Book Notices

Hidden History of Utah

BY EILEEN HALLET STONE

Charleston, NC: History Press, 2013. 206 pp. Paper, $19.99

Eileen Hallett Stone, a history columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, has in this volume collected fifty-eight articles into a single source of lesser-known stories from Utah’s history. The articles highlight the state’s diversity— both in bringing out the lives of immigrant and minority populations and in covering a wide variety of ground from the ordinary to the influential and the extraordinary. Most stories are centered on individuals who confront intriguing circumstances and, as a whole, they create a picture that is both intimate and wide ranging.

Lost Apostles: Forgotten Members of Mormonism’s Original Quorum of Twelve

BY WILLIAM SHEPARD ANDH. MICHAEL MARQUARDT

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2013. 426 pp. Paper, $35.95

This collective biography of six Mormon apostles called by Joseph Smith in 1835 documents the tumultuous early years of the Mormon faith. Shepard and Marquardt exhume the lives and deeds of six men not generally recognized in Mormon history and so save them from relative obscurity. Thomas B. Marsh, William E. McLellin, Luke S. Johnson, William B. Smith, John F. Boynton, and Lyman E. Johnson each clashed and, at least temporarily, severed ties with Mormonism’s founder. Through the details of the apostles’ lives and substantial contributions to the Restoration movement, the authors reveal the dynamic of institutional authority and religious dissent in early Mormonism. In the process, they also introduce readers to the broader world of Mormonism in Jacksonian America.

The Un-Driving of the Golden Spike

BY JEFF TERRY, THORNTON H. WAITE, AND JAMES J. REISDORFF

David City, NE: South Platte Press, 2013. 80 pp. Paper,$24.95

This volume, containing seventy-five photographs, details the “un-driving of the Golden Spike” ceremony at Promontory Summit on September 8, 1942, seventy-three years after completion of the transcontinental railroad. Construction of the Lucin Cutoff across the north end of the Great Salt Lake in the early twentieth century directly bypassed a portion of the 1869 route, relegating the track across Promontory Summit as a branch line. In the decades leading up to the “un-driving” ceremony the branch line was mostly abandoned, with only occasional commercial and passenger use. This volume briefly details the history of the Promontory line, the events of the 1942 ceremony officially marking the line’s end, and the subsequent commemorations and reenactments at the site of the Golden Spike. David H. Mann, a Utah farm magazine journalist, took a series of photographs of the 1942 event; many of these, along with other photos at Promontory Summit, are reproduced in this thin volume.