In This Issue

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Notes

1 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.