Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, Number 3, 2020

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188 Laying the Foundation for Utah’s Beekeeping Success, 1848–1888

By J. Michael Hunter

202 Opening the Road to Chesler Park: How Al Scorup Inadvertently Helped Create Canyonlands National Park

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CONTENTS

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By Clyde L. Denis

218 Behind the Scene: Zach Proctor’s Paintings of the Railmen

By James R. Swensen

228 The History Between the Lines

By Gary Topping

PUBLIC HISTORY 242 Role Call: Creating an Exhibit to Honor Utah Women

By Sabrina Sanders

DEPARTMENTS 187 In This Issue 253 Reviews 263 Contributors 264 Utah In Focus

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REVIEWS 253 Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth

By Byron E. Pearson Reviewed by Andrew Gahan

254 A Diné History of Navajoland.

255 Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences

By Gregory Prince Reviewed by Jaclyn Foster

256 The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks Edited by Craig S. Smith Reviewed by Richard L. Saunders

257 Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997. 3 vols

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By Klara Kelley and Harris Francis Reviewed by Andrew Gulliford

Edited by Gary James Bergera

257 Volume 1:

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Church Historian, 1971–1975

Edited by Gary James Bergera, foreword by Susan Arrington Madsen, introduction by Rebecca Foster Bartholomew Reviewed by John Sillito

258 Volume 2:

Centrifugal Forces, 1975–1980

Edited by Gary James Bergera, with contributions by Joseph Geisner and Lavina Fielding Anderson Reviewed by Glen M. Leonard

260 Volume 3:

Exile, 1980–1997

Edited by Gary James Bergera, with contributions by Thomas G. Alexander and Jeffery Ogden Johnson Reviewed on Cristina Rosetti

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We close with profiles of courageous and influential women. These images and accompanying text draw from Role Call: Fearless Females in Utah History, an exhibit commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and sesquicentennial of the first women to vote in the United States. Special thanks to Sabrina Sanders, a curator, for sharing the exhibit here. This significant year may be one of disruption, but it is also one of commemoration for women, individually and collectively, who inspire a renewal of our civic commitment.

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Canyonlands National Park owes its designation, in part, to a man who also happened to be one of its biggest detractors, the cattle rancher Al Scorup. The water holes he built to sustain cattle during dry summer months resulted in a road over Elephant Hill into the Grabens of the Needles area that people like Ross Musselman, Kent Frost, and Bates Wilson relied upon to showcase the wonders of the region to others.

Clyde Denis tells the story of Scorup’s unwitting contribution to Canyonlands National Park and of the midcentury backcountry excursions that propelled the region into national prominence.

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Just as Proctor’s work eschews precision for evocation, the next essay challenges historians to venture beyond the evidentiary positivism of a strict adherence to documentation into the realm of informed speculation and conjecture.

In a phrase, history between the lines, as Gary Topping puts it. This essay is a reminder that history is science and art, together revealing a portrait of the whole human experience. While the idea of speculation and conjecture in history may be uncomfortable to some historians and readers of serious nonfiction, Topping demonstrates that the interpretive possibilities are well worth the effort. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the historian’s craft.

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A prominent—and apt—symbol of this interconnectedness is the honey bee. Bees are essential machinery in the ecological community to which we all belong. They were highly prized and cultivated by nineteenth-century Utahns. But as our lead piece details, the honey bee is not native to Utah and took decades to take hold: not until the ease of transportation with the railroad were beekeepers able to establish flourishing apiaries with imported bees.

J. Michael Hunter shows how the territorial history of beekeeping was bound up in national and even international trends. Not only did beekeepers import bees, but they relied on new technologies, techniques, and organizations that facilitated their success.

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The work of Zach Proctor, featured in the next essay, trains the eye not to the railroads, as artwork normally does, but to the people who keep them going. The art historian James Swensen argues that Proctor’s contemporary pieces are influenced by and yet diverge from the work of Lewis Hine and Jack Delano, two earlier American photo documentarians. Rather than precise depictions of either an actual object or historical photograph, Proctor’s paintings are purposefully crafted to evoke, as good art is wont to do.

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At the time of this writing, in the grip of a worldwide pandemic, we have all felt isolated and disconnected—from family and friends and from a sense of normalcy and security. The surreal moment of the coronavirus pandemic has ruptured social norms and routines, leaving no one safe from its reach. To all our readers, we extend continued wishes of support and solidarity. If we were to identify a silver lining it is that the resulting dislocation is bringing awareness to how we are all individually and ecologically interconnected.

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In This Issue

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Laying the Foundation for Utah’s Beekeeping Success, 1848–1888

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In the twenty years since Latter-day Saint settlers introduced honey bees to the Salt Lake Valley in 1848, beekeepers struggled to keep their bees alive.1 Exposure to inclement weather, dry seasons, and a scarcity of forage caused early bee losses. Diseases and accidents also resulted in early bee failures because traditional beekeeping methods limited a beekeeper’s ability to detect these problems and protect their bees. Prior to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, overland transportation made it difficult for beekeepers to import new bees to mitigate losses. Many beekeepers determined that beekeeping was not sustainable in Utah and gave up on the endeavor, while other apiarists were determined to prove that beekeeping in Utah could be successful.

Relying on developments in the country’s freight transportation system to ship beekeeping equipment and honey bee stock, they introduced honey bee subspecies that were productive, gentle, and more resistant to diseases. They utilized innovative beehive designs that provided healthier environments for bees to thrive. Nineteenth-century beekeepers took advantage of a modernized scholarly and professional communication system for disseminating scientific information about beekeeping and created organizations dedicated to the art of keeping bees. These successful beekeepers also practiced improved methods of disease control and advocated for bee-protecting laws. In this in-depth analysis of beekeeping in territorial Utah—the first of its kind—I steer away from the typical representation of the beehive as a symbol of Latter-day Saints industry, and rather, emphasize the environmental conditions, technological innovations, and flourishing organizations that fostered the use and culture of keeping bees.2 There is no known evidence that the honey bee existed west of the Rocky Mountains until settlers imported them in the mid-nineteenth century.

Initial honey bee imports to Utah were limited.3 Wagon trains whose inventories included beehives arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September 1848, September 1849, and October 1849.4 According to the 1850 United States census, taken in 1851, Utah Territory produced a combined total of

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only ten pounds of honey and beeswax in 1850– evidence that at least one hive of bees survived the overland journey and was producing a little honey.5 Salt Lake City’s Deseret News referred to “four swarms of bees” in the Salt Lake Valley in the autumn of 1850. Territorial Governor Brigham Young may have referenced the same bees when he wrote his “Fifth General Epistle,” dated April 16, 1851, stating: “Several swarms of bees, that have been brought from the states, are doing well in the valley, and it is very desirable for the brethren to bring all the bees they can; for it is believed they will flourish here; and so far as honey can be produced, it will supersede the necessity of making sugar; and if there were ever so much sugar, honey is needed as a medicine, as well as a luxury.”6 Responding to Young’s call for more bees was no easy task, as transporting bees to the American West was a risky undertaking. For example, Dr. Wood of Polk County, Oregon, attempted to haul bees from the eastern states to Oregon around 1852. “After enduring a tedious route,” Dr. Wood’s bees “perished by the wagon being

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U.S. patent no. 9300 issued to Lorenzo L. Langstroth in 1852 for a beehive design that contained moveable frames and a 1/4-to-3/8-inch space between the side bars of the frames and the hive walls. An American apiarist, clergyman, and teacher, Langstroth observed that bees would neither build comb in this space nor cement it closed with propolis, allowing beekeepers to check hives for parasites and diseases and harvest honey without destroying bees.

The widespread adoption of Langstroth’s hive transformed beekeeping in the United States.

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overturned.”7 Just after leaving Winter Quarters, Nebraska, for the Great Basin on May 26, 1848, John D. Lee was forced to encamp “on acount [sic] of the Heat which melted down the comb in his Bee Hive & destroyed nearly all the Bees.”8 On his way to California, W. A. Buckley planned to avoid the hazardous trip across the prairies by crossing the Isthmus of Panama in the summer of 1852. He sailed from New York to Panama with three hives of bees, losing two before landing due to the tropical heat melting the wax. He was forced to make his way through the dense jungle of Panama by “conveying [his remaining hive] on the backs of natives.”9 The ability to increase the number of hives on hand was essential to Utah beekeepers, because having enough colonies in reserve to make up for the inevitable losses due to diseases, predators, and other challenges was vital to a sustainable bee population. To increase the hives in their apiaries, nineteenth-century beekeepers could either obtain bees from another beekeeper, catch natural swarms, or utilize

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the swarming instinct to divide their hives artificially. Swarming is the natural method by which bee colonies propagate. Through the process of swarming, the original queen takes flight with a portion of the colony to form a new colony elsewhere, leaving behind a new queen to populate the old location. Both swarming and dividing require large, healthy hives.10 Bees that survived the long, jolting overland journey to Utah arrived in a weakened state, making their hives vulnerable to harsh weather, diseases, and predators. These hives were not healthy enough to swarm, and beekeepers had too few hives to pass on to their neighbors. Under these conditions, beekeepers could only hope to grow their existing colonies into large healthy hives that could be artificially divided. In early Utah, however, beekeepers struggled to strengthen their hives while learning to manage them in a new climate.11 Traditional beekeeping methods contributed to the ongoing difficulties. For generations, beekeepers in Europe and America used fixedcomb hives to house their bees. In Europe, beekeepers favored bell-shaped straw baskets called “skeps,” while beekeepers in the heavily forested American colonies preferred to house their bees in wooden barrels and boxes, as well as in hollow logs called “bee gums.”12 Following tradition, early Utah beekeepers kept their bees in fixed-comb hives, including straw skeps, bee gums, barrels, kegs, and boxes of various kinds.13 These styles of hives presented challenges for Utah beekeepers to overcome. For example, bees affixed the wax comb to the sides of these containers so that beekeepers had difficulty removing or manipulating the comb without permanently damaging it and the bees.

It was likewise difficult for beekeepers to move their fixed-comb hives around without causing harm to the bees. The inaccessibility of fixed combs also made it difficult for beekeepers to monitor their bee colonies, concealing diseases and parasites that often spread without notice from hive to hive.14 Notably, one such parasite is the wax moth larva, which destroys honeycomb by boring through and ingesting the old wax. Without being able to check their hives, fix-comb beekeepers could do very little to control the pests.15 In the 1860s, William Bring­ hurst, who maintained beehives for Brigham Young, reported that “the moth have destroyed

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one stand for me and one for you in spite of all I could do.”16 Young, himself, took interest in beekeeping. In February 1860, responding to a query about beekeeping, Young wrote, I have to inform you that several attempts have been made to introduce and raise bees in Utah, but thus far such efforts have been attended by entire failure, there not being a single honey bee in the country, so far as I know, though we now, by feeding, succeeded in keeping a swarm some three years. We would be much grateful could we raise bees here, which is quite doubtful, as honey dew happens here only at long intervals of time, and appropriate native flowers are scarce in this dry climate.17 Although Young expressed discouragement, several local beekeepers remained optimistic and continued trying to establish healthy and growing colonies. These intrepid beekeepers were willing to adopt several midcentury innovations that led to their ultimate success, and among the most important of these innovations was transportation. Beginning in 1852, individuals like W. A. Buckley attempted to transport bees to California by taking them south from New York to Panama by sea, overland across the Isthmus of Panama, and then north by sea again to San Francisco. Buckley’s bees are the earliest known importation of honey bees to California. The completion of a railroad across the Isthmus in 1855 made the route easier and safer for transporting bees to California. By the 1860s, beekeepers had established several large apiaries in California and were selling bees for conveyance to other western states, including Utah.18 In the winter of 1863, William D. Roberts of Provo hauled two hives of bees from San Bernardino to Utah “on springs at the back of John Whitbeck’s wagon.” The popular all-purpose spring wagons featured a box body hung on platform springs for a smoother ride and often had a canopy top for shading. Although Roberts and Whitbeck avoided the long, tedious ride across the plains, the trip from California to Utah remained a rough one. One of the hives “was slightly damaged by some accident, on the way.” After arrival, the injured hive remained

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Deseret News stated later that the bees brought in by Roberts and Whitbeck were “the first bees to live”; Salt Lake Tribune declared that Roberts “imported the first bees to Utah.”20 Sometime after importing these bees, Roberts began to import bees to Utah from Los Angeles, selling them for $100 per hive.21 Other venturesome beekeepers followed Roberts and Whitbeck’s lead. For example, in the spring of 1864, William Bringhurst of Springville purchased two hives in California for $20 in coin.

He transported them to Utah in a wagon with suspension springs, letting them out daily for air and water. In July 1864, George Goddard, whose Church assignment was to travel the territory collecting old fabric that could be mulched into pulp and turned into paper, stopped by Bringhurst’s Springville home in search of rags. Bring­ hurst showed Goddard his beehives. Goddard reported in the Deseret News that Bringhurst’s California imports were healthy and that several Springville residents were planning to travel to California in the fall to procure more honey bees. Enthusiastically, Goddard declared that “every lover of honey will do well to weigh over the facts above stated, pertaining to the successful existence and prosperity of bees in this climate and as to afford an almost inexhaustible supply of honey, it is to be hoped that no stronger

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Advancements in transportation extended the options for transporting bees and bee equipment to Utah beyond the improved wagons coming from California. The opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, connecting the existing eastern rail network at Omaha, Nebraska, with the Pacific Coast Railway, made transporting passengers and goods coast to coast considerably quicker and less expensive.

William D. Roberts was an early adopter of the new railroad for the commercial importation of bees to Utah. In January 1870, some Provo residents “convinced of the importance and value of cultivating the honey-bee” hired Roberts to “go East and make purchases for them.” Roberts planned to “bring on at least a car load.”25 Writing to the Deseret News in support of Roberts’s trip, Provo resident Alexander F. Macdonald wrote:

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One person who utilized the services of Bring­ hurst was Brigham Young, who imported bees from California for his apiaries.23 In 1865 Bringhurst maintained hives for Young in Springville; the following spring Young purchased three new hives from Bringhurst for his Salt Lake apiary. In May 1866, the Deseret News excitedly announced that a hive of Young’s bees had swarmed, “being the first that [the editors] have ever heard of in this city.” Considering that settlers had imported the first bees to the Salt Lake Valley nearly twenty years earlier, swarming seemed a long time coming to the city. Nonetheless, the forecast looked to be improving. In June, the Salt Lake Daily Telegraph announced that another hive Young had received from Springville had swarmed.24

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These gentlemen are confident that bees will do as well in Utah as in California, the opinion that has prevailed heretofore to the contrary notwithstanding. They also state that, with proper care as many bees as desired can be imported from that State by the southern route without difficulty, and they will take pleasure at any time in extending to others the benefit of their experience in the matter. . . . If there be any cause why bee-culture should not engage the attention of the Deseretans we know not what it is. Why has not the Deseret Agricultural Society taken the matter into consideration and encouraged the introduction of bees into the valleys of Deseret?19

arguments will be necessary to encourage their general introduction throughout the Territory.”

Goddard ended his report by informing that honey bee imports from California could be purchased from Bringhurst.22

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unproductive while the intact hive produced thirty-four pounds of honey in four weeks, which Roberts and Whitbeck took as a positive sign. The Deseret News reported,

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Some, from past failures, entertain doubts as to the success of the Eastern bee; three years ago the same doubt existed in regard to the California bee, that now does so well. The means of transportation from the East, heretofore, I believe, was the chief cause of failure, as they had to be moved in their working season, and exposed to accidents and jolting over rough

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William D. Roberts (left), a prominent freighter and enthusiastic promoter of Utah’s bee industry, purchased from Charles Dadant (right) and imported over six hundred bee colonies to Utah by wagon and train from California and the Midwest. Roberts is credited with importing Utah’s first successful bee colonies in the 1860s. Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1904), 4:386–88. Dadant (1817–1902), a French emigrant to America, was one of the first in the beekeeping industry to import Italian queen bees on a large scale to the United States. The company Dadant founded in 1863 was for a time the country’s largest producer of extracted honey and one of the earliest producers of modern beekeeping tools. The company remains a leading seller of bees and beekeeping equipment in the United States today. Lorenzo L. Langstroth, Camille Pierre Dadant, and Charles Dadant, Langstroth on the Hive and Honey Bee (Hamilton, IL: Dadant & Sons, 1907), plate 3.

roads; but now, I think that with care they can come by rail to the city in their dormant state, and then if placed where they need not be disturbed afterwards, during their working season, they will prove a success. . . . We can well afford to engage in the enterprise, when Bro. Roberts proposes to insure [sic] a stand of bees delivered here for twenty-five dollars.26 Roberts began his journey east on February 5 and, wanting to relieve the “anxiety” of those who commissioned him, reported to the editor of the Deseret Evening News from Hamilton, Illinois, on March 17 that “I have met with much better success than I expected in purchasing bees.”27 The bees came from Charles Dadant of Hamilton, Ohio, an immigrant beekeeper from France. Roberts returned to Utah on April 12 with 135 hives “in pretty good condition,” according to the Deseret News. Dadant reported that Roberts purchased 164 hives.

The discrepancy may indicate that Roberts lost twenty-nine hives on the journey home.28 With

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a greatly improved means of transporting bees, Utah beekeepers were poised to take advantage of other beekeeping innovations.

One of these advances was the improvement of the bee stock itself. Although there were more than twenty subspecies of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) in existence, colonists had transported only one, the black bee or German black bee (Apis mellifera mellifera), to North America in the early seventeenth century. The black bee remained the only strain of honey bee in the United States until the latter part of the nineteenth century.29 In the 1850s, several American beekeepers attempted to import an additional subspecies, the Italian bee (Apis mellifera ligustica). Their efforts finally found success in 1860 when enterprising beekeepers brought in Italian queens and began artificially breeding them. Italian-queen rearing became an important part of the beekeeping industry. American beekeepers quickly developed a preference for the Italian bee, which they found to be hardy in cold temperatures, to be gentler than the German black bee, and

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Roberts’s work was in response to what Robert L. Campbell, secretary of the Deseret Agricultural Society, called a “universal demand” for Italian bees. According to Campbell, Roberts eventually returned from Indianapolis with “250 stands of Italian bees; sold out and

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As the demand for the Italian bees grew in Utah, so too did competition in the importation of bees. At a meeting of beekeepers in March 1872, Moses Thurston announced that he was in the process of arranging a shipment of two hundred hives of Italian bees from California and that he planned to sell the hives for $14 each—considerably less than eastern imports going for $20 per hive plus the $3 or $4 freight cost. Roberts, perhaps sensing a threat to his importation business, contested Thurston’s claim that he was importing bees “as pure as could be obtained either east or west.” Roberts declared that “his experience taught him that bees from a warm climate would not do as well when brought to a cold climate, or at least a climate similar to our own, would do much better here.” Coming to Thurston’s defense, George Bailey asked why the Italian bees from California could not adapt to Utah’s climate when the Italian queens, imported from “warm Italy,” did well in other cold regions of the United States.

Seth Putnam also said he could “see no reason” why bees from California would not prosper in Utah. John Pack did not think it made any difference whether they imported “black or white” bees, since bees have short lives and can be “easily Italianized” through the introduction of an Italian queen.41 In April 1872, Thurston imported two hundred hives of Italian bees that he purchased from John S. Harbison, who operated one of California’s largest apiaries.42

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The arrival of the railroad and the distribution of Italian bees by commercial breeders was a winning combination for Utah beekeepers. Of the beehives Roberts purchased from Dadant in the spring of 1870, Dadant reported that 150 held black bees that Roberts purchased for resale in Utah and fourteen held artificially bred Italian bees for testing in Roberts’s apiary. After working with the bees in Utah for several months, Roberts wrote Dadant, stating, “I am so contented with your Italian bees, that I wish I had bought all Italians.”32 That summer, Roberts announced in Deseret News his confidence that the importation of Italian bees would result in the ultimate success of beekeeping in Utah. Roberts’s hasty conclusion may have resulted from his eagerness to see the success of his own beekeeping enterprise. In the same article, he advertised that he was taking orders for queen bees that he planned to import into the territory.33 In August a Deseret News article reaffirmed the superiority of the Italian bee over the black bee, claiming it was “the longer lived and the more industrious.”34 By November, members of the newly formed Deseret Stock and Bee Association were holding meetings in Salt Lake City for “those interested in the importation of Bees and of pure breeds of stock.”35 By the December meeting, members of the association had placed orders for a hundred swarms of Italian bees at $20 per hive, to be secured and transported by W. D. Roberts.36

has now returned East for more.”37 The Utah Central Railroad, according to freight reports, brought 18,000 pounds of bees into the territory the third week in December 1870.38 In January 1871, Adam Grimm, who bred Italian bees in Wisconsin, sold 240 colonies of bees for $2,450 for shipment to Utah in January 1871.39 Later that year Charles Monk, writing in The Bee-keepers’ Journal and National Agriculturist, described what he called “a growing interest in bee-keeping here” and the “success and popularity especially of the Italian bee.”40

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to be more resistant to diseases than the black bee. They also found that the Italian queens tended to be more prolific than the German queens. Beekeepers transported Italian bees across the Isthmus of Panama to California within a short time.30 In May 1866, F. T. Houghton of Oakland, California, advertised in Salt Lake City’s Semi-Weekly Telegraph declaring, “Bees! Bees! . . . I offer to deliver, in San Francisco, in order for shipment for any distance, ready for work on opening the hive, ITALIANIZED BEES, Warranted pure and healthy, TERMS—$25 [gold coin] per swarm.”31

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Accompanying Utah’s and America’s infatuation for Italian bees was enthusiasm for housing them in patented hives. In the nineteenth century, the United States Patent Office issued more than nine hundred patents for beehives. Like the mousetrap, inventors worked continuously to perfect the beehive.43 American beekeepers

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considered the use of skeps or bee gums to be “old fashioned” and preferred moveable frame hives, notably the Langstroth hive.44 In his 1853 Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey Bee, the Reverend Lorenzo L. Langstroth explained that while inventors had introduced many new hive designs, numerous beekeepers saw them as “delusions” and kept with “the simple box or hollow log, and ‘take up’ their bees with sulphur, in the old-fashioned way”—a reference to the method of safely harvesting honey each fall from fixedcomb hives by killing the entire hive of bees with sulfur or brimstone. Langstroth had been experimenting with beekeeping for some fifteen years and, after trying various hive types, came up with a design of his own that featured moveable frames. With public opinion critical of socalled improved hives, Langstroth admitted that “it required no little courage to venture upon the introduction of a new hive and system of management.” However, Langstroth declared that he felt “confident that a new era in bee-keeping has arrived.”45 Through his experiments, Langstroth noted that when his bees had less than three-eighths

of an inch but more than one-fourth of an inch of space available in which to move around, they would neither build comb into that space nor cement it closed. This discovery led Langstroth to design his wood box hive so that the frames, in which the bees were to make their comb, could easily be separated from all adjacent parts of the hive. In his patent, Langstroth wrote, “As there is a stratum of air always interposed between the combs and the sides and bottom board of the hive, the bees are much more effectually guarded against extremes of heat and cold and the pernicious effects of condensed moisture than they can be in hives of the usual construction.” Langstroth believed the space around the frames was the key feature of his hive design. Extracting the frames in Langstroth’s hive did not require any comb to be cut, so beekeepers could harvest the honey and inspect the hive for diseases without harming the bees. While the idea of moveable frames was not a new one, Langstroth obtained a patent for his practical design with its specific spacing in 1852. After Langstroth’s patent was filed, many of the more than eight hundred patents related to bee hives issued in the

U.S. patent no. 19931, issued April 13, 1858. This patent drawing of K. P. Kidder’s beehive design illustrates the complexity and sophistication of nineteenth-century beehives. The Utah Beekeepers’ Association promoted the use of Kidder’s hive design, which was widely used by beekeepers in Utah. Google Patents.

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Kimball P. Kidder’s hive, patented in April 1858, contained two boxes—an upper and a lower. A square base attached to the bottom of the top box connected into the lower box, leaving a “dead air space” for “ventilation” between the base and the sides of the lower box. Frames for comb hung from recesses in the base. Two boards with access holes for the bees covered the frames.

Two “honey boxes” sat on these two boards in the upper box, so that the brood nest was in the bottom box and honey was in the top box. As the colony grew, the design allowed beekeepers to expand the hive for more room by lifting the base out of the bottom board, placing two boards with bee access holes over the bottom box, and placing the base of the upper box on the two boards. It also featured an entrance with a “peculiar slide” for adjusting the size of the opening.

