Book Reviews

Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado's Company Towns, 1890—1930

By RickJ Clyne (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 1999 xii 4- 121 pp Paper,$12.95.)

RICK J. CLYNE'S Coal People is ashort book but, in its modest way, an important one Clyne gives abrief history of the rise and decline of the company town in the southern Colorado coalfields, but his emphasis is on the inhabitants of the towns themselves. It is here that the book's importance lies. Relying primarily ontwo oral history collections, the University of Colorado's Coal Project and the Huerfano County Ethno-History Project, Clyne gives us a richly textured reconstruction of what life was like in the southern Colorado company towns inthe words of the people who lived and worked there What the reader gleans from this book is, above all, asense of the complexity of life inthese towns: immigrants both uprooted from the Old Country and its values and carrying on their traditions in the new land; ethnic groups at once suspicious ofeach other and working and celebrating together; bitter strikes and violence and frequent movement from campto camp and atthe same time apowerful sense of community that the men and women in the oral histories remember with profound nostalgia

Clyne sees this sense ofcommunity as something created by the coal people themselves. Wedged as they were between the misguided and often ruthless paternalism of the coal companies and the ten-year cycles of organization drives and strikes of their unions, the people of the camps were left pretty much to fend for themselves.Their plain words tell how they fared. It will be along time before this reviewer forgets August Andreatta, who wanted to be a lawyer, forced by family need into work instead ofhigh school and who, in his words, "ended upbeing a nobody. Nobody." Or Josephine Bazanelle remembering what itwas like to have aminer husband come home from work: "They [the children] better be quiet in the night because he got to have his sleep Yes sir.When he came just have his supper ready, yes sir.... Ifhe want togohonkey-tonkey someplace just let him go." Or Ed Tomsic remembering Slovenian weddings: "Any time a Slovene get married, the mine don't work on the Monday." Out of common dangers, privations, and needs, and against the ethnic animosities that pulled them apart, the coal people formed a remarkable society

Students of Colorado mining may find themselves taking issue with some of Clyne's judgments in his necessarily brief evaluations of the roles played by the coal companies and the unions in the lives of his coal people, but it will be a rare reader who will not be moved by the voices in his book and by the excellent selection of photographs of the towns and the people who lived in them.

ZEESE PAPANIKOLAS San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco, California

4 Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier

By Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown FirmageWoodward (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000.xxv + 497 pp.Cloth, $34.95.)

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN BECAUSE of both authors' personal interest in the four "Zinas," but for different reasons: Mary Woodward is a direct descendant of the Zinas, while Martha Bradley has been interested in researching and writing Utah and Mormon women's history for a number of years Both were lucky to find a wonderful subject—a four-generational family

Zina Baker was born May 2, 1786, in Plainfield, New Hampshire, to Oliver and Dorcas (Dimick) Baker. She married William Huntington, Jr., and died on July 8, 1839 Zina Diantha Huntington was born on January 31, 1821, in Watertown, New York, to William and Zina (Baker) Huntington. She married Henry Jacobs, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young and died on August 28, 1901 Zina Presendia Young was born on April 3, 1850, in Salt Lake City to Brigham and Zina Diantha Young She married Thomas Williams and Charles Ora Card and died on January 31, 1931. Zina Card was born on June 12, 1888, in Cardston, Alberta, Canada, to Charles and Zina Presendia Card. She married Hugh B Brown and died on December 19, 1974

Much of the information for this book was obtained from letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, and other family documents that had been passed down through Mary Woodward's family. The book is impressively footnoted. Rather than presenting four separate biographies, the book is written in narrative form relating the history of the women, starting in New York and following their lives and experiences as they moved west, finally settling in Utah. It begins with the story of Zina Baker Huntington and her conversion to the Mormon church While all of the women are interesting, the most historical attention through the years has been on Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young She was married to Joseph Smith and later to Brigham Young "while she was still married to Jacobs There has been much speculation on these marriages, and this publication does not shed any particularly new light on the topic, but her marriages are covered.

