Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, Number 3, 2021

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CONTENTS Keynote Address, 68th Annual Utah State Historical Society Conference

By Lisa Tetrault

198 Frémont’s Folklore: Or the Naming of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers, Revisited

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By Sheri Wysong

215 Avoiding Mormons, Running Rapids, Encountering Western Utes William Lewis Manly’s Voyage Down the Green River and Across Utah in 1849

By Michael D. Kane and Nathan N. Waite

232 From Edinburgh to Salt Lake City Archibald Geikie’s Travels in the American West in 1879

By Rasoul Sorkhabi

246 Beehive Brews A Heady History of the Becker Brewing and Malting Company

By Cody Patton

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DEPARTMENTS

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In This Issue Reviews Contributors Utah In Focus

REVIEWS 265 Vision and Place John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin Edited by Jason Robison, Daniel McCool, and Thomas Minckley Reviewed by James M. Aton

266 “Feed My Sheep” The Life of Alberta Henry

By Colleen Whitley Reviewed by Jessica M. Nelson

267 Color Coded Party Politics in the American West, 1950–2016

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By Walter Nugent Reviewed by Leah A. Murray

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The next two pieces make unique contributions to a traditional staple of UHQ: nineteenth-century geographical knowledge and exploration.

Good history builds on earlier scholarship, as each generation reexamines established interpretations in light of recently surfaced sources—and such is the case here. Sheri Wysong enters the figurative maze of place names and their origins by questioning and revising conventional wisdom concerning the toponymy of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers. She argues that the rivers’ names did not derive from Spanish sources, as was previously believed, but the actual sources are in fact puzzlingly complex. By the same token, Michael Kane and Nathan Waite reexamine what river historians have assumed about an early voyage down the Green River, as recorded in William Manly’s 1894 publication Death Valley in ’49. California bound, Manly on a whim decided at the Green River trail’s crossing that it would be easier to reach his destination via the river rather than

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On the theme of travel, our next essay—written by the geologist Rasoul Sorkhabi—introduces readers to the renowned Scottish geologist Archibald Geikie’s visit to the American West in 1879. Having corresponded with some of the great American geologists, including Clarence King and John Wesley Powell, Geikie wanted to see the West for himself. His observations of geologic formations in the Uinta and Wasatch Mountains, as well as in Wyoming’s Yellowstone, enabled Geikie to solve some intractable questions that had long perplexed him concerning the erosional power of rivers and glaciers and the origins of volcanic rocks.

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overland. Although Manly wrote his account well after the fact, and it is somewhat vague and certainly embellished, enough clues remain to conclude that his river journey was longer than previously believed. Our third article, then, is a corrective to the historical record—and an engaging adventure tale to boot.

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The struggle to vote is a dominant thread in American—and Utah—history. Last year we paused to commemorate a celebrated centennial benchmark in that struggle: passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, extending suffrage to women. At last fall’s 68th annual Utah State Historical Society conference, Dr. Lisa Tetrault, who studies gender, race, and American democracy, made a surprising case for what the amendment actually does and what it means to us today in the continuum of voting progress.

Our lead article is an edited reproduction of Tetrault’s remarks.

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In This Issue

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Our final article is Cody Patton’s “heady” history of beer and brewing in a state long stereotyped as incurably dry. That the featured Becker beer company, headquartered in Ogden with a regional reach, continued to operate after passage of the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol, and then flourished during the onslaught of national brewing companies turning a steep profit in the state, speaks not only to the entrepreneurship and innovation of the Becker family but to the economics of alcohol and the drinking habits of Utahns.

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS, 68TH ANNUAL U TA H S TAT E H I S TO R I C A L S O C I E T Y C O N F E R E N C E

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When Women Won the Right to Vote: A History Unfinished

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Thanks to everyone for joining in this new virtual world we’re all growing quickly accustomed to. And thank you to the Utah State Historical Society for this invitation, and for their wonderful programming around this anniversary. I’ve been learning a great deal.

We’ve gathered here, from far and wide, to talk about the Nineteenth Amendment, the amendment that supposedly gave women the right to vote in the United States. Ratified and added to our Constitution on August 26th, 1920, it still serves, one hundred years later, as the conventional date for marking that victory. The main thru lines of this story in popular lore are pretty-well rehearsed, and have not changed much since ratification. This newspaper headline from August 18, 1920, when the last of the states needed for ratification approved the amendment, for example, sings: “Tennessee House Ratifies Giving Women of the Entire Nation Vote This Fall.”1 Likewise, today, google searching “what is the 19th Amendment” yields similar results. Here’s one from a governmental website, ourdocuments.gov: It “granted women the right to vote”; and “legally guarantees American women the right to vote.”2 Also, this widely circulating digital map, created for the centennial, tracks when women around the world won voting rights. The year 1920 is emblazoned across the United States. You’ll see we are not the first to enfranchise women— but somewhere near the beginning of this global turn.3 In other words, U.S. democracy rates fairly well. And many of the stories you’ll hear this centennial season will champion the triumph of this moment, as one step in the steady, progressive, full opening of American democracy.

If you take another look at this global map, however, and zero in on the United States, you’ll see there is a tiny asterisk after 1920. Today, I want to spend my time unpacking that asterisk, because it contains multitudes.

According to the note on the map, the asterisk means not “all women” voted after 1920. This intervention you may have heard. Despite contemporary headlines heralding “women of the entire nation” and present-day google results championing “guarantees,” millions of women, in

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Confused? Most are. To explain how this can be true, and why it matters, I’m going to depart from the traditional biographical approach to this topic—the grand fights of grand women— to instead frame our story through the Constitution itself. Mid-century suffragists were, after all, amending the Constitution. So what did (and does) the Constitution say about voting, and just how did the Nineteenth Amendment amend it?

Approaching the topic from a legal angle throws into question the way American democracy is typically understood (as a steady expansion of voting rights) and even who we are as democratic citizens (people with a right to vote). Rather, I posit that American governance has remained deeply and unyieldingly committed to a project of disenfranchisement, refusing to grant voting rights to anyone, and thereby leaving important victories vulnerable

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The original 1789 Constitution put state governments in charge of creating voters. In other words, state governments got to create the voter eligibility laws for the inhabitants of their states. Such laws (often provisions in state constitutions) listed criteria state inhabitants had to meet in order to vote, such as age, residency requirements, sufficient property holding, being white, and being male. If you cleared these criteria, you voted.

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The way we talk about voting rights in the United States often doesn’t do sufficient justice to our actual understanding of voting rights.

Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to over this centennial has presumed that protections for voting rights reside inside the Constitution.

What’s most surprised nearly everyone I’ve spoken with is that the Constitution is silent on this question. The Constitutional framers (white men) deliberately skirted this issue, leaving it out of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Despite centuries of activism on this very point, that founding silence continues today. Of the roughly 130 constitutional democracies around the globe at present, the United States is unusual in refusing to add this basic right to its founding charter.4

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The Constitution

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Today, I’m going to read that asterisk yet another way, to tell a different, but related, story, one you’ve probably not heard before, and one that will likely surprise you. Ask yourself, without too much reflection: What is the most basic right of citizenship? Did you answer “the right to vote”? Most of you likely did. Yet, as I’ll explain, no women—white or otherwise—won voting rights in 1920. Neither did Black Americans (and others) win voting rights in 1965. This is because the “right to vote,” as we imagine it— as the most fundamental and important right democratic citizens possess—does not actually exist in the United States. That’s right. There is no affirmative “right to vote”—for any citizen, male or female (trans* or non-binary). That too belongs in this asterisk, and may—depending how we read the evidence—require that 1920 be erased from this map altogether and that the space inside our national outlines be left blank, because there is no such date.

to inevitable defeat. As I unravel this story, I hope you’ll begin to see that 1920 was neither the beginning, nor the end, of women achieving voting rights, but rather the middle of a much longer, ongoing story that remains unfinished— handed, now, to you and me.

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fact, still could not vote in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment, owing to ongoing racial exclusion. As Americans and scholars of color alike have repeatedly pointed out, most Black women (and men), Latina, and other non-white Americans would not enjoy this privilege until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—a next (and often said to be final) step in American democratic expansion.

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This is what we have called “voting rights” in the United States—the ability to clear state voter eligibility criteria and thereby cast a ballot.

For our purposes here, I call this a “negative” right to vote. You vote so long as you are not barred from doing so. Yet as with the Constitution, nothing at the state level invested residents with a right to participate in elections by casting a ballot, what I’d term a “positive” right to vote—the right most of us imagine having been born with (propertied white men) or having won at some point in history (everyone else).

State voter eligibility requirements have changed considerably over time, and what social

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movements have “won” is the elimination of specific, targeted state obstacles, and thereby the access to voting, which is generally trumpeted as winning “the right to vote.” Those victories have been tremendously important, to be sure.

But this ongoing lack of specificity around what “the right to vote” is, leaves us impoverished in terms of understanding what has happened historically and how American democracy even works today, in the present.

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The history of women’s suffrage provides an instructive example. At the founding, not all states required that voters be “male.” New Jersey chose not to restrict along lines of gender, and like other states, also chose not to restrict along lines of race. If women, of any hue, met state requirements in New Jersey, they could—and did—vote. (Albeit in very small numbers, given law restricted women’s property owning, which was a voter eligibility requirement.) By 1807, however, New Jersey added the word “male” to its voter eligibility law. And by the 1820s and 1830s (largely having to do with the expansion of slavery and wage labor), states eliminated property requirements, and uniformly now required that voters be both “male” and “white.”5 Those two words, or eligibility requirements, will be our focus here. They are by no means the only things that states required voters to be (age, residency, and other requirements persisted). But those are the two disenfranchising (or eligibility) qualifications that have formed the heart of a women’s suffrage fight.

Over the 1830s and 40s, just as the advent of white male suffrage became universal across all states, a women’s rights movement emerged out of antislavery. Within that women’s rights movement, discernible by the 1850s, biracial and coed, and tightly tied to antislavery, activists made many demands. Among those (equal pay, access to the professions, property holding, equal education, etc.), women called for “the right to vote.” It was, as one adherent put it, “the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”6 These activists, however, did not demand a constitutional amendment, because in the early-to-mid 1800s, everyone understood that the

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Constitution had nothing to do with governing the voting of U.S. residents. You would not, then, go to the Constitution to try to obtain the franchise. Instead, mainstream women’s rights activists went to the individual states demanding they remove the obstacle that stood in their way: “male” and, for many women, also “white.”

