Book Reviews

Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression

BY DAVID M. WROBEL

Albuquerque: Univesrity of New Mexico Press, 2013. xv + 312 pp. Cloth, $39.95

David M. Wrobel acknowledges that his book on the history and development of travel writing, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression, “covers a good deal of ground,” just as the title suggests, including a short treatise on the history of the West and a concise historiography of travel writings (focusing on the one hundred years from the 1840s to the 1940s) from the same region (9). He also traces travel writing about the West through various prisms, including accounts written by world travelers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tourists who visited the West in automobiles, regional guides written during the Great Depression, and more recent accounts by Jack Kerouac, J. B. Priestly, and John Steinbeck. The range demonstrates the continuing vitality of the genre.

Wrobel’s book includes some discussion and analysis concerning travelers who visited the Mormon West, including Howard Stansbury, Mark Twain, Jules Remy, Richard Francis Burton, Solomon Carvalho, and Mrs. Benjamin Ferris. He notes that these writers were all very (and perhaps primarily) interested in the practice of plural marriage. Burton, Remy, and Stansbury nevertheless wrote accounts that presented a relatively positive picture of Utah, whereas Carvalho, Ferris, and Twain were so struck by the Mormons’ idiosyncrasies that they were less inclined to write approvingly about them. In fact, most travel writers who visited Utah Territory preferred to perpetuate stereotypes rather than craft fresh, firsthand observations of people and place.

Wrobel observes at the beginning of his book that Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America established a certain benchmark that has become “a core text in the annals of American exceptionalism.” Thus, although almost two thousand travel accounts were published in the United States between 1830 and 1900, Wrobel focuses his work on “travelers’ accounts of potentially enduring value, ones that do follow in Tocqueville’s footsteps.” In particular he is interested in accounts that focus on the “nations’ norms as well as its exceptions, its commonalities as well as its peculiarities” (6–8).

The author mentions one contemporary example of a travel writer who attempted but failed to follow in Tocqueville’s footsteps. Bernard-Henri Lévy visited America in the twenty-first century and entitled his memoirs American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. Wrobel believes that Lévy “demonstrates a penchant for finding and fixating on the extraordinary for the sake of shock value” (7). He mentions Lévy’s foray into Las Vegas to demonstrate this tendency, but he could have also included Lévy’s description of Utah as “a surreal and artificial place, octagonal and rigid, built in the nineteenth century in the middle of the desert.” In fact, Lévy noted that when he interviewed Mormon church president Gordon B. Hinckley he found him to be “cautious and dapper, dressed in a double-breasted navy-blue suit with gold buttons, closer to a Cinzano drinker than to a WASP Dalai Lama.” 1

My only criticism of Wrobel’s work is that he emphasizes English-speaking travelers (with a few notable exceptions, including the French traveler Jules Remy, the Austrian writer Ida Pfeiffer, and the German author Friedrich Gerstäcken), which is ironic, given his initial observation that Tocqueville is the best model for travel writers. Wrobel could have discussed other continental Europeans who followed Tocqueville’s model, such as the Corsican diplomat Leonetto Cipriani, the French geology professor Louis Laurant Simonin, the French feminist Olympe de Joural Audouard, and the French journalist Jules Huret, as well as others, whose works, like Tocqueville’s, focused on both commonalities and peculiarities and have achieved various degrees of enduring value.

Nevertheless, Wrobel’s book is a well-written, multilayered study that contextualizes travel adventures written about the American West with narratives about other far-flung regions of the world. The book includes fifty-three interesting illustrations as well as comprehensive endnotes and a very useful bibliography. Wrobel’s Global West, American Frontier is a good read for both serious students of the American West and casual readers.

— MICHAEL HOMER Salt Lake City

1 Bernard-Henri Lévy, “In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part Three),” trans. Charlotte Mandell, Atlantic, July/ August 2005, accessed October 22, 2014, http://www. theatlantic.com/.

Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier in 1873–1874

BY CLAUDINE CHALMERS

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xiv + 229 pp. Cloth, $45.00

Prior to modern-day photojournalism, correspondent illustrators visually captured the scenes and events of the day. These “special artists” documented the people and battles of the Civil War, innovations in technology, newly established settlements, unknown lands, and the untamed American frontier for readers in eastern cities.

