Book Reviews

Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West.

By Richard W.Etulain. (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press,2006.xiii + 466 pp.Cloth,$39.95; paper,$24.95.)

IN THIS ENGAGING NARRATIVE,Richard W.Etulain,professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico,traces the history of the western third of the continental United States.The author emphasizes two overarching themes: rapid-fire change occasioned by forces such as mineral rushes and defense spending and social complexity and diversity.Rejecting both the triumphal,Turnerian school of frontier history and the generally condemnatory,pessimistic vision of the New Western historians,Etulain strives for a “nuanced”account that avoids forcing historical actors into “molds of heroism or villainy”(5).For instance,the author describes both the fur trade’s destructive environmental impact and the trappers’promotion of America’s national interests.

Etulain treats standard topics in western history including Native Americans, imperial rivalries,the fur trade,Mormonism,extractive industries,homesteading, and the impacts of World War II and the Cold War.The book’s treatment of the region’s cultural history is exceptionally rich and vibrant.Major western writers, art and film are effectively described and interpreted.Delightful anecdotes, quotations from historical documents and memorable details enliven the book. The book lacks footnotes but does offer suggestions for additional reading at the end of each chapter.Etulain’s familiarity with western American historical writing enables him to summarize other scholars’findings,quote key interpretive conclusions of their work,and offer a state-of-the-art overview of the field. Frustratingly,he furnishes names for only some of the scholars whom he quotes.

In describing nineteenth-century Utah and Mormonism Etulain draws upon classics by Wallace Stegner,Thomas O’Dea,and Leonard Arrington and upon recent work by authors including Richard Bushman and Will Bagley.Etulain characterizes Brigham Young as “one of the most remarkable of all westerners” because of his abilities as an organizer and colonizer (149).The Mountain Meadows Massacre is portrayed as a joint attack perpetrated by Indians and Mormons,the direct result of orders by local civil and ecclesiastical leaders but the indirect result of Mormon leaders’behavior,including their “abuse of Indian allies”(154).In a minor error,Etulain conflates the generally discredited idea of an Outer Cordon of settlements with the concept of a Mormon Corridor of settlements.The peculiarities of pioneer Utah’s theodemocracy,economic relations between the Mormons and non-Mormon capitalists,and plural marriage are cogently summarized,as is Mormonism’s accommodation of the forces of modernization late in the nineteenth century.

Readers who are familiar with Utah’s history will find many parallels between the developments Etulain describes for the West at large and Utah’s economic development and social diversity.To the casual reader, though, these parallels may be obscured by the author’s emphasis upon Utah’s uniqueness as a Mormon stronghold.For instance,the author appropriately contrasts the social structure of Mormon settlements in Utah with that of western mining communities but implies that Utah lacked mining towns;the book’s map of the mining frontier identifies mining towns or regions in every western state except for Utah and New Mexico.The author contrasts the racial and ethnic diversity of other western cities early in the twentieth century with Salt Lake City,alleging that “racial and ethnic diversity ...had little impact on Salt Lake City”(310).In relative terms,the contrast is apt,but it is also misleading in the sense that it obscures the presence of substantial numbers of Italian,Greek,and Japanese residents in the city.Utah’s significant concentration of World War II defense installations and industries is also not acknowledged.Etulain’s map showing “Military Sites and Major Industries in the West,1940s-1950s”shows at least one facility in every western state except for Utah and Montana.

While Etulain’s portrayal of Utah’s role in western history is uneven,he nevertheless offers an up-to-date,lively and objective survey of western American history.

BRIAN Q.CANNON Brigham Young University

History May Be Searched in Vain:A Military History of the Mormon Battalion.

By Sherman L.Fleek.(Spokane:The Arthur H.Clark Company,2006.414 pp.Cloth,$37.50.)

HISTORY MAY BE SEARCHED IN VAIN provides a fresh perspective on the march of the Mormon Battalion.The author,a retired military officer,is clearly smitten with the legacy of the Battalion.He perceptively observes in the book’s introduction,“History loves incongruities,turnabouts,and reversals”(21).The Mormon Battalion provides a plethora of each for the author to extrapolate from. Other satisfactory looks at the general subject have appeared over the years, including Daniel Tyler’s A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War,1846-47 first published in 1881,B.H.Roberts The Mormon Battalion,Its History and Achievements in 1919,John F.Yurtinis’unpublished 1975 dissertation “A Ram in the Thicket:The Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War,”Mary Baldwin Ricketts’narrative history The Mormon Battalion:U.S.Army of the West,1846-1848 published in 1996,and a superb documentary edition by David Bigler and Will Bagley in 2000, Army of Israel:Mormon Battalion Narratives.However,never before has the Mormon Battalion’s story been told in the main from “the perspective of professional arms,”Fleek writes.“The military world can be puzzling and difficult for some,”with its “obsolete”terms,practices,and methods used,the author argues (26).

