Book Reviews

With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West 1849–1852.

Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails, vol. 2. By Will Bagley.(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. xxi + 464 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

IN THIS AMBITIOUS STUDY, Will Bagley examines the routes taken by emigrants bound for the California gold fields. Near its end he notes that stories are not history. Professors, he adds, have been telling us this for one hundred years. It is a cheerful, bald statement that begs the question, what exactly is history? This book—a cumulative effort that combs hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts, and shapes them into prologue, event, and consequence—offers a clear answer.

Late in the book, Bagley admits that “nothing conveys the reality of crossing the plains as well as the story of someone who made the trek,” and proceeds to give a compelling, six-page account of the sufferings of the Oregon-bound diarist Chloe Ann Terry and her family and friends. The remarkable thing is that he does not do this more often. Many historians, having set themselves to a task of this magnitude, would use perhaps a dozen representative figures and families to elucidate places, themes, and big events.

Instead, Bagley draws on hundreds of narratives. In a single paragraph, he might mention the experiences of six or eight different people, unknown to each other but connected by geography, motive, or timing. What he loses in narrative drive by using this technique, he more than gains back by delivering a profound sense of the diversity of the people, events, and landscape on the trails during the peak years of the gold rush. All kinds of people made the trek, for all kinds of reasons; all kinds of tribal people did or did not resist the migration, for all kinds of reasons; all kinds of landscapes were deeply changed by what happened. These are generalizations, but by the end of the book they have taken on rich meaning from Bagley’s careful marshaling of vast armies of facts.

For example, at various points he provides emigrants’ descriptions of the small lakes and marshes of the Humboldt Sink, where the Humboldt River disappears into the Nevada desert. The place is full of waterfowl. From account after account, we come to understand that by this point in the trip all the travelers were low on rations and often weak from scurvy, and the surviving mules or oxen were likewise exhausted. The travelers still had the worst part of the trip to go—across the Forty-mile Desert or the Black Rock Desert to one of three main routes over the Sierras, one of which was bad and two of which were considerably worse.

The Humboldt Sink and other watered places like it in the Great Basin had drawn Paiute, Bannock, and Shoshone people for centuries to hunt birds and cut cattails for food and arrow shafts. Now, quite suddenly, tens of thousands of white travelers were rolling through the middle of the country every summer, their animals eating all the grass and the people fouling the water supply.

These tribes obtained a substantial part of their diet from roots and tubers; Anglos had called them Diggers and held them in murderous contempt since fur-trade times. The Natives began a kind of guerilla war against the emigrants, stealing or wounding their cattle in order to force the travelers to abandon the animals, after which the Indians slaughtered and ate them. The contempt grew, and emigrants often chased and killed the thieves. By this point in Golden Visions, Bagley has lined up enough evidence to succinctly link culture clash with ecological change: “Violence escalated as natural resources declined” (364).

Bagley makes a few important arguments in this book. First, the California gold rush was the first time in U.S. history when people genuinely believed they could get rich quick, “a strange faith that was virtually unknown before” (xvii). A few did, though many more died trying. Most of the emigrants were single men or married men traveling without their families. They had no intention of staying in California, but only of making a pile and then returning home to a lifetime of wealth and ease. Their attitude—their eager dreams—changed us as a nation.

Second, if the trails journey itself was extremely difficult for the emigrants, its consequences were ruinous for the tribes who lived in the West already. As testament to this, Indians appear in Golden Visions almost entirely through the accounts of others, as very few of their own accounts survived.

Finally, California development patterns spread across the West through the mining and mineral rushes—rushes that became key to boom-and-bust economies. In the nineteenth century, gold was “discovered” along routes— in the Sierras, at Pikes Peak, in southwest Montana, in southwest Idaho, at South Pass, and in the Black Hills of Dakota—where its presence had been known for some time. The rushes came only after someone who planned to profit from the rushers loudly publicized the “discovery.”

In 1849, around 30,000 hopefuls made the trek to California by land, ten times the number that had already taken the route since overland emigration began in the early 1840s. Bagley devotes nearly half the book, the first four of ten chapters, to detailed descriptions of the trails as the emigrants found them, based on the three hundred firsthand accounts of the 1849 crossing that survive.

