Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 2, 2014

UTAH H I S T O R I C A L Q U A RT E R LY SPRING 2014

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VOLUME 82

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NUMBER 2

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

(ISSN 0 042-143X) EDITORIAL STAFF BRAD WESTWOOD, Editor HOLLY GEORGE,

Managing Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS BRIAN Q. CANNON, Provo, 2016 CRAIG FULLER, Salt

Lake City, 2015 Lake City, 2015 KATHRYN L. MACKAY, Ogden, 2017 ROBERT E. PARSON, Benson, 2017 W. PAUL REEVE, Salt Lake City, 2014 SUSAN SESSIONS RUGH, Provo, 2016 JOHN SILLITO, Ogden, 2017 GARY TOPPING, Salt Lake City, 2014 RONALD G. WATT, West Valley City, 2017 COLLEEN WHITLEY, Salt Lake City, 2015

LEE ANN KREUTZER, Salt

Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, and reviews contributing to knowledge of Utah history. The Quarterly is published four times a year by the Division of State History/Utah State Historical Society, 300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Phone (801) 245-7231 for membership and publication information. Members of the Society receive the Quarterly upon payment of the annual dues: individual, $30; institution, $40; student and senior citizen (age sixty-five or older), $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100.

Manuscripts submitted for publication should be double-spaced with endnotes. We encourage authors to submit both a paper and an electronic version of the manuscript. For additional information, contact the managing editor or visit our website. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.

Find Utah Historical Quarterly online at history.utah.gov.

Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.

POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 S. Rio Grande,

Salt Lake City, Utah 84101.

UTAH DIVISION OF STATE HISTORY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Department of Heritage and Arts BOARD OF STATE HISTORY MICHAEL W. HOMER, Salt

Lake City, 2014, Chair DINA WILLIAMS BLAES, Salt Lake City, 2017 SCOTT R. CHRISTENSEN, Salt Lake City, 2014 YVETTE DONOSSO, Sandy, 2015 MARIA GARCIAZ, Salt Lake City, 2015 DEANNE G. MATHENY, Lindon, 2017 ROBERT S. MCPHERSON, Blanding, 2015 STEVEN LLOYD OLSEN, Heber City, 2017 GREGORY C. THOMPSON, Salt Lake City, 2015 PATTY TIMBIMBOO-MADSEN, Plymouth, 2015 WESLEY ROBERT WHITE, Salt Lake City, 2017 ADMINISTRATION

BRAD WESTWOOD, Director

and State Historic Preservation Officer

In 1897, public-spirited Utahns organized the Utah State Historical Society in order to expand public understanding of Utah’s past. Today, the Utah Division of State History administers the Society and, as part of its statutory obligations, publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly, which has collected and preserved Utah’s unique history since 1928. The Division also collects materials related to the history of Utah; assists communities, agencies, building owners, and consultants with state and federal processes regarding archaeological and historical resources; administers the ancient human remains program; makes historical resources available in a specialized research library; offers extensive online resources and grants; and assists in public policy and the promotion of Utah’s rich history. Please visit history.utah.gov for more information.

The activity that is the subject of this journal has been financed in part with Federal funds from the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, and administered by the State Historic Preservation Office of Utah. The contents and opinions do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of the Interior or the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, nor does the mention of trade names or commercial products constitute endorsement or recommendation by the Department of the Interior or the Utah State Historic Preservation Office.

This program receives Federal financial assistance for identification and protection of historic properties.

Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, as amended, the U.S. Department of the Interior prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, or age in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to: Office for Equal Opportunity, National Park Service, 849 C Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20240.

U TA H H I S T O R I C A L Q U A R T E R LY SPRING 2014

• VOLUME 82

• NUMBER 2

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IN THIS ISSUE

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Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915

By Ben Cater

114

Grasshoppers, Thanksgiving Dinner, and Utah Turkeys

By Dale W Adams

133

Alma Richards’s Olympic Leap of Faith Revisited

By Larry R. Gerlach

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Male and Female Teachers in Early Utah and the West

By Val D. Rust

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BOOK REVIEWS Michael J. Pfeifer, ed. Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South Reviewed by Patrick Q. Mason

Mark DeVoto, ed. The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne Reviewed by Val Holley

Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo. Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States 1870-1930 Reviewed by Allan Kent Powell

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment Reviewed by Christopher Herbert

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War Reviewed by Timothy M. Wright

Michon Mackedon. Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert Reviewed by Katherine Good

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BOOK NOTICES

© COPYRIGHT 2014 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

IN THIS ISSUE

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n September 1, 1911, a photographer captured an image of several boys playing in the water at Pioneer Park in Salt Lake City. Behind the apparent simplicity of this photograph, our spring 2014 cover, are many complexities. Who were these children? What urban systems and social movements gave them access to a clean public park? These questions are answered somewhat by the knowledge that during the early 1900s, reformers in Utah were engaged in the City Beautiful movement—a major part of which was the creation of playgrounds—and in 1912, the children’s area at Pioneer Park underwent great improvements.1 Just so, it is worth asking about the context surrounding even the most seemingly mundane things and events.

The anchor article in this issue examines the socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic struggles behind the development of Salt Lake City’s sanitation infrastructure. As Utah’s capital city moved into the industrial era, its citizens suffered because of inadequate water, sewer, and garbage services. Civic officials answered such problems in the late 1800s and early 1900s by building waterCOVER: Pioneer Park, Salt Lake City, September 1911. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

IN THIS ISSUE (ABOVE): A crowd of people gathered at a Salt Lake City produce market near the Growers’ Exchange, August 1913. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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works and a sewer system, among other things; however, those improvements disproportionately favored certain neighborhoods. Salt Lake’s public health reforms took on an ethnic dimension because the portion of the city that was most neglected, its Westside, was increasingly inhabited during these years by immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and southern Europe. Many affluent Salt Lakers reacted to Westside conditions by judging the people of that area to be “unclean, unhealthy, and un-American.”

Our second article asks about the “ingredients” that compose the centerpiece of a traditional holiday meal—the turkey—and how turkey-raising in Utah went from a small-scale activity focused on pest control and holiday markets to a thriving industry. Improvements in technology, transportation, and business practices (the establishment of modern processing plants or the invention of bulk feeders, for instance) had a significant part in the growth of turkey farming in the state. The support and direction provided by growers’ organizations, county extension programs, and the Utah State Agricultural College likewise aided the industry. But this story also had a very human element: several key individuals influenced Utah turkey farming, and as the twentieth century progressed, those growers who stayed in the poultry business learned to adapt to change and difficulty.

At this printing, the world has just celebrated the conclusion of the Sochi 2014 Olympics. Just over a century ago, a young man from Utah enjoyed a fantastic victory at the Stockholm 1912 Olympics. Alma Richards was still a relative newcomer to the sport of high jump in 1912, and he was a dark horse at the games. Yet he won. A bit of reportage about Richards’s accomplishment led to a story of how this Mormon boy called for divine help as he made his Olympic leap—and that story took on a life of its own, especially as Salt Lake City prepared to host its own Olympics. Our third article unravels the complicated story of Alma Richards’s Olympic prayer and asks us to consider the uses of history.

The final article in this issue also tackles something of a historical myth: the notion that women formed the majority of school teachers in the Old West.

Besides delicate eastern girls who came west to be schoolmarms, this article argues, plenty of men led classrooms in the nineteenth-century West. Utah had a particularly interesting mix of male and female teachers, one complicated by religion and changed by the passage of time. All told, this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly prompts us to look carefully at familiar stories and ordinary things.

1 Thomas G. Alexander, “Cooperation, Conflict, and Compromise: Women, Men, and the Environment in Salt Lake City, 1890–1930,” BYU Studies 35, no. 1 (1995): 19–23.

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Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915

BY BEN CATER

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ike many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Salt Lake City experienced rising morbidity rates from filth-related diseases. Urban and industrial growth, increased pollution, and the lack of effective therapeutics contributed to human suffering, sickness, and death. Sanitation laws existed, including those for disposing of waste and barring animals from grazing in public watersheds, but enforcing them remained difficult, particularly in a farming community rapidly entering the urban-industrial age. Since curbside ditches supplied water for cooking and bathing, residents were appalled at the sight of garbage “choking and obstructing the ditches and defiling the water.”

Ditches produced noxious gasses, or “miasmas” thought to cause disease, and they harbored deadly microbes that contributed to diarrhea, cholera, typhoid A Salt Lake City home at the fever, and diphtheria. As water-borne illness historic address of 130 North and “dominated the health picture,” recalled the 200 West. As this 1915 image physician Ralph T. Richards, citizens demonstrates, many residents of the Westside faced difficult demanded sanitary improvements.1 This article argues that public health sanitary conditions.

Ben Cater, PhD, earned his doctorate in history at the University of Utah in 2012. Currently he serves as an assistant professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts. He wishes to thank his colleagues, students, and family for their encouragement and support.

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reforms helped to create a health-based hierarchy that informed the city’s shifting cultural geography. Class and race played disproportionate roles in mapping medical improvements, as did religion, which historians have traditionally ignored. As city officials responded to citizen petitions for pure water and, later, sewer and garbage services, they did so mainly to benefit affluent white Mormons and non-Mormon “gentiles,” most of whom lived and worked downtown and in suburban neighborhoods.2 Religion initially pitted Mormons against people outside their faith and sometimes against each other; over time, such contention diminished, which permitted affluent whites of all religious backgrounds to support both sanitary progress and their claims to superior health and American identity.

Conversely, impoverished Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Mexican immigrants who lived in dilapidated Westside enclaves remained segregated from these improvements, causing them to be cast as unclean, unhealthy, and un-American.

Since Salt Lake City’s incorporation in 1847, bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) were responsible for ensuring water supply, purity, and distribution. They fulfilled this charge reasonably well and then, in the 1870s, stepped aside for city councilors and engineers professionally trained in urban planning and design. The central public health problem that these civil servants encountered was growth.

Although rainfall remained normal during the late nineteenth century, population growth did not, averaging over ninety percent annually until 1890. Natural increase and the fruits of LDS missionary efforts combined to create a stress on water resources and increase their relative pollution.

Municipal authorities addressed this dilemma by enforcing sanitation laws more diligently and committing themselves to increasing water volume. One plan, proposed by councilman Elijah Sheets in 1864, entailed devoting ditch water to domestic and manufacturing needs exclusively, while building a forty-mile canal to ferry Utah Lake water to city agricultural fields.3 Mayor Daniel H. Wells and water superintendent Theodore McKean proposed building a waterworks system in City Creek Canyon— the source of ditch water—and the central business district (CBD), only, to save money.4 The least costly plan called for either boring artesian wells in Salt Lake City’s twenty-plus municipal wards or hiring private contractors to furnish bottled water to paying customers.

1 Ralph T. Richards, Of Medicine, Hospitals, and Doctors (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1953), 20. Complete footnotes for this article can be found in Ben Cater, “Health, Medicine, and Power in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah, 1869–1945” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2012), chapter 1.

2 “Gentile” is a historical category used by and against non-Mormons in the nineteenth century, although it is no longer an acceptable term to delineate religious identity.

3 City Council Minutes, August 9, 1864, Salt Lake County Recorder’s Office, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter SLCRO).

4 “Theodore McKean,” MS 2050, box 20, fd. 2, no. 1, p. 8, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL); City Council Minutes, October 25, 1870, February 23, March 15, 1872, April 1, 1873.

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While politicians and civil servants debated these plans, water scarcity and contamination continued to undermine community health. Although outbreaks of water-borne disease had occurred before the 1870s, their rate and severity rose to rival that of the nation’s most squalid municipalities, including Philadelphia and Chicago.5 According to popular lore, Salt Lake City possessed the dirtiest streets in the West after Kansas City. Religious rivalries only complicated the situation, as sanitary services became a bone of contention between city councilors, most of whom were Mormon, and the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune. In April 1871, the Tribune—sensing an opportunity to ridicule city officials—snorted: “Salt Lake City seems like an overgrown and dull country village. There seems to be no public spirit exhibited by the City Authorities, unless it be in hunting down liquor dealers who refuse to pay extortionate licenses.” In May the Tribune continued, “We need first-class waterworks which should place an ample supply of the bright sparkling water of city creek in the house of every resident in the city, to promote health and comfort.”6 It is conceivable that city officials interpreted these editorials as a grumpy, though welcome, endorsement of the plan proposed by Wells and McKean, both Mormons. In December 1870, they had proposed an $180,000 waterworks system that would be funded by the subscriptions of downtown property owners. However, although residents in the central business district frequently requested permission to lay private water pipes in City Creek, during the spring of 1871 they rejected the mayor’s plan on the grounds that they already paid the majority of municipal taxes. Caving in to this pressure, as well as to that coming from the probusiness Liberal Party, Mayor Wells and the city council agreed to fund waterworks in the district through general revenue and license fees.7 On September 3, 1872, policemen oversaw prison inmates as they dug three-foot trenches for water mains in City Creek Canyon. Engineer Thomas Ellerbeck planned for the laminated wood and cast iron mains to run south through the canyon before turning west on North Temple and then through and around the central business district until terminating at the Jordan River. Ellerbeck’s plan seemed rational enough—prior to diesel engine technology, gravity, rather than mechanical force, transferred water—and the placement of the mains accommodated the land’s southwestern slope.8 In October 1876, four years after breaking ground, city 5 Ralph Richards calculated more than 14,000 cases of typhoid fever in Salt Lake City before 1904, with a mortality rate of about 6.5 percent. From 1911 to 1915, that rate increased to 13.2 percent against the national average of 16.38 percent among cities with populations of 100,000 to 125,000, and then to 18.1 percent versus 10.9 percent among the same segment in 1917. Richards, Of Medicine, 167; JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 70 (March 16, 1918): Table V, 778; D. C. Houston and Rey M. Hill, Health Conditions and Facilities in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Planning Board, 1936), 15.

6 Salt Lake Tribune, April 27 (first quotation), May 19, 1871 (second quotation).

7 City Council Minutes, February 13, 1871, SLCRO. 8 Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1907 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing, n.d.), 206–207.

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fathers opened the City Creek reservoir to allow “good, clean water” to flow to businesses, churches, and homes fourteen miles below.9 The Deseret News, the official newspaper of the Mormon church, hailed the water mains as an “inestimable boon.” The newspaper touted the system’s benefits to the “Merchants, Bankers, Hotel, and Livery Stable Keepers” who had petitioned city councilors to lower water rates to “10 cents per thousand gallons” (although churches received water free of charge).10 Clean piped water also served affluent homeowners who, like Victorians nationally, saw indoor plumbing as a way to promote progress and to improve their homes and health. Although Mormons and nonMormons remained segregated from each other in downtown’s northern and southern ends, sanitary water transcended this religious divide by flowing in and around their stores and homes, delivering “liquid health and comfort.”11 While waterworks existed downtown, public health remained a concern throughout the community. Polluted water still ran in city ditches, and municipal officials estimated that only “thirty per cent of the citizens have been directly benefitted by waterworks,” even though all of the city’s taxpayers had shared the $283,000 price tag for its construction.12 During the construction, several dozen residents rose up to protest this partiality and to support a more “just and equitable plan” of taxing property “where the mains are laid” and extending improvements to less affluent areas.13 Echoing these sentiments, other citizens emerged in the 1880s to lament the fact that public improvements were built for the “wealthy portion of the community” at the expense of the “poor portion of the community.”14 Accused of class bias, Salt Lake City leaders responded by endorsing a plan that would potentially benefit the entire community.

Constructed between 1879 and 1882, the Jordan Canal traveled from Utah Lake north along the Wasatch Range to an open conduit at North Temple and Main Street, from whence it flowed to the Jordan River.

Residents in the southern, eastern, and northern parts of the city tapped into the canal to irrigate their gardens and to power their businesses, particularly grist mills, paper, sugar, and woolen factories. However, while the canal initially seemed to heal social divisions, it exacerbated them when religious and class contention reemerged during construction.

In April 1880, the Salt Lake Tribune accused the Mormon-dominated city council of approving a $250,000 bond to enrich the Mormon church and specifically its president, John Taylor. Taylor allegedly had lobbied the councilors to back the bond, since the Jordan Canal required the 9

Deseret News, October 6, 1876.

Ibid.; City Council Minutes, October 12, 1875, August 1, 1876, May 18, 1880, SLCRO. 11 City Council Minutes, April 24, 1877, SLCRO. 12 Ibid., April 15, 1884.

13 Ibid., June, 15, 1878.

14 Ibid., October 3, 1888; Deseret News, September 12, 1888.

10

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Cottonwood ditch—which Taylor claimed The reservoir at the mouth of ownership of—to function properly. The Parley’s Canyon. council paid Taylor $40,000 for the ditch, and the LDS city surveyor Jesse Fox hired exclusively “Mormon pilgrims arriving from the old country” to construct the canal. In addition, the canal was poorly built, leaking and fouling ditch water in the lower-income Westside.

Tribune editor Charles C. Goodwin reprimanded the “jobbers who carried through the corrupt canal scheme” and mixed undrinkable Utah Lake water with City Creek water downtown before carrying it to Westside ditches. He asked, “And of the inhabitants of that whole portion . . . who receive water below the point where the canal discharges? They all have equitable claims for relief in this matter, for a very positive and comprehensive damage has been done there. Even a little foul water will taint a large stream, and the abuse is flagrant.” Yet rather than addressing these critiques, according to the Tribune, the Deseret News brushed them aside to highlight the canal’s success in providing “a steady supply of voluminous water” to the city.15 Because growth continued to diminish water resources, in 1888 the city council brokered a trade agreement with Parley’s Canyon farmers whereby they agreed to exchange Jordan Canal water for high quality drinking water flowing in and around the canyon. Laborers built a reservoir at the 15 Salt Lake Tribune, April 4, 1880, July 27, July 30, 1882, July 1, 1899. The Deseret News quotation comes from the Salt Lake Tribune, July 30, 1882.

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mouth of Parley’s Canyon where a conduit shuttled 8.5 million gallons daily along the city’s eastern bench to a reservoir at 100 South and 1300 East, at which point gravity then carried the water to suburban neighborhoods east of downtown. This “first exchange” was a farsighted improvement in accommodation of growth. It preceded a “second exchange,” wherein the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce worked with city officials to purchase eight to ten million gallons of Big Cottonwood Canyon water in exchange for a similar amount of canal water for farmers.16 With an abundant supply of pure water, affluent residents in the suburbs requested home service. Suburbs emerged during the nineteenth century as peaceful retreats from the noise and squalor of inner cities. In Salt Lake City, argues Cecilia Parera, suburbs revealed class-oriented spatial growth, in that their occupants belonged to the richest twenty percent who owned nearly ninety-two percent of city property.17 The Eastern Slope, the city’s first suburb, consisted of non-Mormon businessmen, doctors, and attorneys and to a lesser extent, wealthy Mormons. The slope extended from Main Street to 600 East and from South Temple to 900 South, with its terrain rising steadily toward the Wasatch bench. Electric streetcars provided service to its spacious Queen Anne,Victorian, and Greek Revival homes, as well as to the city’s two major hospitals.

Farther south was Sugar House, a professional and business-class Mormon neighborhood and the site of a speculative real estate boom, which was bounded by 500 East and 2100 East and 1300 South and 2700 South. Salt Lake City annexed Sugar House after the LDS church suspended sugar beet operations there. Fertile land and good air complemented the area’s opportunities for physical recreation such as golfing and tennis at the country club and hunting, fishing, swimming, and hiking in Parley’s Hollow. The Chamber of Commerce emphasized the suburb’s potential for development.18 Shortly after the first exchange, city officials ordered waterworks construction in the Eastern Slope and soon thereafter in Sugar House, with mains going to homes first and then to vacant lots. Mayor George Scott, a non-Mormon and a member of the Liberal Party, heartily endorsed these plans, stating “nothing more strongly invites improvements than a good water supply.”19 Not everyone endorsed water service, however.

Poor residents, several of whom were African Americans who inhabited the eastern and western edges of the Eastern Slope (commonly called 16 Map #8491, “Sketch Showing Principal Sources of Water Supply to Salt Lake City,” June 28, 1932, LeRoy W. Hooton Jr. Public Utilities Building, Salt Lake City, Utah; LeRoy W. Hooton Jr., “The Jordan and Salt Lake City Canal,” typescript, MSS A 3229, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USHS); Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 1891, March 18, 1892, February 2, 1894.

17 Cecilia Parera, “Mormon Town Planning: Physical and Social Relevance,” Journal of Planning History 4 (2005): 170.

18 Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, “Salt Lake City and Surroundings” (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Company, 1889), 35.

19 Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1891 (Salt Lake City, 1892), 12, Series 4882, USHS.

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“nigger town”), argued that construction imposed too high a financial burden on them.20 Per capita costs could equal $275 and $600 for neighborhood mains, the latter of which averaged eighty percent of an annual working-class salary.21 In 1888, city councilors amended municipal water ordinances to require all beneficiaries to pay three-quarters of home construction costs, plus fifty cents per front foot of home lateral connections. The city also asserted its right to seize property from owners who failed to pay, although in extreme cases permitted payments in two or three installments. Less than two decades after the emergence of waterworks in Salt Lake City, therefore, public health improvements seemed to privilege specific racial, class, and geographic interests, trumping religious differences.

In addition to financial and political support, gravity also influenced the construction of water mains in the Eastern Slope and Sugar House neighborhoods. Salt Lake City occupied the former lakebed of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, which formed a natural amphitheater with land rising north and east toward downtown, the Avenues, and the Wasatch bench. Water thus traveled south and west from the northern and eastern benches toward the Jordan River. This fact helps explain why, until the settlement of well-heeled Salt Lakers in the 1880s, the Avenues retained the unflattering sobriquet of the “dry bench.”

Platted in the 1850s, the Avenues neighborhood covered a high sloping bench northeast of downtown, most of it too high for municipal water service. Its earliest settlers included artisans and farmers who gravitated toward the area’s cheap land but chafed against its lack of water; to the extreme southwest lived a few wealthy LDS officials who worked at the Temple Block. To increase their comfort, a few residents dug shallow wells or laid private pipes in City Creek Canyon, while others hired home water delivery via wooden barrels. The majority, however, carried buckets from springs and ditches lower in the city.

By the 1870s, this hardship motivated residents of the area to establish the Dry Bench Committee and lobby city officials to address their problem. In August 1874, Septimus Sears appeared on behalf of eleven hundred people to request public aid. The city council rejected his appeal 20 City Council Minutes, November 29, 1881, SLCRO; Margaret May, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Nurses Oral History Project, MS OH 02228, p. 4, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. In circa 1890, about 220 African Americans lived in Salt Lake City, mostly on Franklin Avenue on the western edge of the Eastern Slope. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, vol. III, Population, Table IV, “Composition and Characteristics of the Population for Wards of Salt Lake City” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 890; George Ramjoue, “The Negro in Utah: A Geographical Study in Population” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1968), 10; James Boyd Christensen, “A Social Survey of the Negro Population of Salt Lake City, Utah” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1948). For a white perspective on racial segregation in Salt Lake City, see “Interviews with Caucasians in Utah,” box 1, fd. 14, p. 13, MS 483, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah (hereafter JWML).

21 City Council Minutes, September 27, 1887, August 1888, SLCRO. On construction costs, see April 15, May 24, 1884. I based the average annual working-class salary on three dollars per day, at five days a week, totaling $720 per year.

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and redirected him to the county court, which allegedly possessed the sole r ight to grant legal title to the sur plus of Big Cottonwood water. This response did not appease Sears, however, who insisted on equity: just as city residents outside of downtown financed waterworks in the central business district, so should the central business district finance waterworks outside of downtown. Yet the following year, city officials reiterated their historic war ning against settling above the waterline, while the county court explained that no means yet existed to transport Big Cottonwood water to the Avenues.22 The Dr y Bench Committee continued to claim that its constituents “suffered in health, comfort, and This image of the Thomas Kearns convenience” and could not fund waterworks family depicts the opulence that themselves. Fortunately, the committee some Salt Lakers enjoyed. demanded and received a tax refund for previous years. Unfortunately, these refunds were a zero-sum, as the city later imposed taxes for building the Jordan Canal, which Avenues residents were “led to [falsely] believe . . . would bring them relief.”23 With mayoral support, in 1884 the city council approved building a water main from City Creek Canyon through Sixth Avenue to the city cemetery. Six years later, another main had increased the water volume by more than half. These mains provided water to the neighborhoods below them, down to South Temple; the residents of this area included mine owners, bankers, attorneys, doctors, and real estate developers, such as Thomas Kearns, Joseph Walker, and George Downey. These people built spacious homes on lands purchased from early Mormon pioneers and normally traveled by streetcar to work, shop, and worship in downtown. As part of Salt Lake City’s nouveaux riches, they remained categorically different 22 23

City Council Minutes, March 30, 1875, SLCRO. Ibid., January 16, February 6, December 11, 1877, January 29, 1878, February 20, 1883, SLCRO.

