Book Reviews & Notices

REVIEWS

The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847– 1877. Vol. 16, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier

Edited by Will Bagley, with foreword by Floyd A. O’Neil

Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2019. 559 pp. Cloth, $55.00

The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877 assembles primary sources on Mormon pioneers’ early relations with Utah’s Native American peoples, with particular emphasis on documents that report Native peoples’ own words. Despite the volume’s somewhat misleading title, most of the documents relate to the years 1847–1858. Summary treatment is given the years 1830–1847 and 1859–1877. Well organized and beautifully illustrated, this sixteenth volume of Arthur H. Clark’s Kingdom in the West series is somewhat marred by frequent typos and a cover that smears the reader’s fingers with green ink.

The editor Will Bagley has created no mere documentary sourcebook here. He weaves primary sources together with narrative framing. Although Bagley’s ambition is to allow Native voices to speak, he knows that the sources collected in the volume are “white records of what whites said Indians said” and that to “recover” Native voices from these sources requires an interpretive act. Throughout the volume, his editorializing provides a counterweight to the editorializing of the sources’ authors. Yet he also acknowledges that in “presuming to speak for a people not my own,” he commits “an act of pious fraud” and pens a work of “colonial literature” (20, 25).

Many of the sources collected here will be familiar to Utah historians, but others may be new. A western historian of long experience, Bagley draws not only on Mormon pioneer documents, but also on anthropological studies, Spanish chronicles, federal government reports, and travel diaries from emigrants who passed through Utah on their way to Oregon and California. These often prove more fruitful than Mormon accounts, for where Mormons wrote as partisans for their settlement project, outsiders took a more critical view.

Where Mormon sources almost completely silenced dissident Native people’s voices, for example, federal Indian agents ruefully catalogued the dissidents’ grievances against Mormon settlers. “American good! Mormon no good!” the Ute leader Sowiet told Henry Day. In a perfect inversion of how Mormons portrayed Natives’ perceptions of the two white groups, Sowiet told Day that Americans were “friends,” but that Mormons “kill, steal” (191–92).

In characteristic fashion, Bagley engages in at least a little muckraking. For instance, citing evidence that Mormons poisoned Natives, he asserts that the “facts defy denial.” Said facts, however, show conclusively that Mormons contemplated the use of poison and that Natives believed it had been used, but not that any specific act of poisoning occurred (526).

Yet Bagley, always a sharp critic of Mormon leaders, also gives them some credit here. There was at least one “profound difference” between the way Latter-day Saint theology imagined Indians and the way the American literary canon did: the novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s “Indians were the last of a doomed race,” while Joseph Smith’s “Lamanites were a chosen people,” destined for survival (41–42). Smith’s successor Brigham Young may have talked of controlling and exterminating Native groups, but he also advised mercy and defensive strategies more often than his followers liked. “Historians who shift accountability for the brutality shown to Native peoples from leaders to followers have a point,” Bagley writes (524).

For all its aspiration to recover Native voices, Whites Want Every Thing is first and foremost a collection of documents about Mormon pioneer conquest and colonization. Native voices are heard in the documentary record only rarely. Yet insofar as Bagley seeks to humanize Native people, he succeeds. He discusses Numic peoples’ lived experiences, subsistence practices, and religious beliefs without seeking to exoticize them. Through lively narrative, he familiarizes the unfamiliar. Whites and Natives struggled to comprehend each other’s languages, but “everyone understood cursing and swearing in broken English” (67).

Individual Native leaders emerge in Bagley’s narrative not as romantic victims or cartoon villains but as full-bodied characters with the full range of personality traits. The Ute “king” Wakara, for instance, may have been a “ravenous gangland warlord,” but he was a charming one, just like Brigham Young (528).

Christopher Carroll Smith —Independent historian, Albuquerque, NM

One Voice Rising: The Life of Clifford Duncan

By Clifford Duncan, with Linda Sillitoe. Photographs by George R. Janacek

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xxv + 260 pp. Paper, $29.95

In One Voice Rising, Linda Sillitoe has given voice to Clifford Duncan, a significant cultural and spiritual leader of the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah. The book consists of a series of extensive, introspective—and often insightfully critical—interviews with Duncan, recorded by Linda Sillitoe during a series of long truck rides between Neola and Salt Lake City. As such, it is a valuable addition to the literature about the Ute people of Utah. However, One Voice Rising is neither a book of history (although Duncan talks about and critiques various historical events), nor an ethnographic study. However, it is an important addition to previously published studies because it presents especially extensive commentary and descriptions by a Ute about Ute history, traditions, and beliefs—with the occasional aside about inaccuracies published (in Duncan’s words) by “authorities.” Sillitoe and Duncan agreed at the outset that even though he would be talking about the Ute world, the purpose of the book was not to speak for the Ute Tribe, his Native American religion, other Ute healers, or Native Americans in general. Instead, One Voice Rising would be an ethnobiography that represented the life and personal worldview of one Ute man struggling to live in, and make sense of, his bicultural world.

