

Reality

Folk Material

147

Culture

we may arrive at a better understanding not only of what it means to be humans but also of the psychological and moral significance of the matrix that forms and binds distinct folk groups.

Folklorist Alan Dundes has recently noted that "in folklore, one finds a people's own unself-conscious picture of themselves." 31 This is perhaps especially true of the folklore of material culture, even though, as with the Scandinavians of the Sanpete-Sevier area, much of that culture was acquired through acculturation and adaptation of another tongue, through a degradation and loss of native symbols that were consciously and unconsciously sacrificed for the glory of God, for the establishment of Zion, for the dream of Americanization.

Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore H a g u e : Mouton and Company, 1975), p. xi.

(The

Folklore of Utah's Little Scandinavia

BY WILLIAM A. WILSON

1 HE

SANPETE-SEVIER

REGION

OF

UTAH,

located some distance from major thoroughfares and isolated geographically from the rest of the state, has over the years produced a clisLooking north toward Manti. Mormon temple dominates the rural landscape. George Edward Anderson photograph, USHS collections.

Little

Scandinavia

149

tinctive body of folklore. To understand fully the history and culture of the area, we must know and understand this lore.

Briefly, folklore consists of those stories, songs, rhymes, proverbs, jokes, and anecdotes that are sung or told to us by neighbors, friends, and relatives and that we, in turn, sing or tell to other neighbors, friends, and relatives. It does not, as some believe, indicate falsehood. Folklore may, to be sure, originate in fancy, but it may also be based on fact. It is simply that part of our cultural heritage that is kept alive and is passed through time and space not by the written word nor by formal instruction but by the process of oral transmission, the process of hearing a story and then repeating it to someone else.1 Dr. Wilson is professor of English and history at U t a h State University.

1 For a fuller definition, see William A. Wilson, " T h e Paradox of Mormon Folklore," Brigham Young University Studies 17 (1976) : 40-58 and " U t a h Folklore and the Utah Librarian," Utah Libraries 20, no. 1 (Spring 1977) : 25-36.

150

Utah Historical

Quarterly

In arguing that folklore may be based on fact, I am not arguing that it is always factually accurate. Indeed, as stories are passed from person to person, they are often reshaped (probably unconsciously) to reflect the attitudes, values, and concerns of the people telling them. For example, when the first Mormon settlers arrived in the Manti area late in 1849, many of them lived in dugouts on what later was to become Temple Hill. During the spring thaw, hundreds of rattlesnakes crawled out of crevices in the rocks above the dugouts to plague the settlers. Written accounts of this event state simply that no one was bitten or injured.2 But in the folklore accounts, the people are saved by the intervention of God. One story says that the snakes' mouths were sealed so they were unable to bite.3 Another states: "In all that time not one person was bitten. The Lord watched over the Saints so they could do the great work they had been called to do." 1 What we learn from stories like these is not necessarily what actuallyhappened at a place like Temple Hill but what the people believe happened there. For this reason, some scholars have tended to reject folklore references as unreliable research data. But what we must realize is that in our day-to-day living we are motivated not by actual fact but by what we believe to be fact. The great value of folklore, then, is that it gives better insight into what people believe about themselves and about the localities in which they live than we can often get from more customary sources. The reason for this is simple. People tell stories about those things that interest them most or are most important to them. Because folk stories are kept alive by the spoken word only, stories that fail to appeal to a fairly large number of people will not continue to be told. Thus, in the Sanpete-Sevier region, as well as in any other area, folklore serves as a kind of barometer for what is going on in the society, or as a kind of cultural mirror, reflecting the group's dominant attitudes, values, and concerns.

2 W. H. Lever, History of Sanpete and Emery Counties (Ogden, Ut., 1898), pp. 1 4 - 1 5 ; Florence N. Bagnall, " T h e Story of Gray Hill," in These . . . Our Fathers: A Centennial History of Sanpete County, 1849-1947, ed. Daughters of the U t a h Pioneers of Sanpete County, U t a h (Springville, U t . : Art City Publishing Company, 1947), p. 1 1 ; Adelia B. Sidwell, "Reminiscences of Early M a n t i , " in Song of a Century: A Centennial History and Memory Book of Manti, 1848-1949, ed. Centennial Committee of Manti (Manti, Ut., 1949), pp. 15-16.

3 Barbara Lee Hargis, "A Folk History of the Manti T e m p l e : A Study of the Folklore and Traditions Connected with the Settlement of Manti, U t a h , and the Building of the T e m p l e " (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1968), p. 8.

4 Collected by Larry Johnson in Provo, Utah, 1972. Unless otherwise noted subsequent references to items of folklore will give the collector, place of collection, and the year of collection. All items used in this paper, including background and informant data, are on file in the Brigham Young University Folklore Archive.

Little

Scandinavia

151

But folklore not only reflects the beliefs of the people, it also influences their behavior in significant ways. In the snake story, for instance, the folklorist sees not only a reflection of the people's belief in divine providence but also an example of folklore functioning in their lives as it convinces them of the rightness of their cause and persuades them to push steadfastly forward, trusting in God to come to their aid in times of need.

In what follows, as we look more specifically at the lore of the Sanpete-Sevier region, I shall try to demonstrate the points made above: that this lore has taken shape from the beliefs and attitudes of the people in the region and that it has functioned in their lives to help them meet deeply felt needs.

Richard Poulsen argues that when Scandinavian immigrants to the Sanpete-Sevier area gave up their language, they also gave up their Scandinavian culture. 5 I agree with this statement in general, but I think it would be a mistake for any of us to assume that because the Scandinavians adopted the building techniques of the earlier Yankee and English settlers they also wholly accepted other elements of their culture. As Dr. Poulsen points out, gravestones in the area, though related to gravestones elsewhere, became distinctly Mormon in their use of symbols. And such was the case wdth the culture in general. T h e Scandinavians in the Sanpete-Sevier region did not become Yankees or English; they became Mormonsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which is what the Yankees and English also became. Elsewhere in the United States immigrants from Europe brought with them their native church, and the church helped them keep up ties with the Old World and retain their ethnic identity in the new one. 0 Just the opposite was true in Utah, where pioneer settlers labored to establish a new Zion in which people w7ould put aside ethnic and national differences to become members in a community of Saints.

It should scarcely come as a surprise, then, that almost all the folklore collected in the Sanpete-Sevier region grows out of the Mormon experience. Though this lore touches a broad range of subjects, it can be reduced to four main themes: the struggle to settle a new and hostile land, the struggle to build and maintain a temple, the struggle to come to terms with polygamy, and the struggle of Scandinavian converts to come

"Richard C Poulsen, "Folk Material Culture of the Sanpete-Sevier Area: Today's Reflections of a Region's Past," Utah Historical Quarterly 47 (1979) : 133.

"See William Mulder, "Scandinavian Saga," in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: U t a h State Historical Society, 1976), p. 149, and William Mulder, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), p. 248.

152

Utah Historical

Quarterly

to terms w7ith a new language and with their own h u m a n nature. Space will permit only a few examples from each of these themes.

S E T T L E M E N T LORE

T h e lore of settlement focuses on three main events: the migration of the Latter-day Saints from Scandinavia to their new homes in Utah, the struggle with the natural environment, and conflict with the Indians.

All of this lore emphasizes for a later, more happily situated, generation how hard life was for their forebears. T h e stories tell of sufferings in the handcart companies, 7 of a Danish convert burying his wife and four children on the plains. 8 They tell of struggles with snakes and grasshoppers and drought, and, perhaps most dramatically, they tell of struggles with the Indians, particularly during Chief W'alkara's WTar in 1853 and the Black Hawk W a r of 1867, when the residents of Sevier County had to evacuate their homes en masse. T h e following story is typical: T h e r e was a farm that was south of town. M y grandfather was about fourteen years old, working out for wages or whatever he could earn. H e and another boy were supposed to go to this farm to help do grain. They had gone by foot, and the sagebrush and grass was so tall t h a t it was like trees. These boys were just about to this farm, and they could hear these Indians whooping and carrying on, so they got down and crawled through the grass over to where they could see this ranch.

T h e father must not have been at home at that time, and there was the m o t h e r and a little boy and then a baby. T h e little boy h a d run and hid and got away from them, and the Indians d i d n ' t pursue h i m ; but they took the mother and tied her across a horse and whipped the horse and m a d e it r u n with her. They took the baby and swung it around and hit its head on a tree and killed it. T h e n they set fire to the farm. 9

In a number of these stories the settlers rather than the Indians emerge victorious. In these stories, told probably to belittle the Indians and to give the settlers a feeling of superiority, rugged pioneer women frequently stand up to and then face down marauding Indian warriors, who usually respond admiringly with the statement: " H e a p brave squaw!" In some stories, however, as in the following, the "heap brave squaw" overcomes her adversary with woman's ingenuity: After the Indians and the white people had become a little friendly u p there, they didn't go to the fort quite as often. This one day there was this girl down in town and she was washing. They lived quite

Susan Christensen and Doris Blackham, Monroe, U t a h , 1971.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Little

Scandinavia

153

close to the hills and Indians were camped quite close in the foothills.

T h i s girl was washing; she had a washing machine that was an old wooden one that h a d a wheel t h a t would turn. This I n d i a n brave came down and he h a d long braids. Fie came down and he started acting smart to her and talking smart to her and she couldn't understand him. H e wanted different things t h a t she had there at her h o m e ; she wouldn't give t h e m to him. W h e n she wouldn't give them to him, he grabbed her a n d started throwing her around. She grabbed one lock of his hair, his braid, and hurried a n d p u t it into the wringer and wound it u p tight and fixed it so it couldn't r u n back, and then she turned and fled while he was tied to the wringer. 1 0

Though most of these settlement stories emphasize that life was hard and full of difficult trials, they also make clear that final victory was certain since God, as he had been with the children of Israel, was on the side of the Saints. When, as we have seen, snakes threatened their lives, the mouths of the snakes were sealed. W r hen grasshoppers destroyed their crops, the Lord provided pigweed, a spinachlike plant which the women boiled for greens. One account states: T h e place where the weeds were gathered was down on the south side of the stone quarry where the M o r m o n s first camped. After each day a-gathering, there was none left for the next day. But like the food miraculously supplied to the Israelites in the wilderness, each day, just so the Lord provided for this supply of pig weed each day. 1 1

According to the stories, the Lord also sent his Book of Mormon disciples, the Three Nephites, to help worthy settlers in times of need.

According to Mormon tradition, these ancient followers of Christ in America still walk the earth ministering to the needs of the people. 12 In Manti, for example, a man who had to leave his unplowed fields to attend a funeral returned to find that in his absence the fields had been plowed by three strangers. 13 These strangers were believed to be the Three Nephites. Another man, traveling Fairview Canyon by foot, was caught in a bad snowstorm and seemed doomed to die until a stranger, later assumed to be a Nephite, came out of nowhere, helped him build a fire, and then disappeared. 1 1

10 11

ibid.

Hargis, "Folk History of the M a n t i Temple," p. 25.

For treatment of the Three Nephites, see Austin Fife, " T h e Legend of the Three Nephites among the Mormons," Journal of American Folklore 53 (1940) : l - 4 9 ; Hector Lee, The Three Nephites: The Substance and Significance of the Legend in Folklore, University of New Mexico Publications in Language and Literature, no. 2 (Albuquerque, 1949) ; William A. Wilson, "Mormon Legends of the Three Nephites Collected at Indiana University," Indiana Folklore 2 (1969):3-35, 13 Shirley Green, Manti, U t a h , 1961.

14 J a n e t Geary, Provo, U t a h , 1968.

12

154

Utah Historical

Quarterly

T h e settlement stories also make clear that just as the Lord seemed eager to aid those who served him, he was equally quick to punish those who attempted to thwart his purposes. For example, one story tells that a m a n in Denmark who opposed the Mormon church and tried to prevent converts from immigrating was paralyzed as a result and remained "helpless for the rest of his life." 15 O n this side of the Atlantic, in the village of Wales, when a M o r m o n used deceptive means to gain title to land rightfully belonging to his church, a church authority cursed the land. Since then "it has had several ownersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;some have died shortly after acquiring it, some have lost it through bankruptcy." 1 6 T h e picture that emerges from this settlement lore, then, is a picture of a migration to and settlement of the Sanpete-Sevier region that was divinely inspired and divinely controlled, a migration and settlement in which heroic men and women were required to endure great trials but were assured of final victory in a cause that could not fail. For those who told and listened to the stories, they served a variety of functions. They persuaded people who at times doubted the wisdom of settling such a hostile land that settlement was indeed God's will, since he had personally intervened to assure its success. They also gave these people hope that if they would remain faithful themselves they too might be blessed with God's help. Today the stories continue to teach that obedience brings rewards. They also remind people of the price paid by their ancestors for this land and of the debt of gratitude that is therefore owed them, a debt that can be paid in good works.

15 1(1

Larry J. Blain, Spring City, U t a h , 1975.

Susan Christensen and LViris Blackham, Moroni, U t a h , 1971.

Ox yoke typical of type used in early settlements.

USHS collections.

Little

155

Scandinavia TEMPLE

STORIES

While Mormon settlers of the region were still struggling to subdue the land, they were directed by Brigham Young to build a temple where saving ordinances of the gospel (baptisms, endowments, sealings, etc.) could be performed for the living and, vicariously, for their dead ancestors. T h e lore generated by the construction of this building, the Manti Temple, gives an even more emphatic view of God's involvement in the affairs of his people than does the settlement lore. Story after story testifies to the fact that the temple was built by the commandment of

Above: Elsinore livery stable owned by Henry C. Larsen. George Edward Anderson photograph.

Left: Homemade wheelbarrow in the Wilford Murdock collection formerly at Monroe.

USHS collections.

156

Utah Historical

Quarterly

God and under his direction. Years before the temple was even begun, a young man, later destined to become the temple president, supposedly saw the completed temple in a vision.17 Once the construction was underway the people donated the eggs their chickens laid on Sunday to help pay for the work. T h e chickens themselves, as one informant pointed out, "entered into the spirit of the thing" and laid more eggs on Sunday than on any other day. 18 T h e men who worked on the temple, some of them in dangerous tasks, were evidently protected by divine providence since in the eleven years of construction none was killed and few received injuries more serious than a broken ankle. 19 In the construction of the temple, these men, many lacking the requisite skills and all of them lacking the necessary tools, managed to build walls so straight that later builders and engineers marveled at their accomplishment. 20 When a temple guide was once asked what kind of instruments were used, he replied that he could remember only one, a spirit level, with emphasis on the spirit. 21 Getting enough water for the temple was, as the following story makes clear, also regarded as a providential act: T h e water for the temple is a miracle in itself. W h e n the site was first dedicated for the temple, many people wondered how and where they would get water to pipe to the site. T h e hill it is on is nearly solid stone with very little indication of water except for a small trickle, not even enough for a small cow, coming out of the rock in the hillside. T h e people h a d drilled into the rock for irrigation and livestock purposes but never more than a trickle could be coaxed from the stone. After m u c h prayer, drilling was tried again, but this time a stream of pure water burst from the rock, and it is this water that has been used for the temple and it has been used ever since.--

According to some informants, as the need for water has increased, so has the spring's flow.23 When the temple was finally completed, some of those at the dedication ceremony heard the voices of a heavenly choir, a sort of divine benediction on what had been accomplished. 21 Attendance at the dedication was so important to the people that some, according to tradition, even received help from the Three Nephites in order to be there: p7

Larry Johnson, Provo, U t a h , 1972; Hargis, "Folk History of the Manti Temple," pp.

53-54.

1S

Marilyn Heiner, Provo, U t a h , 1970; Hargis, "Folk History of the Manti Temple," p. 65.

Hargis, "Folk History of the Manti Temple," p. 6 1 .

20 Ibid., pp. 71-72.

21 Ibid., p. 72. " V a l e r i e Hall, Manti, U t a h , 1970.

23 Hargis, "Folk History of the Manti Temple," p. 60.

24 Ibid., pp. 69-70.

111

Little

Scandinavia

157

O n e time my great-grandfather was away, and great-grandmother was home watching the kids, and it happened at t h a t time the M a n t i temple was to be dedicated. And my great-grandmother wanted very much to go, but she could find no one to watch the children because everyone in the area was going to the M a n t i temple dedication. O n the morning of the dedication she met an old m a n at the front gate, and he said, "Sister, I see that you'd like to go to the temple dedication. I'm just passing through; let me watch your kids and they'll be all right as long as you're gone. D o n ' t worry." My great-grandmother did not know the m a n , had never seen him before; but somehow she felt that he was a kindly old m a n and agreed. And she went to the temple dedication. When she came home from the temple dedication, she met the old m a n just coming out of the front gate, and he said, "Well, Sister, you have nothing to worry about," and he walked down the street. And she watched him go, and it seemed that as he just about turned down the path out of sight he met two other old men. And it was felt in the family tradition that these were the T h r e e Nephites and one of them had stopped to help my great-grandmother with the children so she could go to the temple dedication. 2 5

Since its dedication, the Manti Temple has continued to generate a large body of stories that testify to the importance of the work carried on there. One of these stories tells of a man on his way to the temple from Mount Pleasant. As he passed by the Ephraim cemetery he saw a large number of people who claimed to be his deceased relatives and who asked that he do their temple work for them. When he arrived at the temple, the recorder told him: "I have just received records from England and they all belong to you." The names were those of the people he had met on his way to the temple. 20 Another story tells of a lady who had come to an impasse in her genealogical research. Leaving the temple one day she was met by an old man who handed her some papers, told her these contained the names she was looking for, and then disappeared.

She assumed he was one of the Three Nephites, come to help her seek out and do the necessary work for her dead ancestors. 27 One of the most recent, and certainly one of the most widespread, of the stories tells of people on the way to the temple who pick up an old man hitchhiking along the road. He engages them in religious conversation, w7arns them that they are living in the last days, and then strongly urges them to get in the year's supply of food Mormons are encouraged to store in preparation for the dreadful days to precede the Second Coming of Christ. H e then disappears miraculously from the back seat of 2 " William A. Wilson, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964; Hargis, "Folk History of the Manti Temple," p. 68.

20 Shirley Green, Manti, Utah, 1961.

27 Ibid.

158

Utah Historical

Quarterly

the speeding automobile. Most people assume that the hitchhiker was one of the Three Nephites. 28 Although most of the temple stories are uplifting narratives designed principally to edify, a few take on a somber tone of warning for those who do not take sacred things seriously. For example, one story tells that two boys who w7ere cleaning the baptismal font in the temple began to "horse around" and to conduct mock baptisms. One of them was struck dead by lightning. T h e General Authorities of the Mormon church supposedly w7ould not allow him a regular funeral. 29 These temple stories, like the settlement accounts, reveal a God who is deeply interested in his people and takes a strong personal hand in directing their affairs, rewarding the righteous and punishing the sinful. More specifically, they persuade the faithful that genealogical research and temple work must be important to them and that if they are to be worthy church members they must actively engage in such pursuits.

