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Life in a Village Society, 1877-1920
Life in a Village Society, 1877-1920
BY CHARLES S. PETERSON
UTAH'S DIXIE IS A REMARKABLE COUNTRY. Apparent to all are its color, the winter relief of its warm climate, and its proud and distinctive heritage. What may be less apparent to those who do not habitually face the past is that 1977 marked the centennial of a divide in Dixie's development quite as clearly as 1976 marked the anniversary of great developments in the nation. Like many benchmark times, 1877 was punctuated by identifying events. On March 23, John D. Lee was executed at Mountain Meadow at the southern edge of the Great Basin. Two weeks later the first of Mormondom's western temples was dedicated in St. George. A few days thereafter a dropsical and weary Brigham Young left his winter home and made his way slowly to Salt Lake City where he died in August. These events marked the end of Dixie's formative years. No longer would Brother Brigham's determined experiments in agriculture, communal life, river transportation, and manufacturing jolt and vitalize the community. The temple was an enduring symbol that Dixie was a significant part of the Mormon community, not a foundering mission. And with poor John D. Lee was laid to rest the legal threat that had hung like a pall over Utah's southwest since the Mountain Meadow Massacre in 1857 as well as part of the guilt and fear that understroked the region's heritage with a powerful sense of tragedy. As the more discerning noted then, 1877 was truly a turning point.
From the vantage point of 100 years one may see that the region was entering its middle years or a time of stable village society. Indeed, southwestern Utah's history falls into three broad periods. In 1877 the time of beginning lay behind. Far to the future, in the years after 1920, lay a modern period made distinctive by the vigor of penetrating influences, roads, federal programs, the mass culture of modern communications, and the infiltration of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the Southwest across Utah borders. In between — after 1877 and before 1920 — was a time of maximum internal influence. Mormon culture may well have reached the zenith of its peculiarity in these years and in this setting. The pioneers of Mormon Dixie were a chosen lot, winnowed by the mission call, doubly sifted by disease and poverty, and seared by the tragedy of Mountain Meadow. By 1877 the area's society was fitted to enrich and give regional variation to the character of one of the West's most notable subcultures.
Yet, it is not a Mormon story alone that these pages seek to tell. The forces of the general frontier were at work in Dixie as well, as were the influences of science and technology. Silver Reef, the livestock frontier, transportation, and governmental exploration and development are all part of the story. In short, the purpose here will be to deal with a society that was "in between" in terms of both time and place and in terms of its relation to the polar influences of Salt Lake City in pioneer times and the broader influences of the Southwest and the nation in recent decades.
In the first place, Dixie's society was physically insulated. It lay more than three hundred miles from Salt Lake City and was separated from surrounding regions by political borders and some of America's most imposing natural barriers. Although the latter barred all rapid transit to the southwest for decades and to the south until after the end of the middle years, Dixie was early recognized as "color country." Even before 1877 it had begun to attract scientists, explorers, and writers who described its grandeur and beauty in vividly written reports and articles that gave it a regional image in the minds of a large and widespread community. Nevertheless, this essay will look more to cultural phenomena than to natural in its effort to understand the character of Dixie's society in the decades after 1877.
An important factor in the cultural context was the character of the faith embraced by Dixie's people of the middle period. In many ways it was the old faith of Mormonism. More than many Utahns, they continued to believe in direct revelation, in the infallibility of Mormon leadership, and in an imminent millennium, although by 1900 fewer waited in momentary anticipation of Christ's second advent than previously. The priesthood continued to govern in many matters of a secular character as well as in all spiritual concerns. Bishops at Washington, for example, were also mayors and presidents of the water board. Stake presidents and general authorities were expected to make pronouncements on matters as various as water-witching and thyroid trouble. For many, dreams and personal impressions were devoutly accepted as God's manifestations, and their lives were directed in accord. Most were comforted by the prayers of the priesthood, and a few still looked to stone peeping to locate lost objects. Evil spirits were legion and exorcised by prayer or by application of herbs and various devices of a churchly nature like Priddy Meeks's admonition to a possessed boy to sleep with his Doctrine and Covenants under his pillow. In many respects the predominant faith of the region was quite as old fashioned, quite as firm, and quite as comforting as the faith that had guided the pioneers of the Cotton Mission.
