Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 77, Number 4, 2009

298

IN THIS ISSUE

300 The Battle for Rainbow Bridge

By Hank Hassell

316 To Lay Bare All of Spiritualism’s Shams: Harry Waite and Oscar Eliason’s Anti-Medium Crusade

By Brandon Johnson

333 Showdown at Geddes Gulch: How Prior Appropriation Ambushed Weber County

By Val Holley

351 All Too Rare: The Rise and Fall of Jazz DJs on Utah AM Radio, 1945-1965

By Laurence M.Yorgason

365 BOOK REVIEWS

David L. Bigler and Will Bagley. Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Reviewed by Robert H. Briggs

William B. Smart. Mormonism’s Last Colonizer: The Life and Times of William H. Smart.

Reviewed by Edward A. Geary

Bernice Maher Mooney and J. Terrence Fitzgerald. Salt of the Earth: The History of the Catholic Church in Utah, 1776-2007. Reviewed by Frederick Quinn

Catherine S. Fowler and Don D. Fowler, eds. The Great Basin: People and Place in Ancient Times.

Reviewed by Matthew T. Seddon

Donna B. Ernest. The Sundance Kid: The Life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh.

Reviewed by Daniel M. Davis

Kevin Adams. Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890.

Reviewed by Robert S. McPherson

Andrea G. Radke-Moss. Bright Epoch: Women & Coeducation in the American West.

Reviewed by Melissa Coy Ferguson

William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann. The West of the Imagination, Second Edition.

Reviewed by James R. Swensen 378 INDEX

Readers of the Utah Historical Quarterly are accustomed to the variety of articles and book reviews that comprise most issues of the Quarterly. This last offering for 2009 continues the eclectic tradition with topics ranging from irrigation and water rights in the Ogden area from the 1880s to the 1940s, magic in Salt Lake City in the 1890s, Jazz DJs and radio in the 1950s, and legal, environmental, and religious controversies associated with southeastern Utah’s Rainbow Bridge in the 1960s and 1970s. Book reviews highlight studies about the ancient peoples of the Great Basin, the Mountain Meadow Massacre, the Catholic Church in Utah, art in the West, women and education, military life in the West, and two of Utah’s most colorful characters; Harry Alonzo Longabaugh—better known as The Sundance Kid—and William H. Smart, a latter-day pioneer and leader in the Uinta Basin.

Authorization by Congress in 1955 of the Colorado River Storage Project included a provision requiring protective measures to keep impounded waters from harming Rainbow Bridge National Monument. Our first article discusses the four sites considered feasible for construction of a structure to block waters from Lake Powell from reaching the boundaries of the monument after completion of Glen Canyon Dam. But as the waters of Lake Powell inundated one site after another eliminating the feasibility of building the protective structures, and as the lake waters

ON THE COVER: Setting a telephone pole at 28th Street and Washington Avenue in Ogden. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY IN THIS ISSUE: Photographs of workers digging a sewer line on Ogden’s 25th Street near the Ogden Academy east of Washington Avenue, November 6, 1913. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Even before man began to record historical events, mystics and magicians awed, bewildered, and entertained their fellow human beings. Those who appeared to possess supernaturalistic powers could also be found in Utah. Skeptics and detractors challenged those who performed magical feats that others could not. Among these detractors were mystics and magicians themselves. Our second article examines the conflict between Harry Waite and Oscar Eliason in Salt Lake City during the 1890s and in doing so reveals much about the world of magic and the nuances and peculiarities of mystics, their practices, and beliefs.

If magic could seem intangible and fleeting, water is tangible and essential to the permanence of life and growth in Utah. Our third article delves into the complex world of irrigation and allocation of water and the systems that Utahns implemented to manage them. Nineteenth-century Utahns expended as much energy and time in building and maintaining a viable irrigation system as they did in planting, tending, and harvesting their crops. In addition, as the showdown at Geddes Gulch suggests, political and legal battles were never far from the Utah farmer and his crops.

Our final article for 2009 takes us from the realm of conflict and disharmony to a world of tranquility and ease found in jazz presented by the Utah DJs who were dedicated to providing an original American musical genre to radio listeners in the post-World War II years. A century after pioneers arrived to establish their homes in the valleys of Utah, much had changed. This change is nowhere more apparent than in the acceptance and popularity of jazz music.

These four articles and the books reviewed in this issue offer unusual and important perspectives on Utah and its history. As the two photographs above suggest, even with such a mundane task as ditch digging, a slightly altered viewpoint can reveal different but important insights to the discerning eye.

extended under the world famous bridge, the fight to protect Rainbow Bridge returned to the halls of Congress and reached all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The Battle for Rainbow Bridge

BY HANK HASSELL

Dividing the waters of the Colorado River among the several states through which it flows proved to be a contentious process filled with bitter argument, drawn-out debate, and carefully crafted compromise. However, when the Colorado River Compact was finally ratified by Congress on December 21, 1928, the stage was set for what became the most massive re-engineering of a river basin ever attempted in American history. The Boulder Canyon Act, passed at the same time as the Colorado River Compact, focused on the immediate needs of the lower basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) but at the same time directed the secretary of the interior to formulate “a comprehensive scheme of control and the improvement and utilization of the water of the Colorado River and its tributaries.”1

With the completion of Boulder Dam in 1935 and the All-American Canal in 1943,

1 43 United States Code (USC) 617N; 45 Statutes at Large 1065.

Hank Hassell is a librarian and teacher at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He is the author of Rainbow Bridge: An Illustrated History, published by Utah State University Press in 1999.

FIG. 1 Aerial view of Rainbow Bridge National Monument and Bridge Creek before flooding, 1958.

P.T. REILLY COLLECTION, CLINE LIBRARY, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY, PH. 97.46.184.9

the focus of the Colorado River water development shifted to the needs of the states in the upper basin (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico). True to its legislative mandate, the interior department in 1946 had ready a report identifying 134 potential dams, hydroelectric sites, and water diversion projects. 2 Since there was neither money nor sufficient water for all these projects, the basin states embarked on a complex series of negotiations to set priorities and formulate a workable alternative to present to Congress. In 1950 the interior department and the four states of the upper basin were ready with their proposal. Called the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), the plan called initially for the construction of ten dams and attendant storage reservoirs on the Colorado River and its major tributaries. The interior department anticipated a quick and easy passage for its proposal. All seven states of the Colorado River basin were solidly behind CRSP, and the development of the West was a high priority for the nation. The Department of Interior did not anticipate the political and environmental furor that would erupt when environmentalists realized that the Echo Park and Whirlpool Canyon dam sites proposed by the act lay smack in the middle of Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado. The fledgling American conservation movement had watched with indignation as Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park was destroyed by a dam and reservoir in 1923. They were not about to let it happen again.

Led by David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society (both at the time small, almost inconsequential organizations), the conservationists put together a coalition of hiking groups, garden clubs, and thousands of ordinary citizens who wrote angry letters to Congress opposing the desecration of still another national monument. 3 This alliance managed to keep the CRSP bottled up in congressional committees for years.

Realizing that their top legislative priority was about to go under, western legislators decided it was time to deal. On December 20, 1955, Congressmen William Dawson of Utah and Wayne Aspinal of Colorado met with Howard Zahniser to discuss the problems of the dam sites. When their meeting was concluded, two key provisions were inserted into the CRSP. The first provision read: “It is the intention of Congress that no dam or reservoir constructed under the authorization of this chapter shall be within any national park or monument.”4 The second revealed that another national monument also threatened by this act would not be forgotten, and that “… as part of the Glen Canyon Unit the Secretary of the Interior shall

2 U. S Bureau of Reclamation, The Colorado River: A Comprehensive Report on the Development of the Water Resources of the Colorado River Basin (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Department of the Interior, 1946).

3 The Story of this controversy is detailed encyclopedically in Mark Harvey’s book, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).

4 43 USC 620B; 70 U. S. Statutes at Large 107.

take adequate protective measures to preclude impairment of Rainbow Bridge National Monument.”5 Set aside by President William Howard Taft in 1910 to protect the largest known natural bridge in the world (Fig. 1) Rainbow Bridge straddled a side canyon destined to be flooded by the granddaddy of all structures proposed under the terms of the CRSP, Glen Canyon Dam. With both provisions firmly in place, all objections to the act were withdrawn, and it passed both houses of Congress with healthy majorities.

Interestingly, the provisions of law which protected Dinosaur and Rainbow Bridge were polar opposites in their effect. At Dinosaur the government was prohibited from building a pair of dams, which the Bureau of Reclamation desperately wanted, while at Rainbow Bridge the government was virtually required to build a series of protective structures, for which the bureau had little enthusiasm. However, the legislative language was clear, and as site preparation began for Glen Canyon Dam, bureau surveyors and geologists were crawling through the canyons of Bridge Creek (Bridge Canyon) and Aztec Creek (Forbidding Canyon) and adjacent mesas planning how best to “preclude impairment of Rainbow

5 43 USC 620B; 70 U. S. Statutes at Large 105.

FIG 2 Site B looking downstream showing the axis of the proposed dam and the elevation of Lake Powell when full.

RICHARD SPRANG COLLECTION, CLINE LIBRARY, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY, PH. 2002.7.1.1582

Bridge National Monument.” Finally, in August 1959, a report, authored by bureau engineer Lloyd Calder, was ready for consideration.6

The bureau identified three sites in Bridge Canyon and one in Forbidding Canyon as possibilities for the construction of the primary structure to block Lake Powell water from entering the boundaries of the monument, which was a mere six miles from the Colorado River. Designated as sites A, B, Narrows, and C (moving progressively downstream from Rainbow Bridge), only B and C ultimately received serious consideration. (Site A was deemed too close to Rainbow Bridge, while the Narrows Site contained some questionable geology.)

Site B was located in Bridge Creek 3,200 feet (0.6 of a mile) downstream from the monument boundary. A dam at this location would have been 183 feet high with a crest length of 500 feet (Fig. 2). Of the two serious alternatives, it would be by far the least expensive, but a dam at this location would encounter two serious problems. Bridge Creek behind it is an intermittent stream for at least part of the year. A method would have to be found to keep water from pooling on the upstream side of the dam

6 U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, Protective Works, Rainbow Bridge National Monument, Glen Canyon Unit, Colorado River Storage Project, Preliminary Report (Salt Lake City: Bureau of Reclamation, Region 4, 1959).

FIG. 3 Bridge Creek showing the location of the proposed diversion dam and entrance to the diversion tunnel.

RICHARD

thereby doing exactly what this dam was designed to prevent. In addition, debris from flash floods roaring down the canyon would eventually fill the space behind the dam, a process the bureau estimated would take only forty-one years. The bureau proposed to solve both problems by diverting the entire flow of Bridge Creek through a tunnel into the drainage of Aztec Creek just to the west (see Figs 3 and 4). The site chosen for the diversion was a half-mile upstream from the national monument boundary. The complex nature of this network of protective structures virtually guaranteed that the project would not be environmentally benign. Besides a high dam, diversion dam, and tunnel, construction at site B would require a high-standard haul road from Tonalea, Arizona, a power line, a construction camp, and a heliport (see Fig. 5). Fill material for the high dam would come from scraping bald the mesa a short distance downstream from the monument. This plan would leave the square mile of land making up Rainbow Bridge National Monument untouched by either the reservoir or construction, but the area surrounding it would no longer be the pristine wilderness, but would bear significant scars on the landscape lasting generations.

Far more appealing to conservationists was site C, located in Forbidding Canyon 4.5 miles downstream from Rainbow Bridge and slightly more than a mile upstream from the Colorado River. This site held numerous advantages. Using existing routes, road access could be had from the north

RICHARD SPRANG COLLECTION, CLINE LIBRARY, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY, PH. 2002.20.7.1.1577

FIG. 4 Forbidding Canyon (Aztec Creek) showing the mouth of the proposed diversion tunnel from Bridge Creek.

via either Hole-In-The-Rock road from Escalante or from US 89 between Page, Arizona, and Kanab, Utah. No upstream diversions of either Bridge Creek or Aztec Creek would be necessary, and most construction scars on the landscape would be hidden by the rising waters of Lake Powell. However, a dam at this site would require nearly as much material to construct (5 million cubic yards) as Glen Canyon Dam itself. It would have to be 365 feet high with a crest length of 800 feet (Fig.6). Its sheer size meant that it would be expensive and time-consuming to build. Furthermore, there were technical problems as well. With no upstream diversions, water would pool on the upstream side of the dam as well as on the Lake Powell side. In fact, the bureau estimated that the upstream side of the site C dam would contain a permanent reservoir 220 feet deep, only 130 feet below the elevation of Lake Powell at full pool. How would a dam react to having a reservoir on both sides? No one knew; tests and simulations would have to be run before construction could even be contemplated.

Conservationists countered the bureau’s objections to site C with an exhaustive analysis conducted by Arthur B. Johnson, a registered professional engineer and fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. 7 Johnson found that a slight alteration of the site C location would cut the

7

Arthur B. Johnson, Some Dam Facts About Protecting Rainbow Bridge (San Francisco: Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs, 1961).

RICHARD SPRANG COLLECTION, CLINE LIBRARY, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY, PH. 2002.20.7.1.1596

FIG. 5 Part of the proposed route to the Site B complex on the east side of Navajo Mountain.

size of the dam, and hence its costs, by half. He further argued that aggressive pumping at the site could virtually eliminate the reservoir on the upstream side of the dam. (Diesel fuel to run the pumps could be inexpensively hauled by barge up Lake Powell from Glen Canyon Dam.) In fact, Johnson argued that the cost for the modified site C complex (roads included) would be no more than $17 million, while the bureau’s own estimates for the cost of the site B complex would approach $25 million.

The Bureau of Reclamation remained unconvinced and continued to push the site B alternative. They did this for one critical reason—time. If the diversion gates at Glen Canyon Dam were closed on schedule early in 1963 then the waters of Lake Powell would probably not reach the vicinity of the bridge until 1970, allowing construction to proceed at site B even as Lake Powell was filling. On the other hand, the proximity of site C to the Colorado River meant that a barrier dam at that location would have to be completed before the gates at Glen Canyon were closed. Delay in the fill schedule for Lake Powell was something that the Bureau of Reclamation refused even to contemplate. Hence, if Rainbow Bridge National Monument were to be protected, the site B complex was the only practical choice available.

In spite of the obvious environmental problems with construction at site B, conservationists did not argue strenuously against it. For David Brower and his allies, site C may have been the preferred alternative, and they argued persuasively in its behalf. However, if site B was all that the bureau was willing to offer, then environmentalists would not raise much of a fuss. Not everyone was reluctant to note the difficulties, however. Dr. Angus B. Woodbury, professor emeritus at the University of Utah and a member of the Glen Canyon salvage project, argued that doing nothing was preferable to construction at site B, and further “to build the protective works would entail permanently marring the remarkable landscape, not only with dams and tunnels but also with the construction and equipment accessory to the main work”8 Dr. Woodbury’s article prompted a number of rejoinders, but it seemed the debate was merely academic. The law clearly called for the protection of Rainbow Bridge from the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam. Accordingly, the Eisenhower administration submitted to Congress as part of its l960 budget a request for $3.5 million as a down-payment on the expected price tag of $25 million for the protective works.

Conservationists were about to learn, however, that it was one thing to prevent the government from building a dam but quite another to get them to actually construct one. As early as 1959, rumblings of congressional opposition to the project were being heard. On a swing through the West with members of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, Wayne

8 Angus M. Woodbury, “Protecting Rainbow Bridge,” Science 132 no. 2426 (August 26, 1960): 528.

Aspinal of Colorado stated: “One reason for the committee’s current tour was to determine whether or not the saving of Rainbow Bridge was in the best interests of the nation as a whole.”9 Just as the Eisenhower administration’s last budget reached Capitol Hill, Senator Frank E. Moss, Utah’s junior senator, was introducing a bill to repeal the protective language on Rainbow Bridge from the law authorizing the CRSP. In his remarks to the Senate introducing his repeal proposal, Senator Moss stated: “I contend that the $25 million requested for this purpose by the President in the 1961 fiscal budget would be an unnecessary expenditure and represents an indefensible waste of the taxpayer’s money.”10 Senator Moss’ proposal went nowhere in Congress, but he, Wayne Aspinal, and newly-appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Floyd Dominy, mounted an intense lobbying effort in the House Appropriations Committee in order to get the funding for the protective works deleted from the Interior Department appropriations bill. Their efforts proved successful, and in May 1960, the proposed appropriation was removed. Opposition to the protective works for Rainbow Bridge focused on the appropriations process. Once enshrined into law, it is very difficult to repeal a statute. Even a small

9 Lois Sanderson, “Touring Lawmakers Split on Rainbow Bridge Plans” Arizona Daily Sun (Flagstaff, Arizona), October 19, 1959.

10 Congress, Senate, 86th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (March 11, 1960),5241.

FIG. 6 Forbidding Canyon (Aztec Creek) looking downstream showing the axis of the proposed dam at Site C.

RICHARD SPRANG COLLECTION, CLINE LIBRARY, NORTHERN ARIZONA

constituency, by deft parliamentary maneuvering, can delay legislative action in the House almost interminably, and at the time it took two-thirds of the Senate even to move a bill forward to a vote. Appropriations bills, on the other hand, because they contain something for everyone, usually move quickly. Such measures are also immune to filibustering in the Senate.

Ordinarily, the lack of such a small appropriation would not necessarily have proved fatal to a project. Monies could be found from elsewhere in the Department of Interior’s budget to at least get site preparation started, but Congress blocked this approach. Language was inserted into the Interior Department appropriations bill which read, “no part of the fund herein appropriated shall be available for construction or operation of facilities to prevent waters of Lake Powell from entering any national monument.”11 Congress had declared that an honorable compromise reached between conservationists and two Western congressmen only four years previous was now worth nothing. In fact, identical language was to appear in every Interior Department appropriations bill through 1971, even though no funds for the protective works were even requested after 1962.

Why were Senator Moss and the Interior Department so opposed to building the protective works for Rainbow Bridge? At the time Senator Moss cited the excessive costs, but compared to the monies being appropriated for Glen Canyon Dam alone (over $300 million), much less the entire CRSP, the cost of protecting Rainbow Bridge was mere congressional pocket change. Interior cited excessive environmental degradation, but if that were a major concern then the site C proposal was a viable, almost benign alternative. In retrospect, one can see that the opposition grew out of pure ego. Western states congressmen had been stung and stung badly by Dave Brower’s success in stopping Echo Park Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation, too, felt that it had been publicly humiliated on its own turf, and now both bodies saw Rainbow Bridge as a way to strike back.

The Department of the Interior was now faced with a dilemma. The law clearly required that Rainbow Bridge National Monument be protected from the waters behind Glen Canyon Dam, but year after year, Congress was refusing the small appropriation necessary to satisfy the statutory requirements. This dilemma now fell squarely on the shoulders of former Arizona congressman and newly-appointed Secretary of the Interior, Stewart M. Udall. Named to this post by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, Secretary Udall tried valiantly to find a way out. He proposed a giant new wilderness park for the Navajo Mountain area, including Rainbow Bridge above the 3,700 feet elevation level, in an attempt to mute conservationist demands for protection at all costs.

However, the Navajos refused to trade the land necessary to make the park happen, and conservationists were unenthusiastic. For the Navajos, the

11 Public Law 88-257; 77 Stat 844 at 849.

Navajo Mountain region was held to be sacred ground ever since the “Long Walk” time of 1864, when some members of their tribe had held out there in opposition to the government’s attempt to relocate them to the banks of the Pecos River at Ft. Sumner, New Mexico.

Conservationists saw Secretary Udall’s proposal begging the question. By setting the boundary of his park at 3,700 feet (the elevation of Lake Powell at full pool), he would have “solved” the flooding issue simply by removing protection from the gorge under the Great Rock-Arch. For David Brower and his allies the issue had become one of principle, something they were unwilling to compromise even for the prospect of wilderness protection for a piece of spectacular landscape. Accordingly, they continued to demand that the gates at Glen Canyon Dam remain open until protection for the small national monument was assured. The secretary pondered the situation and then asked the department’s solicitor general, Frank J. Barry, for advice. On January 18, 1963, Secretary Udall was told that “the provisions originally included in the Colorado River Storage Project Act calling for protective measures at Rainbow Bridge National Monument have been suspended by the Congress and are no longer operative.”12 Accordingly, word was passed by Secretary Udall to the Bureau of Reclamation to close the diversion tunnels at Glen Canyon Dam on schedule. Lake Powell began to fill on January 21, 1963.

Conservationists were aghast! Very clear statutory language mandating protection for “the scenic lodestone of the Glen Canyon region”was being ignored, first by Congress and now by the very secretary and government agency that the law had mandated to “take adequate protective measures.”13 It was clear that legal action would have to be had to the courts, but at this point David Brower, now president and executive director of his own organization, Friends of the Earth (FOE), bided his time. He and his allies had been to court on this issue once before in August 1962, but their case had been dismissed. Judge Alexander Holtzoff of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Sierra Club and its allies had no legal standing to sue on this issue. This time the ground would have to be prepared more carefully. The Friends of the Earth would take the lead in organizing the legal team and paying for the litigation, but the issue of standing had to be met head-on.

Brower finally selected the Wasatch Mountain Club of Salt Lake City and Ken Sleight, a prominent wilderness guide and long-time Colorado River explorer, to be the main plaintiffs. The Wasatch Mountain Club had a clear record of numerous hikes by its members to Rainbow Bridge, while Ken Sleight could show a certain economic interest in protecting the

12

Anthony Wayne Smith, “Rainbow Bridge: Record and Requiem,” National Parks Magazine 37 no. 188 (May 1963): 2, 19.

13 C. Gregory Crampton, Ghosts of Glen Canyon: History Beneath Lake Powell (St. George: Publishers Place, 1986), 49.

monument because of his guide business. Brower figured that this would be enough to get his suit into the court, but he would wait for the right time.

As he waited, the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam began to quickly rise. The mouth of Forbidding Canyon went under in April 1963; site C was covered later in June. One year later the reservoir flooded the junction of Bridge and Aztec Creeks and was now only a mile from the sacrosanct national monument. The reservoir’s climb now got much steeper. Bridge Creek falls toward Aztec Creek at the rate of 140 feet per mile; it would take a lot of water to get the lake level up to 3,606.1 feet in elevation, at which point it would reach the northern boundary of Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the line which the law said could not be crossed. In December 1965, the lake reached 3,534.4 feet, just below the bureau’s preferred site B. Early in 1970, almost exactly as predicted, the lake reached 3,570 feet, covering site A and placing the lip of the pool just one-third of a mile from the monument. By November 1, Lake Powell reached 3,600 feet, just a quarter mile from that imaginary line in the sand. Now, Brower reasoned, it was time to act.

In November 1970, Friends of the Earth, Ken Sleight, and the Wasatch

FIG. 7 Rainbow Bridge with Lake Powell at full pool, elevation 3700 feet, April 1985.

TOM FRIDMANN, U.S. BUREAU OF RECLAMAION

Mountain Club filed suit in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia asking that the Bureau of Reclamation and the secretary of the interior be permanently enjoined from allowing Lake Powell to rise above the elevation 3,606.l feet. The complaint, filed by attorneys James W. Moorman and Victor H. Kramer, read, in part, “Defendants have violated, are now violating, and unless relief herein is granted, will continue to violate the Colorado River Storage Project Act.”14

Brower’s strategy was brilliant. Victory now would involve no expensive and destructive barrier dams, roads, or power lines; rather it would simply hold the elevation of Lake Powell below 3,606 feet. This would protect not only Rainbow Bridge but also a vast expanse of wilderness and many precious side canyons from flooding by the reservoir. If he could not stop Lake Powell, Brower reasoned, he could at least mitigate its most destructive impacts.