In other words, they pursued a negative right to vote, the removal of a state obstacle.

Like us, they nevertheless called this elimination technique the pursuit of “voting rights,” throwing around ambiguous definitions that derived from a strident, if fictious, sense of democratic inheritance and entitlement that endures to this day. Yet part of what I’m insisting upon is that we not perpetuate that ambiguity, that we look instead at the legalities undergirding this vaguely defined, if ardently defended, right.

The Fifteenth Amendment: “White” So where did the idea of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage come from, given that from a legal standpoint, it was an odd way to pursue voting rights. The answer came out of the American Civil War (1861–65). That war settled two questions: the nation would remain united, and chattel slavery, at least as an official institution, was dead. Out of the war came a whole new series of battles known as Reconstruction. On what basis should the nation rebuild, and how should it incorporate four million newly emancipated people. Were they citizens? Were they covered by the same laws as white Americans? Were they entitled to reparations, after the searing experience of enslavement? And were they voters? Freed people had their own demands upon freedom. Most white Americans, in the North and the South, however, were not willing to condone their (extremely reasonable) demands. Yet, for complicated reasons (including politically controlling the South, where most African Americans lived) the Republican-dominated Congress (Lincoln’s party) did take up freed people’s demands to vote, opening fractious debates about federal power to regulate this issue.7 When Congress deliberated about their voting over the late 1860s, the nation was nearly

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The language eventually settled upon—through last-minute deals and unorthodox methods— drew instead upon negation. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in early 1870, stipulated that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In other words, federal and state governments could not use “white” as a voter criteria, and that word (along with any future words mentioning race) was now struck from all state voter eligibility laws as unconstitutional. Because the vast majority of African Americans lived in the South, Congressional Republicans effectively created the first meaningful, bi-racial democracy across, of all places, the former Confederacy (which helped Republicans politically, by giving them a foothold in an otherwise white, confederate, and Democratically controlled South).10 Black men began voting in massive numbers across the South, even in the face of massive vigilante violence and white terrorism. They elected Black officials to all levels of southern state governments, including sending the first slate of Black Americans to serve in the U.S. Congress. Outraged white supremacists

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Just as the Fifteenth Amendment headed to the states for ratification in 1869, the AERA convened its annual May meeting in New York City, where a firestorm erupted. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of nation’s leading women’s rights activists, tore into the proposed amendment for omitting women. She railed against “ignorant” black manhood voting before “educated” white womanhood. And she hurled racial epithets, calling black men “Sambo.” Not only would (to her mind) unfit freedmen be allowed to vote were the amendment ratified, she warned, but immigrant men (Chinese, German, and Irish) too, increasing the ranks of “ignorant,” incompetent voters to epidemic proportions. The famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony, Stanton’s close ally, backed her up. If the vote was to be given “piece by piece,” Anthony fumed, “then give it first to women, to the most intelligent & capable of the women at least”—clearly meaning native-born white women and displaying her own deeply held sense of racial hierarchy.12

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More immediately, the Fifteenth Amendment stirred up controversy within the feminist-abolitionist coalition, and set some white suffragists on a new path: an amendment of their own. Those pre-war allies reorganized as the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), in 1866, just before the Fifteenth Amendment was proposed. Their goal: securing the right to vote for women and Black Americans. Although the Fifteenth Amendment soon promised to strike down “white” in state voter qualifications, this left “male” firmly in place—those two criteria I promised we’d track. They collide here.

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During this broad-ranging debate, several different versions of an amendment were proposed, including a constitutionally created affirmation of a citizen’s right to vote, one that citizens would possess, protected within the Constitution, and therefore not easily abridged by ongoing state eligibility requirements, many of which would be rendered unconstitutional.

In other words, some advocated for creating a positive right to vote. This gained almost no traction among northern or western congressmen (the states controlling Congress), however, because politicians liked disenfranchising in their home states, and they had little appetite for giving it up.9

shouted loudly about federal overreach into state prerogatives, the indignity of Black “rule,” and the unconstitutionality of the amendment itself.11 But in the end, the amendment invested no Black man with a right to vote, as is often claimed (then and now). In fact, it said nothing about them at all. It merely negated a state voting criteria (“white”) and thereby created access—something that would eventually have far-reaching consequences.

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a hundred years old. Yet this marked the first time Congress had had a full-scale debate about the voting rights of national citizens—which is shocking when you think about it. What they decided to do, moreover, was absolutely revolutionary: pass a constitutional amendment to enfranchise Black men.8 The devil, however, was in the legal details.

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Frederick Douglass, himself once enslaved and now the nation’s leading African American statesman, rose to counter. Ongoing vigilante violence across the South gave Black men greater priority, he argued. “With us, the matter

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Stanton and Anthony refused and bolted from the convention in disgust, hastily creating the United States’ first (purportedly) national women’s suffrage organization, aptly named the National Woman Suffrage Association.

This was, in many ways, how a national women’s suffrage movement—now focused on a single issue, the vote—was born: in opposition to striking the word “white” from state voter qualifications. Dedicated to the defeat of the Fifteenth Amendment, the small band who

formed the National Association also hatched a brand-new idea, women’s suffrage by constitutional amendment. The only redeeming feature of the Fifteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony snarled, was that it had federalized suffrage, moving jurisdiction from the states to Congress. Henceforth, they urged women to besiege the congressional citadel for a Sixteenth Amendment granting women’s enfranchisement.

Their allies stood stunned. They rejected not only the pair’s brazen nativism and racism, but also their new constitutional interpretations around voting. Most united behind Lucy Stone, an equally famous antebellum antislavery and women’s rights advocate, who is often forgotten. She formed the rival, and much larger, American Woman Suffrage Association—dedicated to supporting the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and opposing the

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is a question of life and death. . . . When women, because they are women, are hunted down; . . . when they are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement, . . then she will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

We must have the vote now to save our lives, he urged.13

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an educator, poet, essayist, speaker, and civil rights and women’s rights activist, who pushed back on white suffragists’ narrow notions of rights and sex. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-118946.

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Black women’s arguments did not carry the day, and as this division developed in national women’s suffrage organizing over 1869–70, Black women largely opted out. They dipped in and out of white suffrage organizing, when it served them, but they never find comfortable homes there. One of the things we must remember on this anniversary is that if we want to recover Black women’s stories, we can’t simply look inside white organizations, since those organizations rarely represented the interests of Black women. We have to locate Black women where they were. They (and other women of color) would always organize around suffrage, but never as a single issue, a luxury they could not afford, and never just as women, given they faced so many issues along lines of race, class,

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Because Stanton and Anthony succeeded in controlling movement memory by century’s end, we often tell the story of mainstream (largely white) women’s suffrage as if it revolved around the pair, their genius, and their amendment.18 That amendment, called the Sixteenth Amendment when first proposed in 1869, was modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment. The wording, in fact, was identical. The right to vote, it read, “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” (Whereas the 15th had read “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”) In other words, it would strike down “male” in all state voting requirements, which the Fifteenth had left standing (the reason Black women hadn’t voted in its wake). Yet Stanton and Anthony’s advocacy for a constitutional amendment, backed by a large coalition, goes nowhere for fifty years. Congress pays some deference to their insistent demands by creating a Standing Committee on Women’s Suffrage, and even taking a few floor votes, but those were never remotely within range of succeeding. It would take a half century before Congress finally passed it in 1919.

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Numerous African American women also took part in this divisive, historic moment—women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an educator, poet, essayist, and speaker, who was both a civil rights and women’s rights activist. As this fracture around priority (race or gender) emerged during the brief life of the AERA, she urged members not to take the bait. Delivering the type of intersectional critique Black women have been articulating for centuries, Harper insisted this was not an either-or choice. She embodied both, and she cautioned against the developing equation where Black equaled male, and women equaled white, which rendered her and millions of other Black women invisible.15 “Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul,” she intoned, for “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.” She then leveled a damning critique against white suffragists’ narrow notions of rights and sex. “If there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness,” she smoldered, as Stanton and Anthony also sat there on the stage, “it is the white women of America.”16

and more (often in league with men). The very moniker “woman suffragist,” therefore, did not fit them, but they were always stalwart supporters of voting protection and voting rights, and they worked tirelessly for such rights, yet outside the largely white women’s suffrage organizations, on their own terms and in their own communities.17

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newly hatched Sixteenth Amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment had been an emergency measure necessary to safeguard the lives of freed people, Stone argued, but it did nothing to reverse state power over appointing voters.

The franchise for women had to be won state by state, in the same ways activists had always approached this work, by striking “male” from state constitutions.14

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Meanwhile, if we go back to the states, where the largely forgotten Lucy Stone and her American Association labored, there were quite a lot of victories unfolding on the ground. Wyoming Territory enfranchises women in 1869. (Or, more aptly, they don’t add “male” to their voter criteria.) Utah Territory follows suit in 1870.

Stone and the American Association helped support countless state campaigns to wipe the voting hurdle “male” over the 1870s and 1880s, many coming extremely close to passing.19 Over the 1890s into the 1910s, all but one of the Western states also chose to enfranchise women—in other words, strike down “male” on their own accord (since the prerogative is legally in the hands of state governments).20

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“The Awakening,” lithograph by Hy [Henry] Mayer, published by Puck Publishing Corporation, February 20, 1915. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-12369.

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This popular lithograph, “The Awakening,” from 1915 illustrates how thoroughly the West (for reasons we don’t fully understand) adopted this reform, and illustrates how much these reforms got framed by the types of narratives I opened with, about the steady, glorious expansion of American democracy, in the form of increased voting rights. You can see here the cape on this figure, representing progress, reads “votes for women,” and she is moving triumphantly east, toward the clamoring masses on the ground there yearning for this historic, important reform, crying out for her blessings to be bestowed upon the nation-as-a-whole.