STORIES OF POLYGAMY

Moving from stories like these to stories about polygamy, we enter into a different world. Not many of these can be called faith-promoting.

A few accounts do emphasize harmonious polygamous relationships, 30 though some of them in a rather humorous way. For example, the undertaker in one Sanpete town was quite a drinking man. "Every Saturday night he would come home in his mortuary rig and attempt to get down.

At this point his three wives would emerge from inside the house and carry him in." 31 Another story tells that when the wives of one polygamist heard he was coming to town to pay them a visit, they would make a big pot of beef stew and then boil it down until only pure vitamins remained.

H e would then eat this rich food and have strength enough for them all.32 More often than not, however, the stories tend to reflect the disharmony and heartache that grew out of polygamy. Some focus on the bickering of wives trying to live together in the same household. 33 Others stress the struggles of wives competing for the sexual favors of the husband.

-"Shirley Green, Manti, U t a h , 1961; William A. Wilson, Bloomington, Indiana 1964 â&#x20AC;˘ D a u n a Morgan, Provo, U t a h , 1969; Anita Abbott, Provo, Utah, 1970. For further discussion of this particular legend, see William A. Wilson, " T h e Vanishing Hitchhiker Amone the Mormons," Indiana Folklore 8 (1975) : 79-97. ""David Lee Jones, Manti, Utah, 1965.

30 Peggy Hansen, Salt Lake City, 1971.

31 Ibid.

32 Blaine M. Yorgason, Fountain Green, U t a h , 1974.

33 Susan Christensen and Doris Blackham, Mount Pleasant, U t a h , 1971.

Little

Scandinavia

159

For instance, a story from Mayfield tells that a husband of several wives would put the key in the lock of the door of the wife whose turn it was to share his company that night; the other wives would often sneak the key out and put it in their own doors, thus stealing extra turns. 31 Still other stories actually end in physical conflict. Consider the following: M o t h e r used to tell this story about a prominent family w h o lived in Ephraim. T h e first wife of this fella had quite a few children. She was heavy set and not too attractive. Later, her husband married a younger, more attractive girl. Now, their house was set u p in such a way that to get to the kitchen you had to go through the bedroom. O n e day the first wife h a d to pass through the bedroom, and she was carrying some slop for the pigs. As she passed by the bed her husband threw back the covers, gave his second wife a nice swat and said to the first wife, "See, Mary Ann, what a nice shape she has!" Well, it m a d e the first wife so m a d that she threw the pig slop on both of them. 3 0

The polygamy stories circulating today are usually determined by the attitudes of the families towards polygamy. Those families that view that peculiar institution in a favorable light tell stories that reflect positive images of the institution; these stories, in turn, help reinforce their belief that polygamy was good. Just the opposite is true in families that view polygamy negatively.

Stories like the pig-slop narrative are particularly interesting. In these stories, the first wife appears in a favorable light, the second wife as an interloper, and the husband as a callous individual with little regard for his first wife's feelings. In the stories, the first wife comes out victorious.

Most of these stories are told by women. However well polygamy may have worked when it was practiced, many modern Mormon women evidently identify with the first wife in these accounts, applauding her way of handling a problem they themselves would not want to live with and vicariously enjoying the victory of the mistreated first wife.36 One group of polygamy stories enjoyed by most Mormons, even those who do not like polygamy, are the stories about shrewd polygamists who outwit legal authorities bent on putting them in jail. In these stories the legal authorities appear as rather witless dupes and the polygamists as clever tricksters who manage to continue practicing polygamy despite the prohibition against it. Like the stories about outwitting Indians, these narratives probably have given their tellers a feeling of superiority over 34

Olga Sorensen, Mayfield, Utah, 1930.

Peggy Hansen, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1971.

3,5 See William A. Wilson, "Folklore and History: Fact amid the Legends," Utah torical Quarterly 41 (1973) : 55-57.

33

His-

Utah Historical

160

Quarterly

their enemies. I find it rather ironical, however, that contemporary Mormons, who pride themselves on their obedience to the law, still take great pleasure in telling stories in which their ancestors successfully flaunt it.

The following two accounts are typical: Annie Burns was forced to give her two children to Elenora and exile herself to protect her husband, Ingelbert. U p o n her return to the family, she became pregnant with Ingelbert's third child. O n e night while near the birth of this child, Federal Marshals came to the home d e m a n d ing the arrest of Ingelbert, wanting to use Annie as evidence of polygamy.

Hearing the commotion, Annie fled into a driving storm to the nearest home. T h e butcher, knowing the situation, called to his sleeping wife to hide under their bed. H e d e m a n d e d Annie to get into the bed. W h e n the Federal Marshals arrived, the butcher replied that he had only one w o m a n in his bed. Annie and Ingelbert again were spared the law. 37 O n c e a Fountain Green m a n and six wives were summoned to Provo to face charges of polygamy. W h e n they arrived at Provo, the m a n sent 37

Deborah Choate, Provo, Utah, 1975.

Left: Ephraim United Order co-op store has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Below: Richfield at the turn of the century as photographed from the courthouse.

USHS collections.

&

wi^ 11.

US

***J

Little

Scandinavia

161

his wives into the cemetery to rest in the shade of the trees while he went on into town. In court the judge asked him if the charges stating he had six wives were true. When he answered that the accusations were based on truth, the judge wanted to know where the wives were. " I n the cemetery," the m a n replied, "every one." T h e judge, taking pity on the m a n , dropped all charges against him and let him go free. 38

T h e following story, however, suggests that the legal authorities were at times not the only dumb ones: It seems that the deputies were looking for a Scandinavian m a n who was hiding in his barn under a sled and some sleigh bells. They asked the wife if anyone was hiding there and she said there wasn't, so they kicked at the pile of sleigh bells and a voice w e n t : "Yingle, yingle." n 9 3S 39

Shana Anderson, Fountain Green, Utah, 1967.

Peggy Hansen, Salt Lake City, U t a h , 1971.

Right: Manti Temple, here under construction, iv as designed by William II. Folsom.

Below: Funeral procession for James M. Petersen in Richfield near turn of the century.

USHS collections.

â&#x20AC;˘>

â&#x20AC;˘

.

â&#x20AC;˘

162

Utah Historical SCANDINAVIAN

IMMIGRANT

Quarterly

TALES

This last account brings me to my final group of storiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Scandinavian immigrant tales. A story is told of a fellow who came into Ephraim, where the population is heavily Danish, looking for a man named Edwin Jensen. Approaching the "smart bench" next to the post office, he asked the men loitering there if they could direct him to Jensen's home. None of them had ever heard of the man. T h e stranger then said: " I think he is sometimes called Eddie Butcher or something like that." T o which one of the men exclaimed: "Eddie Butcher! My God, that's me!" 4 0 In an area where practically everyone shared his Scandinavian name w7ith at least three or four other people it is not surprising that one might forget who he really was. Nor is it surprising that the people would resort to nicknames like Eddie Butcher to tell each other apart.

W h a t is unusual about this practice is the names they often gave each other. Consider just a few of t h e m : Olof Coffee Pot, False Bottom Larsen, Chris Golddigger, Stinkbug Anderson, Fat Lars, Dirty Mart, Peephole Soren, Alphabet Hansen, Absolutely Anderson, Bert Fiddlesticks, O t t o By-Yingo Anderson, Pete Woodenhead, Long Peter, Little Peter, and Salt Peter. 11 T h e people who made up these names were people who, in spite of hardships suffered, had obviously not lost the ability to laugh at themselves and at their circumstances. Indeed, this humorous approach to life is the most distinctive feature of the folklore of Little Scandinavia.

Nowhere is this humor more evident than in the numerous dialect jokes still circulating in the area.

T h e dialect joke is a unique form of American folklore resulting from migrations of non-English-speakers to this country. Wherever ethnic groups settled in large numbers, as the Scandinavians did in the Sanpete-Sevier region, the children and grandchildren of the original settlers told stories in which they mimicked the strange dialect and the malapropisms resulting from their parents' attempts to speak English. F^or example, the following Ephraim story could really have come from almost any place in the United States: 10

Jack Thompson, Ephraim, U t a h , 1975.

For Danish nicknames and Danish humor, see Hector Lee, "Nicknames of the Ephraimites," Western Humanities Review 3 (1949) : 1 2 - 2 2 ; James Boyd Christensen, "Function and Fun in Utah-Danish Nicknames," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 2 3 - 2 9 ; Lucile J. Butler, "Ephraim H u m o r " (M.A. thesis, University of U t a h , 1950) ; Grace Johnson, Brodders and Sisters (Manti, U t a h : Enterprise Printing Company, 1973). An excellent recording of dialect humor is Hector Lee's / . Golden Kimball Stories, together with the Brother Peterson Yarns (Folk-Legacy Records, Inc., F T A - 2 5 ) . For comparative purposes, see Richard M. Dorson, "Dialect Stories of the U p p e r Peninsula," Journal of American Folklore 61 (1948) : 113-50.

41

Little Scandinavia

163

Shimmy Soren and Shingle Pete are lamenting the childless state of their good neighbors, Brother and Sister Nielsen. "Shingle Pete, issn't it yoost too bad d a t poor Sister Nielsen iss unbearable." " O h , now Shimmy Soren, you shouldn't say d a t about sveet Sister Nielsen. D u vis d a t effery v u n luffs her, so unbearable cannot be de right vord. It is better you should say d a t she iss inconceivable.'" " O n , no, Brodder Shingle Pete, ve all know d a t Sister Nielsen c a n n o t haf any little vuns, so her condition is not inconceivable. I belief de right vord ve vant in dis situation is to say dat she iss impregnable"*2

But the dialect stories from Utah's Little Scandinavia, though similar to dialect stories told elsewhere, also differ from them, even from those told elsewhere in the Mormon West. The following story comes from Malad, Idaho, where the majority of the settlers w7ere Welsh and where any Scandinavians were in a distinct minority: A certain bishop noticed some contention between a Welsh a n d a Danish brother in his congregation, so he called the good Danish brother into his office a n d said, " W h a t ' s the problem here between you and Brother J o n e s ? " T h e Danish brother replied: "Vel, d a t old Velshman called m e a Danish s. of a b. Now, vouldn't d a t make you upset with h i m ? " T h e bishop replied: " N o it w o u l d n ' t bother me at all; I'm not Danish." Whereu p o n the Danish brother defensively asked: "Vel, den, vat if he called you d a t kind of s. of a b. vat you are?' M : i

The humor here arises, of course, from the conflict between opposing ethnic groups. Other dialect jokes grew either out of the settlers' attempts to accommodate themselves to strange American ways or, at times, from character traits of the immigrants themselves. But although these themes can be found in the Sanpete-Sevier jokes, the funniest and most revealing stories come, I believe, from tensions in the struggle to accommodate oneself to the demands of Mormon church membership. This point supports my earlier contention that Scandinavian immigrants to the area became not English or Yankees, but Mormons. The jokes, however, suggest that the transformation was not always easy. To say this is not to say that the people of Little Scandinavia were not good Mormons; it is merely to suggest that the people used humor as a safety valve to laugh at their problems and to give release to pressures that might otherwise have been their undoing.

In spite of all the stories telling of help received from the Three Nephites and of divine intervention in times of trouble, the Scandinavian settlers, faced with the struggles of day-to-day living, must have wandered 42 Woodruff C. Thomson, "Ephraim Stories: T h e Tellers and the Telling" (Paper read at Annual Meeting, U t a h State Historical Society, Ephraim, U t a h , September 13, 1975), p. 12.

41 Sherrie Sorensen, Malad, Idaho, 1977.

164

Utah Historical

Quarterly

at times if the God of their new religion really cared about them after all.

Thus Lead Pencil Peterson prayed to the Lord for rain in very pragmatic terms: Lord, as you can see if you will look down u p o n us, ve haf a very bad d r o u g h t — d e vorst von dat I can remember. De crops in Cane Walley iss already b u r n t u p . D e r iss no vater in Gobblefield D i t c h ; Andrew Kinnikinick's potatoes are vilting right down, so how can he feed his twelve children? Even M u d Lane iss so dried u p dat de cows come home without m u d caked on der bags. Now Lord, we do vant you to send us rain. But ve vant it to be a yentle ra in—a long, yentle rain. Ve d o not vant a cloudburst d a t vii bring a flood out of de canyon to p u t m u d and boulders in our gardens and fields. And, Lord, ve do not vant a big hail storm like de v u n you sent last year d a t knocked all the heads off de hveat yost ven it was ripening. Ve vant a nice, yentle rain. And, Lord, ve know d a t if you vii tink of it, you vii see the reasonableness of vat ve ask, and how it vii be an advantage to bote us and to you. Because if ve do not get the yentle rain dat vii safe de crops, neither vii you get your tithing. 4 1

The Mormon church's constant requests for financial aid—to build temples, to build churches, to support missionaries, to support the Perpetual Emigration Fund—were a heavy burden, becoming at times more than some of the Saints were willing to bear. Thus, when Brother Olsen was asked for a donation he pleaded poverty. "But Brother Olsen," the church leaders responded, "you have raised more wheat than anyone in town and sold it at a good price." "That's true," said Olsen, "and that's the very trouble, because—just think what the wdieat sacks cost me."43 The most difficult principle for these coffee-loving Scandinavians to follow was the Word of Wisdom, the Mormon health code that prohibits the use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco. Speaking at the funeral of his friend, one Dane said, rather wistfully, that his friend had gone to that "happy hunting ground where there is no pain nor tears—nor Word of Wisdom."46 In a Mormon testimony meeting one day, a brother stood up, boasted that he did not use coffee, tea, liquor, or tobacco, and claimed that these things were only for the "yentiles." When he sat down, another brother jumped up and asked: "Brodders and sisters, vy iss it dat all the good tings shall be for the Yentiles."47 When another Dane, speaking in church, had to confess that he did drink a little coffee on occasion, he argued that it was all right because "it don't boil,"48 a reference evidently 44

Thomson, "Ephraim Stories," p. 24.

Chris Jensen, "My Funny Home Town," Ford Times 53 (February 1961) : 3.

40 Butler, pp. 4 6 - 4 7 .

47 Ibid., pp. 107-08.

48 Ibid., p. 117.

45

Little

Scandinavia

165

to the prohibition against hot drinks. When Old Okerman was brought before a bishop's court to be tried for habitual drinking, he was raked over the coals and humiliated. When asked at the end of the session if he h a d anything to say for himself, he replied sadly: "Vel, Biscop and brodders, you haf all de time asked me how much visky I haf drunk, and scolded me for drinking it; but you nefer did ask me how tirsty I vas." 49 Perhaps the greatest struggle of all was the struggle to overcome self. T h e Mormon church demanded a perfection of its members that few, if any, ever reached. Thus, many of the stories treat humorously the failures of frail human beings to do what they know to be right. One example will have to suffice. Shortly after Salt Peter's wife h a d died, a local sister said to h i m : "Well, you had a wonderful life and a wonderful wife, a wonderful w7ife and a wonderful life w7ith her. Maybe you ought to look around and maybe you can find another woman your age.

There are a lot of widows in town that maybe you could find to marry that's about your own age, and that you could have quite a bit of companionship with." Salt Peter replied: "Yas, yas I guess if I was goin' to consider marryin' it'd be the smarrrt think to loook and find somebody in my own age; but ya know, the young 'uns are so temptin' ' [spoken in a slow drawl]. 5 0 People from Sanpete have enjoyed these stories for years. Unfortunately, many of them have hesitated to share them with others, fearing the ridicule of outsiders. This is most unfortunate. T h e genuine affection I feel for people of the area comes in large measure from my acquaintance with these stories. In them I find something of myself. As a Mormon, I have had to struggle with the same issues the characters in the stories struggle with; and as a h u m a n being, I have had to admit, with Salt Peter, that my actions often fall short of my ideals. When we outsiders laugh at Wheat Sack Olsen or at Shingle Pete or at Salt Peter, we really are not laughing at t h e m ; we are laughing at ourselves, at the same h u m a n foibles we share in common with them. As a result, life is a little easier for all of us. T h e Scandinavian dialect stories, then, are at the same time the most distinctly regional and yet universal of the Sanpete-Sevier lore.

CONCLUSION

O n the hill where Sanpete settlers once fought with rattlesnakes in their dugout homes, the Manti Temple now stands, dominating the land49 50

Thomson, "Ephraim Stories," pp. 13-14.

Susan Peterson, Provo, U t a h , 1972.

166

Utah Historical

Quarterly

scape and symbolizing the religious values that originally brought settlers to the region. In the towns surrounding the temple, in church meetings, in casual gatherings of friends, in family circles, the descendants of these pioneers recount stories that tell something of the price paidâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or at least of the price believed paidâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;by the settlers as they struggled to build the kingdom of God in this part of Zion.

T h e picture I have tried to draw of this struggle is certainly not complete since folklore collecting in the Sanpete-Sevier region has been sporadic at best. As a result, there are many gaps. Behind the goodhumored dialect jokes, for example, one catches hints of darker sentiments growing out of the Scandinavians' realization that in the egalitarian kingdom they were supposedly building, their Yankee and British brethren too often enjoyed privileged positions. But these hints, and others like them, must remain only hints until more systematic collecting can be carried out. Hopefully, this article will serve as an impetus for such work.

But even with more thorough collections to draw upon, the picture can never really be completed, at least so long as the pattern of life in the region continues to change. T h e stories collected to date focus mostly on the struggles to settle the land and to establish the kingdom. Of these stories, those concerning the temple will probably continue to be told as long as temple activity remains a central force in the life of the area; but as the world of Indian battles, of polygamy conflict, and of language struggle ceases to speak meaningfully to the present generation, stories growing out of those events will probably fade.

This does not mean, of course, that Sanpete-Sevier folklore will one day disappear. It means only that it will change. For just as the first settlers and their children created a body of lore as they responded to their circumstances, so too will present-day residents create new lore as they come to terms with the conditions of their lives. And this lore, this sensitive indicator of the public pulse, will, if carefully collected and studied, continue to enlarge our understanding of the Sanpete-Sevier region.

Reflections on a Rural Tradition: A Photographic Essay

BY CAROLYN

RHODES-JONES

/ \ s INSULATED BY T H E terrain around them as by the traditions that gave them life, Utah's rural communities form its heartland. These settlements, cradled by geography and culture, held a shared sense of place and a shared sense of purpose, and those who came to live in them seldom came by chance.

However, the story to be told in the following pages is not about their coming but about their staying: the institutions they built, the land they plowed, and the children they parented.

