Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 56, Number 2, 1988

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UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

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( I S S N 0042-143X)

EDITORIAL STAFF M A X J . EVANS, Editor STANFORD J . LAYTON, Managing Editor

MIRIAM B. MuKPWi, Associate Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS KENNETH L . CANNON II. Salt Lake City, 1989 ARLENE H . EAKLE, Woods Cross, 1990

PETER L . GOSS, Salt Lake City, 1988 GLEN M . LEONARD, Farmington, 1988 ROBERT S . MCPHERSON, Blanding, 1989 RICHARD W . SADLER, Ogden, 1988

HAROLD SCHINDLER, Salt Lake City, 1990 GENE A. SESSIONS, Bountiful, 1989

GREGORY C . THOMPSON, Salt Lake City, 1990 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 four times a year b y the U t a h State Historical Society, 300 R i o G r a n d e , Salt Lake City, U t a h 84101. Phone (801) 533-6024 for membership a n d publications information.

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Contents SPRING 1988 / V O L U M E 56 / NUMBER 2

IN THIS ISSUE

107

OVERLAND EMIGRATION, T H E CALIFORNIA TRAIL, AND T H E HASTINGS CUTOFF

GARY TOPPING

109

GREAT SALT LAKE AND GREAT SALT LAKE CITY: AMERICAN CURIOSITIES

RICHARD H.JACKSON

128

STANSBURY'S EXPEDITION T O T H E GREAT SALT LAKE, 1849-50

BRIGHAM D . MADSEN

148

EDITED BY DAVID H . MILLER AND ANNE M . ECKMAN

160

ROY WEBB

175

SEYMOUR MILLER'S A C C O U N T OF AN EARLY SHEEP OPERATION ON F R E M O N T ISLAND .

T H O M A S CALDWELL ADAMS: T H E MAN AND T H E LAKE BOOK REVIEWS

190

BOOK NOTICES

201

T H E COVER Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island. Color transparency courtesy of Gary B. Peterson, Photogeographics.

© Copyright 1988 Utah State Historical Society

Books reviewed Missionary to the Mountain West: Reminiscences of Episcopal Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle, 1866-1886 THOMAS G . ALEXANDER 190

D A N I E L SYLVESTER T U T T L E .

M A U R E E N URSENBACH BEECHER and LAVINA FIELDING A N D E R S O N , eds. Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical

and Cultural Perspective . . RICHARD D . POLL M A X R . MCCARTHY.

191

The Last Chance

Canal Company

MARSHALL BOWEN

193

BARBARA A L L E N . Homesteading

the High Desert

JAMES M U H N

194

E M I L Y F R E N C H . J A N E T L E C O M P T E , ed.

Emily: The Diary of a Hardworked Woman

POLLY STEWART 194

S T E P H E N C . L E S U E U R . The

1838

Mormon War in Missouri

ROGER D . LAUNIUS

196

C A R L G U A R N E R I a n d D A V I D A L V A R E Z , eds.

Religion and Society in the American West: Historical Essays NORMANJ. D.

BENDER

197

MICHAEL QUINN.

Early Mormonism

and the Magic World View . . . .

STERLING M . M C M U R R I N

199

Saltair ca. 1940. USHS collections.

In this issue Of all the natural wonders in Utah, the Great Salt Lake has, to date at least, attracted the most commentary and serious study, although the state's national parks easily outdraw it now in number of visitors. Still, the lake remains always on the edge of a northern Utahn's consciousnessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;its mystique, its smell when the wind is right, its sometimes spectacular effect on precipitation, its rising and falling levels alarming and expensive.

To California-bound travelers of the 1840s and 50s the lake and its surrounding desert represented hazards. The first article in this issue presents an overview of the routes used around the lake with a special focus on the Hastings Cutoff. As the second article points out, however, those less impelled by the lure of California saw the lake and the Mormon capital not far from its shore as American curiositiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;unique, mythical, and often misunderstood.

But not for long.

Collecting more accurate data on the lake, its environs, and the Mormons was the object of Capt. Howard Stansbury's 1849-50 expedition.

The third article relates the accomplishments of this government explorer who has too long stood in the shadow of Fremont and Powell.

A phenomenon of temporary interest to most visitors, the lake has provided to a few a means of livelihood. The fourth article includes a firsthand account of sheep raising on Fremont Island; and the final piece looks at the career of Thomas Caldwell Adams for whom the lake became the center of his life as he studied it, sailed on it, fought for it, and ultimately died on its shore.

Lansford W. Hastings.

USHS collections.

THE

EMIGEANTS' GUIDE, TO

OREGON AND CONTAINING

SCENES , A^D. IN

OREGON EM

ADISGRIPTION SCENES; AND iNCIREiTS OF EMIGr AND

A DESCRIPTION WIT)

A DESCRIPTION OF THE THOB:tu CL

ALL NECESSARY II EaUIPMENT, Se

BY

LANSFORD

W.

HASTINGS,

Leader of the Oregon and Oalifomia Emigrants of 1842.

CINCINNATI: PUBLISHED BY GEORGE CONCLIN, STEREOTYFED BY SHjEPARD * CO.

184a

Overland Emigration, the California Trail, and the Hastings Cutoff

BY GARY T O P P I N G

THE 1840s CALIFORNIA HAD BEGUN T O EXERT something of the same fascination for the American imagination that it does today. Its reputation had been created by infrequent reports from mountain men, by promoters like Dr. John B. Marsh and Johann Sutter, and by sailors engaged in the hide and tallow trade such as Richard Henry Dana, whose Two Years Before the Mast told of a tropical climate and an easy, laid-back tenor of life known today through Hollywood and the Beach Boys. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought Americans uncontested title to a vast land empire extending to the Pacific Ocean, it was perhaps understandable that the resulting continental vision would cause them to cast their eyes to the hospitable valleys of California as well.

Getting there was the problem. At the beginning of the 1840s Americans who wished to settle in California could choose either a long and perilous sea voyage around the Horn or attempt to develop a road based on sketchy accounts of possible trails across the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada passed cilong by mountain men, none of whom had found a route suitable for wagons.

Development of a wagon road to California was first attempted in 1841 by the Bartleson-Bidwell party. We are fortunate to have both first-hand and reminiscent accounts of the trip from the pen of one of the principals, John Bidwell, in whose lighthearted prose much of the humor, the frustration, and the improbable spirit of the venture memorably comes alive.^ Although even more poorly equipped and otherwise unprepared for arduous overland travel than the DonnerBY

Dr. Topping is curator of manuscripts in the Utah State Historical Society Library. ' J o h n Bidwell, " T h e First Emigrant Train to California," Century 41 (1890): 106-30. Since the present article offers little original research or interpretation before its discussion of the 1986 archaeological project, only the basic sources and literature are supplied for each expedition discussed.

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Reed party five years later, the Bartleson-Bidwell emigrants somehow succeeded in their journey, becoming the first overland party of settlers to reach California and including the first woman settler to cross the Sierra, Nancy Kelsey.

The story begins with the young man John Bidwell who, at twenty years of age, was suddenly possessed of a desire to see the West. He left his home in western Ohio to catch a boat at Cincinnati for St. Louis and the Missouri frontier with an outfit that was simplicity itself: about seventy-five dollars, a few extra clothes in a knapsack, and formidable armament in the form of a pocketknife.

On the Missouri frontier Bidwell heard glowing reports of California from a mountain man, and since his prospects in Missouri were dim he formed a group called the Western Emigration Society with the purpose of traveling together to California in the spring of 1841.

It was an improbable group indeed that assembled for the journey. " O u r ignorance of the route was complete," Bidwell admitted.

"We knew that California lay west, and that was the extent of our knowledge." A map from one of Bidwell's friends had depicted two large rivers emerging from the Great Salt Lake, both larger than the Mississippi. His friend advised him to plan on building canoes at that point and floating all the way to California.

Their individual equipment for the journey was quite unequal in quality and effectiveness. It would become important later on, for one thing, that some brought mules and horses and others brought oxen, which would mean that the rate of travel would vary considerably between the two groups. All were relatively impoverished: 'T doubt whether there was one hundred dollars in money in the whole party,'' Bidwell recalled, "but all were enthusiastic and anxious to go." Bidwell's partner, who was to provide the horses to pull Bidwell's wagon, backed out at the last moment. Bidwell must have been a persuasive salesman though, for he talked another man into throwing in with him and allowing Bidwell to trade a nice black horse he had for a yoke of oxen to draw the wagon and a one-eyed mule for him to ride.

The Bartleson-Bidwell party enjoyed their first great stroke of good luck in being allowed to begin the journey with a party of three Jesuits under Father Pierre Jean DeSmet who were on their way to Fort Hall and beyond to work among the Flathead Indians and were guided by the celebrated mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick.^ So they In two letters to his superior DeSmet offers interesting and humorous sidelights on his relations with the emigrants, especially theological discussions with Bartleson and a Methodist minister. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Early Western rra&^/.f (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906), vol. 27, pp. 190, 236-38.

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were assured of being in good hands for the first long leg of the journey.

Fitzpatrick knew the way and the Indians, and the genial and courageous DeSmet was, by Bidwell's account, a constant inspiring example of meeting inevitable difficulties with good humor.

Such good fortune was destined to end, though, at Soda Springs, which Fitzpatrick informed the California contingent would be a good separation point for their divergent destinations. The information they got from others on the trail was neither very specific nor very encouraging: "They brought the information that we must strike out west of Salt Lake . . . being careful not to go too far south, lest we should get into a waterless country without grass. They also said we must be careful not to go too far north, lest we should get into a broken country and steep canons, and wander about, as trapping parties had been known to do, and become bewildered and perish." Attempting to follow directions like those was not easy, and accordingly the party wandered around in the salt desert to the north and west of the Great Salt Lake for some days with no good idea of what they were trying to accomplish and gradually running out of water and provisions.

At the foot of the Pequops in Nevada they finally made the fortunate decision that the wagons were too poorly suited for travel on that terrain and should be abandoned in favor of packing what possessions they could on the animals. The emigrants were almost totally ignorant of packing techniques, but they had observed the pack saddles of mountain men at Green River, and imitated them as best they could with parts fashioned from the wagons. The results, according to Bidwell, were quite inept and humorous, primarily because even the oxen had to carry pack saddles, and their backs were not as suited to them as the horses: "It was but a few minutes before the packs began to turn; horses became scared, mules kicked, oxen jumped and bellowed, and articles were scattered in all directions. We took more pains, fixed things, made a new start, and did better, though packs continued occasionally to fall off and delay u s . " It was a comical and clumsy way to travel, but it brought them down the Humboldt River, which they followed because of its mediocre supply of water for the animals and its apparently correct direction of flow toward their destination. At the expense of considerable difficulty, indeed suffering, the Bartleson-Bidwell party continued south along the Sierra and up the Walker River to an arduous crossing of the mountains to the headwaters of the Stanislaus River and thence down into the San Joaquin Valley to the ranch of Dr. John B. Marsh on

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November 4, 1841. Although they had succeeded in their quest, their route was not again followed closely across the northern part of the Great Salt Lake Desert nor across the Sierra. But they had proven that wagons could be taken at least most of the way to California, and perhaps with more exploration a route could be worked out the rest of the way.

In 1843 Joseph B. Chiles, who had been a member of the Bartleson-Bidwell party, returned to the East and organized another wagon train of emigrants bound for California.^ Aware of the obvious fact that the Bartleson-Bidwell route could be improved upon, he enlisted the services of the mountain man Joseph Reddeford Walker, who had discovered the pass through the Sierra that bears his name and thought that wagons could be taken through it.

Chiles's first innovation was to avoid the salt flats north of the Great Salt Lake that had so taxed and bewildered the Bartleson-Bidwell party. Instead, he continued along the Oregon Trail to Fort Boise where the party divided. Chiles, with a party of one hundred horsemen, ascended the Malheur River and crossed into the upper Sacramento River Valley. The wagon contingent, under Walker, reached the Humboldt, followed it to the Sierra, then turned southward all the way to Owens Valley, where he relocated Walker Pass. They were forced to abandon their wagons in the mountains, however, which proved to be a good move anyway after they reached the San Joaquin Valley and had to struggle through miles of choking alkaline dust before they finally arrived at Sutter's Fort.

By the beginning of the 1844 emigration season, then, two prominent facts characterized the California Trail: it was obvious in the first place that the Humboldt River was indeed, as Dale Morgan has called it, the "highroad of the West." Though it was the most hated of all western rivers, Morgan continued, because of the hostile Indians and risk of cholera, it was also the most necessary, for it pointed the way most directly to the only practical passes over the Sierra.* The other prominent fact was that only pack animals so far had been taken over those mountains, and a wagon road was necessary to sustain any large emigration.

It was the Stevens-Townsend-Murphy party of 1844 that first crossed what became more or less the standard California Trail and

3George R. Stewart, The California Trail (New York, 1962), pp. 203-7. *Dale L. Morgan, The Humboldt: Highroad of the West (New York, 1943), p. 5.

Overland Emigration

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located a pass suitable for wagons through the Sierra. The party is named for the three captains of the eleven wagons, but credit for the route goes largely to the guiding skills of the old mountain man Caleb Greenwood, who was eighty years old when he left Missouri in March at the head of the emigrant train.^ Among Greenwood's accomplishments as guide on that trip was the successful first attempt of the sixty-mile dry shortcut between South Pass and the Green River that became known as the Greenwood Cutoff. From Fort Hall, Greenwood chose an almost direct southwesterly course to the Humboldt, a route that had not been used before. How Greenwood knew of the route is uncertain. He claimed to have been in California eighteen years before, and perhaps it was on that trip that he had discovered what turned out to be the most practical wagon route from Fort Hall to the Humboldt. Whatever his previous experience, it is clear that he knew what he was doing. During the subsequent history of the California Trail only two significant revisions of Greenwood's route through the Great Basin were ever used: the Hastings Cutoff across the salt flats to the south and west of the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Lake Cutoff, which allowed emigrants to use Salt Lake City as a way station, then skirt the Great Salt Lake to the north, passing near present-day Snowville and west to the City of Rocks, where it joined the Greenwood route.

Upon reaching the Humboldt Sink, however, Old Greenwood's knowledge ran out. If he had crossed the mountains before, he had not done so by means of a route that would admit wagons, and so a quest for such a route began. He was fortunate at that time to encounter a Piute Indian named Truckee who told him that a river (which now bears the Indian's name) directly to the west of their camp would lead them to a pass that wagons could negotiate. It proved to be a rough pass, but the Indian was right, though the party barely beat the early snows to reach Sacramento. The California Trail had been established, the first wagons had reached Sutter's Fort, and the way was now prepared for emigrants. All that remained was the need for a good propagandist to advertise the new route and the glories of California.

Lansford W. Hastings is so deeply rooted in the historiography of the California Trail as the villain in the Donner tragedy that some space needs to be devoted to the exact nature of his role in luring the

sCharles Kelly, Old Greenwood (Sak Lake City, 1936), pp. 50-80.

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Donners to the West and then to the trail that caused their demise.^ There is no question that Hastings's Emigrants' Guide is as much an advertising tract as a geographical treatise, nor did Hastings deny the fact. The California one finds in its pages is a paradise in which "December is as pleasant as M a y , " where disease is virtually unknown, where meat can be cured in its pure atmosphere for weeks without rotting, where wild oats with stalks suitable for walking sticks can be cultivated merely by fencing off a field of them to keep the animals out.^ And so on.

For the politically ambitious, Hastings indicated that California was ripe for the picking. The Mexicans and Indians who made up the bulk of the population were almost equally ignorant and degraded, and governed despotically by priests and dictators. " A Mexican always pursues that method of doing things which requires the least physical or mental exorcise [.rzV]," Hastings alleged, "unless it involves some danger, in which case, he always adopts some other method." The purpose of the Catholic church in California, he continued, was "not only to enslave and oppress, thousands of these timid and unsuspecting aborigines, but also to reduce all of the common, and lower orders, of the people, to a most abject state of vassalage, and to stamp indellible [sic] ignorance and superstition, upon their imbecile and uncultivated minds." Militarily, California was a pushover: it was defended by soldiers who are mere Indians, many of whom, are as perfecdy wild and untutored, as the most barbarous savages of the forest; yet it is with these wild, shirtless, earless and heartless creatures, headed by a few timid, soulless, brainless officers, that these semi-barbarians, intend to hold this delightful region, as against the civilized world. ^

In evaluating Hastings's experience as a guide and knowledge of the overland routes one must recognize that he was in fact a man of considerable outdoor skill, experience, and leadership ability who was able to communicate those qualities to those whom he proposed to guide and, as it turned out, was able to deliver upon his promises.

6There is an older, negative literature on Hastings, exemplified by such works as Bernard DeVoto, 1846: The Year of Decision (Boston, 1943); George R. Stewart, Ordeal By Hunger (New York, 1936); and Charles Kelly, Salt Desert Trails (Salt Lake City, 1930). The interpretation presented here, however, follows Thomas F. Andrews, " T h e Controversial Career of Lansford Warren Hastings: Pioneer California Promoter and Emigrant Guide" (Ph.D. diss.. University of Southern California, 1970); and "Lansford W. Hastings and the Promotion of the Salt Lake Desert Cutoff: A Reappraisal," Western Historical Quarterly 4 (1973): 133-50. ^Lansford W. Hastings, The Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California (Cincinnati, 1845), pp. 83, 87. sibid., pp. 93-94, 105, 122.

Overland Emigration

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spring in Pass Canyon, Stansbury Mountains, served emigrants using the Hastings Cutoff. USHS collections.

Hastings's overland experience began in 1842 when he joined, and eventually took over leadership of, the Oregon-bound train of Elijah White. After Dr. John McLoughlin, the Hudson's Bay Company factor at Fort Vancouver, discouraged Hastings from settling there and luring even more Americans to follow him, he led another party of equally disgruntled emigrants down the coast to Sacramento. From there he crossed the Sierra twice, perhaps foolishly, in adverse weather and crossed on horseback the cutoff he proposed to lead wagons over in 1846.

With regard to this proposed cutoff, which left the main trail at Fort Bridger, crossed the Wasatch Mountains, passed to the south of the Great Salt Lake and over the salt flats to rejoin the California Trail at the Humboldt River, it is vital to note that Hastings's book did not advocate use of that route. It is presented, as Hastings's biographer points out, in an offhand manner as a geographical observation rather than a suggestion: The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to

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Utah Historical Quarterly the bay of San Francisco, by the route just described. The emigrants, up to this time, however, have traveled together, as far as Fort Hall, because of this being the only settlement, in that vicinity, at which they are enabled to procure horses, and provisions.^

It was only after Hastings had passed across the cutoff himself that he proposed to lead others across it. Indeed, it proved to be an extremely difficult route, much more difficult than Hastings had imagined, but he successfully led a wagon train over it in 1846, and it was used repeatedly through 1850. Many who used the route seem to have considered its mileage saving as of Pyhrric value, given the toll it exacted on people, animals, and equipment, but the Donners, with one exception, were the only ones to lose lives because of it.

Hastings himself certainly did not regard the cryptic reference to the cutoff in his Guide as sufficient information for emigrants. In fact he and his partner, the mountain man James Hudspeth, proceeded eastward from Fort Bridger in the summer of 1846 with the specific purpose of meeting the emigrant parties and offering to guide them through the new route. ^" The first party to take advantage of Hastings's offer was the Bryant-Russell group who were traveling somewhat in advance of the others because they were on muleback. Edwin Bryant's journal of the trip, published later as What I Saw in California, is one of the classics of western narrative.^^ A medical doctor who chose a career in journalism, Bryant was on his way from Kentucky to California primarily to write a book about his experiences rather than to settle in the promised land. His partner was William H. Russell, a Kentucky colonel who started out as leader of the party but proved unequal to the task and was replaced. At that point, Bryant, Russell, and seven others opted to sell their wagons and buy mules.

While Hastings decided at Fort Bridger to take charge of the slower wagon parties, the Bryant-Russell group pushed on under the leadership of Hudspeth, who promised to accompany them as far as the salt flats, at which point he intended to leave them to engage in further exploration. Although the Bryant-RusseU party left Fort Bridger on July 20, the same day as the polyglot wagon party known as the Harlan-Young group, which was under Hastings's leadership, they 9lbid., pp. 137-38. loj. Roderick Korns, "West from Fort Bridger," Utah Historical Quarterly 19 (1951), is a collection of most of the primary sources of the emigration of 1846, but see also Dale L. Morgan, Overland in 1846 (Georgetown, Calif., 1963).

11 Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California (New York, 1848).

Overland Emigration

117

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Section of the Hastings route near Devil's Slide in Weber Canyon as identified and photgraphed by Charles Kelly. USHS collections.

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soon moved far in advance. Hudspeth elected to lead them across the Wasatch through Weber Canyon, which was a narrow gorge that required frequent riding through the stream but was otherwise not a difficult passage for animals. The rest of the journey, until they parted company with Hudspeth, presented no difficulties either. That parting occurred at the summit of Hastings Pass through the Cedar Mountains, from which a long view of the salt flats confronted them. At that point, Bryant reported, Hudspeth gave his final instructions: standing on one of the peaks, he stretched out his long arms, and with a voice and gesture as loud and impressive as he could make them, he called to us and exclaimedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;"Now, boys, put spurs to your mules and ride like

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Utah Historical Quarterly h !" The hint was timely given and well meant, but scarcely necessary, as we all had a pretty just appreciation of the trails and hardships before us.^^

Although Bryant made a fairly forlorn assessment of their prospects at that point, emphasizing the fact that they would have no guide until they struck the California Trail some two hundred miles to the west, they actually were in fairly good condition to meet the challenges of that difficult passage. Bryant's account of their crossing of the salt flats is memorable. Not only did their animals sink at times clear to their bellies in the soft ground, but mirages repeatedly plagued their riders with visions of ethereal cities ' 'with countless columned edifices of marble whiteness, and studded with domes, spires, and turreted towers, [which] would rise upon the horizon of the plain, astonishing us with its stupendous grandeur and sublime magnificance [j^eV]." Even with those problems, which sometimes forced the riders to dismount, the party eventually reached the springs at Pilot Peak late at night; they had crossed the entire eighty-mile expanse in one long day.

The crossing of the salt flats was the only real adventure for the Bryant-RusseU party. They had little difficulty in reaching the main California Trail at the Humboldt and followed the route of the StevensTownsend-Murphy group through the Sierra, though they seem to have been unaware of their predecessors' identity or history.

In terms of overland emigration, the Bryant-RusseU party was relatively insignificant, since of its innovations, the route down the Weber as yet disclosed none of the difficulties it would present to wagons, and the Great Salt Lake Desert had been crossed on horseback several times before. It was the Harlan-Young party which followed hard on the heels of the Bryant-RusseU group that put the Hastings Cutoff to its first real test.

The Harlan-Young party was a loosely affiliated group of forty wagons that did not really exist as a unit until it left Fort Bridger. Originally a part of the Bryant-RusseU party, the Harlan-Young contingent split off when the party was first being organized, giving reasons of compactness and efficiency as their motives. Eventually the party grew to about fifty-seven wagons, as latecomers joined between Fort Bridger and the valley of the Great Salt Lake.

The Weber Canyon route was the choice of Hudspeth not Hastings. Hudspeth rode back from the Bryant-RusseU camp at the mouth of the canyon to convince the Harlan-Young party to follow them down i2lbid., p. 172.

Overland Emigration

119

the Weber. Hastings was not with the Harlan-Young group at the time, having ridden back to look after stragglers. By the time he rejoined the party they were already well into Weber Canyon. The upper part of the canyon was not bad, but the lower reaches presented serious difficulties, necessitating the use of winches for both animals and wagons at some points. It was thus quite probable, in Hastings's mind, that a better route could be found, perhaps present-day Parley's Canyon, which Hastings and Clyman had used to get out of Salt Lake Valley on their earlier trip, and which he probably had intended to try before Hudspeth persuaded the emigrants to try the Weber.

