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The M-Factors in Tooele's History
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 51, 1983, No. 3
The M-Factors in Tooele's History
BY EUGENE E. CAMPBELL
TWENTY YEARS AGO A PROMINENT HISTORIAN published an article entitled "The M-factor in American History" in which he attempted to identify a characteristic shared by most Americans that differentiated them from other people. He concluded that it was the migration factor — our excessive mobility — and made a strong case for his point of view.
As I began a serious analysis and interpretation of Tooele's history, I was struck by the fact that George W. Pierson's M-factor was important in Tooele's story but also that there were a number of other M-factors that were vital as well. These included the mountains, the Mormons, the miners, the migrants, and the military — each of which has played a vital role in the history and development of our region. One might also add Mexico, the recognized owner of the Tooele area until 1848, and the "melting pot" or "mixing bowl" image of the Americanization of our diverse population.
THE MOUNTAINS
The Tooele region, including both Tooele Valley and Rush Valley, is defined by the Oquirrh Mountains on the east and the Stansbury range on the west. Of course there are other ranges, but the bulk of the population has lived in the shadows of these two relatively small but important mountain chains. Although not as spectacular as the Wasatch and Uinta ranges, both the Oquirrhs and the Stansbury Mountains rise from the valley level of around 4,000 feet to elevations in excess of 10,000 feet and in the case of Mount Deseret of the Stansburys, just over 11,000 feet. Both ranges contain beautiful canyons and supply the valleys with life-giving water. Journalist Jack Goodman labeled the Oquirrhs "The Shining Mountains," which name could be applied to both the exterior appearance and the metallic treasures within, for the Oquirrhs contain one of the largest concentrations of mineral wealth in the world. Unfortunately, the northern part of the range has been denuded by smoke from the Tooele and Garfield smelters, but before they received the deadly fumes, the Oquirrhs were covered with trees and shrubs similar in nature and appearance to the Wasatch Mountains to the east and the Stansburys to the west.
Some of my happiest memories of growing up in Tooele have to do with recreational activities in these mountains. Boy Scout camps, father and son's outings, community celebrations, school picnics, as well as fishing trips, pine nut gatherings and chokecherry-picking expeditions all centered on the canyons of the Oquirrh and Stansbury mountains. The hike to the glacier lake high up on Mount Deseret was an exciting experience, as was the climb up to Butterfield Pass from Tooele's Middle Canyon where we could look down on what historian Leonard Arrington has called "The Greatest Hole on Earth" — the Bingham copper mine. Equally exciting and more dangerous was the hike through the water tunnel that conveyed precious Tooele water from Middle Canyon to Bingham City.
The mountains provided streams that made it possible for the Mormon pioneers to exist in Tooele and Rush valleys and also contained the mineral wealth that attracted the miners and gave rise to the smelting industry. They also provided timber and grazing areas and contributed to the isolation which made the region attractive to the military in World War II. Certainly the mountains have played an important role in Tooele's history.
THE MORMONS
A year before the Mormon pioneers came to Utah, four companies of California-bound emigrants attempted to take the Hastings Cutoff by traversing the Wasatch Mountains and skirting around the south end of the Great Salt Lake and on across Tooele's salt desert to Pilot Peak and then to Nevada's Humboldt River. The first three companies reached California successfully, but the illfated Donner party lost precious time and supplies crossing the Tooele salt flats and became snowbound in the Sierras. Ironically, the time they lost blazing a trail through the Wasatch contributed to their tragic failure but enabled the Mormons to reach Salt Lake Valley with less difficulty, since they followed the Donner trail.
Just three days after Brigham Young arrived in Salt Lake Valley he led a small exploring party, consisting of several apostles of the church and a few others, including Samuel Brannan (soon to be California's first millionaire), westward across the valley to Black Rock at the southern end of the Great Salt Lake. Orson Pratt, one of the apostles, wrote,
He was describing Tooele Valley. A few months later, in December 1847, his older brother, Apostle Parley P. Pratt, and a companion, after exploring Utah Lake and Utah Valley, rode westward into Cedar Valley and around the southern tip of the Oquirrhs into Rush Valley and then northward into Tooele and on to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, thus making the first Mormon exploration of the length of Tooele Valley.