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from the city’s poorer and less influential residents, some of whom lived above the Sixth Avenue main. Lacking political clout, these persons formed the North Bench Committee in the 1880s to reassert their “unjust discrimination,” which threatened their health and land values.24 In 1888, relief finally came when city laborers laid a main on G Street that supplied water to North Bench homes and undeveloped lots.

Public health conditions in one area of Salt Lake City—Chinatown— revealed both the power of sanitary inequity and how white biases against non-white people could become caught up in the politics of sanitation. In the 1870s, after having labored on the transcontinental railroad, many Chinese immigrants settled in urban ethnic enclaves. Chinese men in these enclaves performed jobs that were culturally and legally open to them, especially laundering, which white men typically viewed as “woman’s work” and appropriate for supposedly less masculine men. Besides its association with femininity, washing also seemed to be unsanitary and unsafe because it brought launderers into contact with dirty clothing. In Salt Lake City’s CBD, Chinese men opened laundries in the “miserable shanties” of Plum Alley and Commercial Street, the location of the city’s Chinatown and its red light, gambling, and drug-trafficking district. This area reeked of filth and opium smoke, while its dark alleys and prostitutes seemed to confirm its inhabitants’ proclivity for dirt and despair.25 Despite some attempts by evangelical Christian missionaries to convert and purify the “heathens,” some of whom appeared to be “clean,” the Chinese normally rejected their efforts. 26 Rather, many continued to embrace Buddhism, ancestral worship, and cultural pastimes such as smoking and selling non-medicinal opium, which was illicit in Salt Lake City. They also still lived with other men, prostitutes, and pimps in cramped stuffy quarters, domestic arrangements that seemed to portend violence, sex, and drug-related disease. Some whites believed that Chinese laundrymen, who relied on traditional mouth sprayers instead of new steam technology, passed disease to customers. While the Chinese enjoyed access to sanitary water mains by virtue of inhabiting the CBD, that access ultimately could not wash away white biases against them.27 24 Salt Lake Tribune, March 22, May 22, 1885; City Council Minutes, March 21, 1876, April 9, 1878, SLCRO. 25 Richard T. Page and J. J. Bloomfield, Evaluation of the Industrial Hygiene Problem of the State of Utah, 1938 (Washington, D.C.: Division of Industrial Health, National Institutes of Health, United States Public Health Service, 1938), 27; Salt Lake Tribune, November 15, 1879, October 2, 1899, October 15, 1900.

26 Salt Lake Tribune, May 25, 1884, January 4, 1885; “Reports, 1932–1933,” box 49, fd. 1, MS 558, Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs Records, JWML; Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Reid Neilson, eds., Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 272.

27 Salt Lake Tribune, November 15, 1879, August 10, September 19, October 11, 14, 1883, May 25, 1884, September 11, 1885, January 20, 1886, September 10, 1892; City Council Minutes, August 18, 1874, October 23, 1883, October 30, 1883, SLCRO; Salt Lake Herald, November 11, 1883; Daniel Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns: The Development and Decline of Extinct Ethnic Enclaves,” Utah Historical Quarterly 64 (Winter 1996): 80–83; Michael Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth Century

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In 1883, white residents pressured city councilors to write new laws prohibiting Chinese laundries downtown. City attorney Aurelius Miner suggested that the city purchase land “away from the thickly settled portion” of downtown near the Jordan River for “Chinese Wash Houses.”

Miner also suggested crafting a “special ordinance” to prohibit Chinese launderers from working outside this space.28 Miner’s efforts to remove these immigrants from the CBD occurred within the context of the national anti-Chinese movement, which sought to diminish the economic and cultural competition posed by the “yellow peril” and had recently gained federal backing. The Salt Lake Tribune editorialized that Miner’s proposal seemed like a “good suggestion,” which if carried out would keep “poisonous vapors” from harming the “health of the public.” The Tribune also worked to tie physical health to moral health by asserting that the removal of Chinatown’s dope fiends and “houses of ill repute” would also purge the CBD of Chinese prostitutes—“‘the meanest of moral ulcers.’”29 On September 18, 1883, Jim Lung appeared before the city council to speak on behalf “of the Chinese residents of the city.” Despite his stated mission, Lung asserted that Chinese laundries posed a risk to public health because they used a large amount of common soap, the ingredients of which, when exposed to the sun, and through being allowed to remain in stagnant places, from the lack of sewerage, readily decomposed and induced malaria calculated to produce quick fevers, scarlatina [sic], and other malignant, if not fatal, diseases.30

The city council—likely surprised by Lung’s testimony, but grateful for it— approved his petition, which deepened cleavages in the Chinese community.

The council also listened to the testimony of Henry A. Reed, who represented the white female launderers of the city. Reed cited “many” laundries in California and Nevada as examples and argued that Salt Lake City should also impose a high tax on Chinese laundries, but not on “whites laboring in the same business.” Though he was explicit about his desire to keep “Chinamen” out of downtown, Reed remained quiet about his alleged role in dividing the immigrants. Then on October 30, Jack Fong and eighteen other Chinese immigrants asserted that Lung did not in fact speak for the Chinese community, but rather was likely motivated by “inducements” given by Reed and other whites.31 Fong stated that Chinese launderers were “hard working men and poor” who leased washhouses, Salt Lake City,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Summer 2004): 219–38; “Hiram Clawson Jr.,” MS D 1776, CHL; Paul Siu, “The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953), 80.

28 Salt Lake Tribune, August 10, 1883. The Deseret News, February 2, 1882, lists “A. Miner” as a city attorney. For a short biography of Miner, see History of the Bench and Bar of Utah (Salt Lake City: Interstate Press Association, 1913), 98.

29 City Council Minutes, August 7, 1883, SLCRO; Salt Lake Tribune, August 10, 1883; Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns,” 77 (final quotation).

30 City Council Minutes, September 18, 1883, SLCRO. 31 Salt Lake Tribune, October 11, 1883.

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which they kept “as cleanly as possible.” Rather than taking umbrage at health laws, they agreed to “whatever restrictions or regulations might be enacted for the disposition of soap suds or wash water used by them.”32 To the contrary, claimed the Salt Lake Tribune, some Chinese men installed “fake” sewer pipes to pass sanitary inspections.33 For reasons unknown, the city council allowed Chinese laundries to remain in the central business district. This decision differed from the actions of Park City, which outlawed Chinese laundries from Main Street and segregated them to “Poison” Creek, the city’s de facto sewer. Yet Salt Lake City’s decision created a situation similar to that of Park City.

Although city attorneys were unwilling, or unable, to draft new laws against the Chinese, Chinese laundries gradually disappeared from downtown by the 1890s. Expired or nonrenewable leases, anti-Chinese sentiment, reduced Chinese immigration, and growing competition from white laundries pushed the immigrants out of washing clothes and into other pursuits, especially farming. Moreover, as their lots normally lacked connections to water and sewer mains but were within reach of the polluted Jordan River, they remained dirty and polluted and thus “fit” (in the language of the day) for a supposedly unclean and unhealthy people.34 Meanwhile, sanitary reforms in downtown and the suburbs made matters worse for Westside neighborhoods, populated mainly by working-class whites—some of them Mor mon—but increasingly non-Mor mon, non-white foreign immigrants. As the Salt Lake Tribune pointed out, the Jordan Canal fouled ditch water west of downtown, and according to Mimmie Howard, it habitually leaked to threaten lives and property. Her cellar, for example, filled “to the depth of ten inches, which was getting so offensive from remaining stagnant that there was imminent danger of sickness to her children.” Moreover, her tenants said that “they would be obliged to seek other and more healthful quarters unless the water was drained off.” The city council referred Howard’s petition to the Committee on the Jordan and Salt Lake City Canal and feared that the city “could no longer afford to pay legal judgments against it brought by citizens.”35 Water mains in the east and north also produced increased wastewater, which drained to the Jordan River or remained in vacant Westside lots to create toxic pools. Salt Lake City residents had long recognized the poor drainage of the city’s western portion, which resulted from its clay-based

32

City Council Minutes, September 18, October 9, 30, 1883, SLCRO. Salt Lake Tribune, July 24, 1890.

34 City Council Minutes, October 31, 1893, SLCRO. On this date, the city attorney reported the difficulty of drafting a law specifically against Chinese vegetable peddlers. On September 11, 1885, and January 20, 1886, the Salt Lake Tribune ran stories on boycotting Chinese laundries. Walter Jones, “Chinese Vegetable Gardeners in Salt Lake City: A Study in Ethnic Dispersion and Short-Term Residential and Economic Integration” (paper, American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch, Tucson, AZ, August 3, 2002); “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Salt Lake City, 1898,” sheets 71–74, 78–79, JWML. 35 City Council Minutes, July 27, June 8, 1886, SLCRO. 33

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soil and low elevation. Beginning at Main Street—a “regular back-bone, the grades falling east, west, and south,” and the political boundary separating western and eastern wards—the city descended until reaching the Jordan River.36 The promise of sanitary water in the upper eastern and northern wards thus remained ominous to the Westside.37 On June 15, 1880, forty-six residents complained of a “stagnant pool of water . . . on South Temple between Seventh and Eighth West Streets,” yielding “effluvia arising from decayed and putrefying matter” that injured “their health and comfort.” In 1893, the city health director, Theodore Beatty, reported to the city council that numerous complaints cited “a large amount of stagnant water on Sixth West Street between South Temple and First South Street,” which created an “extremely offensive and a dangerous nuisance.” Several years later, William Showell, the city sanitary inspector, testified that “foul ditches” near Pioneer Square (300 West) yielded an odor that remained strong enough to “cause every person living on the block a fit subject for the hospital.” Meanwhile, Giovanno Cereghino, an Italian immigrant, requested that the city health department abate the “stagnant pools of water on Eighth South Street, between Third and Fourth West streets.”38 While Westside canals existed to channel runoff and debris to the Jordan River or north to the Hot Springs Lake, over time they evolved into “open sewer[s]” that became a “menace to public health.”39 Weeds, leaves, and excrement choked the canals, which also collected garbage because the city failed to provide garbage collection until 1895 and did so then primarily for the CBD. The city also required citizens to dispose of their garbage, but worked with representatives of the Salt Lake Real Estate Association to prohibit dumping on the Eastside.40 To comply with city regulations and to save money during the 1893 depression, residents of the eastern, northern, and southern suburbs commonly dumped their refuse in western canals.

Although Beatty abated some of these “unsanitary” canals by filling them with malodorous but “harmless” horse manure, according to another city health commissioner, William Dalby, in 1895 some of them remained only partially filled, which caused “much sickness in this vicinity.” In response, members of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs proposed ending canal dumping and creating “more sanitary garbage disposal under supervision of town authorities.”41 36

Salt Lake Tribune, September 1, 1888.

Historically residents identified the Westside as the land west of Main Street, an elevated north/south axis that ran along the east side of the Temple Block, the literal and spiritual center of Salt Lake City.

Although some Westsiders settled north of the Temple Block, in the early twentieth century most of them built homes and businesses between it and 2100 South, the southernmost edge of the city.

38 City Council Minutes, June 15, 1880, March 28, 1893, October 20, 1896, March 16, 1897, SLCRO. 39 Ibid., November 18, 1889, March 18, 1884; Salt Lake Telegram, August 17, 1906.

40 City Council Minutes, February 19, March 12, 1906, SLCRO. 41 Ibid., September 26, December 12, 1893, January 30, February 13, April 27, September 11, 1894, August 27, 1895; “Three Decades of General Federation Work,” box 66, fd. 4, Women’s Clubs Records, JWML. 37

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As Westside residents witnessed their living conditions and property values fall during the turn-of-the-century, some, including many lowerincome Mormons, established neighborhood improvement leagues. The Westside Improvement League and the Eight West Improvement League, for instance, emerged to press for sanitary reforms. On June 3, 1907, “one of the sufferers” editorialized: We, on the west side, pay our taxes and we pay double the amount proportionately to the value of our property as the people do on the east side. We are poor people, of the working class, and the assessor knows what each individual owns and he is taxed to the full extent of its value. The money is taken to build boulevards, gardens and buy electric chandeliers to beautify the east side of the city. . . .

Our ditches are not kept clean or open. Our canals are not filled up at the mouth because there is not sufficient money allowed for the west side. Jordan river at the mouth has to make a new channel every year. All the filth and debris which is washed into it comes down through the second and third precincts and no effort at dredging or making an opening at the mouth of it has ever been made. . . We are the tail end and cesspool of our city.42

By the early twentieth century, sanitary divides, as well as organizing for sanitary reform, were becoming increasingly complicated, based on a mysterious calculus of socioeconomics, geography, and race.

Although these complaints resulted in an antidumping ordinance, it was loosely enforced and the city continued to dispose of garbage, filth, and swill in the Westside until 1916.43 In 1907, Salt Lake City leased a new public landfill that was supplied by a special garbage train, but the cost of transportation was high, ranging from $7.50 to $9.00 per load. Thus to save money, residents and officials alike regularly avoided the landfill and dumped their filth in the Westside, even if it was “not to the best interests of sanitation and health.”44 If disposing of refuse in the “least desirable neighborhoods” was a national trend, as the historian Martin Melosi has observed, so was showing preference to central business districts and suburbs in the implementation of sewer lines.45 During the late nineteenth century, Americans increasingly moved to the cities, using city waterworks and overflowing cesspools and privies. Officials worked to regulate waste repositories, but they believed that soil served as a natural filter for excreta whose liquid and solid components fertilized surrounding flora. This theory came under attack, however, as 42 Salt Lake Herald, June 3, 1907; see also, Salt Lake Herald, March 17, 1902, January 1, 1905, March 6, 1908, September 19, 1913.

43 In 1906, city health commissioner M. R. Stewart, city sanitary inspector W. H. Margetts, and four city garbage wagon drivers were arrested for “creating a nuisance” at the corner of 1000 West/300 South.

Municipal Journal and Public Works 21, no. 8 (1906): 186.

44 Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1915 (Salt Lake City: Western Printing, 1916), 543; City Council Minutes, April 1, 1907, SLCRO; Salt Lake Telegram, January 20, 1911; Message of the Mayor 1907,199; Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1911 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing, n.d.), 354.

45 Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban American from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 115–16.

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF ENGINEERING SOCIETIES

population density and infections increased.

A 1909 map of Salt Lake City’s In Salt Lake City, health officials under- sewer system. Westside residents stood that wastewater from upper wards eventually gained access to the drained west to contaminate lower ward intercepting sewer. wells. In the 1870s, downtown citizens informed municipal officials that water mains were vital because “their wells [were] tainted from the water oozing through the soil in a southwesterly direction.” In April 1880, two dozen residents of the western Eastern Slope testified that it remained “impossible to obtain pure water from their wells, owing to the want of proper sewage facilities.” 46 Their wells contained bacteria that spread typhoid fever, diphtheria, and cholera.

Initially, and as with the delivery of water, the debates regarding sewage facilities fractured along religious lines.

Throughout the 1880s, morbidity rates skyrocketed, prompting city chemist Herman Harms to conclude that, generally, surface drainage from the “higher portions of the city” infected wells in the lower wards. As he explained, water “filters through cesspools, dry closets, and other places of 46

City Council Minutes, April 29, 1879, June 22, 1880, SLCRO.

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filth . . . [to carry] germs and impurities directly into wells.”47 The Salt Lake Tribune agreed, arguing that downtown had become “a breeding place for disease” and that it needed a sewer. By contrast, the Deseret News asserted that health could be promoted and preserved by living in accordance with LDS values, which included maintaining a proper diet and personal cleanliness and receiving the blessings of elders. Moreover, one News reader decried such “nonsensical sanitary talk” and argued that in “no portion of this city [was] the soil unclean, or impregnated with unhealthful effluvia. . . . Such a condition is a scientific impossibility.”48 In 1883, the sentiment of the Deseret News changed. With backing from the Chamber of Commerce, Deseret News editor and LDS church official Charles Penrose affirmed that the central business district “is so situated that sewage could easily be collected” and that the best outlet for sewage disposal was the Jordan River, and ultimately, the Great Salt Lake.

Understandably, this proposal incited Westside anger. Residents there invited “everybody who value[d] their health and homes” to meet and condemn Penrose’s plan as undemocratic and akin to the waterworks plan that benefitted “wealthy men” downtown, “non-tax paying tenants and [the] Chinese.” Residents also proposed alternative plans, including sewage farming, which entailed using liquid sewage to irrigate nutrient-poor lands west of the Jordan River.

Though gladdened by the Deseret News’s change of heart, the Tribune still played religious politics by condemning the city councilors and church leaders—“the damned old elders of Israel”—who had initially resisted sewer construction and instead counseled Mormon religiosity. Rather than supporting modern reforms, they supported “a kind of Asiatic progress.”

Rather than advancing a democratic plan, they now advocated one that favored the rich and hurt the poor. Moreover, after city officials approved sewer construction in 1888, the Mormon church allegedly imported converts from throughout the state to build the “Mormon sewer” and, importantly, cast votes for the Mormon People’s Party during the fall 1889 election.49 In 1890, the city collected over $70,000 in tax revenue to fund sewer construction in the CBD, with the first main being laid on Main Street.

Working-class whites and non-whites, especially Greek immigrants, built the sewers, which continued out of the business district into the lower Avenues and Eastern Slope—an area collectively known as “sewer district one.”50 In 1892, sewer service became mandatory, and officials pressured 47 Salt Lake Herald, August 27, 1903, October 24, 1901, November 23, 1902, January 27, August 13, 29, September 6, 1903.

48 Salt Lake Tribune, May 23, 1888; Deseret News, September 10, 1881, November 14, 1888.

49 Deseret News, November 4, 1887, May 9, 11, 16, October 24, 1888; Salt Lake Tribune, May 8, 23, 1888, September 24, October 2, 1889, August 6, 14, 1890, November 5, 1893.

50 Historically, Americans contested what it meant to be “white,” particularly during the late nineteenth century. As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson writes, “The ascendant view among native-born Americans in the 1890s” was that “Southern European, Semitic, and Slavic immigrants held as poor a claim

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residents outside of the district to file for Gravity outlet sewer, Salt Lake connections once residents had paid three- City. quarters of main construction costs, one dollar permits, and charges for residential hookups. The total cost for individual properties could range from one to several hundred dollars, with the bulk of it coming from main assessments that were calculated at several dollars per property foot.51 Although the construction proceeded slowly, by 1893 the sewer could drain suburban and downtown waste. Waste traveled south through six-foot wide brick and concrete pipes on Main Street and west on 500 South to a sump at the Jordan River, where it entered the Surplus Canal and then flowed to the Great Salt Lake. Yet the pump remained underpowered and carried only forty percent of sewage to the canal. This left sixty percent of the sewage to enter the Jordan River, where it decimated the native duck and trout population and sickened the inhabitants of the riverside.

Thus in 1894, city engineer Abraham Doremus designed a new brick to the color ‘white’ as the Japanese, and therefore ought to be turned away at once.” Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 76–77.

51 Second Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1889 (Salt Lake City, 1890), 13–15, 63–71, Series 4882, City Documents, no. 2, USHS; Deseret News, October 17, 1888; “Interviews with Greeks in Utah,” Mr. and Mrs. Michael Bapis, box 1, fd. 7, p. 3, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Borovilos, fd. 11, p. 2, MS 479, JWML; Deseret News, October 25, 1892; Salt Lake Tribune, June 1, 1892.

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gravity sewer to drain filth from 400 East and 900 South in a northwesterly direction to its westernmost point at 400 West and South Temple, and then to a sewage farm near Hot Springs lake, four miles north of the city.

According to the Tribune, the new gravity sewer seemed to be full of promise, as it was adequately powered, expertly designed, and able to serve “the best residence portion and the business center of the city.” However, it only had the capability to receive sewage from the areas east and north of it, or about two-thirds of the city. “The sewage of the west side,” the Tribune noted, “will have to flow into another sewer lying south and north along the Jordan. . . . This is a future consideration however.”52 The new gravity sewer began operation in 1896, with nearly all of its customers receiving service by 1905. Although it experienced some leaking and cracking, it functioned well enough to remove excreta from the city’s confines. The Salt Lake Herald observed the technology’s salubrious effect, proclaiming, “Salt Lake is growing healthier all the time.”53 Yet this proclamation overlooked the condition of areas without sewers. Although the city made plans to improve the Westside, known as Sewer District Two, bond sales and construction did not commence until 1906, with sewer service not starting until 1911 and in some cases not until the 1930s. In the meantime, wastewater and excreta from homes in the east, north, and downtown without sewers collected in western wells, lots, and canals.

Although health officials such as the physician Martha Hughes Cannon acknowledged this problem, they advocated a short-term solution—using new dry-earth closets and boiling water before consuming it—rather than a more difficult and expensive long-term fix.54 Beginning in the 1890s and continuing throughout the early 1900s, Salt Lake City experienced an unprecedented level of contagion. Shallow wells appeared to be the main culprits. Between August and October 1894, typhoid fever sickened 103 people, thirty-four of whom died, resulting in the highest mortality rate in the city’s history. While people throughout Salt Lake City suffered, those in the Westside suffered more. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the “vast majority of cases manifest[ed] themselves in the western part of the city where the ground is low and damp and affording, at present, poor facilities for drainage.”55 52

Salt Lake Tribune, December 28, 1895, January 11, 1894; Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1893 (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Lithographic, 1894), 55–56, 117.

53 Salt Lake Herald, November 23, 1902.

54 Salt Lake Telegram, February 5, 1910; “Sewerage System of Salt Lake City,” Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies 42 (1909), map; Message of the Mayor 1893, 55–56; Sherilyn Cox Bennion, “The Salt Lake Sanitarian: Medical Adviser to the Saints,” Utah Historical Quarterly 57 (Spring 1989), 125–37; Mari Grana, Pioneer, Polygamist, Politician: The Life of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon (Helena, MT: Twodot Press, 2009), 95.

55 “Samuel A. Woolley,” boxes 1–2, MS D 1556, CHL; Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 27, 1895. For instance, the son of Samuel A. Woolley succumbed to the disease; the Woolleys lived at 405 South and 300 East.

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Nine years later, in 1903, an epidemic Concentrations of several ethnic occurred after Westsiders drank from a well groups developed in Salt Lake infected with typhoid bacillus. Their symp- City from roughly 1900 to 1920. toms included high fever, abdominal pain, The city’s Chinatown predated and rashes, although some of these infected these enclaves by about thirty people remained asymptomatic and unwit- years and was in disrepair by tingly passed germs on to others. At the peak 1900. of the outbreak, local health officials counted sixty-five victims of typhoid but suspected many more because hiding from officials was a common practice, particularly among the foreign poor who feared deportation. After mapping the disease, health officials concluded that the epidemic had originated from a well at 300 West and 900 South.56 Finally, in 1909 the city experienced the “most serious typhoid fever epidemic in its history,” with 721 cases in the Westside, 184 in the Eastern Slope, and 268 in the Avenues. Interestingly, the Salt Lake Herald noted that “foreigners dying in Salt Lake largely outnumber[ed] other classes with 376. Natives of the city passing away were 193 in number and 294 were natives of Utah.” Just so, immigrants who sought medical attention had surnames such as Cappucio, Cannochi, Capiccosi, Koukopoulos, Kootsuki, and Skiliris.57 56

Salt Lake Herald, August 29, 1903.

Ibid., September 21, February 3, 1909. Helen Papanikolas recalled that Greek women were “very secretive” and “frantic” over contracting tuberculosis. “Interviews with Greeks in Utah,” Helen Papanikolas, box 2, fd. 3, p. 12.

57

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In response to this outbreak, city officials and civic groups launched a statewide campaign to educate the public about cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene. The campaign revolved around annual “cleanup crusades,” which lasted throughout the 1930s and evidenced the new science of vector ecology.

Crusades were common in cities during the Progressive Era and targeted vehicles of disease transmission, including unwashed bodies, uncovered garbage cans, leaky garbage wagons, unpasteurized milk, impure food and ice, and the housefly—“the worst immigrant.”58 Educational programs appeared in public schools, while organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs worked to educate—and demean—foreigners in particular about the dangers of dirt and the need for domestic and personal cleanliness. To them, foreigners seemed to be ignorant, unable, or unwilling to embrace American standards of health and progress.