His book would also be a memorial, recorded by Duncan for his own Ute people. In sharing some of his deepest feelings about Ute traditions and his personal Indian spirituality, he hoped he could leave a compilation of memories and philosophical musings for a younger generation of Utes, most of whom were no longer interested in learning about, or being part of, traditional Ute culture. But he hoped that one day, when in their maturity they sought their roots, they would read his book and listen to his words. It would act as a “delayed message,” preserving the wisdom he had gained over decades of being a spiritual and cultural leader and a juggler of the old and the new. His words could “fill in the gaps” and lead a future generation toward a better life centered on the power of mind and spirit (xxi–xxii, 218–19).

Meanwhile, for the rest of us—the historian, ethnographer, and interested Indian and non-Indian reader—his words provide valuable insights into how one modern Ute successfully navigated the worlds in which he found himself. His reminiscences and reveries (and sometimes cynical critiques) about religion, spirituality, culture change, and tribal politics provide us with valuable perspectives and a glimpse into the mind of a man steeped in both of these often opposing worlds. We are also granted access into how he and his people view their history, including the theft of tribal land, the problems of tribal reorganization, issues of Termination and mixed-blood expulsion, the good and bad impacts of increased wealth, as well as tribal politics and the unintended consequences of assimilation (forced or otherwise). Through philosophizing and using metaphors, stories, and a touch of “Ind’in humor,” he reveals a uniquely Native view of the world seldom found elsewhere.

Duncan was well placed to provide these insights, for he had extensive experience in both worlds. During his life he had been many things: a bullied child, a saddle-bronc rider, an army veteran, a vocational student, and an artist. He had also acted as a tribal representative in national inauguration parades and Olympic ceremonies, and he had been a director of a tribal museum and an archaeological consultant. He was a Sun Dancer and Powwow dancer, a healer, a sweat lodge leader, a roadman in the Native American Church, a president of state and local chapters of his church, and a consultant to state legislators about the peyote sacrament.

The book does have some drawbacks but none that detract from its overall value as a window into the traditional and modern worlds of the Ute people. The book is not organizationally linear; although Sillitoe tried to generally arrange the interviews by topics, they are interviews and move with the flow of Duncan’s thoughts. Each chapter is centered on a theme, but various threads of side issues often wind their way into the story, leading the reader along unexpected paths. Despite these minor distractions, the book remains a valuable addition to the body of literature about the Ute people of Utah who, until now, have primarily had their stories told and their religion and folklore explained—by non-Indians. With One Voice Rising, one man’s Ute voice can now be clearly heard.

Sondra G. Jones —Brigham Young University

Women Artists of the Great Basin

By Mary Lee Fulkerson and Susan E. Mantle

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2017. xii + 204. Cloth, $49.95

Artist Mary Lee Fulkerson and photographer Susan E. Mantle have produced a lavish book about thirty-two women artists who are inspired by the Great Basin, in which Utah holds a central place. Their work more than fulfills the promise of their aim: “to discover and communicate the rich stories of each artist’s individual journey and how their stories influenced the raw vitality of their art” (xii). This purpose is particularly weighty, because women artists— who create half of the art in the world—are so poorly represented in exhibitions, collections, and the pages of publications. Indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s, my mother was a portrait artist who left her first name—Marguerite—off her signature, signing instead with her maiden and married names: M. Eichorn Daly. She did this because of the deep prejudice against women artists. Today, a half-century later, women still struggle to gain the recognition they deserve, as feminist art scholars such as Linda Nochlin, Roszika Parker, and Alessandro Giardino, and feminist artists such as Judy Chicago have made clear. It is, therefore, inspiring that the artists Fulkerson and Mantle interview and photograph have broken the glass ceiling with their art.

