Book Reviews

So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California 1812-1848

By Will Bagley,Vol. 1 The Overland West:The Story of the Oregon and California TrailsSeries. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. xxii + 458 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

IN THE FALL OF 1844, about forty men and their families from five upper Columbia tribes left home and traveled to Sutter’s Fort, on the American River in California.There, the Swiss John Sutter had built a mini-empire, and had recently begun providing work and shelter for some of the first Americans arriving over the Sierras. A few years later, two of those settlers would find gold in a millrace, changing the West forever.

The native people included a Walla Walla leader,Yellow Serpent, and his educated, Christianized son, Elijah Hedding. At Sutter’s Fort they planned to trade furs, skins, and horses for cattle, and hoped, too, that they might pick up some slaves en route. But early in 1845, a dispute over stolen horses led to Hedding’s murder by a settler named Grove Cook. The Indians returned to the Columbia discouraged and demoralized, and Yellow Serpent turned bitter.

The following year, events were chaotic in California—the year of Fremont’s operatic Bear Flag Revolt and the American conquest.When Yellow Serpent with forty men and their families returned to northern California in 1846, rumors swept the province that two thousand warriors had entered the province thirsting for blood. Yellow Serpent probably wanted revenge as well, but the fact that the Walla Walla came with their families made it clear they wanted only Cook and the property they had left with Sutter earlier. The Walla Walla were not prepared to make war to get it. “Not surprisingly,” Will Bagley notes in one of hundreds of revealing accounts in So Rugged and Mountainous,his new account of the pre-gold rush years of the trans-West migrations, “Yellow Serpent got neither justice nor revenge” (319). What they got was deadly measles, which they brought back to the Columbia country.

At Waiilatpu, the mission the New England Congregationalists Marcus and Narcissa Whitman had established on the Walla Walla River in 1836, the Cayuses, closely associated with the Walla Wallas, began dying in droves. Nearly all the whites, also infected, survived.

Relations between the Whitmans and their charges had been deteriorating for years. Gradually, the missionaries understood there was no real hope of Christianizing the Indians in any meaningful way. At the same time, as the numbers of destitute emigrants landing on the Whitmans’ doorstep each fall grew by orders of magnitude, the missionaries quickly understood the role Oregon could play in America’s growing global power. They neglected the Cayuses and threw themselves into aiding the American newcomers. And the Cayuses realized no one was going to stick up for them as these same newcomers gobbled up their game, grass, and soon, their land.

So when the measles came, and Indians died and whites didn’t, it was obvious to the tribes that bad-hearted magic was behind the deaths. In late November 1847, Cayuses murdered the Whitmans and twelve other whites at Waiilatpu, and took fifty-three women and children hostage.

The next year, Oregon became a territory and memories of the massacre became useful in a campaign to separate the Cayuses from their lands. Down through the decades and across the nation, the Whitman deaths came to stand for alleged Indian perfidy and duplicity. “[T]he martyrs,” Bagley puts it “would help vindicate the calculated and brutal devastation of the West’s American Indians…” (399).

Bagley’s scattering of the Whitman-Yellow Serpent story through this big book is a good example of its geographic, temporal, and thematic scope. It’s a book primarily about the 1840s, when traces and pack trails became broad wagon roads to California and Oregon. It details the main routes, cutoffs, and events of each year’s emigrations. More importantly, as it does with Yellow Serpent and the Whitmans, the book ties events back and forward in time, and laterally in distance: who would have thought the Whitman massacre was so closely tied to events in central California three years before?

Rugged and Mountainous is the first of four ambitious volumes recast from work Bagley undertook ten years ago for the Long Distance Trails Office of the National Park Service. A second volume will describe the gold-rush and mining West, a third the growing conflicts and commercial expansion of the 1850s, and a fourth the Indian wars of the 1860s.