Millions upon millions of women, this lithograph reminds us, voted before 1920, a point we often forget, being preoccupied with the Constitution as the locus of voting rights. Here’s another map of what women’s voting looked like on the eve of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1919. Suffragists themselves kept close watch over these state victories, carefully tracking them, with utilitarian graphics, such as “The Map Proves It.” On this map, all the white states had enfranchised women on the same terms as men, granting what was termed “full suffrage.” This didn’t necessarily mean that all women could vote, because not having won a positive right, they still had to clear all the other state voting requirements. But millions faced only this one remaining obstacle, and they did begin voting once “male” stopped blocking their path. By 1919, full suffrage had even swept some eastern

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states, like Michigan, and the politically influential state of New York.21 Then you see a mishmash of solid shading, dots, and stripes drawn across the rest of the states. Nine of these states, colored in black, a small minority on the map, found largely along the southeastern coast, from Alabama up into Pennsylvania, retained the word “male” for all elections, meaning no women voted, on any terms. The remaining states, filled in with lines and dots, and which number about as many as states with full suffrage, had another type of voting we also often forget, called “partial suffrage.” This meant that for select types of elections, voters were not required to be “male,” whereas in all others, they were. Across these many states, occupying the center and the northeast quadrant on the map, women could qualify, depending where they lived, to vote for school questions,22 in municipal elections, and even for President. All through these other states, then, save for the recalcitrant nine, millions more also voted in various ways—underscoring with robust national numbers that women did not begin voting in 1920, as is so often claimed, precisely because voting governance is primarily a state, and not a national, right.

Before we depart this map, I want to quickly draw our attention to the story of Illinois, which passed municipal suffrage in 1913. One of the popular correctives this centennial has been to say that “only white women” won the vote in 1920. But given that voting governance

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Women’s suffrage map of the United States, ca. 1919. From David Trowbridge, A History of the United States, vol. 2.

is local, we cannot make such blanket statements—even about women in the same demographic—because voting eligibility always varies, based on where you live. Black women in Illinois, for example, voted after the 1913 municipal suffrage laws dropped sex (given the Fifteenth Amendment had earlier cleared race). Quite famously, the nation’s leading civil rights, anti-lynching, and women’s rights crusader, Ida B. Wells, an all-around powerhouse of a human, organized the Black women’s Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, where Wells lived. Black women used this organization to begin leveraging their new electoral power in an organized, concerted fashion (along with men of color) to elect, in 1914, the city’s first Black alderman, Oscar de Priest (who would go on to be elected the first and only Black representative in the U.S. Congress during the early twentieth century).23 As suffragists began to rack up victories in the states, the two rival national organizations (the National and the American Associations) merged in 1890, into the not-very-creativelynamed National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Being a mouthful, the

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organization is generally referred to by its acronym and pronounced “naw-saw.” Susan B. Anthony took charge of NAWSA at its 1890 formation. Lucy Stone, ailing for years with stomach cancer, died in 1893, and never had much of a presence in Anthony’s new organization. Anthony, meanwhile, handed over leadership to her appointed successor, Carrie Chapman Catt, in 1900. Stanton died two years later, in 1902, while Anthony passed in 1906. None of those founding white women lived to see the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which would finally force all states into the same practice where language about sex was concerned.

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The Nineteenth Amendment: “male” By the early 1900s, Carrie Chapman Catt herself had given up the fight for a federal amendment—now referred to at the Nineteenth Amendment, but retaining its original language.24 She instead pursued what she called her “winning strategy,” a state-by-state campaign. Her idea was to get key states to enfranchise women, and the rest, she predicted, would fall like dominoes, eventually bringing about a

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federal amendment. Her strategy worked. Part of the reason a federal amendment passed was precisely because so many women were already voting before 1919, showing this reform would not throw the world off its axis, as opponents charged it surely would.25

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Meanwhile, because social organizing is extremely messy, and never the kind of harmonious collaboration we imagine, things inside NAWSA began to fracture when a young upstart named Alice Paul entered the scene. Paul had a very different political sensibility than Catt. Whereas Catt worked diplomatically to curry the favor of politicians and win them over, Paul preferred applying pressure and calling them out. Paul also set her sights on renewing a direct fight for the federal amendment.

Catt allowed her to pursue the work, including Paul’s plan to announce it: a dramatic, massive parade through the streets of Washington, D.C. Showing her penchant for provocation, Paul deliberately held her procession on the eve of the newly elected Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration, to upstage him for his open opposition to women’s suffrage.26 Thousands of women arrived from all over the country to march, and tens of thousands of men (largely, although not only) lined the streets to watch. There were floats (one heralding the amendment), tightly choreographed delegations (representing everything from individual states to women’s educational attainments), and lots of pageantry. It was then the largest peaceful demonstration ever staged on D.C. streets. As it snaked its way through the city, elements in the crowd grew hostile. Women turned to the police for protection. As they turned their back on the marchers, men rushed into the street grabbing women’s banners and throwing them to the ground. Violence overtook, as the police looked on. Injuries sent scores of women to the hospital. The melee made front page headlines the following day— March 14, 1913—the day of Wilson’s inauguration, upstaging him further. Alice Paul now had what she wanted: the attention of America.

African American women showed up for this 1913 parade too, to insist that white women not monopolize the issue, but Paul and the other white organizers asked Black women to march in the back. Ida B. Wells, who was

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already effectively leveraging women’s votes in Illinois, came in from Chicago. Another major black activist and voting rights advocate, Mary Church Terrell, was there, as was a Black sorority chapter from Howard University. Of course, African American women found Paul’s request deeply offensive, and Ida B. Wells, for one, refused, slipping in with the Illinois delegation and integrating the parade. It formed yet another reminder, although none were needed, that leading white suffragists understood womanhood to be white—and therefore made no meaningful attempts at sisterhood.27 The violence and publicity following the parade outraged Carrie Chapman Catt. Furious, she kicked Paul out of NAWSA, accusing her of endangering all the hard-earned goodwill NAWSA had patiently built over decades and thereby having jeopardized the cause. Alice Paul, electrified from the event, responded by forming a rival organization, the National Woman’s Party (NWP).28 Once again, the mainstream national movement was divided.

Paul’s National Woman’s Party would be responsible for all the theatrics associated with the run-up to the amendment’s 1919 passing, including picketing the White House. In January of 1917, to again pressure President Wilson, NWP members begin standing vigil outside the White House fence, lined up along the back edge of the sidewalk, holding banners urging Wilson’s support, and standing silent. Wilson ignored them, hoping they’d go away. But through rain and sleet, month after month, they took up their posts. When the United States entered World War I that spring, declaring its desire to make the world safe for democracy, Paul seized the opportunity to embarrass Wilson on an international stage. They read his pro-democracy speeches and set them on fire, turned his words against him on their banners, and kept on picketing—a risky move, given the deferential support usually shown war-time presidents. Catt, meanwhile, pledged NAWSA’s support to the war effort—to showcase women’s patriotism and, therefore, their worthiness of citizenship’s principal entitlement. NWP’s ongoing picketing, meanwhile, sent her into a fury for the disrespect and bad publicity she believed it generated.

Soon, Wilson had had enough. He wanted the picketers removed. Only he had no grounds for

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Soon, Wilson himself declared support, addressing Congress to urge its passage. Finally, over the summer of 1919, both houses approved the amendment by generous margins. It’s worth taking a quick detour here to remind ourselves of all those millions of women voting out West, as they and the voters in general had already sent the first woman to Congress, Representative Jeanette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, who was elected in 1917. This means that when the Nineteenth Amendment reached the floor, not only were women already casting ballots around the nation, but a woman cast her vote for the amendment from the House floor itself.29

This was the situation until Harry T. Burn, the youngest member of the legislature, in his early twenties, sat with the weight of history on his shoulders and a letter from his mother in his breast pocket. “I’ve been watching,” she began, “to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet.” “Be a good boy,” she continued, “and help Mrs. . . . Catt with her ‘Rats,’” by putting “the rat in ratification.” As the vote went down to failure, Burn, who had joined the opposing side, unexpectedly changed his vote. He later recalled not wanting to be on the wrong side of history or of his mother. No one could believe it. After decades of struggle, the amendment had just narrowly passed by the razor-thin margin of one. Women’s suffrage was now the law of the land.31

Despite elation over this historic victory fifty years in the making, mainstream suffragists had to cut celebrations short in order to begin what turned into a year-long fight for ratification. Three-quarters of the states were required to approve any amendment before it was added to the U.S. Constitution. That meant

Celebrations erupted across the country, and we arrive back to the type of newspaper headlines with which we started this talk, laying down the triumphant narration that often accompanies this story: “SUFFRAGE WINS—Giving Women of the Entire Nation Vote This Fall.”

“The federal suffrage amendment,” another

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To everyone’s surprise, in August, Tennessee suddenly took it up. A southern state known for its commitment to “state’s rights,” chances did not look good. The amendment would forever cancel that state’s right to use “male” for voter eligibility—a federal intrusion into a state matter. Nashville, the state capitol, quickly turned into a circus, as pro- and anti-forces poured in with hopes of shaping the decision. The liquor lobby kept the alcohol flowing, votes were bought, and respectable white women stormed (sometimes drunken) men’s Capitol offices well past calling hours. As the melee melted into the decorum of a floor vote, it seemed likely to fail.30

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The prisoners soon began a hunger strike, led

by Alice Paul herself, who was now among those arrested. The wardens ordered them force fed. Strapped into chairs, they had tubes forced down their noses and throats, liquid nourishment poured in. They vomited and bled. When word got out that these upstanding white women (who were by the code of white supremacy supposed to be immune from state brutality) were suffering such violence, while the nation fought in a war for the preservation for democracy, a wave of public sentiment developed in their favor. This too, along with NAWSA’s patriotic wartime service, helped push the amendment over to victory.

suffragists needed southern support, which was unlikely to develop. Very quickly—with help from NAWSA’s massive ground game, already in place from work for their “Winning Plan”—states began ratifying, and by the spring of 1920, the amendment needed just one state more. Its steady momentum came to a grinding halt, however, and languished for months, as the remaining states, many Southern, refused to take it up. Throughout the summer of 1920, ratification hung perilously in the balance.

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doing so, as they were on public property and perfectly within their rights. Given arresting them for political speech violated the constitution, he and his minions began having them arrested on the manufactured grounds of “obstructing traffic.” Refusing to pay their fines, the women were sentenced to a jail term in the Occoquan Workhouse, while more picketers took their places. They too were arrested, jailed, and replaced by new picketers. This went on, while the suffragists inside the jail endured brutality and beatings—something familiar to many Black and other women of color, but not to upstanding white women.

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It’s useful to come back here to the language of the Nineteenth Amendment and again query the right to vote, given that our ideas about it are often so different from the legal reality. This was an enormous victory, in many, many ways.

