Book Reviews

As if the Land Owned Us: An Ethnohistory of the White Mesa Utes.

By Robert S. McPherson. (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2011.xii + 432 pp. Paper, $29.95.)

OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, Robert S. McPherson has made the peoples and landscapes of Utah’s San Juan County and adjacent areas his special intellectual province, taking possession of the region through seven books and numerous articles. As If the Land Owned Us, written at the invitation of the White Mesa Ute Council, reflects the author’s deep immersion in his subject matter. This is a big book about a small group of people. Historically, the White Mesa or Allen Canyon Utes have been associated with the Weenuche band of Southern Utes. However, unlike the main body of Weenuche now headquartered at the Ute Mountain Reservation in Colorado, the White Mesa Utes for many years resisted assignment to a reservation, choosing instead to follow their traditional nomadic lifestyle amid the mountains and canyons of southeastern Utah. This independence, combined with the intermingling of Utes with local Paiutes and Navajos, led to the development of a distinct community. McPherson provides a comprehensive and insightful account of the persistence of this small but hardy band over a century and a half of adversity, resistance, and eventual accommodation.

The first three chapters, dealing with Ute origin myths, relation to the land, and daily life in a traditional hunting-gathering existence, are primarily ethnographic in character. Much of the information is drawn from the work of other scholars on Ute cultural practices, but McPherson effectively connects these broader traditions to the White Mesa people through insights derived from numerous interviews with local elders.

Chapters Four and Five sketch the history of the Southern Utes from the first contact with the Spanish in the seventeenth century to the beginning of permanent white occupation of Southern Ute lands in the 1870s. The acquisition of horses, development of trade with the Spanish in the Rio Grande Valley, and shifting alliances with neighboring peoples including the Navajo, Comanche, and Apache led to a transformation from small, scattered groups to larger social units culminating in the formation of the main Southern Ute bands, the Capote, Muache, and Weenuche. There is little information from early in this transformative period to distinguish the forebears of the White Mesa Utes from the larger body of Ute people, but McPherson notes that Escalante in 1776 wrote of a distinct population east of the Colorado River that he termed “Yutas Payuchis,” distinguishing them from the Southern Paiutes he had earlier encountered in southwestern Utah, whom he labeled as “Yutas Cabardes,” or “Timid Utes” (75).

Beginning in the mid-1850s, the U. S. Government employed Southern Utes to assist in rounding up the Navajos and relocating them to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Some Navajos evaded relocation by retreating to the canyons around Navajo Mountain and Elk Ridge, where they spent several years of hiding in contact with local Utes and Paiutes. McPherson cites Navajo oral histories suggesting “that there were fairly peaceful relations between some Utes and Navajos living in southeastern Utah, and that it was the Utes living farther east who actually hunted for those in hiding”(99). Another component in the formation of the White Mesa Utes, according to McPherson, was the band known as the Sheberetch, or Elk Mountain Utes, mobile horsemen who ranged widely from their home base in the vicinity of the La Sal Mountains. The Sheberetch reportedly made up a large portion of Wakara’s band of raiders in the 1840s and 1850s. They repelled the first attempt by Mormons to establish a settlement in southeastern Utah in 1855, the Elk Mountain Mission, and many of their warriors joined Black Hawk a decade later in his campaign against the Mormon settlements in central and southern Utah. The Sheberetch lost their identity as a distinct band following a decimating disease in the early 1870s. Part of the remnant subsequently joined the Northern Utes on the Uintah Reservation. McPherson suggests that others joined with the mingled local Weenuche Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos to become the ancestors of today’s White Mesa Utes: “Their independence, band composition, knowledge of the terrain, and effectiveness . . . established a pattern for the future. Anxious to assert their independence, this band of people, as they coalesced into today’s White Mesa Utes, were able to avoid moving to a reservation for another fifty-five years” (102).