The Mormons were concerned with survival during the first two years in Salt Lake Valley, and only a few settlements were established outside the initial colony. Several valleys, including Tooele and Rush valleys, were used by the pioneers as grazing grounds for their cattle. By 1849 Brigham Young felt secure enough to begin his great colonizing program, and Tooele and Grantsville were chosen as logical places to establish early settlements.
Tooele's settlement came in the fall of 1849 as a result of a call by Apostle E. T. Benson to a few pioneers to build a mill in the area as well as to care for his cattle. Cyrus and Judson Tolman and Phineas R. Wright were the mill builders and John Rowberry and Robert Skelton were in charge of the cattle. They built their settlement on the banks of the creek near the mouth of Settlement Canyon, and by the time they celebrated their first Christmas in the valley there were thirty-one people present.
They followed the same pattern that characterized other Mormon settlements. They were organized into a branch of the church with John Rowberry as presiding elder and into a county with Rowberry as probate judge. Like many other Mormon colonizers they moved from their original settlement site to a better location. They had difficulty with the Indians, and finally, after the Walker War scare of 1853, they heeded Brigham Young's admonition to "fort up" and began to build a mud wall around the town but never completed it. They battled the crickets in 1850 and the grasshoppers in 1855. They built a church, a schoolhouse, a sawmill, and a grist mill, and they planted and harvested adequate crops of grain and vegetables. Tooele City was incorporated in 1853, and nearby Grantsville continued to grow and prosper, especially after 1853 when many families, including a number from Sweden, were sent to settle there.
Both Tooele and Grantsville sent militiamen to defend the territory against the encroaching federal army in 1857, and both settlements were abandoned in the spring of 1858 when Brigham Young ordered all the people in the north to move south into Utah Valley as Johnston's Army moved into Salt Lake Valley. Happily, the Utah War was settled through diplomacy, and the Tooele County settlers were able to move back to their homes by the Fourth of July.
In 1877 Mormon leaders took steps to make their organization more efficient. As part of this program the Tooele Stake was organized on June 24, and Francis Marion Lyman of Fillmore, Utah, was called to be president. Six former branches in the Tooele region were organized as wards and a high council was chosen. Lyman's appointment was a recognition of the importance of Tooele Stake, since he was soon to be made an apostle and ultimately became president of the Quorum of the Twelve.
Following this pattern, the church leaders decided to send young Heber J. Grant to Tooele in 1880 to be stake president as a training experience before being named an apostle. My greatgrandfather was his first counselor and was given the task of "breaking him in." Grant, who served as president of the church from 1915 to 1945, always felt a debt of gratitude for the way he was treated during his two-year sojourn in Tooele.
Another future president of the Quorum of the Twelve, George F. Richards, lived in Tooele on a farm east of the city. His son, the late LeGrand, also a general authority, recalled with pleasure his growing up in Tooele. Tooele's Loren C. Dunn has been a president of the First Quorum of Seventy for many years, and the presiding bishop's counselor Vaughn J. Featherstone lists Stockton as his place of birth, although he grew to manhood elsewhere.
Grantsville's J. Rueben Clark, Jr., must be recognized as one of the most powerful influences in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the twentieth century. Serving as a counselor to Presidents Grant, Smith, and McKay, Clark's brilliant mind and powerful personality exerted a dominant force in the development of the church during that period.
MINING
The Mormon desire for isolation was threatened again during the Civil War when an army contingent of California Volunteers led by Col. Patrick E. Connor moved into Utah in 1862, ostensibly to protect overland mail and telegraph lines from Confederate forces and Indian depredations. This led to the third important M-factor in Tooele's history, mining.