And millions more women voted in its wake, forming the largest expansion in the franchise in U.S. history.33 Yet the language that passed was the 1869 iteration, which had reproduced the language of the Fifteenth Amendment, substituting “race” with “sex.” The entire amendment read:

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brightly trumpeted, “has granted women the right to vote.”32

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—The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

—Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Its reference to “the right of citizens . . . to vote” was a legal illusion, but a powerful, deeply held idea, then as now. Yet despite the soaring opening, nothing in the amendment (or inside the Constitution) conferred that illusory, positive right upon women—who are not even mentioned in the text. Nothing, moreover, “guaranteed” that all women could vote. What the amendment did do, and what it did guarantee (if followed & enforced) was ban the individual states from using the word “male” ever again in voting criteria. In states where this had not yet been fully struck, use of that word became henceforth unconstitutional, for all elections.

Like the Fifteenth Amendment, this created millions of eligible new voters, but it too was a negative right, created by policing the states with federal power, and targeting a lone, single word: “male.”

States Create New Criteria For precisely this reason, millions of women— overwhelmingly women of color—still did not qualify to vote after ratification. Because neither amendment prohibited states from controlling voting eligibility law, which remained a state power, states could—and did—erect new criteria. Their options here were limitless, save for two—race and, after 1920, sex. While the

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white Lady Liberty, with her Votes for Women cape, strode victoriously across the United States in that 1915 lithograph, illustrating the franchise’s expansion and a story of democratic progress, another story of democratic reversal took place simultaneously. That development is inseparable from the story of the Nineteenth Amendment.

If we go back to the history of Black men voting across the South, those bi-racial governments created in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment were overthrown by the 1880s. White supremacists regained state control, and they desperately wanted Black men legally disenfranchised. Their voting numbers had dwindled, due to ongoing, relentless racial terrorism.

But owing to federal expectations around enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment, which grew more and more anemic, they were still legally eligible to vote. Over time, the federal government signaled that it had abandoned the entire enterprise, preferring to ignore what was happening to Black voters down South.34 These white, state governments seized the opportunity and began floating new voter eligibility laws: poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, grandfather clauses—all the disenfranchisement techniques we associate with the Jim Crow South. Mississippi led the way, beginning in 1890. By the early 1910s, these innovations had fully swept the South. Their effectiveness was brutal, reducing Black male voting, once reaching turnouts of 90 percent to almost nothing. Although these laws were racially targeted in their application, they were skillfully worded, never mentioning “race,” and thereby technically complying with the Fifteenth Amendment. Similar types of restrictive state voter laws, including new residency requirements and shorter registration windows, spread across the North and West in the early 1900s as well, as native-born whites set about “purifying” the electorate of “problem voters,” meaning largely immigrant, poor white, and people of color. Even New York instituted a literacy test.35 Scores of women—who a few decades earlier might have voted in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment—no longer could owing to these new racially (and sometimes economically)

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191 Uncle Sam, behind a high wall spiked with pen points and marked “Literacy Test,” tells an immigrant family: “You’re welcome, if you can climb it.” Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-14198.

targeted state voter “eligibility” laws. Although that amendment cleared “male,” something necessary for all women, it was not sufficient for all women, because it was so narrowly targeted. Depending where they lived, women might now be ensnared in a poll tax or a literacy test, and kept from the polls. The Nineteenth Amendment said nothing about these practices.

This wide-spread development in the states reassured the largely native-born, white, male Congress that a vote for the amendment now would only, to recall Anthony’s own damning words, be giving the vote “piece by piece . . . to the most intelligent & capable of the women.”36 This was yet another, highly unsavory factor in why the Nineteenth Amendment finally passed when it did. Congressmen affirmed this during

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floor debates. One crowed that “any person who really wants white supremacy in the South can not [sic] better guarantee it than by the enactment of this equal-suffrage resolution.”

Women’s suffrage suddenly held an advantage: it could double the white vote. “The situation as to negro women can be handled as has been done with negro men,” another reminded his colleagues, adding “it is inconceivable that these conditions will be destroyed or even interfered with by permitting women to vote.”37 Black women across the South did their best to rebuff such open exclusion, not letting the 1920 moment pass without a fight.

They showed up all over the region, alone and in groups, often with recently disenfranchised Black men, demanding what they too

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believed was their basic democratic entitlement. In Americus, Georgia, the white registrar “would hide the book or himself” when women showed up to register, not even allowing them the chance, underscoring the incredible power of local registrars to bar voters. The white registrar in Pheobus, Virginia handed a blank sheet of paper to the confident Susie Fountain, who showed up to take that state’s literacy test. He declared her “test” a failure, showing how fraudulently these requirements were often administered on the ground. Other women, like Indiana Little, a Birmingham schoolteacher, got arrested on charges of “vagrancy” when she tried to register. The white police then sexually assaulted her while in custody, a common method of white supremacist terrorism. White registrars sometimes permitted a few African Americans to register, to create plausible deniability that their actions were race-based. Of the six hundred Black women trying to register in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, the registrar enrolled only four. In a few cases, southern Black women defied the odds and managed to vote, but always against great bodily threat. In Ococee, Florida, white residents torched and leveled an entire Black community of several hundred people, based on a rumor that a single resident intended to vote. “The files of the U.S. Department of Justice, the records of the NAACP, and African American newspapers,” one historian finds, “are . . . bursting with letters of complaint, investigative reports, and affidavits that document the widespread disfranchisement of African American women, especially but not exclusively in the Jim Crow South, in the first elections” after 1920.38 Yet when these women and others—Asian American, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, Latina, and more—came to Catt and Paul’s flagship suffrage organizations with brutal stories of ongoing disenfranchisement and the urgent need to carry on the fight, those white women said no. They celebrated. And they essentially said, we don’t care about your fight, our fight is won. These mainstream white suffragists declared once again, both tacitly and explicitly, that their fight was for women, not race—as if that question were separable. Still impervious to the intersectional arguments of women of color, they claimed the mantle

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of progressivism while shoring up the politics of an exclusionary, whites-only democracy.

Black women and others were left, yet again, to fight on their own, often in league with their disenfranchised brothers, fathers, husbands, and sons.39

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 conventionally marks the eventual winning of voting rights for African American women (and men). That narrative tends to replicate the harmful equation of Blackness with maleness and tells the story of the civil rights movement as if it were male dominated and lead, when women also did much of the work, strategic thinking, organizing, and directing. The passage of that historic legislation was women’s work too, the culmination of their ceaseless, much longer, and far more violent struggle for the vote.

The names of these women are legion, and it’s important to recognize this work too as part of the continued struggle for women’s voting rights. The scores of determined women onthe-ground worked alongside more legendary women, such as Septima Clark, born 1898, an educator and activist, who created a vast network of “citizenship schools,” which were often targets of vigilante violence, to teach literacy to her community, instilling cultural pride and mounting a frontal assault upon literacy tests. Fannie Lou Hamer, born 1917, a Mississippi sharecropper, tried to register to vote in 1962, along with a bus load of others, all of whom suffered extreme physical and economic reprisals. A commanding presence, she became a leading organizer. President Lyndon B. Johnson so feared her voice that he interrupted her live testimony on national television in 1964 with a contrived, “urgent” presidential message.40 When armed troops and police violently beat and turned back marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, in an event known as “Bloody Sunday,” which ushered in the signing of the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, women played an active role. Amelia Boynton Robinson, for example, was beaten to a pulp, her body also on the line for voting reform. Those stories, often narrated through the lens of men, were women’s ongoing fights too.41

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Native American women often approached “voting rights” with skepticism, an undesired “right” that signaled the end of tribal sovereignty and the finality of colonization. Others believed such rights were essential, women like Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonin) of the Yankton Dakota Sioux, who fought for voting recognition among native peoples. Indigenous peoples followed very different paths to citizenship, which often required renouncements of tribal allegiance (something many were unwilling to surrender), happened in stages, and wasn’t complete until after the early 1940s. States then targeted native voters with laser precision, writing separate suffrage laws to bar them.44 In short, there is no single date when women, once and for all, won access to the ballot box.

Because voting law is so localized, and women’s demographics differ so greatly, women faced a multitude of fights that stretched well beyond “sex.” Because these fights were also so different from one another, no clear, final date can speak to all that variation, not even 1965.

Rather, women’s pursuit of the vote is an ongoing, endless string of dates, marking numerous fights that still haven’t ended. Yet the Voting Rights Act proved important for many of these women, for the robust work it did in the states, and for the access it created, well beyond Black Americans in the South.

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The 1965 Voting Rights Act also struck down far more state voter discrimination than either amendment had. It eliminated literacy tests, which had become so corrupted that by the 1960s, that they demanded impossibilities, like correctly answering how many bubbles were in a bar of soap. Ending literacy tests also helped immigrant and Latina women across the nation. The act also struck down things like the use of all white registrars, who had proven to be such effective gate keepers. In the South, it deputized African Americans to register people, and sent in federal officials to do the same. Black registration numbers soared, from almost nothing to upwards of eighty-five percent. Meanwhile, previous court decisions had struck down all-white primaries, and a new constitutional amendment, the twenty-fourth, had ended “poll taxes.”45

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Despite its name, the Voting Rights Act achieved reform in the same way the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments had, through the negation of targeted state voting rules. But unlike those amendments, this was a piece of federal legislation, far more sweeping, and temporary. A crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, it was also a stain on American democracy. Up close, it seemed triumphant, more evidence of the steady opening of voting rights, but viewed from a distance, and within the long frame of voting governance, we’re reminded that it took Congress one-hundred years—an entire century—to finally go back South and enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.

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Other women couldn’t vote after 1920 for different reasons, and they too battled on, without the meaningful support of white suffragists.

Racially driven citizenship laws barred women from the polls, by barring them from national inclusion.42 The Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred both entry and citizenship, first targeting Chinese women (for presumption of prostitution), and then Chinese laborers generally (who had swollen the western shores after the 1849 California gold rush)—both marking the end of this nation’s open borders. Asian Americans residing here, such as Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, then, faced an entirely different fight, and thus followed an entirely different timeline, dependent first on securing citizenship. For such women, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which created paths to citizenship, was a critical date. Once citizens, however, they sometimes faced more fights against state-level restrictions.43

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The Voting Rights Act also went a step further to create an active oversight process, known as “pre-clearance.” States or jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination—some of which fell outside the South—could no longer pass and enact voting laws without first submitting them to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) for review. If the DOJ found them to be racially discriminatory, it could strike them down and prevent them from going into effect—which after 1965, it regularly did.46 One of the most effective pieces of federal legislation ever passed, the Voting Rights Act pushed the United States into becoming an inclusive democracy, two-hundred years after its creation. The act, however, was a temporary

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piece of legislation, set to expire after five years.