T h e r e is a kind of poetry written in the portraits and landscapesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an epic of heroism, endurance, and toil but also of gentility, enterprise, and pleasure. T h e tale is not unique to Utah, but, nevertheless, it is Utah's own.

T h e photographs included in this essay were, for the most part, compiled in 1977 with National F^ndowment for the Humanities funds for the Interpreting Local History collection. They illustrate four distinctive rural regions in U t a h : the Sanpete-Sevier valleys, the Bear River region, Carbon County, and Utah's Dixie.

Mrs. Rhodes-Jones is exhibit coordinator for the Interpreting Local History project.

168

Utah Historical

Quarterly

The Way of Life Although livelihoods depended primarily upon agriculture, farming was not the only occupation practiced. As communities developed so did the businesses that complemented the rural economy. Geography and proximity to the railroad played large roles in determining peripheral industriesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from coal mines to salt works to sugar factories.

A Trenton farmstead, Courtesy Utah State

1914.

University

Spring meant shearing sheep in Sanpete-Sevier country.

Crawford's herd near Manti.

Courtesy Brigham Young University.

Roundhouse and railroad yards at Montpelier, Idaho, ca. 1920. Courtesy Idaho Historical Society.

Opposite: Utah and Northern Railroad provided the first rail transportation for Cache and Box Elder crops. Courtesy Idaho Museum of Natural History.

Salina salt works, 1896. George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Rell G. Francis, Heritage Prints.

Allen Hansen harness shop in Richfield, 1920. USHS collections.

M

"X"

Coal mme in Cedar Canyon, Emery County.

Charles R. Savage photograph, USHS collections.

% r %t»%

" v «•

%

*

Dorc and / o / m Henry Higginson hauled crops for the mines at Sunnyside.

USHS collections.

The Community The community and its institutions reflected the life-styles and the priorities of its people. The earliest landscapes and street scenes are evidence of what people thought was important. In these rural communities a Mormon temple often dominates the landscape, but schools, downtown gathering places, and county fairs are part of the scene as well.

St. George Tabernacle was built of red sandstone.

USHS collections.

f

i ":

Pinto ward and school, built in 1866, was demolished in 1950s.

USHS collections.

Manti Temple towers over rural setting. George Edward Anderson photograph, USHS collections.

Front gate of Hotel Burgoyne at Montpelier, Idaho. Courtesy Idaho Historical Society.

Carnival swing at Sanpete County Fair, 1926. George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Rell G. Francis, Heritage Prints.

Salina drugstore and post office.

George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Rell G. Francis, Heritage Prints.

Friends gather for a rag bee in Mount Pleasant. George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Brigham Young University.

'~; fcw

,M^'X^

"jsJ^Sr^C - ,*

- -#*jy*

* " • ' - - » » - " ' ^ .* 4

».%£«.,

a

$k> c*i

n

TfftwfTTfi T\

IIiiiifffifff

*t

m

tF< r

'*&&*

ip i

Anthony W. Ivins home in St. George.

USHS collections. ^•••••••••IHH

i

HI ,* !

IV

^-l

Airs. Gramb's boardinghouse at Silver Reef, 1880s. USHS collections.

I

"'' • sffl

<

f"

The People

Vi *

I

>.

i

•'»*••»

iHLiJI UU

n

Hft

*

•

-&**&

I%#-J

^fe

.'*,

•

•

The people were a diverse lot, just as they should be. Although poverty was a part of "making a go of it" for many people, it was not universal; and gentility and sophistication were as much a part of society as were hard work and simplicity.

The clothes they wore and the houses they occupied tell a great deal about them, but their faces tell us even more.

Dry-farm settlers pose before their first house at Blue Creek in northern Utah, 1911. Courtesy Utah State University.

Sanpete Valley Railway engine. Courtesy Brigham Young University.

Miss Caroline Westenskow of Manti.

George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Brigham Young University.

This Shoshone family from the Washakie Indian Farm posed at Logan, 1909.

Courtesy Utah State University.

Ephraim gentlemen. Courtesy Brigham Young University.

V ',»

•

ft

" - •'

James Thompson family of Elsinore, 1904. George Edward Anderson courtesy Rell G. Francis, Heritage Prints.

photograph,

44

Utah's Ellis Island: The Difficult Americanization" of Carbon County

BY P H i L I P

^

y

F.

NOTARIANNI

%

^ I

Carbon County section gong. George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Brigham Young University.

1 - i T H N I C DIVERSITY CHARACTERIZES

Carbon County. This variety forms a unique cultural resource around which county residents may identify, cither as descendants of an immigrant group or as individuals coming into daily contact with the ethnic mix. In addition to immigration, railroads, coal mining, and laborâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;reasons for the immigrant influxâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; form an intregal part of Carbon County's history and in turn comprise a Mr. Notarianni is a historian with the preservation section, Utah State Historical Society.

ee

Americanization"

of Carbon

County

179

key aspect of the industrialization and economic grow7th of U t a h and the nation.

Ethnic diversity raises questions of ethnicity and the adjustment of immigrants to life in America, U t a h , and Carbon County. Such questions center around concepts of "Americanization" and "accommodation." 1 T h e Carbon County experience affords an excellent opportunity to view ideas of adjustment, for in the main, the county functioned as Utah's Ellis Island, a principal entrance point for numerous immigrant groups, primarily southern and eastern Europeans, but including some thirty-tw 7 o different nationalities.

T h e present investigation examines the reasons for Carbon County's attractiveness, its ethnic diversity, cultural maintenance in a new environment, and the virtual accommodation of ethnic groups to the existing societyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all these factors helping to form a unique social milieu. T h a t this character forms a significant part of Carbon County's past and remains a cultural resource is visually exemplified by the Lynn Fausett murals in the Price Municipal Building. 2 Elements of county history are skillfully and colorfully painted by a native son with ethnic diversity very much a basic theme running throughout the work.

Railroads and the developing coal industry beckoned laborers to the area now known as Carbon County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' In 1882 the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad opened u p the vast coal deposits of Carbon County, and the railroad's coal subsidiary, the U t a h Fuel Company, by 1900 h a d become Utah's chief coal supplier. 4 Four main coal mining camps developed: Winter Quarters, acquired by the D & R G in 1882; Castle Gate, 1883; Clear Creek, about 1898; and Sunnyside, 1900.7' T h e demand for labor proved the major impetus for immigration.

1 O t h e r concepts relevant are those of the "melting pot," assimilation, acculturation, and cultural pluralism. A concise bibliographical essay dealing with ethnicity and "the making of Americans" is R u d o l p h J. Vecali, "European Americans: From Immigrants to Ethnics," in William H . Cartwright and Richard L. Watson, Jr., eds., The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture (Washington, D . C : National Council for the Social Studies, 1973) pp 8 1 112.

2 T h e Fausett murals and the Price Municipal Building are listed on the National Register of Historic Places owing to their historic and cultural significance.

3 O n M a r c h 8, 1894, Carbon County was officially formed, having previously been a part of Emery County.

4 T h o m a s G. Alexander, "From Dearth to Deluge, Utah's Coal Industry," Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (1963) : 237. Also consult Robert J. Athearn, " U t a h and the Coming of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad," Utah Historical Quarterly 27 (1959) : 128-42.

5 Alexander, " U t a h ' s Coal Industry," p. 237; and James B. Allen, The Company Town in the American West ( N o r m a n : University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 169-72. Some discrepancy over founding dates does exist.

ISO

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Responding to the demand for w7orkers were numerous immigrant groups, part of the general influx occurring throughout the United States.

In Carbon County the 1900 census figures indicate the presence of Canadians, Chinese, Danes, English, Finns, Germans, Irish, Italians, Japanese, Norwegians, Scots, Swedes, Swiss, and Welsh. Soon after 1900 South Slavs (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) and Greeks entered the scene, followed later by Spanish-speaking peoples.

How were these immigrants attracted to Carbon County? Coal company agents and railroad representatives often operated both abroad and at Ellis Island, New7 York, recruiting foreign laborers with the promise of work and wealth, often promoting a mythical America. Padrones, or bosses, of a particular nationality also provided workers. These labor agents would supply laborers, extracting a fee from both the worker and company to which they w7ere contracted. In Utah and Carbon County the prime example of the padrone system occurred among the Greeks where Leonidas G. Skliris became know7n as the "Czar of the Greeks." The Japanese labor agent, also providing workers for Carbon County, was Daigoro Hashimoto.0 The grapevine also served to increase immigrant awareness of Carbon County. Once settled, laborers would write back to their homelands and send for relativesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, cousins.

Thus, Carbon County and its mining camps became places of destination for tickets purchased in the old country. One incident illustrating a summoned immigrant's arrival into Castle Gate was recounted as follows: T h e n the train coming, we took the train. W e got into Castle Gate. It was just getting dark, when the conductor started to holler "Castle G a t e next" . . . I t was a little place, a mining town. I got off there in Castle Gate. M y brother and sister thought I was coming the next morning. I don't find nobody there. . . . T h e r e was snow on the ground and you coming out of that air on the train you know, I shiver. T h e litle depot was a box car. T h e best thing I thought for me is I got a piece of paper and write my sister's n a m e and my brother's name. 7

Another significant aspect to the influx of immigrant laborers was their apparent fluidity of movement. That is, the workers often moved from Colorado to Utah and to other work sites throughout the Intermountain region. The flow of men between the coal areas of Colorado "'Helen Z. Papanikolas, Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah, 2d ed. rev., 120-33, reprinted from Utah Historical Quarterly 37 (1970) ; Helen Z. Papanikolas and Alice Kasai, "Japanese Life in U t a h , " Helen Z. Papanikolas, ed. The Peoples of Utah (Salt Lake City: U t a h State Historical Society, 1976), pp. 336-42. " Interview with Tony Priano, Helper, U t a h , July 29, 1975.

"Americanization" of Carbon

County

181

and Carbon County appears to have been especially strong. 8 Such a phenomenon transcended nationality and occurred among metal miners as well as coal miners.

Carbon County's ethnic diversity was characteristic almost from the outset or at least from the formation of the area into a distinct county in 1894. T h e county's foreign-born population in 1900 and 1920 was: 1900 Australia Austria Canada China Denmark England Finland France Germany Greece Ireland Italy

Japan Mexico Netherlands Norway Poland Russia Scotland Sweden Switzerland Wales Yugoslavia Others

1920

.

— 28 3 96 294 163 — 29 •

—

.

17 374 125 — — 11 — •

—

113 36 18 202 — 325

6 315 33 16 84 477 83 110 53 869 13 1,215

516 113 4 19 19 40 115 61 11 80 162 136

Census statistics reflect only the settled population. T h e movement of workers from place to place is not injected; nevertheless, the figures do illustrate the diverse elements, and the fluidity factor would in all probability inflate the figures.9 T h e various mining camps were themselves multiethnic, reflecting the county's quality. I n 1903 in Castle Gate there w7ere 356 Italians, 108 s This observation was particularly evident in the pension application files located at the United Mine Workers of America Office in Price, U t a h . Similar trends were also discovered in the personnel files of the U t a h Copper Co. ( K e n n e c o t t ) , once located at the R. C. Gemmell Club, Bingham Canyon, U t a h . s U.S., Department of Interior, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Population, vol. 1 (Washington, D . C : Government Printing Office, 1903), p. 7 8 9 ; U.S., Department of Commerce, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population, vol. 3 (Washington, D . C : Government Printing Office, 1922), p. 1040.

English-speaking, and 10 Austrians. Sunnyside contained 358 English, 246 Italians, and 222 Austrians. Clear Creek had 128 Finns, 172 Italians, and 95 English; while 181 English, 126 Finns, and 74 Italians lived at WTinter Quarters. By 1914 the population in these four camps was divided as follows: 1,421 Americans, 663 Italians, 138 Japanese, 1,245 Greeks, 434 Austrians, 97 Finns, 21 Negroes, 21 French, 12 Germans, 7 Scandinavians, and 1 Swede. The towns of Price and Helper contained a conglomerate of all groups.10 in Eastern Utah Advocate, December 3, 1903: State of U t a h . Second Report of the State Bureau of Immigration, Labor, and Statistics, 1913-14 (Salt Lake City, 1915). p. 95. It must be noted that "Austrians" were in reality Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. An idea of the ethnic mix in Price and Helper can lie found in the Utah State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 19031904, vol. 2. 2d. ed. (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk & Co., 1903), pp. 118, 2 6 2 - 6 5 : and vol. 5, 1914, pp. 85, 171-77.

Serbian flute.

Peoples of Utah Institute collections.

District school where Scofield mine disaster victims were taken.

George Edward, Anders oti photograph, USHS collections.

'Americanization"

of Carbon

183

County

How7 did immigrants respond to the new environment encountered in Carbon County's camps and towns? In most cases their first impulse was to congregate where others of the same nationality resided. This was either voluntary or forced, as wdien " J a p ' sections of towns developed. Castle Gate had its Italian section, while Helper by 1914 had become an important area of settlement for South Slavs attracted by business opportunities there. Earlier, Finns had settled in the Scofield and Clear Creek area where they suffered greatly in the mine disaster of 1900. Greeks w7ere labeled as "clannish," but the basic need to be among the familiar was only a natural response.

In one instance, a U t a h Fuel Company officer offered an interesting explanation of the situation i n a 1917 letter regarding ventilation in the amusement halls at Sunnyside and Castle Gate: Opposite: Residence of Paul and Barbara Pessetto between Castle Gate and Helper served as a halfway house, ca. 1915. USHS collections.

T4 f

pBbk

184

Utah Historical

Quarterly

O u r p r i m a r y object in building the a m u s e m e n t halls is to m a k e it a kind of a center for people in the camps, instead of as at presentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the tendency for each nationality to keep to themselves. N o t h i n g will tend to help this situation m o r e t h a n a rapid change of atmosphere in the halls eliminating the present practice of Americans moving to other seats in case Greeks or Italians take seats immediately adjoining them. T h e p r i m a r y reason for m o v i n g usually being that bodily odor from the foreigners is offensive.

Any apparent leniency directed toward the Greeks or Italians was not afforded the Japanese as the same official in various telegrams sought a separate Japanese Hall and " J a p " pool hall for Sunnyside. 11 Immigrants sought security among those who spoke the same language a n d who could offer assistance with such exigent needs as finding a job. These people brought with them language, religion, beliefs, and customs, products of their cultural heritage. Congregation in camps and distinct sections of towns only accentuated the elements of cultural difference. T h e establishment of fraternal groups, coffeehouses, boarding houses, churches, and, later, businesses, all aimed at security and cultural maintenance. Assimilation into American society was not a primary goal because Japanese and most Mediterranean immigrants initially viewed themselves as only temporary workers in America.

Finnish saunas dotted the Scofield and Clear Creek countrysides; individual as well as public saunas enabled the Finns to enjoy their traditional baths created by running water over hot rocks. Greek miners suffering from homesickness, especially because women w7ere not initially present to honor them with feasts on their name days, gathered in coffeehouses for social life. I n the Helper and Price coffeehouses, basil plants lined the window sills, and calendars and pictures of Greek patriots hung on the walls. M e n drank Turkish coffee and smoked the nargile, played cards, read Greek newspapers, and spent hours talking. Sunday dress for Greeks, and most immigrants, meant a sign of respectability. In Helper, Greeks utilized the Y M C A showers to wash prior to donning suits for Sunday visits to the coffeehouse.12 Fraternal organizations flourished in Carbon County. Italians organized Stella D'America ("Star of A m e r i c a " ) , Castle Gate ( 1 8 9 8 ) ; 11 C. H . Gibbs to A. H. Cowie, vice-president and general manager of U t a h Fuel C o . ; telegrams from A. H . Cowie, April 3 and April 12, 1917, M S 154, box 12, U t a h Fuel Co. Manuscripts, Special Collections, Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

12 For a geographical study of the Finns, with emphasis on the Great Lakes but some m a p references to U t a h , see Matti E. Kaups, " T h e Finns in the Copper and Irons Mines of the Western Great Lakes Region, 1864-1905: Some Preliminary Observations," in Michael G. K a m i , Matti E. Kaups, Douglas J. Ollila, Jr., eds., The Finnish Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region: New Perspectives (Vammala, Finland: Institute for Migration, 1975) pp. 5 5 - 8 8 . Research on the Finns in Carbon County is in progress by Craig Fuller, Local History Project, U t a h State Historical Society. O n the Greek coffehouses consult Papanikolas, Toil and Rage, pp. 118-19.

"Americanization" of Carbon

County

185

Principe Di Napoli ("Prince of N a p l e s " ) , Castle Gate (1902) ; Fratellanza Minatori ("Miners Brotherhood"), Sunnyside (1902) ; and Societa Cristoforo Colombo ("Christopher Columbus Society"), Castle Gate (ca. early 1910s). T h e Slovenska Narodna Podporna Jednata ("Slovene National Benefit Society"), affectionately called the "Snappy J," served Slovenes in Carbon County. (The Slovenian National H o m e in Helper still functions and serves as a testimony to the importance of such groups.)

Croatian lodges were also founded in the county, as well as lodges of the Jugoslav Socialist Federation. These organizations were formed to help mitigate the problems of employment in an industrial society. Some functioned as types of labor unions, while others, such as the Jugoslav Socialist Federation and branches of the Italian Socialist Federation in Scofield and Clear Creek, were political. Economic and artistic needs were served by various groups. Greeks also had organizations—Pan Hellenic Unions—fostered by Greece to nourish the idea of repatriation. 1 ' T h e immigrants sought to maintain various customs and traditions while making a living in Carbon County. Italians were either accompanied by or h a d sent for wives earlier; but by 1910-17 Greeks, South Slavs, and Japanese were taking picture and "mail order" brides from their respective nationalities, with some returning to the homeland to marry. Weddings, funeral processions, open-casket viewings, and the memorial wheat of the Greeks were important customs celebrated in traditional ways. Ethnic foods simmered in all parts of Carbon County.

"American" children w 7 ondered in horror why pork entrails were being cleaned on public w7ater spouts. Yet, outdoor ovens in Helper summoned many a child, of immigrant parentage or otherwise, to indulge in a piece of homemade bread after school. 14 Folk beliefs continued in many households. Belief in the occult and in folk cures was especially significant and most often transmitted by the women. T h e mal occhio or "evil eye"—the idea that h u m a n envy could 11 Philip F. Notarianni, "Italian Fraternal Organizations in U t a h , 1897-1934," Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975) : 172-87; Joseph Stipanovich, "Falcons in Flight: T h e Yugoslavs," Peoples of Utah, pp. 3 7 0 - 7 1 . Evidence of the existence of the Italian Socialist Federation is found in issues of 77 Proletario (New Y o r k ) , June 26, 1904, and October 30, 1904, on microfilm, Immigration History Research Conter, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. State locals were listed, U t a h having two branches where one R. Anderlini apparently served as president. Information on the Slovenian National Home, listed on the U t a h State Register of Historic Sites, is located at the preservation office, U t a h State Historical Society. Also see Helen Z. Papanikolas, " T h e Exiled Greeks," Peoples of Utah, pp. 417-18.