The first move by government attorney Thomas L. McKevitt was to get the venue moved out of Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, landing the case in the U. S. District Court of Judge William Willis Ritter. A Truman appointee with legal degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, Ritter was not at all the friendly Utah judge the federal government expected. A true legal maverick, he had little patience with federal lawyers and enjoyed tweaking them at every opportunity. Oral arguments in Judge Ritter’s court commenced on January 13, 1972, the plaintiffs now being represented by Owen Olpin and James B. Lee of Salt Lake City. A year later, on February 27, 1973, Judge Ritter handed down his decision. In a tightly worded three-page order he granted the plaintiff’s motion for a summary judgment and ordered the Bureau of Reclamation “forthwith to remove all waters which have already intruded from Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Unit from entering the boundaries of the Rainbow Bridge National Monument at all times in the future.”15

Now it was the turn of the Bureau of Reclamation to shift into panic mode. The decision could not have come at a worse time, the reservoir stood at 3,600.7 feet, just outside the monument boundary, but the water frozen in the deep winter snows that had accumulated in the Rocky Mountains stood poised to roar down the Colorado River and its tributaries, and there was no place to store it. The bureau began dumping water and fast, sending 26,240 cfs through the dam’s turbines and bypass valves, generating off-season power for which there was no ready market.

Judge Ritter’s decision posed an even larger problem, however. In one fell swoop Brower and his allies had eliminated half the storage capacity of

14 Complaint by Friends of the Earth, Wasatch Mountain Club, Kenneth G. Sleight against Ellis L. Armstrong, Commissioner, U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, and Walter J. Hickel, Secretary of the Interior, November 1976, U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

15 Friends of the Earth v. Ellis L. Armstrong, Rogers C. B. Morton, Order of Judgment and Decree, Utah District Court, Central Division, February 27, 1973, p. 2.

Lake Powell. This truncated reservoir could not at the same time effectively regulate the flow of the Colorado River downstream into the lower basin (its main job) and efficiently generate the hydropower necessary to pay for the gigantic reclamation projects the bureau had already begun to construct in the upper basin states. On March 12, 1973, a furious Senator Moss reintroduced his bill to strip the statutory language protecting Rainbow Bridge from the CRSP; Congressman Gunn McKay of Utah’s first district introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives on March 28. Senator Moss demanded an immediate hearing on his bill: “It is the only certain way to head off the catastrophe which is now hanging over the entire Colorado Basin Project.”16

Senator Moss and Congressman McKay never got their hearings, as their bills went nowhere. The government realized quickly that its only hope lay in the courts. C. Nelson Day on April 22, 1973, filed the paperwork necessary to have the case heard by the seven judges of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado. Their first priority was to get an immediate stay of Judge Ritter’s order, which required the drawdown of Lake Powell. Clyde O. Mertz, assistant attorney general for Colorado, argued the government’s case; Owen Olpin represented the plaintiffs. On May 1, 1973, a three judge panel of the tenth circuit voted 2-1 to grant the government’s request. Lake Powell would be allowed to rise into the monument while the full court heard the case.

On Tuesday, May 22, 1973, just after midnight Lake Powell reached 3,606.43 feet; the reservoir had entered the monument. Two days later the entire seven-judge panel met in Denver to hear the case. On this day James Lee argued not only on behalf of FOE, Ken Sleight, and the Wasatch Mountain Club but also the Sierra Club and twelve other environmental organizations. The hearing took about an hour, after which both sides could do nothing except nervously await the court’s ruling.

When it adjourned the court had promised a decision within a week. However, the decision did not come in a week, or in a month, or even two months, and as the tenth circuit dallied, Lake Powell continued its rise through the monument. On July 31, the lake reached an elevation of 3,644.1 feet, just ten feet in elevation from a point directly under the bridge. Finally, on August 2, 1973, the court released its long-awaited decision. By a 5-2 vote the court ruled that Congress had indeed by implication repealed U. S. Code Title 43 Section 620. In the eyes of the court, Rainbow Bridge National Monument was entitled to no protection from the waters of Lake Powell. Voting with the majority were Judges Oliver Seth, William J. Holloway, Robert H. McWilliams, William E. Doyle, and James E. Barrett. Dissenting were Chief Judge David T. Lewis and Delmas C. Hill.

16 Congress, Senate, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record (March 12, 1973), 7329.

Distressed at what this decision would mean for the small national monument they had labored so long and hard to protect, conservationists took the only avenue open to them. On October 26, 1973, Owen Olpin filed the papers necessary to carry the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their petition stated: “Unless the courts check the license the Secretary and the Commissioner have taken with congressional policy, other parks and monuments may also be compromised by utilitarian encroachments of the kind that Congress historically has prohibited.” 17 Sixteen states filed friend-of-the-court briefs siding with the conservationists.18

It was not enough. On Monday, January 21, 1974, the Supreme Court announced that the appeal was denied—the court would not hear the case. Justices William O. Douglas, Byron R. White, and Harry Blackmun had voted to take up the case, but the necessary fourth vote could not be found. The case had failed by a single vote.19

Rainbow Bridge was not, however, an issue that would slip quietly away. On September 3, 1974, three Navajo medicine men and three chapters of the Navajo Nation filed suit in the U.S. District Court for Utah. Their complaint, authored by attorney Erick Swenson, asserted, “Rainbow Bridge is a religious symbol and is a focal point through which many prayers and religious ceremonies derive.”20 The court commissioned Karl W. Luckert, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, to study the religious significance of Rainbow Bridge to the local Navajo people. His study, published in book form, revealed that for many local Indians the Great Rock-Arch had special significance as one home of the Holy People and a source of moisture bringing rain to the corn fields of the Rainbow Plateau.21 Not only was the bridge a holy site where important ceremonies were performed, but several nearby rock formations and springs were regarded as of special spiritual significance. Unfortunately, the suit never got the backing of the Navajo Tribe, so to the court this legal action appeared to be the work of a few isolated individuals. After a thorough review, Judge Aldon J. Anderson ruled on January 13, 1978, that “there is nothing to indicate that at the present time Rainbow Bridge National Monument and its environs has anything approaching religious significance to any organized group.”22 The decision was appealed to the tenth circuit court in Denver. The appellate court disagreed with Judge Anderson’s reasoning on several legal points but in the end upheld his decision. All legal avenues were now closed.

17 Bob Bryson, “Rainbow Case Advances,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 27, 1973.

18 The states were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, South Dakota,Vermont, Washington.

19 Frank Hewlett, “High Court Declines Appeal Case in Lake Powell Rift,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 22, 1974.

20

“Suit Alleges Rainbow Bridge Desecration,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 4, 1974.

21 Karl W. Luckert, Navajo Mountain and Rainbow Bridge Religion (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona, 1977).

22

“Federal Judge Rules Out Rainbow Bridge Claim,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 14, 1978.

By the time the Navajo suit was filed, Lake Powell stood at elevation 3,669 feet thereby forming a pool fifteen feet deep under the bridge. On Sunday, June 22, 1980, at 9:42 p.m. (MDT) Lake Powell stood at full pool, elevation 3,700 feet. Water now stood fortysix feet deep under Rainbow Bridge and spilled over onto adjacent reservation land (Fig. 7).

The battle for Rainbow Bridge was lost in what is ranked as one of the premier environmental battles ever. For conservationists, however, it was a case of “lose the battle, win the war.” The Bureau of Reclamation had plans for another dam on the Colorado River in the vicinity of its junction with the Green River upstream from Glen Canyon, but the establishment of Canyonlands National Park in 1964 swallowed the site. After Echo Park, the Bureau of Reclamation wanted no further role in any conflict between reclamation and a unit of the national park system. Although it took a while for the bureau to realize it, the era of the high dams and giant interbasin water diversions was over. The high-profile and very public battles fought by David Brower and the Sierra Club over Dinosaur National Monument, Grand Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, and Glen Canyon had awakened a new environmental ethic in the conscience of the American people.

FIG. 8 Senator Frank E. Moss and Department of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall discuss the formation of Canyonlands National Park.

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The Wilderness Act was passed on September 3, 1964; the National Environmental Policy Act became law on January 1, 1970; the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. From now on development would have to proceed hand-in-hand with environmental protection and environmental laws. Reclamation and resource extraction would no longer have a free pass.

As to Rainbow Bridge, a prolonged drought and increased water use by states in the upper basin has caused an unprecedented draw-down of Lake Powell, and even the most optimistic projections fail to see a full reservoir any time soon. Slack water has not intruded under Rainbow Bridge for years, and of late Lake Powell has spent most of each year outside the boundaries of the national monument. It just may be that David Brower and his friends won after all.

To Lay Bare All of Spiritualism’s Shams: Harry Waite and Oscar Eliason’s Anti-Medium Crusade

By BRANDON JOHNSON

On April 23, 1894, an intriguing letter appeared in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune under the title “Open Letter to Oscar Eliason.”

The letter’s author, Harry H. Waite, was a traveling spiritualist medium who, according to an advertisement published in the Tribune only a few weeks earlier, frankly invited curious Salt Lakers to witness his supposedly supernatural skills. “Parlors packed!” read the newspaper announcement. “Lawyers, doctors, merchants, teachers, ladies. Why? Come and see.” Satisfaction, Waite assured the public, was guaranteed.1 By the looks of the April 23 letter, however, it appears the optimism exhibited in the medium’s earlier advertisement had quickly run its course. Instead of a bold cataloging of Waite’s supposedly mystical talents, this new missive was a tangled bundle of self-pitying declarations and vituperative claims aimed at Oscar Eliason, a magician from Salt Lake City.

Eliason, who was born in either 1869 or 1870 to Mormon immigrant jeweler O. L. Eliason and his wife Emma, began his career as a secular conjuror by performing in Mormon meetinghouses, a fact that won him the moniker “Mormon Wizard.” 2

1 Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 1894.

2 Salt Lake Tribune, December 1, 1899; Bureau of the Census. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1880), T9-1337, 153D. The 1880 census lists Eliason’s birth year as “abt. 1870” and gives his age as 10 rather than 11. In the census, the family’s last name is spelled “Elison” rather than “Eliason.” There is an “O. L. Eliason” listed as a jeweler in the 1890 Salt Lake City directory, published by R. L. Polk and Company. According to the directory, the elder Eliason’s jewelry business was located at 220 South Main Street. See Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk and Company, 1890), 271. For more on the elder Eliason’s jewelry business, see Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1883.

Dr. Brandon Johnson is Director of Grants and Historical Programs for the Utah Humanities Council.

Oscar Eliason

REPRODUCTION OF LINE DRAWING IN SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 1, 1899, BY LISA JOHNSON

WAITE AND ELIASON

(Later, he acquired a second nickname: “Dante the Great.”) According to a biographical news story filed in 1899, Eliason was a graduate of Salt Lake’s St. Mark’s School and had been groomed to follow his father into the jewelry business, but his resistance to the “idea that he would have to spend his life ‘watching wheels go round with a dice-box stuck in his eye’” caused him to haunt the environs of the Salt Lake Theater in the hopes of learning some magic tricks, until he finally broke with family tradition and took to the stage himself.3

According to reports, his performances were usually well attended, likely due to his expert conjuring. Audiences left his shows “thunderstruck” at his ability to turn ink into water, hatch “real birds from … eggs,” produce goldfish from thin air, create “umbrella heaps of flowers,” and make people disappear.4 But where audiences were impressed by Eliason’s act, Waite was sorely disgruntled. To his way of thinking, the magician had slyly—and very skillfully—turned the public against him, by contaminating audiences with silly sleight-of-hand performances and then passing his tricks off as exposés of supposed spiritualist deceptions.

The opening salvo of Harry Waite’s April 23 letter focused on Eliason’s perceived bad-mouthing of his father, Dr. A. A. Waite, who was also a medium and appears to have been traveling and performing with his son. (An announcement in the Tribune a day earlier had invited the public to witness “the Waites … in their wonderful materialization séance … at Shell’s Auditorium Hall.”)5 In a culture that prized personal honor, the younger Waite would have sensed his own reputation, as well as his father’s, to be on the line, a feeling that probably prompted him to write his angry letter. But it was the charge of conspiracy that lay at the heart of the spiritualist’s communiqué to the Tribune. In Waite’s mind, Eliason was part of a sinister plot to keep mediums from performing in Utah’s capital city. “I have been refused the Salt Lake Theater Sunday nights,” Waite complained, “but you [Eliason] seem to get it. I have had the rent raised upon me to keep me out, and there is not a place in this city where I can challenge you to meet me in open contest. This puts me to a great disadvantage, but I am honorable enough to meet your bluffs the best way I can—through this paper at so much a line.” Calling on the illusionist to “come to my rooms, 261 South West Temple Street,” with his friends, Waite said that he would give Eliason $100 in gold if he could raise a small table without using his hands, thus duplicating a popular element of many mediums’ acts. Eliason was an untested neophyte, Waite continued, who would prove unable to raise the table, even with the wager on it. But that was only part of Waite’s challenge. He also called on Eliason to “let me come on your stage at your so-called

3 Salt Lake Tribune, December 1, 1899.

4 Ibid., April 8, 1895.

5 Ibid., April 22 and April 28, 1894. For more on A. A. Waite’s experiences in Utah, see Salt Lake Tribune, April 27, 1894; and April 28, 1893.

exposé. In fair contest; if you duplicate my spirit manifestations as they are produced, before an honest committee, you stand acquitted. If not, you stand convicted as an impostor, and the winner takes the gate receipts.”6

Not surprisingly, Waite’s tartly-worded letter found its mark, setting in motion an epistolary mêlée between the hometown magician and the traveling medium. For a brief moment in 1894, Salt Lake City became a primary front in the rhetorical war between practitioners of secular magic (alternatively called “magicians,” “illusionists,” and “conjurors” by nineteenth-century Americans) and public spiritualist mediums. Played out in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune, this local manifestation of the national dust-up between magicians and spiritualists might best be described as an internecine brawl between cultural cousins whose public performances were remarkably similar, but who disagreed fervently about the source of their power. While mediums sought to convince audiences they possessed special supernatural knowledge and could communicate directly with spirits, conjurors were bent on establishing, once and for all, the natural— even mundane—origins of their own tricks, and, by extension, those of the nation’s mediums. But there was more to the illusionists’ desire to expose spiritualist mediums in public than a simple drive to naturalize the supernatural. Their dispute with mediumship was primarily about the respectability and credibility of their profession. In a world where supernatural magical practice and secular conjuring were often still entangled in the minds of spectators, the late-nineteenth-century magician had to struggle mightily to set himself apart from lingering associations with supernaturalism.In a fundamental way, secular magic’s forceful collision with spirit materialization across the country—and in Utah—can be attributed to this issue. Secular illusionists like Oscar Eliason saw any association with otherworldliness as a threat to their desires for professional status, and believed that any conflation of the secular and the supernatural in the public mind promised to re-associate the magical profession with an older, bankrupt culture of superstition and necromancy.

The story of Oscar Eliason’s spirited exchange with Harry Waite, then, plainly illuminates the strong cultural bond between spiritualist mediumship and secular magic in American culture, while at the same time revealing the vast cultural distance that still separated the magical and medium professions. Eliason and Waite (as well as other mediums and illusionists across the country) shared elements of a common repertoire. Yet, at the same time, the professional imperatives of conjuror and medium did not allow them to coexist peacefully.

There is, however, something else the tussle between Eliason and Waite illuminates, namely the modern character of Salt Lake City at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the exchange between Eliason and Waite shows just how far Salt Lake City had progressed along the path toward

6 Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 1894.

cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. We might think of it as evidence of what Gustive Larson (when talking about politics) dubbed the “Americanization of Utah,” but on the register of culture. According to Larson, in the final few decades of the nineteenth century, Utah’s mostly Mormon polity, once highly antagonistic to federal supervision, underwent a profound ideological change that ultimately opened the way to statehood for the long-lived territory. At the heart of that change—Larson’s process of “Americanization”—was the “demand for undivided loyalty to the United States government, for the acceptance of the country’s democratic process under the Constitution, including the separation of church and state.”7

The separation of church and culture in late-nineteenth-century Utah was just as profound, and it is this transformation—what we might identify as “cultural Americanization”—that the public debate between Eliason and Waite unmistakably marks. Once a rather rustic frontier outpost, settled and dominated, both politically and culturally, for decades by Mormons, Salt Lake City had grown into a diverse urban center by the 1890s. As historians Thomas Alexander and James Allen have shown, theorist Gunther Barth’s conception of “modern city culture” clearly applied to late-nineteenth-century Salt Lake City, if only on a “rudimentary level.” “Its divided space,” they wrote, “its newspapers, its department stores, its ball park, and its theater were like those of other American communities.” What is more, argued Alexander and Allen, the citizens of Salt Lake City saw in the 1880s and 1890s the “introduction of ever greater diversity of cultural groups, and

7 Gustive O. Larson, The “Americanization” of Utah for Statehood

1971), ix.

WAITE AND ELIASON

(San Marino: The Huntington Library,

St. Mark’s School, founded by the Episcopal Church, where Oscar Eliason attended school.

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the tendency of persons within the city to belong to more than one subculture,” a noticeable reversal of previous decades.8 Certainly the relative cultural vigor of itinerant mediums and debunking magicians—as well as supporters of both—reinforces the truth of that observation. Waite’s protests about conspiracy aside, itinerant spiritualist mediums treated Salt Lake City as they would have any other American city and often stopped to hang out a shingle, if only temporarily. At the same time, of course, Utah’s capital city had also become a venue for the development of secular magic and its program of disenchantment.

Originating in 1848, when Maggie Fox and her sister Kate claimed to have interpreted mysterious raps in the walls of their upstate New York home as messages from the spirit of a murdered peddler, spiritualist mediumship was, at first, a relatively unsophisticated form of public performance, and consisted primarily of interpreting loud “spirit” noises in walls, floors, and tables as a form of spectral communication. In effect, the Fox sisters’ supposed ability to understand and translate the raps made them the country’s first mediums. Soon, as news of the “Hydesville rappings” spread, other women and men began claiming they too were mediums. Eventually the nation would become acquainted with the likes of Emma Hardinge Britten, Cora Hatch, Henry Gordon, Charles Foster, Ira and William Davenport, Annie Eva Fay, William and Horatio Eddy, Lizzie Doten, and

8 Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Company, 1984), 8-9.

The Salt Lake Theater

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WAITE AND ELIASON

Achsa Sprague, as well as a host of lesser-known public mediums.9

Not surprisingly, eager spiritualist practitioners soon began pushing beyond the conventional boundaries of mediumship set down by the Foxes to invent new forms of spiritualist performance. Within a few decades, they had included as elements of their repertoire not only automatic writing (where “spirits” guided the medium’s pen), but also slate writing (where “spirit messages” appeared between two sealed slates), pellet reading (where mediums “read” sealed messages with the aid of “spirits”), consulting the planchette (the precursor of our modern Ouija board), and trance speaking or lecturing (where mediums “channeled” spirit voices). This last category of performance was especially common, though trance speaking was soon eclipsed by the more popular materialization séance. The supposed ability of materialization mediums to make spirits appear on stage either in special “ghost cabinets,” where they revealed only parts of themselves, or directly in front of the audience, absolutely astounded audiences, who flocked to séance venues just for the chance to see a materialized “specter.”10

At the same time that spiritualist mediums were expanding the boundaries of their profession, magical practice was being redefined in fundamental ways. Old associations with witchcraft and necromancy were falling away and new links to secularity and showmanship were being forged. Linguistic changes substantiate this conclusion. As historian Jackson Lears has suggested, in nineteenth-century America the word “magic” had begun to function more as a “rhetorical device” that connoted “sleight-of-hand showmanship,” than as a reference to “participation in a coherently animistic cosmos.”11

There was still the possibility, however, that audiences would misunderstand this shift and question where secular magic actually “fit” in American culture. This situation motivated illusionists to redouble their efforts at shedding lingering associations with supernaturalism and persuaded them to continue working to refashion their performances into respectable forms of secular entertainment. Over time, the forces of secularization and professionalization transformed illusionism. In New York City in the 1830s, it had become almost impossible to find a magician “who did not explicitly claim disenchantment as the goal and function of magical entertainment.”

9 Herbert G. Jackson, The Spirit Rappers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); and Ernest Isaacs, “The Fox Sisters and American Spiritualism,” in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles L Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 79-110. Also see Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970).

10 Historical treatments of American spiritualism include R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

11 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 42-43.

Audiences, too, were backing away from supernaturalism. Magician Antonio Blitz (1810-1877) recalled that as early as 1835, “large and fashionable audiences” were attending his performances, where “there was, with a very slight exception, a total absence of an approach to the superstitious character” among spectators.12 Magic was also becoming an increasingly important part of commercialized show business, and began to assume many of the trappings of a bona fide profession: a burgeoning market for tricks (which some illusionists considered to be such important assets that they sold them only when they retired or desperately needed money); specialized knowledge cultivated through apprenticeship and incessant practice; hired managers; and modern marketing campaigns. What is more, for many of America’s illusionists, success also depended on a working understanding of various mechanical “magical” apparatuses, superb physical dexterity, flawless showmanship, a keen interest in innovation, and enough expertise to fool the audience’s collective eye. Such markers of professionalism caught the attention of the middle class and gave conjurors a new aura of respectability.13

Through all of these transformations, the nation’s materialization mediums—almost to a person—continued to claim they were aided by otherworldly forces, even as fewer and fewer magicians expressed a willingness to make similar claims. These changes spelled trouble for spirit materializers, whose séances were beginning to look more and more like burlesques of secular magical performance. In one 1876 séance, for example, the “spirits” supposedly materialized flowers and a live dove from thin air, while in another, a medium produced a large black-and-white rabbit from beneath a spectator’s partially unbuttoned waistcoat. Even the illustrious Cora Hatch Tappan, one of the nation’s best-known mediums, turned in the 1870s to materializing flowers. And there were of course the floating bodies, disappearing people, and disembodied limbs that both magicians and mediums were exhibiting on stage. Such phenomena threatened to halt the secular, respectable advance of magical entertainment and undo everything modern magicians had been working for, if only because the public could easily mistake materialization, with its continuing claim to supernatural status, for illusionism. In such a confusing environment, conjurors fretted about how best to distinguish themselves from spiritualist mediums.14

Believing that such circumstances called for drastic measures, anxious illusionists began taking on the deceptive activities of materializing

12 James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 180; Signor (Antonio) Blitz, Fifty Years in the Magic Circle: Being an Account of the Author’s Professional Life; His Wonderful Tricks and Feats; With Laughable Incidents and Adventures as a Magician, Necromancer, and Ventriloquist (Hartford: Belknap and Bliss, 1872), 114; quoted in Cook, Arts, 181.

13 Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 98, 107-34; Cook, Arts, 180-81.

14 Spiritual Scientist (Boston), February 10, 1876; August 26, 1875; and May 20, 1875. See also Milbourne Christopher and Maurine Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2006).

mediums with a vengeance. Robert Heller (ca. 18261878), a British illusionist who toured the United States extensively, was heavily invested in outing materialization mediums as part of his magical work. Initially entering show business as a concert pianist, Heller soon turned to magic after seeing JeanEugène Robert-Houdin, the famous French conjuror, perform. Young Heller was so taken by Robert-Houdin’s performance that his first magical act was based almost solely on the older man’s tricks. He took the act to New York City in 1852, and then traveled from there around the United States. By 1865, he was doing a “cabinet show” based on the Davenports’ materialization act. A report submitted to the Banner of Light, perhaps the spiritualist movement’s most influential newspaper, from a St. Louis correspondent indicates that Heller perfectly mimicked nearly every process the mediums normally went through in their show, even deputizing a committee from the audience and then having them bind his assistant in a cabinet similar to the one the Davenports used. The correspondent, a believing spiritualist, was not convinced by Heller’s act, but others presumably found his exposé compelling.15

Other illusionists were as enthusiastic as Heller in their exposure of mediums, often using print culture as a tool of attack. John Nevil Maskelyne (1839-1917), author of the popular anti-spiritualist tract Modern Spiritualism (1875), targeted Kentucky medium Annie (also known as Anna) Eva Fay for special assault, perhaps because her reliance on confederates to “create” spirit phenomena seemed so obvious. The magician was quick to find the deception in Fay’s performance, pointing to the fact that the

15

WAITE AND ELIASON

Randi, Conjuring, 98; Christopher and Christopher, Illustrated History, 211-12; Carl Waldman and Joe Layden, The Art of Magic (Los Angeles: General Publishing Groups, 1997), 79; and Banner of Light, January 6, 1865.

