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Another Look at Silver Reef
Another Look at Silver Reef
BY GARY TOPPING
Silver Reef, Utah, has long captured the imagination of Utah historians, professional and amateur alike, and with good reason: the very existence of a rich vein of silver in a stratum of sandstone is a geological anomaly, and the existence of a “raucous” Gentile mining town in the midst of the sober Mormon agricultural communities of Washington County created an economic, social and religious dynamic scarcely to be found elsewhere. Unfortunately, the historiography of Silver Reef has been largely (though not entirely) a negative one, as students have been tempted to make invidious comparisons, treating the town as a high-living den of iniquity in contrast with the pious and stable city of St. George. Also, scholars have been too eager to fashion from the Silver Reef story a theology of failure, in which it is implied that the ghost town ruins serve as a symbol of the bankrupt values on which the community was founded. This article will present evidence to show that the story is much more complicated than that historiographical morality play, that Silver Reef was not such a hellhole, St. George was not such a model of civilization, and that the interaction among those two and other Washington County communities was close and beneficial to all.
The story of the Cotton Mission is a familiar episode in Utah history. In October 1861, Brigham Young, pursuing his ideal of Mormon selfsufficiency, sent a party of 309 families to establish the city of St. George and colonize the Virgin River basin. Although the colonists were instructed to grow fruit, grapes, tobacco, and other crops suitable to the area, the primary purpose of the colony was to grow cotton; the colonists were told, as historian Leonard Arrington put it, “that the Cotton Mission should be considered as important to them as if they were called to preach the gospel among the nations.”1 It was an archetypal Mormon colonizing venture, in which an entire integrated community with a full range of occupational skills was transplanted to a hitherto unsettled region. The colonists embraced their call with a will, and before long had erected in the wilderness a classic Mormon village with the characteristic orderly streets and solid buildings. Later reinforcements swelled the population and spawned satellite communities so that by the late 1870s, by Arrington’s estimate, the Cotton Mission included perhaps four thousand people.2
Silver Reef Main Street in 1880.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The first year’s crop, which yielded over 100,000 pounds of seed cotton, seemed to vindicate the venture. Unfortunately, production never attained that level again. In fact with the end of the Civil War, when cotton prices dropped steeply, in addition to other problems like the difficulty of harnessing the treacherous Virgin River, Indian conflicts, insect pests, alkaline soil, and the expense of manufacturing and transporting the cotton, the project was pretty much doomed within a decade. Although sorghum and wine continued as profitable industries, the cotton factory in Washington limped along until 1898 processing wool as well as cotton and also functioning as a store. By the 1870s the Cotton Mission had largely lost its momentum: lacking capital and lacking markets, the economy descended into individualistic subsistence agriculture. As the collective sense of purpose evaporated and Dixie farmers sank into what threatened to be a perpetual agricultural poverty, the morale of the community began to decline, and people wondered if the Cotton Mission was finished.3
Although many, perhaps most, of the cotton missionaries faithfully and tenaciously stuck to their mission, others began to feel forgotten and trapped in a dead-end enterprise. Historian Juanita Brooks told the story of her grandmother, Mary Hafen, attending a meeting in the 1870s where some of Brigham Young’s wives asked the Washington County women to “retrench” from their “extravagances in dress and habits.” Looking around at the coarse homespun dresses of her neighbors and contrasting them with the speaker’s “silk dress with wide bands of velvet ribbon and lace edging,” Mrs. Hafen could not resist asking, “Which do you want us to retrench from, Sister Young, the bread or the molasses?”4
At that low moment, what many Washington County Mormons regarded as a miracle occurred. Although prospectors had become aware as early as the mid-1860s of silver deposits in sandstone strata some twenty miles northeast of St. George, it was not until the mid-1870s that the richness of those deposits became known. When it did, in 1876 a silver rush occurred and a mining town, Silver Reef, sprang up with all the proverbial suddenness of western boom towns. Although the 1880 census counted slightly over one thousand Silver Reef inhabitants, one historian has estimated that the population may have peaked at as much as 1,500. 5 Not all Silver Reef residents were miners, of course: among them were store and hotel keepers, restaurateurs, freighters and other service workers who supported the mining population. But none of them were farmers or ranchers, all of them needed to eat, and they had a ready supply of cash. 6 The economic salvation of the Cotton Mission, it would appear, was at hand.
