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CONTENTS 100 DRAWING THE SWORD OF WAR AGAINST WAR B. H. Roberts, World War I, and the Quest for Peace By John Sillito
116 WHEN BUFFALO BILL CAME TO UTAH By Brent M. Rogers
132 OGDEN’S FORGOTTEN CITY HOSPITAL
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IN THIS ISSUE REVIEWS AND NOTICES CONTRIBUTORS UTAH IN FOCUS
By John Grima
148 COOPERATION AND COMPETITION Community Building among Farmers in Providence, Utah, 1940–1960 By Amy C. Howard
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Reviews
165 THE INTERIOR WEST A Fire Survey By Stephen J. Pyne Reviewed by David Strohmaier
166 LAST CHANCE BYWAY The History of Nine Mile Canyon By Jerry D. Spangler and Donna Kemp Spangler Reviewed by Edward Geary
167 MY DEAR SISTER 2
Letters between Joseph F. Smith and His Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris N O .
Edited by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and David M. Whitechurch Reviewed by Brian Q. Cannon
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168 FAITHFUL AND FEARLESS
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171 MINING IN THE BORDERLANDS Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910 By Sarah E. M. Grossman
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171 NAVAJO TEXTILES The Crane Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science By Laurie D. Webster, Louise I. Stiver, D. Y. Begay, and Lynda Teller Pete
171 MUSEUM MEMORIES Volume 9 Compiled by International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Lesson Committee
171 AUERBACH’S The Store that Performs What It Promises By Eileen Hallet Stone
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The second article in this issue considers William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his checkered relationship with the state of Utah and members of its dominant religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Early in his career, Cody profited from negative, melodramatic depictions of Latter-day Saints. By the turn of the century, however, the showman was holding up the efforts of Utah Mormons as an example of how to farm effectively in the arid West. What had happened? Cody may have changed his tune, in part, because of associations he developed with prominent members of the LDS church in the 1890s. Brent M. Rogers sees Cody’s change of heart as part of the broader “Americanization” of Utah, a persistent theme in the state’s history that refers to its incorporation into the broader political, economic, and cultural life of the United States following the troubles of the nineteenth century and Utah’s prolonged quest for statehood.1 Notably, Sillito accredits this same impulse—particularly the desire of key Utahns to
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Finally, using the tools of folklore and ethnography, Amy C. Howard details interactions within a particular group of people: midcentury fruit farmers in Providence, Utah. The benches east of Providence supported thriving orchards and fields throughout much of the twentieth century. Although the farmers in this neighborhood faced a host of struggles, they managed to cooperate with one another in the details of agriculture and family life, from marketing produce to making quilts for each other’s children.
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In our third article, John Grima reconstructs the existence of the Ogden City Hospital—the city’s first acute care facility and, originally, an entirely municipal affair. Grima’s account takes place from the 1880s until the 1910s, amidst a wider history of the professionalization of medicine, increasing treatment options, and changes in the structure, control, and purpose of hospitals. This was, moreover, an era of evolving municipal governance, when cities throughout the United States grappled with what services they could and should pay for.
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be seen as patriotic Americans—with some of Roberts’s more martial moments. That people as different as B. H. Roberts and Buffalo Bill would contribute to the theme of Americanization demonstrates the purchase it has with historians.
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In 1933, weeks before his own passing, B. H. Roberts delivered an address to the World Fellowship of Faiths entitled “The Standard of Peace.” In it, the religious and political figure denounced international war as a threat to civilization itself. Roberts had reflected on the scourge of war and the behaviors and mechanisms necessary to achieve peace throughout his decades of oratory; now, at the end of his life, he was placing a capstone on that body of thought. Yet sixteen years earlier, this same man had enlisted as a chaplain in the cause of World War I and suggested that God sanctioned righteous wars. John Sillito, in our opening article, traces the evolution of Roberts’s thought, as well as his motivations.
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See, among others, Gustive O. Larson, The “Americanization” of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1971); Dean L. May, Utah: A People’s History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), chap. 6; and Charles S. Peterson and Brian Q. Cannon, The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1895–1945 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 2015), chap. 1.
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B. H. Roberts, photographed in uniform. Roberts served as a chaplain during World War I, representing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Utah State Historical Society, photo no. 38329.
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On the eve of American entry into World War I, B. H. Roberts was a wellknown general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Democratic politician, writer, and popular speaker. In the years after the outbreak of war in Europe, he spoke out often on the need for world peace, as well as the policy of American neutrality toward the belligerent nations. His views tended to reflect those of most Americans, as well as the LDS hierarchy at the time. By the spring of 1917, however, Roberts firmly supported the United States’ entry into the conflict, to the extent that he volunteered to serve as a chaplain. The transformation of his views and the arguments he made in support of American involvement were indicative of a similar change in attitude among other Utahns as well, including those of his ecclesiastical colleagues. Indeed, as was always the case, Roberts’s views and actions were intertwined with those of the church in which he served. Fundamentally, as his views evolved, Roberts believed war was necessary only when it reflected God’s will and achieved God’s righteous purposes. As a result, an examination of Roberts’s arguments not only provides one more lens to view the climate that existed in Utah in wartime but also serves as evidence of the immediacy—and importance— of the Great War itself to residents of the Beehive State.1 Moreover, once the conflict was over, Roberts emerged as an important advocate of postwar reconciliation—again based on his view of God’s will—and reflecting changes in the view of many Americans.
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B. H. Roberts, World War I, and the Quest for Peace
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Long before he served as a chaplain in World War I, Roberts voiced his opinions on war, peace, and neutrality many times. As early as May 1899, after his election to Congress, Roberts commented on an international peace conference then being held in The Hague.2 His remarks
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came in an address before the Mutual Improvement Associations (MIA) of the Weber Stake, a church auxiliary for young men and women. Roberts decried the “mad race” for armaments throughout the world, noting that young people should be “profoundly informed” on this topic since they would soon inherit leadership. In language anticipating his later views, Roberts proclaimed that when peace finally came to the world it would be on God’s terms, but that he also believed “the time will come when there shall be a federation of the world, and a universal brotherhood of man, and come it will, despite the vaunting ambition of monarchs.”3 A few years later, in February 1904, Roberts told a congregation at the Salt Lake Tabernacle that war posed a dangerous threat in the modern world. In dramatic language, he noted that war would only “come to an end when it grows so destructive that to engage in it will mean annihilation.”4 By 1907, again at an MIA conference in Ogden, Roberts said that as he surveyed the state of the world, he believed that “peace would come when . . . nations dealt justly with each other, when laws would all be just and there would be sufficient power behind that law to enforce their enactment.”5 Clearly, it was a topic of ongoing significance to him, and his views were generally in accord with those of most Latter-day Saint leaders at the time. Roberts’s position on the subject became more important after war engulfed Europe in 1914. Initially, Roberts called on the United States to maintain its policy of “absolute neutrality,” while asserting that the war “might have been avoided if the people of the different nations had lived according to the commandments of God.”6 Over the next few years, he expressed similar themes, strongly believing that President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of neutrality was wise because it allowed the United States to be in a position to assist in establishing “permanent peace” once the conflict had ended. Repeating his earlier calls, Roberts told attendees at a session of the LDS general conference in October 1916 that when the war ended, there would “doubtless be constituted a league of nations that will, in a way, establish an empire of humanity, with such instrumentalities created through which to exercise its just powers, that . . . the intensity of national feeling shall
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Woodrow and Edith Wilson riding in the backseat of a carriage during President Wilson’s second inauguration, March 5, 1917. B. H. Roberts greatly admired Woodrow Wilson and his international policy. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-22737.
not be again permitted to disturb the peace of the world.”7 By that time, the term “league of nations” was increasingly coming into common usage. Despite these views, as events in 1917 pushed the United States toward involvement, Roberts shifted into a position of support for Wilson should he decide to call for American entry into the war. This shift again resembled that of the LDS church hierarchy itself. As Brian Q. Cannon has written, church leaders who had initially expressed a contempt for the war, clinging to isolationist views, became convinced once America entered the war that it was “a crusade against evil.” Their sentiments “generally harmonized” with the prevailing sentiment in the nation, Cannon argues, and “church leaders patriotically rallied to the cause.” Indeed, Cannon asserts, the hierarchy’s “reappraisal of the merits of American intervention in light of the altered international situation in 1917 was sensible.” No doubt, despite his initial reservations, Roberts would have agreed with that assessment.8
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The assemblage passed a resolution stating that while “every honorable effort has been made conscientiously to keep this country out of war,” it was time for “all patriotic Americans to take a stand with the republic and the flag and the president.” Such a stand, the resolution asserted, was necessary to defend “our prestige and perpetuity as a nation” and to reassert American “principles of national right and honor.” Roberts joined the others in this statement of support, asserting that “the people are united—they are one behind the president. We are no longer Republicans or Democrats.”11 Additionally, Roberts indicated that he would offer his services to the National Guard at the meeting, noting that while he was barred “by age limits from the ranks,” that did not preclude him from serving as a chaplain.12 Several months later, an unidentified columnist in
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The next evening, Roberts was the “principal speaker” in a similar rally held at the Ogden Tabernacle. He told the crowd—which included veterans of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War—that while he had faced “many an audience” in that particular hall, none resembled the one he was speaking to at that moment. The Deseret Evening News reported that the tabernacle “was much too small to accommodate the great concourse of people who gathered to give expression to the fact that the citizens of Ogden will stand with the president in this hour of national danger.” The large audience provided “thunderous and prolonged applause,” when “in a brilliant speech,” Roberts reiterated his pledge to serve as a chaplain, assuring “the fathers and mothers of Utah that if their sons go to the trenches I will go with them.” Noting that because he expected that “the large majority of the young men” who will volunteer to serve will be “members of the dominant Church,” Roberts stated he considered it his duty to both his state and his church to offer his services “in this hour of crisis.”14 According to the Ogden Examiner, Roberts stressed that the time had come when America need to “assert” itself in the face of the repeated violation of its neutrality. These “gross insults,” he said, could no longer be tolerated. Showing his continued support for the policies of President Wilson, Roberts also told the boisterous crowd not to forget that war
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Two days later, Roberts was one of many prominent speakers at a large mass meeting held in the Salt Lake Tabernacle and called by Bamberger. The meeting, with an estimated crowd of 10,000, saw almost every seat filled, with more waiting outside. In addition to Roberts, others in attendance were Utah senators Reed Smoot and William H. King and Salt Lake City Mayor William M. Ferry, who said that at the present time there were only two classes in America—“patriots and traitors.” The Salt Lake Tribune noted that the city “turned out en masse. All classes and creeds were represented. . . . and the thousands of people as united Americans raised their voices in unison for the ‘Stars and Stripes,’ and the nation of which it is the emblem. Patriotism saturated the atmosphere.”10
Goodwin’s Weekly commented on the decision, noting that “No one was in the least surprised that [Roberts] should desire, in spite of his advanced years, to don the khaki and accompany the boys. . . . That was truly typical of the man.” The writer went on to say that “every citizen of the state rejoiced” in Roberts’s decision because it “made it easier” if the boys had to leave, “knowing that Major Roberts was going along to look after them.”13 Ultimately, his offer was accepted, and he became chaplain of the 145th Field Artillery Regiment.
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As tensions increased, on March 24, 1917, Utah Governor Simon Bamberger issued a call for volunteers, noting that because the United States was “the bearer of the torch of liberty, justice and equality,” it had an obligation to assure similar values would be available to all people. Utahns, he said, must do their duty, and he encouraged “all able bodied men . . . not exempted by law, and of military age,” to demonstrate their “obligation of citizenship” by voluntarily enlisting in the Utah National Guard. In so doing, Bamberger said, they would bring honor to themselves, their nation, and the state of Utah.9 Roberts agreed with these sentiments as well.
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is a solemn thing and involves tremendous responsibility, but despite the fact that active engagement means the loss of life and property destruction . . . the American people will rise to the occasion and meet it with patriotism, love of country, and the principles and
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ideals of our forefathers. . . . Our rights and privileges, the freedom of the seas to which we are entitled, both by international and common law, have been transgressed and American lives have been sacrificed as a result of a disrespect of American neutrality.15
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Not to be outdone, Ogden’s other newspaper, the Standard, calling Roberts a “silver-tongued orator and revered churchman,” described his speech as “magnificent,” and said that in it he approached the eloquence “of a Clay or Cicero.” The paper went on to say that Roberts, like a “revolutionary preacher . . . threw aside the robe of his sacred calling, and stood revealed as a warrior, as a field leader of God’s people in the battle for human rights. . . . One must see him, must follow closely his sledge-hammer logic, his crushing sarcasm, his soul-stirring appeals, to appreciate the power of his speech.” At the conclusion of the meeting, those in attendance adopted a resolution wherein they pledged “themselves to support President Wilson in whatever course he may take in the present crisis.”16 gh As a result of these arguments, Roberts—a man who had emphasized the dangers of war for many years—was motivated to support American involvement in World War I and enlist in the Utah National Guard. It was a crucial step for a man of his age, with far-reaching consequences. Interestingly, his edited autobiography does not discuss this decision. But other sources help us understand his motivations. One of the most revealing statements of Roberts’s views on the war and subsequent peace, and his desire to serve, is contained in a remarkable letter he wrote to Ben Roberts and Harold Roberts, the oldest sons of his first wife, Louisa, and his plural wife Celia.17 Roberts instructed them to communicate “to the two branches of my family of which you will be the heads respectively,” if the “occasion requires,” and he did “not come out of this war alive.” He assured his sons that he was not concerned that he might be killed, thus “cutting off a very few years of my earthly existence.” Noting that the letter was “finished in my tent at Camp Kearney, this 20th day of December, 1917, near mid night,” Roberts
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asserted his belief “in the absolute righteousness of this war. . . . I believe it is a necessary as well as a just war.” Additionally, he wrote that the country needed to fight to “maintain our rights,” to “protect the liberties of our people,” and to guarantee the “respect, security and honor of our country.” Roberts indicated that another reason for entering the war was tied to the fact that because “modern democratic principles” had their birth in the United States, “it was only fitting that our nation should enter into the world war on the side of the free nations battling for . . . the freedom of all nations irrespective of whether the nations are small or large, weak or strong.” He then turned to his views on a postwar world, noting “I hope and believe, that the purpose of the war . . . will be that war will cease. . . . So that I regard this present war as a war against war itself.” Saying that he hoped war would be ended “for a thousand years at least,” only with U.S. involvement could the conflict come “to a proper close, and establish peace for the world.” Roberts also notes that while some had criticized him for offering his services at his age, he believed that to not send Latter-day Saint chaplains would be “an everlasting reproach to the Church” since it was clear the 145th would be “largely” made up of Mormon boys—“two thirds at least.”18 Truman Madsen’s biography of Roberts adds further insight on why Roberts supported the war.19 In speculating on those motivations, Madsen notes that in April 1915, Roberts had read James M. Beck’s The Evidence in the Case, an extremely important book of the time that placed the majority of the blame for the war on Kaiser Wilhelm and his political and military advisors.20 Additionally, Madsen suggests that although Roberts had concluded that “the war symbolized a worldwide failure of churches and their leaders,” he held out the hope that a united effort in support of the war might “help break down the unnecessary divisions” within Christianity. Roberts, however, struggled with a “more personal question: Was America responsible for ending the war by force? He was convinced that the answer was yes; the cause of France and England had become the cause of America.”21 While this was clearly an Anglo-centric viewpoint, it makes sense in light of Roberts’s general attitudes toward the country
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A stereopticon view of the wrecked battleship USS Maine, Havana Harbor, Cuba (detail). A mysterious explosion sank the Maine in February 1898, killing some 260 people and stoking the tensions that caused the Spanish-American War. Meadville, PA: Keystone View Company, c. 1898. Courtesy Library of Congress, LOT 13579, no. 5.
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As part of that embrace, Roberts played an important role in seeing to it that the LDS church was officially included in efforts to establish a memorial to the battleship USS Maine; along with Heber J. Grant, Roberts represented the First Presidency in visits to congregations to secure funds for the memorial.28 In Walker’s view, this policy was part of the effort of church leaders to blend “religious and national symbols,” display “their genuine patriotism for public effect,” and, in so doing, reflect the national mood. In Walker’s words, “They had become part of pluralistic America.”29 Based on all these factors, Roberts’s support two decades later for American entry into World War I should not be surprising. And, on this question at least, Roberts was in harmony with both his party and his church, something that was not always the case.30
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Indeed, this last point was a crucial factor in Roberts’s decision to support the war. Throughout his career, especially as the LDS church pursued polices of Americanization in anticipation of gaining statehood, Roberts argued that the patriotism and commitment to the U.S. Constitution of Latter-day Saints were overlooked, even while both individual church members and the institution itself were denied the constitutional protections promised all Americans. Moreover, as a candidate for congress and despite his earlier views on peace, Roberts—like most Utah Democrats— championed the Spanish-American War, even criticizing William McKinley for not pursuing it more vigorously.23 Support for the 1898 war among Utahns, including some of the general authorities, was strong but not universal.24
Most, including Roberts, saw it as a necessary response to Spanish aggression and oppression of the Cuban people, although some church leaders worried that the conflict might open the floodgates to needless violence.25 Ultimately, the church would support the war to liberate Cuba from Spanish oppression, calling on Latter-day Saint men in Utah to “respond with alacrity” to Governor Heber M. Wells’s call for military volunteers.26 As Ronald W. Walker states, when Mormon leaders embraced the Spanish-American War, it allowed the church to demonstrate its “growing conciliation with American society,” when, for the first time, it could “express its patriotism freely.” Moreover, Walker notes, when the church supported the war, “it did so enthusiastically, compensating for past insinuations of disloyalty.”27
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of his birth—England—and its history, literature, and culture. Madsen also argues that Roberts “wanted to prove his mettle in war. . . . He wanted to act.” More importantly, in Madsen’s view, Roberts felt it necessary to establish that “the Mormon people are not disloyal, but they are true to their country and history will vindicate them.”22
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Interestingly, despite his earlier views, Roberts was conspicuously absent from the large group of individuals who organized a Utah branch of the League to Enforce Peace. The league supported the war effort but pledged to support the creation of an organization after the war had ended to “minimize future disturbances of the international peace by hasty belligerent action on the part of nations.” Beyond that, the group echoed views also held by Roberts outlining Imperial Germany’s “militaristic actions” that had “trampled upon the rights of the United States.”31 All of this became academic when the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917.
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On April 15, 1917, Roberts addressed Utah National Guard troops at religious services held in the Ogden LDS Tabernacle. The troops had gathered first at the armory and then marched in a body to the Sunday afternoon meeting itself where, while the public was invited, most of the seats were reserved for them. Roberts’s remarks were in line with a decision by “the pastors of the Ogden Christian Churches” to preach “patriotic sermons” on that Sunday as a way to support a proclamation made by the city commission earlier in the month.32 With a number of religious, educational, and governmental officials on the stand behind him, Roberts—using as his text Exodus 15:3, “The Lord is a man of war”—told the congregation that “righteous wars were sanctioned by the Divine Creator” and that “retaliation against German aggression on the high seas was worthy of the same sanction.”33 In his capacity as chaplain, Roberts, spoke at length of his pride in his new assignment.34 He said directly to the uniformed men seated in front of him, “In this relationship I bid you hail and welcome. I hope our brotherhood may grow hard and fast together, and I will consecrate my life to your service when we are called into the conflict now at hand.”35 Roberts proclaimed that the “democratic government” of the United States came into existence “by reason of the inspiration of God, resting upon wise men raised up to establish such a government.” As a result of the sacrifices of these men, he said, “their work was sanctified,” and the American Revolution and Constitution had served as an “inspiration” ever since to all peoples of the world. Roberts gave a detailed vision of what he thought the war would accomplish, reflecting prevailing Wilsonian values. It is my sincere belief, and I pray God it may be true, that when this war is finished there will be no more crowned heads in Europe. It is a war of democracy against militarism and autocracy to establish the people of the world as its rulers, and to unite all countries in a great republic of humanity. I expect no less from this war, and as God has said that sacrifices shall bring forth blessings, I believe that from the sac-
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rifice of millions of men who have lost their lives in the present war there will come forth commensurate blessings.36 Roberts concluded by telling the guardsmen, and all those in attendance, that they had “a sacred land and a sacred government” to defend, because it was the government that “safely guards your homes.”37 Two weeks later, speaking at the conference of the Salt Lake Pioneer Stake, Roberts expressed similar views. He told the congregation that as a blacksmith “he had learned that to make a perfect mold of two pieces of iron each must be equally heated . . . but if one is cold the operation will not be successful.” Such a principle, he said, was true in life as well, and particularly true in terms of support for the war “engulfing Europe.” He assured his listeners that he was confident the “Latter-day Saints will do their duty.” Moreover, he said that had “great hope, great faith, [and] great confidence” that the United States and her allies would prevail, and that he believed that God will save this nation [because] it is worth saving.”38 Recruiting for the National Guard saw periods of advance and decline. The Utah State Council of Defense oversaw the effort, with Salt Lake City attorney Carl A. Badger, a former assistant to Reed Smoot, leading the recruiting itself.39 On May 5, state and guard leaders sponsored a massive recruiting rally that brought some 5,000 people to the front of the Salt Lake Tribune building in support of the war effort. Roberts addressed the crowd and called upon Utahns to do their share to defend the nation and oppose enemy forces “arrayed against it.” Roberts made similar appearances elsewhere in mid-1917, energetically boosting the cause of enlistment.40 By June, Roberts—continuing his efforts to increase enrollments in the National Guard— spoke at a large meeting in the Salt Lake Theater called to prove that Utahns would “show their loyalty and furnish the quota of men needed by the national guard for duty at home and abroad.” Such enlistments would also make men “immune” from the impending draft. Roberts told the gathering that the “most serious business from now on must be the prosecution of the war to a successful conclusion.” He also
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Roberts stated that he completely agreed with Woodrow Wilson that this “was a war to make the world safe for democracy.” Moreover, he said that the Allies needed to punish Imperial Germany for causing such a terrible conflict. At the same time, he proclaimed that the “great purpose is that it shall be the end of all war, and as the thunder of cannons is silenced, I hope we shall hear the Angels sing ‘Now shall the Kingdom of this World become the Kingdom of God.’ When the war shall have ended there should be created a league of free nations to guard against the arrogant dominating influences of imperial autocracy.”43 Despite his advocacy, Roberts did not expand on the exact nature of such a league or what powers it would need to challenge such autocracy. At the same time, Latter-day Saint leaders moved to a similar position. According to Ronald W. Walker, “The Mormon
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Because he had strongly attacked the Kaiser, Imperial Germany, and its military and foreign goals, Roberts apparently attracted the attention of some opponents of the war, along with some Utahns of German heritage.46 The Salt Lake Tribune noted that in response Roberts would speak on “The Duty of the German Citizen in the Present War Crisis” at sacrament service in Salt Lake City’s LDS Cannon Ward on Sunday, September 10. The newspaper called the address an “answer to criticism of many so-called German Americans of this city” that had resulted from Roberts’s recent tabernacle address.47
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Predicting that there would be ups and downs over the next months, Roberts said he was convinced that the “sum total of this conflict will be the triumph of right, the accomplishment of Gods purposes. I have absolute faith that so far as the United States is concerned, God is with us.” At the same time, Roberts cautioned that all belligerents sought to have God’s blessing. He concluded by noting that he was “proud of Utah’s part” in supporting the war financially and in every way. Such support, he hoped, would bring a measure of respect for the state. At the same time, he said he realized that “some of ‘Utah’s sons’ might well pay the ultimate sacrifice” but that had been the “price of liberty in all ages.”45
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On August 26, Roberts made a “stirring address” to a “largely attended” meeting in the Tabernacle. He told the congregation that at times conflicts occur in which “God himself takes part,” and he believed that this war was one of those conflicts. He reminded his audience that the United States had entered the war reluctantly: only after “ingenuity had exhausted itself” did the nation see fit to enter the war. Initially the nation had held “tenaciously to the well-established doctrine that we should have no entangling alliances with other nations, and when the conflict broke out we claimed strict neutrality.” Unfortunately, Roberts commented, the nation “remained in this attitude until many American lives were lost, our ships were sunk, the ports were closed to our commerce, and we became the veritable laughing stock of all the world.” Finally, he said, all of these “outrages” forced the nation to act.42
enthusiasm was a microcosm of the nation. World War I united Americans, including the Saints, like no other national war. Moreover, the Mormon’s millennial perceptions made them, like other religious fundamentalists, particularly susceptible to Wilsonian rhetoric.”44
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criticized as a “disgrace” those men who avoided enlistment to wait for their chances in the draft itself, saying that he believed “voluntary service” was preferable to being forced by the government to serve in light of the threat that the war posed to American values.41 In addition to Roberts, other speakers included former Governor William Spry, Colonel Richard W. Young, Reverend P. A. Simpkin of the Phillips Congregational Church, and Bishop Joseph S. Glass of the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City. Some four dozen men enlisted at the meeting.