Fleek also shows that much of the severe discipline and harsh punishment seen by Mormon Battalion volunteers as unwarranted and unnecessary was common in the army of the day.So,too,were the onerous demands made by commanding officers on the enlisted men.

Only a small number of soldiers have encountered more arduous circumstances than those faced by these volunteers in 1846.Husbands and fathers left their families alone on the harsh,demanding plains to answer Brigham Young’s call to undertake an unpredictable nineteen-hundred mile crossing of the American Southwest under the command of Lt.Col.Phillip St.George Cooke.The dogged commitment manifest by this sobering act left a lasting legacy for the Battalion. “Few have faced the difficult circumstances that the Mormon Battalion experienced,”Fleek observes (28).The author’s chosen tack,writing a military history of the Battalion,reflects his many years of service as an officer in the U.S.Army.Thus he brings a perspective to the march of the Mormon Battalion shared by few others.Rather than only focusing on the motivations,personalities,and faith promoting stories of these volunteers,Sherman Fleek approaches the undertaking, above all,as an armed,military venture.The Battalion’s march is correctly viewed, in his opinion,as an act of arms,not as a pioneer journey.As he reminds readers, the Mormon Battalion was first and foremost a military entity.Therefore,to truly understand the Battalion’s place in history,“one must study the profession of arms” (34).The common way of viewing the experience until now has been to see the Battalion as a “group of pioneers,”not specifically as soldiers (26).

Fleek also deserves the appreciation of future scholars when he calls attention to the 2003 acquisition by the University of Utah’s Marriott Library of the writings of Dr.George B.Sanderson—known to the edgy Mormon volunteers as “Dr.Death.”

In summary, History May Be Searched in Vain, may possibly be,in this reviewer’s consideration,the most important narrative on the Mormon Battalion to appear in years.The author is convincing in his sense that the march was,first and foremost,a military undertaking.And his use of recently uncovered materials,such as the Sanderson journal,breathes new life into the story.

M. GUY BISHOP Woods Cross

Spreading the Word:A History of Information in the California Gold Rush.

By Richard T.Stillson.(Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press,2006.viii + 274 pp.Cloth, $55.95.)

IN THIS NEW AND UNIQUE STUDY of the California Gold Rush,Richard T.Stillson,analyzes how word of the discovery of gold spread rapidly from California to the eastern regions,and how that information mobilized tens of thousands to speed westward.Stillson is well qualified for this study possessing Ph.D’s in both economics and history,and is a published scholar on the theory and history of information in financial markets.He teaches history at George Mason University.Stillson utilizes impressive research from period newspapers, from small-town to national newsprint,guidebooks and maps,rumors,and private communications.Pulling these many sources into a manageable study was a monumental work.

Stillson demonstrates how information of the discovery quickly spread from the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill and resulted in “the largest internal migration in U.S.History”(1).He points out that the majority of gold seekers were from the East or Midwest and had little reliable knowledge of the West, Western travel,or gold mining.Most understood that the trip was dangerous. Stories of mountain men,Native American tribes,and an incredible geography of vast plains,rugged mountains,and deserts frequented discussion and fueled caution.Intuitively the gold seekers understood that their preparations would mean the difference between life and death.Undaunted,they had to sift through rumor and printed information,little of which was credible,decide on a course of action, and put life on the line in the hope of striking it rich.Stillson demonstrates that after the first wave of gold seekers reached California in 1849,their letters to family and friends in the east rapidly changed perspectives from the wild and speculative with more reliable and solid information.Because these letters and journals were often published,the next wave of gold rushers could use the information to travel better routes,avoid some of the worst delays and pitfalls,and,after arriving in California,understand better where and how to look for gold.

Spreading the Word is an interesting and important study for the gold rush, California,and media historians.It is a significant fresh look at what many may consider an over examined subject.Stillson’s research and methods are notable;his conclusions valid and logical.Most important are his contributions in showing how communication and technology,with its connection of media,myth,and reality,impacted society during the hazardous and exciting Gold Rush Era.The only drawback to this study is that while it is written in straightforward,easy to read prose that follows a logical organization of information,its appeal will be of limited interest to a general audience.

JOHN D. BARTON Utah State University Uintah Basin Campus

Recollections of Past Days,The Autobiography of Patience Loader Rozsa Archer.

Sandra Ailey Petree,ed.(Logan:Utah State University Press,2006.xii + 267 pp. Cloth,$32.95.)