44 Papanikolas and Kasai, "Japanese Life in U t a h , " Peoples of Utah, p. 342; Papanikolas, Toil and Rage, pp. 139-42, 1 5 1 ; Joseph Stipanovich, The South Slavs in Utah: A Social History (San Francisco: R&E Associates, 1975), p. 7 5 ; Lucile Richens, "Social History of Sunnyside," M S A211, WPA Collection, U t a h State Historical Society; interview with Al Veltri, December 18, 1971, Helper, U t a h , by Philip F. Notarianni and A. Kent Powell, American West Center, University of U t a h .

186

Utah Historical

Quarterly

cause h a r m and could be transmitted by a mere glanceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;was held by many southern European peoples. Among Carbon County Greeks the authority for folk beliefs prescribed cures, explained dreams, predicted the sex of unborn children, and read the shoulder blade of the Easter lamb, feeling its bumps to foretell what the year would bring. 15 T h e desire for cultural maintenance was natural, but the realities of the new environment often produced irony in the attempt. I n trying to maintain and foster cultural ties, immigrants altered or adapted to new conditions, customs, traditions, and beliefs; thus their practices were assuming new meaning and form. Gradual change occurred as immigrants came into contact with American institutions and ideas, but those who favored 100 percent "Americanization" of the new immigrants sought to expedite the process by the abrupt stripping away of cultural differences. It must be said, however, that many viewed this Americanization as a panacea for the country's ills in the post-World W a r I period.

As mentioned earlier, some immigrant men began taking brides in the post-1910 years. Greek women wrere summoned from Greek villages by anxious miners. In some cases prospective brides arrived alone with tags on their clothing that identified future husbands. Such was the case of one Cretan woman who traveled to Carbon County and was left waiting near the railroad tracks in a sagebrush flat thirty miles from Helper. Greek women traveling alone were burdened w7ith the concern that their morals would be suspect, since in the homeland daughters were chaperoned w7ith "paranoid obsession." At the Latuda Japanese camp second cousins were wed, a marriage unthinkable in Japan. Likewise, South Slavs chose brides through correspondence, not only contrary to custom but beset with many difficulties.1G Italian, Greek, and South Slavic men also eventually intermarried with women of other immigrant groups or resident American women. T h e Japanese, however, stayed to themselves and did not attempt to enter American social life. Thus, while clinging to old ideas, the immigrants developed new approaches and responses.

T h e role of unionization in creating a gradual change in immigrant life was especially significant in Carbon County. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unions struggled for life in Carbon County, and in that fight the immigrants were of signal importance. During the lu Philip F. Notarianni, "Italianita in U t a h : T h e Immigrant Experience," Peoples of Utah, p. 327; Papanikolas, Toil and Rage, pp. 149-50.

111 Papanikolas, Toil and Rage, pp. 141-42; Papanikolas and Kasai, "Japanese Life in U t a h , " p. 342; Stipanovich, South Slavs, p. 75.

"Americanization" of Carbon

County

187

strikes of 1903, 1922, and 1933, Italian, Finnish, South Slavic, and Greek miners figured prominently, as they did in keeping the fire of unionism burning throughout the period. 17 T h e activities of various union organizers, such as Frank Bonacci, make this especially evident.

Many immigrants viewed unionism as a legitimate remedy for solving problems associated with work in mines. T h e concept was new7 to some, but others, such as northern Italians who were familiar with unions in the old country, attempted to articulate grievances to fellow workers in an effort to improve the work place. Thus, various immigrant groups came together for a common causeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a cause that transcended ethnic lines. T h e contact w7as not ahvays harmonious, as some groups, such as the Greeks in 1903, were used as strikebreakers. Mexicans w7ere brought in primarily after the 1920s. As in other areas the Japanese appeared to have steered clear of unionization efforts.

Once an economic base had been achieved, many immigrants left the labor ranks and entered business and the professions; again, this effected a gradual change in behavior. After the 1903 strike Italians, mostly northerners, were blacklisted from Castle Gate and settled in Helper where they founded a bank and opened stores, saloons, markets, and other small businesses. Many of their children later entered the professions. Also in Helper the South Slavs found an environment conducive to their seeking improved status; they initiated business ventures, some, such as the Mutual Mercantile Company, in joint interest with other nationalities. Greeks likewise broke the labor ranks in the 1920s. O n one occasion Mexican laborers entered Carbon County to work under a Greek contractor w7ho was bringing in a water line through Price Canyon. Upon completion of the contract many of the Mexicans remained to work in the mines where they experienced many of the same conditions as other immigrant groups. 18 Some Italians turned to farming, while other Italians, Greeks, and Basques herded goats and sheep. T h e first Basque sheepman in Clark's Valley was chronicled as follows: Sheepmen began to come into the valley to find grazing land for their flocks. Gratien Etcheborne [sic] was the first to arrive. Fie came in 1910 and filed the first claim on the land in 1916.lU 17 On labor and unionism the main work is Allan K e n t Powell, "A History of LaborActivity in the Eastern U t a h Coal Fields, 1900-1934" (Ph.D. diss., University of U t a h , 1976). " N o t a r i a n n i , "Italianita in U t a h , " pp. 3 1 3 - 2 0 ; Stipanovich, South Slavs, p. 6 5 ; Vicente V. Mayer, "After Escalante: T h e Spanish-speaking People of U t a h , " Peoples of Utah, p. 442.

39 William A. Douglass and Jon Bilbao, Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World ( R e n o : University of Nevada Press, 1975), p. 244. Also consult Thursey J. Reynolds, comp. Centennial Echoes from Carbon County (Price, 1948).

188

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Basques, however, never gained a strong foothold in Utah's sheep industry because of the willingness of Mormon sheepmen and their sons to continue herding."0 Carbon County contained both French Basques and Vizcayan populations, with Price housing a Basque hotel and boarding house.21 Post-World War I suspicion of foreign and alien groups provided impetus for formal "Americanization" efforts. In Carbon County immi'" Douglass and Bilbao, Amerikanuak, p. 245. T h e authors state on p. 320, "Only in some Mormon outfits of U t a h does the Anglo sheepherder appear with any regularity."

21 Ibid., pp. 4 3 1 , 433.

'Americanization"

of Carbon

189

County

grants' participation in strikes branded them as "un-American," a n d their seeming ambivalence toward serving in the military, even though many purchased w a r bonds, infuriated native Americans.

HUM rlNOF THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH This sentiment prompted an editorial in the News Advocate commenting, "Feeling against such dirty low-down grafters is running high in many towns in Utah.""

SUGGESTIONS FOR Even prior to the war, stereotyped images of "W'ops," AMERICANIZATION "Bohunks," " J a p s , " and "clannish Greeks" intensified natiTEACHERS vistic sentiment. Adding fuel to the fire was the practice bymany immigrants of sending money to their families abroad R. D. HARRIMAN in support of relatives and to provide dowries for sisters. A poignant example of nativistic sentiment appeared in a fifth grade Huntington, Utah, student's essay on " W h a t U t a h Dav Means to M e . " BY

EXTENSION DIVISION SERIES Vol. I

22

No. J

News Advocate, January 3, 1918.

Published by the UniÂťerÂťity of Utah

Americanization brochure.

University of Utah.

Miners bar at Clear Creek, 1912. Frank Frageskakis, center, was bartender. USHS collections.

Courtesy

Salt Lake City

190

Utah Historical

Quarterly

. . . In our mining camps, we can, if we will, stop the Greeks and Japs from their work, and give our own men and boys a chance for work, giving them the money instead of others. If Utah paid her money to her own people instead of other places, we might be rich now. . . P

Such fears were deeply rooted; and interestingly, the same fear of foreign labor currently exists in the United States.

I n any event, in 1918 a state committee on Americanization w7as established, with Arch M. T h u r m a n one of the most active members.

T h u r m a n stated his fear that " T h e presence in our state of large alien groups presents the possibility of a real menace to the welfare of the state." H e continued by urging the necessity of giving immigrants the opportunity to know American ideals and institutions. If not, those who were preaching discontent would instill them with un-American ideas, thus endangering America's free institutions. 21 O n M a r c h 20, 1919, an Americanization bill became law, having been introduced in January by Sen. George H. Dern. It originally maintained that any alien between the ages of sixteen and forty-five residing in Utahâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;except those physically and mentally disqualifiedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;unable to speak, read, or write English required by fifth grade standards must attend public evening school classes. Willful violation of the act w7as considered a misdemeanor and was punishable, upon conviction, by a fine of not less than $5.00 nor more than $25.00. T h e State Board of Education and a state director of Americanization were to oversee the program.

U n d e r the 1919 law sixty-three Americanization classes were maintained within the supervision of school authorities. Classes were held in Granite, Salt Lake City, Carbon, Jordan, Tooele, Logan, and Ogden districts.

Attendance in 1919 of all classes was 60.253. 23 In anticipation of the Americanization Act, the University of Utah in the summer of 1919 offered a course of training for teachers in Americanization work. During the summer of 1920 the course was repeated, and similar courses were conducted at Brigham Young University and the Agricultural College in Logan. 20 Dr. R. D. Harriman, a member of the 23

Emery County Progress, May 4, 1912.

State of U t a h , Thirteenth Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Salt Lake City, 1920), pp. 6 3 - 6 5 .

2j Americanization Act is in Laws of Utah, 1919, chap. 93. In 1921 the law was amended and provided for: registration of aliens, an instruction fee of $10.00 from each alien, a lowered age limit, 16-35, an increased penalty of not less than $15.00 nor more than $25.00, and the elimination of the director of Americanization. See especially, Leroy Eugene Cowles, " T h e U t a h Educational Program of 1919 and Factors Conditioning Its Operation" (Ph.D. diss., University 'of California, 1926), p. 56.

20 State of U t a h , Thirteenth Report of . . . Public Instruction, p. 64.

21

C(

Americanization"

of Carbon

County

191

State Committee on Americanization, stated in a report to teachers: " T h e purpose of this work is not only to acquaint the foreigner with American institutions and ideals, but also to make it possible for him to enter actively into his American life." 27 Public response to the Americanization law was favorable. T h e consensus of the citizenry was that aliens should be required to become Americanized. I n February 1923 the Salt Lake City C h a m b e r of Commerce established an Americanization committee. A national congress of the Sons of the American Revolution met in Salt Lake City in 1923 to discuss the Americanization effort. T h e national chairman of Americanization for the organization, H a r r y F. Brewer, stated: Y o u will h e a r further from this year's committee as soon as possible, b u t d o n ' t let procrastination be the thief of time a n d o p p o r t u n i t y ; the antiAmerican is on the job A L L the time, in season a n d o u t ; should we let h i m out d o us in Industry? 2 8

Americanization of the immigrant was the national vogue. W h e n it appeared that Americanization was not succeeding, residents of U t a h , keeping in step w7ith national forces, advocated immigration restriction.

A. C. Matheson, director of registration, thought to propose a law making it incumbent on employers not to hire aliens w h o had not conformed to the Americanization law, but considering labor shortages a n d the absence of such laws in neighboring states, he relented. 29 Enforcement was extremely difficult, and the law7 w7as destined to fail for reasons set forth in a 1924 report: T h e Americanization law . . . has been found unsatisfactory. T h e compulsory feature is obnoxious to the foreign people. I t creates an attitude of m i n d not conducive to learning. Its enforcement to the letter is expensive and uninviting to the communities with large numbers of t h e foreign population. 3 0

Americanization was considered most important in Carbon County schools, and its "desired" results were admirable. But compulsory adherence led to problems. First, what was "Americanization" or the true prototype of an "American"? Immigrants had believed that America was a land of many peoples. Intolerance and prejudice, r a m p a n t in the 27 R. D. H a r r i m a n , "Suggestions for Americanization Teachers," Bulletin of the University of Utah, vol. 10, no. 16 ( 1 9 2 0 ) , p. 19.

28 Chamber of Commerce News (Salt Lake C i t y ) , vol. 5, no. 7 ( 1 9 2 3 ) , p. 4 ; Minute Man, vol. 19, no. 2 ( 1 9 2 4 ) , p. 76. Both these serials are available in Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of U t a h , Salt Lake City.

29 State of U t a h , Fourteenth Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Salt Lake City, 1922), p. 80.

30 State of U t a h , Fifteenth Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Salt Lake City, 1924), p. 109.

192

Utah Historical

Quarterly

1920s, forged a negative example of Americanism. Carbon County Italians responded to the movement by organizing the Italian Americanization Club in 1920; but this w7as ephemeral, and, in the main, response by immigrants was negligible.31 Immigrants viewed the law7 with ambivalence. Forced compliance represented to many a stripping of cultural distinctiveness. A study of South Slavs has shown that the law was unnecessary in some instances, as those who needed language training obtained it voluntarily. Italians, Greeks, and other groups paid relatively little attention to the law. The Japanese, however, w7ere the most compliant. The reasons for this and for prior observations concerning the Japanese have been attributed to their cultural training in patient acceptance and the belief that their position as workers in America was temporary. In addition, the Japanese culture emphasized a law-abiding attitude, and the training of children under the Bushido code stressed good behavior and diligent study.32 In an ironical sense, by attempting to comply with "Americanization," the Japanese were in essence adhering to their own cultural traits.

The process of accommodation, or adjustment, of Carbon County immigrants to life in Utah proceeded gradually. Tragically, children were torn between the cultural environment at home and the values encountered at public schools. For Greek children, there were Greek schools and American schools. Some found Mormon racial attitudes difficult to understand, and some felt a bitterness at the intense antiforeign sentiment typified by Ku Klux Klan activity in Price and Helper in 1925.

A Serb miner summed up his feelings by stating: "They call me everything but white man. . . . Yeah, sure I leave Carbon County. You could die down there and nobody care." 33 Yet, children were educated in American public schools, and parents committed to life in America encouraged their offspring to betterment through education. Immigrant businessmen were successful, and the turbulence of earlier years waned somewhat after 1933, except for the Mexican-Americans who were recruited to work in Carbon County mines during the labor shortage of World War II. Among these peoples the stigma of prejudice continued longer than for others,31 Perhaps a rea31 News Advocate, April 8, 1920. See also Philip F. Notarianni, " T h e Italian Immigrants in U t a h : Nativism ( 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 2 5 ) " (M.A. thesis, University of U t a h , 1972), pp. 71-74.

32 Stipanovich, South Slavs, p. 9 1 ; Papanikolas and Kasai, "Japanese Life in U t a h " pp. 342-43.

33 Interview with Mike Dragos by Joseph Stipanovich, excerpted in Stipanovich Slavs, p. 64.

34 Mayer, " T h e Spanish-speaking People," pp. 4 6 1 - 6 2 , 464, 468.

South

c

Americanization"

of Carbon

County

193

son for this, and an explanation for the dispersion of other groups into American life, can be found in the fact that after the restrictive immigration legislation of the 1920s, Japanese and southern and eastern European populations were no longer being fed by newcomers as in prior years, whereas the Mexican influx continued. So, with regard to the former groups, language maintenance and many traditions and customs were further modified, since many times their significance was tied to Old World conditions. Even though cultural traits were modified in the accommodation process, cultural maintenance in the broad sense was not lost. Ethnic identification continues.

Thus, the legacy left to Carbon County is ethnic diversity. Whether it be the Greek Orthodox Church, Saint Anthony's in Helper or Notre Dame in Price (the former reportedly built in response to Italians, the latter to the French), or the remaining business blocks built by immigrant businessmenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;their existence is testimony to the county's past. The character of Carbon County's past is also its future character, because as coal begins its new reign as "king" the diversity of population continues.

In conclusion, a final irony remains: through efforts to force conformity, the result was, in most cases, a stripping away of a certain identity, the same identity that is now sought by people trying to find "roots" or to reidentify with their ethnic heritage. Fortunately for Carbon County residents, the diversity of character that marked its beginning is still evident. Such a cultural resource should indeed be preserved and remain a source of public pride.

Home of the Louma brothers, Finnish miners at Clear Creek.

George Edward Anderson photograph, USHS collections.

The Valley of the Bear River And the Movement of Culture Between Utah and Idaho

BY CHARLES S. PETERSON

1 HE BEAR RIVER FLOWS

from the Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah into Wyoming, back to Utah, and into Wyoming again.

After a few miles it bears west into Idaho wdiere it makes a major push north and west before taking its big bend and returning to Utah and to an Dr. Peterson is professor of history at Utah State University.

Bear River Hotel and Collinston USHS collections.

bridge,

1872. William

Henry

Jackson

photograph,

Valley of the Bear River

195

ultimate rest in the dead waters of the Great Salt Lake. Like interlocking units of a giant mortise, the three major valleys of the Bear River's lower drainage extend from one state to another, joining them together. The metaphor here suggested has much to commend it in the physical sense, as the Bear River region provides resources common to the three states. By related developments the Bear River has influenced the cultural character of the three states as well. This paper will examine the Bear River as a border region in which homogenous and mutually accessible natural resources have drawn people and cultural influences back and forth across state linesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;particularly those of Utah and Idahoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to relate those two states in a way no other two states are related and to give the Bear River region recognizable cultural characteristics. Observations presented here are incomplete and tentative but should serve to suggest that regions everywhere possess characteristics well worth continuing historical examination.

The Bear River is something of an anomaly. It rises in one of America's few east-w7est lying mountain ranges. More distinctive, perhaps, is the fact that its great bend conforms generally to the northeast rim of the Great Basin. Running its meandering course for more than three hundred miles within the Basin, it is America's most important landlocked river. Like the Humboldt River of Nevada, of which Dale Morgan wrote in the Rivers of America Series, the Bear River was a "Highroad to the West"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;a natural feature that made the Oregon Trail and westward expansion possible.1 Within the ragged and inverted V of its great elbow, three major valleys lie across the Utah-Idaho border. From east to west these are Bear Lake Valley, Cache Valley, and the Bear River and Malad River arm of the Great Salt Lake Valley.

There is an irony in the fact that Utahn Dale Morgan chose to dramatize the desert miles of Nevada's Humboldt River and to throw the light of his brilliant scholarship upon it while leaving the Bear River to run its course in historical obscurity. But the Bear River's place in history was obscure long before Morgan turned his attention to western history.

Indeed, the obscurity in which it has been shrouded was recognized in a general way even before Americans w7ere aware the river existed. When James Monroe and Robert Livingston completed the negotiations by which the Louisiana Purchase became part of America, one of them expressed regret as to the obscurity of its boundaries. The great French minister, Tallyrand, is supposed to have answered: "I can give you no 1 Dale L. Morgan, The Humboldt, Highroad to the West (New York: Farrar and Rinehart. 1943).

