The History Between the Lines

The History Between the Lines

BY GARY TOPPING

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 Rather than adhering single mindedly to what a historical document definitely tells us, I encourage historians to use evidence to read between the lines and, in so doing, offer greater interpretive insight than would otherwise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 possibilities into the motives and inner drive of historical actors.

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.

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, 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

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Holmstrom standing on his boat at Lake Mead in 1938. Photo by Amos Burg. Author’s collection.

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 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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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 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 future 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, 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.