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Book Reviews
Utah: The Strugglefor Statehood.
By KEN VERDOIA AND RICHARD FIRMAGE (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996 205 pp $34.95.)
As a historian of Utah statehood, this reviewer several years ago considered ways to bring the fascinating story to the general public during the centennial celebration of that event, then did nothing to accomplish that end Fortunately, others—television documentary producer Ken Verdoia and historian Richard Firmage—teamed up to accomplish this task in an exceptionally effective manner Intended as a companion volume to the television documentary special of the same name, this heavily illustrated history of the last half of the nineteenth century, as stated by the authors, has taken on a life of its own With its own immensely valuable illustrations, it certainly serves well as a reminder of the excellent video presentation and stands separately as a good survey of the statehood movements.
The text is a lucid sketch mainly, but not entirely, of the essentials of political history of the last half of the nineteenth century. Its primary focus is on urban northern Utah, which is legitimate since that was the focal point of the movements for statehood. One of the most insightful segments is a brief description of city life in Utah Territory. There is no sugar-coated treatment in this book. Although the Mormons did sometimes feed Indians instead of fight them, they also killed a considerable number of Native Americans And the ugly Morrisite killings are treated, indicating a real tyranny for some in the territory at the time The authors offer a discussion of the Bear River Massacre, which the video covered particularly well with a dramatized reenactment of the tragedy There is no overemphasis here of seagulls saving crops, with the authors stressing that contemporary diaries did not make much of the situation— perhaps news to a few readers.
While intentionally brief, there are occasional significant new contributions to Utah historical scholarship. After mentioning President Zachary Taylor's attempt to join Mormon Deseret to southern California as one huge state, the authors reflect original research in pointing to a letter to President Taylor from William Smith, brother of the founding Mormon prophet, critical of Brigham Young and his regime. This was likely instrumental in the alienation of the president from church interests Another seldom stressed but important subject is the background to a court case involving Salt Lake City saloon owner Paul Englebrecht, whose establishment was raided and damaged at the behest of Mormon city police chief Andrew Burt This case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court with the decision and the bitterness it engendered contributing meaningfully to later antiMormon legislation and law enforcement.
Certainly the highlight of the book is the number of visual images and informative captions assembled amid a careful narrative. Naturally, relevant photographs on the earlier years are more rare when photography was in its infancy. Verdoia and Firmage have performed a great service in reaching into obscure sources to gather artists' sketches of pioneer journeys, landscapes, and infant settlements, often bringing to view seldom-seen and important pictures. On the other hand, nine photographs of Brigham Young plus his residences, when he was alive during only half the period covered, might be a little excessive But then the Great Colonizer had more time and funds to sit for photographers than did the people he sent out to do the real pioneering When possible, as with the well-photographed completion of the first transcontinental railroad, the authors have selected different views than we have usually seen and thereby further enhanced interest.
Although the book reflects the great value of the photographic collections in Utah and the nation's capital, it also reveals an inherent problem Not only are we largely limited to the subjects about which images have been collected and saved, but also the information describing the picture can hardly be expected to be more accurate than the background material accompanying it in the photo or sketch repository Thus one caption mentions a plural wife of Charles C Rich who is actually his first wife The Clear Lake School, said to have been built in 1890, in other frontal images shows a clear construction date of 1900 Many would take issue with the caption of the photo of the joint Salt Lake City and County Building, supposedly only three years old, showing landscaping trees well on their way to maturity. But this is nitpicking and in no way detracts from a great, brief, but richly illustrated layman's history of the struggle for statehood The volume will find a place on the coffee tables of many homes and will be far more widely appreciated than have been most books on the history of Utah.
EDWARD LEO LYMAN Victorville, California
Necessary Fraud: Progressive Reform and Utah Coal.
By NANCY J TANIGUCHI (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. xvi + 319 pp. $39.95.)
Necessary Fraud: Progressive Reform and Utah Coal is a very significant book for several reasons. It examines in detail a pivotal story in Utah's history, the development of coal mining, and it carefully pursues the story into the twentieth century, a period often ignored by mining historians. "Sagebrush" western protestors today will be interested to see what their ancestors had to put up with a few generations ago.
The author, Nancy J Taniguchi, associate professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, is to be congratulated for her dedicated field work and archival research (using a variety of sources) in developing a most complicated story in a professional, objective manner This was not an easy topic to research, but she traces her subject in a fashion worthy of Sherlock Holmes.