The most valuable part of McPherson’s book is the middle chapters that provide a detailed account of the White Mesa people from the first incursions of white ranchers and settlers in the 1870s until the final armed conflict in the so-called “Posey War” in 1923. The public image of the White Mesa Utes as hostile to white intrusion began to take form with an attack on members of the Hayden Survey in Dry Valley, south of the La Sal Mountains, in August 1875.Even though the attackers had identified themselves to the surveyors as Yampa Utes from the White River Agency, blame fell on the local Utes. The influential Uncompahgre chief Ouray, who seems to have borne a prejudice against the Southern Utes in general, had warned the surveyors that “the Indians in the Sierra LaSal Mountains . . . were likely to steal stock if they get a good chance”(116). In the aftermath of the attack, Colorado newspapers further characterized “the Ute/ Paiute/Navajo faction living in southeastern Utah . . . as a group of ‘outlaws,’ ‘renegades,’ and a ‘robber band,’ epithets used for the next fifty years” (124).

Even if the White Mesa people were not involved in the attack on the surveyors, they clearly took a leading role in conflicts with the whites in the following years. In 1879, two prospectors were killed in Monument Valley. In 1881, the Utes defeated a large posse of Colorado cowboys at Pinhook Draw in the La Sal Mountains. Three years later, they repelled a force of United States cavalry in White Canyon. The Utes prevailed in these encounters chiefly because of their superior knowledge of the country. In addition, they were well armed and had capable leaders including Mancos Jim and Narraguinip. But if the Utes were winning the battles, they were losing the war. In 1880, the Mormons established a settlement at Bluff, a favorite wintering-ground for the Utes. In subsequent years, Mormon settlers would expand to Monticello and Grayson (Blanding), which were also sites important to the Utes. During the 1880s, several large livestock operations moved into San Juan County, taking possession of the range that had supported the Utes’ small flocks of sheep and goats as well as the deer that served as a staple of the Ute economy. McPherson treats all of these events in great detail, including maps and photographs that enable the reader to follow the course of the battles. He also provides a good account of the various proposals put forward during the early 1890s, mostly by Colorado interests, to remove the white settlers and ranchers and convert San Juan County into a reservation for all of the Southern Utes. McPherson gives an especially close analysis of the tension between the Utes and the white residents of San Juan County in the early decades of the twentieth century, which broke out in violent conflicts in 1914-15 and 1923. The “Posey War” in the latter year, usually referred to as the last Ute or Paiute uprising, is reinterpreted by McPherson as “the Last White Uprising”(226). In its aftermath, the Utes were settled, more or less, on individual allotments in the Allen Canyon area, and a long process began to have their children educated in white schools.

The last third of the book is devoted to a sympathetic account of the Utes’ life at Allen Canyon and eventual relocation to a new community at White Mesa where they would achieve their own balance between integration into the larger society and preservation of traditional values, a process that McPherson labels as “adoption, adaptation, and abandonment” (323). Taken all-in-all, As if the Land Owned Us is a worthwhile addition to the library of Utah history.

EDWARD A. GEARY Huntington

Go East Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient.

By Richard V.Francaviglia. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011. x + 350 pp. Cloth, $36.95.)

THE FRONTISPIECE to Go East Young Man quotes N. Scott Momaday: “The landscape of the West has to be seen to be believed. And, perhaps conversely, it has to be believed in order to be seen.” Richard V. Francaviglia showcases in this fascinating book the close and historically important relationship between landscape and cultural belief/meaning. The American West has both been blessed and burdened by an overload of discourses and meanings. But while some scholars have noted instances of Orientalist discourses operative at particular times and places within the West, Francaviglia shows just how widespread and important they have been.

Francaviglia’s books tend to be a bit eclectic. He keeps one foot in history and one in geography. He does not seem overly bound to fashionable topics or modes of analysis. The result is a wonderful passion for his topics. He mixes and matches a variety of themes, theoretical stances/critiques, and vantage points in order to best transfer his excitement to the reader.

As engaging and optimistic as Francaviglia’s own personality, Go East Young Man begins with a personal story from not many years ago of how Francaviglia, while touring Israel’s Jordan River Valley, felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity because of his experiences in California’s Imperial Valley. The remainder of the book follows with a wide variety stories of how (mostly) Anglo-Americans and Europeans from the early nineteenth century onward likewise found compelling similarities between the Orient and the American West. Most importantly, they used understandings of the Orient to make sense of the new landscapes and peoples they encountered in the West.