Having crossed the Wasatch, the first great obstacle of the Hastings Cutoff, the emigrants then faced the Great Salt Lake Desert, the other great obstacle. They were not, as we have seen, the first wagon train to have crossed that desert, but they were the first to attempt a crossing to the south of the Great Salt Lake. The crossing took three days, August 16-18, and was extremely trying. Heinrich Lienhard's detachment was the only wagon party to have crossed the Hastings Cutoff through 1850 without having to abandon wagons or animals, but even he complained of great tribulation: " O u r oxen all appeared to be suffering; the whole of their bowels appeared to cry out, an incessant rumbling which broke out from all; they were hollow-eyed, and it was most distressing to see the poor animals suffer thus." Lienhard also related a pathetic story of the oxen pulling his personal wagon, which was second in line. His animals, he said, were in constant danger of breaking off their horns because they were desperate to get too close to the wheels of the first wagon in order to stand briefly in its shade. The other detachments of the Harlan-Young party were less fortunate than Lienhard and his companions: before reaching Pilot Peak, Lienhard counted no less than twenty-four abandoned wagons (about one-third of their total vehicles) on the salt flats. ^^ The Harlan-Young party lost a number of animals but abandoned none of the wagons permanently, for they were able to return with freshly fed and watered animals to pick up the equipment they had left behind.

The Hastings Cutoff, then, was a usable route but not a very desirable one. It required light wagons lightly loaded, fresh strong animals, and a great deal of manpower for hacking trails and winching gear over precipices. The Harlan-Young party made the journey but at the expense of considerable hardship and only barely even at that. The Donners were not so fortunate.

13Korns, "West from Fort Bridger," pp. 148-52.

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Utah Historical Quarterly

A dratving re-created James F. Reed's ''Pioneer Palace" wagon for Virginia Reed Murphy's personal narrative of the Donner party ordeal published in Century magazine in 1891.

If ever a group was doomed at the beginning it was the Donners.^* The party consisted of eighty-seven people in twenty wagons. Of their total number only twenty-nine were men fifteen years of age or older who could be expected to perform the hard work of road building in rough country; the rest were women, children, or elderly men. Their equipment was equally inadequate for the purpose, primarily because of James Frazier Reed's "Pioneer Palace" wagon, a two-story behemoth of far too great size and weight, which Reed obstinately refused to abandon until the party reached the Humboldt River. Furthermore, they were intellectually and psychologically unprepared for the trials they would face. They were Illinois farmers who had never seen a mountain or a desert and had no idea how to cope with either except for what they had read in Hastings's Guide, and that they had partly ignored. They were personally incompatible, so that rivalries and hostilities were a constant fact of their social life: Reed and Keseberg feuded; Reed and Snyder fought, resulting in Snyder's murder; Breen refused food to the destitute Eddy family; old man Hardcoop was abandoned to die of exposureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and so on. Finally, they decided for some unknown reason very early on that they would attempt the Hastings Cutoff, even before Hastings himself recommended it as a practical route. James Clyman met Reed as far east as Fort Laramie and reported Reed's intention already to follow the "nigher route" described in Hasting's Guide. Unfortunately, they were too late on the trail and too slow to make up the difference, so they i*The diary of James Frazier Reed, the only primary source within the Donner party for the Utah portion of the trip, is in Korns, "West from Fort Bridger," pp. 195-221; see also Stewart, Ordeal By Hunger.

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deprived themselves of the immediate guide services of Hastings himself, perhaps the one man on the traU at that time who could have brought them through, and of the added manpower avaUable in the Harlan-Young party.

If history does not disclose its alternatives, stiU it is difficult to avoid asking what might have happened if Hudspeth had taken the Harlan-Young party through Parley's Canyon instead of the Weber, which Hastings recognized the Donners simply could not have negotiated with their limited manpower. A usable road would already have existed for the Donners, thus eliminating the need for the extremely taxing and time-consuming traU-hacking through Emigration Canyon.

Or what if Reed had been induced to abandon his Pioneer Palace early in the mountains, and the others had been able to catch up with the Harlan-Young party and gone down the Weber with them instead?

The Donner-Reed party arrived in Fort Bridger on July 27, 1846, only a week after the Bryant-RusseU and Harlan-Young parties had left, but they had been driving their animals so hard to get there that they stayed four more days to allow them to rest and recuperate. By the time they left, on July 31, they were eleven days behind the others and out of reach of any real assistance. The gap widened as the summer and fall continued, and the weather in the Sierra would not wait.

The Donner wagons had no trouble following their predecessors to the head of Weber Canyon, but when they got there, they found a note from Hastings advising against that route and offering to return to help them find another if they would send a messenger ahead to get him.

Unfortunately, by the time Reed and two others could get to Hastings he was already at Adobe Rock in Tooele VEdley and was no longer in a position to guide them personally through the Wasatch. Instead, he returned with Reed to the summit of Big Mountain where he pointed out an alternative route which the Donner-Reed party then followed. ^^ The alternative was arduous in the extreme, indeed almost beyond the ability of the party, but at least it was passable to them which the Weber was not.

The delay in getting through the Wasatch was great, as was the toll on their animals. For many days in getting through East Canyon and over to Mountain Dell, they made only two or three miles, hacking 15 It is the contention of J . Roderick Korns that Hastings returned with Reed as far back on the trail as Big Mountain, which is the only place along the route where the vista described by Reed can be achieved.' If so, Hastings's assistance to the Donner-Reed party was not as desultory as the older literature indicates, for from that vantage point he could have given Reed a very good idea indeed of the best route. Korns, "West from Fort Bridger," pp. 198-99, n. 16.

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every inch of the way through the tangled brush, and double- and triple-teaming their wagons over the hills. W h e r e the Harlan-Young party h a d taken eighteen days to get from Fort Bridger to the valley of the Great Salt Lake (July 20-August 7), it took the Donners twenty-six days (July 27-August 22). Even more to the point, perhaps, is the fact that on August 22, when the Donners emerged from Emigration Canyon, the H a r l a n - Y o u n g party were resting their animals at Pilot Spring, having crossed the last of the unknown and formidable obstacles of the Hastings Cutoff.

It took the Donner-Reed party three days, August 31 to September 2, to cross the salt flats, and the effect of the crossing on their animals, equipment, and morale was devastating. T h e D o n n e r animals were much less prepared for the arduous crossing than the HarlanYoung animals, so it is no wonder that they, too, began to fail long before the passage was completed. M a n y of their animals simply died A spring at Pilot Peak, a landmark near the present Utah-Nevada border. Emigrants often abandoned wagons here during 1846-50. USHS collections.

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on the spot before water could be brought back for them or wandered off to die or possibly to fall into the hands of Indians. Two of Reed's three wagons had to be abandoned on the salt flats, as did one of George Donner's and one of Keseberg's.^^ It was the beginning of the end for the Donner-Reed party. Seeing one's worldly goods simply abandoned to the elements had a psychological effect that one can only imagine, though its manifestations in terms of increased selfishness and bickering through the rest of the trip are well documented. Such animals as remained were exhausted beyond complete recovery, and the pace of the party, which needed to increase now that they had gained solid terrain, had to continue slowly.

Some members of the party, in particular the Eddy family, were reduced to destitution, and few of the others still had an inclination to share their meager resources.

The remainder of the tragic story is too familiar to need retelling here except in summary. Progress toward and along the Humboldt River was slow, and seething resentments flared up: Reed and Snyder fought, resulting in Snyder's death and Reed's banishment from the company; Breen and Eddy fought, in Eddy's extremity, over food and water; and old man Hardcoop fell behind and was left to die in the cold. When they reached the mountains, their daily progress, because of the emaciated and exhausted animals and people, could often be measured in feet as easily as in miles. At last, time ran out and the snow came, trapping them not far below the summit where roughly half of them died of starvation, exposure, and perhaps even of murder by cannibalistic companions.

As one might expect, news of the Donner tragedy had a discouraging effect on wagon travel over the Hastings Cutoff.^^ During the next two years, 1847 and 1848, no wagon parties used the route, and only three horseback parties are known to have crossed it, all eastbound travelers from California. It should not be surprising that the gold rush which began in 1849 and caused men to throw caution to the wind in so 16It might be well to point out here that in spite of the after-the-fact recollections of the child Virginia Reed, whom many have chosen to believe over the first-hand diary of her father. Reed's Pioneer Palace wagon was not one of those abandoned on the salt flats. Its ultimate fate is unknown; Stewart believes it was abandoned somewhere along the Humboldt after Reed's banishment following his murder of Snyder. Stewart, Ordeal By Hunger, p. 67; Virginia Reed Murphy, "Across the Plains in the Donner Party (1846)," Century, July 1891, p. 417. Compare with Virginia Reed's letter to Mary C. Keyes, May 16, 1847 (much closer in date to the actual events), in which she mentions abandoning wagons on the salt flats, but does not name the Pioneer Palace and also mentions abandoning their last wagon on the Humboldt after Snyder's murder. The letter is published in Morgan, Overland in 1846, vol.

1, p. 282. i^Charles Kelly, "Gold Seekers on the Hastings Cutoff," Utah Historical Quarterly 20 (1952): 3-30; " T h e Journal of Robert C h a l m e r s , " Utah Historical Quarterly 20 (1952): 30-55.

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many other ways should also revive use of that reckless trail, the Hastings Cutoff. Even so, most of those who reached California by the overland route in that year used the Salt Lake Cutoff to the north of the Great Salt Lake, which was becoming known as a better, if less direct, route. Though some are known to have used the Hastings Cutoff, there are no surviving diaries, and their experiences are known to us only through references in diaries of others who took the Salt Lake Cutoff and met them elsewhere on the trail. At that, no more than two or three groups probably chose the more direct crossing of the salt flats. Capt.

Howard Stansbury's survey party of that year accomplished the bestdocumented crossing of the Hastings trail, and an account of his experiences is contained elsewhere in this issue.

The overland travel to California in 1850 dramatically exceeded even that of 1849, which had been by far the largest to date, and though most continued to use the Salt Lake Cutoff, others who thought they could steal a march on the rest of the mob spilled over onto the Hastings Cutoff. The term "Hastings Cutoff," incidentally, by 1850 meant only that part of the route to the south of the Great Salt Lake and across the salt flats. Travel over the eastern part of the old Hastings Cutoff had been greatly improved by development of Parley Pratt's "Golden Pass" road down the canyon that today bears his name, so that reaching Salt Lake City was no longer difficult. And reaching Salt Lake City had become largely a necessity in 1850, since the trail was so clogged with gold rushers that the small supply posts like Forts Laramie, Bridger, and Hall were simply swamped with customers. So the detour to Salt Lake City became a common practice.

Although overland emigration to California continued in unabated numbers through the 1850s, the gold rushers of 1850 were the last travelers of whom we have record who used the Hastings Cutoff.

The sudden abandonment of the route is interesting and not entirely explicable, though one suspects that travelers that year had sufficient opportunity to compare notes with those who had used the Salt Lake Cutoff and learned that the southern route's supposed advantages were illusory. Virtually every journal of the Hastings Cutoff is replete with stories of suffering and delays to salvage wagons and recuperate animals, and it seems a reasonable assumption that the trail's bad reputation had become widely enough circulated that after 1850 no one any longer saw good reason to attempt it.

Given the famously tragic end of the Donner party, it is not surprising that historians have told its story in the most minute detail and

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Bones of an ox and mounds of sand-covered debris on the salt flats ca. 1936. Charles Kelly, who took the photograph, mistakenly believed he had discovered the remains of Reed's ' 'Pioneer Palace,'' but the behemoth wagon was not abandoned here. USHS collections.

popular interest in it has always been high. It is also perhaps not surprising that knowledge of its abandoned equipment on the salt flats has led to a large number of impromptu salvage efforts. By the time professional archaeologists directed their attention to the Donner sites in the fall of 1986, no fewer than thirteen recorded salvage expeditions had preceded them, as well as untold unrecorded ones, particularly since the development of all-terrain vehicles which make travel on the boggy surface of the salt flats safe and easy. Much of the material removed had wound up in the hands of souvenir hunters, and even that placed in museums had been excavated in an unprofessional manner and virtually all of its archaeological context destroyed.

The 1986 expedition was made possible by the West Desert Pumping Project to lower the level of the record-high Great Salt Lake by pumping some of its water into large evaporation ponds to the west of the lake. Since the project required flooding the Donner sites, which were protected by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as well as other legislation, the state was required to remove all historical material before the project could begin. ^^ 18 Records kept and artifacts recovered by the project are being preserved by the Antiquities Section, Utah State Historical Society.

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Previous salvage efforts had disturbed the sites so completely that mere identification of the sites was something of a problem in a couple of cases. In all, five sites which it was assumed corresponded to the four wagons and one small cart reported by the Stansbury survey of 1849 were discovered and excavated, though only three still contained significant artifacts. Although none of the artifacts appear to offer the possibility of major historical reinterpretation, some did provide minor insights that add to our understanding of the Donner tragedy.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery was the three sets of wagon ruts that cut through the sites. The wagon wheels sunk several inches below the surface of the ground and created a permanent disturbance that remains visible even 140 years later. Two sets of tracks measured fifty-eight and fifty-nine inches apart, center to center, and showed a tire width of four inches at the bottom of the rut. These dimensions correspond closely to those of other wagons of the period found in museums. The other set, however, measured no less than eight-six inches apart and showed a tire width of ten inches at the bottom of the rut. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that these are the tracks of James Reed's gigantic Pioneer Palace wagon, the Winnebago of its day, whose luxury came at the expense of the laborious progress that cost the Donner party valuable days, then weeks, then finally death in the snow. This is the first knowledge we have had of any of the dimensions of the wagon, and it adds considerably to our understanding of the reasons for the tragedy. It also helps us understand why, when Reed broke an axle on the wagon crossing the Wasatch, he had to travel fifteen miles to find a suitable replacement.^^ Another significant feature had little to do with the Donners. At one site, a large blackened area was discovered, several feet in average diameter. Since most of the ammunition specimens, the military buttons, and geological samples were found at the same site, the evidence suggests that this was the site of the camp of the Stansbury survey party which spent a cold night near one of the Donner wagons in the fall of 1849 and used boards from the wagon for firewood. The geological specimens are a type of quartz that is found most closely in the mountains to the north and west of the lake where the party had just passed.

The nature of the ammunition itself, though, is cause for some uncertainty in making that conclusion. The nine balls and shot found i^Korns, "West from Fort Bridger," p. 203 n. 25.

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Wagon tracks photographed by Charles Kelly in 1936 remained visible to historians fifty years later. USHS collections.

came from no less than seven different calibers of weapon and thus suggest civilian equipment rather than regular military issue. The great majority of animal remainsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;bones, hide, and manureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are at that site, which might suggest that some of the ammunition was used by the Donners in dispatching exhausted animals, except for the fact that no spent bullets were found to correspond to the fired percussion caps. So a theory explaining all of those artifacts still eludes us.

The supposed Stansbury site also contained specimens of leather strap and buckles which were probably harnesses. It is unlikely, though, that those items are associated with either the Donner or Stansbury parties, since the former used oxen exclusively and ox riggings do not require leather straps or buckles, and the Stansbury party were mounted on horses and mules. It is thus possible that some other party, perhaps the large one of 1850 led by Auguste Archambault, included an outfit with horse or mule-drawn wagons and that it abandoned some of its gear along with a dead animal at that point. Overland emigrants in 1846 were already learning that the slower pace of oxen was a fair price to pay for their greater strength and their lesser attraction than horses or mules for Indians.

Otherwise, the artifacts recovered from the Donner sites were about what one might expect an emigrant party in trouble to discard: hardware from wagons; ceramic specimens, both bottles and dishes; leather and hardware from luggage; and tools, including auger bits, a grass-hook, a plane handle, and a hay fork. All of those were reasonable selections to include in one's wagon on a trip to start a new life in California, but they were also reasonable ones to discard when circumstances became desperate. The Donners would have to make their way in California the best they could without them, for the mere goal of getting there had now become the central problem.

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Great Salt Lake and Great Salt Lake City: American Curiosities

BY RICHARD H. JACKSON

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Fanciful Currier and Ives print ca. 1852 gives the Great Salt Lake a fjordlike look and locates its bucolic namesake city right on its shore. USHS collections.

THAT J U L Y DAY H I YEARS AGO WHEN Brigham Young overlooked the Salt Lake Valley and reportedly uttered his immortal words, "This is the place," he was participating in one of the great traditions of America, visiting geographic curiosities. His selection of the name of the city as a reflection of the most curious element in the geography of the region insured instant recognition of the place and space occupied by the Mormons.

Jackson County, Kirtland, Independence, or Nauvoo were essentially indistinguishable places on the American escutcheon, but Salt Lake was and is a unique place. Implicit in its name is recognition that the Great Sailt Lake is different from all other lakes in the new land. Examination of the lake, visitors to its shores, and its namesake the Mormon capital reveal that it has been a symbol of the American West.

Henry Nash Smith in his landmark work Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth discusses the symbolic aspects of American lands and places, but he ignores one of the most important character traits of Americans that is reflected in their symbolsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the unusual or curious. From the time of the first visitors to the New World the curious has attracted the most attention. We have become a nation of travelers and tourists because of our preoccupation with the unusual.

From the geysers of Yellowstone to the Great Salt Lake to the soaring Rocky Mountains the unusual symbolizes the West. Even today's O N

Dr. Jackson is professor of geography at Brigham Young University.

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concern for saving the western environment reflects attempts to save oddities not found in the humid East. It was fitting that as oddities in the eyes of most contemporary observers, the Mormons located near one of the most curious American landforms and named their city after it. Mormon and Salt Lake become, thereafter, virtually synonymous.

Was it simple serendipity that led Mormon leaders to postmark their first general epistle to the Saints from Great Salt Lake City? Or did the name epitomize the hardheaded practicality of the self-taught New Englander Brigham Young, who recognized the logic of naming the city after the most recognizable and widely known landmark in the region? Had a more visionary leader like Joseph Smith been in charge, would he have called it New Nauvoo or named it after some uniquely Mormon element such as Moroni, Nephi, or Goshen as subsequent Mormon settlements in the West were? Perhaps more intriguing, why wasn't it named after the martyred Smith? The City of Joseph, Smithville, or the City of Zion appear on the surface more logical selections than the name of a nearly lifeless body of water that was largely superfluous to their attempts to establish a new Zion. Given the central role of Smith and the reverence in which his memory was held, the failure to name the city after him may have reflected a conscious or unconscious attempt by Young to transfer allegiance to his new administration. Conversely, it may represent implicit acceptance of Smith's vision, since he had earlier said the Saints would go to the valley of the Great Salt Lake.^ Whatever the reason, the designation Great Salt Lake City instantly created a pairing of physical and cultural geography unrivaled in America.

A number of factors combined to give the lake an unusually high profile among the geographic phenomena of the West. First, it is important to recognize that the existence of such a large body of water in a region of scant rainfall is a curiosity itself For trappers and explorers emerging from the mountains the broad expanse of blue shimmering on the horizon was enough to make it dominate their reports of the region. Discovery that the lake had a high salt content immediately distinguished it from all other known lakes in the new land and gave the geographically ethnocentric Americans a new feature to boast about. Additionally, salt was an important resource used in a variety of everyday activities at home and in industry and commerce, the most important of which were food preparation and preservation. The Great iRichard H. Jackson, "Mormon Perception and Settlement," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68 (1978): 317-34, 322.

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Salt Lake offered a seemingly endless source of salt that was already at a concentration obtainable only after weeks of evaporation of ocean water. The combination of size, salt, and location made the lake a natural addition to the litany of curiosities found in the West.

Reports of the lake from the very beginning to the present reveal a fascination with its salty nature, the limited life of the lake proper, and the lake's changing level. As early as the 1880s the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert predicted the lake would dry up completely as irrigation continued to deplete the inflow. As late as 1987 engineers watched attempts to pump water into the west desert because its rising level threatened lands around it. The lake thus remains of central concern to the people of Utah because of its impact on their use of the land around it. But like the early explorers and visitors to its shores, the residents of its valley remain strangely unaware of its nature and potential.

T H E PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE G R E A T SALT LAKE

Three major characteristics of the physical geography of the Great Salt Lake are important in understanding its nature: (1) its existence as a terminal lake with no external drainage, (2) the shallow valley floor it occupies, and (3) its isolation from other water bodies and the ocean in a region of arid to semiarid climate. Each of these in turn affects the physical attributes of the lake. Its terminal nature means that the only change in water level at the present is through evaporation or diversion of streams flowing into the lake (discounting the efforts to pump it).

Water loss by evaporation has made the lake saltier and saltier over time. The shallow nature of the valley floor means that fluctuations in volume result in much greater fluctuation in area. Because of the relatively level shore areas a rise of only a foot may cover as much as halfmile or more of horizontal area, greatly expanding the surface of the lake. Its location in an arid to semiarid region produces great fluctuation in the lake level. The amount of precipitation in the surrounding mountains, drained by streams that flow into the lake, is reflected in variation in the water volume and level of the lake. Wet periods in Utah have resulted in massive changes in the surface area of the lake and attempts to stabilize its level by pumping (see tables on following page). Finally, its isolation from other water bodies makes it less useful for transportation purposes.

The physical characteristics of the lake that attract tourism and recreation are offset by its physical geography. The high salt content, always a point of interest, has attracted people who want to experience

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HISTORICAL GREAT SALT LAKE HYDROGRAPH 4214

4210

4206

2

4202

4198

4194

4190 1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2(

Time (years)

AREA OF GREAT SALT LAKE AT SPECIFIED ELEVATIONS Elevation of water level Surface area of lake (in feet above sea level) (in acres) 4170 144,700 4172 199,100 4174 253,600 4176 308,100 4178 362,600 4180 417,000 4182 449,600 4184 482,200 4186 514,700 4188 547,200 4190 579,700 4192 620,400 4194 703,800 4196 817,500 4198 910,400 4200 1,034,000 4202 1,107,000 4204 1,180,000 4206 1,247,000 4208 1,308,000 4210 1,426,000 4212 1,472,000 4214 1,664,000 4216 2,099,000

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the phenomenon of being unable to sink. Likewise, the existence of a large water body in a semiarid region has drawn boaters and swimmers. Unfortunately, the terminal nature of the lake in its broad interior basin creates shorelines that are generally muddy and marshy, iU-suited for either swimming or boating. In addition, fluctuations in level have destroyed manmade modifications designed to provide better access for swimming and boating. The recent histories of such developments as Saltair (ultimately left standed by the receding lake) or Long John Silver's beach development (inundated by the rising lake) epitomize the problems of utilizing the lake for recreation. In spite of its geographical perverseness, the lake continues to be a major geographic lodestone in the West because of its unique properties.

EARLY REPORTS OF THE LAKE

The earliest information about the lake emphasized its high salt content. Baron Lahontan reported in The Hague in 1703 that he had information about a region far to the west of the Mississippi in which the principal river ran into a salt lake "three hundred leagues in circumference and thirty in breadth. "^ Its large area and salty nature made it a curiosity. Subsequent visitors to the lake may or may not have included French trappers, but the first recorded information from explorers actuaUy in the drainage of the Great Salt Lake comes from the Dominguez-Escalante expedition. In September 1776 they arrived in Utah VaUey. They named Utah Lake Timpanogotzis Lake and were informed by the Indians that it joined another much larger lake to the north whose waters were "harmful or extemely salty wherefore the Timpanois Indians assured us that anybody getting a part of his body wet instantly feels severe itching around the wet part."^ Their lack of interest in a salt lake is evident, since they did not go north to explore it. The importance of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition to the Great Salt Lake and information concerning it came from their report of it and expedition member Miera's map that showed the Great Salt Lake connected to the Pacific by a river. The most enduring effect of their information was the mistaken notion that a river joined the lake to the Pacific. The significance of such a river for potential settlement and trade with the West, the basis for subsequent government explorations, emphasizes the importance of the descriptions of trappers who had 2Dale L . Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1947), pp. 44-45.

3lbid., p . 49.

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One example of geographic ignorance about the Great Salt Lake, from Anthony Finley, New American Adas, 1926. USHS collections.

direct knowledge that disproved the existence of such a water connection.

The experiences of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition and of Baron Lahonton typify the strange curiosity/disinterest of early visitors. In both cases, beyond ascertaining that the lake was indeed curious in being large and salty, the explorers were not enticed to travel on to the lake shores. Subsequent exploration and description of the lake reflects a simUar dichotomy. Not untU the emergent United States government officially sent explorers to map the lake and determine its actual utility was a broad-based understanding of the lake and its geography available.

