Book Reviews

Sacred Land, Sacred View: Navajo Perceptions of the Four Corners Region.

By ROBERT S. MCPHERSON (Provo, Ut.: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 1992 viii+ 151 pp Paper, $8.95.)

Sacred Land, Sacred View is a slim volume McPherson groups the first half of the book topically around important Navajo sacred geography, along with other subjects like plants, clouds, animals, and the like Along the way he points out each subject's mystical creation, spiritual powers, and purpose to the Navajo For McPherson the myths, legends, and tales associated with these subjects "teach the core perceptions of life" to Navajos His aim is to take the Four Corners region and show the integrated pattern of Navajo environmental and holistic thought He feels that traditional works on Navajo religion (e.g., Van Valkenburgh and Reichard) and other more general studies on Navajo views of the land fail to demonstrate this pattern. This first section of the book is primarily based on interviews conducted by the author and others in the late 1980s for the San Juan Historical Commission, as well as a few Navajo oral histories from the Doris Duke Oral History Project of the 1960s The intended mission of the first part of the book is to conserve an older Navajo generation's beliefs and thought before traditional Navajo culture falls victim to the onslaught of our twentieth-century materialistic world.

The latter part of the book, also based largely on interviews, centers on how the Navajos interpret the Anasazi and their ruins and what this Navajo lore tells about the Navajos' perceptions of their world McPherson states that the "remnants of Anasazi culture play an important part in Navajo life" and afterwards explains in several short chapters how Anasazi ruins provide artifacts (pottery and its designs, pipes, arrowheads, wooden figurines, etc.) for Navajo religious and secular purposes Given typical Navajo avoidance of the dead from childhood, this usage at first appears incongruous with Navajo universal values. But McPherson points out that Navajo medicine men view the Anasazi as a "gifted people gone astray. . . . and that the artifacts serve as mnemonic devices that warn the knowledgeable that the sins of the past are still a threat to those living in the present."

According to McPherson, Navajos deeply respect the power of the these objects and sites This information will be interesting to those familiar with Navajo culture.

The audience for this book is not particularly the scholarly community but instead the public and especially the Dine' of the Four Corners region. Nevertheless, in the considered judgment of the reviewer, this book has two shortcomings Though the book's main source is approximately twentyfour interviews with Navajos, there is no discussion regarding the author's interview methodology. Were these disciplined oral histories, structured anthropological interviews, or simply casual informal interviews? What is the background of the people interviewed (age, residence, role in community) , and how were they selected? Were these recorded interviews and how were the interviews conducted— in English or Navajo? If recorded, were the interviews taped and/or transcribed in Navajo or English and are they available somewhere for future interested scholars to research? What does the author mean that the project's interpreters and translators "conscientiously clarified and developed the ideas of the elders." Did their translation taint the methodology in any way? Without the above methodological information it is hard to judge the soundness of McPherson's research and conclusions. The second shortcoming is that the author fails to compare and contrast information from his previous similar works on the Navajos. For these reasons the book is not recommended to scholars, but the public may find it interesting.

ANTHONY GODFREY U.S. West Research Salt Lake City

Doing What the Day Brought: An Oral History of Arizona Women.

By MARY LOGAN ROTHSCHILD and PAMELA CLAIR HRONEK (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992 xl + 174 pp Cloth, $40.00; paper, $16.95.)

As oral history programs have developed over the last twenty years, those collecting interviews have wondered how to share their information. Studs Terkel used excerpts in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. I combined oral histories with more traditional sources in Mormon Polygamous Families. Doing What the Day Brought is a combination of both methods. The study is based on twenty-nine interviews with Arizona women conducted in 1982 The narrators (with one exception) were over seventy and from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds The book contains lengthy excerpts from oral history interviews similar to Terkel's. The authors also include interpretive data that show how the narrators compare with other Arizona women in the early twentieth century.

The authors found themes that ran through nearly all of the interviews and organized the book around them The chapters describe the women's reaction to the desert environment, their experiences as children at home and at school, and their daily activities as adults at home, in the community, and at work The concluding chapter reflects on the changes these women have seen during the twentieth century The book's strength lies in its ability to summarize the women's experience in the West and Arizona and then place the interviewees into a geographical and historical context The narrators represent married and single women, African Americans, Native Americans, Japanese Americans, Jews, Mormons, and natives of Arizona and imports. They demonstrate the wide diversity of women's experience.

If the book included only the differing experiences of the interviewees it would simply be a nice study of twenty-nine women The interpretive information puts these women into context. However, the authors admit they do not have a representative sample I can understand the financial and time limitations, but I am still uneasy to see an entire book based on such a small sampling.