Interior of the Salt Lake Theater, where Oscar Eliason began his conjuring career and performed in 1894.

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ringing of a bell in a séance was not accomplished by materialized spirits at all, but by Fay’s husband, Henry. When a group of spectators bent on preventing deception held his hands, Henry ingeniously used his mouth to take the bell from his wife, and shook it “as a terrier does a rat.”16

In Utah, Oscar Eliason was doing what Heller, Maskelyne, and other illusionists were doing elsewhere. Spiritualism was hardly new to Salt Lake City in the 1890s. Indeed, the spiritualism “bug” had bitten some Utahns as early as the 1850s, causing Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt to condemn the practice at the 1853 dedication of the Salt Lake temple cornerstone. Mormons, declared Pratt, must be able to differentiate “between the lawful and the unlawful mediums or channels of communication—between the holy and impure, the truths and falsehoods, thus communicated.”17 Other Latter-day Saint authorities, including Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Jedediah Grant, also roundly attacked spiritualism, claiming it was demonic. 18 But it was the influence of dissenting Mormons William Godbe, E. L. T. Harrison, and others who came together in 1870 to form the Church of Zion that helped create the cultural space necessary for spiritualism to flower in Utah. It was after a trip to New York City in 1868, where they apparently visited the rooms of popular spiritualist medium Charles Foster, that Godbe and Harrison began their gradual turn toward spiritualism and away from traditional Mormonism. According to at least one nineteenth-century account, it was Foster’s alleged ability to channel the voice of the deceased Heber C. Kimball that convinced the two men of spiritualism’s authenticity, though Godbe and Harrison believed Foster had also put them in touch with the spirits of Joseph Smith, Jesus Christ, and German explorer Alexander von Humboldt. By the time Godbe and Harrison returned to Utah, they believed they had been set apart to cut their fellow believers free from dogmatic Mormonism and engage them in a new religious movement tinged with spiritualist ritual.19

The establishment of the Church of Zion under the direction of Godbe and Harrison, and visits by Godbeite “missionaries” to the East and West Coasts, helped unleash a stream of visits to Utah by some of the nation’s most eminent traveling mediums and spiritualist speakers. Predictably, Charles Foster garnered plenty of interest in Utah, due to his early contacts

16 During, Enchantments, 156-71; James Randi, Conjuring (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 60-67; Christopher and Christopher, Illustrated History , 155-77; Fred Nadis, “Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’ Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult,” Journal of Millennial Studies 2 (Winter 2000) [online journal]: 1-8; and John Nevil Maskelyne, Modern Spiritualism: A Short Account of Its Rise and Progress, With Some Exposures of So-Called Spirit Media (London: Frederick Warne and Company, 1876; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1976), 122.

17 Parley P. Pratt, “Spiritual Communication,” Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, England: Latterday Saints Book Depot, 1855-86), 2:45, quoted in Michael W. Homer, “Spiritualism and Mormonism: Some Thoughts on Similarities and Differences” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27 (Spring 1994), 176.

18 Ronald W. Walker, Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 111; and Homer, “Spiritualism and Mormonism,” 175-76.

19 Walker, Wayward Saints, 113-26.

AND ELIASON

with Godbe and Harrison. Other spiritualist visitors to Utah included John Murray Spear, whose supposed vision of a hierarchical heaven filled with orderly spirits catapulted him to easy fame in the 1850s; actress-turnedmedium Emma Hardinge Britten; and Cora L. V. Tappan Richmond, whose very public divorce from her abusive manager-husband (while still a teenage bride) became a cause célèbre among spiritualists.20 According to historian Ronald Walker, nearly fifty outside spiritualist practitioners can be identified by name as having visited Utah during the 1870s and early 1880s, though, as he points out, the “actual count may have been much higher.” Whatever the number, spiritualism had found roots in Utah by the 1870s, leading to the establishment of institutions in Salt Lake City, Park City, Beaver, Logan, Ogden, and Mount Pleasant that could, in Walker’s words, “meet the needs of … local and itinerant spiritualists.”21 Even the institutional disintegration of the Church of Zion at the end of the 1870s had only a modest effect on spiritualism’s cultural strength in Utah; spiritualists still flourished outside the boundaries of formal institutionalized religion, and itinerant mediums continued to make the state a stopover point in their transcontinental travels.22

It was these later spiritualist visitors that Oscar Eliason designed to expose. One of the first to feel the Utah magician’s wrath appears to have been none other than Annie Eva Fay, the same Kentucky medium who John Nevil Maskelyne had outed years before. A brief 1893 report in the Ogden Standard put it succinctly:

Eliason, the Utah magician, successfully exposed spiritualism tonight in the Salt Lake theater [sic] to a large and appreciative audience. Eliason performed all the manifestations recently performed in the Ogden opera house by Annie Eva Fay and then exposed them. Mr. Eliason and Mrs. Hammer [Eliason’s wife, Juliana Edmunda Virginia Hammer] performed the so-called manifestation and caused the unknown power to do its work much better than did Miss Fay at Ogden. Mr. Eliason gave other manifestations which he did not expose which would put the ordinary medium to shame. Eliason may well be called the wizard of the west.23

But Eliason did not limit his anti-medium efforts to the Wasatch Front. Taking his act on the road, he sharpened his skills of exposure and disenchantment in shows at various locations around the western United States. An 1893 article, printed in the Salt Lake Tribune, suggests that Eliason’s chances of making money as an itinerant magician were pretty good, particularly as other illusionists were choosing not to travel. Eliason, declared the article, had “received a good offer to go out on a starring expedition in legerdemain. [Alexander] Hermann is practically the only one traveling in

20 Ibid., 251, 253-54, and 267-68. On John Murray Spear, see Carroll, Spiritualism, 105-107, 117-88; and John B. Buescher, The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2004). Also see Homer, “Spiritualism and Mormonism,” 183-84.

21 Walker, Wayward Saints, 268 and 270.

22 Ibid., 208-209.

23 Ogden Standard, April 25, 1893.

the line—[Buatier] De Colta [sic] and [Harry] Keller [sic] remaining in New York and Philadelphia. So, Mr. Eliason would have a good drift to work.”24 By the next year, Eliason could be found touring the “interior Utah towns” and performing in Aspen, Colorado, where a group of the state’s spiritualists, claiming Eliason was himself a fraud, attempted to “expose the exposer.” The illusionist’s response to the spiritualists’ challenge was ingenious: according to a newspaper report, he “exposed himself, showing just how he performed the manifestations.”25 (He also toured an unknown number of “Eastern cities.”)26 Such forthrightness apparently won Eliason rapid fame, ultimately opening the door to international performances. (At the time of his death, he had received invitations to perform in such far-flung places as Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.)27

It is the Tribune’s reports of Eliason’s dealings with Harry Waite, however, that provide us with the most thorough picture of the magician’s antimedium work. His response to Waite’s original April 23 letter in the Tribune was bold and aggressive. Referring to Waite as “Medium-by-the-Gift-ofGall” (a parody of the medium’s self-imposed nickname, “Medium by the Gift of God”), Eliason declared that he had deposited $200 with his manager to be paid to a local charity if he could not move the table. Supposing he could easily shred what he thought were the medium’s outlandish claims to supernatural assistance, he then upped the ante, pledging another $200 if he could not “reproduce, duplicate or expose, without the aid of angel, spirit or devil … [Waite’s] so-called spirit manifestations … after I have seen them performed three times.” Warning Waite that he would not like the dire results of public exposure, Eliason also informed local spiritualists that they “must not blame me if I shatter their delusions. I will so completely expose the sham, humbuggery, and duplicity of all mediums and spirit manifestations that a belief in their supernatural power … cannot find lodgment in any sensible and logical mind.” Writing that he had “never before attempted to lay bare all [of spiritualism’s] shams, simply confining myself to a few of the most difficult tests performed by Miss [Annie Eva] Fay,” Eliason intimated that he had decided to declare all-out war on spiritualist phenomena. “Now I will spare nothing,” he promised, “but will expose all mediums.” He signed the letter “Medium-by-the-aid-of-Tricks” and “Medium-by-the-aid-of-Legerdemain,” no doubt an attempt both to poke fun at Waite and, at the same time, to clarify the very un-supernatural power he believed lurked behind all materialization séances. Eliason’s letter highlights just how deeply his disdain for spiritualism flowed. The move-

24

Salt Lake Tribune, August 15, 1893.

25 Ibid., May 18, and December 18, 1894.

26 Ibid., December 1, 1899.

27

Ibid. Also see Kent Blackmore, Oscar Eliason: The Original “Dante the Great”: His Life and Travels in Australia and New Zealand, 1898-1899, rev ed. (Sydney, Australia: K. Blackmore, 1987).

ment was, to use the magician’s own uncomplimentary term, a “sham,” composed of delusional believers and duplicitous mediums.28

Waite’s response, published the next day in the Tribune, was equally pointed. Calling the illusionist a “slick catfish,” the medium curtly declared that he “admire[d] the twist” Eliason made “by ‘accepting’ my challenge,” and then ignoring it. But Waite did not stop there; as if to demean his opponent by comparing him to a woman, he added: “Don’t toss your curls and get mad.” Not only did Eliason refuse the challenge Waite issued in his April 23 letter inviting him to levitate a table, but he also refused to invite the medium onto the stage during one of his performances. Waite issued a new challenge to Eliason: produce “spirit” slate writing without detection and through natural means, and the medium would pay him a hundred dollars in gold.29

Not surprisingly, the quarrel between Waite and Eliason continued with the two opponents discharging new rhetorical broadsides at each other in the Tribune’s pages. Declaring that he did not need to “resort to billingsgate [or abusive language] ... to defend my position in this community,” Eliason intimated that Waite needed to learn the “rules that govern gentlemen in

28 Salt Lake Tribune, April 24, 1894.

29 Ibid., April 25, 1894.

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Salt Lake City’s West Temple Street in 1908 near where Harry Waite rented rooms in 1894.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

their intercourse with each other,” particularly “moderation in the use of language.” Not wanting to continue his rhetorical scuffle with Waite, Eliason proclaimed that he was “done.” The medium would next hear from him at his Sunday night performance. The medium, on the other hand, maintained that Eliason was a liar, a “consummate fraud,” and a “deliberate impostor,” and that none of the illusionist’s “bluff and talk” had damaged the “confidence” believers had “in spiritualism.” The conjuror had nothing more than a few “Jim-dinkey tricks” up his sleeve, culled from a “10¢ book of magic,” the medium crowed. Adding that he would “fool” Eliason at the magician’s performance the following Sunday night, Waite maintained that his reputation as a medium was above reproach.30

A final, desperate letter from Waite found its way into the pages of the Tribune three days later. In it, the medium angrily attacked Eliason for mocking him in the press and for continuing to refuse him a spot onstage at his upcoming magic performance. “Was there ever,” spewed the spiritualist, “a dirtier coward or a more contemptible liar” than Eliason? “Excuse plain language,” Waite continued, “for the fact is plain that I have been foully slandered and have stood alone, with every church against me, with every newspaper against me, misjudged, falsified, far and near. I ask you if I have been a man! I am challenged and called a fraud, and then, after accepting, barred out of the house [theater] on pain of arrest.”31

It is important to note that Waite’s hyperbolic description of his “persecution” at the hands of Eliason fits onto a broader literary convention used by many nineteenth-century spiritualist mediums. By drawing attention to their physical and mental suffering through writing, mediums sought to elicit sympathy for themselves as “martyrs” to the spiritualist cause and, in an ironic calculus, ultimately convert their “oppressed status” into public esteem and visibility.32

This mode of writing already enjoyed a respected place in nineteenthcentury American religious literature; mediums simply appropriated it and then reshaped it for their own use.33 Works such as Henry Steel Olcott’s People from the Other World (1875), a literary representation of William and Horatio Eddy’s rocky career as spiritualist mediums, made especially heavy use of the “martyr” trope. Shot through with numerous references to the physical victimization of the Eddys at the hands of their opponents, Olcott’s book at times devolves into a shocking litany of sadistic episodes in which the mediums are subjected to inhuman, disfiguring torture,

30 Ibid., April 26, 1894.

31 Ibid., April 29, 1894.

32 Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110.

33 For specific examples of the “martyrological” mode in nineteenth-century American religious literature, see W. P. Strickland, ed., The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, The Backwoods Preacher (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1856), 60-61, 90-92, 131-32, 144-46, 236-37, 312-16, and 376-84; and William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

sometimes with their own parents looking on. To be sure, mental persecution also dogged the Eddy brothers (if Olcott’s book is to be believed); robbed of an opportunity to gain even a rudimentary education, they were never able to “enjoy the companionship of boys and girls of their own age.” It was the physical violence the Eddys allegedly endured, however, that received top billing in the book. “Scored with the lash, cicatrized by burning wax, by pinching manacles, by the knife, the bullet and by boiling water,” the mediums’ bodies bore the physical signs of abuse.34 Once, William had “scalding hot water” poured down his back and a “blazing ember” put on his head, in order to startle him out of a supposed trance. (He still had the scars to prove it, and later showed them to Olcott.) On other occasions, wrote Olcott, the brothers were “passed through the merciless hands of scores of ‘committees of skeptics,’ bound with cords by ‘sailors of seven years’ experience,’ and riggers ‘accustomed to tie knots where human life was at risk’,” until their “soft young metacarpal bones were squeezed out of shape, and their arms covered with … scars” from the melted wax used to make sure their bonds were secure. The “wrists and arms” of the brothers, declared Olcott, were “a sight to see.” Both of them had “a marked groove between

WAITE AND ELIASON

34 Henry S. Olcott, People from the Other World (Rutland,VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1875), 33.

Salt Lake City Main Street near where Oscar Eliason’s father had his jewelry business in 1890.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the ends of the ulna and radius and the articulation of the bones of the hand,” and were “scarred by hot sealing wax.”35

While Waite’s description of his suffering may not have been as successful as the graphic sensationalism of Olcott’s book when it came to making himself a martyr, it likely created an environment of superheated emotion which Eliason would be forced to enter if he chose to go ahead with his planned performance a few nights later. But if Eliason hesitated, we have no evidence of it. When he finally mounted the Salt Lake Theater’s stage on Sunday, April 29, he did so without Waite, despite the latter man’s dogged insistence that Eliason let him “put up [his] cabinet alongside” the illusionist’s. The magician apparently wanted complete control over the stage. Yet, whatever his apparent concerns about actually appearing with Waite, his performance was a resounding success, at least according to the local press. Reminding readers that Eliason had bested Annie Eva Fay only the year before, “duplicating in sleight-of-hand” everything the medium did, the Tribune pointed out that the magician now “took the work palmed off … as ‘spiritualism,’ and duplicated it on the Theater stage … showing to the audience how each trick was done.” The performance had attracted an enormous crowd. “The lobby,” read the Tribune article, “was a compressed cake of humanity, the wide and high flight of steps together with the platform was a crush, and the sidewalk overflowed into the street with … people. The attachés of the Theater said they had never seen such a sight.”36 What the crowd got that night was a behind-the-scenes look at the stunts mediums used to humbug their audiences. Beginning with a short historical talk, Eliason aimed to “show his audience the full humbuggery of this fraud [spiritualism].” Maggie and Kate Fox, declared the magician, the “originators of the so-called religion,” had been exposed. So had Ira and William Davenport, and “a long list [of] French, German and American impostors” who had followed “in the same footsteps and in turn” had been “shown in their true colors.” Then, one by one, Eliason ran through his repertoire of tricks, showing how each one was done, and eventually ending with a mock materialization séance. In this final act, he called up from the audience a committee of representatives from the local papers, along with his assistant H. A. Fyler, and allowed the committee to bind Fyler. Within seconds the assistant was free of his ropes, thanks to a trick knot attributed to Harry Kellar, the illustrious illusionist. The committee tied Fyler again, hand and foot, but this time they threw him into a cabinet where he immediately fell into a fake trance. Then the committee added a few twists of their own, placing coins between his fingers in order to detect even slight movements, and filling his mouth with water to prevent him from playing the horns and other instruments that Eliason had placed around the cabinet. Again, Fyler slipped his bonds, and proceeded to dance

35 Ibid., 26-28.

36 Salt Lake Tribune, April 30, 1894.

330

around the cabinet, playing the instruments by blowing air through his nose. From this performance, spectators were able to see just how easy it would have been for mediums to dress up and behave like “spirits” in a séance. According to the Tribune , “the whole performance was carried out with skill, grace, and a sarcasm extremely enjoyable.” The audience seemed to agree; they “cheered and applauded from beginning to end,” and, tongues planted firmly in cheeks, they voted Eliason “a ‘medium’ of equal ability to any that have ever visited this city.”37 People who had been turned away on Sunday begged Eliason to repeat his exposé, which he did the following Friday.38

More than anything, Eliason’s performance drew his spectators’ attention to the fact that nearly anyone—even his assistant—could replicate materialization phenomena using simple sleight-of-hand tricks. His shows, and others like them, promised to rip open the shadowy world of spiritualist mediumship and expose it to public scrutiny. Eliason furnished audiences with a compelling, alternate interpretation of how supposed spirit phenomena were produced—an interpretation that clearly departed from the explanation spiritualists offered.

The same night Oscar Eliason was being fêted by his enthusiastic audience, Harry Waite was hosting private séances at his rooms on West Temple. In a letter to the Tribune that was printed on the same page as the account of Eliason’s performance, Waite not only claimed he had had to turn “hundreds” away Sunday evening, but also bolstered his claims to spiritual legitimacy by quoting such religious luminaries as Jesus, Simon Peter, Paul of Tarsus, and others. In a particularly humorous quotation attributed to the biblical King David, Waite appears to have equated himself with a young David, sling in hand, and Eliason with Goliath, the “uncircumcised Philistine.” “I am a medium by the gift of God,” he wrote, “for those who are in trouble and need help. Not for blasphemers, curiosity-seekers, or 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., May 1, 1894.

WAITE AND ELIASON

Maggie and Kate Fox, the country’s first mediums.

ANN BRAUDE, RADICAL SPIRITS: SPIRITUALISM AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA (BOSTON: BEACON PRESS, 1989)

smart fools.” A few days later, Waite posted an announcement in the Tribune inviting the public to a séance at the city’s Auditorium Hall. Both he and his father would be there. “Come early,” he instructed, “and avoid the rush.”39

Ironically, that announcement effectively signaled the end of the public battle between Oscar Eliason and Harry Waite for the hearts and minds of the Salt Lake City public. If there was a winner in the skirmish it was Eliason, not Waite. Indeed, after his last plea for attention, Waite’s trail grows cold and he disappears from Utah’s historical record. It seems likely that he decided to leave the state hastily and with little or no fanfare, despite his stated resolve to continue battling the conspiratorial cabal he believed had been formed against him. Eliason, on the other hand, flourished following his 1894 newspaper exchange with Waite. The Tribune kept close track of him, regularly informing readers of his whereabouts and providing them with descriptions of his shows.40

Then, in November 1899, a cable arrived from Australia with the news that the “Mormon Wizard” had been shot and killed.41 Over the next few days, details about the conjuror’s death filtered back to Utah. Eliason had traveled to Australia as part of an international tour and, while hunting near the town of Dubbo, had been fatally injured. Initially, there was some speculation that M. B. Curtis, his former manager, had had a hand in the shooting, but it was eventually learned that Eliason’s pianist had accidentally wounded the magician in the groin with an errant gunshot. Doctors were at first hopeful that Eliason would recover, but he soon took a turn for the worse and died on November 29, 1899. He was buried in Sydney.42 One wonders if Harry Waite caught wind of the sad story, and what he might have had to say about it.

39 Salt Lake Tribune, April 30, and May 6, 1894.

40 For newspaper coverage of Eliason following his scrap with Waite, see Salt Lake Tribune, May 18; July 29; October 14; October 24; December 18, 1894; April 8; April 14; May 14; July 8, 1895; September 22; November 23, 1895; September 5, 1896; and September 18, 1898.

41 Salt Lake Tribune, November 30, 1899.

42 Ibid., December 1, 1899; December 2, 1899; December 29, 1899. Also see Deseret Evening News and Salt Lake Herald for the same days.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Showdown at Geddes Gulch: How Prior Appropriation Ambushed Weber County

By VAL HOLLEY

Exploring Utah in 1889 to evaluate its reclamation potential, a federal irrigation survey team gazed wryly upon the territory’s helter-skelter crop-watering systems. “The lower canals, being in general built first, have the better rights, while the higher canals, last built, have rights only to surplus waters; but from their position up the stream, they have the best facilities for getting what they wish,” noted the survey’s report. The phenomenon was “a striking instance of the survival of the man highest up the stream, irrespective of his rights or of the best use of the water.”1

That observation pertained to systems on the Provo and Sevier rivers, but it happened also to fit the Ogden River’s scenario to a tee. 2 In 1848 Ogden’s pioneers settled on bottom lands and diverted irrigation water

An old view of the Ogden River near Washington Boulevard. The declivity in the background is North Ogden Canyon.

Val Holley, a law librarian in Washington, D.C., is a Weber County native.

1 John Wesley Powell, Eleventh Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1889-90, 2 parts, (Washington, D.C., 1891), II, 72, 75, cited in Thomas G. Alexander, “John Wesley Powell, the Irrigation Survey, and the Inauguration of the Second Phase of Irrigation Development in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37 (1969) 196-97.

William Geddes. He told the Ogden Standard that the lawsuit under his name was between irrigation companies and reflected no personal animosity.

from the river into a dry streambed christened Mill Creek. 3 Over the next dozen years fledgling communities dug ditches tapping either Mill Creek or the river itself in the three miles between its emergence from Ogden Canyon and confluence with the Weber River. Not until 1860 did newer settlements in Ogden Valley, at the opposite and higher end of the canyon, begin tapping the Ogden River’s forks to water their own farms.4 Although these arriviste irrigators’ claims were junior to those of the lower valley, there was no feasible means of preventing them from taking all the water they wanted.5

For the next seven decades Ogden Valley’s unfettered water consumption would be a grave vexation to lower valley farmers, whose emissaries trekked up Ogden Canyon annually to confront their counterparts. In 1883, the West Slaterville Irrigation Company appointed Frederick Foy “to meet with delegates from Lynne and Mound Fort [companies] to devise some plan to prevent certain parties in Ogden Valley from usurping our water.” 6 In the thirsty year of 1888, the Lynne Company’s president, Rasmus Christofferson, personally visited Huntsville “for the purpose of demanding that [they] cease using so much of the water, by right belonging to the people in this [lower] valley,” and recounted similar trips in 1877,

2 Likewise, Donald Drover McKay, summarizing Utah’s nineteenth-century succession of water statutes, observed they “could well have been written for Weber County alone, for they reflected an exact picture of developments in this county during those years.” See Donald Drover McKay, “Report: Irrigation in Weber County” (1947), 11, manuscript, Utah State Historical Society.

3 James Lyman Robson, “Weber County Report on Irrigation Claims on Ogden River” (1918), 5, manuscript, Utah State Historical Society.