Trappers, emigrants, gold rushers, and Mormon pioneers continued the general view of curious disinterest in the lake. For the trappers, discovery that it did not connect to the Pacific and that it had no beaver was sufficient to cool their interest. For the emigrants it was important only as an obstacle to bypass. For the Mormons the lake was a curiosity and a resource, but a resource whose importance dwindled as means other than salt became available for preserving food.

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For fifty years after Dominguez and Escalante the record is unclear as to the visitors to the lake and the mountains around it. It seems very likely that Spanish from the settlements of today's New Mexico and Arizona traded north with the Indians of Utah and Salt Lake valleys but no written observations remain concerning the lake.

The primary visitors to the lake from 1776 to 1826 were the fur trappers from the British forts to the north and the emerging American nation to the east.

The first information about trappers in the West was recorded by the returning Lewis and Clark company of 1806. The subsequent spread of trappers across the West reflected the demand for beaver in Europe and led to intimate knowledge of the geography of the region among those trappers. Few bothered to write the details of their knowledge for their competitors' use, however, so their views and understanding of the Great Salt Lake are dimly perceived.

Dale L. Morgan points out the tantalizing closeness to the Great Salt Lake achieved by several parties between 1810 and 1825. The Astorian Robert Stewart was within the physical bounds of the Great Salt Lake Basin for seven days in 1812 near the Bear River but left before seeing the lake. Donald McKenzie trapped and explored south and east of the Snake River in 1818 and 1819 and sent a letter dated Black Bear's Lake, September 10, 1819, to fellow Astorian Alexander Ross. Morgan concludes that Mackenzie had reached Bear Lake, but the trapper made no mention of a salt lake.* The first recorded visitors to the Great Salt Lake were clearly fur trappers, but it remains debatable as to which company they represented and who the individuals were. Etienne Provost was in the region by 1824 and may well have reached the lake. That same year a group of trappers representing William Henry Ashley (under the direction of William Sublette) camped in Cache Valley. In response to questions about the course of the Bear River, on which they were camped, Jim Bridger reportedly followed the river to its junction with the Great Salt Lake. The accepted story is that on bending to drink from the lake he found that it was salty and exclaimed, "Hell, we're on the shores of the Pacific! "5 The first official information from the trappers to filter back east is contained in a report by Daniel T. Potts, a trapper with Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company during 1822-27: *Ibid., pp. 55-58. sibid., pp. 69-70.

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Utah Historical Quarterly G.S. Lake lies in a circular form from N.E. to N.W. a larger circle being to S. it is about 400 miles in circumference, and has no discharge or outlet, it is generally shallow near the beach, and has several islands which rise like pyramyds {sic\ from its surface. The western part of the lake is saturuated {sic\ with salt, as not to dissolve anymore when thrown into it.

The country on S.W. and N.W. is very bare, bearing but little more than wild sage and short grass.^

His knowledge was no doubt derived from exploration of the lake by trappers during 1823-26. Most of it appears to have come from a journey made around the lake by four men in 1826. They circumnavigated the lake in skin boats. Corroboration of their trip is contained in a story in the Missouri Herald of November 8, 1826, reporting the experience of a party of Ashley's men who "occupied four and twenty days in making the circuit." The letter of Potts is important because it clearly puts to rest the idea that there was a river extending from the Great Salt Lake to the Pacific Ocean, a thesis current as late as March 11, 1826, when the Missouri Advocate printed an account maintaining that Ashley fell upon what he supposed to be the sources of the Buenaventura and represents those branches, as bold streams from twenty to fifty yards wide, forming a junction a few miles below where he crossed them, and then empties into a large lake, (called Grand Lake) represented by the Indians as being 40 or 50 miles wide, and 60 or 70 miles long. This information is strengthened by that of the white hunters who have explored parts of the Lake. The Indians represent, that at the extreme west end of the Lake, a large river flows out, and runs in a westwardly direction. . . . To the north and northwest from Grand Lake the country is represented as abounding in Salt.

Whether the information in the Missouri Advocate simply reflected confusion on the part of the reporter who interviewed Ashley or whether Ashley misunderstood the information given him by trappers is unclear. The maps available at the time might have led him to conclude that there was an outlet to the sea, but the clear description of Potts in 1826 proves that the trappers knew the geography of the lake and referred to it as the Great Salt Lake. Thereafter, the lake would be a lodestone in the West.

In spite of the clear evidence presented by Potts the mystery of the lake persisted. In 1837 Washington Irving related Captain Bonneville's adventures in the West and described his visit to the Great Salt Lake.

^Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), November 14, 1826, as quoted in Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General Ashley (Barre, Mass., Barre Gazette, 1960), p. 58.

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Bonneville himself did not visit the lake, but a detachment from his party under the leadership of Joseph Walker set out from the 1833 furtrapping rendezvous purportedly to explore its mysteries. Walker was actually headed for California to find information about Mexican settlements there, and information about the lake was purely secondary.

Irving maintained that they beheld the Great Salt Lake, spread out like a sea, but they found no stream running into it. A desert extended around them, and stretched to the southwest as far as the eye could reach, rivaling the deserts of Asia and Africa in sterility. There were neither tree, nor herbage, nor spring nor pool, nor running stream, nothing but parched wastes of sand, where horse and rider were in danger of perishing.^

Did Irving simply misunderstand Bonneville's report? O r did Bonneville misunderstand the information he obtained from the trappers? T h e description of the landscape seems to refer to the area west of the Great Salt Lake, a region the party under Walker struggled through going to California and returning. Evidence for this is found in the account of Zenas Leonard who accompanied Walker to California.

H e reported that the party crossed north of the lake, struck west towards the mountains, and found the region " s o dry and sandy that there is scarcely any vegetation to be foundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not even a spear of grass, except around the springs." Leonard's narrative demonstrates conclusively that in spite of the misinformation contained in Irving's account, the trappers and explorers of the region knew and understood the lake. Leonard concluded that " t h e big Salt L a k e " was fed by two streams, the Bear and " W e a b e r ' s R i v e r , " two streams " a b o u t the same size, say from two to three hundred yards wide, and from three to four hundred miles l o n g . â&#x20AC;&#x201D; T h e y r u n south parallel with each other, and empty into the Big Salt Lake on the N o r h \sic\ side, and no great distance apart. "^ GOVERNMENT EXPLORERS

T h e trappers who traversed the valleys of the Rocky Mountains had a broad-based geography but a geography that was only partially shared with the eastern establishment. Moreover, when the information from the trappers was at variance with that of published textbooks 'Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1868), p. 386. sZenas Leonard, Zenas Leonard's Narrative (Clearfield, Pa., 1839), as quoted in Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, p. 103.

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and geographies, too often the latter took precedence. For example, Fremont, before arriving at the lake for the first time, confided to his journal an account that borders on the mystical: we were now entering a region . . . around which the vague and superstitious accounts of the trappers had thrown a dehghtful obscurity....

Hitherto this lake had been seen only by trappers who were wandering through the country in search of new beaver streams, caring very little for geography; its islands had never been visited; and none were to be found who had entirely made the circuit of its shores. . . . It was generally supposed that it had no visible outlet; but among the trappers, including those in my own camp, were many who believed that somewhere on its surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which its waters found their way to the ocean through some subterranean communication. All these things had made a frequent subject of discussion in our desultory conversations around the fires at night; and . . . I was well disposed to believe. . . .^

Fremont's statement that the "accounts of the trappers had . . . thrown a delightful obscurity" denies the reports of Potts and others published in the East. Although it is uncertain whether Fremont was downplaying the trappers' information in order to emphasize his own contribution to the geographical knowledge of the region or whether he had faded to read other accounts, the old ideas of the lake clearly colored his views.

When Fremont reached Promontory, from which he could view the lake, his response was verbose and poetic: Immediately at our feet we beheld the object of our anxious searchâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; waters of the inland sea stretching and still in solitary grandeur far beyond our vision. It was one of the great points of the exploration; and as we looked eagerly over the lake in the first emotions of excited pleasure, I am doubtful the followers of Balboa felt more enthusiasm when, from the heights of the Andes, they saw for the first time the great western sea. It was certainly a magnificent object . . . and to travellers so long shut up among mountain ranges, a sudden view over the expanse of silent waters had in it something sublime. ^^

By the time he arrived at the lake that mood had ebbed, and his comments emphasized the saltiness of the water and the party's lack of food. In anticipation of exploring the islands with a collapsible rubber boat, Fremont again engaged in flights of fancy concerning the prospects of finding a Shangri-la. On September 9, 1843, the men explored part of the lake and arrived at Fremont Island, finding no fresh water 9john C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains and to Oregon and North California (Washington, D.C., 1845), pp. 116-17. lolbid., p. 135.

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or trees. T h e y spent the night there, and Fremont provided some sketches of the lake's major features. T h e next day they left and shortly thereafter departed northward from the valley.

After traveling on to the Columbia River, Fremont turned south along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in search of the supposed Buenaventura River to the Pacific. FaUing to find it, he ultimately turned east and, after a journey of severe hardship across the Sierra in the winter, arrived in U t a h VaUey on M a y 5, 1884. H e did not revisit the Salt Lake VaUey, presumably having satisfied his curiosity about the Great Salt Lake. His journey had proven to him that there was no outlet to the sea. H e concluded that there was a " g r e a t b a s i n " with no exterior drainage, suitable only for sparse settlement because of its desertlike nature. F r e m o n t ' s formal report finally destroyed the idea, long held in the East, of a great river providing access from the Great Salt Lake to the Pacific Ocean.

Subsequent government exploration would come only after the M o r m o n pioneers had created a new curiosity in the West that attracted the interests of the American people and their government.

Once the M o r m o n s h a d established a settlement in the Great Salt Lake VaUey the words of Fremont upon leaving the vaUey in 1843 became strangely prophetic: . . . the bottoms of this river [Bear], and of some of the creeks which I saw form a natural resting and recruiting station for travellers, now, and in all time to come. The bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient; the soil good, and well adapted to the grains and grasses suited to such an elevated region. A military post, and a civilized settlement would be of great value here and cattle and horses would do well where grass and salt so much abound. ^^ T H E M O R M O N S OF THE G R E A T SALT LAKE

F r o m their location in Nauvoo the M o r m o n s received information about the curiosities and wonders of the West from trappers, travelers, and explorers. Newspaper articles from St. Louis to PhUadelphia were reprinted in their Nauvoo Neighbor, providing information that ultimately affected their decision to locate in the Great Salt Lake Valley.

As early as 1842 J o s e p h Smith "prophesied that the saints would continue to suffer m u c h affliction and would be driven to the Rocky M o u n t a i n s . . . a n d b u i l d cities a n d . . . b e c o m e a m i g h t y

iilbid., p. 144.

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people. . . ."^^ On another occasion he "mapped out on the floor with a piece of chalk a diagram of what he called the Great Salt Lake Basin or Valley and said that the Latter-day Saints would go there. "^^ After the death of the prophet the church continued its discussions of moving to the West and "resolved that a company of 1500 men be selected to go to Great Salt Lake Valley and that a committee of five be appointed to gather information relative to . . . the emigration."^* Clearly, church leaders had access to most information about the Salt Lake Valley before their departure westward, including data from Fremont's journal, interviews with trappers, emigrant guides such as Hastings's, and newspaper accounts.

The Mormons prepared for nearly two years before finally arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. During this time the Great Salt Lake remained the reference point in their mental map of the West. Their knowledge clearly included an understanding of its saline nature and of the lack of an external outlet as well as an understanding that settlements would have to be located on the east side where, the reports of Fremont, Hastings, and others indicated, the land was suitable for agriculture.

Orson Pratt and Lorenzo Snow entered the valley on July 21, 1847, and Pratt recorded in his diary that Mr. Snow and myself ascended this hill from the top of which a broad open valley, about 20 miles wide and 30 long, lay stretched out before us, at the north end of which the broad waters of the Great Salt Lake glistened in the sunbeams, containing high mountainous islands from 25 to 30 miles in extent. After issuing from the mountains among which we had been shut up for many days, and beholding in a moment such an extensive scenery open before us, we could not refrain from a shout of joy which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips the moment this grand and lovely scenery was within our view.^^

Wilford Woodruff entered the valley on July 24 and was even more ecstatic in his reaction: This the 24th day of July, 1847, was an important day in the history of my life, and in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After travelling from our encampment six miles to the deep ravine valley

i2joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ed. Brigham H . Roberts, 7 vols. (Sak Lake City, 1902), 5:85.

13A recollection of Steven H. Goddard, a pioneer of 1847, found in Journal History, July 26, 1897, LDS Church Library-Archives, Salt Lake City. i*Smith, History of the Church, 7:439. ^^Millennial Star 12 (1850): 178; Diary of Orson Pratt, July 21, 1847, LSD Church LibraryArchives.

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Frederick J. Piercy portrayed Salt Lake City as a rural farm community in From Liverpool to the Great Salt Lake Valley, 1853. USHS collections. ending with the canyon, we came in full view of the valley of the Great Salt Lake, or the Great Basinâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the land of promise, held in reserve by the hand of God as a resting place for the saints.

We gazed with wonder and admiration upon the most fertile valley spread out before us for about 25 miles in length and 16 miles in width, clothed with a heavy garment of vegetation, and in the midst of which glistened the waters of the Great Salt Lake with mountains all around and towering to the skies, and streams, rivulets and creeks of pure water running through the beautiful valley.^^

The original pioneer company of 1847 was primarily concerned with the suitability of the valley for settlement, but the scenic splendor of the lake caused Brigham Young to lead an exploring party to its shores on July 27. Included in the party were Young; Apostles Heber C. KimbaU, WiUard Richards, Orson Pratt, WUford Woodruff, George A. Smith, Amasa Lyman, and Ezra T. Benson; Sam Brannan; and several others. According to Woodruff's account: We took our dinner at the freshwater pool and then rode six miles to a large rock, on the shore of the Salt Lake which we named Blackrock, i^Wilford Woodruff Journal, July 24, 1847, Brigham Young University Library, Provo.

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Having determined that a person could float in it and that salt was easily obtainable from it, the pioneers largely ignored the lake in their diaries, other than occasional notices of a "lake-effect" on the climate.

William Clayton observed, for example, that high daytime temperatures were moderated by a "regular bracing salt breeze which comes from the north west off the Great Salt Lake."^^ For the eternally practical Saints, however, planting crops, erecting a fort with rooms for the people to reside in, and preparing for the pioneer group following them took precedence over visiting one of the great wonders of America.

An expedition to get salt was undertaken, though, and on August 12 a party of men who had been to the lake to boil down salt, returned, reporting that they had found lying between two sand bars on the lake shore, a beautiful bed of salt all ready to load into wagons. Several loads were brought to camp, and two of them taken east by the company that set out a few days later for the Missouri River. ^^ T H E CITY BY THE LAKE

With the beginning of colonization the Mormon capital became the focus of interest in the Great Basin. The lake remained a curiosity, but until the railroad made access to the Black Rock Beach area easier, it was largely ignored by the settlers and was mentioned by visitors primarily in terms of its buoyancy, which caused most of them to make the seemingly mandatory trek to the lake to float.

The relegation of the lake to a position of secondary importance behind the city was formalized by the adoption of the name of the lake for the city. Great Salt Lake City, Great Basin. Immediately after returning from their journey of exploration and tourism to the lake on July 27 and 28, Brigham Young called the apostles together and laid out the parameters of the city. It was to be rectangular, with a temple lot of forty acres as the center, (subsequently reduced to ten). Each block comprised eight lots measuring 10 rods by 20 rods (exclusive of the streets), each lot having one and one-quarter acres. The streets i7Ibid., July 27, 1847. isWilliam Clayton, William Clayton's Journal (Salt Lake City, 1921), pp. 54-55. isOrson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Sak Lake City, 1892-1904), 1:352.

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were to be eight rods wide (132 feet) with a sidewalk 20 feet wide on each side, with each house located in the center of the lot 20 feet from the front.^° T h e same evening the actions of the apostles were formalized by a vote of the members to make the valley their permanent home. T h e city was thus established, and on August 22 when the Saints held a General Conference " T h e City of the Great Salt L a k e " was adopted as the formal n a m e of the city.^^ H a v i n g appropriated the n a m e of the most famous landscape feature in the West, the industrious Saints set out to build a city that would overshadow the lake itself. Instructions to the pioneers to build a city of such a grand scale, combined with their previous city-building experience, resulted in one of the wonders of the West. Although it did not immediately become more than an agricultural settlement, the influx of settlers to the Great Salt Lake Valley meant that within a short time a rudimentary city began to take form. Although the settlers spent the first winter in the fort in temporary structures or in wagon beds that h a d been removed from their running gear, by the next year they had begun to move out onto their individual lots.

T h e confidence of the leaders in the selection of the Salt Lake VaUey and in their anticipation of a great city is mirrored in epistles written to the members of the church in August when Brigham Young and the other leaders returned east to assist in bringing the major migration of fleeing M o r m o n s to the valley the following year. T h e epistles described . . . a beautiful valley of some 20 by 30 miles in extent, with a lofty range of mountains on the east, capped with perpetual snow, and a beautiful line of mountains on the west, watered with daily showers; the Utah Lake on the south, hid by a range of hills, with a delightful prospect of the beautiful waters of the Great Salt Lake on the northwest extending as far as the eye can reach, interspersed with lofty islands, and a continuation of the valley or opening on the north, extending along the eastern shore about 60 miles to the mouth of Bear River.

In this valley we located a site for a city, to be called the Great Salt Lake City; of the Great Basin, North America. . . .^^

Pioneers arriving the following year commented more on the settlement than upon the lake. Typical are the remarks of Oliver Boardm a n Huntington on September 20, 1848. His description includes 20Edward W. Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City, 1886), pp. 54-55.

2iLeviJackman Journal, July 28, 1847, Utah State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City.

-^â&#x20AC;˘2-Millennial Star 10 (1848): 81-88.

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Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake were represented in European newspapers in the 1850s. This rendering appeared in the Illustrated London News, January 2, 1858.

many of the elements that quickly became almost mandatory for Mormon migrants, newspapermen, and other observers: In a moment release comes to the weary traveller; he sees at once the then only isolated spot of civilized rest for or within 1,000 miles in any direction. A sudden feeling of joy, grandure and gratitude suddenly filled each heart. . . .^^

The description of Capt. Howard Stansbury, who came to Salt Lake City in the faU of 1849 to conduct a thorough survey of the Great Salt Lake, incorporated aU the elements that became enshrined in descriptions of the city: A city has been laid out upon a magnificent scale, being nearly four miles in length, and three in breadth; the streets at right angles with each other, eight rods or 132 feet wide, with sidewalks of 20 feet; the blocks 40 rods square, divided into eight lots, each of which contains an acre and a quarter of ground. . . . Through the city itself flows an unfailing stream of pure sweet water, which, by an ingenious mode of irrigation, is made to traverse each side of every street, whence it is led into every garden spot, spreading life, verdure, and beauty over what was heretofore a barren waste.

23MS, BYU Library.

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The city was estimated to contain about 8,000 inhabitants and was divided into numerous wards, each, at the time of our visit, enclosed by a substantial fence, for the protection of the young crops; as time and leisure will permit, these will be removed and each lot enclosed by itself, as with us. The houses are built principally of adobe or sun dried brick, which, when well covered with a tight projecting roof, make warm, comfortable dwellings, presenting a very neat appearance. . . .

Upon a square appropriated to the public buildings, an immense shed had been erected upon posts, which was capable of containing 3,000 persons.

It was called "the bowery" and served as a temporary place of worship until the construction of the great temple.^^

As time passed and the city grew, larger buildings were added, but descriptions continued to focus on the use of adobe, the wide rectangular pattern of the city, the abundant vegetation within the city, (including trees and gardens), and the irrigation water and streams along each street. Completion of the present tabernacle and ultimately the completion of the temple added two new elements to descriptions of the city. Curiosity about the City of the Saints completely overshadowed the amazing natural feature of the Great Salt Lake. Those who came to the city included both believers and travelers passing through.

Their conclusion as to the relative merits of the city vary, but it is important to note that perceptive observers always emphasized the neatness, orderliness, and pleasant appearance of the community.

Some few observers who came with an avowed anti-Mormon spirit could find nothing pleasant in the city and compared it unfavorably with New England towns with their two- and three-story painted wood houses. Some Mormons were also less than ecstatic, but they represent a tiny minority. Patience Archer, writing in 1856, typifies the negative views: When first we arrived in the city to us everything looked dreary and cold.

The streets was all covered with snow. . . . At that time the city was not built up very much the houses was Scatering to me it seemed a very lonesome place. . . . I had been living eleven years in the city of London before I left England and to me it seemed a very loanly place I said to my old friend Annie Thorn if this is Salt L. City what must it be like to live in the country I don't think I will go to Pleasant Grove. . . .^^

Her negative view reflects in part the time of year she arrived and the difficulties encountered by the handcart pioneers of that year.

24Howard Stansbury, An Expedition to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (Philadelphia, 1855), pp. 128-29.

25Patience Loader Rosa Archer Journal, p. 93, MS, BYU Library.

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The gold rush that brought many travelers through the Salt Lake Valley in the 1850-51 era was followed by the Utah War and an incursion of reporters in the 1858 period. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 furthered the attraction of the twin curiosities of polygamy and the Mormon city. Numerous accounts of the city were published in eastern newspapers, travel books, and antiMormon broadsides. The following account from the St. Louis Intelligencer describes the city in 1853: The city itself is unique in its way. In general appearance, and the manner in which it is laid out and built upâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the latter especially, it is original and striking beyond most cities that I have ever visited and my first entrance into it was attended with reflections equally as impressive as those called up by the presence of any place I've ever seen. These blocks are divided into smaller lots of one and a quarter acres each which usually belong to a single individual, and upon which he erects his tenement and raises his crop, consisting generally of wheat, oats, corn, and various kinds of vegetables. This gives to the place, at first sight, very much the appearance of a city built in the midst of a corn field. The houses are usually quite small, built out of adobes or sun dried bricks, or rude logs and boards. Most of them are one story in height; some few are not more than half a story.^^

In addition to the physical appearance of the city, Brigham Young and polygamy were of major interest to visitors and often colored their reports. The perceptive Sir Richard Burton summarized the difference in views: Parenthetically, I must here warn the reader that in Gt. S. L. City there are three distinct opinions concerning, three several reasons for, and three diametrically different accounts of, everything that happens, viz. that of the Mormons, which is invariably one-sided; that of the Gentiles, which is sometimes fair and just; and that of the anti-Mormons which is always prejudiced and violent. ^^

In consequence, descriptions range from those of believers who found it to be the greatest city in the world; to those who stated, "these houses make little pretention to architectural beauty"; to those who compared it to the country towns of Illinois and Indiana, concluding, "the city is quite an ordinary looking place. "^^ The increasing growth of the city, the construction of the tabernacle, and the beginnings of the temple were paralleled by the estab"^6Millennial Star 15(1853): 45-46.

27Richard Burton, City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York, 1862), p.

28Rolander Guy McClellan, Golden i'^aii? (Philadelphia, 1874), p. 556; Louise Barry, "Overland to the Gold Fields of California in 1852," Kansas Historical Quarterly, August 1942, p. 274.

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lishment of more imposing buildings in the center of the city. By 1866 the city was of such a magnitude that " G r e a t " was dropped from its name, apparently since any observer would recognize its greatness.

The coming of the railroad provided speedy transportation to the West Coast and made Salt Lake City a prime stopover for tourists. The lake once more became of interest, however, as construction of a raUroad to Black Rock Beach and development of a resort at Lakeside north of Salt Lake near the raUroad line to Ogden provided easy access to its waters.

Prior to the construction of Lakeside in 1870 near Farmington by Brigham Young's son, John W. Young, and the connection of the Utah Western RaUroad to Black Rock in 1875, visits to the lake for recreation were limited. Although the early settlers apparently traveled to the lake periodically on July 24 to celebrate, the thirty-five-mUe journey seemed to discourage all but hardy tourists. The construction of bathing and boating facUities at Lake Point and Black Rock between 1875 and 1887 culminated in the building of a large pavilion at Garfield Beach. It was 165 feet by 65 feet, constructed over the water 400 feet from the shoreline, and connected by a 300-foot-long covered pier.^^ This latter development foreshadowed the construction of Saltair in 1893. First burned in 1925 and later rebuilt, Saltair was left high and dry during the drought of the 1930s. Repeated attempts to utUize the lake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ultimately foundered on the erratic shoreline associated with its geography.