Colonel (later General) Connor came from Stockton, California, where he had been involved in mining enterprises. When he arrived in Utah he found that there was little need for his soldiers, although he did involve them in one of the worst Indian massacres in the nation's history near Bear River in January 1863. He soon discovered that the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains showed signs of precious minerals; and believing that he could solve the "Mormon problem" without firing a shot by attracting enough non-Mormon miners into the territory to end Mormon political dominance, Connor encouraged his soldiers to search the nearby canyons for the precious metals by giving them extended leaves from military duties and furnishing them with picks, shovels, and other prospecting tools. The result was the location of numerous bodies of ore and the organization of Utah's first mining district in 1863. Connor must be acknowledged as the father of Utah's precious metal mining industry.
Tooele was not only the beneficiary of these discoveries, but Connor chose to make Stockton the headquarters of his projected mining empire. Named Stockton after his California home town, Connor's plat of the projected center of Utah's mining industry reveals his grandiose dreams. It contained over 60 blocks with 20 lots in each block and could accommodate a population of 8,000 to 10,000 people. With rich mines located at Sunshine, Mercur, West Dip, Ophir, Jacob City (near the head of Ophir and Dry canyons), and Stockton, Connor had good reason for such dreams. The Rush Valley Mining District was organized in June 1864, embracing all of the western slope of the Oquirrhs. By the fall of 1865 over 500 mining claims were located in Rush Valley, most of them a few miles from Stockton, which by 1866 had 40 families and 400 inhabitants.
Connor persuaded friends to add their funds to his own substantial investments, resulting in the erection of a smelter near Stockton Lake in 1864. By the fall of 1864 there were eight smelters located in Stockton. Unfortunately for the investors, the technology for smelting the Stockton ores successfully was lacking; but Connor remained optimistic, writing that". . . the mines of Utah are equal to any west of the Missouri River, and only await the advent of capital to develop them."
Army-sponsored mining in the Tooele region ceased with the end of the Civil War, but Connor, after a year's service in the East, returned to Stockton to resume his mining activities and remained in Utah until his death in 1891."
The beginning of commercial exploration of Utah's mines actually began after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Promoters like Eli B. Kelsey, early mayor and religious leader of Tooele, but by 1869 a member of the Godbeite dissidents, encouraged the development of Tooele's mines and smelters, enlisting the aid of the Walker brothers and William Godbe, among others. Kelsey, on an eastern tour, was able to convince many wealthy merchants of the value of Utah's mines, resulting in the investment of approximately $100,000 in the fall of 1870.
The completion of the transcontinental railroad led to the establishment of Corinne on the Bear River and a smelter nearby. Tooele County ore was transported to Lake Point (or Clinton's) Beach and Black Rock where it was loaded onto steamships and carried across the Great Salt Lake and up the Bear River to the smelter near Corinne and the railroad junction. The venture was unsuccessful, but the beach resorts flourished, especially Garfield Beach west of Black Rock, which "boasted a magnificent pavilion, 165 by 62 feet, built entirely over the water about 400 feet from shore" with a connecting pier. Ultimately, the Garfield Smelter was built to handle the Oquirrh ore.
Ophir flourished in the 1870s, with mines producing $13 million in silver, lead, and zinc and over $300,000 in gold. The town had an estimated population of almost 6,000 people.
Mercur has experienced several periods of boom and bust and is now experiencing one of its most important booms. Originally known as Lewiston in 1870, it prospered for a few years but was practically deserted in 1880. A new discovery led to the rise of Mercur in 1890, and it prospered until a fire destroyed it in January 1896. (Interestingly, the residents had planned to incorporate the town on January 4, 1896, the same day that Utah gained statehood, but the fire forced them to change their plans.) Quickly rebuilt, the town boomed to an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people by 1902 when another fire destroyed the entire business district. In 1913 gold extraction fell below the profit margin, and the town began to decline and was deserted by 1917. The Snyder and Son's Company tried to rejuvenate the mines in 1933, but the outbreak of World War II put an end to this attempt. Today, once again, Mercur gold is being mined but in a different way and on a much larger scale. It can be detected only by an electron microscope and will be extracted at the rate of one ounce per ten tons of ore, as compared to one ounce per five tons at the turn of the century. But the Getty Oil Company expects to extract 85,000 to 100,000 ounces per year by using open pit mining methods and complex techniques of recovery. Success will be dependent, also, on the price of gold remaining at around $400 per ounce.