Ever innovative, Kidder’s hive was an example of how complex and sophisticated beehive designs became in the nineteenth century.51 Putnam did not hold back on promoting the Kidder hive wherever he could. At the May 9, 1874, meeting of the Beekeepers’ Association, for instance, Putnam “had on exhibition a three storied Kidder Hive, made of red wood, which of

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During this period of developing technologies and techniques, the publication of beekeeping journals and the formation of beekeepers’ associations played an important role in disseminating information about what beekeepers were calling “modern beekeeping.”56 In January 1861, a bank cashier named Samuel Wagner edited what is believed to be the first English-language bee magazine, the American Bee Journal, published in Philadelphia. Publishers suspended journals during the American Civil War; the beekeeping movement continued after the war, with the American Bee Journal resuming publication in July 1866 and five other beekeeping publications appearing by the end of the decade.57 The national journals connected local Utah beekeepers to the wider world of regional and national beekeepers and provided them with an avenue for obtaining awareness and knowledge of advances in the trade. For example, in 1870, a beekeeper from Utah named R. R. Hopkin wrote to The Bee-Keepers Journal and National Agriculturist, published in Cleveland, Ohio, declaring, “Quite an interest exists here on bee-culture. Shall try and start a convention on the subject, at which I shall take pleasure in presenting the claims of the BEE-KEEPERS’ JOURNAL, and moveable-comb hives.”58 In October 1871, Charles Monk of Spanish Fork wrote to the editors of the same journal, declaring, “The JOURNAL is always a welcome visitor; I should be sorry to be without it; therefore, I renew my subscription, and I think a few more bee-keepers here will make its acquaintance in ‘72.”59 That same month, a letter from William D. Roberts appeared in the journal, asking for advice on a disease afflicting his Provo hives. Monk had seen something similar

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In Utah, beekeepers were switching to patented hives by the 1860s. In 1863, Roberts and Whitbeck hauled their bees from California “in patent hives, better calculated than any other for being moved such a long distance over a rough wagon road.”47 Generally, the term “patent hive” referred to some patented variation of the moveable-frame hive. In 1866, Houghton was using “the most approved pattern of a movable frame hive, And the only safe one for transporting Bees . . . long distances” to Salt Lake City.48 In addition to Italian bees, Roberts experimented with patent hives in the summer of 1870. He wrote, “I transfer according to [S].

H. Putnam’s plan—from the old box hive into moveable comb hives. I have different kinds of moveable comb hives and would recommend K. P. Kidder’s as the best I have yet seen.”49 Roberts was referring to Seth H. Putnam, a Davis County beekeeper who had paid $1,000 to obtain “the sole Territorial right” to license the use of Kidder-style hives in Utah.50

course he considered the ne plus ultra of all hives for winter and summer use.”52 Kidder also sold accessories for the hive, including the “drone catcher, moth preventive, and bee feeder.”53 An informal network of mutual support appeared to exist among members of the Beekeepers’ Association. When a man in Salt Lake City tried to sell his beehive design known as the “box,” the Beekeepers’ Association “recommended the Kidder hive and unreservedly condemn[ed] the ‘box.’”54 The California bees Thurston purchased from Harbison in 1873 had been delivered in Harbison’s own patented hive, which Thurston “and others” considered “almost worthless.”55

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nineteenth century featured moveable frames, and Langstroth spent years unsuccessfully defending his design from infringement.46

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This late nineteenth-century photograph taken by George Edward Anderson (1860–1929) in Springville, Utah, shows beekeeper Amos Warren (1831–1909) in the foreground wearing a bee hat with the veil lifted. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, MSS P-1 no. 18615.

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in his hives in Spanish Fork and responded to Roberts’s questions in a letter published in the January 1872 issue of the journal.60 Hopkin’s interest in organizing a beekeeping convention in Utah may have resulted from reading in the journals about the formation of beekeeping associations and meetings in other parts of the country. In 1859, beekeepers in Michigan meeting to discuss their craft proposed the formation of a national organization.

In March 1860, beekeepers held what is believed to be the first national beekeeping convention in the United States in Cleveland, Ohio.

That November they met for a second time in the same city. Again, the Civil War forced organizers to suspend beekeeping conventions, but when the movement continued after the war Professor A. J. Cook, secretary of the Michigan Beekeepers’ Association, began organizing a national beekeeping convention to take place in Indianapolis in December 1870.61 Reading in the journals about beekeeping conventions made Utah beekeepers aware of the networking opportunities available through regional and national meetings. Local beekeepers realized that these associations would provide them with a broader perspective on beekeeping and the honey industry, as well as opportunities for learning about new techniques and technologies. In Salt Lake City, Wilford Woodruff was a leader in the “Society for the Introduction and Culture of Stock, bees, fish, etc.,”

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sometimes referred to as the Deseret Stock and Bee Association or simply Stock and Bee Association. At the December meeting of the Stock and Bee Association, Roberts announced that he would represent Utah at the first national beekeeping convention in Indianapolis.62 According to the American Bee Journal, Roberts joined with “an assemblage of wide-awake, intelligent, and enterprising beekeepers” from eleven states and Canada, was a member of the committee appointed to prepare a constitution for the formation of the North American Bee-keepers’ Association (with Lorenzo L. Langstroth elected unanimously as president), and gave a presentation entitled “Bee Culture in Utah.”63 Upon returning from the first national conference, Roberts helped form the Utah County Bee Keepers’ Association, the first association devoted solely to beekeeping in Utah. Beekeepers from Salt Lake County and Davis County were present when locals formed the association in Provo on July 12, 1870.64 In August, the group held “a convention of bee keepers” in Provo and invited beekeepers from other areas of the territory to attend.65 Beekeepers began to meet in other areas as well. On January 24, 1872, Roberts wrote the editor of the Deseret News: “I see . . . there is to be a meeting of bee-keepers at Mill Creek Ward school house. . . . I am in favor of the organization of a bee-keepers’ association separate and apart from the stock, fish, fowl, &c. [Deseret Stock and Bee Association],

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Following its formation, a major focus of the Territorial Bee Association was to promote modern beekeeping. At the organizing meeting, the newly elected president, A. Milton Musser, stated that a progressive beekeeper in Utah was “a very useful missionary, who should not put his light under a bushel, but give the people the benefit of his experience and talent.”

Musser’s plan was to promote the methods and technologies of modern beekeeping through

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Local beekeeping organizations that subsequently sprang up throughout the territory acted in many ways as branches of the statewide society.72 In 1880, Oliver B. Huntington complained at one of the central association meetings that beekeepers in Springville had yet to form a local organization and that “several old-fashioned beekeepers . . . would not adopt modern methods in bee culture.” According to the minutes, “the feeling of the meeting was strongly in favor of organizing bee societies in every settlement in Utah,” and it was “hoped the friends of bee culture everywhere will appreciate the importance of this suggestion and act upon it without delay.” The Territorial Bee Association’s roots extended to Utah’s 1870s cooperative movement where the formation of satellite societies was a networking device designed to promote home industry and self-sufficiency among farmers and small-business owners. Bee Association members carried the sentiments of the cooperative movement forward into the 1880s. In addition to promoting a self-sustaining local economy, association members believed a cooperative network could also encourage uniformity in beekeeping methods, which would in turn raise the territory’s overall honey production.73

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Woodruff responded, calling a meeting of the society on March 4, 1872, “to discuss the propriety of organizing a territorial bee association.” The motion to organize the “Deseret Bee Association” was carried. The organization, also referred to as the Territorial Bee Association, had a president, secretary, treasurer, and vice presidents (i.e., representatives) from the various counties. The organizing meeting began with a discussion about how to deal with the most serious threat to Utah beekeeping at that time—foulbrood, a fatal disease of honey bee brood caused by a spore-forming bacterium. Attendees also discussed methods of artificially feeding bees and protecting bees from predators. This conversation was followed, according to the minutes, by discussions about a “uniform hive for the Territory, infringements on patents, the right of ownership to the Kidder patents,” and the “cost and economy of hives.” The group gave “a decided preference to the general use and adoption of J. P. Kidder’s patent bee-hive.” Because of Seth Putnam’s “indefatigable efforts to promote bee culture,” the group hoped that everyone would remember Putnam’s monetary investment for the territorial rights to the Kidder hive and pay him $6 for farm rights to use the Kidder design.67

the local newspapers.68 The association formed a committee to oversee the dissemination of reliable information about beekeeping through the local newspapers. Association members also discussed forming a local beekeeping journal.69 The information committee encouraged Utah beekeepers to become involved in the social media of the day. “Take a bee journal and post yourselves,” the committee recommended to its members, referring to the practice of writing letters of beekeeping advice for journal editors to publish.70 Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the local newspapers published the association’s meeting minutes and ran regular educational articles written by association members.71

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and would suggest that Brother [Wilford] Woodruff call a meeting of bee-keepers, to be held in Salt Lake City, as soon as convenient, for that purpose.” The society was composed of various committees for livestock, fish, bees, and other agricultural animals. Roberts thought it “necessary for bee-keepers to meet often for the purpose of exchanging ideas and experience.” He was calling for a territory-wide beekeeping association, explaining that he could “see a prosperous future for bee-keepers in Utah, if we be up and doing and encouraging others in the good work.”66

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Persistent beekeepers willing to adopt new techniques and technologies laid the foundation for the ultimate success of beekeeping in Utah. By the 1880s, beekeeping was on solid footing in the territory, although foulbrood was a major challenge for many beekeepers. In early 1880, beekeepers successfully petitioned

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Salt Lake City downtown scene of the 1897 pioneer semi-centennial celebration. Note the float of the beehive, a prominent symbol since the early territorial period. Utah is the Beehive State, the beehive is the state symbol, and the honey bee is the state insect. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 27211.

the territorial legislature to pass its first bee inspection law to protect beekeepers against the ruin caused by the foulbrood disease.74 In early 1884, beekeepers from across the territory reported on the number of beehives in their areas. Though incomplete, the report of 3,183 beehives demonstrates the progress beekeepers had made since 1859 when Brigham Young said there were hardly any honey bees in the territory.75 As the year 1886 began, a reader from Farmington wrote the editor of the Salt Lake Herald-Republican to declare that “beekeeping is a permanent industry and a considerable portion of the farming community are engaging in that pursuit.”76 An article in that same newspaper in December 1886 asserted that “Bee-keeping is no longer a game of chance, but if any industry has been reduced to a science, such a claim may now be made by the progressive bee keeper.” By 1888, the “progressive” beekeepers had established beekeeping as an enduring enterprise in Utah and had set the stage for large-scale commercial beekeeping in the decades that followed.77 Notes 1. The spelling of “honey bee” in this article follows the rules of the Entomological Society of America, which

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specifies that common insect names have two parts—the group name with a modifier—and that “the group name will be a separate word when used in a sense that is systematically correct,” as in “house fly” and “honey bee.”

Those not systematically correct (e.g. yellowjacket) are combined into a single word. “Use & Submission of Common Names,” Entomological Society of America Common Names Database, accessed April 8, 2020, www .entsoc.org/pubs/use-and-submission-common-names.

2. Historians have written very little about this formative period of beekeeping in Utah. For a brief overview of beekeeping in Utah, see J. L. Townsend “Bee Keeping in Utah,” Scientific American, American Periodical Series, vol. 67, no. 20 (November 12, 1892): 309.

William P. Nye devoted one paragraph to nineteenthcentury beekeeping in William P. Nye, “Beekeeping in Utah,” Gleanings in Bee Culture, April 1976, 133. In her extensive world history of beekeeping published in 1999, Eva Crane briefly mentioned the introduction of honey bees to Utah in the nineteenth century. Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York: Routledge, 1999), 307, 359–60.

In an overview of beekeeping in the United States, Tammy Horn focused on the symbolic use of the beehive by Utah’s early founders but provided little information on practical beekeeping in Utah. Tammy Horn, Bees in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 80–81, 93–96. The pioneer settlers of Utah adopted the beehive symbol before settling Utah, though the symbol had little to do with beekeeping in Utah. For more information, see J. Michael Hunter, “The Mormon Hive: A Study of the Bee and Beehive Symbols in Nineteenth-century Mormon Culture” (master’s thesis, California State University Dominguez Hills, 2004), scholarsarchive.byu.edu

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9.

10.

11.

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13.

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ural Resource Conservation Service, 2007, usda.mann lib.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1850/1850a-32 .pdf. Although the census was taken in 1851, census takers attempted to record statistics for 1850. “Census of Utah,” Deseret News, June 12, 1852, 2.

“General Items,” Deseret News, February 21, 1852, 2.

The editor wrote, “One year last fall [autumn 1850] we understood there were four swarms of bees in the [Salt Lake] valley. How many are there now, and what is their success at honey gathering?” See also Reid L. Neilson and Nathan N. Waite, Settling the Valley, Proclaiming the Gospel: The General Epistles of the Mormon First Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 135.

T. T. Eyre, “The Apiary: Bees in Oregon and California,” Oregon Farmer 1, no. 1 (August 1858): 2; Meeker, Seventy Years of Progress, 173.

John D. Lee, A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848–1876, eds. Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1955), 1:30, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002623 836;view=1up;seq=11.

“Bees in California: The First Importation,” Daily Alta California, July 1, 1852, 2, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a =d&d=DAC18520701.2.3&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN --------1.

Jürgen Tautz, The Buzz about Bees, ed. Phänomen Honigbiene (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 42–43, search-lib -byu-edu.erl.lib.byu.edu/byu/record/elee.EBC364609.

A. F. Macdonald, “Correspondence,” Deseret News, February 16, 1870, 1, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id =2606872; Crane, History of Beekeeping, 22–23, 576–77.

Crane, History of Beekeeping, 307–8; Gene Kritsky, The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 79–81.

E. Stevenson, “Bee-Keeper’s Convention,” Deseret News, October 22, 1879, 3; Edward Stevenson, “Correspondence: Bee-Keepers’ Convention,” Deseret News, April 28, 1880, 2; Townshend, “Bee Keeping in Utah,” 309; T. W. Lee and John Dunn, “Bee Culture,” Deseret News, April 30, 1884, 13; E. S. Lovesy, “The Bee Industry,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 2, 1895, 3, newspapers.lib.utah .edu/details?id=12604809. In referring to various housing for bees by Utah beekeepers, Stevenson refers to “skips” and “sugar barrels,” Townshend to a “bee gum made from a section of a hollow tree” and “an old twisted straw rope hive,” Lee and Dunn to “old fashioned bee gums,” and Lovesy to “nail kegs” and “cracker boxes.”

Adam Wayne Ebert, “Hive Society: The Popularization of Science and Beekeeping in the British Isles, 1609– 1913” (PhD diss., Iowa State University, 2009), 3, 36–38, 59–60, 81–82, lib.dr.iastate.edu/.

Horn, Bees in America, 66.

William Bringhurst to Brigham Young, September 1, 1865, Brigham Young office files, 1832–1878 (bulk 1844–1877), CHL, catalog.lds.org/assets/16958836-07da-450c-8bb1 -ae4d6100a94d/0/0.

Brigham Young to William Urie, February 2, 1860, General Correspondence, Outgoing, 1843–1876, CR 1234 1, CHL, catalog.lds.org/assets/60dd4267-e4ad-40b4-aead -23a4ceb1d842/0/9.

“Bees in California: The First Importation,” Daily Alta California, July 1, 1852, 2; Eyre, “The Apiary,” 2–3; Lee H. Watkins, “California’s First Honey Bees,” American Bee Journal 108, no. 5 (1968): 190–91.

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/facpub/1361/. Albert Chubak’s 2017 presentation to the Utah Beekeepers’ Association on the history of Utah beekeeping from 1846 to 1900 provided the most detailed outline of the topic up to that time. Albert Chubak, “History of Beekeeping, Utah, 1846–1900,” presentation, Utah Beekeepers’ Association Conference, Lehi, UT, February 24, 2017, three-peaks.net /uba/2017_UBA_Convention_Day_2_1000_Al_Chubak _History_of_Beekeeping.pdf.

3. Crane, History of Beekeeping, 307–8, 360; Ezra Meeker, Seventy Years of Progress in Washington (Seattle: n.p., 1921), 169, archive.org/details/seventyyearsofpr00 meek; Frank Chapman Pellett, History of American Beekeeping (Ames, IA: Collegiate Press, 1938), 1–2.

Colonists imported the honey bee to America from Europe, and the honey bee migrated west with the pioneers who settled the frontier.

4. Thomas Bullock, “Bullock, Thomas, Journals 1843– 1849, Fd. 1–4,” transcript, 1848, Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, 1847–1868, database, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed January 30, 2019, history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources/4546/bullock -thomas-journals-1843–1849-fd-1–4?lang=eng; Thomas Bullock to Brother Levi, July 10, 1848, published in “Letters from the Camp of Israel,” Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star 10, no. 20 (October 15, 1848): 314; Mary Pugh Scott, “Life Story of Mary Pugh Scott,” in Journey to Zion: Voices from the Mormon Trail (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997), 399–402, citing Mary Pugh [Scott], (1848), typescript copy, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah; Samuel Gully to George A. Smith and Ezra T. Benson, June 26, 1849, in “Found on a Grave,” Frontier Guardian, September 19, 1849, 3; Reuben Miller to Brigham Young, September 9, 1849 (in Brigham Young Office Files, 1832–1878, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah), database, Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, 1847–1868, accessed January 30, 2019, history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources /10638517531107314377-eng/miller-reuben-to-brigham -young-9-sept-1849-in-brigham-young-office-files-1832 -1878-reel-31-box-21-fd-17?firstName=Rosel&surna me=Hyde&lang=eng; David Moore writings, circa 1860, 45–54 (in MS 1892, CHL) database, Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel 1847–1868, accessed February 1, 2019, history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources /90945116270484656910-eng/moore-david-writings -ca-1860-45–54?lang=eng. Bullock was in the Brigham Young Company, which arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September 1848. In his journal entry for May 29, 1848, Bullock lists “3 stand of bees” in the Brigham Young Company. In a column under “Bee Hives” in his July 1848 letter, Bullock lists two in Zera Pulsipher’s sub-company and three in Heber C. Kimball’s company, which also arrived in September 1848. Scott also listed “3 hives of bees” in Kimball’s company. Gully was in the Samuel Gully/Orson Spencer Company, which arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September 1849. Gully lists one “Bees, (Hives).” Miller was also in the Samuel Gully/Orson Spencer Company, and in his letter he lists “Bees 1.” Moore was in the Allen Taylor Company, which arrived in October 1849. Moore lists “number of hives of bees 5” on July 3, 1849.

5. National Agricultural Statistics Service and Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University, “USDA Census of Agriculture Historical Archive,” database with digital images, United States Department of Agriculture: Nat-

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19. “Something New in Utah,” Deseret News, August 5, 1863, 5; Lovesy, “The Bee Industry,” 3; Erik Gregersen, The Complete History of Wheeled Transportation: From Cars and Trucks to Buses and Bikes (New York: Britannica Educational Publishing, 2011), 11.

20. “Death Summons Pioneer at Provo: William D. Roberts Passes Away After a Long Illness,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 9, 1912, 9.

21. Lovesy, “The Bee Industry,” 3.

22. George Goddard, “Honey and the Honey Comb,” Deseret News, July 6, 1864, 5; George Goddard, “Ten Months Among the Paper Rags,” Deseret News, August 20, 1862, 3.

23. Lovesy, “The Bee Industry,” 3.

24. Bringhurst to Young, September 1, 1865, Brigham Young office files, 1832–1878, catalog.lds.org/assets/16958836 -07da-450c-8bb1-ae4d6100a94d/0/0; “Another Swarm,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph, June 3, 1866, 3; “Home Items: Bee Swarming,” Deseret News, May 24, 1866, 5.

25. “Enterprising,” Deseret Evening News, January 28, 1870, 3.

26. A. F. Macdonald, “Correspondence,” Deseret News, February 16, 1870, 1.

27. “Enterprising,” 3; William D. Roberts, “Local and Other Matters: Honey Bees,” Deseret News, March 30, 1870, 1.

28. C. Dadant, “Artificial Queens, and Swarming Fever,” American Bee Journal 6, no. 6 (December 1870): 184; “Local and Other Matters: Arrived,” Deseret News, April 13, 1870, 9. Dadant claimed he sold Roberts fourteen hives of Italian bees and 150 hives of black bees.

29. Michael S. Engel, “The Taxonomy of Recent and Fossil Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae; Apis),” Journal of Hymenoptera Research 8, no. 2 (1999): 172–76, 181–85.

30. Frank Chapman Pellett, History of American Beekeeping (Ames, IA: Collegiate Press, 1938), 59–61; Horn, Bees in America, 91–92, 97–98, 293, 294.

31. F. T. Houghton, “BEES! BEES!,” Semi-Weekly Telegraph, May 3, 1866, 3.

32. Dadant, “Artificial Queens, and Swarming Fever,” 134.

33. William D. Roberts, “Correspondence,” Deseret News, August 3, 1870, 12. The minutes of the Bee Association meeting indicate that beekeeping in Utah was dominated by male beekeepers; however, there were female beekeepers as documented in Edward Stevenson, “Correspondence: Bees and Honey: An Extraordinary Yield.” Deseret News, July 29, 1885, 15; and Edward Stevenson, “Correspondence: Bee-Keepers’ Convention.”

Deseret News, April 28, 1880, 2.

34. “Local and Other Matters: Bees a Success,” Deseret News, August 17, 1870, 1.

35. “The Deseret Stock and Bee Association,” Deseret News, November 16, 1870, 2, newspapers.lib.utah.edu /details?id=23157159; “Local and Other Matters: Stock and Bee Association,” Deseret News, November 16, 1870, 5, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=2607087; “The Deseret Stock and Bee Association,” Deseret News, November 23, 1870, 4, newspapers.lib.utah.edu /details?id=2607131.

36. A. Milton Musser, “Minutes of Meeting of ‘Parent Society,’” Salt Lake Herald Republican, December 14, 1870, 2, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=11526194.

37. Robert L. Campbell, “Blooded Stock and Bees in Utah,” Pacific Rural Press 1, no. 15 (April 15, 1871): 230.

38. “Business of the Utah Central,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, January 1, 1871, 3, newspapers.lib.utah.edu /details?id=11522906.

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39. Adam Grimm, “Report to Horace Capron, Commissioner of Agriculture,” American Bee Journal 6, no. 12 (June 1871): 278, hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4243158 ?urlappend=%3Bseq=402, citing a letter from Adam Grimm to Horace Capron dated January 12, 1871, and written from Jefferson, Wisconsin.

40. Charles Monk, “Bee Keeping in Utah,” Bee Keepers’ Journal & National Agriculturist 12, no. 12 (December 1871): 91.

41. R. V. Morris, “Correspondence: Bee Association Deseret News,” Deseret News, March 20, 1872, 7, newspapers .lib.utah.edu/details?id=2618065.

42. “Bees,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, April 18, 1872, 3, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=11548077.

43. Leggett and United States Patent Office, Subject-Matter Index of Patents for Inventions Issued by the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873, Inclusive (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1874), 1:69– 76, archive.org/details/subjectmatterind01unit; United States Patent Office, Report of Commissioner of Patents for the Year (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1874–1899).

44. “The Bee Keeper: Beekeepers’ Convention,” Wisconsin Farmer 13, no. 6 (June 1, 1861): 191.

45. L. L. Langstroth, Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey Bee: A Bee Keeper’s Manual (Northampton, MA: Hopkins, Bridgman & Company, 1853), 2, 14, archive.org /details/langstrothonhiv00lang/page/n10; For more on the use of sulphur to kill bees, see Crane, History of Beekeeping, 308; Ebert, “Hive Society,” v, 36–37, 62.

46. Lorenzo L. Langstroth, Beehive, United States Patent Office 9,300 (Washington, D.C., issued October 5, 1852), patents.google.com/patent/US9300A/en; Leg­ gett, Subject-Matter Index of Patents, 69–76; United States Patent Office, Report of Commissioner of Patents; Crane, History of Beekeeping, 422–23, 427–28; T. S. K. Johansson and P. M. Johansson, “Lorenzo L. Langstroth and the Bee Space,” Bee World 48, no. 4 (December 1, 1967): 133–43, doi.org/10.1080/000577 2X.1967.11097170.

47. “Something New in Bee-Keeping,” Deseret Evening News, July 11, 1872, 5.

48. Houghton, “BEES! BEES!,” 3.

49. William D. Roberts, “Correspondence,” Deseret News, August 3, 1870, 12, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details ?id=2606183.

50. A. M. Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” Deseret Evening News, March 5, 1872, 2.

51. K. P. Kidder, Beehive, United States Patent Office 19,931 (Washington, D.C., issued April 13, 1858), patents .google.com/patent/US19931.

52. “Meeting of Stock Improvement Society,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, February 8, 1871, newspapers.lib.utah .edu/details?id=11516167; G. E. Wallace, “Correspondence: Bee Keepers’ Meeting,” Deseret News, May 13, 1874, 5, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=2635061.

53. Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” March 5, 1872, 2.

54. A. Milton Musser, “Correspondence,” Deseret News, June 19, 1872, 7, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id =2611386.

55. Morris, “Correspondence: Bee Association Deseret News,” 7.

56. Joseph Swift, “Requirements of Modern Beekeeping,” American Bee Journal 20, no. 34 (August 20, 1884): 538, reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=hive bees6366245_6497_034#page/8/mode/1up.

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76.

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72.

“Correspondence: To the Beekeepers of Utah Territory,” Deseret Evening News, June 5, 1874, 4, newspapers.lib .utah.edu/details?id=23162607.

Wallace, “Correspondence: Bee Keepers’ Meeting,” 5.

John Morgan, “Beekeepers’ Meeting at Millcreek,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, April 2, 1874, 3, newspapers .lib.utah.edu/details?id=11603323; Edward Stevenson, “Foul Brood,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, June 12, 1880, 2, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=10585635.

T. W. Lee and John Dunn, “Bee Culture,” Deseret News, April 30, 1884, 14, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id =2649263; Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community & Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1976), 209–10; Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1900 (1958; Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 226–27, 293–98.