Necessary Fraud is a bittersweet story at best, tracing the development of Utah coal by individuals, corporations, and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad It is also the story of the federal government's role in encouraging mining and then trying to regulate the results of unplanned consequences As Taniguchi writes, "This story of fraud in the Utah coal lands provides a case study of the intricacies of American land law, specifically, of the Coal Land Act of 1873 and its application (and misapplications)" (p. xii).
The necessary fraud developed because of the limitations of the 1873 Coal Land Act, which only allowed filing on 160 acres for an individual or 640 acres for an association. This proved far too few acres to open and operate a coal mine profitably here and elsewhere in the West Thus, land fraud allowed mining to start Taniguchi follows the story into Colorado and Wyoming as well but stays focused in Utah throughout. Although tortuous and tedious, the government's litigation finally paid dividends: "And, as a result of suits lasting into the 1930s, land 'theft' ultimately ceased, thanks in large part to the litigation that [Marsden] Burch and others so doggedly pursued" (p 252)
This is not a pleasant story It involves corporations, individuals, the LDS church, state, local, and national governments, and honesty and dishonesty. The book needs and deserves close reading. It is a complicated subject that tells readers much about the Utah coal mining and attitudes of a century or less ago. The reader might want to develop her or his own score sheet to follow individuals, mines, companies, and litigation.
Nancy Taniguchi deserves thanks for having tackled a difficult subject and turned it into a readable story This isnot a book for an easy evening's reading by the fire; it will take concentration and thought, but the result will be worth the effort. The short chapters are a plus, allowing a one-sitting reading to follow the story line. Her photograph selection adds to the story. However, a few more maps or better placed maps might have helped. This is not a glamorous West, but it is reality.
DUANE A SMITH Fort Lewis College Durango, Colorado
Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer.
Edited by CHARLES E RANKIN (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.xvi +280 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95.)
If ever you are pressed and have time for but one book from which to get the heft and breadth of Wallace Stegner, you may want to pull this one by Rankin It should certainly be among the first of the books on Stegner to open. I know that it is going on my shelf right next to another vital study of Stegner. That is the booklength interview of Stegner conducted in 1983 by Richard W Etulain (Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature) who, fittingly enough, has also contributed an essay to Rankin's collection.
Altogether, there are seventeen essays, three of which are by the very well established writers Wendell Berry, William Kittredge, and Ivan Doig, each of whom was able to speak from a personal acquaintance with Stegner There is also a memoir by Page Stegner, Wallace Stegner's son. And the foreword was written by Stewart Udall, a former secretary of the Interior who welcomed the wisdom Stegner once brought to Washington.
And, then, the rest of the list of contributors is something of a showcase of academic talent Their names read like a Who's Who in the professional associations of western American literature and history Indeed, they constitute, if you will forgive a bit of popular idiom, a Stegner "dream team," and my guess is that we have here about as competent a crew of Stegner scholars as is likely ever to come together.
Now, they do wax a little laudatory. But they are talking about Wallace Stegner, after all, and may be forgiven the enthusiasm we should all feel And two or three of them will discover pretty nearly the same thing, as, for instance, Stegner's unusual ability to use historical outlines as the bases for his fictions But such occasional bits of overlap are often the case with a tightly focused festschriften. It should bejust as interesting to see where and how the fine minds have agreed with one another as where they have differed.
Perhaps the one sour note in the whole is a slight leakage of a peculiar feminist sentiment—this from a man Rob Williams was quite insistent in asking "if every woman on the Plains conformed to the gendered patterns of behavior laid out in Stegner's historical work" (p. 133).
The reference is to Stegner's Wolf Willow, and those familiar with it should think Williams's question is sadly beside the point. Stegner's boyhood along the "High Line" had shown him one of the narrowest slices of life in American/Canadian culture. He wrote to admit that limitation In a sense, he wrote to defeat the limitation. And that Williams would worry the issue with a kind of reflexive feminism shows nothing so much as his own anxiety that he come across as righteously progressive in his politics My view is that Williams could just as well have kept his eye on his subject.
No such distractions troubled the three women who contributed: Ann Ronald, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Melody Graulich Their essays do not demand any sort of a gender identification but were among the most balanced and the strongest parts of the collection.
You will arrive at the end of Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer very well rewarded The book accomplishes something of a feat, that is—the essential Stegner.
RUSSELL BURROWS Weber State University
Encyclopedia of the American West.
Edited by CHARLES PHILLIPS and ALAN AXELROD. 4 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996. lxxviii + 1,935 pp. $375.00.)
For nearly twenty years Howard LaMar's one-volume Readers Encyclopedia of the American West\\?iS sat on the bookshelf closest to my desk as a handy reference source for frequent questions about Utah and western American history While Iwill continue to consult that volume, the new fourvolume, comprehensive and up-to-date Encyclopedia of the American WestwAl now get regular use.