Bagley counts himself among the new (and now aging, he jokes) historians who set out consciously to add depth and diversity to a narrative tradition running from Washington Irving to Wallace Stegner by bringing more people, spread over more territory and more economies, into the discussion. The result, he says, quoting Elliott West, has been “a longer, grimmer, but more interesting story” (405). Bagley uses John Unruh’s The Plains Across:The Overland Immigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West (1979) as “a baseline,” aiming to fill in gaps and enrich contexts with thirty years of scholarship since. (Bagley says that for the project, he has made use of more than five hundred trail narratives unknown to scholarship before 1988.)

For example, it was Unruh who first upended the myth that wagon trains had to fight their way across the continent—by counting the actual casualties of Indian-white violence. Out of around five hundred thousand travelers on the trails between 1840 and 1870, Unruh concluded, 362 emigrants were killed by Indians, and 426 Indians were killed by whites. (Cholera deaths, by contrast, were in the tens of thousands.)

Bagley goes further, with a clear sense of the ecological disaster that the emigrants and especially their livestock brought west all along the trails, and the consequences of that disaster for the people who lived there already. He allows us to understand that violence was widespread after all; the change was violent, as were its consequences.

This is not to imply that whites are the bad guys in these accounts. Far from it; Bagley’s respect for the suffering, courage, humor, ingenuity, and curiosity of all his subjects—Indian, white, black, Hawaiian, and mixed-blood—is so profound that he gives them all the leeway he can to speak for themselves. If he quotes directly too often, I suspect it’s a symptom of his affection. He probably should quote less and summarize more, under a rule of thumb we went by all the years I worked on a daily newspaper here in Wyoming: use the quote to reveal something important about the speaker’s personality or attitude, but tell the story yourself.

Most of the time, Bagley does exactly that. The result is a book that’s compelling, encyclopedic, and a necessary addition to any personal or public library of the West. I can hardly wait for parts two, three, and four.

TOM REA Oregon-California Trails Association Casper, Wyoming

Exploring Desert Stone: John N. Macomb’s 1859 Expedition to the Canyonlands of the Colorado.

By Steven K. Madsen. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010. xxi +273 pp. Cloth. $34.95.)

STEVEN K. MADSEN, a Salt Lake City educator, was introduced to the thenlittle-known Macomb expedition in the mid 1970s by his mentor and partner on the important In Search of the Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles, 1829-1848, C. Gregory Crampton, who probably wrote more history of the region than any other scholar. In this well-written book, Madsen offers an account of the long-overlooked expedition, bringing to it more depth than many such studies, partly because the author has located an impressive number of relevant historical documents which not only illuminate the narrative, but are published rather extensively in Part II, the appendix section.

In April 1859, Captain A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the War Department Office of Exploration and Surveys, directed forty-eight-year-old Captain John N. Macomb, Jr., then the chief topographical engineer in the Military Department of New Mexico, to explore the extremely rugged and almost unknown San Juan River basin and the “lower courses” of the Colorado River. Macomb was ordered to determine the most direct and practicable route through the region between the Rio Grande River in New Mexico and the southern settlements of Utah.

Macomb was a typically well-trained member of the elite corps of engineers who, particularly through the Pacific Railroad surveys just prior to this expedition, collectively filled many large blank spaces and added several representations of mythical natural features, which had been included on some maps of the American West at the time. This was prior to the more famous surveys of John W. Powell, Ferdinand V. Hayden, and George M. Wheeler, who could not benefit much from Macomb’s reports until they were published in 1875.

The Macomb group left wagon roads behind at Abiquiu, fifty miles north of Santa Fe, and followed the horse and pack-mule trace of the Old Spanish Trail most of the way. The book features a good description of the travel route and experience, including important discoveries made on the way. Until Macomb’s expedition, most of the Old Spanish Trail had never been accurately traced on any map. Although the commander appeared to not appreciate most of what they saw, others in the expedition waxed eloquent regarding the magnificent canyons, colored rock formations of all kinds and several important scientific discoveries.