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According to an account in the Salt Lake Tribune, Roberts spoke directly to “German residents of the ward of which there are many in that section of the city.” He was direct and forceful in his views, noting—in familiar language— that the United States was compelled to go to war because Germany was “running amuck.” Repeating his assertion that “American shipping had been attacked, and American lives had been lost,” Roberts asked rhetorically what the ward members would have suggested the United States do differently “under these circumstances.” At the same time, he cautioned the congregation, “if you offer any sympathy or aid to Wilhelm of Germany, you are not true to
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your oaths as citizens” and that doing so would place them “upon dangerous ground.” He then spoke in distinctively Mormon terms, reminding the congregation that the church’s “Articles of Faith” taught Latter-day Saints to “be subject to kings and presidents, and to honor, obey and sustain the law.” He went on to tell them: “Our pioneers raised the flag of freedom on Ensign Peak on July 24, 1847, and it was . . . an invitation to the people of all lands to come here and be free, throwing off the tyranny under which they were oppressed in other nations. Unless men are free they cannot be held accountable in the day of judgement.”48 Additionally, Roberts reminded his audience that the church’s efforts had brought “alien Saints” to Utah. Many of them, while residing in their homelands, he said, had never “dreamed of holding property and owning homes, but here you have that opportunity.” In return for the freedoms America offered, Roberts stated, individuals “must absolutely foreswear allegiance to [their] native country.” Indeed, while he did not say so, this is exactly what Roberts had done many years before when he renounced Great Britain and became an American citizen. Roberts told his listeners that he had “no unkind word or thought against alien citizens,” that he was not singling out Germans, and that his remarks were “applicable to all natives of foreign countries.” As a result, so that there would be no possible misunderstanding, Roberts said he had changed the title of his remarks to “The Duty of Alien Citizens in the War Crisis.” His choice of the term “alien citizen” is interesting, possibly implying that he meant “hyphenated” citizens (rather than non-citizens) who still held to an affinity for their homelands. Perhaps he should have used the term “residents” to clarify what he meant, but he did not.49 Roberts stated that the United States did not “seek one foot of enemy territory.” Moreover, he contrasted Wilson’s efforts to maintain neutrality with those of Germany who had “flooded” the nation with “spies and tried to embroil the United States with Mexico and Japan.” Finally, he concluded—and warned—that while as a whole German-Americans were “loyal and true American citizens,” those who proved to be disloyal or gave aid to the enemy were traitors
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and should be dealt with under the “stern regulations of war.” This was not the time, Roberts argued, “to further treasonable spirits and give them the rights of citizenship while they seek to undermine the government and hamper its defense of itself and its citizens.”50 Obviously, support for the war was complicated for church leaders. Latter-day Saints could be found in the ranks of all the belligerent armies, inevitably pitting Saint against Saint on the field of battle. Moreover, the conflict affected missionaries in various countries. Still, the commitment to the American cause outweighed these concerns.51 On balance, despite some disagreement, as had been the case previously, church leaders such as Joseph F. Smith became “earnest” advocates for the American cause, urging American Latter-day Saints to enlist with the hope that the success of the Allied cause “might increase world-wide liberty and righteousness.”52 Their hope was that an Allied victory would mean the triumph of God’s will.53 Throughout the fall of 1917, Roberts continued to speak in support of the war and the need for unwavering support in a “strong and convincing manner” of the nation’s war effort. At an “overflow” session of that October’s general conference, for example, Roberts delivered an “eloquent address” that lasted some forty-five minutes. He told his congregation that the nation had “drawn the sword of war against war itself that men may be free to live their lives in their own way without oppression.” As a result, he argued that America was engaged in a “Holy War” and pledged that “out of the maelstrom of destruction shall emerge better things than the world had ever known.” Among these accomplishments, he said, would be an expansion of the benefits of the Monroe Doctrine to protect “all peoples of the earth.”54 Shortly after this address, Roberts’s situation took a dramatic change. Along with the other members of the 145th, Chaplain Roberts left for Camp Kearney, California, for training. By September 1918, the regiment was in France where they saw limited action before the Armistice and returned home. While he had not seen hostile action, Roberts had witnessed the deadly effects of the influenza that hit the ranks of his unit with a vengeance, taking fourteen young
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When he returned to Utah, Roberts was a different man, very much affected by what he had witnessed. David W. Smith, a nephew, noted that while he still found Roberts to be “a man of reserve,” he was “much warmer than before.”56 At the same time, Roberts took a measure of pride in the words of an official document from the state praising his “valor, fidelity, and patriotic service” in the Great War.57 Moreover, he also recognized the irony in his wartime service. As he told an old friend, Bernard Moses, “While the government rejected me as a representative in Congress, they did accept my service as a chaplain in the war and I had the joy of serving overseas. You see I was trying to get even with Uncle Sam for turning me out of Congress.”58 At the same time, Roberts—like many Americans—was not sure the Armistice would hold, and, in February 1919, he told a joint session of the Utah State Legislature that “We are standing too close to the mountain to see things as they should be seen. The war is not over yet. It may be that our boys may yet have to march down the streets of Berlin to see that the mandates of the peace conference are enforced. . . .
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The published text of an address delivered by President Woodrow Wilson in July 1919, about the treaty ending World War I and the League of Nations. This copy of the address is in the papers of a Layton, Utah, farming family, indicating the reach of the national conversation about the league. Utah State Historical Society, MSS B 1011, box 1, fd. 9.
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just as complete a sacrifice of their lives to their country as had any who have fallen . . . in the battle line. They faced a condition as deadly to them as charging through bursting shell, or the patter of machine guns or rifle bullets. The miasma of the dread disease proved for them as deadly as the poisonous German waves of shells, and their restless suffering from fever tortured bodies and congested lungs was as pitiful as any death from wounds of bayonet thrusts or shrapnel rents. The heroism of the soldier consists in the fact that he offers his life to his country, with full intent to meet whatever fate may befall him. It is not his prerogative to choose his place in the battle line, or to say when or how or where or in what manner he may fall, if fall he must.55
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lives. As the chaplain, it was his lot to dispose of their personal belongings and to write to their next of kin. It was sobering. As he later remarked, these men had made
It is impossible at the present time to get a true retrospective of the great war.”59 Over the next few weeks, however, his concerns were lessened, and he told a church meeting in Richfield that he saw “in the peace conference and the proposed league of nations, the beginning of the millennium when weapons of war will be turned into the implements of the husbandman.”60
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By then, his full-throated advocacy of American involvement in the war had given way to an unwavering commitment to the League of Nations as proposed by President Wilson, whom he called the “first citizen of the world.”61 Like the president he admired, Roberts believed that by drawing the sword of war against war itself, the future would be made safe for democracy and characterized by a world at peace. This commitment made him the best-known Mormon advocate of the proposed world organization and brought him into conflict with the league’s best-known Mormon opponent, J. Reuben Clark, as the two men debated the issue over the next few years. Ultimately, although there had been great support in Utah for the
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idea in the years after the war, the issue became politicized in the 1920 presidential election. When Utahns, along with the majority of Americans, supported Republican and league opponent Warren G. Harding that year, it became clear that they had concluded that the nation should not support the League of Nations. Ultimately, the United States never joined the league, and B. H. Roberts—who had dramatically and quickly moved from isolationist to internationalist—must have felt that his dream for peace and postwar reconciliation between nations was lost for his lifetime.62 Not long after this, the LDS church called Roberts to serve as president of its Eastern States Mission, and he spent most of the decade out of the state. He returned to Utah in 1927 and resumed his activity in church work and political causes—including peace. On January 8, 1928, the church assigned Roberts to be one of the main speakers at a special meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.63 Sponsored by the Utah Council on the Prevention of War (UCPW), that day had been designated as the second annual “Peace Sunday” by Utah Governor George H. Dern and C. Clarence Neslen, Salt Lake City’s mayor and Roberts’s friend.64 Several other local churches held similar meetings on that day, where, in Dern’s words, the council and churches would cooperate “to make the services a concrete dedication to the cause of peace.”65 The UCPW was an affiliate of the National Council for the Prevention of War, a clearinghouse headed by Frederick J. Libby, a peace activist with contacts in Utah.66 While Roberts does not seem to have been a member, the group brought together a number of local clergy and political leaders. In his remarks, entitled “A Plea for the Ultimate Abolishment of War,” Roberts reminded his audience that Christ was known by many titles, not the least of which was the “Prince of Peace.” With that as a backdrop, he contrasted peace with war, noting that war brought waste and ruin, destroyed science and the arts, and filled the world with terror, sorrow, and death. Moreover, he asserted: I give my voice for peace because . . . peace is the normal state of society . . . makes for the reign of reason . . . gov-
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erns by the enlightened rule of law . . . that . . . regards men as equal before the law and protects all in the enjoyment of their rights. Peace appeals to reason and to the things of the spirit. War appeals to brute force and to the things of the flesh. In view of these contrasts between peace and war, is it any wonder that one announces his intention to take his stand for peace and against war?67 After outlining his views of the suffering of the Mormon people at the hands of their adversaries and reiterating statements from the Doctrine and Covenants that the church above all stood for the renunciation of war, Roberts said he proclaimed himself as one who “favors with all the emphasis I can put into it peace among men; between states, and among nations.” His version of peace, and the one he believed was commended by God, “must be a peace based upon justice and upon liberty. I can conceive of no peace that would be desirable that does not consider those two great things as rises from them as a result of their existence.” And anyone who advocated peace, Roberts concluded, must accept that it was “equally . . . based upon justice and the liberty of men.”68 At this point Roberts turned his attention to the horrors of the Great War, its cost in lives and money, and the rightness of the Wilsonian policies, especially of the League of Nations. He renewed his call for the United States to enter the league as “one of the most potent steps that could be taken in the interest of peace in this world today.” Roberts went on to detail specific actions that would, in his view, make the world less martial and more humane: refraining from enlarging the American navy; eliminating submarine warfare; and outlawing the use of chemical and biological weapons. Roberts concluded his address by returning to where he had started, a hope that world leaders would recognize the folly of war by following the Prince of Peace and accepting God’s commandments as “binding on their consciences . . . make them the full measure of their duty . . . then the attainment of universal peace will be comparatively easy . . . for world peace will be in proportion to the establishment of the doctrine of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”69
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But as it turned out, one more opportunity to advocate peace and international cooperation
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Roberts left Salt Lake City by train on the evening of August 24, arriving in Chicago on August 26, where he was met at the railroad station by the president of the local LDS mission, George S. Romney, and others.79 That day, the Chicago Daily News specifically noted that the Utahn had been “delegated” as the LDS church’s official representative and its contribution to the “impressive program” developed by fellowship leaders. The newspaper referred to the previous parliament and commented that the “sponsors of the 1933 fellowship expect to achieve even greater heights. World brotherhood, universal peace, elimination of poverty and kindred topics will be discussed by men who have made these subjects life time tasks.”80 The next day Roberts met with local LDS officials and members while attending sacrament meeting. Once the fellowship sessions opened, Romney later reported, the gathering’s officials made reference to Roberts’s treatment at the hands of the organizers forty years before, in the same city, at the parliament. As a result, Romney stated, “President Roberts was honored, it seems to me, more than any other of the distinguished people who spoke.”81
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By 1930, Roberts was again active in commemorating Armistice Day activities. That year he spoke at the Salt Lake Tabernacle on “The Armistice and What Came of it to the United States.”72 The Salt Lake Telegram reported that Roberts gave an “eloquent discourse particularly appropriate to the day,” recalling that he had been in Bordeaux with his unit waiting “to go to the front” when he learned of the Armistice from leaflets dropped by airplanes. He warned that if there was another world war it would be worse because the “engines of destruction . . . would be greater.” Roberts reiterated his longheld view of the importance of American involvement in the league. He closed with “a fervent prayer for this nation upon which God had placed a responsibility of leadership; for a continuation of peace, and for God’s blessing upon the United States.”73 Over the next few years, Roberts’s involvement in public memorials diminished, no doubt due to old age, but he still enjoyed reminiscing about the war and his views on peace.74
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awaited him. On August 23, 1933, it was announced that Roberts would represent the LDS church at the forthcoming meetings of the World Fellowship of Faiths in Chicago.75 This gathering, which is little known today, was organized by Charles Weller, a social worker who had created the League of Neighbors in 1918, and Kedar Nath Das Gupta, an organizer of a group called the Union of East and West in America.76 Weller and Das Gupta merged their organizations and made plans to bring representatives of various religious traditions to the Chicago gathering. The meetings, held at Chicago’s Hotel Morrison, attracted a number of reformers and religious figures, with Margaret Sanger, Philip LaFollette, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman among them.77 For Roberts, this opportunity to speak to a gathering of noted religious thinkers represented a culmination of his work in this area. Moreover, he must also have seen it as a vindication of the slight he believed he had received forty years earlier when he was prevented from discussing Mormonism at a full session of the World Parliament of Religions held as part of the World’s Fair.78
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Throughout the rest of 1928, Roberts returned to these themes, especially as he campaigned for Democratic candidates in the elections.70 Toward the end of the year, he spoke at the fifth annual Woodrow Wilson Memorial Dinner in Boise, Idaho, where he denied that the twenty-eighth president was a “dreamer,” calling him instead a “practical idealist” and a “man of action who had accomplished a great deal during his two terms in office.” Moreover, Roberts reiterated his view on the importance of the League of Nations, saying that it had not failed but the United States had failed it. Referring to the Kellogg-Briand Pact—an international agreement calling for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy that had recently been signed in Paris and ratified by the U.S. Senate—Roberts argued that it was a step in the right direction but noted his hope that “we will go further, for this declaration of the outlaw of war must have some kind of force behind it in order that it may be effective. We lost the great opportunity of world leadership. We let it slip through our fingers by not joining that league which is now splendidly functioning today.”71
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Roberts delivered his main address, “The Standard of Peace,” at the fellowship meetings on August 29, with a number of local Mormons and some Utahns in attendance.82 Drawing upon views he had held for some time, Roberts stated that he had chosen his topic because he believed nothing constituted a greater threat to human progress than “the possibility of international war,” which threatened the “very existence of civilization.” Roberts then built upon scriptural references, from both the standard Christian and Mormon canons, to demonstrate God’s injunctions to renounce war and proclaim peace. Such a policy, he declared, had become even more urgent as a result of the “dreadfulness” of the last war.83 Beyond the renunciation of war and the desire for peace, Roberts asserted there was a need to establish a commitment to justice “upon a firm foundation.” The creation a decade before of the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations provided the beginnings of such a foundation. Yet, that was only a first step, “because justice is as yet undefined. Who shall give the authoritative definition of it and how? It must be a generalization that will include every scrap and item of law and custom that has in the development into dignity of international law. But, alas, while much is said and written about justice little is said of it in any satisfactory manner.” For Christians generally, and Mormons specifically, to achieve that definition would require an understanding of righteousness, especially as provided in the Ten Commandments, the teachings of Jesus, and the message of the Sermon on the Mount. Roberts argued that from these sources, one might learn more about justice “than in all the musty volumes of law in the libraries of all the nations.” In concluding his address, Roberts called on his colleagues at the World Fellowship to establish a “standard of World Peace upon these foundations of God’s righteousness and Justice.”84 The Salt Lake Tribune reported that these remarks were “applauded vigorously” particularly by the “large Utah delegation” in attendance.85 After returning from Chicago, Roberts, although often sick, resumed his regular ecclesiastical duties. About a week later he told his friend Josiah E. Hickman, who had read reports of the talk in the Deseret News, that
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he had “received very much better treatment at the hands . . . of the World Fellowship of Faiths,” than at the event forty years earlier.86 It is evident that he was pleased by that fact. By then, however, his faith journey was coming to an end, and he died on September 27, 1933. Roberts’s address at the 1933 World Fellowship of Faiths capped off his decades of thought and experience about war and peace—thought that was not without inconsistencies. Although he always professed a distaste for war, at times he saw it as necessary or even righteous, as with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and with World War I after the American entry in 1917. At other times in his public career, Roberts decried—often in very specific terms—man’s inhumanity to man. Likewise, he looked for concrete solutions to such behavior, finding it in international bodies like the League of Nations and especially in the teachings of Christianity. All told, his responses to war and his hopes for peace seem to have generally hinged on what he viewed as righteous behavior and God’s will. In the years since his death, Roberts has been remembered as a Mormon theologian, historian, and intellectual. At the same time, he should also be remembered as a Utahn who witnessed the horror of war and then became an advocate of peace and international cooperation.
Web Extras Visit history.utah.gov for newspaper articles describing B. H. Roberts’s oratory, as well as further information about the League of Nations.
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For an important overview, see Allan Kent Powell, “Utah and World War I,” Utah Historical Quarterly 86, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 204–33. Roberts was elected in November 1898 but ultimately not seated in Congress because of his polygamous marriages. For a succinct overview of this affair, see Davis Bitton, “The B. H. Roberts Case of 1898–1900,” Utah Historical Quarterly 25, no. 1 (January 1957): 27–46. As we will see, the position he took on the SpanishAmerican War as a congressional candidate may have influenced his views on peace. “Eloquence of B. H. Roberts,” Ogden Standard, May 22, 1899, 5. Newspaper accounts are extremely important in tracing Roberts’s thought and activities, especially during this period. No diaries—except a small pocket notebook that is cited below—are extant for these
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marriage is in dispute. They had no children together. 18 “My Reason for Enlistment,” box 9, fd. 11, B. H. Roberts Papers, MS 0106, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter Roberts Papers). 19 Truman Madsen, Defender of the Faith: The B. H. Roberts Story (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980). 20 James M. Beck, The Evidence in the Case: A Discussion of the Moral Responsibility for the War of 1914, as Disclosed by the Diplomatic Records of England, Germany, Russia, France, Austria, Italy, and Belgium (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915). 21 Madsen, Defender of the Faith, 303. 22 Madsen, 304. 23 Jean B. White, “Utah State Elections, 1895–1899” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1968), 281–83. 24 D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War: An End to Selective Pacifism,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 3 (August 1974): 342–66. 25 Speaking in general conference, Roberts argued that the “present dissensions among the nations” had been foretold in Section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants. He also indicated his belief that “in this day of great turmoil, war, the crumbling of dynasties, and the anger of the elements,” the situation represented “a splendid time for spreading abroad Mormon faith,” and that the gospel message must “continue to be sounded to all the nations.” See “Conference Meetings,” Deseret Evening News, April 7, 1898, 2; and, “They Talked of War,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 8, 1898, 5. 26 “The War with Spain,” Deseret Evening News, April 28, 1898, 4. Similarly, the editorial columns of the Deseret Evening News during this period tended to argue for support for the war. See “Our Cause Is Just,” Deseret Evening News, April 27, 1898, 4. 27 Ronald W. Walker, “Sheaves, Bucklers and the State: Mormon Leaders Respond to the Dilemmas of War,” Sunstone (July-August 1982): 43–56. 28 “At the Tabernacle,” Salt Lake Herald, May 16, 1898, 7; “The Maine Memorial,” Deseret Evening News, October 4, 1898, 4; see also Heber J. Grant and B. H. Roberts to Wilford W. Clark, July 13, 1898, LR 5735/21, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL), digital copy of circular letter and supporting documents, accessed February 27, 2019, catalog.lds.org. 29 Walker, “Sheaves, Bucklers and the State,” 49. 30 For information on the church’s changing view, see “Topics of the Times,” Juvenile Instructor, March 1917, 126–29, April 1917, 186–87, and May 1917, 238. 31 “To Organize Peace League Branch Here,” Deseret Evening News, April 5, 1917, 13. 32 “Guardsmen to Hear Maj. B. H. Roberts,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 15, 1917, 1; “Soldiers March to Tabernacle on Sunday, Ogden Standard, April 14, 1917, 11. 33 “B. H. Roberts to Quit to Serve at Front,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 24, 1917, 4. At the time Roberts was serving as a member of the Utah State Board of Equalization. 34 “Confirmation of Army Appointments, Ogden Standard, September 3, 1917, 8. At that point, Roberts was made a first lieutenant and regimental chaplain of the 145th Field Artillery. Prior to that, while technically a member of the Utah National Guard, he had held the rank of major. 35 “War Sanctioned by the Scriptures Says Major Roberts in Tabernacle,” Ogden Standard, April 16, 1917, 12. For the response of other churches in Ogden to the
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years. Moreover, while his official correspondence, which is held by the Church Historical Department, is voluminous, it is currently closed to research. “B. H. Roberts on War and Peace,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 29, 1904, 7. “Conference Sunday,” Ogden Standard, May 18, 1907, 6; “Conference of the MI Workers,” Ogden Standard, May 20, 1907, 2. “B. H. Roberts Heard by Large Audiences on Sunday,” Ogden Standard, August 10, 1914, 5. B. H. Roberts in Eighty-Seventh Semi-Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1916), 143–44. Brian Q. Cannon, “Chastisement of the Nations, 1914– 45,” in Window of Faith: Latter-day Saint Perspectives on World History, ed. Roy A. Prete (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2005), 427–46. See T. DeWitt Foster, “Governor in Demand for Guard Recruits,” and “Here’s Proclamation,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 25, 1917, 1. This essay draws heavily on Richard C. Roberts, Legacy: The History of the Utah National Guard (Salt Lake City: National Guard Association of Utah, 2003). Also useful is E. W. Crocker, ed., History of the 145th Field Artillery Regiment of World War I (Provo, UT: J. Grant Stevenson, 1968). “Utah Pledges Loyal Defense of Nation’s Honor and Flag,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 27, 1917, 1. “Loyal Utah Speaks,” Deseret Evening News, March 27, 1917, 1. “Loyal Utah Speaks”; see also National Guard 145th Field Artillery Scrapbook, 1917–1918, Series 10339, Utah State Archives and Record Service, Salt Lake City, Utah. “The Spectator,” Goodwin’s Weekly (Salt Lake City, UT), February 23, 1918, 3. “B. H. Roberts Says He Will Go to the Trenches with the Boys,” Deseret Evening News, March 28, 1917, 1. Roberts may have been anticipating the view of Joseph F. Smith, delivered to an LDS audience in June 1917. Smith encouraged soldiers to be “just as pure and true in the army of the United States as you are in the army of the Elders of Israel that are preaching the gospel of love and peace in the world. . . . While death in battle might be instantaneous . . . the death that is caused by the transgression of the laws of God . . . is to be dreaded worse, a thousand times than to die sinless in defending the cause of truth.” Joseph F. Smith, “A Message to the Soldier Boys of ‘Mormondom,’” Improvement Era, July 1917, 821–29. “Prominent Men Offer Services to National Guards,” Ogden Examiner, March 28, 1917, 1. Additionally, Dr. Edward M. Conroy (1857–1926), a prominent Ogden government official and physician, offered his services as a surgeon. Ultimately, he instead served as chairman of the Weber County Council of Defense. See “E. M. Conroy, Ogden Doctor and Ex-Mayor Dies, Aged 68,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 13, 1926, 1. “Intense Patriotism in Ogden,” Ogden Standard, March 28, 1917, 1. Gary J. Bergera, ed. The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990). For more on Roberts’s marriages and families, see Richard C. Roberts, A History of the B. H. Roberts Family (Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2009). Roberts married a third wife, Margaret C. Shipp (1849–1926), but the date of that
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war, see “Pacifism and the Present War,” Ogden Standard, April 14, 1917, 11; “Guardsmen to Hear Maj. B. H. Roberts.” “War Sanctioned by Scriptures.” “War Sanctioned by Scriptures.” “Nation Must Serve God to Be Saved,” Deseret Evening News, April 30, 1917, 5; “Great World Controversy,” Deseret Evening News, May 26, 1917, III:9. Allan Kent Powell, “Utah’s War Machine: The Utah Council of Defense, 1917–1919,” in Utah and the Great War: The Beehive State and the World War I Experience, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and University of Utah, 2016), 91–134. Roberts, Legacy, 104. “To Hold a Mass Meeting in Liberty’s Cause,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 1917, 12; “Appeal to Patriotism is Followed by Enlistments,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 27, 1917, 18. “Says God Takes Part in Certain Great Conflicts,” Deseret Evening News, August 27, 1917, 5. “Says God Takes Part in Certain Great Conflicts.” Walker, “Sheaves, Bucklers and the State,” 50; see also, Joseph F. Smith, “Our Duty to Humanity, To God and To Country,” Improvement Era, May 1917, 645–56. “Says God Take Part in Certain Great Conflicts.” For an overview, see Allan Kent Powell, “‘Our Cradles Were in Germany’: Utah’s German-American Community in World War I,” in Utah and the Great War, 205–25. “Roberts to Answer Pro-German Critics,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 8, 1917, 16. “Roberts Replies to Critics of Address,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 10, 1917, 16; see also, “Work of Churches Told in Sermons,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 10, 1917, 6. “B. H. Roberts is Quite Outspoken,” Ogden Standard, September 10, 1917, 10. “Roberts Replies to Critics of Address.” At the same time, Joseph F. Smith reminded church members that “we have become brothers in the household of faith, and we should treat the people from these nations that are at war with each other, with due kindness and consideration.” Smith, “Our Duty to Humanity,” 61. Walker, “Sheaves, Bucklers and the State,” 49. Joseph F. Smith also feared that servicemen might not remember that they were going in to battle “in the spirit of defending the liberties of mankind rather than for the purpose of destroying the enemy.” Moreover, he urged church members in the military to remember they should “engage in the great and grand and necessary duty of protecting and guarding our Nation from the encroachments of wicked enemies” and do so with “an eye single to the accomplishment of the good that is aimed to be accomplished, and not with the bloodthirsty desire to kill and destroy.” Smith, “Our Duty to Humanity,” 52. Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 7, 1917, 7, CR 100 137, CHL; see also, Powell, “Our Cradles Were in Germany,” 205–225. “Utah Heroes Are Accorded High Praise,” Deseret News, February 13, 1919, 6; see also B. H. Roberts, Chaplain Journal, box 9, fd. 16; and, “The Men Who Died of Spanish Influenza in the Camp of the 145th F. A.,” box 9, fd. 19, Roberts Papers. As quoted in Madsen, Defender of the Faith, 305.
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57 Certificate dated March 20, 1919, in Georgiana R. Mowry Scrapbook, MS 30037, #60, CHL. 58 B. H. Roberts to Bernard Moses, June 24, 1925, Bernard Moses Papers, Mss SC904, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 59 “B. H. Roberts Says War Is Not Over Yet,” Myton (UT) Free Press, February 13, 1919, 1. 60 “Chaplain Roberts Delivers Discourse,” Richfield (UT) Reaper, March 22, 1919, 1. 61 “Chaplain Roberts Delivers Discourse.” 62 James B. Allen, “Personal Faith and Public Policy: Some Timely Observations on the League of Nations Controversy in Utah,” BYU Studies 14, no. 1 (January 1973): 77–98. 63 In addition to Roberts, Apostle David O. McKay discussed “The Ruthlessness of War.” See “The Ruthlessness of War,” Deseret News, January 14, 1928, III:7; see also “B. H. Roberts to Speak at Tabernacle Sunday,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 7, 1928, 7. 64 The initial observance in Utah was held before Roberts returned to the state. Apparently, the designation had the tacit approval of the First Presidency. See “World Peace, Pulpit Topic,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 3, 1927, 6. After that the observances were moved to coincide with the celebration of the Armistice in November. 65 “Dern Proclaims January 8 as Peace Sunday,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 19, 1927, 3; “Sunday Services in Salt Lake Churches,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 7, 1928, 3. 66 For more on the group’s goals, see “Peace Sunday to be Observed in S. L.,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 21, 1926, 2. 67 B. H. Roberts, “The Abolishment of War,” Deseret News, January 14, 1928, III:9. 68 Roberts, III:9. 69 Roberts, III:9. 70 “Peace Sunday to be Observed in Utah on Nov. 11,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 24, 1928, 2; “B. H. Roberts to Speak at Logan Armistice Day,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 23, 1928, 13; “Youth Education Urged for Peace,” Deseret News, November 12, 1928. 71 “Wilson Termed Man of Action,” (Boise) Idaho Statesman, December 29, 1928, 1. 72 “Salt Lake Will Celebrate 13th Armistice Day,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 9, 1930, 2. 73 “Armistice Day in Paris Gives Sermon Theme,” Deseret News, November 10, 1930, 5. 74 “First Armistice Day is Recalled by Vets,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 10, 1931, 13. 75 “Impressive Meeting to Launch Meeting of World Faiths,” Chicago Daily News, August 26, 1933, 8. 76 “Tagore Address Full of Interest,” (Salt Lake City) Utah Daily Chronicle, October 16, 1916, 2. 77 “Religious Groups Open Parliament,” New York Times, June 19, 1933, 17; “Problems for the Fellowship of Faith at Chicago,” Literary Digest, July 8, 1933, 21; “Church Envoy Sent to Meet,” Deseret News, August 24, 1933, II:1. 78 For a general overview, see Reid L. Neilson, “Mormonism’s Blacksmith Orator: B. H. Roberts at the Chicago World’s Fair Parliament of Religion,” Mormon Historical Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 53–84. For more detail, see Neilson’s Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the Chicago World’s Fair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Konden R. Smith “Mormonism and the World’s Fair of 1893: A Study of
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Cozzen Rich Diaries, MS-74, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah. B. H. Roberts, “The Standard of Peace,” in World Fellowship: Addresses and Messages by Leading Spokesmen of All Faiths, Races and Countries, ed. Charles Frederick Weller (New York: Liveright, 1935), 870–75; see also, B. H. Roberts, Discourses of B. H. Roberts of the First Council of the Seventy (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1948). Weller, World Fellowship, 871, 873, 875. “Church Official Deplores Passive Christian Spirit,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 8, 1933, 6. Roberts to Josiah E. Hickman, September 8, 1933, Josiah E. Hickman, Scrapbook 2, accessed March 5, 2019, hickmans family.homestead.com/files/JEHscrapbook2.pdf.
