In This Issue

As this issue begins the eighty-first volume of the Utah Historical Quarterly we might return to the ageless questions of what is history and why does it matter. In his book, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Professor John Lewis Gaddis offers some insights. He cautions that “Studying the past is no sure guide to predicting the future. What it does do, though, is to prepare you for the future by expanding experience, so that you can increase your skills, your stamina—and, if all goes well, your wisdom” (11). Professor Gaddis also instructs that “Historians ought not to delude themselves into thinking they provide the only means by which acquired skills—and ideas—are transmitted from one generation to the next. Culture, religion, technology, environment, and tradition can all do this. But history is arguably the best method of enlarging experience in such a way as to command the widest possible consensus on what the significance of that experience might be” (9). For the past eighty years, the Utah Historical Quarterly has enlarged our understanding of the Utah experience from prehistoric times to the present. The four articles in this issue continue that mission.

When John Wesley Powell and his men carried out the systematic survey of the Colorado River region following the epic 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers, they came to rely on southern Utah Mormons to provide and transport supplies and to help them navigate their way through the twisted geography of Utah’s canyon country. Respect, if not friendship, came to characterize the relationship between Powell’s men and the Mormons with whom they worked and traveled. Their relationship was all the more interesting in that many of the Mormon frontiersmen who assisted with the survey were participants in the infamous massacre of men, women, and children at Mountain Meadows in September 1857. What questions were asked of these participants and what answers were given as the men sat around campfires in the remote locations far from towns and villages is an interesting topic for speculation and investigation. Contemporary diaries and letters, as analyzed in our first article, offer some clues. Testifying before a committee of the United States House of Representatives in 1879 considering the question of the eight hour work day, Henry Rothschild argued against the proposed law claiming “Political economy teaches us that the laborers and the capitalists are two different forms of society….The laborer should do as good as he can for himself, and the capitalist should do as good as he can for himself.” This view was expressed by workers as well including the radical Industrial Workers of the World whose 1905 preamble begins with the sentence, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace as long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.” How did this clash of capital and labor play out in early years of the twentieth century as Industrial America drove the nation to economic supremacy? One manifestation was the employment of labor spies by companies to keep a clandestine eye on the workers and their unions and to subvert their goals when they clashed with those of the company. Our second article reveals a little-known aspect of Utah’s history in discussing the activities of labor spies in the state.

As early Utahns built their homes, businesses, places of worship, and public buildings they made use of an abundance of local stone—granite, sandstone, volcanic rock, and limestone. As our third article reveals Sanpete oolite limestone was a popular local building material that came to be used in some of Salt Lake City’s most prominent homes and buildings as well as the famous Spreckels mansion and the Hearst Castle in California. How was the stone formed, how was it quarried, how was it used are questions answered in this insightful article.

Our final article for this issue takes readers back to the tumultuous years of the late 1960s and early 1970s when student unrest, anti-war protests, and a counterculture movement raised new challenges. Few, if any, of the nation’s colleges and universities were unaffected. Even Brigham Young University saw a wave of student activism roll over the Provo campus. While the activism was not as violent or as radical as on many other university campuses, it nevertheless did exist at BYU and occurred at a time when the university became a nationally known institution. This offering of explorers, frontiersmen, labor spies, miners, businessmen, quarry workers, builders, students, professors, and administrators, will, we hope, bring expanded insights and wisdom.

COVER: A group of early twentieth century men, women, and children pose in front of the California Bar in Bingham Canyon. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY. In ThIs IssuE: Miners in Bingham Canyon during the first decade of the twentieth century.UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.