Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 4, 2017

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Classic Reprints

Departments

294 Utah before the Mormons Winter 1968

By Dale L. Morgan Postscript: Dale Morgan and the Elements of Utah History,

by Richard Saunders

310 The Dash to Promontory April 1961

By Robert M. Utley Postscript: The Golden Spike and Me, by the author

324 Nine Mile: Eastern Utah’s Forgotten Road Winter 1981

By Edward A. Geary Postscript: No Longer Forgotten Road, by the author

338 Bridge: A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake Winter 1985

By Doris R. Dant Postscript: Bridge, an Extreme Example of Railroad Control, by the author

352 Rolling to the 150th: Sesquicentennial of the Transcontinental Railroad

By Christopher W. Merritt, Michael R. Polk, Ken Cannon, Michael Sheehan, Glenn Stelter, Ray Kelsey

291 In This Issue 364 Book Reviews 369 Contributors 370 Utah In Focus

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Book Reviews

364 Mapping the Four Corners: Narrating the Hayden Survey of 1875

By Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel Reviewed by John L. Kessell

365 A Modest Homestead:

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Life in Small Adobe Homes in Salt Lake City, 1850–1897

By Laurie J. Bryant Reviewed by Robert A. Young

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366 Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada, and the Fish Creek Massacre

By Silvio Manno Reviewed by Nancy J. Taniguchi

367 The Women: A Family Story

By Kerry William Bate Reviewed by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel

The post–Civil War era saw a dramatic rise in transportation technology in the West, as railroad lines spanned the continent. Railroad men and financiers—not to be outdone by one another—pushed lines into territories where demand had not yet coalesced. Their large corporations, which were heavily subsidized by the American people, came to symbolize the grandeur of the age and American progress itself. Utahns needed railroads in the same way they needed other technologies like irrigation to move water about the landscape. For Mormons, the arrival of the transcontinental line in 1869 signaled the loss of political and economic hegemony in the Great Basin. Other lines soon followed, and no history of the state or region is complete without following them—a verita-

Thinking about these “marks of human passage” is the design of this issue, a reprint of four exceptional essays previously published in the Quarterly. We begin with Dale L. Morgan’s lively essay “Utah before the Mormons,” originally delivered as a keynote address at the 1967 annual meeting of the Utah State Historical Society and subsequently published in the January 1968 issue. Morgan plays with time scale “to

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If railroads became the major arteries of the West’s nineteenth-century transportation system, roads provided the connective tissue.

Roads follow preexisting routes. Like water, they tend to follow the easiest path—through valleys, canyons, and low-level mountain passes—although some Utah routes cross the roughest terrain imaginable. They facilitate movement, curating how one travels across the landscape just as an exhibition curates historical information. Most roads are fixtures; others have outlasted their original economic or cultural purpose and have been reclaimed by the land. Before becoming a physical presence on the land, roads existed in imagination, revealing much about how generations, then and now, thought about the land and acted on it. As such, roads, like railroads, are cultural sponges—artifacts of earlier times. They are similar to what Wallace Stegner wrote of Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah, as “a palimpsest of human history, speculation, rumor, fantasy, ambition, science, controversy, and conflicting plans for use”—as “marks of human passage.”2

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ble spider web showing prominent nineteenthcentury destinations. Since railroads needed water and fuel, stations and towns cropped up in part to provide that service. Other communities serviced the trains, some of which had a striking impermanence on the landscape. But the threads of connection created by railroads had a more lasting impact. Transcontinentals and the lines they inspired became part of a network that helped to connect Utah and the American West with the rest of the country and the neighboring nations of Canada and Mexico.

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Utah is often known as the Crossroads of the West, and, however overused that name may be, it’s an apt term to describe the state’s cultural and geographic position in the American West. A crossroad is a place of intersection, but it also is “a central meeting place” or “a crucial point especially where a decision must be made.”1 For Native peoples in the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau, a web of migration and trade routes contributed to an exchange of people, goods, and ideas. Since Dominguez and Escalante’s expedition in 1776–1777, these groups had to deal with how the arrival and ambition of Europeans and Americans shifted the dynamic of power in the region. Missionaries, explorers, trappers, and overland migrants passed through, and in some cases lingered, on the way to somewhere else. When Latterday Saints decided on the eastern edge of the Great Basin as the place to plant their settlements, the land had already been traversed by generations of Native peoples, as well as by entrepreneurial trappers who relied on indigenous knowledge and who brought concrete cartographic knowledge of the American Far West. Faint mule trails, wagon ruts, and even the course of modern transportation corridors constitute evidence etched into the landscape of generational movement and travels.

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translate historical time into terms we can individually find meaningful” by tracing the events prior to the Mormon’s arrival in 1847 by using 1967—the year of his address—as a baseline. We can play the same game: Morgan delivered the keynote half a century ago, a longer time span than any of the major events he describes between 1805 and 1847. But the first half of the nineteenth century is chronicled here by one of the West’s accomplished and knowledgeable authorities, who provides a sweeping evaluation of the people, groups, and ideas that made an imprint on the region that became Utah.

That world of explorers, trappers, and overland emigrants was marked by constant movement.

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Our next selection comes from the pen of Robert Utley, an acclaimed historian of the West. “The Dash to Promontory,” published in April 1961, is the product of a different kind of “dash” in the years leading up to the centennial of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad: the effort of the National Park Service, with the help of assiduous locals such as Bernice Gibbs Anderson, to establish the significance of the Golden Spike site for its eventual inclusion to the National Park System. Utley’s reflection on Promontory is followed by Doris R. Dant’s “Bridge: A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake,” published in winter 1985. Dant, formerly an associate professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University, paints a rich portrait of life in a town that owed its sole existence to the railroad. Like other forms of movement, the community’s lifespan on the Great Salt Lake was short lived, and as we see from Dant’s postscript, the town and its history now exist only in memory.

Another classic essay reprinted here is “Nine Mile: Eastern Utah’s Forgotten Road” by Edward Geary, published in the winter 1981 issue.

His familiarity with the locale and, like Dant, his considerable literary talents combine to make a pleasurable read: part history, part personal history, Geary’s article blends the canyon’s regional history with the experiences of his own grandfather driving the rough canyon road a century earlier. One virtue of the essay is the sense of place, Geary’s attention to Nine Mile as “one of the most colorful and little-known areas in Utah” that “does not quite belong to any of the state’s usually recognized

regions.” This canyon, he argues, was central to the region’s development even though modern infrastructure and memory have obscured that fact.

Our final offering is a new selection on a welcome subject, the archaeology of the transcontinental railroad grade in Box Elder County, Utah, and especially the evidence of Chinese rail workers. “Rolling to the 150th” explores the story of Promontory after the driving of the Golden Spike on May 10, 1869, and the archaeological efforts to reconstruct the area’s past in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of 1869.

In so doing, this article provides a fascinating coda to Robert Utley’s prelude to the events of May 1869.

The classic articles reprinted in this issue are nearly verbatim reproductions of their originally published forms, with only minor necessary editorial changes. The major difference is with images: some are duplicates; others are new, from our collection. We are pleased that each piece is followed by a postscript either from the authors or, in the case of Dale Morgan’s essay, from Richard L. Saunders, dean of the library at Southern Utah University and the foremost scholar of Morgan’s life and work. We thank Bob Utley, Ed Geary, and Doris Dant for returning to their essays after many years and offering commentary to a new generation of readers.

These essays offer a sampling of the work published in the Quarterly over the years and remind us of important themes that have graced the journal’s pages. It’s appropriate to return to them a second time for inspiration, for, as the postscripts suggest, these articles still have something to offer. From them we have case studies that show how attention to movement and transportation in Utah history offers a sweep of topography and terrain—the physical space—and of systems and networks that originated in the nineteenth century. On a more granular scale, the concept of movement allows us to reflect on experience and memory: from one man’s experience nearly freezing to death on a freight run through Nine Mile Canyon to a woman’s memories growing up surrounded by the sights and sounds of diesel engines.

We hope that intimate stories of movement and transportation, combined with attention to broader trends and analysis, will continue to be shared. This issue marks the Utah State Historical Society’s commitment to this theme, culminating with the 66th Annual Utah History Conference to be held September 27–28, 2018. This is both a call for papers and a call for community recognition of the centrality of transportation and movement to Utah and the western region.

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1 “Crossroads,” Webster Dictionary.

2 Wallace Stegner, “The Marks of Human Passage,” in This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park and Its Magic Rivers, ed.

Wallace Stegner (1955; Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1985).

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The essays are only a start, a few selections from the region’s nineteenth-century history.

The possibilities inherent in the ideas of movement and transportation potentially force us to reconsider Utah history. The centrality of movement to exploration, industry, and travel— major themes in Utah history—is obvious. Less so is the way movement can be seen on a more conceptual level as a way to evaluate change over space and time: the variation and transformation of the landscape, the flow of ideas and people into and out of the state, the mobility of groups and individuals, the development of transportation-related infrastructure, and the transportation and communication networks connecting the state to regional and national systems. The flow of ideas and people is now more global than ever before, rendering traditional boundaries that confined physical movement less operable.

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Bertram Motor Supply Company, 249–251 S. State Street, Salt Lake City, September 1910.

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A map created by Antonio VĂŠlez y Escalante in 1777, covering sections of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Pen-and-ink and watercolor, with relief shown pictorially. —

C ou rt e sy Libra ry of C on gre ss

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I am going to begin by asking that you join with me in playing some tricks with time. On this twenty-third of September 1967, I would like you to go back with me in time exactly 120 years, to the evening of September 23, 1847, so that we may revisit Brigham Young.

The Mormon leader is returning to Winter Quarters after a summer during which his Pioneer party has hopefully established a gathering place for the Saints beyond the summit of the Rocky Mountains. Our day’s journey of 29 miles in Brigham’s company has been through the sandy eastern reaches of the Black Hills, the Laramie Range, and we have camped for the night at a point about 12 miles west of Fort Laramie, which we will reach tomorrow. Our party of 36 wagons and 108 men left the embryo settlement of Great Salt Lake City on August 26. Just west of South Pass, on September 3, we encountered the Mormon family emigration, which set out from Winter Quarters in June, two months in the rear of the Pioneer party, and we can estimate that these companies by now are winding down Emigration Canyon to join those members of the Pioneer party detailed to winter in Salt Lake Valley.

With Brigham, we reflect upon this new country seen during the summer, and its potential for the harried Saints; but we do so without relinquishing our vantage point of 1967. Let us shuffle together those two years, 1847 and 1967, 120 years apart, for purposes of dramatic demonstration, at one and the same time watching the stars above Laramie Peak and the yellow blaze of the electric lights which illuminate this room . . . .

So then, in Brigham Young’s presence we reflect upon the Prophet Joseph Smith, who (in a despairing moment shortly before his brutal murder) half-accepted the idea of fleeing to the Rocky Mountains and went so far as to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa. (The thought enters our minds: What would he have done had he come up here—sought employment as a clerk at one of the forts? Begun to hunt beaver in the

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Utah before the mormons

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impoverished twilight of the mountain fur trade? Taken up a mendicant life with one of the poverty-stricken Indian tribes of the Rockies? No, impossible! The Mormon prophet is inconceivable, except with a people around him.)

The prophet was slain, we reflect, just three years ago last summer—that is to say, on June 27, 1964, a few weeks before the political conventions that nominated Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater for the Presidency. We reflect, too, on all the events that preceded the tragedy in Carthage Jail, crammed into so short a time as seventeen years: The Book of Mormon, which gave rise to all the striving, was published so recently as March 1950, three months before the furies of the Korean War were unloosed upon the world.

In this way we establish a Mormon time-scale, and also a chronological double exposure for Utah’s history before the Mormons. It was just a year ago last month that the Donner party hacked its way over the Wasatch to reach the open expanse of Salt Lake Valley, preliminary to going on to starvation and cannibalism in the far-off Sierra Nevada during the hard winter just past. John C. Frémont was in the Utah country only a little earlier. It was in the dogdays of September 1963, that he floated out on the waters of Great Salt Lake in his rubber boat to reach and give name to Fremont Island.

After swinging around through Oregon and California, he rode north as far as Utah Valley in the spring of 1964, arriving there about a month before the murder of the prophet, then going on east to Bent’s Fort and Washington, D.C. All this we read with attention in his report, published in Washington two years ago.

We also know that Frémont came back to the Utah country in the fall of 1965, but he is yet not home from that third expedition, and we have still to learn the details, which include his horseback visit to Antelope Island in Great Salt Lake from a base camp between the forks of City Creek—the same locality where we, the Mormon pioneers, recently decreed that a temple should arise.

How long since Utah was first traversed by emigrant wagons? The Bartleson party, making for California, passed around the northern side of Great Salt Lake six years ago, in August and September 1961, a few months prior to the chilling assassination of President John F.

Kennedy, but about this Brigham Young knows little or nothing.

He does not know a great deal more about Jim Bridger, though last June, while bound for the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, he fell in with Bridger on the Little Sandy, west of South Pass, and had a long, rather confusing discussion with him, Bridger’s far-ranging knowledge of the West hard for a greenhorn to take in.

Bridger has lived in this high country for a very long while; with some fellow trappers he first holed up for the winter in Cache Valley late in 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge.

And further back in time: it was during the summer of 1925, when a Lincoln Highway across the country was being vigorously promoted, that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed northern Idaho on their way to the Pacific. Still more remotely: In the summer of 1896, seven months after Utah achieved Statehood, Fathers Dominguez and Escalante made the Utah area at last visible to history by embarking upon their pioneering exploration northwest from Santa Fe.  In making my point so forcibly, I hope I have not labored that point excessively. I have been concerned, as you realize, to translate historical time into terms we can individually find meaningful. All these dates—1964, 1961, 1944, 1925, even 1896—have a personal significance for us that dates like 1847, 1841, 1824, 1805, or 1776 no longer command. Births, deaths, weddings, and graduations mix with the obvious public events to give such dates personal color, each date emotionally different for everyone alive.

Nothing is truly real for most of us beyond the reach of our own experience, and coping with this fact is the recurring, often exasperating, problem of historians. This was brought home to me some years ago through a story told me by my brother Jim’s wife. Her eldest daughter, then a ripe eight years of age, came home from school one day to beseech: “Mama, tell me what it was like to live back in the olden times, when you were a girl.” Mary Beth was and is fast on her feet, and though it disqualifies her as a historian, she got out of that one, she told me, by exclaiming, “I’m not that old!”

Those 236 years before Escalante, in other words, are off any timescale we are interested in devising, whether 1967, 1847, or any other base year is chosen. There were no white men, no chroniclers or annalists, in Utah before 1776 to institute a written history, and I fear that for all their refinements in technique, the archaeologists are never going to be able to speak to us with real authority about the details of the life of the Indian peoples who occupied Utah

I am not, tonight, going to retell in any detail the story of that gentle exploration by the two Franciscan priests. Herbert E. Bolton saw fit to title his account of their experiences, as published by this Society in 1951, Pageant in the Wilderness. This title is one to which I have always taken exception. For a pageant is a bloodless, I might say gutless, visualization of times past, something artificial and staged. The Escalante

Out of prevailing historical murk, the single year 1776 rises like a revolving beacon of incredible candlepower.

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Out of prevailing historical murk, the single year 1776 rises like a revolving beacon of incredible candlepower. A great bicentennial for Utah is now only nine years away, and it is certainly none too soon to start thinking about a suitable observance. Utah shares Dominguez and Escalante with New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, but these explorer priests mean far more to Utah than to her sister states; here they represent a point of prime beginning in history, which is not the case elsewhere. The year 1976 will be a festive one generally, for at that time our nation will be observing its two hundredth anniversary. (We might remark, in passing, that Dominguez and Escalante originally intended to set out from Santa Fe on July 4, a date American history had not until then vested with emotional impact, but delays attended their preparations, and they did not actually get off until sixteen days later.)

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The very difficulty of exploring the other side of the divide adds to its fascination. Back of 1776 we have almost no written records to go upon. Captain Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, one of Coronado’s conquistadors, reached the southern edge of the Colorado’s mighty chasm as early as 1540, but that was in present Arizona. No one to our knowledge, no one capable of recording what he saw, got north and west of the Colorado for another 236 years—a chasm in time far exceeding anything known to geology.

It is true that after Don Juan de Onate launched the colonization of New Mexico in 1598, some knowledge about the immense space west of the Rockies and north of the Rio Grande’s sources reached the Spaniards in New Mexico.

Dr. S. Lyman Tyler could speak to your profit and mine until dawn on this period “Before Escalante,” for that was the topic of his doctoral dissertation some years ago—a contribution to scholarship that I, and doubtless he too, would like to see published before either of us gets very much older. In general, though, the knowledge about, or emanating from, Utah in the era before Escalante was ethnological, relating to the Ute Indians, from whom the Spanish chroniclers extracted no very useful fund of geographical information or anything like a true knowledge of the conditions of existence in present Utah.

during this period. A time machine is the only mechanism that ever seems likely to help us develop a detailed primordial history of the Utes, Shoshonis, Paiutes, and Navajos, and time machines seem to be easily devised only on television.

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If I may be permitted a geological image, 1847 represents a faultline in Utah’s splendidly varied history. Because of the continuity enforced by the patterns of Mormon experience, the long slope our way from 1847 seems shorter than that across the divide, where the cliffs of time plunge sheerly down past the 1830’s and 1820’s to the almost inaccessible 1700’s far below. It is exactly 191 years today since Fathers Dominguez and Escalante rode down out of Spanish Fork Canyon into Utah Valley, and 120 of those years belong to the Mormon era.

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Expedition (so called because Silvestre Velez de Escalante kept the diary, though his associate, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, was the senior ecclesiastic)—the Escalante Expedition, I say, was no pale image of the real thing—it was the real thing, wrought from faith and piety, hard work and perseverance, suffering and frustration, hope and anticipation, and acquiescence to the will of God. The prime purpose of the expedition was to find, if possible, an overland route north of the Apache lands to connect the New Mexican settlements with those the Franciscans had been founding since 1769 in California. The fathers got as far north and west as Utah Valley, where they heard about, though they did not visit, Great Salt Lake, but no Indian trails or information even intimated that a likely route existed on to the coast of California. The ten-man party turned south down the Wasatch Front, eventually drew lots as a way of allowing God to decide whether or not they should give up the quest and make for the Indian pueblos south of the Colorado, and at last, after many adventures, reached Santa Fe in safety on January 2, 1777. The priests had been immensely impressed with Utah Valley, a paradise indeed to one freshly come from arid New Mexico, and they hoped that a mission could be established there to serve the Ute Indians. We shall always wonder how the history of Utah might have been changed had this project been undertaken and proved successful. But the resources did not exist for such a venture at the limits of the known world; we are not even sure that anybody in authority ever gave the idea a moment’s serious consideration.

The consequence is that “After Escalante,” for forty years or so, we confront another essentially blind period in Utah history. The brilliant beacon has been extinguished, and the murk is penetrated only, now and then, by a little star-shine. We appreciate, nevertheless, that Dominguez and Escalante have got Utah history on a meaningful time-scale; after 1776 we do have glimpses of things happening in Utah, however brief and tantalizing our glimpses of these events. Symbolically, the priests brought back with them to Santa Fe what they called a Laguna Indian—that is, a Ute from Utah Valley.

We have to suppose that in the course of time this Laguna Indian returned home. It may well be that some trader went with him. If not, there were traders to venture out on the path of the

fathers, now that the way was known beyond the Gunnison River in western Colorado.

Getting at the history of this period nevertheless presents many and grave difficulties. One problem is, from the New Mexican end, that only official expeditions tended to produce the written records that yield the patterns we call history. With scarcely an exception, only the priests, officials, or army officers, could read and write, and these were the very men who stayed out of New Mexico’s distant north, sufficiently burdened with responsibilities at home.

Those who did follow the padres to the remotest Ute lands were rough men who in all their days never learned to read or write. Only on the rare occasions when one of them was hauled before an alcalde for some infraction of law or polity was a written record ordinarily made of their activities.

Brigham Young, in his camp in the shadow of Laramie Peak in September 1847, knew nothing of these forerunners of civilization in the Great Basin. It is only since 1921, when Joseph J. Hill began to publish his researches respecting the Spanish Trail, that we have known of our unexpected good fortune, that some details concerning an otherwise lost era in Utah history are preserved in the Spanish archives of New Mexico. Hill established to our satisfaction that in the thirty years after Dominguez and Escalante returned home, various traders developed a routine of going off to live with the Utes for months at a time, thereby succeeding where church and state had failed—in establishing meaningful and workable relations with the more distant Ute bands. (We should not forget that through the 1860’s and even later, the Utes ranged through northern New Mexico and western Colorado, as well as northeastern Utah; the Utes are by no means the exclusive historical property of the state that has taken their name.) Something concrete in the way of information comes out when a new governor of New Mexico, Joaquin de Real Alencaster, writes on September 1, 1805, concerning a certain Manuel Mestas (declared to have been a Ute interpreter for fifty years): In the short time that I have governed this province, he has recovered from the aforesaid heathen [that is, the Utes] eight horses which he himself

At this juncture, because we have reached the year 1805, I would like to abandon our New Mexican vantage point briefly so that we may look at Utah from another direction: in fact, from eastern Idaho, where the Columbia-bound Lewis and Clark Expedition has just crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass.

With my Utah orientation, shared by most of you who listen to me tonight, when I first read the original journals of Lewis and Clark, the passage in those journals most exalting to my imagination I found in William Clark’s carefully written notes for August 20, 1805, set down just twelve days before Governor Alencaster made the remarks about Manuel Mestas that we have been discussing. Lewis and Clark were somewhat perplexed about the best route to pursue now that they had left Missouri waters, and sought advice from Snake Indians

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This country to the southwest, Clark observed, the old Snake Indian “depicted with horrors and obstructions scarcely inferior to that just mentioned, he informed me that the band of this nation to which he belonged resided at the distance of 20 days march from hence not far from the white people with whom they traded for horses mules cloth metal beads and the shells which they woar as orniment being those of a species of perl oister.”

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These remarks need some elucidation: Yutas Timpanoges were those dwelling in Utah Valley; and Comanches in this instance would be the Shoshonis or Snakes, cousins of the Comanches proper. (In a New Mexican document of 1828 we find them referred to as “Comanches Sozoni,” which is enlightening enough.) I would hazard the suggestion that the Jimpipas of this document were the Yampa Utes, dwelling in northwestern Colorado and at times ranging into the Uinta Basin. Contact with the northern Ute bands is clearly implied in this document of 1805, and trade with those bands may have become commonplace.

on whom they had fortunately chanced. They were told of the impossibility of descending the Salmon River, and of a possible route through Nez Perce country farther north. An old man also had a fund of information about the country to the south, and it is this which catches our eye: that old Indian’s viewpoint as he faces in the direction of Utah. Let me quote Clark’s entry in the original journals, with some interpolated comment of my own.

As will become apparent shortly, the old man’s band lived on Bear River, and here we have an astonishing picture of quite extensive direct commerce with New Mexican traders, not simply through Ute intermediaries. Clark continues: that the course to his relations was a little to the West of South, that in order to> get to his relations the first seven days we should be obliged to climb over steep and rocky mountains [that is, since Clark was conferring on the Lemhi River, across the Lost River Mountains] where we could find no game to’ kill nor anything but roots such as a ferce and warlike nation lived on whom he called the broken mockersons or mockersons with holes, and said [they] lived like the bear of other countries among the rocks and fed on roots or the flesh of such horses as they could take or steel from those who^ passed through their country, that in passing this country the feet of our horses would be so< much wounded with the stones many of them would give out. the next part of the rout was about 10 days through a dry and parched sandy desert [the vast Snake Plain] in which [there is] no food at this season for either man

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searched for and brought back. In the month of July he went back to the country of the aforesaid people and not only succeeded in bringing back eleven mules and horses, but according to the report of other Yutas, called Jimpipas, shortly started out on a trip of about a month’s duration for the purpose of retaking, not only the aforesaid eleven animals, but also twenty mules and eight horses, which among other things, had been stolen from men of this province last year in the country of the said Jimpipas, by Comanches, and were retaken by the Yutas Timpanoges during a war with the aforesaid Comanches.

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or horse, and in which we must suffer if not perish for the want of water, that the sun had now dryed up the little pools of water which exist through this desert plain in the spring season and had also scorched all the grass, that no animal inhabited this plain on which we could hope to subsist. [Now the old Snake is referring more specifically to the Arco Desert, north of the Snake River.] that about the center of this plain [was] a large river [the Snake] which was navigable but afforded neither Salmon nor timber, that beyond this plain th[r]ee or four days march his relations lived in a country tolerable fertile and partially covered with timber on another large river which ran in the same direction of the former. [Now plainly Clark’s informant is talking about the Bear River, above its great bend at Soda Springs.] that this last discharged itself into a large river [Here an element of fantasy enters, for of course the Bear discharges itself into’ Great Salt Lake.] on which many numerous nations lived with whom his relations were at war [now we are talking about the Utes] but whether this last discharged itself into the great lake [here synonymous with the Pacific Ocean] or not he did not know, that from his relations it was yet a great distance to the great or stinking lake as they call the Ocean, that the way which such of his nation as had been to the Stinking lake traveled was up the river on which they lived and over to that on which the white people lived [the Green River seems referred to] which last they knew discharged itself into the Ocean, and that this was the way which he would advise me to travel if I was determined to’ proceed to the Ocean but would advise me to put off the journey untill the next spring when he would conduct me.