Yet, in the middle years it was a faith that stood more on the merits of the inner stuff of Dixie's own people than in the earlier years. No longer was it necessary to bolster St. George, Washington, and other towns with resident apostles and other general authorities. Indeed, rather than drawing on the wellsprings of faith from outside, Dixie may be said to have become an exporter of faith. Significant in this respect until his death in 1888 was Erastus Snow, alter ego to Brigham Young and field marshal of Mormon colonizing in the south. Faith was also exported in settlers to a dozen areas. The character of the Dixie church for example was carried out by Marcus Funk who, after years of poverty on the Muddy River in Nevada and a fruitless struggle with the Virgin River as bishop of Washington, left for Colorado in 1888 hoping that "facilities for making a living" would be "a little better." Thomas Jefferson Jones was called to head the Parowan Stake in neighboring Iron County. Hundreds moved to Arizona, to the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming, and to Canada, and after 1910 to California, carrying with them customs and values that marked the new regions and Mormon society in them.
This commitment to the church was apparent in many ways. It showed strongly in polygamy, in its lore of flight and escape and of trial and life in the territorial penitentiary. A quest for security in the brotherhood of Mormon association manifested itself in the successful effort of Toquerville's Levi Savage, Jr., and others to have themselves adopted to the prophet Joseph Smith, sealed in death as in life by an ordinance popular until the late 1890s. Commitment was also apparent in continuing submissiveness to the counsel of church leaders, as it was in the hymns of Joel Hill Johnson and Charles Walker and in the nighttime inspiration by which John M. Macfarlane gave the world the Christmas hymn "Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains"—a story movingly recorded by Andrew Karl Larson. Not surprisingly, Dixie faith could also take touches of self-righteousness as when Levi M. Savage looked down his nose at signs of crudeness:
This preoccupation with the kingdom lingered too in the journals of Dixie's old men, many of whom wrote in terms of testimony and admonition, leaving record of little else save perhaps a few words of aches and pains and of irrigation and weather.
But village life in the middle era went far beyond the careful portraits of faith and hope left by the journalists. Toil was a given. If anything, life was more demanding than in pioneer times, as suggested by Washington County's quick growth during the 1860s to 3,100 souls and its laborious climb thereafter to 5,100 by 1915. Little capital existed and speculative development was impossible. In their stead, development fell directly upon the bone and sinew of the county's people. Perhaps nowhere was the role of work more apparent than in the efforts to build and maintain dams and irrigation systems. Small towns failed to get water, lost their dams, or were literally washed away. Even the larger more prosperous places like Washington faced repeated crisis, replacing dam after dam and struggling to drive tunnels, hang flumes, seal porous ditches, and sluice sand out of ditches. In the main, the tools with which they worked were homemade, including a giant maul of nearly a thousand pounds that was cast from bits of iron collected locally during the construction of the pile dam at Washington.
During the 1890s a group from the upper Virgin acted on plans that had been developing for thirty years to bring water to the Hurricane Bench. Undertaken to provide opportunities for young people, the Hurricane Bench project was completed without capital "other than muscle and determination." Over a period of fourteen years about fifty men and boys built and rebuilt Hurricane's relatively simple dam in a box canyon of the Virgin River and with no other tools than wheelbarrows, shovels, and hammers hung miles of ditch on canyon walls, packed foodstuff and camp gear to remote sites, and enriched the region with such place names as Robbers' Roost and Chinatown Wash. Across the county to the northwest, at Enterprise, a similar group "lived on jackrabbit" for sixteen miserable years as with "no machinery of any kind" they struggled to build a reservoir. To make matters worse they faced active opposition from people at Old Hebron whose help and cooperation were desperately needed but who rightly regarded the new development as a threat to their water rights. At length, the hand of God seemed to intervene. A 1902 earthquake that shook all of southwestern Utah hit Hebron hardest, leading many formerly in opposition to move to Enterprise and join the thin ranks of the dam builders. As if this were insufficient, the quake that shook San Francisco in 1906 leveled the houses remaining at Hebron while Enterprise remained unscathed, suggesting providence's support of an otherwise almost insuperable job.
In one rare instance at Washington unemployed miners were willing to work for board and irrigation scrip, bringing equipment and experience with them. A few Indians, too, were employed, taking their pay in produce at 50 cents per day. Otherwise, off-season farmers and boys did it all, working off water assessments at $2.00 per day or taking contracts that gave them claim to ten or twenty acres under the ditch. Water development was thus far-and-away more costly than land, which in new developments could often be had for the $1.25 minimum purchase price of state lands or entered gratis under homestead provisions on the public domain that in 1915 still accounted for 84 percent of all lands in the county.