Mary Woodward has a personal memory of the women, as she is a direct descendant of the Zinas "She knew as a girl that she and her sisters were Mormons because of what the Zinas had sacrificed." Martha Bradley is attempting to understand these women "in the socio-historical context in which their lives played out." Both are reaching for a "connecting thread" that weaves our lives and experiences with the Zinas (vii). For example, the book discusses the family dynamics, from Zina Huntington's appeals to her mother for assistance before her first baby's birth to Zina Presendia traveling from Salt Lake City to Cardston to help care for Zina Brown "when she delivered her fourth child in 1916.

This work is an important contribution to the study of women's history and to Mormon history It is rare when four generations of men or women have contributed so much and have left such a rich historical record behind Contemporary settings add to our understanding not only of the women but also to the time period in Mormon history

LINDA THATCHER Utah State Historical Society

Tale of the Lucin: A Boat, a Railroad and the Great Salt Lake

By David Peterson (Trinidad, CA: OldWaterfront Publishing,2001 158pp Paper,$16.95.)

THIS WONDERFUL 158-PAGE BOOK tells the story of small boat built in 1893 as a passenger launch on San Francisco Bay. In 1902 the boat was moved by Southern Pacific to the Great Salt Lake to help build the earth-fill and wooden trestle across the lake, becoming the first of a fleet of both large and small boats operated by the railroad on the lake.

For anyone interested in the Great Salt Lake or railroads in Utah, this book is a must-read. It begins with a review of the boats and shipping on the lake, including the early explorers and early attempts by Patrick Connor to use his steamer Corinne to ship mineral ores from Stockton on the south shore to Corinne on the newly completed railroad line on the north shore. Included is a review of the resorts and their excursion boats.

Chapter Two relates the story of the construction of the railroad's Lucin Cutoff, beginning "with the early engineering studies and the 1900 decision to begin construction. The Lucin Cutoff was completed in 1904. The author relates many aspects of the cutoff's difficult construction features, a narrative intertwined with an account of the Southern Pacific's fleet of boats, specifically the Lucin, and how they did their part in the cutoff's construction. Especially "well done are examples of the challenges of using earth fill to cross what was,and still is,a lake that has at its bottom a thin salt crust layer atop "10,000 feet of mud." The delicate balance between the weight of the fill material and the ability of the lake bottom to support the load is still an issue today

Additional subchapters tell the stories of how the same construction crews and their boats built Southern Pacific's Dumbarton Cutoff across the southern part of San Francisco Bay, which was completed in 1910 Under the heading of "What's Next," the author presents material about the maintenance of the Lucin Cutoff and its complete replacement in 1959 with an allearthen causeway Construction of this new causeway also used a fleet of boats, and these later subchapters relate the modern methods of moving massive amounts of fill dirt through the use of large tugs and barges. Later subchapters bring the reader up to date "with the subsequent removal from service of the original wooden trestle and the reclamation of its virgin-growth redwood lumber

An interlude chapter does an excellent job at what the author calls biographies of all the San Francisco Bay launches that served on the Great Salt Lake In it are histories of the individual boats that Southern Pacific moved to and from the BayArea to Utah.

A final chapter returns to the later history of the boat Lucin, the survivor.This little boat was returned to San Francisco Bay with the completion of its namesake cutoff in 1904 There it was converted from its original passenger launch configuration to a more utilitarian tug configuration. Its use on the bay ended with its sale in 1917 and its movement to Portland, Oregon, for service at the mouth of the Columbia River In 1937 the tug was sold for its powerful gasoline engine, and in 1939 the hull was sold and converted from a medium-draft tug to a deep-draft fishing boat. The book ends seeking additional information and with a full bibliography that relates the author's journey for research for anyone who might want to follow in his path A full index is also included.