With very little distortion, this is a quite reasonable account of the country south to Utah’s borders, and accords with our understanding that a normal route from the Bear River toward New Mexico would be up the Bear to some

point between present Cokeville and Evanston, then southeast across the Bear River Divide and on via Browns Hole on the Green River, where twenty years later William H. Ashley found a large band of Snakes had wintered. Unfortunately, the light of the old man’s understanding did not penetrate into the Utah area proper, glimmering out almost at Utah’s borders; from a Utah point of view, we more especially glean from this account that the Valley of the Great Salt Lake did not loom so large in the Snake cosmos of 1805 as in ours of 1847 and 1967.

Clark says that he thanked the old man for his information and advice “and gave him a knife with which he appeared to be much gratifyed. from this narative I was convinced that the streams of which he had spoken as runing through the plains and that on which his relations lived were southern branches of the Columbia, heading with the rivers Apostles [San Juan] and Collorado, and that the rout he had pointed out was to the Vermillion Sea or gulph of California.”

In the main Clark was correct, save that he accepted the idea of a great river flowing parallel to the Snake, which later he decided was connected up with the Willamette River of Oregon, and displayed on his map as the Multnomah, a ghost stream of early western cartography.

Clark says: I therefore told him that this rout was more to the South than I wished to travel, and requested to know if there was no rout on the left of this river on which we now are [the Lemhi and Salmon], by means of which, I could intercept it below the mountains through which it passes; but he could not inform me of any except that of the barren plain which he said joined the mountain on that side and through which it was impossible for us to pass at this season even if we were fortunate enough to escape from the broken mockerson Indians . . . .

Now let us leave Lewis and Clark to find their way to the Pacific as best they can while we turn back to our New Mexican eyrie. Eight years pass, to 1813—just thirty-four years before the

Nothing was said in the testimony about the route taken to reach the lake of the Timpanogos—that is to say, Utah Lake—which implies that by now it was well known. The company remained three days at Utah Lake, trading a little and waiting for other Indians to arrive.

When all were on hand, a council was held, but it appears that these Ute Indians would trade nothing but Indian slaves—“as they had done on other occasions,” the affidavits add. When the Spaniards refused, the offended Indians began to kill the horses of the traders, nine animals being slaughtered before the chief could quiet his people. The Spaniards prudently collected their remaining horses, and after standing guard over them all night, set out next day for the “Rio Sebero”—the Sevier River, as we suppose, and the first appearance of this name in history. On the Sevier the traders met a Yuta of the Sanpuchi or Sanpete nation, who agreed to conduct them to a place where they could trade with a tribe of Yutas new to them.

Two of the company were left in charge of the pack train while the other five, guided by

As before, the Spaniards were at first received cordially, only to have the Indians take offense when they refused to trade for Indian slaves.

Having profited by experience, this time the commandant gave his men permission to purchase the slaves, “in order not to receive another injury like the first one.” Twelve slaves were bought, and the Spaniards came home without further adventures except that a mule and a horse were drowned in crossing the “Rio Grande.” The traders also acquired on this journey 109 pelts, described as “but a few,” most likely deerskins.

I have retold this episode at some length, for the obvious importance of the facts, and because the facts are far from well known, notwithstanding their republication in the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1930. The adventures of the Arze-Garcia party are interesting in themselves and revealing with regard to the corrupting effect of Spanish peonage—in plain words, Indian slavery—for hundreds of miles around Santa Fe. After this episode history’s spotlight shifts north again. Indeed, there had been some arresting developments on the Idaho side for two years preceding this time. Lewis and Clark had come triumphantly home from the Pacific in the summer of 1806, and very soon thereafter traders began making determined efforts to exploit the fur riches of the Louisiana Purchase

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the Sanpuchi, set out to the west. Three days’ travel brought them to a tribe of Indians characterized as having heavy beards, clearly the bearded Indians encountered by Dominguez and Escalante. In 1776 these Indians had been described as very gentle and affable, but now they presented themselves with “their arms in their hands, saying their trade would be arrows.” They were quieted, and arrangements were made to trade next day. But that night the Spaniards overheard the Indians plotting an attack upon them. Accordingly, the Spaniards made off, “traveling stealthily all night and day until they reached the place where their companions and pack train were.” Thence they took the road to the Rio Grande—the Colorado, as we suppose; it is vexing that no details of the route are furnished, for the river might also have been the Green at present Green River—and there found what is described as “the rancheria of Guasache, who was waiting on the road to trade with them ‘as was his custom.’”

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Mormons reach Utah, or back in the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by our special time-scale—and the New Mexican archives yield a clutch of documents with an astonishing fund of information about the Utah country, so distant, so nearly lost in time, since Escalante’s day, a generation past. Again we are indebted to Joseph J. Hill for the facts. As he relates, he found in the New Mexican archives a document giving “an account of a trading expedition to the Timpanogos, and the Bearded Yutas west of the Sevier River in the year 1813.

The company consisted of seven men under the command of Mauricio Arze and Lagos Garcia.” They left Abiquiu, a still-existing village north of Santa Fe, on March 16, 1813, and returned July 12. In September the governor of New Mexico ordered the members of the party to appear before an alcalde and report what had taken place on the trip, for which he has our gratitude. (Here I would interject that these seven visitors of 1813, Manuel Mestas in 1805, and the ten men of the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, eighteen altogether, are the only Spanish visitors to Utah that we are able to name during the entire duration of the Spanish empire in America, a period of some three centuries.)

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and the country to the west that would soon become known as Oregon. Some pressed up the Missouri and the Yellowstone; still others made for Santa Fe; and in New York John Jacob Astor conceived his Pacific Fur Company to exploit the Columbia Basin from a base to be established at Astoria. It is the latter enterprise that chiefly concerns us. One division of the Astorians went out to the Columbia by sea, around Cape Horn. Another, under Wilson Price Hunt, crossed the continent in the summer and fall of 1811. The latter reached Henrys Fork of the Snake in October, and before going on toward the Columbia, detached Joseph Miller with four hunters and four horses to go beaver-trapping. These five men have come down in history as the Detached Astorians, and their wanderings the subsequent winter make them more than worthy of note, difficult as it may be to follow their wanderings in the light of the scanty available information. It is definitely known that they got as far south and west as the Bear River, which accordingly became known to the Astorians as Miller’s River. Escalante possibly alluded to the Bear in his journal, and William Clark most certainly alluded to it in his own journal, but both at a distance, and on the basis of Indian information. The Detached Astorians are the first white men we can unequivocally say reached the banks of this river.

It seems doubtful, however, that the Detached Astorians descended the Bear far enough to enter present Utah.

Nor can Utah quite claim that party of Returning Astorians led east next year by Robert Stuart. Coming from the Columbia, much of the way traveling what would eventually be established as the Oregon Trail, the Returning Astorians reached the Bear at its great bend in September 1812, and journeyed up the river as far as Thomas Fork before veering north in an unsuccessful effort to escape the ardent attentions of Crow horse thieves. Stuart and his companions afterward went on east via Teton Pass and South Pass, wintered on the North Platte, and made it safely through to St. Louis in April 1813.

The eastward passage of the Returning Astorians late in 1812 and the troubled passage of the Arze-Garcia party through the Ute lands in the spring of 1813 effectively close the history of Utah in what we might call the proto-historical

period. It is not a very extended record we have to work with; and unfortunately, the prospects are not very bright that scholarly ingenuity will significantly enlarge that record. Utah’s history before the Mormon era, as a promising field of scholarship, must primarily be concerned with the twenty-eight years before the Mormons plowed their first furrow in Salt Lake Valley.

We have already emphasized the shortness of that time span, equivalent to the time that has elapsed since the German invasion of Poland touched off the Second World War, and most of that history dates from a time commencing five years later, equivalent to the period since the Battle of the Bulge marked the last German offensive, twenty-three years ago.

The critical significance of the year 1819 we have begun to appreciate only in the past sixteen years, as the Hudson’s Bay Company archives in London have yielded up some of their treasures, for it was this year, as we know beyond all question, that British trappers first reached Utah from the north.

The circumstances require explanation. At the same time Astor’s people were establishing themselves at Astoria, and at various points in the broad basin of the Columbia, the North West Company was thrusting westward across Canada with the same objective. When the outbreak of the War of 1812 seemingly doomed the Astorian enterprise, the field partners sold out to the Canadian concern, which thereby remained in sole possession of the field. Some of the Astorians entered the service of the North West Company, and one of these men was Donald Mackenzie, who eventually was given the job of revitalizing the interior trade.

Mackenzie established an inland base among the Nez Perces near the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia—this in the summer of 1818—then, during the fall, pushed southeasterly into the great watershed of the Snake River. It was at this time that most of the southern tributaries of the Snake received their names, including the Malheur, the Owyhee, the Bruneau, Raft River, and the Portneuf. The precise circumstances are not known, but we infer that in the late winter or spring of 1819 one detachment of Mackenzie’s party, led by Michel Bourdon, pressed on south to trap the

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stream the Astorians had called Miller’s River.

Our authority is the journal of Peter Skene Ogden, at the head of a later British trapping party. In April 1825 Ogden commented: we reached Bear River a fine large stream of Water about the 1/8 of a mile in width this River was discovered in 1819 by Michel Bourdon & the upper part has been trapped twice but the lower part never has been it takes its rise due east & was supposed to be the Rio Colorado & even now Said to be a Fork of the same as our route is to follow it we shall be enabled to ascertain this point.

Ogden’s clerk, William Kittson, in a diary entry of the same date, added the valuable information that “the Deceased Michel Bourdon named Bear river from the great number of those animals on its borders.”

Subsequently, on May 9, 1825, having reached Cache Valley, Kittson spoke of encamping on

a fork, “one that Michel Bourdon called Little Bear and it has three others falling into it before it enters the Bear River main Branch.” Two days later Kittson told of putting up on the borders of “Bourdon or middle Fork”—known to us today as Blacksmith Fork, south of Logan (a name subsequently applied by American trappers). Nearly four years later, in March 1829, Peter Skene Ogden again was in Cache Valley with a fur brigade, and at that time he observed: The [Bear] River here makes a considerable bend to the Westward and this gave rise to Supposition by the first who descended this River the late M. Bourdon that it was a fork of the Wallamet had he advanced a days travel he would have been undeceived as it discharges in Salt Lake and as that Lake has no discharge there it remains.

By so narrow a margin, Michel Bourdon failed of becoming the discoverer of Great Salt Lake.

He was killed by Blackfeet in 1823, so did not

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Peter Skene Ogden’s map of the Great Salt Lake and the Snake River areas. It also shows Ogden's 1828-1829 route, when he discovered the Humboldt River. Carl Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West, vol. II. —

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survive to relate his experiences in a later day.

Until 1951, when the Ogden journals of 1824–25 were published, we knew nothing of Bourdon’s special distinction in Utah history.

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The North West Company merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821, the combined firm taking the name of the British concern.

By this time a Snake Country Expedition had become a settled tradition in the Columbia Department, and in 1823 the six-foot four-inch Finan McDonald led the Hudson’s Bay Company brigade south as far as Bear River, then apparently went up the Bear and across the divide to the Green River. He established to British satisfaction that the Bear was not “the Spanish River,” as had been supposed since Bourdon’s foray of 1819. McDonald may have led his whole party, or sent a detachment, as far down the Bear as Cache Valley, which is what Ogden thought of in 1825 as the Bear’s “upper part.”

But again this year Great Salt Lake eluded discovery.

That discovery was made at last in the fall of 1824 by American trappers, who after so long a time had penetrated finally to the very heart of Utah. Jim Bridger is usually credited with the discovery, but my personal conviction is that Etienne Provost saw the lake some weeks— even, perhaps, some months ahead of Old Gabe, who wintered in Cache Valley with members of John H. Weber’s company in 1824–25, and may not have descended the Bear to determine its course and settle a bet until late in the winter.

William Marshall Anderson, who visited the Rockies in the summer of 1834, has something interesting to say on this subject, in The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson, a book edited by myself and Eleanor T. Harris lately published by the Huntington Library. On August 28, 1834, after encamping on the North Platte below Ash Hollow, Anderson recorded in his trail diary: “The great salt lake at the termination of Bear river, which has been claimed to be discovered by Genl Ashley & which in the U.S. bears his name, I am informed by good authority has never been seen by him.

False ambition often doubtless prompts to false assertion! Tis believed the credit, if there is any in the accidental discovery of a place, is due to Weaver or Provost.” After he got back to Kentucky, Anderson expanded his trail diary into

a journal, and fortunately the extension of remarks included this particular entry. In the expanded version he says: It has been asserted by, or for Genl Ashley, that he was the first white discoverer of the great salt lake; in either case, he is to blame, as it is not the fact—The credit, if the accidental seeing of a spot is entitled to any credit, is due to Mr Provost of St. Louis—At all events it seems to be generally believed that Genl A. not only did not first find that remarkable inland sea, but, that he has not ever yet seen it— From the accounts of others, he gave a description of it—on which account it is sometimes called by his name— prompted by false glory he acquiesces in the reception of false honours— These remarks by Anderson are the more interesting in that Provost was trail boss for the very party he was accompanying down out of the mountains. We are not sure that Provost spoke English; but on the other hand, Anderson was facile in French. We would give much to have heard the discussion in camp that night. Indeed, any night’s discussion in almost any camp during these years is part of our irrecoverable history.

Etienne Provost we must view as the first American trapper to enter Utah, whatever the merits of the claim that he first laid eyes upon Great Salt Lake. Eleanor Harris and I have provided a considerable account of him in our Anderson book, so I shall be content tonight to say that he was born in Canada about 1782, and appears to have first entered the fur trade in 1814. He trapped in the southern Rockies with the Chouteau-De Mun parties between 1815 and 1817, knew the inside of a Santa Fe jail for a while as a trespasser on Spanish territory, and after the opening up of New Mexico to American trade, was among the first to go out to Santa Fe from St. Louis in 1822. He acquired a partner, Leclerc, and by the summer of 1824 the two had made their way into the Uintah Basin, setting up a base camp on the banks of the Green near the mouth of the White River. Early that fall Provost led a party west across the Wasatch Mountains—as far, I believe, as the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. In October, probably on the

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Jordan River, a band of Snakes treacherously attacked his party, killed eight, and forced Provost with the only other survivor to flee back to the base camp on the Green. Undeterred, he recrossed the Wasatch in the spring of 1825, this time descending the Weber River, where, near present Mountain Green in late May, he encountered the men of John H. Weber’s party.

Utah’s history during that spring of 1825 is incredibly complicated, and we would still be here when the sun rises tomorrow morning if I were to unravel the whole story for you. It must suffice us that five entirely distinct trapping parties converged upon the Weber River during May and June. There were the Ashley free trappers led by John H. Weber, who had crossed South Pass from the Big Horn River the previous summer. These trappers eventually reached the Bear and wintered in Cache Valley (Bridger was one of this group). There was Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Expedition, which had made its way south from Flathead Post in northwestern Montana. There was Jedediah Smith’s seven-man party which had got as far as Flathead Post in the fall of 1824, by way of the Green and the Snake, and which had

Thus briefly we account for the different parties, but we must note also that near Mountain Green Ogden’s British brigade ran afoul of Weber’s Americans, who rode up the canyon to intercept him. The Americans prevailed on some two dozen of the British trappers to desert, an extraordinary episode of clashing nationalisms and revolt against economic exploitation.

In the sequel Ogden was forced into headlong flight, back to the Snake River, and he did not again venture into Utah until the winter of 1828–29. During that time the American trappers were left in almost undisturbed possession of the Utah country—actually, Mexican land, had anyone desired or been able to determine where the boundary ran (identical with the present boundary between Utah and Idaho).

During this time, from 1825 to 1828, the first great rendezvous of the fur trade were held in Utah—in 1825 at Henrys Fork, in 1826 in Cache Valley, and in the summers of 1827 and 1828 at the south end of Bear Lake. After that, the beaver having been trapped nearly to extinction in Utah, the fur trade’s center of gravity moved north toward the Blackfoot country; most of the later rendezvous, down to 1840, were held in Idaho and Wyoming.

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Etienne Provost, 1782–1850, the hunter, trapper, and trail guide for whom Provo, Utah, is named.

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accompanied Ogden most of the way south to Bear River (after which, seeing signs of Weber’s presence in the country, they followed down the Bear to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake to come up with their compatriots near the site of Ogden). There was Provost’s party, making its second penetration of the Great Salt Lake Basin. And finally, a little behind the others, William H. Ashley himself, who had brought a substantial party to the mountains during the winter and divided it into four detachments to trap in different directions (one of which was expected to seek out Weber and Smith). He himself took a party down the Green River in a voyage of exploration through the canyons the river has knifed around the Uinta Mountains.

Ashley had reached the mouth of the Duchesne

by May 23, when the other parties collided in the valley of the Weber. He subsequently met Provost, returning to the Green, and by him was guided over to the Provo River, across Kamas Prairie to the Weber, and eventually back into Wyoming by way of Chalk Creek, in the wake of Weber and Smith, who had set out to rendezvous with him near the mouth of Henrys Fork of the Green.

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In the sense that a reasonably connected and reasonably detailed pattern of events can be worked out, Utah’s history before the Mormons effectively dates from the fall of 1824 and covers a period of just twenty-three years. Many of the events are dramatic, like Jedediah Smith’s first and second journeys to southern California in 1826 and 1827, down through the heart of Utah to the Virgin River, and thence to the Colorado. Some are pathetic, like the death of a man killed while constructing a cache, which gave Cache Valley its enduring name. Nearly all are tantalizing, like the exact sequence of events by which the Spanish Trail came into being, first connecting central Utah with New Mexico’s frontier settlements, later evolving as a feasible caravan route from Utah across the Vegas and Mojave deserts to Cajon Pass.

Very slowly and very reluctantly has the record for this bare quarter-century yielded to the industry of scholars—and, I may say, to their prayers, for there is a necessary element of good luck in the emergence of every fresh detail that extends that history. A great deal remains to be learned, but we have learned so much, every year bringing something new, that I have every confidence the pre-Mormon history of Utah will have been incredibly extended before most of us here tonight lose interest in earthly things.

Very slowly and very reluctantly has the record for this bare quartercentury yielded to the industry of scholars…

Broad areas of this history I have not even begun to mention—overland emigration between 1841 and 1846, for example, which has interested this Society very much. In 1951 the Society published J. Roderic Korns’s West From Fort Bridger, which was centrally concerned with the trail-making of 1846 (and characteristically printed a newly available diary by James Frazier Reed of the Donner party, among many other documents of prime importance). More information has appeared since, some of it incorporated into my Overland in 1846, which was published four years ago. I might add that I have myself given a great deal of attention to the pioneering Bartleson party of 1841, which passed around the north side of Great Salt Lake en route to California, and in the quite early future I expect to publish all the source narratives relating to this episode, including several new diaries. We are by no means done with John Charles Frémont yet; indeed, it may be said that the Utah phase of his explorations of 1843–45 has not even had a thorough first examination. On Frémont, too, fresh information keeps emerging.

This happily burgeoning record of Utah’s pre-Mormon era becomes richer each year. I think it very interesting that the story of the redheaded mountain man, Miles Goodyear, whose Fort Buenaventura, founded in the late summer of 1846, marks the true beginnings of Ogden, has had to be rewritten half a dozen times during the past fifty years. It has been constantly expanded to assimilate fresh information. At this very moment Charles Kelly is again addressing himself to Goodyear, in association with Robert Greenwood. Among the latest developments in the Goodyear saga, we have a letter he wrote from the Mojave River in May 1848, extraordinary for the details it adds to the history of agriculture in Utah. At his fort in 1847, Goodyear says in this letter, his men “succeeded in raising a mess of beans some radishes, hills of corn, cabbages and greens.

A greater variety I could tell but to raise this much I assure you I had to work well, apropos, A few peach and plum trees in the garden grew which I am in hopes will do well if not hurt by frost or mountain dew.” If this sounds like verse, that is exactly what it is; Goodyear naturally expressed himself in rhyme that is more quickly apparent to the ear than to the eye.

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The Miles Goodyear cabin, Ogden, Utah, as drawn by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1968.

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C ou r t e s y L i b rar y o f C o n g re s s

Everywhere we turn, we find an ever richer history emerging out of the blue haze of the distances beyond the Mormon fault-line, a territory we can map in increasing detail, and ever more confidently. So pronounced are the advances that we may be led to exclaim in wonder: Is there more to be found out? After so much time, dare we hope for more? Consider that to Escalante’s journal of 1776 we have now added Ashley’s diary of 1825, Ogden’s of the same year, and all that has survived of Smith’s record for the years between 1822 and 1828. For a long while we had no reason to expect that an Ashley or a Smith record of the kind existed, even. We now have both. Perhaps that thins out the lode, less remaining in the vein to be recovered.

But I have seen so much of enduring importance emerge into the sunlight just in the last thirty years, that I am disposed to argue the probability of further advances—letters and diaries by more Ashley men, maybe; diaries kept on the Spanish Trail, for instance. I would hesitate to say what form the new discoveries may

take; ten years ago, I would never have dreamed that this coming year I would be publishing a detailed account by a British botanist, Joseph Burke, who from a Fort Hall base traveled widely through northern Utah in the spring and fall of 1845. There seems no limit to the possibility of fresh discoveries. And for us, that is the abundant life! New sources, dedicated scholars to labor with them, an audience like the Utah State Historical Society membership to appreciate them! The prospect is enough to bring a sparkle to any man’s eye.

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Postscript: Dale Morgan and the Elements of Utah History

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By Richard Saunders Salt Lake City native Dale L. Morgan (1914– 1971) came to the study of Utah’s exploration and trails during his services as editor for the Historical Records Survey in the late 1930s.

He soon became director of the Utah Writers’ Project, superintending publication of Utah: A Guide to the State in 1941. Over the next three decades, Morgan’s incredible memory and facility with words made him an influential researcher, writer, and reviewer, one whom virtually every major historian of Mormonism or the American West (and many enthusiasts) relied upon for advice or critical review at some point. As a longtime employee of the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Morgan produced historical studies on overland migration, mapping, and exploration that are still outstanding examples of readability, documentary accuracy, and historical insight.

Morgan’s casual presentation style in this article obscures the years he had devoted to studying the details of movement and interaction across the early West. The names, dates, locations, and details he cites corrected the work of earlier writers, the outgrowth of careful study and comparison in hundreds of original sources. He had begun exploring (and correcting) information about the fur trade and Utah’s settlement while working for the HRS. Morgan put that knowledge to work producing the Utah Historical Trails Map for a state agency in 1949 and ghost writing West from Fort Bridger in 1951 for close friend Roderick Korns. By 1967 he had become the acknowledged expert on westward exploration during the American fur trade and on westward migration between 1841 and the 1860s.

Bobbs-Merrill published Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West in 1953; the book re-

mains in print now over six decades later, but his great masterwork on the fur trade was The West of William H. Ashley (1964). Morgan’s work on overland trails included Overland in 1846 (1963) and The Overland Diary of James Avery Pritchard (1958), which included a massive table tracing the movement of every known diarist or letter across the main trail in 1849, the first year of the California gold rush.

Morgan is perhaps less well known for the incredible works he did not manage to complete.

The southern route of 1849 would have been covered in a compilation of journals. He put off and never managed to complete a documentary collection on Robert Campbell, which was intended as a companion volume to the Ashley book. Morgan expanded his work on explorer and fur trader Jedediah Smith with Carl Wheat, but he never managed to find time to complete (or even begin) a revision to his 1953 biography or to edit and correct the tangled chronology and stories of James Beckwourth’s important memoir of the fur trade. At his untimely death from cancer in 1971, Morgan had retired from the Bancroft Library to embark on a second Guggenheim research fellowship, granted for a massive study which would have documented and contextualized the entire North American fur trade, from the French withdrawal in 1767 to 1870.

Approaches and interest in history continually change, and it may remain that Dale Morgan’s dedication to his field will make him the only person capable of such a broad and inclusive feat of Western scholarship—yet his accomplishments may be the more remarkable because he was completely and irreversibly deaf. Robbed of his hearing by meningitis as a teenager, thankfully his conversation tended to be conducted through the clicking voice of his typewriter. His enormous manuscript collection (Morgan wrote or received more than twenty thousand letters over his shortened career) provides a body of research and clues for generations of future scholars to mine. In the days before photocopiers made duplication a matter of push-button simplicity, he compiled a positively massive personal collection of painstaking transcripts. The Bancroft Library collection was enriched by his eager and consuming interest in diaries, letters, reports, and microfilm and in Photostats of relevant material in the holdings of other institutions. Mentor to

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A Shipler commercial portrait of two young children, photographed for a 1952 Christmas card, November 19, 1952.

Ut a h St a t e Hist orica l Socie t y

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Now certainly, in most of the article Morgan talks through important historical points without resorting to this trope, dealing with Britishand American-employed fur trappers, Indian and Spanish slaves, federal exploration of the West, and American emigrants, right up to the Donner party’s fateful delay in the Wasatch Mountains and harrowing crossing of the Salt Desert in 1846—or rather, last summer, in 1966.

Imagine how the state’s past might translate into our own personal calendar. Doing so, as Dale Morgan does very effectively here, makes the sweep of the past very much a part of now.