The fifth chapter concentrates on shortcuts and cutoffs; the sixth on the troublesome Lassen Cutoff into northern California; the seventh on trails events of 1850, when around 50,000 people crossed; the eighth on 1851, when traffic on the trails nearly ceased altogether; and the ninth on 1852, the busiest year of all. The final chapter draws conclusions about greed, gold, and settlement, how the trails that began and enabled the gold rush were in turn changed drastically by its events.

Golden Visions is the second of four volumes the University of Oklahoma Press plans to issue in Bagley’s history of the overland trails. The third will cover 1853–1860 and the fourth 1861–1870. I look forward to both.

In the first volume and again in this one Bagley works hard—and successfully—to be neither booster nor debunker, to simply say what happened and what choices people made, so that we may better understand the choices that face us in our time. The California gold rush, he argues, was second only to the Civil War in its effect on the nation in the nineteenth century. The trails made the rush possible and then quickly spread its effects. To call this book a story of a place and time would be to undersell it. It is much more than that—it is a big, good history, with all the troubling insights, complexity, and understanding those words imply.

TOM REA WyoHistory.org

“A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America.

By J. Spencer Fluhman. (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2012. 229 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

THE FIRST THING ONE NOTICES in picking up this book is the dust jacket—the devil, pitchfork in hand, is kicking Joseph Smith into the air. Smith’s broad-brimmed hat and cane have flown from his grasp, but he still has his gold bible tucked tightly under his arm. Taken from the frontispiece of Eber D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834), this image is the first visual representation of Mormonism and depicts a supposed Smith family story of the Mormon prophet with his famous book, being kicked while running from Satan. The publishers have colored Howe’s black-andwhite woodcut so that the midnight blue background contrasts dramatically with the red devil and the golden bible. The image is worth the price of the book. The original must have delighted early anti-Mormon writers, for it looks as if even the devil saw Mormonism as a fraud.

In this slim but densely written volume, Spencer Fluhman has immersed himself in nineteenth-century anti-Mormon literature. This allows him to trace how Protestants, the dominant religious authority in the antebellum United States, came to define the nature of religion and to weigh all belief systems against their own orthodoxy. “Critics first found Mormonism to be a fake religion, then an alien or foreign religion, and finally a merely false one” (9). The chapters follow this pattern: the first and second cover those who denounced Mormonism as a fraud and delusion; the third and fourth explore polygamy and Protestant ideas of civilization, which revealed Mormonism as alien; and finally, the last treats the post-polygamy period, when critics found Mormonism partially acceptable but still mostly false. “This study,” writes the author, “is thus less a history of the Latter-day Saints than it is a history of the idea of religion in nineteenth-century America” (10). With its focus on religion, it is also not the definitive word on anti-Mormonism, for other studies remain to be written on political and cultural anti-Mormonism.

With the American Revolution, the United States cast off both British colonialism and an established church, but the resulting religious freedom came with a price of great uncertainty among the leading Protestant churches about how to deal with new religious upstarts. Americans believed that “true” religion, by which they meant Protestantism, was critical to America’s strength. And conversely, religions from outside cultures or disturbing movements within America could harm the country. Making themselves the arbiters of what was true religion, anti-Mormon writers quickly linked Joseph Smith to figures they viewed as imposters, especially Muhammad, even before the announcement of polygamy. Smith’s Book of Mormon, like the Qur’an, was viewed as counterfeit. The Mormon gatherings to Missouri, Nauvoo, and then Utah were made parallel to the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Mormon militarism brought to mind the image of Muhammad on a charging horse with the sword in one hand and his holy book in the other.

Polygamy, the establishment of the Mormon kingdom in the West, and the faith’s theocratic and military ambitions confirmed for anti-Mormon writers that the church was religiously and culturally alien. Polygamy was the radical marker of Mormonism’s foreignness, and when that was finally eliminated, Protestants were at somewhat of a loss as to what to make of the faith. “With polygamy and theocracy presumably in the past, Mormons of the 1890s suffered more from near-omission than from wide-eyed alarm” (139).

My one criticism of this seminal work is that several of the illustrations, taken mostly from period political cartoons, are too small in scale to read the text in them. That aside, this inquiry into how American Protestants came to define religion is an exceptional and well-researched study, one I can highly recommend.