Humphries had specifically directed Macomb to ascertain if, in light of the recent “Utah War,” a practicable supply route between New Mexico and Utah might be possible. The Macomb expedition concluded that no such road was possible. However, a greater understanding of the geography, natural resources, and other aspects of the region proved a significant contribution of the survey.

While military and political in origin, the expedition became more notable as a scientific and geographical endeavor because of two energetic civilian assistants, John S. Newberry and Charles Henry Dimmock. A civil engineer and surveyor, Dimmock contributed greatly to the geographical and map-making success of the expedition. Newberry, with connections to the Smithsonian Institution, discovered the first sauropod dinosaur bones found in the Western Hemisphere. Specimens of the ancient reptile were collected with considerable danger from high on a wall of Canyon Pintado near the Old Spanish Trail not far from present Canyonlands National Park. This work would be well described and “splendidly illustrated.” Newberry’s observations also contributed significantly to an emerging school of geological thought known as “fluvialism,” the study of landform changes produced by the action of streams. This was significant in supporting Charles Darwin’s recent theories of the age of the earth. William H. Goetzmann, in his classic Army Explorations in the American West, 1853-1863, asserts that perhaps Newberry “more than any scientist since Fremont opened up new and unknown country to the civilized world” (397). Madsen is the first to provide detail regarding his accomplishments.

One valuable element of Madsen’s volume is the large and beautifully rendered map originally produced by Baron Frederick Wilhelm von Egloffstein, a Prussian aristocrat who had been associated with Dimmock on an earlier survey expedition led by Lt. Joseph C. Ives on the Colorado River. This previously rare map may be worth the price of the book. But even without it, those interested in the four corners region, especially Utah and western American history, will find this work fascinating and informative reading.

EDWARD LEO LYMAN Leeds

Patrick Connor’s War: The 1865 Powder River Indian Expedition.

By David E. Wagner. (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2010. 296 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

COLONEL PATRICK EDWARD CONNOR entered Utah history when he established Camp Douglas in October 1862. His mission was to protect the Overland Trail and telegraph lines, but his command of California volunteers quickly began to assert a strong federal presence on the Mormons. He is mainly remembered for his attack on a band of Northern Shoshone on January 29, 1863, during which his soldiers killed approximately two-hundred-fifty Indians, including at least ninety women and children. With his reputation as an Indian fighter firmly established, he was assigned to the command of the 1865 Rosebud Campaign in eastern Montana. Returning to Utah in October 1865, he left the army in 1866 and remained in Utah until his death in 1891. Known as the “First Gentile in Utah,” and the “Father of Utah Mining,” he was arguably the second most influential person in Utah territory during his lifetime (Brigham Young being the first).

The 1865 Powder River campaign in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming is one of those “what ifs” of western history. If General P. Edward (he preferred to use his middle name) Connor’s expedition had been successful, the resulting eleven years of conflict with the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho might have been avoided. Or, as the author states at the end of the book,“...there may not have been a Fetterman disaster in the following year, and George Armstrong Custer may have died of old age” (268).

The 1865 Powder River Campaign has not received the attention that it deserves and although this book fills a void, there still needs to be a work published on the complete expedition. David Wagoner has done a great job describing the western column of the expedition (one of three columns) that was commanded personally by Connor.

Unlike today’s perception of Connor as a killer of women and children, during his lifetime he was considered one of the best Indian fighters of his time. His actions throughout his military career reflected the attitudes of the era. He believed that the only way to get the respect of the Indians was to strike them first, then negotiate from a position of strength, an early version of “shock and awe.” His orders to kill all males twelve years and older, although initially approved, were later countermanded by his superiors. In all of his campaigns he ordered his men to avoid killing women and children as much as possible. Because of his reputation for knowing how to deal with “hostiles,” he was offered command of the Powder River Expedition and the Military District of the Plains was established especially for him.