196

Utah Historical

Quarterly

direction. You have made a noble bargain . . . and I suppose you will make the most of it."2 Although the obscurity to which Tallyrand referred encompassed the entire West in 1803, there were few regions where obscurity proved to have more lasting implications. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 fixed the international line between American and Spanish claims at the Forty-second Parallel which twice crossed the Bear River's northern loop. But in the Far West, boundaries were little more than abstractions of nationalism—vague at best and, in this case, subject to efforts to bend and reshape. As a consequence, Britons from Oregon, Mexicans out of Santa Fe, and Yankees from Saint Louis competed during the 1820s to establish claims to a country for which surveys were in the distant future. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, temporarily diverted attention from the Forty-second Parallel and the Bear River country when the border between the United States and Mexico was placed far to the south. Had the provisional state of Deseret proposed by the Mormons in 1849 been successful, it w7ould have wiped the Forty-second Parallel out entirely as a boundary. But in the Compromise of 1850 Congress set the Forty-second Parallel, still an unsurveyed abstraction, as Utah Territory's northern limit. Later, Mormons argued that the northern ends of Bear Lake and Cache valleys were within Utah, but a boundary survey in 1872 finally fixed the line as it has since been recognized.3 The establishment of that line was the last in a series of state-making episodes by which Utah was cut down to its present size and the corners of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah drawn so as to be mortised by the meanderings of the Bear River. In time, nine counties were defined along the course of the Bear—four in Idaho, three in Utah, and two in Wyoming.

In addition, at least 114 towns and hamlets were established. Of these, 63 were in Utah and 46 in Idaho.

Only five or six communities w7ere located along the Wyoming portions of the Bear River, a fact that suggests that the interlocking physical and social conditions that have bonded developments in Utah

2 Julius W.( Pratt, A History of United States Foreign Policy (Englewood Cliffs N JT • Prentice-Hall, 1955), p. 100. ' ' '" 3 For a n interesting discussion of boundary-making following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, see Glen M. Leonard, "Southwestern Boundaries and the Principles of State Making " Western Historical Quarterly 8 (1977) : 3 9 - 5 3 . For the general process by which this region was explored, see Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Misissippi West, vol. 2, From Lewis and Clark to Fremont, 1804-1845 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography 1958) • and for the 1872 adjustment of the U t a h - I d a h o border see Daniel G. Major Utah and Idaho Boundary Survey (Boise, 1872), and Merle W. Wells, Anti-Mormonism in Idaho 1872-92 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), p p xiv-xvii.

Valley of the Bear River

197

and Idaho have not existed to the same degree in Wyoming. However, it should be observed here that the southern part of Utah's Rich County with its two townsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Randolph and Woodruff- -and the home ranch of the vast Deseret Land and Livestock Company reflects marked physical and cultural affinity for the Wyoming counties of Uinta and Lincoln to which it is adjacent. By extension, south Rich County may be said to share the Wyoming cowboy and railroad culture that grew out of the post-Civil War era. In it, high meadow scenes abound. It is a livestock country in which Owen Wister's Virginian might well have been at home and into which the political muscle of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association sometimes extended. The stories of squaw men clustering around Fort Bridger, of the Mormon Indian mission to claim control of southwestern Wyoming in the mid-1850s, of Lot Smith's Utah War exploits, of the cattle empire of William A. Carter, and even of southwestern Wyoming's role as a refuge for Butch Cassidy need not detain us.4 By contrast to the Utah-Wyoming relationship, it is distinctly apparent that the three valleys of the Bear River have served as a transitional linkage between Utah and Idaho. Cultural diffusion through these valleys has been varied and persistent. It began early and continues today.

In part, this diffusion has been gradual and subtle. In other respects it has been forceful and abrupt, causing controversy and conflict. The influences behind this diffusion include social, economic, educational, natural, and religious forces that have moved both north and south to contribute to the story of both states.

Historically, the valleys of the Bear River lent themselves to this process in several ways. To the south a self-sufficient Mormon community was established early. It was characterized by determination to expand, communitarian impulses, and a strong will to follow its own practices and to reject others. Relative isolation, water, fertile lands, grazing grounds, fuel and timber, and developing markets for farm produce in the mining frontiers to the north presented invitations that drew thousands of Mormon settlers into Cache and Malad valleys without the mobilizing agencies of colonizing missions which were often necessary to call colonists into areas the church wanted to occupy in regions south of Salt Lake City. Although the Mormon community at Bear Lake was something of an exception, settlement in the valleys of the Bear was a natural expan4 For general treatments of southwestern Wyoming see T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Also see Fred R. Gowans and Eugene E. Campbell, Fort Bridger: Island in the Wilderness (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), and Fred R. Gowans and Eugene E. Campbell, Fort Supply: Brigham Young's Green River Experiment (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1976).

^95

Utah Historical

Quarterly

sion of Mormon society moving at its own pace under what may be called popular volition rather than the product of colonizing missions. Similarly, natural forces shaped the appeal Bear River made to Idaho's frontiersmen. The river's banks and surrounding terrain held little gold or silver.

So, the region was bypassed by the frenzied rushes, camps, and mining development of the era. Except for the traffic from Utah to the mines in northern Idaho and Montana, transportation also skirted the region until the 1880s when the main stream of east-west travel finally pushed the Oregon Short Line Railroad through it. On the other hand, prospects did exist for government positions, trade, livestock, and timber and land speculation; but such opportunities attracted a smaller, more stable society than did the great mining and transportation bonanzas. Thus, settlement of the Bear River was part of both the Mormon frontier and the broader frontier of the West but lacked certain aggressive elements that characterized settlement in other regions of each frontier.5 To trace this process of competing settlement with a bit more detail, it may be noted that Mormon colonization edged north toward the Bear River from the earliest times. But hard winters that froze government stock in 1850 and LDS church herds in 1855 and the outbreak of the Utah War in 1857 slowed northward movement. In the nearest thing to a land boom that early Utah history can boast, Mormon settlers rushed into southern Cache Valley in the years after the Utah War.G Land hunger notwithstanding, habit and the threat of Indians caused them to settle in a pattern entirely consistent w7ith established Mormon procedure. Soon, villages laid out in the characteristic Mormon grid were located at the canyon openings along the south and east portions of the valley. Franklin, now in Idaho, was the most northerly of these early towns. Irrigated farms lay in small plots adjacent to each town, the habits of irrigation were instilled among the settlers, and canal systems were etched in the landscape. Hay grounds and grazing commons extended beyond the village fields, but the presence of hostile Indians apparently curtailed expansion farther north and w7est.7 Developments after 1863 radically altered the picture. On a bitter January morning Col. Patrick E. Connor massacred some three hundred Indians in the so-called Battle of Bear River, and a rich mining boom in northwest Idaho and Montana provided markets for Utah produce and created a business in freighting and trade in which Mormons and non° ° 5 l t h e . M o r m o n colonizing mission see Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your MissionMormon Colonizing along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973), especially pp. 38-62.

Valley of the Bear River

199

Mormons interacted. 8 Malad was soon settled as wdiat Idaho historian Merle Wells has called a "toll road community." 9 It also became the county seat of Oneida County, a far-flung jurisdiction that corresponded in size to the state of Vermont. 10 Cache Valley quickly became known as Utah's granary; and freight outfits passed to and from it, trading for livestock, wdieat, and perishable goods. Trader-stockman Alexander Toponce, who drifted into Utah from the Montana gold fields in 1863, later recalled an 1866 trading trip through Cache Valley: I . . . went up through Cache Valley . . . and loaded up with eggs. I started some time in December. I bought some eggs in Salt Lake and loaded one wagon in Brigham City. Went up the canyon to Mantua and over the divide to Wellsville and Hyrum. Everywhere I bought all the eggs in sight.

At Logan I loaded a wagon and went on north to Hyde's Park, Smithfield, Richmond, and Franklin, Idaho. Bought every egg. . . . I pulled over to the west side of the valley to where Oxford is now located. Everywhere I bought eggs. I wrapped each egg separately in pieces of newspapers and put them in boxes of oats packed around them, and covered the boxes in the wagons with more hay and grain. The packing was done so thoroughly that the eggs did not freeze although I did not get them to Helena until March 1st, 1867, and the day we arrived to Helena every thermometer was frozen up.

But his eggs were still good and brought $2 a dozen on the Montana market. On another occasion Toponce purchased a 600-pound pig for $36 in one of the Utah settlements, hauled it to Montana and sold it for $600 â&#x20AC;&#x201D;a tidy profit even for the freewheeling Toponce. 11 16 As Joel E. Ricks puts it, boom migration into Cache Valley was in a "small way . . . a replica of the 'Ohio fever' which brought thousands of new settlers to the Ohio country following the W a r of 1812." See Ricks and Everett L. Cooley, eds., The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho (Logan, U t . : Cache Valley Centennial Commission, 1956), p p . 4 3 - 4 4 . T h e Deseret News of April 18, 1860, described the phenomenon as follows: "Emigrants have been constantly passing through this city [Salt Lake], for two or three months, on their way to Cache Valley, and more especially since the winter season ended. How m a n y have gone there this spring is not known, at least no definite report has been m a d e , b u t judging from the hundreds of wagons and teams t h a t have been moving in that direction, some of the cities, settlements, towns and villages in U t a h County and perhaps some settlements in the southern part of Salt Lake County must have materially decreased in population, in consequence of the great rush northward by those in search of new homes and better locations."

7 For a consideration of the landscape of early Mormon agriculture see Charles S. Peterson, " I m p r i n t of Agricultural Systems on the U t a h Landscape," Richard H. Jackson, ed., The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), p p . 9 1 - 9 7 . Ricks and Cooley, The History of a Valley, pp. 32-59, provides a good account of early settlement including the influence of I n d i a n relations upon the process. * M a x Reynolds McCarthy, "Civil W a r Military Operations in the District of U t a h , " (Master's thesis, U t a h State University, 1975), pegs the Indian mortality at somewhere between 224 a n d 368. See p p . 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 .

"Wells, Anti-Mormonism in Idaho, p. xiii.

40 Merrill D. Beals a n d Merle W. Wells, History of Idaho, 3 vols. (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1959), 1:516.

II Alexander Toponce, Reminiscences of Alexander Toponce, Written by Himself ( N o r m a n : University of Oklahoma, 1971), p p . 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 5 3 .

Sword of Gen. Patrick E. Connor. USHS collections.

In time the freight roads became well traveled, and numerous stations, towns, and ranches sprang up along them. Ultimately, these routes were traveled by thousands of Utahns, some of whom worked in the mines or homesteaded along the way; and many carried attitudes and ideas about life, farming methods, and economic activities back into Utah.

Among those who followed the freight roads to fortune w7as William Jennings, w7ho by 1865 had become well-to-do and had far-flung livestock and freight interests as well as Salt Lake City's finest storeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Emporium.12 Far more characteristic was a young Mormon named Frank Wyatt of Wellsville, who worked on the railroad through southern Idaho in the late 1870s, freighted to Montana in the mid-1880s, and then left Wellsville's tight village confines to buy part of James Haslam's homestead between Wellsville and Logan. There he lived on a ranch more typical of the general frontier than early Mormon Utah, yet his w7as a modified village experience.13 42 One gets a feel for Jennings's role in the M o n t a n a trade in Toponce, Reminiscences, pp. 113, 121, 140, 154. For a more general biographical sketch see Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine 1 (1881):359-63.

43 Oral Interview Transcription, Elizabeth Wyatt Winn, July 1973. U t a h State University Local History Project.

Oregon Short Line Railroad through Bear River Canyon. USHS collections.

By the early 1870s commercial prospects between Utah and the northern mines led Latter-day Saints in northern Utah to depart from their introverted, self-sufficient economy to the extent that they undertook to build the Utah Northern Railroad to Montana. Although this intent suggested that the free enterprise of the mining trade was infiltrating the Mormon community, the comment of one Wells Fargo Company agent suggested that the Mormon towns along the Bear River had partaken only modestly of business influences. "One Gentile," he reported, "makes as much business as a hundred Mormons and the Utah Northern has found out that a well settled Mormon community will not furnish business enough to run a railroad." 11 By the mid-1870s Logan's Moses Thatcher and other local promoters had sold their interests in the Utah Northern to Jay Gould of the Union Pacific Railroad, thus suggesting that they lacked the necessary cultural attributesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not the least of which was financingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to carry on this kind of enterprise.

Colonel Connor's defeat of the Bear River Indians also had other repercussions. Regarding it to be his duty as a Union commander to reduce Mormon control over Utah and bring the territory into fuller support of the North's cause in the Civil War, Connor promoted mining " Robert G. Athearn, Union Pacific Country (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), p. 248.

The Hayden photograph,

Survey's USHS

camp in Cache Valley, 1870. William Henry collections.

Jackson

202

Utah Historical Quarterly

and supported dissidents, including the Morrisites. Led by Joseph Morris, the Morrisites had fanned much bitterness among the Mormons and had run athwart of territorial law7, with the end result that a posse had killed Morris and one or two others in a bungled attempted arrest shortly before Connor arrived in Utah in 1862. Although Soda Springs at the big bend of Bear River was out of his jurisdiction, Connor wasted no time after his victory over the Indians in establishing a military camp there. Offering the leaderless Morrisites asylum, Connor located them near this new outpost in a place called Morristown. Not surprisingly, Morristown was a hotbed of anti-Mormonism, and while it did not flourish it did set a pattern of hostility toward Mormons that became an article of political faith in Idaho for many years.15 Spurred by Connor's colonizing efforts, the Mormons immediately initiated a move north. Brigham City, the oldest community in Bear River's drainage area, was strengthened numerically and by the initiation of the cooperative movement under Lorenzo Snow's careful supervision.16 Under Charles C. Rich, settlers moved into Bear Lake Valley. E. T. Benson and William Preston located villages in the northern part of Cache Valley, and, as w7e have seen, Malad w7as founded along a major spur of the freight road north. Cooperative herds from Farmington and elsewhere in Davis County were also moved into the areas where Plymouth, Portage, and Howell were later founded.17 Within a decade or so, village settlements similar to the earliest Cache Valley towns were established throughout the three valleys of the Bear. Although Mormon influence was strong in the three valleys, each was different. Bear Lake was isolated. Its climate was cold, timber abundant, and log and frame buildings far more dominant than elsewhere.

Until after 1880 it was not on the road to anywhere. Timbermen like James Nounan cut ties on neighboring slopes, but the valley nevertheless long remained the preserve of an isolated Mormon society in which people came as near living up to the church's ideal of self-sufficiency as anywhere.18 In the earliest years, Bear Lake was the most Mormon of the 15 Good accounts of the Morrisite difficulties and their move to Idaho are found in C. LeRoy Anderson and Larry J. Halford, "The Mormons and the Morrisite War," Montana 26 (Autumn 1974) : 4 2 - 5 3 ; C. LeRoy Anderson, "The Scattered Morrisites," Montana 26 (Autumn 1 9 7 6 ) : 5 3 - 6 8 ; and Brigham D. Madsen, "Introduction," to Agnes Just Reid, Letters of Long Ago (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h Library, 1973), pp. xi-xviii.

30 Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company 1976), pp. 111-34.

17 Glen M. Leonard, "A History of Farmington, Utah, to 1890" (Master's thesis, University of Utah, 1966), pp. 117-24; and Joseph Royal Miller and Elna Miller, eds., Journal of Jacob Miller (Salt Lake City: Mercury Publishing Co., 1967), p. 176.

IS Accounts of settlement are in M. D. Beal, A History of Southeastern Idaho (Caldwell:

Valley of the Bear River

203

three valleys. But this notwithstanding, Mormons there apparently took themselves a good deal less seriously than those in Cache Valley, and they lacked the egocentric certainty of some Malad groups. In a degree, Bear Lake's tolerant spirit may have been the product of leadership. Charles C. Rich appears to have been less given to the exercise of authority than Cache Valley's E. T. Benson, Peter Maughan, and William Preston; and Rich was certainly less given to social experimentation and cooperative economic activity than Brigham City's Lorenzo Snow.19 But experience at Bear Lake, as well as in Utah's Dixie, suggests that there may also have been qualities of isolation and hardship that produced tolerant if not irreverent characters who influenced their own communities as well as Mormon society at large.

Such a figure w7as Joseph Rich, Charles C. Rich's son, who created the myth of the Bear Lake monster as some kind of whacky publicity stunt in 1868. In a community very conscious of the name "Rich," the story was soon branded a "rich tale." But sightings of the monster were reported from time to time, and the story was argued for years by pranksters and sober reporters alike. Later, Joseph Rich became a lawyer and businessman and spent a long career as a moderating influence between the Mormon and Gentile communitiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a role that w7on him neither fame nor fortune nor the admiration of his own people.20 Even more indicative of Bear Lake society's capacity to view itself and life generally in relaxed terms was J. Golden Kimball whose determination not to yield to sober piety made him one of the most loved figures in Mormon history.21 Less insulated from the intrusions of the world, Mormon Cache Valley produced its humorists as well, but when looking for figures who characterize the mood of the valley one hardly comes up with humorists â&#x20AC;&#x201D;far from it. One is more apt to look to Clifton's dedicated and revered Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1942), and Russell R. Rich, Land of the Sky-blue Water: A History of the L.D.S. Settlement of the Bear Lake Valley (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1963).

39 For early Cache Valley leaders see Ricks and Cooley, History of a Valley, especially chaps. 3 - 8 . Excellent insights into Snow's role at Brigham City are found in Arrington, Fox, and May, Building the City of God, pp. 111-34, and Charles C. Rich's mode of leadership is fully apparent in Leonard J. Arrington, Charles C. Rich: Mormon General and Western Frontiersman (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1974).

20 Bonnie Thompson, Folklore in the Bear Lake Valley (Salt Lake City: Granite Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 3 6 - 4 8 , provides a good account of the Bear Lake Monster myth, and Ezra J. Poulsen, Joseph C. Rich: Versatile Pioneer on the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Granite Publishing Co., 1958), provides a general account of Joseph Rich's life.

21 See Thomas E. Cheney, The Golden Legacy: A Folk History of / . Golden Kimball (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1974), and Claude Richards, / . Golden Kimball: Stories, Sayings, and Sermons of J. Golden Kimball (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1951).

204

Utah Historical

Quarterly

church president, Harold B. Lee, or that zealous American Ezra Taft Benson.