POLLY AIRD Seattle, Washington

The Indianization of Lewis and Clark, 2 vols.

By William R. Swagerty. (Norman:Arthur H. Clark Company, 2012. 778 pp. Cloth, $90.00.)

THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION has occupied the imagination of Americans since their return in 1806 and into the twenty-first century. While much of the scholarship produced about Lewis and Clark has focused upon the historical narrative of the expedition, this two-part volume by William R. Swagerty offers a riveting and thorough analysis— which Swagerty frames as “Indianization”—that utilizes anthropological theory. The title and thesis of this study center around the work of the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell and his employment of the term Indianization (10). In essence, Indianization was a process in which the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition adopted Native ways and practices along their journey, making them their own. Thus, Indianization became evident in the men’s physical appearance and in their use of everyday items. Swagerty’s work seeks “to demonstrate that the men were profoundly transformed and the potential for a different understanding of the Indian impact on America was revealed” (46). The author asserts that Indian peoples had a greater impact upon the expedition and American society as a whole than has been previously understood by historians.

The first chapter provides an overview of the cultural history of each man making the journey. The analysis begins with the first U.S. census and explores the “cultural hearths” of the men who composed the Corps of Discovery, in order to better understand the societies in which they lived. This becomes an important foundation for the remainder of the book because it serves as the starting point for understanding how these men became “Indianized.” The second chapter explores the interactions between Indians and non-Indians, highlighting the relationships between the Indians and the French as an example of a Euro-American people who experienced a level of Indianization.

The subsequent nine chapters, topically organized, analyze how “the ‘known’ technological world changed considerably as Indians’ ways and techniques were developed” (149). One prominent marker of this change occurred with the adoption of moccasins by the explorers. In addition, diet and medicines were altered as the Corps incorporated foods and plants used by Indian peoples. These adaptations made travel easier and allowed the explorers to find subsistence along the way as opposed to having to bring and carry innumerable supplies. Swagerty argues that the men’s diets became almost completely Indianized. He concludes with the aftermath of the expedition and explores the return of the Corps of Discovery to the eastern United States. The Lewis and Clark expedition made notable contributions to science, culture, and American Indian diplomacy.

The most impressive aspect of this study is its creative use of primary sources. Swagerty grounds his analysis in the journals of Lewis and Clark, focusing his attention on the Indian perspective contained within the journal entries. This monograph will serve those scholars interested in the American West, the Lewis and Clark expedition, Euro-American identity, and the influence of indigenous peoples upon the cultural and social landscape of America.

ELISE BOXER University of Utah

Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History.

Edited by Brandon S.Plewe, S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson. (Provo, UT: BYUPress, 2012. 272 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

IN 1981, I CAME ACROSS An Atlas of Utah. This book was a geographical treasure trove of maps, facts, figures, and histories of the state of Utah. I had never seen such a wonderful book, and I spent hours looking at the maps and reading the accompanying text. I saw the state from perspectives that I had not even thought about before. The book was a marvel. It gave me an appreciation for geographical research and its ability to teach. Over the years (too many of them), I have waited for a new edition of this work, but it has not come.

Then last year Mapping Mormonism appeared. Though it is not a replacement for the Atlas of Utah, it is nonetheless a wonderful application of the principles and concepts used in the Atlas, and on a topic that, like Utah, I have a great interest in. The book has united the research and writings of sixty scholars in geography, history, and economics to provide a sweeping view of the history of Mormonism. More than an atlas, it has fascinating timelines and informative charts. The sixty-plus authors have produced fine pieces of scholarship, but the editors have done an equally terrific job of compiling this research into a book that is organized, structured, and crisp.

Though the authors are mostly professors from Brigham Young University, there are scholars representing other universities, the Catholic Church, and the Community of Christ, along with independent writers. The book is divided into four main sections: “The Restoration,” “The Empire in the Desert,” “The Expanding Church,” and “Regional History.”

The book is filled with information you would expect, but also with unexpected insights. Who knew, for example, that the explosion of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) might have influenced Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Smith to move their family from Vermont to western New York? This gigantic eruption sent volcanic ash into the air, cooling summers for several years in the early 1800s and prompting thousands to move from the New England states to more promising areas.