Although environmental and personal health remained connected, the Salt Lake Herald chose to stress individual responsibility alone, saying, “The great majority of the people [in the Westside] pay no attention to sanitation.” The Salt Lake Telegram conceded this point by making scapegoats of domestic servants, many of whom were foreign and black women, for spreading typhoid fever by mishandling waste: “Another point that can be made with justice is that housekeepers are careless about their disposal of garbage. Very few of them know how to handle it.” Nurses at local hospitals agreed with the Herald and privately chastised industrial workers —particularly miners and railroad workers, the majority of whom lived in the Westside—for their “low standards of living.” In addition, public school teachers noted that the “children of immigrants [remained] eager to play but reluctant to wash.”59 From the early 1900s until the 1920s, Salt Lake City’s non-white immigrant population of Greeks, Italians, and Mexicans swelled to nearly five thousand persons. Pushed by economic and political turmoil in their native lands and pulled by job opportunities in Utah’s expanding mining and railroad industries, these “new” immigrants often settled in ethnic enclaves throughout the Westside. Following the arrival of the Utah Central and Denver and Rio Grande Western railroads in the late nineteenth century, the western half of Salt Lake City evolved from a marginal agricultural space formerly inhabited by people of British and Scandinavian descent (both Mormon and non-Mormon) to an industrial district populated by dark and olive-skinned immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Latin America.

58 Richards, Of Medicine, 196; “A Brief History of Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1912–1950,” October 1912–October 1914, box 1, fd. 1, Women’s Clubs Records, JWML; Salt Lake Herald, January 24, 1909.

59 Salt Lake Telegram, December 30, 1903, July 9, 1910, September 4, 1903; Ramjoue, “The Negro in Utah,” 21; “Interviews with Japanese in Utah,” Jasuo Sasaki, box 3, fd. 4, p. s1:15, Accn. 1209, JWML.

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These foreigners typically found jobs in railroad yards and depots, tool shops, factories, mines, and smelters. They settled as families or as fictive kin to offset the high cost of living. Tenements and cheap hotels filled the city’s Greek Town, Little Italy, and Mexican Town, which were bounded by South Temple and 600 South on the north and south and 100 West and 500 West on the east and west. In contrast to the suburbs and downtown, these enclaves witnessed rising dirt and noise due to industrial growth, which combined with fetid canals, poisoned wells, and garbage-strewn lots to drive health and property values down.

White onlookers tended to view these foreigners with a combination of sympathy and disgust. For instance, Katherine Groebli, a graduate student in public health at the University of Utah, studied immigrant housing in the Westside where, she acknowledged, the “contrast between filth and cleanliness was the most evident.” Housing normally lacked shower and toilet facilities, although a few places offered “modern conveniences” for a premium. “Adobe and cheap frame” multi-family units cost less to rent, but they remained “the most unsanitary.” Although the city provided free housing for the sick-poor—especially those with tuberculosis, a “poverty disease” that afflicted the cold and the hungry—this housing usually lacked adequate resources, including hot water and furnaces, and thus exacerbated an “endless chain of misery.” Moreover, white landlords typically charged foreigners higher rent than they did native-born Americans. While immigrants such as the Japanese might be “a clean, energetic and advancing people,” Groebli reasoned, most others were “careless and shiftless.” In particular, she concluded, the Italians and Greeks were willing to tolerate the “most unsanitary conditions.”60 Yet many circumstances hindered the ability of these people to leave such conditions. Restrictive housing covenants based on race and ethnicity discouraged and prevented people considered to be non-white from owning homes in desirable areas; likewise, meager incomes forced nearly ninety percent of immigrants to rent rather than buy property. If foreigners desired sanitary improvements, they often faced absentee landlords who were unwilling to pay the “oppressive costs” of sanitary improvements. Landlords also frequently hid the “inherent defects” of their property to escape city fines.61 Thus, Greek immigrants such as Andy Katsanevas remembered cleanliness being an elusive experience. He endured insults such as “dirty Greek” and remembered identifying more as “Greek and not [as an] 60 Katherine Elizabeth Groebli, “On the Housing Problem in Salt Lake City” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1915), 3, 5, 15, 18, 22, 46; Thirteenth Census, Table IV, 890.

61 Deseret News, November 14, 1890, August 20, 1905; F. C. Kelsey, “Map of Salt Lake City, Utah, City Engineer’s Office, Showing Sewer System” (1896), in author’s possession; “Minutes of the Meetings of the Salt Lake County Board of Public Welfare, August 28, 1935,” September 6, 1935, Salt Lake County Welfare Board Minutes 1933–1946, 1937–1942, 03-522, box W-1, Salt Lake County Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah.

In one case, the Welfare Board found that a “landlord would not make basic sanitary improvements because the renting family was too poor to pay anything.”

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American while living on the Westside.” The neighborhood of the Denver Similarly, Mary Mousalimas recalled growing and Rio Grande railroad, seen up dirty like a “‘nigger.’” George Zeese, here in 1917, served as a locus of meanwhile, tried to improve his condition by much Westside ethnic settlement. taking showers at the Young Men’s Christian Academy, only to endure the mockery of onlookers.62 The parents of Rebecca Alvera exemplified the experience of many Mexicans who arrived in Utah after the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Alternately taunted as a “greaser” and a “dirty Mexican,” Alvera lived at 602 West and 700 South in an abandoned railroad car whose seats were removed, but which lacked a toilet. The Alvera family suffered the loss of eleven of twelve children, likely due to sanitary diseases, as did the family of John Florez, whose six siblings fatally drank diphtheria-laced “water used by railroad engines.” 63 As water-borne illnesses are often contagious, overcrowding amplifies the problem of poor sanitation. Because the average family size among Salt Lake City’s “poorer classes” was six, population density deepened the crisis created by the lack of waterworks for nearly four thousand residents and lack of sewer connections for nearly fifteen thousand.64 In turn-of-the-century Salt Lake City, then, sanitation existed as a 62 Message of the Mayor 1893, 117; “Interviews with Greeks in Utah,” box 1, fd. 12, pp. 5, 56, Mary Mousalimas, box 3, fd. 5, p. 22, JWML; Helen Papanikolas, A Greek Odyssey in the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 287.

63 “Interviews with Hispanics in Utah,” box 1, fd. 4, fd. 9, pp. 4–5, s1:3–15, Accn. 1369, JWML. 64 Report of the Utah–White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, April 6 and 7, 1931 (Salt Lake City, 1931), 1–2; J. Wesley Noall, “Quality of Water Supply of Salt Lake City,” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1931), 48; David C. Martin and Arnold M. Marston, “Well Development for Salt Lake City Water Supply,” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1931); D. C. Houston and Rey M. Hill, Health Conditions and Facilities in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Planning Board, 1936), 40–43.

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municipal improvement mainly accessible to the wealthy and the white.

Communal in name only, public health ended up serving particular interests.

Those parties benefitted greatly from industrial growth and population increases, but they remained unwilling to manage the more unsavory effects of such growth. Salt Lake City’s authorities followed the national trend of delimiting waterworks to certain neighborhoods: first to the central business district (at public expense) and then to the suburbs such as the Eastern Slope, Sugar House, and the Avenues. The perception of these places as “the most healthful portions of the city,” in the Salt Lake Herald’s words, helped to reinforce the city’s shifting socio-cultural map.65 Religious contention appeared occasionally during water and sewer construction, but it paled in comparison to the more powerful politics of race and class. These considerations became physically manifested in the squalor of Westside neighborhoods and the sickness and death of Westside residents. Affluent Salt Lakers thus presided—knowingly and unknowingly —over Progressive Era–health reforms that created a social-medical hierarchy that placed themselves at the top and less acceptable Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Mexican immigrants at the bottom.

65

Salt Lake Herald, September 21, 1900.

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By DALE W ADAMS

I

n anticipation of holiday celebrations, A turkey farm, in approximately an 1897 issue of the Deseret News Weekly the 1940s. ran a column detailing how a “housemother” could best prepare her Thanksgiving table. One hoped, of course, that a succulent roast turkey would form the center of that feast, but the columnist recognized that such a treat would not fit in every family’s budget. Not to worry: if a young bird was unavailable “and nothing short of a patriarch is available, do not despair; as an hour’s preliminary steaming will plump him, make him tender, and in good condition for roasting.” Yet “if even the honored bird—the turkey—flies too high for the housewife of limited resources, ‘mock duck’ can essay its place at a quarter of the cost.”1 As the Deseret News piece made clear, turkeys—in spite of their exalted place in American cuisine—were not always an item easily obtained. And in Utah, the ability of a home cook to present a turkey at the Thanksgiving feast might well be entwined with the intricacies of technology, markets, and transportation systems. How, then, did turkeys become a thriving element of Utah’s agricultural economy in the twentieth century? Natives and pioneers had uses for the bird, but the development of a profitable turkey industry required technological advancements, adequate financing, and the concerted action of organizations and individuals.

Turkeys have a long history in the state of Utah. Paleontologists found turkey-like fossils in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in a formation dated to be some 76 million years old.2 Though wild turkeys

Dale W Adams lives in Park City and is professor emeritus, The Ohio State University. Michele Adams, Ricky Christensen, Nancy Garlick, and Dr. Robert E. Warnick assisted with this article. I especially appreciate insights provided by Leonard Blackham.

1

“Domestic Science,” Deseret News Weekly, December 4, 1897.

Lindsay E. Zanno and Scott D. Sampson, “A New Oviraptorosaur (Theropoda, Maniraptora) from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) of Utah,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 25 (2005): 897–904.

2

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Grasshoppers, Thanksgiving Dinner, and Utah Turkeys

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probably did not exist in Utah prior to 1847, Indians in southeast Utah had numerous domesticated turkeys, raising them for many purposes besides food.3 Numerous Mormon pioneers brought turkeys with them to the Great Basin. These bronze, relatively small, birds were of the Narragansett breed. Within a few years, a handful of turkeys, strutting around a farmyard, became a familiar sight in the Utah Territory. Rudimentary markets for the birds soon developed, as shown by an advertisement from a Salt Lake City entrepreneur, George Goddard, who offered to buy fat turkeys.4 By the late 1850s, turkeys had become common enough that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posted a price of $1.50 to $2.50 for each turkey submitted as tithing.5 By 1858, merchants in Salt Lake City regularly sold live turkeys during the holidays. William Jennings’s Deseret Meat and General Provisions Store offered a supply of meats that included “turkeys that were as good as it was possible to raise any place.”6 Jennings bragged that he had sold one turkey that year for the princely sum of twenty-five dollars, perhaps an exaggeration since a so-so horse fetched less than this at the time. Similar sales of live turkeys during the holiday season increased in other communities around the territory.

The pioneers, like the Indians before them, had various reasons for raising turkeys. In 1848, Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball included turkeys on a list of animals they recommended to bring west because of their value in insect control.7 Before 1848, Great Basin insects had hopped and crawled long distances in their quest for sprigs of greenery, but the pioneers’ irrigated crops soon provided them sumptuous banquets. What came to be called Mormon Crickets, along with grasshoppers, were, and still are, a nuisance for Utah farmers. Utahns designated the California gull as their state bird because of its role in lessening the crop damage done by swarms of crickets during the spring of 1848. Had domesticated turkeys existed in number by then, they might have been accorded this recognition instead.

Turkeys especially helped to control insects in the Uinta Basin where farmers relied on alfalfa, a crop relished by grasshoppers and weevils. After spending a week touring the basin in 1923, Thomas Redmond reported seeing more turkeys there than he had ever seen elsewhere in the state.8 He 3

Chester A. Thomas, “Did Utah Have Turkeys in 1200 A.D.?” Utah Fish and Game Magazine 13 (1957): 5.

4 Deseret News, January 9, 1856. Goddard sold a full, hot meal at his Refreshment Saloon, Bakery, and Confectionary Establishment for twenty-five cents. At these prices, one could exchange a large turkey for ten meals at Goddard’s. In 2013, a similar turkey might sell for the equivalent price of one modest meal at an average Salt Lake City restaurant, which demonstrates the dramatic decline in the relative prices of turkeys since pioneer times.

5 Deseret News, May 20, 1857.

6 Deseret News, December 29, 1858.

7 Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, August 1848, CR 100 137, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL).

8 Vernal (UT) Express, September 14, 1923.

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mentioned that insects had severely damaged crops the previous spring, but that turkeys had protected alfalfa during 1923. Farmers asserted that turkeys allowed them to have three crops: alfalfa hay, alfalfa seed, and the turkeys themselves.

Eventually, turkeys helped control insects throughout the state, and were occasionally hauled long distances for that purpose. In 1945 Wilford Larsen partially raised 2,500 turkeys in Orem before trucking them hundreds of miles south to Indian Creek, located northwest of Monticello, to the Scorup-Somerville Cattle Company ranch. There they feasted on swarms of grasshoppers that infested alfalfa fields.9 The beginnings of a commercial turkey industry in Utah can be traced to the 1880s. Until then, several factors—including a restricted ability to incubate and market turkeys—limited flock size to a few dozen birds, and insect control was a major reason for having them. Hens hatched their own eggs, turkeys foraged for much of their sustenance, and they were usually sold live. Turkey growers mostly provided supplemental feed to poults and sometimes to adults several weeks before selling them. Most turkeys were consumed near the places where they were raised. The invention of small kerosene incubators in the 1880s enabled a few farmers to increase their flocks to a few hundred turkeys, and this helped boost Utah’s total turkey production to perhaps a hundred thousand birds by 1900.10 These simple incubators cost about thirty dollars and could hatch up to 180 eggs at a time.

Limited means of transporting and selling turkeys outside a farmer’s local area also constrained flock sizes; this did not begin to change until the early 1900s. One early out-of-area shipment occurred when Ernest Hafen and Theodore Graf hauled a wagonload of live turkeys and chickens from Santa Clara, Utah, to sell to miners in Caliente and Pioche, Nevada, during the 1908 Christmas holiday.11 Two years later, Andrew Sproul Jr. from the nearby community of Washington hauled 150 dressed birds north to Modena for shipment by rail to Ogden12 Similar sales of turkeys some distance from where they had been raised began in other Utah communities around the same time. Eventually, railroads played a major role in facilitating the marketing of Utah turkeys inside and outside of the state.

Another technological improvement—the invention of the Smith Electric Incubator at the beginning of the First World War—furthered the development of Utah’s turkey industry. The Smith incubator, accompanied by the importation of poults from California and Oregon (where turkey eggs hatched more readily), allowed a few farmers to boost their flock sizes to 9

Times Independent (Moab, UT), June 28, 1945.

The Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, vol. V, Agriculture, Farms, Livestock, and Animal Products (p. 668), enumerated about eleven thousand turkeys in Utah, but because the census occurred in January, the overall number of birds in the state later in the year would have been some multiple of this.

11 Washington County News (St. George, UT), November 5, 1908.

12 Ibid., November 24, 1910.

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around a thousand birds.13 Before World War I, Utah was a net importer of turkeys and other poultry to satisfy holiday needs, with the worth of turkey, chickens, and eggs imported annually amounting to perhaps a half million dollars.14 Dressed turkeys were shipped to Utah in barrels via rail, but they sold at a discount in comparison to local birds. In 1905 imported turkeys sold for thirteen cents a pound wholesale, while fresh, local turkeys sold for eighteen cents a pound. 15 This changed soon after the war when Utah became a net exporter of poultry products, amounting to about half a million dollars in revenue each year, part of which came from turkey sales. The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not collect statistics on turkey production in Utah until 1929, but the total number in the state likely was not much more than one hundred thousand in any year before WWI. Between 1900 and the early 1930s islands of commercial turkey production gradually formed around the state, with concentrations in the Uinta Basin, around St. George, in Iron County, in Sanpete and Sevier Counties, in Utah Valley, and along the Wasatch Front from Salt Lake County to Box Elder County, including the Cache Valley. Initially, these islands involved a few farmers who raised up to a thousand birds each, one or more local merchants who sold feed, and perhaps one or more entrepreneurs who arranged to “pool� turkeys for shipment to cities during the holiday season.

After the mid-1920s these islands of production increasingly concentrated around new processing plants.

One of the first areas of commercial production emerged in the Uinta Basin, a trend facilitated in part by motorized vehicles. In 1914, a few turkey growers in the basin shipped their birds to Salt Lake City during the holidays. Soon, several local businessmen bought turkeys for resale, and along with some of the larger growers, shipped dressed turkeys out of the basin by parcel post.16 In 1915, William Witbeck sent a thousand dressed turkeys from the basin to Salt Lake City via parcel post with good economic results.17 Favorable farm prices during WWI induced growers to boost the number of turkeys raised in many parts of Utah, including the Uinta Basin. For the 1920 Thanksgiving season the Post Office hauled about ten thousand pounds of turkeys from Vernal to Price, from which point they went by rail to Los Angeles.18 In 1922, the American Poultry Association handled the Thanksgiving marketing in Los Angeles, and the Uintah County Farm Bureau arranged for the pooling of turkeys for 13 All eggs are permeable. Low levels of oxygen in the air reduce the ability of poults to peck through the thick membrane and shell of a turkey egg.

14 Washington County News (St. George, UT), September 20, 1923.

15 Deseret News, December 11, 1905.

16 Roosevelt (UT) Standard, November 9, 1914.

17 Doris Karren Burton, A History of Uintah County: Scratching the Surface (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Uintah County Commission, 1996), 118.

18 Vernal (UT) Express, November 26, 1920.

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shipment. 19 The Far m Bureau also helped to ship an additional two railroad cars of dressed turkeys to Omaha for the Christmas market that year. A number of far mers in the basin increased the size of their flocks because of these opportunities to export turkeys out of the state. F. O. Lundberg, for example, who lived in Fort Duchesne, had several hundred turkeys in 1922 but increased his flock to about 1,500 birds the next year. 20 Uinta Basin growers raised some forty thousand turkeys in 1923.21 Elsewhere in the state, other centers of commercial production likewise developed in the 1920s and 1930s. In Park J. Arza Adams with his turkey Valley, Box Elder County, L. G. Cater had two flock, in Pleasant Grove. thousand turkeys in 1923, the largest number in that part of the state.22 Within a couple of years, he and several other growers in the county were raising about six thousand turkeys. Ray S. Tanner in Indianola, Sanpete County, started with a small flock of about a hundred birds imported from California and Colorado in 1923. From these he raised about one thousand turkeys, saving three hundred of them to be laying hens. The next year a hatchery in Manti processed his eggs and produced enough poults for Tanner to sell a railroad car full of turkeys in 1924.23 Gradually, these centers of turkey production concentrated around hatcheries and processing plants. Moroni Sanders, Ervil Sanders, Bill Sanders, and E. J. Graff developed hatcheries that specialized in turkeys in La Verkin in the early 1930s.24 They had flocks that produced eggs, and 19

Ibid., December 8, 1922.

Ibid., September 14, 1923.

21 Ibid., November 2, 1923.

22 Box Elder News (Brigham City, UT), November 13, 1923.

23 Albert C. T. Antrei and Ruth D. Scow, eds., The Other Forty-Niners: A Topical History of Sanpete County, Utah 1849–1983 (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1982), 297.

24 Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Washington County Chapter, Under Dixie Sun: A History of Washington County by Those Who Loved Their Forbears (Panguitch, UT: Garfield County News, 1950), 402.

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their facilities took advantage of the better hatching conditions in that area.

Ervil Sanders delivered poults throughout Utah and into Colorado. Along with these hatching activities, other local businessmen formed the La Verkin Feed and Hardware Company to provide feed for the poultry industry around La Verkin. For a number of years after WWII, turkeys remained a multimillion-dollar business in the area.

An additional concentration of turkey production emerged in Utah County, where Andrew W. Pulley began raising turkeys in American Fork in the early 1920s. To provide feed for his flock, Pulley and his sons John and Adolphus built a feed mill in 1926.25 They added a processing plant in 1935 and eventually raised as many as twenty thousand turkeys a year. The Pulleys’ experience encouraged other farmers in the north end of Utah Valley to experiment with turkeys. Partly because of the increased local interest in turkeys, American Fork City celebrated Poultry Days from 1923 to 1941. Fittingly, Andrew Pulley’s daughter, Mary Pulley, became the first Poultry Day Queen in 1923.26 The commercialization of turkeys in Utah was closely tied to the building of modern processing plants that supported the surrounding centers of production. Charles Rudd built the first such plant in about 1925 in Salt Lake City and eventually helped to erect seventeen other plants around the state. Before these plants existed, turkey growers, such as Joseph Jones of Enoch, had invited their neighbors to help kill and remove feathers from a hundred or so birds at a time. In contrast, the modern processing plants could handle thousands of turkeys a day, under more sanitary conditions, and then immediately store them in cooling facilities.

Despite the growth of the turkey industry in the 1920s and 1930s, several difficulties checked the ability of growers to market turkeys outside of their local areas. For instance, growers needed standard methods of killing the birds, cleaning them, and packaging them for shipment. Extension agents from the Utah State Agricultural College (USAC) gave lectures around the state on how to prepare turkeys for commercial sales.27 The unavailability of prepared poultry feed presented a further impediment to turkey production. Before WWI, growers in most Utah communities did not have access to prepared feed. After the war, commercial feed producers, such as Sperry, General Mills, and Purina, increasingly distributed prepared poultry feed through agents; several cooperatives, and some private firms, also began to manufacture poultry feed.

25 Betty G. Spencer, American Fork City: The Growing Years (American Fork, UT: American Fork City, 2006), 286.

26 Ibid., 196. Later, the Pulleys provided an interesting footnote to the history of Utah’s turkey industry.

In 1942, in response to WWII labor shortages, more than four hundred Japanese-American internees at Topaz volunteered to work away from the camp. Some fifty men and women from this group worked at the Pulley processing plant in American Fork; each earned nineteen dollars a month. See Millard County Chronicle (Delta, UT), October 14, 29, 1942.

27 Roosevelt (UT) Standard, August 20, 1924.

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A handful of individuals and several organizations played key roles in the rapid growth of the turkey industry after WWI. The switch from the state being an importer of turkeys to becoming a substantial exporter in the 1920s, for example, can be attributed largely to the efforts of Benjamin Brown and to a cooperative he organized. Born near Odessa, Ukraine, in 1885, he migrated to the United States at fifteen. During a brief stint in the National Farm School, a facility to train Jewish men and women in agricultural skills, he was inspired by the “Back to the Soil” movement that led to the establishment of about forty Jewish farm colonies around the United States.28 Over two years, Brown recruited several dozen Jews to settle in an area immediately west of Gunnison, Utah. The settlement, called Clarion, began in 1911 and encompassed about six thousand acres.

But the soil proved to be poor, the irrigation system was unreliable, the settlers had limited agricultural experience, and, even more importantly, they lacked social cohesion. Despite financial support from local benefactors, the project collapsed and most of the settlers left Utah.

Undaunted, Brown continued to farm with his brother. Within a few years he became director of the Paiute Reservoir and Irrigation System and was elected president of the Gunnison Valley Canning Company. He also managed a cattle feedlot and took the lead in building a cold storage and ice plant in Gunnison. This facility later made it possible for an association of central Utah poultrymen to export their products outside the state.

Although numerous farmers in central Utah raised poultry before WWI, the market for their products was extremely limited. To deal with this problem, federal extension agents urged farmers to organize, and this resulted in the 1922 formation of a three-county group called the Nephi, Manti, and Richfield Poultry Association. The genesis of what would eventually become the Utah Poultry Producers’ Cooperative can be traced to a meeting held in Gunnison on August 13, 1922.29 Brown hosted the meeting that focused on forming a marketing group. Later, in early October, the Central Utah Poultry Association was organized in Gunnison. This private marketing firm covered Sanpete, Sevier, and Juab counties.30 Brown and his exchange handled the candling and grading of eggs and also arranged for the sale of eggs, chickens, and turkeys, mostly in California.31 The exchange provided three important functions: pooling products into carload lots, enforcing uniform grading standards, and arranging for buyers outside the state. For the Thanksgiving market in 1922, Brown shipped two railroad cars of turkeys grown around Gunnison and Elsinore to the Harry Phillips’s Company in Los Angeles.32 The favorable 28 Robert A. Goldberg, Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986).

29 Gunnison (UT) Valley News, August 18, 1922.

30 Ibid., October 12, 1922.

31 Candling eggs involves putting them over a bright light and discarding those eggs with blood spots.

32 Gunnison (UT) Valley News, November 23, 1922.

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prices that farmers received prompted a surge in local egg and turkey production the following year. The selling of railroad carload lots of poultry products outside the state removed a huge bottleneck for poultry farmers in central Utah and later for poultry farmers throughout the state.

Both a visionary and a promoter, Brown recognized that his exchange was instrumental in opening profitable markets for Utah’s poultry products. To fully exploit that market, however, he needed a larger organization.

Together with Har r y H. Metzgar from Richfield, Brown visited Los Angeles and Petaluma, California, in 1922 in pursuit of more business contacts on the West Coast, many of which were arranged through the Utah Farm Bureau. Brown’s agents in Los Benjamin Brown, an important Angeles told him they could sell all the poultry leader in Utah’s early turkey products he could send them, and owners of industry. hatcher ies in Califor nia offered to ship hatching eggs, chicks, and poults to Utah by rail at attractive prices.

