In This Issue

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.

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 veritable 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Notes

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).

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

USHS