It was a popular belief among Dixie Mormons that God had put the silver there for that very purpose. In the words of a poem penned by one of the historians of the Cotton Mission, God didst put it here for us, In our dark and direful day; Didst bring it forth when,—almost,— Hope from us was gone.7
While a skeptical modern scientist or historian is reluctant to accept a miraculous explanation for a geological phenomenon, in this case it is not perhaps a proposition one should challenge, for geologists are themselves uncertain how a rich vein of silver could occur in a stratum of sandstone— a virtually unique circumstance. 8 At any rate, it was clear that Apostle Erastus Snow, the leader of the Cotton Mission, saw the mines as economic salvation, and reputedly thanked the Lord for them in a public prayer offered at the St. George Tabernacle.9
Looking from the northwest to the southeast, a view of the Barbee Mill in the center and the Catholic church and hospital on the far right.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
In Apostle Snow’s mind, however, the Mormons would profit from the mines only indirectly, by doing freighting and providing building material and foodstuffs in exchange for cash, rather than actually working in the mines. Silver Reef might have represented economic salvation, but it also represented moral temptations and an industrialized, capitalistic economy inimical to Mormon agrarianism. If the Mormons would sup with the devil, they would use a long spoon. But as things worked out, no spoon they could find was long enough, and the interaction between the two communities became more tangled than either had anticipated.
What was Silver Reef like, this jack-in-thebeanstalk town that sprang up so suddenlyin the midst of the Mormon community? Nels Anderson, author of the first published study of the Cotton Mission, portrayed it as just another roaring western boom town, as ramshackle in morals as in architecture, and contrasted it negatively with stable, civilized St. George. In 1880, he claims, Silver Reef “was at the height of its prosperity and gentile assertiveness.” Residents of the town “were of the bonanza-minded, carefree, reckless types portrayed by Bret Harte. . . . Silver Reef was worldly—a treeless, grassless, red-sand location. St. George was otherworldly—a community of fields, gardens, and flowers. Silver Reef was a shack town, its main street lined with saloons, gambling places, and other conveniences for miners. St. George was a moral family town, where the humble domestic virtues were glorified.”10 Even when one makes due allowance for Anderson’s Mormon revulsion at what he calls “saloons, gambling places, and other conveniences for miners,” photographs of the town at its height offer ample evidence to confir m his general image of the place as slapdash and transitory, particularlywhen set beside the solid stone dwellings and verdant gardens of St. George.11
Anderson’s view has prevailed in the popular mind, confirming as it does our conventional image of the western mining town as a hellhole of drinking, gambling, prostitution, and violence. Even careful professional historians have not entirely escaped the Anderson image, as one recent history of the area refers to Silver Reef as a “raucous mining camp.”12 Indeed, Silver Reef could undoubtedly hold its own in raucousness. With a population of mostly young, single males and the presence of such testosterone outlets as a race track, a quotient of almost one saloon per one hundred residents, and the inevitable house of ill repute, Silver Reef’s social life would not have been sedate. (Oddly, the sources nowhere mention prostitution, only a certain “notorious” dance hall, but one surely would have found the world’s oldest profession in the territory’s newest town.)13
Others, however, have seen another side of Silver Reef, and in fact by several standards of civilized development, Silver Reef was equal to, or even ahead of St. George. Don Maguire, for example, an itinerant trader who passed through the town twice in 1878-79, thought the balance leaned rather heavily the other way: Silver Reef, he said, was “so neat, so clean, so thrifty. . . that I was reluctant to leave it. I knew that its thoroughly civilized and American-like expression would contrast favorably with the Mormon towns of southern Utah, and that it would be like passing through a foreign land until we reached the Colorado River.”14 Viewed from a cosmopolitan perspective, in other words, St. George was the anomaly, not Silver Reef.