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The seed for this particular article was a story written for the Salt Lake Tribune titled “Utah’s Years Before the Beginning,” which Morgan had assembled in the summer of 1941. The text you read here in print he adapted from a presentation made to the Utah State Historical Society annual meeting on September 23, 1967.

Morgan’s goal was clearly to put the exploration and pre-settlement history of the state into a personal context for his hearers. To do so, he resets Utah’s past into a contemporary context by shifting the calendar forward exactly 120 years. He begins “playing tricks with history” in the article by discussing exactly what Brigham Young was doing on September 23, 1847, and then working backward, placing everything on to a timeline of contemporary events, temporal distances his hearers could identify personally. It is very effective. Everyone knew the Mormons came in 1847—or rather 1967. Morgan can thus talk about Fre-

mont’s bobbing circumnavigation of the Great Salt Lake during “the dog-days of September, 1963” rather than 1843. When did emigrant wagons first cross Utah? Only a few months before the Kennedy assassination. Jim Bridger himself wintered in Utah for the first time in 1944. The Dominguez-Escalante expedition happened coincident with Utah’s statehood.

Seen this way, the distant abstractions of history become a contemporary and very personal exercise; his listeners and reader could think “I remember what I was doing on that date myself, and if not, I know someone who does.”

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Juanita Brooks, reader and advisor to fellow Utahns Wallace Stegner, Fawn Brodie, and Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan is the common link that binds Utah’s influential mid-twentieth century historians, encouraging their reconstructions of western and Mormon history.

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Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869, when rails of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were joined to complete the first transcontinental railroad. The picture is taken from the U.P. locomotive number 119, looking westward. The four companies of the Twenty-first Infantry in formation are visible, as are the Central Pacific's locomotive Jupiter and the tent-buildings of Promontory. This image is a copy of Alfred A. Hart's stereoscopic picture, "The Rival Monarchs." â&#x20AC;&#x201D; USHS

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The driving of the last spike in the Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, was the final act in a drama of competing railroad construction that has no parallel in the history of American railroads.

Most historians of the Pacific Railroad have dealt with the great railroad race, but none has appreciated the extent to which it focused on the Promontory Mountains, where the last spike was to be driven. The fascinating details of construction activities in these mountains are revealed principally in the voluminous dispatches sent to their editors by reporters covering the final stages of the race. Much of this history remains buried today in the files of the San Francisco and Salt Lake City newspapers.

The national legislators who framed the Pacific Railroad acts of 1862 and 1864 made possible the great railroad race, for they failed, through accident or design, to fix the point where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific should unite to form one continuous line from the Missouri River to Sacramento. But practical considerations far removed from the halls of Congress motivated the race. Every mile of track, of course, brought its reward in subsidy bonds and land grants. There were, however, other compelling reasons for speed. Above all, both companies aimed for Ogden and Salt Lake City, for the railroad that captured these Mormon cities would control the traffic of the Great Basin. If the Central Pacific won, it would carry the trade of the Great Basin over its tracks to San Francisco; if the Union Pacific won, this commerce would flow east to the Mississippi. Each contender, therefore, bent its energies towards reaching Ogden and shutting the other out of the Great Basin. Each company, moreover, bore a constantly mounting interest on the government loan and on its own securities. Although the act of 1864 gave them until 1875 to finish the road, every day that tied up capital in construction without the offsetting returns of operation made the burden of interest

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heavier. The Central Pacific faced the hard reality that the line over the Sierra Nevada had been expensive to build and would be expensive to maintain and operate. Without compensating mileage in the level country of Nevada and Utah, the railroad would be unprofitable.

Finally, the surge of public interest that focused on the Pacific Railroad provided a less tangible but no less powerful incentive. Both companies were convinced that the one that built the greatest length of railroad would enjoy the greatest prestige in the eyes of the nation.1 During 1868 and 1869, the decisive years of rivalry, both companies put grading crews far ahead of track, the Central Pacific in the Wasatch Mountains, the Union Pacific at Humboldt Wells, Nevada. In June, 1868, Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific, took the stage to Salt Lake City. During the next few months he contracted with Brigham Young and other prominent Mormons to grade his line from Monument Point, on the northwest shore of Great Salt Lake, to Echo Summit in the Wasatch Mountains.2 The Union Pacific had already let a two million dollar grading contract to Brigham Young for work between Echo Summit and Promontory Summit.3 Thus, during the last half of 1868 Mormon crews worked on parallel grades in Weber Canyon, thereby deriving considerable profit from the rivalry and perhaps a measure of satisfaction at the discomfiture of the companies that had bypassed Salt Lake City. In the final reckoning, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific spent about one million dollars on 200 miles of grade that was never used. Also, since the Union Pacific in the end could meet only half of its financial obligation to the Mormons, Brigham Young obtained one million dollars in Union Pacific rolling stock to equip his own Utah Central Railroad, which was to link Salt Lake City with the main line at Ogden.

By the end of 1868 the Union Pacific had finished grading to the mouth of Weber Canyon and was laying rails down Echo Canyon. The Central Pacific, its track still in eastern Nevada, had made good progress in grading between Monument Point and Ogden but had accomplished much less in Weber Canyon.4 Both companies forged ahead regardless of expense.

In October the Central Pacific had worked a clever stratagem that came very near succeeding. It had filed with the Interior Department maps and profiles of its proposed line from Monument Point to Echo Summit. Secretary of the Interior Orville H. Browning accepted the map. Stanford then proceeded on the theory that the Central Pacific line, regardless of the small amount of work done east of Ogden, was the true line of the Pacific Railroad, and the only one on which subsidy bonds could be issued. From his base in Salt Lake City he exerted himself to occupy and defend this line. In Washington, Collis P. Huntington filed application for an advance of two and four-tenths of a million dollars in subsidy bonds, two-thirds of the amount due for this portion of the line.

A provision in the act of 1866 made this procedure entirely legal.

The Union Pacific, of course, protested mightily. Chief Engineer Grenville M. Dodge and the Ames brothers, Oakes and Oliver, hurried to Washington and used all their influence to block the move of the Central Pacific. Browning retreated, and in January, 1869, appointed a special commission, headed by Major General G. K. Warren, to go west and determine the best route through the disputed territory. Congressmen friendly to the Union Pacific exacted a pledge from Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch that he would not issue the bonds until the commission had reported.5 As 1868 drew to a close, Leland Stanford, in Salt Lake City, began to see that the Union Pacific would reach Ogden first. Charles Crocker and Construction Superintendent J. H. Strobridge might push their Chinese coolies to the limit, but they could not possibly beat the Union Pacific to Ogden. He still hoped that Huntington’s maneuvers in Washington would checkmate their opponents. But Secretary Browning’s vacillation, culminating in appointment of the Warren Commission in January, 1869, made this hope increasingly bleak. “I tell you Hopkins the thought makes me feel like a dog,” wrote Stanford, looking at the darkening picture. “I have no pleasure in the thought of railroad. It is mortification.”6 Stanford had already turned his attention to the country west of Ogden, rather than the Wasatch Mountains, as the area where the

Stanford had turned his attention to the Promontory on November 9, 1868. He had a long talk with Brigham Young, who at length agreed to furnish Mormon labor for grading the Central Pacific line from Monument Point to Ogden.

Young also promised, in allocating forces, to give preference to neither the Union Pacific nor the Central Pacific. With backing from the president of the church, Stanford had no difficulty contracting for this work with the firm of Benson, Farr, and West, which was headed by Mormon bishops. Young himself was to receive one-fourth of the profits. The contract called for Mormon gangs to prepare the line for track under the supervision of Central Pacific engineers. The engineers in turn were instructed to work the force compactly and not let it spread out over more of the line than could be completed.

By the end of the year the Central Pacific was well in control of the line from Monument Point to Ogden. Foreseeing a battle with the Union Pacific over right-of-way, Stanford had sent one of his contractors, Bishop West, to

During March, 1869, both companies went to work on the Promontory with a vengeance.

The grades snaked up the east slope side by side, blasting through projecting abutments of limestone, and crossing deep ravines on earth fills and trestles. At the crest they broke through a final ledge of rock to enter the basin of Promontory Summit. The last mile, across the level floor of the basin, required little more than scraping.

The rock cuts consumed enormous quantities of black powder and liquid nitroglycerine. At Carmichael’s Cut of the Union Pacific, four men filled a large crevice with black powder, then set about working it down with iron bars.

Bar striking rock sparked an explosion that hurled one man high in the air, killing him, and grievously injured the other three.9

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As late as mid-January the Union Pacific still had no graders west of Ogden, although its surveyors were running lines parallel to the Central Pacific grade. Stanford lamented on January 15 that the Union Pacific had so many lines, “some crossing us and some running within a few feet of us and no work on any, that I cannot tell you exactly how the two lines will be.” In February the Union Pacific finally put crews west of Ogden. By early March its grade had been all but completed to the eastern base of the Promontory. In mid-March the Mormon company of Sharp and Young, under contract to the Union Pacific, began blasting at the Promontory. Stanford complained on March 14, “The U. P. have changed their line so as to cross us five times with unequal grades between Bear River and the Promontory. They have done this purposely as there was no necessity for so doing.” But, he said, “we shall serve notices for them not to interfere with our line and rest there for the present.”8

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The first forty-eight miles west of Ogden offered no construction problems. The line crossed perfectly level sagebrush plain skirting mud flats north of Bear River Bay. But between Blue Creek and Monument Point stood the Promontory Mountains, a rugged hill mass extending thirty-five miles south into Great Salt Lake and ending at Promontory Point. A practicable pass separated the Promontory Mountains from the North Promontory Mountains.

The summit of this pass lay in a circular basin at 4,900 feet elevation, about 700 feet above the level of the lake. On the west the ascent could be made in sixteen relatively easy miles; but on the east, where the slope was more abrupt, the ascent required, for an airline distance of five miles from Blue Creek to the Summit, ten tortuous miles of grade with a climb of eighty feet to the mile. Between Monument Point and Blue Creek the Central Pacific and Union Pacific attacked the last stretch of difficult country.

buy right-of-way through the Mormon ranches along the line. He had men on the entire line.

About two-thirds of the grade in each consecutive twenty miles had been finished. Blasting and filling at the Promontory, however, moved slowly. The contractors gave many excuses, but Stanford “started Brigham after them,” and they began to work faster. Nevertheless, Stanford believed that Strobridge and the Chinese would have to put the finishing touches on the grade.7

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contest would be decided. By occupying and defending the line from Monument Point to Ogden, the Central Pacific might yet gain enough bargaining strength to get into Ogden too, or at least to block the Union Pacific from moving west of Ogden.

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The Mormon crews of the two roads engaged in friendly rivalry. A correspondent reported that:

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The two companies’ blasters work very near each other, and when Sharp & Young’s men first began work the C. P. would give them no warning when they fired their fuse. Jim Livingston, Sharp’s able foreman, said nothing but went to work and loaded a point of rock with nitro-glycerine, and without saying anything to the C. P. “let her rip.” The explosion was terrific . . . and the foreman of the C. P. came down to confer with Mr. Livingston about the necessity of each party notifying the other when ready for a blast. The matter was speedily arranged to the satisfaction of both parties.10 At another point the Union Pacific graders took a four-foot cut out of the Central Pacific grade to fill their own. Their rivals later had to repair the damage.11 Of unfailing interest to observers were the Central Pacific’s “Big Fill” and the Union Pacific’s “Big Trestle,” which crossed a deep gorge about half way up the east slope. Farr and West began work on the Big Fill, which Stanford had predicted would require 10,000 yards of dirt, early in February, 1869, and were almost finished when a reporter visited the scene in mid-April: A marked feature of this work . . . is the fill on Messrs. Farr and West’s . . . contract. Within its light-colored sand face of 170 feet depth, eastern slope, by some 500 feet length of grade, reposes the labor of 250 teams and 500 men for nearly the past two months. On this work are a great many of the sturdy yeomanry of Cache County.

Messrs. William Fisher and William C. Lewis, of Richmond, are the present supervisors. Our esteemed friend, Bishop Merrill, preceded them. On either side of this immense fill the blasters are at work in the hardest of black lime-rock, opening cuts of from 20 to 30 feet depth. The proximity of the earth-work and blasting to each other, at these and other points along

the Promontory line, requires the utmost care and vigilance on the part of all concerned, else serious if not fatal, consequences would be of frequent occurrence. Three mules were recently killed by a single blast.12 The Big Trestle was of even greater interest than the Big Fill. The Union Pacific lacked the time to fill in the deep gorge as the Central Pacific had done. Construction Superintendent Sam Reed and Consulting Engineer Silas Seymour therefore decided to bridge the defile with a temporary trestle. On March 28, with the Big Fill still under construction, they ordered their bridge engineer, Leonard Eicholtz, to start the Big Trestle.13 About 150 feet east of and parallel to the Big Fill, it too required deep cuts at each end.

Finally completed on May 5, the Big Trestle was about 400 feet long and 85 feet high. To one reporter, nothing he could write “would convey an idea of the flimsy character of that structure. The cross pieces are jointed in the most clumsy manner. It looks rather like the ‘false work’ which has to be put up during the construction of such works. . . . The Central Pacific have a fine, solid embankment alongside it, which ought to be used as the track.14 Another correspondent predicted that it “will shake the nerves of the stoutest hearts of railroad travellers when they see what a few feet of round timbers and seven-inch spikes are expected to uphold a train in motion.”15 Meanwhile, the rails came forward steadily and rapidly. The Union Pacific entered Ogden on March 8, 1869. By March 15 it was at Hot Springs, by March 23 at Willard City. On April 7 the first train steamed across the newly completed Bear River bridge and entered Corinne.

At the same time the Central Pacific was still about fifteen miles west of Monument Point.

As the construction gangs tore at the Promontory, the contest continued on another front.

Dodge and the Ames brothers thought that Huntington had been checkmated by the Secretary of the Treasury’s promise to withhold subsidy payment on the uncompleted Central Pacific line until the Warren Commission had turned in its report. They failed, however, to

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315 Devil's Gate bridge in Utah during the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. Photograph by William H. Jackson.

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take account of Huntington’s powers of persuasion. As the administration of Andrew Johnson drew to a close, the Treasury Department prepared the bonds for issue. By March 4, 1869, when Ulysses S. Grant took office, it had turned over nearly a million and a half dollars to Huntington. When the Warren Commission reached Utah, it found that the Union Pacific was almost to Ogden and had obviously won the race. The commissioners therefore confined their investigation to the line between the two railheads.16 But the issue was to be resolved in Washington, where Dodge and several others interested in the Union Pacific met with Huntington on April 9, 1869. They drew up an agreement “for the purpose of settling all existing controversies between the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad Companies.” Each got half of the pie, for both were to have access to the Great Basin.

The terminus was to be located at a point to be agreed upon by both companies within eight miles west of Ogden. The Union Pacific, however, was to build west from Ogden to Promontory Summit and there unite with the Central Pacific. Then it was to sell this segment of the line to the Central Pacific. Subsidy bonds were

Each got half of the pie, for both were to have access to the Great Basin.

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to be issued to the Union Pacific as far as the terminus west of Ogden, and to the Central Pacific from the terminus to Promontory Summit.

The following day, April 10, Congress by joint resolution put its stamp of approval on the agreement.

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Union Pacific grading crews received orders on April 11 to stop all work west of Promontory Summit, where they had laid grade parallel to the Central’s grade all the way to Monument Point.17 Three days later Stanford ordered all work halted on the Central Pacific east of Blue Creek, i.e., the eastern base of the Promontory.18 The Dodge-Huntington agreement removed all cause for further competition in grading and tracking. But competition had become a habit, and each company strained to reach Promontory Summit, the agreed meeting place, before the other. The Union Pacific had won the race to Ogden, but the heavy work on the east slope of the Promontory prevented its winning the race to the summit. And now, ironically, the Union Pacific was in effect a contractor for the Central Pacific. Its gangs worked with the knowledge that the line from Ogden to Promontory Summit, according to the agreement, would be turned over to the Central Pacific.

As the two railheads drew closer to each other, an air of excitement pervaded the construction camps. The Central Pacific dismissed its contractors during the first week of April and pushed crews of Chinese forward to finish the grades on the Promontory.19 The Union Pacific rushed Irishmen to the front to help the Mormon contractors finish the heavy work on the east slope.20

By April 16 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific tracks were only fifty miles apart. The Union Pacific, moving west across the desert from Corinne, slowed for want of ties.21 The Central Pacific had reached Monument Point and, one-fourth mile from the lake shore, established a sprawling grading camp. Housing the Chinese workers, it consisted of three separate canvas cities totaling 275 tents.22 As April drew to a close, officials of the two companies fixed Saturday, May 8, as the date of the ceremony uniting the rails.23 By the twenty-seventh the Union Pacific railhead approached Blue Creek, ten miles east of the

summit. But rock cuts and three trestles required another twelve to fifteen days of labor, even though Reed, in order to break through

by May 8, worked his Mormons and Irishmen night and day.24 Blasters tore at Carmichael’s Cut, one and three-fourths miles above the Big Trestle, while other workers built another trestle at the west entrance to Carmichael’s Cut. Below, the Big Trestle remained unfinished.

A third trestle spanned Blue Creek. Stanford went to the Union Pacific railhead and offered the Central Pacific’s Big Fill for the Union Pacific track, but found no one with authority to change the line.25 Earlier, the Union Pacific had laid eight miles of track in one day, a feat that the Central Pacific had not accomplished. Crocker vowed to top this record, but he cannily waited until the distance between railheads was so small that the Union Pacific could not retaliate. On April 27, with the Central Pacific sixteen miles from the summit and the Union Pacific nine, Crocker set out to lay ten miles of rail in one day. But a work train jumped the track after two miles had been completed, and he decided to wait until the next day.26 On April 28, with men and supplies carefully massed, and with Jack Casement, Sam Reed, and other Union Pacific officials as witnesses, Crocker gave the signal. Eight Irish tracklayers supported by an army of Chinese coolies not only laid ten miles of track, thus topping the Union Pacific record, but set a record of their own that has yet to be equalled. At 1:30 P.M. the track had advanced six miles in six hours and fifteen minutes. The remaining four miles could easily be laid. The Central crews knew that victory had been won, and Crocker stopped the work for lunch. The site was named Camp Victory, and later became the station of Rozel.

After an hour of rest the workers returned to the task. By 7:00 P.M. they had completed a little more than ten miles of track, and a locomotive ran the entire distance in forty minutes to prove to the Union’s observers that the work was well done.27 April 28 carried the Central Pacific railhead to within four miles of the summit. With the Union Pacific still at Blue Creek, Eicholtz ordered iron and ties hauled to the summit. On May 1 Union Pacific crews began putting in a

Asked what his people thought of such behavior, one of the Mormon graders replied, “Ah, we don’t care, so long as they keep to themselves.”31 Nor was all peace and quiet in the Central Pacific camps, although the California papers delighted in emphasizing the low moral tone of the Union Pacific. At Camp Victory on May 6 the Chinese clans of See Yup and Yung Wo, whose rivalry stemmed from political differences in the old country, got into an altercation over $15.00 due one group from the other. The dispute grew heated and soon involved several hundred laborers. “At a given signal,” reported a correspondent, “both parties sailed in, armed with every conceivable weapon. Spades were handled, and crowbars, spikes, picks, and infernal machines were hurled between the ranks of the contestants.” When shooting broke out, Strobridge and his foremen intervened to halt the proceedings. The score, aside from a multiplicity of cuts, bruises, and sore heads, totaled one Yung Wo combatant mortally wounded.32

On May 5 the Union Pacific finally achieved the breakthrough. The last spike went into the Big Trestle and the rails moved out on to the frightening span. A train loaded with iron steamed across it. That evening the final blast exploded in Carmichael’s Cut. On May 6 the trestle between Carmichael’s Cut and Clark’s Cut was finished. The graders went through both cuts, made a swing around the head of a ravine, and passed through a final cut to link up with grade already laid in the basin of the summit.

Here rails and ties had been arranged for rapid tracklaying and, at the summit itself, a 2,500foot side track installed.36 The Central Pacific waited patiently—May 8 was still the date for joining the rails—as the Union Pacific tracklayers followed closely on the heels of the graders. Late in the afternoon of May 7 the tracklayers came within 2,500 feet of the Central Pacific’s end of track at the summit. Here they connected, by a switch, with the side track placed earlier. Using this side track,

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The loose population that has followed up the tracklayers of the Union Pacific is turbulent and rascally. Several shooting scrapes have occurred among them lately. Last night [April 27] a whiskey-seller and a gambler had a fracas, in which the “sport” shot the gambler. Nobody knows what will become of these riff-raff when the tracks meet, but they are lively enough now and carry off their share of plunder from the working men.30

Both companies had already recognized that they had more men on the Promontory than the amount of remaining work could keep occupied. Beginning on May 3, therefore, they began discharging large numbers of men and sending others to the rear to work on portions of track that had been hastily laid. “The two opposing armies . . . are melting away,” reported the Alta California, “and the white camps which dotted every brown hillside and every shady glen . . . are being broken up and abandoned.”34 Riding out from Salt Lake City, photographer Charles R. Savage saw this breakup in progress, and wrote in his diary: “At Blue River [Creek] the returning ‘democrats’ so-called were being piled upon the cars in every stage of drunkenness. Every ranch or tent has whiskey for sale.

Verily, men earn their money like horses and spend it like asses.”35

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During the first few days of May the population at the Promontory reached its maximum. Central Pacific camps stretched all the way from Promontory to Monument Point, while Union Pacific camps dotted the valley of the summit and cluttered the plain at the foot of the east slope. They bore such names as Deadfall, Murder Gulch, Last Chance, and Painted Post. They rocked with the riotous living that had characterized their predecessors all the way from Omaha. Noted a reporter from San Francisco:

Irish graders of the Union Pacific, on the other side of the Promontory, heard about the battle between the Chinese clans. They decided to have some fun themselves. Next day a gang of them showed up at the summit, where a Chinese camp had been laid out, and announced their intention “to clean out the Chinese.”

Fortunately, the inhabitants of this camp were absent on a gravel train, and the Irishmen left without accomplishing their purpose.33

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side track at the summit, where tents and board shanties already announced the birth of the town of Promontory.28 This same day the Central Pacific brought its rails to the summit, 690 miles from Sacramento.29

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The Jupiter locomotive, bearing Leland Stanford, passes by the Great Salt Lake en route to Promontory.

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the Union Pacific’s No. 60, with Jack Casement aboard, came to a halt opposite the Central Pacific railhead, about 100 feet to the southeast of it, and let off steam. The Central’s “Whirlwind,” No. 66, rested on its own track. The engineer greeted the Union’s locomotive with a sharp whistle, and “thus the first meeting of locomotives from the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts took place.”37

spike, presented by the San Francisco News Letter; a silver spike brought by Commissioner Haines as Nevada’s contribution; and a spike of iron, silver, and gold brought by Governor Safford to represent Arizona. Finally, there was a silver-plated sledge presented by the Pacific Union Express Company, and a polished laurel tie presented by West Evans, the Central Pacific’s tie contractor.

This afternoon of May 7 was sultry and the sky heavy with rain clouds, which annoyed the photographers trying to capture the climactic scenes of construction. The Stanford Special arrived loaded with an array of dignitaries from California and Nevada headed by Leland Stanford and including U.S. Commissioners J. W. Haines, F. A. Tritle, and William Sherman; Chief Justice S. W. Sanderson of California; and A. P. K. Safford, newly appointed territorial governor of Arizona.

The festive mood of the Stanford Special noticeably dampened when Jack Casement broke the news that the Union Pacific could not hold the ceremony on May 8, as planned, and would not be ready until May 10. The Stanford party faced the prospect of spending the weekend on the bleak Promontory. To make matters worse, rain began to fall. It rained for two days, turning the Promontory into a sea of mud. Stanford wired the unwelcome news to San Francisco, but too late. The citizens there had already started celebrating. Undismayed, they celebrated for three days.

Also on board were the ceremonial trappings to be used in uniting the rails. There was a gold spike presented by David Hewes, San Francisco construction magnate. Intrinsically worth $350.00, it was engraved with the names of the Central Pacific directors, sentiments appropriate to the occasion, and, on the head, “The Last Spike.” There was another gold

Casement’s explanation was that the trains bringing the dignitaries from the East had been held up by heavy rains in Weber Canyon.38 But this was only part of the story. The special carrying Vice-President Thomas C. Durant, Sidney Dillon, and other Union Pacific officials

This same day, May 9, Casement’s workers at Promontory kept busy. As the rain continued, they laid the final 2,500 feet of track, leaving a length of one rail to separate their track from that of the Central Pacific. They also installed a “Y” for the locomotives to use in turning around.41 Rain quit falling during the night, and May 10 dawned bright, clear, and a bit chilly. During the morning two trains from the East and two from the West arrived at Promontory bearing railroad officials, guests, and spectators. With the construction workers and assorted denizens of Promontory, the crowd totaled, according to the best estimates, 500 to 600 people, far short of the 30,000 that had been predicted.42

The crowd had grown loud and unmanageable, which interfered with the ceremony and made it impossible for most people to see what was happening. J. H. Beadle wrote that “it is to be regretted that no arrangements were made for surrounding the work with a line of some sort, in which case all might have witnessed the work without difficulty. As it was, the crowd pushed upon the workmen so closely that less than twenty persons saw the affair entirely, while none of the reporters were able to hear all that was said.”44 This explains the confusion that has surrounded the history of the event ever since.