There was, however, a great variation in the value of land. Joseph Fish who returned to Utah in 1916 after nearly four decades of colonizing in Arizona canvassed the entire southwest portion of the state, finding that water rights and improvements in established farming areas often ran the price of land to $100.00 per acre. It was a poor established farm that could be had for less than $50.00 per acre. With little cash, Fish finally settled at Enterprise and, despite his seventy-eight years and rueful diary entries about homes in St. George costing as much as $7,000.00, rented a crude shelter for $5.00 per month for a time before planting upright cedar posts to form the walls of his own house. He worked constantly until his death at eighty-five to make a proper home with plastered walls, indoor plumbing, and electricity.
With water development extending completely through these middle years, farmers not only worked small farms but worked scattered fields, which complicated their operations and increased costs in terms of work. Joseph Fish, for example, farmed about fourteen acres in 1918 that were scattered in "five or six pieces," while in the years before the turn of the century Levi Savage and his wives made several orchards on town lots part of their small fruit operation at Toquerville as well as farming scattered pieces adjacent to the village. With wry humor that spoke for the entire community, one of the Hurricane Dam builders commented much later to historian, Karl Larson, "I guess we had more muscle than good sense !" More accurate and revealing might have been the observation that muscle and cooperative effort, not investments or government programs, paid the high price of reclamation and new homes.
But too much may be made of the role work played. Life was slower, its rhythm less tense. Winter unemployment was seen more as a normal round of chores, mail pickup, yarning, and petty trade than as a matter of national threat and presidential tension. For many, boredom rested heavy. Days dragged on, forever unchanging. In this setting anything out of the ordinary was welcomed. Breaking the tedium from time to time were the spring horse drive, one-man medicine shows, and begging bands of gypsies who made pathetic bears "dance and do other tricks." Even Mr. Smith, the traveling dentist, was something of an event as he made his rounds through Toquerville to knock out or pull a tooth or take a casting of some old-timer's toothless gums.
In the main, Dixie's people made their own fun. In a period when brass bands flourished throughout the state, Dixie groups excelled. Fiddlers, drummers, and, as 1920 approached, indefatigable pianists played for dances, giving their time first as a public service and later — when cars and customs made it possible to import paid musicians — demanding compensation of their own. At Enterprise, for example, boys who had been off to school refused to play for the Christmas dances in 1924 because they knew that "the people had hired some outside musicians." This matter of striking musicians finally came to the attention of church authorities who acted to support them, whereupon the chairman of the young folks committee resigned in protest.
For many, life was its own escape from tedium. Will Brooks, for example, found boyish interest in the St. George facility that doubled as jail and poorhouse over which his father's jurisdiction extended as marshal and sheriff. At the poorhouse stayed a few old crocks, one of whom told great yarns and was eternally grateful for Mrs; Brooks's cooking. Another had such a vile disposition that he not only flailed at Will with his cane but finally stabbed the elder Brooks. Yet, prison life was casual. Inmates were as often as not committed to young Brooks to whom they were more entertainers than outcasts of society as they went about chores assigned to them at the Brooks home or wandered to and from the jail in the boy's custody. At Washington a tiny jail with privy facilities in one corner was more an invitation to prankish jail breaks than a serious detention until it was bolstered by an iron cage acquired, like many other building materials, from the mines at Silver Reef which were then in decline.
Even death provided its escape from tedium. The bereaved alternated between sorrow for the departed and joy in reunion with returning relatives. The ranks of townspeople closed comfortingly around the family of the deceased making pine caskets, preparing bodies for burial, and hammering at the dry soil as they dug graves. Those with a sense for the morbid listened with fascination to the thud of clods as caskets were covered, and those with family pride or a turn for statistics noted the number of wagons and carriages that made their way to the graveyard.