Ironically, although the cross section was too small, there were just enough women that with their stories scattered throughout the book I often confused them. In the first chapter the authors listed each interviewee by age As I read I wanted to turn back and reread a woman's description, but I could not remember if she was one of the older or younger people interviewed. Eventually all of the women started running together, and I lost track of them as individuals.

I was also uncomfortable with the editing style The authors state up front "the women's stories are heavily edited." Yet, although the authors freely gathered information from throughout the interviews and "cleaned up" the language, they carefully bracket any words they insert I found the brackets awkward and distorting. I also found the diamonds used to set off quotes difficult to read around.

Yet despite these weaknesses, Doing What the Day Brought is a good example of one way to use the numerous oral history interviews that have been collected and often lie gathering dust in archives Combining the traditional sources and the oral histories gave me a sense of women's lives generally and specifically.

JESSIE L EMBRY Brigham Young University

"It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West.

By RICHARD WHITE (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. xx + 644 pp. $34.95.)

Richard White's impressive history leaves the reader with a sense of enormous and unbelievable complexity. He has attempted the daunting task of summarizing the history of the American West (defined as region rather than as process) in a single volume Under the circumstances it is not at all surprising that we find the work idiosyncratic and at the same time informative, brilliant, and challenging.

Focusing on social, economic, environmental, and political history, White also writes of western literature and briefly of motion pictures and painting, but he largely ignores music, sculpture, and religion, except as adjuncts to social or political themes He begins with the Spanish invasion of Indian lands and the transformation of the lives of both and moves to the subsequent northern European conquest of both Native American and Hispanic peoples. Rightly emphasizing the role of the federal government in the changes that took place in the nineteenth-century West, he recognizes the continued importance of federal control and largess in the twentieth century.

Following the conquest of the West by northern Europeans, White emphasizes the decisive imprint of their institutions and activities. He discusses such things as government exploration, public land distribution, territorial administration, westward migration, cultural transformation, economic development, and foreign trade.

Significantly, for the first time a comprehensive history of the West gives the twentieth century its due. Thus, White recognizes the importance of western cities, corporate capital, labor conflict, the Great Depression, the growth of federal bureaucracy, the rise of extra-party politics, the various minority rights movements, the growth of the New Right, and images of the West.

Since this is synthetic history, it is important to understand which myths White appropriates, rejects, or treats lightly. In general he emphasizes conflict, unjustified inequality, exploitation, political chicanery, racism, federal domination, environmental damage, and the dark side of the myths of violence and the garden Had he been otherwise disposed he might have favored the myths of subduing nature (in the positive sense), community harmony, general equality or the inevitable inequality of humans, beneficial development, useful governmental projects, and fruitful environmental alteration.

Still, the tendency to dwell on conflict should not mask the complexity of White's work. His recognition of the significant contributions of entrepreneurs like Henry J Kaiser in World War II and A. P. Giannini in banking and his understanding of the importance of cooperative communities in the nineteenth-century West all reveal that complexity.

Moreover, though he generally sides with the racially and sexually disadvantaged, he recognizes the inconsistency in some minority arguments Examples include the disingenuousness of contradictory demands of Indians and Chicanos for sovereignty and federal largess and of the simultaneous liberal dismissal of Los Angeles as homogeneous, individualistic, and parochial and as pietistic and communal.

A major quibble I have with White's work is an excessive tendency to oversimplify the conflict between minorities and majorities by the use of fluid general categories At various times, for instance, he characterizes the Italians, Greeks, Jews, Mormons, and Slavs as oppressed peoples, On other occasions, however, he includes all of these groups and other European Americans within the category of "Anglo" as persecutors of Asians, Mexicans, African Americans, and Indians. Chinese and Japanese appear as the exploited in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but they drop out of the story in deference to "Anglo" oppressors after World War II.

Inevitable in a book of this size and complexity are occasional errors of fact. The Battle of the Little Big Horn took place in 1876 not 1874 (p 104), the Edmunds Act did not disfranchise believers in polygamy, Wilford Woodruffs Manifesto was issued four months not four days after the U.S Supreme Court decision sustaining the Edmunds-Tucker Act (both p. 174), Idaho's urban population had reached 28 percent not more than 50 percent by 1920 (p. 415), and although Monument Valley straddles the border between Utah and Arizona, most of the scenes for the Searchers were filmed in Utah (p 627).

The emphasis on conflict and male domination has led White to some interpretations that seem questionable. It is anachronistic, for instance, to argue that Utahns gave women the vote in 1870 to protect polygamy (see pp 356-57) At that time, Mormon men constituted an overwhelming majority in Utah Territory They did not fear Protestant and Catholic voters until the late 1880s. Moreover, as research by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Lola Van Wagenen, and others has shown, Mormon women participated actively in the suffrage movement My own view is that suffrage was a progressive measure brought about by the combined efforts of women and men in the Mormon community.