“The Legislature,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, February 4, 1880, 3, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id =10585904; Utah, 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, printer, 1888), 1:777–78, catalog.hathitrust.org /Record/008595997.

Lee and Dunn, “Bee Culture,” 14.

C. T., “Some Good Ideas from a Practical Farmer,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, January 28, 1886, 6.

“Indoors and Out: The Farm Orchard, Garden and Household,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, December 5, 1886, 14, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=10686308.

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57. Pellett, History of American Beekeeping, 114–15, 124; Crane, History of Beekeeping, 427, 446, 453.

58. R. R. Hopkin, “From Utah Territory,” The Bee-Keepers Journal and National Agriculturist, 11, no. 10 (October 1, 1870): 74.

59. Monk, “Bee Keeping in Utah,” 91.

60. Charles Monk, “From Utah,” Bee Keepers’ Journal & National Agriculturist 12, no. 1 (January 1, 1872): 2.

61. Pellett, History of American Beekeeping, 114–15, 124; Crane, History of Beekeeping, 427, 446, 453.

62. A. Milton Musser, “Minutes of Meeting of ‘Parent Society,’” Salt Lake Herald Republican, December 14, 1870, 2, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=11526194.

63. “North American Bee-Keepers’ Association,” American Bee Journal 6, no. 8 (February 1871): 169–70, hdl.handle .net/2027/uc1.b4243158?urlappend=%3Bseq=236.

64. Roberts, “Correspondence,” August 3, 1870, 12.

65. “More Bee Experience,” Deseret Evening News, August 26, 1870, 3, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=23156821.

66. W. D. Roberts, “Correspondence,” Deseret News, February 7, 1872, 10, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id =2610636; “Deseret Bee Association,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, March 6, 1872, 2, newspapers.lib.utah.edu /details?id=11533701.

67. Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” March 6, 1872, 2; A. M. Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” Deseret News, March 13, 1872, 9, newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id =2618023; Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” March 5, 1872, 2.

68. Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” March 5, 1872, 2; Musser, “Deseret Bee Association,” March 13, 1872, 9; “Deseret Bee Association,” 2.

69. Wallace, “Correspondence: Bee Keepers’ Meeting,” 5.

70. Seth H. Putnam, John Morgan, and George B. Bailey,

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The first detailed map of the Needles area from 1927, published in 1933. The double-dotted line is the road into the Needles; the single-dotted lines are the horse trails. “cccm” stands for Cedar Mesa Sandstone, “ch” for Hermosa Formation, and “cp” for Paradox Formation, “cc” for Cutler Formation. The “U” and “D” refer, respectively, to the horsts and valleys of the Grabens. Arthur A. Baker, Notebooks 1927, volume 100059, U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado; Arthur A. Baker, “Geology and Oil Possibilities of the Moab District, Grand and San Juan Counties, Utah,” U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 841 (1933): 1–95.

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In 1927, the soon-to-be-renowned geologist Arthur A. Baker, working on his doctoral dissertation at Yale University, came to southeast Utah to study the region’s geological history for the U.S. Geological Survey. He and his assistants required a reliable way to access its backcountry. For the Canyonlands area, which had not been previously mapped and charted, Baker recorded only one note about how to get in: “J. A. Scorup.”1 Scorup, head of the Scorup-Sommerville Cattle Company headquartered at Dugout Ranch just east of the present-day Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, would be able to provide the necessary horses, camping gear, and general information to make possible this first geological excursion into the Grabens of the Needles area. The Grabens, a series of long sunken valleys richly endowed with grasses, was Scorup’s critical winter grazing area, and he knew it well. As there were no paved or even jeep roads at that time into the Grabens, horses provided the best means of transportation (in fact, Baker’s car failed on the rough dirt roads coming to Dugout Ranch and had to return to Moab for repairs). The trail over Elephant Hill and into the heart of the Grabens was rocky, difficult, and often precipitous.

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Opening the Road to Chesler Park: How Al Scorup Inadvertently Helped Create Canyonlands National Park

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Today this access to the Grabens is primarily by jeep and at many locations remains a treacherous route, one that is prone to wreck even the most sturdy of four-wheel drive vehicles. How did this horse trail route get converted into this jeep-access road? Was it the result of the uranium mining boom that followed Vernon J. Pick and Charles A. Steen’s respective discoveries of rich veins of pitchblende and ore in the San Rafael Swell and Lisbon Valley southeast of Moab in 1952, as suggested by many others?2 A visit by jeep to Chesler Park and Grabens in June 1949, by Ray and Virginia Garner for their filming of the movie “The Desert,” suggests otherwise.3 By 1950, even Kent Frost, the first commercial jeep tour operator in the Needles area, had given up on his Ford Model A and had acquired an army-like jeep for taking his wife, Fern, and friends into this region.4 Although the Garners, with the aid of their guide Merle Winbourn, and Frost separately

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John Albert Scorup, appropriately called “the Cattleman of the Canyons,” oversaw a vast cattle empire (the largest in area in the country) that ranged from the east side of the La Sal Mountains (Geyser Pasture) and into the northwestern section of Paradox Valley in Colorado,

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used dynamite and other means to improve the jeep path, neither constructed the road. Rather, Scorup put the jeep road in, not for jeeping but for his cattle operations. Yet, this led to an unintended consequence. Opening the Grabens to jeep travel enabled Frost, Arches National Monument Superintendent Bates E. Wilson, and others to showcase the region. These visits in turn created renewed public and political interest in a federal designation for the area, leading to the eventual establishment of Canyonlands National Park in 1964—something Scorup had been vehemently opposed to since the 1930s, as such a designation would have precluded his cattle grazing.

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Utah cattleman Al Scorup, whose cattle range included the Needles area, the remote backcountry of what would become Canyonlands National Park. Although Scorup was a strong opponent of the national park, the stock dams he created unwittingly contributed to its establishment. Courtesy NPS/Southeast Utah Group.

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all the way to the San Juan River in the south.

With routinely 7,500 to 12,000 cattle, Scorup’s empire encompassed lands that included Dark Canyon and sections that stretched west to the Colorado River; White Canyon had been under Scorup’s control since the late nineteenth century.5 The nexus of this dominion, purchased in 1918 from the Indian Creek Cattle Company run principally by David L. Goudelock and Harry G. Green, was Dugout Ranch where Scorup had his infrequently used two-room shack of a home, blacksmith, bunkhouses for the cowboys, and principal hay-producing lands.6 The Grabens sat just twenty miles west of Dugout.

It was here and in the adjacent Chesler Park where H. Shisler, Melvin R. Turner, Thomas P. Trout, Goudelock, and other cowboys had wintered their cattle.7 This region, devoid of year-long water sources, provided ample grasslands if a daily water source were available for the cows. From January to March the winter snows could sustain up to six hundred cattle that Scorup kept in the Grabens. In other seasons, sporadic rains would drain away in the sandy soils. Importantly, springs were too infrequently found and other natural catchments too infrequently filled to sustain a herd.8 Depending on the year, in late March cowboys from Dugout Ranch would venture up Elephant Hill and into Devils Lane, collect the cattle, and drive them south to Beef Basin and the Abajo Mountains where reliable water sources could be found during the warm seasons.

But this habitual pattern was dependent on the climate. Scorup had created his cattle fiefdom during a historically wet period (1905 until 1930), but the subsequent years of the 1930s began to display the more typical pattern that remains today: many years of drought. The summer droughts from 1942 to 1945 and dry winters from 1930 to 1934 and again in 1945 and 1946 severely impacted the use of the Grabens, as evidenced by the disappearance of winter cowboy inscriptions—only two appear from 1930 to 1945, compared to nine from the preceding non-drought years of 1914 to 1929).9 By 1946, the climate was forcing Scorup to think creatively about his use of the Grabens.

Scorup’s solution was to construct stock watering tanks in the Grabens. These tanks would allow both more cattle to be brought in and extended seasonal use for the Grabens, possibly

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Aerial view of the Chesler Park and Grabens areas of Canyonlands National Park, with the location of stock dams numbered. Google Earth.

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By Stocks’s reckoning, the trail and tank construction took “about 3 weeks” and was done illegally without BLM permission.16 As to why “some idiot had built that crazy Elephant Hill road” guaranteed to wreck jeeps (even supposedly experienced NPS rangers hang up their vehicles with wheels jutting out over empty space), it was said that when Scorup hired Hunt to push a road over Elephant Hill he “thought he would make a decent road around the hill, the long way. But that catskinner wasn’t about to make a foot longer road than he had to for his flat $200 fee, so he built the shortest trail possible, up and over Elephant Hill, with grades easy for his tractor, but a real challenge even to fourwheel-drive jeeps.”17

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To accomplish the construction of the first eight reservoirs, Scorup hired Emery Hunt from Mexican Hat and Angus Melvin “Puge” Stocks, who ran the farming operations at Dugout Ranch, and he obtained the financial support of William J. Morgan and the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service.11 As Frost later indicated, Hunt came “with his caterpillar tractor in 1947 and 1948 and knock[ed] down some of the bigger ledges on Elephant Hill. . . . It had four or five foot ledges and was just too tough for the stock to get over easily. . . . Emo[e]ry told me he went on over Elephant Hill building roads and reservoirs in Devil’s Kitchen, Devil’s Lane towards the Confluence and Chesler Park and Chesler Canyon.”12 Because Stocks hated to sleep overnight in the backcountry, he flew back

and forth from Dugout Ranch in his T Craft plane.13 Stocks initially cleared brush across the top of Elephant Hill for an airstrip (still visible today). Later, to access an airstrip he had put in at Chesler Park—near the Chesler Wash reservoir sites, Stocks created a dozer trail (following the cowboy horse path that had, in turn, followed a Native American trail) from Chesler Wash to Chesler Park.14 Chesler Park, thus, obtained its jeep road access solely to please Stocks so “he could be home in a good bed regularly.”15 The resultant short flights made unnecessary a tortuously long one-way four-hour jeep trip to the same general locations.

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from even October through April. Notably, the cost of this endeavor was minimal, as all that was needed was dozer access from Elephant Hill to the Grabens. The Devils Lane corridor would then allow reservoir construction throughout the Grabens. But in the waning years of Scorup’s cattle empire, “build[ing] stock watering tanks . . . is a story of frustration and mostly fatal problems.”10

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Unfortunately for Scorup’s plans, by the early 1950s it was evident that almost all of these stock tanks did not hold water. There were multiple causes for this. The dams themselves were earthen. Spillways were put in to allow excess water to flow over the dams during flooding episodes, but neither they nor the reservoirs were lined to prevent seepage or erosion.18 Moreover, Morgan at that time believed only one dam was built in an area where there was enough clay to hold water. Another reservoir (stock tank 7) was made too small and placed in a location that did not gather sufficient water. Importantly, the dams by Devils Lane were constructed too close to the graben itself. Grabens naturally enlarge width-wise as the brittle plate of sandstone upon which they exist fractures and slips toward the Colorado River.19 Stock tank 4, according to Morgan’s son, was “constructed directly over the slip plain of this graben. . . . It is no wonder this site did not store water.”20

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While all of these reservoirs failed, the clear result of this water-storing Sisyphean attempt in the Grabens was construction of the road over and down Elephant Hill, and widening the road at SOB Hill, thereby creating a path that a jeep could roam from Squaw Flat all the way to the South Grabens. This road eventually traversed the difficult Bobbys Hole into Beef Basin, the east side of Elk Ridge, and the length of Cottonwood Creek to Dugout Ranch.21 These latter extensions facilitated creation of many new reservoirs south of the Grabens and provided relatively easy access for trucks to deliver horses and men from Dugout Ranch to these grassland locations, significantly cutting the time required for cowboys to reach their cattle.22 And, critically, all of these roads predated the uranium frenzy that commenced in the summer of 1952.23

of the United States—the Grabens. Since 1931 and 1932 he had hosted dozens of rich eastern youths each summer at his 4-M Ranch near Monticello.24 His tours emphasized self-reliance and independence, cost $100 a day per person in the late 1940s, and involved a three-week horse excursion into the Needles region, the first of their kind and the only commercial visitations until Kent Frost’s jeep trips beginning in 1953.25

The ultimate beneficiaries to this road formation were the tourists who no longer had to rely on horses to navigate the narrow cattle and horse paths previously offering the only access to the Grabens. Fortuitously, just as the road was built, the jeeps of the post-WWII era became readily available, GIs were returning from the war eager for adventure, and people had increased time for leisure and travel again.

Musselman had come to Utah in 1929 to visit his famous brother Roy, the exemplar of western trapping and hunting, having killed the legendary Big Foot wolf in 1920. Employed by the Scorup outfit to hunt mountain lions and coyotes, Roy kept camps throughout the Needles.

Ross Musselman, after what was described as a period of poor health due to an “overworked condition” (he organized and supervised the Y.M.C.A.’s summer camps in New Jersey that served a thousand children a year), on the recommendation of his doctor, came to see his brother.26 The brothers explored the Needles, and Musselman immediately visualized the economic potential for a guest ranch experience for wealthy eastern youth. Musselman’s first guest ranch trip for young men was launched from Roy’s ranch in Monticello. (Roy came along the first two years as guide.) In 1933 Musselman moved his family to the 4-M ranch.27

Long before this juncture, it was Ross S. Musselman of Monticello who had provided guided entrance to the last uncharted, mapless region

The standard horse trip Musselman offered was glowingly written up in a two-part article in The Desert Magazine in 1949.28 The youth

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Current satellite view of Dams 2, 3, and 4 illustrating graben fissure and breaches by the stream. Google Earth.

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But the Musselman-guided horse trips into the Needles would soon pass with the advent of jeep access that Scorup had inadvertently created. There were several reasons for this switch.

Most critically, the replacement of horses by jeeps allowed the average tourist with limited time to make routine visits to the Grabens with an increase in both hours available for exploration and distances that could be covered.

Horseback trips, almost of necessity, were long, something the typical post-war tourist with two-week vacations could not accommodate.

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One of the first and most influential jeep trips into the Needles area was by Ray and Virginia Garner in June 1949. The importance of this trip was that it immediately induced Bates Wilson to visit the Needles (what Wilson called “the land in-between”). As Tug later indicated, Wilson “liked to learn what he did not know.”32 The Garner family arrived at Arches with an important letter from the NPS director just two months after Wilson had become superintendent. “Take good care of these people. They are important,” the letter read. The Garners were established, award-winning documentary film makers visiting the Southwest for the eventual creation of a film called The Desert. Importantly, both were experienced in the outdoors, capable pilots, and premier climbers. Ray had made several first ascents, including the north face of the Grand Teton and the volcanic, 6,825foot tall Agathlan in Monument Valley.33

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Additionally, riding twenty hours a day in a saddle was not what most tourists desired. Jeep travel could bring one into and out of the Needles for a rich experience in as little as a day.

Tug Wilson, Bates Wilson’s son, indicated that jeeps had eliminated the time to “water, feed, and saddle up the pack team, and get them all lined up for the trail, and then reverse that at night.” “With jeeps we cut off several hours of this. Just getting water for the horses . . . was always a challenge.” Camping near water would have been especially limiting in the Grabens.31 Warm weather visitations by jeep became commonplace and available to anybody with a fourwheel drive vehicle.

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(ranging in numbers from 12 to 50 or so and including girls beginning in 1934) departed from Monticello, passed Dugout Ranch, repaired to Squaw Flat for a couple of days, and visited the Confluence Overlook for a day trip through the Grabens. They then explored Salt Creek, rode to the Bears Ears, and sometimes visited Natural Bridges National Monument and Monument Valley. For these 500 mile trips, an average of twenty pack horses and mules carried supplies for a party of forty traveling twenty-five to thirty miles per day—a grueling experience for young men and women unaccustomed to the rigors of backcountry travel and camping.29 To attract clientele, Musselman spent his winter months back East lecturing on various aspects of Native American culture and the geological and scenic beauties of Utah. In San Juan County Musselman received praise for being “a one man Chamber of Commerce,” stimulating tourism in a county that remained in economic depression following the post-WWI fall in agricultural and cattle prices and the end to dry farming.30

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Ross Musselman with his usual pipe in the Needles. Courtesy Nancy Leavitt.

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The Garners’ excursions and film creations— and Wilson’s introduction to Canyonlands— were made possible through funding by the Harmon Foundation, established by the Cleveland businessman William E. Harmon in 1922.

It might seem ironic that Harmon, who had become wealthy by creating the concept of and developing subdivision suburban real estate, eventually helped preserve land in the Canyonlands area. On the other hand, the Harmon Foundation’s mission was to foster opportunities for disadvantaged students, minorities, and rural communities for the purpose of encouraging and stimulating self-help. Creating films to broaden the country’s understanding of these groups, the nation, and the world’s key natural and historic areas was integral to this plan. Harmon said, “the gift of land is the gift eternal. Churches will crumble. Libraries and art galleries will turn to dust, endowments become lost, but land will be ever ready to fulfill the purpose to which it is dedicated.”34 Wilson, with his usual alacrity and good will, quickly arranged for his Arches maintenance man Merle Winbourn to guide the Garners to the Needles area. Winbourn was chosen for several reasons: he owned a small green CJ2A jeep and was already familiar with the Grabens area as a deer hunter and a miner. Furthermore, hiking was an anathema to Winbourn. He would rather drive to a place than walk there.35 That meant that some road “modifications” might be necessary in remote areas. For these purposes, he always carried sufficient dynamite (useful also for his mining) for removing stubborn sandstone boulders that blocked the path of his egress. The Garners later claimed that the dynamite caps (“we were prepared to blast our way through if necessary”), stowed away under the seats, “presented the real danger”—“needless to say, we tried to bounce easy; an impossibility in the rough country we were entering.”36 Dynamite was also used to awaken the Garners one early morning, as Winbourn, an early riser, had become irritated with their inability to get going before late morning—an example of Merle’s “dry sense of humor.”37 All of these factors made Winbourn the perfect guide.

Key to this twelve-day trip into the deep backcountry of the Needles area was replenishing the Garners’ supplies. The small jeep driven by

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Winbourn carried both the Garners and himself, leaving little room for the necessary extra food. Wilson solved this problem by getting Stocks and Charles Di Peso to fly their planes with additional supplies into Chesler Park where they would meet up with the Garners.38 The Garners initiated their trip, driving from Moab to Dugout Ranch where they spent the night “poring over maps and plans.”39 The next day, according to Garner’s account, the party came into the Needles proper and went over Elephant Hill to Devils Lane: The way became increasingly rougher and we bounced all day, holding on so as not to be thrown out of the doorless jeep. . . . As we progressed the country became more and more spectacular.

Topping a high plateau [most likely Elephant Hill] we looked out over the region and knew why it had been called ‘impassable to anything [everything] but the winged bird.’ The scene was weird and lonely; fascinating in its strangeness. Uncounted canyons wind their way to the Colorado, cutting intricate patterns through the high mesas. . . . To the west the gigantic innumerable ‘Needles’ pointed rock fingers at the sky.40 Wilson, who hosted the Garners upon their return, heard firsthand about the geological beauties and archaeological wonders that the Needles area presented, sparking his interest in the area. Importantly, after seeing photographs taken by the Garners that they had developed in Moab (“great photos,” as indicated by Tug, Wilson’s son), Wilson wasted no time in quenching his desire to see the land for himself.41 That fall Stocks flew him over the region that became Canyonlands National Park, further stimulating Bates’ interest.42 Robert Dechert, one of Wilson’s wealthy cousins, a lawyer from Philadelphia, soon after inquired of Wilson as to what there was to see in southeast Utah. Dechert, a world traveler, agreed to fund a Musselman-guided horseback excursion into the Needles for that coming March. Wilson, with only a GS-9 rank and making little money as an NPS employee in 1950, was unable to afford Musselman’s hugely expensive trip involving horse rentals, the

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Garners’s jeep trip, June 1949. Puge Stock helped replenish their supplies in Chesler Park. Stocks has his back to photographer (Virginia Garner) and Ray Garner is to his right. Courtesy Gay Garner Macintosh.

food, and the salaries of Musselman and two horse wranglers.

He became an expert on everything about the Needles area with a passion and breadth that certainly fit his large and outgoing personality.45

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While the Musselman-guided trip started and ended in disaster, Wilson, Tug, and Dechert were still extremely impressed. Musselman had provided the opportunity to see the brilliance and the light of the Needles.46 As Tug later explained, “That trip really gave my father [Wilson] the on-ground overview that he so desperately was seeking. Going to the Confluence, crossing the grabens . . . [, riding] up Salt Creek and exploring some of the tributaries to that.”47

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Wilson’s first excursion into the Needles is a study of what could go wrong on a horse trip, adversity occurring in a most beautiful place.

Musselman took Wilson, Tug, and Dechert, on a ten-day shortened version of Musselman’s usual summer trip. Wilson severely regretted several aspects of it. Musselman had not properly weaned the horses off their winter feed.

This resulted in the horses becoming exhausted and essentially useless by the time they had only traversed halfway from Dugout Ranch to Squaw Flat. This cost them three days of travel as they were forced to wait for the horses to feed on real grass and get stronger again. A few days later, Musselman and his wranglers had not properly hobbled the pack horses, allowing them to run wild. This caused an extensive hunt for them, costing more time—surprisingly, a mistake Musselman repeated in other expeditions in 1949 and 1952.43 By the time they reached nearly the end of their trip in Upper Salt Creek at Cathedral Butte, they were short two days of provisions because Musselman had not properly fitted the lid to their Dutch oven food, allowing sand to get in. The last twenty-four to thirty-six hours of the trip involved a fifteen-mile tortuous walk in a blizzard down Cottonwood Canyon to Dugout Ranch, as the expected flatbed truck pickup could not reach them at Cathedral Butte because of the storm.44 Never again, Wilson vowed, would he allow someone else to guide him through this area.

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Ray Garner on old Jeep Road to Chesler Park. The Devils Pinnacles in the background. Photo by Virginia Garner. Courtesy Gay Garner Macintosh.

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Soon after in 1951, fourteen-year old Tug bought his first jeep, a used 1948 CJ2A with his earnings taking tourists on sightseeing excursions around Arches (Tug Wilsons Guide Service) and doing electrical work for the Moab Electric Company. Tug, as part of the Jack Mormon Boy Scout troop in Moab, had spent the previous winter with his fellow scouts pouring over aerial photos taken by the Air Force in 1940.

Fortunately, the flight had been at daybreak and there were impressive shadows cast across the area. They soon realized that the low angle of incident light would, of course, pass through any arches and create miniature black bounded white circles. With this methodology, they located what later would be named Angel Arch and several other arches. In May 1951, using Tug’s jeep and others lent by Moab residents, Wilson took Tug and the scouts into Salt Creek for what became an annual exploration to see

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the ruins and find some of the arches they had identified. Important to their consideration of taking jeeps into the Salt Creek river bed without complete knowledge of its difficulties and terrain was Tug’s astute observation from his 1950 trip with Musselman that “in many ways made for Dad’s [Wilson’s] exploration possible and that was what looked like Jeep tracks in the first part of Salt [Creek] near Cave S[s]pring.”48 Someone else had already been there and they could do it too.49

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In addition to the Boy Scout explorations, Wilson did many pro bono trips into the backcountry, and he engaged the archaeologist Alice P. Hunt to investigate archaeological sites in Horse Canyon that, in turn, led to Jack Rudy’s seminal study of other sites in nearby Beef Basin.50 These latter endeavors popularized the importance of the Needles area for studies of ancient Native American use of southeast Utah.

These explorations and trips that Tug separately sponsored eventually led to Wilson’s critical realization: “I don’t know exactly what he [Wilson] said but it was along the lines that this ought to be a [National] park.”51 Although these jeep trips to the Grabens via Elephant Hill sound more comfortable than the horse trips that preceded them, that was not always the case. Edgar F. Kleiner, who was experienced with tractors and all manners of farming vehicles (beginning at the age of 12 in the muds of southern Illinois) and who later did seminal studies on the grasslands of the Chesler Park and Grabens area, summed up his thirteen jeep trips that he took in the late 1960s and 1970s: The backside of Elephant Hill is forward and back switchbacks. On one early trip we were delayed at the top for best of a half day. Some nut thought he could turn [instead of backing down], and in doing so just gently rolled his vehicle over down to the next level.

Rangers had ropes galore stabilizing the thing so it didn’t roll any further, then with block and tackle, winches, etc. had to right the thing so a ranger could drive it out. A Canyonlands vehicle must have maximum power while just barely crawling in compound low.

One’s life is completely in the hands of the brake and gears. I know this must

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sound wild but there are a couple of grades up which the incline is so steep all you see is the center of your hood.

You just aim straight, keep going and hope for the best.

As to accidents he had experienced, Kleiner said he was pretty lucky: One trip I blew a tire and bent the rim on the last incline coming out to the top.

One close spot is at SOB Hill, the turn midway between the upper and lower graben valleys. It’s a very steep, close S turn and without great care you can jam your vehicle in. If it happens, jack one end up, and pry it over. The only safe way again, is forward, then back, but dangerous because it’s so steep.

Brakes won’t hold, just gears and more or less slide down. One trip we hit the oil pan, a fairly good leak. We were on the way in for a week, not too far from camp at Bobby Jo [in Butler Flat]. Put a coffee can under, hammered the thing close as possible, poured the oil back in daily. A dash out for Moab and made it.