Continuing our consideration of features that set the valleys apart, it may be noted that the Bear River portion of the Great Salt Lake Valley produced the high point in the Mormon cooperative movement at Brigham City under Lorenzo Snow. By contrast, Malad's spirit appears to have been a complex and unlikely combination of religious zealousness, lusty and sometimes venal free enterprise, the deep group consciousness of Welsh and Danes and, for a time, a stubborn determination to overlook differences in controlling Oneida County. A strong group of Reorganized Latter Day Saints carried on an aggressive missionary program there.22 Welsh Mormons asserted their relative prominence with ethnic confidence.23 Bankers and traders looked for a profit in the mining trade and profiteered from the functions of county government. Democrats and Republicans flailed angrily at each other. Yet, an adroit politician named Benjamin Franklin White straddled all issues to draw liberal Mormon votes, fuse Republicans and Democrats, and control the county for years before changing times fixed anti-Mormonism as an insurmountable element in Idaho politics.21 As it influenced Idaho, this acrimonious spirit of intolerance w7as the direct result of the exchange that took place as two differing cultural frontiers met in the valleys of the Bear River. Anti-Mormonism in Utah was in turn strengthened by this confrontation. Although it took far longer than Patrick E. Connor had hoped w7hen he established Soda Springs (originally Morristown) as a "refuge for all who desire to leave the Mormon church, and have not the means to emigrate farther," developments in the region ultimately contributed to basic changes in the society of the tw7o states.25 Place names, too, reveal much about the way a region develops. In the Bear River valleys they reflect the common heritage of the three " F o r general accounts of developments at Malad see Wells, Anti-Mormonism in Idaho, p. 1 3 ; Richard L. Shipley, "Voices of Dissent: T h e History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in U t a h , 1863-1900" (Master's thesis, U t a h State University, 1969) ; and Glade F. Howell, "Early History of Malad Valley" (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1960), pp. 6 5 - 7 7 . Views of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' activity there may be found in A, Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast . . . How I Became a Mormon and Why I Became an Infidel (n.p., n . d . ) , pp. 5 4 - 7 7 ; and H. N. Hansen, "An Account of a Mormon Family's Conversion to the Religion of the Latter Day Saints and of Their T r i p from Denmark to U t a h , " Annals of Iowa 2 (Summer and Fall, 1971), especially pp. 776-79.

23 See the reference to folklore of ethnic relations at Malad in William A. Wilson, "Folklore of Utah's Little Scandinavia," Utah Historical Quarterly 47 (1979) : 24 Wells, Anti-Mormonism in Idaho, pp. 11-20, and F. Ross Peterson, Idaho: A Bicentennial History (New York: W . W . N o r t o n , 1976), pp. 91-114.

2a Quoted in Wells, Anti-Mormonism in Idaho, p. xii.

Valley of the Bear River

205

localities. Towns were named by settlers, people who in the main planned to stay in the region and wanted to raise monuments to themselves and identify their towns with certain causes and movements. The Mormon conflict may be seen in terms of names, with both groups showing an unimaginative penchant to name towns for luminaries among themselves.

Examples that come quickly to mind include Saint Charles and Georgetown in Bear Lake Valley which did honor to Mormon stalwarts as did Woodruff, Hyrum, and Brigham City elsewhere. Similarly, Nounan, Morristown, and Bothwrell reflect Gentile leaders from one walk or another.

A few names reflected aspirations or covenants held by the bestower. Such a one was Bloomington which Charles C. Rich hoped to tie to the "blossom as a rose" tradition of the Mormons. 26 Other towns took their names from physical features. Among these were Soda Springs, Mink Creek, and Logan, whose name derives from the largest affluent of the Bear River which was apparently named for early mountain man Ephraim Logan. Like Logan, the names Bear River, Bear Lake, Cache Valley, and Malad all hark back to fur trade days.

Trappers found one of the West's greatest population of bears along the stream's course and at the lake. This fact ultimately outweighed the inclination to set the lake apart from the neighboring salt sea by naming it Sweetwater Lake. Cache Valley, of course, superseded the earlier Willow7 Valley after a cave collapsed upon a mountain man while he was digging to cache furs. And Malad City takes its name from a stream dubbed by French trappers when beaver meat trapped along its course afflicted all those who ate it with an extreme but passing malady. 27 Notable by their absence are Indian names. Washakie honors a great Shoshone chief and Battle Creek is a melancholy reminder of Connor's massacre. Otherwise, Indians w7ere largely ignored. This stands out in strong contrast to southern Utah which has a rich sprinkling of Indian place names, including a favorite threesome: Kanab, Kanosh, and Koosharem.

If Indians were neglected as a source of names, place of origin and previous experiences w7ere not. Montpelier is said to honor the town of the same name in Brigham Young's native state of Vermont, and, of course, 20 Beal, A History of Southeastern Idaho, presents interesting information on the origin of southeastern Idaho place names. See pp. 168-86.

27 Dale L. Morgan, ed., The West of William H. Ashley . . . 1822-38 (Denver: Old West Publishing Co., 1964), p. 289. A general treatment of streams, lakes, and other natural features in the area is found in Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1973); specific references are found in Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, 18341843, ed. Aubrey L. Haines, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 3, 124, 156, and in Warren Angus Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains, ed. Herbert S. Auerbach and J. Cecil Alter (Salt Lake City: Rocky Mountain Book Shop, 1940), pp. 36-40, 43, 53-56, 269.

206

Utah Historical

Quarterly

does the great colonizer honor at the same time. Bern and Geneva in the Bear Lake country, on the other hand, reflect the homeland of Swiss settlers. Paris, however, is a corruption of Perris, the name of one of its founders rather than a reflection of French settlers or the city of Paris.28 This notwithstanding, multiple influences may be conjectured in some place names. Would Hyde Park, for example, reflect the prominence of founder William Hyde, the English origins of many of the tow7n's inhabitants, and the role of London's Hyde Park in Mormon missionary lore?

Like towns, farm and livestock districts came to have names. Toponce Creek was named for the prominent freighter and stockman, while Gentile Valley took its name from early stockmen w7ho made a determined effort to exclude Mormons that included the establishment of a post office that would not accept mail addressed to Mound Valleyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Mormon name.29 This w7as apparently as much a reaction of ranchers against squatters as it was non-Mormons against Mormons. As latecomers, sheepmen, too, were sometimes made the butt of jokes that manipulated place names. The object of such a story was Frank Robertson, a western w7riter who in his youth herded sheep in the Bancroft area west of Soda Springs.

His cowboy brother never ceased to needle him and frequently related a story in which a stranger met Frank and asked "where are you from Shep?" "Baa-a-ancroft," young Robertson is supposed to have replied.

"Well, where are you going now7?" "Baa-a-ck" was his response.30 By and large, Bear River place names are utilitarian. Chosen to give character to communities, they lacked color and imagination and suggest that, at the point of town-making at least, the opening of the Bear River country was serious business indeed. It would appear that Gentile and Mormon, squatter and cattleman, and land agent and freighter alike responded to similar impulses when they named their towns. If village names reveal a difference in community character, it is geographic rather than social. Bear Lake's tendency to take itself a little less seriously is apparent here as well as in the people it produced. Who could imagine, for example, Cache Valley lowering its decorum, even if there were reasons valid and substantial, to name towns Pickleville and Dingle? If one doubts that Cache Valley might have balked at such names no matter how valid "s Beal, A History of Southeastern Idaho, p. 178.

29 Not everyone agrees that this account is based in fact but it is discussed in Beal, A History of Southeastern Idaho, pp. 184-85, 4 1 0 ; and Vivian Simmons and R u t h Varley, "Gems" of Our Valley: A Written and Pictorial History of Gem Valley (Providence, U t . : Watkins and Sons, n . d . ) , pp. 14-16.

30 Frank C. Robertson, A Ram in the Thicket: The Story of a Roaming Home-Steader Family on the Mormon Frontier (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1959), p. 248.

Valley

of the Bear River

207

the reason, we may refer him to Preston where early developers changed the name from W o r m Creek. 31 However, when one leaves the straitlaced M o r m o n villages and the boostering Gentile towns, one finds place names that suggest that in offhours, when self-consciousness was relaxed by remoteness, not even Bear River's settlers were entirely void of color in their names, But in the north, as in southern U t a h , it was the "standing up country," the mountains, that reaped a rich harvest of racy names while the valleys below plodded along burdened with pedestrian monikers. 32 Birds and animals of both the domestic and native varieties were a prime source. Indeed, Noah himself might have found a happy hunting ground w7ith names like Dog Spring, Deer Lick Spring, Buckskin F'ork, Bear Wallow Spring, Beaver Mountain, Hummingbird, Porcupine, Hawks Roost, Horselake, Rattlesnake Canyon, Skunk Springs, Bug Lake, and Goat Knoll, all of which appear at random in the mountains between Cache and Bear Lake valleys.

Specialization also shows up. In one small area Swan Peak, Swan Creek, and Sw7an Peak Pond lie close to each other. In another, Hog Hole, Pig Hole, Sow7 Hole, and Boar Hole Spring follow- each other across the landscape like a herd of shoats. Plant life, too, has its day in Old Juniper, White Pine, Red Pine Spring, Chokecherry, Mahogany, Sagebrush Flat, Willow Valley, Cedar Canyon, Clover Knoll, Huckleberry Spring, and numerous Cottonwoods. Church functions tended to concentrate names.

This w7as especially true in Logan Canyon where names such as T a b Hollow, Wood C a m p Canyon, and a half-dozen separate applications of " t e m p l e " proceed up the canyon like a chronology of architectural development. Mill names dot the mountains, and a town cooperative or united order was hardly w7orth its salt if a roll off for logs or a mountain trail were not named for it.

I n terms of nationalities, the Danes left the clearest imprint in the mute evidence of Copenhagen Meadow 7 , Danish Pass, and Danish Dugway. T h e Chinese and Dutch follow with China Wall and China Hill and Dutch Canyon and Dutchman's Canyon, while in French Hollow a token of France's role in settling the West seems to remain. T h e mountain itself might be addressed in the feminine, but female names are comparatively few. Yet, Norma Springs, Maggie Hopkins Spring, Pearl Creek, Marie Spring, and Harriet Spring suggest that, although A b r a h a m Lincoln may have been correct in referring to the Mississippi as the 31

Beal, A History of Southeastern Idaho, p. 170.

C Gregory Crampton, Standing Up Country: (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973).

32

The Canyon Lands of Utah and

Arizona

208

Utah Historical

Quarterly

"father of the waters," ladies had a reasonably good claim on watering holes in the Bear River region.33 Amazon Mine wras named to signify the richness of a particular deposit of ore and Hattie's Grove in Logan Canyon is reputed in Cache Valley lore to have been the rendezvous of a girl named Hattie who was caught spending the night there with a boyfriend.31 A few "fun" names remain. The origin of such unlikely appellations as Black Gut, Hoodoo Knoll, Fiddlers Canyon, and Ox Killer's Hollowis unknown. One can speculate that crawling things gave Wiggler Lake its name and that Ranger Dip was named for a Forest Service dipping vat rather than its merits as a swimming hole for off-duty rangers.

Fortunately, local lore throws some light on Logan Canyon's Cow Cut where a cow being led to the Temple Mill commissary is said to have given 33

Republic 4

Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 762.

Newell J. Crookston, "Reminiscing of Logan Canyon." Typed copy in my possession.

Scythe. USHS museum collections. Below: John Quayle residence in Logan. USHS collections.

Valley of the Bear River

209

out and was straightaway slaughtered. Likewise, tradition holds that Danford's Dive in Logan Canyon was named for the death-defying leap one rowdy young teamster made as his load of lumber tipped into the river while the Logan Temple w7as under construction.3' To such cultural insights as might be garnered from the above may be added the observation that the Utah portion of the mountains between Cache and Bear Lake valleys was the most intensively named area in the region, if Forest Service and United States Geological Survey maps provide an accurate index. This in turn suggests three observations that bear upon the question of cultural diffusion. First, the terrain itself invited names. Second, the Utah mountain area was more intensively used than Idaho forests of the region, a fact borne out by early Forest Service surveys and more recent grazing and watershed studies.36 And third, it sug'â&#x20AC;˘'â&#x20AC;˘" Ibid., pp. 8-9.

30 See for example Albert F. Potter, "Diary of Albert F. Potter's Wasatch Survey, July 1 to November 22, 1902," pp. 2-7, Region 4 Papers, Record Group 95, National Archives, Washington, D . C ; and C. E. Rachford, "Memo to the Forester, November 12, 1921," Grazing Supervision ' 1915-22, Region 4 Papers, Record Group 96, National Archives. See also Charles S. Peterson "Albert F. Potter's Wasatch Survey, 1902: A Beginning for Public Management of

Logan-Hyde F* ark-Smith field canal carved out of solid limestone, 1861-62. USHS collections.

210

Utah Historical

Quarterly

gests that once out from under the shadow of responsibility cast by townmaking, Bear River settlers were also subject to the gift of nomenclature.

An important element in the development of the Bear River valleys was the confrontation of two distinct land systems and the penetration of each into adjoining states. As we have seen, one development in the valleys of the Bear River was the establishment of Mormon villages with their small irrigated farms. Challenging this land system were the more conventional land practices of homesteading, preemption, and squatters' rights. The Mormon village had proven itself as an effective means of occupying new regions, but it was limited in its potential in regions where it faced stiff competition for land, such as in the Idaho portions of the Bear River valleys. This was particularly apparent in Cache Valley. One of the Mormon system's weaknesses grew7 from the fact that land w7as originally distributed by church authorities and held only by right of occupancy.

Thus, as Idaho homesteaders, stockmen, and speculators engrossed land under the federal land policy, Mormons were in very real danger of losing the claim occupancy gave them. With farms much smaller than the 160 acres of the homestead maximum, Mormon settlers undertook to meet this challenge by purchase under the Preemption Act or by having some agent landholder homestead in behalf of the other farmers w7ho occupied a quarter section. Most townsites and village farms were apparentely secured, but the system failed to retard the growing challenge of Gentile settlers w7ho became increasingly hostile toward Mormons.37 As the Gentile movement onto the land continued, it drastically modified Mormon land practices. In places like Weston in the Idaho portion of Cache Valley the village system had originally prevailed, but individuals soon found the urge to exercise their homestead rights to be almost overwhelming. The Mormon church continued to denounce scattering onto homesteads until at least 1882 but nevertheless failed to be consistent in the application of the policy, and many Weston Mormons homesteaded, forsaking their village lots for scattered farmsteads. The village continued to exist at Weston and elsewhere, but Mormon farmers lived scattered among Gentile neighbors and lost much of the internal clannishness incident to village life.38 N a t u r a l Resources in U t a h , " Utah Historical Quarterly 39 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 2 4 3 - 4 5 ; and Charles S. Peterson, "Small Holding Land Patterns in U t a h and the Problem of Forest Watershed Management," Forest History 17 (July 1973) : 4 - 1 3 .

37 Wells, Anti-Mormonism in Idaho, pp. 11-20. :s For a general consideration of changing land practices see Charles S Peterson " I m p r i n t of Agricultural Systems on the U t a h Landscape," in Jackson, The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, pp. 9 1 - 1 0 7 ; for contemporary references to the move onto homesteads see Lars Frednckson, History of Weston, Idaho, ed. A. J. Simmonds (Logan: U t a h State University Press, 1972), especially entries for 1875-80.

Valley

of the Bear River

211

This process of cultural diffusion began in Idaho, but after federal land laws became applicable in 1869 it penetrated U t a h as well. By 1874 disenchanted Mormons began to move out of Cache Valley's towns to homesteads on the west side and elsewhere. Responding to the freight road that crossed into the valley at Beaver D a m and moved along the west side toward Oxford, many settlers located near the road in what became a string settlement. Others located in farming districts at Petersboro, Trenton, Cornish, Lewiston, and the railroad stop of Cache Junction. 39 Even in the south of the valley, one observer commented that villages lay with scattered homesteads extending from them along roads and section lines like arms reaching from one town to embrace the other. 40 In time the trend to scattered homesteads got an unexpected lift from the L D S church itself. This occurred under the aegis of Brigham Young College which for many years held forth in Logan. Endowed by a land grant of 9,600 acres in the bottom of the southern part of Cache Valley, the college first secured revenues by leasing land to individual farmers and later by selling the land to them outright. 11 This practice resulted in the establishment of scattered farming districts in southern Cache Valley.

Not surprisingly the southward spread of the homestead system did not stop in Cache Valley. How7ever, the impact of change was much greater in the northern parts of Utah than in the south. As geographer Wayne Wahlquist has shown, competition w7ith the village system was always strong in the Wasatch Front counties. With homesteading's advent, the new system was superimposed upon the old village communities, the process of which Wahlquist has traced in Brigham City, Kaysville, and American Fork. 12 South of Provo the federal land system's impact was much less apparent. Although homesteading w7as a common practice there, as it was in the north, it did not alter the village system as noticeably. Sanpete 39 This development is treated in A. J. Simmonds, On the Big Range: A Centennial History of Cornish and Trenton . . . 1870-1970 (Logan: U t a h State University Press, 1970) ; and in A. J. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley: A Study of the Logan Apostasies of 1874 and the Establishment of Non-Mormon Churches in Cache Valley, 1873-1913 (Logan: U t a h State University Press, 1976).

40 Philip S. Robinson, Sinners and Saints (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), p. 141.

41 This topic is treated in two papers prepared at U t a h State University by Ronald O. Barney, "Mormon-U.S. Government Interaction over Land Policies, 1847-1860," a copy of which is in my possession; and John A. Hansen, " T h e History of College and Young Wards, Cache County, U t a h , " Special Collections, U t a h State University Library.

12 Wayne L. W^ahlquist, "Settlement Processes in the Mormon Core Area, 1847-1890" (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1974), especially chap. 5 ; also see Wayne L. Wahlquist, "Population Growth in the Mormon Core Area: 1847-90," in Jackson, The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, pp. 107-34.

212

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Valley, for example, was slow in developing homestead districts or string settlements. Indeed, Lowry Nelson found no families living on scattered farms at Ephraim as late as 1950. The same held true for Escalante in Garfield County.'13 The physical character of the Bear River also contributed to changing methods of land and water utilization in Utah's Box Elder County.

Small streams had been developed to found Brigham City and Malad, but the Bear River itself had been beyond the ability and capital of early settlers to develop. In the years after 1887 private capital and land speculators undertook to dam the river where it leaves Cache Valley and to construct vast canal systems on both sides of the river. The new district was promoted in the Midwest and Europe as having great promise for orchard husbandry." A variety of problems beset the promoters until 1902 when Utah and Idaho Sugar Company acquired all assets, introduced sugar beets, and successfully distributed land to a great number of farmers. Although Garland, Bear River City, Tremonton, and Bothwell were among the new tow7ns that developed, many people settled on farms and in string settlements extending along the Wellsville Mountains and elsewhere. A group of Iowa immigrants located along one strip in the middle of the valley, resulting in a Garland road that is still called the Iowa String. Although too much can be made of this Bear River land and water project, as an extension of cultural patterns from one state to another, it was among the foremost of a great many speculative projects in the 1890s and early years of this century and was more akin to Idaho's Snake River w7ater developments of this century than to earlier Mormon irrigation projects.

