Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 87, Number 3, 2019

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CONTENTS Roundtable

Articles

DEPARTMENTS

218 Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History

179 IN THIS ISSUE 253 REVIEWS AND NOTICES 263 CONTRIBUTORS 264 UTAH IN FOCUS

Cartography and the Founding of Salt Lake City 182 The Founding Document of the Mormon West

By Rick Grunder and Paul E. Cohen

By Richard L. Saunders

201 Contextualizing Early Mormon Maps 238 Public Philosophy and the Idea of the University A Cautionary Response

By Richard V. Francaviglia

206 Salt Lake City as Cultural Symbol

The University of Utah’s Great Issues Forum, 1952–1974

By John Nilsson

By Steven L. Olsen

209 Another Gridded Street Plan?

By Ronald E. Grim

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Reviews

253 Across the Continent The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell

By Daniel Davis Reviewed by Kevin P. Keefe

254 The Mormon Hierarchy Wealth & Corporate Power

By D. Michael Quinn Reviewed by Samuel D. Brunson

255 Saints, Slaves, and Blacks 3

The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.

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By Newell G. Bringhurst Reviewed by Russell Stevenson

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256 American Indian History on Trial

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By E. Richard Hart Reviewed by Ian Smith

258 Both Sides of the Bullpen

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Navajo Trade and Posts

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By Robert S. McPherson Reviewed by Bruce E. Johansen

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notices

260 Navajo Textiles The Crane Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science

By Laurie D. Webster, Louise I. Stiver, D. Y. Begay, and Lynda Teller Pete

260 All Because of a Mormon Cow Historical Accounts of the Grattan Massacre, 1854–1855 Edited by John D. McDermott, R. Eli Paul, and Sandra J. Lowry

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The lead piece—written by Grunder and Cohen, who have since sold the map to the Library of Congress—thoroughly sets the table, discussing what the map is, how it came into their possession, and why the evidence places this map as the founding document not only of Salt Lake City but, as they write, “the Mormon West.” The response essays, all by distinguished scholars, may be conceptualized as concentric circles. The first addresses issues most immediate to the map and the settlement of Salt Lake, directly engaging points made in the lead essay.

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The second steps back from the map to address what the document reveals about how early Mormons conceptualized their new homeland, characterizing the enterprise as both a spiritual and practical one. The final response essay takes the story national, suggesting influences from cities like Philadelphia and Chicago and contrasting Salt Lake City’s grid pattern with others that derived from standardized township and range surveys. The plat is certainly a prized artifact, a traceable connection to the past, but even more so when scrutinized and contextualized by this roundtable. It may even be that the hard historical work of evaluating this map helps us rethink the founding of Salt Lake City and Mormon settlement of the American West.

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In 2016, Rick Grunder and Paul Cohen, collectors and scholars of rare documents, announced they had purchased a map, made of sheepskin, from the family of Jesse W. Fox, former surveyor general of Utah Territory. The document made a stir: here, reportedly, was the earliest plat of Salt Lake City—showing the grid layout, nine blocks east to west and fifteen blocks north to south, with varying blocks designated “Temple” or “Public”—only weeks after the arrival of Latter-day Saints in the Great Basin. Among the revelations, on the plat’s upper-left corner, is the name H. G. Sherwood, who had been tasked, along with Orson Pratt, to survey the new city. We lead out this issue with a roundtable discussion that arose out of the map’s unveiling and a host of questions that accompany it. Some of these deal with provenance and authenticity, while others are conceptual and historiographical. Because history is an ever-changing science—based on the surfacing of new evidence or the asking of new questions—good history questions, verifies, and debates. The essays here do just that, drawing on direct and circumstantial evidence to establish not only what the map is but what it means.

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In This Issue

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The next two essays in this issue introduce us to intellectual thought through two disciplines— history and philosophy—operating at the center of public discourse in the mid-twentieth century. At midcentury, the gulf between the history produced by academics and that consumed by the general public was narrower than it now is; historians often refer to American history produced then as consensus history because it emphasized common values and identities over class conflict and social divisions. The first piece takes a lens to Juanita Brooks, the giant of a historian most readers will be familiar with and even empathetic to, and asks the seemingly innocuous question: Why do we consider Brooks great? In her contemporaries’ words, heroic? The answer requires looking at not only what Brooks did, but even more the intellectual waters she swam in leading up to publication of her classic work, The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Here we are talking about the emergence

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At midcentury, the Philosophy Department at the University of Utah was dominated by adherents of pragmatism, a school of thought

that connected knowledge with practical application. For these faculty, philosophy was to be practiced beyond the walls of the academy to address the pressing issues of the day. The Great Issues Forum filled this role. Between 1952 and 1974, local faculty and invited guests addressed philosophical, ethical, religious, and political topics in a series of lectures and roundtable conversations. For philosophy faculty, the forum placed the department in a leadership role in university and community intellectual life. The forum—and philosophy’s broader influence—did not survive the increasing specialization of the discipline. The retreat from widespread public influence befell academic philosophy, just as it did history.

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of a new way of telling the history of Utah and Mormonism. At the forefront of this transformation was Brooks and her young mentor, Dale Morgan, who employed what Richard Saunders calls a documentary approach that valued evidence over theology or cultural solidarity.

Brooks was part of a sea change that brought Utah history into professional and academic ranks and changed public understanding of the past. This article was originally delivered by the author as the Juanita Brooks Lecture at Dixie State University on March 28, 2019.

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UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Journal of

Edited by Jessie Embry The Journal of Mormon History aspires to be the preeminent journal worldwide in the field of Mormon history, fostering independent scholarly research into all aspects of the Mormon past, and publishing rigorously peer-reviewed articles and book reviews that meet the highest levels of originality, literary quality, accuracy, and relevance.

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Mormon History

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Journal of Mormon History is published by the University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Mormon History Association.

For membership and subscription information, please visit: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jmh.html

www.press.uillinois.edu • (217) 244-0626 • journals@uillinois.edu

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“Street in Great Salt Lake City—looking east.” This scene was also published in Howard Stansbury’s Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (1852). Ackerman Lithr. 379 Broadway N.Y., [1851?]. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-13769.

Cartography and the Founding of Salt Lake City

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With one exception, no major city can trace its origin to its first hour of existence and to a single individual. That exception is Salt Lake City.

Brigham Young founded the capital of Utah at five o’clock on the afternoon of July 28, 1847. The beginnings of the city can be dated from that moment, and after more than 150 years in seclusion, the plat map that was used to lay out the city has been discovered. Henry Garlick Sherwood’s “plat of the Great City of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake” carried out Young’s instructions to survey the designated earth in conformity with Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s vision for his City of Zion. Drafted in ink on a piece of sheepskin and mounted on a rudimentary wooden roller, the plan for the “First Survey” was acquired by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress in 2017 (fig. 1).1

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The Founding Document of the Mormon West

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In the annals of Mormon history, nothing is more Homeric than the Latter-day Saints’ overland trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Four days after Brigham Young arrived in the valley, he selected the place that would forever mark the geographical and spiritual center of Mormonism. According to Thomas Bullock, Young’s “clerk of the camp,” “President Young waived his hands and said, ‘Here is the forty acres for the Temple lot.’” He then instructed Orson Pratt, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, to “tell Father Sherwood how many degrees of variation of compass there is at this spot, so that the City may be laid out perfectly Square North & South, East & West.”2 Today that spot is located on the southeast corner of Temple Square where a plaque spells out in bronze letters: “FIXED BY ORSON PRATT ASSISTED BY HENRY G. SHERWOOD, AUGUST 3, 1847, WHEN BEGINNING THE ORIGINAL SURVEY OF ‘GREAT SALT LAKE CITY,’ AROUND THE ‘MORMON’ TEMPLE SITE DESIGNATED BY BRIGHAM YOUNG JULY 28, 1847” (figs. 2 & 3).3 Brigham Young knew intuitively that Sherwood (1785–1867) was the only man for the job. In a word, he was the most experienced surveyor among the first wave of settlers. Sherwood had converted to the LDS

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church in 1832, but on July 22, 1839, he was hovering near death in Commerce, Illinois, the hamlet on the Mississippi River the Latter-day Saints purchased in 1839 and renamed Nauvoo.

According to Wilford Woodruff, Joseph Smith commanded him “in the name of Jesus Christ to arise and come out of his tent,” and before long Sherwood made an astonishing recovery.4 Many of the twenty-eight remaining years of his life were devoted to church affairs. Smith employed Sherwood to survey his properties, and others in Nauvoo also called upon him to carry out these tasks.5 After “the dark clouds of sorrow” gathered above Nauvoo, forcing the abandonment of most of the city, the surveyor became the oldest member of the vanguard company to settle the corner of Mexican territory on the eastern edge of the Great Basin.6 Sherwood was a jack-of-all-trades whose “great importance” in the cartography of Salt Lake City has only recently been recognized.

“While Sherwood was a very prominent citizen of Nauvoo,” wrote the historian Michael Homer, “his profile in Salt Lake City was less apparent until [the discovery of his plat of Salt Lake City. T]he plat is not only a foundational artifact, but the narrative of its creation is a significant contribution to Utah’s history.” Before the plat’s reappearance in 2014, the surveyor named on the plaque at Temple Square had become so obscure that Richard Francaviglia makes no mention of him in his 272-page The Mapmakers of New Zion (2015).7 The first days of Utah history are vividly chronicled in Thomas Bullock’s diary. Church leaders “approved the building of the temple on the square, the laying out of wide streets (eight rods), spacious lots (each one acre and a quarter), and sidewalks twenty feet wide, and mandated that houses be located far enough from neighboring homes to prevent fire from spreading house to house.”8 The perfect squares were thus separated by streets that were 132 feet wide, making the embryonic city “[b]y far the largest grid in the nation (and probably in the world) . . . with [660]-foot-square blocks—ten acres!”9 “Upon every alternate block,” wrote Pratt in 1850, “four houses were to be built on the east, and four on the west sides of the square, but none on the north and south sides. . . . In this plan there will be no houses fronting each other on the opposite sides of streets.”10 Young is often credited with

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originality here, yet, as David Bigler noted, the geometrical design, including its famous streets wide enough for a wagon and team to turn around easily, “is almost a carbon copy of plans for an earlier Mormon city, ‘New Jerusalem, City of Zion,’ designed by Joseph Smith” (fig. 4)11 “We have commenced the survey of a city this morning,” Young wrote to Charles C. Rich on August 2, 1847.12 Henry Sherwood and Orson Pratt, who served as scientific observer on the trail west, began to take the measure of the holy city as a warm breeze blew from the northwest, but the work was cut short when their measuring rods proved inadequate for running city lines. The surveyors had to wait “until the chain could be tested by a standard pole, which had to be brought from the mountains.” The apostle Heber C. Kimball was dispatched to the nearby mountains, returning towards evening “with some good house logs and poles for measuring.”13 With reliable rods in hand, Pratt and Sherwood were back on the Temple block on Tuesday, August 3. So little had been accomplished on August 2 that some sources, such as the plaque on Temple Square, cite August 3 as the first day of the survey. From the beginning, Brigham Young took fervent interest in every aspect of the process, according to Bullock, who makes clear that Sherwood was firmly in charge. When help was needed, Young called on volunteers “to assist Father Sherwood in surveying the city.”14 They encountered problems along the way.

When “[t]he Surveyors run a line on the NW & NE Corner of Temple Block,” its dimensions overwhelmed them.15 Just circumambulating the forty acres with their surveying apparatus was cumbersome. The ideal city—as conceived

by Joseph Smith—encompassed twenty-four temples in its central blocks. However, once Sherwood and Pratt began working, the size of the square became impractical. At first, church leaders talked of diminishing the acreage by one-half; on Wednesday, August 4, they had further reduced the square by three-quarters: “the Twelve [Apostles] held council again . . . when they gave as their natural opinions that they could not do justice to forty acres; hence ten acres was decided for the Temple Block.”16

By August 7, the apostles in residence were ready “to select their inheritances. President Young claimed a block east of the Temple, and running

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While Sherwood was traveling, Thomas Bullock made a truncated pencil diagram of the middle blocks of the proposed city and dated it August 16, 1847. This map was actually the second of several derivatives Bullock would make of Sherwood’s plat.21 His first was begun just as the Pratt and Sherwood survey was getting underway. “I also Make a plot of the City,” he wrote on August 3, “when President Young came into the tent & orders me to rest, and take care of myself.” If Young had had confidence in Bullock’s acumen as a surveyor or mapmaker, he might have turned to him on July 28, instead of to Orson Pratt, and instructed his clerk to execute the survey. In fact, Young seemed to be discouraging Bullock’s mapmaking aspirations when, on the day he was drafting his map, the church leader urged him not to “worry [him]self so much about the business, but preserve [his] health for future usefulness.”22 Bullock’s journal then falls silent on the subject

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The Sherwood and Bullock plats had been inaccessible and virtually unknown to historians for decades when Will Bagley came across Bullock’s in the Thomas Bullock papers and described it in The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock (1997). The scholars who examined the map could plainly see that not only was it dated “16 Augt. 47,” but that the mapmaker had written on the verso “original Plat G S L City.” Because of the docket—and the absence of the Sherwood plat (its discovery would not be announced until 2016)—Bullock’s plat has been cited in recent years as the first of Salt Lake City. Before the city “could take form,” wrote Francaviglia, “a plat map was needed. That task fell to Thomas Bullock. . . . Prepared on or before August 16, the map served as a blueprint for development.”26

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On August 16, Bullock “made another new map.”24 Drawn in pencil, that second work— which survives in the Bullock Papers at the Church History Library—must have superseded his earlier one, which was then no longer needed. The earlier map disappeared, and nothing further seems to be known about it. A purpose of the later map was to record or update lots claimed by the leaders present in the valley at the time.25 Since none had picked the less-desirable lots on the outskirts of the city, Bullock had no need, or indeed space on his 11” x 9” piece of paper, to delineate the lower three rows of blocks (numbers 1–27) or the uppermost rows (numbers 127–135).

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“Wednesday 11 August 1847—Clear Sky, Pleasant morning,” began Bullock’s official record on the day Brigham Young approved the plan: “President Young reported Father Sherwood’s Survey of City runs 15 Blocks North & South by 9 East & West.”19 This announcement, carefully entered in Bullock’s journal, is the earliest reference to the 15 by 9 block configuration that organized the central blocks of Salt Lake City. While the grounds continued to be measured for another nine days, Sherwood’s obligation to Young had been honored, and he was at liberty to go on “an exploring expedition to Cache Valley,” eighty miles northeast of the Salt Lake Valley. The date of his departure is not recorded, but he returned on August 20 from a trip that would normally take five or six days to complete.20

of cartography, picking up six days later when “all of the Council meet in Tent, examine map which I finished while they were present.

Marked out the Blocks for the Council.”23

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southeast, to settle his friends around him.”17 Later he would add contiguous land to this property. The seedlings of the city were planted that Saturday, and nine days later, Young, Pratt and three other apostles gathered in a tent to establish a system for naming streets and numbering lots. “An alteration was also made in the order of numbering lots in the alternate blocks,” reported Bullock on August 16, “so as to have all uniformly beginning at the SE Corner of the Block.”18 Whether a block was four lots wide, or instead four lots tall, the southeastern lot would always be Lot No. 1, with numbers progressing in a clock-wise direction.

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If this map had been such a blueprint, Bullock’s name would be engraved on the plaque on Temple Square, and Salt Lake City would look different today. For one thing, the core of the city would consist of 36 fewer blocks. Bullock’s map delineated 11 blocks North and South and 9 blocks East and West, not the 15 by 9 configuration Brigham Young had approved on August 11. Secondly, the public squares would be in different locations because Bullock mistakenly assigned all three to the wrong blocks.27 One of these misplaced blocks helps us to understand the chronology of the early diagrams of Salt Lake City.

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On the morning of August 3, Pratt and Sherwood were already on the ground marking the boundaries where the pioneers were planning to construct an adobe fort for safety and shelter. “The Surveyors,” recorded Bullock, “. . . run out the chain to the Dobie Square which is 3 blocks South by 3 West from Temple Square.”

Bullock recorded its coordinates precisely that day, but on his August 16 diagram, he assigned the square to the wrong block. While such a fundamental error betrays Bullock’s inadequacies as a cartographer, it helps us understand the sequence of creation.

“Bullock’s map,” Francaviglia wrote in an email on June 6, 2016, “is regarded as a prototype for [the early maps of Salt Lake City] and I cannot disagree with that assertion.”28 If the August 16, 1847, map had been the prototype for the city, then Pratt and Sherwood’s plat would follow the cartography of the Bullock map and would also have Dobie Square on the wrong block (rather than where the fort was instead constructed on what is now Pioneer Park). But Young’s designated surveyors had the squares in the correct blocks and they placed them there before Bullock delineated a single line on his first “plot.”29 Bagley called Bullock’s map “a rough plat of the city,” and later he contrasted it with Sherwood’s: “The discovery of this amazing article [i.e., the Sherwood plat], gave me new appreciation of the importance of early Mormon Utah surveys, which I had assumed were pretty Mickey Mouse.”30 The most minute trivia is faithfully recorded in Bullock’s journal alongside events of momentous import: Brigham Young’s voice was “very hoarse” at 10:00 p.m. and “hunted for the cow and got very tired.” Had Bullock been charged with the design of the western Zion, the assignment would have received at least as much attention in his journal as the report that “the first four chickens in the ‘Great Salt Lake City’ were hatched.” His calling was as a clerk and diarist, and he fulfilled those roles admirably— generations of historians revere his journal.

However, the plats he made were little more than ad-hoc creations executed after the fact to help church leaders organize and locate their land assignments. If he placed public squares in the wrong places, the error did not matter because that was not his assignment. The fact that he marked block 62 for the “dobie” fort,

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instead of block 48 where it was already under construction, suggests that his knowledge for the plan of Salt Lake City must have come from others and not from field work. His maps record second-hand information.31 gh We made every effort to identify references to the Sherwood survey—and Bullock’s map as well—in letters, journals and other records at the LDS Church History Library and elsewhere.

The first appeared in 1849, the year the settlers proposed the State of Deseret. Though not recognized beyond the Mormon faith, that interim administration established an office of surveyor general, and its first appointee was Henry Sherwood. He held the post until the United States government founded Utah Territory as part of the Compromise of 1850—he then became surveyor general of Utah Territory.32 Brigham Young had specified in the Deseret ordinance that “all surveys in the territory should be made to correspond with the original survey of Salt Lake City.”33 The ordinance further stipulated that any Sherwood plat had to be handed down to his successor.34 When Jesse W. Fox replaced Sherwood as surveyor general in 1852, he took possession of the signed sheepskin and retained it as he discharged his surveying duties throughout Utah Territory. Fox may have carried Sherwood’s plat with him as he followed Young’s directive to replicate its distinctive framework in such places as Ogden, Provo, Logan, and Manti. He may also have had it with him when he surveyed the Salt Lake City Temple site in 1853.

The next reference occurs in 1863 when a property line was called into question. Sherwood, though no longer living in Salt Lake City, maintained his authority on the geography of the city in absentia after he had moved to San Bernardino, California. The lot in dispute belonged to none other than Jesse Fox, and Bullock had needed Sherwood’s expertise to determine its “true boundaries.” In his reply, Sherwood made direct reference to his grid as he admonished his successor’s inability to “rightly judge of a good survey—such was mine of the city.”35 The Sherwood plat had been forgotten by all but a few in the spring of 1893 when the Mormon temple, forty years under construction, was about to be dedicated. As Salt Lake City

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When Fox died the next year, the map started down a slow and reclusive path of inheritance through generations of the Fox family. Like geological strata, the plat accumulated layers of unbroken provenance from Sherwood to Jesse Fox to Fox’s descendants. Each generation revered it as a cherished heirloom. Jesse Fox’s great, great, great grandson described how, at family gatherings in the 1980s, his grandfather “would leave the room, soon returning holding this leather scroll as if it were the Hope Diamond. He would then proceed to talk about this relic which he held in his hands.”39 In the Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia (1936), church historian Andrew Jenson wrote that Sherwood “made the drawing of the first survey of Salt Lake City. Having no paper

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The centennial of the founding of Salt Lake City in 1947 occupied its residents for most of that year. The “pageantry, dedication, and entertainment” inspired a member of the Board of Trustees of the Utah State Historical Society to produce a map in commemoration of the jubilee.42 Nicholas Groesbeck Morgan Sr.’s “Pioneer Map, Great Salt Lake City,” published in the early 1950s, measures 39” x 32” and lays out the original 15 by 9 block configuration “Based upon the Pratt-Sherwood survey of 1847.” Unaware that the actual Sherwood survey still existed, the Utah lawyer relied on “the earliest plat-map in the Salt Lake County files,” a derivative that had been “prepared in accordance with the original survey made by Orson Pratt, Henry G. Sherwood and assistants.” The lots for 674 Pioneers were located on this official map from the early 1850s; Morgan identified the owners of 190 additional lots.43

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“General Jesse W. Fox, the veteran surveyor of this Territory,” proclaimed an article in the Deseret Evening News on March 23, 1893, “yesterday exhibited in the News office the original plat of this city, made in the year 1847 by H. G. Sherwood.” It continued: “In those early days— the first year of Utah’s settlement—drawing paper was not to be had; so a bit of sheepskin was pressed into use; . . . The relic bears lightly and well its burden of forty-six years, during forty of which it has been in the possession of the present owner.”37 Cannon was so impressed with his old friend’s treasure that he re-ran the same article, “SALT LAKE’S FIRST SURVEY,” in his own weekly column of the Deseret Weekly.38 Of course, Cannon had known all of the principals personally—Sherwood, Fox, and Bullock—so he retailed the story of the “original plat of this city” with first-hand familiarity.

of suitable size, this important document was drawn on a prepared sheep’s skin.”40 The lack of drafting paper was not the only reason for the sheepskin. The surveyors required a material durable enough to carry in sweating hands for two weeks in August. They also knew that they were creating a document of enduring significance and wanted it on a surface more substantial and permanent than paper, perhaps so that the plat could later be put to use again in the field and elsewhere. Leather had been employed by the Mormons for a city map at least once before. A plat for Far West in Missouri was also accomplished on sheepskin (fig. 5).41

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prepared to celebrate, Jesse Fox decided to bring his proudest possession out of hiding. He took the Sherwood plat to the office of the church newspaper, edited by the son of George Q. Cannon. Cannon (1827–1901) and Fox had known one another in Nauvoo, Illinois, and remained friends after each had moved west. In Salt Lake City, Cannon advanced through the ranks of the church, eventually becoming so prominent that he was known as “the Mormon Richelieu.”

He “was a schoolteacher,” Cannon would recall at Fox’s funeral in 1894, “and I happened to be thrown very closely with him at that time, and the acquaintance has been a continuous one from that day until the day of his death.”36

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gh In the summer of 2014, Rick Grunder, a dealer in Mormon books and papers, received an unsolicited message. “I have a historical/religious artifact that I’m hoping you can give me some more information about,” began the email. “It is the original survey plat A for Salt Lake City. The authentic first survey done by Orson Pratt and HG Sherwood as ordered by Brigham Young in July of 1847. . . . It was held in the office of the Surveyor General,” continued the matter-of-fact communication. “Forgive me for this condensed version of Mormon history, but from what I understand, Brigham Young reached the Salt Lake Valley following an illness of some sort. He reached an area, proclaiming that this was the spot spoken to him from God to build the temple

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and lay out the new City of Zion. Young then directed Pratt and Sherwood to draw up this first plat of the city based on the Joseph Smith model. What I have here is the direct result.”44

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Grunder is well-informed on Mormon history, but he had never come across a reference to the Pratt and Sherwood plat. Nor had several of his contacts working in Mormon, Utah, and western American history. Unconvinced that such a significant document could vanish without leaving a single trace, Grunder began a pursuit of sources. Two-and-a-half weeks of arduous searching finally produced the article describing Jesse Fox’s visit to the Deseret Evening News office in 1893. With this reference to the sheepskin map, Grunder purchased the plat. When it was in hand, he was struck by the utilitarian nature of the undated document.

The sheepskin was not fancy vellum intended for show, but supple working material—sturdy but hardly amenable to elegant writing. It was nailed to an unadorned wooden roller.45 Soon thereafter, his colleague Paul Cohen acquired an interest in it. Cohen, a dealer in rare books and antique maps, was exhibiting at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in 2016, and he and Grunder decided that the fair would be the place to introduce the long-lost object. “Historic Map Showing Brigham Young’s vision for Salt Lake City surfaces after 168 years,” announced the Salt Lake City Fox News headline on April 7, 2016. The plat went on exhibition that night and received additional coverage in the Salt Lake City newspapers. The Associated Press picked up the story and disseminated it around the globe. It is not certain how the citizens of Nigeria and Sri Lanka reacted to the news, but newspapers in those countries also reported the remarkable discovery.46 As a result of the coverage, Cohen returned the sheepskin to Utah where he showed it to historians and librarians at meetings held at the Utah State Historical Society, the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, and the LDS Church History Library. At the Church History Library, archivists prepared for Cohen’s visit by spreading over a conference table all of the early maps of Salt Lake City they possessed, including Thomas Bullock’s August 16, 1847 plat. Of course, it was interesting to see the rough extract based on the Sherwood configuration, but that was not the

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most intriguing item on the table. Among the maps lay a small sheepskin-bound manuscript.

Unknown to Grunder or Cohen, Sherwood had kept a notebook to record property owners. This list of city lots had become separated from the plat itself and was now in the library’s Thomas Bullock Collection. Sherwood’s signature is written across the cover, and below his name it is possible to decipher two words of faded calligraphy: “Old plat.” The ink has bled into the leather, but a few other letters can also be made out: “Account City lots” and “G. S. L. City.” The library catalog described it as “Henry G. Sherwood’s plat book, circa 1850–1852.”47 But it is earlier than this as some of the entries predate 1850. It credits, for example, a payment by landowner William Coray, who arrived in the valley on September 6, 1848, and died March 7, 1849— as well as a payment by William Dayton, who was accidently killed by cannon fire on August 31, 1849.48 An exhilarating moment at the Church History Library occurred when the notebook and the plat were placed side by side for the first time in a century and a half. The two relics from the earliest days of the Mormon experience in the West were briefly juxtaposed, perhaps for the last time. Both bore the distinctive signature of “H. G. Sherwood” with similar identifying inscriptions. While they were on the table, Christy Best, an LDS church archivist, noticed that the numbering of land divisions on the plat did not seem to match Sherwood’s handwriting.

Bullock had noted in his journal that the system for numbering city lots was not determined until August 16, a day when Sherwood was on his Cache Valley trip. Once the Council decided on a system, a scribe must have filled in numbers where Sherwood had left blank spaces.

The recording of property owners is a function of many plat maps, and Sherwood clearly began his plat book to be in readiness for the distribution of lots. According to the Church History Library website, this little volume “Records owners of lots in the original plat of Great Salt Lake City (blocks 1–139) as registered by city surveyor Henry G. Sherwood and continued by Thomas Bullock.” When Young described Sherwood’s original plat on August 11, 1847, he stated that it consisted of 135 blocks—not 139 blocks.49 The companion notebook was so early that it, too, was initially designed to itemize the lots of

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The committee for providing the nascent community with an official name had not yet settled on an appellation when Sherwood signed and identified the “plat of the Great City of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.” Before August 9, there was only a promised city with this description on the plat. On August 9, 1847, the desolate locality had a new name: “Salt Lake City, Great Basin, North America.” Then, on August 22, a “Conference” unanimously designated it “‘The Great Salt Lake City’ of the Great Basin North America” on the motion of Brigham Young, seconded by Daniel B. Huntington.50 Sherwood’s plat was made before the city was officially named; Bullock, on the other hand, used nomenclature that was not decided until August 22 on the plat he dated August 16. This discrepancy suggests that he wrote this date on his map after August 22, 1847.

The notebook had more to tell. It records fees paid directly to Sherwood for surveying individual properties. He charged one dollar per lot and noted each payment in the book. Even Bullock had to pay Sherwood to have his land surveyed (block 69, lot 5): “Thomas Bullock p[ai]d [me] by recording lots.”51 When Sherwood moved to California, he authorized Bullock “to collect my fees on all my surveys in Great Salt Lake City and elsewhere in Utah Territory and dispose of such City Lots whereon the fees have not been paid to me or receipted by you, and [I] hereby

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By August 16 or later, when the lots were numbered, it had become evident that no one would be able to build houses in the northeastern segments. Fifteen blocks were therefore off limit for development—a loss of 150 acres of valuable city property.56 As settlers began to establish their personal lots in the valley, Sherwood gradually corrected the plat in his notebook, sequestering even more hilly blocks than were left blank on his sheepskin grid. To the original blocks deemed unsuitable for development, Sherwood eventually added four more (fig. 11).57 Bullock’s 1848 (and later) large-paper property diagrams agree, though lots on some of these blocks were again offered for sale, conceivably to settlers willing to make allowances for the irregularity of the land.58

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The evolving content of the Sherwood plat indicates a work-in-progress. On July 28, 1847, Young had instructed Pratt to have Sherwood lay out the proposed new settlement “perfectly square” like Joseph Smith’s 1833 plat for the city of Zion. But this was not Missouri, and the Wasatch mountains rose precipitously nearby, starting with foothills that loomed stubbornly as an obstacle to any uniform quadrangle large enough to encompass a “Great City.” The sheepskin plat reveals that this problem was resolved by creating an oblong rectangle running further to the unencumbered south than east and west between the uneven topography.55

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The parade of landowners began with block one on the inside front cover and continued to the bottom of the final page. The only blank sheet was on the inside back cover. When Sherwood added four crudely delineated blocks to the top of his plat, he had to find a place in his notebook for their lot assignments, but he could fit only three more blocks on that inside cover. He solved the problem by gluing a fold-down flap of blue paper at the bottom of that cover and used this sheet for the final, fourth block, number 139.

There can be no doubt that the words “Old plat” on the front of the notebook, with its own 135 + 4 blocks, refer to the sheepskin plat.

ratify all your actions in regard to the same as if I was present in person.”52 Bullock’s own plats on full-size drafting paper were no doubt created to aid him as he carried out duties he had assumed when he returned to the Salt Lake Valley after spending the winter of 1848 near present-day Omaha.53 Bullock continued to record lots in the notebook for Jesse Fox.54

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135 blocks, with entries for three blocks on each page. The surveyor had counted out just enough pages to record all of the landowners. He tied the leaves together and then affixed them to a sheepskin backing that matched that of the plat.

Not one leaf of the paper was wasted.

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It takes tremendous faith to lay out an ideal city in dust and sagebrush before it even has a name. Furthermore, it takes unwavering conviction to camp out in tents and wagons until streets can be permanently laid out, within inches of where they are now located.59 The exact block where the pioneers would spend their first winter was delineated on the sheepskin plat with the same precision as the location for a temple that would not have spires for

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decades. To this day, the stately Salt Lake City and County Building (finished in 1894) stands on a public block prescribed unerringly on that rectangle of leather by Henry Sherwood.

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For all its expansiveness, however, the plat also discloses inconveniences of its time—inevitable exigencies and distractions to be expected when trying to make a new place function.

Since 1847, some of the one-inch blocks have shrunk along with the leather they are drawn on, and more intentional changes were put into effect. The extra blocks, for example, which Sherwood added so roughly to the top left of his perimeter suggest an expansion before the next addition of blocks was envisioned. The owners of the lots of those four blocks are entered in Sherwood’s notebook, but they were not included in subsequent plats by Bullock.

Outside of the perimeter along the lower right side appear numbers added still later to identify conterminous blocks for an eventual “Plat D” addition, suggesting that someone—probably Jesse Fox himself—was still working with Sherwood’s plat into the mid-1850s.60 The sheepskin, in other words, was the master model to guide surveys in the field—its form and substance supporting the earliest Mormon resolve to establish order and permanence in the West. gh In 2008, William P. MacKinnon predicted “the continued discovery of documents that would illuminate Utah’s tumultuous territorial period.” More recently, writing in the Utah Historical Quarterly, he singled out the Sherwood plat as giving substance to that prediction.

Dr. Thomas Alexander, author of Mormons & Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (1984), applauded the discovery of the plat and seconded MacKinnon when he made the following direct statement: “It seems to me that the map you have is the first survey map of the city.

The evidence seems to indicate that your map predates Bullock’s map.”61 The plat, however, has not won acceptance in all quarters. The Utah State Board of Education, for example, still advances the premise that Bullock drafted the “first platte [sic] of the city” and continues to circulate this information on its website.

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Others have also withheld their endorsement of the Sherwood plat.62 In the years leading up to the discovery of Sherwood’s plat, Bullock’s diagram had been accruing stature. Richard Francaviglia gave him full credit for surveying Salt Lake City and making the city’s first map. “Bullock’s map of the city was beautifully drawn,” he wrote in The Mapmakers of New Zion, “with a simplicity and restraint revealing the steady hand of a competent surveyor and cartographer.”63 Francaviglia has since allowed for the possibility that Sherwood’s map might precede Bullock’s, “but lacking more concrete evidence I cannot support that assertion at this time. The lack of dates is particularly troubling to me.” Jeffrey L. Anderson, an archivist in the LDS Church History Department, is also unconvinced that Sherwood’s map (which Young accepted on August 11, 1847) preceded Bullock’s (dated August 16, 1847). He felt that further research is needed to determine the indisputable chronology of the two maps, and pointed to “letters, journals, and other records in our collection that may help better understand the history of the maps.”64 Most important cities are so old as to preclude the existence of their earliest maps. However, foundation maps do exist for two major American cities. Both Washington, D.C., the world’s first planned capital, and Salt Lake City were laid out before a single street or building was constructed. Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original manuscript of the nation’s capital is one of the prize holdings of the Library of Congress.

When the nation’s library purchased Sherwood’s sheepskin in 2017, it took possession of a map, according to its cataloging record, “believed to be the first map of Salt Lake City.”

It would also be the only other original manuscript of a major American city. Salt Lake City “was planned to be great from the beginning,” wrote Richard Francaviglia, “and it quickly began to develop on what many observers called a ‘magnificent’ scale.”65 The first days of the city set the stage for the enduring presence of the Mormons in the American West. If the sheepskin plat is the first of the city, it is nothing less than the first implemented plan for Joseph Smith’s City of God. It would be the founding document of Utah and of Western Mormonism.

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Figure 1. “plat of the Great City of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake,” reportedly drawn by Orson Pratt and Henry G. Sherwood, based on their original survey of Salt Lake City in August 1847. Courtesy of Paul Cohen Rare Books.

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Figure 2. Plaque at the southeast corner of Temple Square commemorating the beginning of the original survey of Salt Lake City by Orson Pratt and Henry G. Sherwood. Courtesy of Tom Howder.

Figure 3. Great Salt Lake Base and Meridian monument, which stands at the southeast corner of Temple Square (block 87) in Salt Lake City. Courtesy of Tom Howder.

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Figure 4. “Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early June–25 June 1833.” Original in the LDS Church History Library, MS 2567 1. Courtesy of Intellectual Property, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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Figure 5. Photographic Print, “Sheepskin Plat� of the city of Far West, Caldwell County, Missouri, ca. 1837, inscribed on sheepskin and traditionally identified as having been found by William Cross in the home of George M. Hinkle in 1839.

The plat, divided into numbered blocks, shows lot locations for homes and businesses, a proposed temple in the center of the public square, and four reserved lots for schools. Photograph and caption courtesy of Community of Christ.

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Figure 8. Jesse Williams Fox Sr., surveyor general of Utah Territory from 1852–1884, portrayed one year before he showed the Sherwood plat at the office of the Deseret News. Engraved portrait facing page 504 in Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, volume 1 (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons Co., 1892); page 503 describes Fox surveying the site for the Salt Lake Temple on February 14, 1853, while Brigham Young and thousands of spectators waited and looked on, followed by music by the bands, public addresses, and the groundbreaking ceremony.

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Figure 6. Brigham Young ca. 1852-53 from a daguerreotype attributed to Marsena Cannon (detail).

Copy presented by Brigham Morris Young to his sister Susa on February 21, 1913. Utah State Historical Society, Susa Young Gates Photograph Collection, MSS C95.

Figure 7. Orson Pratt, shown four years after he and Sherwood began the survey of Salt Lake City.

Frontispiece to A Series of Pamphlets. By Orson Pratt, One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with Portrait (Liverpool: Published by Franklin D. Richards, 1851).

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Figure 9. George Q. Cannon and his son John Q. Cannon, editor of the Deseret News. Each published individually the 1893 article, “Salt Lake’s First Survey,” describing the Sherwood sheepskin plat. Detail from the Cannon Family Photograph Collection, PH 8648, fd.

3, item 1. Courtesy of Intellectual Property, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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Figure 10. The temple and Brigham Young blocks at the heart of Salt Lake City in 1847 and today.

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Figure 11. Detail of “plat of the Great City of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake,” showing six of the fifteen blocks which Sherwood left undivided into lots due to steep terrain in the northeast portion of the city. While examining this artifact in 1893, the Cannons noticed that “to give symmetry to the upper right hand corner of his map he added a few blocks in what is now known as Plat E.” The Utah State Capitol building stands roughly where the blemish appears in the leather here.

Above the top four blocks appears Sherwood’s own handwriting: “Great City of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.”

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Figure 12. Chicago, drawn by James S. Wright, 1834. Printed map, 26 x 21 inches. Courtesy of private collection and Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

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Figure 13. Chicago, drawn by W. L. Flower and James Van Vechten, 1863. Printed map, 75 x 44.5 inches. Courtesy of the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

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Figure 14. Detail from 1869 General Land Office resurvey of Township 1 North, Range 1 West, Salt Lake Meridian.

Note that the section line between sections 35 and 36 does not coincide with the sixth north-south street (North 600 West) west of the Initial Point. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Utah State BLM Office.

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Figure 15. Detail from 1869 General Land Office resurvey of Township 1 South, Range 1 East, Salt Lake Meridian.

Note that the section line between sections 6 and 5 does not coincide with the sixth north-south street (South 600 East) east of the Initial Point, nor does the section line between sections 6 and 7 coincide with the sixth eastwest street (East 600 South) south of the Initial Point. Courtesy U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Utah State BLM Office.

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Figure 16. Great Salt Lake City, looking south, as it appeared shortly after Jesse Fox took possession of the sheepskin plat attributed to Henry Sherwood. Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, volume 1 (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons Co., 1892), image facing page 530.

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Contextualizing Early Mormon Maps A Cautionary Response

In 2016, I received a phone call from Paul Cohen, who was enthusiastic about a map that a colleague had located (fig. 1). Paraphrasing the conversation, Cohen described a sheepskin map that was purportedly made

by Henry Sherwood. Cohen was certain that the map was authentic and claimed that it was the very first map of Salt Lake City, predating Thomas Bullock’s maps drafted in mid-August 1847. If authentic, properly dated to early August of that year, and actually done by Sherwood, the sheepskin map would be truly significant find.

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Having read my book The Mapmakers of New Zion, Cohen was hoping to enlist my support in endorsing the map’s authenticity. However, without seeing the map, and subjecting it to very careful scrutiny—including a thorough examination of its provenance—I was hesitant. My hesitancy was based on an awareness that maps purported to be authentic might be outright fakes or very clever imitations. Cartographic history has its share of questionable early maps, including the controversial Vinland Map and the Liu Gang map, so extra caution is advised when a “first” or “missing link” surfaces. Recalling that the collectors’ market concerning things Mormon was no stranger to fraudulent documents, I urged Cohen to conduct additional research to be certain that the map in question was the genuine article. I was particularly troubled by two things. First, the map bore no date, which seemed unusual given the propensity for many compilers of important documents to record such information. Second, given the map’s potential significance, its having surfaced after a public absence of 168 years seemed somewhat troubling. Nevertheless, I was intrigued to say the least.

During our subsequent phone calls, Cohen said he and colleague Rick Grunder were writing an article about the sheepskin map for the Utah Historical Quarterly. The article promised to be a breakthrough that

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definitively proved the map in question was indeed the earliest cartographic effort in Salt Lake City’s history. In their favor, Cohen mentioned that Will Bagley supported their claim.

I wholeheartedly supported the publication of such an article, provided that the authors carefully document the evidence, and moreover that others familiar with this period in early Utah and Mormon history could weigh in on the subject. I thought an issue of the Quarterly covering the topic would be worthwhile. Upon calling the coeditor Jed Rogers, I was delighted to learn that he was thinking along those same lines. I was overjoyed that a subject that I had covered in only a couple of pages in Mapmakers could now be expanded into a forum that would not only shed light on the earliest mapping of the city, but could also enable readers to see how the process of contextualization and verification of a document—in this case a map— actually works. Happily, the forum you are now reading eventually materialized.

At this point, I would like to step back to clarify my coverage of Salt Lake City’s early mapping, which the authors critique in their article.

In Mapmakers, I tried to capture some of the vision and excitement surrounding the city’s early mapping. An entry in the recently published Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History (which I referenced in my book) had mentioned “1847 Plat A, consisting of 135 blocks, is [sic] surveyed by Orson Pratt and Henry Sherwood,” and so in Mapmakers I hoped to shed light on others involved in the process.1 Like Cohen and Grunder, I was aware of the historical marker mentioning Sherwood and Pratt as early surveyors (fig. 2), but was more concerned with the earliest extant maps that resulted from those surveys. And like virtually everyone researching Utah and LDS history, I was unaware that a sheepskin map purportedly by Sherwood was about to come to light. When Cohen first contacted me, I stated that I certainly would have mentioned and likely even illustrated it in my book, even though it had not been authenticated, much less actually dated to 1847. I should also note that I did not think that sheepskin maps were as rare as Cohen had implied; in Mapmakers I refer to some substitutes for paper used in the early pioneer era. That said, I am well aware that the public finds maps drafted on animal skins to be

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intriguing, despite (as the authors note) their tendency to be dimensionally unstable, that is, subject to shrinkage and expansion. However, what makes this sheepskin map so important is its date. The authors claim that it dates from the very first surveys in early August of 1847, which is to say about two weeks before Bullock’s map(s) of the city.

As it turns out, dates are indeed an issue to the subject at hand because they too should be carefully documented. I must admit that I accepted the “1850” catalog entry date for certain material in the LDS Church History Library pertaining to the Sherwood (and other) surveys, as have many other scholars. Grunder and Cohen’s claim that the sheepskin map actually dates from August 2 (or 3), 1847, if correct, is important indeed because it may have influenced Bullock’s mapping of the city. The lesson for historians is to scrutinize your sources—to trust but verify, to paraphrase the old Russian proverb. Archivists do their best at dating material but are not infallible. If the Sherwood map can be definitively dated as claimed, then it is indeed an important document. Their claims that it matches earlier descriptions and jibes with early property maps would seem to confirm its importance, though not necessarily its authenticity. Similarly, an 1893 newspaper story may or may not be accurate in its reporting of events about half a century earlier, and for that matter may or may not be describing a particular map—in this case the sheepskin map that recently surfaced. Jesse Fox’s reported involvement in this document’s provenance is among the more compelling of the authors’ claims.

Grunder and Cohen’s article does include several very strong endorsements by experts, all of whom I respect. However, it is noteworthy that some of this expert opinion is qualified. For example, as the authors themselves state, Thomas Alexander uses the phrases “It seems to me” and “The evidence seems to indicate” when referring to the map’s authenticity. “Seems” is the operative word here in that it leaves some room for uncertainty. Moreover even the catalog entry for the Sherwood map in the Library of Congress leaves some room for more research, if not doubt, stating “This manuscript plat map is believed to be the first map of Salt Lake City,

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Although I highly commend the authors for shedding new light on the earliest surveying, especially their detailed comparison of the content of early property maps, I suspect their enthusiasm for Sherwood—and for that matter Salt Lake City—overlooks a couple of issues pertaining to the mapmaker and the city.

Regarding the latter, despite the fact that Salt Lake City is a majestic place, it is not universally considered to be “the geographical and

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Hopefully, the Library of Congress will scientifically analyze the sheepskin map in light of others with verified dates, and conduct a full investigation into all aspects of this document’s properties, content, and provenance. For their part, the authors have done a fine job of getting that process started. Their argument that this plat map may have served as a model to guide future field surveys is clearly based on their premise that it is the earliest map of the city. If correct and proven true, then this certainly is a very visionary as well as technically proficient map indeed. I use the term “visionary” here in two ways, one implying forethought and the other pertaining to it as a visual or graphic document as opposed to narrative wording.

In that context, I think that Michael Homer’s characterization of the sheepskin map as “a foundational artifact” of the Mormon West is apt. Even here, though, note that Homer says “a” foundational rather than “the” foundational document, despite the authors’ use of the superlative. That said, the authors’ article makes a significant contribution to scholarship pertaining to Utah and Mormon history, especially when supplemented by the related essays in this issue.

spiritual center of Mormonism” as the authors assert. True, the city’s role in the nineteenth-century “Gathering” is undeniable, but other locales (including Hill Cumorah) have long been involved in the very complicated phenomenon we know as the Mormon sense of place. While on this subject of early surveys of that city, I feel that more research needs to be done to determine how and why the earliest plat(s) were not actually surveyed “in conformity with Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s vision for his City of Zion,” despite Grunder and Cohen’s claims. As for the authors’ support of David Bigler’s claim that Salt Lake City’s plat “is almost a carbon copy of plans for an earlier Mormon city, ‘New Jerusalem, City of Zion’ designed by Joseph Smith” (fig. 4), the deviations are significant and have been long discussed and refuted. As succinctly—and correctly—stated in Mapping Mormonism, “the City of Zion Plat was never canonized as a revelation from the Prophet and was never implemented exactly as drawn.”3 Moreover, Grunder and Cohen’s claims about the scarcity of paper (hence the use of sheepskin) and the earliest use of the appellation “Great” in the city’s name seems compelling but not to me conclusive.

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Utah.”2 I find the wording “is believed to be” both prudent and revealing, for belief is dependent on faith, and leaves some room for doubt by skeptics. Ultimately, of course, authenticity is determined objectively, not by opinion. In other words, truth-seeking is not a democratic process and requires irrefutable evidence. The authors’ case would be even more compelling if it were based on scientific evidence, such as comparative DNA (from the sheepskin and others), a chemical analysis of ink from its lines and lettering, and comparative handwriting analyses—all of which could more definitively authenticate it.

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As regards Sherwood himself, I think the authors do a fine job of bringing from relative obscurity this talented and peripatetic pioneer settler and mapmaker. However, in the process, they seem to have become overly dismissive of Bullock’s efforts and talents. For example, I am not convinced that the authors’ conjectural reading of Brigham Young’s comments about Bullock to not “worry [him]self so much about the business” of mapmaking were meant to belittle his cartographic skills—certainly not without corroboration by someone else who had been present to record the nuances and significance of those conversations. After all, it was Bullock who helped convert the early survey sketches into maps that were useful indeed, reportedly in the subsequent development of the city and certainly in showcasing its impressive design and grand scale. I am reluctant to dismiss Bullock’s maps from mid-August (1847), as they are an important dated visual record of Salt Lake City.

Bullock’s words, too, were seminal: his early journal entries proclaimed, “on this place we

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can lay out a City two miles East and West, and as large as we have a mind to North & South.”

Note that Bullock says “we” and does not claim to be the sole source of the information on his own maps. In Mapmakers, I confirmed this involvement by “other church leaders” and stated that Bullock’s mapping of Salt Lake City “was a team effort” involving “several players.”4 Although I did not individually name them—and should have—that team’s effort serves as a reminder that maps are almost always collaborative efforts, not the result of a single genius.

For the record, I also illustrate additional (later) Bullock maps of other parts on the West that cast doubt on the suggestion that Brigham Young was dismissive of his mapmaking efforts.5 As to the accuracy of Bullock’s maps, which the authors find wanting, I should note that all maps contain errors. Some are easier to spot than others, but any cartographer who puts pen to paper (or sheepskin) is making the transition from narrative to illustration—and hence subjecting their work to scrutiny and criticism.

Why? Because maps concretely position standalone features (boundaries, towns, lots, etc.) in relation to each other, and those positions can be checked as to direction and distance. Many mapmakers discover to their chagrin that errors are part of mapmaking. From a philosophical but also practical perspective, by that process maps become more accurate through time as revisions are made. A related but sobering observation: although it is easy to find fault with maps, making one takes more skill than critics often realize—especially those who have never made a map themselves.

One of the real mysteries to me remains why Bullock would draw what some claim to be a less accurate map than Sherwood’s supposedly earlier—according to Grunder and Cohen, the very earliest—map of the city. After all, if Sherwood’s map was already available, why not simply copy it? Moreover, why Bullock’s supposedly inferior maps were used in the city building process and archived for posterity poses interesting questions. With the diligent work by the authors, we are being encouraged to reexamine key source materials but by no means have the definitive answers. For my part, the sheepskin map in question seems so well

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prepared one could speculate that there may have been other maps that preceded it—sketch maps made on-site that may not have survived.

In other words, as maps go, rather than being the first such document, the sheepskin map attributed to Sherwood could be one of the first.

Something about this sheepskin map, including the confidence with which it was drawn, could impress a cartographic historian as being a bit too refined, even polished, for a very first try. Interestingly, Cohen and Grunder seem to downplay the visual impact of this sheepskin map, for when unrolled it makes a dramatic statement about how the city was seemingly ordained to expand in that vertical (north-south) direction. Rather than suggesting frugality, the map’s tightly cropped borders bearing the compass directions enhance its visual impact.

We will likely never know the cartographer’s intent in drafting and mounting this map attributed to Sherwood, but so presented, it is truly impressive.

Ultimately, however, Bullock’s comprehensive plat maps enabled the Latter-day Saints to envision, and then market, Great Salt Lake City as a premier destination in the American West. As a shrewd delegator, Brigham Young was well aware of the role played by Bullock’s maps. The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton used a later version of Bullock’s map of Salt Lake City in compiling his classic travel narrative The City of the Saints: Among the Mormons and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1860). It was also Burton who wrote something that all researchers may appreciate: “One of my favourite places of visiting was the Historian and Recorder’s Office” which “contained a small collection of volumes, together with papers, official and private, plans, designs, and other requisites”—presumably among them Bullock’s plat.6 That quote leads me to make one parting observation. If the sheepskin map described in the authors’ essay is indeed the genuine article, then some might claim that the Latter-day Saints missed a great opportunity to purchase it for their archives a couple of years ago. I have been told that they were offered the opportunity to buy it, but their offer was evidently too low and was rejected. On the other hand, there may be more to this story as I have also heard

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an object of antiquarian interest. Alas, although one can now scrutinize the original in the nation’s capital, the experience would be so much more palpable if one were consulting it while sitting in the same blocks that were platted, with the towering Wasatch as a backdrop, back in August of 1847. Seen another way, though, one can view the purchase of this document by the Library of Congress as proof that the Mormons have achieved a goal they hoped for in the 1840s—to become a lasting part of the national consciousness.

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that the low bid might suggest that doubts existed, not only about the map’s authenticity but also whether in fact it could really be considered “the founding document of the Mormon West” when earlier written documents have long been part of their collections. In other words, we have come to value maps more highly today for their aesthetic value than ever before, while to early Mormons they were regarded far more pragmatically. That said, there is no denying the appeal of this map as

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Salt Lake City as Cultural Symbol

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The principal article in this roundtable discussion makes a plausible argument that the Henry Sherwood plat of Salt Lake City was the initial design of this new Latter-day Saint homeland as directed by Brigham Young shortly after the vanguard pioneer company set up camp in the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847 (fig. 1). Its authors claim that plats by Bullock and other pioneers based their design and function on Sherwood’s.

The recent reemergence of the Sherwood plat is especially noteworthy for all who are interested in the history of the city that Chauncy Harris referred to as a “regional capitol” and of Latter-day Saint settlement generally.1 While the plat is undoubtedly of great historical significance, as manifest by its purchase in 2017 by the Library of Congress, the question of its primacy is another matter. Historians, archivists, city planners, and collectors may never completely agree on which plat of Salt Lake City was, in fact, the first. More to the point of this article is the question of why primacy in this case matters so much. I am not aware of a lively scholarly debate over which plat was first for Denver, St. Louis, or other major American cities. Why should the founding of Salt Lake City be different? Given the fact that several plats of Salt Lake City were drafted in relative proximity with only slight variations, why should anyone care which was the first? To this point, “first” has two quite different connotations that are relevant to the hypothesis advanced by Grunder and Cohen. It could mean either “prior to all others” or “foremost”—that is, first in sequence or first in importance.2 The former connotation invokes primarily a historical question, that is, ordering the facts in the way that they actually happened as documented by reliable records. The latter connotation invokes largely a cultural question—determining the most influential or meaningful element in a complex process. Grunder and Cohen claim that the Sherwood plat became the official plat of Salt Lake City, hence its primacy in the founding of the Latter-day Saint homeland in the American West. If their claims are accurate, the Sherwood plat is one of the most significant documents, not just in Mormon history but also in the history of the American West, given the strength and size of the culture region that it eventually defined.3

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The Plat of Zion, with its cardinally oriented orthogonal grid, central public square, and consolidated residential neighborhoods, became the standard design for most of these settlements (fig. 4). The layout was of considerable practical value, facilitating a social order and community lifestyle that were efficiently and economically replicated, consistent with Latter-day Saint values, and adaptable to a variety of landscapes and ecologies. Cooperation was essential to accommodate tens of thousands of Latter-day Saint converts from North America, Europe, and elsewhere to “gather to Zion”—as they referred to their religious utopia—and to create a sustainable and symbiotic society worthy of the blessings of heaven.

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Thus, settlement for the Latter-day Saints was a profoundly spiritual as well as practical enterprise, engaging much of their combined energy, devotion, skills, and resources to fulfill this comprehensive spiritual mission. Ordering the landscape and stewarding its resources were essential to this enterprise. Consolidating residences around a central public square focused their attention on the religious functions of the buildings that usually occupied the town’s central square and reinforced the community’s sense of their sacred covenants with one another and with God. The orthogonal shape of lots, blocks, and towns gave a profound sense of order to their lives and surroundings.7 Orienting the wide city streets to the cardinal compass directions reinforced the foundations of their spatial consciousness, which encompassed not only the surrounding countryside but also Latter-day Saints communities located elsewhere, the territorial environment generally, and even the imagined God-centered universe.8 In short, the layout of “cities of Zion” defined the essence of a sacred Latter-day Saint worldview.

Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and existential dimensions of their reality were unified and made meaningful by the city as a core symbol of Latter-day Saint identity and an ideal, heaven-centered existence.9

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The considerable significance of Salt Lake City’s design for the urban history of North America was indirectly acknowledged in 1996 by the American Planning Association, which gave its Planning Landmark Award to Joseph Smith’s Plat of Zion, the formal antecedent of the plan for Salt Lake City, citing that the plan for Zion’s “center place” was “one of the most significant accomplishments in the history of American city development.” Following suit in 2015, Urban Design Utah honored the Plat of Zion with its Legacy Award.4 From 1831 to the first decades of the twentieth century, more than seven hundred communities located throughout the American Midwest and West, southern Canada and northern Mexico, and even the Pacific islands were settled by Mormon pioneers, most under the direction of church leaders but many at the initiative of small groups of Latter-day Saints seeking better places to live.

The ultimate reference point for this ambitious utopian plan was an urban society, called “City of Holiness,” that was founded by the ancient patriarch Enoch and that eventually became worthy to be translated from its mundane setting on earth into heaven, where God branded it “mine abode forever” but which would return to earth at the end of time.5 Perceiving that he was called of God to fulfill Enoch’s legacy, Joseph Smith defined his prophetic mission, in large part, to unite earthly and heavenly Zion, thereby establishing God’s millennial kingdom on earth.6

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I hope that the issue of the primacy of the Sherwood plat engages lively debate for years to come. Even if the question is never definitively settled, the explorations will increase our understanding and appreciation of Mormon settlement from a variety of diverse professional and academic perspectives. In the reflections that follow, I attempt to add to this understanding by addressing a cultural question: what does the Sherwood plat and the larger social practice it represents say about the initial, intended identity of the city that it helped to define? This question is implied but not directly addressed in Grunder and Cohen’s article.

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From this perspective, the founding of Salt Lake City was a matter of great spiritual significance. The Latter-day Saints had just come from a phase of “gathering Israel” and “establishing Zion” that was characterized at once by remarkable charismatic ecstasies and tragic, seemingly catastrophic, agonies. From 1820 to 1846, Latter-day Saint history was a study in contrasts between an abundance of revelations, visions, angelic appearances, spiritual

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gifts, miracles, and other heavenly manifestations, on the one hand, and devastating persecutions, incarcerations, violent conflicts, and assassinations, on the other. Under the direction of Brigham Young, the Latter-day Saints managed an existential paradox: attempting to realize the promise of religious freedom initially beyond the boundaries of the country whose constitution explicitly guaranteed religious freedom for all and, conversely, to fulfill biblical prophecy of establishing “the Lord’s house” in the “tops of the mountains” in “the last days” (see Isaiah 2:2).

Their new beginnings in the “utmost bound of the everlasting hills” (Gen. 49:26) affirmed at once a commitment to the miraculous founding of the faith and the anticipated glorious fulfillment of its ambitious millennial mission.

During his arduous travels to the new homeland of the Saints, Brigham Young personally safeguarded Joseph Smith’s Plat of Zion and sketch for its model temple, which he took to be sacred marching orders from his beloved, but martyred prophet. Although Young followed neither model to the letter, he realized a variation of Smith’s utopian vision to a much grander degree than Mormonism’s founder ever did.

The occasion of arriving in the valley of the Great Salt Lake in July 1847 was marked by a series of paradigmatic events: irrigating the ground and cultivating fields, worshipping together and confirming by revelation the divine approval of this settlement location, dedicating the land by priesthood authority and ritually purifying through re-baptism many of the vanguard pioneer company, laying out the new “City of the Saints” in the image of Zion’s “center place” and locating a site for the temple at its center, distributing residential lots in an orderly fashion and cooperatively building family dwellings, searching for additional places to settle, and receiving instructions on proper personal conduct in their new homeland.10 As his followers began to occupy their new homeland, Brigham Young authorized a survey of the Great Basin, beginning from the southeast corner of Temple Square.11 Latter-day

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Saints thus had two primary spatial reference points: the central square of their respective communities and Temple Square, the spiritual center of their collective lives. Complementing the ordering purposes of the survey, a delegation of church officials under Brigham Young’s direction proposed that the federal government create a new State of Deseret, thereby defining the boundaries of what the historian Leonard Arrington called the “Great Basin Kingdom” and providing its inhabitants with a measure of political and legal protection. In addition, Latter-day Saints gave names to major features of their physical environment—among them Mount Nebo and Jordan River—that reminded them of their covenant connection with biblical Israel.

In settling a new homeland in the American West, Latter-day Saints were not simply searching for refuge to live out their lives in freedom and relative security. They were not simply trying to establish pragmatic and sustainable lives. They were not simply seeking to realize the “American dream” of peace and prosperity in a setting free from want and oppression. From their perspective, they were also, and perhaps more importantly, preparing the earth and its inhabitants for the millennial reign of Jesus Christ by implementing a sacred worldview to link God and man, heaven and earth, and eternity and time, thereby fulfilling what they believed to be God’s purposes.

The plat of Salt Lake City by Henry Sherwood contributes immeasurably to this profoundly religious enterprise. The fact that multiple, roughly identical plats of Salt Lake City were drafted in the early months of settlement reinforces the cultural imperative of its cardinal and orthogonal design. As a historical document, the Sherwood plat is worthy of its recent attention from scholars, archivist, and collectors and may eventually prove to be the Ur text of this major American metropolis. As a microcosm of the Latter-day Saint mission to establish Zion in the latter days, the Sherwood plat is a symbol of one of the most distinctive and successful settlement traditions in the history of North America.

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What is so special about a city plan with another gridded street pattern?

There are many examples in the United States of city and town plans using a square or rectangular grid as the basis for their street pattern and lot sales. A review of the geographical and temporal context of the use of this ubiquitous town plan pattern will help explain the significance of the 1847 plat of Salt Lake City, the subject of this roundtable discussion (fig. 1).

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Historically, the grid pattern for planned towns and cities was introduced into the North American British colonies by William Penn when he planned and laid out Philadelphia in the early 1680s, followed by the rapid spread of similar town plans to county seats in southeastern Pennsylvania, such as Reading, Allentown, Lancaster, and York. Charleston, South Carolina, as expanded in the 1730s, and Savanah, Georgia, as laid out in the same decade, also exhibited grid patterns, although the latter was more elaborate with evenly spaced squares reserved for public use, much like the Salt Lake City plan.1 As towns began to develop in Tidewater Virginia during the first half of the eighteenth century, many including Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Alexandria used grid patterns. In fact, the original manuscript plans for these three towns still exist in county and state archival collections.

In addition, there is a second manuscript version of the Alexandria plan that has been reproduced many times and is better known than the original plan, which is buried in county records. The second plan held by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress was prepared

by George Washington at age seventeen as documentation for lots purchased by his brother Lawrence.2 What is noteworthy about these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century examples is that the norm for cadastral surveys at this time was metes and bounds or irregular surveys. The boundaries of most property surveys formed multisided polygons encompassing a select choice of land

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and bordered by rivers, streams, and artificial boundary lines that were identified by prominent trees or piles of rocks. In fact, some of the earliest towns, such as New York City (originally known as New Amsterdam), Boston, and other New England towns, displayed very irregular street patterns that conformed to the local topography or adjacent shorelines. However, as some of these cities expanded, especially New York City, developers started to prepare for more orderly growth by instituting rectangular street patterns. Even Boston, which probably has the most irregular street pattern of any U.S. city, integrated grid patterns into selected areas such as Back Bay when that area was infilled in the mid-nineteenth century.3 During the 1780s and 1790s, as the new federal government was taking shape, basic concepts of town planning and cadastral surveying changed radically. The nation’s new capital, Washington, D.C., was designed to be a grand and ceremonial city. The base of Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan was a gridded structure of streets, encompassing a much larger area than any other American city had been planned up to this time. What made this plan so unique was the addition of a baroque overlay of diagonal avenues connecting circles and squares, providing for grand vistas and ceremonial celebrations. Besides providing an orderly plan of urban growth and lot sales, this unique design helped promote a sense of nationalism.4 At the same time, Congress passed the Land Ordinances of 1784 and 1785, which provided for the orderly development of the newly acquired public domain west of the Appalachian Mountains. This legislation not only outlined the procedure by which new states would be admitted to the union, but also established an orderly process for surveying and disposing of these public lands (ignoring the fact that these lands were already occupied by numerous Native peoples). After experimenting with a number of surveying systems in the new territory of Ohio, the basic pattern that developed was a grid of square townships measuring six miles on each side and divided into thirty-six square sections. These grids were oriented along a north-south, east-west axis, identified as various meridians and base lines. Initially lands were sold as fractions of a section, usually

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quarter sections or quarter-quarter sections.

This survey pattern strongly influenced the development of the cultural landscape or settlement patterns, especially in areas with relatively level topography, as was encountered in much of the Midwest and Great Plains. Property boundaries, fields, fences lines, and roads tended to conform to the gridded pattern, providing a checkerboard appearance that is still visible as one flies over these areas.5 This cadastral survey pattern also provided a strong influence on how towns and cities were planned and laid out within the public lands west of the Appalachians. Many towns established during the nineteenth century conformed to the township and section lines. Such towns include Indianapolis (Indiana), Omaha and Lincoln (Nebraska), Lawrence and Leavenworth (Kansas), Oklahoma City and Guthrie (Oklahoma), and Chicago. The latter is a good example of how the original town was laid out within the confines of one section and how its continued growth throughout the nineteenth century was guided by the surrounding township surveys. Founded in 1830, an early town plan (1834) shows the town had already been extended over two and a half sections (fig. 12).

The grid pattern could have been oriented to focus on the Chicago River or the Lake Michigan shoreline, but since the township surveys had already been completed in this area, the grid was laid out along a north-south, east-west axis. An 1863 map illustrates that the city’s subdivisions and street patterns continued to follow the earlier township surveys (fig. 13).6 By the last half of the nineteenth century, the grid pattern had become so much a part of the city planning process that towns used them even if they did not conform to the township surveys. Many towns that were established as river ports or railroad stations employed grid patterns, but they were oriented parallel to a shoreline or a rail line, rather than along strict cardinal directions. For example, the street pattern for the original part of Topeka, laid out in 1854, parallels the Kansas River, while newer additions follow the township surveys. Similarly, Cheyenne, Wyoming, which was plotted in 1867, was surveyed as a grid pattern town, but the original plan was oriented along the rail line which ran on a northeast to southwest

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An examination of the early township survey plats representing the first surveys conducted both in 1855 by Burr’s team and the resurveys conducted in 1869 shows that the streets as outlined on the Sherwood plat and as laid out did not conform perfectly to section and township lines as specified by standard General Land Office surveys. Since the starting point for township surveys was located at the “center” of the town, its footprint extended into four townships.10 Fortunately, these early township survey plats show physical and cultural features that were encountered during the course of the survey. Salt Lake City’s street pattern appears on three of the four 1855 and 1869 plats. It is readily apparent that the primary east-west street (South Temple Street) and the primary north-south street (Main Street) coincide with the Salt Lake base line and meridian. But, for example, the western boundary of section 36 in township T1N, R1W, does not coincide with the street that would be identified as North 600 West, nor does the corresponding street in section 6, T1S, R1E (figs. 14 &15). What is the conclusion? The township surveys did not predetermine the street pattern as in Chicago.

Rather, Salt Lake City’s street pattern predated the township surveys and provided the foundational structure for the General Land Office surveys in Utah.

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Utah was not formally recognized as a territory until 1850, and the General Land Office, the federal agency responsible for surveying and disposing of the public lands, did not establish a Surveyor General Office in Utah until 1855, and then with much opposition from the local population. In that year, David Burr, a government cartographer, was appointed as the surveyor general. Despite his present-day reputation as a well-respected map maker and publisher, his short two-year tenure in this position was fraught with controversy and claims of fraudulent surveys. According to his first annual report, his team of deputy surveyors, some of whom were his sons, surveyed approximately 2.5 million acres.8 Despite the questionable quality of these surveys, the fundamental contribution of Burr’s surveying activity for assessing the importance of the 1847 manuscript town plan was the establishment of the base line and meridian from which General Land Office surveys in Utah originated. Most likely because the town’s center point had already been established during the 1847 surveys, Burr also chose the southeast corner of Temple Square as the beginning point for the township surveys.

Not only were streets and house lots within Salt Lake City numbered from this beginning point, all the township surveys throughout Utah would focus on this most important unifying geographical feature for the Mormon religion.

Because of the coincident beginning point for both surveys, it could be hypothesized that the

Although the General Land Office started township surveys in 1855, the relationship between Utahns and this federal agency was very tenuous until 1869, when the first land office was actually established for selling public lands within the territory.9 By that time, Salt Lake City had grown to a population of almost 12,000 and had a well-established street pattern, based on the original 1847 town plan which called for well-defined blocks of ten acres each and spacious streets and side walls of prescribed width.

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In the historical context of the spread of the rectangular township surveys across the country, one might surmise that Salt Lake City’s grid pattern conformed to the township surveys, especially since the Salt Lake meridian and base line intersect at the southeast corner of Temple Square, which already marked the religious center of town. However, Salt Lake City was founded and laid out in 1847, a year before the United States acquired the Mexican Cession as a result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War.

town plan would coincide with the township surveys. However, that is not case.

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diagonal. Other large cities, such as San Francisco and Denver display a number of grid patterns juxtaposed at incongruent angles, representing different shoreline orientations or the addition of separately developed communities or subdivisions.7

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Based on this overview, it becomes apparent that this 1847 manuscript street plan provided the original spatial structure for a town that was much more than another gridded street pattern, especially a typical nineteenth-century town that was influenced by the General Land

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Office township surveys. Yes, it was a gridded pattern, but one that was based on the theology and culture of the Mormon religion. It was a City of Zion, as envisioned by Joseph Smith and implemented by Brigham Young.11 While a gridded street pattern was a fairly common feature of North American town plans, it was the size and arrangement of blocks and lots that made Salt Lake City different from a typical western city. It was distinguished by blocks that were ten acres in size, subdivided into eight lots, each of which was a little more than an acre in size. In addition, the orientation of lots in alternating

blocks of either an east-west orientation or a north-south orientation provided for a low-density settlement, in contrast to the highly congested and densely settled cities of the eastern United States. Certainly, Salt Lake City, designed as a “City of Zion,” exhibited a plan that was more than a simple grid providing for an orderly sale and settlement of lots. It was a plan based on spiritually based ideals. In addition to uniquely defining a religious or utopian center, the 1847 plat is a special artifact as the earliest known plan for Salt Lake City, drawn on a sheep skin, a format rarely used for nineteenth-century maps.

R O U N DTA B L E N OT E S Notes to Grunder and Cohen

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We are grateful to people who have encouraged and aided our research on the Sherwood plat. Almost from the beginning, Brad Westwood, Michael W. Homer and William P. MacKinnon lent crucial unflagging interest and support.

Will Bagley and Thomas Alexander responded with authoritative details and insights that few other specialists could have provided. And as the work continued, we benefited from contributions and suggestions from, among others, Jeff Anderson, Christy Best, Richard Francaviglia, Karen Fox, Mike Marquardt, Joan Nay, Steve Olsen, Jed Rogers, and Greg Thompson.

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1. “Salt Lake’s First Survey,” Deseret Evening News, March 23, 1893, 4, presumably written by John Q. Cannon. It was reprinted verbatim under the same title in George Q. Cannon’s column “Saturday Talk, By an Ex-Editor” in the Deseret Weekly, April 1, 1893, 461. The article describes the sheepskin plat in detail, matching the present artifact described in this paper in some dozen points of comparison.

2. Thomas Bullock, entry for Wednesday, July 28, 1847, in The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock, ed. Will Bagley, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier, vol. 1 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1997), 241. Young reportedly uttered these words immediately after pointing out the forty acres for the temple site. At Winter Quarters on April 12, Young had specifically designated that Bullock should accompany the vanguard company “to keep history, and come back with the Twelve in the Fall” (Bullock, 120). On April 17, while camped along the Platte River about sixty miles west of Winter Quarters, the pioneers organized themselves further, and “Thomas Bullock was installed as clerk of the camp.” Andrew Jenson, The Historical Record 9 (January 1890): 11.

3. Also at the southeast corner of Temple Square is a pink sandstone Great Salt Lake Base and Meridian monument, a reproduction of stone taken from the quarry from which the original monument came. The original monument stood at the site from 1855 until the 1980s and is now preserved by the LDS Church History Museum.

See “The Center of the City,” Church of Jesus Christ

6.

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

of Latter-day Saints (website), accessed August 7, 2018, history.lds.org/article/museum-treasures-meridian -marker?lang=eng.

Jenson, The Historical Record 7 (January 1888): 471, quoting Wilford Woodruff.

For examples, see Sherwood’s “Survey, 6 June 1843” diagram for John and Dorothy Fawlks, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed July 11, 2019, josephsmithpapers .org/paper-summary/survey-6-june-1843/1; debit notations for Sherwood’s services in January-June 1843 surveying four properties for Joseph Smith and one each for Charles Kinsey and E[zra] Oakley in “Henry G. Sherwood record book, circa 1838–1844,” MS 6117, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL); and Sherwood’s diagram of a “Survey of Pleasant Grove Iowa Territory, 1846 May 1,” MS 16883, CHL. Brigham Young used the phrase “dark clouds of sorrow” in a letter to his brother, as quoted in Edward W. Tullidge, Life of Brigham Young; or, Utah and her Founders (New York, 1876), 37. For the roster of the vanguard company, see Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 345.

Michael W. Homer, email to Rick Grunder, April 13, 2017. Homer served as chair of the Utah Board of State History (2003–2014) and is a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society. Richard Francaviglia, The Mapmakers of New Zion: A Cartographic History of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015).

Francaviglia, Mapmakers, 79, citing Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 241–43.

Gerard T. Koeppel, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York (Boston: De Capo Press, 2015), 7, originally saying “600-foot” blocks. Even longtime residents of Salt Lake City can be confused by the dimensions, which work out technically to 6 2/3 blocks per mile after adding the width of the streets: 5,280 feet divided by (660 + 132).

“Interesting items concerning the journeying of the Latter-day Saints from the City of Nauvoo, until their location in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. (Extracted from the Private Journal of Orson Pratt.),” in LatterDay Saints’ Millennial Star 12 (June 15, 1850), 180.

George Shepard, “‘O Wickedness, Where Is Thy Boundary?’: The 1850 California Gold Rush Diary of George Shepard,” Overland Journal 10 (Winter 1992), 28n32.

Brigham Young to General Charles C. Rich and the Presidents and Officers of the Emigrating Company,

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263). Bullock no doubt derived the August 16 date from his journal, but forgot that the name for the place at that time, established on August 9, had been “Salt Lake City”; he merely wrote the name “Great Salt Lake City,” with which he was familiar afterward.

26. Francaviglia, Mapmakers, 79–81.

27. Fd. 1, MS 9118, CHL. Bullock placed what is now the City-County Building square on block 53 instead of the correct block 38, what is now Pioneer Park on block 62 instead of the correct block 48, and what is now West High School on block 115 instead of the correct block 102.

28. Richard Francaviglia, email to Paul Cohen and Jedediah Rogers, June 6, 2016.

29. Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 247–48.

30. Bagley, 352, also 258n49; Will Bagley, email to Rick Grunder, April 11, 2017, adding thoughtfully, “It is often impossible to foretell the impact of anyone’s hard work on the Mormon Kingdom, where many of the best and most important additions often seem cast out in the wilderness.”

31. Pratt and Sherwood were measuring west from the southeast corner of Temple Square (not its west edge).

That places the fort in the right place in relation to Bullock’s written description in the journal, which Bullock may have heard from Sherwood, but misinterpreted.

The Dobie Square’s northeast corner was at the intersection of Third South and Third West Streets, thus three blocks south, but only two blocks west of Temple Square (because the west edge of Temple Square, West Temple Street, is technically also First West Street, being a block west of Pratt’s base and meridian point of beginning). In 1878, John Jacques corrected Bullock’s manuscript carefully in red ink by designating the true block number for the fort, 48, with the word “Dobie.” Later, Assistant Church Historian Andrew Jenson would mark that same, corrected block in pencil, “Now Pioneer Square.” On Bullock’s mistaken block 62 (which was actually residential), one can still see vestiges of Bullock’s incorrect pencil designation, “Public.” Bullock placed the Dobie Square one block too far west, which is explained easily enough, above.

But he also got it one block too far north (on block 62).

How was that possible? Hearing the location for the fort from Sherwood or Young no later than August 3, Bullock may instead have calculated the placement on his eventual diagram based upon the larger, 40-acre Temple Square that was in effect that day. Assuming the primacy of the southeast corner of temples and sacred sites (seen throughout early Mormon history), the original Temple Square may have extended two blocks west and two blocks north from Pratt’s Base and Meridian (thus adding blocks 86, 94 and 95 to the present temple block 87). If Bullock then placed his finger on that four-block area and counted to the third block south and the third block west (his possible interpretation of his August 3 journal description of the site, “3 Blocks South by 3 West from the Temple Square”), it would have landed him on block 62 which we find marked public on his “new” map of August 16. Other explanations may be possible, and we are still faced with the task of explaining why Bullock also got the other public squares wrong as late as August 16, at a time when the survey work was almost completed.

32. Feramorz Y. Fox, “The Life of Jesse W. Fox, Sr.” ca.

1950s, 25–26, unpublished typescript-format mimeo-

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Pioneer Camp, Valley of the Great Salt Lake, August 2, 1847, in Orson Whitney, History of Utah (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons Co., Publishers, 1892), 1:347.

Thomas Bullock provided the fullest report on the survey, with additional accounts appearing in the Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, CR 100, 137, CHL (hereafter Journal History), the scrapbook of newspaper clippings and diary entries maintained in the Church History Library in Salt Lake City. The survey was conducted by Sherwood and Pratt, according to Bullock’s entry for Monday, August 2, 1847 in Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 247, and Jenson, The Historical Record 9 (May 1890): 86 (entry for Monday, August 2, 1847).

13. Bullock’s weather notes were sometimes updated during the day, as in this instance, “Warm day, NW breeze.”

Both passages regarding the poles from Jenson, The Historical Record 9 (May 1890): 86.

14. Sermon of Brigham Young, August 8, 1847, in Howard Egan, Pioneering the West 1846 to 1878: Major Howard Egan’s Diary, edited by Howard R. Egan (Richmond, UT: Howard R. Egan Estate, 1917), 118–19.

15. Bullock, entry for Wednesday, August 4, 1847, in Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 248.

16. Jenson, The Historical Record 9 (May 1890): 86.

17. Journal History, August 7, 1847, 1.

18. Bullock, entry for Monday, August 16, 1847, in Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 257–58.

19. Bullock, entry for Wednesday, August 11, 1847, in Bagley, 255.

20. Jenson, The Historical Record 9 (June 1890): 97.

21. Fd. 1, MS 9118, CHL. 22. Bullock, entry for Tuesday, August 3, 1847, in Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 248. In addition, Bullock initially drafted an abbreviated sketch of three sample blocks on the July 28, 1847, page of his journal. See Bagley, 242.

23. Bullock, entry for Monday, August 9, 1847, in Bagley, 254. Bullock does not define “the Council” precisely in his journal entries. During this period, he seems to mean primarily the apostles who were present in the Salt Lake Valley. Brigham Young was then president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles but did not become President of the Church until December 1847.

24. Bullock, entry for Monday, August 16, 1847, in Bagley, 258.

25. Although Bullock labels his map “original Plat,” he seems to mean his own, earliest-surviving, personally drawn diagram. He could not have meant that this is the earliest of all city plans, at least, because in his own journal, he had already recorded Brigham Young’s description of Sherwood’s plat five days earlier, on August 11. It is important to note that while Young reported that “Father Sherwood’s Survey of City” ran 15x9 blocks by August 11 (Bagley, 255 [emphasis added]), Young had to have seen and referred there to Sherwood’s physical diagram—the sheepskin plat—because the actual survey work was still in progress and would not be completed for another nine days, on August 20. In addition, Bullock’s docket was probably a later note made while organizing his personal papers, because the name he abbreviates so familiarly, “G[reat] S[alt] L[ake] City,” did not exist on August 16, but was first proposed by Brigham Young on August 22, shortly before Young and Bullock left the valley to return to Winter Quarters (Bullock, entry for Sunday, August 22, 1847, in Bagley,

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graph in possession of Rick Grunder. A similar photocopy is described by CHL, call number M270.1 F792f 1967: Feramorz Young Fox, The Life of Jesse W. Fox, Sr. ([Salt Lake City]: James M. Fox, [1967]). Note that my copy of “The Life of Jesse W. Fox, Sr.,” cited, comes from a descendant and appears to originate quite separately from the one described at the Church History Library. Mine does not mention James M. Fox and appears to me to be earlier than the Church copy. I presume that the contents are nearly identical, however. I mention this to explain the differences between estimated dates of the two copies.

33. “Original Land Titles in Utah Territory,” Utah Division of Archives and Records Service (website), accessed October 1, 2017, archives.utah.gov/research/guides /land-original-title.htm; Fox, “Jesse W. Fox, Sr.,” 23, 26.

34. Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials [. . .] of the Territory of Utah [. . .] (G. S. L. City, U[tah]. T[erritory].: Brigham H. Young, Printer, 1852), 96. The statute does not mention the sheepskin plat specifically, but mandates that all such documents be transmitted to the surveyor general’s “successor in office.” By the time Jesse Fox’s long service ended in 1884, that office had ceased to exist, and there was no successor to inherit the plat. Fox and his contemporaries, including George and John Q. Cannon, came to consider the relic as Fox’s personal property over the years, “during forty of which it has been in the possession of the present owner. It is of course greatly prized

by Brother Fox, and as the years roll on it will increase in value.” (“Salt Lake’s First Survey,” 4.) This prophecy was echoed more than a century afterward by Christie’s, which eagerly accepted the plat to feature as the secondhighest estimated piece in its rich sale of “Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts” on December 14, 2016, in New York City, with an image of the plat occupying the entire back cover of the glossy color catalog. The bidding did not reach the reserve, however, and the item was later sold privately to the Library of Congress.

35. Henry G. Sherwood to Thomas Bullock, San Bernardino, California, June 18, 1863, fd. 17, box 3, MS 27307, CHL. 36. Fox, “Jesse W. Fox, Sr.,” 88 (typographical errors corrected).

37. “Salt Lake’s First Survey,” 4.

38. “Salt Lake’s First Survey,” Deseret Weekly, April 1, 1893, 461.

39. Statement of provenance accompanying the artifact.

See note 44 below.

40. Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia: A Compilation of Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson Memorial Association, 1936), 4:717–18.

41. Described by Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library website thus: “This historic document shows that Far West, Missouri was to be patterned after the Prophet Joseph Smith’s ‘City of Zion’ concept.

This plat was drawn with black ink on sheepskin. It was discovered by Mr. J. B. West of Cameron, Missouri in the attic of his grandfather’s vacant farmhouse around 1975.” Photograph credited to LDS Church Archives, accessed August 7, 2018, contentdm.lib.byu .edu/cdm/ref/collection/RelEd/id/4364.

42. Marc Haddock, “Celebrating Pioneer Day in 1947,” Deseret News, July 20, 2009, deseretnews.com/article /705378292/Celebrating-Pioneer-Day-in-1947.html.

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43. CHL catalogs at least two versions of this map, including one under call number 917.9225 M849p 195-?.

Precise bibliographic identification of either Morgan’s map or the early 1850s “map of Plat ‘A’” he used has proven to be difficult. For Morgan’s map, CHL says only “[Place of publication not identified]: [publisher not identified], [195-?],” giving its dimensions as “81 x 100 cm.” A large fold-out illustration of an early manuscript plat diagram appears between pages 338–39 of Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Salt Lake County Company, Tales of a Triumphant People: A History of Salt Lake County, 1847–1900 (Salt Lake City: Stevens & Wallis, 1947), stating in the modern printed caption: “Plat A of ‘Great Salt Lake City’ is the earliest plat-map we have in our Salt Lake County files.” The title shown on that manuscript is in the hand of Thomas Bullock, saying “Plot A. G.S.L. City.”

44. Email from a great, great, great grandson of Jesse Williams Fox Sr. to Rick Grunder, July 26, 2014. Fox Sr.’s descendant’s signed, notarized letter of provenance dated August 25, 2014, and his signed letter affirming his sole ownership and right to sell dated August 26, 2014, eventually accompanied the artifact to the Library of Congress in a discrete file created to protect the seller’s privacy as requested. With the artifact and documentation above, Grunder also purchased an engineering book once owned by Jesse Fox and hundreds of original letters written by Jesse’s grandson Feramorz Y. Fox and related family members.

45. If the roller, mentioned in the 1893 newspaper articles, were possibly a replacement of some earlier roller, such a consideration would have no bearing on the originality or dating of the plat itself.

46. Lauren Steinbrecher, “Historic Map Showing Brigham Young’s Vision for Salt Lake City Surfaces after 168 Years,” Fox13 News, April 7, 2016, accessed August 7, 2018, fox13now.com/2016/04/07/historic-map-showing -brigham-youngs-vision-for-salt-lake-city-surfaces-after -168-years/.

47. Henry G. Sherwood’s plat book, circa 1850–1852, fd. 16, box 3, MS 27307, CHL. The collection register for the plat book dated the item to “circa 1848–1852.” See register under Business and Financial Papers, Great Salt Lake City land business records, Henry G. Sherwood’s plat book, at eadview.lds.org/findingaid/002368442/.

48. Sherwood plat book entries for block 62, lot 2 and block 66, lot 4, respectively, in MS 27307, CHL. For dates of early pioneer births, deaths, and arrivals in the Salt Lake Valley, see “Pioneer Database, 1847–1868,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (website), accessed May 9, 2016, history.lds.org/overlandtravels/search.

49. 15x9=135. “President Young reported Father Sherwood’s Survey of City runs 15 Blocks North & South by 9 East & West,” recorded in Bullock journal entry for August 11, 1847, in Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 255. The actual survey work on the ground was not completed until August 20; see Jenson, The Historical Record 9 (June 1890): 97. Thus, Young’s reference here must have been to the plat drawing itself. The terms “survey” and “plat” were again used interchangeably in the 1893 Deseret News description of Sherwood’s plat artifact, cited further above.

50. Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 254 (August 9) and 263 (August 22).

51. Henry G. Sherwood plat book, entry for block 69, lot 5, CHL. Bullock marks that same lot as his personal

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pear somewhat incomplete but seem consistent in chronology. Bullock’s blocks 123, 130, and 131 were not restricted from development, and fourteen of those total twenty-four lots were marked with owner names of people who arrived in the valley after 1847 but no later than 1858 (including William Cooper who arrived in 1855 or later, and John Binley who arrived in 1858).

None of those fourteen names seem to be clearly identified on other lots available in Sherwood’s plat book or on Bullock’s later Plat A dated from the early 1850s and credited to the Salt Lake County Archives.

59. Despite primitive conditions and the makeshift rods freshly cut in the mountains, variance was slight. According to Andro Linklater, “excavations for new sidewalks undertaken in Salt Lake City in 2001 revealed that the corner posts were set 4 inches farther out than they should have been, suggesting that Pratt had not followed the practice of public lands surveyors and calibrated his chain precisely before starting work.” See Linklater, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy (New York: Walker & Company, 2002), 182–83.

60. Dating of the creation of initial blocks of Plat D seems inconclusive but is generally ascribed to the early 1850s, though that plat was not formally recorded until 1857. Korral Broschinsky, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for “Avenues Historic District (amended)” (Taylorsville, Utah: Preservation Documentation Resource; prepared for Salt Lake City Corporation, March 15, 2013), 6; pdf copy on file; see also: livingplaces.com/UT/Salt_Lake_County/Salt_Lake _City/Avenues_Historic_District.html (accessed August 13, 2018).

61. “Uninvited, Unwelcome, and Uncomfortable: Utah Assignments of Colonels E. J. Steptoe and C. F. Smith. Review Essay by William P. MacKinnon,” Utah Historical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 186; Thomas G. Alexander, email to Paul Cohen, June 13, 2016. Alexander kindly followed up with a second email to Cohen on June 17, 2016, reaffirming his conclusion: “It seems to me as I said before in the absence of contradictory evidence which I have not seen, the Sherwood map was most likely the first plat of Salt Lake City.”

62. “Pioneer 1847 Companies,” Heritage Getaways (website), accessed March 29, 2019, heritage.uen.org/companies /Wc46e27c2eca7d.shtml.

63. Francaviglia, Mapmakers, 81.

64. Richard Francaviglia, email to Paul Cohen and Jedediah Rogers, June 6, 2016; Jeffery L. Anderson, email to Paul Cohen, May 24, 2016.

65. Francaviglia, Mapmakers, 79.

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property on all three of his diagrams of Salt Lake City; see fds. 1–3, MS 9118, CHL. Another example of Bullock paying Sherwood for a survey (either in a personal or some public capacity) occurs in Bullock’s account book entry for February 8, 1849, fd. 11, box 3, MS 27307, CHL: “Henry G. Sherwood Surveying lot [$]1–.”

52. The document is dated “G[rea]t. Salt Lake City, Sept.

22nd 1852,” fd. 17, box 3, MS 27307, CHL. 53. Sherwood, meanwhile, remained the first winter in the valley as a governing member of the High Council. See Jenson, The Historical Record 6 (December 1887): 277.

Bullock spent little more than a month in the valley in 1847 (July 22–August 26), leaving in company with Brigham Young for Winter Quarters near present-day Omaha. See Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 232, 267. Bullock would not see Salt Lake City again until the latter half of September 1848 (again, in Young’s company; see “Brigham Young Company (1848),” in “Pioneer Database, 1847–1868,” accessed September 29, 2017, history.lds.org/overlandtravel/companies/4 /brigham-young-company-1848), after which he “was elected recorder of Salt Lake county, a position which he held until he left on a mission to Great Britain in 1856”; see Jenson, Biographical Encyclopedia (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1914), 2:599.

54. Fox was not only surveyor general of the territory, but had also become Salt Lake City surveyor (1851–76). Fox, “Jesse W. Fox, Sr.,” 68.

55. The Cannons noticed this when they saw the artifact in 1893, writing in “Salt Lake’s First Survey” that “What we know as Plat A comprises the whole of Father Sherwood’s survey, though in order to give symmetry to the upper right hand corner of his map he added a few blocks in what is now known as Plat E.” Francaviglia adds further insight regarding the space limitations along the west side of the city: “According to Bullock, Young stated: ‘On this place we can lay out a City two miles East & West, and as large as we have a mind to North & South.’ Young knew well that although the Great Salt Lake would effectively limit the city’s growth westward, its location on gently sloping land fronting the north-south-trending Wasatch Mountains offered the prospect of almost unlimited development along that axis. In what appears to be the first reference to stewardship in the development of a city in the American West, Young quickly added, ‘I want the grass on the bottoms to be left for our cattle.’” See Francaviglia, Mapmakers, 79, citing Bagley, Pioneer Camp of the Saints, 241, entry for July 28, 1847; the latter quote reads in its entirety: “I want the rushes and grass on the bottoms to be left for our cattle.”

56. These were blocks 90–92, 106–11, and 124–29, including where the Utah State Capitol building stands today.

57. Blocks 112, 123, and 130–31 were left unassigned in his notebook register of lots surveyed for individual landowners (in addition to the fifteen blocks enumerated above). In his original sheepskin plat, Sherwood did not hold back blocks 112, 123, 130, or 131 from development.

He was thus more optimistic at first regarding the number of usable blocks than he would be when he got down to surveying individual lots for owners recorded in his plat notebook. The “plat of the Great City” which is now at hand was the earlier, idealistic template, clearly the “Old plat” referred to on the cover of the notebook.

58. Bullock’s property diagrams are located in MS 9118, CHL. In Bullock’s diagram 3, for example, details ap-

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Notes to Francaviglia I thank the authors for reaching out to me originally and the editors of the Quarterly for inviting my comments here.

1. Brandon S. Plewe, S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson, eds., Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2012), 84.

2. [Plat of the Great City of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake], Library of Congress, Washington, DC, accessed May 29, 2019, loc.gov/maps/?fa=location%3Autah%7C subject%3Amaps%7Csubject%3Asalt+lake+city&dates =1800–1899&st=list&c=25&all=true.

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3. Plewe, et al., Mapping Mormonism, 44.

4. Francaviglia, The Mapmakers of New Zion: A Cartographic History of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015), 81.

5. Francaviglia, 112, 113, and 116–18.

6. Francaviglia, 304.

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1. Chauncy D. Harris, “Salt Lake City, A Regional Capitol” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1940). The literature on Latter-day Saint settlement of the American West is rich and varied. Pathbreaking studies include Milton R. Hunter, Brigham Young, the Colonizer (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1940); Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village: A Pattern and Technique of Land Settlement (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1952); Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1947–1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (June 1965): 191–220; Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976); John W. Reps, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Richard Francaviglia, The Mapmakers of New Zion: A Cartographic History of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015); and Thomas Carter, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

2. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 250, 251.

3. Raymond D. Gastil, Culture Regions of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).

4. See “1833 ‘Plat of Zion’ Wins National Honor,” Church News, May 25, 1996, accessed February 13, 2019, ldschurch news.com/archive/1996–05–25/1833-plat-of-zion-wins -national-honor-10335; “Plat of Zion Recognized,” Transform/Place, accessed February 13, 2019, transform place.wordpress.com/plat-of-zion-recognized/.

5. Pearl of Great Price, A Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith, First Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981), Moses 6–7.

6. For Latter-day Saints, “exalt,” “exalted,” and “exaltation” are specialized synonyms of eternal life. See R. Gary Shapiro, comp., An Exhaustive Concordance of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City: Hawkes Publishing, 1977), s.v. “exalt,” “exalted,” “exaltation.”

7. “Order” is a profound religious objective of the Latterday Saints. In their Standard Works, especially the Doctrine and Covenants, “order” defines the essence of God’s kingdom, priesthood, and many other central aspects of their religion. See Shapiro, Concordance, s.v, “order.”

8. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) is a classic comparative study of the relationship in traditional cultures between

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their formal ordering of the empirical environment and their metaphysical worldview. Cardinality was one such ordering principle. Cardinality is ubiquitous in European and Classical traditions, but with very different purpose and meaning. Rather than restricting its use to mundane physical orientation as most European traditions do, Joseph Smith gave cardinality a profoundly spiritual significance, as a dominant design element for his millennial utopia, Zion.

9. Classic studies of this phenomenon in other traditional cultures include Numa Denis Fustel de Counanges, The Ancient City: A Classic Study of the Religious and Civil Institutions of Ancient Greece and Rome, trans. Willard Small (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, n.d.); Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Paul Wheatley, The City as Symbol (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable, 1969), and The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine, 1971); R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Jerusalem: Holy City of Three Religions,” Jaarbericht Ex Orient Lux 23 (1973–1974): 1–15; Joseph Rykvert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); and John M. Lundquist, The Temple: Meeting Place of Heaven and Earth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993). A systematic examination of the origins of this phenomenon among the Latter-day Saints is Steven L. Olsen, “The Mormon Ideology of Place: Cosmic Symbolism of the City of Zion, 1830–1846” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1985).

10. Classic accounts of this auspicious time include Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail, American Trails Series (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Century One (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1965), 3:232–84; Richard E. Bennett, We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997). The term “The City of the Saints” comes from Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1862; reprint, Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1990).

11. Hunter, Brigham Young, 28–85; Francaviglia, Mapmakers, 78–127.

Notes to Grim 1. John W. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 204–60; Martin P. Snyder, City of Independence: Views of Philadelphia before 1800 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 15–25.

2. Reps, Frontier America, 106–44; John W. Reps, Tidewater Towns: City Planning in Colonial Virginia and Maryland (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA, 1972), 194–231.

3. Reps, Frontier America, 145–83, 184–203; Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, 1527–1995 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997), 90–109; Alex Krieger and David Cobb, eds., Mapping Boston (Boston: MIT Press for Muriel G. and Norman B. Leventhal Family Foundation,

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6. John W. Reps, The Forgotten Frontier: Urban Planning in the American West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), 66–76; Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon, Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West (Chicago: The Newberry Library, 2007), 68–71; Gerald Danzer, “City Maps and Plans,” in Buisseret, From Sea Charts to Satellite Images, 98–99, 174–5; Robert A. Holland, “Chicago,” in Cohen and Taliaferro, American Cities, 181–200.

7. Patricia Molen Van Ee, “San Francisco,” and Wesley A. Brown, “Denver,” in Cohen and Taliaferro, American Cities, 101–40; Reps, The Forgotten Frontier, 61–66, 76– 121.

8. Thomas G. Alexander, “Conflict and Fraud: Utah Public Land Surveys in the 1850s, the Subsequent Investigation, and Problems with the Land Disposal System,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 108–31.

9. Alexander.

10. These are T1N, R1E; T1S, R1E; T1N, R1W, and T1S, R1W. Survey Plats and Fields Notes for Utah can be searched online at General Land Office Records, accessed April 3, 2019, glorecords.blm.gov/default.aspx.

11. Reps, Frontier America, 410–21.

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1999), 119–228; Paul E. Cohen, “New York,” and Ronald E. Grim and Roni Pick, “Boston,” in American Cities: Historic Maps and Views, ed. Paul E. Cohen and Henry G. Taliaferro (New York: Assouline Publishing, 2005), 17–40, 81–100.

4. Reps, Frontier America, 304–43; Iris Miller, Washington in Maps, 1606–2000 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002), 34–53; Ralph E. Ehrenberg, “Washington,” in Cohen and Taliaferro, American Cities, 61–79.

5. Ronald E. Grim, “Maps of the Township and Range System,” in From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History through Maps, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 89–109; Grim, “How Old Land Surveys Shaped Today’s Landscape,” in Our American Land: 1987 Yearbook of Agriculture, ed. William Whyte (Washington, D.C.: Department of Agriculture, 1987), 43–47; C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Land Management, 1982), 18–112; Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, DC: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1969), 59–74.

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Juanita Brooks and Dale Morgan, 1948.

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Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History SAU N D E R S

219 Juanita Brooks is an iconic figure of Utah and Mormon history, one often discussed in superlatives. Her fellow writers and scholars, as well as the discerning public, have publicly referred to her as a hero. Bill Mulder called her “at once representative and singular.” Others have called her “fearless,” a “faithful transgressor,” and “a credible hero.” Perhaps the highest praise was paid her by fellow writer and semiprofessional curmudgeon Charles Kelly, when he said of her with grudging praise, “She has a lot of guts for a Mormon.”1 Lauding heroes is good form in public. In Brooks’s case, praising her literary heroism expresses a deep regard for Brooks as a public figure and her importance to the craft she pursued. I notice, however, that as time passes praise is heaped on Brooks often because she is a notable figure.

She has become a measure by which other writers are measured. As a writer or historical actor, Brooks is more iconic or emblematic than she is directly influential. Brooks certainly provides a local face (and an early female face) to a much larger set of changing realities, yet she trained no graduate students, instead teaching English composition (not history) to junior college students. She produced one work of monumental importance—but I will explain later how deeply indebted that work was to her mentor. Brooks lived her life as a committed but avocational chronicler and storyteller, one who began writing with a massive sense of inferiority in an isolated desert town, but she did not write or publish in a vacuum, so if we are to understand Brooks as a hero, we have to look at her in the context of the world she inhabited.

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Calling Brooks a heroic writer leaves us with the question of why she is considered heroic and not merely a writer. More attention has been paid to praising Brooks than to understanding why she holds place in scholarship, what Brooks means to history, and just exactly why terms like heroic are used to describe her.

Heroes are formed, shaped, and emerge from within conflict, so calling Brooks a hero or heroic writer implies that she fits within a story of conflict. But what was the conflict? Maybe the question is clearer if I ask it this way: What makes Brooks a heroic writer in terms of the writing of her time and within her culture?

Let me give you the answer right up front, and then I will give you the explanation for it. Brooks became a “heroic writer” within Western and LDS historiography by being an early pioneer of a new path through historical narrative of her regional culture. She was one of several visible characters of her time who took a different approach to telling the past, one that collided with Utah’s received wisdom or cultural “master narrative,” the inspiring pioneer myth.2 Before and after the Second World War, as Brooks was cutting her teeth in the practice of history, the Latter-day Saints’ collective psyche experienced a subtle but powerful challenge as the church’s well-entrenched inspirational narrative collided with a small group of writers (Brooks among them) whose influence turned out to be much larger than their body of work. The slow interaction between historical viewpoints forcibly injected a new perspective and new practices into discussions of Latter-day Saint history. Basically, there was a high-level argument about what history is, how it draws upon evidence, and how it functions within the culture. This article is about that contest. It is an exercise in historiology rather than historiography. If historiology is not large or known well enough to be called a branch of philosophy, it can at least be identified as a twiglike offshoot.3 Historiology looks at how the past is understood, the social functions of history, and the social epistemology or concept about what in the past is knowable and what constitutes “evidence.” All these elements shape what is possible to lay before viewers and readers in the present and thus tell us what history is.

I will start (like any historian has to) by setting some limits and boundaries, and to do that

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I have to extract a snippet out of the timeline of the much larger history of Mormonism. We talk about timelines as if time exists with beginnings and ends, but life is not really lived in a line. The historian’s beginning and end points in both time and in circumstance are necessary choices, because no book or article has a limitless page count or is exhaustively inclusive.4 Beginnings and ends help us make sense of a story, trimming it to manageable size and giving it an outline and context. I will choose 1935 to 1950, fixing attention conveniently on the fifteen years during which Brooks received the only real training she had to write history. Focusing on this snippet of time will also help me answer why she is looked on as a “heroic writer.” Because she existed in space as well as time, I also put a pin onto a map at Utah and its Latter-day Saint culture generally. All that these pins do is give us a set of boundaries within which to work. I do not want to imply that my title character created the modern form of Utah and Mormon history. All I am doing is pinning down both a place and a time, trying to figure out how Brooks fits into it. She becomes a lens through which to study what is going on inside our box, across time and culture. gh Prior to 1935, Brooks was a rural housewife and teacher who wanted to be a creative writer, planted in a small desert town of the American West and the Mormon Corridor. She did not start as a historian or even as a writer of history (actually, she was an English professor teaching basic writing at a junior college), but found she was comfortable telling stories about the desert and people around her. In 1933, Nels Anderson, a Dixie Academy graduate and Columbia University-educated sociologist, was doing field research in St. George for a study of rural Mormon life. He knew the Brookses and eventually asked Juanita to write a personal account of her grandfather’s polygamous family.5 He returned east and landed an executive position on the National Labor Relations Board, just as the National Recovery Act began creating projects to provide a few of the unemployed rural Americans with meaningful work during the Great Depression. Anderson asked Brooks to start up and manage a southern Utah branch of the Emergency Relief Administration

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Except among scholars, Morgan does not have Brooks’s name recognition. He is not remembered as the major influence on Utah or Mormon historiography that he was, but he was the defining influence on Brooks as her teacher, mentor, confidant, and an important supply line of sources and expertise during her formative years as a historian. Brooks would not likely have become important as a writer except for Morgan’s training and influence.

Morgan was born and raised in Salt Lake City.

He and Brooks shared an experience in early family loss: Brooks of her first husband and Morgan of his father while still a child. Morgan also sustained another defining personal loss.

At age fourteen, a bacterial meningitis infection completely robbed him of his hearing. Through his high school, college, and entire adult life, he was completely deaf. Typewriters became his voice. Morgan planned for a career in advertising, but his job with the HRS in August 1938 introduced him to the pursuit of history. As early as October 1938, despite being fresh out of college and new to the field, Morgan thought little of Utah and Mormon scholarship of the time, calling it “[p]ractically nothing really worth while.”8 Morgan set himself a personal task to write the history of Utah and then of Mormonism. The tasks of focused research and succinct

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writing in the HRS kindled in him a passion for factual accuracy and a quest for comprehensive completeness. He used both to publish one of the earliest examples of a modern historical study of Utah.9 Morgan possessed a remarkable memory, cultivated a flair for writing, and depended almost exclusively on notes, letters, and memos for his interaction with most people. Brooks learned she could trust his observations and criticisms, and he was faultlessly generous sharing source material with her.

Morgan drew Brooks into a loose constellation of Utah’s expatriate writers. Besides Morgan and Brooks, the circle’s key members included Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Around Brooks and other writers also circulated the novelist Maurine Whipple, the researcher Stanley Ivins, and the aforementioned Nels Anderson. Each of these people and their relationships to Brooks belong in the broad context of history that I will discuss later. The relationships and influences within this group are too complicated to tease out in the limited space here, so I will concentrate on the interaction of Brooks and Morgan, who discovered in each other a kindred spirit dedicated to factuality, fairness, and truth. Before 1941, each discovered their correspondent also wanted to write about one culturally untouchable subject, the Mountain Meadows Massacre.10 The development of Brooks’s Mountain Meadows Massacre is a useful lens through which to see their interaction, since it fits neatly into our snippet of timeline.

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(ERA).6 Thus, Brooks began her involvement with the practice of history as a documentary transcriptionist. She set up a table and bank of typewriters in a back room of her own house, where between November 1934 and June 1935 a dozen local women transcribed diaries and similar records that Brooks gleaned from the bureau drawers and trunks of families around the area. Once the project was complete, deposit carbon copies of the southern Utah transcripts ended up in the hands of a new agency in Ogden, the Historical Records Survey (HRS).

There they languished in the HRS files. Three years later, the HRS hired a young man fresh out of the University of Utah, Dale Morgan, as the project editor/publicist and, later, its historical writer. Morgan came across the southern Utah transcriptions as he reorganized the project’s research files and began corresponding with Brooks in July 1939. After nearly two years of correspondence, the pair met for the first time in January 1941.7

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Brooks came to her subject independently, well before encountering Morgan. The historian Gary Topping points out that Brooks was an insider to her subject, bringing to it two invaluable qualities: first, being a local, with a local’s access to material that would surely have been denied to anyone outside her community; second, being an insider, with an insider’s comprehension of the rural community and the values which drove it.11 As a St. George resident, Brooks was personally interested in the Mountain Meadows Massacre because it was an unspoken reality all around her. Brooks knew personally at least one man implicated in the massacre, Nephi Johnson. Brooks had discovered two crucial firsthand massacre documents in 1936 and 1937. In 1940, she made a preliminary presentation to the Utah Academy

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of Sciences, Arts, and Letters based on those documents.12 The massacre story suffused the Jacob Hamblin biography she wished to write.

The problem was, she did not yet know how to take on the Massacre single-handedly, demonstrating what was provable and dismissing that which was not. Her first publications had been essays—magazine stories about her small-town place and time written for a general American readership. She told stories well, but so much folklore, fear, family patriotism, and emotion were tangled among the narrative threads that merely recounting the massacre as a story was culturally perilous.

Brooks and Morgan certainly must have discussed their common interest at their first meeting in January 1941, but if not, she openly confessed her desire and sent Morgan a magazine article draft in the summer of 1942.13 He responded to her draft a full year later. The subject was too large and convoluted for an article, he thought, and suggested she think about the work in monograph length. As part of his critique, Morgan generated for her a detailed research outline, a list of facts she must document and argumentative points she needed to settle before being properly prepared to write, and he suggested again that her topic was too large for an article.14 “You suggest a monograph,” Brooks replied, “I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not sure that I know what a monograph is.”15 Morgan explained that her narrative would be better presented as a book. Not yet confident in her writing ability or grasp of the massacre as a historical subject, Brooks followed Morgan’s outline scrupulously and set to work enlarging, trimming, and documenting a work of research for the first time in her life. Nearly three years later, she sent Morgan a much longer but very rough draft manuscript. He returned a heavily marked-up copy that focused chiefly on historical details and documentation in the sources, some of which he had ignored in earlier drafts.16 More importantly, he introduced Brooks to the basics of manuscript preparation (such details as margins and note citations). Over two more years and many more letters to and from her mentor, she learned about bias, innuendo, weighing evidence, the importance of documentation, and the elements of an historical approach—though she

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would not have called it that. The process changed her writing about the massacre from storytelling to historical narrative; she gave up the informality and pathos of storytelling, adding citations to her sources of information, shaping the story in terms of what could be documented or reasonably concluded, and assuming a straightforward, dispassionate view of actors and victims. Morgan provided more than half of the sources she quoted and cited, virtually everything unearthed from contemporary newspapers and everything from federal archives.17 He reviewed and commented on the manuscript for a fourth time in June 1948, and at that point it was he (not the author) who approached first Wallace Stegner and then Stanford University Press to assess their interest in its publication.18 It is not the slightest bit of exaggeration to say that The Mountain Meadows Massacre would not have come into being had it not been for Morgan.

As the book was going to press, Morgan recommended Brooks and her growing capability to the Utah State Historical Society. She was appointed to the Board of Control in 1949 and became his voice on it, pushing for creation of a publicly available research collection and real rigor in its publications.19 This story of Brooks and Morgan and The Mountain Meadows Massacre exists at the level of microhistory—history on an individual or community level. On an interpersonal level, Brooks and Morgan encountered each other at a time when Brooks needed development, encouragement, and insight to develop as a historian. Morgan needed someone within the state and its dominant religious culture who shared his perspective about historical realities—a brave and capable peer to encourage. She was nearly old enough to be his mother, but he was the more developed researcher and writer.

Brooks had the disposition and latent ability to write the great book that The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, but she would not likely have written it without her mentor. Alone of her work, Massacre has the ballast of substantive citations. None of her other works are documented nearly so well, and many have virtually no context or documentation beyond a general bibliography.20 It robs her of no credit to say that as a writer of history, Brooks was chiefly a chronicler and storyteller, not a researcher. In

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223 Inside cover of Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre, inscribed to Morgan. Morgan was utterly unsentimental about the physical condition of his working library, habitually cross-reading his personal transcripts or Photostats of original documents against published versions and marking corrections heavily. Though he had been heavily involved in developing this volume and despite this copy being inscribed to him by the author as a personal friend, he carefully read, corrected, and questioned the text with his penciled markings and notes.

1971, Brooks herself wrote Morgan that “I can hardly claim to be an historian. You were right when you said my area is folklore.”21 Her book was a remarkable accomplishment, but at the level of microhistory all we can do is assert that it is a remarkable accomplishment.

To go back to the first question, to understand why Brooks is a hero and her book The Mountain Meadows Massacre is important, we have to look at the book and its writer (and its godfather) in a broader context—what made the book significant in terms of the time in which it was produced, and what set its author on the path toward hero status. That involves a broader level of inquiry: macrohistory. gh

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To understand why Brooks has been widely described as a “fearless” or “heroic” writer requires that we see her work within the place and time it was written. To see her work properly requires three bits of context. The first context is that at the time she began writing in the 1940s, the fields of Utah and Mormon history were inextricably intertwined. Writing about one necessarily involved the other (unless one was writing about branches of Mormonism beyond the Utah tradition). Mormon history is no longer Utah history, but it was often treated as one and the same when Brooks was learning her craft.

The second context emerges from a short comment by Swedish scholar Moses Rischin. In 1969, Rischin published a short essay pointing

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to a perceived change in Mormon historiography, calling it “the new Mormon history.”22 Rischin pointed to Thomas O’Dea’s sociological study, The Mormons (1957), as the origination point for the New Mormon History, followed immediately by Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom. He also mentioned the 1965 founding of the Mormon History Association and the commencement of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Later scholars proposed that the change in Mormon history Rischin identified resulted from the emergence of professionally trained historians from within Mormon culture.23 I am not so sure, because something was going on years earlier, and both Morgan and Brooks were in the thick of it. Like most changes, it had precursors and antecedents and was not clear-cut, but I think it can be seen in the kinds of books published within the timeline snippet I have established (see the Appendix, p. 233). I suggest that this earlier period of conflict smoothed the way for the rise of academic scholarship on Mormonism.

The third bit of context is more like a chunk and involves some understanding of how history was written and distributed in Utah when Brooks began writing, of how Brooks’s first important work, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, fit into the formal practice of history writing at the time. To understand why Brooks was a “fearless” or “heroic” writer, one has to understand when she lived and what about writing history might have made her heroic in comparison. She has to be “heroic” in terms of the telling of Utah and Mormon history in her time.

Until nearly the 1960s, Utah’s history, like the history of most western states, was not really a field of its own, and no one outside Utah was terribly interested in Mormons or Mormon history beyond a certain sensationalism. Most Utah history was written either for schoolchildren, for local citizens and family descendants, or for those interested in preserving the past for its own sake. With few exceptions, Mormon history was generally written by Mormons for Mormons. In Utah, history was almost an outgrowth of LDS church authority, the venue of such encyclopedists as Andrew Jenson, such Romantic compilers and analysts as B. H. Roberts, and such doctrinarians as Joseph Fielding

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Smith. There was little unofficial Utah or Mormon history written or marketed.24 At the same time, there was a small but thriving culture of local and family history publications, especially with the church and state’s pioneer founders a generation gone. Aside from the Utah Historical Quarterly, the major publications were Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) lesson series. Utah was not unique by any measure; state and local historical journals across the country had presented the edited records of founders and pioneers for about fifty years by 1935.

Such publications were fueled by a healthy strain of antiquarianism, or the study of the past for its own sake as an artifact. Publication was textual preservation, primary works were often reprinted without comment. Memoirs and biographies appeared regularly as family publications, and often included segments of diaries. Church leaders were afforded larger biographies. The important point is that history (except for outright polemic) was generally written largely by Utah’s Latter-day Saints for Utah’s Latter-day Saints (or by those outside the church specifically to challenge or document a competing narrative). This was history in terms of the pioneer myth “master narrative”: stories told and books written to congratulate the living on their heritage, partly to gild the founders, and certainly to reinforce values and views.25 One writer once observed privately that the Mormons had never adopted Scottish poet Robert Burns’s invocation, “O, would some Power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us,” but rather “Oh, would someone give the world to see us as we see ourselves.”26 An important problem with all this storytelling was that it was done chiefly by assertion and the source material was chiefly personal narrative.

Very rarely did anyone really explore very far to see how contemporary records compared.

The single library in Utah with a substantive and available book collection was the Salt Lake Public Library.27 By the 1930s, whether intended or not, the telling of the Latter-day Saint story had become closely entangled with church doctrine in the minds of key writers of Utah’s story, and an attack on one was, by point of argument, necessarily an attack on the other. Histories tended to be produced in terms of church leaders’ lives and their agency in the past, and were

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Writers and historians who wrote Utah and Mormon history in the inspirational master narrative style, exhibiting ethicism. Clockwise from upper left: Kate Carter (center), Leland Creer, Howard Driggs, Preston Nibley (far right), Joseph Fielding Smith, Levi Edgar Young. All photos from Utah State Historical Society.

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often written by well-placed younger leaders.

The generation of firsthand witnesses to the church’s founding and the state’s settlement was long gone, and access to firsthand written source material was dramatically limited. As a result, official histories, such as the semi-official History of the Church of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1902–1912), were both source material and explanation. Doctrinal histories, such as Joseph Fielding Smith Jr.’s Origin of the Reorganized Church (1907) and Essentials in Church History (1922), were openly polemic, but because their writers tended to write both doctrine and history and argued about doctrine from a historical perspective, they did not separate for readers the assertive claims of doctrine from the common temporal realities that could have been merely factual.

Levi Edgar Young discontinued his doctoral dissertation on polygamy and did not complete his degree in history because he “could not accept” the reality of things he encountered in his research.28 In 1947, DUP president Kate Carter addressed a BYU faculty group on the subject

of source material. “When she talked of ‘editing’ journals, one of the audience . . . asked specifically what it was that she called ‘editing.’

She explained that she omitted material that seemed not important or that was repetitious and then said, ‘I never allow anything to go into print that I think will be injurious to my church, or that will in any way reflect discredit upon our pioneers. I hope that if I ever do, I shall lose my position and my power to do so.’”29 This was history by ethical expediency.

Everything in the budding cultural collision was on hold during the Second World War, which ended with the heady “triumph of democracy.”

On the war’s heels came the 1947 Utah Pioneer Centennial. A desire to celebrate and memorialize the past provided little room to question it.30 Crawford Gates’s Promised Valley pageant sang paeans to the Utah pioneers. Preston Nibley edited a collection of Faith Promoting Stories (1943) of the pioneer generation. J. Reuben Clark’s October 1947 general conference address, published immediately as To Them of the

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History as a romantic, ethical story drives this Utah & Idaho Sugar Company float in the Utah Centennial parade, 1947. Notice that the woman is portrayed as teaching a group of children at her feet, gesturing toward the rendition of the miracle of the gulls on the back of the float.

The lesson is clear: the young generation should look to the past for inspiration in the way they approach their own challenges. Utah State Historical Society, photo no. 1392.

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At the time Brooks was researching and writing on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and even after her book was published, Latter-day Saint culture held clearly established ideas about how the past should be regarded and how it was appropriately used within the church’s culture of belief and participation. As late as the 1920s, key writers among the Latter-day Saints were used to thinking of history and the present understanding of the past as both a mortal manifestation of revealed truth and the enactment of that truth. History became a form of uncanonized scripture; challenging accepted history was an assault on both God’s word and church leaders’ testimony. When the HRS began poking around uncomfortably in the state’s local past, new sources and questions surfaced that challenged the “master narrative,” making some people uncomfortable. Maurice Howe wrote a friend about his experience starting Utah’s branch of the HRS in 1935, stating that “LDS historians were jealous of our work at first because they thought we were trespassing in their fields.”33 The Mormon story was proprietary. In 1949, an Ogden newspaper editor observed to Morgan that “We Utahns certainly like to read about Utah history—provided

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That Romantic, patriotic, inspirational, culturally affirming history is one side of the equation.

What could possibly be a problem with that approach if it works for readers? Well, what happens when a new set of facts seem to contradict or question the stories of established tradition?

That was a perceived problem for the affirming history of Mormonism between 1935 and 1950. I am not talking about academic scholarship. Scholarship involving the Mormons cropped up occasionally, but mostly in the form of masters’ theses and dissertations read by few besides the candidate’s graduate committee. A few of these made it to print, including Ephraim E. Eriksen’s Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life (1922) and Joseph A. Geddes’s The United Order among the Mormons (Missouri Phase): An Unfinished Experiment in Economic Organization (1922). My grandfather completed his PhD in sociology in 1936 at the University of Wisconsin with a dissertation on social perceptions and adherence to the church’s health standard. Despite the subject, he made an international career in rural sociology, not the Mormons. A few people read scholarship, but it was not many; such work written about the Mormons was generally unread even among Mormon academics.35 That began to change during our snippet of timeline. Since academic scholarship was not very influential (or upsetting), I will focus here on two important factors that were. One was the activity of a new generation of Utah-born writers who lived and worked outside the state and were willing and able to put their culture onto a national stage—that expatriate constellation mentioned earlier. Another was the archives and writing projects of the New Deal. I will talk through the latter first.

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it reads like we think it should.”34 As Brooks’s interest awakened in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a popular desire to memorialize the founders sparked many family publications that claimed a place for their grandfather or grandmother within the founding stories of the church, the settlement of Utah, or of a particular locality.

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Last Wagon, capped the process, drawing the lowliest into the pantheon of “blessed, honored Pioneers!”31 Clark’s emotional appeal sat alongside Ida Alldredge’s zealous laud of the pioneer forebears, “They, The Builders of the Nation,” a hymn praising the founders’ character and quality: “every day some burden lifted, every day some heart to cheer, every day some hope the brighter.”32 Really? Every day? Alldredge’s lyric ignored personal struggles, doubts, arguments, and failures, to gild the entire founding generation and put them high overhead on a very tall cultural pedestal. Clark’s respect for those who had suffered along the overland trail is no less sincere for its stentorian eloquence, but its message also carried a submessage, one that may or may not have been purposefully invoked: that Latter-day Saint history should hold out a clear, noble, inspired and inspiring example of the past—the veritable staff on which floated aloft an “ensign to the nations.”

The underlying message was for those in the present to look to the faithfulness and nobility of those in the past as their example in building the future.

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Brooks’s transcription project and Morgan’s HRS historical work both challenged the traditional forms of Utah and Mormon history, which often focused on founding figures and

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political institutions. The Depression discredited the country’s industrial and political barons of the Gilded Age and motivated a quest for a new approach to the nation’s history. The federal culture projects found it in a new historical approach that came from Britain: documentary.36 “Documentary,” wrote historian William Stott, “deals with people ‘a damn sight realer’ than the celebrities that crowd the media.” Influenced by the work of photographers Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, documentary focused on the experiences and records of nonelite populations. Early forms of documentary emphasized common people, work routines, and daily life, requiring an entirely new set of source materials.37 The previously available memoirs and writings of community and business leaders—the basis of traditional history—were only marginally significant compared to the diaries, letters, and memoirs of those who had been nothing more than followers and common citizens. This approach to history shifted the perspective about “what really happened” away from elite figures and onto the often-conflicting experiences of everyone else. It influenced the telling of Utah history as well. “Mormonism really was compounded out of the lives of hundreds and thousands,” Morgan wrote to Bernard DeVoto in 1942, referring to the diary of a man otherwise unknown to Mormon or Utah history. “There is more to Mormonism than the lives of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.”38 Importantly, bringing up the differing perspectives of documentary often challenged or at least complicated official stories all across the country, not just in Utah or among the Mormons.39 But within Utah, dredging up new records from people with very different and sometimes conflicting experiences challenged the master narrative, what I have termed the pioneer myth. By the end of the war, the documentary approach proved powerful enough that it began reshaping American memory.40 Now for a hard example of the collision. At about the same time that Morgan and Brooks began corresponding, a young woman from Huntsville, Utah, and another University of Utah graduate, Fawn McKay, a niece of First Presidency member David O. McKay, quietly surrendered her family faith and determined to embark on a biography of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. She met both DeVoto and Morgan, was

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influenced by their thinking, and became a close friend of the latter, drawing on him for source material and editorial advice. Between 1940 and 1944, Fawn McKay Brodie mined resources from outside Latter-day Saint history and records. In 1943, her proposal won the Biography Fellowship offered by New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In 1945, her biography No Man Knows My History appeared, a volume that has not since been out of print. The social history revolution of the 1960s and 1970s shook the ivory tower of American academia over years and across many venues; Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith compressed a similar challenge to traditional Mormon history into a single, explosive shockwave.

The great challenge to Latter-day Saint psyche posed by No Man Knows My History and a few years later by The Mountain Meadows Massacre—and the potential threat that Morgan’s own work on the Mormons represented—was less in the writers’ interpretations (which could be dismissed), but rather that those interpretations rested on a body of largely unimpeachable contemporary documentation. It was difficult to get around the issue that in these new works were presented a set of documents that told an entirely different history to the one so long accepted by church members. Here is where the conflict came into the open: rather than simply accepting the old history as a settled reality—a canon—these new researchers began dredging up new evidence, new sources, and brought new questions asked of the well-established facts. All of a sudden, the accepted stories in the master narrative began looking a bit threadbare, privileging some evidence or sources while gliding past, omitting, or ignoring others. To many, Mormonism’s inspirational story became much more human and much less inspiring.

Defenders among the Latter-day Saints knew how to handle ill-informed detractors and sensationalists (they had done so effectively for two generations), but they were unprepared for the assault of source material that appeared in Anderson’s and Brodie’s work. The biography’s reviewer in the Saturday Review of Literature captured the ethical view of Joseph Smith: vilification of [Smith] has largely disappeared with his generation, while among his followers faith and the will

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Once the issue (and questions) of document-based, contradictory narratives was in the open, it could not be tucked back where it came from. There were, these new scholars would argue, perfectly natural explanations for claims of visions, dreams, or other communications. In other words, the key argument was that Joseph Smith and the Mormons existed within history, and their experiences had to exist within historical limits as well. These new writers on Mormonism all looked trustingly to the social sciences to help them revisit the past in terms of proliferating new and rediscovered contemporary documentation.

Now let’s go back to the writers of this new strain of history. This first generation—Brodie,

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Brooks was one of this new group. To bring this back to her specifically, I think it fair to observe that Brooks has been called a “heroic writer” from two directions. First, from outside Mormonism looking in, chiefly because she was willing to bridge gaps in her chosen slice of history inclusively with documented fact, challenging the omissions of faith-promoting narratives. Second, from inside Mormonism (as stated now, not during her early career), in that Brooks “voic[ed] her contrary opinions unequivocally” with the courage of not only conviction, but the moral rightness of factual inclusivity. Whether she actually said that “Nothing less than the whole, unvarnished truth is good enough for the church I belong to,” as has been attributed to her, she insisted on bringing cold, hard, and occasionally disturbing fact to Mormon history.

To Brooks this meant facing up to uncomfortable historical realities, stripping away the inspirational varnish and filling in the omissions of faith-promoting narratives. In the context of her time and culture, that was a bold, new, and somewhat risky assertion or stance to take—but one that would emerge as an article of faith within the New Mormon History.45 Morgan summed up the value of her work as The Mountain Meadows Massacre came from the press:

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The Latter-day Saints’ faith-affirming accounts and personal testimonies were quickly becoming no longer the only facts. First Anderson, then Brodie, and then the others began pulling handfuls of new evidence out of reemerging documents that challenged the comfortable old ones. Fr. Robert Dwyer, who received a PhD in history in 1941, addressed an important point that defined the collision described here: what does one side do when the other side simply dismisses an assertion and uses another standard to measure a claim?42 How could the Mormons argue against a factual context for their history? For those inside a culture, the most direct method is by denial and denunciation— dismissing the dismissal. Yes, of course there was a backlash. J. Reuben Clark, Joseph Fielding Smith, Milton R. Hunter, Levi Edgar Young, and Kate Carter all challenged the uncomfortable new questions by reasserting the nobility of the past and questioning the motives of those who did not accept their versions of history.43

Brooks, Morgan, DeVoto, Stegner, and Anderson—were also writers that fit within what Edward Geary once called more broadly “Mormondom’s Lost Generation.”44 They were lost in the sense that they had strayed not just from Mormonism (neither Stegner nor DeVoto were ever church members) but from the security of Utah’s mountain fastness and the state’s cultural insulation. It is important to note that all of them published or planned to publish their works outside of Utah for non-Mormon readers. Brooks’s Massacre set an intensely local event and its aftermath within the contexts of regional and national conflicts. This was history which intended to explain, not to inspire.

Similarly, each writer in her loose circle approached the Mormon story as one facet of a broader American story rather than a sui generis, self-existent story of the Restoration (Mormons’ term for the reestablishment of the early Christian church by Joseph Smith in 1830).

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to believe have worked upon his memory, expurgating his history of the grotesque, the absurd, or the merely inconvenient, softening his faults, and investing his character with a sweet serenity and an infinite love—a being who withstood the devil and all his archangels and died a martyr.

But if their feelings are to have any weight outside their own sentiments, they will have to unearth from their archives facts to modify or to contravene Mrs. Brodie’s conclusions.41

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The point of view it expresses in the long run is the point of view that must prevail about the whole of Mormon

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Writers and historians who rejected the inspirational master narrative of Utah and Mormon histories, exhibiting instead historicism. Clockwise from upper left: Juanita Brooks, Fawn Brodie, Bernard DeVoto, Robert Dwyer, Dale Morgan (left), Wallace Stegner. All photos from Utah State Historical Society.

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Let me return to my thesis and hypothesis and see where we stand. Hopefully, you can now see how Brooks fits into the writing of her time, a participant in the uncomfortable encounter between practitioners of the pioneer myth as Latter-day Saint master narrative on the one hand, and a small number of writers wielding a new approach to Utah and Mormon history on the

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other. Brooks was virtually the first writer within Utah’s Latter-day Saint culture to challenge inspirational master narrative versions of history in print. With the guidance and substantial reinforcement from Morgan, she constructed her breakthrough study, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, on a foundation of factual inclusivity, without either apology or direct condemnation of the principals.47 Brooks’s nature and disposition were to tell the truth as best she could from contemporary documentation. Those who have called Brooks fearless and heroic were her contemporaries and those in succeeding generations who side with the goals and premises of this new history. Those among Utah’s community and Latter-day Saint culture who placed a greater value on the inspirational message of history expressed different views of her enquiry (and of works like it).48 Among Brooks’s patriotic

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history. Nothing the leaders of the Church may do, regardless of prejudice, resistance to change, or vested interest can prevent this. Your book will serve to shape, even as it now expresses, the social force that will bring it about. In time to come, the pioneer value of your book will be entirely appreciated[. F]ear not.46

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This inscription is the author’s most straightforward explanation of her motivation for writing The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Though this inscription is undated and does not specify the recipient, another inscription identifies this book as the one presented to the LDS apostle Delbert L. Stapley at his meeting with Brooks on June 13, 1961. Convinced that both the massacre and the church’s recent action posthumously restoring Lee to fellowship should remain ignored, sparing the church either publicity or scrutiny for an indefensible act by a few of its members, Stapley insisted that her forthcoming biography of John D. Lee include no indication of Lee’s reinstatement.

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generation, the challenge of an uninspirational history was upsetting to some and frustrating to others. The collision between these two viewpoints—of what history was and what it should be—was expressed in a slow swirl of emotions, values, assertions, and trust—precisely how humans negotiate conflicting values in the face of change. From the 1930s through the early 1960s, the formal discussion about the Mormon past in books and in journal and magazine articles plowed the cultural ground from which could grow the “new Mormon history” that Moses Rischin identified.

Let me address my own thesis and hypothesis by asserting that there is no single, unassailable body of usable facts, no single past, and no single history. Religiously and culturally useful views of the past do not (or possibly should not) involve choosing either one side or the other. History is neither a binary of mutually exclusive “faithful” or “skeptical” studies, nor of “true” and “untrue” facts, nor either of “fair” and “unfair” or “biased” and “objective” approaches—though histories may be each of those. The past will look different if seen through a lens of Mormon theology, which applies rubrics to human existence that are broader than history itself. Strip away that rubric and some venerated pioneer leaders become venal, fanatical, or just unlikeable and inexplicable characters. Perhaps this is one reason Mormon history may seem contradictory, exploitative, or opaque to many outside the culture, and to those inside the culture, such as Morgan, who reject the fundamental religiosity of the movement and its believers. However, scholars who stand firmly on a documentary and contextual foundation have to accept accurate history as a quest for appropriate context into the world inhabited by their subjects.

Because there is more than one way to look at history, and because narrative that is written on its own terms can be easily and convincingly discredited, writers would be wise to question the genuine limits bounding what can be recovered from the past, and they must be equally careful what they assert in turn. Narrative that is intended to teach and inspire can be problematic in that it communicates its meaning by simplification, sidestepping complexity or embarrassments to present a unified message—opening

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itself to dismissal because it risks becoming only superficially truthful. It risks becoming counterfactual narrative—fiction (or misdirection) that conveniently extracts the lessons it wants from the past, often ignoring what is not useful to inspire. Inspirational history does not possess unique flaws. Narrative grounded in the objective, documentary approach gets into trouble because it merely describes, lacking any mechanism to motivate beyond factual awareness—its telling does not mean anything.

The midcentury argument over evidence and narrative in Mormon history that I have talked about here illustrates the root problem with both approaches, that either may be agenda driven. Critics of inspiring “faithful” history charge that it ignores inconvenient truths to create idealized perspectives. On the other side, “objective” history—evidence-based history, the kind that Brooks and Morgan pursued— claims to accept only what may be reliably documented; the trick is that historians often emulate their inspirational-history fellows, reserving the right to decide how “reliably” may be measured or applied. We can do better.

When trying to understand the past and writing about it for present readers, absolute impartiality is not only impossible, but undesirable. A serious writer of history can, however, self-consciously identify biases and perspectives up front, fairly include even inconvenient and uncomfortable facts from the past, and minimize expectations of what the past should represent.

We can allow our progenitors and their antagonists to be real people again, neither angels nor demons. Charting a new course through historical perspective will therefore also stand as a challenge for the Latter-day Saints to understand their church, families, and themselves as well. The biologist Jared Diamond phrased an answer to a similar question about the relationship between motives and understanding.

There is, he explained, “a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation,” Diamond reminds us with a cautionary note, “is a question separate from the explanation itself.”49 Let us be fair and generous about our complex and very human past. Individual readers can find motivating inspiration in the driest, most

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Appendix: Pasts in Collision, 1935–196051 Works in the Inspirational “Master Narrative” Style (exhibiting ethicism)

Works rejecting Inspirationalism (exhibiting historicism [Morgan, Dale L.] The State of Deseret. Utah State Historical Society, 1940.

Dwyer, Robert J., Fr. The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study of Social and Religious Conflict, 1862–1890. Catholic University of America, 1941.

Stegner, Wallace. Mormon Country. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942.

Anderson, Nels. Desert Saints. University of Chicago, 1943.

Brodie, Fawn M. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. Alfred A. Knopf, 1945.

Morgan, Dale L. The Great Salt Lake. Bobbs-Merrill, 1947.

Brooks, Juanita. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Stanford University Press, 1950.

Nelson, Lowry. The Mormon Village. University of Utah Press, 1952.

Mulder, William A. Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia. University of Minnesota Press, 1957.

O’Dea, Thomas F. The Mormons. University of Chicago Press, 1957.

Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. Harvard University Press, 1958.

Furniss, Norman F. The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859. Yale University Press, 1960.

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Brooks became a historian during the 1930s and 1940s as a document-based “objective” approach to studying the past ground against inspirational “faithful” versions of the past. I mentioned Moses Rischin’s 1969 phrase as he discussed “the new Mormon history” that had emerged since the late 1950s. The move toward document-based history took hold within Mormon studies as Brodie’s attention went elsewhere and Brooks became one of its notable figures.

The Western History Association was formed in 1963, and the Mormon History Association was formed by its LDS members and others in 1965. A lot has changed in Western and Mormon history over the past half century. Now there are Mormon-related associations for European and Pacific Rim Mormon history, for Mormon letters, and media studies. Here we are, two generations later, and the Mormon story and experience is no longer a field solely of interest to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or to the Community of Christ. Mormon studies are welcomed as branches of both U.S. history and the history of religious studies in such places as Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the Claremont Colleges.50 Inspirational storytelling in the style of Cecil McGavin, Preston Nibley, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Gerald Lund is not exactly gone—and, arguably, has a legitimate place—but does not hold the cultural position it once occupied without challenge.

It turns out that Brooks and her friends really were at the beginning of something big. Maybe that makes her a heroic writer after all.

Kirkham, Francis W. A New Witness for Christ in America: The Book of Mormon. Zion’s Printing & Publishing Co., 1943. 2/e 1947, 3/e 1951.

Harmer, Mabel. The Story of the Mormon Pioneers. Deseret News Press, 1943.

Nibley, Preston. Faith Promoting Stories. Deseret Book, 1943.

Driggs, Howard R. Ben the Wagon Boy. Stevens & Wallis, 1944.

Hunter, Milton R. Utah, The Story of Her People, 1540–1847: A Centennial History of Utah. Deseret News Press, 1946.

Creer, Leland H. The Founding of an Empire: The Exploration and Colonization of Utah, 1776–1856. Bookcraft, 1947.

Romney, Thomas C. The Story of Deseret. Zion’s Printing & Publishing Co., 1948.

Driggs, Howard R. George the Handcart Boy. Alladin Books, 1952.

Nibley, Preston. L.D.S. Adventure Stories. Bookcraft, 1953.

———. Stalwarts of Mormonism. Deseret Book, 1954.

Hinckley, Bryant S. The Faith of Our Pioneer Forefathers.

Deseret Book, 1954.

Driggs, Howard R. When Grandfather Was a Boy. Stevens & Wallis, 1957.

McGavin, E. Cecil. The Mormon Pioneers. Stevens & Wallis, 1960.

Burton, Alma P., and Clea M. Burton. Stories from Mormon History. Deseret Book, 1960.

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straightforward contemporary description.

In my view, real people who have coped with cares and fears and choices and setbacks are far more believable and inspiring than the flawless and ultimately hollow bronze heroic figures patriotically pushed atop cultural pedestals.

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Smith, Joseph Fielding. Essentials in Church History. Deseret Book, 1922. 7/e 1940, 9/e 1942, 13/e 1953, 16/e 1960.

Barrett, William E. The Restored Church: A Brief History of the Growth and Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Deseret Book, 1936. 2/e 1940.

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This article is a revision of a text written for the Thirtysixth Annual Juanita Brooks Lecture at Dixie State University, March 28, 2019, published as “Dear Dale, Dear Juanita: Two Friends and the Contest for Truth, Fact, and Perspective in Mormon History.” Used by permission of Dixie State University.

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1. The invocations of Brooks as heroic are legion and cannot all be listed here. The ones I quote are William Mulder, review of Juanita Brooks by Levi S. Peterson, Western American Literature 24 (Summer 1989): 159–60; Levi S. Peterson, “The Saving Virtues, the Pardonable Sins,” Juanita Brooks Lecture, Dixie State University, St. George, Utah, April 28, 1989, and “In Memoriam: Juanita Brooks,” Sunstone (October 1989): 7; Laura L. Bush, “Truth Telling about a Temporal and a Spiritual Life,” in Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth-century Mormon Women’s Autographical Acts (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004), 81; and Charles Kelly to Dale L. Morgan, January 4, 1970, reel 14, frame 272, Dale L. Morgan Papers, MSS 71/161 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Morgan Papers, UCB).

2. Myth in the sense of origin story, not falsehood. A myth is not necessarily fiction—yet like any modern myth, the pioneer myth is packed with all sorts of inspirational or instructive expectations. Though myths are often passed along undisturbed or welcome antiquarianism (study of the past as artifact—recounting and correcting dates, times, participants, geography, and other details), myths are usually ethical productions intended to inspire the rising generation of the time. See Eric A. Eliason, “Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression,” in Useable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expression in North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 175–211.

3. Jose Manuel de Bernardo Ares, Historiology, Research, and Didactics: Elaboration and Transmission of Historical Knowledge (San Francisco: International Scholars Press, 1996). The philosophy of history and historiographical literatures are voluminous. Personally, I like two works, both by John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (1984; New York: Routledge, 2015) and Why History Matters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). One book that approaches the subjects I raise here (but more in nationalist contexts) is Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (2009; New York: Routledge, 2016). Historiography is the study of how history is presented.

4. William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1347–76. Choosing a topic, period, and scope are the historian’s choices, influencing the narrative and the arc of the story being told.

5. Published as “A Close-up of Polygamy,” Harper’s 168 (May 1934): 299–307, her first important publication.

Anderson’s work was published as Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).

6. A competing version of this story is given by Maurice Howe, the founding director of HRS/UWP in 1935, in Maurice Howe to Dale Morgan, May 29, 1942, reel 26,

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frames 895–987, and Howe to Morgan, May 30, 1942, reel 26, frame 989, both in Morgan Papers, UCB. Dale Morgan to Jessie Empey, August 17, 1939, reel 27, frame 149, Morgan Papers, UCB; Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 92–93, 100–101.

Brooks and Morgan began corresponding officially in 1939 as Morgan began a revision to the Washington County history for its never-completed county records inventory. They were clearly corresponding prior to the earliest surviving letters, as their exchanges are mentioned to other correspondents. The pair met for the first time when Morgan came south on Writers’ Project business in January 1941 (Morgan to Glenn R. Wilde, April 20, 1966, reel 9, frame 245, Morgan Papers, UCB).

Dale Morgan to Jerry [T. Gerald Bleak], October 5, 1938, Dale Morgan Papers, 1933–1978, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City (hereafter Morgan Papers, JWML); Richard Saunders, “‘The Strange Mixture of Emotion and Intellect’: A Social History of Dale L. Morgan, 1933–1942,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 39–58.

“The State of Deseret,” Utah Historical Quarterly 8, no.

1–4 (1940). Morgan aspired to crafting a social and cultural history of the U.S. setting in which Mormonism rose. This was under contract to Farrar & Rinehart but was never completed. Decades later, a close friend published a volume that probably comes the closest to the study Morgan imagined: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), a volume of the Oxford History of the United States series.

Morgan was introduced to the massacre and the challenges of documenting it in 1939 while revising the HRS Washington County historical sketch and in corresponding with Charles Kelly.

Gary Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 207.

The documents were the anonymous first-hand account signed “Bull Valley Snort” (John M. Higbee) and an affidavit from Nephi Johnson, both reproduced as appendices in Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1950). Peterson, Brooks, 115, 129. An abstract of the presentation, “Sidelights on the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” appeared in Proceedings of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 17 (1940): 12. Beyond this abstract, no text of the presentation survives. She shelved rather than publish it, fearing social reprisal.

Based on her prior reports of the documents, I suspect Brooks first thought about the story in terms of a Utah Historical Quarterly article, possibly (but not certainly) built around editing the two reminiscences she had found. I may be wrong, for the version she first sent Morgan was evidently a narrative and not edited documents. Since she initially had no publisher in mind, Morgan suggested Harper’s for her article on the massacre.

Brooks to Morgan, September 11, [1942], reel 10, frame 1030, Morgan Papers, UCB; Morgan to Brooks, September 27, 1942, box 1, fd. 1, reel 1, frame 1835, Juanita Brooks Papers, 1941–1993, MS 486, Special Collections,

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liographic essays. A careful look at her writing reveals that the notes in On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 1964) are chiefly citations of published primary documents and secondary material. And on very careful inspection it becomes clear how indebted she is to Morgan even for the cited material.

21. Brooks to Morgan, February 10, 1971, reel 10, frame 987, Morgan Papers, UCB. 22. Moses Rischin, “The New Mormon History,” American West 6, no. 2 (March 1969): 49.

23. James B. Allen, “Since 1950: Creators and Creations of Mormon History,” New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 407–38; Davis Bitton and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Professionalization of Mormon History,” in Mormons and Their Historians (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 126– 46; Robert B. Flanders, “Some Reflections on the New Mormon History,” Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History, ed. George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 35–45; Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, James B. Allen, “The New Mormon History: Historical Writing since 1950,” in Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 60–112. In a discussion of Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), Roger Launius asserted that the change between the older style of historical inquiry and the “New Mormon History” was due to the professionalization of the field—the postwar involvement of young, academically trained historians interested in Mormonism as a research topic. See Roger D. Launius, “From Old to New in Mormon History: Fawn Brodie and the Scholarly Analysis of Mormonism,” in Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 195–233. I agree with Bitton, Arrington, and Launius to a point, yet concentrating on the academic flowering masks the real collision that stirred the soil from which that flower grew: what happened before the Arrington generation of scholars began actively writing. Considered from a slightly different direction, the New Mormon History is really the rise of a topical specialty within academically practicing and teaching historians. Davis Bitton points out that scholarly works invoking the New Mormon History approach “have reference not to the fact of being produced recently but to distinctive approaches and questions asked.” See Davis Bitton, “Mormon Society and Culture,” in Excavating Mormon Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2004), 351. See also Grant Underwood, “Re-visioning Mormon History,” Pacific Historical Review 55, no. 3 (August 1986): 403–26.

24. One exception was M. R. Werner’s biography, Brigham Young (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925). I don’t want to imply that there was no such history published outside Utah. B. H. Roberts’s “History of the ‘Mormon’ Church” was published serially in Americana, vols.

4–10 (July 1909–July 1915) was later compiled into the Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of

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J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City (hereafter Brooks Papers, JWML).

15. Brooks to Morgan, September 11, [1942]. Morgan’s review itself is in Morgan to Brooks, May 15, 1943, box 1, fd. 6, reel 1, frame 1836, Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks Papers, 1928–1981, MSS B 103, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City (hereafter Brooks Papers, USHS).

16. Morgan to Brooks, June 2, 1945, box 1, fd. 9, Brooks Papers, USHS. 17. Morgan planned to write on the massacre’s “long range significance to Utah-Mormon history” as early as May 1939, before he began corresponding with Brooks; see Morgan to Maurice Howe, May 22, 1939, reel 27, frames 182–88, Morgan Papers, UCB. The pair formed a partnership to share relevant source material, in which Brooks was the greatest beneficiary, which did not bother Morgan at all; he did the same for many other people throughout his career. Compare Karl Yost, “Introduction,” in Henry DeGroot, Sketches of the Washoe Silver Mines, Reprints of Americana Series no. 3 (Morrison, IL: Reprinted for Karl Yost, 1961).

18. Morgan to Brooks, June 15, 1948, box 1, fd. 3, Brooks Papers, JWML; Morgan to Brooks, August 11, 1948, box 1, fd. 1, Brooks Papers, JWML; Morgan to Stegner, August 11, 1948, box 18, fd. 53, Wallace Earle Stegner Papers, MS 676, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

19. Morgan conceived the plan to professionalize the Utah State Historical Society as the state’s first real public research library. Brooks’s appointment was recommended by her mentor specifically to counter the Daughters of Utah Pioneers’ influence on the way history was documented and related in the state; see Morgan to Brooks, October 3, 1948, reel 1, frame 1905; and Morgan to Brooks, March 23, 1949, reel 1, frame 1921, Morgan Papers, UCB. Marguerite Sinclair, the Society’s secretary-manager, relied heavily on Morgan’s advice for building the Society’s book collection, organizing and housing transcripts, and on physical arrangements of shelving and storage. Beyond his own letters (e.g., Morgan to Utah State Historical Society board, May 27, 1945, reel 9, frame 70, Morgan Papers, UCB), Morgan’s influence on the Utah State Historical Society can best be glimpsed in the Utah State Historical Society record series 1117 (boxes 1–2, 4, 3192, and 7323) and in the recommendations of Marguerite Sinclair Reusser and Elizabeth Lauchnor, both Society secretaries, to USHS president Joel E. Ricks located in the Ricks Papers, Special Collections, Utah State University. When Lauchnor left and A. Russell Mortensen became the Society’s first professional director in 1950, Morgan’s direct influence effectively ended.

20. The Harper’s articles are essays, almost short stories.

Her first work of history, Dudley Leavitt: Pioneer of Southern Utah (privately published, 1942), a biography of her grandfather, provides not a single footnote for context. All are excellent pieces of writing that spin the tale rather than document it or reach conclusions. An argument could be made (not here) that each piece fits within the Latter-day Saint “master narrative” of the time, asserting the underlying nobility of the characters and their struggles. John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1961) and History of the Jews in Utah and Idaho (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1973) rest on general bib-

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Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930). Topping, “The Tradition: Utah Historiography to About 1940,” in Utah Historians, 12–42.

25. The National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers’ mission statement is openly ethical: “Come to know our fathers, and turn our hearts to them. Preserve the memory and heritage of the early pioneers of the Utah Territory and the western U.S. Honor present-day pioneers worldwide who exemplify these same qualities of character. Teach these same qualities to the youth who will be tomorrow’s pioneers.” “Mission of the SUP,” National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers (website), accessed July 10, 2019, sup1847.com/mission -and-activities/.

26. Robert Burns, “O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!”, Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Project Gutenberg; Morgan to Emily Morgan, November 20, 1950, reel 21, frame 694, Morgan Papers, UCB. 27. Stories of these library collections are collected in David Whittaker, ed., Mormon Americana: A Guide to Sources and Collections in the United States (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Studies, 1994).

28. Morgan to Brooks, June 23, 1951, box 2, fd. 13, Brooks Papers, USHS. Admittedly, this is a secondhand claim.

29. Brooks to Morgan, March 6, 1947, reel 10, frame 687, Morgan Papers, UCB. Brooks twice expressly rejected Carter’s bowdlerizing approach in “The First One Hundred Years of Southern Utah History,” Proceedings of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 24 (1946–1947): 71–79; reprinted, Encyclia retrospective issue (1983): 89–98; and in “Let’s Preserve Our Records,” Utah Humanities Review 2 (July 1948): 259–63.

30. Utah’s 1897 settlement semicentennial, which involved the remaining original pioneers, was a far less overt pageant than would be organized after that generation became merely portraits on walls and names on plaques. The church’s 1930 centennial or the 1947 state centennial were exponentially more laudatory, grounded in the contemporary cultural need for enshrining heroes.

31. J. Reuben Clark, To Them of the Last Wagon (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1947). The quoted phrase is from the chorus of “They, the Builders of the Nation” cited below.

32. “They the Builders of the Nation,” lyric by Ida R. Alldredge, music by Alfred M. Durham, Hymns (1948), no.

173.

33. Maurice Howe to Morgan, May 19, 1942, reel 26, frame 987, Morgan Papers, UCB. 34. Darrell Greenwell to Morgan, September 19, 1942, reel 12, frame 1098, Morgan Papers, UCB. 35. Leonard J. Arrington, “Scholarly Studies of Mormonism in the Twentieth Century,” Dialogue 1, no. 1 (1966): 15–32; Ephraim E. Ericksen, “Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1922); R. Welling Roskelley, “Attitudes and Overt Behavior: Their Relationship to Each Other and to Select Factors” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1938). Please excuse the personal indulgence; I mention grandpa’s dissertation because Arrington missed it in the list compiled for the article. The Latter-day Saint experience with scholarship is explored in Thomas W. Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

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36. “Documentary is the presentation or representation of actual fact in a way that makes it credible and vivid to people at the time. Since all emphasis is on the fact, its validity must be unquestionable as possible (‘Truth,’ Roy Stryker said [head of the Farm Security Administration photo office], ‘is the objective of the documentary attitude’). Since just the fact matters, it can be transmitted in any plausible medium.” “The heart of documentary is not form or style or medium, but always content.” “Social documentary . . . shows man at grips with conditions neither permanent nor necessary, conditions of a certain time and place.” William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14, 20.

37. Stott, Documentary Expression, 56, 71.

38. Morgan to Bernard DeVoto, March 2, 1942, reel 2, frame 2147, Morgan Papers, UCB. 39. Stott, Documentary Expression, 104–17; the challenges of this approach can be glimpsed in Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 48–50ff, 98–99, 113–117, 149, 194– 201, 241–85.

40. The inspirational enterprise or ethicism was alive and well, personified by illustrator Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings and the Office of War Information’s highly effective propaganda campaign, which successfully challenged prewar isolationism by linking World War II with the Revolution, thus converting military service from involvement in foreign affairs into a crusade for “liberty” and “freedom.” During and after the war, a school of history known as the Consensus approach grew partly out of the national unity engendered by the war effort. Scholars associated with this approach tended to minimize the nation’s cultural and racial diversity to concentrate on “shared” heritage, the “melting pot” myth of cultural integration, and broad national stories (which privileged white heritages).

See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 11; Peter Charles Hoffer, “The Rise of Consensus History,” Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); and Mario DePillis, review of History’s Memory by Ellen Fitzpatrick, Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 1116–19.

41. Dale L. Morgan, “A Prophet and His Legend,” Saturday Review of Literature 28, no. 47 (November 24, 1945): 7–8. Much of what Brodie invoked was well known, but like Peter Carroll observed about his own education, Mormons had been inured by their expectations not to see these inconvenient facts. Peter N. Carroll, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 90.

42. Dwyer realized how Brodie’s biography had changed the historical landscape. “Here was a book without anger and without the distortion of bias [i.e., it did not automatically accept the Mormon version of events], written with as near an approach to a single eye for historical truth as is morally possible. To ignore it would be blind; to face up to it perilous.” Fr. Robert Dwyer, review of No Man Knows My History, by Fawn M. Brodie, Intermountain Catholic Register, January 27, 1946.

43. The response to Brodie specifically was formulated officially in an unsigned editorial by Albert E. Bowen, “Appraisal of the So-Called Brodie Book,” Church News

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his autobiography and with Brig’s passing can now only be documented as folklore or hearsay. See Will Bagley, “Actions Paint a Portrait,” Journal of Mormon History 36, no. 3 (Summer 2010): xiv.

48. Feeling their values were under attack, those who value this viewpoint tended to more often express this sentiment privately and informally rather than formally in print; see, for instance, Brigham D. Madsen, Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Western Historian (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 213. The official response to Brodie and the unofficial response to Morgan was cited in note 43. The unofficial response to Brooks’s 1961 biography of John D. Lee is related in Peterson, Juanita Brooks, chap. 7.

49. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), 19. For the same sentiment in an LDS context, see Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009), 186–90; and Charles L. Cohen, “The Construction of the Mormon People,” Journal of Mormon History 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 25–64. I think one who wholly accepts an inspirational approach would disagree with Diamond—the purpose is an important component of the explanation since it determines what is told (and what is not).

50. John-Charles Duffy, “Faithful Scholarship: The Mainstreaming of Mormon Studies and the Politics of Insider Discourse” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 2006).

51. This list of commercial and scholarly monographic histories is a textual rendition of the illustrations used in the Brooks Lecture. It is merely illustrative, not exhaustive, omitting four important classes of contemporary material also involved in the contest: (1) historical monograph series, such as the Daughters of Utah Pioneers lesson volumes; (2) works of doctrinal history, such as Joseph Fielding Smith, Church History and Modern Revelation, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1956–1959) or James L. Barker, The Divine Church: Down through Change, Apostacy Therefrom, and Restoration, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1951–1956); (3) local histories, including ward, stake, and mission histories; (4) privately published autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs.

Of course, any list of books entirely misses a fifth class of material: articles in popular magazines and scholarly journals.

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4, no. 20 (and the Church section of Deseret News, May 11, 1946), reprinted and distributed twice in pamphlet form, and unofficially in Hugh Nibley, No Ma’am, That’s Not History: A Brief Review of Mrs. Brodie’s Reluctant Vindication of the Prophet She Seeks to Expose (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1946). The unofficial response to Morgan was J. Reuben Clark’s effort to pressure the Guggenheim Foundation to quash publication of his Mormon history. Documentation of this effort is Clark’s letters to D. D. Moffatt in the Clark Papers at Brigham Young University and Morgan’s applicant file in the Guggenheim Foundation archives.

44. Edward A. Geary, “Mormondom’s Lost Generation: The Novelists of the 1940s,” BYU Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 89–98; the attribution was applied beyond novelists in Newell G. Bringhurst, “Fawn M. Brodie, ‘Mormondom’s Lost Generation,’ and No Man Knows My History,” Journal of Mormon History 16 (1990): 11–23.

Even two of the key practitioners recognized the importance of this circle. See Davis Bitton and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Bridge: Historians Without Degrees,” in Mormons and Their Historians (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 108–25; Topping, Utah Historians, 3–6, 341n4.

45. “It was Juanita’s elaboration of a single complex theme within the history of Dixie which made her into, not merely a respected historian, but an authentic Utah hero.” Levi Peterson, “In Memoriam: Juanita Brooks,” Sunstone (October 1989): 7; Peterson, Brooks, 422. It is not my intent to critique her works individually but to show that they fit into a much broader whole; Topping, Utah Historians, 194–206, briefly considers the foibles and values in her major works.

46. Morgan to Brooks, December 20, 1950, box 2, fd. 10, reel 1, frame 1966, Brooks Papers, JWML. To be fair, Brooks occasionally allowed broad tolerances in the way she hewed to historicism’s line for the sake of personal comfort or to tell a story. See Topping, Utah Historians, 207–19, 220–26. The “new Mormon history” has a broad critique in David Earle Bohn, “Unfounded Claims and Impossible Expectations: A Critique of the New Mormon History,” in Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History, ed. George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 227–61. The entire volume is relevant to this paper.

47. However, Brigham D. Madsen reportedly heard Brooks publicly tell Kate Carter about the settlement of southern Utah: “You can defend Brigham Young if you want, but I won’t.” Regrettably, this gem does not appear in

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Waldemer Read, chair of the philosophy department at the University of Utah and originator of the Great Issues Forum. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

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The University of Utah’s Great Issues Forum, 1952–1974

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Public Philosophy and the Idea of the University

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From 1952 to 1974, the University of Utah’s Department of Philosophy collaborated with the Extension Division (now Continuing Education) to assemble the best minds of the local faculty in the Great Issues Forum.

In a series of lectures organized around a common philosophical, ethical, or religious topic, each year’s invited participants addressed themes that would have resonated with academics and the general public. Topics for each year rotated and included such earth-shaking titles as “The Nature of Man,” “Man’s Survival,” and “The University in Crisis.” The Forum was initially designed to be engaging and accessible to the average interested layperson and to bridge the gap between the academy and the larger community. Consequently, the lectures were well attended and often broadcast to thousands of listeners and reported in city newspapers, given that they addressed, in the words of philosophy department chair Waldemer P. Read, “questions of general interest and of vital current concern to the public.”1 The Great Issues Forum was the brainchild of Waldemer Read, the protégé of the previous philosophy department chair, Ephraim E. Ericksen, who had studied under John Dewey at the University of Chicago at the height of his power and influence in American philosophical, educational, and reform circles. While Dewey was a confirmed humanist, his pragmatic philosophy was amenable to religious inflections, and it was this compatibility that Ericksen found attractive.2 This ideological constellation would

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constitute a compromise for Ericksen and Read between the idealism of traditional religion (treating the universe as the product of mind) and the realism of the natural and social sciences (treating the universe as existing independently of mind); according to Scott G. Kenney, “In pragmatism Ericksen found an intellectual basis for the communitarian emphasis of his people, a rationale for the heroic sacrifices of his parents, and a criterion by which authoritarian excesses might be critiqued.”3 According to the American pragmatist philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926– 2016), pragmatism functions as “realism with a human face.” Distinguishing between a capital “R” Realism that presumes the possibility of a “God’s-Eye” view of reality and a more modest small “r” realism that recognizes the relativity of views contained within the universe, Putnam argued for a view of the cosmos that brackets the notion of absolute truth while commonsensically asserting the necessity of acting as if empirical science provides usable notions about how the world is constituted.4 Such a view would have provided a comfortable ideological halfway house for Read, who, like Ericksen, began his career heavily involved with the LDS church’s religious educational system and transitioned to a traditional secular academic post at the university. Read’s doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of John Dewey contained the evangelistic zeal of traditional religion minus the supernatural elements: “Intelligence can become a significant factor in determining the course of events. It can determine the course of history in the very unique sense of determining it intelligently. . . . [T]he eventual issue of things will be better, not worse or indifferent, as the result of intelligent trying.” Read’s dissertation argues for the efficacy of “collective social intelligence,” formed by progressive public education and in creative dialogue with the community of scientists, both natural and social: “But whether the method of collective social intelligence ever does become a reality or not, those who concern themselves with bringing it about can have the satisfaction of knowing that they have tried to the best of their ability and with the best of instrumentalities to mitigate the evils and dangers that beset mankind.”5 In Waldemer Read’s last contribution to the Great Issues Forum, he lectured on “The

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Nature of Philosophy”: “The study of philosophy is just like any other study except it is more thoughtful. . . . The human mind is as effective as it has proved to be because of the social nature of its operation. Human thought is a cooperative work. . . . I consider the thinking done by the professional so-called philosophers to be but continuous with human thought in general.” Read had an optimistic appraisal of this societal learning process. He believed that the history of human thought was best viewed not as a fruitless guessing game but rather as the gradual accumulation of data that made collective assertions about the nature of the universe more and more accurate as time goes on.6 Deploying academic philosophy with an interested, engaged public in formal and informal dialogues resulted in an interchange of ideas that enlightened participants. In a sense, this understanding of the philosophical enterprise was the germ of the Great Issues Forum, but more importantly it was a microcosm of the idea of the university itself. The university as a cultural idea, and the University of Utah as an instance of that idea, was a vital part of this societal search for truth. Other notions of the university might see the institution as, on the one hand, merely transmitting already discovered truths to a new generation or, on the other, as blindly groping in the dark, as equally unable to arrive at truth as any past or current contender, but for Read and his colleagues, the university as a whole, and the University of Utah in particular, was indispensable in furthering human progress toward comprehending the nature of the universe.

Armed with this understanding of philosophy and the role of the university in discovering and disseminating truth, Read and other academically trained philosophers created a public forum where previously taboo issues could be discussed in an open exchange moderated by faculty in the department and not by the university president or the “downtown” nexus of commercial and ecclesiastical interests. The University of Utah’s Department of Philosophy assumed a leadership role within the university in organizing public discussion of weighty and controversial topics, but also took a similar role beyond the academy to speak on behalf of the

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According to Ralph Chamberlin’s centennial history of the university, the 1915 controversy

Allyson Mower and Paul Mogren assert in their centennial study of the University of Utah Academic Senate that the 1915 crisis was about freedom of speech rather than religion.8 And, yet, these are not mutually exclusive. While disrespectful speech acts were the initial

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More than simply the university’s attempt at community outreach, as was common elsewhere in the country in the postwar period, the lecture series also represented the resolution of the secularizing movement that had begun in earnest in its academic freedom crisis of 1915.

The academic crisis of 1915, in which University of Utah administrators dismissed four faculty members thought to be disloyal to the school, set the university on a trajectory of secularization whereby the university evolved in the public eye from an institution deferential to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the matters of faculty composition and subject matter to an institution that was perceived to be independent of sectarian influence. The Great Issues Forum, both in the topics covered and in the wide-ranging publicity given to its programming, illustrated the university’s complete academic freedom.

was sparked by Milton Sevy’s valedictorian graduation speech, in which he urged the university to throw off its ultraconservative shackles to become more broad-minded.

Governor Spry’s presence at the commencement address and irritation with its inference that the state of Utah was backward-looking led the governor to ask President Kingsbury whether the student had acted alone or with faculty support. Kingsbury then determined several faculty had been aware of the content of Sevy’s speech and terminated their employment. The majority of the student body signed a letter of protest to the president and were joined by protests from civic associations not connected with the university. The resulting national attention, joined with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) investigation, led the Board of Regents to take action to replace Kingsbury.7

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university on these topics. The Great Issues Forum ended in the 1970s, when ideological and personnel changes in the department made it less tenable.

University of Utah campus, 1914, a year prior to the academic crisis that resulted in the dismissal of four university professors. Utah State Historical Society, Shipler no. 15244.

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reasons given by the university administration for their abrupt dismissal of four faculty, the public perception of this was that it was at bottom motivated by religion, replacing critical faculty voices (non- and dissident Mormons) with compliant ones (orthodox Mormons).

The recently formed AAUP sent a committee to investigate the allegations that the academic freedom of the dismissed faculty had been violated. The report they issued largely agreed with the aggrieved former faculty and condemned the actions of university president Joseph Kingsbury. The AAUP investigators felt compelled to devote a section of their report to the allegations of religious influence at the university and determined that while it was not possible to ascertain Kingsbury’s motivations, it was clear that the Mormon faculty he chose to replace the non-Mormon ones lacked the education and experience—and in the case of Osborne Widtsoe (brother of the soon-to-be university president John Widtsoe), who became head of the Department of English, “not such as is at present usually expected in those appointed to headships of important departments in either colleges or universities in good standing.”9 The resolution of the crisis along the lines of the AAUP report’s recommendations for full academic freedom with appropriate institutional safeguards gave both town and gown what they wanted: the LDS church could win respectability by pointing to their hands-off approach to the university and critics of both the church and the business establishment could wrest control of the school from those same social groups. This new public modus vivendi gave rise to a quieter sub rosa struggle on the part of the LDS church and the non-Mormon business classes to place their own representatives in key positions at the university.10 Under Widtsoe and his successor George Thomas, university administration would distance itself from direct church influence and advocate for religious neutrality on the campus. When asked, Widtsoe stated that LDS officials did not “tell him how to run the U, except to ask on occasion, that he employ a Mormon or two.”11 For Thomas, who replaced Widtsoe in 1921, his two stated inaugural objectives as president were to improve the scholastic standards

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of the faculty and to raise the scholarship of the student body.12 Thomas’s relatively long tenure embedded these higher academic standards, including religious and political neutrality, into the soil of the university.13 For example, on the matter of political partisanship, Thomas believed the university should remain above the fray: “The institution is to serve all, irrespective of politics or creed, and it is difficult to engage in partisan politics alienating the good will of your opponents. Work on the stump naturally means partisan discussions, and to the ordinary individual, to say nothing of the active opponents of the participants, it is difficult to differentiate between the activities of the individual and the activities of the University.”14 It is tempting to conclude that Thomas felt the same about other institutions competing for the loyalty of his faculty members. Ephraim Ericksen, who along with Milton Bennion comprised the fledgling philosophy department, was accosted on campus by President Thomas in the 1920s when Ericksen was both a philosophy professor and running the LDS church’s youth program, the Mutual Improvement Association (MIA). According to Ericksen’s wife’s account, Thomas said, “‘Well, good morning, Ericksen.

How’s the MIA coming?’ My husband looked at him, startled, and said, ‘Well, fine. Yes, I . . .’

Thomas said, ‘You know, things would go quite far if you were spending as much time and energy and concern about the university as you do about the church.’”15 During his administration, Thomas instructed department chairs to attempt to keep a rough balance on their faculty between Mormons and those who were not of that religious persuasion, although this conflicted somewhat with his other injunction to hire the best candidate for the position—and his own position to avoid any church affiliation.

When LDS apostle John Widtsoe, who attended the same university ward congregation as Thomas, noted that Thomas’s church activity was restricted to dropping in on a Sunday school class once or twice a year and “slipping out” before the class ended, Thomas responded by saying he felt he could do a better job as president if he did not identify himself with any church.16 Thomas was followed in office by two presidents who continued the university’s trend

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The origins of the Great Issues Forum lie in this postwar period, when rapid growth in both student enrollment and faculty hiring coincided with the waning of the LDS church’s perceived ability to influence campus events. The philosophy department was uniquely positioned to fill the need for a flexing of the campus’s intellectual muscles. Waldemer Read, Obert Tanner, Sterling McMurrin, and Max Rogers were former LDS seminary and institute instructors who went on to graduate study in some of the nation’s finest institutions of higher education such as the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Southern California. McMurrin later referred to the department as “the intellectual hub of the campus” in the sense of attracting attention from university faculty (other professors enrolled in courses taught

by McMurrin and his colleagues) and taking a leading role in public intellectual life.18 Whereas in other American universities of this period philosophy was on the decline in terms of its place within the university relative to other disciplines, at the University of Utah it was at its zenith.

The department chair, Waldemer Read, initiated the Great Issues Forum, and its final year was dedicated to him in recognition of this.19 Read,

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Among the first generation of university thinkers from 1865 to 1895, philosophical idealism was consensual. At the end of the nineteenth century, one form of idealism—pragmatism—won out not only because its proponents were competent and well placed but also because they showed the philosophy’s compatibility with the natural and social sciences and with human effort in the modern, secular world. . . . [P]ragmatism associated mind with action, and investigated the problems of knowledge through the practices of enquiry, tinting the physical world with intelligence and a modest teleology.22

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The only major public incident challenging the stability of the academic freedom consensus occurred during Olpin’s tenure, on the occasion of the university’s centennial in 1950. A student-run literary magazine invited writers of national prominence to submit essays to their issue celebrating the anniversary, and several of the contributions featured critical commentary on the Mormon church. The church-owned Deseret News responded with equally critical verbiage directed at the university. The episode was resolved privately in an apology proffered

by George Albert Smith, the LDS president, to Olpin.17

believing philosophy belonged not merely in the ivory tower but instead should be diffused throughout the community, wanted a wide practical benefit to result from the teaching of philosophy.20 For example, Read and McMurrin sought to offer early, advanced-placement, introductory philosophy courses in local high schools but was turned down by the Salt Lake City School District.21 This emphasis on practical benefit derived from pragmatism, a branch of philosophy Read picked up from John Dewey and which found other adherents in the department. Not only did the long-serving department chair, Waldemer Read, profess it, but he learned it from his mentor, E. E. Ericksen, former chair and Dewey protégé. Pragmatism suited the University of Utah’s situation well, as it was seen as a transitional philosophy between idealism and realism. Pragmatism legitimized scientific inquiry and yet also took seriously the desire for some type of residual metaphysical hope:

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of emulating other American universities and maintaining academic freedom. Leroy E. Cowles, who presided over the university during World War II, and A. Ray Olpin, who was president from 1946 to 1964, were Latter-day Saints, yet acted in the same manner as presidents of other American colleges and universities.

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In addition, in the early 1950s many of the philosophy faculty, along with like-minded colleagues from other disciplines and universities like Brigham Young University and Weber College, participated in the Mormon Seminar, also jokingly referred to as the Swearing Elders.

Organized at the University of Utah by McMurrin and English faculty member William Mulder, the group often had heated discussions and featured presentations from specialists in a wide variety of academic disciplines who could in some meaningful way connect their

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work to the study of Mormonism.23 The Swearing Elders was a template for the Great Issues Forum. Whereas the Swearing Elders sessions dealt with specifically Mormon topics, the Great Issues Forum took many of the parochial matters dealt with behind closed doors and lifted them to a level of abstraction applicable to religion in general. For example, the Swearing Elders would invite guest speakers to address their group on the mystical practices of upstate New York (Mormonism’s birthplace) while the Great Issues Forum would focus on the possibility and nature of religious knowledge for any religion.

conscientiously teaching and guiding the community, as if they had been clergymen without a church.’”24 A dialogue on ethics between University of Utah professors with questions from the audience performed the same function in Salt Lake City in the 1950s that the Harvard pragmatists had in the 1870s. Both may have included audience members struggling to understand, for instance, the implications of taking Darwin seriously and wondering whether and how they ought to modify their own ethical practices based on new scientific understandings of the place of humanity on earth and in the cosmos more generally.

Moreover, the Great Issues Forum provided a space for the members of the university’s philosophy department to continue playing the role most of them had played previously for the LDS church as employees of its seminaries and institutes of religion: that of a spiritual teacher or guide. In this they were following the template of their pragmatist mentors of a generation or two earlier. The educated classes in the time of William James expected philosophy to reassure them about the worth of human life and the value of tradition and to “join mild exhortation with a defense of fundamental verities. George Santayana put it well . . . when he said that the Cambridge philosophers had an acute sense of duty ‘because they were

In its first decade, the themes addressed by the Forum were religious, ethical, and epistemological. For instance, the 1954–1955 Great Issues Forum featured University of Utah philosophy professor James L. Jarrett’s “Does Philosophy Destroy Faith?” Jarrett carefully considered the three terms of the question as a proper philosopher would and concluded that the risks of attending something like the Forum are rather worth taking. He phrased the weakest version of the question as “Do some philosophers and teachers of philosophy sometimes say something which might slightly modify some aspect of somebody’s belief about some aspect of the universe?” and the strongest version of the question as “Do all philosophers

Obert C. Tanner, professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and frequent participant in the Great Issues Forum. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, MSS C 400, no.

8175-8,9.

Sterling McMurrin, E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of Utah and contributor to the Great Issues Forum.

Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, MSS C 400, no. 18045-4,5.

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Jarrett’s argument likely was framed in such a way as to allay suspicions in more traditionally minded University of Utah students that the purpose of the Great Issues Forum was to directly challenge religion in general and Christianity and Mormonism in particular. However, Jarrett’s language was also jaunty enough to welcome participation from the conservative members of the campus community who would likely have some of their ideas refined rather than replaced.

The topic addressed on March 23, 1955, “Do History and Religion Conflict?” featured a debate-style presentation between McMurrin and Hugh Nibley, a professor of religion and history at BYU. Nibley was well-known as a philologist who attempted to vindicate Mormon truth claims by identifying parallel customs in ancient civilizations and those described in Mormon scriptures. Taking the negative side, Nibley claimed that the premise of the evening was faulty: “The obvious intent of the question is to test religion’s claims in the light of historical discovery, or as the newspaper phrased the question, ‘Can religion face its own history without flinching?’ There is no hint that history

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Nibley concluded by taking issue with the historical discipline itself:

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It is a cozy and reassuring thing for student and teacher alike to have our neat authoritarian College Outline Series Syllabi of Western Civilization, Surveys of Great Minds, and what not, to fall back on. But please don’t point to these pedestrian exercises in skimming and sampling and try to tell me that they are a valid refutation of the prophets! . . . If we have gathered here to read lectures to each other or to the Mormon Church, we might as well spare our breath; or if you are looking for a stick to beat the Church with, my advice is, leave history out of it—it will come apart in your hands.28

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The so-called danger would be least in the case of a closed authoritarian personality studying, say, formal logic, with a teacher who in his church commitments is similar to the student.

It would be greatest if the student is of a curious and open-minded turn, already somewhat disillusioned with his church and skeptical of many of its claims, and the course is in the Philosophy of Religion where the teacher is a religious liberal who believes that dogmatic orthodoxy is the enemy of the good life.26

might flinch in the face of religion . . . the question proposes a beauty contest in which one of the contestants has already been awarded the prize.”27

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invariably totally shatter the confidence and wholly overthrow the beliefs of everyone they meet?”25 Rejecting both extremes, Jarrett helpfully formulates a more moderate position: “For those who prize above everything complete orthodoxy as defined by one or another of the dogmatic churches, is there danger in studying philosophy in a secular institution of higher learning?” Acknowledging a risk for the believer when the question is phrased in this more realistic way, Jarrett contrasts two scenarios:

In essence, Nibley urged the primacy of faith over secular scholarship, noting the weightiness or gravitas of the concerns of religion over against the mundane trivialities with which history concerns itself. In this way, Nibley somewhat echoed the midcentury trend of neo-orthodox Christian theology exemplified in the work of such thinkers as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who acknowledged the importance of the scientific method but stressed the incomparably greater demand placed on the believer by the word of God.

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McMurrin adopted the positive side of the proposition and argued that religious faith is undercut by the study of religious history: “It is the study of religion itself that occasions the most difficult and discomposing questions. It is when religion is studied and discussed seriously by rational, informed persons with open minds and honest hearts that it encounters its most severe testing.” This is because “one who is truly conversant with the history of religion has had more than a glimpse of the development of something that a large segment of the faithful suppose to be basically free from historical change.”29 Among the difficulties posed by the study of religion to belief include human failings of religious leaders, the primitive

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origins of all religions, the complexities and contingencies of religious origins, and the fact of development and change writ large. McMurrin charged “apologetic scholars” (presumably including Nibley) with hiding and distorting this history from the faithful, because admitting honest history “would produce a different kind of religion, a kind which they do not like, that often makes people less amenable to authoritarianism and churchly control.”30

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One undergraduate philosophy major at the University of Utah who attended the event recalled how exciting the McMurrin-Nibley exchange was. He remembered the auditorium full not only with students but faculty and the general public. The impact of the Great Issues Forum on undergraduates often was salutary.

Not only was the experience a co-curricular feast for philosophy majors, but students in other departments attended as part of the university’s well-rounded liberal education program. For many students, the Forum assisted in the developmental process of sorting out the varied claims of reason and faith.31 Obert Tanner, in a Great Issues in Philosophy lecture on March 28, 1956, addressed the question, “Are Moral Values Absolute?” Tanner’s philosophical pragmatism was illustrated in his response that standard positions on the grounding of moral values are incorrect.

He claimed it equally untenable to hold that moral values are “determined by an objective standard” as it is to claim that they are “determined by private opinion or by the customs of a particular group.” Tanner asserted that there is an “intermediate position between absolutism and relativity, there is a standard for our values that is relatively absolute.”32 Tanner pointed to a dichotomy in Western civilization between reason and religion, as represented by the Greek and Christian traditions respectively—the former identified with relativism, the latter with absolutism. Tanner thought it possible to work out “a compromise between science and religion as they affect our moral values.” Since, in his view, moral values as established through empirical observation “have always been the supreme moral values taught by religion,” he held up his morality as being “in complete harmony with the teaching of religion.”33 Tanner criticized John Dewey’s

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overly broad definition of morality of carrying out every activity the best way it can be carried out and sided instead with the more or less utilitarian definition of Princeton philosopher W. T. Stace, whose narrower view of morality “includes only those universally applicable rules of conduct which seek to control the relations of men with one another.”34 Based on this definition and the concomitant utilitarian emphasis on happiness as the outcome of morality, Tanner posited altruism as the relatively objective standard of moral actions. Unselfish actions based on justice are praised in all cultures and vary essentially only in the size of the social group in which these actions are to be applied.35 Obert Tanner continued in a similar vein in the following year’s “Issues for Laymen in Contemporary Philosophy”: “To separate myth from truth is an enormous undertaking. It becomes a large part of the work done by a university. This effort to distinguish truth from myth is the primary element of progress in all the history of mankind.”36 Referring to the “endless warfare” of truth with myth, Tanner said there is “some compensation. If truth were to prevail over myth, the humanities and social science departments would just about go out of business. Myth keeps many of us going, pays our salaries, and generally makes life quite exciting. Myth is at once our friend and foe.

Without it we would have to teach science or go into business—a horrible dilemma.”37 Tanner queried the predominance of myth on the campus: “Why is the population of this student body possessed of minds crammed full of explanatory and truth-claiming myths that will not hold up against scholarly investigation?”

He suggested four reasons for myth’s success: “life’s harsh realities,” usefulness of myth to leaders in “keeping power and authority over those who believe,” myth’s “easy alternative to faith,” and the ability of myths to “masquerade as ideals.”38 For Tanner, theologically liberal author of the LDS Sunday School text Christ’s Ideals for Living, this last charge was likely the most serious.

At some length he launched into a point-bypoint exposé of myths that he claimed supplanted “noble” ideals (for Tanner, nobility meant a devotion to one or more of the triad

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Tanner ended his address by considering, and then rejecting, a last ditch defense of myths as helpful to society: “There is no place for truth-claiming myths in a society sufficiently advanced to conceive and support free universities. . . . Truth-claiming myths spring from primitive explanations. It is better to face life as it is, thereby seeking for ways to improve it, than to use the escape of believing what is an untrue, unreal, or fictional interpretation of life.” After what must have been received as a scathing critique of the local power structures, Tanner suggested a positive method for separating truth from myth: “As truth claims go by in review, I would ask: Are you verifiable? And if not, are you probable? And if not, are you reasonable? Imagine all the casualties among truth claims, all those that are unverifiable, improbable, and unreasonable.”40

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An address by Waldemer Read in the 1961–62 “Great Issues Concerning Freedom” series was emblematic of the Great Issues Forum’s approach to public philosophy and represented the peak of the series’ engagement with topics that could be seen as more or less directly speaking to Mormonism. A philosopher and cultural Mormon, Read noted in “What Freedom Exists in the Local Culture?” that every member of the philosophy department agreed that the topic of freedom necessitated a treatment of the status of freedom in Utah. He noted that civil and political liberties common in the United States were also found in Utah, and that Utah was utterly similar to other states in its lack of responsiveness to the dangers of Nazism and McCarthyism.42

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The great and difficult ideal of vicarious sacrifice gets dressed up in a myth about disobedience that demands the death of a good man. The great and difficult ideal of universal fellowship gets dressed up in the myth about a chosen people who practice a local brotherhood. The great and difficult ideal of justice becomes cloaked in the myth of man’s forebears who disobeyed and thereby caused innocent descendants to pay the price of their own wrong-doing. The great and difficult ideal of learning masquerades in the costume of a myth that books are produced in heaven, or by other means, rather than through the patient labor of human effort. The great and difficult ideal of the life of reason becomes the myth of a deity who could offer salvation through the mystical experience of identifying with the Logos.

The great problem of world peace gets dressed up in a myth of wars in heaven and a continuation of these wars on earth—with a personal devil as the principal troublemaker.39

Tanner’s address illustrated several characteristic features of the University of Utah’s midcentury approach to philosophy. First, it claimed a universal relevance and an applicability to the concerns of everyday life. Second, it elevated reason and evidence above intuition in the search for truth. Third, it did so publicly in dialogue with other participants, faculty, students, and community members in the audience. When asked late in his life about the philosophers and philosophical schools he was most drawn to, Tanner replied that he sympathetically entered into the minds of whichever authors he was reading, although when pressed, he identified primarily as a pragmatist, with elements of realism and skepticism making their appearance.41

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of classic Greek virtues of goodness, truth, or beauty). These were myths that those from Christian backgrounds in general, and Mormon backgrounds in particular, would recognize as central to their faith:

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Read then identified freedom of thought as the most important of all freedoms—the one most likely to produce material improvement to humanity. “Thought control” expressed through psychological conditioning is what prevents many in the local culture from realizing that the only sure-proof methods of testing a proposition’s truth value are “considerations of empirical fact, and of logical relation.”43 Those who are hesitant to accept the claims of faith are stigmatized as having a bad character.44 The greatest tragedy of this state of affairs for Read is that the monotony of Mormon culture incapacitated its people to think new thoughts and contribute toward a larger national conversation on United States policy

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Program of the 1957–58 Great Issues Forum “concerning the nature of man.” Department of Philosophy records, University Archives, University of Utah.

248 more generally. This conversation for Read has a domestic component, which is both racial and economic, and an international component, which is mainly to do with issues of peaceful coexistence and the United Nations as an instrument of that peace.45 The Catholic sociologist Thomas O’Dea responded to Read’s paper by humorously noting his religious outsider status and by noting that the local culture at least has produced a man like Waldemer Read. O’Dea offered a few points supportive of Read’s main point, including the need for Mormonism to reconcile itself externally with the Copernican revolution and other intellectual adjustments to the scientific worldview, and internally to reconcile competing theological strands of thought.46 Two philosophers with Mormon backgrounds, David Bennett and Lewis (Max) Rogers, also offered comments on Read’s speech. Bennett thought that it would be more effective to win Mormon believers’ confidence by citing sources from their own tradition that would support the arguments he was making.

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He believed Read’s criticisms would be fairer if they had been based not on the average but on the “highest fruits of Mormonism,” among whom Bennett classed Read and other “avowed heretics.”47 Rogers commented directly on the meaning of the phrase “local culture”: “There can be scarcely any question in the minds of those present as to whom or as to what these terms refer. However, it should be observed that there are important elements in this culture other than the LDS Church . . . who . . . have insisted upon and successfully maintained their rights to be free.” Quoting pragmatist philosopher William James, Rogers places his hope for positive change in the local culture in differences between individuals—the persuadable and the unpersuadable: “There is very little difference between one man and another, but what little there is, is very important.”48 The 1964–65 series was the final Forum explicitly dedicated to a religious topic. In seven sessions spread between October 1964 and March 1965, the philosophy department held

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Read concluded that religion makes a great difference in the life of the individual believer. That said, in his assertion that there is no universal mind, but only a multiplicity of individual minds, there are likewise billions of conceptions of God. He concluded that if God exists, then the difference God makes must be reflected in the way things are—and that therefore, given the reality of social problems like war, it must be up to humans to make peace.51

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The classic American pragmatists . . . had positioned philosophy as a central scholarly discipline: it spoke to educated disquiet about the human condition and provided, to other disciplines, expert counsel on how investigation might be carried out, or on the methods requisite for obtaining warranted belief. . . . But analytic philosophers did not aspire to be public figures, and were content with successful professional lives. . . . Thus, philosophers began to write themselves out of subsidiary careers as what would become known as public intellectuals.52

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The most emblematic of the seven addresses was Waldemer Read’s “What Difference Does It Make?” Read’s pragmatist’s concern for the practical significance of religious belief took the form of what he termed twin “abuses”: the use of theism to win advantage over others in the field of politics, and the use of pressing practical problems to urge the propagation of theism. Read employed Martin Buber’s notion of the “I-Thou” relation with god to provide a counterexample to the conceptual limitations faced by most theists and atheists. Buber believed that god ought to be experienced directly like “the great religious mystics.” Read averred that for those who do, their lives are changed tremendously, but that even for the majority who are not mystics, but merely believers in God, the difference that belief makes in their lives is still great.50

American philosophy began to change after World War II, and although the change was slower to arrive at the University of Utah than at the premier departments of Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago, it came nevertheless. A brand of philosophy that had shared antecedents with pragmatism but was more informed by the precise formulations of a Bertrand Russell or a Ludwig Wittgenstein began to capture the imaginations of younger philosophers newly graduated from PhD programs around the country. Termed analysis, or analytic philosophy, this type of philosophy eschewed the traditional concerns of both American pragmatism and its European ancestors, and focused instead on logic, mathematics, and linguistics. It saw philosophy’s role not as asking and answering the big questions that gave life meaning, but as clarifying the terms under which scientific investigation could be best carried out. As the historian Bruce Kuklick wrote,

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a public conversation treating the issues involved in theism: evidence for God’s existence, the meaningfulness of theism, the reliability of biblical sources of information, the meaning of personality when applied to God, God in popular culture, and the concepts of necessity and contingency when applied to God. The latter was a paper presented by Charles Hartshorne, a leading philosopher from the University of Texas who followed in the footsteps of his mentor Alfred North Whitehead in holding to a non-absolutistic God in a version of process theology. Hartshorne’s paper was consonant with views that Sterling McMurrin had advocated when treating the distinctive nature of Mormon theology, although Hartshorne also advanced a form of the ontological argument for the existence of God, something McMurrin omitted from his more descriptive accounts.49

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In 1963, perhaps partly as a result of newer faculty hired in the department and their interests, the Forum began a noticeable transition to more political topics of national interest. Tanner’s February 20, 1963, address “Economic Competition and World Peace” defended the proposition that “sound international economic competition has an enormous potential for world peace.”53 Tanner, the successful local jewelry entrepreneur, favored competition over cooperation in the economic realm, since in his view “competition is the basic law of life.”54 “Cooperation,” besides being nicely alliterative, is a nicer sounding

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term for economic planning and state control of the economy. In a style reminiscent of his schematization of the war between truth and myth, Tanner argued that through religious united orders, communism, socialism, consumer unions, collectives, mergers, monopolies, and cooperatives” humans have sought solace “from the unhappy and sometimes unsuccessful life of economic competition.”55 Tanner stressed that although unfair economic competition may have prevailed under the old conditions of colonialism, globally earlier forms of colonialism were on the decline.

The United Nations was the honest broker in the new world order to ensure that “tyranny and exploitation are highlighted . . . for all the world to see. World opinion is the new world force. The UN marshals this power of world opinion, which makes older forms of economic exploitation difficult.”56 Whereas Tanner had identified scientific consensus as the corrective to myth, here he placed the UN as the corrective to economic exploitation.

Obert Tanner’s November 6, 1968, “Moral Aspects of the Invasion of Privacy” further illustrates this shift in emphasis. Tanner underlined the serious nature of his talk by saying “the foremost question of public morality facing our country today lies within the area of privacy” and that the quandary with privacy, unlike presumably more straightforward issues like crime, poverty, and international relations, stemmed not from a lack of will but a lack of knowledge.57 Taking it as a matter of course that the protection and extension of privacy was a positive value, Tanner modestly restricted his remarks to the meaning of privacy and its future protections. Accepting the definition of Daniel Dykstra, a former dean of the University of Utah Law School, that privacy is the individual’s control over when and how to communicate personal information, Tanner suggested that the U.S. Constitution contains an implicit right to privacy.58 In conclusion, Tanner equated privacy with freedom: “Many violations of privacy, such as churches asking personal questions about one’s beliefs, overzealous government investigators, businesses prying into personality problems—if these and a thousand more invasions of privacy were discussed, privacy would come more and more to be equated

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with freedom, which is surely the greatest value of our civilization.”59 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of the original group of philosophy faculty who had conceived and organized the Great Issues Forum had moved on. Waldemer Read retired in 1966, though he continued participating in the Great Issues Forum occasionally until the end of the series. Sterling McMurrin resigned his position in philosophy in 1970 to move to the history department, Charles Monson died unexpectedly in 1974, and Obert Tanner reduced his involvement in the department in preparation for his full retirement in 1975. Their departure from the philosophy department ranks decreased much of the impetus for offering these lectures and discussions. McMurrin’s resignation letter sheds light on the generational change that occurred in the department: Philosophy . . . throughout the country and in our own department has turned toward a narrow, specialized professionalism. . . . the Department of Philosophy is now a captive of a small but excessively aggressive and vocal element of the faculty. . . . For many decades and until very recently the Philosophy Department was everywhere recognized as a center for the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the instruments of reason. . . . Much of what went on there was genuinely relevant to the lives of the students and the University and the community. It was an enterprise which produced authentic liberalism in the best sense of that word, a genuine contributor to intellectual freedom and social freedom, to which the University and community could look, and did look, for leadership.60 The newer philosophy faculty members were more interested in devoting their energies to rigorous, technical conversations with their colleagues at other institutions in American Philosophical Association meetings than on accessible local campus discussions about big questions. In addition, whereas the older faculty was largely a product of Utah and interested in issues pertaining to ethics and religion understood primarily

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Equally important, however, was the change in topics offered by the Forum itself, which indicated a turning away from questions focusing on what Read euphemistically termed the “local culture” to the types of topics common on any university campus in the United States.

This shift in direction and loss of interest could also indicate that the freedom Read so earnestly pleaded for was at last a reality and hence taken for granted in the local culture, at least at the University of Utah. This shift reflected the Forum’s role in the secularization of the University of Utah. By the time the Forum began in the early fifties, the university was ready to use the freedoms it had formally achieved in an earlier era. By the end of the Forum in the mid-seventies, the university had achieved a seasoned maturity in matters relating to the local culture, well-illustrated by an anecdote. One senior university administrator in the period after the Great Issues Forum can recall only one incident where the relationship of the university and the LDS church was put to the test. After a winter storm, several fraternity members constructed a snowman elaborately designed to resemble a particular Mormon apostle. A general authority of the church contacted the university president and asked him to do something about it. The president declined.64

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1. Waldemer Read, ed., Great Issues Concerning Freedom (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1962), preface.

2. John Dewey, Terry Lectures: A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Dewey’s conception of religion makes room for worship yet eschews the supernatural.

3. Scott Kenney, ed., Memories and Reflections: The Autobiography of E. E. Ericksen (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 194.

4. Hilary Putnam, “Realism with a Human Face,” in The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce to the Present, ed.

Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 327–29. Although Putnam formulated this in the 1980s, it is clearly based on statements of the early pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James and would have been a familiar understanding of pragmatism’s place on the continuum between realism and idealism during the time of the Great Issues Forum.

5. Waldemer Read, “John Dewey’s Conception of Intelligent Social Action” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1947), box 2, fd. 14, Waldemer Read Papers, MS 572, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

6. Waldemer Read, “The Nature of Philosophy,” October 1972, box 1, fd. 28, Read Papers.

7. Ralph V. Chamberlin, The University of Utah: A History of its First Hundred Years—1850 to 1950 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1960), 323–41. Chamberlin’s is the only comprehensive history of the university to my knowledge, and he treats the 1915 crisis as a matter of “faculty relations”.

8. Allyson Mower and Paul Mogren, When Rights Clash: Origins of the University of Utah Academic Senate (Salt Lake City: J. Willard Marriott Library, 2014), 36.

9. American Association of University Professors, Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Conditions at the University of Utah (July 1915), 75–80, qtn. on 80, available at https:// www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/University %20of%20Utah%20-%20December%201915.pdf.

10. Joseph H. Jeppson, “The Secularization of the University of Utah to 1920” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1973), 187.

11. Jeppson, 218, 223.

12. Joseph Glen Erickson, “The Life and Educational Contributions of Dr. George Thomas” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1954), 23–24. In line with the first objective, Thomas established a committee to enforce the university’s first minimum grade expectations, leading to the identification and dismissal of seventyfive students from the institution the first quarter the new policy was implemented.

13. Erickson, 25. As a member of the State Board of Education in the 1930s, Thomas supported universityapproved released time for religious education on the condition that all religious denominations be allowed to take advantage of the policy.

14. Quoted in Ericksen, 38.

15. E. E. Ericksen, Memories and Reflections: The Autobiography of E. E. Ericksen (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 94n9.

16. Ericksen, 71, 76.

17. Sterling M. McMurrin, “The Cultural Values of Utah and the Future of the University,” October 1978, box

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through pragmatism, the newer faculty was from outside the state and embraced a different set of philosophical concerns, including analytic philosophy and even more radical political stances than those they were gradually replacing, including opposing the Vietnam War and aggressively confronting university administrators.61 A 1972 external review of the department concluded that the faculty were “all actively engaged in philosophical research and very much in the mainstream of American professional philosophy.”62 This marked a profound contrast with the outgoing faculty, whose involvement in research and publishing in philosophy was minimal and usually confined to local outlets but for whom leadership of the university and engagement with the public was paramount. This was common to other universities as well; the divide between the academy and the wider public was less than it is now. This, combined with declining attendance among students, spelled the end of the Great Issues Forum after more than two decades.63

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165, fd. 1, Sterling M. McMurrin Papers, MS 32, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

18. Sterling M. McMurrin and L. Jackson Newell, Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 321.

19. The Salt Lake Tribune, March 18, 1975.

20. McMurrin and Newell, Matters of Conscience, 150.

21. McMurrin and Newell, 217–18.

22. Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95.

23. Thomas A. Blakely, “The Swearing Elders: The First Generation of Mormon Intellectuals,” Sunstone 10, no. 9 (1985); Gary James Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997, vol. 2, Centrifugal Forces, 1975–80 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018), 2:602–4.

24. Kuklick, Philosophy in America, 167.

25. James L. Jarrett, “Does Philosophy Destroy Faith”, in And more about God, ed. Lewis M. Rogers and Charles H. Monson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969), 15–17.

26. Jarrett, 17–18.

27. Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, ed. Don E. Norton, vol. 12, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1992), 436.

28. Nibley, 438, 449.

29. Sterling M. McMurrin, “Do Religion and History Conflict?” in Religion, Reason, and Truth: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 134–35.

30. McMurrin, 140.

31. John Bennion (former philosophy undergraduate), in conversation with the author, December 2017.

32. Obert C. Tanner, “Are Moral Values Absolute?” in One Man’s Search: Addresses (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), 291.

33. Tanner, 292–93.

34. Tanner, 295–96.

35. Tanner, 298.

36. Tanner, “Issues for Laymen in Contemporary Philosophy,” in One Man’s Search, 101.

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37. Tanner, 102.

38. Tanner, 103.

39. Tanner, 107–8.

40. Tanner, 109.

41. Obert C. Tanner, Oral Interview with Sterling McMurrin, 1991, 4, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, accessed April 23, 2019, https://collections.lib.utah .edu/ark:/87278/s68p69pv.

42. Read, Great Issues Concerning Freedom, 113–15.

43. Read, 121.

44. Read, 126.

45. Read, 129.

46. Read, 132–34.

47. Read, 130–31.

48. Read, 135, 138.

49. Box 2, University of Utah Department of Philosophy Records, Acc 504, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

50. Waldemer Read, “What Difference Does It Make?” in Rogers and Monson, And more about God, 340–47.

51. Read, 356–57.

52. Kuklick, Philosophy in America, 267.

53. Tanner, “Economic Competition and World Peace,” in One Man’s Search, 23.

54. Tanner, 27.

55. Tanner, 28.

56. Tanner, 34–35.

57. Tanner, “Moral Aspects of the Invasion of Privacy,” in One Man’s Search, 275.

58. Tanner, 283–85.

59. Tanner, 290.

60. Sterling McMurrin, “Letter of Resignation,” December 1970, box 2, fd. 20, Read Papers.

61. Bruce Landesman, “History of the University of Utah Philosophy Department,” May 12, 2012, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=r2Jwc-Q6oZ4.

62. Vere Chappell, “External Review of Department of Philosophy,” June 1972, box 2, fd. 1, Read Papers.

63. Bruce Landesman, in conversation with the author, December 2017.

64. James Clayton, in conversation with the author, January 2018.

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The book is not only an account of Russell’s railroad photographs for Union Pacific; it also constitutes a highly readable biography of the man.

Davis traces Russell’s early life in upstate New York, where he began his work as an artist in the 1850s. In addition to romanticized, large-format paintings of the American landscape, he had a successful run creating panoramas, a popular entertainment for the middle class. The panoramas were painted on long sheaths of canvas, unrolled from giant spools in a theatrical setting, and accompanied by a narrator. After moving to New York City, he took up photography.

The Civil War intervened, dramatically changing Russell’s life. He joined a unit of New York volunteers but soon came to the attention of Gen. Herman Haupt, who commanded the Union Army’s Military Railroad Construction Corps. Davis explains how Russell went on to create some of the most memorable images of the conflict, from the implementation of the Union’s military resources to the awful aftermath of battle. His work ranged from photos

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Nonetheless, Russell’s Civil War accomplishments set the stage for his great work on the Union Pacific, which hired him in 1868. Actually, Russell was a bit of a latecomer to the transcontinental railroad. As Davis shows, the building of the railroad already had attracted several important photographers, among them Alfred A. Hart on the Central Pacific, building eastward from California; John Carbutt on the UP, building westward across Nebraska and Wyoming; and Alexander Garner on the competing Kansas Pacific route. Davis shows the importance the railroads placed on photography as a means of not only recording their progress, but also whipping up public support.

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In this sesquicentennial year of the transcontinental railroad—its ceremonial completion came on May 10, 1869—much attention is focused on the profound political and economic impact of what in its time was a national obsession. Today’s Union Pacific Railroad is dedicating vast resources to telling that story, as are dozens of publications and video productions in the railroad field. This engaging book explains a different story: the role that pioneering railroad photographers played in capturing the attention of a mid-nineteenth-century public.

Among those essential storytellers was Andrew J. Russell.

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Paper, $24.95

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of the battle of Fredericksburg to the ruins of Richmond to Lincoln’s funeral train. Davis also notes that credit to Russell did not come until a century later; as a commissioned army officer, he was just doing his job. Meanwhile, his rival, the private contractor Matthew Brady, became a celebrity.

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The heart of the book is Davis’s detailed account of Russell’s Union Pacific work, which took place over two celebrated trips made in 1868 and 1869. These expeditions rendered a treasure trove of indispensable photographs: tunnel and bridge building in central Wyoming and Utah’s Weber and Echo Canyons; the inevitable “hell on wheels” settlements that followed the railroad crews; portraits of railroad workers as well as national figures, including presidential candidate U. S. Grant near Laramie; and, of course, Russell’s comprehensive coverage of the golden spike ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah.

As Davis shows, Russell did much more than photograph the building of a railroad. His western trips took him beyond the tracks, where he photographed other aspects of manifest destiny. He framed the farmsteads and main streets of a growing Mormon civilization. He made respectful portraits of Native American men and women. He recorded the construction of a

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subsequent railroad, the Utah Central Railroad from Ogden to Salt Lake City, which Union Pacific skipped. He even traveled all the way to California to see for himself how Central Pacific conquered the Sierra Nevada.

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Adding considerable dimension to Davis’s narrative is his explanation of what it took for Russell to get his work done. This includes not only the fascinating challenges of working with the ponderous cameras and unwieldy “darkrooms” of glass-plate photography, but also the sheer difficulty in transporting all this equipment cross-country, following the railroad gangs.

Davis conveys the discomforts Russell endured as he traipsed across the West in mule-driven wagons.

A word about the production of this book: Russell’s large-format images contain fascinating details, some of which are difficult to discern in the space allotted within a rather brief book.

At the same time, the paper and printing are excellent. If a softcover book at a modest price point attracts a larger audience, then the work of A. J. Russell will succeed all over again.

—Kevin P. Keefe Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth & Corporate Power

By D. Michael Quinn Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2017. ix-x + 597 pp.

Hardcover, $49.95

In the third volume of his Mormon Hierarchy series, D. Michael Quinn sets out to describe 180 years of the financial history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a task he attempts in three chapters (each of which represents a topical mini-essay of sorts) and twenty-one appendices. The task is epic in scope: the history of Mormonism intersects at least three major economic trends in the United States. In its earliest days, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lived in a primarily rural, agricultural world.

The railroads of the Second Industrial Revolution began to transform both Utah and the resident Mormonism, as LDS leaders became more financially sophisticated. More recently,

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Mormonism, with the rest of the United States, has entered into the modern information age.

Quinn not only has to deal with these fundamental economic shifts; he needs to make them intelligible to the lay audience he has written for. To do that, among other things, he adjusts historical dollar amounts to their 2010 equivalents (e.g., 13). Where he believes that appendix material “seems too detailed for general readers,” he deletes that material (503).

The scope of Quinn’s undertaking proves both its greatest strength and its largest flaw.

Through both the essays and appendices, Quinn pulls together an impressive amount of financial history from an impressive array of sources. He has looked at everything from archival Bureau of Internal Revenue tax assessment lists (163) to probate records from various states in the United States (174) to reports from the LDS Church History Library (167) to mandatory nonprofit filings available on the internet (503). His indefatigable research will save future historians countless hours searching for information.

The impressive amount of data Quinn has assembled also proves the most significant weakness in the book. Broadly speaking, the book never finds the story it wants to tell. Providing almost two centuries of history about a single topic in only 150 pages of narrative (because the last 450 pages or so are the book’s appendices) would itself be a Sisyphean feat. But Quinn tries to provide two centuries of history on the personal wealth of LDS leaders, on Mormon-owned businesses (especially in Utah), and on the LDS church’s finances. Ultimately, instead of finding and exploring a particular narrative, the essays jump around, sticking on a single topic and a single era for several paragraphs, and then shifting to focus on another topic.

The lack of narrative, and the enormous scope of the project, leave the book with another significant problem: Quinn does not have time to contextualize the information he provides.

Rather, with a laser focus on LDS leaders, the book elides what is happening in the non-Mormon economic world and suffers from a kind of Mormon exceptionalism.

This plays out in different ways in the text. One is highlighted as he describes how a hypothetical

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Similarly, Quinn reports that in 1907 and 1912, the LDS church denied being a commercial organization, notwithstanding the various businesses with which it affiliated (54). While interesting standing alone, it would be more interesting in the context of American discomfort with religious commercialism and the broad range of commercialism that existed in various churches. For instance, at about that same time, the Israelite House of David was opening an amusement park and sponsoring bands, orchestras, baseball teams, and other similar endeavors. The Hutterites were arguing against taxation on their extensive agricultural businesses. And even in the late twentieth century, the Church of Scientology argued that it was a religious, not a commercial, endeavor.

In spite of its lack of narrative and context, this volume of Mormon Hierarchy provides valuable information for people interested in the financial history of the LDS church and, to a lesser extent, the financial history of Utah. It does not ultimately provide a satisfying answer to questions of financial history, but it provides a treasure trove of financial data, and provides a starting point others can use to formulate these critical questions.

—Samuel D. Brunson Loyola University Chicago School of Law

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By Newell G. Bringhurst

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New times call for revisiting classic scholarship. Alongside the pioneering work of Armaund L. Mauss, Gordon C. Thomasson, and Lester Bush, Newell G. Bringhurst’s 1981 book, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, has held center stage in dismantling the enduring grand racial narratives perpetuated through generations of Latter-day Saints. Bringhurst not only offered a first-of-its-kind book; he launched a subfield. Bringhurst’s 1978 Utah Historical Quarterly article on Brigham Young and the priesthood restriction on black men likely influenced Mark E. Petersen to support lifting the restriction. In commemoration of the 1978 revelation lifting the restriction on black people receiving temple ordinances or priesthood ordination, Greg Kofford books has re-released Bringhurst’s book as a paperback for larger audiences—and it is appropriate to reflect on this germinal book’s impact.

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Moreover, even if the hypothetical family did buy jewelry from Daynes and Decker Jewelry and a car from Richards Motor, the jewelry stores likely purchased their inventory from non-Mormon-affiliated jewelry suppliers, and the Chrysler the hypothetical couple purchased certainly was not manufactured by a Mormon-affiliated company.

Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.

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early-twentieth-century Salt Lake City family could live their entire economic lives only giving money to businesses controlled by the LDS church or LDS leaders (62–65). While possible, Quinn gives no indication of the plausibility of the story. Were there competing Utah businesses that a Mormon family could also patronize?

Did these competing enterprises have comparable prices? Did the family know which businesses were affiliated with the LDS church?

Quinn does not provide context for the reader to answer those questions.

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Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, observed, “collective man . . . invent[s] romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their behavior.” In 1981, Bringhurst argued that the Latter-day Saint community had excluded black people not as a matter of tactical necessity but as a built-in feature of the Latter-day Saint character; “ethnic whiteness” defined the Latter-day Saint community. Bringhurst’s work came to the fore when institutional messaging highlighted aspects of Joseph Smith’s history—for example, his opposition to slavery—that resonated well in the years leading up to the 1978 revelation. In 1970, Stephen Taggart’s book (published posthumously, as Taggart had died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma) had argued that the priesthood restriction was the product of localized pressures and should be dismissed as an anachronism with no place in the modern faith. Bringhurst rejoined that Latter-day Saints had appropriated sacred texts to validate a sense of racial chosen-ness: “whiteness [was]

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emblematic, indeed proof, of their status as the Lord’s favored people,” made apparent (xvii).

The ban, Bringhurst held, formed the LDS conception of their group self.

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This volume is, in some way, a celebration of “time vindicating the prophets.” Bringhurst has been validated in blurring the lines between the “inclusiveness” of Joseph Smith and the exclusion of Brigham Young’s race teachings; their decisions to include and exclude reflected the complications of a worldview framed by politics, scientific racism, and Biblical exegesis; Bringhurst concludes that the “crucial turning point” (80) in solidifying the antiblack priesthood restriction was the polygamy of William McCary. Caught engaging in sexual activity with a number of Latter-day Saint women in the Winter Quarters community, William McCary was expelled with his Caucasian wife, Lucy Stanton—prompting Parley P. Pratt to use McCary as the first “case study” in connecting “Hamitic” ancestry with a restriction from the priesthood.

Subsequent research has revealed illuminating details about Brigham Young’s in-person discussion with Appleby. In Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, Bringhurst had correctly hypothesized that a key conversation took place in late 1847 (87). The General Church minutes, unavailable for public research in the early 1980s, have now revealed three key data points. The first is that in March 1847 Brigham Young openly supported the ordination of Walker Lewis, a black barber in Lowell, MA, and considered him to be “one of the best Elders.” Young dismissed the relevance of ancestry: “its nothing to do with the blood for of one blood has God made all flesh.” Second, the minutes reveal the extent to which prevailing scientific understanding had shaped Brigham Young’s prejudice. In December 1847, when Young learned of Enoch Lewis’s biracial son, he used prevailing racial science (e.g., Josiah Nott) to argue that interracial marriage was a form of interspecies marriage that would decrease the fertility of the human race, an act tantamount to a crime against the human race: “when they mingle it is death to all.” For Young, black men could hold priesthood office and even enjoy priesthood blessings—but they must be “eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake.” Third, during the December 1847

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conversation, Brigham Young swung between considering the Lewises worthy of death and, in the same breath, insisting that interracial couples needed to be baptized. Placed together, these minutes highlight Brigham Young’s competing impulses toward inclusion and exclusion throughout 1847.

These records have had theological significance for much recent scholarship, including that of this reviewer. Young’s emphasis on temple rituals, for instance, prompted historian Jonathan Stapley, in The Power of Godliness, to foreground the temple restrictions—with priesthood ordination serving as an ancillary restriction. These records invite deeper engagement with the lasting impact of Brigham Young’s ideological transformation on the lived religious experience of Latter-day Saints of African ancestry.

Bringhurst’s volume paved the way for future scholars to complicate, unpack, and dismantle the world that shaped the racism of early church leaders. Most importantly, he intervened in established discourse patterns that had eliminated blackness and whiteness from Latter-day Saint history.

—Russell Stevenson Michigan State University

American Indian History on Trial: Historical Expertise in Tribal Litigation

By E. Richard Hart Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018. xi + 339 pp. Paper, $29.00 Recent high-profile arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the status of the Muskogee (Creek) Reservation in Oklahoma, the efficacy of the Crow tribe’s off-reservation hunting rights on national forest lands in Wyoming, and the impacts of salmon-blocking road culverts on treaty-guaranteed fisheries in Washington State reflect the often deeply connected nature of history and federal Indian law. In his book American Indian History on Trial, E. Richard Hart draws on more than four decades of experience as an expert witness in

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The Coeur d’Alene tribe also figures prominently in Hart’s chapter on tribal water rights adjudications. Here, he again shows how historical analyses of the purposes for which the federal government created individual reservations is essential to establishing Indian water rights.

Examining these purposes helps the courts determine which standard(s) apply to each tribe’s water rights claims. For example, Hart points out that although the Coeur d’Alene tribe can assert water rights claims based on its historic irrigated acreage and/or the “Practicably Irrigable Acreage (PIA)” standard, neither adequately accounts for the broader, fisheries-focused homeland purpose of the tribe’s 1873 reservation (202–3). The homeland standard also factors heavily into the Zuni Pueblo’s water rights claims, despite the “very large claim for actual historic use” the tribe can make (194). Meanwhile, evidence of the traditional importance of the Klamath tribe’s fisheries and gathering areas at the time of its 1864 treaty has enabled the tribe to successfully pursue

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In addition to these case studies, Hart gives his readers useful, concrete recommendations for writing expert witness reports and providing testimony in court proceedings. Foremost among these is the importance of painstakingly thorough, primary source research, while avoiding speculation, broad historical theories, and legal conclusions. Hart urges expert historians to assert their findings with “dispassionate intensity” (208), to avoid basing any findings on one “anomalous document,” and to be forthcoming about any “material that does not support the conclusions” (218). At a more practical level, he underscores the importance of meticulous footnotes and document organization, as well as cautioning expert historians against expecting accolades for their work. Finally, in the context of oral testimony—some of which he likens to “your worst nightmare of a PhD exam”—Hart stresses the need for concise and precise answers and the willingness to say, “I don’t know,” when such an answer is appropriate (210).

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The Wenatchi tribe’s more-than-century-long effort to establish its rights at the Wenatshapam Fishery likewise hinged on a historical analysis of the tribe’s 1855 treaty and subsequent 1894 agreement with federal officials. Hart’s deep dive into the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the War Department similarly helped the Hualapai tribe corroborate tribal oral tradition about the long-disputed northern and western boundaries of its reservation—the latter of which may have been intentionally altered in the late 1800s to exclude three important springs that tribal leaders believed were inside the Hualapai Reservation’s borders. Finally, through the story of the Amah Mutsun, Hart offers an insightful window into the often-protracted process of establishing federal recognition for Indian tribes, showing how a variety of nonfederal records are often required to prove that a previously unrecognized tribal group existed historically and has “continued to exist, both politically and culturally, to the present day” (97).

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Hart’s first case study tells the story of the Coeur d’Alene tribe’s successful legal claim to ownership of the submerged lands underlying the southern one-third of Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho. Upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, the judicial outcome of the so-called lakebed case was grounded in the ethnohistorical facts established by Hart’s testimony, which clearly elucidated the central importance of the lake and its tributaries for myriad tribal uses that included fishing, transportation, and religious ceremonies. Since the tribe also faced legal challenges over the alleged impermanency of its executive-order reservation, Hart includes a highly informative and important discussion about Congress’s intent to place such reservations on an equal footing with treaty- and statutorily-created reservations through the passage of the 1887 Dawes Act.

instream flow claims to support salmon runs in the Klamath River Basin.

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tribal litigation to further illuminate this linkage. Using case studies involving six different tribes with whom he has worked on legal issues ranging from reservation boundaries to water rights to federal recognition, Hart masterfully demonstrates the importance of ethnohistorical evidence, analysis, and testimony for tribes seeking legal remedies for an array of historic and ongoing injustices.

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Although Hart’s Wenatchi chapter would have benefited by including more maps to orient the

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reader and although his book contains a few editing errors (see, for example, 73–74, 203), these are minor critiques in what is otherwise a significant contribution to the growing canon of Native American history—a book that will not only appeal to legal scholars and students of Indian history, but also to historians considering nonacademic career options.

—Ian Smith

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Both Sides of the Bullpen: Navajo Trade and Posts

By Robert S. McPherson Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. xviii + 353pp.

Cloth, $34.95

Professor of History at Utah State University Robert S. McPherson has written a remarkable study of cross-cultural communication in Both Sides of the Bullpen, the best recent study in print of relationships between trading-post owners and their Diné (Navajo) clientele.

The Navajo trading post as an institution began in 1868 when the Diné returned from their exile at Fort Sumner, McPherson writes. “With a rather slow start at the southern end of a continuously expanding reservation, the trading post had become an integral part of the Navajo experience by 1900, when it blossomed and prospered into the 1930s, before it began its decline and transformation into what it has become today—for the most part, a convenience store” (44).

Notably, Navajo artistry in weaving and silverwork followed a similar trajectory. Silver crafted into jewelry from Mexican and U.S. silver coins became very profitable for traders, drawing increasing numbers of tourists as mass ownership of automobiles spread across the United States.

From early in the book, the author disposes of stereotypes. Any successful trader, for example, was not an ignorant sharpie setting out to cheat his customers. Anyone who tried such a gambit (and there were a few) went out of business quickly. The Navajo were too savvy to permit such chicanery. Successful traders absorbed

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Navajo culture, with its emphasis on reciprocal relationships, and learned how to help customers with personal transport and necessities, such as burying the dead, which Navajo people wished to avoid.

Traders were required to know the fine points of Navajo cosmology. “For example,” McPherson writes, “one trader received very hostile treatment from his customers when he made the mistake of burying an important medicine man’s body oriented in the wrong direction [southward]; instead of having the head to the north, the direction that the deceased’s spirit traveled upon death” (177–78). A successful trader was generous, up to a point, providing such things as free tobacco, rolling papers, and matches in his trading post. He would have designed the post to make Navajos comfortable, with aspects of hogans (homes) built in. Most of all, he learned at least the trading rudiments of Navajo language. Even so, relations between traders and their clientele were not always peaceful. Between 1901 and 1934, at least twenty traders were killed under of cover of darkness by robbers, who usually ransacked the trading post, then burned it to the ground (183–84).

A trader’s reputation could follow him across the reservation. “There was a direct correlation between [whether] people felt the trader was a friend who provided assistance and how much the trader was just out for gain,” McPherson writes. “A bad reputation hurt and became part of the news spread about. One trader noted, ‘In spite of the fact that there were no telephones, communication on the reservation was amazing. News was spread by word of mouth and spread rapidly. It was nothing for a Navajo to walk twenty or thirty miles just to visit another trading post to learn what was going on. Each trading post was a social center, a gathering place where news was relayed back and forth from all parts of the reservation’” (79).

With an eye for telling detail and anecdotes such as these, McPherson describes the relationships of traders and Navajos from both sides of the “bullpen,” the part of the store in which trades were negotiated. He makes excellent, extensive use of oral history as well as archives to weave a narrative that is a joy to read as well as a record of value to historians. He

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better serve their master when they are killed,� he writes (26). McPherson also references in historical context the contributions of other books that delve into various aspects of trading-post history.

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also places the development of trading posts into a broader context of Navajo history, from the Long Marches of 1864 and 1868 to livestock reduction programs during the 1930s and the plague of lung cancer and other health maladies that has followed widespread mining of uranium that began in the late 1940s. Notably important are sections on Navajo cosmology and spiritual beliefs in harmony and reciprocity, the sort of things with which successful traders had to have at least a passing acquaintance in order to do business in the area: “Navajos believe that this reciprocity continues until death; the animals eat to become fat in order to

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All Because of a Mormon Cow: Historical Accounts of the Grattan Massacre, 1854–1855

By Laurie D. Webster, Louise I. Stiver, D. Y. Begay, and Lynda Teller Pete

Edited by John D. McDermott, R. Eli Paul, and Sandra J. Lowry

Denver: Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the University Press of Colorado, 2017. xxvi + 230 pp. Paper, $34.95.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. 240 pp. Cloth. $29.95.

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This book showcases the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s important collection of Navajo textiles with over one hundred full-color photographs. Beyond a mere catalog of the textiles, Navajo Textiles is the result of work done by anthropologists, curators, and weavers. Containing the historical background of the Navajo rug trade beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the book aims to present the work of Navajo weavers in its full cultural and historical context in a way that is valuable to both scholars and the general public.

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All Because of a Mormon Cow compiles eighty primary source records of the first event in the First Sioux War. An army unit attempted to arrest a Lakota man accused of killing a Mormon emigrant’s cow near Fort Laramie. In the battle that ensued, Lakota warriors killed the entire unit. This book includes an introduction that contextualizes the Grattan Massacre in the history of Great Plains warfare between Indians and non-Indians as well as annotations for the sources, some of which have been recently discovered.

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The Essential Guide to Rocky Mountain Mushrooms by Habitat CATHY CRIPPS, VERA EVENSON, AND MICHAEL KUO “Attractive, authoritative, and well-written. . . . The inclusion of many pictures of trees, wildflowers, birds, and large creature will especially appeal to general naturalist types and so the book could serve as a welcome present for that special hiker friend.”

—The Mycophile 272 pp. 8 x 10. 372 color photos, 1 line drawing, 2 maps, 1 chart.

Paper $29.95; E-book $26.96

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www.press.uillinois.edu

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Thunder from the Right

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Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics EDITED BY MATTHEW L. HARRIS “Thunder from the Right is a fascinating volume on the life, political career, and ministry of the most famous Mormon in politics prior to Mitt Romney, as well as on the inner workings of the LDS Church during the apostleship and presidency of Ezra Taft Benson.”

—Richard Davis, Brigham Young University Contributors: Gary James Bergera, Matthew Bowman, Newell G. Bringhurst, Brian Q. Cannon, Robert A. Goldberg, Matthew L. Harris, J. B. Haws, and Andrea G. Radke-Moss Paperback $27.95; E-book $14.95

Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America JAKE JOHNSON Merges the study of belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to explore the surprising yet profound link between two quintessentially American institutions. ”Jake Johnson illuminates theatricality in religion itself, with Mormonism as his focus.

I encountered surprises throughout.”

—Michael Hicks, author of The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography Paperback $25.00; E-book $19.95 Publication supported by a grant from the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

A volume in the series Music in American Life

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RICHARD V. FRANCAVIGLIA, a historical geographer, has had a life-long interest in maps. His first job after graduating from high school was at Rand McNally & Co. (San Francisco, 1961), and he has studied and created maps throughout his varied forty-five-year career. He retired as Director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at University of Texas at Arlington in 2008, but remains an active researcher and lecturer.

RONALD E. GRIM retired in May 2018 as Curator of Maps for the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library, a position he assumed in 2005 after working thirty-three years for the federal government with the cartographic collections at the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

RICK GRUNDER chaired the BYU Library Bibliographic Department until starting his antiquarian business in 1981, specializing in early Mormon books, manuscripts, and artifacts

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JOHN NILSSON earned a BA in history from Brigham Young University, an MA in history from the University of Utah, and did additional graduate work at the University of Washington.

A native of Los Angeles, he currently serves as the Assistant Dean of the Academic Advising Center at the University of Utah.

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(Lafayette, New York). He is the author of Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source (2008, 2014; Bear Hollow Books, 2018, five vols.) and recipient with Will Bagley of the Merrill Mattes Award for Excellence in Writing for their article “‘I Could Hardly Hold the Pen’: Phebe Ann Wooley Davis’s Hard Road to Utah and Back, 1864–1865,” Overland Journal 27, no.

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PAUL E. COHEN is the author of Mapping the West (Rizzoli, 2002) and coauthor of Revolution: Mapping the Road to American Independence (Norton, 2015). Manhattan in Maps (Rizzoli, 1997; Dover, 2014), which he coauthored, won the New York City “Book of the Year” award in 1997. His articles have appeared in the New England Quarterly, The Magazine Antiques, and elsewhere. He is a dealer in rare books and antique maps and is based in New York City.

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STEVEN L. OLSEN is Senior Curator for Historic Sites at the LDS Church History Department and is a member of the Board of State History. His PhD dissertation from the University of Chicago was a cultural analysis of the origins of Latter-day Saint settlement. He lives in Heber City, Utah, with his wife, occasional children, and assorted pets.

RICHARD L. SAUNDERS is an academic librarian and former Dean of Library Services at Southern Utah University. A graduate of Utah State University, he holds graduate degrees in history from USU and the University of Memphis. He is presently at work on a biography of Utah native and historian of western America Dale L. Morgan and a study of postwar social and economic change in rural America, focusing on several counties in West Tennessee.

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Congregants of the Trinity African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.), posed with the Reverend Thomas J. Townsend, 1963. Trinity A.M.E., founded in the late 1800s, is Utah’s oldest African American church. It has served as both a haven for its members and as a catalyst for the creation of other black community organizations. In 1907, Trinity A.M.E. purchased

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the property for its current building, which stands at 239 East 600 South in Salt Lake City, Utah. Following a 1976 restoration, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Visit ushs.utah.gov to learn more. Utah State Historical Society, MSS C 239, 39222001492565.tif

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