One of the most important results of the mining activity in the Oquirrhs as far as Tooele is concerned was the building of the International Smelting and Refining Company plant on a bench at the mouth of Carr's Fork five miles east of Tooele in 1910. It became an important source of employment in Tooele for the next sixty years until it was dismantled in the 1970s, being Utah's last copperlead and zinc smelter. Ore was brought over the mountains from Bingham by aerial (the high line) tramway, and the smelted product hauled to the railway depot two miles west of Tooele by the Tooele Valley Railway Company. Those who lived in Tooele during the 1920s and early 1930s will remember the engines of the TV (as the railway was called) puffing up and down Vine Street several times day and night hauling workmen to and from the smelter and ore and supplies to and from the Warner depot, usually moving slowly enough that if a boy's timing was right he could catch a ride from the high school to the middle of town on the "cow catcher."
Both the smelter and TVRR are gone now, but a dramatic new development in the mining story of Tooele is taking place in Carr's Fork near the site of the old smelter. The Anaconda Copper Company has developed a new mining and milling complex costing in excess of $200 million to exploit the rich deposits of copper, molybdenum, gold, and siver several thousand feet below the surface. Tragically, the falling price of copper has forced Anaconda to cease its operations at present, but hopefully it is only a temporary set-back. Such large scale operations have brought a wide variety of different nationalities to Tooele, which leads to a discussion of the fourth major M-factor in Tooele's history, the migrant.
MIGRANTS
The Mormon towns in Tooele County were settled by immigrants from the British Isles, the Scandinavian countries, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, and the States; but the mining and smelter towns attracted people from the Balkans, Italy, and the Mediterranean areas, including Greece, Asia Minor, and the Near East. Helen Z. Papanikolas has described their experience:
These were the migrants who came to Tooele in 1910 when the International Smelting and Refining Company announced it would build a smelter five miles from town. The Tooele Improvements Company boasted that Tooele would soon be "one of the principal smelter towns of the United States," and it was "confidently expected that the plant would ultimately become one of the largest smelters in the world." The management announced that only the highest class of labor would be employed and that "any man of moderate means will be able to own a home in Tooele. It will not be a company town," the authors of the brochure asserted, predicting that "Tooele City will have a population of 5000 within five years."
It took more than five years to reach the population predicted, but over 500 people with names like Rinaldi, Pezel, Melinkovitch, Savich, Stepich, Penovitch, Poulas, de Simon, Jankovitch, Buzinis, Carbats, Ronkovitch, and Leonelli soon arrived in Tooele. They settled in Plat C, or New Town as it was called, and formed their own community with their own school, church, and culture, including a wide variety of languages. Unfortunately, the people of Utah shared "the nationwide view that the Balkan and Mediterranean immigrants were of inferior heredity." Besides having to contend with prejudice and suspicion from the Mormons, these migrants brought Old World dissensions with them.
In Tooele, older residents tended to think of the newcomers as a united community when actually they came from areas with longstanding antagonisms, such as the contentious peoples who were later to make up the nation of Yugoslovia — Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Dalmatians, and Montenegrins — all usually listed as Austrians but sharing the kind of hatreds that ultimately led to World War I. 18 However, their location on the edge of Tooele and four miles from the smelter kept them from the fate of a company town, and their need for friends in an alien society helped them to forget their former enmities.