As I read this over it sounds crazy and you must be saying, this has to be an exaggeration!52 gh While Wilson was taking his excursions into the basically unknown Needles, jeeping into the Grabens became common once Scorup’s dozer tracks had been put in place. No one more than Kent Frost, the first jeep guide into the Needles, exemplified the efflorescence of relatively easy access to the area. Frost, from Monticello, helped out on his family’s Depression-era farm that grew dry land beans to supplement their diet of deer meat. There he stumbled on Native American artifacts, spurring his interest in the region’s history and geography: “It had special meaning because we were living on the same land that the Indians had occupied a thousand years before.” Frost ended up collecting the knowledge and experience of the Canyonlands region: “I just spent a great deal of my time just wandering around through the country.”53 Beginning in 1940, after listening to years of cowboy tales about the Needles and with few

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Frost’s commercial jeeping did not begin until he had a fateful conversation with Mary Beckwith on a Cataract Canyon river trip guided by Frost. Since 1938, he had worked for Norman Nevills, running the Green and Colorado rivers from Wyoming to Lake Mead and the Salmon River in Idaho to Lewiston through the “horrible Hell’s Canyon of no return.” On these trips he met a lot of nice people. “They were the same type of people that liked to take jeep trips too,” Frost recalled. “In the fall of 1953 Mary Beckwith and some of the people who I was on the Cataract Canyon river trip with at the time wondered how they could get out into the Needles and see some of that top country. I says, ‘Oh, I have a jeep. I will take you.’ They started talking it up on the river trip. That September we had about nine passengers to go on our first jeep trip [three to four jeeps total were used] out through the Needles.”55

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Because there were no other area tour guides until after the establishment of the national park, when the National History decided in 1954 to do what became a widely influential piece on the Needles in the future Canyonlands area, it was Frost they asked to guide them around.58 Frost, with his extensive knowledge of the area, became central (a “jeep herder” as Wilson called him) to the 1959 and 1960 NPS expeditions exploring the feasibility of a national park. In the 1960 trip, NPS park planner Leo Diederich told Wilson that the whole rimto-rim area of the Needles, the Maze, Indian Creek, Dugout Ranch, and the Island in the Sky—“the entire erosion basin, from the top of the Wingate cliffs to the level of the rivers”— should be part of the park.59 Diederich was even the first to name it: Canyonlands. Frank Jensen, an invited photographer on these study trips, had this to say about Frost and Wilson: “In the beginning, I found Frost as stoic as a cigar store Indian, the complete opposite of Bates Wilson, whose gregarious ways put us immediately at ease. Later I was to discover in Kent, lurking beneath an impassive façade, something of a practical joker with a very wry sense of humor.”60 In April 1964, Frost and Fern led a large group, including dignitaries, into Chesler Park.61 Utah senators Bob Bennett and Frank Moss, Utah governor George Dewey

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Initially “Kent Frost Canyonlands Tours,” Frost secured clients through his previous river contacts, and advertisements in local western magazines such as Western Gateways, Desert Magazine, and Sunset. Frost’s business grew with referrals from repeat clients: “a lot of the people who came with us on our tours were reading our advertisements. And they were the type of people who liked to go out camping in rugged country and explore things.”56 At $25 a day per person on a camping trip (the price in 1962, much less than that offered by Musselman a decade earlier), the Frost tours saw increased business, necessitating vehicles larger than almost all of the other jeepers who were then coming through. Frost had to do some of his own “reconstructions” of the road to make it easier for his vehicles to navigate the various large steps and inclines. Before the tourist season he used cement to fill in difficult spots, and in Chesler Wash he dug out and reconfigured sections.57

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provisions, Frost said that he “would go hiking out in the country and stay for a week or two [for shelter he had a six feet square canvas].”

On one such hike he even ran into Roy Musselman near Elephant Hill who scared Frost nearly “to death” by sneaking behind him and howling like a coyote. Frost later indicated that Roy had been out there so long that “when one pants wore out he just threw another pair right over them, wearing up to three pairs at one time.” Following a stint in the Navy during the war, Frost continued his walking explorations of the Needles area. In May 1949, after marrying his wife, Fern, Frost took her in his Model A Ford all around with his dog that he later said “would ride on that little shelf behind—it was a coupe model—right behind there, with his chin on my shoulder. . . . We started up Elephant Hill, and it powered out, that old car. So, I had Fern and the dog get out and walk up Elephant Hill. I backed up, and took a big run at it and we drove that right up on top of Elephant Hill and down [that is, over to] the west side. So we stopped there and looked around and walked down that where it’s the steepest and decided we couldn’t get our Ford car back up that way.

We had to camp on top of Elephant Hill.”54 After that failure to get into the Grabens, Frost bought a CJ2A civilian type jeep and used it to explore the Needles country. Ever generous, he and Fern took a lot of friends from 1949 to 1953 into the area for free.

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Kent Frost, left, and Bates Wilson in motion, front, at Squaw Flat, probably during the May 11 to 22, 1959, Needles study trip.

Canyonlands National Park, folder 36552, photo no. 259. Courtesy NPS/ Southeast Utah Group.

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Clyde, and the Interior secretary Stewart Udall were among those guided by Frost in the early 1960s. Udall and Moss were most critical in helping to marshal national and, especially, congressional support to pass the legislation for Canyonlands’s establishment.62 Frost, with the aid of his wife Fern, created a rich and varied experience with these tours, garnering support for park status. Even in 1956, just as Wilson was sending his letter to the NPS recommending Canyonlands as a national park, the Frosts guided the prominent businessman, philanthropist, and conservationist Frank Masland on a tour. Masland became an enthusiastic proselytizer for the national park. “We recommended to all of our guests who went out there that it should have park status and if they felt like doing something to write to their congressman about it,” the Frosts recalled.63 Fern, in the 1962 congressional hearings on the creation of Canyonlands National Park (Kent was out on a hiking trip), testified in favor of a large national park (“the bigger, the better”)—even without the multiple use desired by ranchers.64 Over a twenty-year period the Frosts alone took some 250 to 300 trips into the area.65 In contrast, Musselman in two decades took fifty-five trips.66 The jeeping experience cost far less than Musselman’s and was open to anyone with a four-wheel drive vehicle even without the Frosts’ guidance. In vast contrast to the

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touristy drive-through extravaganza of Arches National Monument, the vision advanced by Frost melded with Wilson’s initial and abiding motivation to make Canyonlands a jeep and hiking park. As Tug Wilson later wrote: I don’t know that my dad [Wilson] actually sat down and formulated a strategy or a vision. I don’t think he was that kind of person, but he had an instinct, and that’s somewhat remarkable in the sense that he had an idea what he thought was good for the land and not good for the land. And good for the land did not mean locking people out. . . . He thought people needed access. But they needed access in a way in which they did not harm or damage the land. He would not be in favor of off-road vehicles tearing things up.

And when we used jeeps, the idea was to stay in the track to get to the end of the trail where you couldn’t go any further and [then] hike. The jeep provided access to it. He thought people needed access to enjoy and to see, but not access to the point of destroying what you’re going to see.67 gh The Needles area remains as Wilson described it, a direct result of Scorup’s ill-founded

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From 1956 until 1959, the year of his death at age 81, Scorup had become nearly incapacitated and was in and out of hospitals frequently.75 Because his only direct heirs were six daughters (who all lived elsewhere and who were uninvolved in the company), the inheritance of the supervision of his domain fell to his hired foremen. But as one of his foremen indicated, “Scorup didn’t teach anybody to take over.”76 He had produced a group of foremen as “great cattle managers” but had “failed to bring on board a younger man” with “the entrepreneurial capabilities needed to be his eventual replacement.”77 All his life he had ruled his cattle concerns and then his empire single-handedly in a domineering fashion with no lieutenants and advisors primed to assume command upon his death. After his death, no one stepped forward to take control—or to carry on his resistance to national park designation. At the 1962 congressional hearings, no one from Dugout Ranch spoke. Redd’s son, Hardy, gave a speech favoring park designation as a simple recreation area, small in size, with grazing use intact.78 Critically, Dugout Ranch was extremely valuable, and Scorup’s heirs and others with sizeable shares of the empire seemed more intent on taking their

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By this time, Scorup had become aged, affecting the local intransigence to the park’s formation. He was no longer the man of 1936 who had helped scuttle the Escalante National Monument proposal—a proposal that included the Canyonlands region.69 At that time, in a rare consonance, he had agreed with his arch-competitor and enemy, Charlie Redd, an entrepreneur and renaissance man who ran a large sheep and cattle outfit near the La Sal Mountains.70 Both were strongly against the federal government favoring tourism to dull the vacillations of an often boom-bust local economy at the expense of resource use of the area.71 The government was to be resisted so that these federal domains would be left alone for cattle and sheep interests.72 Redd commented in 1936 at the local meeting that so discouraged federal efforts to gain support for this proposal that “sometimes we overvalue this tourist business” and “feel there are a great many tourists . . . who feel that . . . livestock afford a nice

attraction.”73 Utah government officials, such as Governor Henry Blood, concurred. Blood in 1940 said, “Some morning we may wake up and find that . . . the Escalante Monument has been created by Presidential proclamation, and then it will be too late to forestall what we in Utah think would be a calamity.”74

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attempt to bring drought to its knees for an area he wished to retain for cattle use.68 Scorup’s efforts to extend the duration of his cattle use in the Grabens directly contributed to the “discovery,” visitation, and study of the region by tourists, conservationists, local and national legislators, and scientists. The ease by which individuals accessed the region, coupled with the tours presented by Frost and the excursions and investigations by the Wilsons, popularized and substantiated the need for turning this deliriously strange geological region into a national park.

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Cattle roundup by ScorupSommerville Cattle Company in Butler Flat, Canyonlands National Park, March 1965. Cattle grazing was allowed in Canyonlands until 1974, but ended around 1966. Photo

by James Randall. Canyonlands National Park, folder 21457.

Courtesy NPS/Southeast Utah Group.

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money from it and moving on than maintaining such a large and complicated business.79

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Redd, seizing on this opportunity and just as the legislation to establish Canyonlands wound its way through Congress, made overtures to purchase Scorup’s cattle company after several others failed to buy it (he actually helped run it in the early 1960s during the vacuum that followed Scorup’s demise).80 He finally bought it all in 1965 for $2.1 million. Redd was only interested, however, in a small portion of this large domain: Geyser Pasture close to his lands near La Sal. As to the rest of the holdings, including all of the Dugout Ranch area, Redd intended to sell to other ranching interests. Redd may have seen it as just desserts to have Dugout Ranch possibly eviscerated by losing the Grabens for its winter grazing area.81 Eventually, Robert Redd (another of Charlie’s sons) and his new wife Heidi took over a reduced but manageable cattle company at Dugout.82 Later, in 1997, Heidi, after her divorce from her husband, allowed the Nature Conservancy to purchase Dugout Ranch so as to become a research center, thus preserving this inimitable gateway to Canyonlands for all time, and to remain a functioning cattle ranch at least as long as Heidi lived.83 Scorup’s efforts to maintain the Grabens as a grazing area failed, just as his dams, his health, and “his dream for a multi-generational [Scorup-owned] cattle ranch” had failed.84 Other individuals rose to speak contrariwise of what use the Needles area should be put to.

They had come, via jeep and foot, and had experienced with their own bodies a unique creation of geological and prehistoric importance that no one man should control, listened with their own ears to a silence in nature that had vanished in almost all of the rest of the country, and seen with their own eyes a night sky where all the stars and hopes of the universe could become visible again.

Notes I especially want to thanks James I. Morgan, Tug Wilson, Nancy Leavitt, Chris Goetze, and Peekay Briggs for providing materials critical for this article.

1. Arthur A. Baker, Notebooks 1927, volume 100059, U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado; Arthur A. Baker, “Geology and Oil Possibilities of the Moab District, Grand and San Juan Counties, Utah,” U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 841 (1933): 1–95.

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2. William L. Chenoweth, “Uranium deposits of the Canyonlands,” in Four Corners Geological Society Guidebook 8th Conference, Canyonlands 1975 (Four Corners Geological Society, 1975); Larry L. Meyer, U-Boom on the Colorado Plateau, American Heritage 32, no. 4 (1981): https://www.americanheritage.com/time-great -fever; Lloyd M. Pierson, “The Canyonlands New Park Studies at Canyonlands National Park, 1959 and 1960, and Events Leading Up to Them,” Canyon Legacy 3 (Fall 1989): 6–14.

3. Ray and Virginia Garner, “Land of the Standing Rocks,” Arizona Highways (May 1950): 15–23.

4. Kent and Fern Frost, interview by Gary Cox and Bill Booker, February 1994, Eastern Utah Human History Library; Kent and Fern Frost, interview by Lloyd Pierson, March 28, 1994, CANY 40013, Canyonlands National Park Administrative Collection, Southeast Utah Group Archives, National Park Service, Moab, Utah (hereafter Canyonlands Collection); Kent Frost, interview by Albert Page, July 20, 1973, Utah State Historical Society Southeastern Utah Oral History Project; San Juan Record, July 25, 2008; Kent Frost, interview

by Clyde L. Denis and Michael D. Denis, March 2010, in possession of the author.

5. John F. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails of San Juan: The Ranching Legacy of J.A. (Al) Scorup (Provo, UT: privately published, 2002), copy available at the Utah State Historical Society.

6. Vallentine. For information on the Indian Creek Cattle Company, see Clyde L. Denis, “Fallout from the Demise of the Large Cattle Companies of Late NineteenthCentury Southeast Utah: The Economic Ascendency of Moab,” Journal of the West, 53 (2014): 43–53; Clyde L. Denis, “Departure of the Late Nineteenth Century Cattle Companies from Southeastern Utah: A Reassessment,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80 (2012): 354–73.

7. Denis, “Fallout from the Demise of the Large Cattle Companies”; Denis, “Departure of the Late Nineteenth Century Cattle Companies”; Clyde L. Denis, “The Origins of Chesler Park: Determining Late 19th Century Snowfall Records and Occupations of Inscription Writers in Canyonlands National Park,” Canyon Legacy 69 (Autumn 2010): 2-9.

8. Heidi Redd, interviews by the author, 2014 to 2019, in possession of the author; David Lavender, One Man’s West: New Edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977). Scorup had his principal homes first in Bluff and then in the 1930s in Moab and Provo.

9. Richard Hereford, Robert H. Webb, and Scott Graham, “Precipitation History of the Colorado Plateau Region, 1900–2000,” USGS Fact Sheet, 119–02 (2002): 1–4; Chris D. Wilkowske, David V. Allen, and Jeff V. Phillips, “Drought Conditions in Utah during 1999–2002: A Historical Perspective,” USGS Fact Sheet, 037–03 (2003): 1–6; Denis, “Origins of Chesler Park.”

10. James I. Morgan, “A Brief History of the Stock Watering Tanks in the Needles Area of Canyonlands National Park” 2009, copy in author’s possession.

11. Kent Frost, interview by Richard Negri, chapter 10 of unpublished book (1990), 156–67; “A Chronology of Local Aviation Events,” Canyon Legacy 30 (1997): 30.

Stocks was a well-known bulldozer operator. See Michael R. Kelsey, Hiking, Biking and Exploring Canyonlands National Park and Vicinity, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: Kelsey Publishing, 2013), 378–87; Redd, interview.

12. Frost, interview by Richard Negri.

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26. Edna Pass, “A Twentieth Century Pioneer,” 1–12, A2370, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. Musselman’s condition has been described as “about [having] had a nervous breakdown,” as the pressure of working for the YMCA “was pretty great.” Carl Mahon, interview by Steve Allen, January 30, 2002. See also Nancy Leavitt, interviews.

27. San Juan Record, August 18, 1932; San Juan Record, August 25, 1932; San Juan Record, July 7, 1937; Marie M. Ogden, “Annual Trek to Musselman Lodge Creates Activity,” San Juan Record, July 28, 1938; Ernie Pyle, “Easterner Lauds San Juan Mountains and Early Pioneers,” San Juan Record, August 3, 1939; Richard, “4-M Ranch Guests Return from Long Trek Over Mts.,” San Juan Record, August 24, 1942; Buckley Jensen, “The Giants of San Juan, Ross W. [sic] Musselman: Promoter, Cowboy Known as Father of Canyonlands,” San Juan Record, July 2, 2008. These lectures involved showing reels of moving pictures and lantern slide shows, passing leaflets out, and engaging in lengthy discussions with the audiences. San Juan Record, August 17, 1933; San Juan Record, August 30, 1934; San Juan Record, January 27, 1938; “Last Frontier in United States Described to Kiwanians,” Courier News (Bridgewater, NJ), May 14, 1950.

28. Randall Henderson, “19 Days on Utah Trails,” Desert Magazine, October 1949, 5–11; Randall Henderson, “19 Days on Utah Trails,” Western Gateways, November 1949, 19–25.

29. Pass, “A Twentieth-Century Pioneer.”

30. San Juan Record, February 20, 1936. For economic conditions in the county, see Denis, “Fallout from the Demise of the Large Cattle Companies” and “Departure of Late Nineteenth-Century Cattle Companies.

31. Alan Wilson, interviews. It is no wonder that Frost eventually sold his horse concession for Canyonlands in the late 1960s to Pete Steele while still maintaining his jeep concession. Steele was the son of Percy, Scroup’s wrangler who had provisioned the Baker group in 1927 at Squaw Flat. See Baker, Notebooks.

32. Alan D. (Tug) Wilson, “What Motivated Bates to Create Canyonlands National Park?” personal document, 2006.

33. Gay Garner Mackintosh, personal documents.

34. G. E. Myers, “Some Myths about Harmon-Burke and Their Field,” The Historical Times: Newsletter of the Granville, Ohio, Historical Society 10 (Fall 1996): 1–9.

The Harmon Foundation supported African American artists and was the first agency to provide loans to students for college attendance in the late 1920s (several decades before the federal government did so). Gary A. Reynolds and Beryl J. Wright, Against the Odds: African American Artists and the Harmon Foundation (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1989); Harmon Foundation, Trends and Procedures in Student Loans (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1932).

35. Alan Wilson, interviews.

36. Garners, “Land of the Standing Rocks.”

37. Alan Wilson, interviews.

38. Di Peso was a noted archaeologist from the Amerind Foundation who had known the Garners since 1937 when they were all part of the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley Expedition.

39. Garners, “Land of the Standing Rocks.”

40. Garners. The quote “impassible to everything . . .” is from U.S. Army, Report of the Exploring Expedition

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13. Kelsey, Exploring Canyonlands National Park.

14. Alan (Tug) Wilson, interviews by Clyde L. Denis, 2009 to 2019, in possession of the author; Alan (Tug) Wilson, interview with Sam Schmiedling, n.d., CANY 36607, Canyonlands Collection; Alan Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles: An Idea Takes Shape,” Canyon Legacy 3 (Fall 1989): 4–8; Tug (Alan) Wilson, “Outline/Notes to Bates Wilson Steak Dinner Discussions, Needles District, April 25th, 2005,” copy in author’s possession.

15. Morgan, “Stock Watering Tanks.”

16. Angus (Puge) Stocks, interview by Michael R. Kelsey, before 1989. It was illegal to put the road and reservoirs into the Needles area; see Acts Prohibited on Public Lands, Code of Federal Regulation 43 § 4140.1, https:// www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/43/4140.1. According to Lee A. Bennett, “by 1951 the BLM . . . , expressing its consternation over the unauthorized bulldozer work,” had informed Scorup “that he notify them in the future before he started work on a project.” Lee A. Bennett, interviews with Clyde L. Denis, 2009 and 2020. Morgan’s son indicated that his father’s dislike of the BLM probably induced him to support Scorup’s unauthorized work. James I. Morgan, interview with Clyde L. Denis, 2020.

17. Frank Cox, “Canyonland Safari,” Western Gateways, March 1969, 38.

18. Morgan, in particular, “expressed doubts about the location of all these sites except the one in Elephant Canyon. . . . Indeed, aerial photographs of the Needles area taken in the early 1950’s show standing water in this reservoir.” Morgan, “Stock Watering Tanks.”

19. Clyde L. Denis, “Hypothesis: The pinnacles of the Chesler Park/Grabens region of Canyonlands National Park result from paleostream induration and inverted topographical relief,” in Geology of Utah’s Far South: Utah Geological Association Publication, ed. J. S. MacLean, R. F. Bief, and J. E. Huntoon (Salt Lake City: Utah Geological Association, 2014), 43:25–38.

20. Morgan, “Stock Watering Tanks.”

21. Baker, “Geology and oil possibilities.” In 1927 the road from Dugout Ranch extended only halfway up Cottonwood, ending at Goudelock’s ranch.

22. Maxine Newell, “Canyonlands,” Naturalist 21 (1979): 40–47.

23. U.S. Department of Energy, Summary History of Domestic Uranium Procurement under U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Contracts: Final Report, by Holger Albrethsen, Jr. and Frank E. McGinley, September 1982. From July 1952 to January 1953 Moab’s population doubled within six months. The earlier Atomic Energy Commission’s circulars beginning in April 11, 1948, guaranteed per-ton pricing on uranium and offered special bonuses. Prior to this the economic dynamics of southeast Utah meant slow growth: from 1940 (1084 people) to 1950 (1274) or from 1950 to 1952 there had been no significant changes in Moab’s population. See Tom H. Watkins, Redrock Chronicles: Saving Wild Utah (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Raye Ringholz, Uranium Frenzy: Saga of the Nuclear West (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002). It is unlikely that any early, not-yet-rich prospector prior to July 1952 put roads into the area.

24. “Services Held Wednesday for Ross. S. Musselman,” Times Independent (Moab), August 20, 1964.

25. Nancy Leavitt, interviews by the author, 2018–2019, in possession of the author.

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from Santa Fé, New Mexico, to the Junction of the Grand and Green Rivers of the Great Colorado of the West in 1859 under the command of Capt. J. N. Macomb. With Geological Report by J.S. Newberry. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876).

41. Wilson, interview by Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson.

42. Richard F. Negri, “Bates E. Wilson: Conservationist— First, Last, and Always,” 87–94, unpublished book, fd.

315, Canyonlands Collection.

43. Wilson, interview by Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson; Henderson, “19 Days on Utah Trails”; Mark Beeson, interview by the author, 2018; Bob Dunnagan, interviews by the author, 2014 to 2018. At best, this error may have been normal for cattlemen, with even the seasoned foreman of the Scorup TY outfit, Harve Williams, routinely assigning one cowboy at daybreak each day to go round-up the horses. Harve Williams, interview, 1973, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University,

by Gregory Maynard.

44. Wilson, interview with Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson. This was another Musselman error in that even today that route is very seldom open until the mid-spring weather has melted all the snow on the numerous north-facing parts of the road (this is irrespective of any blizzard) and dried the impassible mud at other locations. Navtec personnel, interviews by the author, 2016 to 2018.

45. Wilson, interview with Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson; Frank Jenson, “A “Civilian Perspective on the First Study Trip,” Canyon Legacy, 3 (Fall 1989): 15–17.

46. B. Musselman, interview by the author, 2018; M. Beeson, interview. Curiously, Musselman, who supposedly knew the Needles area based on his own explorations, his brother’s experiences, and the information from the Scorup cowboys, had not taken them to see Angel Arch, Horse Canyon, or the rock art jewels of Salt Creek, such as the Four Faces and the All-American Man (all areas that later became premier tourist attractions). While Tug Wilson later considered Musselman unknowledgeable about the Needles District, not an explorer, and only in it for the money, in fact, Musselman knew of these places, except for Angel Arch, and had routinely visited them on previous trips. Every year in the 1940s Musselman’s summer youth trips would stop at different places, and they always would visit the Four Faces and All-American Man. See N. Leavitt, interview; M. Beeson, interview. Why Musselman did not show these highlights in March 1950 is probably a result of a time crunch due to the earlier mishaps in the trip. Musselman’s known hatred of Wilson appeared to have developed later. B. Musselman interview.

47. Alan Wilson, interviews; Wilson, interview by Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson.

48. Wilson, interview by Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson. Bates Wilson did not purchase his own jeep until 1961. His low GS rank at

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Arches and, hence, salary may have been partly due to his lacking even a high school degree. Pierson, “New Park Studies.” Wilson, after failing several classes, had dropped out of the Lawrenceville School in the last semester of his senior year and repaired back to his home in Silver City. Student Records, Lawrenceville School, in author’s personal collection.

49. This “someone else” was at least Raymond Hawks and Lloyd Holyoak of Moab who beginning in 1948 had been driving up Salt Creek in a used 1945 Willys Jeep recovering Native American artifacts for the purpose of saving them from destruction by Scorup’s cowboys and the incessant looting by local pothunters. Holyoak’s collection, in turn, unfortunately, was later stolen, most likely by a neighbor or relative. Lloyd Holyoak, interview by Steve Allen, December 5, 2002; Lloyd Holyoak, interview by Milton Shoemaker, March 14, 2003; Kay Hawks, interview by Clyde L. Denis, 2019; Lloyd Holyoak, interviews by the author, 2018 and 2019.

