In Memoriam

Charles “Chas” Peterson, 1927–2017

Chas Peterson, as photographed December 22, 1952. — USHS

Utah lost one of its finest historians on May 10, 2017, when Charles S. “Chas” Peterson passed away in St. George at the age of ninety. Chas was an effective advocate for state and local history whose enthusiasm for Utah’s history was boundless and infectious. His papers housed at the Utah State Historical Society contain a treasure trove of documents and insights, assembled over a lifetime of research and teaching Utah, western, and Mormon history. Chas was a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society, a former director of the society, and editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly and the Western Historical Quarterly. He served as president of the Mormon History Association in 1975–1976. As a history teacher and professor at Carbon College, the University of Utah, Utah State University and, following his retirement, at Southern Utah University, Chas mentored numerous students and professionals, myself included.

Chas was born in 1927 in Snowflake, Arizona, a town not far removed at the time from its pioneer era, and grew up as the tenth of thirteen children in the blended family of Joseph Peterson and Lydia Jane Savage. Along with many of his generation he transitioned from the farm to academia, but, unlike most, his career entailed both agricultural and academic pursuits. As a young man, Chas relished life on the family farm—raising crops, milking cows, and butchering hogs—and his love affair with the yeoman tradition helped to shape his professional trajectory, including his research and writing about agricultural history.

As a boy, Chas believed that Snowflake was the center of the universe, an illusion that was shattered after Uncle Sam drafted him in 1945 and shipped him overseas. Chas entered the military only weeks before Germany surrendered and was stationed in Japan as part of the American occupation force after the war ended. Shortly after he returned home from Asia Chas honored his mother’s wishes and answered the call to serve an LDS mission in Sweden, his ancestral homeland. Taking advantage of the GI Bill following his mission, Chas enrolled at Brigham Young University, where he earned a degree in animal husbandry. Then he and his bride Elizabeth “Betty” Hayes moved to San Juan County, where they leased a dairy farm from Charlie Redd beginning in 1953. Dairy farmers struggled in the Eisenhower era as scientific advances enabled farmers to produce more milk than Americans could consume and as Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson used his discretionary authority to slash dairy price supports. After four disappointing years of low income, Chas reconsidered his career choice and returned to the Y for more training. Initially he planned to certify as a vocational agriculture teacher but, fortunately for the historical profession, he soon converted to western history under the influence of Richard Poll and LeRoy Hafen.

Chas graduated from BYU with a master’s degree after defending a thesis on Territorial Governor Alfred Cumming and was offered a position teaching history, political science, economics, and agriculture at Carbon College in Price. In 1963–1964, he took advantage of a leave from Carbon to begin working on his Ph.D. at the University of Utah. Under the direction of Gregory Crampton, a scholar Chas admired immensely, in 1967 Chas completed a first-rate dissertation on Mormon colonization of the Little Colorado in Arizona. Partly on the strength of that dissertation, Chas was hired in a soft-money teaching and administrative position at the University of Utah. Yet the history department was badly divided, and he was blackballed by a cadre of young faculty members who disparaged western history. Chas found safe harbor in 1969 in the public history arena, securing an appointment as director of the Utah State Historical Society and editor of Utah Historical Quarterly.

The impulse to teach ran strong in his blood, though. Chas soon applied for a teaching position at Utah State University, successfully selling himself to Department Chair George Ellsworth as someone who was ideally qualified to teach western history because he had experienced an important part of it as a yeoman rancher and farmer in the Arizona and Utah outback. From 1971 until his retirement in 1989, Chas taught in USU’s history department, serving over the same interval as associate editor and then editor of Western Historical Quarterly. Chas once commented to me that the editorial position gave him professional influence and esteem that humbled and surprised him. Despite his modesty, Chas was a gifted wordsmith and resourceful researcher with an impressive talent for placing the events he studied within a broad interpretive context. He encouraged students to ask big questions, exercise their historical imagination, and “let the good times roll” stylistically in their prose.

Chas was the author of Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonization along the Little Colorado River, 1870–1900 (1973), which won the Best Book Award from the Mormon History Association, and Look to the Mountains: Southeastern Utah and the La Sal National Forest (1975). In 1977 Chas wrote Utah: A Bicentennial History as part of a prestigious series of state histories commissioned by the American Association for State and Local History. I had the privilege to serve as Chas’s co-author for his final book, The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945 (2015). In addition to these books, Chas wrote several book chapters and over twenty articles dealing with Utah, western, Mormon, agricultural, and environmental history. Through this rich array of scholarly publications, Chas’s careful research and intellectual imagination will continue to influence our writing and teaching of state history.

— Brian Q. CannonBrigham Young University