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Youth standing in center of Main Street, ca. 1868, may have been one of the rowdy young men whose acts greatly concerned residents of the frontier city. Charles R. Savage photograph, USHS collections.
Zion's Rowdies: Growing up on the Mormon Frontier BY DAVIS BITTON
B E N J A M I N FERRIS, SECRETARY OF STATE IN Utah Territory in 185253, was not favorably impressed with the Mormon children there. They were deplorably unhealthy, he said — "the combined result of the gross sensuality of the parents, and want of care toward their offspring."1 Nor was the problem purely physical; it was also behavioral. Nowhere outDr. Bitton is a professor of history at the University of Utah. A version of this paper was presented at the Childhood in American Life Conference, Indianapolis, Ind., April 1, 1978. 1 Benjamin Ferris, Utah and the Mormons . . . (New York, 1854), p. 47.