In his prologue the author states, "History does not neatly divide into separate topics and periods; it is a complex weave of all that has ever passed." Nothing confirms that statement better than this book While it is the story, or rather a tale, of a boat, it is also the story of a railroad and the Great Salt Lake and of man's crossing of the lake. The book makes excellent use of maps and photographs as visual aids There is no better history than history placed in context, which this book does very well

DON STRACK Centerville, Utah

Historical Dictionary of Mormonism 2nd ed.

By Davis Bitton (Lanhan,MD: Scarecrow Press,Inc.,2000 xxxii + 310 pp $69.50.)

THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS BOOK was published by Scarecrow Press in 1994 It is interesting that the press saw a need to publish a second edition.The volume is labeled a dictionary but is an encyclopedia with a short description of names and various terms Davis Bitton has expanded this volume with more than seventy new entries Most of the new terms are the biographies of recently called General Authorities. He has also added names such as Donny Osmond, Orson Scott Card, Gladys Knight, and Levi Peterson He has deleted names of released women's auxiliary leaders and added the names of the women now serving in those positions. He has also added the name ofW. Grant McMurray, the current president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, although he did not have the last Reorganized president in the first volume. He has also added a few new terms: for example, Hill Cumorah, Internet, International Magazines, Book of Commandments, Anthon Manuscript, and Temple Square Concert Series Some of the older terms were probably an oversight from the original edition.

The second edition has also dropped the few pictures that the first volume had, which is no great loss.The pictures were so poor in quality that they distracted rather than added The press has also changed the paper from a stark white to a more pleasing soft yellow. The book gives more importance to recent items rather than historical events or people. For example it includes all members of the first two quorums of the Seventy but does not include people like Heber C Kimball andWillard Richards

The book is written for the general public Anyone, whether a believer or a non-believer in Mormonism, can read the entries and understand a little more about that person or subject than he or she did before If not satisfied, the reader can seek out the excellent bibliography at the back of the book for more information. With a small volume such as this the question is what to select and what to exclude. Bitton has done a good job of selecting important items.

The book is well written.The cost, however, will probably prevent the average reader from buying it.

RONALD G WATT West Valley City, Utah

Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880—1940

By Sherry L.Smith (NewYork: Oxford University Press,2000.xii + 273 pp.$35.00.)

THIS FINE BOOK OFFERS A REVEALING challenge: choosing where to shelve it. Does it belong in American Indian history? Should it rest with works on the American West? Or should it accompany volumes on the Progressive Era's struggles to cope "with industrialization and modernity? The thoughtful contributions it makes to each category testify to the sophistication of Sherry L Smith's analysis of how and why the United States' dominant culture began to think differently about Native Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century During the 1880s, Americans imagined Indians as uncivilized beings who would, presumably, benefit from assimilationist policies designed to erase their unique cultural attributes and replace them with "American" ones The Dawes Act of 1887 embodied that notion By the 1930s, however, Americans imagined Indians and their unique cultural attributes as worthy of preservation, even emulation The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reflected this change In examining why this shift happened, Smith found a group of authors who wrote about Indians in newways Instead of finding faults in Indian cultures, they found virtues These writers began celebrating Indian lives and lifestyles as admirable in their own right and superior in some ways to the increasingly urban and industrial ways of mainstream America Smith argues that the collective output of these authors spurred mainstream America to "reimagine" Indians and to become more accepting of their practices, ultimately paving the way for dramatic changes in federal Indian policy under the leadership of Indian Commissioner John Collier.

Smith places these authors in three categories. "Eastern Adventurers" include Charles Erskine Scott Wood, George Bird Grinnell, and Walter McClintock and Mary Roberts Rinehart. She places Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and George Wharton James among "Western Enthusiasts.""Mothers of Reinvention" are Mary Austin, Anna Ickes, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Some names may not be familiar, but students of the West will recognize Grinnell and Linderman as authors who made ethnographic contributions in works still being read Ickes's name may be familiar; she was the wife of Harold Ickes, Secretary of Interior to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also appointed Collier. Anna Ickes also wrote Mesa Land, equal parts travelogue, amateur anthropology, and popular history, in which she encouraged readers to regard Indians not as curiosities but as human beings whose strong connections to nature, family, tribe, and tradition presented valuable examples for the modern world to follow That theme runs through the work of virtually every author in the study Also, the theme of the West as a regenerative force for these authors and for the nation occurs throughout.

