In This Issue

Because 2010 is likely to be remembered as the year that the controversial National Health Care Reform Bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, it is fitting that the first article for this last issue of the year deals with the issue of health care at the beginning of the twentieth century as it examines the history of the Park City Miners’ Hospital. The first hospitals in Utah—St. Mark’s, Holy Cross, and Deseret hospitals—were established by the Episcopal, Catholic, and LDS churches in 1872, 1875, and 1882. By the 1890s, it was clear that these hospitals were unable to provide the extensive and intensive care needed by injured miners. Consequently, a provision was included in the Utah Statehood Enabling Act providing that annuities from public land sales be used for the construction and operation of a state miners’ hospital. In 1897, the Utah Legislature, in compliance with the Enabling Act, passed a law providing for a state miners’ hospital to be located in Park City. When the public funded hospital was not built, Park City, under the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners local and with strong community support, undertook construction of the hospital on their own, which was completed in 1904. The hospital ceased operation in 1956 but remains today as one of Park City and Utah’s most important historic buildings.

Ah Yen, known as China Mary, lived in Park City in the 1880s where she had a China ware shop on lower Park Avenue. She died in Evanston, Wyoming, on January 13, 1939 at an estimated age of 104 to 110.

Park City Museum

If health care remains an ongoing issue and concern for Utahns in the twenty-first century, so does the availability, ownership, and distribution of the region’s scarce water resources. Likewise is the perceived friction between ecclesiastical and secular authority in the state. Our second article in this issue considers both issues as it looks at the battle between the settlements of Mona and Goshen during the 1870s over water flowing from the western slopes of Mt. Nebo in what was known as Little Salt Creek—now called Currant Creek. Located only ten miles apart, but in separate valleys, the two communities were settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1850s. However a shared religion and common pioneer experience were not enough to stay the conflict over water and the ensuing impact it had on the lives of these early Utahns.

Brigham Young Hampton seems to have led a double life—at least in the assessment of contemporaries. Among many nineteenth-century Mormons he was a stalwart, devoted pious saint. For others, however, he was seen as a “Latter-day thug.” As our third article reveals Hampton was not all one or the other, but as is the nature of mortals he ambled back and forth across the line of Completed in 1888, Park Cityʼs praiseworthy and not so praiseworthy conduct.

Our final article for 2010 recounts an event in 1943 when a military plane enroute from Sacramento, California, to Fort Collins, Colorado, crashed in the remote reaches of Wayne County. When an intensive search damaged in the fire of 1898 and

involving thirty military planes and unknown number of civilian aircraft and search parties failed to locate the missing aircraft, three months later a group of Wayne County ranchers moving cattle from the mountains to the lower desert winter range came across the remains of the aircraft and the bodies of its six member crew. Major LeRoy Gray Heston, from Mather Field in Sacramento, California, was assigned to lead the recovery crew. His account of that effort offers an interesting and insightful view of the interaction of military personnel with the ranchers and their families in one of the most isolated and rural areas of the United States during World War II.

Completed in 1888, Park City's China Bridge provided access above Chinatown as the primary route from Rossie Hill to Main Street until the bridge was badly damaged in the fire of 1898 and had to be demolished.

Park City Museum