Representing the Central Pacific were Stanford, Strobridge, Chief Engineer Samuel Montague, and others; for the Union Pacific, Durant, Dil-

At noon the infantrymen lined up on the west side of the tracks, and Casement tried, with little success, to get the crowd to move back so

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Officials of both roads had been unable to agree on details of the program. Stanford had come equipped with spikes and other ceremonial trappings, but Dodge wanted the Union Pacific to stage its own last spike ceremony. Only two preparations, therefore, had been made in advance. The speeches had been written and handed to newsmen in Ogden on Sunday. And the telegraphers had devised an apparatus for transmitting the blows on the last spike by telegraph to the waiting nation. An ordinary sledge (not the silver-plated one) had been connected by wire to the Union Pacific telegraph line, and an ordinary spike had been similarly connected to the Central Pacific wire. Five minutes before noon, when the proceedings were to begin, Stanford and Durant agreed on a joint program.

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Left in the role of host at Promontory Summit, Casement made up an excursion train, stocked with “a bountiful collation and oceans of champagne,” to take the Stanford party sight-seeing.

The train left Promontory Saturday morning. At Taylor’s Mill the Union Pacific staged a “splendid luncheon.” “The most cordial harmony and good feeling marked their entertainment and all the toasts were drunk with loud applause.”

From here the party went to Ogden, rode a short distance up Weber Canyon, and spent the night in Ogden. Next day, Sunday, they returned to Promontory, boarded the Stanford Special, and pulled back to Monument Point to enjoy a repast of plover killed by Stanford’s steward.40

lon, Duff, Dodge, Reed, the Casement brothers, and many more. Important guests had come from Nevada, California, Utah, and Wyoming.

Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker, of the Central Pacific, did not attend; nor did the Union Pacific’s Oakes and Oliver Ames. Brigham Young sent Bishop John Sharp to represent the church. About fifteen reporters covered the proceedings. A battalion of the 21st U.S. Infantry (probably three companies) under Major Milton Cogswell, en route to the Presidio of San Francisco, were opportunely on hand to lend a military air, as was Brigadier General Patrick Edward Conner, district commander.

The military band from Fort Douglas and the Tenth Ward Band from Salt Lake City supplied the music.43

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had reached Piedmont on May 6. A gang of five hundred workers surrounded Durant’s private car shouting demands for back wages. When the conductor tried to move the train out of the station, the men uncoupled Durant’s car, shunted it on a siding, and chained the wheels to the rails. Here he would stay, they said, until $253,000 was forthcoming. To make sure, they also took possession of the telegraph office.

Durant submitted, wired Oliver Ames in Boston for the money, and paid off the strikers. He was released and managed to be at Promontory Summit on May 10, although the severe headache from which he suffered on that day may well have owed its origins to the experience at Piedmont.39

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320 Central Pacific’s Jupiter locomotive at Promontory Summit, May 10, 1869, after the driving of last spike. This image was copied from a stereo view in the Timothy Hopkins collection, Stanford University. Photograph by Alfred A. Hart.

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that everyone could see. The Union Pacific’s “Rogers 119,” Engineer Sam Bradford, and the Central Pacific’s “Jupiter” No. 60, Engineer George Booth, steamed up and stopped, facing each other across the gap in the rails. Spectators swarmed over both locomotives trying to obtain a better view. At 12:20 P.M. Strobridge and Reed carried the polished laurel tie and placed it in position. Auger holes had been carefully bored in the proper places for seating the ceremonial spikes. Officials and prominent guests formed a semicircle facing east on the east side of the tracks.

Edgar Mills, Sacramento businessman, served as master of ceremonies and introduced the Rev. Dr. John Todd of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, correspondent for the Boston Congregationalist and the New York Evangelist. Dr. Todd opened the ceremony with a two-minute prayer, while telegraph operators from Atlan-

tic to Pacific cleared the wires for the momentous clicks from Promontory. After the prayer, Haines, Tritle, and President W. H. Nottingham of the Michigan Southern and Lake Shore Railroad drove the last save one of the iron spikes.

At 12:40 P.M. W. N. Shilling, a telegraph key on a small table in front of him, tapped out, “We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.”

Next, Dr. W. H. Harkness of Sacramento presented to Durant, with appropriate remarks, the two gold spikes. Durant slid them into the holes in the laurel tie, and Dodge made the response, substituting for Durant whose headache sent him to his car immediately after the ceremony. Tritle and Safford presented the Nevada and Arizona spikes, and these Stanford slid into the holes prepared. L. W. Coe, president of Pacific Union Express Company, presented Stanford with the silver sledge, which

Shilling sent off two telegrams: “General U.S. Grant, President of the U.S. Washington, D.C. Sir: We have the honor to report the last rail laid and the last spike driven. The Pacific Railroad is finished.” “To the Associated Press: The last rail is laid, the last spike driven, the Pacific railroad is completed. Point of junction, ten hundred eighty-six miles west of the Missouri River and six hundred ninety miles east of Sacramento.—Leland Stanford, Thomas C. Durant.”45 The ceremony over, the precious spikes and the tie were removed. Even so, souvenir hunters made necessary numerous replacements of the “last spike” and the “last tie.”46 J. H. Beadle briefly summed up what happened next:

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By Robert M. Utley “The Dash to Promontory” represents one of my first efforts to see my name in print. In 1960 I was thirty years old, lacking the sacred “terminal degree,” without a single book in print, but determined to make my career merging the National Park Service with the writing of western American history. For three years, I had been the lone historian in the regional office of the Park Service in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My most interesting task was collecting historical and other data to support the inclusion in the National Park System of worthy historic sites in the southwestern states. Golden Spike was one of these.

The little Golden Spike monument and plaque in the barren basin atop the Promontory Summit hardly fit what my colleagues conceived as a national park, although it had been declared a National Historic Site in non-federal ownership in 1957. One of my co-workers insisted that if the last spike in the transcontinental railroad had been driven a hundred miles to the east, in the Wasatch forests, he would favor such a park.

In other words, history worthy of commemoration had to be surrounded by trees and scenery.

Such attitudes raised bureaucratic resistance that blocked my attempt to launch a study.

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Amid cheers, the two engineers advanced the pilots of their locomotives over the junction.

Men on the pilots joined hands and a bottle of champagne was broken over the laurel tie as christening. The chief engineers of the railroads shook hands as photographers exposed wet plates. The military officers and their wives gave the precious spikes ceremonial taps with the tangs of their sword hilts, thus producing the only marks to be seen today on the gold spike. The Central Pacific’s “Jupiter” backed up and the Union Pacific’s No. 119 crossed the junction. Then No. 119 backed up and let “Jupiter” cross the junction, thus symbolizing inauguration of transcontinental rail travel.

Promontory had enjoyed its hour of glory.

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Finally came the actual driving of the last spike—an ordinary iron spike driven with an ordinary sledge into an ordinary tie. Using the wired sledge, Stanford and Durant both swung at the wired spike. Both missed—to the delight of the crowd. Shilling, however, clicked three dots over the wires at exactly 12:47 P.M., triggering celebrations at every major city in the country. With an unwired sledge, Strobridge and Reed divided the task of actually driving the last spike in the Pacific Railroad.

Ceremony was then at an end, and general hilarity took place. The western train soon set out for Sacramento, but that of the Union Pacific remained on the ground till evening, presenting a scene of merriment in which Officers, Directors, Track Superintendents and Editors joined with the utmost enthusiasm. . . . At a late hour the excursionists returned to Corinne.47

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was then used symbolically to “drive” the precious spikes, although the blows, if indeed there were any, were not sharp enough to leave marks on the spikes.

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Enter Bernice Gibbs Anderson. This matronly, acutely verbose resident of Brigham City had an obsession with the Golden Spike site. It consumed much of her life—at least if judged by the blizzard of prolix letters fired at members of Congress, the secretary of the Interior, the National Park Service, and finally President Dwight Eisenhower himself. In page after page of ornate prose, she kept up the crusade year after year. “This is sacred soil,” she wrote in one, “dedicated to the sacrifices of the thousands who labored in the great race to build the first transcontinental railway; will it take its rightful place in the heritage and traditions of America, preserved and protected by a grateful government, or will it remain desolate and forgotten to sink into oblivion?” All this paper, including one reprimanding the president, found its way to the Park Service and, ultimately, to my desk.

That mass of letters caused the Park Service to authorize me to prepare a study establishing the national significance of the golden spike site, to be used in supporting its addition to the National Park System by an act of Congress. I embarked on this study in 1959.

Enter Bernice Gibbs Anderson.

In Salt Lake City, I found a sympathetic, helpful, and politically astute director of the Utah State Historical Society. Russ Mortensen not only pointed me toward research possibilities but aided in the quiet, undercover task of promoting Bernice Anderson’s dream. Russ opened the way for me to work in the Southern Pacific collections in San Francisco. There and at Stanford University, I made further progress.

The best sources turned out to be the flood of newspaper correspondents that inundated the country where the dash to Promontory occurred.

In January 1960, returning from research in San Francisco, I stopped in Salt Lake City, obtained from the government motor pool a jeep pickup truck of uncertain reliability, and set forth in a snowstorm to connect with Bernice Gibbs Anderson. Snow covered the Promon-

tory, but the two of us still examined all the historic attractions: the abandoned grades; the fills, cuts, trestle sites; and finally the basin itself. We compared to these historic remains the stacks of newspaper accounts I had brought from San Francisco.

West of the summit, however, the truck slid off the road into a snow-clogged ditch. Help was far too distant to call on. I worked and worked with the four-wheel drive to get out, but only succeeded in digging deeper. Finally, I turned to Bernice and told her the only solution was for her to hoist her ample proportions into the truck bed, over the rear wheels. She happily complied and indeed proved the solution.

Thanks to the persistence of Bernice Gibbs Anderson, and to the quality of the work that I fashioned into the 1961 article, and to the hard work of the Utah congressional delegation, the Golden Spike National Historic Site entered the National Park System in 1965.

As a prominent footnote, I need to plead guilty to using the highly improper term “Chinese coolies” to describe the Chinese construction workers. That was an offensive term in 1961 and has been ever since.

— Notes 1 Henry K. White, History of the Union Pacific Railway (Chicago, 1895), 33; J. R. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War: The Life of General G. M. Dodge (Indianapolis, 1929), 225–26; George T. Clark, Leland Stanford (Palo Alto, 1931), 220.

2 Stanford’s letters to Mark Hopkins, June through December, 1868, cover these activities, although in somewhat less detail than desirable for clarity. Reprinted in Clark, Leland Stanford, 245–67.

3 Edwin L. Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway (Philadelphia, 1919), 180.

4 Stanford’s letters are confused on exactly how much grade was prepared. The evidence suggests that Mormons laid substantially complete grade for the Central Pacific from Monument Point to Ogden, and considerably less than complete grade from Ogden up Weber Canyon to the mouth of Echo Canyon.

5 Historians differ considerably on the details of this episode. This account is drawn from Clark, Leland Stanford, 263; Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway, 293–95; H. H. Bancroft, History of California, 1860–1890 (7 vols., San Francisco, 1890), VII, 571–72; and “History of the Golden Spike” (Ms., U.P.R.R., Omaha, 1949), 8–10, typescript in Southern Pacific collections.

6 Stanford to Hopkins, January 29, 1869, in Clark, Leland Stanford, 260.

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33 Daily Morning Chronicle, May 9, 1869.

34 May 6, 1869, dispatch from Promontory of May 5.

35 Savage Diary, May 7, 1869, in “History of the Golden Spike,” 29–30.

36 Daily Morning Chronicle, May 8, 1869; Daily Alta California, May 6 and 8, 1869.

37 Daily Alta California, May 8, 1869; Daily Morning Chronicle, May 9, 1869.

38 Daily Morning Chronicle, May 11, 1869.

39 San Francisco Bulletin, May 10, 1869; Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, 237.

40 Daily Morning Chronicle, May 11, 1869; Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway, 211.

41 Daily Morning Chronicle, May 11, 1869. Sidney Dillon later stated in “Driving the Last Spike of the Union Pacific,” Scribner’s Magazine XII (1892), 258, that, during the night of May 9, the Union Pacific pulled a coup by laying a siding on to the summit and thus capturing Promontory as a Union Pacific station. When Central crews arrived early next morning for the same purpose they found that the Union had gained the advantage.

This story is repeated in most railroad histories. No report of it, however, appears in contemporary sources, and the installation, at Promontory, of the Union Pacific siding on May 7 and the “Y” on May 9 casts some doubt on the truth of the story.

42 Unless otherwise cited, this account of the ceremony is drawn from J. N. Bowman, “Driving the Last Spike at Promontory, 1869,” California Historical Society Quarterly, XXVI (1957), 97–106, 263–74. This article is a careful reconstruction, based on all available sources, mainly newspapers, of the events of May 10. I have examined most of the papers myself. It differs materially from most of the secondary accounts, but is obviously the most authoritative discussion of the matter that is likely ever to be written.

43 Hugh F. O’Neil, “List of Persons Present, Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869,” Utah Historical Quarterly, XXIV (1956), 157–64.

44 Utah Daily Reporter (Corinne), May 12, 1869.

45 Quoted in Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, 241.

46 The Hewes gold spike and the Nevada silver spike are now in the museum at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, together with the silver sledge. The whereabouts of the second gold spike, which seems to have been given to Dodge, and the Arizona spike is a mystery.

The laurel tie was destroyed in the San Francisco fire of 1906, which also, incidentally, destroyed the records of the Southern Pacific (Central Pacific) Railroad.

47 Utah Daily Reporter, May 12, 1869.

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7 Stanford to Hopkins, November 9 and 21, December 1 and 3, 1868, in ibid., 250–55.

8 Stanford to Hopkins, December 13, 1868, January 15 and March 14, 1869, in ibid., 257, 262–63, 266–67; Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City), March 25, 1869; Salt Lake Daily Reporter (Salt Lake City), March 13, 1869.

9 Deseret Evening News, March 30, 1869.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Salt Lake City Daily Telegraph, April 14, 1869.

13 Diary of Eicholtz, March 28, 1869, in “History of the Golden Spike,” 39-A. 14 Daily Alta California (San Francisco), May 1, 1869.

15 Daily Morning Call (San Francisco), April 30, 1869 (quoting Evening Bulletin, April 29).

16 The report of the Warren Commission is printed in House Executive Document No. 15, 40 Cong., 3d sess.

(Washington, 1869).

17 Eicholtz Diary, April 11, 1869.

18 E. B. Ryan to Butler Ives, Ogden, April 14, 1869, Mark Hopkins Papers, Stanford University.

19 Salt Lake City Daily Telegraph, April 9, 1869.

20 Years later General Dodge (How We Built the Union Pacific Railroad, Senate Executive Document No. 447, 61 Cong., 2 sess., 24) recalled that the Union Pacific’s Irishmen, contemptuous of the Orientals working on the grade above them, fired charges without warning in hope of blowing up some Chinamen. When the Central Pacific’s protests failed to bring results, the coolies quietly set a “grave” of their own and sent several Irishmen to their reward. Although repeated by most railroad historians, this episode needs considerably more verification. No mention of it has been found in the contemporary press, and it is unlikely that the swarms of reporters on the Promontory would have let such a good story pass unchronicled. Moreover, the Central Pacific did not replace the Mormons with Chinese until about April 7. By this same date the Union Pacific had finished its grading west of the summit and on April 11 pulled its graders back. On April 9 the Dodge-Huntington agreement fixed Promontory Summit as the junction. Thereafter there was no need for further parallel competitive construction, and there appears to have been none.

21 Daily Alta California, April 23, 1869.

22 Ibid., April 26, 1869.

23 “History of the Golden Spike,” 59.

24 Daily Morning Call, April 29, 1869.

25 Ibid., April 30, 1869. When the Central Pacific took over the line from Promontory to Ogden as specified in the Dodge-Huntington agreement, it re-laid track on its own grade from the base to the summit of the Promontory, thus abandoning the Union Pacific trestles.

26 Ibid., April 29, 1869.

27 Most histories of the Pacific Railroad relate this episode.

This account is drawn from the contemporary newspapers and from Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway, 202– 4.

28 Eicholtz Diary, April 28, May 1, 1869.

29 Daily Alta California, May 2, 1869. Eicholtz recorded in his diary under May 1 that the Central Pacific had reached the summit the day before. The Alta California’s correspondent on May 1 wrote that “the last tie and rail were placed in position to-day.”

30 Ibid., April 30, 1869.

31 Ibid., May 1, 1869.

32 Ibid., May 8, 1869; Daily Morning Chronicle (San Francisco), May 8, 1869.

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Nine Mile Canyon, with a graded road on the right. Photographed circa 1950. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

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In area Utah is almost equally divided between the Great Basin on the west and north and the Colorado Plateau on the east and south. However, the state’s population and its best-known history are concentrated in the Great Basin half. Except for the Virgin River Valley, the Colorado Plateau was late to be settled, difficult to develop because of its terrain, and generally held in small esteem, as was indicated in the 1861 report on the Uinta Basin which termed it a “vast contiguity of waste . . . valueless excepting for nomadic purposes, hunting grounds for Indians and to hold the world together.”1 One important reason for the little understanding or appreciation of eastern Utah in the early days was the difficulty of access. A continuous mountain barrier separates eastern and western Utah, with very few natural passes. The Dominguez-Escalante party crossed through Strawberry Valley and Diamond Fork, which has never developed into a through route, later travelers having preferred the Daniels Summit route out of Strawberry Valley. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century the most important route across the region was the Old Spanish Trail, which crossed Salina Pass. The Rio Grande Railway, after first looking at Salina Canyon, chose the Midland Trail over Soldier Summit.

These three passes, Daniels, Soldier Summit, and Salina, remain the only feasible year-round routes, with the addition of the route over Fishlake Pass from Richfield to the Fremont River Valley. South of that point, the rugged canyon country makes a through road virtually impossible, as the Hole-in-the-Rock party discovered a century ago.

Within the province of eastern Utah, too, the historic routes remain important today: the Escalante and the Gunnison crossings of the Green River and the Spanish Valley route to the San Juan country. But there is one road, very important in the development of eastern Utah, that has

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Eastern Utah's Forgotten Road

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Nine Mile:

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fallen into near obscurity and disuse: the route between Price and Fort Duchesne, which for some twenty years was probably the most heavily traveled wagon road in eastern Utah and was aptly termed the “Lifeline of Uinta Basin.”2

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The key segment of this road ran through Nine Mile Canyon, one of the most colorful and little-known areas in Utah. Nine Mile does not quite belong to any of the state’s usually recognized regions. From Castle Valley, the West Tavaputs Plateau forms the northern skyline, and the usual perception is that the Uinta Basin lies on the other side. From the Basin, on the other hand, the southern vista is of dry benches terminating in the Bad Land Cliffs. But between those landmarks there lies a long east-west canyon that straddles the Carbon-Duchesne county line and belongs really to neither valley. The canyon heads at about 8,000 feet on the West Tavaputs Plateau and drains into the Green River at an elevation of 4,610 feet. The settled portion lies at about the same elevation as the Uinta Basin and Castle Valley, but the landscape more nearly resembles that of the southern Utah canyonlands with its vivid contrast of castellated cliffs and bright green fields on the canyon floor. The climate, too, is considerably milder than that of the Uinta Basin.

The reasons for this seem to be primarily the air drainage provided by the canyon and perhaps also the tendency of the south-facing cliffs to hold the sun’s warmth in the winter. In any case, old-timers in Nine Mile brag that they can raise fruits that would be impossible to raise in the Basin.

The Nine Mile region is rich in prehistorical interest. It was an important center of the Fremont Culture and has numerous petroglyphs and ruins that have been the object of archaeological investigations since the 1890s.3 The canyon was apparently a route for trappers and Mexican slave traders as well as Indians. There is a possible Spanish inscription at the mouth of one side canyon, together with a date that may be 1819 but has also been read as 1839 and 1879.4 Human occupation goes way back in Nine Mile, then, but it is difficult to determine just when the region first became known to the white settlers of Utah. The 1866 General Land Office map of Utah shows a stream labeled White River in the approximate location of Nine

Mile. The Price River was originally named the White River (as one of its tributaries still is), but the 1866 map also shows (though it does not label) the Price River in its approximately correct location. More precise mapping of eastern Utah awaited the Powell surveys beginning in 1869. The earliest known reference to the name Nine Mile is found in the profile map appended to Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875).5 In the 1878 Powell volume on the arid lands, A. H. Thompson gives a good though brief description of the canyon but calls the creek the Minnie Maud.6 The 1878 U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey map adopts the same name for the creek but shows Nine Mile Valley as the upper portion of the south fork of the Minnie Maud.

Thus, from the earliest reports occurs the confusion of names that has persisted to the present. The canyon, as far as current research can tell, has usually been called Nine Mile, but the creek has more often been known as the Minnie Maud. The 1950 Rand McNally standard map of Utah adds another element to the confusion by identifying an “8 Mile Creek” between Nine Mile Valley and Minnie Maud Creek. The 1976 USGS map reverses the names, making the main creek Nine Mile and the south fork the Minnie Maud. This is apparently the official designation now, as a result of efforts to clarify water rights on the creek.7 The existence of two names for the same creek and canyon has led to numerous folk etymologies. One story has it that Minnie and Maud were sisters who lived in the upper part of the canyon. (There are two similarly shaped hills near the confluence of two upper tributaries that are referred to as Minnie and Maud.)8 Another view holds that the name has an Indian origin, and it is sometimes spelled as one word, Minnemaud. The name Nine Mile poses problems because it is difficult to find a distinct stretch of the canyon that is nine miles long.

One story from Carbon County claims that an early traveler, on asking how far he had to go, received the reply, “About nine mile.”9 Another folk account, this one from Duchesne, has it that the name does not refer to distance at all but rather to the Miles family with its seven daughters, thus, with the parents, “the nine Mileses.”10 However, the region was called

It seems doubtful that settlers came into Nine Mile before the building of the road in the fall of 1886. At any rate, this marked the beginning of Nine Mile’s real importance in the development of eastern Utah. The Nine Mile route provides the lowest elevation entry point into the Uinta Basin from the rest of Utah. However, the first settlers in the Basin, in the Ashley Valley area, entered by the much higher Strawberry Valley route, and for the first decade this long and often impassable trail remained their chief supply line. The U.S. Army hacked out a wagon road through the Uinta Mountains to Carter, Wyoming, in about 1882 to supply Fort Thornburgh.14 With the establishment of Fort Duchesne in August 1886 this route was used for supplies at first but was clearly not satisfactory.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported in a dispatch from Fort Bridger that “there seems to be much doubt regarding the route of transportation to be adopted for the new post. There is arriving at Carter station over one million pounds of freight to be sent forward, and the contractor, Mr. Winston, of Virginia, is pushing it forward as fast as he can, the distance being 130 miles.”15

It rapidly became a well-traveled way after that time. In April 1887 work was begun on a telegraph line that was completed in August.19 According to Henry Fiack, the line was no sooner constructed than “a bunch of young Ute braves promptly cut it down and made firewood out of the poles, with the net result that the cavalry herded them to the fort, where they were confined to the guardhouse for a time, on a very wholesome diet of bread and water.”20 In July the Tribune published a dispatch from Price arguing that “It [Price] ought to be the point for sending mail to Fort Duchesne and the Uintah country, and the report of an agent of the Postoffice Department lately visiting here may result in sending this mail over this route. It is claimed that it is a much better route than from the Union Pacific in Wyoming.”21 The same dispatch reported, “A contract for hauling 2,000,000 pounds of Government supplies to Fort Duchesne, from here, was lately let at the low figure of $1.12 per 100 pounds. The distance is about ninety miles and requires about fifteen days for the big teams to make the round trip.”

Two million pounds would represent more than 220 trips for a two-wagon outfit, if one accepts Evelyn Richardson’s estimate of 9,000 pounds as the maximum capacity.22 At an average of fifteen days per trip, that means more than 3,300 man-days on the road for this contract alone. The “low figure” of $1.12 per hundred represents an income of $22,400 for the contractor and teamsters. These figures take on

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According to a family tradition, John A. Powell, one of the early settlers of Price, assisted the army in locating the route through Gate Canyon and Nine Mile.17 This would indicate that there was not an established road before that time. However, Henry Fiack, one of the original soldiers at Fort Duchesne, wrote of “making the road to Price passable,” which could suggest that they improved an earlier road.18

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If the names in Nine Mile are confusing and sometimes contradictory, it is equally difficult to determine when the first white settlement of the canyon occurred. No doubt cattle herds ranged through the area in the 1870s, as they did throughout eastern Utah. The Midland Trail, which was a well-established route by the late 1860s, passed within two miles of the canyon; and the Price River settlers, who came by this route, would likely have known of its existence in 1878. However, the 1878 USGS map does not show even a trail running through the canyon. Mildred Dillman claims that the first settlers came into Nine Mile “long before 1880” but does not specify a year.12 The earliest names associated with Nine Mile and the West Tavaputs Plateau in the local histories are those of George Whitmore and Shedrach Lunt, who had established ranches in the area, though not in Nine Mile Canyon itself, by 1880.13

This was about forty miles farther and almost 2,000 feet higher than the Nine Mile route to the railroad at Price, a fact that must have impressed itself on the military leaders, since the Tribune of October 8, 1886, reported the return of Fort Douglas troops to their post after constructing “a first-class roadway from Price’s Station to Fort Duchesne.”16

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Nine Mile long before the Miles family arrived.