Smith presents her well-documented case in clear, engaging prose A map showing where the authors traveled and which tribes they wrote about "would have improved the book Readers should know that this book speaks much more to the writers listed above than to the Indians about whom they "wrote.That does not diminish its significance These authors moved the nation's conscience and understanding of Indians in new directions, and this work provides a vital link in understanding why attitudes and policies towards Indians changed in the twentieth century

TODD KERSTETTER Texas Christian University Fort Worth, Texas

Religion in the Modern American West By Ferenc Morton Szasz

(Tucson: University ofArizona Press,2000 xvii + 249 pp $35.00.)

WHEN ONE IS TRYING TO SIZE UP the West, there is no substitute for a good map And that holds true for western places, western history and—the focus of this review—western religion as well

Given that, scholar Ferenc Morton Szasz, professor of history at the University of New Mexico, has performed a great service for the explorers of spirituality in the West. At one point, he quotes the nineteenth-century French slight: "The U.S has fifty-two religions and only two sauces."But his volume quickly proves that the French underestimated Americans. Szasz makes it clear that we have several hundred religions and only two sauces And at one time or another most of those religions found their wayWest "Religious plurality, rather than uniformity, has long been deemed a civic virtue," Szasz writes He then sets out to make his point

The West has proven to be such a hotbed of spiritual diversity, in fact, that Szasz can only give us a quick taste of the varieties and move along. One wishes, at times, that he had expanded his volume and given us more to digest—followed the train of William James, so to speak Still, even brief mentions of the legendary Bloys camp meetings inWestTexas,the Oahspe scripture, the novels of Harold BellWright, and other surprises are enough to pique the interest and allow readers a chance to mount deeper inquiries if they wish

As for format, the book ping-pongs between panoramic overviews and a focus on particular personalities (Albert Cecil Williams and Robert H Schuller, for instance), using specific people to signal universal trends Szasz handles the scheme well, never getting in the way of the information or the subject matter. His insightful asides blend in well "with other quoted references, and his clean, "encyclopedia" writing style easily accommodates a high-minded scholarly tone as well as flashes of the common touch.

The book is divided into three sections of thirty or forty years each, beginning with 1890 and concluding with the present day Topics discussed include "Varieties of Religious Leadership," "Western Religious Personalities" and "Western Religion as Public Controversy." Wisely, since the Latter-day Saints are an anomaly and tend to skew the dynamics, Szasz severs the Mormons from the potpourri of religions and gives them a slot of their own.

A wealth of footnotes and an exhaustive bibliography are included A fine introduction, epilogue, and full index are provided Not to quibble, but given the fervent nature of faith in the West, a flashy photograph or painting "would have done wonders to enhance what is a rather pedestrian jacket.

In the end, Szasz may not be a visionary like Wallace Stegner or a pioneer along the lines of Leonard Arrington, but he does show himself to be an excellent cartographer. And thanks to his book, students and practitioners of religion in the West will have an easier time getting the full lay of the land

JERRY JOHNSTON Salt Lake City

River Flowing from the Sunrise: An Environmental History of the Lower Sanfuan

ByJames M.Aton and Robert S.McPherson (Logan: Utah State University Press,2000. xvi + 216 pp.Paper,$21.95.)

UTAH SCHOLARS JAMES ATON AND Robert McPherson place the SanJuan River "at the center" of this fine book and then describe the experience and impact of "civilizations" as they "come and go" (ix) While the authors are specifically concerned with the "lower" or Utah portion of the river, they are fully aware of the entire river and its environs, as they are of their own environmental consciousness.