Other pages are equally interesting. A world map accompanied by a timeline at the bottom of one page shows when and where the Latter-day Saint scriptures have been translated into other languages for worldwide use. Impressive maps and timelines of the New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois periods allow the reader to see these periods in a spatially fascinating way. The much-analyzed missionary work of the early Quorum of Twelve Apostles is shown, including Orson Hyde’s trip to the Holy Land. Mapping Mormonism presents an informative snapshot (with some admitted imperfection) of plural marriage as it lists the percentage of families who did or did not practice polygamy in communities from St. George to Logan— with Paris, Idaho, and the Muddy River Mission in Nevada thrown in to boot.

“The Expanding Church” opens with maps of the world and the United States on the bottom third of the page and a linear graph on the top two-thirds of the page that shows by year, from 1900 to 2010, the total membership; annual increase; annual growth rate; and number of missionaries, stakes, and temples in the LDS church.

In summary, the authors and editors of Mapping Mormonism have made an impressive achievement. It is colorful, arresting, and educational in a way that would attract a student with the shortest attention span. The writing is generally clear and concise, and the graphics are easy to follow and understand. Needless to say, I really liked this book and can now put to rest my anxiety of not having a wonderful atlas that can truly educate and inform in an attention-grabbing way. To the authors and editors: well done!

MICHAEL E. CHRISTENSEN Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel State of Utah

Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Choice in Twentieth-Century Arizona.

By Mary S.Melcher. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. x + 248 pp. Cloth, $50.00.)

IN THIS WORK, Mary Melcher details how the differences imposed on humankind by race, culture, religion, government, and economic status can be considered not only hindrances to women’s physical ability to give life but also to women’s power to control that ability. In 1912, 69 percent of Arizona’s inhabitants lived in rural areas with 2,500 people or fewer. This meant little or no infrastructure, lack of professional medical care, economic struggles, and disadvantages due to race. All of these factors contributed to the fact that Arizona had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the nation, as well as other struggles regarding womanhood and choice.

While describing the difficulties faced by Arizona women in the twentieth century and making the case for the need of choice and control, Melcher also advances the insight that the ability to provide life is the one thing that joins women together—despite race, culture, religion, government, or economic status. She argues, further, that through childbearing, women share another commonality: the ability to choose. Melcher fills her work with examples of this commonality. In the 1950s Euro-American women blurred socioeconomic lines by assisting the less prosperous Mexicans or African Americans in getting access to birth control resources through a Tucson birth control clinic. Women of faith banded together with the support of ecclesiastical leaders willing to think unconventionally, such as the Reverend Michael D. Smith, a Presbyterian campus minister at the University of Arizona in 1971. Smith declared that because women were created in God’s own image, it was therefore part of a woman’s divine nature to decide how and when to have children. Melcher also focuses on the irony of government involvement in women’s reproduction—being willing to make the choice for women through legislation while denying them the opportunity to choose.

Though Melcher certainly focuses on Arizona, she incorporates historical details about other western states not only to back up her research but also to provide an overall picture of this aspect of western women’s history. This is especially true with regard to Utah. The author details the Utah and Mormon perspective on womanhood, motherhood, and choice throughout the book. In 1940, for instance, Utah shared Arizona’s high birthrate, but it had a lower infant mortality rate. As factors in this lower mortality rate, Melcher notes the medical training of some of Utah’s women, both as doctors and midwives, as well as the success of the LDS Relief Society. She also notes the geographical clustering of settlements along the Wasatch front as a factor. Given the fact that the majority of Utah’s population was centered in and around Salt Lake City, this is understandable. Melcher’s reliance on statistics alone, however, does open the door to the question of rural communities in Utah between Salt Lake and St. George, such as mining towns, where the Mormon church was not as prominent. Did these areas suffer from the same high infant mortality rates as Arizona? Did the lack of infrastructure negatively affect women’s ability to get quality care? How did Utah’s ethnic minorities fair? Though an in-depth study of these questions was obviously not within Melcher’s scope, a comparison between rural Utah and rural Arizona is warranted. There are moments when Melcher seems to discredit women’s personal convictions and the influence of religious or cultural beliefs on decisions regarding motherhood, pregnancy, and choice. She notes the Catholic and Mormon religious perspective, as well as the Navajo cultural perspective, that reproduction is a matter for a higher power to decide. Her tone suggests that women from these traditions would surely choose family planning over nature if they were not under such ecclesiastical or cultural sway, as if these women were somehow lacking intelligence for following personal conviction based on faith or tradition.