50. Alice P. Hunt and Bates E. Wilson, “Archaeological Sites in the Horse Canyon Area, San Juan County, Utah,” 1952, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Jack Rudy, “Archaeological Excavations in Beef Basin, Utah,” University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 20 (1956). For pro bono trips into the backcountry, see W. G. Carroll, “Jeep Trail into Utah’s Rugged Needles Country,” Desert Magazine (November 1956): 5–9. Tug was also present as a guide, along with his father, in the seminal visit by National Geographic in 1956 in the exploration of the Needles area (not published as a very influential article until 1962): W. Robert Moore, “Cities of Stone in Utah’s Canyonland,” National Geographic, 121 (1962): 652-677.

51. Alan Wilson, interviews.

52. Edgar F. Kleiner, interviews by the author, 2014 to 2018.

53. Frosts, interview by Cox and Booker; Frosts, interview

by Pierson; Frost, interview by Page; San Juan Record, 2008.

54. Frosts, interview by Cox and Booker; Frosts, interview

by Pierson; Frost, interview by Page; San Juan Record, 2008; Frost, interview by author, 2010.

55. Frosts, interview by Pierson.

56. Frosts, interview by Pierson.

57. A. Wilson, interviews, 2009 to 2019. While the concrete ramps are viewed by some as a desecration, even today their remains help jeepers navigate the roads.

58. Joyce Rockwood Muench, “Threading Utah’s Needles,” Natural History (December 1954): 457–63. The other major jeeping guide starting in 1964 was Mitch Williams, who ran Tag-A-Long-Expeditions. Frost felt that Tag-A-Long was just that, following his groundbreaking steps. He complained in his early interviews how there really was insufficient business for two tour companies, which might have engendered some antagonism between Williams and the Frosts. Fern referred to “Mitch the Bitch” routinely (Frost, interview by the author), and Williams was not above stealing the leaflets of his competitors that were at the Moab airport (L. Ottinger, interview by the author, March 2021).

On the other hand, Frost “was a big-time womanizer according to NPS female rangers,” even going as far as suggesting to females on each of his jeep trips that they should share his sleeping bag. Frost, interview by the author; L. Ottinger, interview by the author, March 2012; Alan Wilson, interviews.

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ownership of Geyser Pasture so valuably adjacent to Redd’s La Sal outfit that ran sheep. Scorup had refused ever to have sheep on his land and was vehemently opposed to their presence. In 1919 and 1923, during the nadir of the livestock industry in southeast Utah, Scorup pulled his money out of the La Sal Livestock Company (run by Redd), which surely left Redd in treacherous straights for many years. When Goudelock and Green were selling the last vestige of their Indian Cattle Creek Cattle Company properties, they refused to sell it to the very eager Charlie Redd because he did not bank at their First National Bank in Moab. They sold these valuable lands instead to Scorup. Other frictions involved Redd’s sheep trespasses on Scorup land, and Scorup’s partner Bill Somerville’s arrest for purportedly poisoning Redd’s sheep (Somerville died soon after his arrest, apparently from stress). Thus, Scorup would have “turned over in his grave” had he known that Redd, over the next two years after his purchase of Dugout Ranch in 1965 and before Robert and Heidi took it over, “just as an experiment,” had sheep running at the Dugout. M. Beeson, interview.

71. Denis, “Fallout from the Demise of the Large Cattle Companies.”

72. Richardson, “Federal Park Policy in Utah”; Newell and Barnes, Untold History of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

73. Minutes of meeting at Price, Utah, June 9, 1936, 12, box 1, fd. 11, State Planning Board Proposed Escalante National Monument records, Series 22028, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah.

74. Richardson, “Federal Park Policy in Utah.”

75. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails.

76. Williams, interview by Gregory Maynard.

77. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails.

78. Proposed Canyonlands National Park, testimony of Charles Hardy Redd, 277–83.

79. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails.

80. Vallentine.

81. Richardson, “Federal Park Policy in Utah”; Newell and Barnes, Untold History of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

82. Charlie Redd was also antagonistic to Robert and Heidi’s purchase of Dugout Ranch due to his interest in having all eight of his children be intimately involved in the maintenance and running of his La Sal outfit. After a close family vote the ranch landed in the hands of Robert and Heidi. Luckily for the national park, as stewards of this magnificent entry they later were in position to resist Ralph Lauren’s, Christie Brinkley’s, and others’ efforts to turn Dugout Ranch into a huge subdivision of resort homes with their concomitant welter of paved roads, boutiques, and exurbian debris, something even William Harmon would have opposed.

83. Heidi Redd, interviews.

84. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails.

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59. Lloyd M. Pierson, “New Park Studies.” These trips were led by Leslie P. Arnberger and Paul V. Wykert of the Santa Fe Regional Office.

60. Jenson, “First Study Trip.”

61. Frosts, interview by Cox and Booker; Frosts, interview

by Pierson.

62. Clyde L. Denis, “Closing the Road to Chesler Park: How Access to Canyonlands National Park Became Limited,” Utah Historical Quarterly 84 (Winter 2016): 328–46.

63. Frosts, interview by Cox and Booker; Frosts, interview

by Pierson.

64. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Public Lands of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Proposed Canyonlands National Park in in Utah: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Public Lands of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 87th Cong., 2nd sess. on S.2387, March 29 and 30, 1962, 363, testimony of Fern Frost, director, Monticello Chamber of Commerce, 217–19. Although the Frosts were from Monticello and she represented the Monticello Chamber of Commerce, the Frosts’ views were the opposite of almost all Monticelloans and at least about half of the people from Moab who wanted both smaller and separated national parks for Canyonlands with guaranteed multiple use such as cattle grazing, something national parks do not accede to. It should be mentioned that Musselman at the same hearings spoke strongly in favor of multiple use for Canyonlands. In this case, Kent Frost, a native Monticelloan, appeared as if he were from an urban, environmentally progressive community interested solely in preserving the Canyonlands region, while Musselman, the urban easterner, sounded like a local southeast Utahn wanting also to open it up for whatever resource could best provide economic advantage. See Denis, “Closing the Road to Chesler Park.”

65. Frosts, interview by Cox and Booker; Frosts, interview

by Pierson; Frost, interview by Page; San Juan Record, 2008.

66. “Services for Musselman,” Times Independent, 1964.

67. Alan Wilson interviews; Wilson, interview by Schmiedling; Wilson, “Early Trips in the Needles”; Wilson, “Outline/Notes”; Wilson, interview by Pierson.

68. Denis, “Closing the Road to Chesler Park.”

69. Elmo R. Richardson, “Federal Park Policy in Utah: The Escalante National Monument Controversy of 1935– 1940,” Utah Historical Quarterly 33 (1965): 127; Maxine Newell and Terby Barnes, The Untold History of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Canyon Country Series, No. 53 (Canyon Country Publications, 1998).

70. Vallentine, Lonesome Trails; M. Beeson, interviews, and H. Greager, interviews by the author, 2014; Hardy Redd, interview, 2010. Redd and Scorup had a long running feud. The antagonism partly involved Scorup’s

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Ever since travel by rail began more than two centuries ago, artists have been lured to its picturesque qualities. When the English painter J. M. W. Turner depicted the railways in 1844, for example, he captured a newfound beauty that symbolized a burgeoning modern age (fig. 1). The lure of the rails was particularly potent in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and into the next century when the pictorial elements of steel, steam, and speed became irresistible, attracting a diverse cadre of artists like Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, Alfred Stieglitz, and many more.

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Behind the Scene: Zach Proctor’s Paintings of the Railmen

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Although there are numerous exceptions, traditionally pictures of the railroad employ similar, distinctive tropes. Whether through paintings, photographs, or other means, many images seem to feature darkened trains charging through a landscape or people waiting patiently on the quay of a station.1 Rails create natural orthogonals, dynamic lines leading to a vanishing point that structure a picture’s composition. Add a bellowing column of steam rising into the air from a mass of patterned steel, and the image of a mechanized, rhythmic form becomes even more dramatic.

In most railroad pictures, human beings are secondary in importance.

In his imagery of American industry, for example, Sheeler emphasized machinery and technology and rarely included human figures.

In contrast to others, Utah artist Zachary Proctor (born 1976) takes a different approach to the rails. Rather than focus on the more obvious and typical depictions of the railroad, he paints individuals who are rarely the focus of a painting or a photograph. This introduction to Proctor’s work highlights his railway paintings, with particular emphasis on his depictions of the men who tirelessly worked behind the scenes to keep the iron horses moving (fig. 2). Proctor is interested in an ever widening range of subject matter, from masked sea divers to race cars, but his series on the railroad has become a particularly important part of his oeuvre. Featured originally at the Terzian Gallery in Park City, Utah, in 2017, two years later Proctor’s railroad paintings were included in several statewide exhibitions commemorating the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad’s completion at Promontory in 1869.

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Figure 1. J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844. oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, London.

Historically the worker is rarely depicted in railway imagery. Artistic representations of the industry have nearly always followed a top-down approach. Images of locomotives, speed, and power have always been more enticing—thought to be more worthy of study—than mechanics, engineers, and those who work along the line. As the American studies scholar Leo Marx argued, “Technological power overwhelms the solitary man; the landscape convention calls for his presence to provide scale, but here the traditional figure acquires new meaning: in this mechanized environment he seems forlorn and powerless.”2 As mere scale figures that show the enormity of the railroad’s enterprise, the worker was frequently absorbed into the “landscape of production,” becoming nothing more than a cog in the larger machine.3 Notably, this is not true of Proctor’s work. Instead of depicting figures for scale or a mechanized environment glorifying industrial might, he creates paintings that bestow agency on working men and that make their tasks

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seem irreplaceable, monumental. In his work they are not just brute matter but capable men doing their job and making everything work.

Viewers of railroad images, like railroad passengers, rarely think of the individuals who made it possible. As the historian David Nye has written, few individuals “who rode the railroad concerned themselves with the human cost of building it, or inquired deeply into the social effects of railroads beyond their immediate promise of prosperity and speed.” Travelers, rather, much like the audience of a painting or photograph, “learned to focus on the immediate experience of seeing the mechanical perfection and the power of the locomotives. They enjoyed riding in new forms of transportation and seeing new landscapes, concentrating on novel physical sensations and new vistas.”4 In his paintings Proctor turns this tradition on its head, requiring viewers to see what lies at the root of the power and “mechanical perfection” of the rail industry.

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Figure 2. Zachary Proctor, To Be Of Use, oil on canvas, 2016.

Always one interested in technical precision and perfection, Proctor honed his drawing skills, which began early in his life, and later supplemented his abilities with painting. He completed a degree from the University of Utah and an MFA in Art from Utah State University in 2012. Like many visual artists, Proctor is a calculated practitioner. Working primarily in oil on canvas, he constantly builds up and reworks his paintings, worrying about the final result. Adroit at capturing the human form in an economy of brushstroke and line, Proctor gravitated toward portraiture and especially to images from the past. He is an incessant scavenger of images, gleaning subjects from old photographs that he finds in a host of sources, including weathered Life magazines or the orderly archives of the Library of Congress.

These sources helped Proctor with a central theme of his work, which is the exploration of the relationship between man and machine—as he put it, “creating compositions that show the task these men tackle.”5 There is an element of the photographic in Proctor’s work. This is intentional; he insists that his intent as a painter is to “arrest motion on canvas by artificial means, to capture life and

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A pioneer of documentary photography, Hine excelled at recording the laborer. This was particularly true of his series “Men at Work,” which he completed and published later in his life. For Hine workers were not just cogs of the machine age but central to American industry.

Writing in 1932, he professed, “cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.”8 Moreover, he elevated the American worker; “some of them are heroes,” he wrote, “all of them persons it is a privilege to know.”9 Along with the builders of the

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hold it fixed.”6 It is important to note, however, that Proctor’s paintings are not slavish copies of the photographs he uses as source material and inspiration. For those interested in exactness and representational art, he warns, they will be disappointed. After discovering an image, he works it over, modifying and manipulating the photographs. He leaves out details and enhances others in order to bring out what he views as the focus of a piece. It is his aim to “create a nostalgic world once imagined and now conceivably constructed with paint.”7 Fittingly, Proctor’s paintings begin from historic photographs since Proctor has a strong connection with photographers like Lewis Hine and Jack Delano.

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Figure 3. Jack Delano, Chicago, Illinois. A worker in the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad locomotive repair shops, December 1942. Library of Congress, LC-USW3012658-E.

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modern skyscraper (the subject for which he is most remembered) and the coal miner, Hine singled out the railway worker, calling him the “modern Thor.” His photographs of these men set them apart from their pivotal industry and highlight their strength and skill.

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Proctor’s work may carry the spirit of Hine, but he has been particularly influenced by the work of photographer Jack Delano, who clearly follows in the same documentary tradition.10 As a photographer for two New Deal agencies— the Farm Security Administration and, later, the Office of War Information—Delano began documenting the rails in 1940 under the direction of Roy Stryker. For more than three years during a turbulent period in history, Delano made hundreds of photographs along America’s railroads and paid careful attention to the workers who kept the rails going. The product of a struggling Jewish immigrant family, Delano’s primary interest was, as his son Pablo Delano proposed, “the people that made the whole system work: the railroad workers.”11 A poignant example of his concern for the people behind the scenes is his 1942 photograph of the repair shop of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad (fig. 3). Like so many of his images, Delano brings his subject to the fore, recording a human being with depth and individuality.

He stated, “I think it is my lifelong concern for the common people and appreciation of their value that have been the driving force behind everything I have done.”12 Proctor’s work deserves to be seen in the context of—and in concert with—these photographers. He admits that he is enamored and influenced, directly and indirectly, by previous photographers and their work. Together they share a united interest in the unnamed worker of the rails—rarely visible but just as vital to the system’s success. Like the title of one of his paintings, his work moves in “common rhythm” with their photographs and in their united interest in the common man. By following these photographers into the past, Proctor focuses on an age in which the white, male worker dominated American industry. This world was never homogeneous and would see greater diversity over the coming decades as more and more minorities and women gained a greater foothold in the workforce.

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Proctor’s rail series not only benefited from his study of historical materials but was also forged through personal connections to place. A native of Salt Lake City, Utah, Proctor’s first sustained exposure to the railroad came shortly after he finished graduate school and moved to the small town of Helper. Located in eastern Utah, Helper is a railroad town that once supported nearly thirty coalmining settlements. More racially and ethnically diverse than the rest of the state, it was once filled with American and first and second generation Italian, Greek, Austrian, Japanese, and Chinese miners.13 The Denver & Rio Grande Western line came through in the 1880s.

The town received its name in 1892 due to the “helper” engines needed to push trains up the heavy grade to Soldier Summit, one of the highest passes on the Transcontinental Railroad.

With the decline of Utah’s coal industry in the twentieth century, Helper’s population began to dwindle. Residents and businesses slowly pulled up stakes, leaving empty storefronts and homes—and cheap rent—in the picturesque town. This convergence created the perfect environment for artists who began moving to the town and conducting workshops.14 Hoping to revitalize the economy, local boosters began to tout it as an art destination. Even with its new look, however, the presence of the railroad is still visible and omnipresent. Most of Helper is within sight of the tracks, which gracefully curve through the heart of the town.

One of those attracted to Helper was Proctor, who was a resident artist there from 2003 to 2004. During his residency, he became interested in the railroad, not as a subject unto itself, but as a conduit to the worker. “The railroad seemed to present a large demographic of people working together to accomplish something,” he stated. “Helper showed me a ‘behind the scenes’ view into these men.” It also pushed him further. “The railroad town forced me to investigate my own ancestry. I come from people who are cut from the same cloth.” His painting Helper (fig. 4), a work based on Delano’s photograph of the Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, pays tribute to these men and to a place where people worked together toward a common goal.15 It also references the place where he began to see the latent potential of this subject matter.

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Trains in landscapes may sell better, but that is not what interests Proctor. Instead of bestowing monumentality on a machine, he bestows it on his figures, making them more than mere representations of labor. Like Hine and Delano,

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Relating the worker to himself and his family is essential in understanding Proctor’s series.

His railmen are always proxies. Through these images Proctor sees his grandfather, Harold Proctor, a machinist who learned his trade in the Army and through hard work and skill provided his family a comfortable life. Like Hine, who directly linked his photographs of workers to his own labor, Proctor relates his figures to himself as well. By working with their hands and problem solving, these workers are also like artists. “The machinist’s grind is similar to that of an artist,” Proctor argues. “Grinding it out to make things go.” The daily grind of work is important for both professions. Proctor continues, “These paintings make me want to work harder. They say that getting up every day to the grind will provide a better life for my kids.” Yet he knows that his choice of subject matter affects his paintings’ salability and, in turn, his ability to support a growing family.

“They seem to sell well if the train is more of the focus than the men,” he acknowledges. In this Proctor finds himself in a difficult balance that many artists face; do they make what they know will be commercially successful or do they create to satisfy their own artistic impulses and sensibilities?

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Figure 4. Zachary Proctor, Helper, oil on canvas, c. 2016

Unlike the photographers, however, Proctor is able to leave out details that might obstruct or conflict with his overall purpose. This is visible in his painting Anticipating Darkness, which was taken from a photograph that Delano made near Needles, California in 1943 (fig. 6).16 Delano took his photograph in a time of war. Decades later Proctor reexamined the same scene in a period of stability, which allowed him to see it with different eyes. In his painting, Proctor omitted certain details found in the photograph, like power lines, that he believed obstructed the image. He removed the engine’s number (#3891) to make it less specific

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he often brings his subjects to the foreground to confront and fill the viewer’s gaze. As in the painting Submerged in His Task, one sees a man dutifully engaged in his work (fig. 5). In this process even a mundane task becomes grand.

In depicting his workers, Proctor often maintains a limited palette, painting in greyscale, making them appear similar to a historical photograph. He likes to work with “compressed color schemes” so as to create an air of timelessness. Like a photograph, he loves depicting the “texture of grit” which makes the scene believable and tactile for the viewer.

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Figure 5. Zachary Proctor, Submerged in the Task, oil on canvas, c. 2016

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Figure 6. Zachary Proctor, Anticipating Darkness, oil on canvas, c. 2017

Figure 7. Zachary Proctor, Took Thence a Stone, oil on canvas, c. 2017

and more universal. This is also accomplished through the obscured face of the worker making him an everyman. Bringing these images out of the archive is also an important part of the process and the conceptual underpinning of his work. Just as Delano deemed this moment and this individual worthy of recording, Proctor helps bestow additional importance on this image through his selection and artistic efforts. No longer a nearly forgotten photograph in the Library of Congress and the public domain, Proctor makes it his own. He magnifies the original, creating a work of size and skill that will be available to a new audience.

his task. But it also reimagines the dichotomy of man and might, the small and the mighty.

Proctor’s worker is not just a man performing a simple job, but a conduit through which mighty works will be performed and behemoth industries promoted and maintained.

Proctor is also able to elevate his subjects through his use and selection of titles. This is clear of the previous work in which working on a headlamp becomes “anticipating darkness,” with all of its possible metaphors. Proctor admits that he is always searching for titles that can add greater meaning to his paintings and gravitas to his subjects. Like his found photographs, his inspiration for his titles comes from disparate historical sources. Took Thence a Stone is a good example (fig. 7). For the image of a man stretching to complete his task against metal and steam, Proctor chose a line from the Bible (1 Samuel 17:49). The line references David, the future king of Israel, who just selected the stones by which he would defeat Goliath.

Paralleling this anonymous railworker with the ultimate underdog clearly adds weight to

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Figure 8. Zachary Proctor, The Honesty of His Efforts, oil on canvas, c. 2018. Original in color.

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With time, subtle but important changes have entered Proctor’s rail series. Selective color has entered his more recent series that more boldly highlights individual workers and their traits.

This is particularly evident in The Honesty of His Efforts in which color is only employed in the central figure (fig. 8). The brilliant blue of the work suit, the buff gloves, brown shoes, and clean rosy face help the central figure emerge from the monochromatic background. Despite the sweeping gesture of this figure, there is almost a reverence in its stillness. As he performs the simple task of finishing his labors, we are reminded of the value of an honest-day’s work and the blue-collar laborers who were once the backbone of American industry.

In many ways, Proctor’s entire series is driven by nostalgia and a sense of loss—not of the emblematic steam engine but of a generation of men and their way of life. This may be seen in another of Proctor’s newer “color” images: To Move Things Along (fig. 9). Once again, he has presented the viewer with an anonymous figure quietly lost in his task. There can be poetry in what otherwise might be a blunt depiction of menial work. As the subject prepares the train’s imminent departure, we are reminded through image and text of the transience of time.

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Figure 9. Zachary Proctor, To Move Things Along, oil on canvas, c. 2018. Original in color.

In many ways two final Proctor paintings of railmen provide a nice summary and conclusion to this body of work (fig. 10). The earlier work, For Nothing is Fixed, shows three figures performing required maintenance and repairs.

It emphasizes the ongoing and ever changing challenge of keeping everything moving. Eventually nearly all parts will need to be replaced.

In time this engine, too, will be replaced by better and faster technologies. This reading is certainly true, but the title—a reference to James Baldwin’s essay “Nothing Personal”—adds an additional layer of meaning. Proctor stumbled onto Baldwin, the African American writer and critic, and began to learn everything about him.

The lines Proctor used for his painting’s title come from the final paragraphs of Balwin’s essay.”17 “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed,” Baldwin wrote, “the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing. . . . Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.” Weighted by this responsibility, Proctor makes the viewer a witness. By engaging with this material, he believes that it helps us see the importance of the mechanic, the worker, the railmen, and their tasks. In His Final Inspection (fig. 11) Proctor returns to a central figure of For Nothing is Fixed. The bold colors draw attention to the stout and slightly disheveled man who now dominates the painting. While not glamorous or beautiful, the emphasis is on individual

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Figure 10. Zachary Proctor, For Nothing is Fixed, oil on canvas, c. 2016

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workers and their loss. This is, after all, his final inspection. This focus is central to Proctor’s intent as he wants us to remember them, their labors, and their sacrifices.

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This message is timely. With the loss of heavy industries across the United States, jobs like those featured in the paintings are disappearing or already long gone. “These men are becoming extinct,” Proctor insists. “We are focused on the financial markets, and very little on manufacturing.” As a craftsman and artist, he is troubled that we are losing key abilities and skills.

Through his work, and his rail paintings in particular, Proctor reminds us of these railmen and of the importance of those who work with their hands, whether they work with steel, steam, or a brush.

Notes 1. For good examples of these tropes, see J. Craig Thorpe, “Painting the Possible: Railroad Art with a Visionary Message,” Railroad Heritage 3 (Summer 2017): 10–33.

2. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 356.

3. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 133.

4. Nye, 72.

5. Zachary Proctor, interview with the author, Salt Lake City, Utah, April 2017. All quotes from the artist below

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originate from this interview and will not be individually cited.

Zach Proctor, “Statement,” in Transcontinental: People, Place, Impact (Salt Lake City: Utah Division of Arts & Museums, 2019), 32.

Proctor statement.

Lewis Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (1932; New York: Dover, 1977), n.p.

Hine, n.p.

For more see Tony Reevy, The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 13.

Pablo Delano, “Reflections on My Father’s Railroad Photographs,” in Railroaders: Jack Delano’s Homefront Photography, ed. John Gruber (Madison, WI: Center for Railroad Photography and Art, 2014), 15.

Reevy, Jack Delano, 3.

Writers’ Program (WPA), Utah: A Guide to the State (New York: Hastings House, 1941), 404.

Other artists attracted to Helper for residence or workshops include Dave Dornan, Paul Davis, John Erickson, Doug Braithwaite, Charley Snow, Brian Blackham, Lindsay Frei, and Ben Steele.

See Delano, Topeka, Kansas. Wheeling an engine of the 3200 freight class in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, March 1943, Library of Congress, LC-USW3-019286-D. Jack Delano, Needles (vicinity), California. Desert country along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Needles and Barstow, California, March 1943, LC-USW3-021412-E. Baldwin’s text originated from a collaboration with his long-time friend, the photographer Richard Avedon.

See James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, Nothing Personal (Lucerne: C.H. Bucher, 1964).

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The History Between the Lines

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Midway through Moby-Dick, Stubb, the second mate, is frustrated in his attempts at researching the astrological symbols on the Spanish doubloon Ahab has nailed to the mast as a reward for the first sighting of the white whale. Stubb expostulates, “Book! . . . you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.” Those of us who write books should heed that warning, for mere “books”—recitations of “bare words and facts”—can never tell the truth in any culturally significant way. “Facts are inert,” argued the literary scholar William Mulder, “until they are enlivened by the imagination.”1 And yet some historians continue to write compilations of unenlivened facts, proud of our diligence and resourcefulness in finding fugitive sources and separating fact from fiction, assuming that that is the sum total of the historian’s duties. They, and the reading public, often consider as history mere compilations or chronicles of “fact.” This is not to say that historians eschew analysis and interpretation, since those are signature responsibilities of the profession, but even then historians are often hesitant to make any projections beyond what can be firmly and explicitly established in the historical record. As one of the literary arts from ancient times, history must stand beside its sister disciplines of philosophy and poetry to say something significant about the human condition. For a historian to be content with merely establishing an accurate factual record, or even with sticking to an interpretation that strays not at all from a written text, would be like a poet contenting himself with flawless rhyme and impeccable grammar.

Utah historiography, in particular, has been dominated by a sort of logical positivism, a radical empiricism that forbids any speculation or conjecture—indeed, any assertion that cannot be closely documented by reference to a primary source. This essay is meant as a corrective to what I see as an imbalance in Utah historiography. Rather than adhering single mindedly to what a historical document definitely tells us, I encourage historians to use evidence to read between the lines and, in so doing, offer greater interpretive insight than would otherwise be available.