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Religious and Cultural Agency” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2012). Northern States Mission Records, Manuscript History, August 24, 1933, LR 6227/63, CHL. “Impressive Meeting to Launch Meeting of World Faiths,” Chicago Daily News, August 26, 1933, 8. George S. Romney in One Hundred and Fourth SemiAnnual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1933), 40. In a later reminiscence, written after Roberts had died, Emily A. Rich of Ogden described her experiences at the fair and the World Fellowship of Faiths. She said Roberts’s remarks were “wonderful” and that the sessions had been an education. Emily A. Rich, Diary, September 29, 1933, Dr. Edward I. and Emily Almira
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A lithograph portrait of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, inscribed “The Scout Buffalo Bill. Hon. W. F. Cody.” Paul Frenzeny, artist. Boston and New York: Forbes Co. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIGpga-01266.
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William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody—perhaps the most famous American entertainer of his time—made a handful of documented visits to Utah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That era had Americans looking to and thinking about the West, even as a celebrity culture grew in the East. Cody, the western army scout turned actor, emerged as the best-known celebrity symbol of the West. He rose to prominence as a stage performer and became an international sensation through his Wild West show. Buffalo Bill’s biographers have demonstrated that his persona and performances of created and recreated historical events significantly helped to define the meaning of western history and identity for generations of Americans.1
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Yet in all of this, scholars have given little attention to Cody’s relationship with and portrayal of Utahns and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.2 In the 1870s and 1880s some of Buffalo Bill’s routines portrayed Mormons as anti-American threats in the West. But by the 1890s, Cody began to perceive and publicly represent Utah Mormons as model Americans who played a significant role in conquering and redeeming the West, a shift that coincided with Latter-day Saint efforts to gain national acceptance and respectability.3 This history provides insight not only into the heretofore unexplored visits of the famous plainsman to Utah but also into Cody as an indicator of the evolving perceptions of Utah Mormons in American popular culture. The best-known account of Buffalo Bill’s first journey to Utah is one that appears to be dubious at best. According to his 1879 autobiography, an eleven-year-old Bill Cody went to work for the freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell. He claimed to have traveled with the wagon train that supplied the U.S. Army heading west from Kansas “to fight the Mormons” in the 1857–1858 Utah War.4 As a part of his carefully crafted public image, Cody’s autobiography asserts that he was present when Lot Smith and some “Mormon Danites” burned government supply wagons, leaving the boy Cody and other freighters stranded at Fort Bridger (then
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in Utah Territory) that winter.5 While biographers and historians have debated the authenticity of this claim, evidence suggests that Cody fictitiously inserted himself into this scene in American and western history.6 In the late 1870s and early 1880s, a time when Congress began to strengthen its antipolygamy legislation and when general anti-Mormon sentiment was on the rise, Americans would have understood and appreciated the efforts of the young Bill Cody struggling to combat Mormons, even if fabricated. That careful image-making—and the place of Mormons and Utah in it—provides a useful backdrop for understanding and appreciating Buffalo Bill’s better documented visits to Utah.
that the young Cody was “one of the few” who had defended the emigrant wagon train, barely escaping from the ruthless Mormons.8 Blanchett’s statement is historically inaccurate but was likely made to convince eastern American audiences of the authenticity of the play and its hero. The Washington, D.C., National Republican opined that “the plot cannot be said to be a deep one, nor is the play perfect. It seems crude and lacking in refinement, which facts, however, do not detract from the genuineness of the scenes of life on the frontier.”9 For this reviewer, perceived authenticity was key, and it was heightened by depictions of the well-known Mormon characters John D. Lee, Brigham Young, and Ann Eliza Young.
William F. Cody’s first verifiable visit to Utah came in May 1879, the same year he released his autobiography. With other performers, he arrived in Salt Lake City on May 1 while on a national tour. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that, after their arrival, Buffalo Bill and his acting company toured the city and visited with officers at Fort Douglas, the military installation on the mountain bench overlooking the capital.7 Cody then prepared himself for a twonight stand at the Salt Lake Theatre.
May Cody used a narrative formula similar to the plots of dime novels of the post–Civil War era—with their dashing heroes, “villainous Mormon elders,” and young women kidnapped into polygamy—and employed these common stereotypes in the form of Danites, polygamy, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.10 The Danites were an oath-bound military society organized among the Mormons to protect church members during their conflict with Missourians in 1838, although rumors of their continued existence permeated popular thought well into the late nineteenth century and beyond.11 May Cody cast the character of John D. Lee— who had been convicted and executed for his role in the actual Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1877, just prior to the play’s opening—as the leader of the “Mormon Danites,” the main villains of the play, billed only second to Cody himself.12 In Cody’s plays, in dime novels, and in the popular imagination, the Danites embodied the nefarious nature of Mormons and prompted a fear of religious violence. A part of that fear was the controlling influence of ecclesiastical leaders. Enter Brigham Young’s role in May Cody. The play’s synopsis suggests that Lee’s Danites took orders directly from Young to capture the beautiful May.13 With such a representation, audiences would have viewed Mormons as simpleminded, violent, and unquestionably obedient to the dictates of Young, making the leader and his followers a particularly dangerous group.14
During the 1879 tour, Cody’s troupe staged two plays: Knight of the Plains and May Cody, or Lost and Won. The former was a new performance that season and the latter was a production that Cody’s company had presented for the previous two years. The sensational drama May Cody best represents Buffalo Bill’s early portrayal of Latter-day Saint history. It reenacted the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the real-life killings of a California-bound emigrant train by Mormons in southern Utah Territory in September 1857. In his introduction to the play, Charles E. Blanchett, the Buffalo Bill stage manager at the time, described the “truthful incidents” of “horrible butchery” and even claimed that young Bill Cody was present in southern Utah at the time of the atrocious massacre. Buffalo Bill had again been inserted into Utah history. Unlike his autobiography, which placed him on the northern route to Utah at the time of the massacre, the May Cody script placed him in southern Utah ahead of the army and the freighting train on which he supposedly worked. Blanchett went so far as to claim
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In one of the play’s scenes, set in the Mormon temple, Brigham Young attempts to force the
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Much like the real Ann Eliza Young, the representation of her in the show seems to have been intended to inform the public of the undesirability and unacceptability of Mormonism. Indeed, Cody’s claims of authenticity made his performances both crowd-pleasing and memorable. One eastern newspaper reviewer explained the message embedded in May Cody: “It is a vivid illustration of Mormon iniquity, villainy and crime, and is worth more by its thrilling portrayal of what Mormonism really is, towards awakening the sentiment of the people against the monstrous practices of these people than editorials or speeches could ever amount to. We . . . will say in all earnestness that every scene of every act is thrilling and awakens every emotion of the heart.”17 Playing on preconceived notions of Mormon Utah, Cody apparently understood that anti-Mormonism was lucrative, and he sold to the people a “genuine” view of the religious group and its history. According to Cody’s autobiography, the opening season of May Cody was “a grand success both financially and artistically,” which contributed to the most profitable season Buffalo Bill had yet experienced.18 Buffalo Bill’s character in May Cody ultimately saved May from the ominous fate of a forced polygamous marriage, making him the hero
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Buffalo Bill’s exhibition of May Cody occurred during the height of anti-Mormonism and antipolygamy legislation in the United States. Besides the publication of Ann Eliza Young’s exposé and John D. Lee’s trial and execution, the 1870s saw the passage of important federal legislation, a momentous federal court decision, and new directions from the nation’s chief executive related to Mormonism. The Poland Act of 1874 enhanced existing anti-polygamy laws.19 The 1879 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. United States determined that the free exercise of religion did not protect local religious practice in domestic relations at the expense of federal laws, which made the Latter-day Saint arguments that the Constitution protected the practice of plural marriage moot.20 In his annual message to Congress in 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes pushed for the disenfranchisement of Mormons. To “firmly and effectively” execute marriage laws, Hayes advocated for the withdrawal or withholding of the rights and privileges of citizenship of “those who violate or oppose the enforcement of the law on this subject.” Moreover, Hayes’s administration sought to prevent foreign Mormons from immigrating to the United States.21
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and the nation’s protector against peoples deemed un-American. His company’s timely anti-Mormon show gave faces and voices to the most negative tenets of Mormonism. While Cody may not have been involved in the writing of May Cody, he lent his name and persona to a popular anti-Mormon narrative. His production reflected the public’s entrenched perception of Mormon men as lecherous polygamists, especially Brigham Young (even if he had already passed away). It was what audiences wanted to see at a time rife with efforts to end polygamy in the West.
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abducted May Cody into a polygamous marriage.15 The drama May Cody, then, offered a commentary on the Latter-day Saint practice of polygamy and the perception that it was a vicious, shameful system that kept women in bondage. Here is where the name of Ann Eliza Young becomes especially noteworthy. The show’s playbill lists Ann Eliza Young as one of the prophet’s wives. The real Ann Eliza Young had divorced Brigham Young in 1875 and, a year later, published an exposé entitled Wife No. 19 that summarily condemned polygamy and railed against Mormonism. Her publication added to the already negative perception Americans had toward Latter-day Saints and their practice of plural marriage. That Buffalo Bill’s play cast a character for Ann, given her public efforts to “impress upon the world what Mormonism really [was and] to show the pitiable condition of its women,” suggests that the famous plainsman wanted his audiences to understand the same.16
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When Buffalo Bill arrived in Salt Lake City for his early May 1879 performances at the Salt Lake Theatre, however, he did not present May Cody. Instead, the Salt Lake City crowds watched Knight of the Plains, a new drama complete with romance, a stagecoach robbery, and a demonstration of Cody’s shooting prowess.22 Trying to draw a large crowd, Cody apparently chose Knight of the Plains because it did not have content directly related to Latter-day Saints.
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120 A poster (partially damaged) advertising Buffalo Bill’s production, May Cody, or Lost and Won. Sensational and melodramatic, May Cody played on negative stereotypes of Mormon life. Buffalo Bill’s troupe toured with May Cody in 1879 but presented another show in Salt Lake City that year. New York: H. A. Thomas Lithograph Studio. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-54797.
The large Mormon population in Salt Lake City almost certainly would have frowned upon the damaging depiction of its religious culture and the darkest event of its recent past. Reporting on the contents of May Cody, the Washington, D.C., National Republican opined, “Mormon life is shown in all of its repulsive details, from the interior of the temple to the diabolical plots in the wilderness.”23 The Buffalo Bill production company opted for the less sensational Knight of the Plains. Despite Cody’s efforts to play to the local population, his show brought in only a “fair-sized crowd.” In its review of Knight of the Plains, the Deseret News stated bluntly that it could not recommend the actors “as first class,” noting that the dialogue was often inaudible and that the play dragged considerably. Still, the Mormon-affiliated newspaper did enjoy the
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spectacle of the stage robbery and “Mr. Cody’s fancy shooting.”24 Following two days at the Salt Lake Theatre, the company continued its tour. Cody would not return to Utah for nearly seven more years. During this interim, the United States government fortified its campaign against polygamy in Utah. Presidents Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland both hurled insults at the “barbarous system,” while Congress passed stronger antipolygamy legislation with the 1882 Edmunds Act.25 The disdain that the government and the public had for plural marriage had nearly reached its zenith when Buffalo Bill returned to Utah. In late February 1886, Cody and his company traveled via rail from Evanston, Wyoming, to
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The hype did not disappoint the Ogden crowd. According to the Herald’s summary of the one-night stand on February 26, the audience applauded the drama wildly and the reporter found “the acting throughout the entire play was all that could be desired. Mr. Cody (‘Buffalo Bill’) makes a grand hit as the rough, uncultured, but steel-hearted scout, and hero of the play. Miss Lydia Denier as the ‘Waif,’ played with exquisite taste the part of the longlost daughter of General Brown.”30 The next morning, Buffalo Bill’s stage company traveled roughly forty miles south to Salt Lake City on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. At about 11 a.m., the group of twenty individuals arrived at the Valley House, a commodious downtown hotel located on the southwest corner of South Temple and West Temple.31 That afternoon, a downtown street parade for the company preceded a matinee showing of The Prairie Waif, which filled the Salt Lake Theatre “to excess.”32 The Cody troupe came to Salt Lake City just one day after the internationally respected Italian actor Tommaso Salvini had performed in the city. Salvini impressed the crowd and newspaper critics by displaying his marvelous talents in a French tragedy entitled The Gladiator. Salvini spoke in his native tongue,
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but even those who did not understand Italian, one Salt Lake City newspaper declared, would enjoy the power of this acting master.33 The Salt Lake Herald’s reporter couldn’t help but compare the skill and sophistication of Salvini with the players in Buffalo Bill’s western. The Herald critic wrote, “Mr. Buffalo Bill has secured a coterie of artists whose merits might cause Salvini himself to blush—for his profession.” In contrast to the Ogden reporter’s review, the Salt Lake newspaper writer mocked Cody’s acting abilities, suggesting that he was better suited to be a streetcar driver than an actor. The writer further criticized the western drama’s dialogue: “Miss Lydia Denier, the Waif, herself who gave utterance to all such thrilling chestnuts as ‘unhand me, villain!’, ‘Your bride? Never. I’d rather be a corpse!’ and ‘Death rather than dishonor’ in much the same tone. . . . It was a grand spectacle; one we hope, which we shall never be called upon to sit through again.” The critic blamed the Salt Lake Theatre’s management for scheduling Buffalo Bill immediately after Salvini.34 In the end, the Herald’s critic scoffed at the inelegance and crudeness of the western scout, viewing him as an affront to refined acting of a “highbrow” professional. This assessment might suggest a deeper message. It points to a people in a time and place yearning for respectability after decades of prejudiced opinion about the Latter-day Saint faith and its practices. The message appears to be that Utahns, especially those residing in Salt Lake City, appreciated fine art and were refined in their cultural tastes in contrast to the lasting negative portrayal of Mormonism that the popular performer, Buffalo Bill, brought to the stage.
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Ogden to put on another new play, The Prairie Waif, at the Union Opera House.26 This time, at the pinnacle of national anti-Mormonism, Buffalo Bill did not shy away from a performance that cast Mormons as villains. Descriptions and reviews of The Prairie Waif vary, but one newspaper remarked, “The plot is simple, yet very instructive, interesting, and laughable. Onita, a little prairie flower, is captured by the redskins and Mormons, and after ten years time, is discovered by Buffalo Bill, rescued and taken back to her father, after thrilling skirmishes and desperate encounters.”27 The Salt Lake Herald’s announcement of the coming production did not include a description of its anti-Mormon content but simply declared, “‘Prairie Waif’ is one of those plays calculated to picture frontier life, with its various vicissitudes, and especially the thrilling adventures of a scout.”28 The Ogden Herald also dropped any mention of the content and simply stated, “The company are highly spoken of by the press of the country, and we may expect a magnificent performance.”29
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Cody’s troupe played Salt Lake City just that day and continued touring before returning to Park City, Utah, for a show on March 29, 1886. Cody then took leave of Utah for another six years, during which time Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act. That draconian 1887 measure, among its many stipulations, required plural wives to testify against their husbands and disincorporated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.35 Three years later, in 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Edmunds-Tucker Act and the Latter-day Saint president, Wilford Woodruff, issued a statement encouraging his church’s members
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to obey federal marriage laws.36 Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill took his act overseas, growing his international brand and earning the applause of the Queen of England herself.37 When he returned to the Great Basin in 1892, Cody brought with him an entourage that included British military officers. According to John Burke, the general manager and press agent for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, “When abroad Buffalo Bill heard so many officers of the army of France, England, and other countries ask about the Wild West of America, its game and wonderful scenery, that he extended an invitation to a number of gentlemen of rank and title to join him, with others from this country, on an extended expedition to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and thence on through Arizona and Utah to Salt Lake City on horseback.”38 The expedition’s participants included the English officers W. H. MacKinnon and John Mildmay, Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, and two Utahns, Daniel Seegmiller (a Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical leader in and former sheriff of Washington
County, Utah) and Junius F. Wells (a life-long Utahn and organizer of the church’s Young Men Mutual Improvement Association).39 Outside of Burke’s notation about this trip, little has been known about it. Recently located sources, however, provide new, additional details. It is unclear how Seegmiller and Wells came to be acquainted with Buffalo Bill, but Wells was instrumental in organizing the expedition. Wells’s journal notes that in late October 1892 he traveled to New York City, where a telegram from Colonel William F. Cody awaited him.40 On October 25, Wells met with Cody and Prentiss Ingraham at the Hoffman House hotel, a favorite lodging place for Cody in New York City, where Cody, Ingraham, and Wells “had good friendly chat & went over general plan of the trip West.”41 Five days later, Wells wrote in his journal that he was “very busy with arranging [the] trip west.”42 In early November, the men began to travel west by rail. On Friday, November 4, Wells arrived and spent the next couple of days at the North Platte, Nebraska,
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William F. Cody and his traveling companions in Kanab, Utah. Utah State Historical Society, MSS C 103, box 2, fd. 1, no. 9.
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Following his great 1892 adventure, Cody wrote two private letters from Chicago to Wells about the potential of a business venture that the men likely discussed during their time together.52 Buffalo Bill had been in the Intermountain West seeking to develop a natural game park and preserve. He used the expedition through the Grand Canyon country and into Utah as an opportunity to find a suitable tract of land to create a space for the conservation of western animals. Cody lamented, “Outside of the National Park at Yellowstone, America is wholly devoid of any place for the preservation of game.”53 On its journey through the Grand Canyon and into southern Utah, Cody’s party saw “mountain sheep, elk, deer, antelope, mountain lion, wildcats, and coyotes,” as well as plentiful numbers of quail, ducks, grouse, and turkeys.54
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While in Salt Lake City, Junius F. Wells introduced Buffalo Bill and the party to the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which then consisted of Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith. Following that meeting, Wells shepherded them up the hill to meet with U.S. Army officers at Fort Douglas.48 Reporting on the day spent in Salt Lake City, the Washington Post stated, “the party were entertained by President Woodruff, the head of the Mormon Church, and the Twelve Apostles, and every courtesy was shown them. At Fort Douglass, Gen. Penrose and his officers entertained Col. Cody and his party most royally, and the English officers were delighted with the drill of the Sioux soldiers and life in an American frontier post.”49 Cody’s party had an enjoyable visit
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The timing of Cody’s 1892 visit to the Great Basin and his meeting with Latter-day Saint authorities in Salt Lake City is worth noting. It came just two years after Wilford Woodruff issued the manifesto calling for the end to the practice of plural marriage among Mormons. It also came amid the continued efforts of Utahns to attain statehood, which had evaded them for more than forty years. From at least the mid-1880s, Latter-day Saint officials had engaged in public relations campaigns to neutralize and overturn the longstanding negative public image of the church and its people. They were painfully cognizant of the ways the larger American public had perceived them and sought to change their image. For example, they had made alliances with powerful political lobbyists and eastern newspaper editors, hoping to engender a more positive image.51 While it is unknown precisely what was said during Cody’s meeting with the church’s First Presidency or in his many interactions with Junius F. Wells and others, it seems likely that the Latter-day Saint men wanted to persuade Buffalo Bill to publicly treat them more favorably than he had in his productions of May Cody and Prairie Waif. Mormons were desperate for national respectability, and Buffalo Bill, with his immense popularity, could help them attain it.
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In late November, Wells, Cody, and the rest of the party reached southern Utah and stopped at the border town of Kanab.44 While there, they met Anthony W. Ivins of St. George and Edwin Woolley of Kanab, two Mormon ecclesiastical authorities from southern Utah. Buffalo Bill and his fellow travelers received lavish hospitality from the residents of Kanab, which they greatly appreciated.45 Proceeding on to Richfield, Utah, on December 5, the party took the rails the next day and reached Salt Lake City, finding lodging at the downtown Templeton Hotel.46 The Cody company “made their entry into the city in a six-horse coach, and attracted no little attention on account of the genuine frontier style in which they were driven to the hotel. Buffalo Bill was immediately surrounded by old friends and new acquaintances, while his companions were made willing captives by members of the Union Club, who extended to them the freedom of its rooms.” A Salt Lake Tribune reporter took the opportunity to hold a thirty-minute conversation with them. The Tribune published a synopsis of the meeting and gave Cody a hearty introduction by noting that his “exploits on the plains and recent exhibitions in Europe have made him familiar to almost every member of the English-speaking race.”47
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in Utah’s capital city. Having spent nearly six weeks together, Wells saw Cody and the other men board a train and bade them farewell as they departed the city on December 8.50
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home of William F. Cody.43 The expedition reached Flagstaff, Arizona, a few days later and began its journey north to the Grand Canyon and beyond.
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Cody was anxious to create an environmental conservation zone in the West. He wanted to speak with Wells on the matter but worried that they would not be able to secure “a sure title” to a large enough tract of land to proceed.55 Although this endeavor failed to materialize, that he sought the Great Basin further indicates a shift in the ways that he conceived of Utah, its people, and its natural resources.
dens, their young men and maidens are moral and respect their elders, while they have an energy and a push about them that surprised us all. Their homes are comfortable, well furnished and well stored with home products, so that they live well, while their religion, outside of polygamy, will stand the closest criticism.59
Even as Buffalo Bill privately pursued business ventures in Utah, he also made public remarks about Mormons following his 1892 expedition into Utah. “The Mormons,” Cody told the Washington Post, “are law-abiding, energetic, and hard-working people, and, as far as he could judge, good American citizens.”56 Such a statement reversed the barbarous and anti-American image of Mormons presented in his earlier stage performances. The Post further informed its readers that Cody expressed satisfaction and even pleasure at a January 4, 1893, proclamation by President Benjamin Harrison. The president had granted amnesty and pardons to Mormons who had forsaken their unlawful cohabitations and plural marriages in order to “faithfully obey the laws of the United States.”57 In fact, Cody and his colleague Prentiss Ingraham further lauded Latter-day Saints when they informed the Post that “Mormons in Utah were living up to the letter of the law against polygamy.”58 Such a statement would have pleased Latter-day Saint leaders, who remained on the defensive against the entrenched image of Mormon polygamy. The public-facing remarks of the most popular American had shifted by 1893; his statements signaled to others that Mormons could now be accepted as respectable American citizens.
He proceeded to explain that “plural marriages are abolished among them now under the law,” and that there was “a resigned acceptance of the situation among all with whom we talked.” Such acceptance, even if resigned, was enough to convince Cody that Mormons had been reformed and that the rest of their religion and culture were acceptable. Buffalo Bill painted a picture of a refined, settled, family-oriented people, which was a significant change from the stage plays replete with lecherous old men and lawless Danites that he had presented nearly fifteen years earlier.
Around this time, the Logan-based Utah Journal published a letter written by Buffalo Bill that provides even more insight into his views of Utah and its people. Amid words about the territory’s grandiose scenery, Cody wrote a glowing statement of his experience with Utah Mormons. In Kanab, Cody stated, he was most hospitably received, and let me here say that the Mormons are by no means a backward people, but in touch with the age in which they live. They have schools, their villages are generally devoid of saloons and gambling
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Cody also wrote about the enterprising nature of Utah’s Mormons and their desire for statehood, which was then still three years away. “The Mormons seemed too wide awake,” he explained, “not to have their country improved and to bring wealth and immigration into it, independent of creed, and they did all in their power for our comfort, and to show us what the country was capable of. Out of a desert they have made a garden spot.”60 Taken together, these messages foreshadowed the ways in which Americans began to talk about Utah. No longer caricatured as a land of backward polygamists, Utah was a place of good, industrious American citizens who had reclaimed a land devoid of natural resources.61 In the 1890s, the Latter-day Saints faced a major challenge in convincing people that they had changed. It appears, however, that they had convinced Buffalo Bill, whose celebrity status could only help to improve the national perception of them. Mormons had long advertised their own hard work and pioneering character to justify their dispossession of Native peoples and their efforts to make Great Basin lands flourish. In the 1890s, white Americans especially glorified the white pioneers who had supposedly conquered the western frontier.62 Buffalo Bill’s articulation of the Mormon settler experience allowed
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The 1890s found William Cody determined to build up the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. By then, the former star and producer of May Cody had become so positive about Utah and Mormons that he viewed them as a model for Big Horn Basin settlement. In an 1898 letter, Cody wrote, The possibilities of the new region I have no fears are as grand as any which have followed other pioneers in the older Western States. We have only to look at what the Mormons have done in the great Salt Lake Valley, which at the time of its settlement was the most desolate of deserts; they have made it blossom as the rose, and today there is no more prosperous and wealthy state on the continent, taking into consideration all the circumstances, than Utah. We have in the Big Horn Basin, resources that are not only infinitely greater and more varied than in Utah, and I have no doubt that one season’s effective work by our well to do settlers will show as great results as have been accomplished there.66
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His vision also echoed those of other observers who associated Mormons with productive irrigation works. For example, in his writings about the Chicago world’s fair, E. A. McDaniel described the displays seen at the Utah Agricultural Pavilion. The pavilion’s innovative irrigation diagrams and maps, which detailed “how the Mormon pioneers had made the Territory’s desert ‘blossom as the rose,’” captivated hundreds of thousands of curious visitors, according to McDaniel’s account.67 Similarly, in The Conquest of Arid America, William Smythe wrote at length about the agricultural, industrial, and economic success of Utah. Such prosperity was built on the foundation of irrigation. Smythe lauded Salt Lake City’s irrigation works, which furnished a water supply for the sixty-thousand inhabitant metropolis. Moreover, he praised the Mormons as pioneer irrigators who made civilization flourish in Utah and whose example would help the rest of the West develop and prosper.68 By adapting irrigation techniques, Latter-day Saints thrived amid difficult climatic conditions in the Great Basin. Buffalo Bill and other Americans respected Utah’s irrigation systems, hailing them as the blueprint for success in the arid West.