In the post-1870s as entrepreneurs attempted to make the lake into a premier resort to restore its role as a curiosity, the other curiosity, the Mormons and their city, moved towards respectability. Only three years from the time Saltair was completed the Mormons officially separated themselves from their own peculiarity, polygamy. From that time on Salt Lake City has been in a state of transition from curiosity to American prosaic. Neither the city nor the lake are as curious as they once were. The lake has been replaced by modern curiosities such as Lagoon or Disneyland, and the city has overcome its peculiarities to become in large part simply another urban region. The enduring attributes of the lake (buoyancy and erratic shoreline and water level) and of the city (Salt Lake Temple and Tabernacle) add a small note of uniqueness, but except in times of flooding or some other unusual occasion, neither the lake nor the city are the curiosities they once were.

29Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, p. 357.

'#^5lW.-';,

Illustration from Stansbury's report depicts expedition crew members "landing to encamp, shores of Great Salt Lake Bear River Bay. " USHS collections.

Stansbury's Expedition to the Great Salt Lake, 1849-50

BY B R I G H A M D . M A D S E N

T o EXPANSIONISTS IN THE UNITED STATES OF 1848 the capture of the great Southwest from Mexico appeared to be just the first salvo in the conquest of the entire western hemisphere. As one excited politician proclaimed, it was manifestly the destiny of the American eagle to fly over all the region from the aurora borealis on the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. Of course, while plans matured for the next great territorial addition, something must be done to explore what had already been gained in the area stretching from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast and from the forty-second parallel to the Rio Grande.

Dr. Madsen is professor emeritus of history. University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

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The government agency assigned the task of scientific investigation of the Southwest and the Great Basin was the Corps of Topographical Engineers created out of the Army Reorganization Act of July 5, 1838. Under the skilled leadership of John J . Abert, the corps had already sponsored the famous expeditions of John C. Fremont before the War with Mexico and had sent 1st Lt. William H . Emory as topographer with Gen. Stephen W. Kearny's "Army of the West" to C2difornia.^ With peace at hand, the corps now looked forward to intensive exploration of the newly acquired region, and among the first targets was to be an examination of the Great Salt Lake and the recent Mormon settlements which formed a way station for the thousands of gold-hungry emigrants on their way to the new diggings in California.

Colonel Abert outlined the objectives of the 1849 expedition to experienced Capt. Howard Stansbury whom he chose to head the survey party along with an assistant, 1st Lt. John Williams Gunnison.

The captain was instructed to observe and "confirm" the well-traveled Oregon Trail from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Hall; to explore a wagon route from the latter place to the north end of Great Salt Lake; to determine facilities for a "landing place" on the lake for the shipment of supplies from the Mormon settlements to Fort Hall; to survey the Great Salt Lake and determine its capacity for navigation; to survey the Jordan River and Utah Lake; to evaluate the ability of the Mormon settlers to provide food and other supplies for Fort Hall and overland travelers and to report on the population, mills, work force and Indians in the region; to make their home in the main city of the Saints and to employ Mormons on a temporary basis during the survey; and finally to locate a site for a military post in the Great Salt Lake area.^ There may also have been a hidden agenda understood by Abert and Stansbury that the captain was also to discreetly determine the loyalty of the Saints and their present attitude toward the government of the United States now that they were again under American jurisdiction.

To accomplish these various ends would require a leader of rare diplomatic skills and of genial disposition, one who could win the coniWilliam H . Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863 (Nev^ Haven, 1959), pp. 3-21; Frank N . Schubert, Vanguard of Expansion: Army Engineers in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1819-1879 (Washington, 1980), pp. vii-xi; J o h n Charles Fremont, Report on an Exploration of the Country Lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers (Washington, 1843) and Report of the Exploring Expedition Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843-44 (Washington, 1845); William H . Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California (Washington, 1848).

2john J . Abert to Howard Stansbury, April 11, 1849. War Department, Topographical Bureau, Letters Issued, II, October 13, 1848-September 15, 1849, National Archives, Washington, D . C .

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fidence of Brigham Young and the Mormon people and yet who could make a cold-eyed and impartial appraisal of the situation in Salt Lake City. Colonel Abert also needed a commander who was not too gungho as a military man but who could ingratiate himself to get the aid necessary for the accomplishment of his objectives. An individual of broad interests and humanitarian in point of view would aid this cause.

And if the man were a good observer and with literary qualifications able to describe clearly and succinctly what he saw, so much the better.

Howard Stansbury seemed to fit the bill as one of the few non -West Pointers who had spent a number of years outside the mUitary as a civU engineer. Later on, both Gunnison and Albert Carrington, a Mormon, would complain that Stansbury was too rela.xed and informal in his approach to his army duties, although both would concede the captain was always thoroughly in command of the expedition. Howard Stansbury was just a civilian engineer first and a military man second.^ Lieutenant Gunnison, a graduate of West Point, had also had extensive experience with the topographical engineers, having joined the corps in 1838. He spent most of the decade before his Salt Lake trip as a surveyor with parties engaged in work in the Great Lakes region where he spent long hours in the field in the summers and in agency offices in the winters "drawing maps of our survey through the day, and in our parlors sociably at night."* Gunnison was more introspective than Stansbury but energetic and decisive as an engineer and a man of deep religious views. He was to have the opportunity of observing the unique religion of the Utah Saints and of describing them in his book. The Mormons. Together with Stansbury's official report, the two works would inform the nation and the world about the geographic features of the Great Salt Lake area and the theological beliefs and cultural qualities of the Mormon people.^ Most of the records of the Stansbury expedition are located in two boxes in the National Archives. These leather-bound report books consist of twelve journalsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;six volumes by Stansbury, four by Gunni3Except for short sketches in the various biographical indexes, there is no detailed biography of Stansbury. By referring to various congressional documents, it is possible to trace the official career of Stansbury in its high points. See Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York 1888), V; Dumas Malone, ed.. Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1935), X V I I ; Marquis Who's Who, Who Was Who in American Historyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;The Military (Chicago, 1975), 441. *U.S., Congress, Senate, Ex. D o c , vol. 2, no. 5, 27th Cong., 3rd sess. (1843), serial no. 413, p.

289. For biographical information about Gunnison, see Nolle Mumey, John Williams Gunnison (1812-1853), The Last of the Western Explorers, A History of the Survey through Colorado and Utah with a Biography and Details of His Massacre (Denver, 1955), and Andrew H . Booth, Notes on Biography of Cpt. John W. Gunnison, formerly 1st Lieut, of the U.S.A. (Goshen, N. H . , 1860).

5 Howard Stansbury, Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (Philadelphia, 1852); J o h n W. Gunnison, The Mormons (Philadelphia, 1852).

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son, one by Albert Carrington, and one by J o h n H u d s o n . Carrington, who became the straw boss of the survey crews and accompanied Stansbury back to Washington, D . C . , to help prepare the report, was a college-trained scientist and prominent M o r m o n leader who at the time was serving as Brigham Young's secretary.^ J o h n H u d s o n was a welleducated young Englishman and artist who was forced by ill health to stop off in Salt Lake City in the fall of 1849 on his way to the gold fields.

Stansbury hired him as an artist to draw sketches of scenes around Great Salt Lake, m a n y of which appear in the finished report.^ H u d s o n ' s and Stansbury's journals are real literary productions, exhibiting skills in writing and interesting observations and descriptions of the geography and flora and fauna encountered. Gunnison and Carrington have left us rather prosaic and pragmatic accounts of meteorological and technical accomplishments. T h e r e are also two private journals left by C a r r i n g t o n â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a small notebook held by the University of U t a h concerned with the survey of U t a h Lake and a second larger diary of his trip to Washington, D . C , and the winter of 1851 spent there. It is in the possession of the Daughters of U t a h Pioneers in Salt Lake City. Finally, there are sixteen field notebooks in the National Archives containing chiefly engineering data and rough sketches which were no doubt helpful in preparing the two maps produced by the expedition and in fleshing out some details of the survey but of m i n i m u m interest to historians or general readers today.

Although the Stansbury group was to leave Fort Leavenworth in company with a regiment of mounted rifles destined for Fort Hall and Oregon, the captain was late in reaching Leavenworth and so eventually started along the Oregon Trail with only his crew of French Canadians and a small party of California-bound emigrants u n d e r a M r . and M r s . Charles C . Sackett. T h e y left the last of M a y 1849 with eighteen m e n in the Stansbury expedition and six people in the Sackett caravan. Lieutenant Gunnison was so ill at the beginning of the journey that he was confined to an a r m y ambulance and spent most of the trip inside the vehicle with the leather blinds drawn and his only solace some long letters he wrote to his wife describing the hardships of travel.^ Stansbury seemed to enjoy the excursion across the plains and 6Steven H. Heath, Biographical Sketch of Albert Carrington, Ace. 32, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

'Brigham D. Madsen, ed., A Forty-niner in Utah with the Stansbury Exploration of Great Salt Lake: Letters and Journal ofJohn Hudson, 1848-50 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981).

8A series of over twenty letters from Gunnison to his wife or other relatives are held by the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and most of them are being reproduced as part of the edited documents of the Stansbury expedition.

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left a very descriptive and interesting account of the gold rush of that yearâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the over-burdened emigrants, the deaths from cholera, and the sights and sounds of traveling through Indian country.^ At Fort Bridger, Gunnison was sufficiently recovered from his illness to take command of the main party and lead it into Salt Lake City while Stansbury with guide Jim Bridger and a "couple of men" left to reconnoiter a shorter route from Fort Bridger to the north end of Great Salt Lake. After wandering around in this craggy portion of the Wasatch Range, the captain, and no doubt with a bemused Jim Bridger, finally descended through North Ogden Canyon to come out into the Salt Lake Valley at Brown's settlement where Stansbury recorded: Upon requesting food and lodging for the night, we were told to our great surprise that we could not be accommodated, nor would the occupants sell us so much as an egg or a cup of milk, so that we were obliged to remount our horses; and we actually bivouacked under some willows, within a hundred yards of this inhospitable dwelling . . . of this surly Nabal."^^

After this inauspicious introduction to Mormon hospitality, Stansbury rode into the City of the Saints with some apprehension about how he might be received by the chief Mormon, Brigham Young.

Gunnison had already met suspicion from the leader of the Saints and wrote of his first meeting with Young and Albert Carrington: "We had a few moments' talk about our 'Survey.' . . . Under much apparent indifference he showed anxiety - & I hear from various sources that our survey is regarded with great jealousy - and have had warning that secret means would be used to prevent any maps being made of the valley even that our lives are in danger, as a hint from the one man could take them."^^ Thus warned, Stansbury determined to meet at once with Brigham Young and learned that among the Mormon people, " T h e impression was that a survey was to be made of their country in the same manner that other public lands are surveyed, for the purpose of dividing it into townships and sections, and of thus establishing and recording the claims of the Government to it, and thereby anticipating any claims the Mormons might set up from their previous occupation." Using all of his skills of diplomacy and persuasion, Stansbury was finally able to reassure "Governor Young to his entire satisfac^Stansbury, Exploration and Survey, pp. 13-76, and original journal entries by Stansbury and Gunnison plus a few of Gunnison's letters to his wife and three letters by Charles C. Sackett to the St. Louis Reveille, June 3, 12, July 15, 1849. '"Stansbury, Exploration and Survey, pp. 83-84.

'1 Gunnison, Journal, August 25, 1849.

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tion" and clinched the agreement by hiring the Mormon president's private secretary, Albert Carrington, as a chief assistant to the survey.^2 As Young explained in a private letter, this "will enable us to know at all times what their movements & discoveries are. Capt Stansbury's expressed feelings & appearance are very friendly. "^^ With good relationships established in the Mormon community and leaving Gunnison and Carrington to spend the autumn in surveying the Jordan River and Utah Valley, Stansbury now embarked on a reconnaissance of a practical wagon road from Salt Lake City to Fort Hall and a preliminary exploration of the northern shores of Great Salt Lake and the salt desert extending west from the lake to Pilot Peak.

With John Owen, the sutler for the mounted rifles, and his geologistscientist, Dr. James Blake, the captain left Salt Lake City on September 12, 1849; explored " a n excellent wagon road" to Fort Hall; returned with the supplies expected from Fort Leavenworth; made a reconnaissance of Cache Valley as a wintering site for his government stock; and then started around Great Salt Lake and across the salt flats. 1* His purpose was to gain some knowledge of "its general features," but he was warned " b y the old mountain-men [that] such a reconnaissance was considered not only hazardous in the highest degree, but absolutely impracticable, especially at so late a season of the year."^^ Undismayed, Stansbury left Bear River on October 20 guided by the French-Canadian Archambeau who had traversed the salt desert with John C. Fremont in 1845. After much hardship, during which his mules were "deprived of almost all sustenance for more than sixty hours," the exploring party reached the springs at Pilot Peak. After a three-day rest, Stansbury started his group across the Hastings Trail, a seventy-mile stretch "without wood, water, or grass. . . . " Passing abandoned emigrant wagons with all their possessions and the carcasses of several oxen, the weary men, with their poor animals looking "wretchedly," crossed the desert and reached Salt Lake City on November 7, 1849, "being the first party of white men that ever succeeded in making the entire circuit of the lake by land."^^ ,

^"^^tanshnvy. Exploration and Survey, pp. 84-86. i 13"Presidency to Amasa L y m a n , " September 5, 1849, Salt Lake City, Brigham Young Papers, reel 31, box 12, folder 13, Outgoing Correspondence, LDS Church Library-Archives, Salt Lake City. â&#x20AC;˘^Stansbury, Exploration and Survey, pp. 87-98; Stansbury Journal, September 1 2 - October 20, 1849. ^^Stansbury, Exploration and Survey, p . 97. lelbid., pp. 98-119; Stansbury Journal, October 2 1 - N o v e m b e r 7, 1849.

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Lithograph of "street in Great Salt Lake City, looking east" was included in Stansbury's report. USHS collections.

With cold weather ending their survey of Utah Lake, Gunnison now joined Stansbury in Salt Lake City for the winter season where the two men had a lengthy opportunity of observing the culture and lifestyle of their Mormon hosts. Unlike passing emigrants and short-term visitors who too often pronounced anathema upon the religious and marital practices of the Utah Saints, the two army officers enjoyed a friendly communication which resulted in a far more understanding attitude and sympathy for their beleaguered neighbors than the world generally accorded the Mormon people. As a result, Stansbury's long chapter in his formal report and Gunnison's book. The Mormons, reflect a friendlier tone and less strident judgment, particularly of the practice of polygamy.

The only incident to mar a rather peaceful winter of writing up notes and preparing for the survey of Great Salt Lake in the spring was an Indian battle at Fort Utah (now Provo) at Utah Lake.^^ Brigham Young gave his reluctant approval to the settlers at the Fort "to use up the [Indian] marauders forthwith" because of their theft of stock and

i^For a detailed account of this Battle of Fort Utah see Madsen, A Forty-niner in Utah, pp. 77-79, and for an even longer account, Howard O. Christy, " O p e n Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah, 1847-52," Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (1978): 220-27.

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unceasing attacks against the settlement.^^ Captain Stansbury gave his full support to the campaign, both because he wished to maintain the needed support of the Mormon leaders and because he was also concerned about the safety of his surveyors at Utah Lake. He sent Dr. James Blake, a physician, and Lt. George Howland, mUitary advisor, on the expedition with the understanding that the two men would give their services under their regular pay as members of the Stansbury expedition. ^^ As a result of a two-day battle and a few skirmishes later, about thirty Indians were killed.

Dr. Blake then began a series of actions that alienated him from Stansbury and finally resulted in his departure from the Stansbury party. As a physician he had already established a private practice in Salt Lake City to earn extra income,^^ and, following the battle, he engaged two Mormons to help him cut off the heads of some of the deceased natives to send to Washington, D . C , for medical experimentation.^^ In a final thrust at Stansbury he demanded pay in the sum of $123 for his services as doctor for the militia expedition.^^ From this point on, relations between Blake and Stansbury deteriorated until the doctor refused to participate in the survey of Great Salt Lake and sued the captain for $1,436 in back pay. Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders supported Stansbury and reaped their reward later when Blake went to Sacramento and wrote articles for the local paper denouncing the Mormons as the worst kind of perverted criminals. ^^ In the court case it was disclosed that the doctor had carried off all his notes and some of the instruments of the expedition, had buried his meteorological account in a garden, and was in the act of mutilating one of the record books when apprehended. The justice of the peace found against Blake, who then pursued a long correspondence with Colonel Abert accusing Stansbury of a long list of crimes against him.

The recriminations finally ended when the secretary of war refused to pay Blake for his part in the Great Salt Lake expedition.^^ isjournal History, February 1, 1850, LDS Church Library-Archives. i^Stansbury to Brigham Young, February 4, 1850, Journal History.

20Stansbury to J . J . Abert, J a n u a r y 17, 1851, Topographical Bureau, Register of Letters Received, IV, No. 68, J a n u a r y 20, 1851, National Archives.

2iAbner Blackburn, Reminiscences, A-307, Utah State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City.

22Daniel H . Wells to Stansbury, April 5, 1850, Journal History. "^^Sacramento Transcript, October 14, 15, November 2, 1850.

24Stansbury to J . J . Abert, J a n u a r y 17, 1851, Topographical Bureau, Register of Letters Received, IV, No. 68; Stansbury to Abert, Washington, D . C , J u n e 1, 1852, ibid.. No. 499; C. M . Conrad to James Blake, Washington, D . C , July 6, 1852.

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By April 4, 1850, Stansbury and Gunnison were ready to begin the main project of their assignment, the survey of the Great Salt Lake.

Gunnison and his men were to examine and measure the settled east and south shores of the lake, while Stansbury, Carrington, and John Hudson were to tackle the more difficult task of chaining the forbidding northern and western shorelines. Gunnison had the easier mission because he and his group had access to the farms along the east side and a convenient base of supplies at Salt Lake City. Stansbury and Carrington, on the other hand, were always running out of drinking water and the beef which they learned to salt down with lake water, had to endure the interminable attacks of midges and mosquitoes, and were engaged in a constant fight to keep their two boats afloat when the winds would drive the water from under the craft leaving them high and dry on the mud flats. The three months of effort included a near mutiny when the cook quit, a night of sailing in bitter cold and stormy weather which almost resulted in the death of Stansbury, and a few balmy and pleasant days when the captain and Hudson could revel in the delight of bathing in the salty water or in observing the antics of the numerous pelicans on the various islands. It was a real adventure story capped by a successful survey of the lake and its environs.^^ Satisfied with the completion of their surveys of the Great Salt Lake, Jordan River, and Utah Lake, Stansbury and Gunnison then spent July and part of August in the process of triangulation of the three areas so as to gain the engineering data needed for the first accurate map of the entire region.^^ The work was interrupted on July 24, 1850, by attendance at the annual Pioneer Day celebration where, as distinguished guests, the two army officers were called to deliver toasts at the formal banquet and to hear one read in their honor. Stansbury displayed his customary sensitivity by declaring, "Freedom of thought; freedom of speech, freedom of the Press; and the more inestimable freedom to worship our God just as we please." Not to be outdone.

Mormon Patriarch John Smith reciprocated with words of praise for the army engineers, "Capt. Stansbury, and the officers under his command, are worthy of praise for their prudence, perseverance, industry, benevolence and urbanity: they have done their work honorably for their country; may honor, fame and power be their portion forever. "^^ 25journals of Stansbury, Gunnison, Carrington, and Hudson, April 3 - J u n e 27, 1850, National Archives.

26journals of Stansbury, Gunnison, and Carrington, July 3-August 12, 1850. â&#x20AC;˘^TDeseret News, July 27, 31, August 10, 1850.

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With such friendly encomiums ringing in their ears, the government surveyors left the City of the Saints on August 28, 1850, bound for the East and the families from whom they had been parted for over a year. Instead of backtracking via the Oregon Trail, Stansbury decided to reconnoiter a new and more direct route across Wyoming from Fort Bridger due east to a connection with the well-rutted Oregon road at Fort Laramie. His course was destined to become the route followed by the Pony Express and, later, the Union Pacific Railroad, so it has some significance for the history of the American West. Before reaching Laramie, Stansbury suffered an injury to his leg on October 6 which forced him to ride in an army ambulance for the rest of the trip.

He allowed the myth to be perpetuated that he had suffered a fall from his horse, but Carrington reported the real reason in his personal diary: the captain had "hurt himself kicking one of his dogs out of his tent."

From this point on, Stansbury ceased making entires in his journal, and we must rely on Gunnison and Carrington for details of the rest of the return trip.^^ At Fort Laramie the expedition split up with Stansbury and Gunnison going on ahead while Carrington was detailed to wait at the post for the expedition records and equipment which a Mormon leader, Orson Hyde, was bringing from Salt Lake City. Picking up this baggage, Carrington transported it to Fort Leavenworth and then traveled on to Washington, D . C , which he reached on December 13, 1850, to spend the next four months aiding Stansbury and Gunnison in preparing the two maps and the other records for the formal report of the surveys.^^ Meanwhile, the captain and lieutenant were spending some leave with their families before reporting to the nation's capital.^^ There are no extant journals by Stansbury and Gunnison describing the winter's work in Washington, and except for a few letters of Gunnison to his wife we are left to depend on a personal diary kept by Carrington for details of the daily routine at Stansbury's office.^^ Carrington left an interesting account not only of the official work of the survey team but also of life in the capital as he met important political figures and indulged in the kind of sightseeing typical of firsttime visitors to the city on the Potomac. Carrington left for his home in 28Stansbury Journal, September 2 8 - O c t o b e r 1, 1850 and Gunnison and Carrington Journals, August 2 8 - O c t o b e r 11, 1850.

29Carrington Journal, October 12-December 13, 1850.

3oGunnison Journal, October 1 2 - No v e m b e r 13, 1850.

31 Carrington Journal, December 14, 1 8 5 0 - M a y 9, 1851. This journal is in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, Salt Lake City.

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Salt Lake City on May 9, 1851, and journal accounts of the Stansbury expedition end with this entry.

The Stansbury report was published in 1852 as a congressional document and also in a private printing by Lippincott & Grambo. It was widely read in this country, in England, and elsewhere by people interested in the geography of the Great Salt Lake and in the peculiar characteristics of the Mormon people. Stansbury's chapter on the matrimonial practices of the Saints and Gunnison's revealing descriptions in his book. The Mormons, received special attention.

Stansbury had written about polygamy, "Whatever may be thought of the morality of this practice, none can fail to perceive that it exhibits a state of things entirely different from the gross licentiousness which is generally thought to prevail in this community. "^^ Gunnison concurred in this judgment, "Thus guarded in the motive, and denounced as sin for other consideration than divine, the practical working of the system, . . . has every appearance of decorum. "^^ It was little wonder that in reviews of the two books, critics of the time would denounce the two authors for their favorable statements about polygamy. Stansbury especially received vitriolic blasts. The reviewer for the United States Magazine denounced the polygamous Mormon men ("Snakes are not wanting in this valley of Salt Lake") and included Stansbury: "We have seen a specimen of the Howard frog ourself, and truth to say he was not handsome. . . . We could find no pleasure in examining the creature; and hence we infer that this reptile, armed with scales and spikes, must correspond to a bloated, malicious, Ul-tongued old debauchee of either sex, than which Satan himself can furnish forth nothing more hideous."^* But to the Utah Saints, Stansbury and Gunnison were good government friends at a time when there weren't many. One Mormon reviewer of Stansbury's report tried to restrain himself: " T h e style of his language is dignified and elegantâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the flowing tide of rhetorical sweetness, . . . the limpid stream of unmixed Truth flowing from no disturbed or troubled fountain; and moistening in its course, with the dew of gladness, the hearts of thousands who have long smarted under the lash of misrepresentation, cruel jealousies, and the whole family of nondescripts."^^ Even these days there are occasional editorials in the 32 Stansbury, Exploration and Survey, 5.

33Gunnison, The Mormons, 70.

344(1853): 19. ^^Deseret News, January 8, 1853.