On the whole, however, I would applaud Richard White's effort to construct a story of the West based on a set of myths more useful in understanding an urban West of conflict between environmentalist and logger, capital and labor, and black and white. The New Right notwithstanding, the West was never the domain of individualists who subdued the wilderness while living in harmony with all The occupation and pacification of the West by northern Europeans required vigorous and extraordinary governmental activity and considerable violence, conflict, and discrimination directed at minorities and women. White deserves praise for synthesizing the historical background of the modern West so lucidly.

THOMAS G ALEXANDER Brigham Young University

The Weiser Indians: Shoshoni Peacemakers.

By HANK CORLESS (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990. xx + 170 pp. Paper, $12.50.)

The inconsistent policies of the U.S government and the unscrupulous treatment by the American people of the Native Americans can only be viewed as a tragic page in American history. However, there are always those who would defend the nation's actions and rationalize events to justify the immoral actions taken against the American Indians. It is hoped those examining with objectivity the inhumane treatment of this conquered people would recognize the enormous injustices that were committed.

Hank Corless's excellent book, The Weiser Indians, is a study of the confrontation in present Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon between the Northern Shoshoni bands and land-hungry squatters The author provides a detailed account of how Indian territories were taken by force and bloodshed to accommodate the demands put upon the government by the local citizenry to remove all Indians from the public domain.

The nineteenth-century homeland of the Weiser Indians was the isolated valleys of the Weiser and Payette rivers in west-central Idaho near the Oregon border Here they and their kinsman lived a nomadic existence. The acquisition of the horse in the mid-eighteenth century dramatically changed the lifestyle of some of the Shoshoni people, including the mountain Shoshoni A sharp contrast may be drawn between the Western and Northern Shoshoni due to the horse culture which was accepted by the northern bands only To the east the Shoshoni became a buffalo-hunting people and quickly adapted to the plains culture.

The author has divided the text into seven chapters, including within the first three chapters the events surrounding the early pre-white history of the mountain Shoshoni and the events leading up the Snake Wars of 1866-68. The later chapters deal with the flight of the Weiser Indians under their great leader, Eagle Eye, who through peaceful means tried to remain with his followers in their homeland For a period of time the resourceful Eagle Eye succeeded in eluding the ever-present pressures and problems presented by the encroachment of the westward movement. But by the time of his death Eagle Eye's dream of freedom and the "old life" was gone, destroyed by those whose demands generated the removal of the rightful owners from their ancestral lands.

The primary source materials used to document the text are superb and make possible the excellent evaluations and conclusions of the author. The story of Eagle Eye and the mountain Shoshoni represents a competent contribution to Indian history and, it is hoped, will draw attention and appreciation to the plight of yet another small group of Native Americans whose only request was to be left alone and free to pursue their traditional ways. Unfortunately, as with so many before them, they failed.

The University of Utah Press has provided the reader with a quality text containing excellent pictures, maps, bibliography, index, and an appropriate foreword written by Merle W. Wells The Weiser Indians represents a major contribution in the area of Native American studies. Both the author and publisher are to be complimented.

FRED R GOWANS Brigham Young University

Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons.

By LAWRENCE FOSTER. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1991 xxii + 353 pp Cloth, $37.95; paper, $16.95.)

This book, part of a Syracuse University series on utopianism and communitarianism, will provide general readers with accessible information on the sexual mores of three muchstudied millenarian movements, named in the book's subtitle, that gained a foothold in America during the wild and wooly decades between the nation's founding and its entry into the Victorian Era The book's language is jargon-free (if uninspired) and its structure is easy to follow After an introductory chapter, the three groups are treated separately in three or four chapters apiece, most of the material addressing doctrine-based relations between the sexes A concluding chapter sums up the work, drawing some cautious comparisons between the societal concerns of the earlier era and those of our own At one level, then, this book is a mild-mannered though pedestrian disquisition on a topic with which many readers are already slightly familiar.

At a deeper level it is a cobbled-up attack vehicle, a bludgeon. For readers who have the stomach for it, this book is more interesting for the raids, seductions, damnations by omission, and smear campaigns to be found in its apparatus, which accounts for fully a third of the book's pages, than for its blandly written text Readers attentive to the footnotes will at once discern that this publication makes no pretense at breaking new scholarly ground. Instead, it draws heavily upon the author's Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), which under a different publisher and a slightly different title won the Mormon History Association's 1984 award for best book of the year The subject of that earlier book was religion and sexuality among Shakers, Oneida Communitarians, and Mormons. The subject of the present book is identical, though a different emphasis is claimed for it, and its chapters are pieces that the author published in various journals between 1979 and 1988 Foster also makes wholesale, albeit fully and gratitudinously acknowledged, use of other people's recent scholarly work, most notably Newell and Avery's Mormon Enigma (1984) in his eighth chapter and Gottlieb and Wiley's America's Saints (1986) in his eleventh Because of its extensive use of other scholars' work, Foster's book almost seems more a survey of scholarship than a scholarly treatise in its own right.