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other Americans to more readily recognize and embrace this peculiar group. His praiseworthy statements, in effect, celebrated the Mormon effort and incorporated it within the larger national story of white westward progress at a time when Americans began to revere the “winning of the West.”63 In other words, Cody used his profound celebrity to help integrate a once-maligned people into the national narrative of westward expansion. Furthermore, by highlighting their traits of industriousness and their ability to tame dry lands and by downplaying their unusual beliefs, Cody dropped the negative perceptions of the Mormons and focused instead on what he viewed as positive developments in the West.64 This was the type of press that Latter-day Saint leaders had been fighting for, a harbinger of the favorable publicity that would continue with the 1893 Chicago world’s fair and Utah statehood in 1896.65 At a time when industrialization and urbanization prompted more and more eastern Americans to look at the opportunities of the West, Mormon history and society now demonstrated to those seekers the viability of thriving in the arid region.
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William F. Cody owned hundreds of thousands of acres of land and water rights in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Seeking to build a great metropolis there, since the mid-1890s, he had struggled mightily to get settlers to move there and to construct the necessary infrastructure, most notably irrigation canals.69 Hoping to populate the basin and find help developing canals in the area, he recruited Latter-day Saints.70 Buffalo Bill publicly praised the religious group as “the greatest irrigators on earth.” After news broke that he was recruiting Mormons to northwest Wyoming, Cody gave an interview with a midwestern newspaper in January 1900 in which he exclaimed, “Look what they did with the Salt Lake country! Well, I expect them to do the same thing in the way of irrigation in the Big Horn basin.”71 In early February 1900, the Latter-day Saint apostle Abraham O. Woodruff, son of Wilford Woodruff, and a party of a dozen others set
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out from Utah and met Buffalo Bill at Eagle’s Nest, Wyoming, about fifteen miles east from the young town of Cody, Wyoming. During this meeting, according to Charles Welch’s recollection, Colonel Cody said, “I have secured a permit to irrigate nearly all of the lands on the north side of the Shoshone River, from Eaglesnest to the Big Horn River, but if the Mormons want to build a canal and irrigate the land down lower on the river I will relinquish both land and water to them, for if they will do this I know they are the kind of people who will do what they agree to do.”72 What an offer! Free land and water rights to a substantial tract demonstrated both Buffalo Bill’s desperation and generosity. Nate Salsbury, one of Cody’s business partners, insisted that the Mormons pay $20,000 for the rights, but the showman did not make them pay. He saw more value in his liberal offering. It would bring in hundreds of settlers willing to fund and construct their own canals, which would in turn create essential infrastructure to encourage greater settlement and business opportunities in the Big Horn Basin. Approximately two weeks later, Cody relinquished his company’s right to 21,000 acres of land and water rights on the Shoshone River to Abraham Woodruff, at no charge. With water rights secured, Woodruff organized the Big Horn Basin Colonization Company, and by May 1900, a group of Latter-day Saints began work on an irrigation canal in the basin.73 Wyoming state officials likewise visited Utah, hoping to boost Mormon colonization into the northwestern part of their state. According to a Deseret News story, they believed “Utah people to be desirable citizens whom they are glad to see added to their population.”74 These government officers shared Cody’s view of Utah Mormons as hard-working Americans who could turn the basin into a “veritable garden spot.”75 Now that Mormons were perceived as acceptable citizens, Buffalo Bill and Wyoming state officials acted opportunistically in recruiting Utahns to the Big Horn Basin to buoy its fledgling settlements and further encourage infrastructural developments in the area.76 Even as he courted Mormon settlement in northwest Wyoming, Cody embarked on still more national tours with his Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. The
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1902 season brought the internationally famous entertainer back to Utah. On August 3, 1902, the Salt Lake Tribune alerted valley residents to the Wild West’s pending visit on August 13 and 14. The advertisement noted that Buffalo Bill’s spectacle was “now in the Zenith of its Overwhelming and Triumphant Success” and reminded readers of the show’s apparent authenticity, stating that it was “an exhibition that teaches but does not imitate.” The Tribune alerted potential attendees that the two performances each day would take place “Rain or Shine” and directed them to purchase tickets at the Smith Drug store on Main and Second South.77 The auspicious advertisement proved prescient as tens of thousands of Utahns flocked to the grounds on Eighth South and Fourth West to witness the great exhibition of “devil-may-care cowboys, the dashing cavalrymen, the gaudily painted Indians and the various other attractions that go to depict the strenuous life of the world.”78 Alongside the Wild West, John M. Burke also returned to Utah for the first time since he had accompanied the exploration party there in 1892. Burke, the show’s press agent, expressed his astonishment at the “wonderful improvements which have been made around the city since that time, and said that from what he had seen so far this was one of the liveliest burgs he had struck since leaving Chicago.”79 Salt Lake City was certainly abuzz for Cody’s display. Men, women, and children occupied every seat at the enclosed exhibition, and while many monopolized the standing areas, hundreds were denied admittance.80 The audience, among whom were “hundreds of men whose every-day life either of the past or present was being depicted in some of the cowboy and military scenes,” found the Wild West remarkable and appreciated its authentic feel. The front page of the August 14, 1902, Deseret Evening News declared, “Buffalo Bill is distinctly and unmistakably the man of the hour in Salt Lake” following his performances the previous day.81 Buffalo Bill had a busy time in Salt Lake City. Following the afternoon presentation on August 13, Cody met Governor Heber M. Wells, the younger brother of Junius F. Wells, for dinner. He also visited several other friends prior to the evening show, which, like the matinee, dazzled
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127 Two icons of the American West—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Salt Lake Temple—seen together, circa August 14, 1902. Courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, ID no. 70.0304.
some 15,000 spectators.82 The next morning, Cody and his daughter called on the Latter-day Saint First Presidency—Joseph F. Smith, Anthon H. Lund, and John Henry Smith—at the Beehive House for an affable half-hour-long meeting.83 The Deseret Evening News reported on this meeting, describing it as an effort to cement the friendship that had developed between Cody and the Latter-day Saints. Buffalo Bill emerged with “words of praise and commendation for the ‘Mormon’ people.”84 Latter-day Saint leaders— conscious of their still-tenuous national reputation and with ongoing business and colonization interests in northwest Wyoming—sought to keep friendly relations with the showman. For his part, Buffalo Bill continued to offer positive public statements about Latter-day Saints despite some tension then brewing between him and the settlers in the Big Horn Basin, who were trying to acquire more prime land along the Shoshone River.85
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Cody left his rendezvous with Latter-day Saint leaders and hurried to the Mormon tabernacle to attend a special organ recital with his company of some 300 individuals, a concert held specifically in their honor. “This meeting,” according to the Deseret Evening News, “was probably the most unique gathering that ever assembled in the great building.” The Wild West performers sat in the tabernacle dressed in their arena garb awaiting the concert, while residents and spectators poured into the galleries. Within twenty minutes, the tabernacle had an estimated 10,000 people in its bowels, another capacity crowd. Cody relished the event and gave high compliments to the singers and organist. In a statement to a Deseret Evening News reporter, he exclaimed, “Wonderful. The most marvelous building, all things considered, I was ever in. And certainly the most marvelous organ I have ever seen or heard—both the creations of a wonderful, yes, a very wonderful
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Looking east from the Union Depot along Twenty-Fifth Street in Ogden, Utah. Advertisements are visible for Ringling Brothers Circus and Buffalo Bill’s Rough Riders on August 7 and August 12, 1911. Utah State Historical Society, Photo no. 21685.
people.” The two Wild West shows of the 14th again filled the arena to the brim; in all, it is estimated that more than 60,000 people witnessed Cody’s exhibition in its two-day run in Salt Lake City. The celebrated scout commented on the turnout: “It simply proves what has so often been said of Salt Lake. It is the greatest amusement center of its size in the country.”86 At the height of his international popularity, Buffalo Bill did big business in Utah’s capital city. Following his departure, Cody took his Wild West overseas in 1903; he did not return to Utah to perform for another five years. By the time of Buffalo Bill’s penultimate visit to Utah in 1914, a reconfiguration of memory had taken place. “In days of old,” an Ogden Standard article proclaimed, “when they were not so well and favorably known and the practice of polygamy created almost universal prejudice against them, the great scout was one of the best friends of the Mormons, and was always ready to praise them for their industry, thrift, sobriety, honesty and other desirable characteristics, as he had observed them during their operations in the course of making the desert blossom as the rose, and establishing the nucleus of our now great and prosperous intermountain empire.”87 Cody’s anti-Mormon
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performances of the 1870s and 1880s apparently had been forgotten. Instead of a fascinating trajectory that began with pernicious perceptions of Mormons and concluded with mutual embrace and influence, this Utah newspaper column collapsed the narrative to highlight a constantly positive connection between the place, its people, and the celebrity. The history of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s documented visits to Utah offers insights into the evolution of Utah and Mormons in American popular culture in an era that saw Mormons included in narratives of white western expansion and becoming more acceptable to the national body politic. Latter-day Saints had long sought national acceptance and respectability. American perceptions of the dominant religion in Utah were negative and even hostile for most of the nineteenth century. Cody traded on those unfavorable perceptions and grew his business by doing so. After Latter-day Saint leaders called for the end to the practice of plural marriage in 1890 and after Buffalo Bill’s own 1892 journey from the Grand Canyon to Salt Lake City, a transformation occurred in Cody’s perception of and public pronouncements about Mormons. Further, the 1890s were a time that saw more Americans looking westward and
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Web Extras Visit history.utah.gov to read an interview with Brent Rogers about this project. We also provide links to a few of the remarkable online resources about Buffalo Bill.
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A resident fellowship from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and a Charles Redd Fellowship in Western American History from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies provided funds crucial for the research found in this article. Additionally, the staff of the Papers of William F. Cody opened their doors and their database to give me access to a wealth of pertinent source materials. I would like to extend my gratitude to these institutions and the individuals associated with them, as well as to the peer reviewers and editors of Utah Historical Quarterly, for assisting me in the development of this article.
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“The Buffalo Bill Party,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, December 7, 1892; Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 5, 7, 123; Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), xi; William F. Cody, The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, ed. Frank Christianson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), xv–xvi; Jonathan D. Martin, “‘The Grandest and Most Cosmopolitan Object Teacher’: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Politics of American Identity,” Radical History Review, no. 66 (Fall 1996): 92. For book-length biographies, see Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America; Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; Don Russell,
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Cody’s influence and affirmation provided a powerful voice, indicative of a shift in popular opinion during a national reimagining of Mormonism. At the same time, Utah and its Mormon population inspired Buffalo Bill’s own view on town-building in a new West that required persistence, industriousness, and irrigation. Still, plenty of anti-Mormon sentiments remained. Established narratives die hard.88 Although Mormons could never totally escape the old perceptions of them, they became appreciated for their desirable traits that proved the possibilities for settlement and success in the arid West. In the end, the shared influence emerging out of the relationship between Buffalo Bill and the Mormons tells us much about the image of Utah and rapidly evolving ideas about the West at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960); and Robert E. Bonner, William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). According to the Cody Studies “authoritative list of scholarly publications about William F. Cody,” there are no publications directly about Cody’s relationship with Latter-day Saints or Utah. See “Historiography,” Cody Studies, accessed February 13, 2018, codystudies. org/historiography-2. Charles S. Peterson and Brian Q. Cannon, The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and University of Utah Press, 2015), 2, 19. Cody, The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, 69. William Cody committed himself to this story when he met Latter-day Saints in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin in February 1900. To his Mormon visitors, Cody reportedly recounted his career with General Albert Sydney Johnston, who led the army to Utah in 1857. “Exploring the Big Horn Basin,” Deseret Evening News, February 19, 1900. For the autobiographical account of Cody in the Utah War, see Cody, The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, 88–89; see also William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 355–58. This is one rare point in which scholars discuss the connections of Buffalo Bill, Utah, and Mormons. See, for example, John S. Gray, “Fact versus Fiction in the Kansas Boyhood of Buffalo Bill,” Kansas History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 12–14; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 17–21. “Buffalo Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 1, 1879. “Sixth annual tour of the Buffalo Bill Combination in the New and Refined Sensational Drama, May Cody; or, Lost and Won!” box 12, fd. 2, p. 3, William F. Cody Collection, MS 6, Harold McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming. “‘Lost and Won’ At the Opera House,” National Republican (Washington, D.C.), September 27, 1877. Michael Austin and Ardis E. Parshall, eds. Dime Novel Mormons (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2017), ix. “Danites,” Joseph Smith Papers, accessed January 31, 2018, josephsmithpapers.org/topic/danites. For more on John D. Lee and his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, see Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001). “Sixth annual tour of the Buffalo Bill Combination,” 3. Historians and writers continue to grapple with such a representation, while others continue to debate Brigham Young’s role in and responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. See, for example, Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, and Walker, Turley, and Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows. “Sixth annual tour of the Buffalo Bill Combination,” 3. Ann Eliza Young, Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage, Being a Complete Expose of Mormonism and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy (Hartford: Dustin, Gilman, 1876), 32. “May Cody,” Business—Combination—Scrapbooks— 1879–1880, OV box 40, p. 19, Cody Collection.
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lauding the white pioneers, Mormons among them, who had made arid lands productive.
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18 Cody, The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, 425; Cheyenne (WY) Daily Sun, May 7, 1878. 19 Plural Marriage Prosecution Act of 1874, Pub. L. No. 43469, 18 Stat. 253 (1874). The Poland Act restricted Utah probate courts to matters of estates and guardianship, while all civil, chancery, and criminal cases now fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of federal courts. The Poland Act also reformed jury selection in Utah courts. 20 Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), 166; see also Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 119–44. 21 Rutherford B. Hayes, “Third Annual Message,” December 1, 1879, available online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed January 29, 2019, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/204252. 22 Advertisement, Salt Lake Tribune, May 1, 3, 1879; Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 118–19. 23 “‘Lost and Won’ At the Opera House,” National Republican (Washington, D.C.), September 27, 1877. 24 “Buffalo Bill,” Deseret Evening News, May 3, 1879. 25 Chester A. Arthur, “First Annual Message,” December 6, 1881, and Grover Cleveland, “First Annual Message,” December 8, 1885, both available online at Peters and Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed January 29, 2019, presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/ written-messages/state-the-union-messages; Utah Commission, “The Edmunds Act: Reports of the Commission, Rules, Regulations and Decisions” (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Company, 1883), 3–5; Amendment to 5350 U.S.C., in Compiled Laws of Utah, I (Salt Lake City: Herbert Pembroke Printer, 1888), 110–13. 26 “Route Schedules, Season ’86,” box 10, fd. 2, Cody Collection; Advertisement, Ogden Herald, February 23, 1886; “Buffalo Bill,” Ogden Herald, February 24, 1886; “The Prairie Waif,” Ogden Herald, February 26, 1886. 27 “Amusements,” Milwaukee Chronicle, undated, in “May Cody,” Business—Combination—Scrapbooks— 1879–1880, OV box 40, p. 19, Cody Collection. 28 “Buffalo Bill and His Play,” Salt Lake Herald, February 25, 1886. 29 “The Prairie Waif,” Ogden Herald, February 26, 1886. 30 “The Prairie Waif,” Ogden Herald, February 27, 1886. 31 “Personal,” Salt Lake Herald, February 27, 1886. 32 “Buffalo Bill,” Salt Lake Herald, February 27, 1886; “Dramatic and Lyric,” Salt Lake Herald, February 28, 1886. 33 “Salvini,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 1886; “Salvini at the Theater,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 27, 1886. 34 “Dramatic and Lyric,” Salt Lake Herald, February 28, 1886. 35 Anti-Plural Marriage Act of 1887, Pub. L. No. 49-397, 24 Stat. 635 (1887). 36 The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States, 136 U.S. 1 (1890); “Official Declaration,” Deseret Evening News, September 25, 1890. 37 “Victoria and Buffalo Bill,” Deseret News, May 25, 1887; see Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 282–340; Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 65–92. 38 John M. Burke, “Buffalo Bill” from Prairie to Palace (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1893), available at The William F. Cody Archive, accessed January 27, 2018, codyarchive.org/ texts/wfc.bks00010.html.
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39 Burke, “Buffalo Bill” from Prairie to Palace. In 1881, Prentiss Ingraham, under the pen name Frank Powell, wrote an anti-Mormon dime novel, The Doomed Dozen; or, Dolores, the Danite’s Daughter, which featured Buffalo Bill Cody. According to Michael Austin and Ardis Parshall, “This novel brings all of the standard Mormon tropes together in a single place: secretive Danites wearing hoods, a wagon train massacre, women kidnapped to become polygamous wives, murder, betrayal, and, of course, Buffalo Bill, who manages to set everything aright in the end.” Ingraham produced many dime novels in the late nineteenth century; he was also a prominent promoter of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Austin and Parshall, eds., Dime Mormon Novels, xiv. 40 Junius F. Wells, Journal, October 23–25, 1892, box 1, fd. 15, Junius F. Wells Papers, MS 1351, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL). 41 Wells, Journal, October 25, 1892. 42 Wells, Journal, October 30, 1892. 43 Wells, Journal, November 4, 1892. 44 Wells, Journal, November 29, 1892. 45 “The Buffalo Bill Party,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, December 7, 1892. 46 Wells, Journal, November 29, December 5–6, 1892; “Hero of the Plains,” Salt Lake Herald, December 7, 1892. 47 “The Buffalo Bill Party,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, December 7, 1892. 48 Wells, Journal, December 7, 1892. George Q. Cannon noted the visit in his journal, commenting specifically on Cody’s appearance: “Cody is a very fine looking man, and wears his hair full length.” George Q. Cannon, Journal, December 7, 1892, The Journal of George Q. Cannon, Church Historian’s Press, accessed February 6, 2019, churchhistorianspress.org/george-q-cannon?lang=eng. Church president Wilford Woodruff also recorded in his journal that Buffalo Bill and company “were very much pleased with their visit to Salt Lake City.” Wilford Woodruff, Journal, December 7, 1892, box 5, fd. 1, Wilford Woodruff Journals and Papers, 1828–1898, MS 1352, CHL. 49 “The Wild West of Today,” Washington Post, January 7, 1893. 50 Wells, Journal, December 8, 1892. 51 Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 5, 76–79; Reid L. Nielson, Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17, 40–41; Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890– 1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 52 William F. Cody to Junius F. Wells, December 22, 24, 1892, box 2, fd. 4, Wells Papers, CHL. 53 “Buffalo Bill on Utah,” Utah Journal (Logan, UT), February 8, 1893. 54 “The Wild West of Today,” Washington Post, January 7, 1893. 55 William F. Cody to Junius F. Wells, December 24, 1892. 56 “The Wild West of Today,” Washington Post, January 7, 1893. 57 Benjamin Harrison, “Proclamation 346—Granting Amnesty and Pardon for the Offense of Engaging in Polygamous or Plural Marriage to Members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints,” January 4, 1893, available online at
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Brigham Young University; Welch, History of the Big Horn Basin, 58; Bonner, William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire, 189. “Big Horn Basin Colonization,” Deseret Evening News, February 5, 1900. “Paragraphs of Interest to Big Horn People,” Cody (WY) Enterprise, February 13, 1902; “Mormon Settlements,” Cody (WY) Enterprise, February 27, 1902. William Cody also used Mormon settlement as an opportunity to encourage the Burlington Railroad to construct a spur line into the Big Horn Basin and the town of Cody, Wyoming. William F. Cody to Charles F. Manderson, March 5, 1900, CB&Q 33 1890 6.8, CB&Q; William F. Cody to Charles Perkins, April 2, 1900, CB&Q 33 1890 6.8, Big Horn Basin Files, CB&Q; Cody Town Council Minutes, Excerpts, February 13, 1904, Cody-Early Settlers fd., Park County Archives, Cody, Wyoming; George Austin to Thomas R. Cutler, Report, February 23, 1904, box 5, fd. 1, Abraham O. Woodruff Collection; Welch, History of the Big Horn Basin, 53–54, 58–79. Advertisement, Salt Lake Tribune, August 3, 1902. “Thousands Saw Wild West,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 14, 1902. “Maj. Burke Arrives,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 5, 1902. “Thousands Saw Wild West,” Salt Lake Tribune. “‘Buffalo Bill,’” Deseret Evening News, August 14, 1902. “‘Buffalo Bill,’” Deseret Evening News, August 14, 1902. Anthon Lund, Diary, August 14, 1902, in Danish Apostle: The Diaries of Anthon H. Lund, 1890–1921, ed. John P. Hatch (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006), 200. The daughter in attendance with Cody was probably his youngest child, Irma. “‘Buffalo Bill,’” Deseret Evening News, August 14, 1902. Bonner, William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire, 188–205; William F. Cody to Abraham O. Woodruff, March 20, 1900, box 14, fd. 1, Cody Collection. “‘Buffalo Bill,’” Deseret Evening News, August 14, 1902. “A Friend in Days of Old,” Ogden Standard, June 10, 1914. From concerns over post-manifesto polygamy to the Reed Smoot hearings to dime novels and other antiMormon popular culture, negative depictions of Mormons continued to influence public perception. See Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 64–66; Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Kenneth L. Cannon II, “Mormons on Broadway, 1914 Style,” Utah Historical Quarterly 84, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 193–214. For dime novels, see, for example, The Buffalo Bill Stories, nos. 215, 364, and 366, Series 7: Dime Novels, Cody Collection.
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Peters and Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed January 30, 2019, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/ 205484. “The Wild West of Today,” Washington Post, January 7, 1893. “Buffalo Bill on Utah,” Utah Journal (Logan, UT), February 8, 1893. “Buffalo Bill on Utah.” Peterson and Cannon, Awkward State of Utah, 21. Frank Van Nuys, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 3–9. See Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1889–1896). As Frederick Jackson Turner noted, Roosevelt’s work “portrayed the advance of the pioneer into the wastes of the continent.” Frederick J. Turner, review of The Winning of the West, by Theodore Roosevelt, American Historical Review 2, no.1 (October 1896): 171. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 123. Nielson, Exhibiting Mormonism, 40–41; Matthew J. Grow, “Contesting the LDS Image: The North American Review and the Mormons, 1881–1907,” Journal of Mormon History 32, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 111–36; Joseph F. Merrill, “Tabernacle Choir at Chicago Fair,” Millennial Star 96, no. 36 (September 6, 1934): 569. William F. Cody to C. B. Jones, April 9, 1898, University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center, Buffalo Bill Letters to George T. Beck, available online at The William F. Cody Archive, accessed January 31, 2018, codyarchive.org/texts/wfc.css00520.html. E. A. McDaniel, Utah at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Lithographing, 1894), 37–38. William Ellsworth Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1900), 55–56. Charles Morrill to Charles W. Perkins, November 4, 1899, box 161, fd. 1186, Subseries 33, CB&Q 33 1890 6, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company Records, 1820–1999, CB&Q.33, (hereafter CB&Q), Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; Bonner, William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire, 88. “City and Neighborhood,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 15, 1900; “Exploring the Big Horn Basin,” Deseret Evening News, February 19, 1900. “‘Buffalo Bill’ to Raise Horses,” Kansas City Star, January 21, 1900. Charles A. Welch, History of the Big Horn Basin: With Stories of Early Days, Sketches of Pioneers and Writings of the Author (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1940), 58. Abraham O. Woodruff, Journal, March 3, 1900, box 1, fd. 1, Abraham O. Woodruff Collection, MS 777, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library,
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Speaking before the Ogden, Utah, city council in November 1889, Dr. H. J. Powers, the official city physician, presented a dramatic description of how he and another doctor had recently performed “a very delicate surgical operation upon a ward of the City which was of such importance that death would have soon resulted if he had not been treated promptly. This operation was made . . . under the most unfavorable of circumstances as there was no fire in his room and no one to leave with him.”1 The need for adequate, publicly available medical facilities—rather than the hotels and rooming houses often used—would only become greater, he said, for “accidents, sickness, and pauperism are increasing in proportion to our rapid population growth.” Powers’s hope was to persuade the council to create a new entity, Ogden City Hospital, and his hope was soon to be realized. Ogden City Hospital was Ogden’s first acute care hospital. Also known as Ogden General and Ogden Medical and Surgical Hospital, it was the second largest hospital in Utah Territory when built in 1892 and the only one sponsored by a local governmental entity. The hospital grew out of the ambition of the city’s business and political leaders to assert Ogden’s importance within the area’s growing railroad economy and a desire on the part of the city’s physicians for a facility in which to care for patients. The hospital is particularly significant because of Ogden City’s role in its founding and in its initial years of operation. It was built with public funds, bonded for by the city, and, during its first five years, operated as a part of the city’s budget This hospital is mostly forgotten today. Those who are aware of it mistakenly describe it as having closed almost immediately after opening, a victim of city retrenchments during the Panic of 1893.2 One writer dismisses it as not a real hospital, a designation he reserved for the coming of the Dee Memorial Hospital in 1911.3 In fact, Ogden City Hospital arose at a time of particular civic ambition, and, after some initial setbacks that did not include closing, it served the community as a valued resource until its replacement in 1911.
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The immediate stimulus came about in the summer of 1882, when the mayor argued that a growing number of railway workers—lowwage, single men without family support—had increased the need for such care. However, the examples presented at council meetings concerned local people. One was a child who had fallen under a railroad car in the coal yards of the city; the child’s leg was crushed, requiring amputation. The railroad physician had attended to the child but would not continue care unless he was paid. The council was asked to accept the child as “an object of public charity,” pay the doctor, and pay for what further attendance the child required. Another case concerned a local man with severe frost bite of his feet and hands. “He was a poor man and had no relations to care for him.” He too needed amputations. The mayor asked the council to approve his placement at the Globe Hotel, where
Neither the mayor nor the council challenged that the city was obliged to intervene in these “object of public charity” situations. What concerned them were the costs; they worried about being scammed by patients, their families, and other communities that might take advantage of Ogden’s largesse. They did not debate the city’s responsibility, but they wanted to limit its cost.7
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surgery could be performed, and to provide for the cost of the surgery, the hotel, and an attendant to continue care. Another person had a smashed foot, requiring another amputation.6 Other cases involved persons in the early stages of potentially serious contagious diseases: smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever. All involved special arrangements for lodging and board—in hotels and rooming houses or in tents on the outskirts of town—and basic, custodial nursing care.
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Two facilities served as precursors to this hospital. Prior to its creation, the city had experimented with what was alternately called a hospital and a pest house. Ogden built it in 1882 on land well south of the city limits on a bluff above a stream, Burch Creek.4 Mayor Lester Herrick described the primary motivation as “the necessity of having a hospital of suitable capacity and with the needed conveniences for the care and treatment of indigent persons, who by misfortune become objects of public charity.”5
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Ogden City Hospital was an acute care facility built and operated by the city of Ogden, Utah, that opened in 1892. The hospital is seen here soon after its completion. Ogden Union Station Museums.
