Reviews

The Interior West: A Fire Survey

By Stephen J. Pyne

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. xi + 191 pp. Paper, $14.95

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.

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 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.

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 [Cat- Fire] 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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

— Edward Geary Huntington, Utah

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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