The book reviews the initial planning and preparation for the expedition; the discontent of the soldiers who felt that with the end of the Civil War they should be discharged; the march into northern Wyoming; Sawyer’s road building expedition; the fight on the Tongue River; and the disbanding of the expedition and return to Fort Laramie.

If there is any doubt of Connor’s military leadership and physical courage this book should dispel it. Although a strict disciplinarian, he was liked and respected by his soldiers. During the return to Fort Laramie, he gave a shoeless soldier a pair of his own boots. During the Tongue River battle he led the charge and with a small group recklessly chased a band into a canyon, whereupon realizing that they were being pursued by a small force, the Arapaho turned on Connor chasing him back to the main body of troops in the village. Of the seven soldiers wounded in the battle four were with Connor in the thick of the fight. Connor had more internal problems to deal with than the Indians he was going after. Only his aggressive leadership got the expedition underway. Uncooperative army quartermasters, mutinous troops, inexperienced and incompetent subordinate commanders, and the unexpected arrival of a civilian road building wagon train required more of his attention than the Indians. It is not as surprising that so little was accomplished as it is that the expedition got started at all.

The book is well written and does an excellent job of weaving the stories of the many personalities involved in this expedition into an interesting narrative. Copiously illustrated with maps (essential for any military history) the daily progress of the expedition can be followed easily.Any criticisms of the book are of a minor nature. The inclusion of a complete campaign map would have been useful to put Connor’s western column of the expedition into perspective with the columns of Cole and Walker.The footnote on page 239 incorrectly gives 1861 as the establishment of Camp Douglas. It should be 1862.

In summary, I highly recommend this book. It provides a detailed day-byday account of Connor’s expedition and provides an invaluable amount of information for an event that deserves to be better known than it is today.

ROBERT S. VOYLES Fort Douglas Military Museum

The Nauvoo Legion in Illinois:A History of the Mormon Militia 1841-1846.

By Richard E. Bennett, Susan Easton Black, and Donald Q. Cannon. (Norman: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2010. 436 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

THIS BOOK IS AN IMPORTANT and interesting contribution to the understanding of the Nauvoo Legion, which has been a subject for many who write and study about Mormon, Utah, and American history. This topic, in the past, has been presented in bits and pieces in many works, but not with the detail that this volume presents. The three authors have brought their expertise in Missouri, Illinois, Mormon, military, and national history to present in great depth the details and short history of the Nauvoo Legion in Illinois, from its beginning in 1841 until its demise in 1845.

The book is presented in two segments—the first being the narrative history which makes up the first 269 pages (twelve chapters), and a series of appendixes which consists of another 130 pages, and a useful bibliography of twenty-four pages. The first four chapters cover the history of the Legion from its reason for being, response to the persecutions of the Mormons in Missouri and Illinois, to its founding and the details of its formation and characteristics as a military unit. In chapter five, the authors discuss the leadership of Joseph Smith as Lieutenant General and commander of the unit with his other duties as leader of the Mormon church. Chapters six, seven, and eight treat courts-martial actions, parades and musters, and the call to arms in 1842-1843 to keep the peace and to protect Joseph Smith from being extradited to Missouri.

The growth, display, and use of the Legion brought many perceptions and fears into the minds of people in the area as shown in chapter nine, and led to problems of outside mob activity and the use of the Legion to try to keep the peace and carry out ridding the community of a menace, The Nauvoo Neighbor newspaper. This brought on charges of riot and treason against the commander, Joseph Smith, and the killing of Joseph and Hyrum at Carthage jail as told in chapter ten.There is a final story of the Legion in Illinois after the murder of Joseph Smith, the survival of the Legion for a short period, which is recounted in chapter eleven. One of the Legion’s main accomplishments at this time was to keep peace among the Mormons and prevent retaliation against the mobs or government officials. Nevertheless, the legislature of Illinois in 1852 revoked the original Nauvoo Charter ending the days of the Legion in Illinois. The Nauvoo Legion would come to life again in Utah Territory. Many of those who served in Illinois such as Daniel H.Wells, George D. Grant and Peter W. Conover, and many others, would serve in the Utah Nauvoo Legion, which took the same name and much of the same organization with a six level military structure.The Utah Legion suffered the same demise as the Illinois Legion with the passage of the Edmunds—Tucker Act in 1887.

