Utah's Regions, A View from the Hinterland

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 47, 1979, No. 2

Utah's Regions, A View from the Hinterland

BY CHARLES S. PETERSONGUEST EDITOR

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE

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 Historical 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 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 settlement 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 were 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.

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 vivid—color country, or what Gregory Crampton has described as "Standing Up 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 Valley—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.

The 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 slope of the Wasatch Plateau, Sanpete-Sevier shows clear evidence of the "garden"—a blossom in man's effort to make the desert bloom. In it are mountain meadows 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." The railroad town, mining camp, and cosmopolitan population of the popular image suggest a harnessing of human 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. The 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 human structures as symbols loaded with meaning. The 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. He 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.

To 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.

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

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