Folklore at both Washington and St. George suggests that non- Mormons were sometimes subjected to harassment, particularly if they happened to be of the missionizing fraternity who sought to bring education and Christian enlightenment to polygamist Utah in the years before statehood. At Washington this spirit focused upon a Presbyterian school that opened in John D. Lee's old house which invited ghoulish pranks in the deteriorating building where Lee's uneasy spirit was said to roam or in the backyard where, it was whispered, figs ripened black over the hidden grave of a refugee child from the Mountain Meadow Massacre killed and buried by Lee when she talked too much. Similarly, a Presbyterian minister who came to St. George, as much for his health as for religious purposes, was interrupted in his meetings by braying donkeys, stray cats, and pranksters made up in theatrical paint. Local lore, which from this distance seems to possess as much boasting as it does remorse, suggested that the heart attack that caused the minister's death was triggered by harassment. A final twist of macabre lore insists that one of the dead minister's tormentors put a can opener to be used on resurrection day in the tin casket in which his body was shipped to more restful climes to be interred.
Recreation was as various as it was homemade. Children played with bottle-horses and hollyhock babies or copied Indian children in the use of tiny bones from the feet of sheep as human or livestock forms. Karl Larson tells of "walnut keeps," a marble game played with walnuts and glass shooting taws and of "base rounders," an early version of baseball. Wrestling was a rite of passage by which every young man fitted himself into the local pecking order. Sometimes it brought dire consequences as when Simon Leavitt became angered and knifed a comrade or when one Washington man threw his dearest friend, breaking his neck. Racing both on foot and horseback pitted champions from one town against each other or from the best of other towns in competition that was sweetened by petty betting and institutionalized by formal programs on holidays. On the Fourth and Twenty-fourth of July a self-conscious sense of protocol, spawned of polygamy's long conflict, resulted at St. George in a salvo of thirteen cannon shots for the Fourth — one for each original state — and never more than a half-dozen for the Twenty-fourth. Otherwise the Twenty-fourth was probably the grander day as gallons of pink lemonade were consumed, programs and skits presented, and climatic relief found at Dodge's Spring, where facilities for picnicking and water sports were available, or at Pine Valley, where real escape from the 110- degree heat could be found.
Inevitably, a rich folklore grew and retold tales became a special Dixie art. Karl Larson, Juanita Brooks, Pansy Hardy, and others have enriched us all by putting much of this in print. What modern is not better for having read "Ithmar Sprague and His Big Shoes," an incident in which an inventive hoaxter terrified all Washington by leaving unexplained tracks of giant size throughout the town?" Stories of weddings, fires, false teeth, disease, Indians, school days, and of polygamists escaping from U.S. marshals sustained life and gave it color. Mimicry was practiced endlessly by people gifted with facile tongues and good wit. Often cruel in the jest it focused on the unfortunate, mimicry could also be fond and venerating and helped extend the influence of such patriarchs as Robert Covington, first bishop at Washington, whose practice of prefixing "almost every statement" with the word thus was still reiterated with art and satisfaction in 1920, although the old man had been dead for nearly two decades.
But nothing belongs more rightly to the middle years than Dixie wine. Introduced with Brigham Young's blessing as a mainstay in the warm climate agriculture that was to be Dixie's specialty, wine was effectively promoted by Joseph Ellis Johnson, pioneer horticulturist and publicist whose periodical The Pomologist for years broadcast the secrets of its culture. John Naegle developed its largest commercial enterprise and helped make Toquerville the greatest exporter of Dixie's most marketable product. Although local use was supposed to have been limited to sacramental purposes, thousands of Dixie residents found relief and pleasure in its consumption. Freely used, it became a social problem and a religious reproach that may have had more than a little to do with the tightened twentieth-century emphasis upon abstinence in the Mormon church.
Sensing such contradictions, one Toquerville stalwart lamented "some elders abuse this blessing by becoming dissipated" while "the youth in Zion are following diligently the example of thoughtless and foolish fathers." Taken aback by the social problems thus created, the church tried to control wine's use. Ordinances passed on Brigham Young's recommendation limited sales to lots of five gallons or more in an effort to reduce its local distribution but are said only to have increased drunkenness and to have led to reports that "it is utterly impossible to drink five gallons of wine and stay sober." Restrictive efforts notwithstanding, production and drinking continued throughout Dixie's middle period. Among other things, it influenced sacramental customs in the church until after 1900, creating a rich folklore of heavy drinking patriarchs who emptied the sacramental cup and of disappointed children who could consequently do no more than raise the emptied vessel to their lips in a pantomine that seemed a double mockery. From Silver Reef came reports that
Neighboring Mormon communities traded anxiously for it and were influenced in their customs and folklore, as evidenced by the colorful and vivid report of an incident at Panguitch by an English journalist in 1882:
At Kanarraville an equally thirsty but more inventive group is said to have drilled through the floor boards and barrel and drained off tubs of wine while the owner slept on the top of the barrel in his wagon. A recent student's assessment that "of all remedies that will not cure a cold wine ... is the most popular" would not have found support among southwestern Utahns who sold it in their drugstores, circulated remedies based upon it, and had faith in its remedial values rivaling their faith in the healing gifts of the priesthood. So much for Dixie's famous red cup. From it is reflected a split heritage — an irrepressible urge to fun and humor on the one hand and the harshness and tragedy of life on the other.