Chapter twelve, the conclusion, is an important chapter as it outlines the major points and arguments about the Nauvoo Legion in Illinois. In fact this chapter could be read first, and then the other chapters studied to fill in the details of the many important issues. The authors find that “it may well be argued that the greatest contribution of the Nauvoo Legion was in preventing what never occurred—extradition, mass killings, and eventual civil war. Strong and formidable, the Legion was a worthy deterrent to wanton persecution, unjust attack, and very real threats of extermination.As such it deserves an honorable place in the military history and tradition of Illinois and the United States” (269).

The several appendices add much to the book. Appendices A through E include: “An Ordinance Organizing the Nauvoo Legion”; “Revised Laws of the Nauvoo Legion”; “A Chronology of the Legion”; “A list of Commissioned and Noncommissioned Officers from 1841 to 1845”; and “A list of Privates in the Legion” during that same period.The authors have done an excellent job in making these important records available and in presenting a useful and interesting book that provides a valuable basis for further studies of the Nauvoo Legion in Utah.

RICHARD C. ROBERTS Weber State University

John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy.

By James M. Aton. (Salt Lake City: Bonneville Books, University of Utah Press, 2010. 85 pp, $9.95.)

POWELL HIS LIFE AND LEGACY is in essence three essays written and woven together by James M.Aton about the life of Major John Wesley Powell, one of the great American explorers and scientific minds of the late nineteenth century. The book begins with a chapter entitled “Biography.” For those seeking to learn about Powell for the first time or to just revisit his story (as I did) this chapter is worth the purchase of the book. However, the volume does not end here. Aton does a thorough examination of Powell’s written work and his ideas about western water development giving the literature a much needed look at Powell’s ideas about irrigation and the lasting impact of his ideas on today’s western environment.

One easily forgets what an amazing individual Powell was until we visit his life history. Powell’s early education was an active one. Growing up the son of a preacher, Powell and his family bounced around the Midwest. Aton describes Powell’s informal education at the hands of family friend George Crookham as following a “course of studies and pedagogical methodology ...We now call it the field trip” (2). Powell also learned, at a young age, the trials and joys of farming on his family’s Wisconsin farm.These and other life experiences served Powell well as he went on to explore the Colorado River and Colorado Plateau, to establish the USGS and the Bureau of American Ethnology, and to sow the seeds for the creation of the Bureau of Reclamation.

After introducing us to Powell, Aton next takes the reader through an examination of Powell’s writings, both published and unpublished. Aton’s lively writing style, along with Powell’s extraordinary body of work makes this chapter more than just the average bibliographical essay. Aton’s ability to place the work in the context of the time period makes Powell’s ideas jump off the page and leaves the reader in amazement at Powell’s breadth and brilliance. In addition Powell’s mentoring of scientists and artists –Gilbert, Dutton, Hillers, Beaman, etc.—adds other important voices to the writing of this period.

The final chapter, “Interpretations of Powell on Irrigation” is the meat of the book. This chapter not only discusses Powell’s ideas about western irrigation, but just as importantly, Aton discusses and demonstrates how an historian goes about his work. Aton asks two important questions of Powell: How would he feel about the building of the large “cash register dams” in the American West and second, would Powell in today’s world be an environmentalist? Aton looks at how Powell’s writings have been used to argue both sides of these questions, first by those who advocated the building of large dams in the American West during the early twentieth century, and then by environmentalists who advocate for free and wild rivers and a clean environment. Even though Aton comes to his own conclusions to these questions, he notes that Powell never directly advocated for large dams, nor, did he ever directly advocate for free and wild rivers.

