In Memoriam

C. Gregory Crampton. USHS collections.

CHARLES GREGORY CRAMPTON, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOW7 and distinguished contributor to Utah history, died May 2, 1995, at his home in St. George. Extending over four decades of the most exciting times in Utah and western history, his career earned him wide acclaim as a professor, writer, editor, and researcher. He was born March 22, 1911, in Kankakee, Illinois, and raised and educated in California. He married Helen Mickelsen, who died in January 1977, and had two daughters, Patricia and Juanita, who survive him, and married Mary-Helen (Maria) Patrick in 1978 who continues to live in St George.

Crampton earned his doctorate in 1941 at the University of California at Berkeley In 1941 and again in 1948 he won Rockefeller Foundation grants for travel and study in Latin America. After wartime stints with the FBI and as a military historian, he joined the University of Utah history faculty in 1945 where he remained until his retirement in 1979. At the U of U he specialized in western American history, Canyonlands, and Latin America. He directed the work of numerous Ph.D. and masters candidates and helped found and edit The American West in 1963 which immediately attracted more than 30,000 subscribers. Between 1956 and 1964 Crampton headed the historical salvage survey that preceded construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, an assignment "that became his life's work." From 1966 to 1972 he directed the U of U's Doris Duke Program in Indian Oral History, focusing on Utah and Four Corners' Native Americans, and coordinated the Doris Duke Program at seven additional universities Pie wrote and co-authored fourteen books, several of which are now considered classics, and published dozens of articles, many of them in Utah Historical Quarterly. He was a visiting professor at numerous institutions in the United States and abroad and was often honored, including election as president of the national honorary society for history, Phi Alpha Theta He received the Cowboy Hall of Fame's Western Heritage Award in 1964 for Standing Up Country and the American Association for State and Local History's sought-after Award of Merit. For scholarly research and pointing new ways to see Utah history he was designated a Historical Society Fellow in 1963, the seventh of twenty-one persons to be so honored.

To members of the Historical Society, as to his many students and professional associates, Gregory Crampton was known for his intellectual acuteness and integrity, for his responsiveness to beauty, his appreciation for the West and its environment, and his concern for human welfare He was a gentleman in the full sense of the term, quick in his sympathies and compassionate in hisjudgments. Unfailingly gracious, he practiced instinctively the little amenities that give life its charm and friendship its lasting pleasures. He liked the play of ideas and was master of the well-turned phrase and the flash of wit He joined those who searched for man's place in the world He gave himself not to abstract principles but to defining a place of unequalled beauty and to publicizing the role of peoples too long ignored He knew, too, that a good illustration is worth a thousand words and that good taste is the mother of felicitous expression.

After retirement Crampton continued to write and publish, appearing often as a lecturer, most recently on March 7, 1995, when with co-author Steven K. Madsen (In Search of the Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles, 1829-1848, 1994) he delivered the annual Juanita Brooks lecture at Dixie College.

Crampton was a product of the University of California's history department when it was at its best. His masters were titans in the expanding field of western history. Included among them was Herbert Eugene Bolton, whose advocacy of the Spanish Borderlands, archival research, field work, and sense for the Canyonlands as the ultimate barrier all came with Crampton as he made Utah his home. The decades after 1945 were a time of achievement and promise for state history in Utah. Holdovers from the Progressive Era, including William J. Snow, Leland Creer, Andrew Love Neff, and Joel Ricks, had introduced new standards of historical objectivity and enjoyed enviable esteem in the Historical Society and throughout the state. Liberals Fawn Brodie and Bernard DeVoto were national figures in their own right and began to make Utah places and names household properties throughout the country Younger scholars delighted the state with their work and teaching Many, like Crampton, carried the UC Berkeley brand—LeRoy Hafen, Dello Dayton, Brigham Madsen, George Ellsworth, Everett Cooley—to name a few. With giant hands fairly trembling as he communicated the excitement of the Utah story was USC product and erstwhile Uinta Basin teacher, David Miller. Breaking on the scene with mustache at attention was UCLA Ph.D. Russell Mortensen who professionalized the Historical Society and its journal, and with his successor Everett Cooley established the State Archives and introduced the Fellow award at the Society. Demanding national attention were Thomas O'Dea, Donald Mienig, William Mulder, andJuanita Brooks.

Especially noteworthy in terms of the contribution Crampton was beginning to make were Historical Society Fellows Dale Morgan and Wallace Stegner. Morgan directed the editing of the Powell Expedition journals as the complete 1948 and 1949volumes of Utah Historical Quarterly and helped negotiate with Crampton's mentor H. E. Bolton for a new translation of the Escalante Journal, Pageant in the Wilderness, as the 1950 volume of UHQ Wallace Stegner's prize-winning and mind-catching Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West had the nation in its grip by 1956.

Obviously the door to Canyonlands study was open to the Society's Fellows. Invited by a National Park historic survey contract in 1956, Crampton followed the canyons far beyond the greats with whom Morgan and Stegner worked, into the lives and material culture of a thousand aspiring sojourners. For nearly a decade's worth of summers he photographed, measured, and recorded his way through the blistering corridors and antechambers. By 1965, when he was through, he knew the canyons as no one else did. In the years that followed he continued to work in the surrounding hinterlands until all of Standing-Up Country was mastered. In all, six University of Utah archaeological bulletins and other major studies pounded from his typewriter along with eight or ten Standing-Up Country related books. With superb photographs, careful measurement, on-site research, beautiful writing, and objective interpretation he built on the work of Morgan and Stegner, preparing a sound base for popularizers, environmentalists, and color country regionalists who would work the Standing-Up Country later.

The Society had other Fellows who gave new dimension to Utah history. One's hat is off to Leonard Arrington, to Juanita Brooks, to Helen Papanikolas, to George Ellsworth, and, indeed, to the rest of the Society's Fellows. But few came with sounder preparation than Gregory Crampton or pointed to more spectacular new ways to see state history Bon voyage, historian of the Canyonlands Here's to new understanding and the best of history as we work the canyons of the future.

CHARLES S. PETERSON