In the case of wine as in so many aspects of its story, the Dixie world of the middle years does not on first glance appear to have been a woman's world. But superficialities could hardly be more misleading. Women left their imprint on every element of the entire experience including the culture and use of wine. From early times females constituted a substantial proportion of Dixie's population. After the Indian mission of the 1850s Mormons came as families and bore families. Women shared in all functions of life. Indian women were a lasting link of tribal integrity as changing times and poverty brought their society to the brink of destruction. On Indian women fell the obligation of seed and pinenut harvest, and it was they who suffered the worst indignities of begging in Dixie's towns. On white women, too, fell a major burden for holding society together. Men worked outside or were called on missions or fled from polygamy charges. Women raised children, struggled to farm, and shouldered a surprising number of tasks in farming, ranching, business,
and communications. Polygamy produced both happy and broken homes and tangled the branches of family trees in almost impenetrable thickets. Contemplate the maze of relationships possible in such marriages as those of Ann Cooper and her two daughters. Shortly after Levi Savage helped pull their handcart west in the ill-fated Willie's company of 1856 Ann married him. A decade later both daughters likewise married Levi and, intertwined with other polygamist families, moved into the twentieth century with an almost unlimited potential for confusion.
In addition to their family roles, women taught schools, and held political posts (at neighboring Kanab what may have been the first allfemale municipal administration in America was elected in 1912). In every community a surprisingly large number of women served as midwives, delivering babies for a fee fixed at $3.00 by church fiat for many years. A classic example is Mariah Huntsman Leavitt who delivered 500 children in the Mormon towns of southern Nevada, the last of them after she had become so infirm that it was necessary to assign young men to carry her to the home of women about to be confined. The services of midwives were necessary throughout the entire middle period in a region with few doctors and even fewer medical facilities.
Another important point to bear in mind is that in many Dixie towns females outnumbered men. In 1880, for example, females accounted for 52 percent of St. George's population. This statistic is made the more impelling by noting that in the mining society of neighboring Silver Reef only 28 percent of the total was female. By 1909 it seemed to Sarah Comstock, a visitor who wrote for Collier's magazine, that most of St. George's older population were widows. Polygamists who had survived their husbands, they came and went quietly through the red dust streets, dominating a quaint picture:
Even the old cemetery where "tamarasks purr over the graves of the old" seemed to be the special preserve of women:
The symbol of the monument with three columns is appropriate for Dixie's society in these years. Although the records —- both the formal written record and verbal lore — have stressed the role of men, there was little doubt among the people of the period themselves that women on either side righted the column of life and held it steady.
It should also be noted that Dixie's Mormons of the middle years were no strangers to tragedy. Together with the rest of southern Utah their heritage was marked by tragedy in the Mountain Meadow Massacre. A moral blot hurled again and again by an outraged society, the infamous mass murder was tragic beyond description in itself. Deeper, however, lay a subtle sense that the entire promise of the restored gospel and even the promise of life implicit in Christ's atonement were threatened by the incident. Thus, the Mountain Meadow Massacre left a brooding sense of tragedy that touched the entire southern Utah experience, giving it a tragic counterpoint that has ironically served like the harshness of the country and its moving beauty to make Dixie's heritage fascinating and give it meaning.