4 E.S. Borgquist, “Ogden River Water Commissioner’s Report for 1930,” 3, George D. Clyde Papers, Merrill Library, Utah State University.

5 Technically Ogden and the farming communities west of Ogden Canyon are part of the Salt Lake Valley, but were commonly called the “lower valley” in irrigation documents.

6 West Slaterville Irrigation Company, minute book, March 6, 1883, William Wheeler Papers, Marriott Library, University of Utah.

PIONEERS AND PROMINENT MEN OF UTAH

1880, 1883, and 1887. 7 Water masters from Lynne, North Ogden, and Harrisville followed Christofferson to Ogden Valley to plead with Huntsville and Eden to turn water down the river, but could only report, “No definite arrangements were effected to get the water down, as the people there seemed so determined and unwilling to relinquish it, but held onto it so.” Nor could the water masters learn “on what the people in that valley based their rights.”8

No lower valley town suffered from water deprivation more frequently than Plain City, whose irrigators would instigate three out of four landmark water cases to plod through Weber County’s courts in the decades before storage reservoirs slaked the perennial scarcity. The first of those cases, known as the Geddes case (1892), imposed the doctrine of prior appropriation, or first come first served, on Weber County. The subsequent cases would erode prior appropriation’s force and adjudicate once and for all every last right on the Ogden and Weber rivers.9

The circumstances that compelled William Geddes and the Plain City Irrigating District trustees to hale their fellow companies into court were an unlucky coalescence of geography, meteorology, and politics. Plain City had the geographic misfortune to be the caboose among Ogden River water users. Its canal was nine miles long and usually dried up during peak growing season. In contemporary vernacular this was called being at the “honest end” of the stream, since there was no one below it from whom to steal water.10

If 1888 was not Utah’s driest year since the Mormons’ arrival, the everincreasing demands on limited water resources made it seem so. The 1888 scarcity “has given rise to … claims to water privileges which have never heretofore been developed,” reported an Ogden correspondent to the Deseret News . “The worst passions of some of the citizens have been aroused; a collision between them was imminent, and the civil authorities have had to interfere to prevent consequences that would have caused much sorrow, grief, and regret.”11 Community representatives met at the

7 Lynne Irrigation Company, minute book, July 5, 1888, in possession of Anna Stone Keogh, Ogden.

8 Lynne minute book, undated but after July 9, 1888.

9 Two comprehensive critiques of prior appropriation are Moses Lasky, “From Prior Appropriation to Economic Distribution of Water by the State – Via Irrigation Administration,” Rocky Mountain Law Review 1 (April 1929): 161-216; Rocky Mountain Law Review 1 (June 1929): 248-270; Rocky Mountain Law Review 2 (November 1929): 35-58; and Samuel C. Wiel, “Theories of Water Law,” Harvard Law Review 27 (1914): 530-44.

A good foundation for the study of Utah water law is Robert W. Swenson, “A Primer of Utah Water Law: Part I,” Journal of Energy Law and Policy 5 (1984): 165-96, and “Part II,” Journal of Energy Law and Policy 6 (1985): 1-54. Annals of individual Utah irrigation companies are presented in Thomas G. Alexander, “Irrigating the Mormon Heartland: The Operation of the Irrigation Companies in Wasatch Oasis Communities, 1847-1880,” Agricultural History 76 (2002): 172-87; and Thomas G. Alexander, “Interdependence and Change: Mutual Irrigation Companies in Utah’s Wasatch Oasis in an Age of Modernization, 1870-1930,” Utah Historical Quarterly 71 (Fall 2003): 292-314.

10 Barre Toelken, “The Folklore of Water in the Mormon West,” Northwest Folklore 7 (Spring 1989): 14.

11 Deseret Weekly News, July 18, 1888.

Weber County courthouse in Ogden on August 18 to air grievances. Plain City’s farmers were the most vocal; they “suffered for water” and had “great cause to complain.” But whenever they mentioned their claims on the Ogden River the chairman ruled them out of order and asked them to limit their speeches to proposed solutions. Men from Ogden, Slaterville, and Plain City were appointed to draft a compact for equitable water distribution during droughts, but no final version was ever reported.12 Ogden Valley had not participated and it must have rankled the lower valley to read in the Ogden Standard that Liberty’s farmers were harvesting “very good crops” and in Eden “everything was flourishing.”13 The lesson taken away by Plain City’s irrigators was that efforts to arbitrate were all talk and no action.

Much to Utah irrigators’ collective alarm, very little snowfall came that winter and 1889 dawned equally dry, compounding the previous year’s desiccation. The apparent futility of arbitration prompted Plain City water users to obtain an injunction in district court restraining other Ogden River irrigators from “interfering” with their water. Again, representatives convened at the county courthouse, but this year the Huntsville, Eden, and Liberty irrigators, impacted by the injunction, showed up. At the outset, Plain City demanded that its water rights be “reorganized” as equal with the other companies’ or it would withdraw from arbitration. Joseph Taylor of Harrisville scoffed that it would take half the water in the Ogden River to reach Plain City’s remote fields. Trustee William Geddes of Plain City stated that arbitration would prove a waste of time unless each company “prepare[d] legal and lasting articles as to permanent rights.” Once again, the chairman ruled individual claims non-germane.14

Nonetheless, a motion pledging “our strenuous endeavors” toward an arbitrated settlement carried unanimously. In October a drafting committee published an eleven-point plan. Among its proposals were a registry of all claims on the Ogden River, a triumvirate of referees to settle disputed claims, and one water master to oversee the entire river. The plan was a last-ditch attempt to stop the lawsuit portended by Plain City’s injunction. One of its authors was Edwin Dix, another Plain City trustee. But for reasons not preserved, neither Dix’s input nor the central committee’s good intentions could derail the suit, which even then was unfolding in district court.15

Had the Ogden River impasse occurred a decade earlier, the county court might have devised a fair and non-controversial solution. Since 1852 Utah’s county courts, created by the territory’s all-Mormon legislature and

12

Ogden Standard, August 19, 1888. The drafters were Ogden’s William Lowe, Slaterville’s John Knight, and Plain City’s Andreas Peter Poulsen.

13 Ogden Standard, September 21, 1888.

14 Ogden Standard, July 31, 1889.

15 Ogden Standard, July 31, October 5, 1889.

manned by Mormons, had enjoyed exclusive jurisdiction over water and were statutorily obligated to distribute it on an equitable basis. But 1880 brought a sea change to Utah’s water law, stirring up what historian Robert Dunbar called “a jungle of uncontrolled appropriations and undetermined water rights.”16 Whereas under the old law water had been public property; the 1880 law treated it as private property. Previously, the broadest public access to water had been presumed and defended by the county courts, but now irrigators would have to procure a certificate as evidence of water rights. Jurisdiction over water claims and certificates was given to new boards of water commissioners.

After the new law was approved on February 20, 1880, water commissioners throughout the territory mobilized to administer it. Weber County’s board announced monthly hearings, but water users’ rush to establish claims proved overwhelming and soon required daily sessions, with the Ogden Standard urging claimants to procure their certificates “immediately.” 17 But the new law unleashed a host of unintended consequences. Absent the old duty to decide water claims in the public interest – that is, to maximize the benefit of water to the entire population – commissions generally rubber-stamped any quantity demanded for private use. Economist George Thomas cited a Weber County certificate

16

17 Ogden Standard, June 30, September 29, 1880.

Robert Dunbar, Forging New Rights in Western Waters (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1983), 17.

Principal Ditches on the Ogden River and its forks in 1897.

SAMUEL FORTIER, SEEPAGE WATER OF NORTHERN UTAH

permitting forty-nine second-feet of water for two hundred acres where three second-feet would have sufficed. 18 Nor could commissions from county to county agree on what the 1880 law meant. One commission held that no one could be prosecuted for taking water not his own until the commission determined the legal rights of all claimants to that water, emboldening some irrigators to break dams and take others’ water with impunity.19

In January 1881, district court judge Phillip Emerson of Ogden ruled that the 1880 law’s delegation of judicial authority to the water commissions violated the territorial organic act, and that all certificates issued under it were void. (Many reference works on Utah water law acknowledge that the 1880 law became “inoperative” or “unenforced” but fail to document how it happened.)20 Emerson’s ruling would have steered water disputes into the district courts, created by the U.S. Congress and manned mainly by non-Mormon judges. But in many counties, including Weber, the ruling was ignored and one month later many irrigation districts got water certificates, including Plain City, West Slaterville, and Eden.21 Water certificate hearings continued at least through 1883.22

However, if Judge Emerson’s ruling could not stop the boards of water commissioners from usurping judicial prerogatives, the escalating competition for scarce water resources could. Water commissions were simply not equal to the task of resolving complicated and contentious water disputes. “We have a water question to settle,” wrote a Nephi resident in 1881. “The water commissioners have settled it once, but it won’t stay settled, and will have to go to the district court.”23

So in 1889 Plain City had nowhere to go but the district court, which had its own shortcomings. Samuel Fortier, chairman of civil and hydraulic engineering at Utah Agricultural College, observed that the costs of attorney, court, and witness fees were “worse than being obliged to hoist a ten-ton derrick in order to raise a sack of potatoes,” and recommended spending the money instead on storage reservoirs. The costs in time were substantial as well; farmers lost days and even weeks as they traveled long distances and waited to testify. Water cases in district court typically

18 George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, with Special Reference to Early Utah Conditions (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 139.

19 Deseret Weekly News, July 28, 1880.

20 Salt Lake Tribune, January 26; March 18, 1881; Territorial Enquirer [Provo], January 29, February 16, 1881. Emerson made a similar ruling three years later; see Ogden Herald, May 15, 1884.

The Deseret Weekly News of July 2, 1884, without being specific, said the only adverse decision from any Utah court on the 1880 law had been from the First District (which included Ogden). The voiding of the 1880 law by Judge Emerson is identified here for the first time. Seven years earlier, Emerson, as a Utah Supreme Court justice, had upbraided the territorial legislature for creating judicial authority inconsistent with the organic act; see Golding v. Jennings, 1 Utah 135 (1874).

21 Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in Utah (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1898), 204.

22 Ogden Standard, April 18, 1883.

23 Deseret Weekly News, March 2, 1881.

required three years for a referee to be assigned, testimony taken, and a decree issued.24

George Thomas favored the late methods of the old county courts, which sometimes initiated their own investigations and conducted their own field work. He felt district courts were too reactive, constrained to hear only cases brought to them and rendering decisions based solely on evidence produced by litigants. He said crucial evidence on soil physics and irrigation engineering was usually poorly presented or entirely absent. Both Thomas and Fortier deplored the selfinterested, partisan, and exaggerated testimony often elicited from farmers and surveyors.25

Water cases in Utah’s district courts came to be seen as economic and legal fiascoes. Both the Deseret News and Ogden Standard pleaded with their readers to opt for arbitration over litigation. Said the latter, “It is not only cheaper, but in the end more just. Technicalities are avoided.”26 Most irrigators did not need to be told this; their minutes reflect an abhorrence of litigation.27 The 1888 and 1889 summit meetings at Weber County’s courthouse were, in fact, grand attempts to avert a showdown in district court.

Despite all the warnings, William Geddes and his fellow Plain City trustees pushed ahead with their case, called “by far the most important water contest ever brought up in Weber County and probably the most important ever considered in the Territory.”28 The trial, technically a hearing on making the July 1889 injunction permanent, finally began on March 30, 1891. As fate would have it, the intervening year, 1890, had been one of the wettest years on record in Utah, with water so plentiful that

24 Samuel Fortier, “Irrigated Utah and Her Needs,” in Irrigation in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah Irrigation Commission, 1895), 41. Fortier had been chief engineer of Ogden City’s waterworks

case and his writings were apparently informed by it.

25 Thomas, Development of Institutions, 190-91; Fortier, “Irrigated Utah,” 41-42.

26 Deseret Weekly News, December 1, 1880; Ogden Standard, July 17, 1888.

27 For example, the Lynne Irrigation Company’s minutes of June 29, 1888: “All possible should meet together and talk the matters over … and not allow the matter to go into litigation.”

28 Salt Lake Tribune, September 11, 1892.

during the Geddes

William Maginnis, referee in the Geddes case, had been chief justice of the territorial Supreme Court of Wyoming until October 1, 1889.

COLLECTION OF MICHAEL O’NEILL

many irrigation companies neither hired water masters nor held meetings. The forecast for 1891 was good, too, so the case’s urgency had dissipated.29

Plain City relied on two contentions: that an 1859 grant from the county court guaranteed sufficient Ogden River water to fill its ditch, and that its “early settlement … entitle[d] them to the prior right to use all the water necessary.”30 The town was indeed settled before the Ogden Valley. But North Ogden, Harrisville, and other lower valley defendants proved they had appropriated their water before Plain City was even a gleam in the eyes of its migrating founders from Lehi.31 Plain City knew perfectly well that its rights were junior to these defendants, as shown by its insistence during the 1889 arbitration that its rights be upgraded as “equal.” But it clearly expected a decree in the old county court mode, ordering pro-rata distribution of water.

Instead, on September 10, 1892, more than three years after the Geddes case was filed, referee William Maginnis came down solidly for prior appropriation, a legal doctrine followed in other western jurisdictions’ case law and recognized by the Utah Supreme Court.32 Prior appropriation’s essence is first in time, first in right. In its most draconian form, it flinches not at drought; a senior appropriator may, even during scarcity, take all the water specified in his title before a junior appropriator gets even one drop.

Maginnis’s decree established a hierarchy for thirteen irrigation districts, based on their claimed dates of first appropriation, from Mound Fort (June 1, 1850) to Huntsville Mountain (June 1, 1872), and formalized the ditches’ dimensions and volumes of water. Those thirteen districts were entitled to “exclusive use of so much of the water of the Ogden River as will flow in their said ditches according to the dates of their appropriation.” But whenever there was insufficient water to supply each ditch, the junior appropriators, beginning with Huntsville Mountain, would have to close their ditches until Mound Fort and other senior appropriators in succession received all their water.33 If Plain City, which ranked fifth in a three-way tie, still expected “equal” water rights, the decree must have been a shock.

Geddes shattered the tradition of benevolent solutions. Under the guise of civil procedure, the case had allowed “a great many complications, men claiming more water than they were really entitled to and also spurious dates of filing,” noted a 1918 Weber County Farm Bureau report. “A very peculiar feature of this decree was the adjudicating of claims for nearly

29 Ogden Standard, April 1, 1891.

30 Ibid. The Geddes pleadings have not been located.

31 Ogden Standard, April 3, and 8, 1891.

32 The Colorado Supreme Court “developed” the doctrine of prior appropriation beginning in 1872.

See Gordon Bakken, The Development of Law on the Rocky Mountain Frontier: Civil Law and Society, 18501912 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 33. The Utah Supreme Court’s earliest recognition of prior appropriation was in Crane v. Winsor, 2 Utah 248 (1878).

33 See http://www.waterrights.utah.gov/cgi-bin/docview.exe?Folder=DECREE112230 (accessed April 2, 2008).

double or treble the amount of water in the river in low water season.”34 It also left important issues untouched. Utah, in its territorial days, was the single western jurisdiction not to require water titles to be filed.35 Scores of claims on the Ogden River existed when Geddes commenced, but none was legally recorded.36 The Ogden Bench Canal Company, for example, had wanted to “clear up” its claim during the 1888 drought, but could unearth no record of its establishment. Its secretary noted, “The county clerk … failed to record the minutes of the meeting of the probate court, at which [our] organization was perfected [on June 26, 1855].”37 Geddes ignored the problems stemming from the lack of legal evidence of water titles.

Moreover, some irrigation districts were not parties to Geddes, including Marriott, West Slaterville, and Northwestern Union.38 These three companies became the plaintiffs in Weber County’s second landmark water case, Marriott Irrigation Company, et al. v. Bear River Irrigation and Ogden Waterworks Company, et al (1899).39 The Marriott case would modify the Geddes decree and demonstrate how grueling it was to prove title without legal evidence.

Marriott’s catalyst was another very dry summer, 1895, during which another central committee formed “to equalize the water to all the settlements in order that none may entirely lose their crops.”40 On September 6, 1895, two days before a central committee convocation, the West Slaterville Irrigation Company met to strategize. As with Plain City in 1889, West Slaterville considered refusing to submit to arbitration. Edwin W. Smout argued, accurately, that they had prior rights over “most” Ogden River companies, including Plain City, Harrisville, Farr West, North Ogden, Huntsville, and Eden, and he favored going to court to “stick to it.” John A. Allred, Slaterville’s Mormon bishop, agreed with Smout because establishing those rights was easier “while we had the testimony at hand which we would not have always.” Smout proposed conferring with Slaterville’s oldest living original settler, Stephen Washington Perry, “and get all the information they could.”41 Perry had helped to construct the Northwestern Union Canal, Slaterville’s earliest diversion from Mill Creek. 42 Whether through interviewing Stephen Washington Perry, researching county records, or consulting attorneys, West Slaterville discovered that both its rights and Marriott’s rights were derived from Northwestern Union’s.

34 Robson, “Weber County Report,” 3.

35 Bakken, TheDevelopment of Law, 72.

36 Robson, “Weber County Report,” 3. Much of the Ogden River water was appropriated before the county courts existed.

37 Ogden Bench Canal Company, minute book, September 15, November 6, 1888; January 10, 1889, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University.

38 The West Slaterville Irrigation Company was the predecessor of present-day North Slaterville Irrigation Company. Northwestern Union Irrigation Company was the predecessor of present-day Perry Ditch Irrigation Company (not to be confused with Perry in Box Elder County).

39 The Bear River Irrigation Company owned the Ogden Waterworks from 1890-1910.

40 Ogden Standard, July 10, August 7, 1895.

41 West Slaterville minute book, September 6, 1895.

42 Ogden Standard, January 23, 1899.

The complaint, filed in August 1897, asked for an injunction preventing the defendants, all irrigators west of Ogden Canyon, from diverting plaintiffs’water from the Ogden River and Mill Creek.43 (A later motion to add Ogden Valley water users was denied.) After more than a year of cross-complaints and answers, the trial began on January 23, 1899, with Jacob Johnson of Spring City, “one of the best posted men in the state on irrigation and water rights,” as visiting district court judge. 44 Stephen Washington Perry and his brothers Alonzo and Sylvester led off as plaintiffs’ first witnesses, presumably because their institutional memory would lay the foundation for establishing titles. They testified to “the manner and means by which [Northwestern Union’s] interest became the interest of the Marriott Company.”45

Thomas Slater, West Slaterville’s oldest continuous shareholder and first witness, testified for an entire day, followed by numerous company stalwarts and the county recorder who read various deeds and descriptions. The defendants marshaled over one hundred witnesses, Judge Johnson fretted over concluding the case before his term expired, and a doodling defense attorney, fearing the case might never end, sketched caricatures of the judge and court reporter as wizened old men. The exhaustive reconstruction of title provenance can be inferred from a list of persons with “interests” in West Slaterville’s ditch printed in the Ogden Standard. Many on the list were either deceased or had not lived in Slaterville for four decades, including Morrisites who had left in 1861.46

Although no transcript survives, a critical consideration in establishing plaintiffs’ titles would have been Northwestern Union’s relation to the Bertonati Irrigation Company, whose head gate lay one mile east on Mill Creek. The Bertonati ditch was the original Northwestern Union ditch and had so functioned until 1878, when a majority of shareholders constructed a new (and present) diversion point with the right to five of the original eight second-feet of water.47

Judge Johnson filed his decision on April 24, 1899, consisting of an

43 Complaint in Ogden Standard, August 27, 1897.

44 Ogden Standard, March 29, 1899.

45 Ogden Standard, January 23, February 6, 1899.

46 Ogden Standard, March 30, 1899. The list included Thomas “Bergo”

47 Bertonati Irrigation Company, minute book, February 7, 1926, in possession of Anna Stone Keogh, Ogden. The old ditch was renamed for shareholder Michael Bertonati who must have purchased his rights from an original owner. It was filled in after its lands were appropriated for the Defense Depot Ogden.

[Virgo], landlord to the schismatic prophet Joseph Morris, plus Morrisites William Field Bull and Moses Byrne.

Judge Jacob Johnson, who modified the Geddes decree, later served as a Congressman from Utah, 1913-1914.

COLLECTION OF ARDATH E. JOHNSON

opinion and thirty findings, only two of which were reprinted in newspapers. From press accounts, one might conclude that Marriott, West Slaterville, and Northwestern Union lost their case. Johnson ruled that the defendants had not “in any manner interfered with any rights of plaintiffs,” nor “threatened” to interfere.48

But the Marriott case was actually a stunning victory for the plaintiffs. Although they never claimed to be the first to divert Ogden River water, Marriott, West Slaterville, and Northwestern Union were guaranteed that the low water allotted to them would henceforth “be distributed to them prior to all other rights on the Ogden River.”49 Annual reports of Ogden River commissioners confirm that the “Johnson decree” overrode all other adjudications of the river. A 1942 Bureau of Reclamation report said the 1892 Geddes case had “defined the major right[s] on the river system … However, some of its provisions were superseded in subsequent decrees, particularly one made by Judge Jacob Johnson in the [1899 Marriott case].”50 Johnson’s rationale for leapfrogging the plaintiffs’ rights over the senior rights of the Mound Fort and Lynne companies was not preserved. The resulting doctrine would seem to be: first in time, first in right except whenit is not.

48 Ogden Standard and Salt Lake Tribune, April 28, 1899.

49 District Court of the Second Judicial District of the State of Utah, in and for Weber County, Plain City Irrigation Company v. Hooper Irrigation Co., et al., No. 7487, Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Judgment and Decree (1948) (hereinafter “Ogden River Decree”), 21, Utah State Historical Society.

50 Gilbert Wheelwright, “Ogden River Water Commissioner’s Report for 1937,” 3, 8; Bureau of Reclamation, “Appendix Report on Ogden River Investigations” (1942), 36; both documents in Orson Winso Israelsen Papers, Merrill Library, Utah State University.

A rural road near Ogden.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Slaterville historian Jerome Wheeler later explained, “First claims … had previously been secured by Lynne and Mound Fort companies … However, these companies refusing in later years to cooperate in defending their early rights in court forfeited first claims to [West] Slaterville Irrigation Company as stipulated in a decree of the court.” 51 Lynne Irrigation Company minutes seem to validate Wheeler’s statement. They record a conversation between their president and Marriott’s president, who “thought we [Lynne] should have been plaintiffs instead of defendants … [Marriott’s president] did not think they cared to fight us although they had made us a party to the action.” Lynne’s directors agreed “to procure witnesses if possible to establish a better claim to our upper ditch and if this could not be done to negotiate with plaintiffs for the privilege of joining them as plaintiffs.” Obviously that was not done.52

Blain Johnson, current Ogden River commissioner, confirms that the three companies’ priority of low-water Ogden River rights remains intact to the present day. But the commissioner doubts the 1899 decree matters nowadays because “there is always enough water for rights with high seniority, anyway.” No report of hardship resulting from the three companies’ “super” rights was found. During 1930, a year of water scarcity, the three companies voluntarily shared their water with the Mound Fort and Bertonati companies.53

Weber County’s third landmark water case, Fuller v. Sharp (1908), ascended to the Utah Supreme Court where it introduced the concept of “return flow” into state case law, a significant retreat from prior appropriation’s severity. “One of the matters which most complicate and embarrass … the strict enforcement of priorities of appropriation,” U.S. Geological Survey hydrographer Frederick Haynes Newell had written, is return flow, which “comes from the seepage from lands higher upstream to which water has been applied earlier in the year.”54

Fuller’s slapstick narrative, centered around the Eden Irrigation Company’s dam on the North Fork of the Ogden River, might present an opportunity for an enterprising Utah farceur. In July 1904, Milo Sharp and other trustees of the Plain City and Harrisville irrigation companies broke Eden’s dam, believing Eden had diverted water belonging to them. George Fuller and his fellow Eden trustees repaired their dam and got a court injunction restraining their predators from further demolitions. The situation was turned on its head the following summer as North Ogden

51

Jerome Wheeler, History of Slaterville (private printing, 1978), 55. Wheeler was sixteen and an experienced irrigator when the Johnson decree was issued.

