Book Reviews

COWBOY APOSTLE: The Diaries of Anthony W. Ivins, 1875–1932

EDITED BY ELIZABETH O.ANDERSON

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2013. xli + 689. Cloth, $125

Anthony W. Ivins (1852–1934) was a lot of things: cowboy, explorer, rancher, actor, husband, father, Indian agent, attorney, mayor, legislator, businessman, colonizer, and ardent Democrat, as well as an LDS (Mormon) mission president in Mexico, apostle, and First Presidency member. His diaries can’t and don’t cover any of this activity very deeply. But they do give the reader a fuller understanding of the breadth of Ivins’s work and, more importantly, of the cultures and times that he influenced and that influenced him. For this we owe a large debt of gratitude to the editor, Elizabeth Anderson. She has painstakingly transcribed, proofread, and annotated the diaries—the originals housed at the Utah State Historical Society. The volume includes a helpful introduction, maps and photos, a transcription of Ivins’s Record Book of Marriages, his son Grant Ivins’s essay on “Polygamy in Mexico,” and—for an unexplained reason—the 1896 remarks of U.S. Representative Clarence E. Allen of Utah on Mormon polygamy.

Ivins’s work as leader of the Mexican colonies forms the heart of the book. In Mexico, he bought land and surveyed extensively for settlements. He arranged for roads, water, and telephone lines. He worked with the Mexican government, sometimes smoothly and sometimes in frustration: in 1898 the constant “annoyances,” “disapointments [sic],” and “humiliation” from officials so aggravated him that he announced his readiness to enlist if the United States went to war (193). He formed friendships with powerful men, such as military leader Emilio Kosterlitzky, whom he constrained from killing an innocent young man (185–86). He prospected for minerals, inspected mines, and visited widely scattered congregations, organizing them, speaking to them, and managing internal conflicts. In all of these endeavors, he traveled widely by rail or horse—camping or, if sleeping in hotels, often tormented by bedbugs. And, of course, he married couples who came to Mexico to form polygamous unions away from the reach of U.S. law. Unfortunately, the diaries don’t shed much light on post-Manifesto polygamy or even on Ivins’s thoughts about it. He simply doesn’t mention polygamy as such but only notes encounters and marriages in passing.

Lovers of the land can appreciate the sections detailing an exploring trip to Mexico—on assignment from the LDS church—when Ivins was a young man. In addition, accounts of ranching on the Arizona Strip and in Utah, with references to such places as House Rock Valley, Kane Springs, Pipe Springs, and Mount Trumbull, and Ivins’s numerous accounts of traveling, hunting, and camping give a sense of how closely he was connected to land. More maps and more detail in the maps would have greatly enhanced these geographical aspects.

The diaries also cover his early years in community life and politics in St. George, Utah, and his later years as a high LDS church official. As he grew older, however, his diary entries tended to focus on the content of meetings, which he detailed to a surprising extent—even noting in some cases the number of minutes occupied by each speaker. Ironically, part of his duty as an apostle was to investigate Mormons who had married plural wives in violation of the 1904 Second Manifesto.

Throughout, the editor is careful to guide the reader and make the reading journey as comfortable as possible. She translates various bureaucratic Spanish words; provides additional information taken from journals where Ivins annotated his diaries; and gives extensive information on places, people, context, and historical events. There are a few inevitable missteps in such a large project. For instance, Edward Snow is called the stepbrother of Ivins’s wife, Elizabeth Snow (he was her halfbrother—and Ivins’s important ally in the Democratic Party, for that matter). In many instances, chapter titles are confusing in that they describe only a tiny slice of the contents, and the introduction includes a letter written to Ivins that has no apparent relevance to this project—about a dream describing Jesus Christ. I found a couple of holes in the index that made me wonder how complete it is.

Again, the diaries do not reveal the whole man. Letters, sermons, other writings, and accounts by others fill in parts of the picture missing from this volume. But what was Ivins thinking as he wrote these particular diaries? What did the endeavor of so carefully keeping a record mean to him? Why was it so important to mention every deer he killed—and then neglect to discuss what happened when he attended the National Conservation Committee meeting in Washington, DC (428–29)? Why didn’t he describe the outcomes of a southern Utah tour he gave to a high-ranking senator, congressmen, government officials, and a Los Angeles Times reporter (599–600)? And why did he detail the murder of an Apache family by Mormons but make no comment on the morality of the situation (254–55)?

