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 Mormonsand 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 previously 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 containing 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 hundred years 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 (1884- 1960). 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. Fowlerand 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. Radke-Moss. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xii + 352 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

ECONOMIC NECESSITY AND PROGRESSIVE IDEOLOGY informed 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, Radke- Moss 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