The independent scholar and California historian Claudine Chalmers has written a fascinating account of two well-paired artists sent overland to document the burgeoning regions between New York and San Francisco. Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier in 1873–1874 adds tremendous insight into this long-forgotten chapter of the history of illustration. The book deals with the experiences of special artists Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, Frenchmen who immigrated to New York to work for Harper’s Weekly. Best known for its reporting of the Civil War, Harper’s was America’s leading news and political magazine. The magazine regularly featured illustrations by renowned artists Winslow Homer, Theodore Davis, and Frederick Remington and satirical editorial cartoons by A. B. Frost and Thomas Nast. As a result of their coast-to-coast assignment for Harper’s, Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier also became household names in America for their illustrative reporting of the frontier West.

The purpose of Frenzeny and Tavernier’s assignment, as described by Chalmers, was to enlighten eastern readers with visuals of the epic migration and settlement of the West following the construction of the transcontinental railroad. “There were substantial settlements in Utah, California, and Oregon, but the country’s vast interior was still largely unpopulated and little known,” she writes. “By providing easier access to this new country, ever-lengthening rail lines unlocked the mysteries of the American West and greatly accelerated the tempo of the nation’s westward migration” (13). Chalmers points out that it was no coincidence that the artists were sent on assignment when the movement west was at its zenith: “The two artists were hired to chronicle the frontier at a time when the entire American nation seemed to be marching west, an unparalleled migratory tide that had increased tenfold at the end of the Civil War” (13).

At the start of their journey in July 1873, the two artists depicted the stepping off point for many westward travelers, a crowded emigrant boarding house in New York, followed by a brimming emigrant wagon, a loaded train, and scenes of day-to-day life on the overland route. During their stay in Colorado during the winter of 1873–1874, Frenzeny and Tavernier acted as consummate observers of life and labor.

In the spring of 1874, the artists made side trips from Denver to northern Arizona and New Mexico, capturing a Hopi pueblo scene at Acoma. Later, Tavernier traveled to Wyoming and Nebraska, where he illustrated settlers driven from their homes by Indian raids at Fort Russell and Laramie and a rarely seen Indian Sun Dance. Meanwhile, Frenzeny traveled to Salt Lake City and Ogden to illustrate Mormon polygamy, men quarrying stone for the church’s temple, and Ute Indians trading in a frontier town. Frenzeny arrived in San Francisco a month before Tavernier to document the Chinese presence in the city, including Chinese fishermen, laborers, the Chinatown market, and a gambling den. After Tavernier reached the Bay City in August to rejoin his companion, he finished their assignment by producing sketches of the San Francisco suburbs.

No one can doubt the originality of Chalmers’ research on the two artists and their illustrations. Readers should know, however, that Robert Taft covered Frenzeny and Tavernier’s pictorial record of the American West in Kansas Historical Quarterly (1946) and then in an excellent reference work Artists and Illustrators of the Old West (1953). Although Taft’s study was original and informative, it does not provide the level of insight of Chronicling the West. Chalmers’s perceptive commentary surpasses Taft in the fact that she examines the images as visual anecdotes, providing meaningful context and commentary on their creation.

For its illustrative and documentary quality, Chalmers has also written a superior companion to Richard Reinhardt’s enjoyable Out West on the Overland Train: Across-the-Continent Excursion with Leslie’s Magazine in 1877 and the Overland Trip in 1967 (1967). Reinhardt reprinted the serialized articles from Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper as a commemorative look at Frank Leslie’s famous 1877 transcontinental excursion. Along with the reprinted articles, Out West on the Overland Train contained reproductions of the magazine’s original woodcut illustrations by Leslie’s own special artists, Walter R. Yeager and Harry Ogden. Chalmers’s historical insight, however, takes Chronicling the West past the commemorative intent of Reinhardt’s book. The qualities that distinguish it from Reinhardt’s book are inquiry and elucidation.

In keeping with other books in this series, the University of Oklahoma Press has produced a beautifully designed volume. The book is lavishly illustrated with magnificent reproductions of Frenzeny and Tavernier’s woodcut illustrations. It also includes more than a dozen plates showing the artists’ original drawings and ink wash sketches for the magazine. In addition, the book contains a complete list of the one hundred engravings in an appendix. Those who have an interest in the settlement of the West will not only value Frenzeny and Tavernier’s illustrations as visual artifacts, but they will appreciate Chalmers’ intelligent commentary. She presents a well-researched and engaging examination of the early days of journalistic illustration and the opening of the West to settlement. Her investigation of these two special artists’ “iconic images” led Chalmers to conclude that their vision “started to actually define the West for the people of a young nation still in the making” (200).