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LDS church newspaper, the Deseret News, remembering that halcyon time when two eastern visitors defended the Mormon people against their detractors.^^ Capt. Howard Stansbury's expedition to the Great Salt Lake has for too long been relegated to a short note in the history of the American West. Overshadowed by such flamboyant explorers as J o h n C. Fremont and lacking the ability or motivation to dramatize himself and his exploits like a J . W. Powell, Stansbury's significant accomplishments have not received the attention they deserve. His interesting and descriptive portrayal of the great California gold rush of 1849 across the plains ranks with that of J . Goldsborough Bruff and other well-known accounts. H e and Dr. James Blake were among the first to postulate that the terraces they observed along the mountainsides ringing the Great Salt Lake were evidences of a large prehistoric lake in the Great Basin. In his exploration of the sea of salt, he gave the country its first accurate map of the area as well as leaving his name to the largest island in the lake and the range of mountains just beyond and attaching Gunnison's and Carrington's names to two other large islands. H e reconnoitered a new road between Salt Lake City and Fort Hall that later became part of the Montana Trail and established the feasibility of the route through southern Wyoming that was to become the Union Pacific access through the Continental Divide. And in the process of almost two years of such exploration, he maintained command of his expedition and did not lose a man to accident or disease.

His sojourn among the isolated Mormons of Utah allowed him to observe their habits and lifestyle for one of the best accounts of these unique Rocky Mountain Saints. T h e chapter on the Mormons in his published report is only one example of his skill as a writer. The narrative and descriptive passages in the document and in his personal journals are superb literature.

Aided by a competent assistant, Lieutenant Gunnison, and by a conscientious surveyor-foreman in the person of Albert Carrington, Stansbury took back to Washington, D . C , and the reading public of the East and Europe an important description of the Great Salt Lake and the Great Basin and of the Mormon settlers who occupied this northern section of the new Mexican Cession. The journals, correspondence, and other documents of the Stansbury expedition provide a significant and striking record of the events of 1849 and 1850 along the Oregon Trail and in the valley of Great Salt Lake.

36lbid., August 24, 3 1 , September 7, 2 1 , 1940, and August 28, 1965.

Seymour Lewis Miller. Courtesy of the editors.

Seymour Miller's Account of an Early Sheep Operation on Fremont Island EDITED BY DAVID H. MILLER AND ANNE M. ECKMAN

I N MAY 1944 SEYMOUR MILLER, AGE SEVENTY-THREE, DICTATED the

following account of the Miller family sheep operation on Fremont Island in the Great Salt Lake to his nephew, Utah historian David E. Miller.^ Because of the constraints of its peculiar geography, the Millers' sheep-ranching enterprise was undoubtedly one of the more Dr. Miller is dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cameron University, Lawton, Oklahoma. Mrs. Eckman is a school teacher at Farmington Elementary School. ' T h e original notarized typescript appears as an appendix in David E. Miller, " T h e Great Salt Lake: Its History and Economic Development" (Ph.D. diss.. University of Southern California, 1947).

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unusual operations in the annals of the western sheep industry. Born in Farmington, Davis County, on November 1, 1870, to William Henry Miller and Helen Aurelia Hinman, Seymour was one of eleven brothers and sisters. He married Lily Mary Hunsaker on November 12, 1891. She bore him fifteen children between 1892 and 1914.

Seymour spent most of his life as a rancher and farmer in Box Elder and Davis counties, and in southern Idaho. For several years he raised truck garden crops on the old William Henry Miller farm in Syracuse, near the shores of Great Salt Lake.

Just over a hundred years before Seymour Miller dictated his recollections, J o h n C Fremont made the first recorded examination of Fremont Island. In September 1843 he and his men paddled to the island in an inflatable India rubber boat from the mouth of Weber River. Fremont expected to find a pristine wilderness "teeming with game of every description," untouched by human hands. Instead of a pastoral Eden, the island proved to be a treeless, wind-swept triangle of land, covered with sage and rank grasses but with no trace of the "clear streams and springs of fresh water" which Fremont's men had hoped to enjoy. His romantic expectations shattered, he called the place "Disappointment Island."^ Topographer Howard Stansbury subsequently named the island in Fremont's honor during his 1850 survey of the lake. A man of more practical orientation, Stansbury speculated that the island would make an "admirable r a n g e " for sheep and goats, if adequate fresh water sources could be developed.^ Mormon pioneers had found the lake's largest island, Antelope Island, ideally suited for ranching operations. It provided abundant grazing, required little or no fencing, and offered both winter and summer ranges. Leaders of the Mormon church stocked Antelope Island with sheep and cattle in 1849 and in 1850 reserved grazing lands on both Antelope and Stansbury islands for the use of the Perpetual Emigrating Company in supporting Mormon immigration to Utah.

Private herds were also pastured on Antelope Island under church supervision during this period.* By contrast, Fremont Island attracted 2John C Fremont, Report on an Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-'44 (Washington, D . C : Gales and Seaton, 1845), pp. 152-60.

See also David E. Miller, " J o h n C Fremont in the Great Salt Lake R e g i o n , " The Historian (Autumn 1948): 14-28.

3 Howard Stansbury, Expedition and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1852), pp. 159-60. *See David E. Miller, " G r e a t Salt Lake: A Historical Sketch," in J . Wallace Gwynn, Great Salt Lake: A Scientific, Historical and Economic View, Bulletin 116, Utah Geological and Mineral Survey (June 1980), p. 7.

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Henry William Miller, left, courtesy of the editors, and Daniel Arnold Miller, right, from Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah.

little attention from area stockmen until Henry WUliam MiUer and Daniel Arnold Miller decided to stock sheep there in 1859.

Henry William Miller and Daniel Arnold Miller were brothers who had immigrated to Utah after the Mormon expulsion from Nauvoo. Daniel settled in Farmington in 1848, and his brother followed in 1852. In addition to farming and stock raising, the Miller brothers built and operated a water-powered sawmill near the mouth of Farmington Canyon. The Miller brothers decided to stock Fremont Island with sheep and cattle; they buUt a large barge to haul their stock from Farmington Bay to the island. During the next quarter-century, the Miller brothers and their sons and grandsons pastured sheep on Fremont Island and operated a saltworks there. They hauled cedar timbers, minerals, and livestock on a small fleet of boats which they constructed and sailed on the lake. During the 1860s and 1870s, Fremont Island was known in Utah as Miller's Island, and was so designated on Augustus Mitchell's 1865 commercial County Map of Utah and Nevada.

When the Millers began their sheep operations in 1859, Fremont Island was part of the public domain. The MiUers never attempted to homestead the island but were satisfied to use the island as squatters, a practice not at all uncommon among western stockmen. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory in 1869, the

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I-'

-4M^M.y^MJ- Mitchell's 1865 County M a p of Utah and Nevada showing Miller's Island (now Fremont Island). Courtesy of the editors.

odd-numbered sections on Fremont Island fell within the confines of the Union Pacific Railroad land grant. According to family tradition, the Millers obtained grazing rights from the railroad as well as the option to purchase railroad lands on the island should these come on the market at a future date.

In 1885 Judge Uriah J . Wenner challenged the Millers' claim to the island. Wenner and his young bride Kate had arrived in Salt Lake City in 1880. Wenner opened a law office in the city, while his wife immersed herself in the social scene. Their son, George, was born in 1881 and a daughter, Blanche, in 1883. Gov. Eli H . Murray appointed Wenner (a non-Mormon) to the bench as probate judge in 1882. He replaced Elias A. Smith, who was disqualified under terms of the Edmunds Act of 1882. The Wenners prospered in Salt Lake City until 1885 when Judge Wenner contracted tuberculosis. Forced to step down from the bench, Wenner followed his physician's advice and began searching out a secluded spot where he could raise his growing family while recuperating from the ravages of the disease. He and a friend visited Fremont Island in 1885, and on at least one occasion that year, he visited the island as a guest of the Miller brothers. Without

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Wallace Stegner was photographed at the remains of Judge Wenner's house on Fremont Island by David E. Miller. Courtesy of the editors.

consulting the Millers he initiated plans to gain possession of the island.^ The means by which Wenner obtained control of the island in 1885 and 1886 are not entirely clear. In 1885 when he first took the island move under consideration, Wenner offered to purchase the Millers' grazing rights and sheep should he decide to take up residence there.^ Later that year, after considering the Millers' tenuous claim, he decided to force them and their sheep off the island by legally gaining control of its only reliable water supply, a spring situated on the southeastern tip of the island. He led the Millers to believe that he had negotiated the purchase of the railroad lands from a Union Pacific agent, but he actually filed for 390.83 acres of federal land on the island under terms of the Desert Land Act of 1877.^ Under the provisions of 5See David E. Miller, ed., " A Great Adventure on Great Salt Lake: A True Story by Kate Y. Noble," Utah Historical Quarterly 33 (1965): 218-36; and Dale Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), pp. 329-35.

6 See Joseph Royal Miller and Elna Miller, eds.. Journal of Jacob Miller {n.p.. Mercury Publishing, 1967), pp. 190-91.

-"See U.S. Bureau of Land Management to Dale Morgan, October 21, 1946, quoted in Miller, " A Great Adventure on Great Salt Lake," p. 222 n. 11.

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this law, a settler could file for up to one section (640 acres) of the public domain for a twenty-five cents per acre down payment. The purpose of the legislation was to encourage irrigation of arid western lands. In order to receive title to his claim, the applicant was required to irrigate the entire claim and pay an additional dollar per acre within a three-year period.^ Judge Wenner was well aware that the island was unsuitable for farming and that its springs and seepages would provide insufficient water for irrigation. Like many stockmen who filed claims under the Desert Land Act, Wenner had no intention of building an irrigation project but instead used his claim as a temporary means of gaining control of the island.

In 1892 after her husband's death, and long after the Millers had been evicted, Kate Wenner relinquished the Desert Land Act claim and on the same day filed for a homestead on the island, which she patented in 1893. She also purchased 1,109.9 acres from the Union Pacific Railroad in 1892 for $2.00 per acre.^ Subsequently she acquired the rest of the island, thus terminating any claim the Miller family had to Fremont Island.

Seymour Miller was not the only member of the family to record his reminiscences. His cousin Jacob Miller also kept an account of the Miller brothers' sheep operation.^° Jacob, the son of Daniel Arnold Miller, took an active role in the family's livestock business between 1860 and the time the Millers withdrew from the island in 1886. His journal provides much insight into daily operations on the island and provides details of the recurring cycle of shearing, lambing, and transporting sheep across the lake. Storms on the lake were a constant hazard, and boats were frequently blown off course and grounded on shoals. Sometimes the consequences were serious, as on J u n e 9, 1862, when Daniel Miller's flatboat sprang a leak, forcing him to throw fortyeight sheep overboard. ^^ Jacob Miller's journal also provides interesting details of a saltworks the Millers operated on the island during the winter of 1865-66.

Jacob built large vats with sheet metal bottoms and plank sides for boiling the salt water, hauled them to the island, and rigged a pump to

8 See Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1936 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 219. ÂŽSee BLM to Morgan. loMiller and Miller, eds.. Journal ofJacob Miller. iilbid., p. 62.

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bring water directly from the lake. Using sagebrush for fuel, he boiled down several boatloads of salt, most of which he hauled by wagon to mines at Virginia City, Montana, for use in fluxing ore.^^ His journal also provides details about the construction of several boats used to haul livestock on the lake, including the Lady of the Lake, a two-mast schooner he built in 1879. The Lady of the Lake (rechristened the Argo when the Wenners bought her in the 1880s) was used on the lake for at least two decades and was still intact as late as 1909.^^ Seymour's grandfather, Henry W. Miller,^* recorded the beginning of this enterprise in his journal: In the Spring of 1859 I went to the Island known as Fremont Island in the Great Salt Lake and explored it, accompanied by my brother DanieP^ and Quincy Knowlton.^^ I built a boat and after we had sheared our sheep we took them to the island. There were about 153 head. It was said that there had never been any stock on that Island before we took our sheep there. This island is about 25 miles from Farmington and about six miles north of Antelope Island, where the Church had some stock. This Fremont Island is opposite the mouth of Weber River. After we had taken our sheep on the island, it became known locally as Miller's Island. It proved a good place for sheep, it being about four miles from the mainland and no wild beast on it to destroy the sheep. The herd increased very fast in number and needed no herder to take care of it. We used to visit the Island every few weeks to clean the spring, and at times of lambing, shearing and marketing we spent days on the island at a time.^^

i2lbid., pp. 69-70. i3lbid., p. 176. i*Henry William Miller (1807-85) was born in Lexington, New York, to James Miller and Ruth Arnold Miller. He moved to Quincy, Illinois, in 1829 and with his brother, Daniel, operated a store and sawmill there. He married Elmira Pond (1811-1904) at Quincy in 1831. He was a member of the Illinois Militia and served in the Black Hawk War. He and his wife met several Mormon families who had been driven from Missouri to the Quincy area and in 1839 were baptized into the church. He moved his family to Nauvoo in 1840 and helped finance construction of the Nauvoo House. In 1846 he established a home at Kanesville, Iowa, where he assisted with the Mormon migration to Utah. He moved to Utah in 1852, establishing a home in Farmington. In the 1850s he was a member of the Utah Territorial Legislature and served as a missionary to the Cherokee Indians. He married a second wife, Fanny Gunn, in 1862. In 1864 he helped colonize northern Arizona. He moved to St. George, Utah, in 1867, where he spent the remainder of his life. See James H. Miller, " H e n r y W. Miller," unpublished typescript in possession of the editors. isDaniel Arnold Miller (1809-81) was born in Lexington, New York, the son of James Gardner and Ruth Arnold Miller. He moved to Quincy, Illinois, in 1829, where he operated a prosperous milling business with his brother Henry William. He married Clarissa Pond (1806-44) in 1833. After her death he married Hannah Bigler(b. 1820) in 1844 and took a third wife, Elenor Williamson (1827-64) in 1857.

Converted to the Mormon faith in 1839, he moved to Nauvoo and subsequently to Utah in 1848, having assisted with the Mormon exodus of 1846-47. In addition to his sheep operations on Fremont Island, he was active as a farmer and rancher in Davis County. See Miller and Miller, eds., Journal of Jacob Miller, pp. 7-22; Frank Esshom, Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1966), p.

1038. lejohn Quincy Knowlton (1835-86). i7journal of Henry W. Miller, photostat of original MS in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, pp. 48-49.

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Island

Historian David E. Milter drinking from a shallow well on Fremont Island. Courtesy of the editors.

By the time Seymour Miller dictated his reminiscences, he was the only surviving eyewitness to the MiUer family's unusual sheep operation. His dictated account of the sheep enterprise follows: E X P E R I E N C E S O N T H E G R E A T S A L T L A K E AND I T S ISLANDS

BY S E Y M O U R LEWIS M I L L E R

My grandfather, Henry WiUiam Miller, and his brother, Daniel Arnold Miller, were the first men to occupy Fremont Island. They had formed a partnership and after having explored the island decided that it would make an exceUent range for sheep, so they made arrangements to take their flocks there. These brothers had been partners in many enterprises before they came to Utah. At Quincy, lU., they married sisters who were instrumental in bringing the brothers into the L.D.S. Church. After they had joined the Church, the men helped get out the timbers for the Nauvoo Temple. In 1848, soon after his arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, Daniel Miller setded at Farmington. In 1852 Henry WiUiam Miller came to Utah and also setded at Farmington. The two families owned much of the land that is now the city of Farmington including much of the present Lagoon. In fact the old race track of Lagoon was once part of the old Miller farm.

When Henry WiUiam Miller and his brother Daniel Henry decided to stock Fremont Island with sheep their sons naturally played a vital part in the

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actual completion of the project. T h e son of H e n r y William was William H e n r y , ^^ m y father. Daniel's sons were J a c o b , ^^ Edward,2° Joe,^^ Dan,22 and Henry.23 Father's sons, William,2* Lyman,^^ and I, and J a c o b ' s sons, Frank^^ and Dan,27 took an active part in the project.

T h e first time I visited Fremont Island was in the Spring of 1877 when I went with father and spent the whole day riding over the island on a horse. I d o n ' t know the exact date that sheep were placed on the island, but when I visited it for the first time we had had enough sheep there long enough for the island to have become over-grazed. O n e herd h a d been taken off in 1876.

O n e of the big problems of the sheep project was that of a satisfactory boat. J a c o b Miller had m a d e a trip around the world and had conducted quite a study of sail boats. ^^ H e designed the boat, Lady of the Lake, and helped build it.2^ Father and he took the most active part in the building. It was m y j o b to keep the tar barrel hot for caulking the boat. L u m b e r for the craft was obtained from Blacksmith Fork near Logan and the timbers were taken from near-by hills.

isWilliam Henry Miller (1838-1922) was born in Quincy, Illinois, the oldest son of Henry William Miller and Elmira Pond. He was thirteen when his family settled in Farmington, Utah. He married Helen Hinman (1840-1911) in 1858, who bore him eleven children. He was active as a teacher, farmer, and rancher and worked for a time as a railroad construction contractor in New Mexico. He was active in the Mormon church and served a mission among the Catawba Indians in South Carolina. He was involved in the family sheep operation on Fremont Island and during the 1890s established the first large commercial apple orchard in Syracuse. He also served as Davis County inspector for horticulture.

See James Henry Miller, "William Henry Miller," unpublished typescript in possession of the editors. isjacob Miller (1835-1911) was the oldest son of Daniel Arnold Miller and Clarissa Pond. Born in Quincy, Illinois, he migrated to Utah with his parents in 1848. The Millers settled in Farmington. He married Helen Mar Cheney (b. 1835) in 1856 and that same year was called to the Salmon River (Fort Lemhi) Mission (1856-57). He also completed a mission in Australia (1875-76) and was active in church affairs throughout his life. He spent most of his life in Farmington, Davis County, where he worked as a schoolteacher, farmer, and rancher. He played a major part in the family sheep operation on Fremont Island and used his shipbuilding skills to construct several boats used on the lake. He married his second wife, Annie S. Christensen, in 1885. Fear of arrest over this polygamous marriage may have been the major reason why the Millers did not contest Judge U. J. Wenner's efforts to gain control of Fremont Island in 1886. See Miller and Miller, eds.. Journal ofJacob Miller, and Esshom, Pioneers, p. 1038.

20David Edgar Miller (b. 1855), son of Daniel Arnold Miller and Hannah Bigler Miller.

2iJoseph Smith Miller (b. 1847), son of Daniel Arnold Miller and Hannah Bigler Miller.

22Daniel Gardner Miller (b. 1847), son of Daniel Arnold Miller and Hannah Bigler Miller.

23Henry William Miller (b. 1859), son of Daniel Arnold Miller and Hannah Bigler Miller.

24Winiam Morgan Miller (1861-1941), son of William Henry Miller and Helen Aurelia Hinman Miller.

25Lyman Henry Miller (1865-1923), son of William Henry Miller and Helen Aurelia Hinman Miller.

26jacob Franklin Miller (1865-1906), son of Jacob Miller and Helen Mar Cheney Miller. He was a mathematics professor at Brigham Young College at Logan during 1892-96. See Esshom, Pioneers, p.

1038.

27Daniel Thomas Miller (b. 1870), son of Jacob Miller and Helen Mar Cheney. He was a languages professor at Brigham Young College in Logan.

28jacob Miller had served on a Mormon mission to Australia in 1875-76.

29The Millers' sheep boat had been wrecked in June 1876. When Jacob Miller returned from his mission to Australia in September of that year he commissioned Henry Barrot, a retired ship's carpenter, to design the Lady of the Lake. Under Barrot's direction Miller constructed the boat in the fall of 1876. Miller described her as " a schooner with a flat bottom for running in shoal water. It was 50 feet long by about 14 or 15 feet wide on deck. There was a four-foot hold for carrying sheep under the deck and a cabin aft." Miller and Miller, eds.. Journal ofJacob Miller, p. 176.

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Two-masted schooner believed to be the Lady of the Lake transported men, supplies, and sheep for the Millers' stock operation. Courtesy of the editors.

T h e Lady of the Lake was about 50 feet long and 12 feet wide. She carried two m a i n masts, the largest one being about 50 feet high. She flew four saUs, two main sails and two jibs. She was a double-deck craft with three and a half or four feet clearance between decks. This was plenty of clearance for sheep and 300 head could be carried at a time. T h e cabin was at the rear of the boat.

It contained a stove and other equipment and could accommodate eight m e n .

A four-foot square box of sand was kept on deck where fires for cooking and signaUing could be kindled. Although two or three m e n could easily m a n a g e the boat, four or five usually went along when a load of sheep was being hauled. T h e extra m e n were used to r o u n d u p the herd. O n some occasions the women folks accompanied their husbands.

T h e boat was built near the m o u t h of Big Cottonwood Creek (Farmington Creek). W h e n she was finished we launched her side ways down some greased planks. T h e morning after the launching we found our boat resting on the bottom with about three feet of water in her hold. However, the lumber had soaked a n d sealed the seams and after we had bailed her out we never h a d any more trouble with leaks. She was a shallow-water boat and when empty, would float in eight or ten inches of water. W e used two other smaU boats before we built the Lady of the Lake, but she was our main craft.3° 30 Henry William Miller built the first sheep boat in 1859. The Millers built a second flat-bottom boat in May 1862 which they used for transporting sheep to Antelope and Fremont islands. The Lady of

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Fremont Island was ideal for sheep. There were some springs along the east side and, although the water was slightly brackish, it was satisfactory for sheep. There was enough vegetation on the island to accommodate a herd of 2,000 sheep. We always tried to keep our herd down to that number. T h e sheep lambed in the late fall and early winter so that by April many were ready for market. T h e meat of this flock tasted more like venison than mutton and would always bring a fancy price on the market when ordinary mutton could hardly be sold. We made trips to the island mainly between early April and J u n e for the purpose of taking animals for market and for shearing. We sheared in J u n e . Of course, whenever we wished to sell a load, we had merely to take the boat and go after them.

Since the sheep could not stray away from the island, no herder was necessary and the sheep became as wild as deer. It became quite a problem to corral them for shearing or market. We found it necessary to build a fence across the island toward the south end. This fence was built of sagebrush and was five or six feet high. There was a gate in the middle with drift fences to direct the sheep into the corrals. Even then we once made several sweeps around the island, two men on horses and three on foot, without getting a single sheep through the gate.

I said the sheep were wild. O n e time we had cornered some on a peninsula at the south end. Rather than be caught, several of them took off into the lake. T h e last I saw of them they were still going.

Father and the other men built a cabin on the island near the east shore where the fence and corrals were located.^^ T h e house was 12 by 14 feet and built partly from lumber salvaged from a boat that wrecked on the north end of the island and partly from lumber shipped to the island. We used the cabin as temporary quarters on our visits to the island. There is probably no trace of either cabin or corrals or the fence we built now since a fire swept the island about 30 years ago. I should say that part of the shearing platform was made of the bottom of the above mentioned boat that had wrecked on the island.

This platform would accommodate about a dozen shearers.

W h e n we occupied the island we found sagebrush as big around as a m a n ' s waist and taller than a m a n on horseback. T h e largest sage was found on the north side. There was an abundance of grass, wild daisies, and some prickly pears. T h e main types of wild life on the island were snakes, mice, and lizards. Snakes were very numerous. It was asserted that there was a snake in every bush. T w o types were very common, the blow snake and the whip snake. Neither is poisonous, but they caused us a lot of unpleasant experithe Lake was their third boat. Jacob Miller built a fourth boat in the summer of 1879 for the Davis County Cooperative, which needed a boat for transporting stock to Antelope Island. He described the boat as "16 by 40 feet, a sloop with a cabin foreword of the mast and, back of the mast, a pen in which to put stock; (wild stock if necessary), with ropes to prevent the main sail from dropping below the boom where it might be injured by the stock. I was appointed to the building committee and built and launched the boat. It cost $615.72. It was arranged to load and unload from the stern." Ibid., pp. 61, 176-77; and "Journal of Henry WilHam Miller," p. 48.

31 The Millers built the cabin in March 1862. The Wenners used it for a kitchen in the 1880s.

Miller and Miller, eds.. Journal of Jacob Miller, p. 60; and Miller, ed., " A Great Adventure on Great Salt Lake," p. 225.

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ences. O n one occasion a large blowsnake crawled up on the bed where father, D a n and I were sleeping. W h e n father awoke in the morning he found this snake, as large around as a m a n ' s a r m and five or six feet long, stretched out on top of the blankets. H e crawled out and calmly told us that we were sleeping with a snake. I got out at once, but D a n considered it a joke and merely opened one sleepy eye. There he was within two inches of the reptile.