Against this backdrop tragedy continued to mark the country throughout the middle period. In part this was a repetition of the old tragedy first sketched in primordial times as man and the civilization his doings represent met the wilderness. Dixie's desert wilderness was a killer, and the tragedy of man's puniness as he ventured into it was repeatedly thrust upon Dixie dwellers by lonely death. Near Old Hebron express rider Lehi Jones came on the frozen body of a man lost and alone who had fallen from his wagon and died. Tragic, too, in its narrative of humanity's failure in the face of wilderness is Will Brooks's story of the gruesome last hours of a vagrant with a cut throat he picked up and got to a doctor only to have him succumb when his wound was sewed up. But an incident even more filled with the pathos of failing hope was the tragedy of a family of English converts in 1869 as they undertook to make a desert passage between the Muddy settlements and St. George. Without water, the parents ended their quest for a new life by sending their son on by horseback while they composed themselves on a blanket under a mesquite tree and quietly expired. The boy's body was found only a short distance from water.
But even such tragedy is less heart-rending than when the wilderness in man erupts uncontrollably and turns him on his fellows. In 1899 all southern Utah was filled with horror at what was possible within their society when in a quarrel over irrigation water, William Roundy, a respected resident of Kanab, killed his neighbor Daniel Seegmiller, an equally respected man, and then himself. The irony of wilderness and human passion was laid out in even more stark horror a few years later at Orderville. An eighteen-year-old girl's body was found in a remote canyon where it had been hidden. She had been seduced and, when she became pregnant, murdered by her lover whose motives were later recounted in a folk song made available by Olive Burt.
He said he's been friends with Mary, And had promised to be true;
She wanted him to marry her, For a wedding was her due.
He begged her not to press him, Some excuses must be found;
For she was not attractive; She weighed two hundred pounds.
While all these customs and activities were as characteristic of Dixie as red rock and sorghum, they and the Mormon society of which they were part fell very much within the cultural influences of Salt Lake City. Although Dixie was discernibly different from other subregions within the Mormon cultural area, its society looked to the mother city for most of its connections, and, more than most, maintained the attitudes and customs that had led to the flight from the Midwest and the effort to develop a self-sufficient religious commonwealth centered at the Mormon capital. Thus, as distinctive as Dixie may have been, it remained very much in the orbital field of Salt Lake through the half-century following 1877. However, this should not be construed to mean that broader influences were not felt. The contrary is true. A variety of developments between 1877 and 1920 may be recognized as belonging to the larger frontier of America or as the product of federal influences. These brought new people with different values and broadened the activities and thinking of those already in Dixie.
One of the earliest and most individualistic developments was mining. As early as the 1860s when Gen. Patrick E. Connor sent his troops prospecting in the hopes of transforming Utah's society by a great gold rush, there had been mineral interest in Dixie. With mines opening in Nevada this continued until after the mid-1870s when unlikely deposits of silver were found in sandstone at Silver Reef, enabling mining to flourish in the heart of Dixie for a decade and to play a diminishing role during the remaining years of the century. In some respects Silver Reef was typical, a "worldly . . . treeless, grassless, red-sand location"— its residents "bonanza-minded, carefree, reckless," and from all quarters of the globe. Over a hundred petty businesses struggled for a stake in its wealth, but only a few big companies, including the Barbee and Walker and Stormont, struck it rich. Violence was common, and at least one accused murderer was seized from the St. George jail and lynched. Labor troubles revealed the basic sympathies of the Mormon community. In their anger, Mormons supported the companies when county authorities bundled miners off to court in Beaver after Enos Wall, who managed the Barbee, was taken hostage in lieu of unpaid wages. In time, it came to boast a Wells Fargo station, thriving saloons, and even a newspaper or two. Isolated by distance, Silver Reef does not appear to have exhibited much of the chest-thumping instinct common to mining towns of the era.
On the other hand, Silver Reef provided unprecedented work opportunities and cash pay to southern Utahns. Boys and men from towns nearby worked there, although Nels Anderson assures us that less than 5 percent of Silver Reef's population "were Mormons in good standing." Many more sold wood to the mills and engaged in freighting or peddling which in the years after 1877 became an integral part of the agricultural experience in Dixie. Indeed, everyone seemed to have something to trade. Although wine and sorghum were the staples of this petty trade, garden, farm, and orchard products of varying sorts were peddled. With their wagons and carts loaded — often with perishable goods — peddlers made their way from Silver Reef to the Nevada camps and to the towns in Iron County and beyond. Dode Brooks, who sold needles and buttons, would return from a good day with the jubilant song, "Hurrah, hurrah, hurray, I've made twenty dollars today." Russell Chandler, an eccentric blacksmith who sometimes hitched rides in Dode's wagon, would roll through town, rattling a length of chain and in a tuneless chant sing "Chain-lengths, open links, bolts and screws, bars and clevises" until his stock was gone. In time Silver Reef ran its course. With nothing to hold them, most of its citizens departed, and the declining town became little more than a junk paradise from which iron parts and used lumber and buildings were gleaned. Later, about 1911, an incipient oil boom near Virgin City rocked Washington County. Although petroleum meant little to the county, the expectant reaction to it suggests that a mentality of promotion was replacing the old values of the kingdom.