Even though such questions remain unanswered and the diaries don’t offer much insight on Ivins’s inner life, they are invaluable for the light they do shed. They reveal him as a man of energy and intelligence—a remarkable man by any standard, living in remarkable times.

— KRISTEN IVERSEN Salt Lake City

25th Street Confidential: Drama, Decadence, and Dissipation along Ogden’s Rowdiest Road

BY VAL HOLLEY

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013. xiv + 202.Paper, $24.95

In 25th Street Confidential: Drama, Decadence, and Dissipation along Ogden’s Rowdiest Road, Val Holley acknowledges the difficulty of documenting the history of a subject largely enshrouded in legend. Using a wide range of primary sources, including Sanborn maps, archival documents, photographs, mug shots, and oral histories, Holley presents a history of Twenty-Fifth Street just as compelling as the legends. The book lives up to its subtitle, and readers will find a historical basis to some of the Twenty-fifth Street legends while others are discredited. This work of local history offers a sound illustration of themes, trends, and events that dominated the country as a whole from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Twenty-Fifth Street—just as a large portion of Ogden itself—exists because of the railroad. With the first trains coming into the city on March 8, 1869, the history and fate of the street became intertwined with that of the railroad. Holley argues that Ogden in the nineteenth century was not unlike other western towns except for the contentious religious divide between Mormons and “gentiles.” The legendary vice of Twenty-Fifth Street had its roots during this period. Unfortunately, in the first few chapters, the tone at times borders on hokey, as Holley uses phrases like “you could scarcely toss an egg . . . without hitting a bootlegger or speakeasy” (12), “canoodling” for sex, “Sam was a goner,” and “gun-toting men” (31), which detract from significant history to be gleaned from Holley’s research.

Prostitution played a heavy role in Twenty-Fifth Street’s history. Holley details the famous Belle London’s power over not just her houses of ill repute but also over law enforce- ment, the justice system, and the city of Ogden. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how long prostitution was actually accepted and tolerated. In the 1930s, houses of prostitution paid a monthly charge to police. The city in turn used that money in part to fund the Ogden City Health Department’s venereal disease clinic. The city required all prostitutes to report weekly to the clinic for an examination; individual prostitutes were given an allowance by madams or pimps to cover the charge. (This vice–law partnership is detailed in Twenty-Fifth Street’s history of alcohol and gambling as well.) Holley does an admirable job of tracing prostitution’s evolution, from Belle London as proprietor of her own brothel in the late nineteenth century to the next century’s best known Ogden madam, Rosetta Davie. According to Holley, from 1948 to 1955 Davie “spent more time in courtrooms or jail than she did as a free woman”—a reflection of increasing intolerance and the stigma of prostitution in the twentieth century (99). Holley addresses the legends of Twenty-Fifth Street by attempting to allow historical sources and even folklore to speak for themselves.

If there is something missing from Holley’s book, it is attention to the association of Ogden residents to the street. The drama of Twenty-Fifth Street political intrigue and corruption, prostitution, gambling, and liquor is well known by Ogden residents, as well as to those familiar with local history. Less explored is the relationship between Twenty-Fifth Street and the rest of the city. How did Ogden residents view and associate with the street? How did the vice of the street affect residents, religious organizations, schools, and other businesses? Holley refers to—but does not expound on— Ogden mayor Harman Ward Peery’s opinion of Twenty-Fifth Street as a place for “ordinary people,” those individuals neither associated with the Old West’s railroad crowd or Utah’s elite (71). While the everyday citizen is occasionally referenced or quoted, Holley’s focus on the “drama, decadence, and dissipation” of Twenty-Fifth Street ignores the simple, everyday reality surrounding it.

Holley’s concluding chapter details the historic preservation and the repurposing of many of downtown Ogden’s historic locations in recent decades. Currently, Ogden City uses Twenty-Fifth Street as its gathering place for holiday events, the summer farmers’ and art market, and the annual Ogden Restaurant Week. While the development of commercial entertainment and dining, the remodeling of the Ogden LDS Temple, and UTA’s Frontrunner rail traffic add a modern look to a historic city, the dedication of the Ogden City Landmarks Commission ensures history endures on Twenty-Fifth Street.