H e was soon wide awake. With one sweep of his a r m he threw the bedding into the corner and ran out the door. H e didn't stop to dress and refused to even return to the cabin for his pants. I took them out to him but he refused to put them on until I had run an arm through each leg and put a h a n d into each pocket. H e declared that he had had enough of the cabin and refused to sleep in it again. H e and I made our beds on the boat after that.

T h e whipsnakes annoyed m e more than the blow snakes. They weren't as large but very fast and not afraid of m a n . They traveled with their heads in the air and could go faster than a m a n could run. We would just j u m p out of the way when we saw one coming down the trail.

There were a lot of mice on the island. H o w they got there, I d o n ' t know. But it was a common sight to see snakes chasing mice under the floor of our cabin. O t h e r than snakes, mice, lizards, and a few birds, there was no other wild life on the island.

We communicated with the mainland by means of signal fires. T h e east slope of the island was clearly visible from home. In case the folks at home wanted to communicate with us they went u p on the foot hills east of Farmington and kindled their fires. Three fires was the distress signal. Mother used that signal to s u m m o n father from the island when my baby brother, Arnold,^2 ^^2i^s, very sick and not expected to live. M r s . Wenner used the same signal to s u m m o n her boatman when J u d g e Wenner died on the island several years later. We saw her fires burning three nights in a row.^^ We usually sailed the lake at night because the wind was better at night.

Ordinarily it was just a matter of a few hours trip from Farmington to Fremont Island. However, sometimes things didn't go so smoothly. O n one occasion we spent eight days in a calm just west of Hooper with a load of sheep we were bringing from the island. O u r provisions ran out, although we had plenty of mutton. We sent a m a n ashore in a row boat for supplies and he returned with some soda crackers instead of bread. W h e n the wind finally came up some of the sheep had died and the rest were in bad condition. So we sailed back to the island, unloaded them and rounded up a new load.

At times storms came up and blew us off our course. O n one occasion, the same trip on which we had been becalmed, we were just northwest of the north point of Church Island^* when we saw a storm coming u p . Since we h a d 32Arnold David Miller (1879-1954).

33judge Wenner died suddenly in September 1891. Mrs. Wenner built signal fires as a distress signal, but heavy waves prevented an immediate response from the mainland. See Miller, ed., " A Great Adventure on Great Salt Lake," pp. 232-33.

34Antelope Island was known in Utah as Church Island because of LDS-owned livestock grazed there.

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already spent so m a n y days on the lake, our captain decided to r u n full sail and try to make port. However, when the wind struck, the fore sail snapped and hit the water with a smack as loud as a cannon shot. T h e boat went up on its side and almost tipped over. W e spent considerable time clearing up the wreckage and finally m a d e port safely.

T h e oldest m a n on board always acted as " s k i p p e r " and we all took orders from him. Each took his turn at m a n n i n g the sails or steering. We steered by the stars and by using canyons and m o u n t a i n peaks as landmarks.

We always carried barrels of water with us.

T h e first time J u d g e W e n n e r visited Fremont Island he went as our guest. We gave him free transportation and food for the trip as we did on later trips he m a d e with us. I was present on one of these trips. We were very much surprised and quite put out when he announced, a few years later, that he had bought a section of the island and that we would have to move the sheep off within a year and pay him 100 head of sheep as rental fee during that year.

A large part of Fremont Island was raUroad land, having been granted as subsidy to promote the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Father and Uncle Daniel had obtained from the U . P . railroad the right to use the island and an option to buy it should it be put u p for sale. T h a t is why we were so completely surprised when W e n n e r announced that he had bought it and that we would have to get off. We wrote to the U . P . office at O m a h a to inquire about W e n n e r ' s claim but the reply letter was delayed. W h e n it finally arrived in September, 1884, we had already moved most of the sheep from the island.^^ T h e letter denied W e n n e r ' s claims to the island.^^ I was home when the letter arrived, it being m y j o b to receive the sheep as they were unloaded from the boat. Father and some of the other men were on the lake with the last load of sheep. W h e n father read the letter he expressed the desire to take legal action and try to regain the island. However, since J a c o b Miller was a polygamist and in " h i d i n g " at the time, he did not wish to go to court.^^ As a result nothing was done to regain possession of the island to which we had prior rights.

It was quite a task to bring all the sheep off the island. We used the Lady of the Lake and a cattle boat which we had built for another company for the purpose of shipping cattle to C h u r c h Island.^^ This was a flat boat about 50 35 The Millers removed their sheep from the island in September 1886. They herded them for a time west of Bear River and then leased 450 head to Israel Barlow and a Mr. Scott, who were to winter them in the desert in southern Idaho. The venture failed. The Millers were unable to recover their sheep or collect lease payments. See Jacob Miller to Barlow and Scott, Farmington, October 10, 1890, in Miller and Miller, eds.. Journal ofJacob Miller, p. 191.

36The letter from the Union Pacific Railroad is no longer extant.

37Jacob Miller married his second wife, Annie S. Christensen, on May 13, 1885. Miller believed that he was taking considerable risks in adhering to the Mormon teaching of plural marriage as his journal entry for May 13, 1885, indicates: "This was a cautious venture, as it was done in the height of the raid, as we termed it, and of arrests and prosecutions for polygamy. It was necessary to play a secret part to avoid arrest, prosecution and imprisonment, as the offense was made a Penitentiary act, as well as being subject to fine, under the special act of Congress against this special part of the restored Gospel.

Ibid., p. 190.

38See note 30 above.

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feet long a n d 18 feet wide. It would carry 25 h e a d of cattle a n d about 200 h e a d of sheep. At that time the lake was high a n d we l a n d e d sheep in various places along the east shore.

W e rented the sheep out to sheep m e n w h o placed t h e m in the custody of regular herders. H o w e v e r , since the animals were so wild they could not be treated a n d herded like ordinary sheep. O n e flock was counted and placed in the custody of a h e r d e r who knew all about ordinary sheep. H e left t h e m long e n o u g h to cook breakfast, and the sheep got away in the m e a n t i m e . I went into his w a g o n a n d told h i m that h e ' d lose the sheep if he d i d n ' t look after t h e m . H e replied, " D o n ' t try to tell m e how to herd s h e e p , " a n d finished his meal. W h e n he came out the sheep were gone. Although he hired us to help h i m , most of the animals escaped. W e found some as far as ten miles from the camp.

This is typical of the way we lost the sheep. T h e y were j u s t too wild to h a n d l e . Some were lost in an extra severe winter; others strayed away. At a n y rate, we never got a dollar out of t h e m .

At one time we took a boat load of sheep to C a r r i n g t o n Island hoping that, with the aid of winter snow, we could develop e n o u g h water for t h e m .

However, we were unsuccessful, a n d m a n y of the sheep died before we removed the herd.^^ O u r boating on the lake was not limited to the shipping of sheep. W e used o u r boat to haul ore, salt a n d cedar posts. O r e was obtained from mines located in various places a r o u n d the lake. O n e rather rich deposit of silverlead ore was located at the west side of the lake. W e hauled m u c h of this to a spot between F a r m i n g t o n a n d Genterville where the railroad h a d been built to the lake. U n d e r good conditions we would cover this distance d u r i n g one night.

Salt from various salt works a r o u n d the lake was also hauled to this railroad connection. W e built a 75 foot boat with three holds to use in this salt business.

O n e of our m o r e i m p o r t a n t enterprises was that of obtaining cedar posts.

T h e s e we cut on the west side of P r o m o n t o r y a n d shipped to F a r m i n g t o n . W e cut a n d hauled most of the cedar posts used in Davis C o u n t y . T h e Lady of the Lake was used for this hauling. W e ' d load between 2,000 a n d 3,000 posts on the top deck high e n o u g h so that the b o o m would j u s t clear t h e m .

In a b a d storm the Lady of the Lake was finally blown u p o n the beach west of F a r m i n g t o n where she stood for years. J u d g e W e n n e r finally bought her a n d overhauled her for his use in going to a n d from F r e m o n t Island.*" I u n d e r s t a n d that the boat was finally wrecked on the rocks at P r o m o n t o r y Point.

^^Carrington Island was named after Albert Carrington. Charles Stoddard homesteaded the island in 1932 and managed to pasture sheep there. However, his attempts to develop fresh water sources on the island failed when an artesian well he drilled produced only warm salt water. See MiUer, " T h e Great Sak L a k e , " pp. 190-91.

40The Wenners rechristened her the Argo. See Miller, ed., " A Great Adventure on Great Salt L a k e , " p. 227.

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O n one of the early expeditions of the Millers to Fremont Island, some of them climbed to the summit, a peak which they called " C o u r t h o u s e R o c k " because it reminded them of the courthouse in Farmington.*^ H e r e J a c o b Miller found a m o n u m e n t of rocks probably erected by either J o h n C .

Fremont or H o w a r d Stansbury when these m e n visited the island.*2 In the middle of this stack of rocks J a c o b Miller found a folded piece of paper left there by the builder of the monument.*^ J u s t off the top of this peak J a c o b Miller also found the brass cap of F r e m o n t ' s spy glass which had been accidentally left on the summit when Fremont visited the island.** I have seen and handled these two articles m a n y times at the home of J a c o b Miller in Farmington. T h e paper was old and yellow with age when it was found. I do not r e m e m b e r exactly what was written on it.

J a c o b Miller scratched F r e m o n t ' s n a m e on the spy glass cap which he had found and kept it at his home as a souvenir. I d o n ' t know what has become of it since J a c o b ' s death.*^ I a m now the only living person who took part in the enterprises described in this statement. Because of this, and in order that these facts might not be lost to history, I have recorded them here exactly as I saw them h a p p e n and swear that the statements on these pages are true.

*iCourthouse Rock is now known as Castle Rock. It has an elevation of 4,995 feet.

42Howard Stansbury's surveyors build a triangulation station at the summit on April 6, 1850. It is pictured in a lithograph in Stansbury's report opposite p. 159. See Stansbury, Expedition and Survey, 159-60. *3This paper was subsequently lost in a flood at the Jacob Miller home in Farmington. **Fremont lost the lens cap on September 9, 1843. " I accidentally left on the summit the brass cover to the object end of my spy glass; and as it will probably remain there undisturbed by Indians, it will furnish a matter of speculation to some future traveller." Stansbury searched in vain for the cap in April 1850. Subsequent visitors, including the Wenners, also searched in vain. See Fremont, Report, p.

156; Stansbury, Expedition and Survey, p. 160; and Miller, ed., " A Great Adventure on Great Salt Lake," p. 226. *5 Family members were unable to locate the cap after Jacob Miller's death. It was probably lost in a flood at the family home in Farmington.

Thomas Caldwell Adams. All illustrations accompanying this article are courtesy of Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah.

Thomas Caldwell Adams: The Man and the Lake

BY R O Y W E B B

7, 1965, WAS NO DIFFERENT from any other late faU day to Thomas Adams. As was his custom, he drove to the crumbling Saltair resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake to continue studying ways to restore the aging pleasure palace. For many years he had been a lone voice urging restoration of the resort; indeed, he was one of the driving forces behind the effort. His persistence and sound engineering background had gradually won over supporters in the SUNDAY, NOVEMBER

Mr. Webb is on the staff of the Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, University of Utah Libraries.

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community. But with the Great Salt Lake at its lowest recorded level it looked as though the very forces of nature that had doomed the resort in the first place— the fall in lake levels that left the huge structure high and d r y — m i g h t now m e a n an end to A d a m s ' s efforts to restore it to its former glories.

T h e next day, Florence U . BoUschweiller, A d a m s ' s secretary, was puzzled when he failed to appear at the usual time at his office in the U n i o n Pacific building annex. She knew that he spent practically all his spare time at the resort or out on the lake in his boat. But still, he was usually punctual, as engineers are wont to be. According to the note he left at the office before he went out to Saltair, he would be in at his usual time on M o n d a y ; not notifying her that he would be late was unlike him. She called his home, but there was no answer. W h e n the office clock struck noon and he still had not shown u p , she reached for the telephone to call her husband. Something was definitely wrong. ^ It was not the first time that T h o m a s Caldwell Adams h a d caused people to shake their heads in worry, frustration, or sometimes, anger.

Throughout his long and varied engineering career he and his controversial and strongly held convictions were often a source of concern to his friends, associates, students, and colleagues. H e was an outspoken advocate of the causes he believed i n — w h a t he believed in thereby became a c a u s e — a n d an outspoken critic when he felt that something was not in the best interests of the public, the engineering profession, or himself.^ For example, irreconcilable differences with the University of U t a h resulted in a Board of Regents request for his resignation from the university faculty in 1941. His consulting for local and state governments on engineering matters often ended in abruptly terminated contracts, acrimonious exchanges of correspondence, and threatened lawsuits. H e disagreed with the city of Salt Lake over its proposal to widen State Street, which he felt might threaten the integrity of the Eagle Gate M o n u m e n t . H e successfully fought a plan by Kennecott Copper to use the Great Salt Lake as a vast d u m p for mine tailings.

It was this last issue that was closest to his heart. For all his wideranging interests in engineering, the Great Salt Lake was A d a m s ' s first and foremost love. No matter how far he ranged, he always came back to the lake. A d a m s was an only child with few living relatives; he never married. But there was always the lake. It was as if that vast body of ^Salt Lake Tribune, November 10, 1965.

2Biographical material on Adams and his family is drawn from the Thomas Caldwell Adams Papers, MS 43, housed in the Manuscripts Division, University of Utah Libraries Special Collections, Salt Lake City. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes and other information are from the Adams Papers.

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water was his mistress and companion in times of stress. It was certainly his lifelong obsession. From the late 1920s, when he helped resuscitate the Great Salt Lake Yacht Club, until his death three decades later, no matter how far afield his career might take him, he always returned to the Great Salt Lake. He surveyed it, sailed on it, wrote about it, lectured on it, and defended it against developers. In return it gave him solitude, beauty, and unending fascination.

Adams's lineage might account for both his feisty nature and and his love of the Great Salt Lake.

His paternal grandparents were both natives of Ireland who came to America as converts to the LDS church in 1844. They were called to Parowan to "establish an industrial center and metropolis for Thomas C. Adams, afiesty loner, was out of his University of Utah the southwestern United States" in forced professorship.

1849. In 1882 they were part of the famous group that pioneered the Hole-in-the-Rock route to Bluff, Utah. His mother's family was originally from Canada. Arriving in Utah in 1852, they were immediately sent to Rush Valley and later settled in Tooele. Adams was named after his father, Thomas, who was born in Parowan in 1861. His mother, Emily Maria Caldwell, was born in St. Thomas, a small town south of Tooele in 1869. Thomas and Maria were married in Salt Lake City in J u n e 1899. Thomas Caldwell Adams was born on May 12, 1901, in Salt Lake City. The elder Adams was a respected local attorney, while Mrs. Adams was a member of the General Board of the MIA. When his father died of typhoid fever in October 1905, young Thomas and his mother were left alone. Save for a few remote cousins, his mother would be his sole living relative until her death shortly before his own.

Thomas received his early schooling in Salt Lake City, and attended the LDS High School. Even before he graduated from there

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in 1918, he had started engineering classes at the University of Utah.

H e enrolled as a fuU-time student in the fall of 1918. While doing undergraduate work for a major in civil engineering, Adams supplemented the usual courses with work in geology and electrical engineering and some humanities classes. H e was an honor student and m e m b e r of engineering and honor societies, and he graduated second in his engineering class in 1922. A comment written on an exam by one of his instructors demonstrated the far-ranging interest that would m a r k his later career and often cause friction with those more inclined to the straight and narrow: " Y o u r other teachers say you could be one of the best students in their class, but you seem to be satisfied to be only a fair student and spread out your energies over other t h i n g s . " Adams entered CorneU University at Ithaca, New York, in 1922 for graduate studies in engineering. There he studied advanced experimental hydraulics, advanced hydraulic construction, hydraulic power constructionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;evidence of his fascination with w a t e r â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a n d other engineering topics ranging from the economics of engineering design to the design and construction of roads, streets, and sanitary utilities. H e was a M c G r a w Fellow in engineering and a m e m b e r of the honorary research society Sigma X i . His master's thesis was, characteristically, titled "Flow of Water in SmaU O p e n F l u m e , " but his doctoral dissertation, " T h e Position of the Engineer in Economic Life," sounded an early note of the phUosophy of social responsibUity of engineers that A d a m s would espouse later in life.

After receiving his P h . D . from CorneU in 1926, Adams took his first j o b as a practicing engineer in U t a h . D u r i n g his undergraduate years at the University of U t a h , he had spent several summers working in the southwestern part of the state for the Department of Agriculture.

Now he was once again with the U S D A as a drainage assistant, traveling to various parts of the state and later to other states in the western U . S . D u r i n g his travels he investigated drainage patterns for agricultural and non-agricultural lands. His final recommendations took the form of a report published in 1929, The Drainage of Irrigated Agricultural Lands in Utah.

By that time A d a m s had joined the faculty of the University of U t a h . H e started as an assistant professor of civU engineering in 1927, and by 1928 he was already in trouble with the university administration. In April 1930 a letter of admonition from R . B. Ketchum, dean of the School of Engineering, concluded on this ominous and prophetic note: " [ Y ] o u r future employment and progress in this department wiU

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depend entirely on your general attitude as to loyalty and attention to the work assigned to you." From that point it was mostly downhill for Adams, for he found it increasingly difficult to restrict himself to the set and regulated life of academia. Matters came to head in the fall of 1940 when he was hailed before the Board of Regents and told that he must choose between his position as secretary of the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences or his faculty positionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;he could no longer hold both. In his typical acerbic style, Adams dismissed the assertion that he was not spending enough time at the university as "scurrilous accusations . . . backed by gossip, innuendos and threats in good 'axis' style." His outspoken nature and high opinion of his own achievements had long since cost him any allies among his colleagues, and his comparison of the Board of Regents to the Fascist governments then ruling Europe was the last straw. When the board demanded his resignation at stormy session in March 1941, his career as a professor was over. At loose ends, he tried to obtain a commission in the Navy during World War II; failing that, he worked for various wartime agencies.

After the war be became a private consulting engineer.

It was shortly after Adams joined the faculty of the University of Utah that he showed his first sign of scientific interest in the Great Salt Lake. In a letter to D. A. Lyon, director of the Utah Engineering Experiment Station at the university, dated April 18, 1931, Adams set out a comprehensive program for surveying the lake: Such a study should, I believe, be very comprehensive and be well done.

It could be divided into the following general headings: (1) Biology and botany of the Lake and environs. (2) The water resources of the lake. (3) Chemical investigations of the waters of the lake and other chemcial phenomena associated with the Lake. (4) Charting of the Lake and topography of the islands and shore lands. (5) Study of the currents, waves, and other hydraulic phenomena of the Lake. (6) Study of meterological phenomena connected with or affecting the Lake. (7) Investigations of the feasibility and attending conditions of various engineering projects in which the Lake is an important factor. (8) Structure of the region. (9) Archeology of the Lake. I will outline more in detail what I believe might be done in connection with each one of these suggested fields. . . .

And that was just what he did in another three pages of singlespaced text. Here was a proposal for the first serious, comprehensive study of the Great Salt Lake since the Stansbury survey more than eighty years before. Adams proceeded to gather equipment, student help, and resources and was ready to start on his survey when he heard that the Utah Engineering CouncU was studying the possibUity of

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buUding dikes along the north and south ends of Antelope Island to create a freshwater embayment east of the island. In November 1931 he wrote to George Bacon, secretary of the council, outlining his proposed survey and suggesting that the two projects be coordinated. His suggestion was adopted.

As finally organized, the project was divided into two parts. The survey of the area to be diked for the freshwater lake was conducted by Sumner Margetts, another civU engineer from Salt Lake City. He would investigate the area east of Antelope Island, including the topography of the shores, the infiow of the Bear and Weber rivers, and other engineering aspects of the proposed embayment.^ Adams would, in his words, ''Control [the] Survey of the entire lake." He would supervise crews surveying the lake shores and taking detaUed soundings and direct laboratory investigations of the chemistry of the lake, the mixing of the salt and fresh water, and other, more general topics.

It is obvious from his correspondence that Adams considered himself in charge of the whole project, but this impression wasn't shared by others involved.

The survey was jointly funded by the state of Utah and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a New Deal agency. The crew was recruited from among Adams's students and the ranks of the unemployed, of whom there were many in Salt Lake at the time.

Before they could begin, however, a considerable amount of preparation had to be done. A large boat and several smaller craft were needed, as weU as survey equipment such as transits, stadia rods, and chains. Camp equipment was also required, as the parties expected to be out on the lake and islands for a week or more at a time. Supplies of fresh water, gasoline, and food were to be shipped to points along the Union Pacific RaUroad where it crossed the lake, to be picked up by the crew as needed.

Adams secured a twenty-four-foot cabin boat, named the Hydrographer, for the main support craft for the survey. The Hydrographer had an inboard marine engine and because of a hinged propellor shaft could operate in only eight inches of water, which turned out to be of great importance to the completion of the survey. The crew lived on board the boat. There was also a seven-foot dinghy with oars for getting into especially shaUow places. SmaUer craft were used by other parties, but the Hydrographer was the flagship of Adams's fleet.

3"Report on Proposed Freshwater Lake, March 1932, by Sumner G. Margetts, Engineer," Ace. 549, Manuscripts Division, University of Utah Libraries Special Collections.

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Aerial view of Saltair, lower left, and Antelope Island in 1930s. Note low water level during this drought period.

Actual survey work on the lake began in October 1934. Adams stayed on shore for the most part, coordinating the other crews and overseeing the course of the work. The crew of the Hydrographer began at the southwest end of Stansbury Island and in the next four months worked aU the way around the lake. On the first day the boat developed engine trouble, a harbinger of things to come. The survey was hampered from the start by the extremely low stage of water, the lowest recorded up to that time on the gauge at Sakair. Salt crystaUized on the outside of the boat and fouled the cooling system of the engine.

Mudbars, sandbars, and reefs of tufa—precipitated calcium carbonate — impeded progress, making access to some parts of the lake difficult and even impossible. East of Antelope Island, for instance, where Margetts's crew was working, was one vast mudflat. Finally, the weather began to turn toward winter, which heralded storms and rough saUing for the intrepid but inexperienced crew of the Hydrographer and the other survey parties. Several times the boats were driven ashore by severe wind and wave conditions, and on a couple of occasions they were almost wrecked on the leeward shores of the islands.

Crew of the Hydrographer.

Through it all they persevered, however, and made good progress on the scientific work of the survey. By the first of November the crew of the Hydrographer had completed the survey of the west side of the lake up to the Lucin Cutoff and made the somewhat hazardous crossing under the railroad tracks to the north side of the lake. The railroad rested on pilings, and the Hydrographer^s crew had a difficult time finding an opening that would permit the passage of a large craft. On November 10 Adams met the survey crew at Gunnison Island with some of his colleagues, and all climbed to the highest point of the island where they found a cairn erected in 1850 by Capt. Howard Stansbury.^ After a month's work on the north side of the railroad trestle the crew crossed back under the pilings (making it only after three separate tries) and returned to the southern part of the lake. They continued along the south shore, pausing at most of the islands to set up triangula4"Strivings on Salt Water: Surveys on Great Salt Lake, October-December 1934, by Lloyd Conyers," MS 408, Manuscripts Division, University of Utah Libraries Special Collections.

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Reefs of tufa (preciptitated calcuim carbonate) capped with sodium chloride made some parts of the lake inaccessible by boat.

tion points and explore their seldom-visited shores. Finally, at the end of December 1934, field work was completed and the crews disbanded.

Calculations, laboratory work, and preparation of reports and maps took a good part of the next year. The proposed freshwater embayment on the east side of Antelope Island was declared to be completely feasible from an engineering standpoint, and bids were called for from several dredge and construction companies. Various Utah state agencies and industrial commissions predicted that the freshwater lake would make Utah one of the premier industrial centers of the country.

Even before the surveys had begun, state officials had predicted great things would come of the project. At a dinner at the Alta Club in May 1933, R. A. Hart, of the Industrial Section, Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce, grandly declared: The Great Salt Lake Diking Project is one that challenges the imagination. Its projection has developed world-wide interest already. It has no counterpart and has had no counterpart in all history. It presents features that intrigue the scientist and engineer as well as the layman. It offers an opportunity for the economic salvation of our Commonwealth and it represents an inspiring example of the truism that, "What the mind of man can conceive, the hand of man can accomplish."