Howard Price suggests that the name Nine Mile might have come from the nine-mile triangulation used by Powell’s surveyor, and that Powell might have had a niece named Minnie Maud.11 It is clear at any rate that both names were used by the Powell party.

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added significance when one considers that the population of Price was less than 500 at that time. Clearly, the freight business had a heavy impact. Indeed, it was probably the chief factor in establishing Price as a commercial center for the region.

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The “first-class roadway” evidently left something to be desired because the Tribune reported in September 1887 that troops from Fort Douglas were again working on the road. One of the soldiers wrote, “There are quite a few travel this road, to different mines, the Fort, Ashley and surrounding country. . . .”23 Thus, in its first year the Nine Mile road had clearly established itself as the main route to and from the Uinta Basin. A twice-weekly stage line was established in 1888 to carry passengers and mail, and this became a daily service in 1889.24 Also in 1889 the first gilsonite mines were opened in the Basin, enabling the freighters to haul a full load both ways. The Price Eastern Utah Telegraph reported in its first issue that 1,618,407 pounds of freight had been shipped to Price on the railroad in the single month of December 1890.25 The following week the Telegraph reported, “Half a million of gilsonite has been shipped from this point in the last eight days.”26 In light of the strong strain of boosterism that characterized the rural press in those days, it is doubtful that these are typical figures, but

Thus, in its first year the Nine Mile road had clearly established itself as the main route to and from the Uinta Basin.

clearly the freight traffic to and from the Uinta Basin was heavy—perhaps an average of fifty trips per week, each way. Considering that the round trip took two weeks or more, that means there were about a hundred teamsters on the road at a time. The army constructed a warehouse in Price and stationed a quartermaster there to receive incoming freight. A large campground developed that was for several years a prominent feature of Price, where teamsters waited for their wagons to be loaded. There is further evidence of the activity on the freight road in the numbers of freighters cited in local histories. Richardson includes thirty-one names in an admittedly incomplete list of teamsters from the Vernal area.27 Arthur E. Gibson, writing of early Carbon County, says, “Most of our farmers and early settlers were . . . also freighters. Money was not as plentiful in those days as it is today and any farmer who had either two, four, or six good horses and a couple of wagons would be ready at most any time to make a trip on the freight road.”28 In addition, the Indian agencies had their own outfits and hauled a large portion of their own freight with Indian teamsters.

Normally, the individual teamsters did not deal directly with the army or the Gilson Asphaltum Company. Instead, merchants in Price and Vernal would contract for the transportation of goods and then subcontract to individual freighters at the usual rate of one dollar per hundred pounds, sometimes in cash but more often in merchandise, or “calico pay.”29 Theoretically, a freighter with a good outfit and a full load both ways could make as much as ninety dollars per week on the freight road. In practice it is unlikely that anyone approached that income because of the irregularity of shipments, the uncertainties of the weather, which could sometimes make the trip take twice as long as normal, and the expenses of maintaining the teams and equipment. Moreover, the freighter was liable to deductions if there were any loss or damage to the goods, and sometimes the teamsters felt that they were shortchanged by different methods of calculating weights at different ends of the route.30 On the other hand, there were sometimes opportunities to make extra money. My grandfather, who drove on the freight road throughout the 1890s, recalled a trip in 1897

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when the agent at Ouray offered him twice the usual rate—and in gold—if he would haul a load of wool to Price in one of his wagons instead of gilsonite. Grandpa used his windfall to finance an excursion to the Pioneer Jubilee celebration in Salt Lake City later that summer.31 All in all, the freight road made an important economic contribution to the development of eastern Utah, especially in the depression years of the 1890s when money was scarce. Price benefited the most from this economic infusion, a fact that led to some envy in Vernal, which was a larger community than Price throughout the freight road years. The rivalry between the two towns is apparent in this early comment in the Uintah Pappoose: They are talking of incorporating Price, making a city of it. We are glad of it for there will be a city we country verdants can feel at ease in. We can have all the excitement of knowing we are in a metropolis and as we walk its thoroughfares hooking little fingers how natural and homelike to have to jump a sage brush to get into

the city hall or wade a swamp from an overflowed ditch to get to church or to tip our heads to get the alkali dust from our ears before we can listen with awe, as the mayor welcomes us and presents us with the freedom of the city. Hadn’t you better wait and let Vernal show you what a city ought to be?32 Although Price and Vernal were rivals for the role of metropolis of eastern Utah, they were by no means near neighbors. The distance between them via Nine Mile is about 120 miles, or almost as great as the distance from Price to Salt Lake City. Moreover, the road, despite the periodic labor of the soldiers, was notoriously bad. The most hazardous stretches lay in the higher elevations of Soldier Canyon and in Gate Canyon, which was subject to flash floods. Some teamsters claimed that they had to walk beside their teams in Soldier Canyon during wet weather to hold them on the road.33 In December 1891 the Eastern Utah Telegraph reported, “We have heard a great deal of complaint in the last week in regards to the wagon road up soldier canyon. They say it is almost

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Miners or travelers with pack animals stand outside a general store in Smith Wells, Utah, 1906.

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impossible for a team to get over it, as the road is a glare of ice, besides great danger of upsetting and killing their teams and smashing their wagons to pieces.”34 Though the low-elevation pass was usually free from heavy snow, there were occasional storms so heavy that the troops from Fort Duchesne had to be called out to clear away the drifts.35 In one such storm, in 1891, the stage was stranded for an entire week before a rescue party could reach it.36 But even in the best weather it was a difficult trip. As Mildred Miles Dillman, herself a Nine Mile native, puts it, “To ride on the stage with its swinging seat of buckskin over that road was an experience not to be duplicated in many other places in the world and, thank heaven, not very often.”37 The teamsters who traveled the route regularly became well acquainted with one another, and a fellowship of the road developed as they helped each other repair broken wagons or doubled up their teams to pull exceptionally heavy loads up Gate Canyon. My grandfather remembered one bitterly cold trip when he came close to freezing to death after sitting on the wagon seat all day. At the night’s camp, one of the other freighters recognized the dangerous state he had reached and forced him to run around the camp until his body heat was restored. Besides the regular freighters there were also drifters along the road, men close to the edge of the law. (Nine Mile is the easiest route between the outlaw havens at Brown’s Park and Robbers’ Roost; old-time residents remembered being awakened in the night by herds of stolen horses being driven through the canyon.38) My grandfather recorded an incident in which he suffered an attack of asthma that made him unable to care for his horses, and a young man “with questionable reputation” called “Six-Shooter Bob” offered to drive the team to Price.

The men folks made a bed on top of the load under the cover of one of my wagons and I rode there most all the way to Price, which took five days.

We were coming up nine-mile canyon when we met some teams going down the canyon. One of the men was acquainted with “Six-Shooter Bob” and asked whose team he was driving.

I heard the conversation from under the cover. Bob answered, “Ed Geary’s.”

“Where is the kid?” the other one asked, and Bob answered, “Oh, he is damn sick and will be dead before we get to Price.” I did not die, however.39 The settlement of Nine Mile Canyon developed along with the freight road, which provided a supplementary income for many of the residents. Nine Mile has never had a townsite, or a permanent community center, or a ward or branch of the LDS church (which must make it almost unique among Utah communities), though it was, and still is, very much a community. Ranches were scattered along thirty miles of the canyon. The logical center point was William Brock’s ranch at the mouth of Gate Canyon. When the telegraph line was built, a relay station was established there and manned by soldiers from the fort. It was the last campground with good water before the long two-day pull to the Duchesne River, and so the freighters usually camped under the cliffs there. Brock must have been one of the first ranchers to settle in Nine Mile, but his career was a short one as he killed a man named Foote in a dispute and had to flee the country. His place was taken by Pete Francis, who operated a saloon (which still stands, as does the telegraph station) and built a twenty-room hotel.

But Francis was also caught in the recurring violence of Nine Mile history, dying in a brawl in his saloon. Shortly thereafter, in 1902, Preston Nutter purchased the Brock ranch from Francis’s widow and made it the headquarters of his far-flung operations. Nutter was not interested in being an innkeeper. He closed the saloon and converted the hotel into a bunkhouse. He kept the peacock he inherited from Pete Francis, however, and found a mate for it, thereby starting the flock of peafowl that remains one of the distinctive features of Nine Mile.40 The Brock precinct is listed with a population of 50 in the 1890 census. In 1900 the precinct, now called Minnie Maud, had a population of 121. Shortly thereafter, the post office was moved from Brock’s to Frank Alger’s ranch, a couple of miles up the canyon. Alger also drove the stage and operated a small store, and his place became the center of activity in the canyon for a time. In 1905 the name of the precinct and post office was changed to Harper, and the 1910 census showed the population at its high

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The Preston Nutter ranch in Nine Mile Canyon, as photographed by Charles Kelly. Fire destroyed these buildings in 1935. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

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point of 130. The precinct center remained quite movable. The rock house of E. L. Harmon was the main stage stop for a time, and there was a schoolhouse nearby. The last stage stop was the Ed Lee ranch, where the log hotel still stands and the names of the horses can still be seen over the harness pegs in the old barn.41

and built a hotel and other buildings from the native rock.42 The next stop and campground was at Bridges (present-day Myton) on the Duchesne River. From there it was one stage farther to Fort Duchesne, and there was another stage stop and campground between the fort and Vernal.

The stage line had stations spaced about twenty miles apart along the route, and the freighters tended to camp at the same locations since twenty miles was a good dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s travel for their teams. From Price the road went over the foothills to the mouth of Soldier Canyon. The first stopping place was Soldier Station. The second night, for the freighters, was spent in the upper reaches of Nine Mile Canyon. The stage evidently made its second stop in the middle reaches of the canyon at the stations mentioned. The third stage stop, and in some ways the most interesting, was at Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wells in the waterless stretch of the southern Uinta Basin. Here Owen Smith dug a deep well for water

Over this route, then, passed the great bulk of the freight, passenger, and mail traffic to and from the Uinta Basin for many years. In 1905 the Uintah Railway was opened from Mack, Colorado, to Dragon, Utah, and this took most of the gilsonite shipments. This loss of traffic was more than offset by the opening of the Indian reservation to settlement in the same year.

The majority of homesteaders came by the Nine Mile route as did the supplies to maintain them. The agricultural products of the Basin continued to be carried to market on this road as well, including the large quantities of alfalfa seed produced in those years. The Uintah Railway attempted to capture the mail and

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Early businesses and homes in Myton, a stage stop and campground on the Duchesne River originally called Bridges.

Photograph by Frank L. Hall.

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passenger traffic in 1910, but Nine Mile held its own. The Vernal Express of May 27, 1910, reported, “The mail company which Mr. Lee represents has bought the Soldier Station and the Wells, and all the stations along the road will be equipped to give perfect satisfaction. Soldier Station will be a stopping place for dinner.

A change of horses at Myton, dinner at Moffat and then to Vernal. Four of the best Concord coaches have been bought for the service and sixty good horses.”43 In the end, it was not the railroad that brought the eclipse of the Nine Mile road (the Uintah Railway itself ceased operation after a few years), but alternative wagon and automobile routes. The higher but shorter route from Castle Gate to Duchesne over Indian Canyon was improved in 1919–20, and the mail was carried by that route until 1934 when the Daniels Canyon route, with its more direct connections to the state’s population centers, finally became the main access to the Uinta Basin.44 The Nine Mile road has seen little improvement over the years, except for an annual grading in prepa-

ration for the deer hunt. There is little traffic today except for ranchers, oil and gas drilling crews, the few tourists who deliberately seek out the interesting features of the region, and the unfortunate few who misunderstand Nine Mile as referring to the distance between Myton and Wellington.

Being off the beaten track has its advantages, however, one of which is the preservation of the landscape. There is perhaps no place in Utah where the atmosphere of the Old West is as clearly felt as in Nine Mile. The cattle ranches remain, still benefiting from the natural grazing drift from the summer range on the West Tavaputs Plateau to the winter range in the lower canyons along the Green River.

In Nine Mile, indeed, can be found in microcosm the history of the cattle industry from the 1880s to the present: the early expansion of the herds; the sharp decline about 1910 as a result of competition from sheep herds on the Plateau; the sharper decline in the early 1920s with the collapse of the beef market; and the continuing adjustments and consolidation to

still march down the canyon carrying the single telephone line.46 Cattle still graze as they have done for a century in the fields, and the wild black currant bushes grow abundantly along the fence lines, their tart fruit in midsummer coated lightly from the dust of occasional vehicles that pass where once the six-horse teams pulled their heavy loads along eastern Utah’s forgotten road.

the present. There are fewer operators today, and far fewer year-round residents, but in the Preston Nutter Corporation there is still a direct link to the great era of cattle ranching in the West. Another link to the Old West can be found in the name of Art Acord, daubed on the rock wall near the Nutter ranch. Acord came to Nine Mile as a runaway boy of about twelve and worked for Nutter until he drove a herd of horses off a cliff. From that inauspicious beginning, he went on to become a championship cowboy and performer in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and later a silent film cowboy star.45

By Edward A. Geary

Many of the ranch houses and outbuildings still remain, though in decay, defining by their intervals the scale of life of an earlier period, and the old shade trees and orchards mark the oases where the teamsters on the freight road found refreshment. The stone Harmon house raises interesting conjectures about architectural influences, as it seems to resemble a European cottage more than the usual folk architecture of early Utah. The Miles-Pace ranch in the lower part of the canyon is almost a museum of ranch life, with its clustered sheds and bunkhouses, its stone ranch house, its cellar built into the canyon wall, and its spectacular setting surrounded by high, vertical cliffs. Traces of the old road remain in the bottom of Gate Canyon, and all along the way there are names and dates written in axle grease on the rocks by teamsters. The iron telegraph poles, erected in 1890–95 to replace the original wooden poles,

My connection to Nine Mile Canyon had its roots in the summer of 1890 when my grandfather, Edward George Geary, at the age of twelve, first drove a four-horse, two-wagon outfit from the rail head at Price, Utah, to Fort Duchesne on the Uintah Indian Reservation.

His father drove a six-horse team, and together they carried (as grandpa recalled seventy years later) a cargo of lumber, kerosene, beer, groceries, and other supplies. For the return trip, they loaded their wagons with Gilsonite. This 200-mile-plus round trip was repeated several times each year for the next decade, providing funds for investments in land and cattle, for the building of a two-story brick home, and for travel to the Salt Lake LDS Temple capstone ceremony in 1892 and the dedication in 1893.

These years also provided grandpa with a supply of “freight road stories” that he drew upon to entertain the grandchildren at family gatherings.

As far as I know, grandpa never returned to the Nine Mile Canyon wagon route after his teamster days were succeeded by a Mormon mission, marriage and children, and a busy life of farming and livestock raising, operating a general store, and engaging in a multitude of civic activities. In his last years, in the late 1950s, my aunt and uncle took him once more over the, by then, little-traveled road. Grandpa had an extraordinary memory for events and places,

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Postscript: No Longer a Forgotten Road

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Being off the beaten track has its advantages, however, one of which is the preservation of the landscape.

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and he directed them unerringly to a cliff face in Gate Canyon where he had painted in axle grease his name and the date May 12, 1893.

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Grandpa’s stories merged in my imagination with the Hollywood Westerns that were a staple of the weekly “ward budget” picture shows in our local meetinghouse. The landscape of my heart’s desire became a place of rugged cliffs and desert valleys, a place of heroic adventures, Indians and outlaws, and secret oases where cool spring water flowed through groves of ancient cottonwoods, a place signified by the magical name “Nine Mile Canyon.” After I reached adulthood, I could easily have driven the Nine Mile road myself, but for some reason I did not.

Perhaps I was afraid the real place would fall too far short of my boyhood dreamscape.

Then, in 1979, I received an invitation to participate in a series of lectures on the history of Carbon County, sponsored by the Utah State Historical Society, the Carbon County Historical Society, and the College of Eastern Utah, and funded by a grant from the Utah Endowment for the Humanities. The other lecturers focused on the pioneer settlement of the area, the dominant coal industry, and the ethnic diversity of the county. The lectures were later collected in a volume edited by Philip F. Notarianni, Carbon County: Eastern Utah’s Industrialized Island (1981). My own contribution was something of an outlier, focusing on the freight road from Price to the Uinta Basin and its key role in establishing Price as the regional commercial center. The same body of research also yielded my Utah Historical Quarterly article, “Nine Mile: Eastern Utah’s Forgotten Road” (Winter 1981).

The documentary sources were relatively sparse: brief accounts from the Daughters of Utah Pioneers histories of Carbon, Duchesne, and Uintah counties; the Post Returns for Fort Duchesne, available in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah; a few newspaper articles from the 1880s and '90s. There were several archaeological papers from the 1930s, but I was looking then for history, not pre-history.

Three articles from the Utah Historical Quarterly provided useful information: Henry Fiack’s account of Fort Duchesne’s early days, published in 1929, and two articles from 1964,

“The Utah Military Frontier, 1872–1912,” by Thomas G. Alexander and Leonard J. Arrington, and especially “Preston Nutter: Utah Cattleman, 1886–1936,” by Virginia Nutter Price and John T. Darly.

The field research was a delight. I remember well my first trip on the storied road. Starting from Wellington, you cross the ascending sagebrush flats to the mouth of Soldier Canyon, site of the first way-station for freighters coming from Price. I had grown up near an elderly widow whose husband had been killed when his wagon rolled off the narrow Soldier Canyon dugway. The road had been widened and surfaced to provide access to a coal mine, but it was possible to envision the original road. The road crested the broad expanse of Whitmore Park with its weathered log cabins set amid meadows that extended to aspen and fir groves at higher elevation. The Roan Cliffs loomed behind. Then the road crossed over a ridge to the Nine Mile Creek drainage. (Some geologists claim that Nine Mile Canyon was formed by the Price River before its waters were captured by head erosion in Price Canyon.) A little farther on, Minnie Maud Creek comes in from the west. And then the gradual descent of the long canyon, past old ranch houses and outbuildings in various stages of decay. Water was running in the irrigation ditches, and the yellow and black wild currants were ripening along the fence lines. The iron telegraph poles (reputedly cast from melted-down Confederate cannons, and installed after Indians or freighters cut down the original wooden poles for firewood) still carried a single telephone line. At the Nutter Ranch, the cries of the peafowl still filled the air. Everything was just as it should be. On a subsequent trip I spent half a day with Preston Nutter’s son-in-law, Howard Price, who introduced me to another family link to Nine Mile: the name of Art Acord, my mother’s uncle, inscribed in axle grease on a cliff face near the ranch house. According to Price, Acord had been a runaway teenager who turned up at the ranch and was given a job by Nutter. His cowboy skills were satisfactory, but not his judgment. After being fired for driving some horses off a cliff, he later joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and had a Hollywood career in silent Westerns.

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Art Acord. In addition to working on the Preston Nutter ranch, Acord joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and later performed in silent Hollywood westerns. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

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Nine Mile was truly a forgotten road in the 1970s, traveled mostly by ranchers and hunters, and impassable in wet weather. I recall spending days in the canyon and meeting only one or two vehicles, or none at all. For the USHS annual conference held in Vernal in 1980 or ’81, the Society chartered a bus that carried participants from Salt Lake to Price, where I gave a lecture, then on to Vernal over the Nine Mile route. It was a slow trip. As the bus was bouncing on the washboard road surface near Smith Wells, Theron Luke (longtime city editor of the Provo Daily Herald, and a USHS board member) remarked that as far as he was concerned the road could have remained forgotten.

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But it was not entirely forgotten, even then, and more public attention was soon to come.

The 1970s brought a renewed interest in Nine Mile Canyon archaeology led by the Public Archaeology Research Group at BYU and by the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum.

Local tourism agencies promoted the canyon as “the World’s Longest Art Gallery,” referring to the unequaled concentration of prehistoric rock art, most of it produced by the Fremont culture between 800 and 1100 years ago. (More than 300 sites in the canyon are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.) Visitor guides to roadside rock art panels were published in 1984 and 1993, complete with warnings not to trespass on the private land where many of the sites are located. In 1990, the once neglected road was designated as a National Back Country Byway. Increased visitation moved a group of mostly local residents to organize the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition in 1991, dedicated to “the preservation and protection” of the area. The Bureau of Land Management in cooperation with Carbon County developed picnic areas, restroom facilities, and interpretive sites at several locations.

A new phase of Nine Mile history opened in 2002 with large-scale development of the natural gas resources on the West Tavaputs Plateau.

The gas wells were located in the high country south of Nine Mile Canyon, but the Nine Mile road is the main access, and pipelines and processing facilities were constructed in the canyon. The old wagon road had been improved over the years, but it was not designed for industrial traffic. Dust and vibration from

numerous heavy trucks passing near the prehistoric sites aroused widespread public concern. In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation added Nine Mile Canyon to its list of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Places.” The debate over preservation versus economic development is ongoing, but the dust was settled by the paving of the road in 2014, largely with funds provided by the drilling company. So Nine Mile Canyon is an easier drive now than it used to be, but the road still demands some caution as flash floods out of the side canyons can easily leave you stranded.

The literary history of the Nine Mile area has also been enlarged since 1979. The Utah Historical Quarterly published an informative article

by H. Burt Jensen on the Smith Wells stagecoach station in 1993. The Utah Centennial County History volumes on Carbon (1997) and Duchesne (1998) counties, authored, respectively, by Ronald G. Watt and John D. Barton, provide updated information on the Nine Mile road. Tom McCourt’s The Split Sky (2003) is an engaging memoir of a summer the author spent working on the Nutter ranch in 1963, when he was sixteen years old. Jerry D. Spangler and Donna K. Spangler published Horned Snakes and Axle Grease, a detailed travel guide, in 2003. Jerry Spangler continues to examine the prehistory and history of the area in Nine Mile Canyon: The Archaeological History of an American Treasure (2013) and Last Chance Byway: The History of Nine Mile Canyon (2016).

My own personal favorite among the chroniclers of Nine Mile is the indefatigable Norma Rich Dalton, who spent her early childhood on a ranch in the canyon and has devoted many years to collecting and publishing the stories of canyon residents through the Newsletter of the Nine Mile Canyon Settlers Association. Norma and her daughter Alene authored the Images of America volume on Nine Mile Canyon (2014), a book rich in historic photographs and a most informative guide to the ranching history. Indeed, to the traveler who wants to get the most out of a visit to Nine Mile Canyon, the best advice I can give is to go slowly, with the Daltons’ book in one hand and the Spanglers’ Horned Snakes and Axle Grease in the other.

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1 Deseret News, September 25, 1861; quoted in Charles S. Peterson, Utah: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1977), 137.

2 Evelyn Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” Builders of Uintah: A Centennial History of Uintah County (Uintah County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1947), 260–63.

3 See, for example, John Gillin, Archeological Investigations in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah: A Re-publication, Anthropological Papers, no. 21 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1905).

4 Interview with Howard C. Price, Jr., July 24, 1980.

5 J. W. Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the Direction of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C., 1875).

6 A. H. Thompson, “Irrigable Lands of That Portion of Utah Drained by the Colorado River and Its Tributaries,” chap. 9 of John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah, ed. Wallace Stegner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 172–73.

7 Price interview.

8 Ibid.

9 Unidentified informant, East Carbon City, Utah, April 10, 1980.

10 Interview with Arwella P. Moon, June 26, 1980; Price interview.

11 Price interview.

12 Mildred Miles Dillman, “Harper (Nine Mile),” Early History of Duchesne County (Duchesne County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1948), 253.

13 Ibid., 258; James Liddell, “The Cattle and Sheep Industry of Carbon County,” Centennial Echoes from Carbon County (Carbon County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1948), 51.

14 Thomas G. Alexander and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Utah Military Frontier, 1872–1912: Forts Cameron, Thornburgh, and Duchesne,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (1964): 342–43.

15 Salt Lake Tribune, September 2, 1886.

16 Salt Lake Tribune, October 8, 1886.

17 Interview with Leland Powell, March 20, 1980.

18 Henry Fiack, “Fort Duchesne’s Beginnings,” Utah Historical Quarterly 2 (1929): 32.

19 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, April, June, July, August, 1887, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

20 Fiack, “Fort Duchesne’s Beginnings,” 32.

21 Salt Lake Tribune, July 10, 1887.

22 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 260.

23 Salt Lake Tribune, September 23, 1887.

24 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, August 1888, July 1889.

25 Eastern Utah Telegraph, January 15, 1891.

26 Eastern Utah Telegraph, January 22, 1891.

27 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 263.

28 Arthur E. Gibson, “Industries, Other Than Coal, Which Were Important in the Development of Carbon County,” in Centennial Echoes, 45.

29 Ibid., 45; Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 260.

30 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 261.

31 Edward G. Geary, “Personal History,” 13–14, manuscript, 1957, in author’s possession.

32 Uintah Pappoose, January 23, 1891.

33 Dillman, “Harper,” 38.

34 Eastern Utah Telegraph, December 11, 1891.

35 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, January 1888, March 1891.

36 Eastern Utah Telegraph, March 5, 1891.

37 Dillman, “Harper,” 256.

38 Price interview.

39 Geary, “Personal History,” 16.

40 Virginia N. Price and John T. Darly, “Preston Nutter: Utah Cattleman, 1886–1936,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (1964): 245–47.