52

Lynne minutes, September 23, 1897.

53

Blain Johnson conversation with author, December 21, 2007; Borgquist, “Commissioner’s 1930 Report,” 1.

54

Frederick Haynes Newell, “Letter of Transmittal,” April 13, 1897, in Samuel Fortier, “Seepage Water of Northern Utah,” Water-Supply and Irrigation Papers of the United States Geological Survey, No. 7, House of Representatives Document No. 349, 54th Congress, 2nd Session (1897).

obtained an injunction from a different judge ordering Eden to break its formerly protected dam so water might flow down to North Ogden. Eden complied but two days later rebuilt its dam, only to be held in contempt of court.55

To justify its taking of North Fork water contrary to the 1892 Geddes decree, Eden presented considerable scientific data at trial, showing that water diverted onto its fields seeped and percolated through layers of loam, sand, and gravel and then returned to the Ogden River through gullies and springs.56 Back in the Geddes trial, the Ogden Valley companies had alleged this return flow, unsupported by expert testimony, but referee Maginnis had not considered it legally applicable.57 Only in 1894 did Professor Samuel Fortier, alerted by a Colorado colleague that irrigation at high elevations appeared to increase a lower river’s summer volume, take measurements in Ogden Valley streams that would so change the concept of prior appropriation.58

Plain City, through its own expert, insisted that North Fork water if left alone would course down its natural channel into the Ogden River and

55 Ogden Standard, August 27, 1904; August 8, 1905. Harrisville’s company was known as the Western Irrigation Company.

56 Fuller v. Sharp, 94 P. 813, 815-16 (1908). This case is Weber County’s principal contribution to Utah water law. The 1892 Geddes decree was never appealed and is not known to have influenced water cases in other counties.

57 Ogden Standard, September 11, 1892.

58 McKay, “Irrigation in Weber County,” 13-14. Fortier’s 1894 measurements were published in “Seepage Water of Northern Utah” and noted in the Fuller opinion.

Construction of the Pineview Dam.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Lower valley canals and ditches at the time of Pineview Dam’s completion, 1937.

that no water diverted onto Eden’s farms ever found its way back into the river.59 The trial court ordered the Eden Canal closed for two weeks so measurements of uninterrupted North Fork flow could be taken. As Eden had claimed, the water sank into the gravelly streambed, leaving a dry channel over a mile in length and producing no perceptible increase in Ogden River water.60 The court ruled for Eden and Plain City appealed.

The Utah Supreme Court affirmed for Eden. The majority opinion and dissent classically illustrated the tension between an equitable approach to water distribution and the austere legality of prior appropriation. Since seepage demonstrably caused more water to flow down to Plain City than if North Fork water took its natural course, the majority said the route for Plain City’s entitlement was immaterial. Prior appropriation, it said, was a right to a quantity, not to a means of conveyance. If North Fork water could not reach Plain City even without Eden’s diverting it, then Plain City could not deprive Eden of a beneficial use where Plain City would get no benefit regardless.61

The dissenting justice, on the other hand, saw no reason for equitable considerations to intrude on the Geddes decree of 1892. He stated

59

Ogden Standard, December 2, 1904.

60 Fuller v. Sharp, 815-16.

61 Fuller v. Sharp, 817-18.

OGDEN RIVER WATER COMMISSIONERS REPORT, 1937

vehemently that everything concerning the parties’ rights, times of appropriations, quantities, and circumstances of usage were already adjudicated and the trial court acted inappropriately to treat those matters as undetermined. He considered the trial court’s finding that Plain City still had a prior right in North Fork water yet did not own or control that water, to be unclear and contradictory.62

Fuller did suppress longstanding scuffles over North Fork water, but this merely shifted the lower valley’s glare to other Ogden Valley irrigators, particularly those on the South Fork. Amplifying these chronic frustrations was Ogden City’s drilling of artesian wells, beginning in 1914, at the east end of Ogden Canyon for a new water supply. The wells earned immediate renown for their pristine and delicious water, but they depleted the return flow that had supposedly justified weakening the lower valley’s prior rights.63 On January 18, 1921, Plain City again filed a major water lawsuit (its third and Weber County’s fourth), this time to compel the adjudication of rights on the entire Weber River system, of which the Ogden River is a tributary. The adjudication would take twenty-seven years to complete.

A new state water law passed in 1919 created the adjudication process, a judicially-supervised tabulating of claims and conducting of field surveys by the state engineer. The law required courts to notify the state engineer of any suit for determination of water rights; the engineer then had to identify and notify all claimants and submit a proposed determination to govern water distribution until the court approved a final determination. However, the engineer’s proposed determination could not supersede rights already established in earlier decrees.64

The state engineer filed his proposed determination on September 3, 1924, inciting claimants to file nearly five hundred objections with the court.65 Of all these objections, none was more contentious than Plain City’s unflagging belief that the Ogden Valley took its water, and the state engineer tried doggedly but unsuccessfully to mediate. Prominent Ogden Valley irrigator Donald Drover McKay described his neighbors’ wariness of the state’s intervention. “It was clear to those who knew the opinions of the [successive] state engineers,” McKay wrote, “that when the decision was finally made, it would be on the basis of first in time, first in right [i.e., prior appropriation] without any qualification or modifying factors.” The Eden and Huntsville irrigation companies both sought writs of prohibition at the Utah Supreme Court to prevent the district court from making its final determination, but the writs were denied.66 Opting for carrots instead

62 Fuller v. Sharp, 821-22.

63 Leonard J. Arrington and Lowell Dittmer, “Reclamation in Three Layers: The Ogden River Project, 1934-1965,” Pacific Historical Review 35 (1966): 18-19.

64 Bureau of Reclamation, “Appendix Report,” 36-37.

65 Ogden Standard Examiner, April 1, 1925.

66 See Eden Irrigation Company v. District Court of Weber County, 211 P. 957 (1922); Huntsville Irrigation Association v. District Court of Weber County, 270 P. 1090 (1928).

of sticks, companies on the South Fork organized to lobby both the engineer and the lower valley to accept the data on return flow, but McKay said these efforts were “finally abandoned as useless.”67 On September 18, 1926, the engineer ordered the Weber River commissioner to shut off all water taken by South Fork companies. The companies were prepared for the move and got a restraining order the same day, forcing the commissioner to reopen the ditches only a few hours after closing them.68

Years of field work by the state engineer’s office finally persuaded the Ogden Valley, lower valley, and Ogden City to sign a three-way stipulation on July 23, 1929, to govern water distribution for a trial period of seven years. Ogden City would have unlimited use of its artesian wells in exchange for a portion of its water share in an anticipated future reservoir (present-day Pineview). The lower valley’s prior rights were quantified at one hundred twenty-five second-feet, and whenever the flow at the mouth of Ogden Canyon fell below that level, Ogden Valley must release enough water to create a flow equal to 133 percent of the flow at the U.S. Geological Survey’s gauging station on the South Fork.69

With this stipulation in place, the Ogden River commissioner could focus on improvements in distribution. In 1930 he persuaded all lower valley companies and many in Ogden Valley to install locking head gates and measuring devices, allowing irrigators to see precisely how many secondfeet they were getting. “It has been possible,” he reported, “to set the canal[s] with just the amount to which [they are] entitled and then hold it there days and days without any change whatever.” Plain City installed inverted siphons to route its water under the Ogden River and over Mill Creek, eliminating an old problem of commingling different companies’ water.70

Another welcome development in 1930 came as the new Echo Canyon Reservoir on the Weber River in Morgan County began storing water. Plain City purchased storage rights, and the water so acquired, routed through their canal’s extension to the Weber River, gave them an adequate supply. Otherwise, noted water commissioner E. S. Borgquist, “due to [Plain City’s] priority date it would have been dry all summer if furnished from the Ogden River.”71

The adjudication of the Weber River system, instigated in 1921, was finalized on June 2, 1937, but the portion comprising the Ogden River had to be postponed. Construction of Pineview Dam and Reservoir on the Ogden River was completed that summer and water users would require eleven more years to adjust to the new circumstances. Storage in Pineview had begun in November 1936 and irrigators began purchasing water

67 McKay, “Irrigation in Weber County,” 18.

68 Ibid., 20; see Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 21, 1926.

69 Bureau of Reclamation, “Appendix Report,” 37. Upon completion of a reservoir on the Ogden River, the lower valley’s priority would rise to one hundred thirty-five second-feet.

70 Borgquist, “Ogden River Water Commissioner’s 1930 Report,” 4.

71 Ibid., 3, 5.”

the following summer.72

Pineview Reservoir would palliate water shortages and pacify irrigators’ perennial quarrels, but the need to maintain a priority-based distribution system did not change. Under various scenarios, water shortages can still occur. By contract with the Bureau of Reclamation, Ogden City has the right to drain Pineview for inspections and repairs of its artesian wells, now underneath hundreds of feet of water.73 The reservoir is also drained intermittently for dam repairs and seismic upgrades, sometimes during periods of drought in spite of irrigators’ heightened needs.74 During dry years, of course, Pineview can drop to inadequate levels. In 1959, for example, it held only one-third of its normal amount, embroiling Ogden City and Plain City in litigation over distribution.75

While clearly a boon to irrigators, Pineview never significantly altered the distribution scheme established in the 1929 stipulation. When the final determination (the “Ogden River Decree”) finally came on April 1, 1948, the stipulation’s essential elements – the prime measurements on the South Fork and at the mouth of Ogden Canyon, and the Ogden Valley’s obligation to turn down water if the latter measurement underperformed – still stood.76

With the era of behemoth water lawsuits in Weber County now behind

72 Wheelwright, “Ogden River Water Commissioner’s 1937 Report,” 2-3.

73 Arrington and Dittmer, “Reclamation in Three Layers,” 23-24.

74 Standard-Examiner, July 2, 2002; Salt Lake Tribune, October 3, 2004.

75 See Plain City Irrigation Company v. Hooper Irrigation Company, 356 P. 2d 625 (1960).

76 Ogden River Decree, 11.

Echo Dam and Reservoir, completed in 1930.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

us, it is fitting to assess prior appropriation’s impact on the county’s irrigating history. When first formally imposed via the 1892 Geddes decree, prior appropriation took the county, and especially Plain City, by surprise. While they understood intellectually that seniority mattered, they expected the district court to oversee an equitable distribution of at least some water to all irrigators. Instead they got a rigid hierarchy of rights that could easily have left junior irrigators with no water during periods of scarcity. Nonetheless, irrigators adapted to prior appropriation’s vagaries. Twelve years later Plain City would embrace the Geddes decree in justifying its breaking of Eden’s dam in the Fuller v. Sharp case, and went so far to hire as its attorney William Maginnis, the Geddes referee.

Aside from its obvious incompatibility with Utah’s equitable traditions, prior appropriation encouraged the view among irrigators that the courts and the law were ineffectual. For all the Geddes decree’s bluster, farmers never felt prior appropriation protected their interests. Senior rights failed to control the outcome in subsequent cases. Companies constantly accused each other of stealing water and hired men to watch their ditches twentyfour hours a day. Worst of all, as McKay pointed out, lawsuits under the doctrine of prior appropriation “settled nothing and provided not one single drop of additional water.”77

In subsequent landmark water cases Weber County gradually distanced itself from prior appropriation’s harshness. Judge Johnson’s 1899 decree in the Marriott case rearranged the rights on the Ogden River so prior appropriation meant, literally, twelfth in time, first in right.78 Fuller v. Sharp, decided at the Utah Supreme Court in 1908, qualified prior appropriation with return flow, so that as long as a senior irrigator got his water, his means of delivery was immaterial. The Ogden River adjudication, completed in 1948, benefited from the 1919 state water law’s transfer of fact-finding duties to the state engineer and its favoring of empirical solutions over legal rigors in ranking an entire region’s rights.

Prior appropriation was simply a legal tool improvised in the course of the arid West’s growing pains to allow courts to process water disputes. Although it nominally remains the law in western jurisdictions, Professor Gordon Bakken asserts that prior appropriation became obsolete when confronted by the extreme circumstances of dry weather cycles and burgeoning populations. Utah’s legislature eventually imported successful strategies from other western states, emphasizing economic distribution by the state over legal rights. Such policy judgments, wrote Bakken, “promoted the efficient use of water based on scientific considerations rather than the oftentimes wasteful use of water based on strictly legal grounds.”79

77 McKay, “Irrigation in Weber County,” 21.

78 Ogden River Decree, 21. As tabulated in 1948, Northwestern Union’s (now Perry Ditch) right ranked twelfth in time; West Slaterville’s (now North Slaterville) ranked fourteenth; and Marriott’s ranked twenty-first.

79 Bakken, The Development of Law, 32, 39, 70.

All Too Rare: The Rise and Fall of Jazz DJs on Utah AM Radio, 1945-1965

By LAURENCE M. YORGASON

Since the early 1960s disc jockeys have been highly visible promoters of rock and roll music on both AM and FM radio stations in Utah. They remain an integral and powerful influence in the spread and popularity of music. Almost forgotten by the general radio listening audience is an earlier group of DJs who played and promoted a popular genre of music that since the mid-1960s has nearly vanished from the AM radio dial. Jazz was that music, and those DJs who played jazz are the subject of this article.

Unlike their rock brethren, jazz DJs first made their appearance after jazz music had already reached its height of popularity elsewhere. As DJs came onto the listening scene in the middle 1940s, jazz and radio were already joined at the hip.

Hal Zogg

Laurence (Lars) M. Yorgason is a free-lance author and jazz musician with degrees in music and history from Brigham Young University. He is currently researching and writing an historical study of jazz music and jazz musicians in Utah.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

However, the end of World War II marked the beginning of a slow decline in the popularity of jazz music. The DJs’ on-air careers mirrored the fortunes of the music in the two subsequent decades.

Jazz developed and became popular concurrently with the spread of radio, aided by that medium’s voracious appetite for music. Jazz featured rhythmic syncopation, improvisation and associations with youthful freedom, and despite vigorous opposition from conventional music authorities, its popularity began to exceed that of all other forms of music.

Jazz’s marriage to radio began in the first decades of the twentieth century, although the formation of jazz itself can be traced to the late nineteenth century. Before radio, early jazz performances were heard principally in cities where African Americans resided in substantial numbers. It wasn’t until live performances of white, large jazz-influenced dance bands were broadcast from large cities and heard on the newly formed national radio networks National Broadcasting Company (1926); Columbia Broadcasting System (1927); Mutual Broadcasting System (1934); and American Broadcasting Company (1943) that the rest of the country joined the listening party. And join they did, listening to Red Nichols and Paul Whiteman, moving through World War II with the big bands of Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller, and finally enjoying the black bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others.1

Commercial radio in Utah utilized music wherever possible. Local radio stations in Utah featured programs with live and, eventually, recorded musical performances. The fare ranged from classical to all varieties of American popular music. However, dance music, with jazz phrasing, was limited to the radio audience along the Wasatch Front.2

Rural radio stations KOAL in Price, KSUB in Cedar City, KS VC in Richfield, KJAM in Vernal, and a few others featured local musical performances as well as popular and western music, request shows, news and daily farm reports, mine work schedules and reports, local business happenings, weekly super-hero programs, serial dramatizations, high school athletics,

1 The following general histories of jazz trace these developments: Mark C. Gridley, Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000); Brian Harker, Jazz: An American Journey (Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice Hall, 2004); David D. Megill, Paul O.W. Tanner, Jazz Issues: A Critical History (Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark, 1995); Frank Tirro, Living with Jazz: An Appreciation (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996); and Jack Wheaton, All That Jazz! (New York: Ardsley House, 1994).

The relationship of cities to jazz music is discussed in Charles Nanry, The Jazz Text (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1979); and Leroy Ostransky, Jazz City: The Impact of Our Cities on the Development of Jazz (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978).

Analysis of relationships between black and white musicians and their audiences in the period are found in LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963); Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); August and John H. Bracey Meier eds. Music in American Life and Blacks in the New World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981).

2 This analysis was made from examining radio logs in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Provo newspapers from 1930 to 1950.

religious programs, and state and church leaders’ visits. Occasionally, these rural stations carried network feeds of national broadcasts of classical performances. Two powerful stations, both 50,000 watt stations, Salt Lake City’s KSL and Denver’s KOA, were heard throughout Utah and parts of other western states. Salt Lake City’s KUTA was also heard in Delta.3

Devotees of swing dance music during the 1930s and early 1940s likely never imagined that their favorite music would ever lose its appeal, but vocalists grew in popularity following the end of World War II, singing a new style of rhythm and blues, which developed out of the black musical community. This style would quickly evolve into rock and roll during the mid-1950s.4 Despite the jazz characteristics found in the more structured big band swing style, many jazz musicians believed that music for dancing was esthetically limiting. Jazz music should free the emotions, encourage improvisation and on-the-spot creativity. This type of jazz was best performed by small musical ensembles at smaller venues. Such small musical groups provided the bulk of most recorded music played at radio stations by jazz disc jockeys. According to one musicologist, this jazz was less danceable, which resulted in a decline of the listening audience.6

The radio and phonograph records were the principal means of disseminating music to America’s listening audience. Early radio broadcasts of jazz in Utah came by way of hookups to live performances from distant big cities. Radio station program directors or “engineers” turned the knobs, played the recordings, and read the news. Other employees produced in studio plays, dramas, quizzes, musical performances, and comedy pieces. Beginning in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, local remote radio broadcasts featured both Utah and celebrity swing bands. The most popular venues in northern Utah were The Terrace and the Rainbo Randevu in downtown Salt Lake City, and, of course, Lagoon, Saltair and the Avalon. These sites were large enough for big bands and numerous couples to dance. In almost all cases the featured music was Swing. For those who were unable to be present, these live radio broadcasts provided opportuni-

3 Tim Larson and Robert K. Avery, “Utah Broadcasting History,” Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1994), 55-58. Tom Mulvey, “Denver Radio: 80 Years of Change,” www.broadcastprofessionals.net/denver-radio.html (accessed September 20, 2007).

4 Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).

5 For more on this subject see Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) and Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962; reprint, 1972), 133-55.

6 See Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 845-49; David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 204-205, 209-210, 241-45. At the same time that jazz DJs first appeared, a new music style, bebop, was also developing. This new style found its roots in New York City, beginning in the early 1940s, but remained silent to many of the listening audience. In June 1942 and for the next two years the American Federation of Musicians struck the major recording companies, which limited new recordings and which thwarted for a time the new bebop sound. See Veaux, The Birth of Bebop, 17-27.

JAZZ DJS ON UTAH AM RADIO

ties for couples and small groups to dance at home. A new, regularly scheduled radio personality, the “disc jockey,” began airing his voice over the radio in the late 1930s.7 In the greater Salt Lake City radio broadcast area, the voices of disc jockeys Bill Sears, Paul Alexander and Bill Agee at KUTA, Emerson Smith at KDYL, Salle Caprice at KUTA, and “Cousin” Ken Bennett at KLO were heard in the mid- 1940s. They played popular music during the morning hours and midday’s shows were frequently identified with their own names. These local radio shows lasted an hour. During other times of the day, stations interspersed these onehour programs with other short music programs of fifteen to thirty minute time blocks along with radio dramas, local and national news programs, celebrity sports and comedy. These “fillers” had titles such as “Sweet and Hot,” “Breakfast Time Tunes,” “Melody Minutes,” “Musical Mirage,” and “Moods in Rhythm,” to name a few. This programming pattern continued through the war years.

The first jazz disc jockey in Utah was Al Collins. Collins was probably not exaggerating when he described how the radio audience of 1945 responded to his music: “When I came out here people hadn’t heard hardly anything of jazz, really. I remember, I put Benny Goodman and Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge and Slim Gaillard and things like that on the air, and people never heard about them around here. So, they got a kick out of it. ”8

Collins was quite optimistic about the place of jazz in American culture. Known as “Jazzbo” or “Jazzbeaux” before arriving in Salt Lake City, Collins had appended his nickname at the urging of a fellow employee, an “engineer” at station WIND in Chicago.9 That nickname epitomized Collins’s casual and playful attitude, an outlook reflected in his approach to broadcasting. Because Collins found jazz an important musical form, he tried to present it accessibly and spontaneously to grab attention of the radio audience in Salt Lake City. But for Collins, jazz was also a means to an end. He paid close attention to the audience’s tolerance for this fairly new and unknown music: “Luckily I had enough controls on myself so I didn’t play any loud, steaming brass, and a lot of drum solos. I kept it all very tasty, and all within the realm of credibility. And I was able to get away with playing jazz under those conditions. See, that’s an important point for me.”10 His audience became as interested in his antics as in the music he played. Jazzbo described a typical stunt while at KALL:

But [regarding] the Man on the Street Show, from the second floor, they hung a micro-

7 Peter Gammond, “Disc Jockey” in The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 156.

8 Al “Jazzbo” Collins, interviewed by Paul Smith in the late 1950s; and Al Collins interviewed by Tim Larson and Greg Thompson, April 8, 1992. Transcript copies in possession of the author.

9 Al Collins interview by Larson and Thompson.

10 Ibid.

phone down and onto the sidewalk. And I would take it and start broadcasting from there. But I noticed that every time I started a broadcast with that microphone, everybody would run away and go on the other side of the street.

So, one day I … took a blanket out of my car and put it down on the sidewalk, and I stretched out like I was either dead or unconscious. Pretty soon there were about twenty people standing around, and Nephi Sorenson, who was the engineer, gave me the sign, and I jumped up and I had a ready-made audience, and they never left after that. I used to do it everyday. Then it got to be a gag…. You didn’t see guys doing that in Salt Lake at that time.11

Jazzbo’s unusual antics carried him beyond his usual broadcast studio and listening audience. He was invited to perform as a rodeo clown because the professional clown, who was also named Jazzbo, had been killed just before the rodeo arrived in town. Collins recalled: that the rodeo producers had heard about me and my on air name and asked, “Why can’t you be the clown for the afternoon at the rodeo?” I said, “what do you do?” They said, “oh, you don’t do anything. You just come out and you do this to the bull and he looks like he’s gonna chase you. And we have another guy who does this over here and he goes over there. In the meanwhile you stand inside this barrel which had a rubber tire around both ends of it and in the middle. I said, “OK, I’ll do that.”

So I stood in the thing, and I didn’t know, but the guy standing in back of me doing that with his hands, and I’m just sitting there, and the bull did like he does in the cartoons. He turned into a locomotive, and headed straight for you-know-who. So when he gets about ten feet away, the clown that was coaching me says, “geez, get down in the barrel, get down in there, and put your arm up against the inside and cushion yourself, because he’s comin’.” He came, and hit that barrel and it took me off the ground and went around at least once, then came down and hit. And when it hit, it broke my glasses and gave me a helluva bruise on the arm.

I crawled out, and everybody at the place thought it was great. They didn’t know that I was in a state of shock, I really was, and I had to go home and rest the rest of the day. And the next day they called me up and asked what time I would be coming out for that afternoon’s performance. I just laughed for fifteen minutes just like you did. I said, “I don’t remember what you are even talking about.” But that was just one of those things. I just did it without even thinking, which was dumb.12

Collins began his radio career in Utah at KALL on December 31, 1945, with a daily program he called “Jazz Band Jamboree” lasting from 4 to 4:30 p.m.13 Collins also read the news and produced other programs for which he was not the host. His jazz show remained at the same time slot until April 1947, when he moved to KNAK where he hosted a daily two-hour show from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. The newspaper radio logs hint at his increasing popularity: “Jazzbo - with his big, fat satchel full of vout records. Mello, groovie bands, hits and bits of info. Solid jive. Before and after 5. If in doubt, vout!”14

11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

13

Salt Lake Tribune, December 31, 1945.