Turn to the front and end pages in each volume and it is clear what the editors define as the American West. The full-spread map of the United States identifies the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi River by name and includes inserts of Hawaii and Alaska. The states east of the Mississippi are outlined but not identified The chronological framework stretches from the early Spanish period to the mid-twentieth century However, as the editors note, "these geographical and chronological boundaries are crossed freely as adequate coverage of any given topic may demand" (p xi).
Encyclopedia of the American West is another of the fine reference works produced by Macmillan Reference It is the same company that gave us the four-volume Encyclopedia of Mormonism in 1992 The encyclopedia includes 1,700 articles that begin with Edward Abbey and end with artist and illustrator Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum As with most encyclopedias, biographical entries make up the majority of items included. A useful section following the last entry in volume 4 is a listing of "Biographical Entries by Profession." The fifty professions include everything from actors, entertainers, religious leaders, Native American leaders, and social reformers to gunfighters, prostitutes, historians, writers, fur trappers, outlaws, and politicians—the latter category having the most entries. Biographies of contemporary individuals are not included; neither are living persons mentioned except in the context of the histories of certain cities and states.
In addition to the biographical entries, you will find articles on each of the states, major cities, organizations and institutions, ethnic groups, trails, events, and overview entries on such topics as agriculture, architecture, art, child rearing, disease, exploration, farming, the federal government, film, the frontier, the fur trade, homesteading, Indian schools, the labor movement, land policy, literature, mining, national expansion, Native American cultures and peoples, pioneer life, the U.S Army, U.S Indian policy, violence, wildlife, and wild west shows. Volume one contains both a list of entries and a list of contributors; the latter includes the entries written under the name of each author.
Among the nearly four hundred authors of the entries are at least three dozen with Utah connections. Thomas Alexander, Jim Allen, Leonard Arrington, Maureen Beecher, Newell Bringhurst, George Ellsworth, Craig Foster, Fred Gowans, Charles Hibbard, Richard Jensen, Stan Kimball, Stan Layton, Leo Lyman, Carol Madsen, Dean May, Charles Peterson, Ross Peterson, Harold Schindler, Jan Shipps, Sandra Taylor, Gary Topping, and Ronald Walker will be familiar to most readers of Utah Historical Quarterly.
One of the great strengths of the Encyclopedia is the magnificent presentation and excellent writing. The 8 x 11-inch pages are bound in a very attractive red cover highlighted with blue and gold stamp lettering The use of a fairly large and readable type, the generous use of the more than 1,000 photographs and 42 maps, the comprehensive index, the references within the text to appropriate articles for items and subjects, and the list of suggested reading at the end of each article make this a pleasant and effective work to use. The readability of the entries makes it easy to pass an hour or two in your favorite chair perusing and browsing with great pleasure.
The Encyclopedia was produced with remarkable speed The four years from the first meeting of the seven-member board of editors in 1992 until publication in the fall of 1996 required a herculean effort to identify topics and authors, research and write the entries, and complete the editing and production. Although one could quibble with the choice of some entries, certain inconsistences in coverage, the omission of an important bibliographical citation or two for some articles, the need for another map here or there, and the length of one article compared with another, there is little substantive criticism to focus on this work. However, one regret is the missed opportunity to expand participation beyond the nearly 400 writers that are included About 500 of the 1,700 entries were written by the two editors and two assistants. It is easy to understand why the editors took up the burden of writing so many entries. Time, money, frustration with individuals who did not meet their commitments, and the extra work required in identifying other writers are all part of the expla-nation Still, perhaps a little more effort given to the search for other contributors would have produced articles of equal or even better quality and given more western scholars an opportunity to share in this commendable and monumental project.
ALLAN KENT POWELL Utah State Historical Society
Uncommon Common Women: Ordinary Lives of the West.
By ANNE M. BUTLER and ONA SIPORIN (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996 x + 138 pp Paper, $21.95.)
The complicated lives of contemporary American women, made at once more difficult and easier through modern technology, seem distant and remote from the ordinary lives of the women who inhabited the American West during the last half of the nineteenth century The women of this earlier period could hardly have envisioned the fast-paced, push-button, electronically governed lifestyles that would introduce the twenty-first century Conversely, for modern women to understand the lives of women of the American West is equally difficult. Yet the existence of these earlier women has become the warp through which our current lives are woven, and it is through them, though often nameless, faceless, and unknown, that our heritage has evolved; through their stories we can see that the challenges they faced are close and immediate to our own.