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The decision to build the pest house came soon after the mayor moved a smallpox patient to an impromptu quarantine area south of the city, in the summer of 1882.8 The city had begun a project for a new city hall and a jail, which did not at the time include a hospital. They intended to finance the new construction through the sale of city-owned land in the heart of the business district.9 This plan stalled and with it progress on the city hall, but funding was available
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to start the jail, and the hospital, which had been under study, was authorized at the same time. The same contractor built both buildings. One gets a sense of the relative scope and importance of the two from the time and dollars expended on each: the jail took eight months and cost around $11,000; the hospital took one month and cost $2,000.10
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The contractor completed the building near the end of 1882, and the first patients were admitted in early 1883.11 The six-room, rectangular structure had one room at each end and four rooms off of a central hallway, a kitchen, a storeroom, and four rooms for residents. There was no central heat, but expense records show purchases of coal, so there were coal stoves. The pest house had no plumbing and no connection to city water. Bathroom functions would have been served by an outhouse, water pumped and carried from a well or brought to the building from the creek. The roof blew off in severe windstorms.12 Most patients fell under the charge of the city, although a few turned out to be the responsibility of the county. The doctor who attended to pest house patients—to the extent that a physician attended to them—would have been the city or county physician, officials whose duties included care for the indigent and who had the power to order confinement for reasons of public safety. Very rarely, private or railroad physicians sent patients to the pest house, people who could not be properly quarantined at home, all poor people. The conditions mentioned included pneumonia, measles, spinal concussion, delirium tremens, smallpox, recovery from amputations, and, in at least one case, pregnancy.13 Smallpox patients, in some instances, did not stay in the building but rather in tents placed in “a hollow nearby.”14 Persons who died from smallpox were buried in a nearby cemetery, as were individuals who died at home of smallpox.15 While no record exists of opposition in 1882 to the pest house, an attempt to build a replacement in the 1910s generated resistance from people living in the area.16 The facility very likely frightened the public. It became the subject of ghost stories, especially with an 1891 run of newspaper articles that told of hauntings at the
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hospital, at which time “the Pest House Ghost” became a motif in local advertising.17 Lorenzo Waldram, together with his wife, acted as steward and operated the facility under a lease. This involved no rental payment; the city provided the facility for free and retained the obligation to fund repairs and improvements; the Waldrams agreed to care for consigned patients for a fixed daily rate. The arrangement served to insulate the city from the costs that came from caring for indigent patients in doctors’ offices, hotels, and rooming houses, with privately contracted caregivers. The fact of a pest house might also have acted in a subtle way to reduce demand for assistance from marginally poor people, who would have to accept humiliation and risk of confinement as a condition of receiving support.18 The lease arrangement also ensured that the city would not have to pay staff when the facility had few inmates; the stewards accepted that risk. The financial model appears to have failed from the start. The pest house’s census was often too low to generate any revenue for the stewards, who soon sought a salary and reimbursement for the operating expenses that were to have been covered by the daily rate.19 The city made an appeal for public philanthropy to help defer the costs of the new service. It also sought support and financial participation from the railroads.20 These efforts did not succeed. There was talk of approaching Weber County for support, but the county had a similar service at its poor farm.21 Within a short time, the city council members were questioning their judgment in establishing the service. They mistrusted the stewards, worrying that they accepted patients too liberally and were not frugal with board and supplies. They worried that neighboring communities were sending their indigent sick to Ogden.22 In October 1885, Ogden City abruptly closed the pest house, evicted the stewards, and terminated the lease. The city council publicly stated that the need had passed and that the hospital had become too expensive to maintain. A new territorial law then under discussion, which assigned counties responsibility for care of the indigent sick, seems also to have influenced the city’s decision.23
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A facility owned and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) served as the second important precursor to Ogden City Hospital. In 1883 the railroad purchased a building on the corner of Eighth and Spring streets, near the southern edge of Ogden, and converted it to hospital use.27 Prior to that time, the UP had paid for services at facilities maintained or overseen by its locally contracted physicians, sometimes in the physicians’ offices, sometimes in rooming houses and hotels. One such doctor was T. E. Mitchell, whom the newspapers frequently described as the railroad physician, sometimes referring to his offices as the railroad’s hospital.28
The railroad had established a hospital fund based on an employee payroll deduction in 1882, which likely supported the building’s purchase.29 The judgment that the company would be better off providing hospital services to employees itself rather than purchasing them piecemeal from others—the same judgment that led to the creation of Ogden’s pest house—probably motivated the railroad. The building, which had previously served as a dance hall, was fairly large, with two floors and a basement, room for eight patient wards, a kitchen, a dining room, and an office. Surgery would have been performed in the wards. From 1887 to 1888, a contingent of Sisters of the Holy Cross briefly staffed the hospital, the same group that sponsored Salt Lake City’s Holy Cross Hospital, before moving to Price to work with the mining communities there. The facility seems to have seen quite heavy use, with a census as high as twenty-five individuals and patients brought in from Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada.30 In 1890, the railroad added a separate building adjacent to the old dance hall. Reports at the time mention improved systems for heat and water but do not discuss the building’s clinical functions.31
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Ogden retained the building as a municipal asset and eventually rented it for residential use, prior to bringing it back into service for quarantine in the fall of 1900.24 The reopening again occasioned conflict between Ogden City and Weber County over care of the poor, especially transients without established city or county residence. In 1902, the city took the county to court over Weber’s refusal to pay for such a patient. A local judge ruled in favor of the county. The city appealed to the new State Supreme Court and won.25 The resolution seems to have led to more productive discussions, and in 1906 an agreement was concluded in which the county took over operation of the pest house on a no-rent lease with the city. It remained in operation as a county service until 1914.26
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The chatter about a ghost at Ogden City’s pest house in the late spring of 1891 prompted a local shop to use the brouhaha in its advertising. The pest house came to be when the city decided to run its own facility instead of making piecemeal payments when assisting sick and indigent persons. Ogden Daily Standard, June 3, 1891, page 6.
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The UP hospital served only railroad employees hospitalized for employment-related conditions and was staffed only by railroad-contracted physicians. Although the facility made occasional exceptions for
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The Union Pacific Railroad hospital. As this image shows, the building was configured with the raised porch that, in other hospitals of the time, was used for receiving patients delivered by a horse-drawn wagon. If that was the use of the hospital’s porch, then there were likely trauma facilities just beyond the entryway. Ogden Union Station Museums.
nonemployee patients under the care of a contracted physician, it completely barred other physicians in the community. In this era, doctors still delivered most private medical care in the home or in their offices, even surgery, but the presence of a modern operating room—off limits at a time of a growing array of surgical procedures—would have highlighted for local physicians their lack thereof and been a factor in the developing perception that Ogden needed a public hospital.32 The hospital closed in 1896, a victim of the UP’s bankruptcy following the Panic of 1893. It remained in operation until mid-1896 while the courts sorted out the liquidation of the railroad’s assets. Union Pacific subsequently provided hospital services for its employees under contracts with Ogden City Hospital and its successors, a critical factor in the new hospital’s success.33 By 1890, driven by the city’s centrality as a railroad hub, Ogden’s population had more than doubled from 6,069 (1880) to 14,889, much of the growth caused by in-migration of non-Mormons seeking work and opportunity.34 These demographics increased anti-Mormon sentiments in local politics, and—aided by the candidate
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and voter eligibility provisions of the Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker acts of 1882 and 1887—resulted in the election of a non-Mormon Liberal Party mayor and city council in 1889.35 The new mayor, Fred Kiesel, a founding member of the new and ecumenical chamber of commerce, championed Ogden and advocated for the separation of church and state rather than vociferously attacking Latter-day Saints. His ambitions for Ogden seem to have been widely shared. The projects of the next several years indicate that there was a broad community consensus that Ogden’s time had come—that the city should no longer cede leadership to Salt Lake City, that it should build for itself a place as the leading railroad hub in the Intermountain West. Kiesel himself imagined that Ogden might become the capital after statehood.36 The previous administration had expanded the city’s bonding capacity from $50,000 to $150,000 and initiated design for the previously delayed city hall and a new fire station.37 The city hall building, constructed from 1889 to 1890, expressed well Ogden’s sense of itself at the time. An ornate Second Empire–style structure, it housed Ogden’s municipal offices and, eventually, its public library.38 The next
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Frederick J. Kiesel, a prominent Ogden businessman who became the city’s first non-Mormon mayor in 1889. Utah State Historical Society, photo 12774.
construction item for the new administration, after the completion of the City Hall and fire station, was a hospital. No evidence exists that Kiesel and the city council had included a hospital in their campaigns, and reports of the mayor’s victory comments do not mention one.39 But at a council meeting in October 1889, the mayor asserted the need for a hospital. He linked that need to the question of transient and indigent people, echoing the arguments for the pest house ten years earlier, but more forcefully to what he called Ogden’s “metropolitan” status.40 The role of hospitals in American cities at the end of the nineteenth century was in transition. They still retained an association as end-of-hope institutions, places where people were sent for the safety of their neighbors and where those too ill and too poor went to be out of sight while dying. But hospitals also symbolized modernity, municipal and philanthropic investment, and civic success. There had been real advances in
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The new hospital began in a preemptive way— without publicly reported discussion, approved by the city council after the fact—with the rental of a suite of rooms at Twenty-Fifth and Grant in downtown Ogden in January 1890.44 The city, acting through City Physician Powers, hired a steward and arranged for food service, soon using the same vendor who supplied the jail. They arranged laundry and cleaning services; and acquired domestic and hospital supplies, along with stethoscopes, thermometers, and specialty items for surgery. The city paid all expenses, and the steward was an employee, not a contractor.45 While never precisely declared such, this was a municipal hospital.
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the possibilities of medical care that were now expressed in hospitals: aseptic surgical procedures, stand-alone operating rooms, and an evolved standard of nursing care. They were no longer considered appropriate for quarantine; in Ogden, the new civic hospital screened out patients with contagious diseases, diverting them instead to tents on the lawn, a “detention hospital” at the jail, or the city pest house after it reopened.41 Hospitals had also become important as aggregation facilities and workshops for physicians. Facilitated by transportation changes that made it more efficient for patients to come to central locations for care, hospitals allowed doctors to group their sicker patients for trained oversight with room and board, specialized surgical facilities, and proximate stocks of drugs and supplies.42 H. G. Powers, the city physician, clearly articulated this “physician workshop” perspective in arguments he presented to the city council in November 1889: “In constructing a hospital,” Powers noted, the chief consideration was “the work to be done in them; that is how to get the sick well in the greatest numbers and with reasonable comfort.”43
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The old concerns about moral hazard and abuse of the city’s generosity emerged immediately. The council suspected that other cities were sending their patients to Ogden and that individuals were feigning poverty in order to avoid having to pay for care. In response, the sanitary committee developed a set of rules for the management of the facility. These required that the committee review charity admissions and that payment plans be set up after discharge for those who could return to work. There was
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hospital in the state at the time, built to accommodate fifty beds. Only the new Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake, completed in 1882, was larger.49 The design included the possibility of a second building placed parallel to the first, suggesting that it was planned to accommodate expansion. The hospital’s built and planned sizes speak to the ambitions of the city’s planners, while the haste and decision not to seek specialized architectural expertise show their inexperience and suggest they underestimated the complexity of such a project.
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The opening page of “Rules and Regulations of the Ogden City Hospital,” dating from the early 1890s. This document illustrates the municipal character of the new hospital, as well as its welcome stance to qualified physicians. Courtesy of Utah State Archives and Records Service, Series 5321, document 5245.
an optimistic sense that these measures would work, that through them the city could control the financial risks that having such a hospital created.46 A year-and-a-half later, in the summer of 1891, having looked at and rejected a few existing buildings that might serve as a home for the hospital, the city council authorized the issuance of bonds and initiated a formal search for property for a new facility. They announced a competition for plans, open only to local architects, and they very quickly purchased a site, accepted a design, and awarded a contract for construction—again considering only local firms. By October 1891, the new hospital was under construction.47 George A. d’Hemecourt, an architect who had worked for the city as a building inspector and advisor, was the designer.48 It was a vertically aligned building with two wings, both with a basement, the second largest acute care
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The building was of brick and stone and the cost of construction was expected to be about $40,000. The first floor housed an operating room, a pharmacy, surgeon’s quarters, patient wards, toilet rooms, and dining rooms. Private wards made up the second floor. The basement held a kitchen, another dining room, a storeroom, a fuel room and a furnace room. Sterilization was done in the basement, with instruments carried back and forth to the first floor. The building included a coal furnace and lined flues for the delivery of heat to the upper floors. It was said to be the first heating system of that type to be included in any building in Ogden. The city extended water to that portion of Twenty-Eighth Street in time with the hospital’s construction, so it had piped, pressurized water when it opened in June 1892.50 Ogden elected a new mayor and council at the end of 1891 as the hospital was about to open.51 The new administration returned to discussions about the moral hazard and risks of being taken advantage of by citizens, adjacent communities, and the railroads, which frequently denied payment for employees who were deemed to have contributed to their illness or injury. The council and the sanitary committee worked and reworked these issues, developing a final set of regulations that gained majority approval in May 1892 as the hospital opened.52 With them, the council passed a resolution authorizing the mayor to “make such changes and hire such help” for the hospital “as he in his judgment may see fit,” essentially establishing the hospital as a department within city government.53 These regulations focused on maintaining city control, preventing abuse of the city’s generosity, and paving the way for privately paying
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The new hospital opened with a grand reception and praise from the local press. The newspaper lauded it as a symbol of Ogden’s progress, an echo of the sentiment that had motivated Mayor Kiesel and his colleagues to propose it and one comparable to the laurels other western newspapers heaped on their cities when a major building opened. Here was an institution asserted to be the equal of hospitals throughout the region, another sign of Ogden’s coming into its own. Carriages took the city leaders and other guests for tours and lunch, and “everything was found to be in splendid shape.”55 Despite the hoopla, Ogden City Hospital launched with difficulty. There were design errors. The original plans had omitted electricity and lighting, which the council authorized in June 1892, just before opening.56 No sewer ran to the site, and the cesspool—an underground arrangement for the collection and filtering of waste—failed and had to be replaced.57 A Territorial Circuit Court judge, apparently acting in regards to a regular inspection of custodial institutions, found fault with the sanitation, the flooring, and pipe sizes with respect to fire safety. His report carried the authority to require corrections.58 The hospital was located on the southeastern edge of town, and there was an initial problem with pigs on the site.59
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The long economic expansion that had carried Ogden through the end of the 1880s ended abruptly in May and June 1893 with the nationwide Panic of 1893. The stock market crashed, a large number of banks and businesses failed, and, not least for Ogden, the Union Pacific Railroad went into receivership.61 The city’s revenues declined and with them the city council’s confidence that it could maintain a hospital. At a July 1893 meeting, one month into the downturn and cheered on by local editorial writers, the council called for a broad set of budgetary retrenchments, including the closing of the hospital. It passed those cuts, which then went to Mayor Robert Lundy for final approval. He vetoed them along with the hospital closing, and his veto was sustained at a subsequent meeting.62 Nevertheless, while the hospital had survived and stayed open, the glow was off.
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patients. They held, first of all, that the hospital fell under the supervision of the mayor, the city physician, and the chairman of the sanitary committee. The hospital would admit no one as a free patient without the approval of the city’s supervisors. The city physician, acting as such, would attend only to patients under city sponsorship, and he was to receive no additional compensation for that care. The facility was to be open to graduates of reputable medical colleges, after application to the supervisors. Such physicians would set and collect their own fees, but their patients must pay in advance for their board and care. The rules noted that the object of this latter provision was “to make the Hospital self-supporting, as nearly as possible.” Mirroring the practice of the railroads but without dipping into wages, the city council allowed free admission for city employees who became ill in the performance of their duties, so long as the illness was not due to negligence.54
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Writers who have described Ogden City Hospital as closed between 1893 and 1897 might miss the veto and reversal of the council’s vote.63 The way that the Ogden Standard reported the story obscures those events. The newspaper published several articles and editorials about budget retrenchment and the possible closure of the hospital but provided only limited coverage of the mayor’s 1893 veto and the failure to override it. It is clear, however, that the hospital continued to operate in the ensuing months and to be an expense item for the City and a subject of ongoing news.64 The city council, meanwhile, continued to be split in its opinion, and that split next evolved into a dispute over the nature of the hospital’s financial relationship with the city. Within twelve months, in the summer of 1894, with the Ogden Standard’s editorial page still calling for closure, a majority of councilmen agreed that they
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preferred a lease arrangement like that with the old pest house in which a lessee would operate the hospital in return for accepting city-sponsored patients at a predetermined, negotiated rate—effectively shifting the financial risk of operations to the lessee.65 The proposal divided the city administration, with the next new mayor, Charles M. Brough, and the members of the sanitary committee seeking to retain the municipal service model. Part of the community weighed in with a rare expression of progressive sentiment through a petition from the Ladies Charitable Association that opposed leasing “to the lowest bidder.”66 The petitioners argued that doing so went “against public policy” and asserted that “no community is too poor but what it cannot properly take care of its sick.” More than one hundred individuals, including a number of the city’s physicians, signed the petition.67 Mayor Brough and his allies eventually prevented the city council from awarding a lease to its preferred candidate and gained the council’s concession that, leased or not, the hospital would remain under the supervision of the city, the sanitary committee, and its officers.68 However, the council prevailed on the larger issue: Ogden City awarded a contract to Frank Sherwood, its current hospital steward, whose status then changed to contractor.69 Sherwood pledged a $1,000 bond; the term was to be eighteen months, expiring on February 1, 1896. The lease included the hospital, its furnishings, and the existing easements. He was responsible for heat, light, and the cost for all patients whom the city might consign there.70 The city physician retained the responsibility to care for city patients, and the city government continued to support the hospital by paying expenses such as fire insurance premiums and needed property improvements. In this way, it continued to subsidize the institution. Yet the change to a lease agreement marked the end of the full municipal hospital model for Ogden City. It had existed for not quite five years. The city maintained its governance role, and it continued to provide the building and subsidies without seeking a return on investment, but it was no longer responsible for the cost of operations. Even with the new model, the Standard and some councilmen continued to call for Ogden
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City Hospital’s closure throughout Sherwood’s term.71 An 1895 law anticipating statehood repeated the ambiguously worded provisions of the 1888 territorial law that assigned counties responsibility for the care of the indigent.72 This led to a round of proposals about whether the city or the county should own the hospital and which entity should be first in line to pay for certain patients, which in turn fed into arguments about closure and possible transfer to Weber County.73 But the hospital did not close; it did not become a county entity. Rather, the institution persevered through Sherwood’s eighteen-month lease and then through another year of discussion about what should happen, as the economy improved and the Union Pacific bankruptcy worked its way through the courts. Upon leaving office at the end of 1895, Brough persisted in his opinion that the city had a duty to maintain a hospital, in the interests of both “suffering humanity” and “municipal economy.”74 Little in the extant records tells us about hospital operations during the term of Sherwood’s lease. The cesspool project was completed, but one does not see other improvements. One gets the sense that the years during the economic downturn were ones of minimal growth and not a lot of use; it might not have been much of a hospital, not in the sense of equipment, staffing, and amenities. Nevertheless, when the lease came up for renewal in 1896, a number of individuals and groups came forward to bid, seeing Ogden City Hospital as a viable business opportunity, and this time the bidders came mostly from the ranks of “qualified physicians” rather than from nonphysician generalists like Sherwood.75 The successors emerged in the fall of 1896, a group of five doctors that included two past city and county physicians, a future mayor, and the physician for some of the community’s wealthiest families. The group incorporated itself as the Ogden Medical and Surgical Hospital Corporation (OMSH), an approach that allowed its members to protect their individual business and family wealth from any losses the hospital might incur. It was this entity that would now manage the hospital. A lease proposal dated September 7, 1896, indicates the applicants would lease the city hospital and its equipment for no less than two years, paying the city on an annual basis.76 While there is no mention of a
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set price for city-sponsored patients and no explicit commitment to accept such patients, the hospital continued to accept those patients and bill the city for them.
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Newspapers in Ogden and Salt Lake City took notice. The Salt Lake Tribune called it “a step forward” and said that the hospital deserved success. The Standard completely reversed its previous opposition. Now the hospital was “something that was urgently needed” that would be “of material advantage to the city.” The newspaper praised the doctors’ medical ability and competence, stated (probably prematurely) that the building had been “thoroughly renovated,” and predicted economic benefits for the city’s merchants.77
The corporation promoted the enterprise extensively in newspaper advertisements, attempting to create a public perception of itself as technically competent, safe, and comfortable. An ad ran every other day or so in the Standard Examiner, well over 150 times, between April 1897 and the end of 1898. It addressed the lay public and physicians, noting that “the hospital is open to all reputable physicians who may desire its
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This time, circumstances were more favorable. A key factor resulted from the 1893 railroad bankruptcies. The Union Pacific’s hospital had remained in operation, but its two buildings had been among the assets seized by the court to pay shareholders and creditors. Those buildings finally went out of service around mid1896. Railroad groups talked about starting a new hospital to replace the one lost to liquidation but those ideas never took off, and OMSH ended up as the contractor for hospital services to Union Pacific’s large base of employees with their reliable funding source.78 By March 1897, the county had also agreed to a contract with the hospital corporation.79 The new lessees petitioned Ogden City Council for a remission of their first year’s rent, arguing that the facility was in poor shape, and promised to invest an equal or greater amount in improvements. The council granted their petition, as it did with similar petitions in subsequent years.80 Finally, as the area’s population grew and the number of “qualified physicians” in the community increased, it had become much more likely that private patients would in fact be served at the hospital.81
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An advertisement for Ogden Medical and Surgical Hospital, also known as Ogden General Hospital, that appeared in the local newspaper on a reoccurring basis in 1897 and 1898. Ogden Daily Standard, April 27, 1897, p. 8.
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superior advantages for their patients.” The timing of the new financial model, near the end of the 1890s, fits neatly with a broader trend in American medicine when improvements in surgical practice increased the opportunity for paying patients and fed the growth of hospitals.82 By mid-1899, the newspaper was reporting that the hospital—now alternately referred to as Ogden General—had installed a host of improvements, including a button-operated nurse-call system, operating rooms with marble slabs, and a complete dispensary.83 One begins to see mention of named, nonindigent patients—even the occasional city councilman or his family members— cared for at the hospital, often for abdominal or orthopedic surgery. This suggests that the hospital had become acceptable to the middle and governing classes. Further, the Standard praised individual physicians by name and lauded their surgical successes.84 Other developments indicate the increasingly professional nature of OMSH. The hospital hired a new chief nurse (or matron), a woman with hospital experience from Milwaukee, as well as nursing, laundry, and maintenance staff.85 Ambulance service was initiated, and in 1906 Ogden City gave ambulances priority right-of-way on its streets.86 The hospital became the beneficiary of charity on the part of the Elks Club and local women’s societies, and itself contributed to San Francisco earthquake relief in 1906.87 Significantly, patients came from Davis and Box Elder counties, Idaho, and Wyoming for hospital care, hinting at a geographic service area not unlike that of Ogden’s present-day hospitals. The city renewed the OMSH lease at the end of 1900 for ten years on terms similar to what had been in effect since 1897. Under it, the corporation owed the city a more than nominal amount for rent, but payment could continue to come in the form of improvements and equipment.88 By the end of the lease period, after 1907 or so, disputes arose whether the OMSH physicians were meeting these obligations, but even then, the arrangement between the city and the hospital appears to have been quite stable. The city continued to employ a city physician, and it continued to make occasional payments to the hospital for the poor. It paid for fire insurance and for a connection to a newly extended city
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sewer system, and it continued to contribute the use of its building without a return on capital, while the corporation paid the expenses of operating the facility and employing its staff. After 1905, while the city continued to depict the hospital as a proud community accomplishment, signs of strain in the relationship began to appear.89 The Southern Pacific railroad developed a trauma station in the Ogden railyards, clearly with the intention of reducing costs; and although the county and the railroads continued to contract with Ogden General, a renewed sensitivity to costs on the part of purchasers was evident.90 Accounts emerged about the hospital turning away patients at its doors because they lacked proof that they could pay for services. One particularly lurid story concerning a quack doctor, the Boy Phenomenal, Earl S. Beers, who was engaged in an affair with the wife of a merchant, seems to have stuck in the mind of editorial writers.91 The local press complained about access to information for hospitalized patients.92 By mid-1906, as houses began filling in the area around the hospital, the city council expressed concern that the level of investment OMSH had made pursuant to its lease obligations did not equal the rents the city had forgiven. The council twice voted to put the hospital up for sale and announced that it was accepting bids.93 The lease remained in place and no sale occurred, but discussions began about creating a replacement facility. The motivation for a new hospital apparently arose out of a sense that the community needed something better, both architecturally and organizationally. Newspapers were full of stories of the wonders about modern medicine as performed in hospitals, and new ones emerging elsewhere in the country now served as aspirational models for Ogden.94 The major organizational shortcoming people saw in the existing model was the inability to accept unsponsored patients of limited means, a variant of the free-rider concerns that the city had faced prior to the OMSH era. Ogden General had dealt with this problem in much the same way that the city had in its 1892 hospital regulations: by forbidding admission to patients who did not have sponsorship and who could not prove that
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A description and image of Ogden General Hospital, also known as Ogden Medical and Surgical Hospital, published in 1901. Industrial Utah, no. 35, July 15, 1901.
they could pay for service. Yet there was embarrassment about turning away the sick and injured, and a community sentiment seems to have grown to support extending care to the poor.95 They also wanted to make medical care more generally available, to extend its benefits to low and moderate income people by, for instance, encouraging the use of the hospital for routine childbirth.96 The city’s elected leaders apparently joined these discussions, but only as individuals and representatives of one among several stakeholder groups with a common ambition. No newspaper record exists after 1898 of a publicly vetted suggestion that the city should build a new hospital, and by the time these discussions were in progress in 1908, the city seems to have fully retreated from the idea that it should be in that role. Instead the community had seized upon a model based on philanthropy as a potentially perfect solution. The hospital would be funded with private donations from the wealthy and run through a not-for-profit corporation that would earn enough from paying patients to support reinvestment and growth,
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with additional needs supplied through further philanthropy. Philanthropy, this time in the form of an endowment, would also provide a solution for funding care for the indigent.97
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Annie Taylor Dee was the philanthropic lead for the new facility, the Thomas D. Dee Memorial Hospital, which was named for her deceased husband. Community physicians led the planning and preparation for design. The result was a better researched and designed facility that was larger and better appointed. It was completed in late 1910 and opened on January 1, 1911, a little more than a year after the formal expiration of the last OMSH lease. The OMSH operated right up until the opening of the new hospital. The two facilities coordinated the transfer of patients, staff, supplies, medicine, and at least some equipment. The entire medical staff of the old hospital moved to the Dee Memorial.98 The railroad contracts passed to the new hospital, and there was no payment for the “going concern� value of the business that OMSH and the city might have claimed for the self-sustaining hospital operations that they had developed over the past thirteen years.99
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The Ogden Medical and Surgical Hospital Corporation dissolved at the end of 1911. The Twenty-Eighth Street building was offered for sale in September after the opening of the new hospital. One sees a suggestion that it be converted to a detention home but no serious proposals for purchase.100 The site was eventually subdivided and broken up into residential lots. The first houses built on the land appeared around 1922, so one can be confident that Ogden General was demolished within ten years of its closing.101
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The Dee Memorial Hospital continues today as the Intermountain McKay-Dee Hospital. However, the organizational model under which it began life lasted only a few years. Revenue grew more slowly than planned; expenses and demand for charitable care did in fact exceed the resources of the trusts designated to fund them. This time, the solution did not come from Ogden City or from transferring risk to private contractors, but rather through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its local congregations, an arrangement that persisted into the late 1970s and the formation of Intermountain Health Care.102 In 1890, during an era of expansion and with an administration focused on an ambitious program of building and growth, Ogden City committed itself to a municipally funded, acute care hospital that first opened in rented quarters in the downtown area, serving mostly indigents. At the end of 1892, the city opened a new, fifty-bed hospital facility on land just east of the city center, intending it to serve both publicly and privately funded patients. At the time of its opening, Ogden City Hospital was the second-largest such hospital in Utah and the only one sponsored by a city or county. Both the temporary facility and the 1892 hospital were funded entirely by Ogden City; both functioned as municipal hospitals—operating units of Ogden City government, supervised by the mayor, city physician, and city council, with all funding flowing through the city budget. The Panic of 1893 strained Ogden City finances and almost led to the closing of the new hospital. A mayoral veto of a council motion for closing was sustained, and the hospital persisted, but, after 1894, in an altered organizational form. The city retreated from maintaining the hospital as a municipal operation and turned
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to a lease model that transferred risk to a lessee, still retaining components of oversight and control and continuing to subsidize the hospital by funding facility improvements and expenses such as insurance and water. The first lessee was not a doctor, but after three years a newly constituted physician corporation, the Ogden Medical and Surgical Hospital Corporation, replaced him. The hospital under that organization, variously known as Ogden General, Ogden City Hospital, and Ogden Medical Surgical Hospital, succeeded as a private enterprise. It made use of public capital, served public and private patients, and was accepted by and integrated with the community around it. OMSH controlled the hospital until 1911, when it closed and was effectively absorbed into the new Thomas D. Dee Memorial Hospital, itself the first attempt in Ogden to finance hospital care through private, not-for-profit philanthropy. With the end of Ogden General, public funding of hospitals through the city came to an end. Ogden City Hospital, eclipsed by its immediate and subsequent replacements and lacking a constituency that valued its memory, faded from public awareness.