PART OF UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS’S Life Writings of Frontier Women’s Series, Recollections of Past Days,edited by Sandra Ailey Petree,associate professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University,joins an abundance of recent books and articles on the Martin and Willie Handcart Company remembering their overland ordeal in 1856.Writing thirty years after the event, Patience Loader used three notebooks and 335 hand-written pages to record her handcart experience and the events of her long life.

It is the completeness of her account that makes this volume so valuable. Patience not only narrated her handcart journey,but told of her early life in England,her marriage to Camp Floyd soldier John Rozsa,and her time in Washington,D.C.during the Civil War when John served in the Army of the Potomac.After his discharge and his death near Leavenworth,she returned to Utah.

Patience spent hard years making a living for her family.She worked under terrible conditions as a cook for miners in a Utah canyon.Later,she married John Archer and spent the remaining years of her life caring for her children and grandchildren and participating in civic and church affairs in Pleasant Grove. Patience narrates it all in detail.

Petree’s organization of her record and extensive research is evident in the introduction and in the informative footnotes,photos,maps,and appendices.The discussion in the Introduction of autobiographical writing and specifically women’s writing is an excellent introduction to Patience’s record.Through Petree’s research we are introduced to village life in England with pictures of the Loader home,as well as scenes Patience described in her diary.For instance,the reader might puzzle over her mention of a nineteenth century bathing wagon had not Petree found a drawing of and an advertisement for one.

The autobiography is just as thorough and honest.When the respectable and educated Loader family arrived by ship in New York City they worked until they were assigned to a handcart company.Patience wrote of their dismay and the family’s fear that their mother was too frail to make such a journey.Personally such a plan did not appeal to Patience either.She wrote,“I could not see it right at all to want us to do such a humeliating [sic] thing to be...harnest up like cattle and pull a handcart....”(57).Patience wrote to her brother-in-law John Jacques,still in Liverpool,and asked him to see if they could be reassigned to a wagon train. John responded with a scathing letter of chastisement and must have reported their reluctance to go on foot.After overhearing rumors that his name had been reported in the Millennial Star as apostatizing,John Loader said,“Mother I am going to Utah[.] I will pull the hand cart if I die on the road”(57).Unfortunately that is what happened to him.

A review can do little justice to the quality and content of Patience’s record of their overland travel.Needless to say,they endured the problems of suffering, death,hunger,and cold,and each event is faithfully entered in her record.

AUDREY GODFREY Logan

Big Dams of the New Deal Era:A Confluence of Engineering and Politics.

By David P.Billington and Donald C.Jackson.(Norman:University of Oklahoma Press,2006. xiv + 369 pp.Cloth,$36.95.)

I CAN’T THINK OF ANOTHER TITLE like this one even though it covers a familiar topic:the big dam era in the western United States.There are,of course, many books about the politicians who authorized the dams and the companies that built them.But there are few books that pay attention to the engineers who actually did the design work.This sweeping regional survey—much of it based on archival research—marries bureaucratic history to the history of technology. Unlike most dam historians (myself included),Billington and Jackson know a lot about the science and engineering of dams.The result is a singular achievement.

The authors begin with two chapters that consider the origins of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.They explain how the former agency got into the power-producing business and how the latter agency got into the dam-building business.Then the book separately discusses four watershed systems and their keystone dams—the Colorado (Hoover Dam),the Columbia (Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams),the Missouri (Fort Peck and Garrison dams),and the Sacramento-San Joaquin (Shasta and Friant dams).Strictly speaking, Big Dams covers the interwar period rather than the New Deal era;the authors demonstrate that many of these projects had been planned before the Depression-era administration of FDR gave them momentum.New Deal power had its limits,however:proposals for TVA-style regional authorities failed to win support in the West.

Big Dams offers more facts than interpretations,yet one suspects that the authors agree more with Donald Pisani than Donald Worster about the relationship between dams and authority.Billington and Jackson avoid a teleological narrative about the planned rise of a technocratic elite.They highlight the role of contingencies like the Mississippi flood of 1927,the Columbia flood of 1948,and the Great Depression itself.Furthermore,by placing dam design at the center of their story,they demonstrate that anonymous mid-level bureaucrats shaped the western waterscape as much as anyone.Uncomfortable with “blind boosterism or knee-jerk opposition”about dams,the authors prefer to dispassionately and painstakingly describe the technical work of dam engineers.

Billington and Jackson make the interesting point that these dams that now symbolize technological modernity and progress were actually designed conservatively.Engineers had two basic design choices,one old and one new:the “massive”dam type (which commandingly holds back water with its sheer bulk) and the “structural”dam type (which artfully displaces water pressure onto its rock abutments).Although the “massive”tradition required far more labor and material, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps consistently went back to the old trough.Their big dams were far bigger than they had to be.Without the Art Deco flourishes added to Hoover Dam as an afterthought,we might see the edifice for what it is:comparatively wasteful and inefficient.