Uncommon Common Women by Anne Butler and Ona Siporin is a slim, easyto-read volume that links bonds of womanhood across generations Divided into seven chapters, each discussing a different aspect of the lives of women during the western immigration era, the book reveals much about the struggles of race, class, and gender that strike a familiar chord with women of today. Dispelling stereotypes and the romantic nostalgia that often accompanies Americans' perceptions of frontier women, Uncommon Common Women emphasizes their diversity and humanity "forged from the reality of life's constant and often searing experiences" (p. 7).
A distinctive characteristic of this book lies in its unusual presentation. Co-authored by a conscientious historian and a gifted storyteller, the book is written in a multi-genre format. Anne Butler provides an appropriate, interesting historical background as a setting for Ona Siporin's rich tales of individual women's experiences Founded in fact, fiction, and folklore, these stories bring to life the experience of ten-year-old Rebecca Gowan who was saved from a Crow arrow by Turning Wolf, a member of the Lakota tribe, and who, later as Turning Wolf's wife, lived and raised her own family among the peace-loving Lakotas. They tell of former slave Susanna and her daughter who carried Susanna's son Joshua all the way from Alabama to Nebraska after his legs were broken by a white bully. They tell ofJewish Fruma who left Russia with her children to find an address in Omaha, Nebraska, where she knew her husband would be waiting and of the great courage and wit Fruma used in getting her sick baby past the health inspector as they disembarked in America. The stories tell about how "Manuela had been convicted, with her pimp, of murder It was the pimp who had killed the man—for money—but he had been let off, and Manuela had been incarcerated. A fiftyyear sentence, with seventy-five men as cell mates" (p 99).
Butler's historical contribution to the stories expands the scope of traditional history to include the impact made by ordinary people of all skin colors, all ages, and all situations. Siporin's storytelling is characterized by her beautiful, poetic language: "Perhaps you didn't know her before I told you this; but if you are a woman, you have known her all along. She is the prism of your dream; the light catches her in mid-air, and with a sudden intake of breath, you see the brilliant spectrum of your own colors" (p. 65). Both the historical narrative and the storytelling are enhanced by carefully chosen photographs that accompany the text The picture of Ada Blayney sitting out-of-doors at her treadle sewing machine in a stark landscape with only a small shack to interrupt the endless prairie leaves a haunting message with the reader. The photo of young Genevra Fornell filling a water barrel loaded in a wagon, bucket by bucket, speaks wordlessly of the arduous labor required by those early homesteaders The combination of history, storytelling, and photographs works in concert to give powerful voice to the lives of women in the frontier American West
It is with the mute photos, however, that I offer a small criticism of this work. The authors and editors obviously chose not to accompany each picture with a caption, feeling that the photograph alone left its own profound message; nevertheless, I found myself wanting an explanatory comment to accompany each illustration as it appeared in the text A photo credits appendix included in the book contains only bibliographic information, and I felt unsatisfied by the brevity of these entries. Despite this deficiency, reading Uncommon Common Women was richly rewarding for me. The book offered me new insights into lives of women in the American West, and in doing so it became a tool for increased self-awareness, thus generating bonds of sisterhood between me and my silent predecessors.
LAUREL BARLOW Weber State University
Change in the American West: Exploring the Human Dimension.
Edited by STEPHEN TCHUDI (Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee and the University of Nevada Press, 1996 xii +257 pp Paper, $14.95.)
The humanities that encompass the selections in this collection are not the usual humanities associated with academic disciplines. As they are defined in Stephen Tchudi's "Editor's Note" and inJ. Edward Chamberlin's lead essay, these are more public humanities "grounded in the urgencies of the everyday and the gritty particulars of place" (Chamberlin's phrase). Concerned with the particulars (italics mine) of human life, they can, Chamberlin asserts, enable us to respond to situations and events that are "appallingly incoherent, unstable, and sometimes even insane" with "intelligence and courage." The humanist works in this volume are intended to offer "just that sort of perspective on the unwieldy but fascinating theme of 'Change in the American West'" (Tchudi's phrase).
Can these humanist writings about unsettling events and processes in the evolving West help westerners cope with them? There is an editorial "yes," but most readers will find it to be a tall claim, one that is not supported by the four poems, the prose poem, the short story, and the thirteen essays that compose this volume.
There is no need, however, to expect them to do more than they are capable of doing Fortunately for this brief anthology, what they can do, without editorial inflation, is offer writing about changes in our West that is informative, readable, and often thought provoking.
Though all works adhere to the theme of change in the West, their forms are remarkably diverse: essays, poetry, fiction, even a panel discussion. Yet each form seems right for its subject. For example, the wild beauty of Utah's imperiled southern desert is captured more evocatively by T H Watkins's combination of photography and poetic prose than it could be through photos, poetry, or prose alone.