The introduction highlights academic discussions of Orientalist discourses, where Edward Said’s influence remains powerful. But unlike Said and many of his critics, Francaviglia does not regard Orientalist discourses primarily as moral problems. Instead, he argues that these discourses, when used to understand the American West, express positive wonder as often as they denigrate. Seven chapters (Part I) explore these tendencies prior to 1920. Americans imagined the Great Plains as the Sahara, for example, while a period of fascination with Egyptian civilization saw Americans finding pyramids, sand dunes, and even sphinxes and camels in the West’s landscape. Many observers viewed Native Americans as Moors, Americans thought California “a land that imported and embraced the best of the exotic,” and people understood California’s and the Pacific Northwest’s potential via their links to the Far East (194). Part II (the final three chapters) shows how these imaginations, both of

Far and Middle Easts continued to inform understandings of the West in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as how representations of the American West (the frontier West, for example) find their way into explanations of twenty-first century Asia (China’s Wild West economy, for instance).

Most significant for Utah is a chapter from Part I arguing that representations of the Orient (again both positive and negative) helped to both make and understand the state. Here Francaviglia highlights much well-known material—for example, the Promised Land, Great Salt Lake as the Dead Sea, the Jordan River, Mormon leaders as desert patriarchs, Native Americans as Israelites, Corinne as Sodom and Gomorrah, Saltair’s architecture—as well as a few more obscure representations—Point of the Mountain as the Tower of Babel. But here, as elsewhere, the book’s signal contribution (though well researched) is less than its original findings its demonstration of the flexibility, malleability, ubiquity, and power of these Orientalist imaginations in helping Americans understand the West and its landscapes.

ETHAN YORGASON Kyungpook National University Daegu, Korea

The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon.

By William M. Adler. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. 435 pp. Cloth, $30.00.)

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY, scholars have been intrigued by the case of Joe Hill. The basic facts are well known. Hill turned up with a bullet wound the same January 1914 night that Salt Lake City grocer, John G. Morrison, and his seventeen year old son, Arling, were murdered. After a controversial trial, Hill was executed for the killing. Some think he was not guilty, but framed and murdered by Utah authorities because of his radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) unionism. Others believe Hill received the appropriate punishment for the crime—one which marked the Morrison family forever. Many simply know him as a romantic, iconic figure, who urged those enraged by his death not to mourn, but organize. Over the years, historians, novelists, and playwrights have sought to separate the mythical Hill from the real person. That may be impossible, but William Adler’s excellent study, building on past scholarship, provides the most important re-examination in a generation.

Not content to simply revisit what was previously known, Adler has tracked down important new information, both in archives and private hands, addressing crucial questions. Why did police identify a likely suspect, who, as it turns out, had a long criminal record, then drop him quickly

once Hill was arrested? Why wouldn’t Hill provide authorities with an alibi to explain his actions that fateful evening? And finally, in Adler’s words, “the essential question of Hill’s life: why he chose to die rather than try to save himself” (23).

Initially, based on two key points, police believed they were dealing with a revenge killing not a botched robbery. First, Morrison’s son Merlin, who survived the incident, reported that the gunmen had said “We’ve got you now,” before opening fire. Second, there were prior attacks on Morrison, most recently in September 1913. Their prime suspect was Frank Z. Wilson, paroled from the Utah State Penitentiary in December 1912, after serving sixteen months for burglary. While they had no definite connection, Wilson had been in the vicinity of the Morrison store, and fit the description of Morrison’s attackers provided by several eyewitnesses; even been picked out of a police line up. Yet, detectives released him, convinced that he was not involved. In the past, the story has stopped there. Adler, however, discovered that Wilson, born Magnus Olson and known by a score of aliases, was a career criminal who had been in and out of jail in Utah, Nevada, and elsewhere for committing violent crimes, which often included threats of retribution. Indeed, after Hill was arrested, one policeman told the press that despite what he claimed, their prisoner wasn’t Hill but Wilson. This isn’t surprising considering their similarity in age, height, weight, hair and eye color, etc. Why didn’t the police look closer at Wilson? He was never interrogated about his whereabouts at the time of the September 1913 attack on Morrison, nor were his movements immediately prior to the killings seriously examined. Perhaps, Adler asserts, once they had arrested this radical IWW, authorities were “satisfied that Hill was a serviceable culprit” (86).