There was little socializing between the "Newtowners" and the people of Tooele during the early years. The Roman Catholic church provided a center for the community, including an athletic program for boys. The Plat C school built at a cost of $10,000 undertook the task of "Americanizing" the 132 students who began work under the tutelage of five teachers. When some were ready for high school, a mingling of the youth of the two communities was inevitable. The "Newtowners" attended Tooele High but were not encouraged to participate in sports or other activities. Sterling R. Harris, former superintendent of county schools and highly successful Tooele High School football coach, was the person most responsible for breaking down prejudice. He remembers having to threaten to appeal to the State Board of Education in order to use such athletes as Joe Rinaldi, George Melinkovitch, and Dan Savich on his football squad. With their aid Tooele High won state football championships in 1929 and 1930, which helped to break the ice and brought a sense of unity and pride to the community. Many will remember when the athlete known as Joe Rose was named to the all-state football team and had his picture in the Salt Lake papers, but his name was listed as Rinaldi rather than Rose! The family had been using the name Rose because it sounded more American than Rinaldi, but when Joe gained this important recognition they wanted the world to know their real name.
With the decision to build the Tooele Ordnance Depot in 1942, a new wave of "outsiders" came to Tooele, including Mexicans, Japanese, German and Italian war prisoners, and blacks, presenting a new challenge to the people of Tooele that their past experience enabled them to meet with a minimum of difficulty.
THE MILITARY
Military developments had been a significant factor in Tooele's history but did not become dominant until 1942. Military men such as John C. Fremont, Howard Stansbury, John W. Gunnison, and J. H. Simpson participated in early explorations of Tooele County, but it was Lt. Col. Edward J. Steptoe who first established a military camp in the county in 1854. Steptoe came to Utah at the head of a military and civilian party of 375 men with the twofold assignment of apprehending the murderers of Captain Gunnison and seven members of his unit and studying the feasibility of a miltiary road through Utah Territory to California. Needing a place to quarter his troops and graze his animals, Steptoe chose Rush Valley and built temporary barracks near the shores of Stockton Lake. While stationed in Utah, Steptoe was asked by President Pierce to take Brigham Young's place as territorial governor. After studying the situation, he declined and led his troops on to California in the spring of 1855. My great-grandfather, Hugh S. Gowans, arrived in Utah with his wife and baby daughter in the summer of 1855 and was advised, with others, to go to Rush Valley where he could find a "ready-made apartment" in Steptoe's abandoned barracks. According to early Tooele historian John A. Bevan, Soldier's Bridge and Soldiers Canyon received their names from the Steptoe incident.
Three years later, Johnston's Army came to Utah and began building Camp Floyd on the southeastern border of Tooele County at the time the citizens of Tooele and Grantsville were returning to their abandoned homes after the move south. Camp Floyd was not important in Tooele's history, but the Camp Floyd Mining District included many claims on the Tooele side of the Oquirrhs. The importance of Colonel Connor's troops on Tooele's development has already been described in discovering and developing the county's mining industry, but the military impact was minimal.
Tooele County furnished men for the territorial militia (known as the Nauvoo Legion) and also contributed its share of men for the military during the Spanish-American War and World Wars I and II. During these latter conflicts, Tooele, like all of America, recognized the value of citizens from all different nationalities as they participated in the war efforts of the United States, including the important military installations that were established in Tooele County during World War II.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, army investigators, anxious to expand the Ogden arsenal, selected a 25,000-acre tract southwest of Tooele as a site for a large ordnance depot, and with that action in the spring of 1942 Tooele's history made a dramatic change. Tooele men, usually employed at the smelter, now had a chance for a different career; and many women found opportunities for rewarding work at good salaries. The influx of job-seekers made rental property valuable, and local merchants experienced a new wave of prosperity after a decade of depression.
In addition to building the ordnance depot, the Defense Department ordered the construction of a storage depot for Chemical Corps toxicants on land twenty miles south of Tooele in Rush Valley. Total area of the two depots was 44,092 acres. In the same year, the Army Chemical Warfare Service established the Dugway Proving Ground in Skull Valley on 841,000 acres (1,300 square miles) and built barracks and a village to house the soldiers and civilian employees and their families.