Web Extra Visit history.utah.gov for photographs of contemporary Utah hospitals.
Notes I presented a version of this paper at the Ogden Medical Surgical Society Meeting, May 16–18, 2018, at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Kurt Rifleman and my Tuesday coffee group have helped it with important advice and encouragement. Kathryn MacKay and Holly George provided extensive and valuable suggestions about format and content. The staffs of the Utah State Archives and the Ogden City Recorder’s offices, the latter in a wonderfully detailed response to a Government Records Access and Management Act request, provided invaluable assistance in identifying sources and enabling me to access them. Without Utah Digital Newspapers, there would be no paper. Sunee Grima, my wife, discovered the photos of Ogden General in collections at Weber County Library and the Union Station Museum photo archive. My thanks to all of them. 1 2
“City Council,” Ogden Semi-Weekly Standard, November 13, 1889, 6. Richard C. Roberts and Richard W. Sadler, A History of Weber County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Weber County Commission, 1997), 218; Jo-
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ald, May 10, 1903; Salt Lake Telegram, January 25, 1905. 26 Ogden Standard, June 5, 1903, July 23, 1906; Jones, “A Pest House Haunting” and “History of Ogden’s Pest Houses.” 27 Ogden Herald, April 1, 1884. These streets subsequently became Twenty-Eighth and Adams. 28 Salt Lake Herald, April 18, July 4, 1882; Ogden Herald, January 3, 1883. 29 Ogden Herald, February 6, 1882. 30 Kathryn L. MacKay, “Sisters of Ogden’s Mount Benedict Monastery,” Utah Historical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 242–59; “At the Hospital,” Ogden Herald, December 7, 1887. 31 “The U. P. Hospital,” Ogden Daily Standard, February 18, 1891. 32 Starr, Social Transformation, 179; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 33 See below. 34 Riley Moore Moffatt, Population History of Western U.S. Cities and Towns, 1850–1990 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1996), 308. 35 Richard C. Roberts and Richard W. Sadler, Ogden: Junction City (Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, 1985); Roberts and Sadler, Weber County, 138–39. 36 Richard C. Roberts, “Friedrich Johann Kiesel, Ogden Business and Political Leader,” in Ogden, Utah: The First 150 Years, 1851–2001, Ogden Sesquicentennial Committee (Ogden: Ogden Sesquicentennial Committee, 2002). 37 See, for example, Council Minutes, October 20, 1888, March 8, 15, 1889. These projects and their financing are mentioned iteratively in city council meeting minutes and in occasional newspaper meeting summaries many times between 1882 and 1892 as they evolved. 38 Roberts and Sadler, Weber County, 300. 39 Salt Lake Herald, February 12, 1889. 40 Council Minutes, April 23, 1889; Ogden Semi-Weekly Standard, October 23, 1889. 41 Ogden Daily Standard, January 1, 1901, January 18, March 27, September 16, 1902, February 24, May 14, 1903, March 24, 1905. 42 Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers; Starr, Social Transformation. 43 Ogden Semi-Weekly Standard, November 13, 1889. 44 Council Minutes, November 22, 1889, January 17, 1890. 45 Council Minutes, January 1, February 14, June 6, September 26, 1890; Ogden Daily Standard, February 24, 1891. 46 Council Minutes, January 24, 1890; G. H. Jones, “1891 City Physician and Hospital Report,” February 18, 1892, Ogden City Recorder Correspondence, Series 5321, USARS (hereafter Recorder Correspondence). 47 Ogden Daily Standard, May 7, August 20, 25, September 9, 15, October 20, 1891. 48 George A. d’Hemecourt appears to have come to Ogden from New Orleans in the mid-1880s and stayed through the mid-1890s, after which he practiced in the San Diego area. Willam Ellsworth Smythe, History of San Diego, 1542–1908: An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Pioneer Settlement on the Pacific Coast of the United States (San Diego: The History Company, 1908), 533; Roulhac Toledano and Mary Louise Christovich, New Orleans Architecture, Vol. VI: Faubourg Tremé and the Bayou Road (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1980), 179; George A d’Hemecourt, Utah Center for Architecture, accessed December 5, 2018, utahcfa.org/architect/george-a-dhemecourt.
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seph Morrell, “Hospitals Important Now, but Pioneers Had None Until 1882–83,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 11, 1955. Joseph Morrell, “Hospitals,” and Utah’s Health and You: A History of Utah’s Public Health (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1956), 145. Morrell, whose work was for many years the only secondary source about Ogden hospitals, might be the source of the “it closed” error. Morrell worked for a time at Ogden General prior to its replacement in 1910, but he had no personal experience of the events of 1893. The spelling is Burch Creek today, but it was Birch Creek in the relevant 1880s news stories. Minutes, January 12, 1883, Ogden City Council, Council Minutes, 1880–1894, Series 5316 (hereafter Council Minutes), Utah State Archives and Records Service, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USARS); Ogden Herald, January 30, 1883. Council Minutes, January 20 (qtn.), June 16, August 1, 1882. Over the next twenty years, Utah would write two laws and experience at least one State Supreme Court case dealing with city and county responsibility for the “indigent sick.” Council Minutes, August 25, 1882. Council Minutes, February 14, 1882. This plan would fail in its specifics and lead eventually to a round of bonding that would set the stage for the funding of the hospital to be built in 1892. Council Minutes, multiple sessions, 1882; Ogden Herald, October 21, 1882. Ogden Herald, December 18, 1882, January 30, 1883; Council Minutes. Ogden Daily Standard, May 28, 30, 31, 1891. Two windstorm incidents occurred in the early 1900s. Ogden Herald, March 27, September 4, 1883. Reports of patients cared for at the city hospital were a staple of Ogden newspapers from the 1880s to the 1900s. They provide the basis for observations in this paper about patient case types and demographics. See also James B. Allen, “The Development of County Government in the Territory of Utah, 1860–1896” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1956), 78–80, 155. Ogden Daily Standard, June 2, 1891. Ogden Daily Standard, January 2, 1901. Ogden Daily Standard, June 1, 1915. Jennifer Jones, “A Haunting at the Pest House,” November 2, 2017, and “History of Ogden’s Pest Houses,” February 15, 2016, The Dead History, accessed December 20, 2017, thedeadhistory.com; Ogden Daily Standard, June 3, 1891. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 150. Ogden Herald, August 12, September 6, 1884. Ogden Herald, January 29, 30, February 8, 1883. Ogden Herald, September 6, 1884. Ogden Herald, November 29, 1884, September 5, 19, October 3, 1885. Allen, “Development of County Government,” 200; Ogden Herald, October 3, 31, November 2, 14, December 12, 1885, May 29, 1886, January 8, February 7, 1887. Ogden Daily Standard, September 15, November 27, 1900. Ogden Daily Standard, April 26, 1902, February 2, 3, 1903; Deseret Evening News, January 29, 1903; Salt Lake Her-
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49 Morrell, Utah’s Health, 145, reports a capacity of thirtyfive beds prior to 1910, with some wards functioning as private rooms. The only other hospital was St. Marks, built in 1874. Deseret Hospital, 1882–1890, had ceased operating when the Ogden hospital opened. The W. H. Groves’ L.D.S. Hospital would not open until 1905; the Salt Lake County Hospital not until 1912. 50 Ogden Daily Standard, August 20, 25, September 15, 1891; Morrell, Utah’s Health, 144–45. 51 Ogden Daily Standard, February 10, 1891. 52 Ogden Daily Standard, February 9, 23, May 17, June 1, 1892. 53 Ogden Daily Standard, May 24, 1892. 54 Council Minutes, file 5464. 55 Ogden Daily Standard, June 28, 1892. 56 Ogden Daily Standard, June 14, November 19, 1892. 57 Ogden Daily Standard, September 19, December 15, 1891, May 10, 1892. 58 Ogden Daily Standard, March 2, 1893. The Ogden Daily Standard, for several years, reported on the annual inspections of the reform school, the hospital, and the city and county jails conducted by this court. The reports read as if the court was acting on its own authority, but it also might have been directed by a territorial authority. It does not appear to have originated from a litigant or other sort of complaint. Ogden Daily Standard, March 2, December 10, 1893. 59 Ogden Daily Standard, July 29, 1892. 60 Ogden Daily Standard, September 20, 27, 29, 1892. 61 Ronald W. Walker, “The Panic of 1893,” Utah History Encyclopedia, accessed March 23, 2018, uen.org/utah _history_encyclopedia; Ogden Daily Standard, October 14, 1893. 62 Ogden Daily Standard, June 20, July 18, 22, 26, August 1, 1893 63 Roberts and Sadler, Weber County, 218; Morrell, Hospitals and Utah’s Health, 145. 64 See, for example, Ogden Daily Standard, July 23, August 2, November 2, 1893. 65 Ogden Daily Standard, January 16, March 8, May 1, 1894. 66 Few references to this group exist in extant records, with an exception in “The Charitable Association,” Ogden Daily Commercial, May 29, 1891. Many women’s groups existed at this time in Utah and America, often with ties to churches and with missions of personal and community uplift. See Ogden City Directory (Ogden: R. L. Polk, 1896), 29–30, for contemporary women’s organizations. 67 Council Minutes, box 23, files 7165, 7230. 68 Ogden Daily Standard, May 1, 28, 29, June 5, 9, 18, 29, 1894. 69 Ogden Daily Standard, July 31, 1894. 70 Ogden Daily Standard, July 31, August 21, December 18, 1894, May 7, 1895; Council Minutes, box 23, file 7389, file 7393. The agreed-upon price per patient, per day was reported to be $1.23 (the bid) and $.83 (the council’s approved amount). 71 Ogden Daily Standard, January 9, 1895, January 21, May 30, 1896. 72 For the 1888 law, see Laws of the Territory of Utah (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing, 1888), 161; Samuel Richard Thurman et al., The Compiled Laws of Utah: the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States and Statutes of the United States Locally Applicable and Important (Salt Lake City: H. Pembroke, 1888), 1:299; Al-
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len, “Development of County Government,” 33–39. 73 Ogden Daily Standard, January 8, 9, April 9, 13, 29, May 20, June 3, 1895. 74 “Mayor Brough’s Valedictory,” Ogden Daily Standard, January 1, 1896, 17. Brough eventually served as an administrator of the Dee Memorial Hospital. Auxiliary to the Weber County Medical Society, The History of Medicine in Weber County from 1852 to 1980 (n.p., 1983). 75 Ogden Daily Standard, July 28, August 4, 7, 1896. 76 Recorder Correspondence, user box 24, files 8794, 8854, 8855, 8923. 77 Salt Lake Tribune, November 21, 1896; Ogden Daily Standard, November 21, 1896. 78 Ogden Daily Standard, March 8, 1894, June 16, 17, 18, 25, July 27, December 3, 1898. 79 Ogden Daily Standard, May 29, September 1, 1896, January 7, February 17, 25, March 30, 1897. 80 Ogden Daily Standard, February 16, 1897; Recorder Correspondence, user box 24, files 9081, 9134, 9135. 81 Of the original thirty-two medical staff members at the Dee Memorial Hospital in 1911, all of them “qualified” by contemporary standards, just under 40 percent were already listed in the 1896 city directory. Ogden City Directory (Ogden: R. L. Polk, 1896); Eleanor B. Moler, A Tradition of Caring (n.p., 1982). 82 Starr, Social Transformation, 154–62. 83 Ogden Daily Standard, March 31, 1899. 84 Ogden Daily Standard, March 18, April 13, 1899, September 13, 1900, June 28, July 7, August 6, November 17, December 8, 1902, September 12, 1904, May 11, 1906. Cases mentioned in the press include gunshot wounds, head injury, crushed bones, meningitis, typhoid, pneumonia, stomach cancer, necrotic foot repair, female conditions, postamputation surgical repair, orthopedic repairs, elective amputation, tissue excision, stroke, brain abscess, bad back, and rheumatism. 85 “Changes at Hospital,” and want ads, Ogden Daily Standard, October 17, 1902; see also Polly Aird, “Small but Significant: The School of Nursing at Provo General Hospital, 1904–1924,” Utah Historical Quarterly 86, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 102–27, for the role and experience of a nurse matron at a contemporary Utah hospital. 86 Ogden Daily Standard, February 27, 1906. 87 Ogden Daily Standard, June 28, 1901, May 9, 11, 1906; Salt Lake Tribune, August 3, 1906. 88 “City Council Meeting,” Ogden Daily Standard, October 2, 1900. 89 Ogden Daily Standard, March 21, 1899, December 21, 1901. 90 Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 3, 1905, October 29, 1906, March 3, August 3, 1908; Deseret Evening News, August 4, 1908. The Southern Pacific also opened a hospital facility in Ogden for workers of Japanese descent, staffed by trained Japanese physicians. This facility remained in operation until at least 1913. “Hospital in Ogden for Japs,” Ogden Daily Standard, April 15, 1905; Ogden City Directory (Ogden: R. L. Polk, 1913). 91 Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 24, October 4, 1907. 92 Ogden Evening Standard, March 28, 1911. This might represent a developing sensitivity to patient privacy on the part of the hospital and perhaps accounts for the reduced number of admission notices one sees after about 1905. 93 Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 5, December 4, 1906, January 22, 28, 1907.
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Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 12, 1908. Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 4, 1907. Moler, Tradition of Caring. Ogden Daily Standard, March 30, 1909, February 25, 1910. In his end-of-term report to the city council, then Mayor H. H. Spencer floated the idea of bonding for the construction of “a modern city hospital,” a suggestion that went nowhere. Ogden Daily Standard, January 16, 1898. 98 Eleanor Moler, Tradition of Caring; Morrell, Utah’s Health, 145.
99 Ogden Daily Standard, February 25, 1910. 100 Salt Lake Tribune, October 1, 1911; Ogden Standard, September 19, 1911, December 17, 1914; Ogden Evening Standard, November 2, 1911. 101 Weber County Public Records, Weber County Assessor’s Office, Ogden, Utah. 102 Tom Vitelli, The Story of Intermountain Health Care (Salt Lake City: Intermountain Health Care, 1995).
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Community Building among Farmers in Providence, Utah, 1940–1960
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Ten minutes south of Logan, Utah, in the Cache Valley, lies the town of Providence—a model of modern suburbia, with new homes set on quarter-acre lots and the promise of more construction to come. The downtown heart of Providence, in contrast, is characterized by historic homes and large plots, reminders of the town’s past as a place settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1880s. Part of that past was a thriving fruit-growing area along the town’s eastern bench. The Providence bench, now filled with winding suburban neighborhoods, once produced fruit bountifully, helped along by canals and winds from the canyons. As with other regions of Utah, the fortunes of agriculture in the Cache Valley fluctuated throughout the twentieth century, with an orchard boom in the early years, depression in the 1920s and 1930s, recovery and growth during World War II and the postwar era, and, finally, mechanization and consolidation as the century wore on.1 This article focuses on the patterns of working and socializing established by the farmers on the Providence bench and the successes they accomplished through community ties and folk practices in the decades following the Great Depression. It is based on interviews I conducted with the children of the fruit farmers, their parents having passed on, and the people who in their youth picked fruit on the farms. Their recollections tell a story of family, community, nostalgia, and struggle. Even with the inaccuracies of memory and the filter of individual perspective, it is clear that many of the farmers on the bench tended toward collaboration in the face of hardship. Their interactions were defined by a balance between cooperation and competition, fueled by the cultural norms and values of their small neighborhood. A sense of interdependency made it possible for
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149 A photograph taken by Russell Lee, under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, entitled “Mormon farmer and his family, Cache County, Utah.” August 1940. Russell Lee, photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF34-037258-D.
this generation of farmers and their families to prosper, despite environmental factors and the ups and downs of the economic climate.2 This collection of personal narratives represents a folk history of Providence that, like all folk histories, exists alongside the official history. Popular definitions of folklore and history often place the two concepts in opposition to each other—the former equated with fabrications and the latter with truth—yet as formal disciplines, history and folklore complement each other in a surprising way, with folklore providing a lens for understanding “the whole of the human condition.”3 For the purpose of this article, folklore refers to the traditions and practices of culture that exist alongside formal institutions, such as government. When collecting contemporary occupational folklore (including work techniques, material
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culture, and interpersonal communication) researchers often rely on observing “cultural scenes” or the “folk” in action.4 Because the “cultural scenes” of Providence’s midcentury fruit fields are unavailable, we instead can understand the area’s occupational culture through the collected narratives of those who lived it. Those narratives identify patterns of community and provide vignettes of social history.5 In them, the children of the farmers describe the scenes of their childhood, a sphere where familial livelihood met the larger community. Although many of Providence’s farmers had additional jobs, their lives were deeply connected to the other farmers whose land lay near theirs and to the neighborhood youth who helped in their fields. In Providence, as in all communities, individuals played roles defined by gender, occupation, family, group affiliations, region, and
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geography but also by personal preferences and situations.6 The Providence fruit farmers had a variety of identities that shaped their interactions with each other in the field and in town. Their larger regional identities as farmers in the Cache Valley, descendants of Mormon pioneers, added another layer of meaning. Within this region of the “Mormon West,� in a town founded during a period of Mormon expansion, the people on the Providence bench were a specific community of their own, connected by the piece of land they farmed.7 Even more narrowly, these farmers identified as individuals, protecting their own water rights and profits. The interplay between community support and individual strength could create conflict as individuals negotiated a variety of identities.8 Memories of conflict, or at least hard feelings, between various regions and groups in Cache Valley and Providence itself varied from person to person, but some aspect of division exists in the narratives of everyone I interviewed, on both small and large scales. Some of my informants described resentment between the congregations (or wards) of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Providence, stemming from the division of the original Providence Ward in to the First and Second wards. The Providence Ward had been meeting in what is now the Old Rock Church on Main Street, which the members had funded and built themselves. When the church formed the Second Ward, it asked the congregants to build another chapel, despite their contributions to the first church.9 The members of the First Ward, meanwhile, continued to meet in the Old Rock Church and did not contribute to the building of the Second Ward meetinghouse. In this case, conflict arose on a small scale in the Latter-day Saint community in Providence. Of course, some people only remembered that a social divide existed between the members of the two wards because they did not attend regular church meetings together, a discrepancy in memory that might be due to the passage of time or their own families’ non-involvement in the dispute. If much animosity existed, it clearly was soon forgotten and did not pass on to the youth from their parents. The strength of the community, then, could supersede conflict.
Providence, Utah, circa 1929. Map created by Deb Miller, Utah Division of State History.
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151 The Old Rock Church in Providence, Utah. Latter-day Saints began building the church in 1869, finishing in 1872. Today, it is used as a bed and breakfast and events venue. Amy C. Howard, photographer.
An individual’s affiliation with larger groups also affected integration in the community and overall social cohesion between neighborhoods. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Latter-day Saint community in Providence was especially strong because most of its inhabitants were affiliated with the church. If an individual did not belong to the faith, my interviewees pointed that out in their narratives. The LDS church sponsored most of the community activities at this time, so not attending church led to a certain amount of social exclusion. On the other hand, religion did not seem to affect farmers’ views of each other or inclusion in a professional sense. Another division existed between the farmers on the bench and the townspeople in Providence. The severity of these differences again depended on individual perspective. One woman admitted it was common opinion in town that those who lived up on the bench were unpopular and unfashionable. Mostly, though,
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the social divide existed between those who worked on farms and those who did not. Joan Lofthouse remembered her surprise when an old friend labeled her childhood-self as a “white slave girl” because Lofthouse had worked much harder than her friend and the others of her set.10 Speaking about the youth in Providence, Shayne Mathews conceded that he “always called them ‘town kids’ because . . . I thought they had it easy. We were always on the farm and they got to do other stuff. But a lot of those kids that worked in town, their parents owned property outside of town, so they were working on farms too. It was very much a farming community.” According to Mathews, they all attended the same school and went to the same church, so the only apparent difference between them was that families like the Mathews lived “in the sticks.”11 Other regional rivalries might have existed from town to town in Cache Valley. One man from Wellsville, on the other side of the valley,
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said he felt animosity directed toward him for being on the wrong turf during the period when he courted his wife, who had grown up in Providence. Some of the animosity between towns might have stemmed from a combination of geography and human nature: as water ran down from the mountains, each town progressively received less water as farmers closer to the mouth of the canyon took more than their share. Mendon, for instance, was one town on the “honest” end of the irrigation system.12
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Water has always been an essential part of the history of the communities in Cache Valley. The strain that water put on the community, as well as its importance, are evident through the vast number of personal narratives and legends on the subject contained in the Fife Folklore Archives at Utah State University, as well as the coverage given to water systems in local histories. The issue of water extends beyond farming and is a relevant concern today as the population of Providence grows, putting a strain on the available resources.13 In the early days of white settlement in the valley, as elsewhere in Utah, Latter-day Saint pioneers worked cooperatively to dig canals and manage water. By 1860, the county court supervised water appropriation, a difficult task it had passed on to irrigation companies and water districts by 1876. With shifts in Utah’s water law occurring in 1880 and 1903 especially, management increasingly moved “from private and local entities to public agencies.” The doctrine of prior appropriation (or first in time, first in right) became codified in law, with water rights becoming a salable commodity, not always attached to a specific piece of land.14 On the Providence bench lands, the system was not much different than other areas of Utah. The Spring Creek Water Association controlled the water schedule, and the amount of shares a person held determined the frequency and length of time his or her water turn would be. Art Bitters described in depth his family’s experience with the irrigation system: “[Dad] had water, at least, I would say, twice a week. You’d rotate though. The hours you’d have would rotate. Sometimes you’d have it in the morning. Sometimes you’d have it in the afternoon. Sometimes you’d have it at night, and so it wouldn’t be the same all the time.” Each person knew
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when their water turn was through charts distributed by the water association. There were multiple ways to accrue shares of water. Bitters recalled, “Sometimes . . . when you bought the land, it would come with a certain number of shares of water. And sometimes you wouldn’t have any water shares with a piece of property, and you’d have to buy it from somebody else. That’s what happened to a lot of people who would buy homes or that would buy property and the farmer would sometimes sell his water rights and sometimes he wouldn’t. It just depends what you are entitled to with the land you bought.”15 In this arid climate, people made the most of the water flow they had, dividing water turns up at all hours of the day and night in order to maximize each person’s share. Because the watering turns were predetermined, each farmer had to accept the schedule and take advantage of his allotment—even if it occurred in the middle of the night. Art Bitters only had to irrigate in the middle of the night when his father was working second jobs during lean years, but it was a task he remembered vividly. “You’d have an alarm clock. You’d just sleep in the truck or in the car and just be up there. You’d get out and set the water, get it running down all the different furrows. Then it seemed like you just barely got it set and you’d just lay down for a minute and the alarm clock would go off again and you’d have to go out and do it all over again. Just every couple of hours, and if you didn’t do it that way, you wouldn’t get [everything] irrigated.”16 It was not hard work, but the sleepless nights were hard on a teenage boy. Lex Baer explained that he would take his dog out with him to irrigate at night because of the rattlesnakes.17 Overall, it was an uncomfortable, sometimes unsettling experience that they all had to participate in at one time or another. Despite their mutual experiences with farming and the collective need for water, the shared, honor system needed for the irrigation system to work led to tensions when members of the community took water out of turn, innocently or not. Barre Toelken noted that in this religious community, where sharing and giving were considered godly qualities, anger and violence over water were, surprisingly, generally accepted. “Bert Wilson recalls,” Toelken related, “that
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Shayne Mathews, the son of Morris Mathews, described similar experiences with water. He too recalled the water schedule and occasionally having to get up in the middle of the night to irrigate. Mathews added that his family would have to “set” the water before their allotted time in order maximize their water turn. “There would be problems with water from time to time. I don’t remember any, what I would call, serious conflicts with any of [the other farmers] that way.” When issues did arise, “most of the time it was accidental. Once in a while you’d find that kind of regularly, your head gate
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Among the farmers on the bench, these same tensions often existed but did not turn to violence. Art Bitters further clarified, “I can remember sometimes when people got pretty upset about not getting what they thought [was] their share of the water. Water some years was pretty short, and when there wasn’t a lot of water to go around, yeah, there were sometimes people’s tempers got pretty heated.” He did not recall any physical altercations but knew of “a couple of cases when somebody would be irrigating down the line and somebody’d put a dam in and cut the water off and you’d have to chase up and see what was
happening. . . . There was some strong feelings about people not being too good about sharing their times.”19 The bench farmers were a tight-knit group, which is apparent in the way they resolved their conflicts without violence; further, they understood each other’s need for water because they all farmed the same crops. On the other hand, they also needed to tend to their individual welfare. The water turns were determined in order to benefit the entire community; their folk enforcement of these turns occurred quite naturally as they protected their individual rights.