Brown was brimming with enthusiasm when he returned to Utah, and in early January he met with Farm Bureau leaders in Salt Lake City. From these meetings came a proposal to form what the Gunnison newspaper called a “Gigantic Corporation” to promote a statewide organization to foster the poultry industry.33 With Utah Farm Bureau’s support, Brown soon met with farmers in Utah and Salt Lake counties to spark their interest in a poultry marketing organization. Concurrently, a Utah Farm Bureau lawyer, Frank Evans, began looking into formalizing a statewide organization, drawing mostly on the tri-county exchange that Brown had helped to establish earlier.

At a meeting held in Salt Lake City on January 27, 1923, and sponsored by the Utah Farm Bureau, a number of farmers met to form a new association.

The association designated Brown as its marketing agent and authorized him to charge a one-cent commission on each dozen eggs that he sold.

Evans acted quickly and filed incorporation articles on February 2 with the Salt Lake County Court for an organization initially called the Utah Poultry Producers Association.34 By the end of 1923, more than five hundred farmers, mainly in Sanpete, Sevier, Juab, and Utah counties, had 33

Ibid., January 4, 1923.

In October 1923, the Utah Poultry Producers Association was converted to a cooperative and given the name of the Utah Poultry Producers Cooperative. Ibid., October 30, 1923. In 1948, the organization again changed its name to the Utah Poultry and Farmers Cooperative.

34

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joined the poultry cooperative. Initially, most of them had laying hens, but a few were also experimenting with turkeys. Utah Poultry also played a key part in the creation of the modern processing plants so critical to the industry’s development by hiring Charles Rudd and purchasing his Salt Lake City plant.

In addition to Benjamin Brown, two other individuals were also instrumental in forming and later expanding Utah Poultry: Albertus Willardson, a cattleman, and Clyde C. Edmonds, a banker, both from Gunnison. 35 Initially, Willardson was the assistant manager of the cooperative; later, he moved to Los Angeles to handle marketing there for the organization.

Edmonds served as the first secretary and treasurer of the cooperative and then became its long time general manager when Brown left in 1926 to establish a marketing agency in New York City.36 In 1930, seeing the need for a separate organization for turkey growers, Edmonds helped to form a multistate marketing organization initially called the Northwest Turkey Growers Association—subsequently called Norbest. Continuing his duties with Utah Poultry, Edmonds also became the turkey cooperative’s first general manager. Norbest was preceded by the formation of a committee in 1930 whose purpose was to create a turkey growers’ association in Utah.37 Extension agents helped establish these county-based turkey grower associations.38 By the mid-1930s, more than 2,500 farmers in Utah raised turkeys, and most of the larger growers (including many members of the county associations) joined Norbest.

Another key individual in Utah’s nascent turkey industry was Herbert Beyers, who, as a member of the Oregon Turkey Growers Association, had worked to find dependable markets for turkeys.39 Beyers’s experience led Edmonds to hire him as the assistant general manager of the Northwestern Turkey Growers Association in 1932. Two years later, the association appointed Beyers as its general manager, a position he ably filled for thirtyfive years. He was largely responsible for establishing the Norbest brand’s reputation for quality.

In the decade from the end of WWI to the start of the depression in 1929, the number of turkeys raised in Utah possibly more than doubled to a quarter million; over the next eleven years, the number quadrupled to more than a million birds. The increase during the 1930s occurred despite major swings in the prices of turkeys and in the prices farmers paid for a 35 For further information on Edmonds, see Clyde C. Edmonds Papers 1911, 1937–1957, MSS 1426, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

36 Stacie Lloyd Duce, The History of the Intermountain Farmers’ Association (Salt Lake City: Intermountain Farmers’ Association, 2013).

37 Roosevelt (UT) Standard, May 29, 1930. A. DeMarr Dudley (Jensen), S. R. Boswell (Richfield), Landwig Olson (Ephraim), H. E, Calderwood (Coalville), B. M. Mendenhall (Springville), Albertus Willardson, and Byron Alder (Logan) were the initial members of the committee.

38 Roosevelt (UT) Standard, October 23, 1930.

39 Herbert Beyers Collection: American Poultry Historical Society Papers, HD9437.5 T873U63R, United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland.

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primary component in turkey feed—corn. The turkey producers who survived these ups and downs in prices became hardened risk takers.

As farmers increased the size of their flocks, they had problems financing their enterprises. Small rural banks could not provide sufficient loans, and the collapse of many banks during the early 1930s exacerbated financing problems. Farmers found some relief from this shortage of credit after the Farm Credit Act of 1933. It created the government-supported Farm Credit System, which established four groups of lending institutions.

Among these institutions was the Bank for Cooperatives that supported farmer cooperatives. Utah Poultry increasingly borrowed from the Bank for Cooperatives, and, in turn, provided short-term financing for some turkey farmers. Later, the Moroni Feed Company offered similar types of financing to members of its cooperative in Sanpete County.

Despite the assistance farmers received from these organizations, raising turkeys was a risky business, compared to most other poultry and livestock enterprises. The birds required shelter when young and when the weather was hot or inclement. Occasionally, turkey farmers suffered losses in severe storms. For example, growers in American Fork and Pleasant Grove lost a total of about ten thousand turkeys in a severe storm in July 1943, with one grower losing most of his flock.40 Early turkey varieties were flighty and prone to pile into bushes when alarmed by unexpected noises such as airplanes or when frightened by predators or other animals. Moreover, it took some years before growers fully understood the nutritional requirements of the birds.

In addition to an increase in the number of turkeys raised in Utah during the 1920s and 1930s, a major qualitative change in the birds occurred, beginning in 1937. Previously, most of the turkeys in Utah were of the Mammoth breed, an improved version of the earlier Narragansett variety. By the early 1930s, Jesse Throssel in Oregon had developed a much larger bird, the Broad Breasted Bronze. The Daniel E. Adams and Sons Hatchery in American Fork was one of the first in the state to import and hatch eggs from this new breed in 1937; within a few years it became the dominant variety in Utah.

As the size of the industry increased, various disease problems intensified.

Several diseases that afflicted young turkeys, for example, passed from parents to poults through eggs. In extreme cases, these diseases caused a fifty percent mortality rate in poults. The industry eventually learned to control this problem by blood testing parent stock before allowing eggs into certified hatcheries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and USAC administered this certification.

Blackhead was another major ailment that affected turkeys. It is a parasitic disease that was not fully understood until the 1940s. Initially, the 40

Salt Lake Tribune, July 18, 1943.

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losses from blackhead threatened the existence of the entire turkey industry, with some flock losses amounting to seventy percent. Scientists discovered that infected birds, particularly chickens and sparrows, passed the long-lived parasite to turkeys through their droppings. Because the disease only slightly affected other infected birds, such as chickens, the separation of turkeys from other birds was vital in controlling blackhead. Rotating turkeys onto fresh ground, raising them in confinement and on wire mesh, and administering new drugs eventually controlled the disease.

In addition to diseases, the state’s turkey growers grappled with the recurring problems of volatility in the number of turkeys raised and in turkey prices. This instability became especially severe in 1936 and 1937.

Between 1935 and 1936 the number of birds raised in the state more than tripled, but then fell by more than a quarter in 1937. In part, the stampede into turkey growing in 1936 was induced by a temporary recovery in the overall economy, accompanied by a fifty percent increase in turkey prices from 1934 to 1935. National feed companies, including General Mills, Ralston Purina, and Sperry, played a major role in this volatility. These companies recognized the business opportunity in Utah, and, in late 1935 and early 1936, they aggressively financed turkey production in the state and enrolled many new producers. The typical arrangement included the feed company providing the poults, supplying the feed on credit, and then handling the processing and sale of the birds, taking a commission on each transaction. Partly because of a decline in turkey prices in 1936, and partly due to the hefty commissions charged by the feed companies, numerous turkey farmers found at the end of the year that the receipts from the sale of their turkeys were less than their debts to the feed companies. This wrenching experience contributed to a sharp decline in the number of turkey farmers in the state from more than 2,600 in 1935 to only about 1,000 in 1940.

From the depression years onward, turkey production in Utah became increasingly concentrated in Sanpete County, and the Moroni Feed Company—a farmers’ cooperative—played a central role in this.41 William Irons and Marion Jolley were the first commercial turkey growers in the area, starting with flocks of about five hundred birds in 1921. They later joined with Jake Anderson, Ray Seeley, Eldon Westenskow, Rex Kellet, and Ralph Blackham to form the Moroni Feed Company in 1938. Within a few years, with help from Utah Poultry, the group bought the property of the defunct local sugar mill in Moroni, acquired the processing plant that Utah Poultry had built in Moroni, began marketing its turkeys through Norbest, and built its own hatchery.

Several factors contributed to Sanpete County becoming Utah’s turkey capital. Interest in turkeys in the county originated in the 1920s with 41 Moroni Feed Company, Moroni Feed Seventy-fifth Anniversary Memory Book (Moroni, UT: Moroni Feed Company, 2013).

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cutbacks in grazing rights on government lands that made raising sheep and livestock less profitable. The cutbacks were followed by a collapse of the local sugar beet industry, the distress caused by the Great Depression, and a prolonged drought. As a student of the business put it, “The turkey industry in Sanpete was a child of the depression.”42 Turkeys required little water, utilized underemployed labor, and consumed inexpensive local grains. Sanpete growers found marketing outlets through several new cooperatives that sprouted in central Utah. The experience gained by turkey farmers in Sanpete County during the difficult 1930s created a stock of managerial experience that reinforced by a strong cooperative, enabled growers there to persist in the business into the next millennium, while most other turkey production in Utah disappeared.

From 1941 to the end of WWII, the number of turkeys raised in the state doubled, to more than two million birds. Military demand for animal products stimulated this increase, resulting in attractive wartime turkey prices. Many turkey farmers made enough profit during the war to pay off their debts and to capitalize their enterprises. The enthusiasm for raising turkeys in Utah and around the country led to the formation of the National Turkey Federation in 1939 and to the founding of the affiliated Utah Turkey Growers Federation in 1942.43 About 450 growers attended the first state convention in Salt Lake City, perhaps a fair measure of the total number of commercial turkey farmers in the state at the time. The election of Ralph Blackham from Moroni as the first president of this organization reflected the increasing importance of turkeys in Sanpete County, where more than one-third of the birds in Utah were then grown.

Subsequently, the state federation held annual conventions; in 1948, it began holding turkey shows, occasionally in conjunction with its conventions.

USAC staff conducted several studies of the turkey industry from 1942 to 1962. This included collecting information from growers in the four counties where about half of the state’s turkeys were grown: Box Elder, Cache, Sanpete, and Sevier.44 The authors of these studies documented the substantial changes that were shaping the industry. The first study took place after turkey production had increased almost five-fold, to more than one million birds, from 1935 to 1942. By 1961–1962 the number of turkeys had expanded to more than 3.5 million birds.

Yet even as the numbers of turkeys increased, the number of turkey farms decreased. The authors noted that the percentage of farms in the state with turkeys declined from about fifteen percent in 1929 to less than five 42 Emmett R. Hayes, “Geographic Analysis of the Utah Turkey Industry” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1971), 20.

43 Salt Lake Telegram, December 8, 1950.

44 Dee A. Broadbent, W. Preston Thomas, and George T. Blanch, “Bulletin No. 318, An Economic Analysis of Turkey Production in Utah,” UAES Bulletins (Logan: Utah State Agricultural College, 1945); Roice H. Anderson, “Bulletin 445, Utah Turkey Industry—An Economic Appraisal” (Logan: Utah State Agricultural College, 1964).

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percent in 1940. They also reported on an The invention of bulk feeders, industry that was starting to specialize— such as those seen in this image, shrinking in terms of number of growers, but reduced labor demands on turkey continuing to expand in number of turkeys farms. raised. The average flock size in 1942 was only two or three thousand birds and many of the farmers had other agricultural enterprises; only six of the growers in Sanpete County, for example, specialized in turkeys. By 1961–1962, however, the average flock size in the state had about doubled, and many of the growers specialized in turkeys.

Changes in several measures captured the growing efficiency of the industry during this period. The first was that the average mortality rate in the state among turkey flocks dropped from about one-third in 1940 to less than fifteen percent in 1962. The second revealing measure was a sharp decline in the all-important feed-conversion-ratio (pounds of feed used to produce a pound of turkey) from more than six to less than four pounds.

Since feed expenses composed about two-thirds of the costs of raising turkeys, this improvement in feed efficiency strongly affected profitability.

The third important measure was a sharp decline in the number of hours of labor required to produce a hundred pounds of turkey from 8.6 in 1940 to only 1.24 in 1962. In just two decades Utah’s turkey industry had become dramatically more efficient.

The use of bulk and automatic feeders explained a major part of the decline in labor use. Walter Hansen, a local inventor who operated a machine shop in Ephraim, built some of the earliest bulk feeders in Utah.45 He had noted that feeding turkeys involved a lot of labor, including

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sacking feed, loading sacks on trucks, and then pouring the feed by hand into troughs. This led him to design and build metal turkey feeders that each held about a ton of feed. He also designed a bulk truck that hauled feed from the mill to the feeders without sacking, thus substantially reducing the time involved in feeding turkeys. Later, turkeys grown in confinement used labor-saving automatic feeders, further reducing labor costs.

Traditionally, consumers bought turkeys mainly for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and this led growers to organize production around these two markets. After WWII, leaders in the industry recognized the opportunity to expand turkey consumption beyond just holiday markets.

The National Turkey Federation—assisted by state groups, including the Utah Turkey Growers Federation—took the lead in convincing consumers to eat more turkey. A major aspect of this effort in Utah was a vote taken by growers in 1947 to contribute money to fund the promotion of turkey consumption. These funds were used to support research, as well as advertising. This included urging consumers to eat turkey throughout the year and also to accept new turkey products, such as turkey in bologna, salami, frankfurters, and burgers, and turkey parts, steaks, and bacon.46 A deboning machine developed by a Utah firm, the Beehive Machine Company, was critical in the production of these new shapes. In 2013, a facility in Salina owned by the Moroni Feed Company processed about half of the turkeys raised in Utah into these new shapes.

Another important change was the switch from selling “New York dressed” birds (which still had their heads, legs, and entrails) to marketing oven-ready birds. The National Turkey Federation played a key role in convincing consumers that eviscerated turkeys were safe to eat, and that they had been checked by government-licensed inspectors. Part of the “Eat More Turkey” campaign included the presentation of a turkey to the nation’s president by the National Federation before the holiday season each year. In 1956, J. Arza Adams from Pleasant Grove was president of the federation, and along with Ezra Taft Benson, who was then Secretary of Agriculture, he presented President Dwight D. Eisenhower with a turkey that year.

The rapid growth of the industry in Utah after WWII was due to the leadership of a few individuals, among them William A. Barlocker. He developed a thriving turkey business during the 1950s in St. George and Enterprise, one of the largest in the nation at the time.47 On two occasions he won the National Turkey Federation’s prize for raising the largest turkey in the country; his 1961 winner weighed over fifty-eight pounds. In addition to his turkey enterprise, Barlocker was actively involved in Utah 45

Antrei, The Other Forty-Niners, 303.

Carroll Draper, “New Shapes for Turkey” Utah Science 33 (1972): 101–102.

47 W. Paul Reeve, A Century of Enterprise: The History of Enterprise, Utah 1896–1996 (Enterprise, UT: City of Enterprise, 1996), 182–84.

46

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politics. Yet his career also illustrated the risks Members of the Utah turkey involved in the turkey business: he lost an industry present President average of a half million dollars each year Dwight D. Eisenhower with a from 1961 to 1965 and was forced to liqui- turkey, as part of an “Eat More date many of his assets, including his turkey Turkey” campaign, 1956. businesses.

Developments in technology and advertising, as well as the leadership of growers’ associations and a few key individuals, further contributed to the advancement of Utah’s turkey industry after World War II. Governmentsupported research was also important. The development of turkey production in Sanpete County prompted the USAC, in 1956, to open a facility in Ephraim known as the Snow Field Station, which emphasized research on turkeys. The station was supported, in part, by funds collected from Utah turkey growers, and in 2000, it changed its name to the Turkey Research Facility. For forty years several scientists worked there on a variety of problems including turkey diseases, nutritional problems, using pelletized newspaper for bedding, manure management, dust control, use of solar energy, and housing and shelter issues.48 In the late 1960s and 1970s, several major changes occurred in Utah’s 48

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turkey industry. Beginning in the late 1960s, the Broad Breasted White turkey began to replace the bronze variety, and by 2013 most domesticated turkeys in Utah were white. Three factors led to this change. The white turkey dressed out more cleanly than did bronze turkeys, and they were less prone to a form of arthritis that afflicted the bronze variety. Also, when packaged for sale the white birds had a flatter and broader breast than earlier varieties.

Raising turkeys completely in confinement and throughout the year were two other major changes in the industry beginning in the 1970s.

Earlier, most turkey poults were first raised in coops, later transferred to more open confinement facilities, and when about a third grown turned loose in fields with rudimentary shelters from the sun and storms. Growers moved to complete confinement primarily for the sake of bio-security, or disease control. Various wild animals and birds carry diseases to which turkeys are susceptible, such as cholera. Two additional factors drove the change to year-round production. Continuous production allowed hiring permanent, instead of hard-to-find temporary, workers in processing plants.

It also resulted in more efficient use of investments in processing plants, feed mills, and other associated facilities, than was the case when turkeys were grown mostly for the holiday markets.

Two other major changes occurred in the industry after the 1970s.

Earlier, turkey producers had required as many as six months to ready their birds for market and they used as many as six pounds of feed to produce each pound of turkey. Thanks in part to the quicker maturation time of white turkeys, by 2013 growers typically marketed their birds when they were only four months old and produced a pound of turkey with just three pounds of feed.

Perhaps the most dramatic change, however, was the geographic concentration of the industry. By 1970, the industry had begun to contract geographically and was increasingly concentrated around six remaining processing plants. These included Ogden Poultry; the American Holding Company in St. George; Turkey Growers Incorporated, which included growers from Richfield and Spanish Fork; Moroni Feed Cooperative; the Morgan Brothers, in Davis County, which used a Salt Lake plant; and independent growers in Box Elder County who processed some of their birds in Twin Falls, Idaho.49 Six hatcheries in the state, all using supplemental oxygen, provided some of the poults, and those growers who produced turkey eggs in the state used artificial insemination to enhance egg fertility. During the 1970s, the total number of turkeys increased to about four million birds, a level that was maintained with ups-and-downs over the next four decades, until 2012, when the number increased to about five million birds.50 49

Hayes, “Geographic Analysis,� 25.

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Agriculture stopped collecting and publishing information on the number of turkeys raised in Utah. The post-1994 numbers in the text are my estimates.

50

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Over time, the turkey industry increasingly The Board of Directors of the centered on Sanpete County. Population Washington County Turkey growth provides one explanation for this Growers Association, inspecting trend. Many of the areas along the Wasatch a flock.

Front where turkeys had once roamed became housing developments and shopping centers. Land became too expensive for agricultural uses, and growing turkeys close to dwellings caused environmental problems, especially dust. Land in Sanpete Country was less expensive and environmental issues were less problematic there, especially after turkeys were raised in confinement.

By 2013, only two processing plants for turkeys remained in the state.

Forty-five turkey producers—all with large flocks, all members of the Moroni Feed Cooperative, and most of them located in Sanpete County— used a plant in Moroni. The other was the Wight’s Farm Fresh Turkey Business near Ogden, which processed a few thousand turkeys each year, mostly for the natural foods market. Similarly, the number of hatcheries in Utah that handled turkey eggs declined; the last turkey hatchery, located in Moroni, ceased operating in 2008. Thereafter the Moroni Feed Company imported all of its poults from the Midwest in semi-trucks that carried as many as fifty thousand poults each.

In 2011 Utah’s domesticated turkeys make up only about two percent of all turkeys in the U.S. Moreover, only a tiny fraction of Utah farmers raise turkeys commercially, and they contributed only four percent of the value of all farm products in the state in 2011.51 The turkey industry in Utah is 51 Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, 2012 Utah Agriculture Statistics and Utah Department of Agriculture and Food Annual Report (Salt Lake City: Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, 2012), 37.

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interesting, not because of its size or even because it provides centerpieces for Thanksgiving dinners in Utah, but rather because it exists. We all appreciate the good cooks and recipes that result in a fantastic holiday meal, but we should likewise acknowledge the craftsmen who grew the showpieces for those meals and the “ingredients” they used to create the turkey industry in Utah.

Before white settlers came, the Great Basin lacked a tolerable habitat for wild turkeys. The only advantage the area had for turkeys was an abundant supply of grasshoppers, crickets, and other insects. Utah’s mountains and deserts were more suited for sheep, cattle, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes. The fact that Utah turkey growers had to import most of their feed from out of state and then pay to have many of their products hauled out to distant urban centers, put Utah growers at an economic disadvantage. As a result, the state is a challenging place to raise turkeys. How the individuals who were involved in the turkey industry surmounted these obstacles and ended up raising four to five million turkeys each year is the intriguing part of the story.

Four ingredients contributed to this success. The first was a handful of creative individuals who formed and led several organizations that supported the turkey industry. The formation of Utah Poultry, Norbest, Moroni Feed Company and the Utah Turkey Growers Association occurred largely through the efforts of men by the names of Brown, Edmonds, Byers, Blackham, Barlocker, and Adams, as well as a few others. The second critical ingredient was the persistent farmers who survived the ups-and-downs in the turkey business and mastered the art of raising these persnickety birds.

The few dozen Utah farmers who remained in the turkey business in 2013 were survivors. Along the way, numerous other farmers failed to master the skills that were necessary to raise turkeys successfully in the state.

Several state and federal agencies constituted a third ingredient in the industry’s success. Research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USAC, and others led to the control of turkey diseases, improved nutrition, and the development of new varieties of turkeys. Federal extension agents disseminated useful information to growers and promoted the formation of essential farmers’ cooperatives. Especially after WWII, the Farm Credit System became a vital ingredient in enabling turkey growers and their cooperatives to boost the size of their operations. The National Turkey Federation also deserves credit for leading the successful campaign to expand the market for turkey products beyond just the holiday season.

Especially early on, the Utah Farm Bureau played a key role in nurturing the turkey business in Utah.

The final ingredient for success, and perhaps the most important, was the ability and willingness of some nimble Utah farmers to adopt cost-saving, profit-enhancing technologies. Those turkey growers who persisted had to adapt more quickly than growers in other states did. This included using new technologies that lessened turkey mortality, enhanced the efficiency of

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feed, and reduced labor requirements; employing their capital investments more efficiently; and decreasing their average costs by expanding their flock sizes. Turkey growers in Utah survived because they ran faster than did their competitors in other states. Only time will tell if they are able to keep up the pace.

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Alma Richards’s Olympic Leap of Faith Revisited

By LARRY R. GERLACH

L. TOM PERRY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

I

t is doubtful that Alma Richards or any other 1912 Olympian appreciated the historic significance of the Stockholm Games. The moder n Olympics had begun only sixteen years before in Athens, Greece, and the subsequent three games—Paris 1900, St. Louis 1904, and London 1908—had been plagued by poor participation, organizational problems, and competitive controversies. Stockholm was the first to exhibit the attendance, facilities, and administrative efficiency envisioned for the Olympics, as well as numerous “firsts” that heralded the future success of the Games.1 The V Olympiad also witnessed the finest athletic performances to that point.

One of the most remarkable performances came from Alma Richards of Parowan, Utah,

Alma Richards at the high jump competition in Stockholm, July 1912. Here, he displays the determination that would produce the gold medal. He is wearing the official USA team uniform; note the optional leggings.

Larry R. Gerlach is professor emeritus of history at the University of Utah. His recently completed biography of Alma Richards combines his interest in Olympic and Utah history.

1 See Erik Bergvall, ed., The Fifth Olympiad: The Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912 (Stockholm: Swedish Olympic Committee, 1912); James E. Sullivan, ed., The Olympic Games: Stockholm 1912 (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1912); Horst Ueberhorst, “Stockholm 1912,” in John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 41–46; “The Olympic Games,” The Outlook, July 27, 1912, 655–56; Will T. Irwin, “The Olympic Games,” Colliers, August 10, 1912, 8–10, 26.

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who set an Olympic record when he won the gold medal in the high jump.

Richards’s epic story has been described as “equal parts Rocky, The Natural, and Chariots of Fire.”2 The description is apt: with a stunning upset in the high jump, the unheralded Richards became the first Utahn ever to win an Olympic gold medal and the only native of the Beehive State to do so in the twentieth century. During the next twenty years he was recognized as the most accomplished all-around track and field athlete of his generation, earning national championships and records in five different events. One of the finest athletes in Utah history, his national and local honorific awards included election as a charter member of the Utah Sports Hall of Fame and to the Brigham Young University Hall of Fame; additionally, the Parowan High School athletic stadium bears his name. But throughout his life, the surprising Olympic triumph fundamentally defined his public and personal persona. Richards’s gold medal leap in Stockholm was one of those rare instances in sports when mind and muscle so meshed as to produce an extraordinary physical feat. Or was it?