14 Salt Lake Tribune,April 21, 1947.

JAZZ DJS ON UTAH AM RADIO

Jazzbo’s adoption of “hep” or “hip” jargon followed new developments in jazz. Shelly Hyde, a jazz pianist in Salt Lake City in the late 1940s and the 1950s, was a friend of Jazzbo. His son Jan attested that Shelly and Jazzbo often used this language in both public and private: “They were always talking this ‘jive’ language. I mean it was a completely different thing, and in those days it was really different. Not Beatnik, but a hipster thing: ‘Hey man, that’s a great short you have there;’ a car, you know. And ‘crazy, man.’ ‘I dig it.’ ‘Get with it,’ ‘Well, all-reet,’ ‘Macvout-o-rooney,’ ‘eee gad zooks, man!’”15

While at KNAK from July 1948 to March 1949, Collins was simply listed as “Jazzbo.” That latter date marked the end of Collins’s stint at KNAK; he then returned to KALL with fanfare. The station promoted his return in the morning paper with the advertisement on the newspaper’s radio log page on April 1: “It’s April Fools Day! But We’re Still Not Talking To find out who came to KALL – Dial 910 KC at 8:15 A.M. and 4:15 P.M. Today and 1 P.M. Saturday KALL where anything can happen.” The radio log entry read: “Surprise. Don’t miss KALL’s newest disc jockey. Tune in. Who is he?”16

From April 1949, through early February 1950, Collins was featured at KALL with shows variously titled as; “Jazzbo’s Hit Parade of music—Music of such stars as Kay Starr, D. Shore, Stan Kenton, F. Martin, King Cole, Woody Herman. All the Top recording Stars;” “Jazzbo the Mellow fellow, Top Stars such as Mel Torme, Lionel Hampton, Kay Starr, Les Brown;” “Happy Al - Music, ph. calls, Music, jokes, Music, interviews, music, gab.”17 Significantly, the time slot for his jazz shows changed during this period, airing live from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. weekdays and 1:00 to 4:15 p.m. on Saturdays. Beginning in January 1950, his broadcast times shifted to late evenings, from 10:30 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., a time slot in which all jazz programs in Utah were soon placed. This change was probably driven by economic factors, reflecting the changing nature of the music played, its altered social function, and its diminishing popularity.

In February that same year, Collins moved his jazz program to KDYL. The ad on the radio log newspaper page announced: “He’s on KDYL the new 1950 ‘Jazzbo’ Al Collins with all his old tricks and a bag full of new plus novelty platters latest tunes 11:15 tonight and every night except Sunday KDYL Utah’s NBC station.”18

Collins simultaneously worked afternoon television at KUTV, where he had his own show. Like some of his radio shows, the TV show had nothing to do with jazz. His jazz broadcasts continued until September 1950, when he left Utah for New York City. He returned to Salt Lake City in September 1957, for

15 Jan Hyde interview by Laurence M. Yorgason, December 7, 2000. Transcript copy in possession of author.

16 Salt Lake Tribune, April 1, 1949.

17 Salt Lake Tribune, July 9 and 15, August 27 and 29, 1949, January 2, 1950.

18 Salt Lake Tribune, February 27, 1950.

a three and a half month layover on KALL. In January 1958, he left for San Francisco.19

John

1958.

After Collins left Utah, the on-air priorities of Utah disc jockeys focused their attention to promoting (an evolving) jazz. The jazz disc-jockeys who came after Collins were more dedicated to the new music, white though they were. For them the “swing” of the war years gradually became old hat. The up-and-coming generation, while still dancing to swing orchestras, began to explore new forms of music. Increasingly public preferences for radio music moved to pop, with African American vocalists turning eventually to rhythm and blues. With the decline of jazz’s popularity, Salt Lake City DJs focused their appeal on a more “sophisticated” listening audience: the white connoisseurs of jazz who aspired to an upper-middle-class lifestyle.20

19 In New York Collins fashioned his most memorable gimmick, one for which he became nationally famous. As Dave Cavenaugh wrote in a New York Times October 4, 1997 obituary reporting Collins’s 1997 death: “At WNEW, he decided to situate his show in a fantasy underground landscape, the Purple Grotto, populated by creatures like Harrison, the purple Tasmanian owl, and Jukes, a purple chameleon. Speaking in beatnik-inspired slang with a low, leisurely voice, he drew a loyal following. He was known for his horn-rimmed glasses and his wardrobe of jump suits, including a formal one.

20 Ball rooms such as the Coconut Grove, the Rainbow Randevu, and Danceland flourished in Utah from the 1950s through the 1970s. For more, see Jarren L.Jones, “Close Enough for Jazz: An Autobiography,” (Salt Lake City: self published, 1982), copy available in the Utah State Historical Society Library.

JAZZ

Brophy in his home studio,

John Brophy exemplified this new approach. In 1947, while a student at the University of Utah, he began broadcasting jazz on weekends. He also worked as an advertising salesman at KUTV television. But jazz “was the love of his life.” Because the radio station owned no jazz recordings, he tape-recorded jazz in a studio he set up in his home and then played the program over the air from KUTA.He followed this procedure throughout his broadcasting career in Utah.

He left Utah for a time working in New York and Los Angeles before returning to Salt Lake City where he resumed DJing at KCPX in November 1962.21 A recording of one of his shows in 1962 reveals a laid back, reasonably well-informed and earnest salesman of jazz.22

Brophy’s jazz programs into the mid 1960s were sponsored by high-end men’s stores, Arthur Frank’s the Racquet Shop, Al Hohman’s Florsheim Shoes, as well as the House of Music, which featured high-end home sound equipment and recordings of all types of music.

The third jazz disc jockey to appear on radio in Utah was Hal Zogg. Zogg was born in 1924 in Ohio, where he grew up and was drafted into the army. While Zogg was in the service, his father took a job at Kennecott Copper and his parents moved to Magna. After his discharge from the army Zogg joined his parents in Magna. He found Utah to be “…quite a culture shock, and he couldn’t believe there was no place to relax and listen to jazz.” To provide such a place, he started the first VFW club in Magna. Like Brophy, he began his radio career while attending the University of Utah in 1948.23 He continued his work as a DJ until 1955.

Although we have no record of his time slots from 1948 to 1952, it is likely that Zogg’s shows aired on KUTAin the late evening hours. Like Brophy, he was very interested in jazz, which probably came out of his experience in the army. After ending his career as a DJ he worked as an advertising salesman for both KUTA and KUTV, where he eventually became sales manager. In 1970 he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age forty-five.

While John Brophy and Hal Zogg worked to bring nationally known small jazz groups such as Dave Brubeck’s Quartet to Utah, jazz was seldom performed on the formal concert stage in Utah until the 1960s.24

Unlike Zogg and Brophy, Jazzbo Collins was not interested in arranging

21 Salt Lake Tribune November 22, 1962.

22 A copy of the show is in the author’s possession.

23 Christie Lueders, e-mail correspondence, August 24, 2004.

24 Ibid., Hyde Interview. Jan Hyde remembered that Dave Brubeck played in Utah in 1948-49. Carol Brophy recalled that Zogg and Brophy worked together to bring several musicians to Salt Lake City. Sometime after 1953 Red Norvo (1908-1999), born Kenneth Norville, an early jazz vibraphonist and composer, appeared at the Old Mill, a dance hall at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. Brubeck played at the Casbah, a club directly across from the City and County Building on 4th South. Starley Bush remembered that Brophy and Zogg were the first to bring national jazz names to Utah. Starley Bush interview by Laurence M.Yorgason, January 28, 2006. Transcript in author’s possession.

for nationally recognized musicians to play in Utah. Collins was more interested in making a name for himself whereas Zogg and Brophy were more interested in educating the public about new developments in jazz. Their approaches to broadcasting jazz were perhaps both competitive and complementary. Collins was the zany one, using jazz and other attractions to increase his audience. Zogg and Brophy were the serious advocates, basically volunteering their time for jazz, but making their livings in sales. As Zogg said as he signed off his late programs, “Take care, and listen every chance you get, ‘cause it is all too rare.”

Occasionally, Brophy and perhaps Zogg as well did indulge in some antics. Jan Hyde recalled that while his father, Shelly Hyde, who was rather spontaneous himself, was playing nightly at Olie’s Terrace Room, located at 158 South 300 East, in the early 1950s, Brophy also had a fifteen-minute show there and one night Brophy began his show with: ‘“Well, this is John Brophy at the Olie’s Terrace Room…We have Shelly Hyde here; hey, Shelly, what have you got up your sleeves tonight?’ And he [Shelly] says, ‘a couple of bloody elbows.’ That really happened. Well, Brophy just came apart.”25

Beginning in the late 1950s an increasing number of jazz shows competed for audience in the greater Salt Lake City radio listening market. These new jazz programs featured several new disc jockeys: Paul Smith, Jack Warren, Ron Ross, Wes Bowen, Rob Branch, Michael Kavenaugh, “Daddy Wiggins” (Ron Silver), Starley Bush, Murray Williams and Joe Meier; all had great love for jazz.

Paul Smith began his broadcasting career in Provo at KEYY sometime before 1955, when he moved to KDYL. He enthusiastically promoted jazz and MC’d celebrity performances and interviewed many musicians. By 1962, citing jazz’s “decline of popularity,” he explained, “I saw the handwriting on the wall. I’m not that good, and I’d better get me another career or I’m just going to be nothing here. And I don’t want to play rock.”26 He returned to school, worked at KUER, and then joined U. S. Senator Orrin

25

26

Hyde Interview.

Paul Smith, interview by Laurence M.Yorgason, February 3, 2006. Transcript in author’s possession.

Paul Smith at the KDYL microphone, 1959.

Hatch’s staff as his press secretary. Smith worked for Hatch for twenty years. Ron “Erik the Red” Ross DJd at KDYL where he played the same artists as Smith. He was one of only two DJs who were also musicians; the other was Murray Williams, whose son Steve Williams, is the jazz DJ for KUER. Ross claimed he was “never a really good musician,” while Williams, on the other hand, was quite accomplished. Neither focused his career on being a DJ. Ross had multiple interests: he played piano in jam sessions in Ogden with jazz saxophonist Joe McQueen in the 1940s; obtained graduate degrees in dance and theater and was an instructor in dance at Utah State University. He was “Fireman Frank” on Channel Four and “Engineer Ron” on Channel Three in Salt Lake City, “Doc Ross” the weatherman on TV in Las Vegas and he was an advertising manager for a car dealer in Nevada.27

Murray Williams, a DJ at KALL, came to Utah from the east coast for family reasons. He was a professional clarinet and saxophone player, who played with the very best from Red Nichols in the 1930s to Charlie Parker in the 1950s. In Utah he discovered that music would not pay the way, so he became involved in various business endeavors, including a short stay in the early 1960s on a radio program called “Moondial.” He never returned to music as a full-time occupation, but did play with numerous Utah bands until his death in 1995.28

Rob Branch worked for Starley Bush, owner of KWIC in the mid-1960s. The station originally featured mixed programming, but when it lost its lease in the Newhouse Hotel on Main Street and 400 South and its program director left programming changed. The staff followed Branch’s suggestion to change the format to all jazz. The new format lasted less than a year as country and western music replaced jazz when a new program director was hired.29

Bush also DJ’d briefly on his radio station until he realized that the jazz format could not be profitable. Michael Kavanagh worked as a DJ spinning jazz music under Starley Bush as well. The crowded market made jazz programming unprofitable, especially in the face of rock and roll’s increasing popularity in the 1960s. Starley Bush eventually converted his station KSXX to a successful “talk” format. Kavanagh made the switch playing rock and “smooth jazz’’ at the radio station called “The Breeze.”30

From 1960 to 1965, the two most influential jazz shows in Utah were on KSL in Salt Lake City and KEYY in Provo, although the latter station’s signal rarely reached beyond the Point of the Mountain. These two shows

27 Ron Ross, interview by Laurence M.Yorgason, December 3, 2000. Transcript in author’s possession.

28 Steve Williams, interview by Laurence M. Yorgason, December 15, 2004. Transcript in author’s possession.

29 Rob Branch, interview by Laurence M.Yorgason, 2005. Transcript in author’s possession.

30 Bush Interview; Michael G. Kavanagh, interview by Laurence M. Yorgason, September 10, 2004. Transcript in author’s possession.

featured disc jockeys Wes Bowen and Joe Meier who developed loyal and growing audiences. Bowen came onto the scene first, broadcasting on KUTA from midway through 1955 to the middle of 1956, moving to KMUR from the end of 1956 to October 1958, and finally making the switch to KSL where he broadcast jazz until the end of 1965. Joe Meier began at KEYY in Provo in January 1956 and continued the longest run on one station of any jazz show in Utah, ending in 1965 at virtually the same time Wes Bowen terminated his show.

Bowen’s success in part was due to the huge KSL reception area. KSL was a clear channel 50,000 watt station that was heard, at least at night, throughout the western states, and sometimes in the Midwest. As a result, several San Francisco businesses frequently advertised on Bowen’s show.

Dick Nourse, a well-known KSL news personality, recalled that when he “discovered Wes Bowen and all his jazz,” as a teenager in Ennis, Montana, he “would lie in bed in the dark with my portable radio, and listen to him ‘til I fell asleep.” Nourse said he became a jazz pianist, arranger and composer because of Bowen’s influence. 31 Larry Jackstien, a noted Salt Lake City jazz pianist related a similar story. He first heard Bowen on station KMOR (KMUR), and became fascinated by his approach to jazz. He eventually met Bowen, which led to much collaboration over four decades in producing jazz shows, celebrity concerts and other jazz related events in Salt Lake City. Bowen’s commanding knowledge of jazz and the power of KSL were a distinct advantage over other jazz DJs.

Gene Minshall, a colleague of Bowen’s at KSL, recalled an incident with film music composer Henry Mancini that manifested Bowen’s influence in the West:

I remember I had gone to L.A. one time. I was independent from KSL, but still had close ties; they wanted me to do a spot for their counterpart in Los Angeles that was owned by Bonneville Productions. I went over and they set it up with Henry Mancini. I went to his home. This happened several years after I had met him.

When I arrived, Mancini was not in the right mood to do anything. He was cantankerous when we went in and I showed him the copy. But he was just miserable to work with. Finally, I said, “wait a minute; screw this. [I said to my cameraman—Peter] pack up your camera and let’s get the hell out of here.” I went over to Mancini, and I said, “You don’t remember me, but we met one time, and I’m a very good friend of Wes Bowen. Wes worships the ground you walk on.”

He said, “You know Wes Bowen?” I said, “Yes, very well.” Peter had packed up his camera and was on his way out, and I had turned and walked out. [Mancini] followed me and caught me in the driveway: “I haven’t talked to Wes for a long time. Tell me, how is he?” I told him that he was just fine. He said that he needed to call him. He said, “Come on in; let’s do this thing again.” He couldn’t have been nicer then. “Don’t tell Wes that I was such an *******.” I said, “All right, I won’t.” So we got a great sound-bite from Mancini. He loved Wes, and he said, “This guy has probably done

31 Dick Nourse, unpublished comments at Wes Bowen Funeral, September 12, 2003. Copy in author’s possession.

more for jazz and the enlightenment of jazz in the West than anybody.”32

Jackstien said Bowen employed a certain technique to educate the audience.

[He would] pick out an artist — I can think of some examples like Mose Allison and Charlie Byrd — who weren’t very well known at the time. He would pick out some of their best cuts, and like any good pop DJ, he would play them on a regular basis. Not once every month or once every three months. He’d play them every night or every other night, either a different selection or the same cut. The artists that he wanted to push would sell all kinds of their records in Salt Lake and become a phenomenon. People would say, “How come all those records would be sold in Salt Lake?” It was because Wes had great taste; he’d pick a good artist, and he made Mose Allison and Charlie Byrd big stars in Salt Lake.33

Bowen’s taste in jazz was mainstream: Oscar Peterson, Charlie Byrd, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Ray Brown, among others. He had no use for the rock-crossover groups emerging across the United States in the last years of his shows. Bowen’s erudition was broad; he loved poetry. He was generous with his time and name. He used his influence to provide help for needy children in India. Minshall said “he was also a world class authority on warfare and the structure of war. He could talk for hours on the Napoleonic era and the techniques and strategies of people like Wellington and Napoleon and Nelson would use to defeat an enemy.”

Bowen was a pioneer, at least in the KSL broadcast area. He inaugurated a ground-breaking public call-in show in March 1961, where community, state and national issues were discussed each night for a half hour or more preceding his jazz show. Public Pulse continued well after his jazz show ended in 1966. He was also a member of the station editorial staff and became a vice-president at KSL before leaving for other business opportunities.34 Bowen later returned to the airwaves, where he hosted a jazz program at the University of Utah’s KUER-FM station. He died in 2003.

The last jazz DJ on a Utah AM radio station was Joe Meier. He worked for KEYY which had 250 watts and covered only Utah County. Meier, hired in late 1955, was instrumental in KEYY’s decision to stick to the bigband repertoire, and he gradually added mainstream jazz performers. Two radio stations in Provo, KEYY and KOVO, catered to the young listening audience in the 1950s and 1960s. KOVO played the latest musical trends: Elvis, the Beatles and other popular artists. The big band jazz format remained alive in Utah Valley well into the 1950s because of its popularity at dances at Brigham Young University. KEYY decision makers liked the same music, and opted for the Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole crowd at BYU.

32 Gene Minshall, interview by Laurence M. Yorgason, September 20, 2004. Transcript in author’s possession.

33 Ibid., Larry Jackstien, interview by Laurence M. Yorgason, January 20, 2005. Transcript in author’s possession.

Gary Madsen, a parttime DJ at KEYY during the last two or three years of Meier’s tenure, led one of the big bands that played for Utah Valley dances.

Meier produced concerts, interviewed celebrities and involved the community in his programs. He said his show’s format was mostly left up to him: “We were amazingly loose back in those days.” BYU brought Stan Kenton to town in the late 1950s, and Meier interviewed him on air for three hours:

We kept playing his records and he kept saying, “Don’t you have to play some commercials?. . . ” I said, “Stan, don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of that.” Two hundred fifty-watt radio stations, even in college towns in those days, were not known for their great revenue potential. We actually added it up and found we averaged $0.67 a spot if we counted all the programs. So we weren’t missing much. But we gave him virtually the entire afternoon of the concert, and I loved every minute of it.35

Meier, with the support of KEYY and other financial backers, also brought in Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Pete Jolley and Richie Kamuka to perform at LDS stake centers and in the old Provo Tabernacle.

Meier continued at KEYY until the end of 1965, when he was hired by KSL. The move coincided with the termination of Wes Bowen’s jazz show. Meier stayed with KSL for seven years, leaving in 1972 for CBS. The departure of Meier ended jazz programming at both KSL and KEYY in 1965, and jazz programming on AM radio in Utah.

As in other parts of the country, the fortunes of jazz on Utah AM radio reflected the value of jazz in the public eye from the mid 1930s to 1965. Radio exposed listeners and dancers to the likes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller, all of whom played danceable jazz.

The end of World War II brought to the public listening audience new forms of jazz, which featured longer improvised solos, faster tempos and tricky melodies. This musical style was not well suited for dancing. At the 34

Minshall Interview, and Nourse, Wes Bowen funeral comments. 35 Joe Meier, interview by Laurence M.Yorgason, February 11, 2006. Transcript in author’s possession.

JAZZ DJS ON UTAH AM RADIO

Wes Bowen.

same time, vocalists began to dominate the popular music scene, and jazz became more specialized, appealing to fewer people and requiring much more of the listener. Jazz radio programming in Utah reflected this narrower style which appealed to middle-class aficionados. With the exception of Al Collins, Salt Lake Valley’s radio jazz disc jockeys were usually willing to produce their programs as a hobby and as an expression of their zeal to spread the word about jazz and expand the audience; they were among that smaller group of devotees who felt that the music was “all too rare.”

When the early forms of rock and roll and talk radio entered the picture, radio management saw the financial handwriting on the wall: jazz programming was no longer supported by radio advertisers. Bowen and Meier continued to host jazz programs on the AM dial until 1965. Their style was unique. When they left the AM airwave, jazz radio was done. Today, only KUER radio schedules a late evening program of jazz.

Joe Meier

BOOK REVIEWS

Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

By David

L.

Bigler

and Will

Bagley,

(Volume 12

in

Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier Series (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2008, 509 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

IN THIS DOCUMENTARY HISTORY, David L. Bigler and Will Bagley have assembled an important collection of documents related to the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 frontier Utah. Bigler and Bagley state that the reason for this volume is that they have “turned up a wealth of evidence”; evidence that “casts a new light on the event.” These documents should “help dispel the mystery and confusion surrounding the crime” (17). These “essential documents,” they contend, “reveal the truth” about the massacre. The editors have “definite opinions about how and why it happened” (18). Bigler and Bagley state that they have tried to keep their editorial comments as dispassionate as possible, but acknowledge that the task “may be impossible when dealing with such a hotly contested subject.” The new evidence, they contend, “refutes many of the old deceits and justifications and, although circumstantial, paints a convincing picture that the Fancher train’s destruction was inescapable from the start of its jornado del muerto across Utah” (18). Continuing the themes that Bagley advanced in Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, this volume is in a sense a companion to that earlier one.

Following the introduction, the first few chapters establish the broad context for the massacre: the emigrants in their Arkansas homeland on the brink of their fateful journey (chap. 1), the Mormon Reformation in Utah (chap. 2), the murder of Parley P. Pratt in Arkansas (chap. 3), and the emigrants’ journey through Utah at the outset of the so-called “Utah War” (chap.4). Next, Bigler and Bagley present documents and commentary on the first massacre reports in Utah, California and the East Coast (chap. 5) and some of the initial cover stories that circulated in Utah (chap. 6). The next chapters center on the federal investigation of 1859 (chap. 7) and the return of the seventeen surviving children to their families in Arkansas (chap. 8).

Next, the editors present documents detailing some of the events of the 1860s and 1870s: the increasing pressure for a federal prosecution (chap. 9), the ensuing trials in 1875-76 of John D. Lee (chap. 10), Lee’s execution in 1877 (chap. 11), and the defense of Brigham Young (chap. 12). Finally, they present some of the evolving stories about “Missouri Wildcats” (chap. 13), several militia perpetrator accounts (chap. 14), narratives from several of the surviving children (chap. 15), and some concluding documents (chap. 16). The editors present their conclusion in the Afterword. The text also contains more than thirty historical photographs of key personages while the appendix contains a useful chronology. Bigler and Bagley are to be congratulated for making available such a wide range of previ-

ously obscure material. While all of the “essential narratives” of the massacre are not presented here, there is much to reward the scholar and serious student of the massacre.

How well do the editors succeed in their larger purpose of “reveal[ing] the truth” about the massacre and specifically their thesis that the Arkansas emigrants’ destruction was “inescapable” from the moment they entered Utah? Reactions to the editors’ commentary and theses will vary sharply among readers. Those who accept the thesis that Bagley advanced in Blood of the Prophets will find in this volume much to support their conclusions. Those who were unconvinced by Bagley’s argument that Brigham Young was an accessory before the fact will be unconvinced still. In addition, since most of the material comes from secondary sources, an issue of enduring importance is the basic reliability of this material. These are subjects about which reasonable minds may disagree.

The Bigler and Bagley thesis cannot be fully assessed in a short review. In time those familiar with all of the relevant sources will weigh the principal evidence and arguments presented here. Ultimately, however, the final judge of history, including documentary history, is the assessment of future generations of historians. Thus, the conversation about the causes of the massacre continues.