Powell aside, Aton through his essay explains and demonstrates the process under which the historian uses primary sources to uncover answers, and how often the answers are not directly stated, but interpreted. This interpretation is often done through the writer’s own time lens, and not through the context of the times. In addition to a needed discussion of Powell’s ideas about irrigation and western resources, this section is an excellent piece on historical methodology.

Aton’s book offers the student of history and of the American West much to mull and think over. The book’s slim size, eighty-five pages with notes and bibliography, makes it the perfect item to slip into one’s duffel bag or backpack and read while traveling and contemplating the beauty of the West.

BRAD COLE Utah State University

Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan.

By Toby Jurovics, Carol M. Johnson, Glenn Willumson, William F. Stapp. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. xv +255 pp. Cloth, $60.00.)

IT COULD BE SAID that the nineteenth-century survey photographer Timothy O’Sullivan is the Great Sphinx of the American West. Because he left no written account of his life, we have but a rough sketch of the man and photographer. His most important legacy is a tremendous cache of photographs taken during the Civil War under Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, and in the American West as part of Clarence King’s U.S. Geological Survey of the 40th Parallel (1867-1873) and George M. Wheeler’s Geological and Geographical Survey and Exploration West of the 100th Meridian (1871-1874).

Had O’Sullivan produced images like other survey photographers like William Henry Jackson or others working in the American West like C.R. Savage and Carleton Watkins, his photographs would be noteworthy, but not exemplary. Unlike his peers, O’Sullivan produced unique images that were consistently austere and utterly “unpicturesque.”Working throughout the arid West — a region that Page Stegner calls “a stark, arid, bony landscape of twisted and tortured rock”— clearly added to the stark nature of his photographs. Beyond terrain, however, there is a certain matter-of-fact sensibility to his work that profoundly influenced generations of photographers as disparate as Ansel Adams and Lewis Baltz.

Without a history or insight into his intent, O’Sullivan’s work also received a significant degree of attention from historians and critics like Joel Snyder, Rosalind Krauss, Rick Dingus, Robin Kelsey, and several others. To come to a more rounded understanding of the photographer, they searched his photographs, government archives, buried correspondences, the journals of his peers, variant albums, and the actual sites of his work.These investigations produced a figure that tended to oscillate between artist and scientist, primitive genius and mere operator.

Published in connection with an exhibition of the same name at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Framing the West represents an important contribution to our understanding of Timothy O’Sullivan. It is a visually stunning book with 150 illustrations – the best and most complete reproductions of O’Sullivan’s work in nearly thirty years. Far more than a catalog Framing also features three essays, an extensive chronology, and seven appendices. It is an informative read that sheds light on the photographer and the challenges of understanding his work. Toby Jurovic’s lead essay, in particular, exemplifies the pitfalls of writing about O’Sullivan. Unfortunately, but understandably, it does little more than reiterate many claims already in circulation for decades.

Located prominently in King’s field of study, O’Sullivan spent a considerable amount of time in Northern Utah during the 1869 field season. During that time he worked in Echo Canyon and the Weber River Valley, Ogden, Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, Provo Canyon, the Heber Valley, the Salt Lake Desert, and high on the summit of Lone Peak. Under Wheeler he documented the dramatic landscape of Flaming Gorge in 1872. It had long been assumed that O’Sullivan also worked for King in the Uinta Mountains in 1869. One of the most important contributions of Framing is the reattribution of this series of photographs to A.J. Russell, the official photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad who joined King that summer. This discovery, made by art historian Glenn Willumson, not only adds to our understanding of Russell’s work in the West, but also further refines and makes consistent O’Sullivan’s unique vision.

In the end, the most important contribution of Framing may be William Stapp’s understated chronology of O’Sullivan’s life. Compiled from numerous biographical fragments, it creates a composite portrait that will assuredly be an important aid for future research on the enigmatic photographer whose work and life will continue to entice.

JAMES R. SWENSEN Brigham Young University

Reflections in Place: Connected Lives of Navajo Women.