Alma Wilford Richards was born on February 20, 1890, in rural Parowan, Utah, into a devout Mormon family of pioneer ancestry.3 His father, Morgan Richards Jr., managed the town Cooperative Mercantile and held several civil and ecclesiastical offices, among them selectman, superintendent of schools, and bishop of the Parowan First Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ninth of ten children, Alma was in a sense the chosen one, the only child given a name of religious significance: “Alma” for the Nephite prophet whose founding of the Church of Jesus Christ in the ancient Americas is in the Book of Mormon and “Wilford” in honor of the modern prophet, Wilford Woodruff, who had married Alma’s parents in 1870 and who was then serving as the fourth president of the LDS church.

As was common for boys in rural communities, “Pat,” as he was familiarly known, left school after the eighth grade in 1904 to become a “cowboy.”

Then Richards met Thomas C. Trueblood, a professor of elocution and oratory at the University of Michigan, during a snowstorm in December 1908. The chance meeting inspired the nineteen-year-old Richards to pursue a high school education, and so, in January 1909, he enrolled at the Murdock Academy near Beaver, Utah. The strapping freshman was considerably older and physically more mature than the other students, and he immediately caught the eye of coaches, who convinced him to go out for track. Despite a lack of familiarity with the sport and a lack of training— 2

Lee Benson, “Alma,” BYU Magazine, August 1996, 38.

See Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia: A Compilation of Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1901), 3:499–500; Luella Adams Dalton, comp., History of Iron County Mission and Parowan, the Mother Town (n.p, 1973), passim.

3

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there was no high school in Parowan—he On July 12, 1912, two days before proved to be a natural athlete. the U.S. Olympic team sailed for With a physique ill-suited for sprints or Sweden, the track and field distance running, Richards concentrated on athletes participated in a field events, not as a specialist but as a partici- fundraising exhibition at Hilltop pant in multiple contests. In 1910 he led tiny Park. Richards (fifth from the left) Murdock to the state championship, scoring was one of the athletes who half the team’s points and being named the assembled along the center field meet’s outstanding performer after setting state records in the high jump and shot put fence for a group photograph. while finishing second in the broad jump and He wore the Illinois Athletic Club pole vault. He then transferred to Brigham uniform in which he had competed Young High School in Provo, where, thanks in the Evanston team trials. to the lack of standard eligibility rules, he was for the next two years the star performer on the university’s varsity team.

There, Richards displayed a remarkable versatility and competed in all the field events—the high jump, shot put, broad jump, pole vault, and discus.

On May 31, 1912, only three years after being introduced to the sport of high jump, Richards boarded a train for his first trip out of the Beehive State. He was headed to Evanston, Illinois, to participate in the central regional trials for a place on the U.S. Olympic team. He had intended to compete in the broad jump and high jump during the trials, but decided to focus on the high jump. During the pre-meet training, it quickly became evident that Richards possessed not only exceptional physical ability, but also supreme confidence, despite his inexperience in top-flight competition.

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One of the coaches, Boyd Comstock, recalled how Richards arrogantly dismissed his competitors in the trials—“None of them are any good”— and vowed to win “here first and then [at] the Olympics.”4 On June 8, Alma Richards made good on his first boast, winning the high jump with a leap of 6-feet 3-inches, the highest he had ever jumped.

Thinking the surprising victory by a virtually unknown competitor was a fluke, the meet director, Everett C. Brown of the Chicago Athletic Club, tried unsuccessfully to replace the newcomer on the team with a collegiate champion, Earl Palmer of Dartmouth College.5 But the next day, Richards boarded a train headed for New York City, there to join the other members of the U.S. Olympic team. How the objections to Richards’s place on the team were resolved is uncertain, but it is clear that he joined the squad as a regular member, not as a supplemental choice, as has been suggested. On June 14, with his newly issued first passport in hand, Pat from Parowan boarded the SS Finland and embarked on a life-changing experience.

Richards was proud of his accomplishment and thrilled by the oceanic voyage, but his teammates did not take him “seriously on the trip to Sweden.” His demeanor led some of them to call him a “boob,” “rube,” and “chump” behind his back. Others found him “quite gullible” and played good-natured practical “country boob jokes” on him. He tended to keep to himself, prompting James Sullivan, secretary of the American Olympic Committee, to comment, “Well, Richards, I would not have known you were on the boat if I had not heard some of the fellows talking about you.

You seem to be the quietest man with the bunch.” While not given to social interaction with teammates, Richards was confident, even boastful, about his ability. He told Wesley Oler, a fellow high jumper from Yale University, “I do know that I’ll win the high jump.”6 In truth, he later recalled that at the beginning of the voyage to Stockholm, it “looked to me as if I was taking a 12,000 mile trip just for the pleasure of sightseeing and gaining a few points that I wish to use in the future as a coach.”7 Indeed, observers gave Richards little chance of winning a medal in Stockholm, despite his win at the central trials. He knew that Mike Murphy, the head American trainer and a track coach at the University of Pennsylvania, and his teammates “thought that I was a good second rater” and “expected some of the other fellows to make a better showing.” They downgraded Richards’s potential less because of his inexperience in 4 Deseret Evening News, May 31, 1912; Salt Lake Tribune, June 1, 1912; Boyd Comstock, “The Man from Utah,” Sporting Life, April 1923, 19, 35, 38. Comstock was in town with three athletes from Citrus Union High School in Azusa, California, to participate in a national preparation meet.

5 Provo Post, June 11, 1912; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 1912; Deseret Evening News, August 24, 1912; Alma Richards, Personal Statement, October 14, 1954, box 1, fd. 14, Alma Richards Papers, 1919–1972 , L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter Richards Papers).

6 New York Evening Mail, February 3, 1914.

7 Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 25, 1912.

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top-flight competition and more because of his physical stature and technique. As Murphy observed, Richards’s “huge frame”—six-feet, twoinches tall and 210 pounds—made high jumping the event for which he was “the least fitted naturally.”8 And instead of the customary scissors technique, Richards used an utterly unorthodox style: he approached the bar straight-on, like a broad jumper, leaped with his body erect, and tucked his knees against his chest to clear the bar. The coaches agreed that he was “about as awkward looking an athlete as [was] ever seen.”9 The qualifying round of the 1912 Olympic high jump competition took place on July 7.The nine-man American contingent included the world-record holder, George Horine of Stanford University, and Carlisle’s Jim Thorpe, who would win both the decathlon and pentathlon; the team was heavily favored to win all three medals. At the end of the first round, six Americans ranked among the eleven finalists—including the “Mormon giant.”10 In the final round on July 8, one month to the day since the Olympic trials in Evanston, the contenders steadily dropped out. When Horine, the pre-meet favorite, failed at a 1.89 meters jump, two long-shots—Hans Liesche, the German champion, and Alma Richards—unexpectedly found themselves competing for the gold medal. Liesche looked the winner as he had sailed over the first twelve heights “with wonderful litheness” on the first attempt, then cleared both the 1.89 and 1.91 meter marks with “the greatest confidence” on his second jump. Richards, who admitted he “had much difficulty that day,” needed all three tries to surpass the 1.83, 1.87, and 1.89 bars. He again failed twice at 1.91, but on his third and final attempt, when “everybody looked for a win for Germany,” he “lifted his heavy body with enormous power across the bar.”11 The bar was now raised to the Olympic-record height of 1.93 meters, or six feet and four inches.

Richards wanted Liesche to jump first, but the German deferred, as was his right for having had fewer misses. In contrast to his earlier struggles, Richards surprised everyone by sprinting without hesitation to the pit and clearing the bar “with a couple of inches to spare.”12 Liesche now appeared unnerved, whether by the effortlessness of Richards’s exceptional leap or by 8 Provo Post, August 25, 1913; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 18, 20, 25, 1912; Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1912.

9 New York Times, June 13, 1912; New York Evening Mail, June 13, 1912; New York World, June 13, 1912; New York Herald, June 13, 1912; Iron County Record (Cedar City, UT), July 5, 1912; Salt Lake HeraldRepublican, August 20, 1912.

10 Edward Lyell Fox, “Our Olympic Flyers,” Outing Magazine, July 1912, 387–89; Richard Hymans, “The History of the United States Olympic Trials—Track and Field,” USA Track and Field, accessed December 9, 2013, http://www.usatf.org/statistics/champions/OlympicTrials/HistoryOfTheOlympicTrials.pdf, 47; New York Times, April 30, 1912; Milwaukee Sentinel, August 11, 1912; Richards, Personal Statement, Richards Papers; Salt Lake Tribune, July 9, 1912. Due to the lingering effects of pink eye, when he was not jumping, Richards wore a ragged old hat to shade his eyes.

11 Bergvall, Fifth Olympiad, 393–94.

12 Ibid.; David Wallechinsky, comp.,The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Athens 2004 Edition (Wilmington, DE: Sport Media Publishing, 2004), 343; Arthur E. Grix, “The Olympic-days in Stockholm,” box 1, fd. 12, Richards Papers.

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his unsportsmanlike effort at “getting his goat” by walking back and forth several times in front of the pit between the posts.

Although the bar was set only three-quarters of an inch above a height Liesche had cleared easily, he failed twice to match the Olympic record. Then, as he began the run-up to his third and final attempt, he was inter rupted three times—by a starter’s gun for the 800-meter final, by a band that started to play unexpectedly, and a by Swedish official who pointedly urged Liesche to “hurry up.” Utterly frustrated, his concentration gone, Hans Leische missed badly on his last jump. 13 With another stunning Richards, jumping at a spring upset, the unheralded, unorthodox, but 1911 track meet at Brigham supremely confident countr y lad, who Young University. This image previously had “but a vague idea of the features his good-luck hat and, importance of such an event,” became the most notably, the markedly premier high jumper in the world.14 unorthodox jumping style that Richards received a hero’s welcome upon would amaze coaches and returning to Utah and went on to forge a commentators throughout his career unlike anything he had imagined as a career. boy in Parowan. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, received a law degree from the University of Southern California, and taught science in Los Angeles high schools from 1922 to 1953. For twenty years after the Olympics, Richards competed in championship track and field competitions. He set national records in the indoor and outdoor high jump, broad jump, and decathlon; won a national title in shot put; and won regional championships in the high jump, broad jump and fifty-six-pound 13 Sullivan, Olympic Games: Stockholm, 392–93; Bergvall, Stockholm 1912: Official Report, 393–394; David Wallechinsky, comp., The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Athens 2004 Edition (Wilmington, Delaware: Sport Media Publishing, 2004), 343; Grix, “The Olympic-days in Stockholm,” Richards Papers.

14 Provo Herald and Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1912; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20 and 25, 1912.

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weight events. After retiring from competition in 1932, the Beehive State’s greatest athlete slowly slipped into historical oblivion, known only as the name of an Olympic champion to a few sports enthusiasts. And then, Richards’s achievements were resurrected, largely because of the purported circumstances of his dramatic gold medal leap. Shortly after Richards’s death in May 1963, Hack Miller, the sports editor of the LDS-owned and operated Deseret News, received an article that a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newspaper had presumably published. The article came to Miller from James Alva Banks of Manti, Utah, who was then serving an LDS proselytizing mission in Milwaukee.The article appeared in the Deseret News on May 18, as follows: The moment of the supreme test had come. The Americans who had failed were cheering and encouraging Richards. He took off his cap, walked back 200 feet and suddenly dropped to his knees. A murmur of surprise, followed by a reverent hush, came to the great crowd.

Kneeling there, hands clasped before all that great crowd, Richards was praying. In a moment he arose, his face alight, and with a quick run, he raced down the pathway, leaped, cleared by an inch and in spite of the prejudices, the crowd roared with applause. A few moments later Litsche [sic] had failed and Richards was champion.15

Initially not much was made of Richards’s reported prayer, even in LDS circles. T. Earl Pardoe, a BYU drama professor tur ned Alumni Association–historian, included Richards in his compilations of famous BYU personalities and LDS athletes without mentioning prayer. William Black’s Mormon Athletes simply excerpted the Deseret News article without comment. And a Brigham Young University graduate student’s theatrical script about Mormons who achieved excellence in a variety of endeavors discussed Richards, but without reference to prayer.16 But as interest in the Olympics increased with Salt Lake City’s efforts to host the Winter Games, sport and religion merged in Utah in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the midst of these efforts, two Salt Lake City sports writers published a compendium about LDS athletes intended for LDS readers, Trials and Triumphs: Mormons in the Olympic Games.17 Lee Benson and Doug Robinson made Alma Richards the subject of their lead chapter, and several Deseret News and BYU alumni magazine articles subsequently retold and embellished his story.18 His celebrity grew, in part, because Salt Lake City’s 15

Deseret News, May 18, 1963.

T. Earl Pardoe, The Sons of Brigham (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1969), 449–52; William T. Black, Mormon Athletes (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1980), 6–10; Kris Marele Morgan, “Mormon Montage: Mormons in the World: A Production Script” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1979), 92–93. Morgan presents Richards as a hayseed, having him speak with “a Utah drawl” and saying “Ahh, shucks” when General John J. Pershing compliments him.

17 Lee Benson and Doug Robinson, Trials and Triumphs: Mormons in the Olympic Games (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1992), 1–19.

18 See Lee Benson, “He Came, He Saw and He Went Home With Gold,” Deseret News, July 22, 1992, and “Alma,” BYU Magazine, 38–43, as well as derivative pieces by Twila Van Leer, “Utah Native Leaped to Fame in 1912 Summer Games,” Deseret News, March 25, 1995, reprinted January 14, 1996; see also “Alma Richards Was Utah’s First Olympic Gold Medalist,” Utah History Blazer, February 1995; Gib Twyman, “Route to Honor Utah Golden Boy,” Deseret News, June 20, 2001; Pardoe, Sons of Brigham, 449–52; Black, 16

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Olympics quest coincided with the LDS church’s initiative to project more Christian and “mainstream” images—an effort aided by include Parowan on the initial Olympic torch relay route through the national visibility of Brigham Young Utah. Widespread protest ensued, University’s athletic programs, notably football, and the prominence of professional LDS and on February 5, 2002, a brief athletes such as Steve Young, Danny Ainge, ceremony to celebrate the state’s Johnny Miller, and Dale Murphy.19 The story first Olympic champion took of Richards’s medal-winning prayer meshed place in front of Richards’s neatly with America’s obsession with sport boyhood home. and with the church’s public relations efforts.

Consequently, LDS officials, strong supporters of Salt Lake City’s bid, embraced Richards and his story of faith and piety in order to establish a faith-promoting Mormon Olympic identity.

David Lunt has admirably described how the LDS church packaged an Olympic trinity—Richards, the double-gold-medal gymnast Peter Vidmar (1984), and the steeplechaser Henry Marsh (1976, 1984, and 1988)— as exemplars of Mormonism. These Olympians offered an inspirational message of faith and piety for Latter-day Saints—and for those outside the religion—by personifying how traditional LDS beliefs, teachings, and The Salt Lake Organizing

Committee inexplicably failed to

Mormon Athletes, 6–10. Wallenchinsky, Athens 2004 Edition, 343, is the only Olympics history or reference book that has carried the story; it adds, “He closed his eyes and bowed his head, and made a deal with God.” 19 Larry R. Gerlach, “Sporting Saints: Reshaping Mormon Identities,” in Bettina Kratzmuller, Mattias Marschik, Rudolf Müller, Hubert Szemethy, and Elisabeth Trinkel, eds., Sport and the Construction of Identities (Vienna, Austria:Verlag, Turia, and Kant, 2007), 453–61.

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practices led to success in sport and, presumably, in other endeavors.20 Church leaders had long praised Mormon athletes for faithfully illustrating the power of adherence to the Word of Wisdom (the LDS health code), but Alma added an important dimension to the affirmation of belief.21 Vidmar and Marsh bore their personal witnesses before church groups, but the retelling of Richards’s story was more compelling because it represented an overt, public expression of religiosity by “a devout believer who prayed for God’s help—and received it.”22 Richards had previously been known as a champion track athlete whose religious significance came in his observation of the church’s dietary proscriptions; he now had become a venerated LDS role model and highly publicized Olympic icon. Several years prior to the 2002 Winter Games, his image had appeared on billboards throughout the Salt Lake Valley, and on February 4, 2002, the torch relay (after an embarrassing oversight that necessitated rerouting) passed through his home town.23 More conspicuously for Mormons, he was the principal Olympian depicted in the LDS church’s cultural contribution to the 2002 Olympics, Light of the World: A Celebration of Life, a drama, dance, and music extravaganza that performed for sold-out audiences in the 21,000-seat LDS Conference Center during the Games in February 2002.

Light of the World used Richards’s life story, with liberties, to illustrate Mormon pioneer history, the Olympics, and notions of universal brotherhood through the production’s main theme: the “light of Christ” had inspired courage and achievement and had enabled the boy from Parowan to find his way. In the final scene, Richards, who has drifted from his Mormon heritage, kneels below a projected photograph of his gold-medal leap and prays to God for support. The narrator explains the message: “The light in Alma Richards and in all of us is not the light of victory alone. It is the light by which we find our path and follow it to the end.”24 Richard Kimball has succinctly summarized the larger issue that, “Whether it was 1912 or 2002, recreation and athletics remained viable ways for the church to inculcate values and model proper social behavior.”25 And, one might

20 David J. Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics: Constructing an Olympic Identity,” Olympika 16 (2007): 1–18.

21 Harrison R. Merrill, “Utah Athletes Coming to Their Own,” Improvement Era, August 1928, 824. For the use of athletes in teaching the Word of Wisdom to young Latter-day Saints, see Richard Ian Kimball, Sports in Zion: Mormon Recreation, 1890 –1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003),107–24.

22 Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics,” 2–3.

23 Parowan was inexplicably left off the original route, but was added following substantial public protest and press criticism. Deseret News, January 12, 23, March 7, June 20, 25–28, 2001.

24 See David G. Pace, “Endowing the Olympic Masses: Light of the World,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 151–55; Church News (Salt Lake City), February 9, 2002; Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 7, 2002. For video of Light of the World and other LDS cultural activities related to the Olympics, see Friends to All Nations: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the 2002 Winter Olympic Games (Salt Lake City: LDS Church Productions, 2003), DVD. 25 Kimball, Sports in Zion, 189.

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add, connect Mormons with the broader Christian community. Alma Richards had become a preeminent representative of Mormonism because of an event that may or may not have happened.

Today it is commonplace for athletes to signify faith by making the Sign of the Cross, inscribing scripture references on eye shadow, kneeling prayerfully in end zones, or pointing heavenward after a notable achievement. But such overt religious expressions did not often occur in sport in predominately Christian America in 1912 and much less so in an international athletic arena such as the Olympics. The most infamous example of Olympics-related religiosity involved Forrest Smithson, a theology student from Oregon State University who in 1908 won the 110-meter hurdles in a world-record time. The Official Report of the London Games contains a picture of Smithson carrying a Bible in one hand during the race. It is bogus. The picture was staged to challenge the scheduling of any Olympic event on the Christian Sabbath. Smithson’s event occurred on a Saturday, not a Sunday, and no contemporary newspaper, observer, or official mentioned his dramatic protest of toting the Good Book while running.

Further, another photograph of Smithson’s race shows him running emptyhanded.26 Smithson was a fake; Richards was not.

It was perhaps inevitable in a religious culture given to premonition and discussion of God’s revealed favor that Richards’s extraordinary athletic achievement would become part of the folklore. Because his public display of religiosity seemed so remarkable, in the course of researching a biography of Richards, I sought more information about this compelling, inspirational, and most unusual supplication for God’s favor. Immediately, two questions required resolution.

The first was provenance. A search of Milwaukee newspapers, the supposed source of the 1963 Deseret News article, yielded no results. Neither the Sentinel nor the Journal, the two major Milwaukee newspapers, published anything about Richards at the time of the Olympics in 1912 or his death in 1963. Then, while researching his intercollegiate career at Cornell, I found the likely “mother” article in the New York Evening Mail of February 3, 1914. It appeared under the byline “Francis,” the pen name of Frank Albertanti (who was also known as Max Francis), a flamboyant sports columnist who specialized in the coverage of prize fights. The germane portions of the article are as follows: After the bar had been cleared at 6 feet 3 inches, there remained only Richards and Litsche, the German, to compete for first honors. At this height Richards had knocked the bar down once. But he was not disheartened. On the next trial he cleared it. At 6 feet 3.98 inches Richards bowed his head and thought a moment. Litsche was looking him straight in the face. The country boy say [saw] 20,000 people staring in his direction. The announcer had told in advance of the great competition that was going on in 26 William O. Johnson Jr., All That Glitters Is Not Gold: The Olympic Games (New York: Putnam’s, 1972), 129; James Edward Sullivan, ed., Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac for 1909 (New York: American Sports, 1909), 48.

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the high jumping pit. Horine, Grumpelt, Thorpe and Erickson, the Americans, who had failed at various heights seated themselves and gazed at Richards. He was America’s hope. Horine yelled words of encouragement to the “boob.” Suddenly Richards went to one side. All eyes were upon him. He threw off his cap and walked slowly 300 feet away from where his companions sat. He threw himself on his knees. With bowed head he crossed himself and his lips move[d]. He was praying. A minute elapsed and he was on his feet again. Tears came to Horine’s eyes. Gritting his teeth Richards straightened up like a new man, crouched and in a flash “sprinted” to where the posts stood, flung himself in the air, and, legs first sailed across the bar. Thunderous applause followed.

Richards jumped to his feet, shook the dirt from his legs and walked leisurely back to the bench. It was now up to Litsche.27

Hack Miller apparently had assumed that the material Alma Banks sent him came from a Milwaukee newspaper, when in fact Banks had sent along a copy of Albertani’s article from the New York Evening Mail. Miller—as was his wont—excerpted substantially from the piece and rewrote portions of it. Further, Miller apparently did not know Les Goates, his predecessor, had previously obtained a copy of the Evening Mail article and published excerpts of it in the Deseret News.28 Second, I had to resolve the issue of accuracy. Albertani, who accompanied the American team to Stockholm, was seemingly an authoritative source.Yet serious questions exist about his story’s validity. Written eighteen months after the fact, the article contains numerous errors, fabrications, and manufactured verbatim conversations supposedly heard aboard the Finland and after Richards’s winning jump.29 Albertani’s most egregious mistake was his reference to a devout Mormon crossing himself in prayer. (Perhaps the sportswriter, a Catholic, deliberately used “crossing” in referring to another faith instead of “blessing himself,” the correct Catholic terminology.) It is also curious that though Albertani purportedly wrote the column in anticipation of Richards inaugurating the indoor track season in Boston on February 7, he apparently did not know that the Cornell athlete’s next 27

The article concluded with Richards reflecting on the prayer the next day: “‘You must have felt like a hero after you did that 6 feet 4 inches?’” a companion asked. “‘You betcher,’” was the answer. “‘But maybe I didn’t pray to do that. I never prayed so hard in my life. The bar was at 6 feet 4 inches. I had talked about it to almost everyone that I expected to clear it at that height. I felt that I owed a debt. I was determined to clear the bar to clear myself. When I saw the stick at 6 feet 4 inches I thought for a minute that my confidence would fade away. If I was on my sick bed I wouldn’t have prayed any harder than to make that 6-foot 4-inch jump.” These effusive assertions of prayer are absolutely inconsistent with Richards’s subsequent silence on the matter. Further, the article contains a basic contradiction (Richards purportedly says he that “didn’t pray,” and then, in the next sentence, says he had “never prayed so hard”) and an impossible claim (Richards could not have boasted about clearing the six feet, four inches mark because he had no way of knowing the bar would ever reach that height). The conversation seems invented.

28 Deseret News, April 2, 1947, July 30, 1953.

29 For example, Albertani incorrectly wrote that Richards was in Parowan when the Olympic selection committee sent a written invitation to him to come to New York as a member of the team; that Amatuer Athletic Union officials in Utah had recommended him to Sullivan; and that, when in Stockholm, Richards had left his chickens and geese “to mother’s care,” although he had not lived in Parowan for three years. Albertani tried to paint Richards as an unschooled hick by having him say “you betcher”; and the sportswriter consistently misspelled Liesche as Litsche. Finally, Richards had missed twice, not once, at the six-feet, three-inches mark; he did not wear his hat in the final round; and he did not “walk leisurely back to the bench” after his record-setting jump, but instead paced back and forth for a time in front of the pit.

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scheduled competition would take place in New York City’s Madison Square Garden four days later. new Olympiastadion for the Factual errors and journalistic license aside, ceremonial beginning of the 1912 the major problem with the article is its Olympics. Opening ceremonies singularity. Such a conspicuous public expreswere not yet major media and sion of devotion would have been a remarkable spectator events; only 13,653 occur rence, but not one contemporar y witnessed King Gustav V declare American or European newspaper (including the opening of what would be the Evening Mail), U.S. teammate or official, the largest and most successful or any other Olympic participant alluded to Games to date.