Hill always maintained that he had been shot in a dispute over a woman. Here again, Adler sheds important light on this claim, noting there were two people who could have given him an alibi: “the man who had shot him and the woman over whom he had been shot”(291). While neither stepped forward at the time, that changed thirty-five years later. During the trial, and after his death when she served as a pall bearer, Hilda Erickson had been close to Hill. Was she the woman involved? In June 1949, Erickson sent a lengthy letter to Aubrey Haan, a novelist writing about Hill, outlining what she knew, and providing an alibi. She told Haan that she had once been engaged to Hill’s friend Otto Applequist, had changed her mind, but denied to him being attracted to Hill. Erickson reported that Hill told her the night of the Morrison shooting that Applequist had “shot him in a fit of anger” (296). In a second letter, Erickson said that she had seen Hill at a play in Salt Lake City earlier that same evening. These letters raise as many questions as they answer. Why did she wait and not come forth at the trial? Did Hill wish to protect her? Was he so convinced in the presumption of his innocence that he refused to involve Erickson unnecessarily? Adler admits he doesn’t have answers to these questions, but perhaps they shed light on something else—Hill’s decision to die rather than try to save his life.

Adler concludes that Hill was “innocent of murder,” and could have avoided execution by “revealing the circumstances of his shooting.” But, he writes, “like many Wobblies, Joe Hill was principled to the point of recklessness and no less stubborn than he was principled. Time and time again ... [d]espite persistent appeals from his lawyers and friends that he break his silence ... Hill kept mum.” Hill likely “came to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that he could better serve the union by dying.” In that sense, Hill’s death “imbued his life with meaning,” transforming him from just another “anonymous working stiff tramping around the West with a bindle on his shoulder and a red card in his pocket,” to someone whose “place in history was secure ” (23-24). Thus, metaphorically speaking, he never died.

Adler’s impressive book combines solid research with well-crafted prose, and he places this event into a broader context. Regardless of how one feels about Joe Hill or the IWW, The Man Who Never Died helps us better understand conflicting forces and factors in early twentieth century Utah, and the American West.

JOHN SILLITO Weber State University

Bonanzas & Borrascas: Gold Lust and Silver Sharks, 1848-1884, vol. 1;and Copper Kings and Stock Frenzies, 1885-1918, vol. 2.

By Richard E.Lingenfelter. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2012. 461 pp and 586 pp.Cloth, two-volume set $72.00, single volume $40.00.)

THIS HANDSOME TWO-VOLUME SET by historian and astrophysicist Richard Lingenfelter is an exposé of how western American mining properties were financed over the seventy-year period from the California Gold Rush to the First World War. To shed light on the otherwise shady process of how mines large, small, and non-existent were financed, Lingenfelter consulted varied resources such as financial records, stock reports, court cases, and sensational news stories. As he demonstrates, successful mining requires capitalization, but obtaining that capital often involved considerable fleecing of the public. Lingenfelter’s duo arrives on the heels of the financial meltdown of 2008, and it has much to say about how greed and corruption operated—and still operate—in the American economy. As those familiar with mining investment have long joked, when promoters develop a mine, someone—usually the investor—gets the shaft. With good reason, it takes Lingenfelter more than a thousand pages to tell this often sordid story. The West is a huge area with a long history of financing both sound and dubious enterprises. The exploitation of mineral resources here required capital from not only the East, but also Europe. Although Lingenfelter covers the entire West, this review will focus on how the Territory and state of Utah are treated, and, by extension, how Mormons were involved in some of that activity.

Volume 1 begins with early Spanish and Mexican mining operations in New Mexico, and then quickly moves to the discovery of gold in California (1848). Utah is introduced in the later 1860s in the context of the transcontinental railroad that enabled full scale commercial metals mining to flourish, but little is said about U.S. military explorers here who were ever on the lookout for mineral wealth from the late 1840s into the 1850s, nor about the Mormons who began to actively develop strategic mineral resources for the building of Zion during that period. However, these seeming oversights are rectified when Col. Patrick Edward Connor emerges as the father of Utah mining in the 1860s. From here on, Utah is frequently featured, sometimes center stage. The financing of the Emma Mine at Alta and the burgeoning mines in the vicinity of Eureka are cited as prototypes for outside investment in Utah mining properties. By the 1870s, smelters began springing up in the Salt Lake Valley, and the City of the Saints developed a dual personality that is still evident today. Silver and gold were the metals that outsiders mined first, and this activity brought schools of “silver sharks” trolling for investors, a vivid metaphor that Lingenfelter often employs. Then, too, the mines at Frisco had boomed in the 1870s, and in another metaphor, an eager flock of new pigeons invested in that opportunity. As Lingenfelter astutely notes, most of this investment money never reached Utah, much less the mines there, and even less still ever came back to the investors in the form of profits. Rather, it wound up in the hands of the promoters—in other words “fed the sharks.” Volume one concludes in the mid-1880s, with a drop in metals prices, a nationwide financial depression underway, and the grueling winter of 1886-1887 about to grip much of the region.