41 Dillman, “Harper,” 256–58.

42 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 263.

43 Quoted in Builders of Uintah, 265.

44 Dillman, “Harper,” 37–39.

45 Price interview; family records.

46 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, July 1890, August 1895.

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The telegrapher's shack at Bridge, Utah, which featured an outhouse that hung over the water.

Note semaphore to signal trains. Also note dead pelicans on shore in foreground. Undernourished birds were too weak to fly when they became crusted with salt. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

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The community of Bridge was built not where people would clamor to live but where it was needed—atop the eastern end of the fill forming part of the bed for the train tracks traversing the Great Salt Lake. On top of huge twenty-ton boulders sloping down on two sides to the water there was room for two tracks, a telegraph station on their north side, an old boxcar on one side of it, one or two thrown-together shacks on the other side of it in good years, a water cistern, and a semaphore signal. Actually there was not even that much room, as the shacks hung out over the sides and had to be supported by pilings, and the community outhouse rested upon pilings right in the lake. There were no trees and no flowers and only occasional bands of marauding mice. If you walked along the tracks inland to the shore, there was still little sign of life—just glittering salt and, in season, dead or dying pelicans.

As Bridge was one-fourth of a mile to a mile away from the shore and (if you could bump across the rough terrain in a car) fifty to eighty miles from the nearest city of Odgen, accessibility was ordinarily limited to train traffic.1 Even on a train you would have to travel about thirty miles.

Bridge was home to various telegraphers for fifteen years. One of them, a Mr. Pratt, applied in 1941 at Southern Pacific in Ogden for a telegrapher’s position. A typical boomer, or railroader who frequently changed both jobs and locale, Pratt traveled lightly, even more so because he had always worked in eastern railroad stations that were adjoined by towns with hotels. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for Bridge, his new assignment, and no one in Ogden warned him. Carrying no food

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A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake

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Bridge:

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and no bedding, Pratt arrived in Bridge only to learn that there were no hotels, no restaurants, no stores, and no immediate means of reaching those in Ogden. The kindness of the other two inhabitants saved him from cold and hunger,2 but he could not escape the stark isolation, poor accommodations, and total dependency on the railroad that formed much of the life at Bridge.

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The foundation of Bridge was literally built during the construction of the Lucin Cutoff. In 1901 a general revamping of the Southern Pacific lines was begun. One of the major projects discussed was rerouting the lines that ran from Ogden up through Promontory, around the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, and over to Lucin. William Hood, chief engineer for SP, had always dreamed of routing the lines straight across the lake. When he proposed that his dream become reality, several objections were raised, the most relevant being that the severe storms on the lake would wash away part of the fill and damage the structural integrity of the trestle and that the lake, which was at its lowest level since 1873, would rise again and engulf both fill and trestle.3 Nevertheless, a change was badly needed. The proposed cutoff would shorten the distance by forty-three miles and thus save time. (After the cutoff was built, it saved twenty-one to twenty-seven hours per trip.) Even more important, it would eliminate sharp curves and steep grades of up to 2.2 percent, which required three locomotives for freight trains and two for just one-half or one-third of a passenger train.4 Hood’s proposal was adopted and construction began in March 1902. The cutoff was designed to use fill as much as possible and then a trestle in the deeper part of the lake. In the area where Bridge was eventually built, a temporary trestle was constructed to support a track for the trains that transported fill material to the dump site. This trestle (and the other temporary trestles) were constructed by establishing stations at each mile end of the route and setting two pile-drivers to work back to back. The workmen were quartered right on the site “well out of the way of storm-waves” in a boarding house resting on a platform supported by piles.

For this privilege the men paid four dollars a week each, but supplies and cooks were free.

(Two camps, Camp 10, later renamed Colin,

and Camp 20, situated on the permanent trestle and later known as Midlake, will be referred to again.)5 Working in ten-hour shifts around the clock and with no days off, the men would drive four seventy-foot piles, then move down the route fifteen feet to drive four more. A total of twenty-five piles was considered a good day’s work.

The progress would be much slower either at this side of the western arm of the lake or at the other side when the 3,200-pound hammers could drive a pile only a few inches. Sometimes, when the pile was already thirty to forty feet deep, it would rebound two or three feet after being struck. Then a hole had to be steamblasted.6 The men had to live at their stations until their work was completed. There was no store available and no bar. In fact, liquor was strictly forbidden. Even the packages from home and the supplies were searched for contraband, and any found was forfeited. Thus even the excitement provided by drunken brawls was largely missing.7 After the piles were driven, capped with a heavy beam, and connected by the stringers (big timbers laid parallel to the track), and the temporary track built, trains started backing out to the dumpsite with the fill materials. At first, gravel and dirt were used, but the lake floated those materials away; so huge multi-ton rocks were used that in turn were “swallowed up.” Dumping continued, however, until the fill started building up; then the finer materials were resorted to again. When the fill was completed, it was twenty feet wide at the top and sixteen or seventeen feet above the water.8 The Lucin Cutoff with its twelve miles of permanent trestle, 2.5 miles of fill at the Promontory Point end, and 5.1 miles of fill at the opposite end, was opened to freight traffic on March 8, 1904, despite continuing problems with the fill sinking. Passenger traffic began on September 18, 1904. Across the lake, the trains traveled on a straight track boasted of as “more nearly level than an ordinary floor.”9 Two-directional traffic was handled safely on the single track through the implementation of telegraph stations to direct a train to one of the

In 1929 the double tracks were extended west from the station of Promontory Point to the beginning of the trestle. That change meant that the controlling telegraph station should also be moved further west. Accordingly, in June 1930 a new station was built on the fill about one-half mile east of the trestle. The station was named Bridge because it was near the end of the trestle, which was usually called The Bridge. Bridge became the only station between Ogden and Lakeside; Promontory Point, which had had an agent and two telegraphers, and Midlake were both abolished.12 Two of the men at Promontory Point chose to transfer to Bridge, one of them, the agent Al Holiday, because his family was in Ogden. He moved to an outfit car (a boxcar fixed up as living quarters) on a spur at Saline, where his family visited him on weekends. The other man, one of the telegraphers (a Mr. Compton), briefly worked first trick (the 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. shift) at Bridge, then became ill. He was replaced by Jack Dockter. Jack, who had started working

The operators at Bridge were kept busy not only with the usual volume of passenger and freight traffic but also with trains pulling “reefers,” refrigerator cars shipped from California to the Chicago markets by Pacific Fruit Express, a subsidiary jointly owned by Southern Pacific and Union Pacific. When the harvest was over, the remaining volume of train traffic did not justify keeping telegraphers at Bridge, so it was

When things dried off, the rails would be white and the office windows so coated with salt he could hardly see out of them.

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Of the first summer at Bridge, Jack remembered primarily the “big ballast rocks and the big black spiders in the office.” He remembered, too, that the water was almost up to Saline (the lake was at 4,200 feet that year) and that big storms would push the waves up the fill and over the tracks. When things dried off, the rails would be white and the office windows so coated with salt he could hardly see out of them. 14

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Due to the demands placed on the railroads during World War I and the resulting congestion, the government took over control of Southern Pacific and the other railroads in December 1917 and did not return them to private control until March 1920. In that same year Ernest L. King was sent to supervise the Odgen Division. By then the lake had risen and continued to rise until in 1924 it was nine feet above the level of 1902. King found that storms would damage the fill on both ends of the trestle, just as had been feared in 1901. High winds would create waves up to eight feet high and dash the heavy water (seventy-six pounds per cubic foot) against the fill and roll away large rocks, sometimes enough of them that the track on the north side could not be used. He had rocks averaging twenty tons dumped over the sides, starting thirty feet from the track, and gradually sloped the fill upwards—thus the huge boulders found at Bridge. Also several major repairs were made to the trestle during 1920–27.11

for Southern Pacific in 1929, was sent to Bridge because he was still on extra board. The extra board was composed of men who lacked the seniority to bid into a regular job; they were moved around the various stations either to fill in for operators who were ill or on vacation or to open up new or closed areas. Jack, too, lived at Saline until an outfit car and a cistern (for the domestic water supply) were moved to Bridge later in the summer. Then, because he was on first trick, he had first choice of housing. The third trick (midnight to 8 A.M.) was manned by L. P. Affleck, who also lived at Saline.13

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Jack returned to Bridge in the winter of 1932.

This time he worked second trick and lived at Saline with the signal maintainer for Promontory Point. The other tricks were manned by Carl Reynolds and Eric Wilson, the latter being one of the telegraphers at Promontory Point before that station was abolished. Wilson lived at Camp 10 in an outfit car.16 By 1937 when Jack returned to Bridge, passenger traffic had so diminished that although Southern Pacific had restored all the “popular pre-depression trains,” the freight and passenger totals still did not reach the 1929 totals. Therefore, only the first two tricks were manned, John Reid sharing the duties.17

This summer was more “exciting.” At Saline lived Louie Gabrielli and Bob Goodnell, both bridge inspectors, whose duties included traveling in a motor launch up the south side of the trestle to Lakeside and back via the north side.

Louie had Jack shoot cottontails for them and reciprocated by cooking the rabbits and Italian food. By then the lake had receded to or below the 1902 level, so the shore was not as far away.

Jack found, however, that he could not walk there too long, for the brilliant salty ground would blind him. The station closed as usual in November, so Jack, who was still on extra board, was sent off to do relief work; but he returned again to man the station alone during the harvest season in 1939.

That August and September Jack witnessed a phenomenon that had been noted since at least 1935—pelicans coated with salt sitting upon the shoreline too weak to fly. Because Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake were very low and

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closed the first of November. The pattern of heaviest traffic being from August to November held for much of the 1930s, because before the war, agricultural products were “one of the largest items in Southern Pacific traffic.”15

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Dead pelicans were a common sight in the late 1930s when the level of the Great Salt Lake was low. Examining a dead bird in September 1939 were, left to right, Ward Armstrong, Gordon Campbell, an unidentified man, and Jack Dockter.

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Sy had already been on the railroad at that time one or two years, so he was able to bid into the job at Bridge. He was there a short while before he was joined by his wife Lydia. A new man, Farrel Ross, arrived August 10. Farrel had taken a telegrapher class offered by Southern Pacific at Weber College but was not offered a job on the extra board until two months later, when he was sent to the San Joaquin Division.

He worked three days at one job, ten at another in a different location, and three at still another.

Then some boomers came who were hired because they had more experience. Out of work and out of money, Farrel called his former instructor, Mr. Beasley, who was a telegrapher at Ogden. Beasley told him to return, as the Salt Lake Division was now hiring. Farrel was sent to open up another trick at Bridge and a railroad shack was moved to Bridge to house him. His wife Delia stayed with her parents in Pleasant Grove until there was enough money for her to join him (ten days later). The Nappers left before she arrived and were replaced

by Earl Wood, who had bid into the job and

The trains classified as “inferior” were the ones that had to do the waiting. The “drags,” or trains pulling empty cars, had no right of way over any other train. Next up the scale of importance was usually the westbound freight train when paired with an eastbound freight. Even more superior was the fruit (a generic term for agricultural produce) train or a “hotshot manifest” (a train carrying a very wide variety of manufactured goods). The most superior were passenger trains, and of them the streamliner was at the top of the list.22 Usually action was initiated by the dispatcher, who would telephone (unless the phone lines were down, in which case he would telegraph) a train’s orders to the telegrapher. The telegrapher would copy them, repeat them back to the dispatcher, and never change a word after doing so. Then when he sighted the train (or sometimes when he was certain the train was due), he called the dispatcher for a

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The duties were shaped by the demands the single track across the trestle placed upon traffic control. When both an eastbound train and a westbound train approached the trestle, they were issued either a “meet” or a “wait.” When the dispatcher in Ogden, who already knew what speed the trains would be traveling, also knew exactly where the trains were, he would “put out a meet.” If, for example, the operator at Lakeside was “copying orders” for train #576 and the one at Bridge was copying orders for #3769, the order might read: “Extra #3769 take siding and meet #576 at Midlake.” Probably neither train would be five minutes off schedule. If, however, the movement of the trains was more uncertain, a wait would be issued: “Extra #3769 wait at Colin until 5:30 P.M. for #576.”

Sometimes the westbound train might wait fifteen to thirty minutes for the other train to come by. Most of the orders issued were meets and waits.21

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The type of recreation and the degree of socializing at Bridge were obviously influenced by the level of the lake and the amount of train traffic. However, the tenor of life there was influenced in other ways, one of them being, of course, the nature of the telegraphers’ duties.

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Jack was able to bid into the job at Bridge in May 1940. He had married; his wife was living in Ogden and he wanted to be close by. This year the station did not close down in November as usual. Because of the war in Europe and the resulting bulge in defense shipping “in the closing months of that year, traffic began increasing so rapidly that the ton-miles of freight carried in 1940 were the greatest in its [Southern Pacific’s] history up to that time.” Jack stayed on alone over the winter, working a shift that went from 5:25 to 10:25 A.M. and from 11:25 A.M. to 3:25 P.M. Before he left at the end of June he was joined for a time by Sy Napper.19

brought his wife Jean; he was in turn replaced by the boomer Pratt, who did not stay long.20

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supported too few fish, the birds were undernourished. When they landed on the supersaturated waters of the Great Salt Lake, an “immense weight of salt” crystallized on them.

The birds helplessly floated on the lake until death or were washed upon the shore. Somehow Ward Armstrong, who owned a sporting goods store in Ogden and was affiliated with the fish and game department, heard about the pelicans and told Jack to bang them over the head with a baseball bat. (A couple who lived at Bridge in August 1941 were amazed by the great number of “dead ducks and other birds or their bones on the shore.”)18

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“clearance.” (The clearance gave the train permission to pass the station; without it the train would have to stop.) Sometimes the dispatcher would then have another order; then the operator had to work more rapidly than usual to fasten one copy each of both the orders and the clearance to two “hoops.” (The hoop was a bamboo pole with four and a half feet of its length used as a handle and its other end bent into an eighteen-inch circle. The papers were held in place by a clothespin-type clip.) Then the operator would take his lantern or turn on the floodlight if it was dark and stand about four and a half feet from the track to wait for the fireman to run his arm through the hoop, take off the papers, and throw the hoop down by the track. The procedure was repeated for the conductor at the end of the train.23 Although the trains passing Bridge had slowed down—speeds of 30 mph for passenger trains and 20 for freight trains were the maximum on the trestle—passing the hoop was still challenging. The train would blow dust and steam all over the operator, a strong wind would make him feel he was about to be blown over, he had to hold the hoop tight enough so the wind would not blow it away or twist it but loose enough so that he would not pull the receiver off the train, and he had to release it at just the right moment. The sight and logistics would awe visitors from the salt mines at Saline.24 As both ends of the train had to receive a clearance so each would know what was happening, if either man missed the hoop, he would have to stop the train and come back to the office for another one. The stop would ruin all the schedules. No such occurrences were reported for Bridge, but one of the operators, Sy Napper, did receive demerits at another station for such a mishap.25 After the train passed, the operator had to “O. S. the train.” That means that he had to call the dispatcher to report that the train had passed at such and such a time. O. S. stood for “on the sheet,” referring to the sheet on which the dispatcher noted the information. Then, his duties over, the telegrapher could “go back to sleep.”

One informant made the latter comment half jokingly. Actually, he received ten demerits at another station for falling asleep and not clearing the board before the train stopped.26

If the train had no orders, the procedure was simpler but carried its own challenge. During the hours the office was open, the semaphore was kept in the “stop” position (both arms were in a horizontal position or the red light was on). A train could not proceed unless it saw the semaphore changed to the “proceed” position (the right arm dropped to a 45° angle or the green light was turned on) or unless it received a clearance from the telegrapher. Thus when the train was where it could see the signal, the operator “cleared the board” (dropped the arm), and the train would continue, knowing that it had nothing to pick up. The challenge was to pull the lever on the control board neither so soon that the train was too far away to see the change nor so late that the train stopped. The air at Bridge was so clear that, until an operator became used to it, a train’s headlights looked much closer than they actually were and the operator might change the semaphore too soon. Such a misjudgment was made by Farrel Ross, who, when the train stopped, had to call his dispatcher to report he needed a clearance for a train he had stopped. Fortunately he was not given any demerits, probably because the train was not an important one.27 The experienced operator felt no pressure in carrying out these responsibilities, unless it was to stay awake during those frequent times when there was nothing to do. Everything was routine to him. But the inexperienced operators, such as Sy and Farrel, did feel the pressure of doing the job properly so that they would not receive demerits from stopping a train. Receiving too many demerits meant that an operator would be fired; in those days jobs were considered too precious to risk. At first, Farrel would wake up from a sound sleep in bed and “reach for the board,” afraid that he had not given the proceed signal to an approaching train.28 The most dramatic example of what the pressure did to those at Bridge was recorded by Delia Ross: One morning toward fall, while Farrel was still working, I arose and tried to start a fire in the pot-bellied stove so I could have breakfast ready when he finished work. No matter how hard I tried I could not get that fire to draw the smoke up the chimney. It seems

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Farrel L. Ross taking a break from his telegrapher duties at Bridge. Swimming, walking, and watching the sunsets were other leisure activities.

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The equipment provided at the Bridge office was minimal and old-fashioned. Ordinarily, when the number of messages did not warrant a teletype, a typewriter was provided. Such was not the case here. Southern Pacific just tested the operators for legible handwriting.

Furthermore, although keys had been available for decades that allowed messages to be sent simultaneously on the same wire in each direction, only the standard single-use key was furnished. Thus if Bridge opened its key, Lakeside could not send until that key was closed. Also

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This window faced the west. As I looked up prepared to scream for help, I saw the streamliner coming down the track. I dared not scream for fear Farrel would not pull the signal board at the right time and thus stop the train. As the train neared, I dared not scream for fear he would not get the orders handed up to the brakeman and stop the train. Then the noise of

the train was too loud, and I could not be heard. As the train passed, I dared not scream until I felt Farrel had had enough time to “O. S.” the train. Then I really screamed. Farrel came running, worked until I got my fingers released.

They were unbelievably flat and hurt so much. I thought perhaps they were broken. They weren’t; however each was badly bruised and cut where the frame fell on them. Our neighbor bandaged me up, but I couldn’t use my fingers for some time. Farrel had to wash the black smoke from my face, hands and arms and get his own breakfast.29

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that the smoke stack on top of the house was not tall enough. The wind was blowing from a different direction and caused a downward draft instead of upward. Soon the house was filling with smoke. I started opening windows to get cross ventilation to blow the smoke out of the house. These windows were the type that work by weights. The windows matched the cheap construction of the house; no weights had been put into the sides of the windows. As I pushed up on the frame of the bottom window, the top window frame fell, pinning all eight of my fingers between the top and bottom frame.

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all the operators down the line could hear any message sent out. A key, called the bug, which allowed more rapid transmission of messages, was in use at other locations in the country but not at Bridge. Jack Dockter did add his own improvement—a tobacco can placed so that it touched the brass of the key’s sounder and made the sound clearer and louder.30

allow Farrel to jump into a gondola. In such style he rode into Ogden to make the necessary purchases. Pratt, whom they called Chillicothe Ohio, figured out which train Farrel would return on, and left the semaphore in the stop position. Farrel got out of the train right in front of his house. Unlike the others, Pratt did not worry about being fired. He was a boomer.33

The wages of those at Bridge were considered quite satisfactory. Jack Dockter, for instance, was paid in 1930 at 63¾ cents an hour, or $5.50 a day with only one monthly deduction—50 cents for the company hospital in San Francisco. By 1940 he was making 75 cents an hour.

Farrel Ross started out at Bridge with 73 cents an hour. Both men belonged to the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, and that union negotiated their raises. The main perquisite offered was a pass for the family on some of the company passenger trains; exactly which trains a person could ride depended upon the operator’s seniority.31

Push-pull type handcars were available for shorter trips. Sy Napper would transport his wife on one to Saline once a week. There she would catch a train and travel to Ogden to do her wash, pick up the mail, and buy supplies. She would ride back on a passenger train that would stop at Saline, and Sy would meet her with the handcar.

After his wife gave Farrel a butch haircut which stuck up two inches all around, he would ride the handcar to the shore for a cut from one of the men working there. Other times the handcar would be used just for fun.34

These were the compensations for working eight hours a day seven days a week at straight time. Overtime was paid only when no one was on duty when a train was late and another train was coming from Lakeside or for some other reason an order was needed. Then the dispatcher phoned an operator at his quarters, sometimes at three or four in the morning. To pass the orders, the operator received time and a half for one hour’s work even though he actually worked only fifteen minutes. No vacations were given until sufficient seniority had built up, and an operator had to remain on the job unless he arranged for a relief operator in advance, which is what Jack had to do when his first daughter was born. If an operator had a wife in Ogden, as Jack did, he could visit her only by catching a train and riding in a boxcar or whatever was available when his shift was over, visiting her for the next few hours, and returning in time to start working again. The same practice had to be followed for any type of necessary excursion.32 Such an occasion arose when Farrel wore holes through the soles of his shoes. After finishing his night shift, he walked to the beginning of the trestle and gave the engineer of a freight train the pickup sign. The train, which was already traveling slowly, slowed even more to

As the U. S. Postal Service did not service Bridge, mail was sent with the conductor of any train that had stopped, frequently the “local” (see below), or sent with the signal maintainer who had his own track-riding motorcar. Mail sent to Bridge was bundled together with the company mail and thrown off at the station as the train passed.35 The local was a short supply train sent weekly from Ogden to pick up empty cars, deliver freight, do some switching, and pull a water tank for filling the cisterns of Bridge and other stations that did not have a local water supply.

The residents of Bridge would order supplies from an Ogden grocery store (the Nicholas Grocery on 25th Street and the American Food Store were two such stores), and the local would deliver them free of charge. (Bridge residents had free billing on any freight that came out.) The local also provided the fuel for the community’s stoves.36 Of course this arrangement, coupled with the fact that those on extra board were limited to six pieces of luggage for carrying all their belongings—bedding, clothes, food, dishes, cooking utensils, and any luxury items such as radios—and that they might be transferred at any time with little notice, meant that they had to calculate their food supply so that it stretched through the week with little left over.

The shack was described as . . . typical of most of the S. P. houses— frame with a gable roof. It was painted like all S. P. buildings in a tannish yellow color. It was smaller, however, than most of the houses we were in.

The house had no insulation, no running water, no bathroom, no electricity and no cupboards. The floors were bare board—not even varnished. In fact you might say it was just a shack, about twenty by thirty feet in size, finished on the inside with vee-grooved boards. . . . The fill gradually tapered

When Farrel arrived at Bridge, there was no place to sleep except on the floor. An old army cot had been thrown into the lake. Farrel retrieved the cot, put it on the tracks and hammered on it to knock the rust and salt from it. He wired it together and put a big cardboard box over it to protect the bedding from becoming rusty. It was a single cot that sagged in the middle, but it was better than sleeping on the floor. Farrel worked all night while I slept. He slept in the day, so a single cot worked out fine.42 Living in a house that hung over the lake was somewhat scary, according to Delia, when the wind would blow so hard that the waves almost reached the tracks — and the house.43 The wind also caused a problem when the outhouse was used. The outhouse was a twoseater located behind the station on a platform placed right over the lake and up quite a distance from the water. The outhouse of course had no bottom. More than one resident noticed that “using that facility was a real chore sometimes if the wind blew very hard because of the terrific updraft.”44 Life at Bridge was not all trial and tribulation, however. There were several sources of recreation. The conductors of passenger trains

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As already noted, housing was of two types, outfit cars and shacks (that was a common name for them). The outfit car was partially divided into two rooms—the kitchen in front and the bedroom in back. Lydia Napper recalled that the boxcar’s condition was such that “I would start sweeping the floor and by the time I got across the floor, there wasn’t any dirt left because it would all go down between the cracks.”39 It was a “yucky” green inside and red outside (standard colors for outfit cars) and sparsely furnished, “just makeshift,” with a built-in counter on one side, a bed, a table, and a bench to sit on.40 When Sy Napper arrived, there was not even a bed. He had to pull the springs of an old iron bed out of the lake and make a mattress out of an old rug. Orange crates served as cupboards.41

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Two other limitations on their food supply arose from the lack of refrigerators (or even ice boxes) and of cooking stoves at Bridge. Ice was kept in an ice cellar at Saline. Either the section gang would bring fifty pound blocks of it to Bridge or an operator would use the handcar to get the ice. The ice was kept in a covered box, and there they stored perishables; but the fresh items still had to be eaten the first couple of days, and the bread soon turned moldy. Thus they ate food that did not spoil quickly, the type depending on their budget. Being limited to pot-bellied stoves, which had no ovens and had the source of heat far from the top, meant that only foods that could be slowly boiled or fried could be cooked.38

down to the water so the back of the house was braced up with piling. A very tiny railed area was at the back door. Here we disposed of our garbage into the lake. Here I also kept a box for a block of ice. . . . As to the inside of the house. The sink and drainboard were of galvanized tin—very hard to clean.

The only source for heat or cooking was a pot-bellied stove in the kitchen.

This was the only piece of furniture furnished by the S. P. The house was divided into three equal rooms. The middle room had a sort of a clothes closet without a door. The inside doorways didn’t have doors either. There were no kitchen cupboards. Wooden orange crates were prize possessions as they provided shelves.