Right-wing forces immediately targeted it for defeat. Congress nevertheless reauthorized and strengthened the Voting Rights Act multiple times. Since 1965, for example, reauthorizations have determined that a state voting practice can be considered racially discriminatory if shown to have that effect (over earlier rules requiring intent to be proven, which was nearly impossible). Reauthorizations also included the creation of bi-lingual ballots, vastly extending voting access nationwide. It is impossible to overestimate the effect of the Voting Rights Act in establishing a largely accessible, multi-racial democracy for the first time in U.S. history.47

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Whack-A-Mole Democracy It would not last. In each chapter of my story today—1870, 1920, and 1965—activists did propose a very different path: the creation of a positive, federal right to vote, guaranteed to all.48 This was then, and remains now, a bridge too far for most politicians, who like retaining the option of picking voters thru exclusion.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also held firm here. When presented with claims that citizens were entitled to vote, the Court has unyieldingly held that “citizens . . . were not invested with the right of suffrage.” Voting, they have countered, drawing upon this gaping silence in the Constitution, is merely a “privilege,” and can therefore be denied, on almost limitless grounds (save for those now deemed unlawful).

Were citizens vested with such a constitutional right, the Court has also clarified, then citizens “must be protected” from state infringement.49 And that is my key point here. The continued absence of a positive right to vote has meant citizens have very little protection from state infringement upon their ability to vote.

The jarring absence of an affirmative right to vote, so thoroughly rebuffed across all of U.S. history, has meant that activists have been forced to engage the states in an epic game of whack-a-mole. A state pops up restriction; social activists bat it down. A state pops up a different restriction; social activists whack that down. A state places new restrictions in their wake; and activists once again attempt to strike them down. Ad infinitum. Viewed over the whole of U.S. history, this becomes a

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foreboding pattern—menacing for the possibilities of a healthy, steadily inclusive democracy.

In 2013, this game started up again, when the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. That decision paved the way for the return of race-based and other state voter restrictions.50 Officials in Shelby County, Alabama, argued that they should no longer be subject to pre-clearance, because racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past. DOJ enforcement of fair voting laws, then, was no longer needed. The DOJ countered that racial discrimination in voting was alive and well, submitting into evidence thousands of racially discriminatory laws they had recently prevented from taking effect. Writing the majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts—whose job as a young lawyer was to kill the 1982 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act (he failed)— sided with Alabama and ended the practice of pre-clearance, or federal oversight.51 State waters are now shark infested once again, roiling with new methods of state voter suppression—all possible because citizens possess no preceding, federal right to vote that the states are bound to respect. We are currently in-the-midst of the biggest wave of voter suppression since before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Since roughly 2010, state governments have devised all sorts of new “eligibility” or disenfranchisement techniques: voter ID laws, for example; partisan gerrymandering; closing polling locations; purging voter rolls; ending same-day registration; shortening early voting; and disenfranchising the formerly incarcerated (often for life).52 The jubilant centennial of “women winning the right to vote” has co-existed with the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of women, many of whom voted previously and who are disproportionately people of color.53 So devastating has this new, unfolding chapter been, that already in 2016, before that fateful presidential election, the Economist’s Democracy Index (a non-partisan agency measuring the health of global democracies) downgraded the United States from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy.”54 Since then, the state of affairs has grown much worse, as state governments rush to enact more and more restrictions,

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Recalling that asterisk after 1920 on the global map with which we began, I hope this exploration of the mechanisms of voting (or, voting governance) has helped you see the difficulty in using 1920 to claim women’s achievement (and guarantee) of voting rights. And I hope it’s offered you one more reason to qualify that date. Not simply because not all women won that right, but also—importantly, for who imagine ourselves to be as citizens today—because no one in the United States has ever won that right. It remains the elusive, unfinished promise of American democracy.

The massive armies of everyday people who, along with their more famous counterparts, mounted the struggles we remember here today remind us that, in the end, it is everyday citizens who hold the power to shape the future of American democracy. Those people died and sacrificed. They held strong, resisted, and persisted. And they handed us an extremely complicated legacy, putting into our care this ongoing, embattled project. It’s now up to us to write the next chapter. What will you say?

What will you do? With whom will you make alliances? What now?

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1. “Suffrage Wins,” Lowell (MA) Sun, August 18, 1920.

2. “19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” accessed April 18, 2021, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc .php?flash=false&doc=63.

3. “Women’s Suffrage Mapped: The Year Women Got the Vote by Country,” Brilliant Maps Website, map created March 8, 2018, https://brilliantmaps.com/womens -suffrage-world/.

4. For one discussion of this, see Alexander Kirshner, “The International Status of the Right to Vote,” Democracy Coalition Project (2003), at http://archive.fairvote .org/media/rtv/kirshner.pdf.

5. For a survey of changing voter eligibility criteria in the states, see Alexandar Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Declaration of Sentiments,” July 1848. Often credited with writing the document, she was not its sole author.

7. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1995); Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

8. Foner, Second Founding.

9. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

10. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014); Foner, Second Founding; DuBois, Black Reconstruction.

11. Foner, Reconstruction; Foner, Second Founding; DuBois, Black Reconstruction.

12. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 28–29.

13. Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 29.

14. The politics behind the aggressive forgetting of Lucy Stone and of the American Association can be found in my book, Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls.

15. A Black women’s studies anthology made this same point in 1982, vividly conveyed by its title. Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Feminist Press, 1982).

16. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” speech delivered at the American Equal Rights Association, 1866, https://www.blackpast.org /african-american-history/speeches-african-american -history/1866-frances-ellen-watkins-harper-we-are -all-bound-together/.

17. Martha Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barrier, Won the Vote, and Insisted Upon Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020); Brittney C. Cooper, Remaking Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Rosalyn-Terborg Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

18. Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls.

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This anniversary we still have a great deal to learn about how this historic and widely misunderstood amendment reshaped, but also upheld, features of our democracy that have remained deeply entrenched since our national founding: namely, the continued absence of any positive, affirmative, overarching right to vote guaranteed to citizens that overrides states’ long-standing prerogative to deprive citizens of the franchise. Recognizing that, we must also reckon with how staunchly mainstream white suffragists, who advocated for this amendment on the grounds of “sex” only, were willing, in the name of whiteness, to let omission ride, tacitly and explicitly covering it up with cheers about “voting rights” for all.56

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justified by false allegations of voter fraud and misleading claims of “voter protection.” Voter fraud does happen, but in minute amounts. All credible studies find that it forms a small fraction of a single percent of all votes cast. Fraud, then, does not create margins big enough to sway major elections, whereas voter suppression absolutely does.55

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19. Sometimes, these proposed state constitutional revisions did pass, but cumbersome rules for amending state constitutions often sabotaged affirmative votes.

Many states, for example, required that it pass two successive state legislative sessions (sometimes spaced two years apart). It sometimes passed the first, but then narrowly lost in the second. Records of these votes are compiled in Martha G. Stapler, ed., The Woman Suffrage Year Book (New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company, Inc., 1917).

20. Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: NYU Press, 2004).

21. New York passed full suffrage for women in 1917, and Michigan did so in 1918.

22. Not requiring voters be male for school elections began early, with Kentucky dropping that qualification (but retaining plenty of others) in 1838.

23. Lisa Matterson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Ida. B. Wells, with Alfreda M. Duster, et al., eds., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd ed.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

24. Several other amendments passed in the fifty years that the women’s suffrage amendment languished, causing it to be renumbered. The Sixteenth Amendment allowed Congress to levy income tax (1913), the Seventeenth Amendment established the direct election of U.S. Senators (1913), and the Eighteenth Amendment created prohibition (1918).

25. Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Schuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926).

26. J. D. Zahniser and Amelia Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

27. For a new read on the parade that identifies other women of color there, from Indigenous to Latina, see Cathleen Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

28. Paul’s first organization was named the Congressional Union, before it assumed its more well-known name, the National Woman’s Party over 1916–17.

29. Harriet Agerholm, “America Falls short of being a full democracy for second year running, report finds,” Independent (UK), February 5, 2018. See also the annual reports from the Democracy Index, a non-partisan arm of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

30. For a fuller account of these final days, see Elaine Weiss, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York: Viking, 2018).

31. Tyler Boyd, Tennessee Statesman Harry T. Burn: Woman Suffrage, Free Elections, and a Life of Service (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2019).

32. New York Tribune, October 31, 1920, p. 3, accessed electronically through Chronicling America, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

33. Dawn Langan Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

34. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the OneParty South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery:

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Disenfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

35. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics; Perman, Struggle for Mastery; Liette Gidlow, “The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women’s Struggle to Vote, 1890s–1920s,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (July 2018): 434; Liette Gidlow, “Resistance after Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement after 1920,” in Women and Social Movements in the U.S., 1600–2000 database (Alexander Street Press, 2017).

36. Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 28–29.

37. Elizabeth Cobbs, “What Took So Long for Women to Win the Right to Vote? Racism is One Reason,” Washington Post, June 2, 2019.

38. These examples have all been unearthed by Liette Gidlow, whose forthcoming book uncovers this essential history. Preliminary pieces of that research can be found in Gidlow, “Resistance after Ratification” and “Sequel.” On the use of rape as a method of white supremacist terror, and Black women’s resistance, see Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

39. For the stories of Latina, Indigenous, and other women of color, see Cahill, Recasting the Vote.

40. Video of Ms. Hamer’s commanding, eight-minute testimony before the 1964 Democratic National Committee can be found online.

41. Jones, Vanguard; Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Channa Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

42. Remarkably, individual states hadn’t always required that voters be citizens, and some aliens legally voted until the early 1900s. Jamin B. Raskin, “Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional and Theoretical Meanings of Alien Suffrage,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141 (April 1993): 1391–1470.

43. Cahill, Recasting the Vote; Glen D. Magpantay, “Asian American Voting Rights,” in Minority Voting in the United States, vol. 2, ed. Kyle Kreider and Thomas Baldino (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016).

44. Cahill, Recasting the Vote; Jennifer L. Robinson, “The Right to Vote: A History of Voting Rights and American Indians,” in Minority Voting in the United States, vol. 2.

45. Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Picador Edition, 2016); Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).