Despite all the optimistic predictions of the Chamber of Commerce, however, nothing came of the plans for creating the freshwater lake. By the time the surveys were finished, America was beginning to pull out of the depression, and a sober look convinced state officials that the project was in reality out of their league. This is not to say that the

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project was not a sound scientific achievement. By making such a comprehensive and thorough survey, A d a m s and Margetts added immeasureably to the body of scientific knowledge about the Great Salt Lake. Later, in the 1950s, some of the data obtained by the surveys was used in the construction of the WiUard Bay dikes and the Antelope Island causeway and in later engineering projects around the shore, such as the construction of the Salt Lake International Airport and Interstate 80 in the 1960s. T h e survey laid the groundwork for future scientific research efforts and provided data for government decisions concerning development of the lake shores. T h o m a s A d a m s h a d added his n a m e to the list of scientists who h a d felt compelled to study U t a h ' s inland sea.

In light of the sudden rise in lake levels in the 1980s, several facts about the proposed diking project become interesting. W h e n solutions to the problem of lake flooding were being discussed by the U t a h State Legislature, the diking project was revived as an alternative to the West Desert P u m p i n g Project. H a d the dikes been buUt in the 1930s the cost would have been about $1 million; the same plan fifty years later would cost over forty times that amount. Also, it is interesting to note that the tops of A d a m s ' s proposed dikes would have been at an elevation of 4210 feet, which at the time seemed ample to ensure containment of the water. In 1987, however, when the lake reached a level of 4211.89 feet, the tops of the dikes would have been two feet underwater.

A d a m s ' s interest in the Great Salt Lake was not limited to scientific matters. Even before the diking surveys were underway, he was instrumental in reviving the Great Salt Lake Yacht C l u b . T h e club, founded in the 1870s when the lake was in a high-water cycle, h a d languished in recent years. Largely due to A d a m s ' s persistence, it was re-formed in 1928 and incorporated in 1932, its purpose being, as stated in the by-laws: [T]o encourage the sport of yachting and boat motoring, to promote the science of seamanship and navigation, and to provide and maintain a suitable clubhouse and anchorage, boats and equipment, for the use of its members and for social and recreational purposes.

A d a m s , predictably enough, was c o m m o d o r e .

T h e club was headquartered at first in the aging Ssdtair resort, where members installed change rooms for m e n and women, storage rooms, a n d a boat hoist. Although they were forced to use the old pier built by the Saltair Beach C o m p a n y , A d a m s and the other club members h a d more ambitious plans. T h e y convinced the Works Progress

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A display advertising the Great Salt Lake Diking project, a proposal Adams and others believed would boost Utah's economy.

Administration to finance and build, at a cost of $175,000, a grand new boat harbor as a relief project. Construction began in November 1934 on a site about a mile east of Black Rock, a well-known lake landmark, and was mostly completed the foUowing year.

The harbor was formed by a " t e e " of uneven arms, thus creating two anchorages. The breakwater, constructed about 400 feet from the shore of the lake, was 850 feet long. Ironically, Adams's main concern at the time was that the lake would recede further and leave the harbor and yacht clubhouse high and dry, much as Saltair had been left when the lake began to recede in the late 1920s. This possibility, however, was provided for by means of a deepwater channel leading out into the lake. No thought was given to the possibility that the lake might rise and cover the breakwater, although that is precisely what happened when the lake rose in 1984. In Adams's time, with the lake at its lowest level in recorded history, that was deemed impossible. Situated on one arm of the breakwater was the clubhouse " a t a point of great scenic

Aerial view of Adams's pet project, the Great Salt Lake Yacht Club boat harbor.

beauty." In a pamphlet entitled " T h e Great Salt Lake Yacht Club: Advantages and Obligations of Membership," Adams extoUed the clubhouse's other virtues.

It comprises a lounge, balcony overlooking the lake, observation deck atop the house, a men's locker room, women's locker room, stewards quarters, and a store room. These are equipped with water, sanitary facilities, with electric lights and other necessary features. The lounge and deck are delightful places to enjoy the evening sunsets and star risings on warm summer evenings.

Adams didn't stop with being commodore of the Yacht Club and chief exponent of the wonders of the Great Salt Lake. He compUed a file of information on the history of the lake and wrote numerous pamphlets about various aspects of the lake, including " A Compendium of Useful Information for Yachtsmen on Great Salt Lake" and the interestingly titled "Catechism on Boating on Great Salt Lake."

He also wrote others detailing the advantages and disadvantages of inboard and outboard motor boats vs. sailboats and even designed a shallow-draft sloop specifically for saUing on the Great Salt Lake. He appeared on local radio shows to talk about the lake, the Yacht Club,

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and the Saltair resort. H e became the lake's chief prophet (although even he never envisioned the high levels of recent years), promoter, and, in m a n y ways, protector.

As he sailed on the lake and enjoyed the " g r e a t scenic b e a u t y " from the deck of the clubhouse during the 1940s and 1950s, A d a m s ' s eye was continually drawn to the aging Saltair resort. This grand structure was a shell of its former glories. D u r i n g its first decades the magnificent resort h a d drawn thousands of visitors from Salt Lake City and surrounding communities. W h e n the lake began to drop, however, Saltair suffered. T h e resort's fortunes rose a n d fell with the lake, until finally in 1959 the owner deeded the massive structure to the state of Utah.5 A d a m s , always one to espouse a cause, was quick to adopt the defense and restoration of the resort soon after it was donated to the state. As commodore of the Yacht Club he d r u m m e d u p interest a m o n g the membership and created the Saltair Restoration Division of the club with himself as acting secretary. According to A d a m s , the U t a h State Parks Commission had neglected to protect the property, ruthlessly stripped it of anything valuable, and allowed " m a r a u d e r s and v a n d a l s " to break windows, shoot holes in the roof, and generally wreak havoc. Furthermore, the commission "refused to consider several meritorious and inexpensive plans [i.e., A d a m s ' s plans] for operation which would have soon led to full-scale restoration, and attempted to substitute wholly impractical, extravagant p l a n s " of their own. In a final indignity to the grand old resort, the Parks Commission " a n n o u n c e d frequently that it would immediately proceed to demolish and obliterate the p r o p e r t y . " It was too m u c h for A d a m s to stand, and in 1963 he browbeat the state attorney general's office and the Parks Commission into selling the entire resort and property to the Yacht C l u b . This was necessary, he said in a parting shot, " t o remove it from the sphere of political and bureaucratic interference and b u n g l i n g . " T h a t done, Adams and the Yacht Club plunged into planning the restoration of the resort to its former glory. Pamphlets were written, meetings held, money raised, and plans laid out; and for a time it seemed as if the efforts to increase the public's interest in the structure and its past would succeed. U n fortunately, efforts to raise sufficient money for restoration of the deteriorated resort were unsuccessful and the plan was abandoned. All sNancy D. and John S. McCormick, Saltair (Sah Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), p.

92.

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would have come to naught, in any event, for in November 1970 Saltair caught fire and was destroyed in a spectacular conflagration.^ The Parks Commission's neglect of the resort was not the only threat, however. No sooner had Adams secured the sale of Saltair to the Yacht Club than Kennecott Copper announced plans to dump a billion cubic yards of tailings from their mills into the lake. This proposal threatened more than the resort; it endangered the very existence of Adams's beloved lake, and he jumped to its defense. In a statement to the Salt Lake County Commission, he raised his rallying cry: [A]11 of us must decide whether the south part of the Great Salt Lake is to be made a mine tailings dump . . . and the remainder of the Lake made turbid and repulsive with metallurgical slimes. All this is now proposed to be done in order to save the Copper Corporation not more than one, two or three cents per cubic yard . . . [I]t is now time to stop giving lip service to the enormous potential value of the Lake . . . stop advocating grandiose, impractical schemes for development of the Lake which would require expediture of large and unjustified sums of public money and leave tourists and recreation seekers wading in the muck of dead brine shrimps [sic] on a degrading beach of silt. Stop, above all, the dangerous plan to make the Lake a tailings dump.

Adams, other Members of the Yacht Club, and concerned citizens collected samples of the tailings for analysis. Despite Kennecott's blithe assurances, opponents of the proposal found that the tailings, far from being sand that would create new beaches, were more like silt that would create nasty, clinging mud. When washed up on shore and dried, they would be lifted by the strong winds around the lake and create clouds of dust. Samples of the tailings in plastic bags were stapled to a four-page fact sheet about the proposal and mailed all over the state. Under public scrutiny the plan did not look so good after all, and Kennecott backed down. It was Adams's last victory.

When Florence BoUschweiller and her husband became concerned over Adams's prolonged absence they drove out to Saltair to see if something had happened to him. The resort was so run down that a person could easily fall through the rotting boardwalks and be injured.

Or Adams could have had car trouble or be stranded in a boat out on the lake. With the lake at its lowest recorded level and the resort closed, not many people went out there these days. The BoUschweillers were walking around the resort, calling his name, when suddenly they

^"Response to publicity re: Saltair, Utah State Parks Commission, April 8, 1965," Western Americana, University of Utah Libraries Special Collections.

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spotted him lying where he had faUen. They rushed over . . . but it was too late. Adams had apparently been stricken by a massive heart attack as he wandered around the resort and had died there alone.

When asked about the danger of dying alone in his beloved Yosemite Valley, the naturalist John Muir responded, "Such a grand burial place is not to be taken lightly." The same thought could be applied to Thomas Caldwell Adams. Throughout his long and sometimes controversial career in engineering, teaching, consulting, and fighting for causes public and private, Adams had always seemed to be the odd man out. He was always the loner campaigning for sometimes unpopular causes against what he considered to be mediocrity and narrowmindedness. Although he achieved high honors in his chosen profession and held offices in many distinguished societies, he never fit into the society of his birth. Always, he preferred the company of the wind, the waves, the vistas, and the smell of salt in the air as he sailed out on his beloved Great Salt Lake or worked, alone, within the crumbling ruin of Saltair. What better end, then, for a loner in love with a lake than to spend his last moments alone, with only the seagulls wheeling overhead, the aging pavilions, and the salt-tinged breezes to witness his departure from this life.

Great Salt Lake Yacht Club regatta, mid-1930s, with Saltair in the background.

Book Reviews

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Missionary to the Mountain West: Reminiscences of Episcopal Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle, 1866-1886 By DANIEL SYLVESTER TUTTLE. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987. xvii + 498 pp. Paper, $14.95.)

Born in New York and educated at Columbia University and General Theological Seminary in New York, Episcopal Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle served as missionary bishop of Montana, Idaho, and Utah from 1866 to 1880 and as bishop of Utah and Idaho from 1880 until 1886 when he accepted a call to serve as bishop of Missouri.

The term "missionary bishop" did not â&#x20AC;&#x201D;as some may supposeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;refer to his dealings with the Mormons. The designation derived from what the Episcopal House of Bishops perceived as the disorganized state of religion in the Mountain West in general and of the Episcopal church in the area in particular.

Leaving his family in New York, the recently ordained bishop moved west to assume his new position in 1867.

After visiting briefly in Salt Lake City and Boise he spent a winter each in the mining towns of Virginia City and Helena, Montana. Then, he returned to New York to get his family. They moved to Salt Lake City where they lived from 1869 through 1886. He made annual visits, usually during the summer, to Montana and Idaho. Perhaps three-fifths of the book deals with his background and preparations, his experiences in Montana and Idaho, and his call to Missouri, and about two-fifths concentrates on Utah.

Bishop Tuttle justly considered the mining frontiers in Montana and

Idaho and parts of Utah as religious frontiers. In most of the towns he and his co-workers were either the first or among the first ministers of religion to hold services, build churches, establish schools, found hospitals, and offer ministerial services. In mining towns like Helena and Virginia City, Montana, and Idaho City and Silver City, Idaho, riotous living, gambling, excessive drinking, and sabbath-breaking were the rule rather than the exception. Montana society suffered from the aftermath of legally supported brigandage under Henry Plummer and the counterviolence of the vigilance committee. In Montana and Idaho, goods, services, and housing were very expensive, and Tuttle either had to board in cheap hotels or live in abandoned cabins.

Salt Lake City was quite different.

When Tuttle arrived, the Mormon capital boasted a population of 20,000; and, while the murder of J . King Robinson had shaken the community in 1866, the Mormons generally created a stable society quite unlike that of mining towns in Montana, Idaho, and elsewhere in Utah.

In Salt Lake Tuttle identified himself with moderate gentiles like businessmen Warren Hussey and George M. Scott rather than with the anti-Mormon element allied with the territorial officials. In addition, he cooperated with second-echelon Mor-

Book Reviews and Notices mon officials like Bishop Edwin G. Woolley in providing welfare services to city residents prior to the establishment of Saint Mark's Hospital (Salt Lake's first hospital) which Tuttle and supporters opened in 1872. He accounted William H. Hooper and Bishop John Sharp among his friends.

His attitude and that of his family toward the Mormons was one of tolerant opposition. He and his wife both praised Orson Pratt's intellectual prowess and Brigham Young's speaking and organizational ability. Although he opposed the practice of plural marriage and the mixture of church and state in the Mormon commonwealth, he did not crusade against the Latter-day Saints. When he left Utah in 1886 at the height of the antipolygamy prosecutions, the Deseret News published an editorial praising him for his good works and kindness.

Since he accepted the denominational compact, after some reflection Tuttle acknowledged Mormon baptism as acceptable for those seeking Episcopal confirmation. He argued for the difference between the Church of Christ to which all believing Christians belonged and Episcopalianism which could minister to the needs of some Christians. He did not hesitate to fill his vestry with Unitarians, Presbyterians, or Methodists if they could help in his ministry.

The book is not without its flaws.

Tuttle's manuscript could have benefited from the services of a good editor.

The narrative is marred by the inclusion of unedited correspondence and effusive praise for unidentified indi-

191 viduals who were undoubtedly important in Tuttle's life but whose names are hardly household words today. The index is quite inadequate. The full names of many of the people are not given. Even the longer listings for topics like Mormons and Tuttle, D. S., are not adequately detailed. For instance, the reader who wishes to find the passages on the bishop's religious philosophy or his discussion of the Mormon temple ceremony must search for it page by page.

Although Brigham Madsen supplied a foreword, someone assigned by the press could have assisted the reader by annotating the manuscript. The large number of unidentified individuals presents a problem. Moreover, in spite of the fact that the Episcopal church has a million fewer members in the United States than the LDS church, for some reason writers on Mormonism feel the need to explain such terms as ward, stake, Relief Society, and Primary while few consider it necessary to define words like rector, vestry, warden, and parish.

Still, the autobiography is extremely valuable for the point of view it presents on conditions in the Mountain West in the late nineteenth century, for the insights into the organization and growth of Protestantism in a frontier area, for the representation of the attitudes of moderate gentiles in the Mormon commonwealth, and for the commentary on conditions in mining towns.

THOMAS G . ALEXANDER

Brigham Young University

Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective. Edited by MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER and LAVINA FIELDING ANDERSON. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xxii -H 281 pp. $21.95.)

In the foreword J a n Shipps describes Sisters in Spirit as " a brave and impor-

tant work" (p. vii). I would substitute "provocative" â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in its affirmative con-

192 notationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for " b r a v e . " Each of the nine essays and two poems in the volume provides information and impressions that provoke thought, and the cumulative impact may provoke emotion as well. But they clearly qualify as what Richard Bushman called "faithful history" â&#x20AC;&#x201D;faithful to the facts while faith-affirming toward the church whose history and doctrines they rather critically examine.

The short poems of Maryann MacMurray are artistic leaven in this collection of seven carefully crafted historical essays and two thoughtful interpretations of contemporary Mormonism.

All the authors and editors have credentials in motherhood as well as one or more academic disciplines. In varying degrees all express dissatisfaction with the subordination of women in current church teachings and practices, but all would probably agree with Jill Mulvay Derr's statement that "contemporary Mormon women have found in their history precedents, possibilities, and hope for the future" (p. 198). " T h e Redemption of Eve" by Jolene Edmunds Rockwood and "Precedents for Mormon Women from Scriptures" by Melodic Moench Charles present scholarly evidence that the traditional subordination of women in Judeo-Christian cultures is not required by biblical or other scriptural texts. In "Mormon Women and the Temple: Toward a New Understanding" Carol Cornwall Madsen argues that the Genesis elements and other components of Mormon temple ceremonies do not require subordination either. " T h e Mormon Concept of a Mother in Heaven" by Linda P. Wilcox marshals the sparse evidence on its topic; the hymn " O My Father" is the only item well known to the Mormon laity. In "Mormon Motherhood: Official Images" Wilcox traces how the Victorian invention of motherhood

Utah Historical Quarterly as a career was belatedly incorporated in twentieth-century Mormonism with its attendant pedestal and patronizing rhetoric. This piece comes closest to militant feminism in tone, but it strongly endorses motherhood as both opportunity and challenge.

Linda King Newell's "Gifts of the Spirit: Women's Share" and Derr's " 'Strength in Our Union': The Making of Mormon Sisterhood" are important contributions to Mormon history. They affectionately describe the range of sacred and temporal activities that many LDS women shared in the pioneering days when " s i s t e r h o o d " circumscribed their lives. Then they trace how, since the abandonment of plural marriage and cultural isolation, environmental changes and priesthood decisions have diminished the range of autonomous sisterly endeavors. Both authors find hope in historic precedents and some recent priesthood utterances, but they and the other contributors to Sisters in Spirit almost certainly share Susa Young Gates's 1905 judgment: " T h e privileges and powers outlined by the Prophet [Joseph Smith] . . . have never been granted to women in full even yet" (p. 143).

In "Mormon Marriages in an American Context" Marybeth Raynes shows that twentieth-century LDS marriage and family patterns have followed changing American norms rather closely, except for a higher birthrate. This squares with inferences elsewhere in the book that, except for polygamy, such cultural norms have been more influential than revelation and doctrine in defining women's work, women's place, even women's nature.

Grethe Ballif Peterson, in the concluding essay, looks at "Priesthood and Latter-day Saint Women: Eight Contemporary Definitions." Finding a stimulating diversity of views as well

Book Reviews and

Notices

as experience among the well-educated, active LDS women whom she interviewed, Peterson concludes: " T h e women. . . are forging living definitions of the priesthood which are positive and strengthening. . . " (p. 267).

This is an important book for an audience larger than just professionals in Mormon studiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or just women. It is

193 attractively printed but without illustrations. Choice informational tidbits are to be found among the extensive citations at the end of each chapter. A usable index is provided but no separate bibliography.

RICHARD D . POLL

Provo

The Last Chance Canal Company. By M A X R . M C C A R T H Y . Charles Redd Monographs in Western History No. 16. (Provo, Ut.: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 1987. X + 131 pp. Paper, $6.95.)

This is a book about water rights and water utilization along the Bear River in southeastern Idaho. The author, a native of the Bear River country and in his youth a Last Chance ditchrider, has combined an intimate knowledge of the area with meticulous use of primary source materials to produce a detailed, stepby-step account of the life of a private irrigation company from its inception in the 1890s to its brief involvement with hydroelectricity generation in the early 1980s. Using the experiences of the Last Chance company as a case in point, he explores the broader question of water utilization in the dry West, where impoundment for power generation and diversion for irrigation are not necessarily compatible. Analysis of the landmark Bear River water case, settled in 1920, illustrates the complexity that issues concerning water use can reach when this precious resource crosses state boundaries and is sought after by more than one deserving party.

General readers and people not familiar with southeastern Idaho may find the presentation tedious, for the book's major strengthâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a painstaking reconstruction of events relating to the canal company's existenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is also its chief weakness. It is easy to become bogged down in excessive detail and to

lose sight of the author's ultimate objectives. In addition, the book's narrow focus prevents the reader from developing an understanding of closely related events, such as the impact of the company's expanding irrigation system on land-use patterns in the early 1900s and of the introduction of sprinkler irrigation several decades later. The volume's five well-drawn maps are very helpful in clarifying locational matters, but inclusion of scales of d i s t a n c e would h a v e increased their usefulness. Lack of an index is another frustrating oversight.

Despite these flaws the book will find a welcome place on the shelves of local historians and students of western water policy. The author has done a commendable research job, which specialists in the field can best appreciate, and has presented his findings in an orderly fashion. The Charles Redd Center should be congratulated for preparing an attractive, reasonably priced volume. It will not climb to the top of the best-seller lists, but it will be recognized as a solid contribution to our understanding of the emergence of a sensible water policy in the Intermountain West.

MARSHALL BOWEN

Mary Washington College Fredericksburg, Virginia

194

Utah Historical Quarterly

Homesteading the High Desert. By BARBARA ALLEN. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987. xx + 183 pp. $25.00.)

Betweeen 1905 and 1915 hundreds of homesteaders, drawn by the promise of opportunity, rushed to take up the remaining public lands in the Fort Rock - Christmas Lake Valley of central Oregon. The expectation of federally sponsored irrigation brought the first wave of homesteaders. The reclamation project was never completed, but hopes of "greening" the desert remained high. The new panacea of dry-farming replaced the dream of irrigation, and in its wake came an even larger flood of homesteaders. The hopes and dreams of these homesteaders, however, could not sustain them against a combination of environmental and economic factors that forced most to abandon their homes and land.

For those who now live in the Fort Rock-Christmas Lake Valley, the experience of those homesteading years is the "pivot around which all local history [revolves]." It is this experience with which folklorist Barbara Allen is concerned.

Homesteading the High Desert provides readers with an intimate look at the homesteaders. Through the skillful use of documentary and oral sources Allen tells of the coming of the homesteaders, their attempts to establish a new life in the central Oregon desert, and the failure of most to realize their dreams.

The author then explores the national and regional factors that attracted homesteaders to the Fort R o c k -

Christmas Lake Valley.

There are problems with the book.

Most notable are the author's errors regarding the legal mechanics of the public land laws. An example is Allen's assertion that one reason settlers in 1909 chose to make entries under the 160-acre homestead law of 1862 rather than the newly enacted 320-acre Enlarged Homestead Act was because the former required only three years of residence and cultivation while the latter demanded five, while in truth, both laws required five years of settlement until the passage of the Three-year Homestead Act of 1912.

Inaccuracies such as this leave Allen's explanations of the homesteading process wanting.

Though such errors detract from Homesteading the High Desert, the book should not be set aside by those interested in the homesteading boom that swept the semiarid West after the turn of the century. Allen brings a muchneeded human perspective to the experience. She tries to show that the homesteaders were more than the shortsighted and foolish people that historians often characterize them as being; they were individuals pursuing the opportunities that the public lands had long offered, and it is a point that she makes quite well.

JAMES M U H N

Bureau of Land Management Denver

Emily: The Diary of a Hard-worked Woman. By EMILY FRENCH. Edited by JANET LECOMPTE. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. viii + 166 pp. Cloth, $18.95; paper, $7.95.)

For decades a pocket-size diary for the year 1890 lay quietly in the archives at Colorado College. No one

knows who donated it, or when. The diary came to the attention of Janet Lecompte, a researcher and writer on

Book Reviews and Notices western historical subjects; she, with the help of research colleagues in several states, has done an extraordinary job of providing a social and historical context for this diary, an otherwise hermetic piece of writing.

The diary's author was a woman whose hopes for success at dry-farming in eastern Colorado had been ruined by the drought that gripped the region starting in 1889. In this respect she was no different from thousands of other people who had been drawn there on the strength of several years' worth of abundant rainfall—a climatological fluke—and now found themselves quite literally high and dry and in need of alternative means of earning a livelihood. But in other respects, however, the woman who kept the diary was in a class by herself.

Emily French was not a particularly well-educated woman, yet she had a command of language that powerfully conveys feeling; as Lecompte's notes show, in an era when women diarists were wont to disguise hardship and despair in optimistic and flowery terms, French's language was defiant, an open wound: " I have always worked hard, too hard. My bent shoulders, my crippled hard hands all go to show I have never rested when there was any work to be done" (January 20). Entries like this (and there are many) have a cumulative effect upon the reader of unbearably heightened emotion; eventually, a kind of mental exhaustion sets in that approximates the emotional and physical exhaustion of Emily French. Her naked language invites—forces—the reader to identify with her. (This reviewer may have felt the identification more keenly than will others, having been born exactly one century, almost to the day, after Emily was born.)