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If they ran out, they had no food until the local returned.37

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Sy Napper, left, and an unidentified man on a handcar at Bridge, Utah.

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would bundle up all the discarded newspapers and magazines and throw them off at Bridge almost daily. Such contact with the outside world was much appreciated. The residents could swim in the lake by the side of the fill opposite that of the outhouse, then shower off under the tap on the cistern. They took walks in both directions of the fill. Jack Dockter said that on some of his long walks, “I used to talk to myself quite a lot. And a lot of times I’d answer myself, too.” The sunsets and their reflections on the lake were striking. There was socializing with each other and with the section gang or the signal maintainer, who stopped by occasionally for a few minutes. Sometimes there were visitors from Saline, and the conductors always waved; among the railroaders there was a special camaraderie.45 Obviously those at Bridge were very dependent upon the railroad, which had to supply literally all of Bridge’s needs. As Farrel Ross put it, “You were totally at the mercy of the railroad.”46 Nevertheless, not one of those interviewed expressed bitterness or resentment. Instead, gratitude was the common sentiment, as shown in the following comments from the interviews.

Arlene Dockter: “We were glad to have a job.”

Jack Dockter: We were comfortable.

We were happy with what we had because when we had to move we didn’t have a lot of stuff to move.”

Lydia Napper: “Just being married it was kind of like a vacation. With the swimming it was like a picnic.

Delia Ross: “We were just married.

It was just like a honeymoon. It was nice just to be the two of you together. . . . Because this time followed the depression, we had to take things as they were, and we weren’t used to a lot.”

Farrel Ross: “We were pretty happy to have a job. . . . I was paid twice what my father ever made.”

When it came, the transfer was done in typical railroad fashion. Use of the telephone was allowed for orders only, never for personal calls

With the war and the abandonment of the Panama Canal for shipping came a tremendous increase in the tonnage carried by Southern Pacific, up from almost 53 million in 1940 to over 66 million in 1941 and almost 70 million in 1942. More traffic meant more trains, which meant that more meets and waits had to be issued. Stations were brought up to full coverage, and 700 new stations were added to the Southern Pacific system. One of those was at Midlake. A third trick was added to Bridge in the fall of 1941.49 Bridge’s days, in fact the days of the telegrapher, were numbered, however. “Twilight for Men of Morse” proclaimed one article in 1943.

The FCC required radio service on all railroads

by December 31, 1945, for communications train to train, conductor to engineer, and dispatcher to train.50 Also in 1945 central traffic control was installed in Ogden to handle traffic from Bridge to Lucin. This system used coded electrical pulses that were sent along the tracks and interrupted when a train was on the rails. This information was shown by lights on the big control board in Ogden and by pens that automatically charted the progress of the trains and recorded the

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A telegrapher was no longer needed to change the semaphore and to pass hand-written orders and messages to the engineer and the conductor. Thus toward the end of 1945, Bridge was abandoned, and its buildings moved.51

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The amount of notice depended upon when the operator finished his current shift, when the new shift began, and when a connecting train would be available. Usually only a few hours were allowed for packing. When asked how much notice was usually given, Jack Dockter erupted, “No notice!” Close to the end of one shift, he would receive the transfer from the dispatcher. There would be just enough time to roll up his bedroll, throw a few things into a cardboard box and catch a train. He would arrive at the new site with maybe three hours left before the new shift and use the time to lie on a “hard bench” and “get a few naps.” The Rosses were given four hours’ notice to leave Bridge when they were transferred at end of September 1941.48

times they passed each siding. Furthermore, with the CTC board the dispatcher could send coded impulses to change signals and to switch trains to sidings. Lights would tell him if the change had been made.

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or messages (anything that did not pertain to train movement). Thus Ogden would tap “B” (for Bridge) over and over on the telegraph until “B” answered. Then the orders for an employee to catch a certain train and report to a particular shift elsewhere were given.47

By Doris R. Dant As a child, I relished the stories my parents told about their time on the railroad in the early 1940s. “Their time” is an odd phrase, now that I think about it. My father was the only railroad employee of the two, but that is how they described those years, perhaps because the railroad set much of the bounds and content of life for both of them—where they lived, how much they could keep, how their homes were furnished, when they moved, who they associated with, when they could sleep, how they traveled, how they communicated with the world, and why my father was not overseas fighting the Axis powers.

This degree of corporate control engendered a level of privation and confinement that was totally alien to me, a child from a nice home who was free to roam. It was this inconceivable nature of my parents’ railroad life that so captivated me. And of all their stories, those about their time living on the Great Salt Lake in Bridge seemed the most improbable.

In high school I drew upon my parents’ railroad stories as subject matter for short essays.

But I never wrote about Bridge. It loomed too

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fantastic to capture in two to three pages. Plus, a typewriter was too constraining. Not until I purchased my first computer in 1984 did I feel free to write—and edit—at greater length. An aunt told me about the Utah State Historical Society conference that summer. Believing I should interview my parents before they grew any older, I submitted a proposal that was accepted, and I embarked on a whirlwind of research. “Bridge: A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake” is the result.

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Rereading “Bridge” immerses me yet again in the issues of control and fear. The railroad’s control over its extra board hires—those men lacking sufficient seniority to have any say over their working conditions—was so pervasive and invasive that I can comprehend a man’s gratitude for such work only by placing it in the context of the Depression. Coming out of a period of deprivation, high unemployment, and financial fear, men like Farrel Ross, Jack Dockter, and Sy Napper, who are featured in this article, were accustomed to hardship and long hours of demanding physical labor. A telegrapher job in an office at an hourly wage instead of one dollar a day was indeed a blessing on multiple fronts. But the Depression fears also explain why these men and their wives would sacrifice whatever was necessary—living together, for instance—or silently endure injuries so that the men could keep their jobs. I wish I could return to my informants and explore the issue of fear.

It was this inconceivable nature of my parents’ railroad life that so captivated me.

If I were to rewrite this article, I would not only mention the Depression but would also place this control in the larger social context of the long-standing struggle for better treatment of workers. The men belonged to the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, which apparently limited its negotiations to better wages and eight-hour workdays. The railroads could still transfer extra board employees with at most only a few hours’ notice, expect them to work immediately after a transfer even if they had little time to sleep, require seven-day work weeks with no vacations, provide very primitive living conditions, and limit one’s total belongings to six pieces of luggage, including bedding, food, and cooking and cleaning utensils. In the case of Bridge and other isolated posts, the railroad also controlled access to food, fuel, water, and mail.

Although the extra board workers were moved around, their circumstances in isolated Western telegraph stations nevertheless beg a comparison with miners in a company mining town. The extra board did not risk debt bondage, as did miners in some towns, and they had the expectation of their situation improving once they had built up sufficient seniority, but the restrictions on living and work conditions bear some similarities. They are telling examples of the continuing tension between company and worker over what is withheld, what is provided, and what is demanded and of how isolation and dependency can worsen the conditions in which a worker functions.

Now for the rest of the story. Not only does Bridge no longer exist, but the trestle on the Lucin Cutoff that Bridge served is also gone. A dirt and rock causeway for train traffic crossing the Great Salt Lake was completed in 1959, making the trestle superfluous. Since the 1990s, the trestle itself has been systematically dismantled by Trestlewood, a Utah company that sells the salt-impregnated wood.

Lakeside, on the western end of the cutoff, is now a military restricted area. Lucin, basically a ghost town, has one inhabitant, Ivo Zdarsky, famed for flying over the Iron Curtain to freedom in a homemade aircraft. The fates of these towns and of Bridge are similar to those of other former isolated telegraph stations in the West.

Parren, Nevada, a prime example, consists of

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1 Interviews with Farrel Ross, Oakland, California, July 12 and August 14, 1984; interviews with Jack Dockter, Ogden, Utah, August 8–10, 1984.

2 Ross interview.

3 Oscar King Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off: A Remarkable Feat of Engineering across the Great Salt Lake on Embankment and Trestle,” Century 71 (January 1906): 460– 65; Deon C. Greer, et al., Atlas of Utah (Odgen and Provo, UT: Weber State College and Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 45. All the references to specific lake levels are to this page.

4 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 460, 468; J. E. Newby, “Great Salt Lake Railroad Crossing,” Great Salt Lake: A Scientific, Historical and Economic Overview, ed. J. Wallace Gwynn, Utah Department of Natural Resources Bulletin 116, June 1980, 393.

5 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 462–63; Dockter interviews; Neill C. Wilson and Frank J. Taylor, Southern Pacific: The Roaring History of a Fighting Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1952), 111.

6 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 464–66.

7 Ibid., 465.

8 Charles S. Fee, Great Salt Lake Cut-off: Going to Sea by Rail (San Francisco: Southern Pacific, 1920), 26–27; Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 463, 466–67.

9 Newby, “Great Salt Lake Railroad Crossing,” 393; Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 468; Fee, Great Salt Lake Cut-off, 27.

10 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 461, 466; The Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Porto [sic ]Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba, 86 vols. (New York: National Railway Publication Company, October 1920), 53:721; Dockter interviews.

11 Ernest L. King and Robert E. Mahaffay, Main Line: Fifty Years of Railroading with the Southern Pacific (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1948), 181–82; Newby, “Great Salt Lake Railroad Crossing,” 394, 398.

12 Dockter interviews; Ross interviews.

13 Dockter interviews.

14 Ibid.

15 Ross interviews; Dockter interviews; S. Kip Farrington, Jr., Railroads at War (New York: Samuel Curl, 1944), 27.

16 Dockter interviews.

17 Ibid.; Southern Pacific’s First Century (n. p.: n. d.), 66; Farrington, Railroads at War, 26.

18 Dockter interviews; Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., [1947]), 374–75; Delia Ross, “House at Bridge,” undated holograph, author’s possession.

19 Dockter interviews; Farrington, Railroads at War, 37; interview with Lydia Napper, Martinez, California, August 4, 1984.

20 Napper interview; Ross holograph.

21 Dockter interviews.

22 Ibid.

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23 Ross interviews.

24 “Speeding Gravel from Hills to Lake Roadbed: Causeway across Great Salt Lake,” Business Week (January 5, 1957): 69; Dockter interviews; Ross interviews.

25 Ross interviews; Napper interviews.

26 Ross interviews; Dockter interviews.

27 Ross interviews.

28 Dockter interviews; Napper interviews; Ross interviews.

29 Ross holograph.

30 Charles L. Buckingham, “The Telegraph of To-day,” in The Electric Telegraph: An Historical Anthology, ed.

George Shiers (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 147–50; Ross interviews; Dockter interviews. Coordinating time between the telegraphers and the dispatcher apparently was done differently at different times. Farrel Ross states that a beep was sent over the telegraph at precisely 9 A.M. every day for him to set his watch by.

Dockter’s dispatcher called around midnight and asked for the weather and the time; the two men then coordinated their watches. Having accurate watches was sufficiently important that the telegraphers were required to wear regulation watches and submit them for inspection. Again the inspection was done by different men, either annually by a certified jeweler or monthly by the watch inspector, who traveled the lines on a motor car to perform the inspections and kept a careful record of his findings on each telegrapher’s watch card.

31 Ross interviews; Dockter interviews.

32 Ibid.

33 Ross holograph; interview with Delia Ross, Sparks, Nevada, 1974.

34 Dockter interviews; Napper interview; Farrel Ross interviews.

35 Farrel Ross interviews; Dockter interviews.

36 Ibid.

37 Ross holograph. The imposed restriction on how much a railroading family could transport (and, in essence, possess) did not disturb everyone. When a bachelor, Jack Dockter carrried a bedroll, a suitcase with clothes and a few cans of food, and a box that held a few kitchen utensils, a double boiler, a frying pan, and one knife, fork and spoon. He comments, “If I had any company, why they’d have to wait until I got through eating. Then we’d wash up.”

38 Dockter interviews; Ross holograph.

39 Napper interview.

40 Interview with Arlene Dockter, Ogden, Utah, August 8, 1984; Dockter interviews.

41 Napper interview.

42 Ross holograph.

43 Interview with Delia Ross, August 4, 1984.

44 Ross holograph.

45 Napper interview; Ross holograph; Jack Dockter interviews.

46 Farrel Ross interviews.

47 Ibid.

48 Delia Ross 1974 interview.

49 Farrington, Railroads at War, 26–27, 34; Farrel Ross interviews.

50 Science Digest 14 (December 1943): 66–68; New York Times, November 16, 1945.

51 Interview with Dave Larkin, Ogden, Utah, August 8, 1984. Midlake was also abandoned.

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just scattered refuse and a few foundations in Nevada’s forty-mile desert. With the passing of these stations, railroad workers have been freed of the necessity of being so completely at the mercy of their company.

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Rolling to the 150th: Sesquicentennial of the Transcontinental Railroad

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By Christopher W. Merritt, Michael R. Polk, Kenneth P. Cannon, Michael Sheehan, Glenn Stelter, Ray Kelsey

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The celebration at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869—when the eastern and western lines of the transcontinental railroad were connected by the driving of the Golden Spike—has received much public attention, but that event represents merely the conclusion of the first phase of an American corporate and social epic. The seven years of fit-and-start construction efforts that began in 1862 culminated in the well-known and well-orchestrated festivities that are now commemorated each year at Golden Spike National Historic Site.1 Yet even before the construction workers could catch their breath or soothe their backs, the next chapter of the transcontinental story had begun.

In the days before the May 10, 1869, celebration, railroad work crews started the arduous task of making permanent the grades, fills, trestles, and culverts that had been quickly slapped together in the “Race to Promontory.”

Chinese and Irish laborers, as well as a hodgepodge of people of other ethnic and national backgrounds, worked backward down the recently built grade from Promontory Summit to replace temporary features that would not be able to sustain the constant pounding of freight and passenger railroad travel.

The railroads established section stations at regular intervals of about ten or twelve miles along the entire length of the line between

A wooden trestle spanning a 450-foot-wide cut on the Union Pacific Railroad line east of Promontory.

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A map of the original ninety-mile grade in Box Elder County known as the Promontory Branch. The 1904 construction of the Lucin Cutoff led to the abandonment of the Promontory Branch, which significantly affected the economy of northwestern Box Elder County. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

F rom Can n o n e t a l , 2 0 16

Sacramento and Omaha. These would service the maintenance needs of the railroad grade.

Larger communities such as Winnemucca, Carlin, Elko, Terrace, Kelton, Corinne, Ogden, Evanston, and Laramie served the greater needs of passengers and the more significant repairs of the steam and, later, diesel engines.2 In Utah, the most remote of these stations wrapped along the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, from Lucin to Ogden.

which included replacing cross-ties, fixing and replacing rails, stabilizing and re-ballasting the grade, and cleaning out and repairing culverts. There was also a need to service the locomotives and rolling stock of trains operating on the line. While most of those tasks were undertaken at larger facilities, the vagaries of early railroad operations sometimes required personnel at the smaller facilities to assist with the work.

In the salt barrens and dunes northwest of the lake, groups of exclusively Chinese workers, led largely by Irish foremen, toiled in the oppressive heat and biting cold of Box Elder County into the 1890s. The Chinese lived in groups of eight to seventeen individuals, in barebones towns with such names as Ombey, Bovine, Watercress, Blue Creek, and Monument, usually overseen by two Irish foremen.

Railroads required constant maintenance,

The Federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a broad-reaching anti-immigration act focused on the Chinese workers of the American West, lead to the successive employment of Japanese, Italian, and Greek laborers in the West. The isolated camps of Box Elder County quickly shifted toward housing these groups, but the heavy labor and unforgiving conditions did not change. While the Chinese concentrated in growing, urban Chinatowns throughout the

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A view of the short-lived town that sprang up at Promontory, Utah, during the completion of the transcontinental railroad, circa 1869â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1880. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

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Chinese Railroad Workers on the Central Pacific Railroad Name

Railroad Division

Work Start Date

Work End Date

Occupation at Retirement

Time in Service

Ah Hop

Salt Lake (Montello)

1871

1920

49 years, 6 months

Laborer

Toy Gee

Salt Lake (Carlin)

(1873) 1879

1923

43 years, 8 months

Laborer

Charlie Dan

Salt Lake (Sparks)

1882

1930

47 years, 7 months

Machinist helper

Gee Wo

Salt Lake

1902

1930

27 years, 8 months

Laborer

Ah Chin

Salt Lake

1880s?

Unknown

27 years

Boiler shop worker

Chin Seuy

Salt Lake

Ca. 1870

1915

30+ years

Engine wiper

Ah Nan

Salt Lake

1866

After 1915

49+ years

Engine wiper

1

2

3

4

Portraits of (1) Ah Hop, (2) Toy Gee, (3) Charlie Dan, and (4) Gee Wo, known Chinese railroad workers, taken from the Southern Pacific Bulletin.

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In 1904, the newly constructed, 102-mile-long Lucin Cutoff altered the fortunes of northwestern Box Elder County and its small railroad towns and stations. The Lucin Cutoff cut directly across the Great Salt Lake, removed the need for the longer, original route around the north side of the lake, and avoided the steep climb through the Promontory Mountains.

With the majority of travel along the Union

Pacific and Central Pacific now bypassing the towns of Terrace and Kelton, most of their residents moved elsewhere. Even the railroad moved its maintenance shops to more convenient locations. By the early 1910s, only limited railroad travel occurred on the old grade, which now primarily served wheat and sugar beet growers, ranchers, sheepherders, and some freighters to the rural communities of southern Idaho. Section stations and towns such as Terrace disappeared as the railroad destroyed or picked up entire buildings and moved them to more appropriate locations in Nevada or

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West, the tangible legacy of their achievements remains in the railroads of the western United States.

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Two children play in the construction town of Terrace, Utah. The railroad moved its shops to Nevada in 1900, and the town was deserted by the 1940s. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; US H S

Downtown Terrace in 2017, photographed from same perspective. Courtesy of Kristina Stelter.

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beyond. Some of these buildings were also acquired by nearby ranchers and homesteaders.

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In 1933, the Southern Pacific applied for a certificate of abandonment of its line from Kelton to Lucin, a distance of about fifty-five miles.3 Subsequently, the railroad filed to abandon the rest of its holdings between Kelton and Corinne, another 120 miles.4 The Interstate Commerce Commission ultimately approved the request in 1942, and the rails were repurposed at newly constructed military installations in Utah and Nevada for the World War II war effort.5 From that time forward, no trains have passed over the grades, trestles, and culverts of the Promontory Route, so painfully erected and maintained by thousands of hands.

After their abandonment, the railroad grade and what remained of its facilities deteriorated and were used for other purposes by local ranchers until the Southern Pacific Transportation Company transferred portions of the line to the National Park Service’s (NPS) Golden Spike National Historic Site (GSNHS) and the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Salt Lake Field Office.6 While the grade no longer sees freight and passenger trains, the BLM and Box Elder County promote this stretch as a Scenic Backcountry Byway through brochures and online driving tour maps or is included in Golden

Two fragments of “Bamboo” style Chinese porcelain bowls. Photo by Tessie Burningham.

Spike National Historic Site. Now, the legacy of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad is largely an archaeological landscape, rich with history, artifacts, and ambience but lacking in the people and standing architecture that made this area so important to American history.

Much of the existing historical literature of the transcontinental railroad tends to focus on the meta-narratives of western expansion and skimps on place-based and personal narratives. Archaeologists, on the other hand,

A Chinese coin, or “wen.” Photo by Chris Dunker.

Chinese gaming, or “wei-chi,” pieces found along the railroad, a small reminder of the workforce that built and maintained the road for thirty years. Photo by Chris Dunker.

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Promontory Route Railroad Trestle Complex drawings from documentation carried out as part of Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) UT-64 project. The seven trestles, recorded in 1992, are located on the original grade of the transcontinental railroad route west of Corinne, Utah, in Box Elder County. Document prepared by Sagebrush Consultants, Ogden. Collections held at Library of Congress.

while strongly suited to the deep engagement with place and lived human experience, have mostly ignored the tangible legacy of the Lucin to Corinne stretch. Richard Fike and Anan Raymond’s 1981 publication, “Rails East to Promontory,” was the first comprehensive, on-the-ground assessment of the railroad’s archaeological heritage in Box Elder County.

In a second, 1994 printing, Raymond and Fike visited each of the sidings, section stations, and towns along the abandoned grade and mixed archaeological descriptions with historical documents and remembrances.7 Limited professional archaeological work bridged the gap between Raymond and Fike and literature produced in the early 2000s.

The most prominent work done during this period was a five-year archaeological survey of the entire NPS GSNHS carried out by Sagebrush Consultants.8 Around the same time, Mike Polk of Sagebrush completed the first

Historic American Engineering Record survey and documentation of railroad trestles in Utah (consisting of seven trestles along the Promontory Route), and with funding from the NPS Sagebrush personnel undertook a controlled excavation of Promontory’s 1872–1913 roundhouse (now filled in and no longer visible to the public).9 More recently, Mike and Ann Polk have continued archaeological and historical work on section stations along the Promontory Route to better understand the railroad experience beyond the irregular and incomplete historical documents, particularly in reference to Chinese railroad workers. 10 A resurgence of interest in the archaeology of the transcontinental grade began in 2014, when the NPS’s Underrepresented Communities program awarded a grant to the Utah Division of State History, in partnership with the BLM’s Salt Lake Field Office. One component of this grant was to acquire a private consultant

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One of the seven trestles recorded as part of the HAER UT-64 documentation. This is a large format photograph of a small trestle spanning a wetland west of Corinne. This trestle was reconstructed in 1872 with large vertical and horizontal milled timbers to provide better support for heavier trains. This reconstruction replaced the juniper timber supports (seen as stumps in front of the much larger milled pilings) used in the original 1869 construction of the railroad. The late 1940s-era concrete covered metal pipe resting on the trestle is a pipeline that still carries petroleum products north from Salt Lake City refineries to Spokane, Washington. Photo by Mike Bradshaw. Library of Congress.

to conduct a targeted archaeological inventory in the locations of two known railroad section stations. These inventories, made under the direction of Kenneth Cannon of Cannon Heritage Consultants, resulted in the identification of section station building locations and thousands of nineteenth-century artifacts and the clear spatial patterning of Chinese and non -Chinese artifacts, illustrating the segregation of workers by ethnicity. While larger communities along the grade have suffered the bottle hunter’s probe and the looter’s shovel, many of the smaller stations remain intact, and future archaeological endeavors could shed light on the lived experiences of workers, foremen, business owners, and others who called this area both work and home.11 Cannon’s new findings—coupled with a growing sense of urgency regarding the condition of the transcontinental grade in anticipation

of the 150th anniversary of the Golden Spike— have reinvigorated the BLM’s management of this resource. For instance, in the 1980s a rancher deconstructed an 1870s wooden trestle to refashion its components into a corral (which, itself, is no longer even in use). During a routine visit to the transcontinental grade, BLM archaeologist Michael Sheehan identified two trestles (dating to circa 1870) badly damaged by erosion. Major engineering features such as these trestles require constant maintenance, which has not occurred since the 1940s.

One trestle in particular rested only on its central piers, with the ends free-floating away from the grade. Heavy rain had eroded the soil on a second trestle’s piers down to its twelvefoot deep base. Sheehan, in consultation with the Utah State Historic Preservation Office and other BLM staff, developed stabilization plans for both trestles, giving them—with constant vigilance—perhaps another 100 years of life.

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359 A map of the surface distribution of ethnic Chinese and Euro-American artifacts. Notice the distinct spatial segregation of artifacts by ethnicity, which likely illustrates social segregation of Chinese laborers and their EuroAmerican foremen. From Cannon et al, 2016.

The incised, interior base of a porcelain rice bowl. The incising identified the owner, who was likely a Chinese railroad worker. This artifact was found at the Matlin Section Station. Photo by Michael Polk.

A now-abandoned corral made from the remains of a transcontinental railroad trestle, photographed in 2017. The corral was built during the 1980s, an act that, while destructive in nature, showed the need for wood in this barren environment. Photo by Glenn Stelter.

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ited an unfunded burden to care for this part of American history; the agency is making efforts through education, financial partnerships, and funding requests to stop any further loss of the historic fabric. Building off this foundational work, Ray Kelsey, the BLM Salt Lake Field Office’s Recreation Planner is spearheading the creation of a management plan that will promote and protect the transcontinental railroad for the next generation and create a holistic interpretive plan for the public’s enjoyment and education.

A trestle near Lucin, Utah, that has been heavily undermined by seasonal flooding, exposing the bases of the piers. Photo by Ray Kelsey.

A view of what was once a cantilevered trestle, separated from the railroad grade on both ends and balanced on the central pier only. The BLM has now stabilized this trestle. Photo by Ray Kelsey.

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Faced with two failing trestles, archaeologist Glenn Stelter of the BLM initiated the first comprehensive survey of the remaining railroad features between Lucin and Promontory.

This section of the railroad had experienced seventy years of heavy use followed by nearly seventy years of abandonment, so it was unclear how many intact railroad features there would be until this assessment. Stelter identified ten stone, forty-four wood, and thirty-eight trestles that date to the railroad’s early reconstruction period of the 1870s. With no more section crews to maintain the railroad, the BLM inher-

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A wooden culvert, likely constructed in the 1870s–1880s. Photo by Glenn Stelter.

