Book Notices

Sandy City: The First One Hundred Years.

By MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY (Sandy, Ut.: Sandy City Corp., 1993 x + 228 pp $25.00.)

Histories of Utah communities, whether compiled or written by a committee or a single author, often resemble scrapbooks containing masses of detail with little interpretation By contrast, Sandy City: The First One Hundred Years has a strong interpretive thrust, reflecting its authorship by a professional historian, Marty Bradley. The result is a highly readable narrative that should appeal to many readers outside the Sandy city limits.

Residents of other Salt Lake Valley communities unfamiliar with the town will find its early history unique Settlers looking for farmland began moving into the Sandy area in the 1860s and 1870s, and a town resembling somewhat the typical Mormon village was eventually laid out. But Sandy really developed because of mining and quarrying in nearby Big and Little Cottonwood canyons. Sandy became, first, a supply station for the mines and, later, a transportation and smelting hub with the completion of the Wasatch &Jordan Valley Railroad and the building of several smelters in the 1870s.

Sandy incorporated as a city in 1893, the year of a nationwide financial panic With mining in decline, Sandy residents focused their attention on developing community structures, services, and small businesses The opening in November 1914 of Jordan High School marked a milestone in Sandy's evolution.

Sandy emerged from two world wars and a depression with its quiet, rural image intact, but change was in the air The post-World War II demand for housing and the development of Salt Lake City as a major metropolitan area led ultimately to the explosive growth of Sandy as a sprawling suburban boom town.

Although population continued to increase at an astonishing rate through the 1980s, astute city planners managed to resolve many growth problems; but crowded schools and clogged highways continue to defy easy solutions Meanwhile, commercial development—including retail businesses and light industry—has created jobs within the community, making it less dependent upon Salt Lake City.

Refusing to identify itself only as a suburb of Salt Lake City, Sandy has reclaimed its early identity as a town—at least in the minds of its residents.

History of Logan.

By RAY SOMERS 2 vols. (Logan, Ut.: Somers Historic Press, 1993. xviii + 468 pp. Paper, $35.00.)

For Ray Somers, writing History of Logan was a labor of love, the fulfillment of his life's goal "to leave something of worth for the next generation—an actual glimpse of the past."

Volume 1 of History of Logan is divided into eighteen chapters covering a wide variety of topics, including, among others, businesses, historic homes, city government, churches, schools, newspapers, and civic and religious organizations.

Researchers will find the detail in some chapters especially useful For example, chapter 8 lists known occupants of homes and commercial buildings in the Logan Historic District. This annotated entry is typical: "68 West 1st South Thatcher Milling and Elevator Company, a rock building which used water power, built by Moses and B. G. Thatcher around 1880. It burned down in the 1930s. The rock shell is still visible behind VOne Gas."

Volume 2 contains hundreds of photographs arranged in fifty subject categories This impressive collection took Somers more than ten years to gather and identify.

"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. Paper, $21.95.)

This brilliant, if slightly eclectic, work is now available in paperback. Emphasizing conflict, ethnic domination, environmental exploitation, and other tenets of the new western history, it may well be the most significant synthesis of the American West to have been published during the past decade.