Book Reviews

On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape.

By Jared Farmer. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. xvi + 455 pp. Cloth,$29.95.)

THIS SPLENDID VOLUME is a tour-de-force of historical scholarship that all lovers of Utah history will want to read. The author is Jared Farmer, a native of Provo and an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Ambitious, imaginative, theoretically sophisticated, and highly engaging, this volume tells the story of the creation of Mount Timpanogos as a cultural landmark and the concomitant fading of Utah Lake and the Lake Utes from most Utahns’ historical memory.Three sections comprise the book.

In Part I, Farmer describes Utah Lake at the time of the founding of Provo as an abundant landscape teeming with fish and capable of supporting more than one thousand Utes. Rough-and-tumble Mormons, largely natives of the western frontier and the southern states, settled along the Provo River where they soon clashed with the Utes and murdered one of them. Tensions mounted, culminating in the Battle of Provo River and the subsequent slaughter of at least eleven Ute men on the frozen surface of Utah Lake near Table Rock. Drawing upon a rich array of archival sources, Farmer recounts the awful tale vividly. Farmer greatly exceeds other scholars’ more careful estimates of both the number of Utes who inhabited the valley and the number who died in the Provo River battle. Dismissing contemporary counts of “about forty” as “deliberate undercounting” he readily accepts a much higher estimate reported by a non-combatant, Epsy Jane Williams, in a later reminiscence (76).

The author demonstrates the importance of Utah Lake as a source of fish for the first generation of Mormon settlers and then charts the ecological changes that occurred as streambeds were channelized, river water was withdrawn for irrigation, and at least two dozen non-native aquatic species were introduced. Over time, Anglos recast the landscape that greeted the first white settlers as a desert and they reduced the Utes to a handful of stereotypical good and bad Indians, epitomized by Walkara and Sowiette.

In Part II, Farmer examines the symbolic importance of mountains for early Mormons and argues that in the nineteenth century Mt. Nebo “accumulated far more symbolism than any other alpine summit in Utah”; by contrast, locals did not perceive or celebrate the entire massif of Timpanogos as a single mountain until early in the twentieth century (163). A key factor in distinguishing the peak was the tradition of yearly group hikes to the summit begun by Eugene Roberts in 1912. By the 1990s, the naming of the LDS Church’s Mount Timpanogos Temple seemed natural because “the mountain meant too much to ignore” (236). Farmer’s creative narrative of the cultural construction of Timpanogos as a twentieth-century phenomenon invites debate. As he acknowledges, the Stansbury Expedition of 1849-50 identified a “Timpanogos Pk” as did federal surveyor Clarence King in 1869. But it is true that the label Timpanogos in nineteenthcentury writing usually refers to a river (the Provo) rather than a mountain. Moreover, early Utah artists rarely focused upon individual peaks as landmarks, aside from an 1865 painting of Mt. Nebo by C. C.A. Christensen.

In Part III, Farmer traces the origins of pseudo-Indian legends surrounding Mt.Timpanogos to Eugene Roberts, Boy Scout leaders and William Hanson, who composed an Indian opera called The Bleeding Heart. Farmer effectively compares the legend of Timpanogos to other pseudo-Indian legends of lover’s leaps. Ironically, Farmer notes, in popular memory these fictive Indians and “their” mountain supplanted the real Utes and the lake that sustained both them and the Mormons.

A charming sense of humor graces the book. For instance, following his discussion of the paving of access roads to Aspen Grove in the 1930s, Farmer quips that the annual hike up Mount Timpanogos “had become a well-oiled event” (205).

This book’s breadth, wit, eloquence, and creative reinterpretation of local history in light of key developments in American cultural history make it a must-read.

BRIAN Q CANNON Brigham Young University

At Sword’s Point, Part I: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858.

Edited by William P. MacKinnon, Vol. 10 of Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier Series. (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2008. 544 pp. Cloth,$45.00.)