In many respects River Flowingfrom the Sunrise is an admirable book It is admirable in the team that offers it: Aton—introspective, evocative, widely read and fine-tuned to the river's spirit; McPherson—student of the inner Native American, regionalist, author of a growing list of books, and resident of southeastern Utah for half a lifetime The book is impressive, too, in the authority and force of Donald Worster's foreword and in the growing reputation of Utah State University Press. It is also tightly disciplined, rarely deviating from the focus of its environmental analysis Beginning with an introduction that gathers the geology of time's eons and the cultural march of twelve millennia, it moves perceptively through chapters on prehistory, Native Americans (then and now), exploration and science, livestock, and irrigated agriculture Then follow chapters on the failings of Mormon settlement and of gold and oil booms and reclamation projects and then, in contrast, chapters on the progress of environmental legislation and the flowering of the "SanJuan of the imagination."

It is a skillful marshalling of fact and illustration. The authors know and manage their vocabulary, scoring beautifully with language appropriate to the river of imagination as well as to the river of policy, utility, settlement, and cultural interaction The authors' command of the resources and literature is also impressive. They may have given short shrift to sources in Washington, D O, but they make up for it in careful attention to materials in Denver and in regional repositories elsewhere Among the book's merits as a guide to sources is its use of the hearings and testimony involved in two U.S. v. Utah cases in 1931 and 1960, to which the authors had microfilm access at the Utah State Historical Society (130-31 and 191).

Although Aton and McPherson succeed in the scientific standard they apply, there is never any doubt where they stand. Throughout the entire study, some people -wear black hats and some "wear white.The authors eschew polemics, but their division tends to resolve tensions between "expeditionaries and settlers" in favor of those who do not have to survive in the region. Their confidence in the formulas of presentism gets pretty tough on some of the older orders. This shows particularly in their using poor Albert Lyman as whipping boy in the chapter on imagination without recognizing that they too advance a particular interest by a narrow and pointed use of the frontier's "language of conquest."

After this bit of tilting, where does this review stand? My reading was not without discomfort After all, I myself failed in San Juan during the drought of 1955—56 But even as a "would-be conqueror" I happily conclude this is a thought-provoking and reader-friendly environmental antidote Many other Utah Historical Quarterly readers, including some who stand even nearer than I to the old orders, will find River Flowing to be interesting and useful reading

CHARLES S PETERSON Professor Emeritus, Utah State University

A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell

By Donald Worster (NewYork: Oxford University Press,2001 xii + 673 pp $35.00.)

THE STORIES SURROUNDING the discovery, conquest, and settlement of the American West, particularly that land of deserts, canyons, and mesas situated between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, have produced a litany of names evoking images of courage, vision, and fortitude None, however, can match that ofJohn Wesley Powell in color, romance, or the sheer breadth of one man's impact on history. His epic voyage down the Green and Colorado rivers still excites the imagination, and his name is invoked "whenever the debate over the future of the Colorado Plateau rages anew. Now, at last, we have a biography that gives a complete picture of a very complex man with a soaring ego and faults to match Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, has produced a monumental volume which is at once a tribute to its subject and a fetching portrait of the United States struggling to find its soul in the years following the Civil War

The man Worster reveals to us is a mass of contradictions Worster shows us a Powell deeply distrustful of government power who nevertheless spent his life as an integral part of the federal bureaucracy, a Powell who seemingly thrived on adventure but seemed quite content to live most of his days in a tame urban environment, and a Powell who loved science and the interchange of ideas but who lacked even the rudiments of formal education. However, we also are shown a man who refused to be discouraged or deterred by any obstacles, physical, financial, or political. Whether exploring the Grand Canyon country, founding the Bureau of American Ethnology, or serving as director of the United States Geological Survey, John Wesley Powell made his way by dogged determination and prodigious strength of character. Worster's portrait reveals a man who propelled himself to greatness without ever compromising the ethical principles inherited from his devout Methodist forbears.