Local historian Marietta Mariger, who interviewed many old-timers both from Silver Reef and the neighboring Mormon communities, supports Maguire, suggesting that while “it seemed a very rough place to those Mormon pioneers, . . .as mining camp history goes, it was not a wild camp, though there were some murders, duels, and even one lynching.” And despite the hurried construction of some Silver Reef buildings, others, like Harrison House, which she calls Silver Reef’s “Waldorf Astoria,” were impressive in their comfortable amenities. In addition to the guest rooms on the second floor, “the ground floor had kitchen and dining room, and amusement rooms, which contained at least three billiard tables, and an immense grand piano. . . . When this old building ceased to be used, its bedroom furniture was sold all over the county, I suppose. I still have one of its marble-topped dressers.” Private dwellings seem to have run the gamut, from the shacks emphasized by Anderson to what Mariger recalled as “the finest of them, as I remembered it, [which] followed the Harrisburg water ditch, and had fine shade trees, lawn, and flower gardens.”15
Even some of the St. George Mormons thought Silver Reef was a surprisingly civilized place. Lawyer and druggist Joseph E. Johnson, who also founded the Silver Reef Echo, the town’s first newspaper, said, “As to the class of miners and business men at and about these mines, it has never been our lot to see brought together so many hundreds of mining population as free from poverty and dissoluteness. All seem able to pay their way, to have business and go after it with a will, and the camp as a whole seemed rather a community of gentlemen than a camp of rough miners. . . .”16
Tim Quirk, an Irish Catholic Miner in Silver Reef, dressed for after-work socializing.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Still others, while acknowledging that life in Silver Reef had its rough edges, nevertheless saw it as an exciting place where colorful people enjoyed a vibrant social life. Mark Pendleton, who moved there as a boy from Parowan with his family in 1878 and lived there for the next thirteen years, remembered it thus:
The coarseness of life in western mining towns, it seems, fell along a continuum, and surely Silver Reef would rate as one of the tamer ones. In comparison with St. George, of course, Silver Reef looked like a pretty wild place, but a fairer comparison, with Pioche, Nevada, yields a very different picture. The two towns were roughly the same size at their peak, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500, yet where Silver Reef had nine saloons, Pioche had no fewer than seventy-two; while Silver Reef had no out-and-out brothels (though the “notorious” dance hall apparently fulfilled that function), Pioche had thirty-two. 18 In the light of figures like those, Silver Reef does not seem radically different from St. George, while the mines of Pioche begin to look like primarily a support system for the booze and sex industries.
The Barbee and Walker Silver Mining Company at Silver Reef. From left to right: blacksmith shop, mine hoisting works, five stamp mill, and assay office.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Interaction among Mormons and Gentiles was intimate, and over time vindicated both Erastus Snow’s hope of economic prosperity and his fear of moral decline. As Mariger points out, the primary relation was economic, “for the two communities were forced to depend much on one another. Silver Reef sought laborers; the Mormons sought labor; Silver Reef needed what the farms produced; the Mormons needed what stores and shops furnished.” Economic relations expanded to social ties, as the two communities joined together in “social mingling” during dances and holidays.19
The moral decline, from Snow’s perspective, came from the wine industry, which had flourished even before Silver Reef came into existence and had even been promoted by the St. George Tithing Office. Dixie wine, by some accounts, was infamous for its poor quality. To trader Don Maguire, it was “a villainous stuff, containing about as much of the juice of the yellowjacket and wasps as it does of the grape. . . . So rascally is the nature of this drink that people of Arizona and Nevada claim that a man who drinks a quart of it will get up in the night and steal his own clothes.”20 Mark Pendleton had a similar memory: The natives were immune, but woe to the ‘stranger within the gates.’ Often he was brought back to the Reef [from Leeds, which seems to have been the center of Dixie
wine production] in a helpless condition, or returned hatless, spurring his horse and shouting. Recovering consciousness some twelve hours later with a terrible headache, he wondered who he was, where he was, and what had happened and was not fully sober for several days.21
Mine buildings at Silver Reef.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
One of the civilizing elements in Silver Reef was the Catholic church, which made its first appearance at the end of 1878.23 The central figure in that church, as indeed in the whole history of Catholicism in Utah, was Father Lawrence Scanlan, a priest from Ireland who later became the first bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake.24 Born in 1843, Scanlan trained for the priesthood at All Hallows College, Dublin, which had been foundedin 1842 to provide priests to follow the Irish diaspora. Ordained in 1868, he immediately came to California and soon was assigned to his first pastorate in the mining town of Pioche, Nevada. It was a tough boot camp for a pioneer priest. Although mining camps were often rough places, Pioche had developed a reputation as one of the worst. The Virginia City [Nevada] Enterprise said of the place that it “is overrun with as desperate a class of scoundrels as probably ever afflicted any mining town on this coast, and the law is virtually a dead letter. . . . as matters now stand the name of Pioche has become a by-word of reproach and a synonym for murder and lawlessness throughout the state.”25 Although the Irish miners at first welcomed Scanlan as one of their own, they turned against him when he began telling them to stay away from gambling dens and houses of ill repute. For a time he had trouble earning enough even to feed himself, but in the long run his firm moral stand impressed his parishioners and he once again became popular.