I use two examples of how taking this approach can offer interpretive

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At the same time, though, there were others who saw narrative and interpretive possibilities that could produce a much more powerful and significant historiography than merely charting the hoof prints of Jedediah Smith’s horses as they plodded across the continent or the morphology of the Mormon village. One was the combative magazine columnist and freelance historian Bernard DeVoto, whose The Year of Decision 1846 employed the literary device of synecdoche (the part stands for the whole) to treat the year 1846 as a sort of paradigm of the entire westward movement.

Perhaps predictably, DeVoto’s literary device,

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But Stegner’s greatest contribution to historiography has never been published and therefore has never extensively discussed. If it had been, it could have hastened the liberation of Utah historical writing from the prison of positivism to which Morgan and his disciples had sentenced it.

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Another was DeVoto’s younger friend and protégé, the novelist Wallace Stegner, who made occasional forays into history and biography like The Gathering of Zion and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (as well as his DeVoto biography, The Uneasy Chair). A much greater literary talent than DeVoto, Stegner boldly employed literary techniques in his nonfiction work that bent the bounds of historical narrative into another dimension: his Wolf Willow, for example, was a creative combination of history, fiction, and memoir that must have been a library cataloguer’s nightmare.

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The godfather of historiographical positivism in Utah was Dale L. Morgan, whose prolific work from the 1940s through the 1960s established a rigorous standard of factual accuracy, employed no literary devices beyond simple metaphors or similes, and eschewed speculation and, in fact, any larger philosophical dimension beyond bare-bones factual narrative.2 At the time, Morgan’s work was rightly regarded by many as a liberating force from the sloppy research of the likes of Leland Hargrave Creer and Andrew Love Neff, both at the University of Utah, and the defensive Mormon historiography of the likes of Milton R. Hunter and Joseph Fielding Smith. Morgan’s work, in particular The Great Salt Lake and Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West, helped revolutionize the writing of secular Western history. His multivolume history of Mormonism would have done the same thing for Mormon history, but it remained unfinished and unpublished at his death in 1971. Fortunately, contemporary Mormon historians accomplished that, most notably his friend Fawn Brodie in her irreverent biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, and Leonard J. Arrington’s economic history of Mormonism, Great Basin Kingdom.

Taken together, those two books inaugurated what has been called the New Mormon History (a movement that has scarcely lost its force even today) which was concerned not so much with the truth or falsity of Mormon religious claims, but rather with who the Mormons were, what they accomplished, and what the historical significance of the LDS movement is.

as well as his flamboyant character portrayals, provoked the ire of less imaginative positivists of the Morgan ilk, who objected that the only unique thing about 1846 was that it was the only year that fell between 1845 and 1847.3

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possibilities into the motives and inner drive of historical actors.

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Stegner had taught by example; now he would teach by precept. The vehicle was a 1973 letter to Leonard Arrington, who by then was the head of the History Division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and thus the de facto Church Historian.4 Arrington at the time was beginning what became a succession of family-funded biographies of important figures in Mormon history. His objectives were twofold: to raise money to support other worthy but unfunded projects, and to exemplify his New Mormon History goal of objective, critical historical writing.5 One was to be a study of David Eccles, the business and industrial pioneer who became Utah’s first millionaire and the compiler of a huge fortune that drives numerous charitable foundations.6 The project became complicated from the outset. Eccles, a known polygamist, had families in both Ogden and Logan (actually, unknown to either family, there was a third family in Salt Lake City, a fact which came to light only after his death and is largely irrelevant to this story).

A scion of the Logan family, Nora “Noni” Eccles Harrison, hired Arrington to write what

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Wallace Stegner (1909–1993), left, and David Eccles (1849–1912). At the behest of Nora Eccles Harrison, Stegner reviewed Leonard Arrington’s draft of his life history of Eccles, offering what Arrington called “a miniature manual on how to write a good biography.” Utah State Historical Society, photograph nos. 13817 & 12170.

she hoped would be an unvarnished biography, complete with a frank examination of David’s sometimes unethical and unscrupulous—if not actually illegal—business practices. So far, so good, except that most of the Eccles papers were in the Ogden family’s possession, having been collected by a son, Royal Eccles, who died before he could complete his own biography.

Royal’s widow, Cleone Eccles, was willing to grant Arrington access to the papers, but it became apparent that she was interested in hagiography, not objective biography, and Arrington found himself in the midst of a biographical tug-of-war. As Stegner observed later, “though I don’t think biography should have to be written within such [family-imposed] limitations, if they exist, they exist, and you have no choice but to write your book within them or give it up entirely.”7 Arrington, the most gregarious and diplomatic of people, apparently thought he could negotiate a compromise, and determined to soldier ahead.8 As was becoming his practice, Arrington farmed out the actual writing of the book, this time to a secretary, JoAnn Bair, with no apparent historical training. His strategy was that she could be

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paid something like her secretarial wage while the remainder of his much larger professional fee could be applied to some other project. He, obviously, would be around to repair any shortcomings in the manuscript that would then be published under his name alone.

Perhaps surprisingly, the first draft turned out to be a serviceable biography, though it was an uninspired Morganesque compilation of facts with no literary flair and little factual interpretation. More to the point, it was mostly lacking in the kind of critical bite that had motivated Noni Harrison’s commission in the first place.

Even at that, it was too critical to please Cleone Eccles. So the project came to a stalemate.

What to do?

It happened that one of the Harrison’s neighbors in Los Altos Hills, a suburban community south of San Francisco, was Wallace Stegner, newly retired director of Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center and distinguished novelist, historian, and biographer. No doubt they had become acquainted not only due to geographical proximity, but also because of their common Utah roots, Stegner having grown

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Stegner’s suggestions fall into three categories, every one of them alien to positivist history. One is the use of literary devices like the cliff-hanger ending and the dramatic climax to emphasize watershed moments. “Climax is something you ought to play all the way,” he urged. “Any story ought to take advantage of natural climaxes, and . . . it ought to be as sensuously vivid and evocative as possible—it ought to help the reader to recreate the reported experience as his personal experience.”10 Secondly, Stegner wanted Arrington to interpret his material, not simply to report facts: “Your perspective is fairly consistent from within your documentary materials. . . . You do not comment on them, judge them, or quite sufficiently relate them to outside events and circumstances. Now and then I kept wishing for a guiding voice through this, the voice of the historian able to see the family and David Eccles in the context of a longer time and a larger West.

You report faithfully; you seldom judge or comment. I think you should.” He even suggested a possible comment on Eccles’s ruthless determination: “Eccles is fascinating, like a ditching machine. He digs through lawn, shrubs, roots, rocks, and part of the fascination is watching his foot-by-foot, inevitable progress, and the neat trench he leaves behind him.”11 Finally, and most offensive to the positivists, Stegner encouraged speculation. Biography is

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Stegner’s fifteen page critique turned out to be, as Arrington put it, “a miniature manual on how to write a good biography.”9 Actually, if Arrington had only realized it, it was nothing short of a manifesto on the use of literary techniques to “enliven,” as Mulder put it (Stegner even uses the same word), the factual narrative and to flesh out the skeletal factual record by reasoned conjecture and informed speculation.

It was a key to unwinding the positivistic straitjacket into which Morgan and his followers had bound the historical profession and so limited the potentials of history and biography.

a species of history, but it is a species with its own characteristic problems, and one of those problems is frequently a lack of sources. How little of our lives, certainly the mundane aspects but even the more momentous ones, ever gets written down?12 And yet that connective tissue needs to be there if a life is to make any sense at all. An episode in Eccles’s life offers a fine example: during the railroad journey across the continent on their way from Scotland to Utah, the family disembarked briefly in Hannibal, Missouri, but fourteen-year-old David failed to reboard before the train departed, leaving him stranded. “I’d play up that missed train in Hannibal, and I’d play it up from David’s point of view,” Stegner suggests. “If you haven’t any record of how he felt to see that train pulling out and leaving him in a strange town in a strange country, guess. Put it in the subjunctive. . . . Not ‘David watched the train departing, the space between it and him widening, with horror, etc., etc.,’ but ‘David would have watched.’ That lets you evoke without actually faking. Easy.” Further, Stegner suggested filling in details of the journey which would have been there, as we know from countless other records of overland emigration even if none of the Eccleses recorded their own experience: “Take them across the plains and mountains, as sensuously as you can; evoke the dust and heat and smells and weariness, the night fires, the prayers and singing, and see the strange oncoming of the dry country and the slow oncoming of the deferred hope. Let us follow the orderly procedures of a Mormon company on a sample day. It’s been done, but it can stand doing again.”13

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up largely in Salt Lake City. A compromise appeared possible: would all parties agree to let Stegner arbitrate the dispute by suggesting revisions to the manuscript that would turn it into a respectable biography? (Harrison would pay Stegner’s stipend.) They would.

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Those who have attempted to write history along the lines of Stegner’s recommendations have met with a mixed reception. An example might be Polly Aird’s 2009 biography of an ancestral member of her family, Peter McAuslan, Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861.14 McAuslan left behind only a handful of personal papers, and the biography was possible only because of the celebrated Mormon penchant for record keeping: not only does he appear in official church records, but the biographer may also cull from the personal papers from others who shared various experiences with him. McAuslan’s biography, then, almost necessitates a certain degree of conjecture if

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anything beyond a disjointed picture of his life is to be attained. The fact that the biography won the Best Biography from the Mormon History Association indicates that some readers, at least, thought that Aird brought off the feat successfully.

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On the other hand, reviewers were rarely able to resist complaining about the amount of conjectural connective tissue–in fact, about the only negative point they could make. Aird’s “speculation concerning [McAuslan’s] reactions to various events is occasionally overdone,” one reviewer asserts. “I believe that either she or her editor could have cut such phrases as ‘Peter learned from their distress and general turmoil;’ . . . ‘Their faith brought many occasions of joy’ . . . and ‘this new life must have caused anxiety’ . . . from the manuscript or provided specific evidence to support the nexus between general events and Peter’s reaction to them.”15 Another reviewer, while acknowledging that “historians do have to surmise on occasion to build on the possibility of what happened at various times, particularly when writing biography in the absence of comprehensive personal papers and diaries by the subject” (and even at times when such papers do exist, one might add), commented that “conjecture detracts from Aird’s huge amount of amazing research.”

An example of this: “when McAuslan ‘took the family’s animals south to find winter feed, . . . his twenty-year-old brother, Frank, most likely went with him to help with the stock and to build a house where Agnes, now pregnant again could join him (Peter) once the worst of winter was over. Peter probably felt relieved to have these tasks in front of him rather than only fearful thoughts about the Reformation preaching and where it might lead.’”16 One supposes that each reader has his or her own limits on the degree of acceptable speculation, but it seems that in each of these cases Aird is well within the limits suggested by Stegner. She does use the subjunctive mood which, as Stegner pointed out, lets her “evoke without actually faking.” Additionally, some of her speculations hardly seem that at all: we know, for example, that the faith of most new Mormon converts, especially those as enthusiastic about it as we know McAuslan to have been, “brought many occasions of joy,” whether we have a diary

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entry to document such joy or not. And when those new converts immigrated to Utah and found that life in Zion wasn’t quite the Elysian Fields the missionaries had led them to believe, especially when they began hearing rumors of the Parrish-Potter murders or the Mountain Meadows Massacre, saying that “this new life must have caused anxiety” does not seem much of a stretch of the evidence.

Despite such complaints, as positivism has loosened its grip on Utah historiography, scholars have already been including speculation, so that Aird’s employment of it hardly seems novel. On a single page of S. George Ellsworth’s biography of Samuel Claridge, for example, we find these examples: “it is quite likely,” “these figures suggest,” “there are no other allusions to this trip, though it was quite likely,” “he probably stopped,” and “he would have seen family . . . and possibly learned that.”17 Or, in a more recent example, Todd M. Compton’s article on Jacob Hamblin’s 1858 journey from Santa Clara, Utah, to the Hopi Mesas of Arizona, on a single page we find no fewer than two speculative assertions regarding the route taken: “Their first major obstacle was the Hurricane Cliffs, which they probably surmounted near the eventual site of Fort Pearce. From there they may have passed the Short Creek area and entered into the territory of Arizona.”18 A certain amount of speculation, then, can enable the historian or the biographer to do at least three things. One is to add geographical detail that is not actually mentioned in the sources: we can document that a person passed from point A to point C; since it is necessary to pass through point B to get there, we know that he did, and since we ourselves have made that journey, we can describe what that person would have seen on the way. Another is to speculate on one’s state of mind: we know that it was the rhetoric and ensuing violence of the Mormon Reformation that caused Peter McAuslan to defect from the church and flee to California, so it obviously would have been a relief to him to be able to separate himself from those conditions to build a new house for his pregnant wife. Finally, though I have given no examples of this, there is what one might call the “rain falls on the just and the unjust alike” speculation: if a mountain man was part of a company

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I’m going to go even further than that, and suggest that a certain amount of judicious speculation, a certain reading between the lines of history, might even make it possible to include that most vexed question of homosexuality as a possible motivation in historical personages.

Please let me, with the greatest humility, propose some terms under which I think we might attempt to include homosexuality as a factor in our historical studies. In so doing, I hasten to acknowledge that I have no professional training in the relevant aspects of biology, psychology, anthropology, or any other field of the natural and behavioral sciences that purport to explain the causes of homosexuality. But as an empirical historian, I simply ask you to recognize that homosexuality exists. If you believe, as I do, that historical study ideally encompasses all forms of human activity, then homosexuality as a motivating force in history cannot be exempt from our consideration.

As a second proposition, let me suggest as a general principle that all human beings, historical or contemporary, have a right to privacy. It follows, then, that historians have no right to “out” closeted gay persons from the past simply as an intellectual exercise. I propose that we

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I am encouraged in this line of argument by the experience of the historian D. Michael Quinn, who found that faced with often skimpy evidence in his investigation of occult elements in the early development of Mormonism, he learned to be satisfied with levels of proof that fell short of positivistic certainty. “Between the past’s indisputable facts and its unknowable gaps in evidence,” he found, “there is a vast terrain of the possible and the probable.”

Rather than throwing up his hands at that level of uncertainty, though, the historian can learn to deal with it: “As researchers accumulate evidence about a topic, they may conclude that a significant possibility has increased to a probability. If this sounds like detective work, that is what most historians do. Like detective work, the conclusions of historical research are similar to the legal requirement known as ‘preponderance of the evidence’ rather than ‘proof beyond the shadow of a doubt.’” Another eminent Mormon historian, Richard L. Bushman, similarly argues that “recognizing the contingency of written history does not mean we can dismiss it as trivial. No human activity, including the physical sciences, escapes these limitations. We must try to speak the truth about the past as earnestly as we try to tell the truth about anything.”20

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Finally, I urge that we learn to live from time to time with a lower standard of proof than the positivistic requirement of a footnote to an authenticated primary document. I suspect that rarely is it possible to attain that level of proof and that historical gay people who wanted to be in the closet will, in most cases, remain there.19 Thus, historians are going to have to learn to be content with doing part of our work in the shadowy world of conjecture, possibility, probability, and interpretation based on reading-between-the-lines evidence.

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But does speculation have other uses as well? I believe it does. Psychobiography, for example, though in undertrained or overenthusiastic hands has sometimes achieved controversial results, can also yield at least tentative explanations of irrational behavior by relating certain statements and actions of a historical person to similar behavior in living people who can be diagnosed. One needs to wield such tools with a light hand, of course, but if one believes that human behavior is motivated by a tangled combination of the rational and the irrational, then surely the historian and the biographer have inherent obligations to make the attempt.

investigate a possible homosexual orientation only when it seems a promising explanation for behavior that cannot otherwise be explained.

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of fur trappers who fell into an Indian ambush, one can be relatively certain that he was firing his rifle right along with his companions, even though he never recorded the fact in a diary or a letter; or if a woman was part of a Mormon handcart company that found itself reduced to short rations in the freezing snowstorms of a Wyoming winter, we can be relatively certain that she starved and froze with everyone else, even if she did not record the fact.

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I should like to direct your attention to two individuals in Utah history—Everett Ruess and Haldane “Buzz” Holmstrom—whose behavior was bizarre enough to elude a wholly rational explanation and for which homosexuality has been suggested as a possible motive. One of them came to a tragic end, and the other quite

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possibly did as well, though his ultimate fate is unknown. In studying these two people, I am not trying to offer a lesson in writing gay history, and I hasten to acknowledge that I do not claim to prove that either, in fact, was gay. What I am trying to do is to show what can happen if we stop denying, ignoring, or explaining away evidence that might suggest homosexuality and instead begin collecting and assembling it.

Even when such evidence falls short of positivistic proof, it can open up intriguing new interpretive possibilities.

Everett Ruess (1914–1934?), became famous for several lengthy solo trips into the canyon country of Utah and Arizona during the years 1931 to 1934 and for mysteriously disappearing after last being seen in the vicinity of the Escalante River. Ruess’s memory has been kept alive by his dramatic block prints depicting natural features, often of the canyon country, and by his diaries and letters which poetically evoke emotions that one can experience in a natural setting. Ruess, in fact, has attracted a cult following among outdoor aficionados who see him as a romantic figure in the mode of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.

This image of Ruess contrasts with the recollections of some of his contemporaries, like the Indian traders and backcountry guides John and Louisa Wetherill and Harry and “Mike” Goulding, who knew him personally. By their

perspective, he was basically an outdoors incompetent who abused his animals, took unnecessary risks, and survived as long as he did in the backcountry more by luck than skill.21 Viewed in this way, Ruess’s solo trips could be seen as desperate acts of a risk taker at odds with conventional societal norms. Could heterosexuality have been one of those norms at which he chafed?

A definitive answer is probably impossible.

His extant writings suggest an ambivalence regarding his sexual identity, possibly because, at barely twenty years of age at the time of his disappearance, that identity had not yet fully formed. “Everett’s sexuality is difficult to assess,” the historian Gary Bergera admits. On the one hand, he expressed infatuation with several women, even referring to one of them as his wife. But there is also enough evidence of likely same-sex attraction: he refers to “strange comradeships and intimacies,” including one man “who wanted to sleep with me,” and “a strange experience with a young fellow at an outpost, a boy I’d known before.” And finally, Bergera points to expressions of a general longing for companionship, with no reference to gender.22 Perhaps confronting that ambiguous identity and trying to live with it in a heterosexual world was simply too daunting a task, and he reacted instead by fleeing by himself to the desert where conventional social norms held little or no sway.

“Monument Valley,” Everett Ruess linoleum wood block, ca. 1930.

Donated by Waldo Ruess. USHS no.

1988-048-002.

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Coming out of the closet for Everett Ruess might have been possible, if difficult. For Haldane Holmstrom it would have been out of the question altogether. Perhaps my personal experience might help elucidate Holmstrom’s situation. I was born in Coquille, Oregon, Holmstrom’s home town, in 1941, and grew up in Coos County, of which Coquille is the county seat. I was not quite five years old when Holmstrom died, so he was more of my parents’ generation than mine. Nevertheless, the cultural environment in which we were both reared was little changed.

That environment was an intensely masculine one of loggers, lumber workers, and ranchers.

It contained a strong element of homophobia and also a strong element of conformity. Given what we now know of the incidence of homosexuality in masculine camps and in the general population, I must have known a fair number of gay people. But I was unaware that any of them was gay because the homophobic and conformist elements in the culture gave them

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Unfortunately, though he had a famously buoyant personality and was well liked by everyone he met, he lacked the skill to capitalize on his achievements when he attempted to enter the lecture circuit. World War II intervened, and he spent the war in the Pacific theater doing construction projects as a Navy SeaBee. In 1946, after the war, he got a job with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey running one of two boats to survey the Grande Ronde River in eastern Oregon. His boat was a large scow too big to handle safely in the swollen river, and Holmstrom, the expert river runner, seemed beaten at his own game. Depression had always lurked below his happy-go-lucky demeanor, and one afternoon it got the best of him. He borrowed a .22 caliber rifle and disappeared on a trail downriver, saying that he was going to “shoot a chicken.” When he did not appear for supper, a search party found his body.

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Holmstrom’s biographers have every reason to hold their subject in high regard. Coming from a very humble background as a gas station attendant, Holmstrom achieved international recognition for his navigational skill on whitewater rivers in his self-made wooden boat. His career achieved its climax in 1937, when he accomplished the first solo run of the Green and Colorado Rivers, and in 1938, when he ran every rapid on those rivers, the first time that had been accomplished.

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On the other hand, living a double life in the closet would have exacted its own price in frustration and emotional distress. I will have to leave it to the psychologists to catalog the various forms that that frustration and distress can take, but I consider it a given that such things can occasionally manifest themselves in irrational behavior.

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On the other hand is the case of Haldane Holmstrom. Vince Welch, Cort Conley, and Brad Dimock, authors of an adoring Holmstrom biography, while acknowledging that dark psychological forces tormented him and led to his suicide, disdain even to consider that trying to cope with homosexuality might have been a fundamental cause of those forces. They bring up the issue, in fact, only in one perfunctory instance, and then dismiss it out of hand: “Despite a lack of evidence, such allegations [of homosexuality] lingered. One wonders why they were made at all.”24

every incentive to stay in the closet. Although the burly Holmstrom could have defended himself against most homophobic harassment, he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by coming out.25

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Adding to the difficulty is the fact that Ruess grew up in southern California in a family and an environment of writers, intellectuals, and artists where homosexuality would not have been a rare or hidden phenomenon. While one suspects that for any gay person coming out of the closet is always fraught with trauma, those difficulties, for Ruess, might have been of a lesser degree, if he were indeed gay, than for others in other circumstances. Although Ruess’s older brother Waldo, who probably knew him better than anyone else, was quick to deny a homosexual orientation, recent biographers have noted evidence that suggests such a denial might be overhasty.23

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Although Holmstrom had prepared himself much better for the challenges of fast water navigation than Everett Ruess had for those of solitary desert living, both of them apparently had a death wish. Amos Burg, Holmstrom’s partner on the 1938 trip, told the present author

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a brothel, where he “bellowed like a bull,” and he had been in love with women like the biologist Lois Jotter and one Loas Morrison, a high school friend he visited in San Francisco.26

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But surely this is looking for evidence in all the wrong places and then misinterpreting it when it does appear. I have no experience with brothels, but surely “bellowing like a bull” is an unconvincing overreaction to supposed sexual ecstasy and sounds more like Holmstrom trying to convince his companions that he was having a good time. And his letters to Jotter and Morrison quoted in the biography seem more like letters to close friends than love missives.

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Holmstrom standing on his boat at Lake Mead in 1938.

Photo by Amos Burg. Author’s collection.

that he was completely convinced that Holmstrom wanted to die. Although he refrained from attempting the most dangerous rapids on the 1937 solo run, simply being out there by himself was a tremendous risk. Burg pointed out, too, that Holmstrom’s life jacket was totally inadequate, and would have been of virtually no use if he had been thrown into the water.

Was coping with homosexuality a factor in the depression that led Holmstrom to take his own life? One of his biographers, in correspondence with the present author, admits that there was a long-standing suspicion reported by river runners like Otis R. “Dock” Marston and P. T. Reilly that Holmstrom was gay: he was “queer as a goat,” Reilly alleged. Nevertheless, the letter goes on, the biographers were unable to locate a scrap of evidence to that effect among all the documents they had studied and all the Holmstrom family members and friends they had interviewed. We should interject here, too, that Marston and Reilly were only reporting a tradition, and that neither had any professional qualifications for diagnosing closeted homosexuality. Further, there was evidence to the contrary: Holmstrom occasionally visited

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What, then, if we were to give up trying to find an explicit source that would give us hard proof, and start rethinking the sources we already have, with an idea of creating a possibility, or even a probability of homosexuality. “I think one could construct a fairly convincing profile of homosexuality,” I wrote to the aforementioned biographer, “right out of the pages of your own books if one knew where and how to look. You’re looking in the wrong places and in the wrong way.”27 In fact, one does not have to look very far at all to begin finding hints of homosexuality. In the biographer’s own edition of Holmstrom’s letters and diaries, Every Rapid Speaks Plainly, one finds almost at the outset a letter of Holmstrom to his mother from Green River, Wyoming, dated October 3, 1937, in which he reports that, “Last night I had a young fellow with me and we were out in the middle of the desert when I decided I wanted some sleep. He complained about being cold so I let him use the sleeping bag & slept on the desert with just one small blanket very comfortably.”28 On the surface, this all looks innocent enough, and we must keep in mind that he was writing to his mother, probably the last person he would be willing to confide in if something less innocent were going on. But there is more evidence as well: Holmstrom photographed the “young fellow,” and it is clear that he was quite taken with him. The young man turns out to have been attractive, and Holmstrom posed him (or he posed himself ) stretched out on Holmstrom’s boat in what one could reasonably interpret as a suggestive posture. With

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237 Young man sitting on Holmstrom’s boat somewhere west of Green River, Wyoming, 1937. Photo by Holmstrom.

Author’s collection.

that in mind, then, one feels justified in turning the Freudian psychologists loose on the text of the letter and wondering who was sleeping where and with whom (keeping in mind once again that the letter was to his mother). Moreover, to “read between the lines” means to evaluate all the available evidence—in this case a photograph.