— NOEL A. CARMACK Utah State University Eastern

UNDER THE EAGLE: Samuel Holiday, Navajo Code Talker

BY SAMUEL HOLIDAY AND ROBERT S. MCPHERSON

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xii + 266 pp. Paper, $19.95

Under the Eagle is the story of Samuel Holiday, from his childhood on the Navajo reservation in Monument Valley through his subsequent life. Although the main focus is Holiday’s experiences as a World War II code talker, it is also an account of his journey through life guided by the Navajo tradition—a tradition that gave him the strength to endure the Pacific arena during the war. Robert S. McPherson has written a biography/autobiography that is more than a historical narrative of one man’s experience in war but also a story of Navajo cultural traditions. McPherson has spent more than three decades studying these traditions and he effectively weaves them into Holiday’s story.

McPherson begins the book with an explanation of why and how he decided to tell Holiday’s story, followed by a history of the origin of the code talker program in the United States Marine Corps. He then narrates, in Holiday’s voice, a life story, from his early life on the reservation, through boarding school in Tuba City, to his summers working on projects for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

Following the entrance of the United States into WWII, Holiday volunteered for defense work and attended a training school in Provo, Utah, operated by the National Youth Administration. It was while he was at the school that he received his notice to report for a physical examination. Passing the examination, he was sent to San Diego for Marine Corps boot training in Coronado, California. From boot camp he was assigned to a communications school at Camp Pendleton and joined other Navajo recruits. Upon completion of this training, he received a ten-day furlough. While at home, he received a ceremony to protect him and was given an eagle feather and some corn pollen in a small medicine pouch. Holiday carried this pouch throughout his service in the Pacific.

He was assigned to the Twenty-fifth Marines, Fourth Marine Division. His first combat action was the taking of Kwajalein Island, a short and vicious four-day fight, followed by actions in Saipan (June 15–July 9, 1944), Tinian (July 24–August 1, 1944), and Iwo Jima (February 19–March 26, 1945). These were some of the hardest fought battles in the Pacific, and they left a lasting impression on Holiday. Not only did he have to face the Japanese, but on at least two occasions he was mistaken for a Japanese infiltrator dressed in Marine uniform, taken prisoner, and almost shot before someone could vouch for him.

After returning from the Pacific, his work as a code talker went unrecognized, and since the program was classified, he was not able share his experiences with others. As with so many veterans, the war left him with many adjustment concerns afterwards, including a deep depression. His mother arranged an Enemy Way ceremony to drive away the enemy demons. Finally, in late 1960, the Fourth Marine Division recognized the code talkers in its reunion program. This was the beginning of national recognition of their service that led Holiday to numerous speaking engagements, including a trip to Japan. Finally, the ghosts subsided and he was at peace.

This book is remarkable because it immerses the reader not only into Holiday’s physical and spiritual journey but also into the cultural beliefs of the Navajo. The author is to be commended for introducing the non-Native American reader to this perspective. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in one Marine’s experiences during World War II and the subsequent impact these experiences had on his life.

— ROBERT S. VOYLES Fort Douglas Military Museum

Warrior Nations: The United States and Indian Peoples

BY ROGER L. NICHOLS

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xiii + 237 pp. Paper, $19.95

During my career as a college history teacher, I have scanned scores of United States history textbooks. Most contain a mere chapter on the American West, with a few paragraphs on the “Indian Wars.” I always found that unsettling, and I knew it to be unfair both to the subject and especially to the novice history students. The topic is complex with multifaceted themes and deserves more attention, but, after all, these were survey textbooks, most written without a frontier or conquest focus.