Miners and towns people at Silver Reef.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Scanlan was assigned to Salt Lake City in 1873, where he took charge of the only Catholic church in Utah Territory. When the Silver Reef boom began in 1876, many of the miners were Irishmen who had moved over from Pioche, so when Scanlan visited them late in 1877, he found that it was pretty much his old parish transferred to Utah. (To some degree, the towns of Pioche and Silver Reef were one and the same: once the Pioche deposits began to play out and the ones at Silver Reef began to pay, some Pioche merchants simply dismantled their stores and reassembled them in Silver Reef.)26 As Scanlan was building churches for the railroad workers in Ogden and the miners in Park City, he started construction of a church in Silver Reef on January 1, 1879. Once begun, the church went up as fast as the town itself, and Father Scanlan said his first Mass in the new St. John’s church on Easter Sunday—April 13, 1879. On September 1 of the same year, St. Mary’s School opened in the church basement with fifty-five students, staffed by several Sisters of the Holy Cross whom Father Scanlan had invited from Notre Dame, Indiana.27 Altogether nine Holy Cross sisters served in Silver Reef over the course of its brief history.28 At the same time, the education system in St. George was much more primitive: schools were staffed—when they existed at all—by volunteer teachers who often had little more education than their students.29
The Wells Fargo Building at Silver Reef.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Perhaps Scanlan’s most remarkable accomplishment in Silver Reef, though, was construction of St. John’s Hospital across the street from the church. Mining is an infamously dangerous occupation, yet there was no facility within many miles where anything but the most minor injuries could be treated. During his pastorate in Pioche, Father Scanlan had erected a hospital, so once he showed up in Silver Reef his former parishioners from Pioche suggested he do the same for the new community.30 Begun on April 1, 1879, and opened on August 1, the hospital was staffed by five Holy Cross sisters and a medical doctor, Dr. J. T. Affleck.31 Construction and maintenance of the hospital was an interesting partnership among the miners, mine and mill owners, and residents of the community, each of whom agreed to contribute one dollar per month. While patients had to pay doctor’s fees and buy prescriptions, their stay in the hospital was free. Indigent patients were charged nothing and were cared for out of the hospital’s general fund. 32 What Father Scanlan and the citizens of Silver Reef had done, in effect, was to create the first hospitalization insurance plan in Utah history. At the same time, St. George had no doctor, no hospital, and treated illnesses by Thomsonian herbal methods or folk remedies. 33 It was only after Silver Reef was abandoned in the mid-1880s that St. George acquired its first doctor—the selfsame Dr. Affleck, who moved over from Silver Reef.34 Although Mormons and Catholics apparently mingled amicably in their regular contacts in both the Mormon communities and Silver Reef, the most dramatic symbol of cooperation between the two faiths occurred on Sunday, May 25, 1879, when Father Scanlan took his entire congregation to St. George to celebrate Mass in the Mormon Tabernacle, with music provided by the tabernacle choir under the direction of John M. Macfarlane. Although he lived in St. George, Macfarlane was Deputy U.S. Mineral Surveyor at the time and spent his work week in Silver Reef, where he boarded at the same hotel as Father Scanlan and the two became acquainted. As their friendship developed, Macfarlane invited Father Scanlan to say Mass in the tabernacle—a gesture he was able to make only after some difficulty with his stake president and by special permission of Apostle Erastus Snow.35 Why Macfarlane would extend such a unique offer and why Father Scanlan would accept it are both problematic questions: what did each man hope to gain? Macfarlane’s biographer has Scanlan lamenting that he had “neither a church nor a choir” in Silver Reef and thus he would have found an offer of both in St. George irresistible.36 But that was only partly true, for the Silver Reef church had been completed and used for Easter Mass on April 13. The church did have an organ, but perhaps not a choir.37 More plausibly, Father Scanlan probably saw the Mass as an opportunity to undermine the Mormon faith of the St. George spectators, for those early Utah Catholics had not yet given up their naïve image of Mormonism as a tottering house of cards that would collapse under the onslaught of solid theology.38
The Silver Reef Catholic Church.
ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF SALT LAKE CITY
And what was in it for Macfarlane, Erastus Snow, and the Mormons? Juanita Brooks, the dean of southwestern Utah historians, speculated that one motive was to show off the splendid new tabernacle, which had only been completed in 1875.Catholic historian Msgr. Jerome Stoffel adds to that speculation the darker point that Dixie Mormons at that time were in need of some good public relations toward Gentiles because bad memories of the Mountain Meadows Massacre only twenty-two years earlier—an event in which some of them had participated—were still strong, and in fact John D. Lee had been executed at the massacre site just two years previous to the Macfarlane offer.39
The liturgy was a Mass in D by a composer named Peters. There is a Macfarlane family tradition that the choir practiced nightly for six weeks, probably, as Macfarlane’s biographer speculates, with repeated visits from Father Scanlan to help them understand the meaning of the Latin and its proper pronunciation. When the Mass began, at ten a.m. on May 25, Mormon observers in the Tabernacle far outnumbered the Silver Reef Catholics, so Father Scanlan took a few moments to explain the nature of the liturgy and of the vestments he was wearing. His homily—incredible to a modern Catholic—was reported to have lasted two hours, although Scanlan’s biographer notes that “he was inclined to preach with violence and at a length which would today be considered intolerable,” and perhaps the priest was not about to waste what he realized would be a unique opportunity to teach Catholic doctrines to a large assembly of Mormons. More believable, though, was a report by an unidentified French Catholic who was present that Scanlan’s oration was a speech given after Mass rather than a homily given during the liturgy.40
Mrs. Grambʼs Boarding House at Silver Reef during the 1880s.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
How successful were his efforts? All seem to have agreed that the music was exceptional and the event itself was of great significance. The aforementioned French Catholic reported that Scanlan “delivered the clearest, most informative speech I’ve ever heard. He proved the Truth of the Catholic Church in a perfect style, interesting manner and in a way that couldn’t be contested. He gave the history of the Institution up to our time and created an impression on the Mormons of St. George that won’t soon fade.” Others were not so impressed. Although Apostle Erastus Snow, his biographer tells us, “was proud to call [Scanlan] friend and brother, . . he certainly believed Catholicism was a perversion of Christ’s doctrines,” and used the Mormon Sacrament meeting that very afternoon to lay out the antidote to Scanlan’s poison: “Pres E Snow spoke in a clear and lucid manner on the Divinity of Christ building his church on the Rock of Revelation,” wrote one who attended the meeting, “[and] quotedthe scriptures copiously to show the apostacy [sic] of the Catholic Church and the various sects of the day.”41
The St. George LDS Tabernacle, constructed in 1875.
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So what is the larger meaning of this anomalous event, a Catholic Mass in a Mormon tabernacle? At the time, it would have been hard to point to any real rapprochement between the two churches: although St. John’s parish continued to exist for another five years and Father Scanlan presumably continued to lack an adequate choir, the event was never repeated. In the longer perspective of history, the event has certainly played a larger role in Mormon folklore than in Catholic.42 In addition to the Dixie historians, who have missed no opportunity to narrate it in proud detail, the Southern Utah Heritage Choir re-enacted it in 2004 and invited the Catholic bishop. Everyone needs friends, but the Mormons, in their often cross-grained relationship to American culture throughout history, have understandably sought such opportunities to eradicate misunderstandings and extend the olive branch.
By 1885, the silver of Silver Reef had played out, and despite the fact that some of the mines continued to operate into the twentieth century, its residents were mostly moving on to other digs, and Father Scanlan terminated the parish, school, and hospital. 43 Although a parish was temporarily maintained in Frisco (in Beaver County northwest of Milford) for a couple of years, and a permanent one was established in Cedar City in 1936, Washington County did not have another parish until 1958, so the process of building good relations between Mormon and Catholic entered into a long hiatus. Economically, Silver Reef helped St. George in death as it had in life— building materials and furniture were scavenged to be used in other communities—but other economic effects are harder to measure, for despite the infusion of capital and markets Silver Reef had offered, Washington County continued to struggle well into the twentieth century. Perhaps we can find Silver Reef’s greatest significance in its brief example of economic symbiosis and a modicum of mutual cultural toleration with its Mormon neighbor.
Silver Reef in the twenty-first century is a ghost town, with little more than the foundations of most buildings visible above the rubble of the rest of the structure. Similar ghost towns exist throughout the West and even elsewhere in Utah, but the wreckage of Silver Reef is uniquely conspicuous as wreckage because of its close proximity to the neighboring Mormon towns, most of which are in as good repair today as they were in Silver Reef’s heyday. And the contrast is rendered even more vivid by the major metropolis St. George is becoming and the retirement homes that are spilling into the former city limits of Silver Reef and threatening to engulf the ghost town completely.