46. Berman, Give Us the Ballot; Waldman, Fight to Vote.

47. Berman, Give Us the Ballot; Waldman, Fight to Vote.

48. This forms the subject of my current book-in-progress.

49. The language excerpted here is from the majority decision in Minor v. Happersett (1875). Similar claims were made more recently in Bush v. Gore (2000), and in numerous other cases before the court.

50. The VRA still (as of this publication) prohibits racebased discrimination, but it now has to be challenged after taking effect, which can be a long process. It also has to be challenged within a judiciary that has been

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-can-vote/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud. Some allege changing demographics are the cause for voter suppression, which disproportionately target voters of color and young voters. On those changing demographics, see Katherine Schaeffer, “The most common age among whites in the U.S. is 58—more than double that of racial and ethnic minorities,” Pew Research Center, July 30, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common-age-amongus-racial-ethnic-groups/; and D’vera Cohn, “It’s official: Minority babies are the majority among the nation’s infants, but only just,” Pew Research Center, June 23, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact -tank/2016/06/23/its-official-minority-babies-are-the -majority-among-the-nations-infants-but-only-just/.

56. There were efforts throughout the mainstream suffrage campaign to claim a broader, positive right conferred upon the voter, but those did not win the day.

For the most famous of these efforts, see Ellen DuBois, “Taking the Law into our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995).

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stacked with conservative justices often hostile to the idea of an expansive, fully inclusive democracy.

51. Berman, Give Us the Ballot; Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Oyez website, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012 /12-96. Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg issued a scathing dissent in this case.

52. These methods are all verifiable and have mountains of evidence supporting their wide-spread and rapidly growing existence. The fraud and disenfranchisement more recently alleged by Donald J. Trump, which postdated the delivery of this lecture, on the other hand, have no basis in fact, which has been established by multiple judges who have routinely dismissed these claims as baseless.

53. Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).

54. The Economist Intelligence Unit, “Global Democracy in Retreat,” January 21, 2020, at https://www.eiu .com/n/global-democracy-in-retreat/.

55. These lies about voter fraud are robustly interrogated in the Brennan Center for Justice’s project, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” which compiles many reports and has conducted their own. See https://www .brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american

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Frémont’s Folklore: Or the Naming of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers, Revisited

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BY

S HE R I

WYSO N G

In the spring 1961 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, Rufus Wood Leigh argued “that the names of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin rivers have their genesis in these original Spanish names respectively: Rio Verde, Rio Severo, and Rio de la Virgen.”1 Leigh contended that the then-current explanations for the name derivations “are the sort of stuff of which folklore is made-up,” and he sought to credit the names with the Spanish and Mexicans who first encountered the rivers.2 But in trying to correct the past, Leigh relied on another source of “folklore”—John Charles Frémont.3 Prior to the publication of Frémont’s 1845 report of his first two western expeditions and his 1848 memoir written after his third expedition, others had published maps and narratives depicting and naming the subject rivers, but Frémont’s were the first that were widely dispersed, and it was the names on his maps and narratives that survive to this time.

Lingering with the names, however, are also Frémont’s assertions about Spanish origins—assertions that, upon closer review, were unauthenticated and likely incorrect.

There are indeed a few rivers in Utah whose names are undoubtably of Spanish origin, notably the Colorado, but also the San Juan, Santa Clara, and San Rafael, among others. The Spanish Fork River was not named by but for the Spanish Fathers Atanasio Dominguéz and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante. No documentation suggests that the Spanish called the Green River “Rio Verde.” “Sevier” is likely not derived from a Spanish word, and “Virgin” either had an Anglo origin or was a corruption of another currently unidentified word. As such, the following analysis provides a corrective to Leigh’s conclusions.

Leigh’s choice of analyzing the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers in one article was prophetic; the connections between their names are stronger than Frémont’s assertion of Spanish origins. Both the Green and Virgin Rivers—tributaries of the Colorado—were confused by early explorers with the Sevier, whose waters were confined to the Great Basin. This confusion, documented on early nineteenth-century maps, had been

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Lithograph of John C. Frémont, ca. 1856. In addition to assigning place names, Frémont is the namesake of cities, towns, counties, and geographical place names in the American West. Library of Congress, photograph no. LC-DIG-pga-00384.

sorted out by Anglo explorers more than fifteen years prior to Frémont’s explorations, but until Frémont tentatively sorted out the geography and names on his maps and reports, it was not widely known. However, Frémont added his own inaccuracies, leading to new myths.

This treatise is not meant to be an exhaustive dissertation of all the past names of the rivers, but an examination of the origins of the current names. By so doing I present new information and correct longstanding assumptions.

The history of these three Utah rivers suggests just how complicated toponymy, or the study of place names, can be.

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Green River Before diving into the origin of the name Green River, some historical geography is in order.

The existence of the Colorado River was well known to the Colonial Spanish, as it flowed between Mexico City and their missions along the California coast. It was called Colorado because of the large amount of red sediment it once carried (now mostly trapped behind the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams). In 1777 the Dominguéz party, in an attempt to find an overland route between Santa Fe and California, forded it at the “Crossing of the Fathers” in the deep and rugged Glen Canyon. By the

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200 Map of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers, with the course of the imagined Buenaventura River.

Map by Sheri Wysong.

name Father Escalante (the chronicler of the party) gave it, El Rio Grande de los Coninas, the expedition members apparently did not recognize the river as the Colorado. But by the time the expedition cartographer, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, drew his maps, he had made the connection and called it Rio Colorado, putting together the first pieces of the enigma of the Colorado River system. The Colorado River basin, with its deep canyon gorges, stymied holistic exploration. Explorers saw only parts of the vast watershed and gave them their own names. As such, until early in the twentieth century, the headwaters of the Colorado River did not originate in Colorado. Instead of having a contiguous name for the river from head to mouth, with a separate name for the tributary, the Colorado commenced in southeastern Utah at the confluence of the Grand River, which

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heads in Colorado, and the Green River, with its headwaters in Wyoming.

In 1921 Edward Taylor, a U.S. senator from Colorado, was determined to ensure that his state received credit for originating the headwaters of the river that shared its name, despite the fact that the longer Green River, with its larger drainage basin, would more logically be considered its head. Upon Taylor’s initiative, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution to change the name of the Grand River to the Colorado River. The Green River was left with the lessor status as tributary.4 In late 1811, a party of sixty Astorians, at least half of whom had been recruited in St. Louis, having crossed the continental divide at Union Pass in Wyoming, dropped into the headwaters

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KáNa

Eastern Shoshone

Seeds Kee Dee

Crow for “Prairie Hen River.”

Adopted by Smith and other St. Louis trappers (1824).6

Middle Segment (Northwest Colorado and the Uintah Basin) Piah nut cuit

Uintah Ute

San Buenaventura

Escalante (1776)

Middle and Lower Segment Green/R. Verté

Taos Trappers (by 1824).7 First used by Ashley (1825).

Ute Crossing Rio Verde? Rio Grande? Rio de los Zaguananas? Rio Colorado?

Spanish and Mexican traders on the Old Spanish Trail

of the Green River.8 The party then moved on to eastern Idaho to Fort Henry, named for Andrew Henry of the Missouri Fur Company.

Henry had abandoned the fort several weeks earlier and was returning to St. Louis. However, if he did not already know of the “Spanish River” when he left, he likely learned of it after members of the Astoria party returned to St. Louis in the ensuing years.

By that time, Spanish traders from New Mexico—lured to Utah Valley by lingering rumors of the riches of Teguayo and the nearby region imparted by the Dominguéz party—were regularly crossing the Green at the ford at present-day Green River, Utah (the “Ute Crossing”). If the traders had had access to Miera’s map, they would have been confused. Upon crossing the Sevier River near present-day Mills, Utah, Escalante questioned whether the river was the San Buenaventura, the name given to the Green River, which the expedition had crossed in the Uintah Basin near present-day Jensen.9 Despite this reservation, when Miera drew his maps the Green was depicted as flowing southwest, becoming the Sevier. Having pieced together the puzzle of the Colorado, he created a new one for the Green.

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By 1824 Taos trappers were journeying to the middle reaches of the river in present-day northern Utah and Colorado and calling it the Green, as evidenced by an article published in the April 19, 1825, edition of the Missouri Intelligencer of an account of William Huddart, a member of a trapping party led by Etienne Provost. “On the 24th of August [1824] he, in company with fourteen others, left Taos for the purpose of trapping fur beaver, and traveled for 30 days. On Green River (probably Rio Colorado of the West).”10 Early that same year, a party led by Jedediah Smith was guided to the upper reaches of the “Seeds Kee Dee.” Smith relayed the information back to his employer, William Henry Ashley, in St. Louis.

3

Americans (by 1824)

Upper Segment (Wyoming)

N O .

Colorado River (of the West)

I

Astorians (1811)5

8 9

Spanish River

V O L .

Source

Entire River to Gulf of California

I

Name

Miera drew several copies of his map, but they were never published or widely available.

However, in 1803 and 1804, the same years that Lewis and Clark were looking for the Northwest Passage, Alexander von Humboldt was exploring Mexico, including a short foray north of Santa Fe. It was either in Santa Fe or Mexico City that he copied a Miera map onto his own Map of New Spain, which he published sometime thereafter. By 1810, cartographers were borrowing from Humboldt’s geography on widely distributed maps.

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Table 1. Historical Names of the Green River

201

Ashley happened to be partnered with Andrew Henry, and they probably surmised that Smith had found the Spanish River of the Astorians. No existing maps fit the description of the Astorians and Smith. Any map available to Ashley and his men published in the several years leading up to his travels depicted the fabled river Buenaventura leading to the Pacific.

Ashley determined to solve the puzzling path of the Spanish River, or Seeds Kee Dee. On April 22, 1825, three days before publication of the Missouri Intelligencer article, Ashley and several others put in on the Green River near its confluence with the New Fork River in Wyoming. They steered “bull boats” through the rapids of Flaming Gorge and Lodore Canyon, giving up the trip near the mouth of Nine Mile Canyon in Utah after determining that the river was entering the rugged Desolation Canyon. From there they made their way back upstream to the mouth of Ashley’s Creek, where they had stashed a cache a few days earlier. Preparing to travel overland to the

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Snake River country, they encountered Taos trapper Etienne Provost. Provost likely confirmed that what he called the Green (or, reflecting his French roots, the Verté) River was the “Rio Colorado of the West.”11 In his journal entry of June 7, 1825, Ashley changed his designation from the Seeds Kee Dee to the Green.