Dry-farming, too, was very much a development of the Bear River valleys. As in much of Idaho to the north, rainfall here w7as a little more abundant than in Utah generally. Without the cultural affinity that was attached to irrigation in Mormon Utah, dry-farming was quickly accepted in Idaho's Bear River country. When John A. Widtsoe became a great advocate of scientific dry-farming at Utah State Agricultural College, his efforts to promulgate the new science extended north as well as south. Trains especially equipped to teach the rudiments of the new science toured the Bear River counties in Idaho as w7ell as Utah. In a real w7ay, however, Widtsoe's efforts carried a transitional mode of farming from '" G. Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village: A Pattern and Technique of Land Settlement (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1952), pp. 139-40, 164,87.

44 The best treatment of this development is Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in Utah. . . (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1898).

Valley

of the Bear River

213

the northern wheat belts south into irrigated Utah. 4 5 In time, the growth of dry-farm districts, like the irrigated farming communities that preceded them, extended across the borders of the two states, linking them as to landscape and culture as w7ell as population.

Evidence suggests that Idaho farmers of the Bear River valleys have also been more responsive than their U t a h counterparts to other innovations in irrigation. Somewhat more inclined to depart from the revered principles and practices of early irrigation, they have apparently influenced U t a h farmers to follow suit. Among other things, Idahoans have been less inclined to regard water resources as adequate than Utahns.

Perhaps as a result, nearly twice as many have developed wells to take advantage of underground supplies. In modifying irrigation systems in the last twenty years they have also been quicker to change to sprinkling systems, while until very recently, Utahns have been more apt to refine conventional irrigation systems by improving canals and distribution systems. Abstracted from data gathered by U t a h State University's Institute for Social Science Research on Natural Resources, this information would support a visual impression that sprinkling is an irrigration development that caught on more quickly in Idaho and is now migrating south with its greatest impact areas located in the north of U t a h rather than the south. 46 As a final note on the cultural relationships of the U t a h and Idaho portions of Bear River's three valleys, one should refer to Preston. By 1940 it was county seat of Franklin County and a Saturday marketplace for people from the farming districts throughout the county and to some degree from the scattered communities in neighboring U t a h as well.

Although Logan had long been a center for Utah's Cache Valley, its domination of retail outlets and services was by no means as great as was Preston's. In a fashion consistent with supply centers throughout farming America, Preston was a social as w7ell as a business and political center.

In it, the entire county met. Although U t a h towns and cities such as Logan, Brigham City, Nephi, and Richfield served as market and social centers, the Preston experience fixed it more firmly in the broader national tradition. It is a topic worthy of continuing study. 47 15 See J o h n A. Widtsoe, Dry-Farming, a System of Agriculture for Countries Under Low Rainfall (New York: MacMillan Co., 1911), and John Edwin Lamborn, "A History of the Development of Dry-Farming in U t a h and Southern I d a h o " (Master's thesis, U t a h State University, 1978), especially chaps. 4 and 5. ""' Wade H. Andrews and Dennis G. Geerstan, The Function of Social Behavior in Water Resource Development (Logan: U t a h State University, Institute for Social Science Research on Natural Resources, 1970).

47 Philip A. Langdon, "Social and Economic Change in a Small Town Undergoing Long-

214

Utah Historical Quarterly

These rather far-ranging observations yield a number of suggestions about the movement of people and culture in the Bear River region.

Perhaps most important is the fact that regional variety exists. Comparative examination of these valleys and other localities promises rich insight into the wonderfully varied experience that has been American life. In a more specific sense, it may be observed that the valleys of the Bear River have been at once conduits of change and chambers of conservatism. In the one sense, they are separate environments whose mountain walls turn back interaction. As a result, each has characteristics that are recognizably its own. In the other context, they are rather wellwatered and fertile avenues through which people, values, and customs moved from one cultural area to another. Mormon influence moved from Utah into Idaho. Conversely, the influence of the broader frontier penetrated Utah through them. One result w7as a long tradition of social and political conflict that helped mark the region. Another w7as a sharpening of internal and contending elements within each of the two societies involved in the confrontation. In the general sense, this phenomenon shows clearly in the strong, conflicting Mormon tendencies to be "as American as apple pie" yet to withdraw from the w7orld. Through the valleys of the Bear River also moved customs relating to land use, water distribution, and the layout and function of both towns and farms. Through these valleys moved political and educational attitudes and practices.

Through them w7ere reached important regional markets, and through them the dry-farming practices of the wheat belt extended into Utah.

All told, the Bear River's interlacing valleys resulted in important cultural developments that have done much to make the relationships between Utah and Idaho what they are and to give the West a distinctive subregion. term Population Loss: Preston, Idaho, 1940-1973" (Master's thesis 1977).

U t a h State University,

Book Reviews The

Social

Ecology

of Chicanos

in Utah.

By L I O N E L A. MALDONADO a n d DAVID R.

BYRNE. ( I o w a City: Iowa U r b a n C o m m u n i t y Research Center, University of Iowa, 1978. 69 p p . Paper, $2.95.)

W h e n any literature appears in an area t h a t has been as neglected as Chicano studies, there is a n impulse to overappreciate a n d praise the slightest contribution. This monograph, however, truly merits commendation. T h e authors are not only professional and competent but with this work make an enormous contribution toward the understanding of a people. With insight, force, and directness they wade through past cliches and immediately address issues of consequence.

T h e i r purpose is to determine and then describe the social condition of Chicanos in LTah. But, this is no mere anthropological study. For not only are the authors interested in describing the social position of Chicanos, but they boldly launch themselves into an explanation of why they are in that position. With clarity they explore alternative possibilities that explain the relative dysfunctionality of Chicanos within the context of American interpretations of success modes. W i t h the conviction and courage born of their research, they select their position and forcefully articulate that position.

T h e book is only sixty-nine pages in length, a n d this includes a succinct twopage bibliography. But n o words are wasted. T h e style is clear, forthright, and one does not need to be a trained intellectual to understand its full implications. A particular strength of this study is that while both m e n are seasoned and reputable scholars, M a l d o n a d o is a Chicano and is therefore inside the com-

munity that is t h e focus of the work.

Byrne, on the other h a n d , is Anglo, a n d therefore forms the outsider role in this unique effort.

After establishing their purpose, thesis, a n d methodology, the authors research those critical institutions that so impinge upon a n d control the lives and destinies of Chicanos. T h e schools, educators, J o b Service, and social service agency personnel are viewed as important conditioners or as those w h o form the ecology of the Chicano population.

A n important consideration in the volume is that the unique characteristics of the U t a h subject are carefully noted a n d addressed. Those issues that make the U t a h study uniquely necessary are carefully explored. Among t h e important considerations a r e : that U t a h is a representative I n t e r m o u n t a i n state, that U t a h has the I n t e r m o u n t a i n region's largest Chicano population, that Chicanos are exploited in the labor market, and, finally, that Chicanos are affected by a culture dominated by M o r m o n religious influences.

Although the work is done by sociologists, not historians, a n d is essentially sociology a n d not history, its contributions to the historian are clear. Until one clearly understands not only where a group of people are, but why they are there, one cannot begin to correctly interpret the relevance of historical research.

At the m o m e n t very little historical work on the Chicano in U t a h has been achieved. Beyond the publication of the University of U t a h American West

216 Center's, Toward a History of the Spanish-Speaking People of Utah ( 1 9 7 3 ) , and Vicente V. Mayer's chapter in the Peoples of Utah edited by Helen Z. Papanikolas and published by the U t a h State Historical Society ( 1 9 7 6 ) , very

Utah Historical

Quarterly

little exists in published form. Maldonado's and Byrne's work will hopefully spur additional study.

RICHARD O.

ULIBARRI

Weber State

College

A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930: Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Broadsides Relating to the First Century of Mormonism.

Edited by C H A D J. F L A K E with an introduction by D A L E L. MORGAN. (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h Press, 1978.

Xxxii 4- 825 p p . $75.00.)

People use bibliographies for several reasons. O n e is to discover works of a favorite author. Another is to locate titles on a given subject. O r perhaps an institutional historian is seeking a significant body of material on the institution u n d e r study. Some people just like books. T h e better the book is printed and bound the better these bibliophiles like it. T h e r e are a few people w h o read bibliographies like they read dictionaries â&#x20AC;&#x201D;for the love of the word and just because they are there. Readers in all these categories w h o read A Mormon Bibliography will experience satisfaction.

Never has a more impressive collection of published works on M o r m o n s a n d Mormonism been p u t together. T h e compilers, and editor C h a d Flake, have worked hard for years a d d i n g to Dale Morgan's original material to produce this book which includes imprints from the first century of Mormonism. Interest in Mormonism has generated an inordinate n u m b e r of printed pages (this work has 10,145 citations plus a brief 56-item a d d e n d u m ) . An interesting picture of development and direction is a p p a r e n t on many pages, such as p p .

4 1 2 - 1 3 where entries in close proximity cite debates between representatives of the L D S and R L D S churches, a story of colonization in southern Alberta ( C a r d s t o n ) , a historical sketch of Mormonism in two languages, and a work of fiction titled Hagar, a Tale of Mormon Life. In all cases the repositories

where these publications can be found are listed by symbols explained on pp. xxviiâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;xxxi.

I n books of this kind, involving enormous amounts of technical detail, errors are inevitable. John James, one of the early compilers, has found nearly 200 items in the U t a h State Historical Society ( U H i ) collection that were omitted, over 750 citations where U H i was omitted, 65 w h e r e U H i is included incorrectly, and nearly 150 errors of various other kinds.

Physically, the book is very impressive.

Care has been taken to set off the beginning of each alphabetical category with a reproduction of a title beginning with the corresponding letter; for instance, the listing beginning with the letter Z is preceded by a photo-reduction of the cover to Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution Agreement, Order, Certificate of Incorporation & ByLaws. Very neat.

T h e index of publication by year is a useful feature. Also, appendix A lists nineteen unpublished plays, and appendix B gives fourteen titles that first appeared in three foreign newspapers and were then m a d e into books.

T h e size and weight of the book is enough to attract bibliophiles, but its beauty will make it a joy forever.

J A Y M.

HAYMOND

Utah State Historical

Society

Book Reviews and Notices

217

The Road to California: The Search for a Southern Overland Route, 1540-1848.

By HARLAN H A G U E . American Trails Series, no. 11. (Glendale, Calif.: A r t h u r H .

Clark Company, 1978. 325 p p . $20.50.)

As we read this book, we learn that there were many roads to California.

If a person headed west from almost anywhere above north-central Mexico and south of the Forty-second Parallel, he might h a p p e n upon a road, a trail, or a footpath that would lead to California. Of course, the a u t h o r concentrated mainly on the roads t h a t led from northern Mexico and New Mexico to the Californias in an effort to tie the interior provinces into a more closely knit unit.

T o provide a setting for the developm e n t of his principal theme, the author discusses the Indian peoples w h o occupied greater Arizona in the centuries before the arrival of the EuropeanAmericans. I n some instances where an anthropologist might tend to qualify statements concerning the origins of I n d i a n peoples, the a u t h o r was quite definite. As an example: "Descended from the H o h o k a m are the Papagos who live in the deserts of southern Arizona and the Pimas who live farther north. . . ."

It was along I n d i a n footpaths and trails that Cabeza de V a c a and Estevanico m a d e their way across the southern United States to the meeting with Spaniards in northern Mexico in 1536.

T h r e e years later, Estevanico, I n d i a n guides, and Fray Marcos de Niza m a d e their a p p r o a c h to the Seven Cities of Cibola. In the early 1540s, Fray Marcos and other I n d i a n guides led members of the C o r o n a d o expedition along trails that crisscrossed the southern part of w h a t is now the southwestern United States: north to the Hopi villages and the G r a n d C a n y o n ; east to the buffalo plains; west to the lower Colorado region; and then the melancholy return back home to Mexico, empty-handed, without having discovered another Mexico or another Peru,

T h e Spaniards refused to give u p .

T h e failure of the C o r o n a d o expedition was soon forgotten. After a lapse of time, new leads from I n d i a n inhabitants of the northern interior resulted in the formation of new expeditions. Failing to discover precious metals, the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries found Indians w h o lived in villages and rancherias, practiced irrigation agriculture, and needed preachers to lead them from their "heathen ways" to Christianity.

Kino, the Jesuit, and Garces and Escalante, Franciscans, deserve to be called explorers and pathfinders as m u c h as Anza, Miera, Armijo, and Romero, w h o were Spanish and Mexican civil and military leaders. All h a d a role to play in the establishment of the road to California.

It is interesting t h a t the quarter-century of United States involvement in the Southwest takes about as m u c h space in the books as the three centuries of Spanish and Mexican involvement, but with the coming of the Anglo trappers a n d the events related to the Mexican War, the pace did quicken. F r o m the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s, there were few streams in the Southwest t h a t h a d not been trapped or crossed by such m e n as Jedediah Smith, the Patties, Ewing Young, Kit Carson, Antoine Leroux, Pauline Weaver, Antoine Robidoux, etc.

Stephen W. Kearny and Alexander W. D o n i p h a n with their Dragoons, and Philip St. George Cooke with the Morm o n Battalion, all are familiar to historians and history buffs of U t a h a n d the West, a n d all started on the road to California: Kearny westward along the length of the Gila River; Cooke south into Sonora, then north along the San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers, then westward along the Gila behind K e a r n y to the Colorado Crossing into California

218 a n d on to San Diego. D o n i p h a n and his m e n were sidetracked into C h i h u a h u a and finished the Mexican W a r there, without completing the journey to California.

This is an attractive a n d durable book, such as we have come to expect from A r t h u r H . Clark C o m p a n y publishers.

Selected illustrations, maps, bibliogra-

Utah Historical

Quarterly

phy, and index supplement the text a n d m a k e this a volume that readers a n d libraries with a n interest in the Spanish, Mexican, and United States Southwest will w a n t to acquire.

S. L Y M A N T Y L E R

University

of

Utah

The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to California, 1826-1827.

Ed. by GEORGE R. B R O O K S . (Glendale, Calif.: A r t h u r H . Clark Company, 1977. 259 p p . $24.50.)

This h a n d s o m e octavo volume, with its ivory laid, deckle-edged p a p e r a n d distinctive gold bands and p r o m i n e n t lettering on the spine, is clearly a "Clark book." Published in J a n u a r y 1978, in an edition of 750 copies, The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith sold out within seven m o n t h s â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a m o d e r n Clark record. A second printing, slightly more modest in a p p e a r a n c e , has since been issued. T e n years in preparation, tfiis valuable addition to the publisher's "Western Frontiersman Series" has been w o r t h the wait.

D u r i n g the summer of 1967 Smith's personal account of his 1826-27 expedition turned u p in a box of family papers that h a d been given to the Missouri Historical Society in Saint Louis. T h e discovery h a p p e n e d almost as if on cue from Dale M o r g a n who, just four m o n t h s earlier, had publicly expressed his hope that additional early fur trade narratives might yet be found in the closets and attics of the " G a t e way City." Although Smith's accomplishments in the American West were well known, having been quite fully and accurately documented in the earlier works of Harrison C. Dale, M a u r i c e Sullivan, a n d M o r g a n , a m o n g others, certain points continued to stir debate and some questions remained unanswered, including the following: W h a t were Smith's motives in u n d e r t a k i n g the journey? W h a t was his real destina-

tion? W h a t route exactly did his expedition follow? I t was the h o p e of George R. Brooks, longtime director of the Society, that the new d o c u m e n t might provide the answers. His expectations were only partially fulfilled.

T h e exact route of J e d e d i a h Smith in 1826-27 can now be determined. H e left his Bear River rendezvous site in early August with a small contingent of between thirteen and eighteen men. After working his way south along the Price, Sevier, Virgin, and Colorado rivers, he reached the Mojave I n d i a n villages in mid-October. Smith then pushed west across the Mojave Desert a n d the San Bernardino M o u n t a i n s (through Sawpit C a n y o n ) , arriving at the Mission San Gabriel in late November â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the first American to travel overland to California.

After a trip to San Diego (to secure official permission from Governor Echeandia for his m e n to remain temporarily in the p r o v i n c e ) , which landed h i m in jail, Smith was released and reunited with his men. I n m i d - J a n u a r y his party left the mission, ordered to r e t u r n h o m e by the same route they h a d come. N e a r present-day Victorville, however, Smith veered to the Northwest, crossed the T e h a c h a p i Mountains, a n d entered the San J o a q u i n Valley. I n May, after his party h a d trapped some of the northern streams, he led two companions across the Sierra N e v a d a (through Ebbetts

219

Book Reviews and Notices Pass). Fie reached the Bear River rendezvous on July 3, 1827â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the first American to accomplish an eastward crossing of the Sierra N e v a d a a n d the first to traverse the Great Basin.

Smith's motives a n d original destination r e m a i n very m u c h clouded. I t is the editor's wide consideration of these u n resolved points of controversy, however, that gives the present volume m u c h of its value a n d its sweep. Brooks moves skillfully t h r o u g h the maze of possibilities a n d handles t h e entire t h e m e with j u d g m e n t a n d insight. H e brings a n attractive objectivity to the task with his full b u t unobtrusive annotations.

O n the other h a n d , one disappointing lapse in analysis must be mentioned â&#x20AC;&#x201D; t h e editor's t r e a t m e n t of the Mojave I n d i a n s ( p p . 7 1 - 8 5 ) . Brooks h a s chosen to rely heavily on A. L. Kroeber's Handbook of the Indians of California (1925) while ignoring t h e more recent research of Lorraine Sherer. A check of Sherer's Turning

Points:

Historical

and Sociological

D E M O S a n d SARANE S P E N C E BOOCOCK.

work on " T h e Clan System" ( 1 9 6 5 ) , " T h e G r e a t Chieftains" ( 1 9 6 6 ) , a n d " T h e N a m e M o j a v e " ( 1 9 6 7 ) , in the Southern California Quarterly would have prevented several errors while providing a m o r e accurate s t a n d a r d against which to c o m p a r e Smith's lengthy observations. This is n o t a n insignificant failing, b u t it is m o r e t h a n compensated for by t h e book's other strengths.

Finally, t h e volume h a s been enhanced by t h e careful field notations of T o d d Berens a n d his Explorer C l u b students from Walker J u n i o r H i g h School in Santa A n a , California. Berens worked closely with M o r g a n on this project a n d has aided a n u m b e r of " a r m c h a i r " scholars in their attempts to unravel the confused threads of early western expeditions.

T H O M A S F. ANDREW'S

Azusa Pacific Essays on the Family.