Space prohibits their full examination, but other broadening influences also made themselves felt. John Wesley Powell and his surveyors made southwestern Utah the basis for remarkable advances in the sciences of geology and ethnology. The woodcuts, sketches, and photographs that accompanied their reports along with the popular writing of one of their numbers, Frederick Dellenbaugh, did much to attract America's attention to Zion Canyon and led ultimately to the establishment of Zion National Park in 1919. Other government surveyors studied things as various as animal life, water, and the Dixie National Forest. Livestock in the region expanded from the cow or two and half-dozen sheep necessary to the self-sufficient farm of the early days to the large herds of the Canaan Cooperative Stock Company and to large stockmen. Moreover, it may properly be said that outside influences and individuals increasingly dominated the character of Dixie's grazing industry. Non- Mormons, including F. B. Saunders and Preston Nutter, competed vigorously to control range rights on the Arizona Strip and elsewhere. Even people from neighboring Mormon localities appear to have been more aggressive than most Dixieites in pushing livestock claims. The Orderville holdings and those of Lehi Jones and David Bulloch of Cedar City were, for example, among the most important in Washington County and adjacent areas of Arizona. Dixie dwellers who did respond to the livestock influence were nevertheless important and among others included the Atkins family, Anthony W. Ivins, and the Maxwells whose Maxwell and Grand Canyon Cattle Company is said to have included much of the Arizona Strip and to have run "more than 100,000" cattle by 1910.
Ironically, broadening influences also reached Dixie by means of its migrating people. During the entire period after 1877 the outflow continued as people found better options in new surroundings. The names of Dixie families are included in every colonizing venture of the church during the years before 1920, including the Little Colorado in Arizona, the San Juan in southeastern Utah, the San Luis Valley in Colorado, Colonia Diaz in Mexico, the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming, the Grand Ronde Valley in Oregon, and the Canada settlements.
Perhaps an even more important influence upon the spread of Dixie's culture were the young who went to school. Hundreds were educated in Salt Lake City and at Provo. By the turn of the century institutions of higher learning, including Brigham Young University, taught commercial economic practices, scientific agriculture, and about the forbidden fruits of Darwinian evolution. At the great universities of America, students hailing from Dixie found the broadening leaven of the nations' intellectual currents. Many of these never left Dixie, returning in person or in their hearts and bringing influences that became a second voice to the pulpit oratory that in the early years had made church leaders the primary interpreters of the regional society. Important in this process was Nels Anderson, an adopted son of Dixie, whose book Desert Saints may be said to be Utah's first modern history. Drawing heavily from southern Utah, Anderson's book is also among the first studies in which the culture of a Mormon subregion is presented in its own light rather than as a reflection of Salt Lake City.
Other products of Dixie's middle period who also recognized that the experience in which they had grown up was regionally distinctive were Andrew Karl Larson, Juanita Brooks, LeRoy R. Hafen, and Maurine Whipple. Perhaps no other Utah community has produced so distinguished a group of interpreters of its past. Individually they have fleshed out the country's image. Cumulatively they have made the heritage of Dixie's middle period the heritage of all Utahns. In writing "I Was Called to Dixie/' The Mountain Meadows Massacre, Giant Joshua, and numerous other works they have given this country and its society an image that goes beyond the simple image of Mormon, of Utahn, or of American. It is the image of Utah's Dixie, an important additional dimension. It is a culture initiated in the pioneer years before 1877 but which came to full flower in the half-century of the middle period.
In the decades since 1920 Dixie has changed drastically. It has turned its eyes increasingly from the red dust streets of St. George and the bonds that held it to Salt Lake City to the power marts of Washingon, D.C., and the hurdy-gurdy of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. But fortunately for a people swept ever more into one great national culture, the Dixie experience of the middle years was not only distinctive but it has been faithfully and skillfully recorded. In the process it has become the lasting culture of all who have eyes to see.
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