The interior of the St. George LDS Tabernacle, where a Catholic Mass was celebrated by Father Lawrence Scanlan on May 25, 1879.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Those contrasts have provoked perhaps more than the usual tongue clucking and head shaking about the glory that once was, how the mighty have fallen, and the failure of the once-thriving community. Former resident Mark Pendleton, on a return visit nearly thirty years after he had left:
A recent history of Silver Reef offers the following caption below a photograph of the remains of the Wells Fargo building: “An abandoned mine car stands in front of an equally forlorn Wells Fargo building in Silver Reef.” (Actually, while the mine car appears a bit forlorn, the stone building, the best preserved edifice in town, is in excellent condition with the exception of the rotted doors and windows, and would compare favorably with most of the structures of similar vintage in St. George.) On the following page, a photograph through a doorway is interpreted thus: “The southern Utah desert, not a booming mining town, is all that can be seen through the sandstone arch of an abandoned building in Silver Reef in 1976.”45
“Ruins everywhere,” a “desolate” cemetery, “silent as a grave,” a “forlorn” building, and a dust-to-dust view from a ruined doorway—these metaphors of death and failure in the midst of permanence and prosperity could be multiplied many times in the literature of Silver Reef. Was Silver Reef a failure, and its death a reminder of the wages of sin?
Perhaps even more than other ghost towns, Silver Reef asks us to confront an essential ambivalence we Americans feel toward our history. On the one hand, we embrace those ruins as symbols of an antiquity our brief history of barely five centuries does not possess. Ghost towns are our pyramids; they are our Parthenon.
On the other hand, ghost towns are silent embarrassments to our secular religion of growth, success, and progress. Silver Reef in particular, in its close proximity to the enduring Mormon communities of Washington County, seems a poignant reminder that not all dreams come true, and that there are no guarantees of progress and permanence.
If, as we have seen, though, Washington County history is not a dualistic narrative of Sin versus Salvation, Success versus Failure, perhaps Silver Reef can suggest a more nuanced way of looking at our history. It could be argued that an abandoned community does not necessarily indicate a failed one. Surely humankind can as legitimately pursue temporary goals as permanent ones. A community based on an extractive industry is necessarily going to have a finite life; the only question is how long the resource to be extracted will hold out. An agricultural community, by contrast, barring some natural disaster, can reasonably expect permanence. Thus the ramshackle architecture of many—but not all—buildings in Silver Reef, some of them moved in pieces from Pioche, seems appropriate. Why build for the ages when the end is so obviously near? Viewed in this way, the ruins of Silver Reef could be seen as evidence of the practical wisdom of its creators, who knew the whole project would be transitory and built accordingly, even as the St. George Mormons built for permanence, as a witness to their faithfulness to their church calling. Viewed in this way, Silver Reef represents a goal achieved, a project completed, as its builders moved on to other enterprises.
The Elk Horn Saloon and James N. Lowder Store in Silver Reef— 1890.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
NOTES
Gary Topping is archivist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City.
1 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 217.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1996), 94-95. The threat of failure was real, and the cotton missionaries knew it: although St. George and other communities survived, others, like Harrisburg, Grafton, Shunesburg, Duncan’s Retreat, and Hebron did not.
4 Juanita Brooks, Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1982), 112.
5 Alder and Brooks, History of Washington County, 86; Bart C. Anderson, “Silver Reef,” in Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 498.
6 Since about 1870 the Washington County Mormons had been supplying produce to the miners in Pioche, Nevada, so Silver Reef was not their first outside market. But Pioche was much farther away and the route was infested with robbers, so Silver Reef represented a much more convenient and safer one. William R. Palmer, “Early Day Trading With the Nevada Mining Camps,” Utah Historical Quarterly 26 (October 1958): 353-68.
7 Marietta M. Mariger, Saga of Three Towns: Harrisburg, Leeds, Silver Reef (St. George: Washington County News, n.d.), 59.
8 Paul Dean Proctor and Morris A. Shirts, Silver, Sinners and Saints: A History of Old Silver Reef, Utah ([Provo, Utah:] Paulmar, Inc., 1991), Chapter 4, pp. 51-62 examines several theories about the origin of the silver. W. Paul Reeve, “Silver Reef and Southwestern Utah’s Shifting Frontier,” in Colleen Whitley, ed., From the Ground Up: The History of Mining in Utah (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006), 250-71 is the best history of mining in that district.