— HEIDI ORCHARD Utah Division of State History

A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary

BY TODD M. COMPTON

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 2013, xix + 642Cloth, $44.95

In his well-organized, insightful, and thoroughly researched biography of Jacob Hamblin, Todd Compton presents Hamblin in the context of the nineteenth-century West, Mormonism, and the Indian frontier of the Great Basin and the American Southwest. Hamblin emerges as a rough-hewn frontiersman who through his extensive travels and interactions with Native Americans made a significant contribution to the exploration of the West and a salutary influence on Mormon-Indian relations. Hamblin (1819–1886) has been the subject of numerous earlier biographies and other published research, and yet it has remained for Compton to flesh out his life, motives, explorations, and particularly his relationship with Paiutes, Navajos, Hopis, Utes, and other American Indian groups of the Southwest.

Compton’s book is divided into thirty-five chapters, which generally are organized on a chronological and geographical basis. The biography includes 127 pages of notes that are valuable and of great interest to the careful reader looking for scholarly references and additional insight into the life and times of Hamblin. The extensive nature of the notes demonstrates the wide-ranging research on which the book is based. The notes also contain numerous instances of Compton’s agreement and disagreement with sources. Of great value in understanding Hamblin are the appendices. The first, entitled “Jacob Hamblin’s Families,” notes his marriages, wives, and children. Listed in this section are Hamblin’s Caucasian wives and children and his Indian wives and his adopted Indian children. The second appendix, three pages in length, is a chronological listing of Jacob Hamblin’s trips to and across the Colorado River. This brief summary involves the period 1858 to 1877 and includes thirty-six trips with specific dates and the historical and geographical significance of each trip noted. Hamblin’s explorations were often guided by Brigham Young’s requests and instructions and laid the foundation in different ways for Mormon settlement in southern Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, and Mexico. The listing, along with complementary materials in the chapters dealing with each expedition or trip, places Jacob Hamblin in the forefront of explorers of the Southwest and arm-in-arm with John Wesley Powell and his explorations in the area and on the Colorado River. This summary is a significant historical contribution. Compton details well Hamblin’s relationships with Powell and others who explored this area.

Five other important Hamblin relationships emerge and are well described through the book. These form much of the significance of his life. The first is Hamblin’s relationship with his wives and children; the second, his relationship with John D. Lee, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and Lee’s Ferry; the third, Hamblin’s kinship and relationship with Indians; the fourth, his relationship and association with his fellow Mormon Indian missionaries; and the fifth, his involvement with and commitment to Mormonism and Brigham Young. Compton explores Hamblin’s relationship to Lee, often cooperative and sometimes combative—as when Hamblin delivered testimony at Lee’s second trial—in detail. Hamblin was a devoted follower of Young, though he did not always hesitate to suggest that Mormon colonization was destroying Indian culture and civilization. Compton deftly paints Hamblin as a friend, confidante, brother, missionary, and advocate to and for Indians from his early days in Tooele to his last days in Arizona and New Mexico.

This book is a most valuable historical contribution. A second or paperback edition would be improved by maps drawn particularly to help identify Hamblin’s wide-ranging travels and explorations.

— RICHARD W. SADLER Weber State University

Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country

BY JEDEDIAH S. ROGERS

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013. 252 pp. Paper,$24.95

It’s certainly no secret that Utah and the federal government have a rocky relationship over the issue of public lands. This decades-long conflict recently manifested itself in H.B. 148, passed by the state legislature in 2012, which demanded that the U.S. Congress relinquish control of some 30 million acres of federal land within Utah’s borders. Against impassioned protests from environmentalists, Governor Gary Herbert signed the legislation, declaring, “We feel the federal government has failed to keep its promises to the state of Utah. We feel it’s time we do something about that.” 1

Given the ongoing litigation over H.B. 148, the publication of Roads in the Wilderness is certainly timely. In it, Jedediah S. Rogers argues that roads are a central issue driving the debate over public land in Utah. 2 This is particularly true for wilderness designation, a process in

which decisions for or against recognition often hinge on the existence and condition of roads. But federal policies stemming from a one-sentence statute in the 1866 mining laws, R.S. 2477, and the conditions of its subsequent repeal in 1976, fail to define exactly what constitutes a road. Because of this ambiguity, Rogers argues we must first understand the history and cultural underpinnings of roads in order to resolve bitter disputes over public land in Utah and the West.

To this end, Rogers examines a series of people and events that highlight conflicting world views in Utah’s remote canyon country. In chapter one, he uses the story of the 1879–80 Hole-in-the-Rock expedition to demonstrate the centrality of roads in Mormon lore, where they often represent the pioneer conquest of nature. Alternatively, Rogers tells the story of Clyde Kluckhohn, a young adventurer whose travels through Utah’s unsettled territory in the 1920s convinced him that such isolated areas should not to be etched with roads but simply visited and departed. Building from these early viewpoints, chapter two explores the rivalry between wilderness advocate Edward Abbey and the local official and booster Calvin Black over the construction of Utah State Highway 95, which was completed in 1976. Chapters three through seven explore still more recent conflicts—largely between environmentalists and local residents and county officials—over roads in areas including Negro Bill Canyon, Waterpocket Fold, Book Cliffs, Grand Staircase–Escalante, and Arch Canyon.

Despite the contentious nature of these stories, Rogers largely manages to remain above the entrenched positions that define them. In the final chapter, he admonishes locals who “fail to recognize that mining and industrial development erode not just the land they hold dear but also the culture and traditions that make the region unique.” As for conservationists, Rogers feels they “could do better to articulate a vision that recognizes the culture, identity, and needs of rural people instead of treating these as collateral damage in the quest to preserve nature” (183). Perhaps, Rogers suggests, the only way forward is to cast off this old dichotomy of environmentalists versus locals in favor of something new. “We are in the West an eclectic mix,”

While Rogers’s optimism seems hard to swallow given the current political climate, his argument is compelling; there is certainly a great deal to learn about the wilderness movement through the study of road development. Though a few more maps might help clarify his retelling of the conflicts in Utah’s canyon country, Rogers excels in his use of primary sources from government offices and archives across the state. Roads in the Wilderness is sure to engage environmental historians, environmentalists, engineers, and anyone with a connection to southern Utah’s wild backcountry, and all are sure to share Rogers’s hope: “We can yet work for a middle way” (185).

— CLINT PUMPHREY Utah State University

The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau

BY EDWARD DORN; EDITED BY MATTHEW HOFER

1966: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.176 pp. Paper, $34.95

Edward Dorn and Leroy Lucas traveled across the Great Basin in 1965 to record their findings and feelings about the Shoshoneans—primarily Ute, Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone—whom they encountered. Under contract to produce this volume, the two men—one a poet, the other an African American photographer—experienced a journey that took them through parts of Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. It was the mid- 1960s, with the Vietnam War gathering steam, the Civil Rights movement well underway, and appreciation of free-thinking views against the “establishment” de rigueur. Exalting the mundane and challenging the status quo to turn the staid American society of the 1950s on its head brought recognition. Dorn, as part and product of this era, wrote with an edge that found dissatisfaction in much of what he experienced. It was all a matter of finding the “truth,” which was not often pretty.

This book is an expanded (from 85 to 166 pages), edited (with additional letters, interviews, and writings) version accompanied by three sections of Lucas’s black-and-white photos taken at the time. Close to a half century later, Shoshoneans again speaks to the public, but what does it say, and is it relevant? In keeping with Dorn’s approach, let’s be honest. His understanding of the historical and cultural context of these people was minimal, based primarily on time spent reading the works of anthropologists and historians to gain a base knowledge. He included passages of others’ writings in the text, but his own original understanding came from personal observation; the book sports less than two dozen endnotes, only half of which are about the people under discussion. On a number of occasions he records positive experiences and impressions, some bordering on the spiritual. But often he finds those he meets immersed in poverty, alcohol, and social problems without hope, as degraded as those found in historical accounts that called them “diggers.” He describes people clinging low to the rungs of the human ladder. Dorn is at times sympathetic and other times brutally honest—whether writing about Native Americans or members of the dominant society. Again, the reader must realize that the author’s main focus is based in his brief experience and observations, not in honed understanding.