Generalists may find this book hard to digest.Its very virtues—its comprehensiveness,its evenhandedness,and its technical detail—make it far less readable than Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert .However, Big Dams of the New Deal Era will become a standard reference for specialists.Scores of illustrations (maps,diagrams, photographs) enhance the text.I have come to expect that books from the University of Oklahoma Press will be handsomely designed and produced,and this one is no exception.

JAREDFARMER University of Southern California

The Marrow of Human Experience:Essays on Folklore.

By William A.Wilson,Edited by Jill Terry Rudy.(Logan:Utah State University Press,2006.vi + 321 pp.Paper,$24.95.)

THE LIFE WORK of folklorist William A.(Bert) Wilson,whose book of selected essays, The Marrow of Human Experience,has been edited by his BYU colleague and fellow-folklorist Jill Terry Rudy,exemplifies what we might call lived scholarship. Whatever Bert Wilson teaches and writes is grounded in and motivated by the ethos imprinted upon him through membership in his family and through participation in the life of the small,vital southern Idaho community of his childhood and adolescence.While claims about the power of early experience could be made about practically anyone,not everyone is sufficiently aware of the significance of that early experience to direct it mindfully toward the fulfillment of his or her calling.But as the seventeen essays in The Marrow of Human Experience (and his daughter Denise Wilson Jamsa’s biographical sketch of him at the end of the volume) show repeatedly,the primal motivations of this scholar-teacher’s life–love of learning,faithful keeping of his LDS religion,ongoing fostering of community and connectedness with others,love of story–are inscribed in everything he has produced.

Personal involvement with one’s scholarly material,known as reflexivity,has until quite recently been anathema in many academic fields,though attitudes have been changing in the crucible of post modernity,and it must be noted that Wilson’s reflexivity–his candor,as an academic,about his life-concerns—has been at times costly and painful to him.Nonetheless,we can read the cover of this book,which juxtaposes a sepia-tinted snapshot of his mother as a young woman with a contemporary color image of a derelict log cabin,the only structure remaining in the southern Idaho ghost town that had been his mother’s childhood home,as a testament to Bert Wilson’s ongoing and unapologetic and wholehearted reflexivity.

The essays in the volume are arranged into three thematic categories–first,folk- lore as a subject of study and folklorists as players in the world of public arts and education policy;second,Finland and the problematic,two-edged role that nineteenth-century Romantic Nationalism played in Finland’s development as a nation (the subject of Wilson’s doctoral dissertation,which in 1976 became a groundbreaking,prize-winning book, Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland); and third,the areas closest to the author personally–religion and family.Were we to rearrange these essays chronologically,we would see that Wilson has been speaking and writing about all three areas throughout his four-decade career. Twelve of the essays,over two-thirds,were originally speeches that he delivered to live audiences (three are published here for the first time),a fitting indication of the author’s devotion to connectedness with others.His passion for building bridges with others is further attested in the variety of audiences addressed.Only seven of the essays were originally directed to folklorists;the rest were directed to various audiences of non-folklorists:historians,musicologists,general humanities faculty,students just beginning to learn about folklore,Mormons.The author’s bridge-building propensity,his care to ensure that everyone be included,means that the early part of every address to a non-folklorist audience is devoted to basics:what folklore is,its provenance,its necessity.

Utah historians know Bert Wilson as the fellow who brought the Utah State Historical Society into an extended and mutually satisfying association with the Folklore Society of Utah.He tells the story in the essay “Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall,”his dinner address to the 1991 joint annual meeting of the two scholarly societies.Here he shows similarities between folkloristics and historiography (also acknowledging distinctions) and delineates the value for historians in making judicious and informed use of folklore materials.

Folklorists internationally know Bert Wilson as the first to throw light on Romantic Nationalism as a theorized and effective plan of action for oppressed peoples (and embraced by the Finns,who had been under Swedish domination for six hundred years before being catapulted into Russian fiefdom) and to show how this construct of nineteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder was to be contrasted with the contemporaneous “evolutionary anthropology”dear to English theorists.

Closer to home,folklorists know Bert Wilson both as a mentor and a scholar of high stature and as a humane and fearless friend.Editor Jill Terry Rudy has arranged to preface each essay in the volume with a short introductory piece by a folklorist whose work is related to the subject of the essay.Every essay is thus burnished by the evaluation of a fellow-professional,and the anthology as a whole is made even more valuable in classrooms and on reading lists in history,humanities,and social-science courses across the board.This book builds bridges.

POLLY STEWART Salt Lake City