9 Alder and Brooks, A History of Washington County, 257.
10 Nels Anderson, Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 428-29.
11 Both Mariger and Proctor and Shirts, cited above, include photographs of Silver Reef, as does Stephen L. Carr, The Historic Guide to Utah Ghost Towns (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1972 [rev. ed., 2003]): 138-42. On page 141 Carr also helpfully reproduces a plat map of the town from 1879.
12 Reeve, “Silver Reef,” 250.
13 Mark A. Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” Utah Historical Quarterly 3 (October 1930): 103, 108.
14 Gary Topping, ed., Gila Monsters and Red-Eyed Rattlesnakes: Don Maguire’s Arizona Trading Expeditions, 1876-1879 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 107.
15 Mariger, Saga of Three Towns, 97-98.
16 Albert Bleak Stucki, “A Historical Study of Silver Reef: Southern Utah Mining Town” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1966), 35-36.
17 Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” pp. 100-101.
18 Reeve, “Silver Reef,” 264; James W. Hulse, Lincoln County, Nevada: 1864-1909: History of a Mining Region (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1971), 28. The Pioche numbers seem high until one learns, as we shall see, that the Virginia City Enterprise, which had seen a few Nevada mining towns, rated Pioche as the roughest. On the other hand, Leonard Arrington and Richard Jensen, “Panaca: Mormon Outpost Among the Mining Camps,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 18 (Winter 1975): 213, estimates that in 1872 Pioche may have had a population of six thousand; if so, the numbers, while still high, seem more credible. The population of western mining towns was so transitory that unless a town happened to reach its peak in a census year, as Pioche did not, accurate population data is elusive.
19 Mariger, Saga of Three Towns, 99.
20 Topping, ed., Gila Monsters, 108-9.
21 Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” 115.
22 Anderson, Desert Saints, 435-36.
23 Catholics comprised by far the largest religious group in Silver Reef; thus the emphasis on them here. Readers should know, though, that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists all maintained ministries there, holding services in the Citizens’ Hall, where also a free public school was taught for nonCatholic children. Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” 101.
24 Robert J. Dwyer, “Pioneer Bishop: Lawrence Scanlan, 1843-1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 20 (April 1952): 135-58.
25 Hulse, Lincoln County, 25
26 W. Paul Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 117; Proctor and Shirts, Silver, Sinners and Saints, 47-49. I can name only one merchant, a Hyman Jacobs, who literally dismantled his Pioche store and reassembled it in Silver Reef, but perhaps others also literally “moved” in that way. Stucki, “A Historical Study,” 32.
27 “Historical Record and Home Accounts—Book A, 1880-1890,” and “Account Book, 1871-1892,” Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, hereafter referred to as Diocesan Archives.
28 Bernice Maher Mooney, Salt of the Earth: The History of the Catholic Church in Utah, 1776-1987 (Salt Lake City: Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, 1987, 1992), 517.
29 Andrew Karl Larson, “I Was Called to Dixie”: The Virgin River Basin, Unique Experiences in Mormon Pioneering (St. George: The Author, 1961), 544-52
30 Rev. Denis Kiely, “The Story of the Catholic Church in Utah,” unpaginated MS prepared for deposit in the cornerstone of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, July 22, 1900, copy in Diocesan Archives.
31 It is a trivial matter, but this Dr. Affleck contributed a bit of local color as well as medical care. When making house calls in his buggy, he would tie his horse to a heavy piece of iron he carried with him, almost as a sailor would drop an anchor. [Juanita Brooks,] “Silver Reef,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (July 1961): 293-94.
32 Father Lawrence Scanlan, “History of the foundation of St. John’s Hospital, Silver Reef,” in “Account Book, 1871-1892, 94-95.
33 Samuel Thomson was “a popular evangelist of anti-orthodox herbal medicine whose influence preceded the Mormons into virtually every area they entered. Thomson’s remedies appear regularly in both Mormon diaries and sermons, and he allegedly once was described by the Prophet to be ‘as much inspired to bring forth his principle of practice according to the dignity and importance of it as he [Joseph Smith] was to introduce the gospel.’” Lester E. Bush, Jr., Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1993), 92.