(Chicago:

College

Edited by J O H N

University of C h i c a g o Press,

1978. Xii + 413 p p . Paper, $10.00.)

Written u n d e r the sponsorship of the American Journal of Sociology, this book provides the student of the family with an example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its finest. T h e essays in Turning Points result from the successful interchange between historians a n d sociologists.

Edited by a p r o m i n e n t historian of the American family, J o h n Demos, a n d an equally skilled sociologist, Sarane Spence Boocock, this book is intended as a stimulus to further interdisciplinary research of the subject matter. As the title indicates, the editors believe the study of the family h a s brought about a reorientation in historical inquiryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; away from traditional public a n d official topics a n d toward more in-depth research into personal a n d private experiences of the past. And they a p p l a u d the transition,

T h e historians w h o contributed essays to this volume use theory a n d m e t h o d ology from such fields as demography, social psychology, sociology, a n d history.

T h e authors effectively incorporate kinship, age stratification, a n d culture into the historical study of such crucial aspects of h u m a n existence as education, work, marriage, sexuality, childrearing, and old age. Although none of the essays is intended to be in any way definitive, all provide a d e q u a t e starting points for further research.

T h e book is well organized, with t h e material presented in a tightly structured a n d scholarly m a n n e r . T h e volume is divided into four sections, the first an overview of social research on the family by sociologist Glen H . Elder, J r .

T h i s initial essay provides a competent bibliography in sociology to those historians interested in developing an inter-

220

Utah Historical

disciplinary a p p r o a c h to the family.

T h e next two sections a r e devoted to historical treatises on a variety of topics.

Included in p a r t 2 is an essay by Carl F. Kaestle a n d Maris A. Vinovskis on education in nineteenth-century Massachusetts; a study on youth a n d industrialization in Hamilton, O n t a r i o , in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Michael B. Katz a n d I a n E. D a v e y : an investigation of marriage as the transitional step to adulthood from 1 8 6 0 1975, by J o h n Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., a n d Douglas Strong; a n d an essay by T a m a r a K. Hareven on kinship and its socioeconomic importance to millworkers in Manchester, N e w H a m p shire, 1880-1936. This section focuses on process or changes in family experience a n d heavily utilizes quantitative techniques.

Part 3 offers studies that emphasize psychohistorical methods of analysis.

Joseph F. K e t t discusses nineteenthcentury views of precocity a n d some social fears of that period; sex a n d symbolism in the Jacksonian period make for an intriguing study by Carroll SmithRosenberg; a n d the social consequences of old age in colonial N e w England are discussed by J o h n Demos. While the appeal of these historical essays depends largely u p o n the reader's interests, each is well written a n d makes a scholarly contribution in its area.

T h e concluding section comprises critical response from sociologists Neil J. Smelser a n d Sydney H a l p e m , Rosabeth Moss K a n t e r , Anne Foner, a n d

Preserving History.

Quarterly

Sarane Spence Boocock. Each critique goes beyond simple evaluation of the historical studies by assessing the potential historical d a t a in illuminating sociological research a n d the increasing possibilities for interdisciplinary history.

A generous list of references is given at the conclusion of each essay. This bibliographic information will prove invaluable to the scholar researching any of the topics discussed in the book.

T h e principal value of Turning Points lor the student of t h e historical family is the new directions for research it encourages. T h e social historian, in general, should find many of the essays enlightening. Some background in sociological methodology, psychohistory, or demography is assumed in m a n y of the studies.

Scholars from diverse areas should find this book valuable reading. Although the volume does not by itself convey the full measure of opportunities available to students of the history of the family, it does provide an acceptable example of methods by which history may be successfully integrated with the social sciences. If properly applied, each discipline may serve the others. T h e book's advocacy of further interdisciplinary study of the family along with the inferred commitment to increased nontraditional historical inquiries reflects current trends in historical research.

M. G U Y B I S H O P

Southern

Your Past: A Painless Guide to Writing

Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois

Your Autobiography

and

Family

By J A N I C E T . D I X O N a n d DORA D. F L A C K . ( G a r d e n City, N . Y . : Double-

day & Company, Inc., 1977. 334 p p . $8.95.)

This excellent book, aimed at a traditional, family-oriented audience, is packed with dozens of useful ideas for would-be autobiographers a n d family historians. Divided into four sections, it

is three parts Dixon a n d one part Flack.

Dixon's sections are the first three: Writing Your Autobiography" (106 p p . ) , "Writing Your Family History" (60 p p . ) , a n d "Writing Your Diary" (11

Book Reviews and Notices p p . ) . Flack's section is a miscellany called "Searching, Organizing, a n d Preserving the M a t e r i a l " (108 p p . ) . A useful a p p e n d i x contains library helps, a list of how-to-do-it books, a n d locations of vital records, plus a brief bibliography.

Good writing is the best sermon the a u t h o r s preach (and p r a c t i c e ) . As the preface states: "the major portion of this book is concerned with the writing [activity]." T h e book is strongest when discussing " h o w to choose which stories to tell, how to write it, a n d then h o w to polish t h a t writing." T h e i r other suggestions range widely, touching such matters as finding source material at home and in the community, how to tape oral histories, problems of color photographs, locating birth and death certificates, the importance of historical contexts, h a n d l i n g dialect, a n d using h u m o r . T h e y include m a n y h a n d y checklists, questions, and forms.

T h e autobiography section draws skillfully from autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, Flelen Keller, and M a r k T w a i n to illustrate Dixon's perceptive points about writing creatively. I n fact, the writing ideas in this section alone are worth the modest price of the book.

T h e family history section is also sprinkled with valuable ideas. But it is only half a loaf. Dixon discusses the "inverted p y r a m i d " a p p r o a c h (working back in time from the writer) b u t she fails to point out other widely-used frameworks, including the normal pyramid which starts with a g r a n d p a r e n t and broadens as it approaches the present. Additionally, she treats family history projects like a personal venture, when in fact m a n y families make it a family project complete with committees, funding, and shared research a n d writing (and tricky family politics!). This section could use m o r e examples, like Dixon inserted in Section O n e , from published family histories.

A n eleven-page Section T h r e e on diaries? W h y not create a good-sized section called " C u r r e n t Records" a n d in

221 elude therein a c h a p t e r each on diarykeeping, scrapbooks, family p h o t o g r a p h s , a n d memorabilia? T h a t would leave Section F o u r smaller but more cohesive as a reference c h a p t e r on locating source materials. As is, the book's organization shows signs of haste. Section Four, for example, is not integrated well with the rest of the book, particularly with Section O n e where t h e would-be autobiogr a p h e r is led step-by-step to finish the task but is never pushed to consult the wide variety of i m p o r t a n t records listed in Section F o u r â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a serious failing.

While the wealth of good ideas in these last sections far outweighs shortcomings, a few problems are noteworthy.

Some diaries are written for family m e m bers or the public, but Dixon asserts t h a t a diary "is not written for anyone else to read." Some m i g h t object w h e n she states t h a t a daily diary entry should not include m a n y activities except " t h e one t h a t impressed you most." Finally, the authors should discourage, not encourage, readers from using spiral notebooks a n d binders (pages easily rip o u t ) , felt tip ink on backs of p h o t o g r a p h s (bleed t h r o u g h ) , a n d ditto copies (high acid content causes quick deterioration of p a p e r ) . While guiding readers to excellent family, government, and church records, they fail to point out the value of records of business a n d labor, schools, fraternal societies, a n d loan agencies.

T h e book is well printed b u t plainly covered. Footnotes a n d bibliography are included, but where is the index? If Kybig's a n d Marty's Your Family History can feature forty intriguing family photographs in seventy pages, c a n n o t Doubleday spice u p Preserving Your Past with a few? T h e bibliography might benefit by citing a style m a n u a l (Dixon suggests readers consult one) a n d some sample published family histories (like Wyatt Cooper's nationally popular Families).

Small problems aside, this book is so loaded with practical information it needs to be in public a n d academic

222

Utah Historical

libraries a n d in the h a n d s of anyone w h o is even half serious about doing his or her own life story or family history.

The

Country

Railroad

Station

in America.

W I L L I A M G.

Quarterly HARTLEY

Brigham Young University Salt Lake City Center

By H . R O G E R G R A N T a n d C H A R L E S W .

B O H I . (Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Publishing C o m p a n y , 1978. 183 p p . $22.50.)

Sometimes as a n ornate architectural statement in a n established county seat a n d sometimes as a prefabricated wooden rectangle slid off a railcar in advance of civilization, t h e small town rail station in N o r t h America is treated thoroughly by t h e authors. Both m e n grew u p with t h e subject a n d both are teachers of history. T h e y p h o t o g r a p h e d over forty-six depots in the mid-1960s, by which time the small-town depot was becoming a vestigial reminder of the days w h e n railroads d o m i n a t e d the transfer of people a n d goods from coast to coast.

T h e book is a b u n d a n t l y illustrated, with fewer t h a n one dozen pages lacking a p h o t o g r a p h or rendering of a country depot. N o t only d o the photographs give t h e reader a chance to compare a n d contrast, b u t they corroborate the authors' t h e m e t h a t small town depots have waned as active centers of the community except in the cases of a d a p t a tion for other uses. T h e graphics along with the narrative give the reader a microcosmic view of the nation's economic development, using depot style as an indicator of a town's affluence, permanence, a n d climate.

T h e authors concentrate on the 80,000 railroad stations built by 1916 in the United States which cost less t h a n $25,000 to construct, a n d they succeed in portraying these depots as " t h e pivots of life in all its most tumultuous departures a n d arrivals." T h e combination station served both passenger and freight functions a n d was often the town's meeting hall, political arena, social center, a n d even church. I n at least one case, a fortune was spawned in a combination station w h e n in 1886, in Redwood, Minnesota, the company

agent for the Minneapolis a n d Saint Louis line acquired a shipment of watches t h a t h a d been refused for delivery by the local jeweler. T h e agent was R i c h a r d W a r r e n Sears, a n d his subsequent profitable sale of the jewelry was the beginning of Sears, Roebuck, and C o m p a n y .

T h e authors set o u t to explain in general terms why the combination stations evolved as they did a n d then concentrate on the regional differences as found east a n d west of the Mississippi River a n d in C a n a d a . T h e station agent, privy to m u c h a d v a n c e news, is described as the best informed m a n in most towns. Fie often lived with his family in the station.

T h e evolution of the combination stations reflects the merger of several independent railroads into larger companies, helping to explain the greater divergence of architectural style in the East where depots were built by m a n y predecessor railroads, as compared to the West where one railroad could span the continent from t h e Mississippi to the Pacific. Another mirror of national economic development was the use of standardized building plans for the sake of economy a n d c o m p a n y identity, using only architectural trim or different paint colors to vary the theme. T h e harshness of winters a n d scarcity of population dictated spartan design for prairie town depots, which were often accompanied by adjoining wooden platforms a n d water towers. T h e authors explore the building policies a n d plans of the n a tion's railroads, explaining h o w the territory served, a n d t h e company's economic condition influenced, depot style.

T h e final c h a p t e r projects the future

Book Reviews and Notices

223

of country railroad stations as dim, listing eight major reasons for their decline in importance. T h o u g h faced with conclusive evidence that the small town railroad station is a structure of t h e past, the authors succeed in documenting one of the most vital elements of community life in America for a t least half a cen-

tury. An excellent essay a n n o t a t i n g sources for further reading on both u r ban a n d rural railroad stations concludes this interesting book.

TEDDY GRIFFITH

Ogden 1

m

Book Notices

M/M/fy{\y^< '<

1

An Enduring SON UTAH

Legacy. Compiled by L E S -

COMMITTEE, PIONEERS.

DAUGHTERS (Salt

Lake

OF

City:

Daughters of U t a h Pioneers, 1978. X + 447 p p . $10.00.)

listing of post office openings a n d closings throughout the state.

The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A Market Critique of Sectarian Economics.

By M A R V I N S. H I L L , C. K E I T H

ROOKER,

A new D U P series in U t a h history has been launched, the fourth to be issued by t h e group. Similar in format t o its predecessors â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Heart Throbs of the West, Treasures of Pioneer History, a n d Our Pioneer Heritage â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the first volume in An Enduring Legacy includes some bibliographic d a t a a n d footnotes, features absent in most previous D U P p u b lications.

T h e most detailed piece is "Historic Cosumnes a n d the Slough House Pioneer Cemetery," a seventy-page account of a M o r m o n family's activity in California gold rush country.

Like most D U P compilations, the current work brings together a mass of information about less well-known people and events.

The Post Offices

of Utah. By J O H N S.

G A L L A G H E R . (Burtonsville, M d . :

The

Depot, 1977.83 p p . $7.50.)

Contains a short history of post offices in U t a h as well as a county-by-county

and

LARRY

T.

WIMMER.

(Provo, U t . : Brigham Y o u n g University Press, 1977. Viii + 88 p p . Paper, $4.95.)

This work employs economic statistics and d a t a to evaluate the highly emotional a n d heretofore moralistic conclusions about M o r m o n economics during t h e Kirtland period, particularly as they related to the banking experiences.

I n so doing, the authors challenge most of the premises of both Brodie a n d Fielding.

This very scholarly study argues t h a t the primary cause for the bank's failure was t h e absence of a "legal" charter. I n other economic aspects, M o r m o n leaders' behavior paralleled quite closely t h a t of western O h i o non-Mormons. Further, their expectations a n d hopes were, for their frontier, Jacksonian times, quite reasonable.

Although this booklet m a y not satisfy everyone, it is a n excellent piece of economic detective work a n d a n important addition to M o r m o n history in

Ohio.

224 Victorian

Utah Historical West.

By LAMBERT

FLORIN.

(Seattle: Superior Publishing Co..

1978. 190 p p . $14.95.)

Florin's camera records more than a h u n d r e d Victorian structures in California, Oregon, a n d Washington a n d a sprinkling in Colorado, British Columbia, M o n t a n a , Nevada, I d a h o , a n d U t a h (one derelict house in Park C i t y ) . T h e book looks as if it were hurriedly thrown together from easily available materials to take advantage of current interest in the topic. Neither the photographs nor the text does justice to the architecture.

Canyon Country Geology for the Layman and Rockhound.

By F . A. BARNES. (Salt Lake City: Wasatch Publishers, 1978. 160 p p . Paper, $3.95.)

Intended for the layman, this h a n d y guide describes the spectacular geology of southeastern U t a h a n d adjacent parts of Colorado a n d Arizona. Geologic time periods a n d their principal shaping events, the various rock strata characteristic of the Colorado Plateau country, the major a n d minor surface features, a n d information on collecting mineral specimens are included in the contents. If you can't tell a rincon from an anticline, you will w a n t a copy of Barnes's guide in your glove compartment or back pack.

"Soul-Butter and Hog Wash." and Other Essays on the American West. Ed. THOMAS

G.

ALEXANDER.

Quarterly

the American West mirrored attitudes from their traditional Victorian American upbringing in such areas as religion, sense of propriety, a n d the need for order.

T h e individualism of the cowboy is brought into question by D o n Walker, and Helen Papanikolas explores the sources of strain between M o r m o n s a n d new immigrants to U t a h around t h e t u r n of the century. Finally, in his article on U t a h politics, J. Keith Melville concludes that n o n - M o r m o n s m a y d o well even in the predominantly M o r m o n population of U t a h .

Land of the Iron Dragon. By ALIDA E. Y O U N G . (Garden City, N . Y . : Doubleday a n d Co. 1978. 213 p p . $7.95.)

This is an excellent, well-written novel about a fourteen-year-old immigrant who toils with other Chinese to build the Central Pacific Railroad across California, Nevada, a n d U t a h in the 1860s.

Contrary to the author's assertion in an afterword that "the Chinese were still given n o credit for their great contribution to the building of the railroad" during the centennial celebration in 1969, one of the nine articles in The Last Spike is Driven {Utah Historical Quarterly, volume 37, n u m b e r 1 ) , the official publication of the Golden Spike Centennial Commission, is "Chinese Laborers a n d the Construction of the Central Pacific."

Charle s

Redd M o n o g r a p h s in Western History, no. 8. (Provo, U t . : Brigham Young University Press, 1978. 155 p p .

Paper, $4.95.)

T h e five articles printed here were edited for publication from a lecture series on aspects of the American WTest presented in 1975-76. I n his essay, Jeffrey Holland discusses the early years of M a r k T w a i n ' s religious thought. According to H o w a r d L a m a r , migrants to

Hispano Folklife of New Mexico: The Lorin W. Brown Federal Writers Project Manuscripts.

Edited by MARTA WEIGLE

and

CHARLES

L.

BRIGGS.

(Albuquerque: University of N e w Mexico Press, 1978. 336 p p . $15.00.)

Collected in the 1930s, these m a n u scripts d o c u m e n t the folklife of Hispanic northern N e w Mexico and include folk songs, proverbs, riddles, folk tales, impressionistic sketches, a n d field reports.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY D e p a r t m e n t of D e v e l o p m e n t Services Division of State History BOARD O F STATE HISTORY MILTON C. ABRAMS, Smithfield, 1981

President DELLO G. DAYTON, Ogden, 1983

Vice President MELVIN T. SMITH, Salt Lake City Secretary THOMAS G. ALEXANDER, Provo, 1983 M R S . ELIZABETH GRIFFITH, Ogden, 1981

WAYNE K. HINTON, Cedar City, 1981 THERON L U K E , Provo, 1983

DAVID S. MONSON, Lieutenant Governor/

Secretary of State, Ex officio MRS. ELIZABETH MONTAGUE, Salt Lake City, 1983 WILLIAM D. O W E N S , Salt Lake City, 1983 MRS. HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS, Salt Lake City, 1981 TED J. WARNER, Provo, 1981

ADMINISTRATION MELVIN T. SMITH, Director

STANFORD J. LAYTON, Managing Editor JAY M. HAYMOND, Librarian DAVID B. MADSEN, State Archaeologist

A. KENT POWELL, Historic Preservation Research WILSON G. MARTIN, Historic Preservation Development The Utah State Historical Society was organized in 1897 by public-spirited Utahns to collect, preserve, and publish Utah and related history. Today, under state sponsorship, the Society fulfills its obligations by publishing the Utah Historical Quarterly and other historical materials; locating, documenting, and preserving historic and prehistoric buildings and sites; and maintaining a specialized research library. Donations and gifts to the Society's programs or its library are encouraged, for only through such means can it live up to its responsibility of preserving the record of Utah's past.

MEMBERSHIP Membership in the Utah State Historical Society is open to all individuals and institutions interested in Utah history.

Membership applications and change of address notices should be sent to the membership secretary.

Annual dues are: Individual, $7.50; institution, $10.00; student, $5.00 (with teacher's statement) ; contributing, $15.00; sustaining, $25.00; patron, $50.00; life member, $150.00. Your interest and support are most welcome.