Volume 2 documents the renewed activity of the later 1880s as Park City’s mines and thousands of others throughout the West were promoted. Lingenfelter here discusses the “silver barons” of Utah, including David Keith and Thomas Kearns, as well as Utah’s “Silver Queen” Susie Emery. In the Tintic mining district, Lingenfelter discusses in some detail the Mormon involvement with commercial mining, highlighting the roles of George Q. Cannon, John Beck, and Jesse Knight—the latter of whom, Lingenfelter irreverently if humorously notes, “had run out of revelations....” (vol. 2, pp. 111-12). In the 1890s, Mercur was noteworthy for several reasons. Although a German miner had hoped to mine quicksilver here, precious metals were found and the pioneering use of the new cyanide process here ironically signaled the end of mercury as amalgam. Mercur, too, was a rare exception to the rule of mine financing and payback because tenderfeet here actually made (and kept) money. The year 1900 marked an economic watershed as inflation increased and speculation schemes flourished. Between 1904 and 1912, Lingenfelter estimates that the amount of money provided nationally by “armchair Argonauts” (about three billion dollars) surpassed the entire amount squandered on mining speculation up until that time! Incredibly, more than one hundred billion dollars—fully half the entire worth of the nation—had been offered in mining stocks. In other words, more opportunities were offered than could ever realistically materialize. Utah was in the thick of this mining scam mania. This period also marked the aggressive development of Utah’s porphyry ore bodies as huge open pit mines. This Lingenfelter calls the “copper crescendo,” and it also characterized much of the West, especially places such as Morenci and Bisbee, Arizona, Butte, Montana, and Ely, Nevada. But Utah’s Bingham Canyon was the original leader of these low-grade porphyry copper mines and ultimately developed into what proved to be the largest. The names of extremely powerful individuals such as Dan Guggenheim, Samuel Newhouse, and Daniel Jackling, and the names of incredibly powerful companies such as Utah Copper, Kennecott, and ASARCO became household words at this time. However, as Lingenfelter demonstrates, these properties were not really profitable until Europe went to war with itself in 1914–1918, at which time Bingham Canyon yielded what he calls “obscene wartime profits” (vol. 2, p. 425). Despite these profits, though, shareholders typically came out on the short end. Ultimately, thirtysix billion dollars in copper, and nine billion dollars in gold and silver, were produced from Bingham Canyon, keeping Utah on the map as a major metals producing state throughout much of the twentieth century.

Like most western history, this epic set is ultimately about politics, and it is noteworthy that Lingenfelter elects to conclude it with some lessons from the 1930s to the present. Here he again turns to “that old mining shark and beleaguered Republican president” Herbert Hoover, who once cold-heartedly opined that money lost by hapless investors was not really lost after all because it would be reinvested by others who had profited (vol. 2, p. 442). Noting that Hoover had left the nation in a depression, Lingenfelter here introduces visionary Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose Democratic administration rescues the nation’s economy through greater government involvement. Lingenfelter ends with the current (2012) ongoing financial crisis, citing Alan Greenspan, and calling for greater government oversight of the economy, concluding that “the marks and the sharks will always be with us and that where there’s a lot of money involved things are seldom as they seem” (vol. 2, p. 444). Readers should recall that both political parties are no strangers to the crony capitalism that enables some mighty big sharks to chew right though the best of nets.

RICHARD V. FRANCAVIGLIA Salem, Oregon

Homesickness: An American History.