These women work in a variety of media; some are familiar, such as stone, brass, paint, glass, and textiles, while others are less familiar, such as gourds, used tea bags and coffee filters, and Twinkies. Virtually all are described as energetic. The written descriptions and exceptional photography capture spirited moments of women in the midst of their art-making. These moments are fascinating as we gain a glimpse not only of them but of their studios and working spaces, filled with various materials, pens, paint brushes, hammers, welding torches, and a loom. In addition, Fulkerson and Mantle include photos of the artists’ finished work. But the working spaces are so crucial for artists because it is, as many artists reveal, the process not the product of one’s art that is the most satisfying. As the artist Rebekah Bogard stated, art is not about “the destination; it’s about the journey” (174).

In addition to their art work and art working, the authors provide a brief biography of each artist. These show that all the artists have weathered some sort of diversity, obstacle, and trauma: breast cancer, polio, abuse, divorce, and death among them. Growing up in times when women were offered limited opportunities as teachers, nurses, or mothers, each chose a different path—that of artist. On reflection, Fulkerson notes that “I have written this book to highlight women . . . who have walked through adversary to create art that changes our perceptions of the world because they do it their way” (128). This she accomplishes well.

These artists subvert the vertical, mainstream view of art versus craft through their materials, their subjects, and their renderings. Blurring the artificial line is currently applauded and necessary, for the split between art and craft, fine art and applied art, high culture and low culture is a late eighteenth-century invention. This western view was strengthened during the nineteenth century and cemented in the twentieth. Yet, as the applied arts scholar Peter Dormer has correctly observed in The Culture of Craft, “The consequences of this split have been quite startling. It has led to the separation of ‘having ideas’ from ‘making objects.’ It has also led to the idea that there exists some sort of mental attribute known as ‘creativity’ that precedes or can be divorced from a knowledge of how to make things” (18). Clearly, art contains both thinking and making as these Great Basin artists demonstrate. Thus, we should return to what Aristotle taught us in the Metaphysics about artists as those who are “wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes.” In other words, artists are those who know their knowing. Aristotle continues, “it is a sign of the man [I’d add woman] who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is.” All the Great Basin artists here know their knowing and most went on to teach art.

The artist Gail Rappa speaks to the power of Women Artists of the Great Basin when she says, “I wish everyone who wants to would give themselves permission to create in some way” (117). This book gives that permission. And so, I will now put down my pen and pick up my yarn and crochet hook; I anticipate other readers will also feel so creatively inclined after finishing this fine work.

Maureen Daly Goggin —Arizona State University

NOTICES

Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music

By Michael Hicks

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. x + 232. Paper, $17.95

Michael Hicks, an emeritus professor of music, considers Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection to be the third volume in his trilogy of books documenting Latter-day Saint music. In his words, it covers musical topics, differing viewpoints, and “high-class gossip from artsy backrooms of Mormonism” (ix). An early chapter analyzes Joseph Smith Jr.’s favorite popular songs—or, in other words, what the contents would be of his nineteenth-century-style mixtape. The book covers LDS musical culture from the religion’s first days until the present: three chapters trace the history of LDS hymns, while “Elder Price Superstar” analyzes The Book of Mormon musical. Of particular interest to UHQ readers will be Hicks’s survey of the history of minstrelsy in Utah and in relation to Mormon culture.

American Prisoner of War Camps in Idaho and Utah

By Kathy Kirkpatrick

Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2018. 96 pp. Paper, $22.99

With American Prisoner of War Camps in Idaho and Utah, the genealogist Kathy Kirkpatrick provides an overview of the prisoner of war (POW) experience in Idaho and Utah during World War II. The narrative describes the everyday lives of prisoners, the role POWs played in supporting the local war effort, and the position of Italian prisoners following the fall of Mussolini in 1943. Kirkpatrick has illustrated this book generously (the photographs come primarily from Weber State University’s Stewart Library Special Collections), and she focuses on Italian prisoners housed in the Ogden area. The book provides an extensive bibliography, a list of POW camps in Utah and Idaho, and death and burial indexes. It will be most

useful for readers seeking a starting point for research on individual prisoners or learning about this particular aspect of WWII history in the Intermountain West.

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West

By Melvin C. Johnson

Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019. xvii + 210 pp. Paper, $24.95

Melvin C. Johnson provides a thorough look at the life of John Pierce Hawley, an early Latter-day Saint convert, and his search for truth in Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley. Johnson traces Hawley’s journey through and among various sects of Mormonism, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints led by Brigham Young, as well as other sects led by Lyman Wight and James Strang. Hawley ultimately ended up joining and defending the reorganized church led by Joseph Smith III. Johnson’s research provides a complex picture of a man searching to find the truth among the Mormon diaspora and those vying to be recognized as Joseph Smith Jr.’s true successor. Although this is primarily a biography of Hawley, Johnson’s sympathetic view provides glimpses into the practices, thoughts, and behaviors of some of Hawley’s contemporaries, often through Hawley’s own critical lens. Supplemented with several primary sources, Johnson’s work provides a thought-provoking counterweight to more conventional pioneer narratives.

Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays

By Ron Tyler

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xii + 300 pp. Cloth, $65.00

Ron Tyler, the retired director of the Amon Carter Museum of America Art, explores the art and legacies of men who visited and portrayed the nineteenth-century West in Western Art, Western History. In this collection of essays, Tyler examines a range of artists, from well-known individuals such as John James Audubon and Frederic Remington, to more obscure painters such as Louis Choris and federally commissioned artists. The essays explore the significance and context of the various artists’ works, and each piece is accompanied by reprints of the art it discusses. Tyler advocates that much can be gleaned from the art as historical sources, because the artists in question witnessed events firsthand, even if their reproductions were filtered through personal or contemporary biases. The artwork and essays will be of special interest to artists and art historians of the West.

Rescuing Beefsteak: The Story of a Pragmatic Pioneer Idealist

By Myron Harrison

Jackson, WY: Myron Crandall Harrison, 2018. xiii + 169 pp. Cloth, $34.43

Myron Harrison tracks the life and history of his great-great-grandfather, George “Beefsteak” Harrison. Starting with Harrison’s birth in Manchester, England, the book explores not only the details of Harrison’s life, but also the context in which he lived, including the impact of industrialization in England, the methods and challenges of emigration to the United States, handcart travel to Utah Territory, the Blackhawk War, and more. Rescuing Beefsteak is richly detailed, based on contemporary notes and stories by Howard Driggs, as well as Myron Harrison’s additional research. Beefsteak’s story is an interesting one, and even those without much knowledge of Harrison or Utah history should be both entertained and informed by the stories. Among other things, Harrison spent some time living as a runaway among Native Americans; he later opened up a successful steak restaurant, from which he earned his nickname.

Layton

By Lynn Arave

Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2019. 127 pp. Paper, $21.99

In Layton, Lynn Arave provides a thoroughly illustrated history of the community he has studied for years. Layton, Utah, was settled in 1850 as an outgrowth of Kaysville, and a twenty-year legal battle to separate from Kaysville was finally settled in 1902. Layton includes chapters on the city’s early agricultural history and sugar beet processing factory. World War II and the development of Hill Air Force Base entirely changed Layton from a settlement of a few families to a city anchored on a military installation. By 1950, the city’s population had increased five-fold, something Arave shows with photographs of the base and the housing units created to support it. Arave also provides images of schools, churches, and other aspects of community life, as well as illustrations of the beloved neighboring mountains.

City between the Canyons: A History of Cottonwood Heights, 1849–1953

By Allen D. Roberts

Cottonwood Heights incorporated as a city in 2005; City between the Canyons delves into the record of the area from the earliest days of its settlement. Known by a number of names during the century that this book surveys, Cottonwood Heights has been home to a variety of communities, from Scandinavians to African Americans. This book, by the architect and writer Allen D. Roberts, seeks to “separate legend and myth from fact,” as Cottonwood Heights’s first mayor writes in the foreword.

Bonneville Salt Flats

By “Landspeed” Louise Ann Noeth

Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2020. 127 pp. Paper, $21.99

With Bonneville Salt Flats, “Landspeed” Louise Ann Noeth provides a pictorial tour of Utah’s famous racing grounds. She begins the story in 1914, with photographs of early racing events at the speedway—including images of Governor William Spry there. The wealth of illustrations in Bonneville Salt Flats comes from magazines, the Utah State Historical Society, race participants, and Noeth’s own collection; they include images of racers, charts and schematics, the Salt Flats community, and of course, a host of cars and motorcycles. Noeth includes short sections on women in racing and about the environmental degradation of the speedway. Her knowledge of the world of the Salt Flats and of racing make this an enjoyable read.

Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed- Reading Worked

By Marcia Biederman

Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019. 240 pp. Cloth, $26.99

In Scan Artist, the mystery-author-turned-biographer Marcia Biederman recounts the story of Evelyn Wood. Wood was famed for her speed-reading method, which the public eagerly embraced in the 1960s. Biederman weaves together the genres of true crime and memoir, as she mines the sources to paint a comprehensive picture of a twentieth-century “scammer in cashmere.” Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed-Reading Worked is a discussion of the national anxiety after Sputnik and the Utah woman who turned that unease to her advantage.