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the only time he saw his father get violently angry was when he caught a neighbor stealing water (taking Wilson’s water turn) and chased him across the fields with a shovel, trying to hit him.” Sometimes, water rights took precedence over both Christian charity and the law. Angry reactions to going out of turn or blatantly stealing water seemed justified, given the absolute necessity of water to crop survival, and thereby, to the farmers’ families, not to mention the pains that each farmer took to stay within the schedule.18
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Water flowing from Spring Creek in Providence Canyon. Amy C. Howard, photographer.
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wouldn’t be clear down and somebody would be taking all of the water that should be coming to you. And that happened a little bit, but usually it was an accidental thing where somebody got the wrong turn.”20
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Again, Mathews described the general understanding of human error and the resolution of problems in a mostly peaceable manner in this corner of Providence. Incidents of intentional water stealing happened, but for the most part, the farmers on the bench all chose to stick with the schedule. Although irrigation was a nuisance to the teenagers assigned the chore (and likely to the adult farmers themselves), their diligence in maintaining the irrigation schedule aided in allaying any possible confrontation between their parents and other farmers. Because a number of farmers on the bench and across the entire Cache Valley raised fruit, one would expect there to have been competition among the farmers to find buyers for their harvests. Fruit production in Cache Valley originally found a large market in the mining operations in Idaho and Montana, where the farmers could sell their wares at exceptional prices.21 It continued to be a profitable industry, as evidenced by the number of farmers who took it up.22 Farmers generally spent the afternoon hours peddling their wares and delivering orders to stores, leaving their wives and children home to sell fruit to people who stopped by. LaVon Baer had a flair for salesmanship, according to his children, actively building relationships with store owners. Each farmer usually sold to the same few stores, so Eloise Baer Toolson did not remember much competition among the farmers themselves, describing instead the understandings between the farmers and local merchants as gentlemen’s agreements.23 Then, in the 1950s, prices for fruit dropped dramatically for a number of reasons, including problems with middlemen. Wes Bitters remembered his father being one of the first to grow berries specifically. His parents were never rich, he said, and they probably never made more than $6,000 to $7,000 per year, but berries proved to be a successful crop, so others with land on the bench started their own berry production. Bitters blamed the oversupply
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of fruit for the precipitous drop in prices. This drop came at a time when berries had been steadily gaining value. “And I think berries, I could be wrong in this, I can’t remember that well, but I think a case of berries probably in the ’40s started out for $2.50 and by the time we got into the early ’60s, they were . . . maybe eight dollars a case. Dewberries were twelve; they were expensive,” Bitters recalled. The exact numbers might have become hazy in his memory over the years, but the problems associated with slipping prices did not. Bitters explained that “because of the overabundance in the supply, the stores could haggle. And so, all of a sudden, people were selling berries for two dollars a case.” This led to negative returns on production. “Well, you couldn’t pay a picker. You couldn’t pay for fertilizer and developing your crop for two dollars a case.”24 In response, the farmers banded together to form the Cache Fruit Growers Association to regulate prices and, in some cases, remove the need for a middleman.25 Wes Bitters recalled a different name than is recorded in Providence and Her People, but he remembered the action plan they created and the impact it had. The farmers agreed that all surplus berries that they did not have orders for should not go to stores, but rather, “they would take them to a location over in town and this location . . . on the back side of the Capitol Theater, that parking lot, and that’s where the Cache Valley Berry Association was.” If store owners wanted the farmers’ produce, “they would come down to the Berry Association or have the Berry Association deliver the berries to the store. That way, we controlled price.”26 Harvey Mohr also remembered this cooperative arrangement. “It was the one out by the old courthouse on Main Street. And there was a basement entrance in the back. And all us local farmers, when it was berry season would pull back there and take all the berries down and they then would distribute them out to stores and dealerships, kind of the co-op thing. I don’t remember what we called it.”27 His memory adds to Wes Bitters’s account by explaining the actual distribution of the berries. The association took an active part in the distribution of farmers’ goods instead of being only a type of farmers’ market. The arrangement eventually
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The Mathews and their neighbors gained clientele by word of mouth. Shayne Mathews described the long gravel lane up to their house that customers might have missed without guidance. His mother painted a sign to point their customers in the right direction. “She was kind of arty too. . . . It was a guy pointing . . . and said ‘Mathews’ Peaches.’ I remember us having that.”31 Mathews supposed that others had similar signs in place, a supposition that Harvey Mohr’s memories confirmed. Mohr recalled that while he was growing up, helping on his father’s farm, he built and painted a number of signs for selling fruit. “Seems like most people would make a sign to stick out” in front of their houses. To Mohr, the signs did not represent
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From planting and maintaining crops to harvesting and selling them, fruit farming was hard work. The Providence bench farmers all faced the same kind of struggle each year as they combatted the dry climate and cold winters. Everyone shared stories about irrigating and all of them feared late freezing temperatures. The Bitters, as well as other farm families, lit bonfires on cold nights to keep the fruit warm, and the Baers sprayed the fruit with water so the water would freeze and not the fruit. They all contended with the same plant viruses that would spread across the entire area, especially affecting the strawberries and raspberries. And they all understood and were connected by the need for a second job when harvests came up lacking. These connections bound them together as an occupational folk group and as a community.
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As the fruit industry became harder to maintain, farmers switched to commercial products. The Bitters were “fortunate to have switched to apples” ten years before the berry market bottomed out.33 The Mohrs sold cherries commercially, as did the Mathews after Shayne was grown and had left the house. Cherry growing was not part of his farming experience, but it was for Skarlett Mathews, Shayne’s younger sister by about fifteen years. The families had to diversify and adapt with the market, an inevitability their collaborative efforts could not prevent.
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Shayne Mathews explained that in the case of “peas and such, Del Monte bought them all. Grain would sell to mills in Logan.” Sugar beets also fit this category, because farmers sold to the sugar factory in Lewiston while it was in operation. Selling commercially—or selling produce, perhaps at a lower price, to large companies for canning and processing—generally seems to have been more lucrative than filling direct orders to grocery stores or individuals because the demand was more constant. In the case of the fruit, which the farmers could not sell commercially, Mathews said, “we kind of all developed our own clientele. And we had customers that bought peaches from us for as long as I can remember, as long as I was living up there. . . . We never really advertised or anything. They just knew that’s where we were. And the other farmers up there had the same kind of [situation].”30 The reliance on repeat customers to sell fruit was common among all the farmers on the bench.
competition because there was not much traffic along the road. They too had mostly repeat customers who came to buy produce. “Except for the cherries which were more commercial,” this was the method his family used to sell most of their fruit.32
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failed, but it did alleviate the pricing problem for a short time. Meanwhile, the farmers found buyers through other means, such as the Cache Commission Company, or they resorted to selling their goods commercially to canneries.28 When California berries entered the market in the 1960s, a trend spurred on by mechanization and other advancements in agricultural technology, there was no action that could save the local strawberry farmers’ business as customers flocked to this new commodity.29 Everyone agreed that imported berries were flavorless, but they were also much cheaper.
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One practice that epitomized community was the giving and selling of “starts” (those parts of a plant used for propagation) within the neighborhood, a practice that followed patterns of exchange and bartering found on the bench and in other rural communities.34 When Mormon pioneers came to Utah, their leaders specifically instructed them to plant fruit. None of the people I interviewed definitively knew where the plants their parents grew had originated, but they speculated that the pioneers brought non-native fruits and vegetables with them.
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156 A Cache County, Utah, farmer standing in his orchard, which the Farm Security Administration helped him establish. August 1940. Russell Lee, photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF34-037189-D.
This idea is supported in part by historical scholarship. Records and diaries show that settlers often brought seeds from their homelands or other areas. They also ordered away for new varieties over the years, as Brigham Young did to receive “peach pits and apple seeds” and as George D. Watt did throughout the 1850s and 1860s, passing his knowledge and seeds to others along the way.35 As in the Salt Lake Valley, the early settlers of Providence must have engaged in a combination of sharing, bringing, and buying seeds and starts. Lex Baer remembered his father ordering their plants from a nursery in Ogden.36 The longtime Providence resident Ike Christensen, when asked about the origins of the plants in his parents’ garden, described another method for receiving plants: “You didn’t order anything. You’d go to the neighbors. . . . Come spring there’s a lot of raspberry starts coming off from the roots. So you’d cut them off and bring
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them home and plant them. That was how you propagated the species from one field to another.” He still maintains that practice now. “My neighbor bought some raspberries, good ones, and so that’s the kind I grow. And the name of them, I don’t know, but they’re good berries.”37 In gardening and even in subsistence agriculture in Providence, a common way of getting berries and other fruits was simply to ask for a start from a neighbor. The farmers on the bench also helped each other by selling starts for berries to one another. Art Bitters explained that “people would come and buy plants from [them] sometimes when they wanted to get . . . some starters.” Strawberry plants “throw out a runner” each year: “And you’d just go through, and you’d dig those up, and they’d sell them to people. And that’s probably where my dad got his original ones, from my grandfather. But I don’t know . . . where they got the original ones.”38 The common
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A July 1940 photograph by Russell Lee, originally captioned “Young town girl picking berries in Cache County, Utah. Because of diversification of crops, no migrant labor is needed or used in this section of Utah.” The teenagers who picked fruit for Providence farmers, especially the girls, had their own traditions of songs and sociality. Russell Lee, photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF33-012852-M3.
practice at the time would suggest they bought starts from local farmers, as Harvey Mohr believed his father did, or ordered them from a nursery as the Baers most likely did, according to Lex’s recollection. As these plant starts and seeds transferred from one person to another, they became part of a network of trust and community among the farm families. The fruit growers also tapped into each other’s methods and fruit varieties. This applied especially to the strawberry fields because the plants only bore fruit for two or three years. Harvey Mohr and his father rotated the varieties they produced in their acre-and-a-half field among Marshall, Kasuga, and Utah Shipper cultivars. The Baers, on the other hand, grew mostly Marshall strawberries, according to Lex’s memory, the sugar-packed jam berry that was not hardy in cold temperatures. Wes Bitters remembered his father Melvin searching for a berry better for their climate and being one of the first to plant Lindalicious, a berry
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that was still sweet, yet hardier than the Marshall. Melvin then shared his newfound discovery with others on the bench, who started growing it. The farmers on the bench, in other words, were planting similar varieties and were open to sharing ideas, strategies, and plants with each other.39 Another item that symbolized the relationships among the farmers was machinery. On Morris Mathews’s farm, along with apples, they “raised alfalfa, grains, barley and wheat” and “oats once in a while.” During his lifetime, Shayne Mathews witnessed a remarkable progression of technology. Early on, his family used grain binders to gather the wheat into bundles. “This was a time when everybody worked together because there were only a few threshers in the valley.” The Mathews would “hire a threshing machine to come” at harvest and “then a lot of the neighbors would come and help” them haul in the wheat bundles. “At that time we were still hauling with a team of horses and a wagon. . . .
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That was a time when you’d get a lot of cooperation.”40 This pattern changed when combine harvesters became the machine of choice. The difficulty of the harvest prior to modern technology necessitated more manual labor; hence, the farmers’ need for support from each other. Although farmers paid fruit pickers for their labor, the pickers consisted of family and friends—rather than workers who had migrated from other parts of the country—giving the harvest a communal, cooperative feeling. The farmers also commonly understood that they would assist each other when machinery broke down. For example, if a farmer’s tractor broke, it was imperative that he receive help because the timing of planting and harvest were so exact—and repairs were so costly and time consuming—that he would otherwise miss vital parts of the season. In contrast to water rights, where self-concern kept the entire community in check, the sharing of equipment and labor was based on a sense of community welfare and empathy.41
A set of photographs taken by Russell Lee in 1940 in Mendon, across the Cache Valley from Providence, captured this spirit of collaboration through images of farmers using a sprayer owned by a cooperative created by the Farm Security Administration. Like the farmers who participated in such institutional cooperatives, the farmers on the Providence bench supported each other but on a folk, or noninstitutional, level. Speaking of Royal Gessel, Lex Baer elaborated on the importance of congeniality for the people on the bench, “He was kind of a loner, kind of a different guy. I got along with him. Because if you’re raising fruit, you kind of have to do some things, or you should, to get along with the other guy.”42 One of the benefits of “getting along with the other guy” was the use of farm equipment when help was scarce. By analyzing the use and sharing of sprayers in the area, we can see how the farmers settled tensions through collaboration. These sorts of reciprocal services also fostered a sense of occupational community on the bench. Ironically, life-giving water drove the
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A sprayer, part of a Farm Security Administration cooperative, in use in Cache County, Utah. The fruit farmers on the Providence bench had their own informal, cooperative methods of sharing equipment and work. Russell Lee took this photograph in August 1940, as part of a series of images depicting the FSA work in the county. Russell Lee, photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF34-037218-D.
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Although keeping chemicals away from children did play a role in this arrangement, there was also a sense of propriety and tradition involved in it. Those with more experience and maturity were in charge of the spraying. It did not matter if the equipment belonged to them or not. “Because of the chemicals and because of the whole feel there,” Mathews explained. “They would keep good track of it” and “would make arrangements for the whole summer,” which ensured the spraying got done properly by a single person. This in turn benefitted those who farmed full time and did not have extra income from any kind of part-time job.44 Harvey Mohr, whose father worked part-time for LeGrand Johnson Construction, explained how the process unfolded when Melvin Bitters came to spray for them. “Wes’s dad had an old wooden sprayer. . . . We’d get him to come up, and then Dad and I’d sit on the back of it, and we’d spray all our fruit trees right around off the end of the tractor, and then we’d spray our fruit. We’d fill it full of water and pesticide and spray.”45 Bitters came along and helped drive, but the two Mohrs also participated, making it a team effort between the farmers.
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The farmers who owned the sprayers kept track of the appropriate time to spray; they knew who needed their services and made sure they were taken care of. In this sense, spraying turned into a second business venture, which was, again, mutually beneficial for the parties involved. Farm equipment in this sense played a dual role: it provided an opportunity to build relationships and a way to earn extra money for those who needed it, but the business relationship was secondary to the personal relationship.
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Of this type of cooperation Shayne Mathews recalled, “I don’t remember a lot of problems up there with the neighbors. We all got along pretty well. As a matter of fact, it was, you know—we would help each other because—like we used Royal Gessel to spray for us sometimes.” Melvin Bitters and Floyd Newbold also sprayed for them. Mathews continued, “And so we did different things and we might help them with something they were doing. Everybody got along pretty good up there.” They didn’t directly exchange services but “maybe somebody would have a piece of equipment that maybe somebody else didn’t have, and if you needed that, you could usually borrow it, or he’d come and do whatever you needed done for you. It was that kind of a thing.” The Mathews had their own sprayer, but because his father had a second job, “he would just hire the other guys to come and spray. That way us kids weren’t spraying the fruit and maybe spraying each other [laughs].”43
The Mohrs had a similar relationship with other farmers on the bench. “Newbolds lived right by our four acre piece . . . on the bench. On Providence Canyon Road, going up. . . . He had a sprayer too. He’d spray for us once in a while.” This kind of cooperation happened quite a bit, Mohr agreed, but there was no kind of code or formality involved with it. “You’d have to spray for apples two or three times a year and you had to know right when to spray. So when it was time to spray, why,” Newbold would “give us a call or something and say, ‘Got my sprayer, if you want a spray.’ And I think we paid him, you know. We paid him to come spray [and] use his sprayer.”46
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farmers apart, but the use of sprayers—machines with lethal purposes—brought people together.
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Just as the farmers needed each other to maximize their success, each person in a household contributed to keeping the family and farm running. Family cooperation and conflict were common themes throughout the narratives I collected. Women played an integral part in the farming community, as did children. As was common in other parts of Utah, the mother typically stayed in the home caring for younger children, cooking, cleaning, and often doing gardening or other subsistence farming tasks. Mothers had to work hard in order to provide for the family.47 Lex Baer said of his mother, Sarah Hyer Baer, “She did everything. She was a great cook. She bottled, of course, all kinds of fruit. She helped with the selling of the fruit. She just took care of home.” Sarah sold fruit to people who came to the Baer home to buy it, while her husband took charge of peddling the fruit to local grocery stores. Other families had similar arrangements. Lex continued, “We’d always have a lot of fruit at home and she would sell that, and she bottled hundreds of bottles of fruit. Very good.
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A garden was a typical addition to most yards during this time. Here, Mrs. Marion E. Cox stands in the large home garden she built as part of her home management plan. Cache County, Utah, 1940. Russell Lee, photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF34-014112-D.
She was a very good cook.”48 Although this was a typical response from children about their mothers or the women they worked with on the farms, at least two of the households I talked to had mothers who had full-time jobs out of necessity. Here, as in other rural areas, women’s roles in contributing to the household were not confined to the home but “also extended to areas immediately surrounding the house.”49
into the garden area as well. “We had a garden, but usually she didn’t do the garden. Usually it was me, my dad and so on,” said Lex about his mother’s role.50 Joan Lofthouse’s father and mother “did grow a large garden. . . . Actually, it was my father that grew them. I mean, [mother] helped, but he was the one that loved the garden.”51 Here it was a matter of personal choice and passion.
The garden is an example of a space where gender norms were more flexible, where household tasks met the physical labor of the field. Although the garden traditionally fell within a woman’s domain, in rural Providence, there seemed to be no specific gender assigned to that space. Father or mother could be in charge of it, while sons or daughters helped maintain it. Sarah Baer grew up on a dairy farm, so she could milk faster than the rest of the family. Accordingly, Sarah often helped with the milking, but she did not take part in the harvesting or planting. This extended
Another woman recounted a memory of her mother’s role in the gardening, using the pronoun they in way that suggested that neither parent was necessarily in charge. She recalled that every year her parents “planted a big garden. I remember that. . . . They planted everything. We had all kinds of vegetables. And one thing I remember is they would plant the little green onions. And I remember my mother going out there and crawling along the ground on her hands and knees pulling the weeds out of those little tiny green onions.” Her mother also “canned the
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The roles of children—daughters and sons— on the farms were also fluid, confusing established gender roles. The amount of work done in the fields outside often depended on birth order for both males and females. Art Bitters, for example, did not spend as much time working with berries as Wes Bitters did because he was younger, but he did help with apples as he got older. “When I was about ten, eleven, twelve that was when they were doing a lot of the fruit growing. They’d get up about six and start. Or earlier, five or six. As soon as daylight started. And they’d pick until they got finished about noon. . . . So I would just goof around while [they worked],” Art recalled. But he made it clear that he was contributing while at home, doing the things his mother might do if she were there. Art would “mow the lawn, . . . weed the garden, just stuff around the house. It wasn’t city living. It was all country, so everybody kind of did a little something around the farm related to the farm.”54 The reverse was true for Joan Lofthouse as a younger daughter in her family. “We worked hard growing up. Just because that’s what you done to survive as families. And I didn’t think much about it,” she said. “I was the fourth girl in our family, and by then my father had decided he needed help outside instead of all of us doing dishes. So me and one of my other sisters were outside, and consequently we learned to love the outdoors. The others didn’t. They didn’t want to get their fingers dirty. [Laughs].” The comments of Joan Lofthouse and Art Bitters illustrate that although family obligations took precedence, children had some choice in
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Mathews’s friendship with the Jensen family extended beyond working in the fields. Because the county did not have busses to take the students on the bench to school, the neighbors offered rides to each other. “For a long time it was Sister Heckmann, Mrs. Heckmann, that lived across from us,” Mathews recalled. “They had a car that they’d pick us up and take us to school in. And then Floyd Newbold had a little Jeep Wagoneer and we rode in that. He picked up the high school kids. And grade school too, a lot, so it was either Heckmanns or Newbolds that were picking us up. So, the kids, we were all riding those little busses and stuff together.”58 In this sense, the cooperative spirit extended beyond the fields into day-to-day life and sociality. Likewise, one woman, who I will call Mary, as she preferred to remain anonymous, remembered that although Floyd Newbold had a reputation “for being Scotch” (or stingy), he was a good person, as demonstrated by the sacrifice of his time and money every day during the school year.59
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The farmers on the Providence bench got to know each other to varying degrees through work and socializing. These relationships mattered as much as exchanges of work and goods in building and sustaining the rural community and led to closer cooperation and exchange. In my interviews, there was the sense that work was work, but people also formed friendships with each other and had a good laugh when taking a break. For example, most of my interviewees remembered Royal Gessel as “a real jolly kind of guy,” “kind of a character.”56 He was a part of all of their lives because of his personality and the location of his farm. Location was, of course, influential in the relationships the farmers created with each other. “The Jensen kids worked a lot on their farm over there. But their dad was usually there,” said Shayne Mathews. “He worked part-time too, but he was home a lot and helped them on the farm. They’re the ones I associated the most with because they were about a quarter mile from us and farming all the time.”57
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The garden itself could often be a space where anyone participated, making it more of a family affair. The garden harvest was usually used by the mother in bottling and food storage, its result a product of physical labor that sustained the family, as did men’s work outside of the home.53 The hard work in the garden and in the kitchen after the harvest were essential in keeping the family fed throughout the winter when work and food were scarce. The canned preserves also served as a treat when fresh fruit was not available.
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produce for winter and stored the potatoes” so they would have food ready for winter.52
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Mary, whose family lived in town, described the intimacy shared among the women on the
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bench: “My family was friends with the other farmers on the bench. . . . In fact, my mother was in a little club with all those ladies up on the bench that had farms.” The adults in these families would get together regularly, “maybe once a month and have a dinner together. . . . And they were all wonderful cooks. Oh! Wonderful cooks! They all raised big gardens . . . I don’t recall that any of the women in that group ever worked out of their home. I think they were homemakers, every one of them.” These kinds of clubs were common in rural areas and took on many forms. In this case, the members of the group gathered for dinner mostly during the colder winter months rather than during the busy planting and harvesting seasons. Each woman hosted in her turn, and the children were never invited. These dinners were big affairs for the families, and her parents enjoyed the occasions immensely. Mary remembered all the women gathered around in the kitchen, sharing news about their families. “Well, I’m pregnant,” they would say. These club meetings and dinners were times when the farmers and their wives could get together and celebrate, taking it easy when the farm required less
attention. Because of the wives’ association, they could share in the bounty that they had all worked hard to achieve.60 The women’s relationships with each other extended beyond cooking and eating together to other forms of exchange that “flowed from [the] women’s visiting and work patterns,” such as caring for children and making clothing.61 Around 1947, a few of the mothers, including Ona Newbold and Rhetta Jensen, decided to have their daughters all enroll in dance classes together, sharing the carpooling duties among themselves. The care for each other’s daughters continued later in life, as Mary remembered in the following way: “All of those mothers, when they would have a daughter get married, then all the women would get together and quilt a quilt for that daughter.” This pattern continued for several years until she was married. “I got married in the middle of the summer and they came to my mother and said, ‘We can’t quilt in the summer. We just can’t make a quilt.’”62 Instead of sewing a quilt for her, they pooled their money together and bought her a nice set of china. Her mother and father did not socialize with
A July 1940 picture by Russell Lee, likely depicting women in Box Elder County, Utah, tacking a quilt to be used by a sheepherder. Women on the Providence bench often banded together to enjoy each other’s company and care for each other’s children by, among other things, quilting. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF33-012855-M1.
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At history.utah.gov, we feature more photographs from the series taken by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration.
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F. Ross Peterson, A History of Cache County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Cache County Commission, 1997), 158–62, 279, 283–91, 304; see also Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Brian
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Despite any tensions that might have occurred among farm families on the bench due to competition for water or sales, the shared experiences of growing fruit on the Providence bench connected and unified them. They had built up an enclave of support and mutual understanding both in their families and as a group, which enriched their lives and helped them through difficult periods. Yet as the twentieth century progressed, blighted crops and other disasters made Providence’s small farming operations less profitable. Meanwhile, the value of the farmland only increased. There is no surprise, then, that as each farmer sold his share of the land when agricultural production was declining and the land values rising, that the bonds of community also started breaking down. The face of the Providence bench, now covered in homes, is drastically altered from the midcentury years of fruit farming. Those subdivisions are a reflection not only of the changes in local economy but also of the disintegration of the farming families’ community ties.
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Shayne Mathews also remembered his parents associating with their neighbors, along with a few couples from in town. “As a matter fact,” he said, “Mom, up until the day she died, was really good friends with Rhetta Jensen that lived up there and Opal Naylor and some of the other neighbors up there.”63 The feeling of camaraderie was obviously not limited to the men, who felt connected by their work, but existed among their families as well.
Q. Cannon, “Introduction,” in Life and Land: The Farm Security Administration Photographers in Utah, 1936– 1941, ed. Peter S. Briggs (Logan: Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art and Utah State University Press, 1988), 3; and Nancy K. Berlage, Farmers Helping Farmers: The Rise of the Farm and Home Bureaus, 1914–1935 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 56. Henry Glassie, “Folklore and History,” Minnesota History 50, no. 5 (Spring 1987): 188, 191 (qtn). Robert McCarl, “Occupational Folklore,” in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, ed. Elliott Oring (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986), 71. Melissa Walker, “Narrative Themes in Oral Histories of Farming Folk,” Agricultural History 74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 347. Michael Hoberman, Yankee Moderns: Folk Regional Identity in the Sawmill Valley of Western Massachusetts, 1890–1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), xviii. D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55, no. 2 (June 1965): 191–220. See Brock Cheney, Plain but Wholesome: Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012), 2–3, for a pioneer-era example of the interplay between competition and cooperation. Historical Society of Providence, Providence and Her People (Logan, UT: Herald Journal Printing, 1949), 40– 41. Joan Lofthouse and Boyd Lofthouse, interview by Amy Howard, March 6, 2013, Logan, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah (hereafter MCUSU). Shayne Mathews, interview by Amy Howard, October 21, 2013, Petersboro, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. Barre Toelken, “The Folklore of Water in the Mormon West,” Northwest Folklore 2 (Spring 1989): 13–14. Providence History Committee, “Providence City Oral History Project, 2005–2008,” FOLK COLL 53, Special Collections and Archives, MCUSU; Historical Society of Providence, Providence and Her People; Providence History Committee, Providence and Her People, 2nd ed. (Providence, UT: K. W. Watkins, 1974); 2008; Robert Parson, Providence and Her People, Vol. 3 (Providence, UT: Exemplar Press, 2009). Peterson and Cannon, Awkward State of Utah, 210, 211 (qtn.), 214–28, 397n5; Peterson, History of Cache County, 57–60, 83–84, 169–71, 322–28; George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, with Special Reference to Early Utah Conditions (New York: Macmillan, 1920); John Bennion, “Water Law on the Eve of Statehood: Israel Bennion and a Conflict in Vernon, 1893–1896,” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 289–305; Historical Society of Providence, Providence and Her People, 25–26. As F. Ross Peterson put it, “water control in Cache County is a microcosm of the evolution of irrigation in the West.” Peterson, History of Cache County, 84. Art Bitters, interview by Amy Howard, February 8, 2013, Centerville, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU.