ROBERT H. BRIGGS Fullerton, California

Mormonism’s Last Colonizer: The Life and Times of William H. Smart

.

By William B. Smart. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008. x + 347 pp. Cloth, $44.95.)

WILLIAM H. SMART (1862-1937) did nothing by half-measures. From a young manhood dominated by “torment, guilt, depression, and failure” (1), Smart transformed himself into a figure of stern and zealous righteousness, devoted to his church, confident in his own judgments, and autocratic in directing the activities of others. He rose from modest circumstances to affluence by his early thirties then dissipated a fortune through open-handed philanthropies and failed investments and spent his last years in poverty. After a “disastrously ineffective” (1) Mormon mission at the age of twenty-six, he became a successful mission president at thirty-seven and a stake president at thirty-nine, successively directing four different stakes over the next twenty years, including two as the founding president. And for more than fifty years he kept a detailed journal, recording not only his activities but also his thoughts and feelings in a neat script aggregating to some ten thousand closely-filled pages.

This voluminous journal is the chief source used by Smart’s grandson and namesake, William B. Smart, in composing this biography. (A compact disk con-

taining a transcription of the entire journal is included with the book.) William B. Smart is a prominent Utah journalist and editor, and the biography is by no means an exercise in family hagiography but a probing, critical assessment of a remarkable and flawed man in his historical and cultural context.

Author Smart effectively sketches the conditions of his grandfather’s boyhood in Franklin, Idaho, his education and beginning of a teaching career at Brigham Young College in Logan, and his decade-long struggle to overcome a tobacco addiction with attendant feelings of guilt and self-loathing that led to bouts of “despondence that—during at least one period—incapacitated him in what looks like clinical depression” (31). A series of erratic efforts to establish himself finally led in 1892 to a fortunate venture into the sheep business, which at that period was expanding rapidly in the west (with consequent environmental devastation of the ranges and watersheds). In less than six years, Smart’s livestock enterprise had become so profitable that he was able to leave the day-to-day operations in the hands of his partner and devote the remaining forty years of his life to almost fulltime service in the LDS church.

The author characterizes William H. Smart as “a man born out of time” (3), temperamentally and philosophically attuned to the theocratic, cooperative, and polygamous Mormon society of his boyhood and resistant to the gradual integration of Mormon Country into the larger American society that was taking place during his adult years. Deeply committed to the principle of plural marriage, he contemplated taking a second wife even before he married his first, expressed in his journal his disappointment at the “expediency” that culminated in the Woodruff Manifesto of 1890, and contracted a polygamous marriage himself in 1902, more than a decade after the Manifesto. As a stake president, he sought Mormon control of community institutions including schools, banks, newspapers, and irrigation companies, and expected members of his stake to follow his counsel in political and economic as well as ecclesiastical matters.

Smart’s zeal found its fullest expression in his efforts to colonize the Uinta Basin. When the Uintah-Ouray Reservation was opened to white settlement in 1905, it represented the last large area in Utah to become available for agricultural development. Most of the reservation lands then fell within the boundaries of Wasatch County and the Wasatch LDS Stake, over which Smart presided, and he was determined to fill the region with his own people. The land distribution was directed by the federal General Land Office through a lottery designed to provide an equal chance to all applicants without regard to their religious affiliation or place of residence. Smart, however, made exploratory visits to the reservation in advance of the opening “to locate good farming land, townsites, water sources and canal routes, and other essentials to settlement so as to give Mormons a crucial advantage when the time came” (158). Then he enlisted other stake presidents to encourage their members to enter the lottery and, if they were successful, to select their land with the assistance of the Smart-controlled Wasatch Development

Company, which had previously filed on water from several Uinta Basin streams.

In 1906, the reservation area and President Smart were transferred to the Uintah Stake with headquarters in Vernal. There, and later in Roosevelt as president of the Duchesne (1910-1920) and Roosevelt (1920-1922) stakes, Smart organized numerous wards and branches and played a leading if not dominant role in creating and extending community infrastructure including schools, banks, newspapers, water systems, electricity and telephone services, even the Uinta Basin honey industry. He took the lead in a campaign that led to the creation of Duchesne County out of the eastern portion of Wasatch County in 1914. By making Roosevelt his headquarters, Smart ensured that this community (rather than non-Mormon Myton) would become the dominant town in eastern Duchesne County, even though he failed in his efforts to make it the county seat. And by the time Smart left Duchesne County in the early nineteen-thirties, more than eighty percent of the population belonged to the LDS church.

These achievements came at a cost. Smart alienated many non-Mormons and some Mormons with his autocratic leadership style and readiness to engage in sectional disputes. Almost all of his business ventures lost money, losses magnified by his practice of freely lending money or endorsing bank loans to other investors who later defaulted. His frequent and sometimes extended absences from home on church business meant that family responsibilities fell largely on the shoulders of his loyal, capable, and under-appreciated wife, Anna. When he was at home, Smart was “a stern and autocratic father, not sparing the rod” (6). His last, impoverished years in the Uinta Basin were spent in traveling on an old mule from settlement to settlement as a genealogical missionary, paying for his room and board by hoeing gardens and doing chores. Although William H. Smart was arguably the area’s leading citizen for more than two decades, his author-grandson notes with some irony that he is “little remembered in the Uinta Basin today” (6). Some years ago, the family presented a portrait of Smart to the Vernal Camp of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers for display in their pioneer museum—only to find the portrait later gathering dust in a storage closet.

The author does a good job of tracking Smart’s multifaceted activities and numerous excursions through the complicated geography of the Uinta Basin. Not surprisingly, in view of the mass of material to be interpreted, there are a few errors and inconsistencies. In relating Smart’s first exploratory visit to the reservation in September 1902, the author interprets Smart’s reference to the “Price Road” as referring to “the Indian Canyon road built from the Duchesne River bridge to the railhead at Castle Gate” (156 n. 19). It is more likely that the reference was to the Nine Mile Canyon road that extended from the Duchesne River bridge near present-day Myton across the southern benches of the Basin and through the Book Cliffs to the railhead at Price. The alternate spellings Uinta and Uintah present a challenge to the author’s consistency, as they do for others who write about the area. While he articulates the convention that favors Uinta as “the

spelling of naturally occurring things” with an h added at the end for “non-natural things,” the very page on which this principle is stated includes two instances of the term “Uintah Basin” (151). These, however, are only minor distractions in a solidly-researched, well-written study of an important regional church official during a transitional period in Mormon history.

EDWARD A. GEARY Huntington

Salt of the Earth: The History of the Catholic Church in Utah, 1776-2007.

By Bernice Maher Mooney and J. Terrence Fitzgerald, Third Edition. (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2008. xix + 391 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

THE HISTORY OF UTAH is interwoven with religious history; this has resulted in an unusually large number of books and articles on church history, among which Salt of the Earth, deserves a prominent place. The story of the Roman Catholic Church in Utah begins over two hundredyears ago with pioneering explorations of two Franciscans, Fathers Dominguez and Escalante. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the church was active among Utah’s growing number of miners and mountain men, and among a scattering of French fur trappers. Typical of the early missionaries was Father Edward Kelly, who in 1866 rented rooms in a house on Emigration Street, Salt Lake City, held masses and gave lectures in Independence Hall, the setting of non-Mormon cultural and religious activity, and baptized small numbers of Christians at nearby Camp Douglas. He travelled by Overland Stage about the vast mission territory and on September 21, 1866, purchased land for the first Catholic Church in downtown Salt Lake City— then 17,000 persons.

Much of the church’s future growth mirrored Utah’s history, gradual expansion and consolidation, resulting in the creation of a Diocese of Salt Lake in 1891. The post World War I period is understandably labeled a “Renaissance,” with Irish and Italian Catholics enjoying a measure of affluence and contributing generously to the expansion of their church, including the building of parishes all over the state and dedication of the landmark Cathedral of the Madeleine in 1909. The church was largely an immigrant church in its first century, responding to the needs of miners and industrial workers in Carbon County, Magna, Park City, and elsewhere, and to a growing non-LDS commercial community across the state.

An amazing number of institutions make their way in the pages of this lively chronicle, including numerous missionary orders for men and women, social centers assisting the poor and needy, a core of schools, including the flagship Judge Memorial and Juan Diego high schools. Plus the important Holy Cross Hospital, founded in 1875 and sold in 1994 when churches everywhere were getting out of

the health care business. There are also capsule histories of contributing lay groups, such as the Knights of Columbus and Catholic Women’s League. The range of Catholic institutions in Utah extends from cloistered Carmelite sisters and Trappist Cistercians of the Strict Observance to two Tanzanian priests living in Roosevelt and covering the vast Uinta Basin.

This is an institutional history, an insider’s story, drawing on the extensive and well catalogued Diocesan Archives, a treasure trove for historians. As such it understandably concentrates on the stories of Utah’s Catholic bishops. Two are especially memorable, Lawrence Scanlan (1843-1915) and Duane G. Hunt (18841960). Scanlan was a colorful, intrepid, and hard working Irishman who led the church in a demanding time of expansion. The reflective Hunt, who once taught speech at the University of Utah, was responsible for much of the church’s post World War II growth.

A skillfully written institutional history, this study also raises several unanswered questions, such as: what was the actual impact of the early missionaries on indigenous populations, their structures and beliefs? What were the ups and downs of Catholic—Latter-day Saint relations through the years? How were the sweeping Vatican II reforms processed by the church in Utah? What was the extent of discussion about the place of marginalized groups, like gays and lesbians, in church life? How have gender issues worked their way into church life across recent decades? An additional chapter also could be devoted to Utah’s rapidly growing Hispanic community, its social and spiritual presence, and the hot button questions of immigration reform, capably addressed nationally by Utah’s most recent Catholic bishop, John C. Wester.The book is tastefully designed and artfully illustrated with vintage and recent photographs. In 2007 Utah’s nearly 250,000 Catholics represented 9.3 percent of the state’s population of nearly 2.7 million persons. Their history is an important part of any account of the state’s past and present. Authors Mooney and Fitzgerald have admirably provided such a history, an invaluable building block in Utah’s evolving religious story.

FREDERICK QUINN Utah State University

The Great Basin: People and Place in Ancient Times. Edited by Catherine S. Fowler and Don D. Fowler. (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008. xiv + 166 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE GREAT BASIN can be a hard sell. With a few notable exceptions, archaeological sites in the region lack above-ground architecture and are often difficult for non-archaeologists to appreciate. Visitors

brought to Range Creek Canyon, one of the more spectacular new discoveries in the region, often leave saying “That was it?” This is unfortunate, because the story of how the prehistoric people of the region lived in this dynamic landscape is indeed fascinating. The story is told in thousands of archaeological sites spread over huge landscapes; by broken stones, frayed baskets, and tiny ancient campfires. What it lacks in photo opportunities it makes up in the remarkable story of human adaptations to the landscape. Still, it takes a great deal of talent to bring the field of Great Basin archaeology to the general public.

This volume attempts to do so. Edited by two major scholars in Great Basin archaeology, the book’s twenty chapters provide an overview to much of the most current research in the archaeology of the region. The book is in a well-illustrated format designed for the educated lay person. Authored by senior and well-respected researchers, the chapters are nonetheless almost jargon-free and intended to be read by non-specialists. Articles include an overview and introduction, two backgrounds to the unique environment of the region, a brief history of cave archaeology in the Great Basin, several overviews to the archaeology of various time periods and places, and focused chapters on particular types of prehistoric occupations (high altitude, marsh sites, Range Creek Canyon, the Tosawihi toolstone quarries in Nevada). The book also includes articles on specific artifact types and art forms, with multiple chapters on basketry, textiles, sandals, and rock art, along with a summary conclusion. In the words of the editors, the volume is intended to be “…a set of smaller stories or vignettes about how people lived in this intriguing place, written by archaeologists who know it well” (1).

As a whole, the volume is a very mixed and uneven collection of chapters. Most archaeologists are not trained in writing for the general public. A rare few have a natural gift for it and some have developed a knack. The majority, however, specialize in writing journal articles that are as deathly dull as they are technically defensible. While all the chapters in this book are readable by nonspecialists, only a few can be called engaging. The rest appear to be summaries with the jargon removed and are not as enjoyable a read as one might wish.

The book, as the editors admit, also does not provide a comprehensive overview to all current archaeological research in the Great Basin. Notably absent are chapters on obsidian sourcing and dating studies, new theories of hunting patterns, and emerging research on the most recent phases of the prehistoric past. The book is not intended to provide a comprehensive overview, and it doesn’t. I believe the general public misses some exciting research as a consequence.

I am pleased to see more professional archaeologists trying to bring the excitement of Great Basin archaeology to the general public. This book is a noble attempt and I simply wish that it were a little more comprehensive and that it had been assisted by an editor with a background in science writing for the public. I commend to the reader a recent volume by Steve Simms, Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau (Left Coast Press, 2008), which, while longer

and more detailed, provides an engaging and comprehensive overview to the Great Basin’s past.

MATTHEW T. SEDDON SWCA Environmental Consultants Salt Lake City

The Sundance Kid: The Life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh. By Donna B. Ernest. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xxiii + 233 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

LET’S SAY THAT HARRY LONGABAUGH could have broken the spacetime continuum on February 5, 1908, and transported himself away from his impending death and into 2009 Utah. As he perused the shelves of a clothing store, hit the slopes, caught a movie, and had breakfast at a resort (all of which are named after him) he would be amazed at his own celebrity. Even more amazing to our timetraveler would be that for Utahns the name Sundance is more associated with an actor than the real life outlaw who died in Bolivia in 1908. This book gives us a sense of the man, as opposed to the man as portrayed by Hollywood.

Ernest provides an overview of the life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (a.k.a. The Sundance Kid) from his family genealogy, to growing up in Pennsylvania, to his days as a cowboy in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and, to his time of confinement in Wyoming, and through his various train and bank robberies. She also details the life of Butch, Sundance and Ethel Place in South America including the final shootout in San Vincente, Bolivia.

Ernest uses the available sources along with a few interesting tidbits that came to her through her husband’s family who are the descendants of Sundance’s brothers and sisters. For instance she discusses Sundance’s childhood in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and his first return visit in 1901 after he and Ethel Place left Fort Worth and before they visited New York City. The new information is not revolutionary, but it is enlightening. She makes a plausible case that Sundance was not, despite widespread acceptance, one of the outlaws at the Tipton train robbery, nor at the Belle Fourche bank heist. Mrs. Ernst also makes a persuasive case that Butch and Sundance died in Bolivia on November 6, 1908, although her work is based upon the 1985 book, Digging up Butch and Sundance, written by Dan Buck and Ann Meadows (who also wrote the foreword in this book).

This book gives us a more complete picture of who Sundance was as a man. For instance, Sundance made a few sincere efforts at reform, but he felt his constant hounding by the authorities did not allow him to settle down to a normal life. By most accounts he was an affable and likable fellow who was appreciated by his employers and his fellow employees. Ernst does not, however, clarify certain mysteries about Sundance. We are still not sure about the fate of Ethel Place, and there are several gaps in the chronology of his life. Also, the circumstances under

which Butch and Sundance met and became inextricably connected remain clouded. Ernst also hedges on his participation in the Telluride Bank Robbery of 1889. Finally, the forces, both internal and external, that led him down his chosen path are not analyzed.

The Sundance Kid will be of interest to scholars of outlaw/lawman history, especially of the Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy, but less so to the general public. The book is not written to be the final word on Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, but rather it reads as an extended series of research notes in which Mrs. Ernst has laid the facts at our feet and it remains up to the reader to draw his/her conclusions. The casual reader will find this frustrating, but those who are well versed in Western outlaw/lawman history, will find the book a great reference tool.

DANIEL M. DAVIS Utah State University

Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890

By

Kevin Adams. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xvi + 276 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

IN 1963 DON RICKEY PUBLISHED Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay (University of Oklahoma Press), one of the first in-depth looks at the daily life of the enlisted man serving in the American frontier military between 1865 and 1890. Life was difficult, discipline harsh, rations skimpy and insipid, garrison duty boring, field conditions hazardous, and promotions slow. Desertion rates averaged in the area of 30 percent while new enlistments came from the ranks of the foreign born—predominantly Irish and Germans. Rickey’s account left officers in the background as those who led these men and enforced the rules, but they did not receive primary consideration.

Adams’ Class and Race in the Frontier Army provides a well-documented account of the other side of the parade ground. His thesis is simple, direct, and well-supported: the officer corps of this same period was a mirrored reflection of middleto-upper crust values espoused during the Gilded Age; class was a predominant distinguishing factor within the officer ranks. “Officers were regarded as gentlemen, and many of them spent exorbitant (and sometimes ruinous) amounts of money attempting to live up to this title” (7). As for the enlisted men, they lived in an entirely different world of shared values and toil. Two chapter titles, “Soldiers, Servants, or Slaves?” and “Starvation and Succulence” suggest just how opposite these two worlds could be.

A composite sketch of the officer corps in this study colors the group as pampered aristocrats who considered themselves the elite of American society. White, West Point graduates (76 percent), and overly-indulged, even a second lieutenant

earned $1,400 annually compared to $1,200 or less earned by 90 percent of the civilian work force. These highly educated college graduates became connoisseurs of literature, the arts, and sciences since they delegated most of the work to noncommissioned officers and had little else to do. For the enlisted men, the army “elevated manual labor to the most important component of frontier military service” while for officers, “outside of Sunday inspection, the occasional drill, and guard mount, [they] rarely interacted with soldiers” their social inferiors (58,68). This left an inordinate amount of leisure time which officers filled with “calling” (formal and informal visiting and partying among their associates), hunting, dining, and educational pursuits—all of which fostered social ranking. With enlisted men doing all the work to include performing as servants for officers and their families, the social gulf seemed unbridgeable. As for the four African American units (Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry), they were at the bottom of the hierarchy as were the white officers who led them.

The two books discussed here require a third one to be written. While Adams has made his point well, there is little reference to field operations and how enlisted men and officers actually performed together successfully. In the myriad of studies that document military operations against the Indians of the Plains and Southwest, there are plenty of accounts that show officers as effective, caring individuals under trying circumstances, working with enlisted men willing to risk their all to support and protect them. The gulf that separated the two was bridged by more than ironclad discipline, class-derived subservient behavior, and fear of the enemy. This third, yet to be-written work, needs to look not so much at class but rather role distinction, a practice still followed in the US military today. While differences are far less exaggerated than in the past, they exist and are necessary in even a highly educated all-volunteer force. This next book must evaluate the positive leadership qualities exhibited by these puffy dilettantes on the frontier that made them effective commanders of men who had every right to resent them.

Adams’ work is well-researched and recommended for those studying the frontier military and class/race relations. While there are a few specific examples taken from Utah, the book’s value lies in providing a general background.

ROBERT S. MCPHERSON College of Eastern Utah — San Juan Campus

Bright Epoch: Women & Coeducation in the American West. By Andrea G. RadkeMoss. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xii + 352 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

ECONOMIC NECESSITY AND PROGRESSIVE IDEOLOGYinformed

Congress to designate land-grant institutions as coeducational facilities in the years following the Civil War. Coeducation posed new questions about gender inclusion and separation, both philosophically and physically. Because land-grant institutions

have largely been ignored in studies of women’s coeducational experiences, Radke-Moss explores women’s education at Iowa State Agricultural College, Oregon Agricultural College, University of Nebraska, and Utah Agricultural College. She argues that “the culture of gender separation and inclusion occurred in similar fashion regardless of the institution” (9). By exploring literary societies, athletics, interpersonal sociality, military training, and political activism, RadkeMoss offers a sophisticated discussion of gendered space and the body in coeducation between 1869 and 1918.

Although women and men shared course work, land-grant institutions strove to maintain Victorian sensibilities for what was considered appropriate interaction between the sexes. Initially, male and female students used different entrances, separate walkways, and segregated seating. By the 1890s, some of the rules against co-ed socialization relaxed. The institutions hosted chaperoned dances, allowed for shared walking spaces, and installed park benches for couples to sit and visit. Radke-Moss shares some delightful anecdotes of how some students tried to bend the rules. Male and female students tapped on the pipes in the dormitories to signal a clandestine meeting in the stairway, or simply shouted to each other from their windows. Students on group dates developed an after-dinner ritual around the toothpick to extend their time together. Most of all, the bicycle challenged all notions of student segregation. Administrators feared that bicycles gave students far too much freedom to be alone together. Sporting events and school functions offered more opportunities for coupling. With more interaction between the sexes, “mashing” (flirting), “spooning” (public cuddling), and even kissing became commonplace.

As administrators grappled with the social challenges of coeducation, they strove to protect female students’ bodies from health problems and male students’ “gaze.” Believing that female education increased blood flow to the brain at the expense of the reproductive organs, administrators advanced physical education to counteract the risk of infertility. In an effort to maintain Victorian propriety, women practiced individual sports such as gymnastics or calisthenics drills with doors closed and curtains drawn. Shortly after the invention of basketball in 1891, women’s team sports became hugely popular. Soon a black eye a female player received during a basketball game became a badge of honor. In addition to spectator sports, female students also entered the male realm of military training, drilling publicly. With the feminine body on display as both beautiful and aggressive, women carved a new space for themselves in a previously male sphere.

Bright Epoch is full of delightful anecdotes and insightful analysis. A few problems exist, however. Radke-Moss’s analysis of homosocial interaction could benefit from recent discussions in gay and lesbian studies. Also, her synopsis of land-grant student participation in the suffrage movement on campus lacks a broad connection to the movement throughout the West. Despite these flaws, Radke-Moss executes a smart and sophisticated analysis of the female student

body and its relationship to contested space. These female students created a space for themselves in the professions, in politics, and as homemakers whose education infused their lives with new meaning. These are, after all, the institutions that gave us Willa Cather and Carrie Chapman Catt.

MELISSA COY FERGUSON Utah State Historical Society

The West of the Imagination. By William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann,

Second Edition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xxi + 604 pp. Cloth, $65.00.)

RECENTLY, IT SEEMS, there has been a renewed interest in the American West. In keeping with this resurgence is the republication of William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann’s The West of the Imagination. Originally published in 1986 and accompanied by a PBS series, the second edition continues where its predecessor left off by exploring the visual documents that have shaped the perception of the American West. Greatly expanded with eight new chapters and a wealth of images that, unlike the previous edition, are nearly all beautifully printed in color, the book is an ambitious and rewarding undertaking that encompasses nearly two hundred years of representing the West from Titian Peale to Michael Heizer.

The worth of this book is not particularly in its depth but in its breadth. It is an academic primer that introduces the various personalities who made the West an important part of their work. Through its pages readers will gain an understanding of artists like George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Remington. The expanded version adds a new and diverse cadre of artists to this list such as David Hockney, Robert Smithson, photographer Patrick Nagatani, and Jackson Pollock – curiously posited as the second best western artist behind Georgia O’Keefe. Also rightfully included are Native American and Latino artists, and women artists such as Helen Hardin.

Another of the text’s strengths is its ability to broaden the visual culture of the West. Looking beyond painting, it investigates the often-neglected lithographs of Currier and Ives, inner-city murals, and Western pulp covers. Film is also given an important place in the mythologizing of the West from Ford’s Stage Coach to Eastwood’s Unforgiven

Despite the book’s strengths, however, there are shortcomings. Its historical writing is stronger than its art history, and there is also an interesting geographical bias that favors Texas and other locales in the Southwest. Utah serves as a backdrop for federal surveys and Earthwork artists, but the contributions of its own artists are unfortunately ignored (with the notable exception of painter Michael Coleman).