Richards’s alleged act of praying on bended knee. George Horine, who supposedly teared up while cheering for Richards, never mentioned the incident in his reports from Stockholm for the San Francisco Call. In his detailed account of the high jump event, James Sullivan wrote of Richard’s winning leap, “We all thought he would take a great deal of time and care, making the usual measurements carefully. To our surprise, he disdained all preparations, skipped up to the bar with an easy run, and hopped over it with a full two inches to spare.”30 An analysis of the Evening Mail account of Richards’s inspired leap raises five fundamental questions. Why would Albertani write about Richards’s public prayer if it did not happen? Did the journalist craft a stirring, On July 6, a parade of 2,047

athletes entered Stockholm’s

30 George Horine, San Francisco Call, July 18, 26, 1912; James Sullivan, “What Happened at Stockholm,” Outing Magazine 61 (October 1912–March 1913): 30.

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human-interest tale of Olympian religiosity to attract readership? Why did an account from an on-the-scene reporter contain so many errors? If Richards did kneel openly in prayer, why did no other reporter or competitor—or anyone else, for that matter—discuss it? And, most significantly, why did Richards himself make no mention of prayer?

The day after winning the gold medal, Richards telegraphed the man responsible for launching his athletic career and his Olympic ambitions, the BYU track coach Eugene Roberts. He did not refer to prayer in his description of the winning jump: The time has at last gone by that I have longed for and I gave them all I had. It was sure a very lucky contest for me as my eyes were very bad and it was hard for me to see the bar. My jump was 6 feet 3.94 inches. I did it the first trial without touching the bar. I did not try any higher height. There were 59 jumpers here but only eleven got over [the] 6-foot mark. The others were great jumpers but my luck was better.31

A more revealing fact was that, upon returning to Provo, the LDS athlete who had attended and competed for BYU—his church-owned institution —failed to include an act of religious piety and devotion when explaining his gold-medal jump to a welcoming and overwhelmingly Mormon audience. Richards said only that when the bar was placed at six feet, four inches, he “experienced a momentary feeling of discouragement and doubt and felt the shadow of a chill down his spine.” Then, he continued, “I thought of the B.Y.U., Utah and my friends there, and the old United States and made the spurt—and chill and all went over the bar in the first attempt.” 32 Richards’s BYU high school yearbook provided a similar description of his leap: “The honor of his country, his state, and his Alma Mater were in his custody and visions of this responsibility for a moment numbed him. Then, after warming up slightly, he summoned his powers, and reinforcing them with a liberal portion of that old, determined, B.Y.U. spirit, he jumped.” 33 He repeated the account several times, and in interviews with Utah newspapers, including the Deseret News, never mentioned prayer. He simply stated, “As it happened the good jumpers did not do as well as they had formerly and through some power new to me I was able to do better. I squeezed out the winner.”34 Richards surely knew about the story of his Olympic prayer while he attended Cornell. The Ithaca Daily News reprinted Albertani’s article about the school’s famous track star on February 4, 1914, but neither Richards nor the school publications made any reference to it. During the next twenty years of Richards’s collegiate and amateur track competition, his contemporaries, as well as the sports reporters who covered his lengthy career did not mention a Stockholm prayer. Neither did the dear friend 31

Alma Richards to E. L. Roberts, July 9, 1912, printed in the Provo Herald, July 26, 1912.

Deseret Evening News, August 24, 1912.

33 BYUtah 1913 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Student Body, 1913), 186.

34 Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 25, 1912.

32

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who delivered his funeral eulogy or the LDS elders who conducted his memorial services in California and in Utah.35 This is not surprising. After all, neither Richards nor the press had mentioned the prayer in 1912. And while he remained true to the faith of his fathers throughout his adult life, with the passage of time, his religiosity probably became more a matter of personal conviction than institutionalized practice. Baptized as was customary at age eight, Richards did not serve a proselytizing church mission or receive temple endowments—two important commitments of faith in an LDS life. His church attendance waned and likely ceased for a time, as his first two wives, Marion Gardner and Anita Gertrude Huntimer, were not LDS; further, he did not raise any of his four children as Mormons. His third wife, Lenore Griffin, whom he married in 1948, was an active Latter-day Saint, but their marriage was not solemnized in an LDS temple.

Whatever the extent of his religious practice, Richards earnestly embraced his Mormon heritage. Although he lived in Los Angeles from 1922 until his death in 1963, he remained a Parowan boy at heart. He subscribed to the Parowan Times, returned frequently to Utah to visit family and friends, contributed to church-sponsored charitable activities, and enthusiastically supported the preservation of the pioneer-era Old Rock Church, where, he wrote, “many of us were taught that it was wrong to steal, lie, smoke and drink and these teachings have been followed by many who otherwise would not have been so true.”36 Then, thirty years after the fact, came Richards’s first intimation of an Olympic prayer. The Improvement Era, the official LDS news magazine for various church organizations, printed excerpts from “letters recently received” from Richards in a November 1942 piece entitled “Alma Richards—His Record and Testimony.” After briefly summarizing his athletic career, the Era quoted Richards as having said, “I told the Lord . . . that if He would help me to win the high jumps in the Olympic Games at Stockholm, I would do my best to be a good boy and set a good example.”

Whether this entreaty occurred before Stockholm, sometime during the Games, or at the actual competition is unclear. However, the main point of the article was not Richards’s vague, imploring comments about prayer, but rather, his reiteration of his refusal to accept a thousand dollars from “a large tobacco concern” to endorse its products after he won the gold medal. “It was no temptation whatever,” he declared. “Many times I had needed money badly—yet not that much.”37 His firm rejection of the offer 35 Los Angeles Times, April 4–5, 1963; Iron County Record (Cedar City, UT), April 11, 1963; Long Beach Press Telegram, July 3, 1963; New York Times, April 5, 1963; James B. Miller, “Eulogy in Memory of Alma Wilford Richards,” box 1, fd. 10, Richards Papers.

36 Alma Richards to Jane W. Adams, printed in the Parowan Times, July 10, 1929.

37 Improvement Era, November 1942, 731. The Improvement Era published this piece in its section for LDS men eighteen years of age or older; thus Richards’s description of himself as “a boy” of twenty-two in 1912 was incongruous.

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in 1912 was well known and had earned him, like other outstanding Mormon athletes, praise for personifying the relationship between athletic success and adherence to the church’s dietary teachings at a time when the Word of Wisdom was evolving from preference to principle. A 1928 Improvement Era article, for instance, extolled Richards for his athletic achievements and noted that he had remarked, “I have never used regularly tea, coffee, tobacco, or liquor in any form. I still believe in the Word of Wisdom.”38 Accordingly, the Improvement Era featured Richards’s 1942 comments in its “No-Liquor-Tobacco Column.” The editor began the column by reminding the chairmen of local LDS committees of their charge to get at least one hundred Latter-day Saints to urge their U.S. senators and representatives to support a bill sponsored by Texas senator Morris Sheppard, the so-called father of Prohibition. Sheppard’s bill would have banned the sale, gift, or possession of alcoholic beverages where American military personnel lived, worked, or trained. Within this context, the Era column concluded by praising Richards not for offering a prayer during the Olympics, but rather for serving as an exemplary representative of Mormonism: “Alma Richards is a modest, thoroughly honest man who attributes his athletic successes and moral strength to parental teachings, keeping the Word of Wisdom, and prayer. He has always believed that liquor and tobacco are not good for man—a truth revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1833. Alma Richards has set an example of moral courage, fidelity to parental teachings, and faithfulness in keeping the commandment of the Lord, worthy of imitation by every boy in the Church.”39 Why did Richards mention his Olympic prayer for the first time thirty years after the Games? Could the emotional impact of a second divorce (one involving three preteen children) have prompted Richards to rededicate himself to his faith? In August 1942, he wrote a letter amounting to a testimony of beliefs to Joseph F. Merrill, a member of the Council of the Twelve, who in 1930 had authorized a church loan for Richards. Merrill, knowing the Olympic champion’s firm endorsement of the Word of Wisdom would inspire the faithful and bolster the church’s support of the Sheppard temperance bill, forwarded the letter to the Improvement Era for publication. Whatever the circumstances, Richards’s celebrity gave added importance to his affirmation of the LDS faith. The Deseret News understood as much, reprinting the column with the same title two months later.40 38 Harrison R. Merrill, “Utah Athletes Coming to Their Own,” Improvement Era, August 1928, 824.

Asking a practicing Mormon to endorse tobacco may have indicated unfamiliarity with the Word of Wisdom, the LDS dietary code contained in Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants. On the other hand, the proscriptions regarding tobacco, food, and drink were not considered obligatory until 1921. See Thomas G. Alexander, “The Word of Wisdom: From Principle to Requirement,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 3 (1981): 78–88.

39 Improvement Era, November 1942, 731.

40 Joseph F. Merrill to Alma Richards, August 24, 1942, box 1, fd. 1, Richards Papers; Deseret News, January 16, 1943.

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Twelve years later, Richards renewed contact with his old Olympic rival, Hans Liesche, through the assistance of the German sportswriter Arthur E. Grix.41 Richards had been deeply troubled since 1912 with doubts about his Olympic victory, frequently saying that Liesche was “the best jumper in the world” and noting that repeated interruptions had upset the German as he attempted a final leap. In his first letter to Liesche in February 1954, Richards recalled the high jumping competition in detail, forthrightly declaring, “I have always felt that you should have won the 1912 High Jump” because “you were interrupted a great deal.” He subsequently repeated the statement, always citing the distractions Liesche endured, but without discussion of prayer.42 Nor did Richards mention prayer in an autobiographical statement he sent to Grix, who was preparing a magazine article on the reuniting of the two aging Olympians. If Richards had knelt openly in prayer during the competition—an act that would have been widely observed—why did he not mention it to Liesche, who surely would have known about it, or to Grix, who would have liked to have known about it for his article?

But then, in October 1954, Alma wrote a statement assessing his life, in which he again referred to prayer in conjunction with the gold medal. He reiterated the comments he made after the Games and in the Improvement Era article, with slight embellishment and a major addition: “Many thoughts went very rapidly through my mind. I thought of Parowan—my folks—the B.Y.U.—Utah—my people—that I was representing our Country against a fine athlete from another country. I felt weak and as if the whole world was on my shoulders. As I walked back to make my jump, I said a prayer and asked God to give me strength and if it was right that I should win—that I would do my best to set a good example all the days of my life. The weight went off my shoulders and my confidence returned.”43 By writing that he had prayed privately while walking back to prepare to approach the bar, Richards effectively countered the idea that he had knelt in open supplication.44 Is it coincidence that Richards again mentioned prayer—this time with specific reference to the 1912 Olympics—in an introspective, private document he penned seven months after having resumed contact with Liesche? Did referring to prayer help alleviate his long-standing uneasiness, now heightened by correspondence with Leische, about a triumph that, 41 For an account of the Richards-Liesche correspondence, see Larry R. Gerlach, “An Olympic Friendship: Alma Richards and Hans Liesche,” in Janice Forsyth and Michael K. Heine, eds., Problems, Possibilities, Promising Practices: Critical Dialogues on the Olympic and Paralympic Games (London, Ontario: International Centre for Olympic Studies, 2012), 45–50.

42 Alma Richards to Hans Liesche, February 20, 1954, box 1, fd. 2, Richards Papers. See also Arthur Grix to Richards, February 5, 1954, and Richards to Grix, February 25, 1954, box 1, fd. 3 and 5, Richards Papers.

43 Richards, Personal Statement, Richards Papers.

44 Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics,” 3, first raised this point.

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however exceptional, remained troubling because of extenuating circumstances? Could invoking prayer, in whatever form, justify a seemingly miraculous achievement that seemed inexplicable, save for divine intervention?

It is uncertain how—or even whether—Alma Richards prayed before his victorious Olympic leap. No contemporary sources discussed a prayer; and, upon his return from Stockholm, Richards himself did not refer to prayer before overwhelmingly LDS audiences or in interviews with Provo and Salt Lake City newspapers that, given the religiosity of much of their readership, surely would have reported such a demonstration of faith.

During the next thirty years of collegiate and amateur track competition, Richards was widely heralded as an Olympic champion, but none of his fellow competitors or newspaper reporters apparently knew of his purported prayer. The teacher who wrote a lengthy ode for Richards’s retirement, the friend who delivered his eulogy, and the Latter-day Saints who conducted his memorial services did not hint at the Olympic prayer. Richards himself did not bring up prayer in the Olympic-oriented autobiography he prepared for Arthur Grix or in his correspondence with Hans Liesche from 1954 to 1963. And no evidence exists that his widow—whose determined efforts to preserve Richards’s Olympic memory resulted in the transfer of his athletic awards from the Helms Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles to BYU—mentioned prayer in Stockholm. In short, the only direct evidence of an Olympic prayer are two brief, vague statements Richards made thirty and forty-two years after the fact.

If Richards did pray before his final leap in Stockholm, certain conclusions seem evident. First, he apparently placed no particular significance on it at the time since he did not cite the effects of a prayer while explaining his achievement to fellow church members and to the press after returning from the Olympics. He may have felt prayer was a purely a private matter, but the failure to share with coreligionists apparent evidence of God’s favor countered the customary practice of Mormons to bear faith-promoting witness. Second, he most assuredly did not ostentatiously kneel in prayer— a practice atypical for Mormons—but instead offered a private, brief, and silent entreaty, similar to the sort of supplications that would later become common among athletes during competitions.

Ultimately, the question of Alma Richards’s Olympic prayer relates to the larger issue of the use of sport as an instrument of social assimilation and the reinforcing of faith. This is nothing new. Church-affiliated educational institutions from Notre Dame to Brigham Young have sponsored athletic teams for this purpose since the late nineteenth century. The Alma Richards story is unusual in that it involves a religious institution, the LDS church, officially using an individual athlete’s specific expression of faith to inspire the flock, to project a “mainstream” image of cultural respectability, and to indirectly support Salt Lake City’s bid to obtain the Winter Olympics. There is nothing untoward in any of that.

What is troublesome is how stories of Richards’s alleged prayer were

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constructed, even exaggerated, so that the faith-related purpose took precedent over factual accuracy. No attempt was made to ascertain the veracity of the story, in whole or in part. And despite a compelling 2007 article in which David Lund questioned the account of Richards’s public prayer, the story continued to be repeated uncritically and with embellishments; prior to the 2012 London Summer Games, for instance, the Deseret News credited Richards with having set a world record, instead of an Olympic record.45 Does it matter? Well, yes. Extraordinary professions of religiosity and overt examples of God’s favor provide a potent means of reinforcing and transmitting faith; given the folkloric status such tales command, it seems imperative to ensure their accuracy. Personal testimonies of spiritual experiences, borne by Latter-day Saints, form a vital part of Mormonism; observers may consider such testimonies to be experiential perceptions or to be contrived parables—in other words, expressions of belief intended to bolster religiosity. However, statements about historical figures—which might be taken as gospel truths that have withstood the test of time— should be faithful to history, not faithful history. While faith-promoting history is not solely an LDS issue, attributing religiosity to Richards’s gold medal performance not only attached a defining quality to one of Utah’s finest athletes, it also positioned him as an exemplar for all those who seek evidence of divine intervention in mundane events.

The uncritical acceptance of a questionable account about an undocumented Olympic prayer created a distorted, if not false, representation of Alma Richards and his historic achievement. It is only certain that phenomenal leg strength and indomitable determination propelled him over the bar; more than that need not be said. Alma Richards deserves a place in the pantheon of great Utah, Mormon, and American athletes for the same reasons that brought him fame before it was fashionable to emphasize a questionable instance of public devotion—he was Utah’s first Olympic gold medalist, he adhered to his religion’s dietary proscriptions, and he became the most versatile and accomplished track and field athlete of his generation.

45

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Trent Toone, Deseret News, July 27, 2012; Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics.”

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Male and Female Teachers in Early Utah and the West

By VAL D. RUST

O

wen Wister’s famous novel, The Virginian, contains a classic story of a young eastern woman braving “a country where Indians and wild animals live unchained” to teach in Bear Creek, Wyoming. After exchanging letters with the people of Bear Creek about a “schoolmarm” position, Miss Mary Stark Wood leaves Vermont, travels west, and falls in love with the Virginian.1 Western fiction often featured such women. Hamlin Garland’s Prairie Folks tells of Lily Graham, an eastern woman as lovely “as if builded of the pink and white clouds.” Graham crosses the prairies of Iowa to teach and finds herself acting as a savior for her pupil’s parents, whose lives with each other have become fraught with difficulty.2 These sentimental stories provided a moving image of the westward migration of young female teachers, but they represented only a small slice of social reality.

Men taught school children in the nineteenth-century American West as much, or more, than women did—a function, perhaps, of the region’s demographics. In Utah, the gender of educators was connected not only to population but also to religion. As they settled Utah, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened schools connected to the church’s fundamental unit, the ward. In these settings, and according to the Latter-day Students from the Homer School Saint (LDS or Mormon) worldview, teachers in Salt Lake County, 1911–1912.

Val D. Rust is professor of education at UCLA. He is the director of the Center for International and Development Education. He recently served as the faculty chair of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and served for many years as the director of the International Education Office at UCLA. 1 2

Owen Wister, The Virginian (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 60–64, 90 (quotation).

Hamlin Garland, Prairie Folks (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 102.

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could be either male or female. In contrast, women primarily served as the faculty of mission schools founded in Utah by Protestant denominations.

Then, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the relationship between religion and the gender of teachers took another turn with the creation of LDS “academies,” with their largely male staffs. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century, when the state finally opened public schools, that more and more women began instructing Utah’s children.

Thus, in Utah, whatever entity sponsored a school played a critical role in whether men or women led the classroom—and throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, those entities often had religious affiliations.

The assumption that a school teacher will be a woman was established in the mid-nineteenth century and is now so commonplace in American culture that we use female pronouns when speaking of teachers. However, at the time, in the South and in the West, men served as teachers as often as women. Although most mainstream Americans imagined an “impermeable boundary” between men’s public, political, and economic role, and women’s private, domestic, and maternal role, the school crossed this boundary. It functioned in both the public and the private domain.

The idea that a woman might have a career as a professionally trained teacher developed slowly. It was finally established in the 1830s and 1840s with the coming of the American common school, an institution created to meet the budding industrial demands for educated workers, as well as to satisfy the Jacksonian striving for an educated citizenry.3 The common school in America was an importation of the Prussian Volksschule, an eightyear school for the German masses, distinguished from schools for the elites and charged with imparting the basic skills of arithmetic and reading, patriotism, and faith in God. Americans adopted its curriculum but extended its mission to include all young people, who were to have a “common” schooling experience. In a single generation, almost all the states in the union had created a new, democratic school system. Soon afterward, the states put compulsory attendance laws in place.

The cost of establishing an all-encompassing common school in every city and hamlet of America would have been prohibitive if teachers had been paid a professional salary. The genius of the American school system was that school leaders called on the talents of better-educated females.

Women gladly took on the burden of serving as teachers in the common schools, and they made them function without demanding salaries equivalent to those of men. In 1857 New England, for instance, men earned substantially larger salaries than did women.4 3 Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper Collins, 1980).

4 Edgar B. Wesley, The NEA: The First Hundred Years. The Building of the Teaching Profession (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957), 10. In Massachusetts, male teachers earned $43.63 every month, more than twice as much as women ($20.34). In Connecticut, men earned $29.00 a month, while women earned $17.25.

In Rhode Island, men earned $34.50 a month, while women earned $20.34.

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Even though at the Table 1. Gender in the West, 1890 beg inning of the nineState or Territory Percent Male teenth century most formal school teachers had been California 58 men, by the middle of the Colorado 59.5 century, teaching had shiftIdaho 60.7 Nevada 64.4 ed to become a primarily Oregon 58 female occupation in New Washington 62.3 England. Of course, women had long given instruction in an informal capacity. In 1647, colonial leaders mandated that some mechanism be set up to school the young in every community of at least fifty householders. New Englanders usually accomplished this goal by enlisting and providing some remuneration to a woman who would gather her neighbor’s boys and girls together in her home and teach them reading skills, faith, and habits of good behavior.5 Throughout the colonial period, therefore, large numbers of women gave instruction, but their work was viewed as a family responsibility.6 As long as the teaching of young children was understood as an extension of family responsibilities, the separate-sphere concept was retained. Working with small children was seen as a nurturing process natural to women. The establishment of the common school did not destroy that basic dualism of male and female roles because many Americans viewed the entrance of women into the common schools as an extension of the role of the mother.

In fact, Horace Mann, the father of the American common school movement, argued for the employment of women teachers by defining “teaching as a nurturing behavior that was natural to women.”7 The Boston Board of Education reinforced Mann’s claim, declaring that “females are incomparably better teachers for young children than males. . . . Their manners are more mild and gentle, hence more in consonance with the tenderness of childhood.”8 Educational historians have supported the notion of teacher as female, projecting a New England regional perspective such that it has become a national perspective. It is true that in New England almost all early common school teachers were female. Some historians estimate that just prior to the Civil War, at least one in five women in Massachusetts taught at some time in her life.9 The educational historian R. Freeman Butts noted 5 Joel Perlmann and Robert A. Margo, Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers: 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

6 Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

7 Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States (Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1929), 1:463.

8 Horace Mann, Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education (Boston: Boston Board of Education, 1840).

9 Richard Bernard and Maris Vinovskis, “The Female Teachers in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 3 (1977): 332–45.

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that “by the Civil War the American teacher was female.”10 However, objective data from other parts of the country do not support this claim.

Whereas in 1869–1870, approximately 86.4 percent of all school teachers in New England were female, in the South the reverse was true: almost three quarters were male.11 In the West, as late as 1890, California and Nevada were the only two western states and territories where female teachers held a majority—and it was slim. A simplistic explanation might be that the population in the nineteenth-century-West was predominantly male. In New England, in 1890, males were in the majority only in Vermont (50.9 percent), while the western states and territories were skewed toward males. Moreover, the 1890 demographics represent a dramatic drop in the percentage of male dominance in the West (see Table 1). For example, in 1870, 76.1 percent of people in Nevada were males, and that figure dropped to 64.4 percent over the following twenty years.12 Accordingly, the teachers of the West were not typically “mild and gentle” women, who “cherished the tenderness of childhood.” More often they were men whose lives were honed and strengthened by the brutality of the deserts and mountains of the West. Of course, men did not settle the West alone. Some eastern women, including teachers, also braved the unknown. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the National Board of Popular Education sent more than 250 women west to teach.13 Still, men dominated the West, and they led classrooms more often than women did.

Utah is a special case. In 1890, there were more men than women in the population, but they held only a slight, 52.8 percent, majority. Utah’s initial Euro-American settlement by Mormon pioneers gave the state a greater balance between males and females than in much of the American West.

During the nineteenth century, men somewhat dominated the ranks of teachers in Utah, a fact that was all the more remarkable because the sexes were more balanced in Utah than in other western states and territories. In 1870–1871, for example, 55.1 percent of all Utah teachers were male. With the passage of time, women increasingly led Utah classrooms—by the end of World War I, three quarters of the state’s teachers were female—but the question remains, why did men and women play equal teaching roles in Utah through the end of the nineteenth century?14 Though the first schools of Utah would today be considered private 10

R. F. Butts and L. A. Cremin, History of Education in American Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1953),

284.

11 The United States Bureau of Education was first established in 1868, so no national data exist prior to that time.

12 U.S. Bureau of Education, Annual Survey of Education (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Education, 1923–1924).

13 Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1984), 5–7.

14 U.S. Bureau of Education, Annual Survey of Education.

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undertakings, they were part of the communal Mormon environment and were intended to serve all the children of a neighborhood or village.15 Prior to the 1890 free public school law, LDS wards mainly organized and administered basic schooling in Utah. The Mormon pioneers likely opened the Salt Lake Valley’s first school soon after their arrival in July 1847. That October, Mary Jane Dilworth gathered nine young pupils together in a military tent to instruct them in some fundamental knowledge.16 As the LDS church sent its members out to settle an area or as they moved on of their own initiative, they gathered in groups for mutual protection and cultivated a strong sense of community. While Mary Jane Dilworth, Utah’s first the Mormons were geographically isolated teacher. from the world, they nevertheless maintained a cosmopolitanism that ensured cultural and social development.

By 1854, nearly all the LDS wards in the Utah Territory operated a school, an institution many community members saw as the local “common school,” which provided basic schooling for all children. In Salt Lake City, for example, there were “21 school districts, each coterminous with the city’s 21 Mormon wards (or parishes), and each with its own elected three-person school board.”17 The ward school had a quasi-public nature, even though an ecclesiastic unit controlled it. While school boards held the formal responsibility of appointing teachers, Mormon bishops (the lay leaders of the wards) played an important role in selecting them. In fact, the position of teacher was considered a “calling” that came from a bishop.