Part of Melcher’s thesis outlines the “pattern of change” of women’s reproduction in the twentieth century, as illustrated by the shift in the late 1960s and 1970s regarding sexuality. Likewise, she adds historic context about why Roe v. Wade occurred when it did and why it was received or rejected so passionately. While the ability to give life once provided common ground for Arizona women, the sexual liberation of women did not have the same unifying effect. Hence, the emergence of two separate distinct groups: pro-life versus pro-choice.

Melcher’s passion for her subject is evident, but she maintains an objective voice throughout Pregnancy. The fifty-three pages of endnotes bear witness to Melcher’s extensive historical research, as do the variety of sources. Current events, such as the debate over an age restriction of access to the “morning after” pill, add force to her general subject matter, giving it increased relevance not only historically but contemporaneously as women continue to define their place in various cultures and defend their freedoms with regard to reproduction.

HEIDI ORCHARD Utah Division of State History

Butch Cassidy: Beyond the Grave.

By W. C. Jameson. (Lanham, MD: Taylor TradePublishing, 2012. 187 pp. Cloth, $22.95.)

THE NOTED AUTHOR and treasure hunter W. C. Jameson has just completed his second book on famous outlaws (Billy the Kid was the first) and their “bigger than life” legend. In this case he features the Utah native Robert Leroy Parker, otherwise known as Butch Cassidy. Jameson’s well-researched book provides an analytical approach to the hypothesis that Butch Cassidy did not really die in a shootout in Bolivia. He gives plenty of examples that Butch returned to the American West “beyond the grave.”

Jameson draws from many different authors as he traces Butch’s life from his origins to his path across the West, until his imprisonment in Wyoming. He follows the later adventures of Butch and the Wild Bunch and their deeds across the West, and then covers the voyage of Butch and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh) to South America. Here with Etta Place they established a nice ranch and went “straight” until the Pinkerton Detective Agency discovered them; they eventually returned to the outlaw trail. Unfortunately, while Jameson cites respective authors on these various incidents, he does not include specific pages in his footnotes, which would have been a nice addition for other researchers.

Jameson argues that because credible records do not exist, there is only scanty evidence that the two outlaws died in the shootout at San Vicente and were buried there. He puts forth twelve points that raise doubts about the identities of Butch and Sundance and other American outlaws who were possibly operating in South America. He states that it was not until publication of an article by Arthur Chapman twenty-two years after the shootout, based on the information Chapman obtained from Percy Seibert, that most people came to believe that the people killed were Butch and Sundance.

Following Chapman’s article, many folks stepped forward to dispute his assertion that Butch was dead. Jameson presents numerous accounts of people who claimed to have seen and visited with Butch after he returned to the American West. He presents the evidence of these various accounts, including a purported visit to the Parker family home. Some people believed that the man who penned the manuscript “The Bandit Invisible”—William T. Phillips from Spokane, Washington—was Butch Cassidy because information contained therein must have come from someone who had been on the scene. Jameson makes a thorough analysis of the Phillips/Cassidy comparison, but cannot really tie down a conclusion. He calls it “Occam’s razor,” essentially saying he needs more evidence.

Unfortunately, while Jameson was finalizing his book, an expanded manuscript of “The Bandit Invisible” surfaced and was acquired by a Utah rare document collector. This enlarged manuscript was turned over to the Montana author Larry Pointer for analysis. In this process, Pointer concluded that William T. Phillips was really William T. Wilcox, a fellow inmate with Butch Cassidy in Wyoming’s territorial prison.

W. C. Jameson’s book is a nice addition to the expanding library about Utah’s most famous outlaw. It of course leaves the legend alive for someone else to prove whether the mystery of Butch’s life “beyond the grave” can be solved.

JOEL FRANDSEN Elsinore, Utah