Another of the more intriguing and challenging aspects of this edition is its attempt to make the art of the last two decades intelligible and meaningful. It becomes evident that understanding an artist in 1832 is a seemingly easier task than grappling with the tangled art world since 1986. In deference to the authors this is a daunting task, and, to their credit, they did not shy away from adding a voice to the dialogue that is decidedly different from the New York City critic. Their angle, in fact, is a refreshingly conservative (even “red state”) view of the West that is more comfortable embracing artists of the Cowboy Artists Association than postmodernism. Both, however, are a vital part of the discourse. Despite all of the authors’ attempts, the question still looms of what the West means to us in this new millennium. The West is a mirror, they assert, upon which Americans have projected their aspirations and anxieties for the past two hundred years. This was true a century ago as it is today. Cobbled together from the previous edition, the latter section of this book is simply unable to answer what the West means to us now. As valiant as this new book is, a new understanding of the West cannot be written using the same conclusion as the 1986 text. New conclusions of what and where the West is must still be written.

JAMES R. SWENSEN Brigham Young University

2009 INDEX

A

Allen, A. C., 149

Alta, 260, 263

Altonah, 77

Amalgamated Sugar Company, 17, 24 American Sugar Refining Company (Sugar Trust), 11, 17

Aneth, conflict with Indians near, 42-45; Indian trading post at, 32, 40-41; 45

Antes, Howard Ray, Methodistminister and reservation storeowner, 32, 46-47, 48, 51

Arc lamp, demonstration at ZCMI, 227, 228-29; opposition to, 237-38, 239-40; 231, 239

Aspinal, Wayne, U. S. Senator, 306-07 Ayóó Ndiili (Heavyset Man), cabin of, 31

B

Ba’ álilee (The One With Supernatural Power), camp site of, 41, 49; capture and arrest of, 42-44; early life of, 26-28; followers of: Atsidíí (Silversmith), 46; Ba álilee Bidá í (Fuzzy Hat—also known as Ch’ah Ditłoii), 44; Bitsii’ Agodí (Short Hair), 37; Biwoo’ádinni (No Teeth), 46; Ditłéé’ii Yazhí (Little West One), 44; Hastiin Éé tsoh (Mister Coat—also known as He Who Smells Himself), 46; Mele-yon; 46; Naabaahii Yázhí (Little Warrior also known as “Smarty”), 43, 44; Tłíł ání Biye (Many Goats Son), 46; Sisco, 42; Ta’neeszahnii Tsoh (Big Tangle People Clansman), Naakaii Biye’ (Son of Mexican), 46; Tó Háálíinii Nééz (Polly also known as The Man from Spreading Water Who is Tall), 43; incident at Mitchell trading post and Antes store, 30, 32; Navajo medicine man and leader, 28-29, 30, 36; resists federal government, 34-35, 37-38, 43-44, 50-51; 26; group, 49 Barnes, A. R., state attorney general, opinions concerning Duchesne-Uintah county line, 87, Beers, W. D., state engineer, 85, 87 Beuregard, Donald, member of Byron Cummings expedition to Rainbow Bridge, 167 Bił įį Yishtłizhii (Cream Colored Horses), embroiled with Ba álilee, 49-50 Billings, G.V., state legislator, 89, 90 Bird, Alice Ann Evans, mother of Myron Bird, 52; 55

Bird, Myron, physician, care for Japanese internees, 61, 62; church service, 64; community involvement of, 58, 60, 63-64, 65; death of, 66; education and medical practice of, 57, 58-59; marriage to Romania Westenskow, 54-55; military service, 54-56; home of 62, doctor’s office, 61; family, 52,55,58,Ramona and Myron, 66 Bird, Romania Westenskow, wife of Myron Bird, assistant to husband, 61, 65-66; death of, 66; marriage to Myron Bird, 54-55; social involvement, 66; 59, 66 Black, James W., miner, 176-77; Rainbow Bridge statement, 177-79, 180; second expedition to Rainbow Bridge, 181-82, 184-85; 185

Black soldiers (Buffalo soldiers), Ninth Cavalry, Troop I, 132, 144; Twenty-fourth Infantry, 208, 212, 218 Bleak, James G, and wife, 122 Bonelli, Daniel, 109, 112, 113-14 Bowen, Wes, KSL radio personality, 359, 36162; 363

Bridge Canyon (Bridge Creek), Site B, 302303, 304, 306, 310; 302, 303, 304, 305 Broad Ax (Salt Lake City), 209-210, 211, 21213; 204, 207 Brophy, John, Radio disc jockey, 357-58, 359; 357 Brower, David, and Friends of the Earth, 309; executive director Sierra Club, 301, 306, 308, 311 Brush, Charles Francis, developer of lamps, 225-26; 222 Bryan, William Jennings, 220 Burgess, Ernest H., attorney, argues Duchesne-Uintah county line in court, 89-90

Buys, William, Wasatch Wave publisher and editor, 70, 75-76

C

Cade, Cash, prospector, 69-70

California Safe Deposit and Trust, 18, 21-22 Catholic health care, 244, 246-47; Sevier Valley Hospital, 254 Chaffin, Louis M., Rainbow Bridge statement, 185-86

Chapman, James, bank official and Silver King No.2 Extension claim holder, 271 Chidester, Otis H., writer and Rainbow Bridge, 173-74

Christofferson, Rasmus, Lynne Irrigation Company president, 334-35

Collett, Reuben S. 75, 88

Collins, Al “Jazzbo” and“Jazzbeaux”, 354-57, 359

Colorado River and Navajo Mountain, 176

Colorado River Storage Compact (CRSP), 301-302

Connell, R. S., special Indian agent, 38-39

Coombs, Fanny McLean, 157

Coombs, Isaiah Moses, correspondence with Dryden Rogers on: Civil War, 156; cooperative movement, 161; early history, 151-52; land ownership, 153; polygamy, 157, 158-59; scriptures, 154; 151, family, 161; family home, 164

Corey Brothers: Amos B., Charles J., George L., Lester S., and Warren W., owners of Corey Brothers Construction Company (Corey Brothers Incorporated), 12, 13, 14, 23; uncles to E. O Wattis and W. H. Wattis, 12

Cultural Americanization of Utah, 319-20

Cummings-Douglas Expedition, 1909, members of, 173

D

Dance Venues: Avalon, Rainbo Randevu, Lagoon, Saltair, The Terrace, 353

Dee, Thomas D., David Eccles business associate, 9, 14; death of, 19; 24

Dee Hospital, School of Nursing, 251-52 Delta Hospital, 61; improvements made to, 63; 65

Dinosaur National Monument, 301, 302

Dix, Edwin, Plain City trustee, 335

Dominy, Floyd, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner, 307

DuBois, Charles, federal government surveyor, 68, 80, 85

Duchesene City (Theodore), Utah, county seat for Duchesne County, 84, 86; 73, 81

Duchesne County, financial concerns, 86-87; issues over county lines, see DuchesneUintah County line and DuchesneWasatch County line; legal concerns for creating, 74-76, 78-79, 86, 88-90; votes concerning, 76-77, 78-79, 84

Duchesne Stake, 73, 78

Duchesne-Uintah County line, 60, 78, 82; concerns over, 84, 85, 86

Duchesne-Wasatch County line, ad hoc

east-end committee: Alva M. Murdock, H. C. Means, John A. Fortie, William Smith, 81; ad hoc west-end committee: Chase Hatch, Dr. H. R. Hatch, George Barzee, J. R. Murdock; and DuBois survey, 80; concerns over, 82-84; proposals for, 78-79, 81-84; votes on, 82-83

E

East-enders, Uinta Basin residents, 69, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 82, 84 Eccles, David, alderman and mayor of Ogden, 8; business enterprises of: banking, 11; lumber, 6-7, 9-11; freighting, 7; heavy construction, 11, 16-17, 18-23, land and livestock, 23, sugar company, 11, 17-18; death of, 23; early life of, 5-6; marriages to Bertha Marie Jensen and Ellen Stoddard, 8, 24; relationship with LDS church, 11-12; 4, 7, 19 Eccles, David C., son of David Eccles, and Eccles estate executor, 23, 24 Eccles, Ellen Stoddard, wife of David Eccles, 8, 24

Eccles, Marriner S., son of David Eccles, 24 Echo Canyon Reservoir, 348, 349 Eden Irrigation Company Dam, 344 Electric lighting, opposition to, 231-32 Eliason, Oscar, “Mormon Wizard”, “Dante the Great”, death of, 332; exposes spiritualists, 330-31; illusionist, 316-17, 324, 328

Emerson, Phillip, district court judge, water decision of, 338

F

First National Bank of Ogden, 11, 14, 21, 25; and Corey Brothers, Inc., 12, 22 First Security Bank system, 11, 24 Foote, M. S., member of Case Hite prospecting group to Navajo Mountain, 169 Forbidding Canyon, named by Charles L. Bernheimer, 183; site C, 302-303, 304306, 308, 310; 166, 181, 304, 307 Fort Defiance, 30, 32, 37 Fortier, Samuel, water engineer, 338-39 Fort Lewis (Colorado), 129 Fox, Maggie and Kate, spiritualists, 320; 331 Fruitland, Utah, 82-82, 83

G

Geddes, William, Plain City water trustee, 339; 334

Geddes Water Decree (1892), 335, 336, 340-41, 344-46, 350

George Fuller v Milo Sharp (1908), 344, 346-47, 350

Glena Block, Salt Lake City, 265

Glen Canyon Dam, 306, 308, 309, 310, 311

Godbe, William, Utah spiritualist, 324

Groux, Wilfrid J., supports Ogden Catholic hospital, 246-47, 252

H

Hamblin, Jacob, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118

Harmston, Craig, county surveyor, 87

Harmston, Ed F. county surveyor, 80, 85, 87, 89

Harrison, E. L. T., Utah spiritualist, 324

Hastiin Sání Bich’ahii (Old Man Hat), death of 29

Havemeyer, Henry O., business dealings with David Eccles, 11, 17-19, 25

Hay, William (Billy) B., Moqui Bar placer claim, 186-87; 187

Heber Valley, west-enders, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83

Hefferman, J. A., operates Aneth Trading Post, 40, 43, 45

Heller, Robert, magician exposes mediums, 323

Hite, Cass, southern Utah prospector, 168-69

Holley, James M., owner, Aneth Trading Post and government farmer, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 45, 51

Homesteaders, on the former Uintah Indian Reservation, 69 Hospitals, Ogden, 245-46, 256, 57

Hughel, Nile, land surveyor, 86, 87

Hyde, Shelly, Jazz musician, 356, 359

I

Indian Rights Association (IRA), 48-49

Indian-white hostilities, Four Corners region, 135, 136-38, 139-40, 142

J

Jablochkoff candle, commercial arc lamp, 223

Johnson, Arthur B., civil engineer, 305-306 Johnson, Jacob, judge, 1899 water decree, 342-43; 342

Johnson, John S. “Regulator”, 260-61, 262; death of, 272; established Big Cottonwood

Mining and Milling Company, 266-67, 272; marriage to Louisa M., 262, and to Regina Johnson, 268; moves to Eureka, Utah, 263-64

K

Kelly, Charles, and Rainbow Bridge, 175, 182 Klah Hastiin (Left Handed), Navajo policeman and judge, 28, 36

L

Lake Blanche, 264 Land surveys, by Charles DuBois, 68; by Ed F. Harmston, 80, 85, 89 LDS Church, condemns spiritualism, 324; involvement in creation of Duchesne County, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81 Lincoln Club, Salt Lake City African American Republican club, 214 Little, George M., prospector, camps at Rainbow Bridge, 186, 187

Lucifer’s Lantern, anti-Mormon periodical, 218 Lyman, Joseph A. (Jody), healed by Ba álilee, 30 Lynne Irrigation Company, 334

M

Magic, form of American entertainment, 321-22 Maginnis, William, water arbitrator, 340; water decree, 340; 339 Marriott Irrigation Company, et. al., v. Bear River Irrigation and Ogden Waterworks Company, et. al. (1899), 341, 343 Martin, Robert, and William T. Shelton, Harry O. Williard, Polly, Ba’álilee, and others, 49 McKay, Gunn, Utah congressman, 312 McPherson, J. Gordon, publisher, African American newspaper, Democratic Headlight, 208

Medicine men, Navajo, 28-29 Mediums, spiritual forms of, 320-21, 322 Meier, Joe, Utah radio personality, 359, 362; 364 Merrick (Charles)-Mitchell (Henry), lost silver mine, 168, 170 Military, post Civil War, artillery, 133; encampment, 141; escort wagon, 145; organization, logistical problems, tactics of, 128-30, 131-34,141, 143-44, 145-46; use of Springfield Carbine, 130

Mineral Fork Mill B and D, mining claims, 269, 267

Miners’ store cabin remains, 261, 273

Mitchell, Henry L., store owner on Navajo Reservation, 30, 31

Moss, Frank E., Utah senator, 307, 308, 312; 314

Myton, Utah, 68, 80, 67; river bridges at, 70, 71

N

Narrows Site, 303

Navajo, federal government programs and, 33-34, 36, 37; marriage customs of, 36-37; sheep raising, 33, 37-38; Navajo Faith Mission, 46 Navajo Mountain, 308-309

Newspaper stand, Salt Lake City, 206, 209 Nibley, Charles W., LDS Church Presiding Bishop and business associate of David Eccles, 9-10; and David Eccles, 19 Northwestern Union Irrigation Company, 341, 342, 343

O

Ogden, maps of irrigation ditches, 327, 346 Ogden River, 333 Ogden River Decree, 249, 342 Ogden’s 25th Street, 298, 299

Old Mexican, Navajo resident at Aneth, 33, 34, 43

Olson, John, Swedish mining partner of John S. Johnson, 261 110th Meridian, (Wasatch-Uintah and Duchesne-Uintah county lines), 68, 80, 82, 85, 87, 89, 90

Oregon-Short Line Railroad (OSL), 15-17 Owens, Franklin H., claimed discovery of Rainbow Bridge, 188

P

Patrick, Sister Mary, at ground breaking ceremony, 254

Penrose, Charles W., newspaper editor, opposes electric lights for Salt Lake City, 234-36

Perry, Stephen Washington, 341, 342

Pine View Dam, construction, 348-49; 345 Plain City Irrigation District, 335; at “Honest End”, 335

Polly, Navajo, with Robert Martin, William T. Shelton, Harry O. Williard, and Ba álilee, 49

R

Railroad construction, by Utah Construction Company, Blackfoot to Mackay, Idaho, 15, Caliente Canyon, 16-17, Idaho Falls to St. Anthony, Idaho, 15, Modena, Utah, to Las Vegas, Nevada, 15, Park City line, 15, Salt Lake City to Oakland, 18-19, 20-21, 22-23

Rainbow Bridge, inscriptions: W. E. (C.) Mitchell, G. E. Choistila, William Brockway, M. (Notley) C.Young, J. E. H., Cade, Bill Cade, Gladwell Richardson, C. (George) W. (M) Wright, A. (Al or Alonzo), G. Turner, 180-81 Rainbow Bridge expedition, 1909, 169 Rainbow Bridge National Monument, provisions to protect, 301-302, 304; 300 Ritter, William Willis, U.S. District Court judge, 311 Roads, in Wasatch County, 71, 72, 83-84 Rogers, Dryden, correspondence with Isaiah Moses Coombs (see Isaiah Moses Coombs); early life, 151-52; 155 Roosevelt, Utah, and boundary dispute, 80, 84-85, 86, 89; commercial, cultural and educational center, contends for county seat, 80, 82; 71, 73-74; 83 Ruthrauff, Charles Conrad, arc lamp salesman, 224, 230-31, 232-33

S

St. Benedict’s Hospital (Ogden), 250, new, 256-57, 256 St. Mark’s School, 319 Salt Lake City, Main Street, 329; West Temple Street, 327 Salt Lake Theater, exterior, 320; interior, 323 San Juan River, Navajo names for, Old Age River (Są Bitooh), One with a Long Body (Bits íísnineezi), 26; crossing of, Soldiers/Police Move Across (Silá Ha naa Nininá, 35

Santa Clara, founding of, 110-11 Santa Clara Paiutes, 121-22, 123, 124; 123, 124

Santa Clara River flood (1862), 115-16; victims: Caroline Beck Knight, 119-20; Ira Hatch, family, 118; JacobCrosby, 114; John D.Lee family, 110, 119; John Ray Young family, 115, 116, 117, 119; 108, 121, 125; John Staheli family, 109, 119; Joseph Knight, 117; Mary Ann Hafen, 112-13;

Mary Judd, family, 114, 116-17, 118; Nellie Gubler, 109; Priscilla Leavitt Hamblin, 115, 118, Rachael Judd Hamblin 119; Solomon Chamberlain family, 114

Shelton, William T., Navajo Indian Superintendent, 27, 32-33, 34, 35, 36, 38-39, 46-48; with others, 49

Silver King No. 2 mine, 265-66

Sisters Mary Patrick, 254, Nordick, 251, Victorine, 248; 257

Sisters of the Holy Cross, 253

Sisters of Ogden’s Mount Benedict Monastery, founding members: Sisters Danile, Francis,Iris,Jean, Jeremia, Judine, Luke, Marilyn,Mary,Stephanie, Virgene, 258; relations with non-Catholic community, 252-53, 53; Sister Benora Gaida, 252, Sisters Estelle Nordick and Mary Margaret Clifford, 242, 245, 246,

Site A, dam, 303 Site B, dam, see Bridge Canyon Site C, dam, see Forbidding Canyon

Slater, Thomas, 342

Sleight, Ken, 309, 310-11, 312

Smart, William H. 71-72, 73, 79

Smith, George H., 110

Smith, Joseph F., 73, 75, 81, 223

Spiritualists, in Utah, 324; formed Church of Zion, 324, 325; Godbeites, 324-25

Staheli, Barbara, daughter of John and Sophia, first born in Santa Clara, 113

Staheli, John, 109, 112 Stockley, George Washington, 225, 227; 224 Swiss Emigrants, 112-13

T

Taxes, and the creation of Duchesne County, 70, 84, 86-87, 89

Taylor, John, LDS church president, opposes electric lights, 236

Taylor, Julius F. appeals to diverse readership, 208-09, 216; biographical sketch, 206-07; editor and publisher, African American newspaper, Broad Ax (Salt Lake City), exhorts self-reliance, 214, 21, 217; member of press associations, 220; views on organized churches, 216, on church and state, 216-18

Taylor, William W., champions civil rights, 214-15; editor and publisher, African American newspaper, Utah Plain Dealer (Salt Lake City), 207-208; GOP candidate, Utah House of Representatives, 213-14

Tenth Circuit Court, and the Rainbow Bridge decision, 312 Thompson Springs, Utah, 139 Tri City Oracle (Salt Lake City), black newspaper, 208 Twenty-second Infantry, 126

U

Udall, Stewart M., Secretary of the Interior, 308, 309, 314 Uintah County Commission, 78, 87-88 Uintah-Duchesne County line dispute, see Duchesne-Uintah County line Uintah Indian Reservation, 68 U. S. Army, actions taken against Ba álilee and Navajo, 39-40, 43-45, 45; investigation of U.S. Army conduct against Navajo, 46-48 U. S. District Court, and Navajo-Rainbow Bridge suit, 313 U. S. Supreme Court, and Rainbow Bridge decision, 313 Utah Constitution, and division of counties, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 Utah Construction Company (later called Utah International), construction steam locomotive, 15; dispute with Oregon Short Line in Calente Canyon, 16-17; early financial difficulties of, 21-22; formation of, 14-15, 24, 25; railroad construction work sites, 10, 13, 16

Utah Plain Dealer, Salt Lake City Democratic black newspaper, 207-08

Utah radio, disc jockeys: Bill Agee, KUTA, 354; Bill Sears, KUTA, 354; Emerson Smith, KDYL, 354; Gene Minshall, KSL, 361; Hal Zogg, KUTA, 358, 359, 351; Paul Alexander, KUTA, 354; Paul Smith, KDYL, KUE, KEYY, 359-60, 359; Ken “Cousin” Bennett, KLO, 354; Rob Branch, KWIC, 359, 360; Michael Kavenaugh, 359, 360; Murray Williams, KALL, 359; Ron “Eric the Red” Ross, 359, 360; Ron Silver “Daddy” Wiggins, 359; Salle Caprice, 354; Starley Bush, 359, 360; rural AM stations, 342, 353

Utah Water Laws: 1880, 337-38; 1919, 347 Ute Indians, 137

VVernal, Utah, early Main Street, 74

W

Waite, Harry H., spiritualist, hosts séances, 331, 328; reactions to Oscar Eliason, 317, 326

Wasatch County, 68, 83; schools, 68-69, 71-72, 79

Wasatch-Duchesne County line, see Duchesne-Wasatch County line

Wasatch LDS Stake, division of, 73

Wasatch Mountain Club, 309, 310-11, 312

Wasatch Wave (Heber City), and county division, 70, 72, 75, 82, 84

Washington, Booker T., 215

Washington, James W., black pastor and newspaper publisher, 208

Wattis, Edmund O, David Eccles business partner, 12-14, 19, 20, 21, 25

Wattis, William H., David Eccles business partner, 12-14, 19, 21, 25

West Slaterville Irrigation Company, 334, 341, 343, 344

Western Pacific Railroad, 18-19, 21-22, 23, 25 Williams, James Benjamin (Ben), brother to William F. Williams, trading post operator, 174-75 Williams, William F., claimed first sighting of Rainbow Bridge, 170-78; family, 183 Williard, Harry O., U. S. Army Captain, investigates military actions taken against Navajo, 40, 41-43, 44; 49 Woodbury, Angus B., 306

Y

Young, Brigham, warns Santa Clara settlers, 120-21

Z

Zahniser, Howard, Wilderness Society executive, opposed to Colorado River Storage Compact, 301 ZCMI (Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution), 211

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation

The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042-143X) is published quarterly by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101-1182. The editor is Philip F. Notarianni and the managing editor is Allan Kent Powell with offices at the same address as the publisher. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the Society or its magazine.

The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 3,415 copies printed; 5 dealer and counter sales, 2,690 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 2,695 total paid circulation; 67 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; 2,762 total distribution; 653 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; total, 3,415.

The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 3,160 copies printed; 3 dealer and counter sales; 2,588 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 2,591 total paid circulation; 76 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution; 2,667 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; 493 total 3,160.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS

THOMAS G. ALEXANDER JAMES B. ALLEN

LEONARD J. ARRINGTON (1917-1999) MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER FAWN M. BRODIE (1915-1981)

JUANITA BROOKS (1898-1989) OLIVE W. BURT (1894-1981) EUGENE E. CAMPBELL (1915-1986) C. GREGORY CRAMPTON (1911-1995) EVERETT L. COOLEY (1917-2006) S. GEORGE ELLSWORTH (1916-1997) AUSTIN E. FIFE (1909-1986) PETER L. GOSS LEROY R. HAFEN (1893-1985) B. CARMON HARDY JOEL JANETSKI

JESSE D. JENNINGS (1909-1997) A. KARL LARSON (1899-1983) GUSTIVE O. LARSON (1897-1983) BRIGHAM D. MADSEN CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN DEAN L. MAY (1938-2003) DAVID E. MILLER (1909-1978) DALE L. MORGAN (1914-1971) WILLIAM MULDER (1915-2008) FLOYD A. O’NEIL HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS (1917-2004) CHARLES S. PETERSON RICHARD W. SADLER GARY L. SHUMWAY MELVIN T. SMITH WALLACE E. STEGNER (1909-1993) WILLIAM A. WILSON

HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS

DAVID BIGLER JAY M. HAYMOND FLORENCE S. JACOBSEN STANFORD J. LAYTON WILLIAM P. MACKINNON JOHN S. MCCORMICK MIRIAM B. MURPHY LAMAR PETERSEN RICHARD C. ROBERTS MELVIN T. SMITH LINDA THATCHER GARY TOPPING