Book Notices

Coal Camp Days: A Boy's Remembrance

By Ricardo L. Garcia (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.295 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

The author has fictionalized his life as a child in a northern New Mexican coal camp during World War 11. Living among the usual diverse nationalities of a coal camp, the Hispanic family in the book experiences birth, death, and the ever-present danger of mining accidents.When his children express an interest in becoming coal miners, the father takes them into the mine and explains that the earth is like a giant layer cake.The coal is the frosting, and the miners are tiny insects trying to take the frosting out without having the cake collapse on them. But not until he himself falls victim to a cave-in do the children give up their romanticized notions of mining.

The book describes war celebrations and war fears, a fishing trip,Victory gardening, pranks, faith, and such details as sharing a bed with two brothers and having to take turns sleeping in the undesirable center position.

The Arduous Road: Salt Lake to Los Angeles, the Most Dficult Wagon Road in American History

By Leo Lyman and Larry Reese (Victorville,CA: Lyman Historical Research and Publishing, 2001.108 pp. Paper, $20.)

Former Mormon Battalion members returning to California took the first wagon over what became and remains a significant route of travel. Some seven thousand freighters, forty-niners, emigrants, and Mormon colonizers followed them. Some of these actually had northern Cahfornia as their goal but decided to trade the rigors of travel across the Salt Flats and the Sierra for a 300-mile desert road that offered only ten watering stops. This book begins by recounting some of the journeys on the trail during the 1840s and 1850s. The second section describes places and experiences along the trail in detail, quoting extensively from the journals of the travelers. Contemporary photographs and maps enhance the text and the historical photos.

The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War

By E. B. Long (198 1;reprint ed., Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xiii + 3 10 pp. Paper, $18.95.)

Brigham Young, "narrow, shrewd, and careful. .in his actions, if not always in his words, during the war years" (268), and Patrick Connor, "headstrong (though not to the point of recklessness).. .opinionated in the extreme, and always controversial" (270), take center stage in this volume that describes what was happening in Utah during the bloodletting in the East.

The author asserts that both men possessed character and principles and that both, "despite obvious faults, served their faiths and their nation well." He lets each speak for himself, with the strident rhetoric on one side counterpointing that on the other.This is a well-balanced, well-reasoned, and enlightening volume.

The Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860- 1900

By Robert S. McPherson (1988; reprint, Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001. 144 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a complex web of associations characterized human interaction in the Four Corners area. Utes, Paiutes, Navajos, cowboys, traders, miners, and Mormon settlers all mingled in the Four Corners area, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in alliance. Generally, the northern Navajos who had remained free during the Bosque Redondo incarceration used these relationships to good advantage. Although they had historically fought with the Utes, they formed alliances and kinship bonds with the Paiutes and, through them, with the Utes.

With the Mormons, the Navajos also maintained friendship and even "converted" to the religion as long as this stance served their interest, but when Mormons encroached on their territory the Navajos responded by sending their herds onto Mormon lands, protesting against Mormon appropriation of water and land, mutilating calves, and expanding the range of their herds. They eventually won the expulsion of Mormons from the reservation.With settlers in general, Navajos also refrained from open hostility but instead expanded their sheep grazing and, at times, threatened violence.

Author McPherson details these trends and calls the Navajo actions an aggressive defensive policy.The Navajos, he writes, were astute players in the events that saw their reservation boundaries expanded during the same period that other tribes lost territory.

Religion in the Modern American West

By Ferenc Morton Szasz (2000;reprint,Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.249 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

First published in hardback, and reviewed in UHQ 69 (Fall 2001), this comprehensive study of the relationship of religions and the West has been released in paper.

The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader

Edited by A. Gabriel Melkndez, M.Jane Young, Patricia Moore, and Patrick Pynes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.300 pp. Cloth, $45.00;paper, $24.95.)

The essays, stories, poems, and other writings in this volume are as diverse as the topic. Readers will find new understandings of both traditional and contemporary lives, for instance, in Rina Swentzell's explanation of a mid-century Tewa community's connection to its dwellings and space. The people interacted with their homes as if the adobe buildings were living beings. They also let the houses die of old age-when one house developed a large crack, the author's greatgrandmother said, "It has been a good house, it has been taken care of, fed, blessed and healed many times during its life, and now it is time for it to go back into the earth" (88). Soon afterward, the structure collapsed.

Angels of Darkness: A Drama in Three Ads

By Arthur Conan Doyle, Edited and with an introduction by Peter Blau (NewYork: Baker Street Irregulars in cooperation with the Toronto Public Library, 2001. x + 191 pp. ???.)

A facsimile of an unfinished play by the creator of Sherlock Holmes and five scholarly essays comprise this volume. The play closely resembles Conan Doyle's novel A Study in Scarlet, and an essay by Utahn Michael Homer explores the Mormon subplot-centered around fiendish Danite deeds-in both. Homer describes the literary, Masonic, and Spiritualist sources that influenced these works. He also details the author's first visit to Utah some forty years after writing the novel and play (and the crowd that, despite his negative writings about Mormonism, filled the Tabernacle to hear him speak), his belief in Spiritualism, and his growing appreciation of Mormonism's similarity to Spiritualism and of Joseph Smith's abilities as a medium.

When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood

By Margaret Bell, Edited and with an introduction by Mary Clearman Blew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. di + 253 pp. $24.95.)

A box of papers found in a garage turned out to be a remarkable memoir of an unusual childhood. In the care of a sadistic and shiftless stepfather, young Peggy did a man's work, acquired great skill at ranching and horsemanship, and endured horrific abuse.Yet instead of playing the victim, she "learned to take the blows without collapsing" (242) and grew tough, eventually breaking free and creating the life she wanted. As an adult in the 1940s she tried to get her vivid narrative published, but that had to wait until the manuscript's rediscovery. Its appearance now is a victory for those who struggle to let the female voice, too often silenced, be heard.