A year and some months later, Jedediah Smith reached the Colorado at the mouth of the Virgin. On July 12, 1827, Smith wrote a letter to William Clark, in which he called the Colorado the “Seeds Keeden,” proving that Ashley had solved Miera’s puzzle and had passed the information on to Smith.12 With Kit Carson as guide, Frémont and his men first explored the Wyoming headwaters of the Green River in 1842; at one point they were ten miles east of the river at the Upper Green River Rendezvous Site. On August 10, the expedition camped on what is now called Boulder Lake, the creek flowing from which he described as “the head of the third New Fork, a tributary to Green River, the Colorado of the West.”13 Frémont focused on exploring the Wind River range to the east, then returned east having never seen the main branch of the river. He was in the eastern states only long enough to prepare for another expedition to the west the following spring, when he crossed the Green at a point further downstream in Wyoming. At this location Frémont reported: August 15 [1843] . . . This is the emigrant road to Oregon, which veers

much to the southward, to avoid the mountains about the western heads of the Green River, the Rio Verde of the Spanish . . . August 16 . . . The refreshing appearance of the broad river, with its timbered shores and green wooded islands in contrast to its dry sandy plains, probably obtained for it the name of Green river, which was bestowed on it by the Spaniards who first came into this country. . . . Lower down, below Brown’s Hole to the Southwards, the river runs through lofty chasms, walled in by precipices of red rock. . . . I have heard it called by the Indian refugees from the California settlements the Rio Colorado.14 Frémont’s cartographer, Charles Preuss, also referred to the Colorado as such in his diary.15 On Frémont’s return to the east the next spring, upon crossing the Green at Brown’s Hole, he called it the Colorado.16 He returned west again in 1845, this time crossing the Green further downstream at the mouth of the White River.

Frémont offered no elaboration on the naming of the river on this trip or on a subsequent trip when he crossed the Green at the Ute Crossing. Frémont’s assertion that the Spanish had named it “Rio Verde” is limited to the August 1843 passages. Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh wrote of those passages in his 1913 book, Frémont in ‘49, that Frémont’s assertion “is the only statement I know of that Green River was once called Rio Verde.”17

Photo of the Green River in the vicinity of Frémont’s August 1843 crossing. Photograph by U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management.

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Owen goes on to assert that the hue’s source is erosion of soapstone deposits along its banks.

Despite Frémont’s implication that the Spanish and Mexicans had explored as far north as the Oregon Trail crossing, their known familiarity with the Green River was, with the exception of the Dominguéz party and perhaps a few others shortly after, limited to the Ute Crossing, where sediment from several tributaries had altered the green color, rendering it brownish when observed from its banks. What then did the Spanish and Mexicans call it? Documentation is scanty. In a 1826 letter to his brother (see endnote 7), Potts described his 1824 trip over the South Pass: “we took a more westerly direction over high rolling prairies to a small branch of a considerable river, known to us by the name of Seet Kadu, and to Spaniard, by Green River.” But Potts, who undoubtedly heard this information from Ashley, may have equated the Taos Trappers with the Mexican traders further south. The Spanish and Mexicans may

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The Spanish expedition followed what was probably an established route down the Spanish Fork River to Timpanogos (Utah) Lake.

Since new laws passed by the Spanish prevented them from trading for slaves, which angered local tribal bands (probably Utes), the Spanish

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Other than assuming a Spanish origin of the name of the Green River, Frémont had no role in naming it, but he did with the Sevier. Leigh discussed the research of Joseph J. Hill, who found what is probably the first written account of the name that would ultimately be spelled Sevier.20 In 1921, the Hispanic American Historical Review published an article by Hill that discusses an 1813 incident after a Spanish trading expedition reportedly traveled to Utah Valley.21

V O L .

The name “A Va Pa Noquint” is similar enough to the Uinta Ute name for the Green River, “Piah nut cuit,” that the cartographer Miera may have heard both names and believed they referred to the same river, leading him to depict the Green and the Sevier as one. Branch’s “Pooneca” is also likely to have derived from this name.

3

Sevier River

I

My own opinion is that the name was given to this stream from the intense and beautiful color of its water, and not, as many writers have claimed, from its verdant banks which afford such lively contrast with the desert country through which it runs for many miles.18 Now, while it is generally known that nearly all bodies of water, under certain conditions, will give forth a greenish hue, it must be understood that these conditions are not at all essential when viewing this particular stream; for the water of Green River is intrinsically green. No matter under what conditions it may be viewed the water of this stream, at least as far as that portion of it above the Green River Lakes is concerned, will be found to possess this color.19

well have called it Rio Verde, but there are many other possibilities beyond the scope of this article.

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Why, then, did the Taos trappers and then Ashley call it the Green River? Leigh, more focused on who named it rather than why, only touches on the probable reason in his 1961 article: the water appears green. This phenomenon was documented by William Octavius Owen, U.S. Mineral Surveyor for Wyoming and U.S. Examiner of Surveys for the Department of Interior in the late nineteenth century:

203

Table 2. Known Names of the Sevier River Name

Source

Mooyai sevee’u

Koosharem Paiute

A Va Pa or A Va Pa Noquint

Ute or Paiute. Given that the name is said to mean “Big Placid River,” it would likely have been the Pahvant Ute.

Rio de Santa Isabel

Escalante (1777)

Buenaventura

Miera (ca. 1777)

Rio Sebero

Spanish traders (1813)

Ashley’s River

Smith (1830 memoir)

Rabbit River

Potts (1827)

Pooneca River

Wolfskill/Yount (1830–31), as documented by Ziba Branch

Savarah River

Ferris (1836)

Sevier River

Frémont (1845)

Nicolett River

Frémont (1848)

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with more hostility, returned to the “Sebero” where they had left most of their horses, and traveled back to the “Grand” River where waiting Utes demanded they trade for slaves. When they reached Santa Fe with the slaves, they were taken into custody, and all wrote affidavits to the events of the expedition, documenting the use of the name “Sebero” and “Grand.”22

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Hill’s article also discusses the 1829 expedition of Antonio Armijo. Armijo left Santa Fe with an expedition of sixty men, determined to reach California more than a half century after the aborted attempt by the Dominguéz party. According to Hill, having crossed the Colorado River from south to north at the Crossing of the Fathers, he came upon “Rio Severo.”23 Sebero could be easily corrupted to Severo, since “b” and “v” are pronounced similarly in Spanish.

Hill, and subsequently Leigh, assumed this was the case and tried to devise a route that would fit Armijo’s belief that he was on the Sevier— an improbable path from the Colorado to the headwaters of the Sevier.24 They then followed the Sevier to Sevier Lake, then south, presumably across the Escalante Desert to Mountain Meadows along the future path of the Old Spanish Trail to the Virgin River.25

204 The Sevier River in the vicinity of the Dominguez expedition ford. The river would have been low in late fall of 1776 when the expedition crossed it, but given that a series of dams upstream have significantly altered the flow since that time, the river was probably not this low. The Frémont expedition passed through here in the spring of 1844 when the river was at flood stage, and Frémont and his men used rafts to cross. One man died here in a firearm accident and was buried along the banks. The last documented siting of the grave was in 1849 by Mormon pioneers on their way to Southern California. Photograph by Sheri Wysong.

party continued on to “Rio Sebero,” encountering it at some point where it flowed north from the Sevier Valley. They then met up with a San Pitch Ute, who offered to take the expedition to trade with the “bearded” Indians encountered thirty-seven years earlier by the Dominguéz party near Clear Lake (south of present-day Delta). This would be about forty miles (as the crow flies) due west of the “Sebero,” which is consistent with the three days the expedition traveled west to reach the band. There they met

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Hill devised this circuitous route to try to explain how Armijo could have encountered the Sevier River on his journey. But LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen, as well as later scholars, have asserted that the river Armijo called Severo was the Virgin, not the Sevier. Armijo either mistook the Virgin River for the one he had heard pronounced as “Severo,” or he gave it his own name.

How could Armijo have confused the southand west-flowing Virgin with the north-flowing Sevier segment most familiar to traders and explorers of the region? Escalante’s name for the river, “Sulphureo,” may have at some point been confused with “Sebero,” leading to the belief that the two rivers were one. By the time of Armijo’s expedition, the folklore of the Buenaventura had begun to include an outlet from Sevier Lake to the Pacific Coast. That, in addition to confusion about the route of Green River, may have led Armijo to believe that the outlet ran south to the Colorado River. After dropping into the Virgin River canyon near present-day Hurricane and following it downstream, and upon encountering the mouth of

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Map of Armijo’s proposed route along the Sevier River and around Sevier Lake, as determined by Hill and Leigh. By contrast, Hafen argued that Armijo’s course to the Virgin River was much more southerly. Map by Sheri Wysong.

La Verkin Creek, Armijo may have assumed he had reached the Sevier.26 Leigh defended Hill’s assertion that Armijo was on the Sevier: “It was winter, the high altitude, cold weather, and swift current of the stream conjoined to confirm the fact that he was on the severe, rigorous river, named by predecessors Rio Severo.”27 This passage in Leigh’s article seems to be the origin of the idea that the Sevier, described by a local tribe as a “big, placid river,” was named for its harsh qualities. However, Dellenbaugh’s analysis is more on target: “The Virgin is certainly a river which for almost its entire course from its sources on the ‘Rim of the Basin,’ to the debouchment at the Colorado, fully deserves the name of Severe.

The Spaniards, however, named things not so much from their qualities, as from the day on which they saw them.”28

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205

Thus, while “Severo” could be an accurate description of a section of the Virgin River, as a name for either the Virgin or the Sevier, it doesn’t reflect the nature of either river by those who documented the name. However, it makes sense as a derivation of another name. Evidence points to the idea that Sebero was a corruption of the Paiute name for the Sevier. In his 1992 book Southern Paiutes, LaVan Martineau states that Jimmy Timmican, a Paiute probably of the Koosharem band, told him that the Sevier was called the “Mooyai sevee’u,” which, when shortened to “Sevee’’u u,” may have sounded like “Savarah.”29 In the Paiute language, the letter “b” is “often replaced with a ‘v’ sound and sometimes sound[s] halfway between “b” and “v” when used within a word.”30 The “Sanpuchi,” a Ute band, may have pronounced the name slightly differently. The languages are very similar, but one of the differences is that the Ute sometimes

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Portion of Thomas J. Farnham’s 1845 Californias map depicting his understanding of the “R. Severe.” Sevier River and Sevier Lake are unnamed in the upper righthand corner.