With his new book Warrior Nations, Roger L. Nichols, Emeritus Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, fills the gap. He examines eight conflicts to substantiate his theory that America’s wars against the Native Americans were due to demands for land and territorial expansion of the United States. These conflicts are the Ohio Valley War, 1786–1795; the Red Stick War, 1813–1814; the Arikara War, 1823; the Black Hawk War, 1832; the Minnesota Sioux War, 1862; the Cheyenne and Arapaho War, 1864–1865; the Chiricahua Apache War, 1861–1872; and the Nez Perce War, 1877. The conflicts, lasting from a few weeks to several years, contained similar characteristics, including intertribal conflict over leadership and religion, cultural change, economic and political pressures, fraudulent treaties, outside influence from the British (the Ohio Valley War) or Spain and Mexico (the Apache War), and the never-ending land hunger of Anglo Americans. All involved the use of federal troops and all received national attention. Nichols writes that during the conflicts U.S. officials, as well as Anglo settlers, “remained ignorant of, rejected, or ignored the deeply held Indian beliefs about local band independence” (11). This fact isn’t lost on readers who remember that not many years before the outbreak of the first conflict analyzed in this volume, the Ohio Valley War, the American colonists had waged war against Great Britain for the principles and ideals of independence.

Each of the eight fact-filled chapters dissects the events of one conflict and ties them together based upon six key ideas of the author: first, the ethnocentric and racist ideas of the Anglo settlers; second, unending demands for land by the Anglo Americans; third, the U.S. government’s unwillingness to punish or prevent anti–Native American violence; fourth, militarized village society and related ceremonies; fifth, Native American customs that required young men to protect their clan; and sixth, Native Americans’ determination to preserve their lands, cultures, and independence. Nichols states, “Together these elements played central roles in helping to cause almost all of the wars examined here” (12).

Writing in the summary, he concludes, “To label the conflicts examined here ‘Indian Wars’ diverts attention from their basic causes and begins the analysis from the wrong point of departure. They need instead to be considered wars of American aggression that were central to the territorial expansion that created the nation’s present land area” (189). Warrior Nations offers a concise thesis and framework for studying Anglo–Native American conflicts, and it is quite possible that readers will rethink what they know about this history. The book allows them to examine why and how the conflicts began and what was the desired outcome and to look at history from the bottom up—in other words, not just from the perspective of the winners. This volume is a readable, informative tome for everyone who loves western history and wants to be challenged by new ideas and innovative interpretations.

— PATRICIA ANN OWENS Lawrenceville, Illinois

DANCE WITH THE BEAR: The Joe Rosenblatt Story

BY NORMAN ROSENBLATT

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013. xix + 205 pp. Cloth, $44.95

Among the movers and shakers of twentieth-century Utah, few individuals surpass Joseph Rosenblatt in impact and long-term influence on the state. Rosenblatt’s influence as a successful international businessman, community leader and critic, philanthropist, and bridge between Utah’s Mormon and non-Mormon communities is still felt in the economic, educational, and cultural life of the state. The son of an orthodox Jew who left his native Russia in 1884, Rosenblatt embraced the business opportunities his father found so attractive in the new world while jettisoning many of the beliefs and practices of the old world orthodoxy. His “approach to religion was truly ecumenical. He had no tolerance for religions—including his own—when they flocked together or fenced others out” (168).

Dance with the Bear is an arresting title for this biography. It comes from the description that beginning operators used to explain their first encounter with the EIMCO Rocker Shovel, a hard rock loading machine that revolutionized the mining industry and brought substantial wealth to the Rosenblatt family. However, as Rosenblatt’s son Norman Rosenblatt writes, the title is a good metaphor for his father’s life. “The bear assumed many faces over ninety-six years: the International Association of Machinists, Caterpillar Inc., the Utah Legislature, the Salt Lake City Council, at times the University of Utah president’s office—even members of his own family” (xvii). In each case, Rosenblatt knew where he wanted to go and expected others to follow.

In Dance with the Bear, Joseph Rosenblatt emerges as a paradox. While supporting right to work legislation, he had, at least for a time, a good relationship with the machinists union that represented the workers at his EIMCO plant. While castigating the Utah Education Association and public education in general, he gave one-on-one help to two Salt Lake City west-side schools. While continuing to send paychecks to a loyal employee no longer able to work, he could “walk through the shop, and say, ‘Who’s that guy and where did he come from?’ And he might tell you to get rid of him, without talking to him but just seeing him” (56). As the beneficiary of a supportive father and family in launching his business career, he found his own children, “based on their past performance, their education and work habits,” incapable of running EIMCO (76). While donating his home of many years to the University of Utah as a residence for the president and providing a generous endowment for awarding the prestigious annual Rosenblatt Award to a faculty member, he also led the intense fight to prevent renaming the university’s School of Medicine after James L. Sorenson.