Even though I have not been able to find pronouncements by early church and civic leaders about the value of women teachers, with their unique female traits, as had been made by the fathers of the American common school movement, the Mormon general authorities tended to link teaching with parenting more broadly defined. In 1865, Heber C. Kimball emphasized that “as parents and teachers, we should try with all of our ability to impress upon the minds of our young people, by precept and example, the principles of truth.”18 Acting as parents and as teachers in the communal environment, both men and women had this responsibility.

15 Frederick S. Buchanan, “Education in Utah,” in Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 153–54.

16 Andrew Love Neff, The History of Utah, 1847–1869 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1940), 351.

17 Frederick S. Buchanan, Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890–1994 (Salt Lake City: Smith Research Associates / Signature Books, 1996), 1.

18 Heber C. Kimball, February 19, 1865, in Journal of Discourses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (London and Liverpool: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854–1886), 11:86.

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A kaleidoscope of teaching arrangements existed in early Utah. In one variation, the LDS church incorporated the school into priesthood functions, and men’s authority over women was not to be questioned. Such an orientation was consistent with the prevailing national ideology that men and women belonged to separate spheres.19 Other educational arrangements in Utah did not make such a clear distinction, but used the participation and talents of both men and women in educating the young. Sometimes, church leaders simply appointed anyone who was willing to take on the burden of teaching. That person might have been a man who had been maimed in outdoor work. Or it might have been a young girl who saw an opportunity for a person without formal training to yet take up a “holy calling” in a school.20 Louisa Lula Greene represented such a case. After entering the classroom as a teacher, she lamented, “I want to be a very good teacher, and do not know how. I feel that I am not competent as yet to do justice in this respect and so am not satisfied with what I do.”21 In a third variation, a ward would set a specific standard and demand that a legitimate candidate, male or female, must meet that standard. Fifteenyear-old Mary Jane Mount Tanner was just such a person. She tried unsuccessfully to gain a position, but then studied arithmetic, geography, and grammar and practiced reading, writing, and spelling enough so that a year later she impressed the examiners enough to be offered a position.22 Fourth, a local Mormon school would appoint the best possible teacher, even though that person might not be Mormon. In 1860, Warren and Wilson Dusenberry, two brothers from Illinois, passed through Utah on their way to California, where they attended Vacaville College. The Dusenberrys returned to Utah in 1862 and were the best candidates for teaching positions in Provo’s ward schools. A year later, the brothers started their own private “First Dusenberry School” and subsequently joined the LDS church.23 Among these types of church-run schools, Latter-day Saints clearly did not consider it appropriate to separate men’s (public) and women’s (private) roles. The Mormon church had swallowed up the conventional framework and had replaced it with a belief in the unity of all things in God’s sphere.

It followed Apostle Paul’s assertion that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.”24 According to the historian Christine 19 Anne Firor Scott, “Mormon Women, Other Women: Paradoxes and Challenges,” in The Mormon History Association’s Tanner Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ed. Dean L. May and Reid L. Neilson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

20 Jill C. Mulvay, “Zion’s Schoolmarms,” in Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, ed. Claudia L. Bushman (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997).

21 Louisa Lula Greene Richards, “Louisa Lula Greene Journal 1878–1940,” Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL).

22 Mary Jane Mount Tanner, Autobiography, circa 1870–1875, MS 8024, CHL. 23 Charles S. Peterson, “A New Community: Mormon Teachers and the Separation of Church and State in Utah's Territorial Schools,” Utah Historical Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1980): 299–300.

24 Galatians 4:28.

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Talbot, as Mormons strived for oneness, they tried to unite things that the broader society “insisted should remain separate.” Ideally, Mormonism did not distinguish between the home and the outside world and, instead, “subsumed the private individual, private property, religious and political conscience, and the private home into a broad, communitarian spiritualpolitical order.”25 God’s kingdom on earth demanded that men commit themselves to the home, child rearing, and other dimensions of life that the dominant American culture had marked as feminine. It also demanded that women commit themselves to the wider sphere of social relations, the economy, and political life.26 Both men and women, Brigham Young proclaimed, would “live together” in heaven “as one great family.”27 In other words, Mormons disavowed the public and private world and saw only an amalgamation of religion, family, economics, and politics, which they identified as God’s kingdom. This unification of spheres, Talbot argues, was best exemplified in polygamy: Even marriage was not to be based exclusively on love and affection, but also on the idea of a community-wide family whose higher purpose was to further God’s work.28 The very language Mormons used reflected that unity, for they addressed each other as “brothers” and “sisters” in a heavenly family.29 Talbot fails to include the schools and teaching as examples of a breakdown of the dualistic world found in eighteenth century America; and yet, it is a powerful example of the unity demanded

by Mormon doctrines. Women participated fully not only as teachers but as principals, district superintendents, teacher trainers, teacher association officers, and academics in early Utah.

While the LDS church took for granted that both men and women would devote their lives to the family, the definition of the family had been extended to the broader community, including the schools. This unity of the public and the private allowed women to bypass men’s authority through a direct relationship with God, gain access to important aspects of the broader community, and serve faithfully and fully in spheres denied to many of their female contemporaries.30 Although the Mormons founded more than three hundred settlements in the Great Basin before the death of Brigham Young in 1876, it would 25 Christine Talbot, “The Church Family in Nineteenth-Century America: Mormonism and the Public/Private Divide,” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 4 (2011): 221.

26 Linda Thatcher and Patricia Lyn Scott, eds., Women in Utah History: Introduction (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005); Janet Zollinger Giele, Two Paths to Women's Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (New York: Twayne, 1995).

27 Brigham Young, January 12, 1868, Journal of Discourses, 12:153.

28 Talbot, “The Church Family,” 221.

29 The kingdom of God also had economic and political dimensions. Women often participated in economic matters on an equal footing with men, as exemplified by the women’s cooperative movement. See Eileen V. Wallis, “The Women’s Cooperative Movement in Utah, 1869–1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2003).

30 Katherine Sarah Massoth, “Writing an Honorable Remembrance: Nineteenth-Century LDS Women’s Autobiography,” Journal of Mormon History 39, no. 2 (2013).

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not be possible to provide a statistical profile of male and female teachers in those earliest communities. But we have some indication of the gender of the first teachers from a collection of sites. In Manti, in 1850, Isaac Morley directed the building of a log schoolhouse, in which Jesse W. Fox acted as “the pioneer teacher.” Later, Mary Whiting became a permanent teacher.31 A year later, in Cedar City, George A. Smith helped establish the Iron County Mission and began teaching children before the settlers had even raised their homes. On Februar y 21, Smith noted that he commenced “a g rammar school in my wicky-up” for five young boys, who read by Jesse W. Fox, an early teacher in the “light of the camp fire, with only one Manti. grammar book.”32 This trend of both women and men teaching children in Utah settlements continued throughout the 1850s and 1860s. In 1852, in Ogden, Andrew Jensen recorded that “a common school was opened and conducted by a widow lady named Gean.”33 On May 2 of that year, in Nephi, Martha Spence Heywood wrote the following in her journal: “Sunday. Had a meeting to regulate about the school and was decided that would commence forthwith engaging Candace Smith to teach at the rate of five dollars a week and board herself.” Smith remained for only six weeks before moving to Manti, and Heywood was persuaded to take her place and teach the seventeen children in the school. While two women first taught Nephi’s school children, the village’s other early teachers included five men (Andrew Love, George Spencer, Amos Gustin, James Bailey, and Thomas Ord) and only one woman (Amy Sigler).34 Around 1853, in Provo, David John taught in the Fourth Ward School, while in Spanish Fork, a primitive schoolhouse became ready for use in 1857, and Samuel Cornaby, an English immigrant, became its first teacher.

That fall of 1857, the people of Spanish Fork completed two other buildings used for schooling; the teachers were “Hon. Silas Hillam and Mrs. 31

W. H. Lever, History of Sanpete and Emery Counties, Utah (Ogden: W. H. Lever, 1898), 16.

The U.S. Bureau of Education, a statistics office, was established in 1868, so no records are available prior to that time. George A. Smith, Journal, 1850–1851, MSS 654-1, p. 21, typescript, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USHS).

33 Milton Lynn Bennion, Mormonism and Education (Salt Lake City: Department of Education of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1939), 14.

34 Martha Spence Heywood, Not by Bread Alone: The Journal of Martha Spence Heywood, 1850–1856, ed.

Juanita Brooks (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1978), 79.

32

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Margaret Leah.”35 In Midway, the first school was a log cabin, but it was soon replaced by a “pot rock” school house.

In the early 1860s, Simon Higgenbotham became the first teacher of Midway’s children, instructing them in a program of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Attewall Wootton, whose family had converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s, replaced Higgenbotham in 1866. Wootton served successfully as an educator throughout his long life.36 Though exact information is unavailable, these case studies demonstrate that men and women alike took on the role of establishing basic schooling.

This balance of male and female Martha Spence Heywood. teachers continued in the Mormon settlements established after the Civil War. Phil Mass settled at Henry’s Fork in Daggett County in 1862 and established a ranch. His family consisted of four boys and five girls, so in 1869 he hired William Pearson to come to his ranch and serve as tutor. When, in 1877, a public school was finally established in the area, Pearson became the teacher at that one-room school. Later, Mark Manley and Robert Hereford also served as teachers; each received fifty dollars a month.37 The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, and history.38 In 1870, Kanab became a permanent settlement under the leadership of Levi Stewart, who brought fifty-two people from the southern Salt Lake Valley to colonize the area. In that year, the colonists organized an LDS ward and built a combined school and meetinghouse. Beginning with forty-seven pupils, the school quickly expanded to more than one hundred pupils, taught by William D. Johnson and assisted by Persis Brown. In 1874, Orderville, just north of Kanab, was established as a United Order settlement, and its first teacher, Ellen Meeks Hoyt, had received a teaching certificate at age fifteen.39 As they opened these rudimentary schools, Mormon colonists were 35

Bennion, Mormonism and Education.

Leslie S. Raty, “A History of Wasatch County, 1859–1899” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1954).

37 They were almost all one-room schools. In 1883, for example, 441 schools employed 491 teachers.

Stanley S. Ivins, “Free Schools Come to Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1954), 312–42.

38 Donald Weir Baxter, “The History of Public Education in Daggett County, Utah, and Adjacent Areas” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1959), 33–34.

39 Martha Sonntag Bradley, A History of Kane County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Kane County Commission, 1999), 86.

36

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responding to their church’s educational imperatives. Brigham Young observed that “Most of the people called Latter-day Saints have been taken from the rural and manufacturing districts of this and the old countries, and they belonged to the poorest of the poor.” Yet he exclaimed that the gospel had awakened in most of them a desire to seek after the best life has to offer.

The gathering of the Latter-day Saints of both sexes was intended to inspire them to seek after “every accomplishment, every polished grace, every useful attainment in mathematics, music, and in all science and art.” He admonished his co-religionists to encourage their children to “become more informed in every department of true and useful learning than their fathers are.”40 Of course, Young had overstated the case. Early converts were usually poor and certainly did not represent the elites of society, but some of them—both men and women—had received as good an education as easterners and willingly shared their talents with the young in building up God’s unified kingdom on earth. Orson Pratt had attended various schools, for example, including an academy in New York State.41 Louisa Barnes Pratt attended local schools and finished at the “Female Academy” in Winchester, New Hampshire. She had gained teaching experience before she joined the LDS church and moved west. 42 Samuel Cornaby, the first teacher in Spanish Fork, graduated from Borough Road Normal School in London.

Elmina Shepard Taylor received normal school training in New York, and Emmeline B. Wells was schooled in Massachusetts.43 Karl G. Maeser, the founder of Brigham Young Academy, joined the LDS church in Germany after attending a university preparatory school and the Friedrichstadt Schullehrerseminar, or teacher training college.44 The father of Mary and Ida Cook, a physician, saw to it that Mary graduated from State Normal School at Albany and that Ida graduated from Oswego State Normal School, both in the state of New York.45 Young recognized this talent among the pioneers and emphasized that “a good school teacher is one of the most essential members in society.”46 However, problems arose from the beginning. As early as 1851, in Salt Lake County, authorities required teachers to present themselves for examination—and those examinations demonstrated that the teachers usually fell “far below the standard of the qualifications.”47 Mediocrity was not universally the case, however. For more than thirty years during the nineteenth 40

Brigham Young, March 4, 1860, Journal of Discourses, 8:9.

Orson Pratt, The Orson Pratt Journals, ed. Elden J. Watson (Salt Lake City: Elden J. Watson, 1975).

42 Louisa Barnes Pratt, Schoolmarm All My Life, ed. Joyce Kinkead (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000), chapter one.

43 Mulvay, “Zion’s Schoolmarms.”

44 Brigham Young University, “Biographical Sketch: Karl G. Maeser,” ed. Office of the President (Provo, UT: L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University, n.d.).

45 Jill C. Mulvay, “The Two Miss Cooks: Pioneer Professionals for Utah Schools,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1975), 396–409.

46 Brigham Young, April and May, 1863, Journal of Discourses, 10:226.

47 “School Teachers, etc.” Deseret News, December 11, 1852.

41

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century Mary and Ida Cook had an impact on Utah’s education. In 1871, they were both employed by John R. Park at the University of Deseret.

Mary became the principal of the university’s model graded school; both women actively prepared students to become teachers and served as officers in the teacher’s association.48 Also among Utah’s outstanding educators was Richard S. Horne of the Salt Lake City Fourteenth Ward School. In 1867, Brigham Young called him to go on a mission to St. George to restore order to the town’s rowdy schools.49 In St. George, Horne emphasized diligence and discipline, and he reminded his students that school was meant “to refine your intellect and store your minds with wisdom.” One of Horne’s fellow teachers honored him by saying that his was “the best school of the town and the teacher was my ideal of what a teacher should be. Good governing ability—he had perfect order and much method.”50 He had apparently learned that method by attending the Parent School in Salt Lake City.

The initial experience of the Parent School illustrated the extent to which men filled the ranks of Utah’s first educators. In November 1850, Orson Spencer supervised the creation of the Parent School in Salt Lake City to help “gentlemen” qualify as teachers for the LDS ward schools.51 Early notices for the institution demonstrated its connection with male teachers. One notice implored “young men, middle aged, old men, and all men, married or unmarried . . . to come forward as speedily as possible.”52 The Parent School held its first classes in the home of John Pack, but his house was not large enough to accommodate women. The school rectified this injustice the next year by offering training to both males and females.

The school attended to the best pedagogy of the day, including a “large and well-selected assortment of school books” provided by Wilford Woodruff. 53 Of course, the curriculum included LDS scriptural canon, including the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Old and the New Testament. The intent of such undertakings was to make the Mormon territory as nearly independent of the outside world as possible. The young people were being cultivated to thrive in a Mormon culture and become capable, contributing members of an independent territory.

The position of teacher was considered a “calling” on the part of the bishop. All too often, men failed to respond to such a calling, and the burden fell on willing women. God’s unified kingdom demanded that both men and women respond. The men were challenged to accept their responsibility.

For example, in 1872, George A. Smith, speaking in the Salt Lake 48

Mulvay, “The Two Miss Cooks.”

Robert V. Bullough, “Teachers and Teaching in the Nineteenth Century: St. George, Utah,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 4, no. 2 (1982).

50 Ibid.

51 The formal name was the University of Deseret.

52 Neff, History of Utah, 353; “Parent School,” Deseret News, November 16, 1850 (quotation).

53 “Parent School,” Deseret News, November 30, 1850 (quotation), January 11, 1851. Notices for the Parent School appeared in each edition of the Deseret News until the school collapsed a year after its opening.

49

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Tabernacle, exclaimed, “Let me say to you, brethren, there is no calling more important than to teach a common school.”54 Likewise, at the LDS church’s 1867 general conference, Erastus Snow observed, “I will say that our school teachers should not only be men qualified to teach the various branches of education, but they should be men possessing the spirit of the gospel, and who, in every look and word, and in all their discipline and intercourse with their pupils are influenced by that spirit.”55 The calling of a teacher was given to both men and women; however, in 1872 male teachers earned, on average, $25.93 a month, while female teachers earned $13.00.

We must keep in mind that much of a teacher’s remuneration came as in-kind benefits such as food or fuel.56 As time passed, the question of who would instruct school children increasingly became not only a question of gender, but also one of religious affiliation. Not all ward school teachers belonged to the Mormon church.

Even though such teachers constituted only a small quantity of the ward instructors, their numbers were apparently significant enough that Brigham Young chastised bishops for ignoring Mormon teachers in favor of outsiders.57 On the other hand, after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, a growing non-Mormon population complained about the ward schools with their Mormon-controlled curriculum, hiring practices, and facilities. The Latter-day Saints usually operated the ward schools in church buildings, and the non-Mormons claimed that these quasi-public institutions should not be conducted in buildings owned by the LDS church.58 Non-Mormons were also concerned that the school board not be part of the ward structure, and that the teachers be hired by a broader-based school board.59 By the early 1870s, these ward school districts began to be consolidated into county school systems, overseen by a county superintendent of schools. In 1874 Mary Cook was nominated to be the Salt Lake County super intendent, but ter r itor ial laws prevented this from happening. In 1877, Ida Cook, who was now the principal of a female high school in Logan, was nominated to be the Cache County superintendent of schools. She too was prevented from such an appointment. In fact, soon after she had been prevented from taking the position, Brigham Young appointed Ida Cook as the principal of the new Brigham Young College, the precursor to Utah State University.60 However, such nominations suggest that gender was less an issue among Mormons than competence.

54

George A. Smith, April 8, 1872, Journal of Discourses, 14:371–76.

Erastus Snow, October 8, 1867, Journal of Discourses, 12:177–79.

56 United States Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1873 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1874).

57 Brigham Young, April 6, 1867, Journal of Discourses, 11:353.

58 Marguerite Cameron, This Is the Place (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1939), 200.

59 Buchanan, Culture Clash.

60 Mulvay, “The Two Miss Cooks.”

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The early Mormon ward schools focused almost entirely on basic education.61 Even though some pioneering Mormon teachers (such as Orson Pratt) gave private instruction in advanced subjects, Utah’s mission schools represented the major institutional options for higher schooling. These mission schools— which Protestant denominations founded after the Civil War—followed the New England pattern in that their teaching staffs were dominated by females, sent from the East by Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, and other churches.

In 1866, the first Episcopal missionary bishop, Daniel Tuttle, arrived in Salt Lake City, and there, a year later, founded St. Mark’s school. The Reverend R. S. Foote served as a part-time teacher to assist a Miss Wilson H. Dusenberry.

Davenport, who had come west from Brooklyn to teach. The school offered special classes for boys who might wish to go to a university in the East.62 In 1870, Episcopal Church services began in Ogden, and the School of the Good Shepherd opened that same year. In 1873, St. John’s school opened in Logan, and in 1880, the Rowland Hall boarding school for girls opened in Salt Lake City.

In 1879, the Congregational Church established a “New West Education Commission” and supported a wide range of schools in the West. By 1893, twenty-six of these schools existed in Utah, with the showcase institution being the Ogden Academy, which appointed Hiram Waldo Ring as its principal and Virginia W. Ludden as the head of the elementary department.

In the second year Bernice Peaslee Ring, the wife of the principal, became the third teacher. Later Mary L. McClelland and Abbie Parish Noyes joined the teaching staff.63 Nineteenth-century Utah also had Meth-odist schools, where, as at other Protestant-run institutions, women dominated the faculty. In the 1860s, in Heber, the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society set up a school and the teachers were, in succession, Angie Steele, Jennie Clafin, M. A. Hand, Miss Crosbie, Miss Lestr, and Miss Stoner.64 Marysvale was a mining town, and many of the people in the settlement were non61

Smith, Journal, 1850–1851, USHS. Paul La Mar Martin, “A Historical Study of the Religious Education Program of the Episcopal Church in Utah” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1967), 36.

63 Gary Topping, “The Ogden Academy: A Gentile Assault on Mormon Country,” Journal of the West 23 (January 1984): 37–46; Joel E. Ricks, The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho (Logan, UT: Deseret News Publishing Company, 1956).

64 Raty, “History of Wasatch County.”

62

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Mormons. In 1891, the Methodist Women’s The Ontario Canyon School in Missionar y Society provided a woman Park City, 1902 or 1903, with teacher, Lulu Christian, who opened a class- teacher Daniel B. Shields. room and offered the only schooling in the community at the time. She was succeeded by Erma Osborn in 1904, Lulu Cole in 1906, Elida Mork in 1907, and Lulu Gamble in 1909.65 Presbyterians came relatively late to the creation of mission schools in Utah. In 1877, the Woman’s Executive Committee of Home Missions organized for the purpose of providing schools and teachers in the West and Southwest. The committee had a particular interest in working among the Mormons, Native Americans, and Spanish-speaking peoples. The Presbyterian schools in Utah included Willard Academy in American Fork, New Jersey Academy in Logan, Wasatch Academy in Mount Pleasant, and the Salt Lake Collegiate Institute in Salt Lake City.

All of these Protestant missionary schools followed an obvious gender norm of providing female teachers, women who came to Utah from the eastern part of the country. Though these instructors often had graduated from “the finest colleges,” the local minister or priest (who might also act as a part-time teacher) usually supervised them.66 The number of females in the Protestant institutions was somewhat offset by the makeup of the faculty at other academies, such as the Catholic All Hallows Academy in Salt Lake 65 Wilford Meeks Halladay, “A Brief History of Piute County and Its Educational Development” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1951), 28–29.

66 Ibid., 62.

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City and the Military Academy in Ogden, which preferred to employ men.67 On the other hand, women apparently taught at private denominational schools that were not connected with missionary activity. In the largely non-Mormon mining town of Silver Reef, the Catholic Church opened St. Mary’s day school in 1879 for children of that faith. Sister Superior Euphonsine became its first teacher; a Sister Regas replaced her.68 As the nineteenth century progressed, Utahns increasingly looked to the status of higher education in their state. As opportunities for secondary schooling grew, the gender composition of Utah educators also changed.

Protestant mission schools clearly offered the first opportunities for extensive secondary schooling in Utah. The LDS ward schools usually provided only a basic curriculum in one-room schools that made it difficult for wards to establish high schools and higher studies. The commissioner of education for the territory, Jacob S. Boreman, reported to the Legislative Assembly in the late 1880s that no statute existed for the creation of high schools.69 Mormon-run high schools in Utah were almost non-existent. As late as 1896, when the state issued its first report on public education, Dr. John R. Park, state superintendent, noted that, “Thus far, practically no schools of higher grade than the eighth, have been maintained outside of cities of the first and the second class.”70 Even then, the cities were lax in initiating public high schools. In fact, the first students graduating from public schools in Salt Lake City received their diplomas in 1893.71 In 1875, beginning with Brigham Young Academy in Provo, under the direction of Karl G. Maeser, the Mormon church finally began establishing a series of high schools, known as academies. These academies gave instruction to primary school children, secondary students, and students wishing to become teachers. Men largely made up the faculty of the academies, and one man—Maeser—left his imprint on twenty-two academies that the LDS church established over the next thirty years. Stakes (the Mormon ecclesiastical unit above the ward) ran these institutions, and thus they were named the Weber Stake Academy, Wasatch Stake Academy, Uintah Stake Academy, Emery Stake Academy, and so forth.

Even though the academies provided secondary school curriculum, they were more closely aligned with higher education than with the common schools, and the male teachers in these academies often moved from the

67 United States Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1890/91 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 1348–49.

68 Alfred Bleak Stucki, “A Historical Study of Silver Reef: Southern Utah Mining Town” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young Univerisity, 1966).

69 Biennial Report of the Commissioner of Schools for Utah Territory, for the Years 1888–9 (Salt Lake City: George C. Lambert, 1890), 5–7.

70 Biennial Report of the Commissioner for the Years 1894 and 1895 (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1896), 38.

71 Fifty Years of Public Education, Fiftieth Annual Report School Year 1939–1940 (Salt Lake City: Board of Education, 1940).

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academy into university positions. In Beaver in 1886, the LDS church established a stake academy, but transformed it in 1898 into the Murdock Academy, identified now as the first secondary school in the state established south of Provo. Its early teachers included its principal, Ephraim E. Ericksen, George Luke, and Thomas Joseph—each of whom went on to successful careers in academia.72 At Brigham Young Academy it was difficult to distinguish between a teacher and a professor.

The Mormon academies not only reinforced the presence of men as teachers in Utah; they also undermined the mission school movement. Both the missionary schools and the LDS academies went into decline after 1896 with the establishment of a public school system after Utah gained statehood. Only the strongest of the academies, both Protestant and Mormon, survived. Public schools soon became the primary vehicle of education and contributed to the rapid growth in the number of female teachers.