By Donna Deyhle. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. xxvi + 242 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

RACE RELATIONS — and that is what this book is about — is a well-worn topic that has seen major shifts from the 1960s to present. So has San Juan County, Utah, the setting of this work. As a young Navajo woman, I came to Blanding in 1972 from Church Rock, New Mexico, and have lived through much of what the author writes about. During these years my daughter attended school in the San Juan School District, I was in the first graduating class of the small community college often mentioned, have worked there ever since as a counselor, and have seen hundreds of students graduate from high school and go off to college or trade school. So it was with great interest that I read Reflections in Place.

The theme of this book is: (1) to present three women’s lives in a respectful way, (2) “capture the ways in which historically rooted racial warfare plays out in their daily lives,” (3) illustrate situational complexity of their lives, and (4) demonstrate their vitality, spirituality, and “different ways of being Navajo”(xiv). To do this, Deyhle provides a study over twenty-five years of three Navajo friends she met starting in 1984, when she came to southeastern Utah as an ethnographer to examine the school district and its relations with Native American students and their communities. A lawsuit prompted this investigation of inequalities, which she was hired to report. Well over half of what is presented here comes from her findings in the 1980s and has since been published in various journals during the 1990s. The theme through much of this work as well as this book is “The long-standing racial tension in southeastern Utah frames this cross-generational set of portraits that together depict all aspects of this specifically American Indian struggle” (Jacket).

The author writes well, using the ethnographic present as well as the poetry of Luci Tapahonso and other Native Americans to paint a portrait to match the difficult lives of three Navajo women. Her picture of life on the reservation, the frustration with school administrators and teachers, and the difficulty of instructing unwilling learners is truthful and reflects the attitude of some Navajo parents at that time. She also uses local history to expose the outlook and problems that have plagued Indian-white relations over the years which, in turn, has been translated into the lives of students. Her main focus is to explain how this history and the problematic school experience established the pattern for these women’s troubled lives, and where they are today. Few readers will finish this book believing formal education or the dominant society were much help.

What she presents is accurate but one-sided. Throughout this book blame is placed on the Anglo for all the wrongs; little is said of the role that parents should have played but did not. Since the author’s work focused on dropouts and troubled youth, the quiet, hard working ones are ignored. All three of the women that become representative of the school experience share this distressing background. This is not to deny that there were problems with racism, stereotyping, and dysfunction in the educational system, but there was another side that is never mentioned — those Indian students who succeeded. From my experience, there was as much internal friction — racism, feelings of entitlement, jealousy, and factions — within the Native American communities as there was between them and the dominant culture.

An underlying perspective from the lives of these three women is that they were poorly prepared for later life, the schools readying them only for vocational work, if anything, and that much of their personal difficulties is a result of this experience. Deyhle characterizes their attitude as one of “survivance” which is the “will to resist dominance,” a feeling expressed during their high school years that continued into their present lives (xviii).That may be true for these women, but I do not agree in general. There were Navajo people then, and many more now, who are successful teachers, counselors, administrators, and professionals who went through the “system,” were not “pushed” into the trades, and did not get bulldozed into a life of mediocrity. In some cases, they found more friendship in the white community than in the Indian community. I believe the other half of this story needs to be told with the understanding that there were many good people on both sides of the desk, trying to improve a difficult situation at a time (1970s,1980s) when confrontation was a way of life. If we see only what we look for, we may miss what is best.

KAROLYN ROMERO Utah State University College of Eastern Utah — San Juan Campus

My Fellow Servants: Essays on the History of the Priesthood.

By William G. Hartley. (Provo: BYU Studies, 2010. xix + 492 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

WILLIAM G. HARTLEY throughout his long and award winning career as an historian has studied things in the Latter-day Saint past that others considered quite ordinary and perhaps even uninteresting. In this book, Professor Hartley, as he has in many of his other writings, displays his rare ability to extract from the sea of the Mormon past fresh insights that are not only instructive but more clearly reveal the fundamental importance of the priesthood at every organizational level of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Moreover, his writing is as fresh as are his insights, and this book reveals him at his best.

