In This Issue

Volume eighty-two of Utah Historical Quarterly opens with three articles that bear witness to the importance of the land in the American West. Scenic beauty and physical difficulties are overarching aspects of life in this diverse, mostly arid section of the continent. As Wallace Stegner put it, “The West is a region of extraordinary variety within its abiding unity, and of an iron immutability beneath its surface of change. The most splendid part of the American habitat, it is also the most fragile.” 1 How then, have humans interacted with this splendid, fragile place? This, of course, is a key question in the history of both Utah and the West.

Our first article examines road development in Logan Canyon and a conflict that stretched from the 1960s to the 1990s. On one side were groups and individuals who wanted to preserve the aesthetics and ecology of the canyon; on the other, those who wanted a safer, faster highway through it. It was, in many ways, a classic contest about man’s relationship with the natural world, as the people of the Cache Valley and government administrators struggled to decide what constituted the greater good: ease of transportation (and all the economic and safety benefits that went with it) or the protection of a lovely place. This article is also about change over time—throughout the course of the Logan Canyon debate, the attitudes of many northern Utahns toward the environment evolved, from mostly utilitarian to more open to preservation.

Complex dealings with the land were hardly new to the late twentieth century, as our second article demonstrates. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt traveled through the West, in part to promote his conservationist ideals. The conservation of natural resources fit neatly with the progressive ethic, as reformers hoped to mitigate the effects of laissez-faire capitalism and industrialization through well-informed government involvement. Accordingly, in Utah, Roosevelt delivered a major speech at the LDS Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, wherein he expounded on the need to wisely manage irrigation systems, grazing lands, forests, and other resources. (As this issue’s opening article notes, places such as the Cache Valley were suffering from the ill effects of overgrazing and deforestation by Roosevelt’s time.) Notably, Roosevelt paid homage to the pioneering irrigation efforts of Utahns, a testament to the warming relationship between Utah and the federal government.

Half a century before Roosevelt delivered his speech at the tabernacle, another representative of the federal government made a trip to Utah that concerned the land as much as anything. Captain Howard Stansbury of the U.S. Army’s Topographical Corps led a surveying expedition around the Great Salt Lake in 1849. The details of this often arduous journey are preserved in a journal, an official report, and beautifully drawn maps—and yet, as our third article argues, these sources do not always agree with each other. Specifically, Jesse Petersen finds that significant discrepancies exist between Stansbury’s journal and report, on one hand, and his maps, on the other hand. Petersen’s examination of the Stansbury expedition also makes clear the difficulties experienced by that 1849 party: exploration was a key element in development and settlement of the American West by Euro-Americans, and it was far from easy.

The final piece in this issue, a photographic essay, takes us from the shores of the Great Salt Lake in 1849 to a moment of pomp and glamour in the Salt Lake City of 1940. That August, the executives of Twentieth Century Fox opened a major film, Brigham Young, not in Hollywood, but in Utah—and Utahns responded with verve. For some Utahns, much of the excitement came from Darryl Zanuck’s sympathetic portrayal of the Latter-day Saint story. And perhaps it was more than a little thrilling for Utahns to entertain some of Hollywood’s brightest stars (no one less than Tyrone Power) that August evening, when seven sold-out theaters premiered the film.

Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 57.

COVER: Linda Darnell and Tyrone Power, co-stars in Brigham Young, acknowledge paradegoers in downtown Salt Lake City, August 23, 1940. SALT LAKE CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

IN THIS ISSUE (ABOVE): The Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal, near the mouth of Logan Canyon, photographed in 1947. Utah State Historical Society. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY