Reviews

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

By Daniel Davis

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018. viii + 195 pp. Paper, $24.95

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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, 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 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.

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.

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

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

By Newell G. Bringhurst

Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018. 298 pp. Paper, $27.95

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.

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] 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.

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 Mc- Cary 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 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 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.

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.

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

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).

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).

Although Hart’s Wenatchi chapter would have benefited by including more maps to orient the 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 Historical Research Associates, Inc.

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 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 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 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.

This book is an important resource and a readable treat for historians and students of intercultural communication, as well as casual readers.

—Bruce E. Johansen University of Nebraska at Omaha, emeritus