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The initial push for a transcontinental railroad was a pivotal event in American and Utah history that went from an unreal idea to the very real labor of tens of thousands of diverse people toiling through mountains, plains, and salt flats. Now, years after the sounds of steam engines and cosmopolitan voices have faded from the line in northwestern Utah, the BLM and its partners are trying to reawaken the American public to the material experience of the nation’s first coast-to-coast railroad. The authors wish to challenge each reader to make the drive to Terrace, Kelton, or one of a dozen spots in northwestern Utah, take a deep breath, and

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Looters and vandals continue to damage the transcontinental railroad grade in Box Elder County, as the area’s remoteness has fostered an appearance of abandonment. Further, the new interpretive signs placed by the BLM have

become the target of vandalism. All Utahns, as well as visitors to the state, have a common responsibility to respect the contributions of those who came before them by refusing to take pieces of American history for their own personal enjoyment or profit.

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The renewed emphasis on the entirety of the transcontinental railroad’s history and archaeology is gathering toward the designation of the more than ninety-mile length from Lucin to Promontory as Utah’s fifteenth National Historic Landmark (NHL). A NHL recognizes a property’s significance to the entire United States and can open further marketing and funding doors. Alongside the likes of Temple Square, Desolation Canyon, Fort Douglas, Topaz Internment Camp, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre site, a Transcontinental Railroad NHL would be a key public history piece in an argument for Utah’s significant role in American history.

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Part of the foundation of the 1873-1913 Promontory Roundhouse uncovered during excavations by the National Park Service and Sagebrush Consultants in 2002 (now covered once again by soil). Note the terra cotta drain pipe near the foundation, which helped drain water and oil from locomotive pits within the roundhouse (linear depressed areas between tracks that allowed maintenance of the underside of locomotives). Michael Polk, Sagebrush Consultants, 2002.

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Roundhouse at Terrace, Utah, circa 1870 to 1880. Locomotive â&#x20AC;&#x153;Gold Runâ&#x20AC;? is pictured, with master mechanic William McKenzie, J. A. Jacobs, an agent, and Charles Wright, engineer. USHS.

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The remains of the Terrace roundhouse in 2017. Photo by Ray Kelsey.

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1 In 1862, the U.S. Congress voted to initiate construction on the long proposed “Pacific Railroad,” favoring a proposed central alignment from Council Bluffs, Iowa, through Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, ending in Sacramento, California. Construction began in 1863, but the Civil War, combined with unanticipated difficulties by both railroads, resulted in little headway.

It was not until contractual details were renegotiated and the Civil War ended that meaningful progress was made, beginning in 1866 and ending, three years later, at Promontory Summit, Utah. David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).

2 Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt, “Chinese Workers at Central Pacific Railroad Section Stations, 1870 to 1900” (paper presented at the Chinese Railroad Workers of North America Conference, Palo Alto, California, April 14–16, 2016); Michael R. Polk, “Chinese Railroad Workers at Central Pacific Stations Ca. 1870s–1880s” (paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Washington, D.C., January 6–10, 2016).

3 Don Strack, “SP’s Promontory Branch,” Utah Rails, accessed July 12, 2017, utahrails.net/ogden/ogden-sp. php#promontory; Richard Francaviglia, Over the Range: A History of the Promontory Summit Route (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 115.

4 Docket Number 13655, March 1, 1942, ICC 252 ICC 805, Records of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), Record Group 134.7, Records of the Bureau of Enforcement, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

5 Facilities where the rails were used included the Defense Depot Ogden (which was in 1942 called the Utah Quartermaster Depot at Ogden), Hawthorne Naval Ammunition Depot in Hawthorne, Nevada (which became Hawthorne Army Depot in 1977), and the Naval Supply Depot Clearfield (Utah). David H. Mann, “The Undriving of the Golden Spike,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1969): 131; Michael R. Polk, Sheri Murray Ellis, Kevin C. O’Dell, and Donald D. Southworth, Cultural Resources Overview and Preservation Recommendations, Promontory Route – Corinne to Promontory, Utah, Sagebrush Consultants Cultural Resources Report No. 1034 (Ogden, Utah: 1998), 20–21; “Navy Gets Rail from 116 Miles of Historic Line,” Railway Age, February 20, 1943, 388–400.

6 Quitclaim Deed, April 7, 1992, “Southern Pacific Transportation Company to Bureau of Land Management,” Box Elder County Recorder, Book 519, pages 62–68.

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7 Anan S. Raymond and Richard E. Fike, Rails East to Promontory: The Utah Stations, Bureau of Land Management, Cultural Resources Series No. 8, available at nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/blm/ut/8/, accessed July 21, 2017.

8 Heather M. Weymouth, with contributions by Andrew M. Williamson, Sandy Chynoweth Pagano, and Angela L. Garrison, Golden Spike National Historic Site Systemwide Archaeological Inventory Program Fiscal Year 2003 Interim Report, Sagebrush Consultants Report No. 1303 (RMC Consultants and National Park Service, May 2004); Heather M. Weymouth, Sandy Chynoweth Pagano, and Angela L. Garrison, Archaeological Inventory of Golden Spike National Historic Site and Adjacent Bureau of Land Management Railroad Rights-of-Way Fiscal Year 2002 Interim Report, Sagebrush Consultants Report No. 1279 (RMC Consultants, May 2003); Heather M. Weymouth and Don D. Southworth, Golden Spike National Historic Site Systemwide Archaeological Inventory Program Fiscal Year 2001 Interim Report, Sagebrush Consultants Report No. 1225 (RMC Consultants and National Park Service, September 2002); Michael R. Polk and Wendy Simmons Johnson, From Lampo Junction to Rozel: The Archaeological History of the Transcontinental Railroad across the Promontory Mountains, Utah, Sagebrush Consultants Report No. 1614 (Ogden, Utah: 2012).

9 Promontory Route Railroad Trestles, Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress, accessed July 21, 2017, loc.gov/pictures/item/ut0700, loc.gov/ pictures/item/ut0389, loc.gov/item/ut0394, loc.gov/ pictures/item/ut0395; Michael R. Polk and Adrienne Anderson, “Central Pacific Railroad Operations and the Promontory Summit Roundhouse Excavation” (paper delivered at the Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Louis, Missouri, January 7–11, 2004).

10 Michael R. Polk, “Interpreting Chinese Worker Camps on the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah,” The Archaeology of Chinese Railroad Workers in North America thematic issue of Historical Archaeology 49, no. 1 (2015); Michael R. Polk, “Ethnic Chinese at Central Pacific Railroad Maintenance Camps” (paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Seattle, Washington, January 6–11, 2015); Michael R. Polk, “The History and Influence of Chinese Railroad Workers on the Transcontinental Railroad: A View from the End of the Line at Promontory Summit” (paper presented at the Archaeology Network of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Workshop, Stanford, California, October 10–12, 2013); Michael R. Polk, “PostConstruction Chinese Worker Housing on the Central Pacific Railroad: 1870–1900” (paper presented at the Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Fort Worth, Texas, January 4–8, 2017); Polk and Merritt, “Chinese Workers at Central Pacific Railroad Section Stations, 1870 to 1900.”

11 Kenneth P. Cannon, H. L. Martin, J. M. Peart, M. B. Cannon, J. Blong, P. Santarone, K. Selmon, and K. Price, The Archaeology of Chinese Railroad Workers in Utah: Results of Surveys in Box Elder and Emery Counties.

USUAS Special Report No. 2 (2016). On file at the Utah Division of State History, Salt Lake City, Utah.

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imagine life in the 1870s in this austere landscape on the fringes of the rapidly industrializing United States. Archaeology is the past we can touch; history places our lived experiences into a broader context: both converge in Box Elder County to remind us of those who came before.

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BOOK REVIEWS

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Mapping the Four Corners: Narrating the Hayden Survey of 1875

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By Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xvii + 284 pp.

Cloth, $29.95.

In that banner year of 1776, the first recorded Europeans—part of a small, ill-advised, illplanned, and ill-provisioned party—managed to track and map an irregular 1,700-mile oval around the Four Corners of today’s New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah (then part of Spanish New Mexico). A mere ninety-nine years later, in 1875, came the well-advised, meticulously planned, and abundantly provisioned Hayden Survey. Although the authors of the present volume have no reason to mention the Domínguez-Escalante “expedition” of 1776 and its cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, the contrast is stark. Not only had the sovereignty of this vast region changed, but also the occasional New Mexican traders to the Ute Indians had given rise to a tsunami of Anglo settlers, miners, and ranchers that threatened the very existence of the Ute people. One thing hadn’t changed; there was little water.

Masterfully compiled and interpreted, this documentary chronicle focuses on the 1875 summer field session of the larger U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories, 1867–1879, directed by Ferdinand V. Hayden.

The ultimate goal of the so-called Hayden Survey, really a series of civilian scientific surveys that vied for federal funding with the conventional, less scientific military surveys of the time, was “to produce a series of thematic maps giving visual expression to the region’s economic potential—geology, natural resources, topography—everything that settlers, miners, entrepreneurs, and policy makers would need for an orderly, efficient, and profitable development of the region” (15).

After a festive parade of men and mules down Denver’s main street on June 7, 1875, this particular Hayden survey broke “into small field groups, each with a topographer and geologist working in tandem, supported by two or three packers and a cook” (16). Map 1 details how widely five of the “divisions” dispersed into New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but mostly into Colorado. Creatively chosen primary sources— newspaper articles by “guest” journalists, along with correspondence, diary entries, field notes, and memoirs—sweep the reader along with these “men creating maps while experiencing a hearty adventure” (xiii).

Perhaps the best remembered of Hayden’s illustrious subordinates in the field that summer (while Hayden himself delayed in Washington, D.C., directing the operation from there) was William Henry Jackson who led the “Photographic Division.” Jackson had worked for Hayden before, most notably in Yellowstone.

His was the only division not assigned to a specified geographical area. He was to go wherever to get spectacular photos of the Colorado Rockies, for which he packed a 20 by 24 inch camera, glass plates, and portable dark room.

Nothing furthered Hayden’s purposes more than breathtaking graphic imagery.

In the field, while members of the various divisions climbed crests, set up tripod and plane table, sketched prominent features, noted bearings, and applied triangulation, they always had to find water and hope not to arouse local Native peoples. A real scare occurred in mid-August 1875. The Western or Grand River Division under Henry Gannett and the Primary Triangulation Division led by James Terry Gardner, while traveling between the La Sal and Abajo Mountains in Utah (both of which appear on Miera’s map of 1777), actually engaged in a two-day running firefight with a band of Utes. To enable their escape, the intruders jettisoned much of their gear. “What we saved,” wrote Cuthbert Mills, “were the

— John L. Kessell University of New Mexico

A Modest Homestead: Life in Small Adobe Homes in Salt Lake City, 1850–1897

By Laurie J. Bryant Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017. xv + 295 pp.

Paper, $24.95.

With A Modest Homestead, Laurie J. Bryant provides the reader with an insightful look into “ordinary houses and everyday life” in early Salt Lake City (5). United by their faith and their belief in the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the original Mormon settlers of the Salt Lake Valley shared another characteristic: they constructed most of their first homes of adobe. Trees and timber were comparatively scarce and the few sawmills and brick kilns needed to produce conventional lumber and bricks could not keep up with demand for housing materials. Thus, the pioneers resorted to adobe, a building block composed of mud and straw, hand formed into bricks, and left to cure in the hot sun. Bryant’s curiosity about the approximately 200 adobe brick buildings in Salt Lake City that she has documented, as well as the people who built and lived in those houses, form the basis of this book.

The second section describes ninety-four of the extant adobe houses that the author identified in her research, with the houses organized by the historic ward designations of the LDS church. Each description includes a drawn image or photograph of the house, its street address, a narrative sketch of the early building form and, when it is available, a brief genealogy of the people who inhabited the home. The descriptions are supported by copious endnotes that provide evidence of the broad range of resources Bryant used in her extensive research.

Collectively, these descriptions, when placed in context of each other, form an almost palpable glimpse of everyday life. To aid the reader in following and locating the people identified in the book, the author has included each person mentioned individually in the index. This strategy enables the reader to not only identify them but also make the connections between those associated with several buildings. As I read the descriptions, there were numerous times when I wanted to venture out and visit

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A Modest Homestead contains two sections. In the first, an extended introduction and background, Bryant presents the context necessary to understand the place of adobe in Salt Lake City’s emergence from a seemingly desolate landscape. She also describes the difficulties of fully illuminating the backgrounds of Salt Lake City’s adobe buildings and their first inhabitants, including the pioneers’ relative lack of time or skills to record the everyday details of life, the resulting scarcity of documentation in the public record, and the sociocultural environment of the early city. Still, Bryant writes, adobe buildings “are a life-sized link to the owners and builders,” their details lending clues to the world of nineteenth-century Salt Lake City (46).

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In 1777, Bernardo de Miera drew in Santa Fe the earliest map, his “Plano Geografico,” of the Four Corners, long before there were any corners. In 1877, Hayden published in Washington, a stunning Atlas of Colorado, mainly the work of master geologist, artist, and cartographer William Henry Holmes. The dizzying precision of the geological cross-sections, the panoramas, and the maps, especially sheets IX and XV, both labeled “SW. Colorado and Parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah,” would have struck Miera speechless.

Bryant does not focus on the glitterati of the day: the prominent church leaders and their welldocumented lifestyles; rather, she explores the lives of the everyday men and women whose legacies have largely gone undocumented.

Some of these people, through the sheer commonness of their daily lives, and others, who had little to no literacy skills, left behind little evidence of their lives. Bryant took on a Herculean task and succeeded in her goal of illustrating the commonalities of the pioneers as they strove to achieve a permanent settlement.

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scientific records of the work done on the trip, all the mules except four, and our lives” (186). As a field epilogue, during the 1950s and 1960s, what was left of the discarded equipment became the object of a treasure hunt. Much of what was recovered resides today at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming.

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these buildings in person. Toward that end, I would have enjoyed seeing vicinity maps for each ward showing the locations of the houses described therein; unfortunately these were not included.

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A Modest Homestead enhances the historiographical niche that expands the awareness of the life of the common men and women of the era, their hardships and shortages, and their ability to succeed in establishing a community.

This book will appeal to a variety of readers.

Social historians and genealogists who enjoy learning about the early pioneers will appreciate the insights provided. Architectural historians will gain an enhanced perspective on the physicality of the built environment during the pioneer era and the transformation that occurred in the late-nineteenth-century Salt Lake City. Lastly, explorers of the urban condition will enjoy seeking out and observing firsthand the actual buildings identified and described in the book.

Overall, this book introduces the reader, and potential future researchers, to the use of adobe brick in Salt Lake City in an engaging manner that, as noted earlier, will be useful for a variety of people who follow Utah history. In and of itself, A Modest Homestead encompasses a rich array of information on the early pioneer families that will serve as a starting point for other researchers, and the methodology and resources Bryant employed will provide a precedent for similar histories in other communities.

— Robert A. Young University of Utah

Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada, and the Fish Creek Massacre

By Silvio Manno Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016. xvi + 278 pp. Paper, $29.95.

In this work, Silvio Manno painstakingly describes events leading up to and resulting from a violent confrontation near Eureka, Nevada, on August 18, 1879, the so-called Fish Creek

Massacre. Five striking Italian and Swiss-Italian charcoal burners died in gunfire after weeks of negotiations over the price of charcoal and the formation of the Charcoal Burners’ Protective Association (CPBA). Facing their demands, corporate leaders had predictably called on the governor, who deployed the militia, while the sheriff arrested twenty-two Italians, including union leadership. Another attempted arrest led to the killings. Subsequent legal responses included a coroner’s investigation, grand jury inquiries into the culpability of the lawmen and the burners, and the arrival of the Italian Consul from San Francisco in the midst of this inquiry.

Manno’s work displays clear strengths and weaknesses. His fluency in the Italian language has allowed him to use sources inaccessible to English speakers, such as official Italian documents and a conference paper presented in his native language. His friendship with Italian Americans in Eureka, some of them descendants of charcoal burners, facilitated access to privately held papers. Yet this book is hamstrung by the author’s unfamiliarity with the historical method and significant sources, both primary and secondary. In his “Author’s Notes,” Manno explains that he spent ten years researching this book, simultaneously “garnering the wherewithal of scholarship” to create a work that “tested my impartiality” (247).

An Italian immigrant himself, Manno clearly reveals his sympathy for the burners in his flowery “Conclusion” (225–32). His attempt at impartiality has led him to provide lengthy paraphrases and elaborate speculation based on newspaper articles, particularly from the pro-business Eureka Daily Leader and the Eureka Daily Sentinel, which constitute the principal sources for this entire work. His reliance on these papers skews this study in painful ways. Descriptions of all the newspaper articles discussing the massacre, for example, with digressions into their reliability, mean that one has to dig hard to discover what happened at Fish Creek. Manno provides no succinct explanation. In another example, the outcome of the grand jury investigation of the slayings ends with the exoneration of the lawmen and the release on bail of “the Italians who had been jailed on charges of assault with intent to kill and perjury” (222). According to the author,

Overall, this work is a beginning. Manno has effectively fulfilled his purpose in resurrected a single, harsh clash from the oblivion of history.

But he leaves the reader with many more questions than answers.

— Nancy J. Taniguchi

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. xxi + 389.

Cloth, $39.95

The Women: A Family Story won the Mormon History Association’s Best Personal History/ Memoir book award in June 2017 because it is well written and utilizes a variety of sources that provide an insider’s view of a southern Utah family over multiple generations. Bate worked on this book for thirty years, publishing four articles on the subject in Utah Historical Quarterly and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought between 1986 and 1995. The present volume focuses on the story of four generations of women in one family: Catherine Campbell Steele (1816–1891), Young Elizabeth Stapley (1847–1938), Sarah Catherine “Kate” Roundy (1866–1949), and Sarah Elizabeth Sylvester (1888–1938).

Additionally, readers learn much about extended family members, making The Women a genealogical treasure trove. Fortunately, Bate often connects individuals with their relationship to the broader family, thereby helping readers navigate the many people mentioned in the book. This history also includes family stories about neighbors, local community and church leaders, and even a visit by Warren G. Harding to southern Utah in 1923. It’s not a surprise that “this large multigenerational family had conflicts” (228). However, Bate weaves together a story than includes family loyalty, love, forgiveness, and respect.

The matriarch of the family, Catherine Campbell Steele, was a Mormon convert in Ireland.

She and her husband, John Steele (1821–1903),

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Likewise, contextualization and subsequent analysis is weak. For context, Manno utilizes sporadic quotations from Patricia Nelson Limerick’s iconic Legacy of Conquest, from Andrew Rolle’s The Immigrant Upraised, and from a scattering of other works that lean toward studies of violence and immigration. He ignores comparative labor studies, such as Allan Kent Powell’s fine Utah-based work, The Next Time We Strike, which would reveal well-known patterns in labor conflict in the American West near the turn of the twentieth century. Such a study would also indicate what is not typical about the event Manno describes. Specifically, the author intriguingly notes but does not analyze a social clash between wealthy Swiss-Italian and Italian merchants and their destitute charcoal burning compatriots. Yet some of the more well-to-do ethnic Italians supported the burners, even initially heading their union.

Manno mentions that the mining companies had tons of charcoal stockpiled before engaging with the unionizing burners. Why then were the burners not simply ignored, and the stockpiles used to run the furnaces? Surely if the charcoal burners were as impoverished as Manno declares, they would be forced to move on. Their union is portrayed as weak and disorganized, so did it really constitute a threat?

Perhaps company records or the governor’s correspondence could enlighten us. The arrival of the Italian Consul is unusual. Most frustrating, Nevada’s political context is unclear. After describing a number of telegrams sent to Nevada’s governor that resulted in deploying the militia to Eureka, Manno notes in passing that “during the violent outbreak, Governor John H. Kinkead was in Bodie, California.” The lieutenant governor was in San Francisco, so the Nevada government was headed by “Senator W. R. King, president pro tempore of the state senate” (152). Unlike most protagonists, who tend to enjoy lengthy biographies (sometimes based on census records in addition to the newspapers), King is not profiled in this book. He apparently had an important role in

the confrontation, which deserves further explanation.

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“the virtual dearth of information exhibited in the local press after the grand jury’s verdict [means that] the subsequent condition of the charcoal burners remained unknown” (223).

One longs for more information from appropriate legal sources.

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immigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois, arriving shortly after the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. had been killed. Later, John enlisted in the Mormon Battalion. The couple eventually arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Their daughter, Young Elizabeth, was the first Mormon born in Utah— an honor that followed her throughout her life.

In 1850, the family “was called to . . . [help] found a settlement more than two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City . . . in Southern Utah” (18). They arrived in an open valley on January 13, 1851, and participated in building the new community, Parowan.

Bate uses traditional historical sources, such as diaries, letters, business and church minutes, and contemporary newspaper reports, to tell this story. However, he extends his research to include family and community folklore, personal histories, family artifacts, and, most importantly, oral histories—the foundation of this book. Though ostensibly the story of four generations of women, The Women is also about Bate’s great-aunt Reba Roundy LeFevre (1904– 2001), to whom it is dedicated. Readers must refer to the family pedigree charts often to keep the main characters straight. Unfortunately, one chart identifies Reba’s birth and death incorrectly (xxi). Obviously, if she had died in 1903, Bate could not have interviewed her or attended her funeral. In the end, the story is familiar and could easily be that of almost any Euro American family, whether they were Catholics living in Maryland, Southern Baptists living in Alabama, or Congregationalists living in Maine. If readers were to change the names and change the locations, Bate’s family story— highlighting birth, death, tragedy, triumph, and survival—would be a typical American story.

Family history books based on oral histories present challenges. As the dust jacket of The Women notes, “Family history, usually destined or even designed for limited consumption, is a familiar genre with Mormon culture. Mostly written with little attention to standards of historical scholarship, such works are distinctly hagiographic forms of family memorabilia.”

Family history works often make mortals into super heroes, with flawed relatives and neighbors perhaps included as part of the story as a

way of highlighting the main character or specific branch of an extended family. In this way, readers learn about a family through the eyes of those who have left their version of the story.

In one sense, The Women is also Bate’s story, for readers learn as much about him and his great-aunt—especially her memories and family lore—as they do about the four generations of women at the heart of the book.

As Reba opined about her family, “They were struggling human beings, so no use throwing a silk mist over their lives” (ix). Bate doesn’t put “a silk mist over their lives,” and as a result, readers know more about these people, who by and large would have been remembered only by a tombstone inscription.

— Richard Neitzel Holzapfel Brigham Young University

CHRISTOPHER MERRITT is deputy SHPO, Utah Division of State History. MICHAEL R. POLK is the principal archaeologist at Aspen Ridge Consultants, L.L.C. KENNETH P. CANNON is the president and owner of Cannon Heritage Consultants and research assistant professor in the Anthropology Program at Utah State University. MICHAEL SHEEHAN is the cultural resources program lead for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)-Salt Lake Field Office. GLENN STELTER is the fuels archaeologist for the BLM-Salt Lake Field Office.

RAY KELSEY is the outdoor recreation planner for the BLM-Salt Lake Field Office.

DALE L. MORGAN (1914–1971) was a respected historian of the American West. Morgan’s work on overland migration, mapping, and exploration includes The Great Salt Lake, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the American West, and Overland in 1846. At the time this essay was published Morgan was a research specialist and editor for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

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ROBERT M. UTLEY, at the time of publication of his article, was regional historian of the Southwest Region of the National Park Service, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Before retiring in 1980, he had served as chief historian, director of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, and assistant director of the National Park Service, and deputy director of the President’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He is the author of twenty-three books on western American history.

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EDWARD GEARY, a native of Emery County, Utah, is professor emeritus of English and former director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. His publications include Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood, The Proper Edge of the Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah, and A History of Emery County.

RICHARD SAUNDERS is a long-time student of Utah history and presently serves as dean of the library at Southern Utah University.

He has edited several of Dale Morgan’s works for publication or new editions and is at work on a biography of Morgan. He is also editor of Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails.

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DORIS DANT retired in 2012 as an associate professor of linguistics from Brigham Young University. For fifteen years, she was executive editor of BYU Studies. She coedited Nearly Everything Imaginable: The Everyday Life of Utah's Mormon Pioneers and Turning Freud Upside Down and coauthored The Book of Mormon Paintings of Minerva Teichert.

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CONTRIBUTORS

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U TA H I N F O C U S

370 Throngs of people welcome Charles Lindbergh on his visit to Salt Lake City on September 3, 1927. In May 1927, Lindbergh successfully flew the first ever nonstop flight between New York and Paris. This image from the Salt Lake City parade greeting Lindbergh bears witness not

only to the pilot’s popularity but also to the many kinds of transportation in use by the 1920s. Visible in this photograph are cars, motorcycles, trolley lines, pedestrians, and—in the person of Lucky Lindy—aviation. Main Street and 400 South, Salt Lake City, 1927. —USHS

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042-143X) is published quarterly by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101-1182. The editor is Brad Westwood; the co-managing editors are Holly George and Jedediah S. Rogers, with offices at the same address as the publisher. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the society or its magazine.

The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 1,950 copies printed; 1,337 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 1,242 total paid circulation; 107 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; 1,444 total distribution; 506 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; total, 1,950.

The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,950 copies printed; 1,376 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 0 dealer and counter sales; 1,246 total paid circulation; 155 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution, 1,401; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 549; total, 1,950.