None of the groups who have tried to make the major into an icon for their causes will be pleased with the man revealed in these pages Environmentalists will be distressed to learn that Powell saw nature as cruel and disordered, needing to be reshaped to the needs of human society Capitalist entrepreneurs will be surprised to learn that his vision of development in the West was very socialistic, concentrating on basin-wide farming cooperatives with communal ownership of water and timber Advocates for the American Indian will most certainly be angry with Powell's view that the only hope for the Native peoples of the region was to tear them away from all emotional and religious connection to their ancestral lands

This book is not without its faults While generally tightly written in an engaging style, the "work slips from time to time into a thicket of minutiae in which the author's grand purpose is seemingly lost There are also times "when the work moves from a chronological narrative to a topical one and back again, leaving the reader somewhat perplexed However, the thoroughness of the research and the consistently high quality of the writing make these faults inconsequential This book is required reading for anyone with the slightest interest in the history of the American West

HANK HASSELL Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, Arizona

Seeing Salt Lake City: The Legacy of the Shipler Photographers

ByAlan Barnett (Salt Lake City: Signature Books,2000 xiv + 174pp $49.95.)

THE UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S Shipler Photograph Collection is a rich resource for historians, and Alan Barnett, former information services manager for the society, has done a real service in bringing together a sampling of photographs from the collection in his book Seeing Salt Lake City: The Legacyof the Shipler Photographers. The collection consists of more than 100,000 images from Idaho,Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah, the bulk of which are of Salt Lake City, taken between 1903 and 1979 by three generations of commercial photographers: James William Shipler, who established a studio in Salt Lake City in 1890, his son Harry, and Harry's son Bill The Historical Society purchased the collection in 1988 and has since worked to preserve and make it available to the public

Barnett has brought together what he says is "a representative sampling" from the collection of photographs of Salt Lake City, 174 in all.The photographs are arranged chronologically, beginning with a view of the Fremont School taken on February 19, 1903, and ending with a shot of the Crystal Palace Market on August 20, 1940 They include mainly buildings and street scenes but also such subjects as parades, ethnic neighborhoods, striking streetcar workers, newsboys, and the city's red light district The purpose of the book, he says, is two-fold: "to highlight the relatively unknown work of the Shiplers using selected examples to illustrate the breadth, depth, and quality of their work"; and to provide insight into the history of Salt Lake City Barnett does not say much about the criteria he used in selecting the photographs or in what ways they are representative I often found myself wondering why he chose particular photographs. With only a few exceptions, the photographs he has included are tremendously absorbing and provide a-wealth of information.

The collection as a whole, and the photographs assembled in the book, do have their limitations. Because for the most part they were commissioned by a variety of clients for their own purposes, there is much they do not reveal, in particular the stories of those who were positioned and constructed as the powerless, those on the margins, the strangers, the others, the alien. There are no images, for example, of the marches and rallies of the unemployed in Salt Lake during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and most of the faces in the photographs are white Still, there is much they do tell us The early twentieth century was a particularly crucial time in Salt Lake City's history, and the photographs, both in the Shipler collection as a whole and those in Seeing Salt Lake City, help us understand it. When interrogated, analyzed, and interpreted with care, they help render Salt Lake's history visible, allowing us to articulate some of the "ways the city organized itself over time, what its interests and aspirations were, the "ways it thought, what it valued, the manner in which particular groups sought to represent themselves and establish their authority and their place, and the relations of power that existed among various groups. For a number of historians of Utah practicing in the last two decades or so, the idea that Utah is a story of many peoples with many voices—voices that must be heard—has been a guidepost and has led to a much-expanded telling of Utah's past that is more varied, plural, multivocal, and multicultural than -were previous accounts. Even with their limitations, the photographs in Seeing Salt Lake City help us understand this.

Photographs, however, like other pieces of evidence, do not speak for themselves They have to be "read," and I would like Barnett to have undertaken a more thorough reading than he does of the photographs he has brought together. I would have liked him to do more interpretative work, both in his introductory essay and in the captions for each photograph, offering his own insights about what the photographs allow us to conclude about the history of Salt Lake City, and what they do not, against which readers could react and compare their own readings.