FOR THE PAST HALF CENTURY,William MacKinnon has been immersed in the Utah War and nineteenth-century American politics while living in the twentieth century and being engaged in a successful career in business. At Sword’s Point, Part I is a major contribution to Utah history and particularly the study of the Utah War, and as the title indicates is the first of a two volume set of documents concerning the Utah War. MacKinnon’s energy and his love for this period of history is evident in his careful writing and his selection of documents in this volume. Volume 1 carries the Utah War story from the beginning of Mormonfederal conflicts in Utah in 1849 with emphasis on 1857 and ending on the last days of that year. The eighteen chapters of the book are filled with narrative and interpretation by the author including the introduction of the documents. MacKinnon’s volume II will deal largely with the events of 1858.

Others have studied this era in detail including the earlier documentary collection Mormon Resistance edited by LeRoy and Ann Hafen. In some histories, the Utah War and its most tragic chapter the massacre at Mountain Meadows were pushed off the historical stage by the all-encompassing Civil War in the United States and then later by some who felt the war unimportant and those who didn’t like the characterization of Mormons as rebels and wanted early Utah to fit into mainstream patriotic America. Although not often portrayed by many historians of the decade of the 1850s as a major episode of the Buchanan administration, the Utah War, MacKinnon would have us believe, “began the destruction of James Buchanan’s presidential reputation and accelerated the nation’s descent into disunion and financial insolvency” (37).

MacKinnon describes in detail James Buchanan and Brigham Young including a look at their management styles, their advisors, and notes that both suffered from serious illness during the winter and spring of 1857, which may have led to some of the problems of the conflict. In this discussion, a comparison made of actions of Young and Theodore Roosevelt thirty years later, seems not to be analogous. A relationship that is not made is that Buchanan was a bachelor and Young was one of the most married men in America. MacKinnon notes that he believes that correspondence from Judge W.W. Drummond to Senator Stephen Douglas led to Douglas’ anti-Mormon stance in 1857. Professor Kenneth Stampp, historical authority on the 1850s, is identified as being from Stanford University but spent his entire career at the University of California, Berkeley.

MacKinnon dispels the myth that the Utah War was a “bloodless” conflict and asserts that the atrocities of the Utah War may have approached the 157 fatalities that earned the conflict in Kansas the label “Bleeding Kansas.” For MacKinnon the Utah War atrocities include the Mountain Meadow massacre, the pre-war Ambrose-Betts affair and the Parrish-Potter murders, the Richard Yates murder, the death of Private George W. Clark, the death of Henry Forbes, and the deaths of the Aiken Party. MacKinnon suggests that the atrocities of the war came about in part because of the nature and tone of the communications Young had with his church and military subordinates, and the poor communications and experience of Buchanan. He further asserts that the Utah War atrocities were not isolated incidents, but were, in fact, acts and intertwined events linked to the active guerilla-like operations of the Nauvoo Legion.

The documents of this volume are well-chosen and represent well a variety of view points. The assignment to Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston to command the Utah Expedition came late in 1857. As Colonel Robert E. Lee, Johnston’s Executive Officer in Texas wrote on August 1 to Johnston about the new assignment, he noted: “Tell Mrs. Johnston wives are a perfect drug [drag] out there, & if I was her I would not go. Besides Brigham’s 50 female saints will look upon her as a poor imposed on sinner, & she will not be appreciated in that community. I fear too the season is too far advanced for her to venture. However, you will be able to see when you reach Washn & things may be better than they do appear. Wherever you go Colonel I wish you every happiness & success, & may all happiness attend you and yours” (379).