One of the most challenging bears with which Rosenblatt tangled was as chairman of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government—better known as Utah’s Little Hoover Commission. Established in 1965 to reform and streamline state government, the commission met with strong resistance from state agencies, commissions, and lobbyists. Even voters did not approve a proposal to abolish the cumbersome Board of Examiners in favor of a stronger Office of the Governor. Nevertheless, many commission recommendations were implemented over the years, and Rosenblatt received praise for his work as chair. Rosenblatt’s role with the Little Hoover Commission including its successes and failures might have been developed further in Dance with the Bear. The corporate history of EIMCO and other business ventures need more elaboration although a paucity of written records makes such an undertaking difficult. At times the focus moves from Rosenblatt to tangential aspects such as biographical information about winners of the Rosenblatt Award. But even with these criticisms, Norman Rosenblatt must be commended for his effort in writing a balanced biography of his father, no easy task for any writer.

— ALLAN KENT POWELL Salt Lake City

Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830–1853

BY MERINA SMITH

Logan: Utah State Univesrity, 2013. x + 267 pp. Cloth, $29.95

In this book, Merina Smith asks why nineteenth-century Mormons accepted polygamy, given their monogamous, sometimes puritanical background (which often caused the “resistance” mentioned in the title). Her answer is twofold. First, she argues that Mormonism began in a period of millenarian religious movements that frequently were open to significant experiment and novelty. Second, she contends that Mormon polygamy occurred within a convincing theological narrative that was based on the Bible and modern Mormon revelation such as Doctrine and Covenants 132, which discusses polygamy and refers back to Biblical figures such as Abraham and Sarah. She writes that, given Doctrine and Covenants 132, “it is not difficult to understand why polygamy was called the ‘capstone’ of Mormonism. It was the expression of a consummate family-centered theology. . . . The language could hardly be more vehement about the necessity of practicing the new and everlasting covenant, nor could the promises be greater” (162). Polygamy was at the center of “the highest level of salvation and exaltation,” and this exaltation was family centered (246).

Smith looks at the beginnings of polygamy and notes the relevant doctrinal developments that occurred during this period and the reasons why early Mormons “converted” to the practice. She tracks Emma Smith’s resistance to polygamy and her use of the Mormon women’s association, the Relief Society, to work against it. (Joseph Smith had directed someone to write down Doctrine and Covenants 132 to try to convince Emma that polygamy was a divine commandment.) Merina Smith’s sources include William Clayton’s extraordinary diaries as well as the lesser known story of John Solomon Fullmer and his plural family. She continues the polygamy story from the martyrdom of Joseph Smith to the succession crisis (in which some non-polygamists departed from the main church), then to “open” polygamy under Brigham Young in Utah.

Merina Smith’s initial question was a thoughtful one, and her answers were also thoughtful. Her book is a valuable contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue on Joseph Smith’s practice of and teachings on polygamy. In trying to understand how the early Latter-day Saints resisted then accepted polygamy, she has supplied a useful interpretation of the practice. The book is admirably evenhanded, given the highly charged subject of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, which has sometimes been avoided by conservative Mormons. It is an example of the growing opinion that early Mormon polygamy cannot remain a taboo subject.

A few quibbles. Merina Smith has read deeply in the secondary literature on polygamy and Joseph and Emma Smith and on polygamy in Nauvoo. However, she did not go beyond secondary works into the primary literature on some of Joseph Smith’s wives. This certainly was a limitation she set herself as she wrote the book. Nevertheless, this omission sometimes kept her from making strong judgments on some of the issues she discussed. For example, she stated that Sarah Ann Whitney “purportedly” married Joseph Smith, and she often used similar language in discussing his other wives (186). If the author did not solidly accept these women as wives of Joseph Smith, there was little point in discussing them. At one point Merina Smith seemed to accept that Fanny Alger married Joseph Smith in Kirtland; later, she seemed to reject pre-Nauvoo plural marriages (49, 66). In addition, the author did not discuss the handwritten memoir of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney—a very important record of a young woman’s resistance to polygamy, and how Joseph Smith dealt with it.

Despite these minor points, Merina Smith has written an engaging and thought-provoking account of early Mormon polygamy.

— TODD M. COMPTON Cupertino, California