JOHN S. MCCORMICK Salt Lake Community College

William Henry Holmes and the Rediscovery of the American West

By Kevin J Ferlund (Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press,2000.xvii + 300 pp.$39.95)

ARTIST, ARCHAEOLOGIST, GEOLOGIST, museum curator: W. H. Holmes excelled at them all in his brilliant career between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression During that period he rose to the very heights of each profession that he wove into his life Like his boss John Wesley Powell, Holmes was one of those great nineteenth-century polymaths; he trained himself in science and art and became a major name in these fields during his lifetime.

Holmes was born on the southern Ohio frontier and grew up not far from Powell He had some formal education, and like many bright young men of the time he spent a few years teaching school But his ambition to be an artist took him to the big city, first to Cleveland and then to the nation's capital His talent was noticed one day, and through various connections he met Ferdinand Meek, the famous paleontologist, and then geologist Ferdinand B Hayden Hayden hired him for his survey as an illustrator, and Holmes never looked back He ended up holding many important field and then bureaucratic positions for the Hayden Survey, the United States Geological Survey, the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the Field Museum in Chicago

As an artist, Holmes excelled as a master of scientific illustration As Kevin Ferlund points out, "Holmes' landscapes reveal...an artist possessed by the confidence that his work, informed by science, could achieve nothing less than an exact picture of the physical world." Moreover, as one well-known contemporary artist once told me, "His work stands up aesthetically "with anything done in America in the nineteenth century."

While working for Hayden in Colorado in the mid-1870s, Holmes quickly picked up geology and archaeology. His insights into "what became known as laccolithic structures in his study of the Carrizo Mountains in Arizona helped pave the way for the work of the great geologist Grove Karl Gilbert in his classic studies of the Henry Mountains. Holmes also became an expert of prehistoric rock art and ceramics, and he was one of the first to suggest that the modern pueblo tribes descended from the ancient cliff dwellers, or Anasazi In fact, his superb fieldwork in those seasons with Hayden later led School of American Research director Edgar L Hewitt to call Holmes "the founder of the science of southwestern archaeology," a title usually given to Adolph Bandelier

When the USGS was formed in 1878, Clarence King hired Holmes to continue his work as geologist and illustrator. His subsequent collaboration "with Clarence E Dutton on the classic Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District was unsurpassed as geologic science, art, and scientific prose Holmes's contribution as both an artist and a scientist was extraordinary His illustrations are usually the first choice by editors seeking a Grand Canyon depiction today

As the 1880s rolled on, Holmes became more and more enmeshed in his work at the Bureau of American Ethnology, and by 1889 he was working there fulltime He "was eventually named director after Powell died in 1902 Besides administration, Holmes was the national expert on prehistoric ceramics and mining; he was also the leading authority on human antiquity in America (although his demand for high standards of evidence ended up hurting his reputation after the Folsom and Clovis discoveries in New Mexico) Holmes also wrote the bill that became the very significant Antiquities Act, which Theodore Roosevelt signed into law in 1906.

When Holmes died in 1933 at the age of 86, however, the world had passed him by; modernism and cultural relativism had superseded the worlds of art and archaeology that he had lived in It has taken a reawakening of interest in the Colorado Plateau and its environmental and aesthetic issues to get people talking about him again. This began with Wallace Stegner and his landmark book on Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. For many years, however, only Holmes's art was discussed Now Ferlund has done an outstanding job of filling in the whole picture of his many significant professional accomplishments as both an artist and a scientist This book joins a growing list of books that have come out recently on Powell and his survey men, including Donald Worster's new biography, A River Running West: The Life of'John Wesley Powell. One hopes now that someone will do for Clarence E Dutton what Worster and Ferlund have done for Powell and Holmes, respectively. This is a well-researched, smoothly written biography of W. H. Holmes's professional life. I recommend it highly for anyone interested in Utah, the West, or the history of the earth and social sciences in America

JAMES M ATON Southern Utah University