One might argue that because Dorn was a writer, not an anthropologist or historian, his expression of thought, feeling, and eloquence should be the measure of his work. Fair enough. There are occasional passages that soar above the mundane while much is purely functional. For a poet—supposedly the master of the finely tuned phrase—he does a lot of patching of others’ material into his work and does not build toward a tightly knit conclusion other than that problems abound in Indian country. For example, he ends his essay with a lengthy selection from Clyde Warrior—a Ponca Indian advocating for his people—with rhetoric that fits nicely into Dorn’s view of Native America: “We are among the poor, the powerless, the inexperienced, and the inarticulate” (93). This is his finding, painted on a canvas he takes from his observations. It is his way to look at the Shoshoneans and the conclusion he wants the reader to accept. The result: a starkly real, unsympathetic portrait of a people sketched by an outsider with limited knowledge.

— ROBERT S. MCPHERSON Utah State University Eastern, Blanding

Great Basin Indians: An Encyclopedic History

BY MICHAEL HITTMAN

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013. xii + 494 pp. Paper,$58.50

This encyclopedic treatment of the indigenous peoples who occupied the Great Basin from prehistoric times to the present is an ambitious though not exhaustive work completed by Michael Hittman, professor emeritus of anthropology at Long Island University. The Ute, Shoshone, Goshute, and Paiute tribes and bands and their various groups and subgroups have been, perhaps, the most overlooked portion of Native people in American Indian scholarship. Great Basin Indians: An Encyclopedic History incorporates “the fruits of several generations of scholarship as well as recent discoveries made possible by new areas of scientific inquiry” (xi).

The encyclopedic format enables Hittman to detail anthropological arguments, historical events, brief biographies of key individuals, intertribal relations, and many other topics that would overwhelm a monographic approach. Hittman’s best entries include anthropological issues such as his treatment of the prehistoric people of the Great Basin and the spread and impact of the Ghost Dance and Peyote religion on the Great Basin tribes; however, as he is a professor of anthropology this strength is hardly surprising. He tackles some stimulating and provocative scholarly debates such as Numic Spread and the date of Sacajawea’s death. Citing the arguments and evidence advanced by several differing historians, Hittman presents his inferences to these issues by historiographical examination rather than drawing his own conclusions.

Less impressive were his treatment of wars and raids—the Walker War, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Meeker Massacre, and the removal of Utes from Colorado—and his treatment of the acquisition of horses and their impact on Ute and Shoshone culture and livelihood. Adoption of an equestrian culture was one of the most significant aspects of Ute and Shoshone history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and perhaps the most telling difference between those tribes and their non-equestrian cousins—the Goshutes, Paiutes, and Western Shoshone. Though adequate, these entries demonstrated far from the same level of scholarship apparent in other areas of the encyclopedia. This reviewer found some omissions and inclusions noteworthy. For example, in the entry on Ute Chief Wakara/ Walker, Hittman makes no comment on Wakara’s supposed links to gold mines (but details that his name might have meanings relating to gold in the Ute language), his baptism into the LDS church, or his urging of Mormons to settle in San Pete Valley, while his treatment of Chief Blackhawk was much more detailed in some of these same areas.

The author makes some small errors such as saying that John D. Lee was hanged for his role in the Mountain Meadow Massacre and that the Sundance originated with the Cheyenne or Kiowa when the Sioux/Lakota also claim that distinction (181, 301). The author makes little mention of the Comanche’s origin as a Shoshone people within the Great Basin. But these are small distractions and do not seriously harm the credibility of the study.

Great Basin Indians is a crucial addition to the library of serious scholars of Native peoples from the Great Basin and surrounding regions. The fifty-five page bibliography, which includes primary and secondary sources, is impressive and a worthwhile resource for researchers of all levels.

— JOHN D. BARTON Utah State University, Uintah Basin

1 Dennis Romboy, “Herbert Signs Legislation Demanding Feds Give Public Land to Utah,” KSL, March 24, 2012, accessed July 21, 2014, http://www.ksl.com/?sid=19706081.

2 Rogers joined the staff of Utah Historical Quarterly after Roads in the Wilderness was assigned for review.