Who was this man encountered by Holmstrom and where did he come from? People do not just materialize out in the middle of the Green River desert. Holmstrom’s biographers identify him as a hitchhiker.29 He may have been that, though Holmstrom does not use that term, but he certainly would not have been hitchhiking in that desolate country west of Green River, Wyoming, in street clothes (including a necktie) and no camping equipment. Most likely Holmstrom had picked him up in Salt Lake City, the last urban center, where he had stopped to visit the old riverman Bert Loper. The drive through

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that lonely country between Salt Lake City and Green River is tedious enough even today at eighty-five miles per hour on Interstate 80, but it was much slower and time-consuming in 1937. Realizing that, perhaps Holmstrom was only welcoming company to ease the tedium, as any of us might, though in those slower-moving days people were more equipped to put up with arduous journeys than in our impatient era. At any rate, he and his passenger would have had plenty of time to get acquainted, perhaps even to develop an intimate relationship if they had so desired, before stopping for the night.

This, of course, is not hard proof. Perhaps it is not even enough to create, on D. Michael Quinn’s scale of proof, a probability. But surely it at least creates a possibility, and thus offers scant comfort to anyone who “wonders why [allegations of homosexuality] were made at all.”30 The fact that it comes so early in the collection of Holmstrom’s letters and diaries forces one to

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wonder how much similar evidence might be discoverable throughout the rest of the book.

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If historians aspire, as we do, to create history that is a close reflection of life, then perhaps we need to begin to realize that while the certitude of hard proof is always desirable, life itself is not always amenable to it, and in fact it contains a multitude of loose ends and ambiguities.

Modesty requires me to acknowledge, as I have in my previous citations of the historians Quinn and Bushman, that my recognition of those loose ends and ambiguities is anything but original; in fact, I would wager that almost any historian with substantial experience in wrestling with original sources has encountered some version of the problem. In what I hope is not a far-fetched example, the historian Johan Huizinga, writing as far back as World War I, called attention to occasional observable and vitally important phenomena that one simply cannot get a footnote underneath. Referring to the curious persistence of loyalty of people to princes in France and the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages, long after the legal bonds that had created those loyalties had dissolved, “the attachment to the prince,” Huizinga observes, “was childish-impulsive in character; it was a direct [irrational] feeling of fidelity and community. . . . This same emotion blazed into reckless passions during feuds and strifes. . . .

Anyone who studies the history of that period will at times be shocked to find the inadequacy of the efforts of modern historians to explain these [loyalties] in terms of economic—political causes. . . . No one, even with the best of intentions, can find them by reading the sources.”31 Indeed, how does one document such a thing?

And yet what kind of history do we write if we just throw up our hands and choose to ignore it?

Much of life, in other words, exists “between the lines,” and our histories should include recognition of the contingency of our conclusions as well as embracing both the probabilities and possibilities that life itself requires.

If, as Richard L. Bushman points out, not even the so-called “hard sciences” are immune to ambiguities and reinterpretations (one recalls the physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle”), then how much more should those of us in the humanities, whose daily work

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it is to study the infamous unpredictability of human nature, be prepared to deal with uncertainties? “I prefer to write about the silences in traditional history,” D. Michael Quinn tells us.32 Trying to fill those silences can be as frustrating as translating Stubb’s doubloon, but it is my contention that they can speak to us if we but train our ears to hear.

Notes 1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967), 360–61. For other editions, the quotation is in the chapter titled “The Doubloon.” I quote Mulder approximately from a private conversation many years ago. His actual phraseology was undoubtedly more eloquent than my imperfect recollection.

2. For a much more elaborate discussion of Morgan as a historian, see my Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 114–73. I am much indebted to Morgan’s biographer, Richard Saunders, for identifying his philosophy as a sort of positivism. Morgan himself was reluctant to discuss any philosophical dimension to his work, perhaps feeling that it would compromise the hard-headed empiricism that underlay it. He even seems to have been naïve enough to think that one could do without a philosophy. The choice, however, is not whether or not to have a philosophy, but whether to have one that is conscious and well thought out, or one that is neither.

3. This retort may have found its way into print somewhere, but the author heard it in a seminar room at the University of Utah exactly forty years after DeVoto’s book appeared.

4. On Arrington’s historical career, see my Leonard Arrington: A Historian’s Life (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2008).

5. The biographies, many of which were written in first draft by his secretaries or assistants and were heavily influenced by the family sponsors, fell a good deal short of the critical objectivity to which they aspired. Part of it was Arrington’s fault, too, for he was a gentle soul who could only rarely bring himself to say something negative about someone.

6. The book was published by Utah State University Press in 1975 under the title, David Eccles: Pioneer Western Industrialist.

7. Stegner to Arrington, April 25, 1973, 2. The original is in the Leonard J. Arrington Papers, 1839–1999, COLL 001, Special Collections and Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, while Stegner’s retained copy is in the Wallace Earle Stegner Papers, 1935–2004, MS 0676, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

8. Topping, Leonard Arrington, 151–57, tells the story of the Eccles book.

9. Topping, 153.

10. Stegner to Arrington, 4, 3.

11. Stegner to Arrington, 7, 10.

12. With the advent of Facebook and other social media, this problem could become a thing of the past, and fu-

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Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), and David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer (New York: Broadway Books, 2011). Gary Bergera, in “‘The Murderous Pain of Living’: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess,” was the first historian to speculate extensively about Ruess’s sexuality, and his review of the Fradkin and Roberts biographies in Utah Historical Quarterly 80 (Spring 2012): 200–3 offers further thoughts about evidence offered by Fradkin. Roberts is skeptical of such speculation.

24. Welch, Conley, and Dimock, The Doing of the Thing: The Brief Whitewater Career of Buzz Holmstrom (Flagstaff, AZ: Fretwater Press, 1998), 276. A new edition of the book appeared in about 2002, but seems to be the identical text of the original edition with the exception of excerpts from three reviews added to a blank page at the beginning of the volume.

25. Quinn, Same-sex Dynamics, 158, documents homoerotic relationships within logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. That region, however, is remote from Quinn’s main area of investigation, and he cites only a single source. I never worked in logging camps, but my brother and a number of friends did and reported no such thing. One of those friends, Dow Beckham, says nothing about it in his history of Coos County logging, Swift Flows the River (Coos Bay, OR: Arago Books, 1990). On the other hand, Beckham was a devout Baptist who likely would have found such a thing abhorrent and disdained to report it.

26. Brad Dimock to Gary Topping, June 21, 2004, letter in author’s possession.

27. Gary Topping to Brad Dimock, July 2, 2004, letter in author’s possession.

28. Brad Dimock, ed., Every Rapid Speaks Plainly: The Salmon, Green, and Colorado Journals of Buzz Holmstrom Including the 1938 Accounts of Amos Burg, Philip Lundstrom and Willis Johnson (Flagstaff, AZ: Fretwater Press, 2003), 35.

29. Welch, Conley and Dimock, The Doing of the Thing, 89.

30. Welch, Conley and Dimock, 276.

31. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17. Huizinga’s 1919 Dutch text was translated into English with many abridgments in 1924; this edition is a restoration of the original version with a new translation.

32. Quinn, Same-sex Dynamics, ix.

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ture biographers might find themselves instead inundated with more daily-life trivia than they can handle.

13. Stegner to Arrington, 5.

14. Aird, Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2009).

15. Michael Homer, review of Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861, by Polly Aird, in Utah Historical Quarterly 78 (Spring 2010): 181.

16. C. Brid Nicholson, review of Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector: A Scottish Immigrant in the American West, 1848–1861, by Polly Aird, in Journal of Mormon History 38 (Winter 2012): 211. Similar complaints come from Michael Bolton’s review of Aird’s book in John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 30 (2010): 268–71, and David Morris’s review of the same book in the International Journal of Mormon Studies 5 (2012), 165–69.

17. S. George Ellsworth, Samuel Claridge: Pioneering the Outposts of Zion (Logan, UT: privately printed, 1987), 102.

18. Todd M. Compton, “’In & through the roughefist country it has ever been my lot to travel”: Jacob Hamblin’s 1858 Expedition Across the Colorado,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80 (Winter 2012): 7. Emphasis mine.

19. My role model in the discussion which follows is D. Michael Quinn, whose Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-century Americans: A Mormon Example (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), esp.

156–94, is a model of circumspection in refraining from naming a same-sex relationship as homoerotic unless there is explicit evidence. It may be worth noting that Quinn is dealing with the nineteenth century when, as he emphasizes, gestures and expressions of affection between people of the same sex were much more widely accepted than at a later date, and must not necessarily be interpreted as evidence of homoeroticism. I face a somewhat different problem in dealing with subjects from the early twentieth century when, as Quinn points out, such gestures and expressions had become unacceptable, indeed risky.

20. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, rev. and enlarged ed., 1998), xxxii; Richard L. Bushman, “Faithful History,” in Faithful History, ed. George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 6. To be fair to both scholars, I should point out that Quinn and Bushman are talking about different things: Quinn is addressing the problem of evidence that cannot be dismissed even though it does not achieve the level of “hard” proof, while Bushman is referring to historical interpretations that change over time.

21. It should be said, too, that Ruess returned their contempt in cash and with interest. See W. L. Rusho, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983), 28, 151–53.

22. Gary Bergera, “’The Murderous Pain of Living’: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Winter 1999): 64–65.

23. “Everett was no homo,” Waldo burst out to the present writer during a visit to his Santa Barbara, California home on December 20, 1988. Since I had not raised the subject, it occurred to me that Waldo might have been protesting too much. Recent biographies include Philip L. Fradkin, Everett Ruess: His Short Life,

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Role Call: Creating an Exhibit to Honor Utah Women

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The year 2020 marks the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ensuring that the right to vote cannot be restricted on the basis of sex. Inspired by this anniversary, we began to think about an exhibition drawn from the collections of the Utah State Historical Society (USHS) that would highlight influential women in Utah’s history. Two small venues were available for the exhibition: the downtown Salt Lake City Public Library and the spotlight wall at the Rio Grande Depot, also in Salt Lake City.

We tossed around ideas related to the exhibit’s theme and agreed on the title Role Call: Fearless Females in Utah History. While deliberating on possible titles, we began with a list of words that communicated ideas about the women we had been researching. Once we had a working list, the wordsmithing began and we hit on an idea: that this exhibition called out individuals like a teacher taking roll call in a classroom or a roll call vote in the Senate. Both examples connected to the ideas of the exhibition. It was easy to make the play on words—role instead of roll—because each of our subjects was a role model. I imagined these women standing proud and responding “Here!” as their names were called. We then conjured up the idea of lining up large portraits of each person across the top of the exhibition, as if they were in a roll call.

As I began my research, I was struck by the individual stories of a number of women, such as Martha Hughes Cannon. The artifacts, photographs, artwork, and writings of these women showcased their courage, drive, and talent. Then came the hard part: finding objects in the historical society’s collections that were at once connected with the women under study, worthy of display, and supportive of telling their stories. What’s more, the objects had to fit in small cases and cabinets. At this point, I had to narrow down the list of exhibit subjects based on the materials available in our collections.

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Left: The title graphic for Role Call. Todd Anderson, Utah Department of Heritage and Arts.

Right: Setting up the Role Call exhibit at the Salt Lake City Library. In creating this exhibit, we needed to choose subjects with artifacts held by the historical society and artifacts that were relatively small.

Courtesy of the author.

Curating the objects for this exhibition had an impact on me: I began to see the women I was researching as whole people and not as one-dimensional heroes whose lives were incomparable with my own experiences. Their writings and photographs revealed the everyday—and relatable—work they did to bring about a change in women’s rights, the rights for women to have not only the vote but also to have a voice, own a business, be provocative, and do the everyday work to advocate for their beliefs. In my desire to bring out the relatable aspects of the women featured in the exhibition, we landed on the idea of using “fun facts.”

These would be short statements printed on individual labels and posted around the objects pertaining to a specific individual. The family members of two women we chose to highlight

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allowed me to interview them. The interviews were insightful and touching, providing intimate details into the women’s lives. Another technique to make these stories and biographies relatable for the audience was the use of informal and conversational language within the exhibition text. Examples of this include the use of first names and short blocks of information for ease of digestion.

The photo essay that follows has been adapted from the library exhibition and its counterpart at the Rio Grande Depot. The image captions here are slightly modified versions of the labels appearing in the exhibition. Our hope for this exhibition was to bring more awareness to the role women have played in shaping our civic identity, inspiring present and future women.

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Emmeline B. Wells, 1828–1921

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Emmeline worked hard to bring equal rights for women in America through her editorial work, membership with the National Woman Suffrage Association, and connections with the International Council of Women. A prodigious writer, Emmeline used her voice to push for social change at a time when women were seldom allowed to participate in our country’s civic conversations.1 USHS, photo no. 17800.

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Woman’s Exponent, August 1, 1891, vol. 20, no.

3. In 1877, Emmeline became the editor of the Woman’s Exponent, a twice-monthly publication for Latter-day Saint women. In this capacity, she championed women’s causes and the practice of plural marriage. This edition of the Exponent makes that stance clear: its masthead declares “The Rights of the Women of Zion, and the Rights of the Women of all Nations,” and its front page reprints the constitution of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Chase Roberts, photographer. Utah Division of State History.

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Alice knew the value of art in the community and created the civic framework to support the arts in Utah. Thanks to her diligence, Utah can claim the first state-sponsored arts agency in the nation. Alice was an artist, teacher, legislator, activist, and writer. She developed and wrote school lessons on art appreciation, landscape studies, and architecture—and she was also a clean air advocate.2 USHS, photo no.

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Alice Merrill Horne, 1868–1948

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Left: Smog in the Salt Lake Valley, 1942. In response to the poor quality of Salt Lake Valley air, Alice helped organize the Smokeless Fuel Federation of Utah in the 1930s to agitate against pollution. USHS, photo no.

21216.

Right: Pamphlet, Smokeless Fuel Federation of Utah, circa 1930. USHS.

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Mignon Barker Richmond, 1897–1984

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Langston Hughes, The Dream Keeper, inscription.

Mignon was a friend to two of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, who stayed with her family to escape the bustle of New York City. This book was signed

by Langston and addressed to Mignon’s daughter, Ophelia, in 1937. USHS, catalog no. 1981–048–002.

246 Mignon’s actions to better the community were a lifelong commitment; she was a true civil servant. The countless hours she devoted to serving in organizations such as the YWCA, NAACP, USO, Nettie Gregory Center, and Salt Lake City’s Central City Center only scratch the surface of telling the story of her kind and generous spirit.3

Award program, Utah Community Services Council, 1970. On this occasion, Mignon was honored for her social welfare service. Throughout her career, she campaigned for anti-poverty legislation, established a school lunch program, and created recreational spaces for minority youth—among many other things. Today, Richmond Park in Salt Lake City is named in her honor. Courtesy of Mignon Richmond family.

Turnverein Group, Utah State Agricultural College (USAC), circa 1920. Mignon graduated from Salt Lake City’s West High School in 1917 and went on to become Utah’s first black college graduate in 1921, when she earned a degree in home economics. Because of racism, it would take years for Richmond to find work in her field. Yet she persevered and served in the community throughout her life. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University.

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Kuniko Muramatsu Terasawa, 1896–1991

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Activism can be done in many ways, including quietly. Small, daily acts can bring about change.

The everyday work Kuniko did to create the Utah Nippo helped bring together a community, change attitudes about Japanese immigrants, and provide an example of what a woman can achieve.4 Courtesy of Haruko Moriyasu.

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Japanese-language manual typewriter, circa 1950.

These type sets are an example of what would have been used at Utah Nippo. USHS, catalog no. 1992-110001a.

The English-language section of Utah Nippo, February 25, 1942. Uneo Terasawa founded Utah Nippo in 1914.

After his untimely death in 1939, Kuniko shouldered the responsibility of operating it. She kept the newspaper running amid the turmoil of World War II. It was distributed to all the Japanese detention centers, albeit with heavy censorship from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Back Cover: Kuniko setting type, circa 1990. As her life progressed, Kuniko continued serving her community and publishing Utah Nippo. She was, in turn, honored with several awards and magazine profiles. Courtesy of Haruko Moriyasu.

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Ellis Reynolds Shipp, 1847–1939 Health is an important issue for everyone, and Ellis helped to professionalize women’s health care in nineteenth-century Utah. In 1878, she earned her medical degree, becoming one of the first female physicians in Utah; soon thereafter, she established the School of Nursing and Obstetrics in Salt Lake City. Ellis travelled from Canada to Mexico educating on women’s health and treating the medical needs of rural western women and children.5 USHS, photo no. 27187.

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Ellis’s anatomical chart, circa 1880. During her career, Ellis delivered more than five thousand babies and trained five hundred women to be midwives. USHS, catalog no. 1983-003-020.

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Mae Timbimboo Parry, 1919–2007

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Mae always had a notebook nearby to take down stories, and she recorded important dates and events of her tribe for future generations. A dedicated historian and matriarch of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone, she willingly shared her family’s story and Shoshone heritage at schools and community presentations. Mae’s grandfather, Yeager Timbimboo, was one of the few survivors of the 1863 Bear River Massacre. Through her determination, the name Battle of Bear River was changed to Bear River Massacre.6

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Mae Timbimboo Parry, [Shoshone Pictorial Beaded Bag], 1988. Mae was a master beadwork artist who prepared hides using a traditional brain-tanning method. This bag, made of beads on white buckskin, depicts two bison in a meadow with birds overhead.

Utah State Folk Arts Collection, accession 1988.16.

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Susa Young Gates, 1856–1933

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Susa was a strong woman who used her pen as an instrument for change. She was a critical player in several LDS organizations, especially those that involved women’s advancement. A prolific writer, she helped to establish key publications such as the Young Woman’s Journal and the Relief Society Magazine. Susa was a passionate advocate for women’s rights and suffrage, working with prominent national groups and leaders like Susan B. Anthony.7 USHS, photo no. 12328.

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This piece by Susa tells at least two stories. The top portion commemorates her parents, Brigham Young and Lucy B. Young, with hairwork made circa 1870. The bottom portion is a card with Gates’s handwriting, noting her donation of it to an early relic hall display. After a prolonged illness, Gates dedicated herself to researching and preserving the history of her people.

USHS, catalog no. 1980-013001.

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1. Emmeline B. Wells, Musings and Memories (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1896); Carol Cornwall Madsen, An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870–1920 (Provo: Brigham Young University, 2006), and Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017); “Current Topics,” Relief Society Magazine, February 1916, 102.

2. Harriet Horne Arrington, “Alice Merrill Horne: Art Promoter and Early Utah Legislator,” in Worth Their Salt: Notable But Often Unnoted Women of Utah, ed.

Colleen Whitley (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 171–87; “Utah’s Third Legislature,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, November 18, 1898, 4; “Women Urged to Campaign Against Smoke Nuisance,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 2, 1936, 11; “Church, Social Leader Succumbs at Hospital,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 8, 1948, 25.

3. Mignon Richmond, interview by David Schoenfeld, August 5, 1974, typescript, MSS A 4051, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah (USHS); Wilfred D. Samuels and David A. Hales, “Wallace Henry Thurman: A Utah Contributor to the Harlem Renaissance,” Utah Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2013): 345–67; Jackie Thompson, “Mignon Barker Richmond, A Community Organizer with Heart,” Better Days 2020, accessed October 28, 2019, utahwomenshistory.org/bios /mignon-barker-richmond/; “Negro Health Week Will Be Observed,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 23, 1934, 24; “U. Dean Discusses Poverty,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 12, 1970, 22; Barbara Springer, “Young, Old Reach for Each Other,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 24, 1971, 21.

4. Haruko T. Moriyasu, “Kuniko Muramatsu Terasawa: Typesetter, Journalist, Publisher,” in Worth Their Salt, 202–217; Helen Z. Papanikolas and Alice Kasai, “Japanese Life in Utah,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Soci-

ety, 1976), 333–62; Miwame Tatai, interview with Paul Kato, November 19, 1975, typescript, MSS A 2817, USHS; “Kuniko Muramatsu Terasawa,” Beehive History 17 (1991): 29–30; “Utah Nippo (newspaper),” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed December 11, 2019, encyclopedia .densho.org.

5. Leonard J. Arrington and Susan Arrington Madsen, Sunbonnet Sisters: True Stories of Mormon Women and Frontier Life (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984), 126–33; Gail Farr Casterline, “Ellis R. Shipp,” in Sister Saints, ed. Vicky Burgess-Olson (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 363–81; Ellis Reynolds Shipp, While Others Slept: Autobiography and Journal of Ellis Reynolds Shipp (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1962).

6. Mae Timbimboo Parry, interview by Michele Welch, May 2, 2006, transcript, Utah Valley University Digital Collections, accessed December 6, 2019, uvu.content dm.oclc.org/digital/collection/womenswalk/; “Brother and Sister Leaders in Shoshone Indian Affairs,” Hill Top Times (Kaysville, UT), June 13, 1969, 24; Quig Nielsen, “‘Greatest Indian Disaster’ Recanted,” Davis County (UT) Clipper, January 29, 1991, A6; John Barnes, “The Struggle to Control the Past: Commemoration, Memory, and the Bear River Massacre of 1863,” Public Historian 30, no. 1 (2008): 81–104; Darren Parry, “Mae Timbimboo Parry, Historian and Matriarch of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone,” Better Days 2020, accessed December 5, 2019, utahwomenshistory .org/bios/mae-timbimboo-parry/. See also Newell Hart, The Bear River Massacre (Preston, ID: Cache Valley Newsletter Pub. Co., [1983]).

7. Birthday of the Lion House and of Susa Young Gates (n.p., 1926), PAM 8597, USHS; Susa Young Gates, “Suffrage Won by the Mothers of the United States,” Relief Society Magazine, May 1920, 250–76; Annie Wells Cannon, “Birthday Party of Mrs. Susa Young Gates,” Relief Society Magazine, May 1926, 234–36; R. Paul Cracroft, “Susa Young Gates: Her Life and Literary Work” (master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1951).

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Pearson maintains that historians have given the lion’s share of the credit in the defeat of the Grand Canyon dams to the environmental movement, especially the Sierra Club and David Brower. He argues that while this narrative has grown to mythical status, his study seeks to correct this misconception, claiming that despite preservationists’ efforts legislation authorizing the dams would never have passed after August of 1966. He argues that other factors beyond the preservationists’ protests had an even greater impact. Pearson claims that Washington senator Henry Jackson’s powerful position as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee and his adamant opposition to proposals diverting Columbia River water to the American Southwest foreordained that any CAP legislation containing this provision would never leave his committee. In addition, political forces in California held sway over any CAP

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With such a complicated story as this one, Pearson focuses primarily on federal efforts to construct dams in the Grand Canyon, and he sets his sights on the roles of the federal government’s legislative and executive branches.

For Pearson, the federal legislative process was byzantine, characterized by powerful committee chairmen who dictated how and when Congress acted on legislation. That power allowed them to exert inordinate control in Congress and thus constrain public involvement. The executive branch is represented by the actions of the Bureau of Reclamation, who apparently was running amok constructing projects throughout the American West by overwhelming an unsuspecting Congress with tedious engineering reports and a well-oiled publicity apparatus. This theory is problematic, because it implies that a lone federal agency could run roughshod over the entire legislative process.

Moreover, it refutes Pearson’s narrative wherein he demonstrates the ability of local water interests to use their political clout to influence water policy. Federal policymaking has always worked with legislative and executive branches responding to the needs of a vocal and determined constituency. Pearson is also handicapped by a loose rendition of Bureau of Reclamation activities during the first half of the twentieth century to demonstrate its myopic view of constructing projects in the American West to serve its self-interests. According to Pearson, this rampage was finally halted with passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, which allowed greater public scrutiny on resource development projects.

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Byron E. Pearson’s Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth examines the heroic narrative that arose after the defeat of federal proposals to build two dams on the Colorado River within Grand Canyon to provide power for the Central Arizona Project (CAP). Pearson’s study explores water resources development along the Colorado River from the beginning of the twentieth century to passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act in 1968, which authorized CAP construction. His discussion investigates the multiple interests—federal, state, private capital, and environmental—that directly influenced policymaking regarding Colorado River development. Pearson’s study exposes the complex nature of water resources development in the American West, while also revealing holes in the constructed legend of the environmental movement’s supposed elevated role in stopping dam construction in Grand Canyon.

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legislation unless assured their water needs were secured. Finally, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall gave up the Grand Canyon dams in 1967 to gain Jackson’s support for CAP before he and Senator Carl Hayden left office in 1968. Thus, according to Pearson, regionalism, self-interest, and desires to secure a legacy had a greater effect in removing the Grand Canyon dams from CAP legislation.