The source of Emily's exhaustion was twofold. For one, there was the

195 sheer physical labor of keeping other people's houses, which she did, in various venues, throughout the year 1890.

She worked like a draft animal on a schedule that typically began at 5 a.m. and lasted far into the evening. She did prodigious amounts of work—hauling water, washing clothes and dishes, ironing, cleaning. If she complained, it was not about having to do housework for her living (Lecompte's notes indicate that for an unmarried woman of Emily's age and education, the only alternative in those days would have been prostitution) but about finding too little of it to suffice. She earned pitifully small amounts of money because the market for houseworkers in Denver was glutted. She had an unusual capacity to withstand physical hardship; on two occasions, once in the dead of winter—February—and once in raw November she uncomplainingly reported traveling the fifty miles between Elbert, Colorado, and Denver in an open buggy.

The other source of exhaustion was emotional, familial. Emily had eloped at fourteen and a half years of age (not fifteen, as Lecompte claims) with a man eight years her senior. Over the next decade and a half she bore eight children, all but one of whom survived early childhood. Her husband appears to have been a charming and ambitious, but unrealistic and ultimately improvident, man who never quite achieved what he was capable of (perhaps due to alcohol, as evidence in Emily's diary suggests). In late 1889, for reasons that will never be fully known, their marriage of thirty-one years ended bitterly. We learn from her diary of 1890 that she has become alienated not only from her former husband but from all of her children except the two youngest, a boy of eleven and a girl of thirteen, whom she has been keeping—hidden—in a

196 D e n v e r boardinghouse. T h e emotional tone of Emily's diary is not one of grieving over what she has lost but of resolutely, desperately holding on to what is left to her. If she achieved this (one cannot be sure), it was at great personal cost.

T o do justice to the content a n d literary merit of Emily F r e n c h ' s diary would take far m o r e space than is available here. It is, needless to say, a compelling d o c u m e n t . W h a t h a p p e n e d to Emily after D e c e m b e r 3 1 , 1890, can only be guessed at, for she vanishes from D e n v e r records, evidently one of m a n y thousands of people who threw in the towel and went elsewhere d u r i n g

Utah Historical Quarterly the dark economic times of the 1890s.

A great part of the success of this book comes from the editor's superb historical sleuthing in contemporary newspapers, court a n d census records, published histories, and other docum e n t s . In all, the book is an excellent contribution to the growing body of historical publications that make accessible, explicate, and ultimately celebrate the lives of ordinary (yet extraordinary) people of times past.

P O L L Y STEWART

Salisbury State College Maryland

The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri. By STEPHEN C . L E S U E U R . (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. ix + 286 p p . $24.00.)

Stephen C . L e S u e u r ' s fine study, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouriâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as unimaginative a title as has ever been appended to a work of historyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is an important and exciting book. This is true for essentially two reasons. First, it has all of the elements that m a k e for fun reading: d r a m a , people who act and react in relation to events surr o u n d i n g t h e m , a n d a certain touch of irony and tragedy. Second, as interpretive history, L e S u e u r argues that the M o r m o n war is a case study in the use of extralegal violence on the American frontier. It is the story of two groups of Americans confronting one another over religious, cultural, political, a n d economic differences. In this a r e n a the author discusses the M o r m o n war in the context of the heritage of American vigilantism. From the Carolina Regulators to the cattlemen's wars this legacy of violence has informed the n a t i o n ' s development.

Against a backdrop of misperceptions by leaders on both sides, L e S u e u r describes the importance of the M o r m o n c h u r c h ' s quest for orthodoxy a m o n g its m e m b e r s h i p as a catalyst in

the M o r m o n war. T h e activities of the Danites in seeking to discipline church m e m b e r s crystallized already forming perceptions of Missourians that the church was antidemocratic. T h e quiet support of J o s e p h Smith, J r . , for Danite activities m a d e these preconceptions all the m o r e believable. T h e political cohesion of the Saints also fostered a c o m m o n misconception that the church was seeking to overthrow the local government. Public statements of church leaders only added to these impressions. T h e Missourians concluded that violence was justified to t u r n back the threat to their c o m m u n ity.

W h e n the M o r m o n s refused to be threatened the potential for catastrophe grew, finally exploding at Gallatin in August 1838. Both sides defended the violence that followed as necessary to the preservation of their communities. In the end the M o r m o n s could not win, a n d the m o v e m e n t was left a shambles, m a n y of its leaders were jailed, m a n y of its fiscal resources were destroyed, and its m e m b e r s were expelled from the state.

Book Reviews and Notices Although this is a good book, I must question the author's excessive reliance on sources written by dissenters interested in discrediting the Mormon leadership. These seem to lead to certain overstatements. For instance, LeSueur notes that on October 16, 1838, "Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon rallied the Mormons in Far West and called for them to fight in defense of their people in Daviess County.

Several hundred Mormons gathered at the town square and listened as Smith and Rigdon vented their seething anger and frustration" (p. 113). The impression left here is that the Mormon leaders were rabidly committed to violence. At least one source, Warren Foote's autobiography, suggests that LeSueur's assertion about Smith and Rigdon venting "their seething anger and frustration" is an overstatement.

Foote wrote that Smith "said that the Mormons would have to protect themselves, as they could not put any dependence in the militias of the state,

197 for they were mostly mobocrats" (Warren Foote, Autobiography, p. 25, typescript, Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah).

In spite of this criticism, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri is a valuable case study of vigilantism on the American frontier. Its most important strength lies in its linkage of the Mormon war with the broader theme of frontier violence, but as a narrative work it is also compelling. LeSueur captures admirably the tensions between the two communities of interest in western Missouri. Overall, the author and publisher should be commended for making it available. It will be of interest not only to specialists in Mormon history but also to students of American frontier violence, religious history, Missouri state history, and the development of the Midwest.

ROGER D. LAUNIUS

Scott Air Force Base, Illinois

Religion and Society in the American West: Historical Essays. Edited by CARL GUARNERI and DAVID ALVAREZ. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. xvi + 491 pp. Cloth, $36.50; Paper $23.75.)

Essays in this volume, with one exception, were presented in earlier versions at a conference on religion in the American West held in J u n e 1984 at St. Mary's College of California.

Carl Guarneri and David Alvarez, members of the faculty at St. Mary's, have skillfully woven these essays into a variegated tapestry of themes that explore the relationship of religion and society in the American West. Constrained by a definition of the West as comprising present-day Pacific, Rocky Mountain, and southwestern states, the essayists have succeeded admirably in supporting the contention that any reputable history of the development of this region must give serious consider-

ation to the impact of religion on the processes of settlement and growth in the area.

The introductory essay by Eldon G. Ernst, professor of religious history at the Graduate Theological Union, presents an overview of "American Religious History from a Pacific Coast Perspective." In a commendable synthesis of issues and events pertinent to the scope of his topic, Ernst concludes that it would be a mistake to label the impact of religion on society in the Far West as either unique or imitative.

Certainly western religion, as it has developed over the years, has reflected distinctive regional qualities, but, at the same time, it has also exhibited

198 commonality with religion in other social contexts across the nation.

In agreement, generally, with this observation, the works of the other nineteen essayists in this volume are arranged, as far as possible, in topical groupings to reflect similar interest fields. Four of the works examine the impact of individual and collective missionary enterprises in the Far West.

Subjects considered include Methodist conflicts with Native American cultures in the Pacific Northwest, successes and failures of Catholic educational programs in New Mexico, experiences of a Hispanic convert from Catholicism to Presbyterianism as he tried to carry the message of his new faith to a nonreceptive audience in New Mexico, and the little known role in the trans-Mississippi West of mobile churches improvised by the Baptist church from modified railroad cars.

Three essays evaluate various aspects of Mormon efforts to establish their faith in the Far West. Topics developed in this segment of the book are tensions derived from the introduction of polygamy into a prominent Mormon family, the work of the female Relief Society, and efforts to sustain a Mormon colony at San Bernardino, California. In a series of five essays, the writers assess the influence of groups outside the basic framework of the Protestant religious structure on the shaping of western society. This panoply of diverse material encompasses commentary on the quest by Jews to find an acceptable niche in the western civic arena, the position of Freemasonry as an aspect of nonevangelical religious movements in San Francisco, the perceived neglect for many years of the MexicanAmerican Catholic community by its church in California, the significant role of black churches in the struggle

Utah Historical Quarterly for civil rights in California in the late nineteenth century, and the often ignored position of Filipinos in central California as they tried to retain a cultural identity in the face of church pressures to become Americanized.

Turning to issues related to churches and education, two essays address changes in attitudes between support for public schools and private denominational schools in San Francisco and early rivalry between Jesuit and Christian Brothers colleges in California.

The next three discussions deal with case studies of individual churchmen who stepped beyond the confines of their pulpits to advocate the cause of social Christianity in Pacific Coast cities. The writers interpreting this subject investigate the careers of a prominent Presbyterian pastor in Seattle, a dynamic Methodist minister in Berkeley, and a bellicose IrishCatholic priest in San Francisco.

Under the heading Communal Sects and New Religions, the final two contributors analyze the vicissitudes encountered by a communal religious society crossing the Oregon Trail to relocate in the Pacific Northwest and the origins, doctrine, and development of the Unification church in the San Francisco Bay area.

Aft;er this admittedly fragmentary description of the topics covered by the essayists, perhaps a logical conclusion to this review would include commentary on the quality of each essay.

However, since this exercise would carry the review far beyond the prescribed space limitations, suffice it to say that each author is to be commended for producing a scholarly and well documented article. Particularly useful to the reader inspired to pursue these topics further are the excellent and informative bibliographical notes accompanying each essay. While the authors offer, as one might expect,

199

Book Reviews and Notices conclusions drawn from their own particular research fields, all of the writers would surely agree with the editors that "one need not argue that religion in the American West was unique in order to justify giving it more attention" (xiv). Indeed, one might confidently predict that in the future more

attention will be devoted to themes introduced in this volume. And that thought, in itself, justifies the preparation of this book.

N O R M A N J . BENDER

University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Early Mormonism and the Magic World View.^y D. MICHAEL Signature Books, 1987. xxii + 315 pp. $14.95.)

Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View is nothing less than a scholarly tour de force. It is a highly informative and quite remarkable exercise in detailed research.

The involvement of Joseph Smith and his family and many associates in occult beliefs and magical practices is not news. In his own time Smith was dogged with claims of treasure digging, reliance on peep stones, and related occult matters, but much of the evidence for the more blatant accusations came from sources that the LDS church managed quite successfully over the years to debunk on the ground that enemies of the church are not to be believed, and any writer or witness who criticized Joseph Smith was an enemy. In recent years historians both in and out of the church have chipped away at this shield until now it is impossible to deny the obvious.

The strength of Quinn's study, it seems to me, is threefold: (1) It exhibits an impressive knowledge of folk magic and its practice in nineteenth-century America; (2) it lays before the reader an astounding array of detailed events and practices, even to the point of overkill; and (3) it clearly establishes, through the corroboration of divergent sources, that in this matter the traditional historians of the church have to some degree either been uninformed or have engaged in a conscious cover-up to protect the Mor-

QUINN.

(Salt Lake City:

mon image. I suspect that it has been both of these.

Most churches are involved in some measure of magical belief and practice, and the Mormon church even today is no exception. Consider the use of sacred wordsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;especially namesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;exorcisms, or the presumed power of set rituals. But such things are so commonplace and habitual that they are usually not seen as magical. Most Mormons have managed to live comfortably with the claims of a magical translation of the Book of Mormon by regarding it as revelation or inspiration, or something like that; and seer stones, which in Quinn's account were not uncommon among early church members, have been kept at a bare minimum by the official histories. The prophet's treasure digging, which has been difficult to ignore, has been regarded as a forgivable youthful aberration. According to Quinn, magic largely disappeared from Mormonism by the end of the century, but most Mormons are aware that some of it is still around. After all, it adds a little spice to religion.

But Quinn exposes far more in the magic line than most well-informed Mormons have ever suspectedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;witness the very titles of some of his chapters: Divining Rods, Treasure Digging, and Seer Stones; Ritual Magic, Astrology, and Talismans; Magic Parchments and Occult Men-

200 tors. No doubt the book holds no surprises for those who are well acquainted with recent research on Mormon origins, considering the present crop of excellent historians of the church, but I confess that I was both surprised and shocked by Quinn's disclosure of the extent of belief in astrology of early church leadersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that Joseph Smith, for instance, even timed some of his numerous marriages by astrological charts.

Like most studies, Quinn's work has its weaknesses: a penchant for generalization, for instance, that sometimes overlooks differences in place and time, excessive attention at times to matters more or less irrelevant to the case of Mormonism, and a failure to exploit fully the implications of important instances of magic with which he is concerned. And there is the problem of treating such things as astrology and phrenology as if they were more or less similar in nature to manipulative magic.

Finally, there is one gnawing problem that 1 have in reading the book.

Just where does Quinn himself stand with reference to magic in relation to

Utah Historical Quarterly the belief claims of Mormonism? He is not obligated to discuss his own views, but in the introduction he makes it clear that the magical beliefs and practices of Joseph Smith and his family and associates in no way affect his faith in the truth of Mormonism. He states unequivocally, " I believe in Gods, angels, spirits, and devils, and that they have communicated with humankind" (xx). Perhaps the secret of Quinn's sturdy faith lies in his position that while magic and religion are not "identical entities," they are not "polar opposites" (xvi). He is certainly correct that religion has usually, if not always, been infected with what today we regard as magic and superstition. But, at least on the surface, he seems to be remarkably generous in his attitude toward such things, almost as if, after all, they are really God's way of dealing with the masses, or even with their prophets. They are man's way of dealing with God, but surely not God's way of dealing with man.

STERLING M . M C M U R R I N

University of Utah

Book Notices Foot by Foot through the USA: A High Adventure Odyssey to Every State in the Union. By WINFIELD H . LINE and FRANCIS

RAYMOND

LINE.

(Irvine,

Calif: Wide Horizons Press, 1987.

312 pp. Paper, $8.95.)

In 1922 two high school graduates from Michigan left the small town of Howell on a journey of discovery across the U . S . The brothers, now in their eighties, have edited their diaries and letters from the trip to produce a book of personal adventure that also captures an era. They vowed never to ride a train, sleep in a hotel, or telephone home. They did, however, hitch rides (a very safe option then), write long letters home to their parents, and earn money selling shoelaces and working on farms and in mines.

Through the then forty-eight states they carried a deep appreciation for the country's varied landscapes and a genuine good-fellowship that created instant friendships with many of the people they met on the road.

Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal. Edited by J O H N FRANKLIN W H I T E . (Metuchen, N . J . : Scarecrow Press, 1987. vii + 195 pp. $22.50.)

The 1930s witnessed many federal programs for assistance to the arts, but none had greater impact on American cultural life than the establishment of more than a hundred community art centers. Art in Action, the first collective study of New Deal art centers, exam-

y^^mi

ines the programs in Utah, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Missouri, Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and North Carolina.

Dan E. Burke authored the Utah section.

This is far from being a dry account of federal dollars and bureaucratic pronouncements, for the program's intent was to get entire communities involved in the arts. In Utah they were, and sometimes this led to controversies over modern vs. traditional styles, representation of the human body, and artists who smoked while they taught children's art classes.

The Bohemians: American Adventures from Bret Harte's "Overland Monthly. " Edited by ROBERT A. BENNETT. (Wafla Walla, Wash.: Pioneer Press Books, 1987. xi -i- 365 pp. Paper, $10.95.)

F o u n d e d in 1868, the Overland Monthly out of San Francisco became popular on both coasts and propelled Bret Harte to fame as its editor and the author of such well-known stories as " T h e Luck of Roaring C a m p " and " T h e Outcasts of Poker Flat" which first appeared in the Overland. In addition to Harte, the monthly published such writers as Mark Twain, Noah Brooks, Charles Warren Stoddard, Prentice Mulford, and J . C. Cremony.

Over thirty adventure stories from the Overland were selected by historian Robert Bennett for inclusion in this volume. Among them is J . D. B. Stillman's tale of Utah, " T h e Last T i e . "

202

Utah Historical Quarterly

Western Trails: A Collection of Short Stories

by Mary Austin. Edited by MELODY GRAULICH. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1987. xii + 309 pp. $22.50.) " I n her life and her art, Mary Austin (1868-1934) attempted to create a set of traditions that would reflect the American experience of casting off inherited ways of thinking and establishing a new life on the frontier, whether it be literal or metaphorical.'' So writes Melody Graulich in an introductory biography to this collection of thirty short stories. Indeed, the characters in these stories struggle, as did their creator, with inherited ways of thinking and in so doing become memorable.

Most frequently the characters are women confronting in some way generally accepted notions about women's work, worth, and relations with men.

Photographer Ansel Adams, who collaborated on a book with her in the 1930s, recognized her intellectual and spiritual power and called her " a 'future' personâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one who will, a century from now, appear as a writer of major stature. . . . " Austin's work is currently enjoying a major renaissance, of which this collection is a part.

Graulich is to be commended for her illuminating general introduction as well as her perceptive comments about each individual story.

Mormons, Indians, and the Ghost Dance Religion of 1890.

By

GAROLD D .

(Boston: University Press of America, 1986. ix + 248 pp.

Paper, $13.50.)

BARNEY.

Barney attempts to synthesize the complex literature on Mormonism and the Ghost Dance religion and evaluate the question of Indian-Mormon relations during the nineteenth century, exploring those aspects of Mormonism

that may have influenced the Ghost D a n c e a n d the I n d i a n p r o p h e t Wovoka. The author also examines how Mormon and Indian beliefs were momentarily shattered with Wounded Knee and the publication of the Woodruff Manifesto.

Marketing Precedes the Miracle. By CALVIN GRONDAHL. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987. 69 pp. Paper, $4.95.)

This new collection of Grondahl cartoons carries LDS missionary efforts into outer space and probes the practices of Utah's majority culture with the unerring wit and superb drawings readers have come to expect. The pages sparkle with everything from zero gravity baptisms to a Mother-inL a w - i n - H e a v e n to a d i s m a y e d Mormon couple facing the wrath of a line-up of Christians who claim to have been born againâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not only once but twice, three times, etc.

Diamondfield Jack: A Study in Frontier Justice.

By

DAVID

H.

GROVER.

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. xvi -i- 188 pp. Paper, $6.95.)

In 1895 "Diamondfield J a c k " Davis was hired by the wealthy SparksHarrell cattle outfit to intimidate sheepmen who tried to bring their flocks onto the ranges in Cassia County, Idaho. When two young Mormon sheepherders were found murdered, Davis became the prime suspect. He was tried in the little M o r m o n f a r m i n g c o m m u n i t y of Albion, Idaho, some distance from the cattle ranges and before a jury that contained no cattlemen. William E. Borah, later a U . S . senator from Idaho, prosecuted the case with the help of Orlando W. Powers of Salt Lake City. In spite of high-powered

Book Reviews and Notices legal help provided by the cattle company and a lack of evidence placing Diamondfield Jack at the scene of the murders, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to hang. Appeals kept him alive until the real murderers confessed in 1898. Still, the Idaho judicial system was slow to release him. H e was not pardoned until 1902. H e moved to Nevada and became a wealthy mining man before sliding into obscurity.

The Town That Died Laughing: The Story of Austin, Nevada, Rambunctious Earlyday Mining Camp, and of Its Renowned Newspaper, "The Reese River Reveille. "

By OSCAR LEWIS. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986. xvii + 235 pp. Paper, $8.95.)

H u m o r was one of the staples of mining town newspapers, for these sheets felt a duty to entertain as well as inform weary muckers at the end of the day. Because Mark Twain's writing in the Territorial Enterprise has overshadowed the efforts of other worthy frontier editors and journalists, Oscar Lewis determined to save for posterity some of the best columns from the Austin, Nevada, newspaper. A highlight of the book is the chapter devoted to the Sazerac Lying Club, an organization conceived by the fertile imagination of Fred Hart, editor of the Austin Reveille. Readers of Twain's Roughing It will find the genesis of his version of the auction of a sack of flour that raised thousands of dollars in chapter 4 of Lewis's book.

Wells, Fargo Detective: A Biography of

203 greatest of Wells, Fargo detectives, ranged all over the West in search of robbers, but he did not operate in the usual manner of western lawmen. Instead of using his gun to apprehend badmen, he preferred to rely on his brains. Working with San Francisco policeman Isaiah Lees, H u m e pioneered scientific detection in the West.

Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode. By OSCAR LEWIS. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986. xxviii + 286 pp. Paper, $10.00.)

Originally published in 1947, Silver Kings presents a biographical study of the four Irishmen who made millions and gained widespread notoriety from their control and manipulation of the famous Comstock Lode mines. In his foreword to this reprint edition, James J . Rawls points out the strengths of Lewis's group biography that have made it engaging reading for a generation of readers: " H i s prose is vivid, filled with the sights and sounds of the Comstock and of San Francisco during its Age of Excess. Entering Virginia City, we hear the roar of the stamp mills, the shriek of the steam whistles, and the boom of blasting powder. . . .

Lewis makes even the minor characters in his drama come alive."

Arizona at Seventy-five: The Next Twentyfive Years. Edited by BETH LUEY and NOEL J . STOWE. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. ix + 221 pp. $25.00.)

James B. Hume. By RICHARD DILLON.

(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986. X -h 320 pp. Paper, $8.95.)

Historian Richard Dillon has recreated the life of one of frontier America's most gifted lawmen. H u m e , the

In the spring of 1987 dozens of scholars, politicians, business leaders, and others came together to celebrate Arizona's seventy-five years of statehood and to predict what the future might bring. T h e results of that meet-

204 ing are crystallized in six essays included herein that examine the state's heritage and prospects in the arts and culture, the history and future of Native Americans, the changing status of Hispanics, the state's economic transformation, the changing problems of water supply, and the preservation of historical resources. Recurring themes include the importance of land and natural resources, the growth of cities where 80 percent of the population now lives, the variety of cultures, and the gap between image and realityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a gap the editors hope this volume may bridge.

Utah Historical Quarterly Sierra-Nevada Lakes. By G E O R G E HiNKLE and BLISS HINKLE. (Reno: University of Nevada press, 1987. vi + 383 pp. Paper, $8.95.)

This history of the major lakes of the eastern Sierra and the western Great Basin, originally published in 1949, focuses on Lake Tahoe and Donner, Gold, P y r a m i d , H o n e y , M o n o , Meadow, and Webber lakes. The Hinkles provide a more detailed historical account of this rugged lake country than most guidebooks contain and include data on early exploration and development.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Department of Community and Economic Development Division of State History BOARD OF STATE HISTORY THOMAS G . ALEXANDER, Provo, 1990

Chairman LEONARD J . ARRINGTON, Salt Lake City, 1989

Vice-Chairman M A X J. EVANS, Salt Lake City

Secretary DOUGLAS D . ALDER, St. George, 1989 PHILLIP A. BULLEN, Salt Lake City, 1990 ELLEN G . CALLISTER, Salt Lake City, 1989 J . ELDON DORMAN, Price, 1990 H U G H C . GARNER, Salt Lake City, 1989

DAN E . JONES, Salt Lake City, 1989 DEAN L . MAY, Salt Lake City, 1990 AMY ALLEN PRICE, Salt Lake City, 1989 SUNNY REDD, Monticello, 1990

ADMINISTRATION M A X J . EVANS, Director J A Y M . RAYMOND, Librarian STANFORD J . LAYTON, Managing Editor DAVID B . MADSEN, State Archaeologist A. KENT POWELL, Historic Preservation Coordinator PHILLIP F . NOTARIANNI, Museum Services Coordinator JAMES L . DYKMAN, Administrative Services Coordinator

The Utcih 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: collecting historic Utah artifacts; locating, documenting, and preserving historic and prehistoric buildings and sites; and maintaining a specialized research library. Donations and gifts to the Society's programs, museum, or its library are encouraged, for only through such means can it live up to its responsibility of preserving the record of Uteih's past.

This publication has been funded with the assistance of a matching grant-in-aid from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, under provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended.

This program receives financial assistance for identification and preservation of historic properties under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The U.S. Department of the Interior prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, or handicap in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to: Office of Equal Opportunity, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. 20240.