34 Larson, “I Was Called to Dixie,” 615-23; Alder and Brooks, History of Washington County, 103-107. W. Paul Reeve wisely counsels skepticism regarding the credentials of mining camp doctors: “Licensing and regulation were almost nonexistent, making it possible for anyone with an inclination to dabble in the healing arts to call himself a doctor and open for business.” Making Space, 150. There is evidence, though, that Dr. Affleck was a physician of some skill, though we know nothing about his training. Another physician, a urologist named Dr. Joseph Walker, knew Affleck well and held him in high esteem. One one occasion, Affleck removed a diseased kidney from a woman in Washington, Utah, operating on her kitchen table. Afleck admitted to an element of luck in the procedure, but it was, after all, a success. Dr. Joseph Walker, “Portrait of a Country Doctor (Dr. J. T. Affleck),” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (July 1961): 293-94.
35 L. W. Macfarlane, Yours Sincerely, John M. Macfarlane (Salt Lake City: The Author, 1980), 153-59.
36 Ibid., 155.
37 Father Scanlan’s “Account Book, 1871-1892” in the Diocesan Archives indicates that he paid $75 for the organ. Apparently there was a piano as well, for Mariger, Saga of Three Towns, 99, reports that Mormon girls took piano lessons from the nuns at St. Mary’s school.
38 The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, an association of French laypersons which collected funds to support Catholic establishments in far-flung parts of the world, was an important source of financial support during the 1870s and 1880s for the Catholic church in Utah. Each year Father Scanlan or his assistant, Father Denis Kiely, submitted a report to the Society describing the previous year’s accomplishments and justifying their requests for funding for the following year. Although those reports are obviously important historical sources, they are also significantly biased, for the Society wanted to see tangible accomplishments, and baptisms were about the only way spiritual progress could be made visible. There is no reason to doubt, however, that converting Mormons was a sincere goal of those early priests. But the fact that they went about their proselytizing in a much less confrontational way than the Presbyterians or
Methodists, for example, actually seems to have endeared them to the Mormons instead of provoking the bitter controversies that largely characterized Mormon-Protestant relations. Nevertheless, in his 1876 report, Father Scanlan referred to Utah as “this far off and largely pagan land,” and reported that he had baptized “about a dozen” non-Catholic students in Catholic schools “and refused to comply with the desires of many others, through motives of prudence and objections raised by their parents.” John Bernard McGloin, S.J., “Two Early Reports Concerning Roman Catholicism in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (October 1961): 337-38. Similarly, Father Kiely, reporting Father Scanlan’s Mass in the St. George Tabernacle, characterized it as an effort “of great help expanding the light of the ‘True Faith’ among people immersed in darkness.” Father Denis Kiely, Report to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, October 31, 1879, copy in Diocesan Archives.
39 Msgr. Jerome Stoffel to Rev. [Paul S.] Kuzy, CPPS, December 30, 1987, in Diocesan Archives. Stoffel reports Brooks’s opinion expressed in conversation with him. He incorrectly gives the tabernacle completion date as 1871 instead of 1875—not an insignificant error, because the later date gives even more cogency to Brooks’s speculation: the building was newer than Msgr. Stoffel realized and local pride in it would have been bright. Father Kuzy was pastor of St. George Catholic church in St. George.
40 Macfarlane, Yours Sincerely, 156; Dwyer, “Pioneer Bishop,” 151; Kiely, “Report,” 2.
41 Kiely, “Report,” 2; A. Karl Larson, Erastus Snow: The Life of a Missionary and Pioneer for the Early Mormon Church (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971), 578. The Mormon quotation was from the diary of Charles L. Walker.
42 I can find no mention of the event in Scanlan’s subsequent writing. He even failed to mention it in his annual appeal to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Father Francis J. Weber, “Father Lawrence Scanlan’s Report of Catholicism in Utah, 1880,” Utah Historical Quarterly 34 (Fall 1966): 283-89. Father Kiely’s “Story of the Catholic Church in Utah” does mention the event and says of Scanlan’s homily (or lecture, as it probably was), “Careful to give no offence and respect the belief of his hearers, nearly all of whom were Mormons—he won for himself the esteem and good will of all.”
43 According to interpretive material in the modern Silver Reef museum, the church was moved to Leeds, where it served for a time as a social hall, then apparently was dismantled. Other Silver Reef buildings were either moved elsewhere or dismantled for building materials.
44 Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” 99.
45 Whitley, From the Ground Up, 299-300.