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These discrepancies, although significant, do not take away from Pearson’s purpose of

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establishing a comprehensive narrative of the CAP/Grand Canyon Dam saga. He is correct that many historians have given greater attention and credit to the environmental movement’s role in this successful battle. Water development in the American West is, and has been, a convoluted issue involving multiple players and interests. CAP legislation emerged at a time when opportunities for new projects were becoming increasingly difficult. Rising costs of the Vietnam War and the social programs of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were making federal funds more difficult to secure. Moreover, change was in the air. As Pearson poignantly illustrates, Americans’ attitudes regarding their relationship with the natural world slowly began to evolve. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring questioned society’s faith in technology, while novel environmental laws, such as the Wilderness Act (1964) and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), were enacted. Public distrust and disenchantment with the workings of the federal government was also emerging, represented by protests over the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. All these, Pearson argues, coalesced to aid the environmentalist cause. But as Pearson concludes, although environmentalists benefitted from these transformations in American thought and culture, it was old-fashioned political deal making that led to the eventual passage of CAP legislation, without dams within Grand Canyon.

chapters (Diné communities and units of local governance)” (4). The result is a wide-ranging book of stories and accounts grounded in the concept that “by telling how we came to be who and what we are, oral tradition makes a bond between the land and the people” (4).

—Andrew H. Gahan

Other chapters discuss traditional Diné maps with the idea that history and geography are inextricably linked. Chapter 4 titled “Diné-Anaasazi Relations, Clans, and Ethnogenesis” describes how traveling Athabaskan bands emerged as distinctive Navajo clans united by songs, ceremonies, chants, and rock imagery. “Scholars have long recognized that ‘Dinétah’ (the upper San Juan region) was the scene of Navajos and Puebloans coming together,” explain Kelley and Francis (107).

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A Diné History of Navajoland

By Klara Kelley and Harris Francis Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 331 pp. Paper, $35.00

The authors of Navajo Sacred Places and Navajoland Trading Post Encyclopedia have written a unique history of Navajos and the Navajo landscape based on oral histories and archaeological research. For years, Klara Kelley and Harris Francis have worked as consultants for the Navajo Nation and Navajo-related federal programs.

Their expertise includes lengthy interviews with hataaliis, or Navajo traditional ceremonialists, and “more than 30 years of work on historic preservation projects in all of Navajoland’s 110

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Extensive citations make this a scholarly work of great value with important concepts of sovereignty and a belief in Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance,” which combines survival with resistance. The introduction details the Blessingway ceremony, the growth of clan systems, and resilience after forced incarceration at Bosque Redondo. The federal government and federal agencies are referred to as “Washindoon” not as Washington.

This is a book with a Navajo perspective including the belief, contrary to some archaeologists, that Navajos, or at least Athabaskan people, were in the Four Corners region concurrently with Ancestral Puebloans or prior to 1300 CE. The authors argue that “more Diné ancestors might have been some of the farmer-hunter-gatherers in the small extended family sites scattered in the backcountry around the big pre-1300 Anasazi ‘great houses,’” and that “most of the People today still seem to accept what their elders have said, that their ancestors were in Navajoland far back in pre-Columbian times” (42, 43).

The book’s strengths include chapters on Diné landscapes before the Long Walk and imprisonment, and on conflicts with Euro-American settlers and ranchers in the Checkerboard area of mixed-property ownership on the Arizona railroad frontier. The chapter on Diné traders at trading posts offsets conventional stories about trading posts and Anglo traders. Some of the oral histories focus on the livestock era

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Kelley and Francis end the book as they began it—on a political note explaining that “Diné sovereignty has been damaged by colonizer hegemony” and that “a people’s accounts of their own history both critique and refute the self-serving stories of absence, ‘victimry’ and voicelessness that colonizers use to take Indigenous land and resources” (268). But if there is anger, there is also affirmation. “Political and cultural sovereignty are tied together through the land base of a people . . . as oral tradition protects the People’s hold on the land, the hold on the land protects oral tradition” (270).

The authors of A Diné History of Navajoland have produced a valuable reference book reflecting their life’s work. Decades from now it will still be in use, and hopefully, still be taught.

It is an essential scholarly benchmark for a diverse, culturally evolving, sovereign nation.

—Andrew Gulliford Fort Lewis College

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Gay Rights and the Mormon Church has two primary objectives. The first is to supplement national LGBT histories with a focused history of Mormon/LGBT intersections. The second is to help LGBT Mormons by “chronicling the church’s attitudes and actions towards LGBT people” (4). Prince argues that these positions were informed by a now-discredited behavioral paradigm, and that when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fully accepts biological homosexuality it will “inevitably call for a systemic reevaluation of [its] policies” (4).

While Prince largely succeeds in producing a history of the institutional church, he provides little support for his claim that a biological etiology for homosexuality will cause a watershed moment. Prince’s skill as a historian of Mormon Studies is on full display here, as is his inexperience in the discipline of queer history.

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New information is brought to light about Navajo workers in underground coal mines near Gallup, New Mexico, but much of the northern Navajo reservation, including sections in Utah, is not well covered in the book. There is limited information on Navajo participation in World War II or employment in uranium mines during the Cold War, perhaps because those topics have been covered by other writers.

The last chapter focuses on Diné land use and climate change and is innovative in its scholarship, though the disastrous ecological consequences of having over 30,000 feral horses on the reservation is not chronicled.

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A fine sub-section of the book titled “Products from the Land and Goods from the Store” is a comprehensive look at Navajo families in transition with specific examples of what they produced to use, trade, and barter, and what they chose to purchase.

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after the 1930s and before trading posts devolved into convenience stores. As the authors explain, “in the decades before 1950, schooling and knowledge of English were uncommon among the people” (205).

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This book provides unprecedented insight into the private deliberations and decision-making of Mormon leadership in regard to the LGBT community. In addition to anonymous interviews with church employees, Prince accessed little-known documents such as Dallin Oak’s 1984 memorandum, which strongly influenced decades of LDS policy. Prince methodically walks the reader through each U.S. state’s attempt to legalize gay marriage, clearly explaining the political strategies employed on both sides of the debate. As a result, Gay Rights and the Mormon Church is a useful reference for what was happening within the LDS hierarchy and how LDS political involvement played out on a regional level.

Prince also succeeds in documenting how the LDS leadership gradually transitioned from a behavioral paradigm that condemned homosexual feelings, to a semi-behavioral, semi-biological paradigm that accepted same-sex attraction – whatever its provenance – and only condemned homosexual behavior. However, Prince fails to convincingly argue that fully accepting a biological basis for homosexuality

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will change the LDS church’s current stance.

Indeed, queer historians have generally avoided etiology in favor of analyzing social and cultural currents precisely because etiology does not inevitably lead to certain social positions on LGBT issues. (Many Mormons fully accept the genetic basis for homosexuality and their church’s current policies, arguing that many behaviors that transgress church teachings have a genetic component).

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While meant for an LGBT audience, Gay Rights mainly speaks to the experiences of gay, cisgender men. Prince acknowledges this bias, and attributes it to the constraints of the LDS church’s “nearly universal focus [on] gay men” (20). However, archival silence can be nearly as useful a tool for the historian as archival sources. Prince’s body of work demonstrates his skill as an oral historian, and the experiences of lesbian, transgender, and intersex members in navigating an institution that was only equipped to respond to them through the paradigm of “the gay man” merits more than their three single chapters. Furthermore, Prince focuses on gay men even when his source base does not constrain him. For example, Prince’s review of the scientific literature, “The Biology of Homosexuality,” only cites studies on gay men (20–24).

Prince does lesbian Mormons a further disservice by spending much of their single chapter discussing how the expectation of celibacy is especially difficult for LGBT Mormons who want to have children. The desire for children is not unique to lesbians—many gay Mormon men find childlessness a particularly painful aspect of celibacy—and to frame this concern as a uniquely female issue perpetuates gender roles and stereotypes that the LGBT community has consciously repudiated.

Transgender Mormons get even shorter shrift in their chapter. While Prince correctly notes that gender identity is separate from sexual orientation, all transgender people have a sexual orientation. Just as lesbians are not the inverse of gay men, the intersection of sexual orientation and gender identity can produce unique challenges for transgender Mormons. Additionally, the distinction between gay and trans identities emerged fairly recently (around the 1960s) within the LGBT community, which

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occasionally makes Prince’s treatment anachronistic. For example, when Boyd Packer stated in 1978 that “there is no mismatching of bodies and spirits,” his statement could be fruitfully analyzed as a reflection of the entangled discourse on trans and gay identities (20). Finally, Prince repeatedly uses “transgender” as a noun rather than an adjective (e.g., “the church’s silence on transgender,” “the biology of transgender”), a jarring error equivalent to finding the phrase “the gays” in an academic publication (271, 277).

Gay Rights and the Mormon Church is an able history of institutional Mormonism, and gives compelling insight into the experience of gay men in the LDS church. For an understanding of lesbian and transgender Mormons, however, the reader must look elsewhere. Prince’s concern for the LGBT Mormon community is evident and touching, but his advocacy sometimes veers into a teleological account of LGBT/Mormon issues as they currently stand.

—Jaclyn Foster University of Utah

The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks Edited by Craig S. Smith Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. 520 pp. Cloth, $45.00

A published collection of letters gives a writer and their memory to the ages. Collections of historians’ letters are uncommon, so clearly this collection is about more than a historian.

It is a record of a time, a woman, and a place.

Juanita Brooks is arguably the most notable figure of Utah historiography. A woman writing boldly and honestly about her own social and religious culture, she is a figure whose stature still defines an age. Best known for The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, 1950), her other major publications include a biography of a massacre perpetrator, John D. Lee, and an edited volume of the finest Utah diary of the nineteenth century, that of Hosea Stout.

Brooks was a force on the Board of Control as the Utah State Historical Society was becoming the state’s first publicly accessible research library. She was a popular speaker, a fixture in

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Like any book, the finished work is neither comprehensive nor exactly representative. This is fundamentally a work about Brooks, not her correspondents. Although the editor collects and presents only Brooks’s half of a correspondence, it is delightful reading. The letters, chosen for their interest and readability, miss a few that I wish would have been included—specifically her October 4, 1962, letter to Dale Morgan written upon completing the editing for Hosea Stout’s diary, the comment of an honest, earnest, and still-vulnerable student talking about her work to her mentor. It is also unfortunate that no photographs of any correspondents are included in the volume. Letters represent people, and people have faces that provide context.

Unfortunately, the volume simply stops after its

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Since publicly available digital collections are now common, published book-length volumes of collected correspondence are becoming outdated, and surely the next step for someone of Brooks’s stature is a large-scale digital project collating her widely scattered papers. The key importance of these primary sources on Brooks and her work allows glimpses of her significance throughout the volume without being stated overtly. Brooks’s approach and commitment to factually inclusive, forthright, unapologetic tellings of the past seems to be the message in her letters. The “see what the evidence suggests and tell the truth about it” approach to history she learned and adopted has come to be the accepted standard for Utah and Latter-day Saint history. That is why Brooks remains important. This is a good book, a contribution to regional literature, and a pleasure to read.

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Brooks was a letter writer at a time when letters required real effort. This one-volume collection of 220 select letters presents correspondence dating between 1939 (several years after she began her writing career) and 1978, about the time dementia began whittling away her memory and about a decade before her death. The general theme shaping the selection is Brooks as an actor in the story of Utah and its past, but much else is captured as well. The curation of the letters itself is quite affecting, drawing in not only professional correspondence but select personal correspondence as well, including a meek and perfectly honest letter to a neighbor about their dog. Brooks was a terrific letter writer. Her letters are not as long or detailed as those of her fellow professionals, such as Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, or Wallace Stegner, but her personal communications possessed a quality of artless sincerity and quiet competence, qualities that seem absent from her contemporaries. I don’t think a similar collection of their letters would be nearly as interesting.

While the book is structured chronologically, it is divided into chapters essentially by major writing project, each chapter introduced by the editor Craig S. Smith in a few well-chosen pages of biographical and historical context. The editor has filled in contextual notes and citations for the benefit of later scholars.

last letter in 1978, but Brooks lived for another decade. Although her dementia was covered briefly in the chapter introduction, the edited collection of letters would have profited from some concluding biographical comment and wrap-up of the volume.

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St. George and throughout Utah. Despite her accomplishments, she was also deeply insecure about her work, her abilities, and the consequences of her writing.

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—Richard L. Saunders Southern Utah University

Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997. 3 vols Edited by Gary James Bergera Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018. 2,605 pp. Hardback, $150.00

Volume 1: Church Historian, 1971– 1975 Edited by Gary James Bergera, foreword by Susan Arrington Madsen, introduction by Rebecca Foster Bartholomew From 1974 to 1977 I had the good fortune to know and work with Leonard Arrington at the Church Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even though I worked in the Archives Division and not the History Division, I considered him a colleague and friend, then and after. As I have talked to

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others who worked during his years as Church Historian, I have found that my experience was not unique. As a result, I find it much easier to refer to him as Leonard—with utmost respect for his status as the dean of Mormon historians—and will do so in this review.

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Without a doubt, the first volume of Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997—which covers the period from November 1971 until June 1975—constitutes an important addition to our knowledge not only of Leonard but our understanding of Utah history, Mormon history, and the nature of the LDS church’s bureaucracy itself. Despite his own autobiography, and other excellent historical examinations, they are quite unique. As a result, from my perspective I find them especially valuable for three reasons.

First, it is clear that Leonard was writing to document his own life story, and there is considerable Arrington/Fort family history herein, but also to record his place in the larger historical narrative. In various places he adds insightful observations about his life. At the same time, he was simultaneously creating a broader primary source, which he assumed would be judged like any primary source. This volume is particularly useful because Leonard provides important insights on his selection as church historian, and the choosing of his assistants and staff, as well as the personalities and differences of opinion that developed over time.

Second, Leonard sought to capture information which he felt was valuable and might not be captured any other way. His lengthy entry of December 9, 1971, is a good example. In it, Leonard records a conversation with Winslow Whitney Smith, grandson of Orson F. Whitney, who said that his grandfather believed that “the Lord gives the Prophet a vision, not a blueprint.” To support this assertion, Smith reported that when asked, Heber J. Grant once stated “I never had a revelation about the Church except the revelation about the Welfare Plan.” This revelation, coming after the development of the plan by Harold B. Lee and Marion G. Romney, “shows the natural way in which revelations are received.” Smith also told Leonard that Grant had sought to name Richard W. Young as an apostle but “hadn’t asked the Lord with an open mind,” and when he did

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was “inspired to name Melvin J. Ballard.” Smith said he believed the “Lord couldn’t get through to [Grant] until he had an open mind” (84–85).

On other occasions Leonard provides assessments of individuals based on his own observations and research. One of the most interesting is of David O. McKay, as recorded on December 13, 1971, an honest assessment of McKay’s strengths, faults, personality traits, and place in church history. In his view, despite his faults, no person other than Joseph Smith contributed more to the church’s growth than McKay. Clearly, Leonard wanted those contemporaneous observations on the record for future scholarly reference (90–92). Indeed, anyone seeking to understand the people, policies, and decisions of this milieu will find these volumes essential.

Finally, I learned some things. Leonard was a bit of a gossip. He had a wide network of friends, associates, and people he met whose viewpoint he wanted to record. And he enjoyed a good story. Leonard emerges as a more complex and complicated person than one might assume. He was not perfect personally or professionally.

He could be reflective and compassionate, but also strategic and honest. This volume allowed me to see what was happening at the Church Historical Department in a different lens than the one that I had when I worked there. In short, for me these observations were at once familiar, at once different, but always revealing.

Bergera, and those who assisted him, should be congratulated for this illuminating and important contribution to the historical record.

—John Sillito Ogden, Utah

Volume 2: Centrifugal Forces, 1975–1980 Edited by Gary James Bergera, with contributions by Joseph Geisner and Lavina Fielding Anderson This second volume of Leonard J. Arrington’s diaries begins in July 1975, three years into Arrington’s service as the first professional Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It ends in March 1980 just as a sixteen-volume church history was announced.

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Several books were written and published in the early years, but three of them attracted the most attention. I coauthored, with James B. Allen, The Story of the Latter-day Saints, which Deseret Book published in July 1976. The controversy triggered by this book delayed publication of the volume created by Arrington and Davis Bitton for outsiders. Alfred A. Knopf published The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints in 1979.

Soon after The Story of the Latter-day Saints reached the bookstores Arrington learned that three people had extracted sections from the book that they felt were inappropriate and shared them with three of the most conservative apostles: Elders Mark E. Peterson, Ezra Taft Benson, and Boyd K. Packer. Benson and Packer went public with the information. Arrington knew that “Benson will not stand for our ‘real’ history.” “[W]e are in a powerless position,” he wrote. “We have certain members of the Twelve who will speak up for us, if they are permitted to do so.” However, the Twelve’s policy was not to publicly challenge each other.

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Two weeks later, Arrington met with the First Presidency and four members of the Twelve.

Benson and Petersen explained their concerns about The Story of the Latter-day Saints and a second book, Building the City of God, a manuscript by Feramorz Y. Fox that Arrington and Dean L. May updated and published in 1976.

Arrington responded to the comments and then was instructed to write more directly to church members and less to scholars and non-members. Other changes followed. On April 29, 1977, G. Homer Durham, an academic who had served as Utah Commissioner of Higher Education before his call to the Seventy, became managing director of the Historical Department. He would limit church-sponsored publications and slowly reduce the size of the staff. Either he or one of the apostles would review each publication.

Another administrative change followed on February 8, 1978, when two apostles who were “advisors to the Twelve” were replaced by Gordon B. Hinckley and Boyd K. Packer to represent the Twelve as “liaison between the First Presidency and the Historical Department” (464–65, italics added). Benson’s suggestion that the History Division be moved to BYU happened four years later. The division eventually returned to join the Joseph Smith Papers project.

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Arrington kept a diary for future historians. The main storyline in the second volume is the tugof-war between conflicting views about how religious history should be written. Arrington and his staff of nine professional historians were creating open narrative histories set into the historical context. Some General Authorities felt that academic history ignored God’s role in history. They preferred faith-promoting texts that ignored difficult issues. Arrington’s plan was to create a one-volume history for the Latter-day Saint audience to replace Church Historian Joseph Fielding Smith’s Essentials in Church History, a second volume for readers outside the church, and a multivolume series to replace B. H. Robert’s outdated six-volume history. Church leaders agreed with Arrington that these books would not require vetting by the Correlation Department. Instead, Arrington, his associates James B. Allen and Davis Bitton, and staff editor Maureen Ursenbach Beecher would approve them for publication.

Arrington wondered whether he should stay with the job and “try to write history which will be approved by Correlation” or “resign and continue to write ‘real history’” (225–26).

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Gary James Bergera organized Arrington’s diaries into chapters with useful titles and introductory quotations that help define each chapter’s contents. Volume 2 includes chapters 20–40, each of which covers one to three months.

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Volume 2 contains much more, including Arrington’s reflections on his early life and his conversations with numerous people. Professional historians and others with a deep interest in Mormon history will want to read all 2,500 pages in the three volumes. Others will find a rich narrative that reaches beyond the diaries in Gregory A. Prince’s 464-page biography, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (2016). A shorter version is Arrington’s 238-page autobiography, Adventures of a Church Historian (1998), published less than a year before his death. Whatever choice you make, you will discover that Arrington’s diaries document the beginning of a commitment to the professional writing of an authentic Mormon history.

—Glen M. Leonard Farmington, Utah

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Volume 3: Exile, 1980–1997

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Leonard Arrington’s diaries present a man who catalyzed a new era in Mormon history during his tenure as Church Historian, the priesthood calling responsible for maintaining accurate records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its history. Unlike his predecessors in the history division, Arrington was a trained, professional historian with a PhD in economics from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a faithful and practicing Latter-day Saint. Time and again, his diaries reflect a man caught in the middle of producing professional history worthy to stand alongside scholarly historical research and promoting a faithful image of the Saints that would bolster the faithfuls’ testimonies. On December 7, 1975, Arrington affirmed this struggle when he wrote, “If we survive this year, we shall have proved, as I believe we can, that Church history can be excitingly written and [still be] basically faith-promoting, and at the same time professionally and intellectually respectable. I pray that this may be true and that we can measure up, both to our devout friends and to our professional colleagues” (128).

No segment of Arrington’s life demonstrates this tension greater than the years 1980–1997, covered in the third volume of Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997. It was during this period that Bruce R. McConkie delivered the “Seven Deadly Heresies” address, making clear the church’s stance on evolution and distancing itself from doctrines associated with fundamentalism, Boyd K. Packer gave his critique of the New Mormon History, the LDS Church Historical Department moved to BYU, and Arrington was released from his calling as Church Historian. At the same time, this period illuminates an increased tension between historians and the LDS church, as resignations over limited academic freedom and discipline for BYU faculty attending certain academic conferences (Sunstone Symposium) increased. Taken together, these events demonstrate a constriction within the institutional church following Arrington’s release

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as Church Historian. However, despite challenges and Arrington’s own frustrations, his diaries reveal a man who never wavered in his loyalty to the LDS church and commitment to producing impartial history.

During Arrington’s service as Church Historian, the goal of a more honest and open history was made tangible with a less restrictive archive. This openness became a consistent point of contention among Arrington and church leadership. Because an open archive is dangerous and frees the people from the past to be their authentic selves, it is messy and complex. The Saints are no longer mere reflections of perfection, but struggling humans reaching out toward their God as they toil to build Zion. This concern was most apparent in 1987 when church apostle Delbert Stapley spoke about the Church Historian’s responsibilities and the concern over writings that reflected poorly on the church. To this concern, Arrington replied that “if our picture is entirely rosy nobody, even members of the Church, will have confidence in what we write because members of the Church know that there are warts and blemishes and unless we acknowledge some of these they will not have confidence that we are writing the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (234). Arrington wanted a history of people as they lived; high-ranking LDS church leaders wanted a history of how they imagined their past.

Readers may appreciate that, much like his historical writing, Arrington’s diaries present a “warts and all” approach to himself. Like his characters, he does not appear one-dimensional. He broke ground through hiring women and fighting to keep them employed during the duration of pregnancy, something the church did not do previously. But he also wrote of his struggles, his anger, his illness, and his flaws.

He reflected of his remarriage and frequently commented on “liberals” toward the end of his life. But, that is what good history does. It offers truthful accounts, even when it is hard.

In October 2017, I had the honor to speak with Carol Lynn Pearson about Leonard Arrington and the release of his diaries during the annual Sunstone conference in Short Creek, the historic home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).

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Arrington understood that history has consequences. He also understood that history could serve as a force of vindication. Mormon history vindicates the struggling, the marginalized, those subjected to the church “inquisition” (as Arrington called it) of 1983, the believers in the 1886 Revelation (whom he writes about sympathetically throughout the diaries), and the historians who felt the blunt force of church leadership in the form of excommunication during the beginnings of a new era in Mormon Studies. In life, Arrington knew this. In his death, these diaries will be part of the vindicating force of history.

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Arrington had praised Pearson’s work time and again and expressed concern at the removal of her work from the Ensign, an official magazine of the Church, because of her public support for the Equal Rights Amendment. Over the weekend I shared bits of the diary and listened to her stories of their close friendship. Toward the end of our time together she told me about a gift she had sent Arrington, small cards that read “History is on our side, as long as we control the historians!”

This phrase became a constant theme in the final part of his diaries. On August 29, 1986, he wrote, “On the one hand, history is on our side, let the consequences follow. On the other hand, it is only on our side as long as we can control the historians!” (444)

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J. MICHAEL HUNTER is the author of mystery and suspense novels, as well as nonfiction works on urban legends, popular culture, Utah, and the Latter-day Saints. He works as the Associate University Librarian for Research & Learning at Brigham Young University and holds BA, MA, MLIS, and MPA degrees from Brigham Young University and California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is a backyard beekeeper with an interest in Utah’s wild and domesticated bees.

SABRINA SANDERS is the Artifacts Collection Manager for the Utah Division of State History, where she also sits on the acquisition committee. She is an active member of

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JAMES R. SWENSEN is an associate professor of art history and the history of photography at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography and In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange’s Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, winner of the best book award from the Utah State Historical Society. He is also the recipient of the 2016–2019 Butler Young Scholar from the Charles Redd Center for Western American Studies.

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the Utah Museums Association, taking part in programming the annual conference. An initial degree in art history from Wayne State University was followed with an MA from Johns Hopkins University in museum studies, she believes authentic objects bring history alive.

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CLYDE L. DENIS is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the University of New Hampshire. His federally funded research was on gene regulation in relation to cancer. An inveterate backpacker, he and his family have been exploring southern Utah and northern Arizona since 1971. His appreciation of the region was enhanced by a 1996 sabbatical at the University of Utah. Recently, he has been publishing research on the history of the Canyonlands area.

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GARY TOPPING is a retired historian and archivist living in Salt Lake City. He is an Honorary Lifetime Member and Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society. His writings include Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country and Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History.

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Undated studio photo of Chief Atchee, an Uncompahgre Ute chief. Used by permission, Uintah County Library Regional History Center, all rights reserved.

In the global 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, Chief Atchee was one of a reported sixty-two individuals on the Uintah Reservation who succumbed to the flu by the end of 1918. That the virus moved with ease among and between tribes reflects the fluidity across Native American boundaries.

All told, the pandemic had a devastating impact on Native peoples—more so than many other groups. According to the Office of Indian Affairs,

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in the Four Corners region about 40 percent of Native American population caught the influenza, with a death rate of nearly 12 percent. Navajo ceremonies and sweat baths, used to combat the disease, may have inadvertently spread it, resulting in relatively higher fatalities among the Navajo than other Indian tribes.

For more information, see Robert S. McPherson, “The Epidemic of 1918: A Cultural Response,” and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918–19 in Utah,” both published in Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 58, Spring 1990.

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