For more than thirty years Hartley has written articles focused on the restoration of the priesthood, LDS Aaronic priesthood offices, acting teachers, the bishop, Brigham Young and priesthood work, pastors and pastorates, the priesthood reorganization of 1877, the priesthood reform movement, as well as “War and Peace and Dutch Potatoes.” These articles and eleven more, many of which earned him prestigious honors, have now been published under one cover by BYU Studies. No longer will students of Latter-day Saint history have to consult a variety of journals and magazines to be informed by his research regarding the priesthood.

Part one of this volume focuses on priesthood restoration; part two consists of five essays that deal with the Aaronic Priesthood; part three with Melchizedek Priesthood operations; and the final section examines the church’s organizational and administrative history broadly. Hartley’s wide priesthood brush includes wagon and handcart emigration, the “down and back system of sending Utah wagons and teams, ...to retrieve emigrants waiting to cross the plains,” as well as what it meant in “the pioneer era to be active in the Church” (xviii).

Those who believe that there is little left to learn about Mormonism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be surprised at how much new information Hartley has gleaned from ward and stake records found in the archives of the LDS church. A few examples follow. Newel K. Whitney, not Edward Partridge, was the first Presiding Bishop (117). In the Salt Lake 33rd Ward in the 1920s the bishop assigned a man in his late sixties to preside at the sacrament table to add dignity and sacredness to the sacrament service (65). Women in the Salt Lake 4th Ward, during the 1930s, polished the sacrament trays, laundered, starched and pressed the lace tablecloths, baked and sliced the bread and set the sacrament table each week (70). During the Second World War, Salt Lake’s 24th Ward lacked deacons and the bishop asked the Beehive Girls to collect half of the ward’s fast offerings and tithing (71).

Teachers quorums served as courts to try recalcitrant individuals for their church membership and were sometimes called “the spiritual policemen” of the church (87, 93). In the 1850s, some wards had but one pair of teachers visit all of the ward families (92). Initially lesser priesthood quorums operated as stake rather than ward quorums and their leaders were sustained in the church’s general conference (90).

President Heber J. Grant, in the early 1940s, authorized boys with no priesthood to pass the sacrament (107). In the 1930s, ward priesthood meetings shifted from Monday nights to Sunday mornings (121). One day when Presiding Bishop Edward Hunter was praised by Brigham Young as others were being scored, he was overheard muttering, “Don’t get the big head, kill you sure, kill you sure, killed more men than anything in the Church” (147). Sometimes, while Brigham Young led the church, ward bishops served for years without being ordained (178). Boys as young as fourteen were encouraged to receive their temple endowment (178). In 1877, the Salt Lake Stake had 19,798 members and the Panguitch Stake had 859 (195). In January 1879, the first endowments for the dead were administered (199). It was not until 1877 that members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles received “a reasonable compensation for their service from church funds” (251). Such facts standing alone might seem insignificant, but the cumulative effect of such information allows readers to understand how and why the priesthood functions as it does today. Hartley’s work on priesthood matters is, for the most part, unique as well as informative.

Because the twenty articles that make up this book were written over a thirtyyear time frame and appeared in a variety of magazines, books and journals, and with only “minimal editing” for the book, there is some repetition and overlapping that, if edited out, might have made My Fellow Servants an even more interesting read. Furthermore, this reviewer is not convinced that the chapters detailing Brigham Young’s overland trails revolution nor the one titled “War and Peace and Dutch Potatoes” really fit in a volume otherwise focused on priesthood matters. Still, Hartley’s writing style, his ability to inform readers with new information, and his talent of finding documents that contain information others have not studied, mark this volume as one most Latter-day Saints will not only enjoy reading but one from which they will learn much that pertains to the Mormon past and the development of priesthood practices which until now have remained obscure.

KENNETH W. GODFREY Logan