Book Reviews

The Civilian Conservation Corps in Utah: Remembering Nine Years of Achievement, 1933–1942

By Kenneth W. Baldridge

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xvi + 508 pp. Paper, $34.95

Writing a history of a short-lived agency program, especially one as unique as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), is no small feat. Kenneth Baldridge has done this. His original work on the subject was a doctoral dissertation in history at Brigham Young University. He carried out his research in the late 1960s, when many of the CCC participants were still alive, giving us up-close insights into the lives of some of these men.

I knew Baldridge’s excellent work through his original 1970 dissertation. As a contracting archaeologist in Utah, I recorded and photographed a number of CCC-constructed structures in the state. As part of my research, I would regularly pull out Baldridge’s dissertation to refer to what he may have written about a particular camp or project. However, this was not a widely available resource. With the publication of this book, that has changed.

Shortly after taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the CCC and signed a bill passed by Congress that established it. It became one of the most popular and successful of the New Deal agencies. It surely helped with the unemployment situation during the depths of the Depression, especially for young people, but it also supplied much-needed labor for a wide variety of federal and state agency projects. In Utah, as in much of the country, virtually every federal land management agency benefited from the corps. Baldridge’s book provides an excellent introduction to the subject, and always with an eye to how it all played out in Utah.

The book furnishes information about operations within the CCC, describing each federal and state agency’s particular project needs, who the corps workers were, and where they came from. Those men who were accepted into the corps in Utah often came from other states, sometimes from as far as the East Coast. Baldridge includes chapters on the type of projects the CCC carried out and what camp life was like for participants. Of particular interest, he details the Utah camps, when and where they operated, and with which agencies they were affiliated. Baldridge also chronicles the types of projects undertaken by particular agencies and the specific camps where that work was carried out. While not all projects are listed (that would be a quite daunting task), he gives many examples and lays out, in general, the types of projects and locations that the CCC worked on for each agency. In my own previous research, I often had a hard time finding this information and was forced to depend on other available sources, such as surviving camp newsletters.

The book is well structured, clearly listing tables and figures, and has a useful, detailed index. Its appendices present good information concerning the camps’ locations and duration (or at least such information can be inferred from the tables). The maps give an adequate sense of where each camp was located. However, a larger, pull-out map with some additional detail would have enhanced the information.

One of the most interesting aspects of the CCC that the author points out is how popular and enduring the legacy of the agency has been. It lasted only nine years, yet the memory endures; as he states, “It isn’t just the bridges, campgrounds, stock trails, and emergency work done by the CCC that have provided ways for the nation and the state of Utah to recall the tremendous impact” of the corps. “Organizations have been created to perpetuate its legacy; signs have been erected to identify the location of CCC camps and projects, and many corps groups have been set up to carry on the actual work carried out by the enrollees in the 1930s” (359).

As was the case throughout the nation, life was hard in Utah during the 1930s. Joblessness was prevalent, wages were low, and most people just tried to get by. The creation of the CCC and allied New Deal agencies lent a much-needed boost to the economy and morale of the nation. Baldridge’s book gives a good look at how one agency in Utah provided this boost in a time of need.

—Michael R. Polk Aspen Ridge Consultants

The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge nor pen can never tell the sorrow.”

By Candy Moulton.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xv + 172 pp. Cloth, $29.95

For many decades, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have put a great emphasis on their history of migration. At the heart of that collective memory is the tale of the handcart pioneers. As the author of this fine version of that story puts it, “Although only about 3,000 people traveled the Mormon Trail from Iowa City and Florence to Great Salt Lake City by handcart from 1856 to 1860, the handcart story has become an icon of great faith for millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (188). An inevitable side effect of this overemphasis is monumental mythmaking, as church leaders use pioneer heritage as a tool for bolstering the faith and for keeping the rising generation in line. Witness the Trek phenomenon, which takes thousands of youngsters to the wilderness to reenact the scenes of the suffering handcart pioneers. As legends become facts during the enterprise, the greatest casualty is the actual history of the handcart migration. This brings us to the urgent need for such a detailed, comprehensive, and carefully researched study as the work here under review.

An accomplished Trails enthusiast whose spouse has a familial connection to the handcart pioneers, the author came to her task determined to tell the story exhaustively and accurately. Her challenge was to write a balanced account that would land somewhere on the spectrum between the documentary and celebratory work of LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, 1856–1860 (1960), and the gothic polemic of David Roberts, Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (2008). There can be little doubt that she has succeeded on all levels and with room to spare. The book showcases the author’s skill as a storyteller and as an expert at the craft of producing compelling narrative history. That said, the book is hard to read: not through any fault of hers but rather because the story contains so much pain, at some points relentlessly so, that the book becomes the opposite of a page-turner. You have to put it down occasionally to escape the gloom that inevitably descends on the reader.

Without doubt, the greatest accomplishments of the volume come within the first four chapters, which discuss the origins of the handcart idea, the recruitment and organization of the first companies, and their journeys across sea and land to the starting points on the edge of the Plains. Beginning with chapter four, while covering the experiences of the first three handcart parties in 1856, the author quickly makes evident the strengths and weaknesses of the handcart concept. She argues persuasively that the key shortcoming of the handcart idea was that there was no way these companies could carry enough food to sustain themselves, which explains why hunger was so commonly part of the stories of all ten companies, even the most successful ones. Brigham Young and a few other Mormon leaders get due respect (Young for insisting that no more than three companies come per year), despite the abundance of evidence that they and not a few others also made disastrously poor decisions. Before turning the page to chapter five to begin reading in six chapters the harrowing account of the Martin and Willie companies, the reader has learned that the judgment of history might be more positive relative to the handcart idea, despite its weaknesses, had it not been for the terrible events that haunted the fourth and fifth companies.

The bulk of the volume, more than 40 percent of its text, involves a painstaking rehearsal of the disturbing tragedy that overtook the fourth and fifth companies as they staggered into an early winter snowstorm in Wyoming. Their misfortune—that they left too late and that every other conceivable mishap seems to have befallen them—becomes agonizingly plain as the reader slogs ahead, with death and unimaginable suffering on virtually every side once things begin to come apart. In this regard, the author’s overemphasis on the Martin and Willie tragedy helps perpetuate the pioneer myth, inasmuch as readers of her book would hardly notice that four times as many handcart emigrants made it through with general success.

The book concludes with a reasonable, if brief, accounting of the final five companies (1857– 1860) and an attempt to make some sense of the whole business. Here the author stumbles a bit. Remarkably, she seems not to comprehend well the motivation behind it—the millenarian urgency of the Gathering—while instead leaving the impression that Young and others were merely anxious to bring more laborers to Zion as cheaply as possible. She also spends not a small amount of space noting the foibles and weaknesses of some of the leaders, from top to bottom. As far as merely blaming Brigham Young, she adroitly avoids falling into the Devil’s Gate trap, but she nevertheless concludes two final chapters with embittered John Chislett’s haunting call for “a day of reckoning” for the man at the top (185, 196).

In the aggregate, it is very easy to label Candy Moulton’s book as the best work yet on the intriguing handcart story. Indeed, given her fine writing and the depth of her research, it is difficult to imagine a better account of this often-painful chapter in the wide history of Mormon migration.

—Gene A. Sessions Weber State University