By Susan J. Matt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xii + 343 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

ITALIAN IMMIGRANT RAFFAELE SCALZO commented thusly on his new-found home in Carbon County, Utah: “if someone speaks badly of Italy I get mad, but if they speak badly of the United States or Carbon County, I get god-damned mad.” Such a statement helps to address the issue of “connectedness” between Mr. Scalzo’s native Calabria, Italy, and his adopted home in Helper, Carbon County. The element of “emotion” looms as most significant. Susan J. Matt’s, Homesickness: An American History delves convincingly into the history of the emotion of homesickness. While lacking specific examples drawn from Utah history, the work nevertheless can be most useful in providing a broad framework for understanding the Utah experience as alluded to in the Scalzo quote, and including the Mormon pioneers. Matt, Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, stated succinctly that “Americans have not always been able to leave home with ease. This book explains how they learned to do so . . .” (4).

The author’s main thesis centers upon her statement that “The history of homesickness recovers the story of how Americans learned to manage their feelings, but beyond that, it reveals how Americans learned habits of individualism that supported capitalist activity” (7). The author distinguishes between homesickness, the separation “from home by a gulf of geography”; and nostalgia, a separation by “a greater gulf – the gulf of time” (130). Immigrants and migrants can return “home” only to find that “home” no longer remains the romanticized original place of departure. This, in part, perhaps explains Scalzo’s view of place and time.

The way capitalism formed (and forms) our emotional patterns in a society in motion serves as another emphasis of the study. According to Matt, homesickness “is a problem not just because it seems to be a sign of immaturity, but perhaps more crucially because it threatens individual and social progress, for it carries with it the temptation to return home. If acted upon it can disrupt market relations and render individuals less interchangeable, less fungible. It interferes with profits and contradicts the idea of fluidity that is at the base of the capitalist economy” (252). Perhaps Raffaele Scalzo ran counter to this notion. Nevertheless, Scalzo also discussed the “return,” which Mann insightfully described as “. . . the dream of returning home rich—a tangible payoff for the homesickness that so many had endured” (148).

This reviewer would have appreciated more on the American Indian and African American experiences, especially in the context of the American West. The author somewhat casually states that “Much of the discontent that Indians manifested on reservations grew out of simple homesickness” (111). Perhaps they had much more at stake. One point well made in discussing the role of emotions in the post-Civil War world of the African American experience, author Matt observed that “In reality, it was often whites who wanted to remain lodged in the ways of the past and blacks who wanted to move on, but discussions of emotions were more than idle explorations of social psychology—they were a way of defining and justifying power relations in the racially divided South” (110).

This careful analysis of an “emotion” provides a balanced approach in studying people in motion, either voluntary or involuntary. “What the history of homesickness, and the history of the emotions more generally, brings to the American narrative is a record of intention, motivation, and feeling” (9). This summation truly argues for the importance of oral history in the methodology of writing about the past. In this context, Homesickness: An American History is a must read for historians and those desiring to understand a basic “emotion” in the American past and present.

PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI Magna

Parley P. Pratt and the Making of Mormonism. Edited with contributions

by Gregory K. Armstrong, Matthew J. Grow, and Dennis J. Siler. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2011. 351 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

PARLEY P. PRATT (1807-1857) ONE OF Mormonism’s original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has been the subject of much recent attention including this volume of edited essays and the 2011 biography Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism by Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow. As an early Mormon missionary, Pratt was the earliest link to Sidney Rigdon in Mentor, Ohio. Pratt wrote poems and hymns, was an indefatigable proselyting missionary, spent nine months in jail in Richmond and Columbia, Missouri, before he escaped to Illinois, and explored much of the Utah Great Basin for future Mormon colonization. Pratt was the creator and first editor of the Latter-day Saints Millennial Star, as well as The Prophet an eastern states Mormon newspaper. He authored The Voice of Warning (1837) a groundbreaking Mormon missionary tract. Pratt had twelve plural wives, and was murdered near Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the spring of 1857 by Hector McLean the estranged husband of his last wife, Eleanor McComb McLean.

Many of the eleven essays in this volume began as papers in an academic conference held in 2007 at Fort Smith, Arkansas. The editors of this volume suggest that “Pratt remains among the least understood of early Latter-day Saint leaders” and that Pratt “arguably influenced the direction of early Mormonism more than anyone besides Joseph Smith and Brigham Young” (14). Seven of the eleven essays focus on the life and contributions of Pratt, while the remaining four essays focus on his controversial death. In her essay, Jan Shipps places Pratt in historical context and notes the twenty (or more) biographical accounts of his life. In discussing early Mormonism and Pratt, Shipps notes, “…sects grow up to be churches while cults grow up to become new religious traditions” (35). R. Steven Pratt’s essay deals with the complex and involved family life of his great-great-grandfather. Pratt’s essay is a significant case study of early Mormon plural marriage including incidents examining conflicts over who held ultimate authority to authorize and perform plural marriages. David Whittaker’s essay is a close examination of Pratt and the early Mormon Print Culture in which Whittaker notes that Pratt may be called “the literary pathfinder of early Mormonism or the father of Mormon pamphleteering” (135).