Subjects are as disparate as forms These three will give some idea of how varied the menu is: the way in which rhetoric and language have literally changed the flow of water into Nevada's Walker Lake; what eco-warrior assaults on the Glen Canyon Dam in the fiction of Edward Abbey and Leslie Silko reveal about strategies for environmental defense; and the impact that the transcontinental railroad had on the insularities of the early Salt Lake Theatre.
Throughout the selections in this volume are passages memorable as much for their style as their content. For example, T H Watkins's prediction for the future of "wildness" in Utah: "the Beehive State, like the rest of the West, [is becoming] more of what it has always been in human terms, an urban place where the engines of extraction desecrate the land even while industrial tourism celebrates it to death" (p. 182). Or the fine irony at the end of Bill Cowee's poem, "On the Demolition of the Virginia and Truckee Engine Shops" (p. 45):
Change in the American West is the first book in a series that will be drawn from Halcyon: A Journal of the Humanities and published by the Nevada Humanities Committee and the University of Nevada Press. Future volumes will deal with themes "central to our existence in the West." One hopes that their second will contain selections as rewarding as those in the first. One also hopes that the intent of their next venture will be more realistic than to offer intellectual and emotional renewal for all westerners who have been frazzled by change. To give us more fresh thinking about the American West, like that in the first volume, would be enough.
ROBERT S MIKKELSEN Emeritus, Weber State University
Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representation of an American People.
By JAMES C. FARIS. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. xvi + 392 pp. $39.95.)
Ever since the imprisonment of the Navajo people at Fort Sumner in the 1860s, they have been the subject of countless artists and photographers. Most of these have been EuroAmericans, who naturally portrayed the Navajo on their own terms, often with insensitive or even offensive results.
This volume on the history of Navajo photography is based on a single premise that all attempts to depict the Navajo people by non-native photographers fail to accurately show the lived experiences of the Navajo. This premise is certainly valid, since no artist, native or otherwise, can ever completely represent any group of people with his art Most historians intuitively understand the concept that the historical validity of photographs is limited by many factors, including time, place, subject, and the cultural bias of the photographer. As the basis for a journal article, this concept has definite value. As the subject for an entire book, however, it becomes pretentious and tedious.
Although the attractive dust jacket and photographs might entice some to buy this book in the hope of learning more about the early history of the Navajo, such a buyer would soon be disappointed In the first two chapters the reader is subjected to a lengthy diatribe that denounces outsiders' views regarding photography among native peoples This is written in semiological jargon that is nearly unintelligible to the average reader. A sample sentence reads: "The West had long privileged scopic enterprises and visual modalities, and by the mid-nineteenth century an observational visualist hegemony became a persistent focus of modernism in social, scientific, and aesthetic endeavors." Whew!
In chapters three through seven the author gets down to the business of criticizing the work of nearly every photographer of note who has operated in Navajo land, both living and dead Edward S Curtis is slammed for his "posed" and "excessively romantic" photographs, while Monson, Moon, and other photographers are denounced for taking candid photos without permission. Later photographers, such as Laura Gilpin, are taken to task for photographing scenes of interest to their Euro-American audience rather than to the Navajo themselves. All of the photographers are condemned for portraying the Navajo according to non-native ideals and standards, rather than their own. This being said, the author never actually stateswhat these standards ought to be, or how such documentation of the Navajo lifestyle should be accomplished, strongly implying instead that all non-native photographers should simply leave the Navajo alone Clearly it is much easier to be a photo critic than a photographic creator In addition, Faris consistently portrays the artist/subject encounter as a power struggle, with the dominant EuroAmerican photographers forcing their photographic will upon the conquered Navajo, powerless to protect themselves against the invasion of their privacy by the camera-toting pillagers
The photographs, too, have clearly been chosen with a political agenda in mind Of the tens of thousands of magnificent pictures of the Navajo people, the author has selected those that show Navajo reluctance at being photographed, dominance of EuroAmericans over Navajos, or subliminal racist overtones. After denouncing all non-Navajo photographers, the book contains only two pictures taken by Navajos, one indistinguishable in its style from the other photos in the book, and the other a very modernistic, protest-type picture of a Navajo with her census number painted on her forehead.
For those readers interested in an unbiased photographic history of the Navajo, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you enjoy reading critical essays that bemoan the lack of 1990s political correctness in 1870s photographs and historical figures, this volume may be very appealing Just remember to bring an anthropology degree or a very good dictionary.
BRADLEY W RICHARDS Ogden