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this group as much once their children had left home, but some of the friendships on the bench remained strong throughout these people’s lives.
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16 Art Bitters, interview. 17 Lex A. Baer, interview by Amy Howard, February 11, 2013, Providence, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. 18 Toelken, “The Folklore of Water in the Mormon West,” 13. 19 Art Bitters, interview. 20 Mathews, interview. 21 Parson, Providence and Her People, 23–24. 22 For context about the ups and downs Utah’s farmers faced in the decades preceding this study, see Charles S. Peterson and Brian Q. Cannon, The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and University of Utah Press, 2015), 63–64, 232, 266, 274, 330; and Brian Q. Cannon, “Struggle against Great Odds: Challenges in Utah’s Agricultural Areas, 1925–1939,” Utah Historical Quarterly 54, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 308–27. 23 Eloise Baer Toolson, interview by Amy Howard, March 8, 2013, Smithfield, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. 24 Wes Bitters, interview by Amy Howard, January 28, 2013, Providence, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. 25 Historical Society of Providence, Providence and Her People, 156–57. 26 Wes Bitters, interview. The Capitol Theatre is now the Ellen Eccles Theatre. 27 Harvey Mohr, interview by Amy Howard, February 13, 2013, Nibley, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. 28 Historical Society of Providence, Providence and Her People, 156–57. 29 “California Agriculture Timeline,” California Agriculture 50, no. 6 (1996): 22–25. 30 Mathews, interview. See Peterson, A History of Cache County, 304–11, for the growth and decline of agricultural processing plants in Cache Valley from the 1910s to the 1990s. 31 Mathews, interview. 32 Mohr, interview. 33 Wes Bitters, interview. 34 Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 59–62 35 Cheney, Plain but Wholesome, 27 (qtn.), 28; Ronald G. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe for Zion (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 196–204; see also Mark Thomas, “Grafts from a Lost Orchard,” Utah Historical Quarterly 74, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 231–40. 36 Baer, interview; see also Historical Society of Providence, Providence and Her People, 155.
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37 Ivan “Ike” Christensen, interview by Amy Howard, February 8, 2013, Providence, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. 38 Art Bitters, interview. 39 Mohr, interview; Baer, interview; Wes Bitters, interview. 40 Mathews, interview. For contemporary descriptions and illustrations of grain binders and combine harvesters, see “Labor Costs Reduced and Farm Efficiency Greatly Increased with Improved Mechanical Developments,” North Cache News (Smithfield, UT), September 14, 1945, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Culture of Oats in the Western States, Farmers’ Bulletin No. 2134 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1959), 9–11. 41 Lofthouse and Lofthouse, interview; see also Walker, “Narrative Themes,” 345–46. 42 Baer, interview. 43 Mathews, interview. 44 Mathews, interview. 45 Mohr, interview. 46 Mohr, interview. 47 Brian Q. Cannon, “The Best Years of Their Lives? Wives and Mothers on Western Homesteads in the Postwar Years,” Agricultural History 74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 452, 461–63; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 17–39. 48 Baer, interview (qtn.); 1940 U.S. Census, Providence, Providence Election Precinct, Cache County, Utah, family 122, line 69, LaVon A. Baer, digital image, accessed January 25, 2019, familysearch.org. 49 Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 19. 50 Baer, interview; see also Toolson, interview; Clotille Baer Liechty, interview by Amy Howard, March 5, 2013, Logan, Utah, recording and partial transcript, Fife Folklore Archives, MCUSU. 51 Lofthouse and Lofthouse, interview; see also Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 19 52 Former fruit picker (name withheld), interview by Amy Howard, March 4, 2013, recording and partial transcription in possession of the author. 53 Cannon, “The Best Years of Their Lives?,” 462. 54 Art Bitters, interview. 55 Lofthouse and Lofthouse, interview; see also Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 20–21, 240. 56 Mathews, interview; Mohr, interview; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 40–54. 57 Mathews, interview. 58 Mathews, interview. 59 Former fruit picker, interview. 60 Former fruit picker, interview. 61 Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 55 62 Former fruit picker, interview. 63 Mathews, interview.
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The Interior West is the sixth volume in Pyne’s and the University of Arizona Press’s “To the Last Smoke” series. The book is broken into overviews of each state’s fire history followed by chapters emblematic of each state’s fire-defining characteristics. For anyone familiar with Pyne’s other, often voluminous, works, this compact book may appear thin on detail. However, its point is to trace in broad strokes the arc of cultural fire history from Indigenous peoples’ use of fire, through settlement, and finally to the backyards of exurban subdivisions. As such, and combined with other volumes in the series, The Interior West succeeds in briskly linking past to present, broaching the acute fire management dilemmas of our time instead of dwelling on mere subtext. Pyne guides us through fire regimes contorted by removal of Indigenous peoples who had
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Stephen J. Pyne has yet again crafted a thought-provoking volume that explores the history of fire within the context of broader cultural and environmental history, this time focused on the Interior West of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. In this collection of intertwined essays, Pyne argues that, throughout much of the twentieth century, the Interior West has largely taken a back seat to other regions when it comes to fire, at least partially because it has “boasted no charismatic megafires, no mesmerizing Big Blowups [like the Northern Rockies], no monumental fire sieges, and until 1994 [South Canyon fire] no fire that commanded national attention” (3). But Pyne looks beneath the char of recent fires to reveal that the region has indeed played a significant, if oft-forgotten, role in fire geography, beginning with John Wesley Powell’s burned area mapping in his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States.
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propagated fires, by post-settlement practices such as mining and grazing that modified landscapes, as well as metastasizing invasive species that, in turn, jumbled the conditions under which fires burned. In some regions, for example, exotic cheatgrass has threatened the sage-steppe habitat of the sage grouse by making it more flammable. All of this has been exacerbated by policies with little tolerance for fire and by development—especially along the front ranges of the Sierra, Wasatch, and Colorado Rockies—where culture has intermixed with fire-prone landscapes. None of this is a simple, linear storyline as some would lead us to believe. The ecological and cultural history of fire in the Interior West, as elsewhere in North America, begins in deep time. Take, for instance, the interplay between presettlement culture and fire. Early occupants of Mesa Verde likely stripped surrounding vegetation for domestic fuel, effectively corralling free-burning fire into hearths and altering the landscape in the process. Today, ironically, the preservation of cultural resources collides with ecology: the landscape might have looked very different during the occupation of the Anasazi but fires are now suppressed to protect cultural resources, often creating more damage to the landscape than the fires themselves.
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While Nevada, Utah, and Colorado share many attributes relative to fire, Utah is unique. According to Pyne, early Utah was “the model for rational settlement in the West. From Utah then came the first map of forest fires to document the relationship between agricultural settlement and fire. From Utah today has come one of the most progressive state programs [CatFire] for coping with exurban settlement and fire” (88–89). Yet even though Utah’s national significance relative to fire has only smoldered for the better part of a century, Utahns are now facing larger, more challenging fires that have thrust their state into the national dialogue about fire management.
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This is an eminently readable book and a model for environmental history. Pyne grounds the historiography in his own narrative dance with fire: from his days as a National Park Service firefighter at Grand Canyon to scholarship that brings us face-to-face with the social, political, ecological, and even moral complexity of free-burning fire. Even though the book focuses on the Interior West, Pyne goes beyond the mere recitation of dates and places to plumb bedrock questions with much broader application: “Science creates data, but narrative, aesthetics, and ethics create meaning. Today, we have mountains of data, libraries of knowledge, more science than ever, and perhaps the worst fire problems since Homo erectus” (107). As such, the book is a must-read for fire professionals, environmental historians, the general public, and policymakers. Fire is with us to stay, so the sooner we come to that realization and figure out how to make peace with this most primordial force of nature, so much the better. Pyne helps us conceptualize that détente. — David Strohmaier
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Missoula, Montana
Last Chance Byway: The History of Nine Mile Canyon By Jerry D. Spangler and Donna Kemp Spangler Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. viii + 372 pp. Paper, $34.95
Last Chance Byway is the most ambitious effort to date by the research and writing team of Jerry Spangler and Donna Kemp Spangler, whose previous writings on eastern Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon and the West Tavaputs Plateau include a travel guide, Horned Snakes and Axle Grease (2003); an illustrated overview, Treasures of the Tavaputs (2007); and a more scholarly study, Nine Mile Canyon: The Archaeological History of an American Treasure (2013). Last Chance Byway should appeal to the general reader looking for lively stories about colorful people and places. It also offers to those who already know something of the regional history an extensively documented study with some insightful analysis. The book is attractively designed and generously illustrated with
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maps, historic photographs, and full-color renderings of Nine Mile Canyon scenery, some by the well-known Utah landscape photographer Ray Boren. The organization is topical, with chapters on the fur trade, the Gilsonite boom, the building of the Nine Mile Canyon wagon road by “Buffalo Soldiers” based at Fort Duchesne, the “Squatters, Freighters, and Barkeeps” and outlaws attracted by the rough but busy thoroughfare, the career of the rancher Preston Nutter, and the decline of the Nine Mile road as an important travel corridor. The authors justify the topical approach by claiming that the history was too complex for a linear narrative, which in turn made some overlap and repetition unavoidable. In fact, there is quite a lot of repetition, and a more economical approach might have been to treat the topics within a chronological framework. Still, the prose is lively enough to carry the reader along, and the historical interpretation is interesting even where it seems somewhat strained. For example, the authors argue that there was no compelling reason to construct the Nine Mile road when a wagon road already existed that linked the Uinta Basin with the Union Pacific Railroad at Carter, Wyoming. The Nine Mile route, built and maintained by the U.S. Army, primarily served the interests of the Gilson Asphaltum Company and the Rio Grande Railway. A simple comparison of average winter snowpack on the West Tavaputs Plateau with that of the Uinta Mountains is enough to call that argument into question. The final, and longest, chapter, “A Genealogy of Place,” is perhaps the most original contribution to historical scholarship on the Nine Mile region. In it, the Spanglers trace the complicated story of the small farmers and ranchers who made a home in Nine Mile Canyon down to the mid-twentieth century. The “Biographical Register” includes more than five hundred names (some individuals are listed twice, under both single and married names) even though there were never much more than a hundred people living there at any one time. Each decennial census shows a large turnover in the population. This is hardly surprising, for it was a hard life. But a few stuck it out for several decades, and their descendants still have a strong emotional attachment to the place. The authors introduce
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My Dear Sister: Letters between Joseph F. Smith and His Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris Edited by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and David M. Whitechurch Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2018. lxxi + 672 pp. Cloth, $49.99
My Dear Sister reprints the text of the 241 surviving letters exchanged between Joseph F. Smith, the sixth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his only sister, Martha Ann Smith Harris. The editors designed this volume for three audiences: descendants of Joseph and Martha Ann, general readers interested in
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The letters illuminate deeply personal experiences, including the emotional pain of losing children, Joseph’s divorce from his first wife, the drinking habits of Martha Ann’s husband, and the two siblings’ disapproval of some relatives. They contain theological reflections, such as Joseph’s attribution of the death of small children to Satan. Some touch upon politics and events in the public sphere. This correspondence also illustrates the refinement and growth that the siblings experienced as they aged.
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This is an elegant volume with clear photographic reproductions of dozens of the letters. The pages are further enlivened with visually appealing photographic portraits of Joseph, Martha Ann, and their relatives and friends, along with sketches, paintings, and photographs of places where they lived, worked, or visited. Indeed, images grace nearly one-third of the book’s pages.
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In a book with nine full-page maps, there is regrettably no map of the historic Nine Mile ranches. It is no simple matter to arrange and caption as many illustrations as there are in Last Chance Byway. The task has been well accomplished with one amusing exception: a photograph that purportedly shows Preston Nutter roping a horse actually shows him branding a mule.
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Latter-day Saint history, and professional historians who will mine the letters for historical evidence. Hundreds of useful footnotes compiled by twenty-five research assistants in concert with the editors identify people, places, and events mentioned in the letters, along with the meaning of anachronistic words and phrases. Those who read the volume from cover to cover may find superfluous the practice of repeatedly identifying individuals whose names appear in scores of the letters. In many instances, though, the notes are invaluable and fascinating. One example is the set of notes that accompany Joseph’s brief mention of Latter-day Saint acquaintances who were alcoholics. An appendix provides even more biographical information regarding people mentioned in the letters, as well as information about Joseph’s children and Martha Ann’s children. The letters are reproduced chronologically; insightful essays designed for general readers introduce the historical context for each decade. Consistently applied editorial methods govern the presentation of the material.
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some of the more prominent figures, including Frank Alger, who ran a general store; Edwin Lee, an uncle to J. Bracken Lee, who operated the stagecoach stop and hotel; and the multigenerational Housekeeper family. They also tell of two good friends, Hank Stewart and Neal Hanks, who were both married (at different times) to the same woman, Minerva Van Wagoner, without any injury to their friendship. But they do not include the story that explains the existence of a house, still standing, that looks out of place in its rustic setting. When Van Wagoner’s son died in a gun accident, she used the life insurance money to build a modern frame bungalow, like something you might see in Price or Roosevelt, complete with bathroom and bathtub. Of course, there was no plumbing, so water for a bath had to be pumped from the cistern and heated on the kitchen stove. But she cherished that small luxury while her neighbors had to make do with a number three galvanized washtub. For other needs, she, like them, had a privy in the backyard.
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The letters invite reflection as they document the far-reaching consequences of gendered roles and expectations. As the editors incisively observe, Martha Ann’s sphere was much “more limited” than Joseph’s (183). In their round of quotidian labor and economic struggle, the lives of most men in pioneer Utah more closely resembled the life of Martha Ann than of her
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brother. But the Smith siblings were part of an extraordinary extended family in Mormon society. The contrast between the advantages that Joseph F. obtained as the son of Hyrum Smith and the prosaic life of his sister are stunning. Neither possessed much formal education, and both were shuttled between the homes of relatives after they were orphaned. But Brigham Young looked out for Hyrum’s son after he was expelled from school by calling him on a life-changing mission to Hawaii. In her brother’s absence, relatives fed and clothed Martha Ann, but she was still expected to earn her keep by working hard on their farms instead of attending school. She married at the tender age of fifteen. Meanwhile, the places Joseph visited and the people he met as a young missionary provided rich opportunities for personal development and education. As he remarked in one letter from Hawaii, “It is differant here to what it is in the vallyes” (40). As a missionary and in subsequent assignments Joseph became proficient in lecturing, preaching, reading, and writing. By 1866, when he was ordained an apostle at the age of twenty-seven, he had lived abroad in Great Britain and Hawaii for nearly a decade, presided over a subdivision of the church in Britain, served in Utah’s territorial legislature, worked in the Church Historian’s office, and been tutored through association with Brigham Young, George A. Smith, George Q. Cannon, Ezra T. Benson, and Lorenzo Snow. Never a naturally gifted financial manager, he would nevertheless become the president of major church-owned corporations and one of the largest tithe payers in the church late in life. By contrast, Martha Ann struggled financially throughout her life, never traveled in adult life farther than California and Texas, infrequently associated with general church authorities aside from her brother, and enjoyed few opportunities in the public sphere to hone leadership abilities. She became an accomplished seamstress, creating elegant pieces for sale and for loved ones. She bore and reared eleven children to adulthood, the source of her greatest pride. Thus, the letters contained in My Dear Sister document vastly different, gendered experiences and lifeways in early Utah. — Brian Q. Cannon Brigham Young University
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Faithful and Fearless: Major Howard Egan: Early Mormonism and the Pioneering of the American West By William G. Hartley Holladay, UT: Howard Egan Biography LLC, 2017. xix + 619 pp. Cloth, $44.95
During World War I, while two of Howard Egan’s sons struggled financially and editorially to publish Pioneering the West, “an invaluable collection of Egan-related documents and materials, but not a biography” (xvii), one of them complained that “if the Egan family doesn’t show more interest than at present I am afraid we can not raise the money to publish the book” (462). Such was hardly the case a century later when a battalion-sized association of Howard Egan’s descendants engaged Professor William G. Hartley of Brigham Young University to write this biography and then supported him with a plethora of research materials, anecdotes, folklore, speculation, and clerical help. Notwithstanding this assistance, the author makes clear that with Faithful and Fearless, he alone retains responsibility for the book’s structure and interpretation. With sensitive subjects such as illegitimacy, homicide, polygamy, divorce, and perhaps even a brush with treason coursing through the complex, colorful story of Egan’s life, his descendants chose well in selecting a professional of Hartley’s caliber. The result, published in close proximity to the author’s death, is a sterling, judicious study that is neither hagiography nor family history at its stereotypical worst. In thirty well-documented chapters, Hartley chronicles not only an individual’s life but the development of a religion and the geographical region in which it grew to prominence. In writing this biography, Hartley and his sponsors aimed for a study that would be “thorough, honest, accurate, and that it must be a history my academic colleagues could respect and that the general public—including Egan descendants—would enjoy reading” (xvii). They have succeeded admirably. In a review of this length, it is impractical to list all of the adventures, travels, and occupations
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Most valuable to readers of a book this long is the summation constituting its final chapter, aptly titled “Major Howard Egan: The Man and His Legacy.” Here Hartley deals frankly with the negative impact of Egan’s long absences from home on his family life. Many of these separations were in pursuit of church callings so frequent that they border on seeming exploitive to a twenty-first-century non-Mormon. Other absences were clearly voluntary, taken in pursuit of personal business opportunities or wanderlust. Hartley notes that “in the Egan home in the [Salt Lake] Nineteenth Ward he was more visitor than resident,” a pattern that the author attributes to the fact that Egan “grew up with no model of married life or family life to learn from” (476). In a sense, this pattern was an indirect cause of the Monroe-Egan affair, as well as the fact that all three of Egan’s plural wives divorced him to marry other men, including in one case Brigham Young.
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After sixty years of studying Mormon, Utah, and Western history, I thought I understood the broad outlines of Egan’s life story. Accordingly, I was stunned at the surprises Hartley presents in this study, especially the scope of his travels on church missions and personal business: six round trips between the Missouri River and Salt Lake Valley alone and even more extensive treks (perhaps as many as fifty) between the Great Basin and the Pacific coast. For years, the historian Will Bagley and I have debated which American frigate Egan served on during the 1830s, only to have Hartley demonstrate that it was most likely in the British Royal Navy that Egan shipped. For those who think they understand Egan’s 1851 assassination of James Madison Monroe, with whom his wife had an affair, it is in Faithful and Fearless that one learns the important Nauvoo backstory to this tragedy. Equally surprising is the quiet role that Egan played in pioneering an efficient central route between the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch Front for which U.S. Army Captain James H. Simpson later received credit after he retraced much of Egan’s trail between Camp Floyd and Carson Valley in 1858 and published an account of the route. That Egan lied about the place of his birth throughout his marriage to his first wife, Tamson, a New Hampshire native rabid about the Irish, is as stunning as it is revelatory and might help to explain his willingness to forgive her dalliance with Monroe.
Among the book’s strengths are its maps, a welcome aid to understanding Egan’s travels. So too is the genealogical table that Hartley provides to help both non-Egans and descendants navigate the intricacies of a family tree rooted in Egan’s four marriages.
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that engaged Egan between his birth in Ireland in 1815 and his death in Salt Lake City in 1878. There are few major events in the development of Mormonism, Utah Territory, or the American West during this period in which Egan was not somehow involved. He participated actively in the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon Battalion, the Gold Rush, the development of Fort Limhi, the Utah War, the fatal Morrisite conflict, and more. Prominent exceptions were the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Civil War, a conflict during which Egan managed the operations of first the Pony Express and then the Overland Mail Company in the hazardous deserts between Salt Lake City and California. After reading Faithful and Fearless and digesting what this Forrest Gump-like pioneer accomplished under daunting circumstances, many of us will feel lazy.
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In this concluding chapter, Hartley also provides us with his assessment of what he describes as Egan’s major historical contribution: his pioneering of a central route from Salt Lake City to California, south of the Great Salt Lake and more direct than the northerly Humboldt River route. This improvement facilitated the ability of Utah cattlemen to exploit the Pacific coast market and provided a more practical route for constructing the western half of the transcontinental telegraph and moving mail and stagecoach traffic between San Francisco and the rest of the country. If Faithful and Fearless has flat spots, one of them is Hartley’s devotion to detail, which in places exceeds the need for many readers to know such factoids as the location of campsites, the menu for individual meals, and the placement of windows in one of Egan’s cabins. There are also occasional misstatements of fact, most of which for some reason are clustered in the treatment of the Utah War in chapter 22. Among the book’s most jarring missteps is its bland description of Egan’s chance
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That many of the most helpful records of Howard Egan’s life on which Bill Hartley relied are housed in a collection of Western Americana at Yale’s Beinecke Library rather than in a religiously oriented repository is emblematic of the author’s view of his subject as a fearless
pioneer of the trans-Mississippi West and a faithful Latter-day Saint. Unknown to Hartley, in 1955, Ralph Babb, a Yale University librarian, described the chain of events by which these records migrated from Utah to Connecticut as one in which the New York book scout involved fled Salt Lake City with these treasures in fear of his life. It was a drama that would have amused Howard Egan as well as his accomplished biographer. — William P. MacKinnon Independent historian, Montecito, California
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trailside encounter with a stagecoach containing a cheerful, chatty Porter Rockwell and the bullet-riddled corpse of the equally notorious Lot Huntington, a tableau that Hartley fails to tell the reader was the bloody follow-on to Huntington’s brutal attack of Utah governor John Dawson.
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NOTICES
Navajo Textiles: The Crane Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science By Laurie D. Webster, Louise I. Stiver, D. Y. Begay, and Lynda Teller Pete Denver: Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the University Press of Colorado, 2017. xxvi + 230 pp. Paper, $34.95
This illustrated volume showcases the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s important collection of Navajo textiles with over one hundred full-color photographs. More than a 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
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Compiled by International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Lesson Committee
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Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergency of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910 focuses on the role of the mining engineer in the technological advances of copper mines along the U.S.–Mexico border around the turn of the twentieth century. Sarah Grossman argues that the professionalization of the job of mining engineer led to more efficient mines, which in turn furthered the territorial and cultural expansion of the United States. Mining engineers were not just technical experts but also labor managers and liaisons to the investors who supplied the necessary capital to copper mines in the borderlands. In Mining the Borderlands, Grossman offers an innovative approach to western mining history.
Museum Memories, Volume 9
Salt Lake City: Carr Printing, 2017. 368 pp. Cloth, $19.00
In this final volume of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers’ Museum Memories series, the society has featured a number of full-color reproductions of photos, original artwork, and artifacts on display in the Pioneer Memorial Museum. The Lesson Committee has included the histories of the owners of these pieces of material culture from the pioneer days, highlighting themes such as the kindnesses of non-Mormons to the traveling pioneers and the development of the Deseret Alphabet.
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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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Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910
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Auerbach’s: The Store that Performs What It Promises By Eileen Hallet Stone Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018. 160 pp. Paper, $23.99
In Auerbach’s: The Store that Performs What It Promises, the author and veteran Salt Lake Tribune journalist Eileen Hallet Stone tells the story of a Utah dynasty. After making their way to Utah, three Jewish, Prussian brothers founded Auerbach’s, a store that went on to become one of the state’s most successful retailers until its close in 1979. Beginning with the brothers’ immigration to the United States, this book chronicles the challenges that both the Auerbach brothers and Auerbach’s the store overcame, including ethnic alienation. Stone’s book would be of interest to those curious about Salt Lake City’s past or about the variety of cultures in Utah.
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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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Sounds of the New Deal
The Federal Music Project in the West PETER GOUGH | Foreword by Peggy Seeger “Peter Gough’s book traces the origins and development of the Federal Music Project (FMP), one of the least studied of the New Deal’s cultural agencies. . . . The sources are impressive. Gough has scoured relevant published secondary literature, dissertations and theses, WPA administrative records, local records, sound recordings, and oral histories. . . . The result is a portrait of the activities of thousands of local FMP participants in the American West.”—Western Historical Quarterly 304 pp. 6.125 x 9.25. 29 b & w photos. Paper $27.95; E-book $14.95 A volume in the series Music in American Life
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CONTRIBUTORS
AMY C. HOWARD received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brigham Young University and master’s degree in American studies and folklore from Utah State University. She has worked on folklife documentation projects in Utah, Oregon, and Idaho, most recently documenting traditional Mexican music in Southern Idaho for the Idaho Commission on the Arts and folklife in the Willamette Valley for the Oregon Folklife Network. She worked at Idaho State University as an instructor from 2014 to 2018, teaching courses in folklore,
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JOHN SILLITO is emeritus professor at Weber State University and a member of the board of editors of the Utah Historical Quarterly. Sillito is the editor of History’s Apprentice: The Diaries of B. H. Roberts, 1880–98 (Signature Books, 2004) and is completing a biography of Roberts. His book, coauthored with John S. McCormick, a History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic and Decidedly Revolutionary (Utah State University Press, 2011) received the Francis Armstrong Madsen Award for the Best Book in Utah History in 2011 from the Utah State Historical Society.
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BRENT M. ROGERS , PhD, is the associate managing historian for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and an instructor of history at Brigham Young University, Salt Lake Center. He is the author of Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). He is currently writing a monograph on Buffalo Bill and the Mormons.
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English composition, and Spanish. She and her family recently relocated to Georgia, where she hopes to continue contributing to the study and documentation of folklore and folklife.
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JOHN GRIMA came to Utah in 1986 as a hospital planner with Intermountain Healthcare. He spent the bulk of his career at McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden working on services planning, facilities development, and business strategy. He is a board member at Midtown Community Health Center and has worked as a consultant and volunteer with other Utah health centers and the Utah Primary Care Association. Grima has led seminar courses on health policy and economics with Weber State University MHA students and with the physician residents at McKay-Dee’s Porter Family Practice Residency in Ogden. He is currently retired and working as a volunteer with Midtown.
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Children prepare for Mexican Independence Day, August 3, 1956. Notices appeared in Utah newspapers throughout the mid-twentieth century noting celebrations to honor Mexican independence. Such affairs included music, dancing, beauty contests, traditional foods, and religious observance. They were often sponsored by the Mexican consulate or by the
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clubs Mexican immigrants had founded in Salt Lake City, Bingham Canyon, Ogden, Helper, and elsewhere. Throughout Utah and the nation, the organizations immigrants established helped them adjust to the United States and, in turn, brought added vitality to their new homes. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune negative collection, photo no. 37120.
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