In the middle essays of the volume, Alex Baugh examines Pratt’s Missouri imprisonment, David Grua looks at him in terms of martyrology and persecution, and Jordan Watkins focuses on the ideas of Pratt and his Key to the Science of Theology in which he states “Gods, angels and men are all of one species” (201). David Clark Knowlton explores Pratt’s missionary efforts in Latin America.

The last essays probe the death of Parley P. Pratt. Patrick Q. Mason scrutinizes ante- bellum culture in the United States and places the murder in context with both honor and extralegal violence. Richard Turley asserts that the death of Pratt played little or no role in bringing about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Robert J. Grow relates recent family unsuccessful efforts to remove Pratt’s remains from Arkansas after locating the gravesite only to find that the body had disintegrated. Matthew Grow’s essay notes that to Mormons Parley P. Pratt was a martyr to the cause of truth, while to the nation at large the story of Pratt illustrated religious fanaticism, sexual deviance, polygamy, and justly delivered violence. This volume is well edited and the essays are both thoughtful and provocative.

RICHARD W. SADLER Weber State University

Forging a Fur Empire: Expeditions in the Snake River Country, 1809-1824.

By John Phillip Reid. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2011. 229 pp. $29.95).

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW professor John Phillip Reid is no stranger to writing about the fur trade of the Pacific Northwest. His Patterns of Vengeance (1999) chronicled cross-cultural homicide in the fur trade. Reid’s Contested Empire (2002) focused on Peter Skene Ogden and the Snake River Expeditions of the mid to late 1820s. Now, a decade since that publication, Reid offers the prequel to the Peter Skene Ogden expeditions. In this book, number 36 in Arthur H. Clark’s “Western Frontiersmen Series,” Reid focuses his lens on the attempts by the American Fur Company, the North West Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company to forge a fur empire by constructing posts to encourage trade with the Indians and then sending out trapping brigades into the Northwest to harvest the furs themselves.

Reid, a legal historian, examines the different notions of justice shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia during the fifteen years between 1809 and 1824. He begins his narrative with the arrival of the Astorians on the Columbia River in the wake of Lewis and Clark. These members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company (a subsidiary of his larger American Fur Company) erected Fort Astoria on the Oregon side of the Columbia River not too far from Lewis and Clark’s Fort Clatsop. The War of 1812 dashed Astor’s hopes when Fort Astoria was occupied by (and eventually sold to) the British. The North West Company continued fur trading operations along the Columbia and its tributaries but increasingly found it needed to build posts further inland nearer to the source of beaver and to do more of the trapping since many Indians refused to hunt beaver for commercial sale.

Enterprising men, first from the North West Company, and then from the Hudson’s Bay Company, continued exploiting the fur resources of the region. Donald McKenzie, Michel Bourdon, Finan McDonald, and Alexander Ross all led British efforts to capitalize on the fur market. Unfortunately, the first three men did not leave much in the way of journal keeping or letter writing. Hence, three quarters of this book dwells upon the 1823-24 expedition of Alexander Ross, who left extensive journals, wrote numerous letters, and penned an autobiography. The author uses the Ross expedition as the lens to reveal the economic, political, tribal, and international concepts of law in the fur trade.

Reid is at his best when discussing the intersection of geopolitical, social, institutional, economic, and legal culture in this trans-boundary region. He does an admirable job of portraying how individuals, tribes, and companies often judged events by the standards of their own cultural perspective. His evaluation of class separation, ethnic contempt, and different world views in the trade is a welcome contribution, as is his presentation on the hierarchy of social preference, cultural perceptions, and institutional values in the trade. He is especially good at discussing the Hudson’s Bay Company rationale to “denude” the Snake River Country by trapping out all of the beaver, not as an economic ploy but rather as a geopolitical strategy to keep American trappers from penetrating into the Oregon Country–a policy that met with partial success.