First Sergeant James Stewart described the difficulties the army faced and detailed the weather in western Wyoming in early November 1857 by noting that the snow fell deeply, the thermometer fell to 45 degrees below zero, and six hundred horses died in one night as a result of the cold and starvation. James Parshall Terry who rode with Lot Smith into Wyoming in early October 1857 noted that after a train of twenty-six wagons was surrounded on October 4: “…We placed guards around the wagons and got the men all up of which I (never) saw a scareder lot in my life until they found that they was not going to be hurt. Then they laughed and said they was glad the wagons was going to be burnt as they would not have to bull whack any more, as they called it.The teamsters was permitted to take their private clothing and guns out of the wagons and then they were burnt. Capt. Smith was very (happy) to see that there was no ammunition or anything to explode to cause axidents.There was one wagon loaded with tar rope ostensibly, as it was said to hang Brigham Young and his danites. But suffice it to say the tar rope made a grand light” (348).

At Sword’s Point is an apt title and an accurate description of this important narrative and documentary contribution to the study of the Utah War.

RICHARD W. SADLER Weber State University

Wallace Stegner and the American West.

By Philip L. Fradkin. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. xiv + 369 pp. Cloth, $27.50.)

FROM HIS APPEARANCE on the western American literary landscape with his first novel, Remembering Laughter (1937), until his death in April 1993, Wallace Stegner stood tall as a writer of fiction, history, and biography and as a prominent voice on conservation and ecology. As the author of thirty-five books and several hundred essays, reviews, and short stories, Stegner was one of the most prominent figures in American literature of the second half of the twentieth century.

Philip Fradkin is a distinguished historian of the American West, having produced important books on Wells Fargo, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the Colorado River, and Alaska. His latest is the second full-length study of Stegner’s career.The first was Jackson Benson’s Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (Viking, 1996). Before Benson’s book there had been two earlier works, which covered Stegner’s career but only through the mid-1970s. Wallace Stegner by Forrest G. and Margaret G. Robinson (Twayne, 1977) devotes one of its six chapters to Stegner’s biography. Merrill and Lorene Lewis’s brief Wallace Stegner was published in 1972 as the fourth volume in Boise State University’s Western Writers Series. Thus at the present only Benson and Fradkin cover the whole of Stegner’s life and work.

In his introduction Fradkin says that “this is a book about a man and the physical landscapes he inhabited and how they influenced him.Within that framework it is also the story of a quintessential westerner who eventually could not deal with the wrenching changes that are a constant of the American West” (xi).

Fradkin’s text, framed by a prologue and an epilogue, consists of four major sections: “Unformed Youth,” “Talented Teacher,” “Reluctant Conservationist,” and “Prominent Author.” Each section contains three to five chapters. Thus Fradkin uses Stegner’s life as “the vista from which to gaze upon the panorama of the American west in the twentieth century from the prairie frontier to Silicon Valley. Stegner inhabited all of the West’s different landscapes physically, emotionally, and mentally, as well as in his writings. The prairies, mountains, deserts, rivers, coast, remote villages, small towns, and cities of the West were intimately known to him”(xi). These excellent and detailed discussions of Stegner’s years in Saskatchewan, Montana, Utah, New England, and California give the reader good insights into the influence that each of these places had on the man and his writing.

Fradkin’s research is meticulous, but there is one error of fact: Hilda Stegner died on September 27,1933, according to her grave marker, not in November, an error to which Stegner himself contributed in his “Letter, Much Too Late,” when he says that after her death “I walked blindly out into the November darkness.”

Especially valuable is his fair and balanced treatment of the charges of plagiarism made against Stegner for his use of sources in Angle of Repose. For Fradkin, the issue is complex and slippery with no simple answers, but he sees Stegner as somewhat naïve, but not criminal in his use of sources.

In his conclusion Fradkin is right when he says that “What Stegner chose in the end was a return to his beginnings. What he found in Vermont, as he had in Eastend, was a convergence of nature and human history” (323). It is this convergence that continues to attract readers to Stegner’s fiction, essays, histories, and biographies fifteen years after his death.

Fradkin’s biography is a fine addition to the library of Stegner criticism and biography and with Benson’s book, which provides in-depth readings of Stegner’s fiction and nonfiction, gives us a complete coverage of Stegner’s career.

ROBERT C. STEENSMA University of Utah