We have found that the myth that women taught in American schools from the time of the common school movement is accurate only in New England.

In the South, men led classrooms almost exclusively. In the West, both men and women taught, a fact that partially reflected the preponderance of males in the general population, but also mirrored an overall openness of society.

In contrast with the rest of the West, Utah had a good balance of men and women, which was evident in the gender of the teachers in both community and common schools. There were two exceptions. First, Protestant mission schools in Utah hired female teachers, in accordance with the New England pattern. The only men in these schools were usually the ministers, who played both an administrative role and a part-time teacher role. Second, LDS academies tended to hire male teachers, although some women worked in most of these schools. Generally, however, not only did a high ratio of male to female teachers exist in Utah, this ratio continued long after the proportion of male to female teachers was tipping in favor of females in the rest of the West. This took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

How do we explain this phenomenon? Perhaps it occurred because the Mormon church disavowed the traditional separation of male and female roles by establishing a communitarian ethos that “made no distinction between the private family and the broad Mormon community.”73 No pronouncement ever came from LDS leaders suggesting that women should not become teachers. Further, women saw fulfillment of their traditional role by entering the classroom alongside the men, who were admonished that they too must shoulder the burden of educating Mormon youth. Both men and women recognized that this burden should be seen neither as a domestic nor as a public responsibility, but as a responsibility of all adults in God’s kingdom.

72 Ephraim E. Ericksen, Memories and Reflections: The Autobiography of E. E. Ericksen, ed. Scott G. Kenney (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987).

73 Talbot, “The Church Family,” 211.

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BOOK REVIEWS Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South. Edited by Michael J. Pfeifer. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 336 pp. Paper, $28.00.)

AMERICANS’ ALL-TOO-FREQUENT RESORT to “lynch law” to execute alleged (and actual) criminals as well as other perceived troublemakers is one of the black eyes on this nation’s history. Understandably, the vast majority of scholarship on lynching and other race-based forms of violence focuses on the American South. Michael Pfeifer’s edited collection of essays, Lynching Beyond Dixie, admirably fulfills its title’s promise in extending our gaze beyond the former Confederacy to recognize “rough justice” as a national—not simply a regional—phenomenon.

The volume’s ten essays (plus an excellent editor’s introduction) take the reader on a tour of the United States, with half of the chapters focusing on “the West” (primarily Texas, Arizona, California, Kansas, and Utah), three on the Midwest, and two on the Northeast. The collection’s novelty is somewhat diminished by the fact that four of the ten essays have been published previously, but the convenience of having them all in one place justifies the book’s utility and contribution. One of the book’s truly outstanding features is a table charting all the known lynchings that took place outside the South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grouped by state but also including information about the locality, date, names of victims, race, alleged offense, method of killing, and sources. That the table is nearly sixty pages long, in small print, is itself a sobering testimony to the human toll of just this small slice of American violence.

As is common in the literature, the authors cannot agree on what constitutes a lynching. Helen McLure stretches the definition to include a wide range of lethal hostilities between whites and Indians, as well as other cases that I would classify as murder, frontier violence, or mass violence. Without a precise definition, too many dissimilar types of violence are all included inside one term, thus diminishing its analytical utility. Even more questionable is Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua’s reference to “academic lynching” (166), in which scholars pay more attention analyzing white perpetrators than black victims—a critique-worthy imbalance, to be sure, but does it really constitute a contemporary act of lynching remotely akin to the original lethal act?

All of the authors should be congratulated for their outstanding and careful primary source research. In many ways, the host of local nineteenthand early twentieth-century newspapers are the star witnesses here, as they represent the only known documentation for many of these lynchings. As for the individual essays, I can mention only a few highlights. Christopher Waldrep’s essay on the tension between politics and law in 1850s San Francisco—site of the largest vigilante movement in U.S. history—insightfully demonstrates how Americans came to exalt majoritarian politics over

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abstract constitutional law. Brent Campney’s treatment of Reconstructionera Kansas is a fine example of respectfully challenging previous scholars’ arguments through careful research and nuanced argument. Dennis Downey effectively contrasts the involvement of two ministers (one white, one black) in a 1903 lynching, thus revealing competing public theologies, democratic theories and discourses, and politics of the street.

UHQ readers will be especially interested in Kimberley Mangun and Larry Gerlach’s analysis of newspaper treatments of the 1925 lynching of Robert Marshall in Carbon County, Utah, and its aftermath. Based on an impressive body of research, the essay reveals that the lynching conformed to fairly standard national patterns. Particularly interesting was the organization of a Day of Reconciliation in 1998 to heal the wounds from the lynching. Despite positive national press coverage, local residents grumbled that the event failed to remember the original murder that provoked the lynching; they also complained that dredging up the past was hardly a way to promote racial good feelings in a community that had largely forgotten the event. While acknowledging the challenges associated with this kind of post-conflict reconciliation, more familiar to us from settings such as South Africa or Rwanda, the authors seem overly dismissive of local concerns and critiques. Even more distracting are repeated mentions of Mormonism’s troubled history with race, but in a way that is only tangentially connected to the case at hand, thus making the references seem speculative and almost gratuitous.

Scholars unfamiliar with the broader literature on lynching may miss some of the nuances propelling the various authors’ arguments. But all students of American history will benefit from considering how this nation’s conceptions of law, justice, democracy, popular sovereignty, and the common good are all rooted, at least in part, in a bloody history of extralegal violence. As this volume powerfully indicates, lynching is not just a southern problem—it is an American problem.

PATRICK Q. MASON Claremont Graduate University

The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne. Edited by Mark DeVoto. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012. xix + 508 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

AFTER A MASS FIRING OF non-Mormon faculty in February 1915, freshman Bernard DeVoto soured on the University of Utah and fled to Harvard. From a purported Cambridge vantage he wrote his inflammatory “Utah” for the American Mercury of March 1926. Without his Ivy League

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reinvention, DeVoto might never have edited the Saturday Review of Literature, written the influential “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s, or been the first native Utahn to win the Pulitzer Prize. A century later, however, it is not Harvard but the University of Utah whose press logo adorns DeVoto’s definitive body of correspondence.

As recently as 1974, DeVoto’s biographer Wallace Stegner could write that “the name of Utah’s most prominent writer is still spelled in his home state with three letters, M.U.D.” Utah’s imprint on this long-awaited collection signals that the hatchet is buried and concedes that DeVoto’s gifts of observation and description outweigh his sins. Into these letters to Katharine Sterne (the “gallant” dedicatee of his The Year of Decision: 1846), DeVoto poured his passion for western history unabashedly.

Sterne, a tubercular patient in Poughkeepsie, New York, initiated their epistolary bond with a fan letter praising a 1933 DeVoto story in the Saturday Evening Post. One decade and nearly eight hundred letters later, DeVoto confessed, “I certainly never would have written to a man as I have to you [and] you have represented some blend of wife-daughter-mother to this odd soul” (364).

In 1940 DeVoto, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made a field trip of western rivers and trails for Year of Decision, dispatching rambling narratives to Sterne. “I found that a boyhood in the mountains plus Uncle Sam’s careful training of an intelligence officer [during World War I] have soundly supported historical research,” he exulted. “All my recreation of the country from [explorers’] journals was right” (238).

DeVoto’s reactions to monumental events enlighten us, particularly World War II, during which he studied extreme first aid (“I now know how to deliver babies in the street”), and the Great Hurricane of 1938, which devastated New England (“water cascaded with a roar loud enough to drown out the wind”) (309, 180). The hurricane struck less than a month after a personal drama nearly as turbulent: DeVoto’s blowup at his idol and “father image these last three years,” the poet Robert Frost, whom he said was “break[ing] down into about equal parts willful child, demanding child, jealous woman, and mere devil” (176, 174). Mutual recriminations continued through 1943, when DeVoto told Sterne, “I’ll remind him that the life insurance tables give me the probability that I’ll outlive him” (355).

Fatefully, by the time Frost recited his poetry at the Kennedy inauguration, DeVoto had been dead five years.

An appendix to the book, “The Bucolics of Decadence,” a memoir of DeVoto’s youth he drafted at Sterne’s request, is a treasure of Ogden history.

In the memoir, he maintained that Moroni Olsen, a fellow community theater alumnus, agonized over changing his name on Broadway. “I had great difficulty,” cracked DeVoto, “dissuading [Olsen] from dropping the i” (434).

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Formerly a New York Times art critic, Sterne held her own with perspicacity and wit. She grumbled, for example, that another patient endlessly disrupted her sleep with “nose-blowings that are answered by hounds in [neighboring] counties; farts that contravene every convention of decent and humane warfare” (366). The correspondence ceased at her death in 1944.

The index disconcertingly omits many names of importance to researchers of Ogden history. Otherwise, this collection’s significance as guide to DeVoto’s strengths and biases cannot be overemphasized.

VAL HOLLEY Washington, D.C.

Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States 1870–1930.

By Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012. viii + 235 pp. Cloth, $49.95.)

THE STORY OF THE IRISH and Chinese laborers who constructed the first transcontinental railroad—culminating with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit in northern Utah on May 10, 1869— has been told in countless books and venues and stands as an example of the contribution that millions of immigrants from many countries have made in building America. However, for Central Pacific Railroad officials preparing for the construction eastward from California, Chinese workers were not the first choice. “Prior to 1869, the Central Pacific briefly considered importing ‘thousands of peons’ from Mexico but Euro American opposition in California ended that possibility” (38). But not for long; as early as 1871, Spanish-speaking residents of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico took employment with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad to become the first of thousands of traqueros from Mexico and the American Southwest to build and maintain the network of railroads that spread across North America. In Utah, Spanish-speaking workers helped construct the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad from Denver to Salt Lake City in the early 1880s and have worked to maintain Utah’s railroad tracks ever since. By the first decades of the twentieth century, “Mexican origin workers sought gainful employment in virtually every state in the union” and made up the largest group of railroad track maintenance workers in the American West (168).

Jeffrey Garcilazo begins his study with an overview of the significance of the railroad in the West and how Hispanic workers filled an essential role, especially as other immigrant workers—Italians, Greeks, Irish, and

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Chinese—moved from railroad maintenance work to jobs in the mines, industry, and small businesses. In time, some Hispanic workers also moved from the railroad to other jobs as the $1.25 per day they earned fell far short of wages in other industries. Five chapters focus on the Hispanics— Labor Recruitment, Work Exper iences, Labor Struggles, Boxcar Communities, and Traquero Culture. In these chapters Garcilazo addresses such questions and topics as why Mexican track workers were hired, what incentives they were offered, the arduous and dangerous work, the challenges that workers faced, unionization and other forms of resistance to perceived mistreatment, and the community life of workers and their families in the United States. The latter chapter is of particular interest to cultural historians and folklorists as the author describes the family, religion, godparenthood, mutual aid societies, food, folktales, superstitions, songs, Mexican patriotism, Americanization, and the dominant role that women played in fostering and maintaining a culture that sustained their men in the isolated and difficult jobs they encountered.

Readers should be aware that this study was completed in 1995 as the author’s dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jeffrey Garcilazo passed away in 2001 at the age of forty-five. We owe a debt of gratitude to mentors, colleagues, and family who carried through with the publication of this important study. However, the most recent sources cited in the extensive bibliography are from the mid-1990s, and an updated or supplemental bibliography would enhance the usefulness of this study.

As questions of immigration reform, restriction, and citizenship continue to demand our attention, it is important that we look back to examine how the Hispanic community became such an important force in America’s political, economic, social and cultural history. This book is an excellent resource to help further our understanding and hopefully encourage students of Utah history to investigate further the traquero and other Hispanic experiences in our state.

ALLAN KENT POWELL Salt Lake City

Gunfight at the Eco-Corral:Western Cinema and the Environment. By Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. xii + 260. Paper, $24.95.)

IN GUNFIGHT AT THE ECO-CORRAL, Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann seek to analyze representations of nature in western films through an “eco-critical” lens. This project has several goals: first, to include

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westerns in the broader canon of nature writing; second, to explore how environmental concerns are reflected in these films. The third goal, a call to extend “the middle place” to westerns, is a response to American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism by Joni Adams (2001) and will be fairly unintelligible to readers not familiar with that work.

The authors organize their first five main chapters around a central environmental concern. Chapter one deals with the conflict between free-range ranching and fenced-in homesteads, chapter two with the conflict between different types of mining, chapter three with property rights and access to water, chapter four with land and oil rushes, and chapter five with the building of the railway. Chapter six differs in that it examines the portrayal of Natives’ relationships with the environment in both white and Native-made movies.

Gunfight is simultaneously insightful and deeply flawed. It is strongest when it explores a particular film in-depth and then applies an eco-critical reading to that film, as it does with The Last Hunt and Smoke Signals. The book also presents innovative readings of well-trod classics like Shane and newer films like There Will Be Blood, making a compelling argument for the need to pay attention to the environmental conflict at the heart of those movies and many other westerns. In this way, Gunfight succeeds in its first goal of demonstrating that westerns are a form of nature writing and can be read as such.

As long as Gunfight stays within the realm of analyzing westerns as nature texts, it is on solid ground, but when the authors try to evaluate these narratives in relation to contemporary and modern environmental concerns, the book runs into trouble. For instance, the authors repeatedly demonstrate that the environmental message of a particular group of western films did not reflect contemporary scientific thinking about the causes of environmental degradation. The point of this argument is unclear, however, because, as the authors acknowledge elsewhere, moviemakers create films in response to idealized understandings and myths about the West, not current research. Inexplicably, however, the creation of popular attitudes toward the environment and the West are almost entirely absent from the book.

Many of the films are also loosely situated historically, making it hard for non-experts to understand the significance of their particular environmental message. For instance, the Johnson County War, though referenced repeatedly, is not adequately explained, nor is progressivism, the New Deal, or the significance of 1960s counterculture. This is where the chapters that focus on one or two films, such as Smoke Signals, stand out because those films are clearly grounded in a historical and environmental context.

Experts will be disappointed by the hit-and-miss nature of many of the

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sources that the authors do cite, with major works in the field replaced by ones that are obscure or out-of-date. Overall, this work would benefit from a more comprehensive grappling with the voluminous literature on resource exploitation in the West.

Perhaps of most concern is the way that a book that claims to deconstruct binary understandings of the environment ends up deploying just such a binary understanding of Native Americans. In their reading of Smoke Signals, the authors rather uncritically accept that Natives have a special, sustainable attitude toward the environment. This view fits comfortably with their goal of trying to present an alternative to mainstream environmentalism but ignores the literature on the image of the ecological Indian, as well as the anthropological and archaeological literature on native land use and subsistence strategies.

Despite these problems, Gunfight will be a valuable resource for anyone looking to explore western films through a new lens. The book also provides a good starting point for further studies seeking to link environmentalism and popular culture in the West.

CHRISTOPHER HERBERT Columbia Basin College

Crooked Paths to Allotment:The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War. By C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. xv + 228 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

IN CROOKED PATHS TO ALLOTMENT, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa seeks to disrupt dominant narratives about the ideological homogeneity of late nineteenth-century Indian reformers and the inevitability of the dispossession and destruction of Indian nations under the Dawes Act; further, he links the development of federal Indian policy to the broader trends in the political development of the post-Civil War nation. He does so by telling the stories of two “alternative reformers”—Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca leader who served as the commissioner of Indian Affairs under Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas A. Bland, founder of the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA) and an outspoken critic of forced assimilation.

Through Parker and Bland, Genetin-Pilawa examines how alternative reformers sought to seize the opportunities at “constitutive moments” of Indian policymaking after the Civil War. Genetin-Pilawa argues that these moments were points where these alternate reformers had real opportunities to challenge, derail, and redirect the intensification of coercive federal policies

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aimed at forcing Indian assimilation into the national polity.

To make this case, Genetin-Pilawa begins with a new look at Parker’s brief career as commissioner of Indian affairs (1869–1871). Parker is depicted as a political innovator and as a stalwart, if inconsistent, protector of indigenous rights who sought to soften and slow down federal efforts to resolve the Indian question through forced assimilation. In this way, Parker looked towards a gradual, voluntary, and humane assimilation process that was in marked contrast to the aggressive plans developed by non-Indian reformers. While these white reformers eventually forced Parker out, Genetin-Pilawa demonstrates that his resistance was a significant twist in the crooked path to allotment.

Turning to Bland and the NIDA, Genetin-Pilawa convincingly shows their initial success in challenging the Dawes Act and the assumptions that underlay the work of the act’s supporters, such as the Indian Rights Association (IRA). These groups typically took a condescending view of Indian capabilities and sought to impose their own “civilizing” solutions to the Indian problem. Bland and NIDA, on the other hand, aimed to uphold tribal sovereignty and involved Native people in developing and presenting alternative proposals. In telling this story, Genetin-Pilawa rescues Bland and NIDA from obscurity and illuminates them as an effective, if ultimately unsuccessful, impediment to coercive assimilation; he provides a clear example of how the drive toward allotment could have taken a different, more Indian-centric path.

However, Genetin-Pilawa also aims to demonstrate how these Reconstruction-era federal Indian policies “reflected and shaped” the political development of the nation between the Civil War and the Progressive Era—and even foreshadowed some of the ideas, policies, and processes espoused by John Collier during the Indian New Deal of the 1930s. It is a worthwhile goal, yet here the narrative falters. The links between the discussions of Indian policy and the course of national political development are often tenuous. For example, while Genetin-Pilawa shows that both the NIDA and IRA delved into the proper role and author ity of government over its citizens and wards, he provides little evidence that these discussions informed, or were part of, broader national conversations.

Taken as a whole, Crooked Paths succeeds admirably in questioning the inevitability of coerced assimilation after the Civil War. It serves as an important reminder that there were viable, potentially less destructive paths not taken in the quest to resolve the “Indian problem.” It less successfully shows how those discussions and ideas were linked to broader themes and activities of American political development, even as it points to the ways that could be done.

TIMOTHY M. WRIGHT University of Washington

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Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert. By Michon Mackedon.

(Reno: Black Rock Institute, 2010. xv + 234 pp. Cloth, $60.00.)

WHAT CONSTITUTES “SOUND SCIENCE,” and who determines it? Experts? Then who qualifies as an “expert”? Particularly in the field of nuclear testing, officials knew the importance of their language and chose it carefully. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and government officials had a mantle of authority, “expert” opinion, and “sound science,” which allowed them to spin information about activities ranging from the testing of explosives to the description of outcomes—all in an effort to retain public support in the atomic age.

Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert delves deeply into this subject. From the beginning, Michon Mackedon posits her central question: how “official rhetoric [was] used to pull the wool over our eyes?” “And so,” she states, “this book is about words” (xiii). Mackedon began the project after serving as vice chairperson of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects.

Through this position, she recognized that the Department of Energy has hidden behind “layers of irony” for decades. Thus began her exploration into the politics and nuances of atomic language, as well as its effect on history (xiii).

Mackedon relies heavily on secondary sources to support her thesis, but this is appropriate for the style and purpose of the work. Her use of primary sources to illuminate cultural and public response makes the writing provocative and compelling. Unfortunately, Bombast catalogs the nuclear tests in too brief a fashion. In some sections, the author provides little substance other than a test’s code name, the occurrence of fallout or other complications, and the emergence of public concern, followed by the Atomic Energy Commission’s usual response pattern of stressing the importance of “national security, their previous safety record, the role of experts, the soundness of the science employed, and the economic advantages sure to accompany the test,” while all the time assuring of the public’s safety (149).

The examination of the creation of code names and the language used to describe atomic testing to the public provides an intriguing angle on the subject. However, in the end, Mackedon does not deviate far from the established historical research. Her goal of examining the nature of rhetoric surrounding atomic testing proves only partially successful. The connection between code name and nuclear event is not always explicitly stated and, in many cases, seems repetitive. Overall, she offers little in terms of new research about site selection, individual tests, or the nuclear waste disposal debate. Even so, this work functions well as an introduction to atomic testing in Nevada.

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Overall, Bombast is quite accessible to the average reader. Mackedon uses an engaging, logical style of writing that holds the attention of her readers.

She glides easily from topics such as site choice decisions to the testing period itself, all the way through to present-day waste site determination.

The illustrations and side commentary add much to an already entertaining narrative. Each side note addresses the irony of the atomic age, whether in culture, politics, or a combination of the two.

While Mackedon is not the first to discuss atomic rhetoric, she does present the most extensive overview of the language used to promote nuclear weapons. She articulates the ironies of the AEC’s choice of humanizing or affectionate names for such a violent technology. Mackedon also addresses the consistent pattern of AEC responses to public concern over the side effects of testing and fallout. This was accomplished through the use of press releases and discussions of “site suitability,” “sound science,” and “expert” opinion, strategies that stretch even to modern times; little has changed in the language used to calm public fear, and, as demonstrated by Mackedon’s research, it doesn’t seem as though it will any time soon.

KATHERINE GOOD Virginia Tech

BOOK NOTICES They Call It Home:The Southeastern Utah Collection. By Ken Hochfeld and Gary L. Shumway. (The authors, n.p., 2013. v + 105 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

Through half-page black-and-white images, this picture profile book provides a charming look at San Juan County and its residents.

Ken Hochfeld captured the images in 1972–1973 when he was a student at California State University Fullerton. Hochfeld spent time in the community getting to know the residents for his project and that is evident in the comfortable, natural way they responded to his camera. Years later, Gary L. Shumway, a southeastern Utahn, produced brief biographical or historical notes to accompany some of the photographs. Shumway notes in the introduction that—as a rough, dry place—southeastern Utah was not a desirable spot to settle, but that those who did created a sense of home and community. The goal of the book is to convey that feeling through the daily lives

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of residents at home, work, and celebratory events. The quality of Hochfeld’s images, as well as the candid context of the images supported by Shumway’s text, achieves this goal nicely. Of particular note are the images of the Navajo reservation and some of its people, as well as the Blanding “town picture” Hochfeld took on July 4, 1973, which demonstrates both the diversity and unity of this community.

Ruby’s Inn at Bryce Canyon. Images of America Series. By A. Jean Seiler.

(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2013. 127 pp. Paper, $21.99.)

This book focuses on the story of Ruby and Minnie Syrett and their tourist lodge business. An abundance of photographs with captions gives a fascinating look at the couple and their family, the historic lodge and its development, guests at the lodge, and activities around Bryce Canyon.

New Perspectives in Mormon Studies: Creating and Crossing Boundaries.

Edited by Quincy Newell and Eric F. Mason. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 248 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

This volume stems from a 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar, “Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormonism: Bicentennial Perspectives.” The collection includes nine essays culled from the many generated by the seminar, and it serves as a sampler of the current Mormon Studies movement, heir of the New Mormon History of the 1970s to the 1990s (see chapter 9). Topics range from an approach to Joseph Smith’s political economy to a theological treatise on the enigmatic biblical figure of Elias to an article on development of the Ex-Mormons for Jesus/Saints Alive in Jesus movement. Utah historians will be particularly interested in the essay on BYU’s internationally visible work on various Dead Sea Scrolls projects, the foreword, and the introductory essay on the story of the seminar itself. The authors argue that awarding a NEH seminar to a group proposing to examine the origins of Mormonism signals another milestone in the development of Mormon Studies as a viable field for academic inquiry.

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UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS THOMAS G. ALEXANDER JAMES B. ALLEN LEONARD J. ARRINGTON (1917–1999) MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER DAVID L. BIGLER FAWN M. BRODIE (1915–1981) JUANITA BROOKS (1898–1989) OLIVE W. BURT (1894–1981) EUGENE E. CAMPBELL (1915–1986) EVERETT L. COOLEY (1917–2006) C. GREGORY CRAMPTON (1911–1995) S. GEORGE ELLSWORTH (1916–1997) MAX J. EVANS AUSTIN E. FIFE (1909–1986) PETER L. GOSS LEROY R. HAFEN (1893–1985) B. CARMON HARDY JOEL JANETSKI A. KARL LARSON (1899–1983) GUSTIVE O. LARSON (1897–1983) WILLIAM P. MACKINNON BRIGHAM D. MADSEN (1914–2010) CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN DEAN L. MAY (1938–2003) DAVID E. MILLER (1909–1978) DALE L. MORGAN (1914–1971) WILLIAM MULDER (1915–2008) PHILIP F. NOTARIANNI FLOYD A. O’NEIL HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS (1917–2004) CHARLES S. PETERSON RICHARD W. SADLER GARY L. SHUMWAY MELVIN T. SMITH WALLACE E. STEGNER (1909–1993) WILLIAM A. WILSON

HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS DAVID BIGLER CRAIG FULLER FLORENCE S. JACOBSEN MARLIN K. JENSEN STANFORD J. LAYTON WILLIAM P. MACKINNON JOHN S. MCCORMICK F. ROSS PETERSON RICHARD C. ROBERTS WILLIAM B. SMART MELVIN T. SMITH LINDA THATCHER GARY TOPPING

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