One wishes the author had provided even more analysis of the complicated legal arrangements surrounding the proprietary rights of horses, traps, guns, ammunition, and equipment loaned by the company on credit and whether the borrowers had possessory interest or simply custodial interests. There is also some repetition of arguments (such as discussion of the problems of the Hudson’s Bay Company had with Iroquois trappers) that could have been pared down. Moreover, there is one map that contains some of the forts and rivers, but none of the Snake River Expeditions are charted. Nor are there any other illustrations. As for Utah, Reid scarcely mentions the Snake River Expeditions’ significance in northern Utah, although he does briefly mention occasional forays into Bear Lake country and Cache Valley. Nevertheless, this work makes a fine contribution to understanding the motives and operations of the Snake River Expeditions in the 1820s.

JAY H. BUCKLEY Brigham Young University

An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp.

Edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak. (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. xiv + 390 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

WHILE THE STORY OF THE DONNER PARTY has been told and re-told in nearly three hundred accounts, what is known of the Donner Party and their daily lives during their entrapment in the Sierra Nevada is based on a sparse narrative heavily focused on cannibalism. As set forth in the Introduction of An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp, the editors hope to “slow down the narrative, elaborate on the details, and reexamine the questions through an interdisciplinary lens” (2). By utilizing historical, archaeological, bio-archaeological, enthohistorical, and social anthropological resources an interdisciplinary team of researchers examined and expounded upon the results of two filed seasons of archaeological investigations at Alder Creek, the camp site of the George and Jacob Donner families. The researchers sought to “unequivocally” link the site to the Donner family, then consider the “various contexts within which the entrapment took place” and “examine how kinship, class, and gender were negotiated in Jacksonian America” to understand the responses of the Donner Party members to their unfortunate situation (3).

The book is divided into four parts Locating (Ch. 1- 2), Lingering (Ch. 3-5), Consuming (Ch 6-8), and Narrating (Ch 9-11), with each part containing chapters of similar subject matter or sources of analysis. Part I, Locating, presents a well researched and written historical overview of the Donner Party and the Alder Creek Camp. Part II, Lingering, presents archaeological work conducted both by previous explorations and the current research to confirm the Alder Creek archaeological site was indeed the remnants of the Donner Alder Creek camp. Based on the types, amounts, and distribution of features and artifacts recovered from the Alder Creek site and historical records the researchers conclude that the most viable explanation for the Alder Creek site is that it was indeed the Donner camp. Part III, Consuming, presents the scientific analyses of the skeletal material recovered from the Alder Creek site and a review of cannibalism. The necessarily somewhat technical chapters 6 and 7 discuss that while no human bone was identified among the heavily butchered and processed tens of thousands of bone fragments from Alder Creek, horse, cattle, dog, and deer were identified. The extensive processing exhibited by the bone fragments reveals the lengths to which the Donner Party went to extract every last bit of fat and nutrients out of the bones in their desperate fight to stay alive and avoid cannibalism. Part IV, Narrating, presents Native American narratives from the Washoe people, a review of how the media and other groups presented the fate of the Donner Party, and the summary chapter.

A few chapters seem superfluous in the book. The evolutionary and historical review of cannibalism presented in chapter 8, while a must read for any student writing a paper on cannibalism, seems unnecessary as the pertinent information on cannibalism had already been discussed in several preceding chapters. Similarly, chapter 9 presents an interesting history and narratives of the Washoe people and their interactions, or lack thereof, with the Donner Party; however, the chapter does not adequately discuss or connect those narratives within the overall argument of the book set forth in the Introduction.

An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp presents valuable historical and archaeological evidence for a portion of the Donner Party story not too well known. The Alder Creek camp site reveals a tale of struggle, desperation, perseverance, and unfortunate death. The editors attempt to place the data from the Alder Creek site within the historical and cultural constructs of the Donner Party experience to elucidate “life and death during the winter entrapment, as well as the human condition in desperate situations” to understand the responses of the Donner Party members to their desperate situation. The book could have benefited from a summary chapter wholly devoted to the synthesis and discussion of the information presented by each chapter within the theoretical theses presented in the Introduction; unfortunately, the brief final chapter does not sufficiently accomplish this.

DERINNA KOPP Antiquities Section Utah Division of State History