Wendover Air Force Base was begun in 1940, prior to Pearl Harbor, as a result of Air Force program expansion. By late 1943 the base had a population of 17,500 military personnel and 2,000 civilian workers. Termed by historians "the world's largest military reserve," the base at the height of operations encompassed 3,500,000 acres and contained a city built of salt for bombing practice. Lifelike battleship targets and a mobile machine-gun range were constructed as crews trained for bombing missions. After the war ended in 1945 it became known that Wendover had been the training site for the crew of the Enola Gay which dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to an abrupt end. The wisdom of this action has been a source of controversy ever since.
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact that these huge military installations have had on Tooele's history, but one obvious result was the overnight increase of the population of Tooele from 5,000 to almost 15,000, with all the benefits and problems resulting from such a dramatic growth. Grantsville's population has multiplied four times since 1941, and other county towns, such as Stockton and Erda, have experienced considerable growth. The planned city of Stansbury Park, near the site of E. T. Benson's pioneer mill, has come into being as a direct result of this military activity. But if the Tooele towns have prospered as a result of the military, the nation has benefited from the reliable, dedicated, intelligent workers that Tooele County has furnished to man these installations and the many acts of kindness tendered to the "outsiders" who came to find work and a new home in Tooele.
CONCLUSIONS
The mountains, the Mormons, the military, and some mines are still here, but the migrants have long since been accepted as permanent citizens; so perhaps it is time to consider another important M-factor in American history and Tooele's story — that of the "melting pot." This concept suggests that America has received peoples from most of the nations of the world and has "melted" them into a different race with distinctive characteristics called American. Widely accepted in the earlier part of the twentieth century, this idea has been challenged by some sociologists who see America as a mixing bowl rather than a melting pot and believe it should remain that way. In this concept the various nationalities are mixed together like the ingredients of a salad, which is more nutritious and appetizing than any single element, yet each ingredient retains its distinctive characteristic. Margaret Mead has described this process in a perceptive article entitled "We Are All Third Generation." Asserting that we all have the characteristics of third- generation Americans, no matter how many actual generations our ancestors may have been here, Mead suggests the following pattern: The first-generation immigrants grew up in a foreign land but felt the need to leave it, at least temporarily, to come to America which they perceived as a land of goodness, liberty, and plenty. They found, instead, rejection, exploitation, and menial jobs. When their sons grew up these immigrants were torn between the desire to see them succeed in America (which meant that they must become more American) and the loyalty they felt toward the land of their birth. So they encouraged their children to succeed in the school that was Americanizing them but berated them for lack of respect for their parents and the land and culture they left.
The second generation, children born in America of foreignborn parents, threw themselves with intensity into the American way of life; they ate, talked, and dressed American, rejecting half of their life to make the other half self-consistent and complete, and by and large they succeeded. "Almost miraculously, the sons of the Polish day laborer and the Italian fruit grower, the Finnish miner and the Russian garment worker [became] Americans."
The third generation has been educated to believe that they have really arrived — they are genuine members of an exclusive club — America. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln have become their founding fathers, no matter what their ancestry might be. They expect to move upward, not because they are better than their parents but because they have better opportunities. They respect their parents' accomplishments, even if they are a bit old-fashioned; and because of their feeling of belonging, they have no need to hide their ancestry but can take pride in grandparents who had the courage to break with the Old World and help build America. They can learn the language of their forebears and appreciate their culture without diminishing their love for America.
Many of us have witnessed much of what Mead has described here in Tooele — and the results have been good. Although descended from people of many different nations with different languages, religions, and customs, we have learned to live together with respect and dignity and have created a genuine community. Here in Tooele, then, we have experienced, in an unusual way, the M-factor in American history, plus the other factors that have made Tooele's history so rich and interesting.
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