That the book is a pastiche is not, however, troublesome in the least The difficulty that many readers will have with it lies in its use as an ideological weapon.

The author evinces a commendable commitment to reading history according to the nonjudgmental principles of historical anthropology (pp xiv-xv). However, he uses this position to engage in attacks upon theory based historians, especially "feminists." These attacks are not easy to analyze for two reasons. First, he never openly states just which feminists he is attacking; he will make an allegation and then provide a footnote that blurs the source (as on p. 92 where he alludes to "[i]mportant but seriously flawed studies of Oneida from contemporary feminist perspectives: and then in the footnote directs us to no fewer than six references, one of them written by Foster himself), or he will make an allegation and cite no source at all—as in his astonishing claim on p 40 that "[f]eminists today typically have emphasized individualism, fuller self-expression, and the need for women to get free from traditional expectations that they should subordinate themselves to others such as their children or husbands rather than have the opportunity to develop their lives as individuals in their own right" Second, Foster appears not to have actually read feminist theory but rather to have developed his view of the subject empirically Certainly the definition he has invented, as exemplified on p 40, above, which he then assails—dare one breathe the term straw woman?— is not grounded in feminist theory.

POLLY STEWART Salisbury State University Salisbury, Maryland

House with a Past.

By ERIK BARNOUW. 1992 v + 106 pp Paper, $14.95.) (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society,

The slender volume by Erik Barnouw accomplishes what lengthy tomes often fail to do: provide new insights into seemingly well-traveled corridors of history It is ostensibly about an abandoned one-room schoolhouse in Vermont that the Barnouws purchased for $85 in 1951. Most of the book details their attempts to discover why it was built like a church, with vaulted ceiling and thick stone walls (the only stone schoolhouse in the region) with cathedral-like windows It is of interest to students of the Mormon experience because their inquiries into why the local people called the dirt trail the building was located on "Temple Road" revealed that it had once been home to a Mormon congregation.

The author and his wife ultimately discovered that the building itself was probably built by a small Freewill Baptist congregation in 1826 but that the congregation joined the Mormons in 1831, making the building the first Mormon chapel in New England The original impetus for the conversion was the return of a former member of the community, Jared Carter, who had recently joined the Mormons. Carter baptized twenty-seven people, creating the first Mormon congregation in New England. The Mormons left in 1833, part of the migration from New England to the better lands of the Ohio frontier These early converts from Vermont apparently played an important role in the early church, with Jared Carter and his three brothers mentioned specifically in the Doctrine and Covenants (sections 52, 75, 79, 102) They were early and important missionaries spreading the new religion, and Jared and his brother John S Carter were members of the first twelve-member high council organized at Kirtland in 1834. They were participants in the Zion's Camp expedition of 1834, with John dying from cholera en route to assist the Saints in Missouri Another brother, Gideon, was killed by mobocrats at Crooked River, Missouri, in 1838 in consequence of whichJared became a founder and "Captain General" of the Danites. Only one brother, Simeon, finally arrived in the Salt Lake Valley.

While not necessarily the author's intent, House with a Past provides invaluable insights into the social and religious milieu into which Mormonism was introduced. Details about the internal disagreements among members and ministers of existing frontier churches of the early nineteenth century are illustrated by the minutes of the Baptist congregation that ultimately built the "schoolhouse" purchased by Barnouw, examination of the experiences of the early members of the Mormon faith, the importance of family relationships in early conversions, and the potential divisiveness of such conversions on the families involved.

While not claiming to present a definitive analysis of any specific aspect of the Mormon experience, the author has presented a microcosm of the impact of the new belief system on individuals and communities The establishment of the Mormon congregation affected more than just the congregation that converted, as extended family relationships were strengthened or broken and as lands were abandoned and economies changed as the Mormons heeded the doctrine of the gathering and joined with the larger Mormon community Slow travel combined with removal of families or strained family relations to prevent future contact between the migrants and their old community, resulting in the author's lament that over 150 years later the thousands of descendants of the Mormon migrants from the congregation near Benson, Vermont, knew nothing of their original ties to Vermont, and the people of Benson knew nothing of what had become of the Mormons.

Well written and illustrated with a map and numerous photographs, House with a Past will be fascinating to any individual interested in the early period of Mormon history. Its personal style will generate enthusiasm for local and community history and leave the reader with nothing but admiration for the Barnouws and their decades-long commitment to unraveling the history of their stone "schoolhouse."

RICHARD H.JACKSON Brigham Young University