Book Notices

Letters from Wupatki: Courtney Reeder Jones.

Edited by LISA RAPPAPORT (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995 xxx + 151 pp Cloth, $24.95; paper, $13.95.)

In May of 1938 Courtney Reeder Jones, a newlywed bride of two weeks, moved with her husband to Wupatki National Monument He worked as the park ranger, she as a faithful helpmate, while together they experienced various cultural lifestyles of Arizona For part of the time they lived in an800year-old Indian ruin until the Park Service built a larger home. The couple also became close friends with their Navajo neighbors, observed animal and plant life, and traveled to various parks and monuments throughout the region. But primarily they shared a mutual compatibility and love for the area, captured in these edited letters that provide a feeling for Park Service life in the rural Southwest around the time of World War II.

Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess.

By RICHARD S VAN WAGONER (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994. x +493 pp. $28.95.)

Although he never spent time in Utah, Sidney Rigdon was an important figure in the early history of Mormonism Asa trained minister he was able to lend structure and substance to much of the church's early theology and influenced Joseph Smith in a variety of ways Troubled by manic depression and an eccentric personality, he was destined to run afoul of church leaders eventually. With his final subjugation by Brigham Young in 1844, he relocated to Pittsburgh and then the Cumberland Valley, becoming the spiritual ancestor to a Church of Christ sect that still thrives today.

This well-researched, well-written book won the Mormon History Association's 1995 Ella Larsen Turner Award for Best Biography.

Kit Carson Days, 1809-1868.

By EDWIN L SABIN 2 vols (1935; revised ed.; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 xxx + 996 pp Paper, $16.00 each.)

Wrangler, teamster, trapper, soldier, guide, courier, scout, and Indian agent, Kit Carson jammed more activity and excitement into hislife than most men ever dream about His grand adventure did not completely end with his death in 1868at the relatively young ageof fifty-eight; rather, he almost immediately boarded a historiographical rollercoaster that hassince taken him tothe heights of mythic heroism and to the depths of vilification. He presently enjoys a mood of forgiveness among historians; thus the reissue of this friendly biography, handsomely packaged in a Bison Book edition. Marc Simmons's brief but enlightening introduction offers a caveat or two then a welcome assurance that this once standard work, "from whose pages the real Kit Carson shines," isstill aworthy read.