206

Detail of Warren Angus Ferris’s “Map of the Northwest Fur Country,” with “River Savarah” flowing into “Savarah Lake,” 1836. The map was not published for over a hundred years after Ferris drew it. A publisher in Denver, Colorado, Fred A. Rosenstock, desiring to publish Ferris’s chronicle in book form, found the map in the Ferris family’s possession and published both in 1940. Brigham Young University, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, MSS 1505.

put an “r” in their words.31 So “sevee’u may have been pronounced more like “sevee’ ru.” The Paiute/Ute name for the Sevier River could have been heard by the Spanish in 1813 as “Sebero,” and the American mountain men in the 1830s as “Savarah.”

The trapper Warren Angus Ferris spelled it as “Savarah” on the map he drew in 1836. A young man from New York who traveled west in 1830 to join “a trapping, trading hunting expedition,” Ferris returned about five years later and began a serial narrative of his adventures published in a Buffalo weekly newspaper, the Western Literary Messenger, called Life in the Rocky Mountains. Ferris’s map, drawn contemporaneously but not published until 1940, depicted “Savarah River” and “Savarah Lake,” undoubtedly references to the Sevier River and Lake.32

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Another source documenting the river’s name as known by mountain men comes from Thomas J. Farnham. On August 12, 1839, Farnham, chronicler of an expedition from Missouri to Oregon, arrived at Fort Davey Crockett at Brown’s Hole, where Frémont later crossed the Green River. During the week Farnham stayed at the fort, he availed himself of geographic information from the hosts and other travelers, and he wrote in his journal: “Between this river (the Colorado) and the Great Salt Lake, there is a stream called Severe River, which rises in the high plateau to the S. E. of the lake, and runs some considerable distance in; a westerly course and terminates in its own lake.”33 After following the Oregon Trail to the Willamette Valley in 1843, the second Frémont expedition turned south through California where they picked up the Old Spanish Trail and began following it eastward. On May 23, 1844, Frémont reported that his party “reached Sevier River . . . The name of this river and lake was an indication of our approach to regions of which our people had been the explorers. It was probably named after some American trapper or hunter, and was the first American name

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Name

Source

East Fork Levier Skin

Smith/Steele (1852)

North Fork Zions Creek

Thompson map

Pah Doos

Paiute, as recorded by Martineau

Escalante (1777)

Rio de los Pyramides

Miera ~1777

Rio Severo

Armijo (1830)

Adams River

Smith (1826)

Virgin River

Unknown, recorded by Frémont (1845)

Levearskin

Lee (1852)

N O .

Rio Sulfureo

I

Paiute

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As to who corrupted Severo into Sevier deserves scrutiny. Frémont’s earlier declaration of a probable American origin may have been an excuse to honor his benefactor, Arkansas Senator Ambrose H. Sevier, who had helped finance Frémont’s western expeditions.37 But by the spring of 1848, when Frémont and his wife Jessie were writing the memoir published later that year and Preuss was finishing their latest map, Sevier had resigned the Senate. In addition, Farnham’s second memoir, published in 1844, had been in circulation long enough that the passage which Leigh quoted in his article—“a river arises which . . . the Mexican Spaniards have named Rio Severe—Severe River”—may have been brought to Frémont’s attention. Frémont changed his previous assertions and honored earlier explorers and geographers, naming the river he had explored on his third expedition the “Humboldt” and attempting to rename the Sevier “Nicolette” for Joseph Nicolette.38 However, by then the 1845 Frémont/Preuss map with the name Sevier had been dispersed too widely; Sevier was the name to survive, and Frémont’s version of Sevier’s origin became the stuff of folklore.

Virgin River As already established, after the 1776–77 journey of the Dominguéz expedition, Spanish traders from Santa Fe began infiltrating the

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western Wasatch, referring to the Sevier River as the “Sebero.” After Armijo’s initial journey in 1829 until the Mexican–American War in 1846, Mexicans traveling along the Old Spanish Trail appear to have adopted the derivation “Severo” for the Virgin River. Dellenbaugh’s 1914 analysis of Frémont’s 1845 reports corroborates this: “Frémont says he had been told the Sevier River was a tributary of the Colorado. . . . At some remote time Sevier, or Severe, seems to have been the name applied to the Virgin, probably

by Spaniards who traversed the trail in the days of Wolfskill.”39

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In his 1848 memoir, Frémont backed off his assertion that Sevier derived from an American name: “Southward from the Utah is another lake of which little more is now known than when Humboldt published his general Map of Mexico. It is the reservoir of a handsome river, about two hundred miles long, rising in the Wasatch mountains, and discharging a considerable volume of water. The river and lake were called by the Spaniards Severo, corrupted by the hunters into Sevier.”35 On his 1843–44 expedition, Frémont had undoubtedly been told Armijo’s name of “Severo” for the Virgin, a name apparently still used by travelers of the Old Spanish Trail, and which could easily be heard as the French surname pronounced “Səvē’ā.” (The river and lake are now pronounced sə-vir’.)36

Table 3. Known Names of the Virgin River

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we had met with since leaving the Columbia River.”34

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Another indication that the Virgin was once called Severe comes from Thomas J. Farnham.

After leaving Fort Davey Crockett in 1839, Farnham traveled the Oregon Trail to Fort Vancouver. From there he sailed to Hawaii and then back to California. After traveling overland to Mexico proper, he caught a ship to New Orleans in May 1840 and steamed home to Illinois. In 1841 he published the memoir of the first part of his trip, to his arrival at Fort Vancouver, containing information on the Severe River that he had obtained at Fort Davey Crockett. After the success of that volume, Farnham wrote a memoir of the second part of his travels, where he related his experiences, stories, and observations from the entire expedition.

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In the second volume Farnham included the story that Leigh references in his article. However, Farnham’s story of “Rio Severe” deserves a full review:

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About four hundred and fifty miles from the mouth of the Colorado, and a short distance north of that stream, a river arises, which, on account of its rough character, the Mexican Spaniards have named Rio Severe—Severe River. Its source is among a small cluster of mountains, where it presents the usual beautiful phenomena of rivulets gathering from different quarters—uniting—increasing—tumbling and roaring, till it reaches the plain, when it sinks into chasms or kenyons, of basalt and trap rocks, and dashes on terribly over fallen precipices for about eighty miles, where it loses itself in the sand. This river was explored by an American trapper, several years ago, under the following circumstances.

He had been hunting beaver for some time among the mountains in which the river rises, with considerable success, and without seeing any Indians to disturb his lonely tranquility. One night, however, when the season was far advanced, a party of the Arapahoes, which had been watching his movements unseen by him, stole all his traps. Thus situated, without the means of continuing his hunt, and being two hundred miles from any trading post where he could obtain a supply, he determined to build a canoe and descend the Rio Severe, in the hope that it might bear him down to the habitable parts of California. . . .

Seven days he passed in floating down this stream. Most of its course he found walled-in by lofty perpendicular cliffs, rising several hundred feet high, dark and shining, and making palpable his imprisonment within the barriers of endless solitude. At intervals he found cataracts, down which he passed his boat by means of lines, and then with great labor and hazard,

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clambered up and down the precipices till he reached the waters below.

On these rapids the water was from two to three feet deep, and a hundred yards in width. In the placid sections, the stream was often thirty and forty feet in depth, and so transparent, that the pebbly bottom and the fish swimming near it, were seen, when the sun shone, as distinctly as the like appear in the supposed peerless waters of Lake George. As this man drew near the close of his fifth day’s journeying, the chasms began to disappear, and the country to open into rolling and drifting plains of sand, interspersed with tracts of dark-colored hardpan.

About the middle of the seventh day, he came to the sands in which the river was swallowed up, and hauling his shattered boat on shore, explored the country northwest, for the reappearance of the stream. But to no purpose. A leafless dry desert spread away in all directions, destitute of every indication of animal life, breathless and noiseless, a great Edom, in which every vital function was suspended, and where the drifting sands and the hot howling winds warned him that he must perish if he persisted. He therefore left his faithful old boat and made his way back to the mountains, where he lost his traps, and thence travelled to Robidoux’s fort, on the upper waters of the San Juan.40 As noted, Farnham’s description of the Sevier River in the first part of his memoir reflected the river’s true nature. By contrast, the river in this story does not completely describe any particular river in the western United States.

Leigh’s assumption that Farnham was writing about the Sevier could be based on the name, but the only descriptive that could be applied to the Sevier is that it originates in the mountains and forms from numerous small streams— hardly a unique attribute for a river. But with a little imagination, one could ascribe the description to the Virgin during spring floods. A sudden turn of the weather could quickly melt the snowpack, causing the river to run high for several days. When the snow was gone the

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Dellenbaugh wrote in a footnote of his discussion of Frémont’s expedition: “I heard long ago that in some manner the original Spanish names of the Sevier and the Virgin got exchanged; that the present Virgin should be the Severe and vice versa. See ante page 22, where Captain Young expected to find the Severe rising from the sands.43 Possibly this idea was founded on the name Severe having been also attached to what we now call the Virgin River.”

Dellenbaugh had it almost right, except for the idea that the “Rio Virgen” was the original Sevier. There is no indication that the Sevier River was ever called the Virgin. Since Dellenbaugh’s book was published several years prior to Hill’s discovery in the Spanish archives of the 1813 incident on the “Rio Sebero,” Dellenbaugh could not have known that Sebero was the original Sevier. What actually seems to have happened is that after Armijo’s 1829 expedition, both rivers were called a derivation of Severe—the St. Louis trappers continuing to call the Sevier

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Where, then, did Frémont get the idea that the Virgin River was called “Rio Virgen”? When his expedition reached the Virgin River on May 8, 1844, they thought the name of the river was Sevier. Frémont stated as much in his report, corroborated by Preuss’s diary entry. Two weeks later, by May 23, when they reached the Sevier River after traveling north, they were aware that it was “actually” the name of that river. What happened in those fifteen days?

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No source prior to 1844 refers to the Virgin River as the Virgin or Virgen. Leigh cited to Will C. Barnes’s Arizona Place Names, published in 1935, as suggesting that Escalante had named and spelled it “Rio de la Virgen,” but this is erroneous. Escalante’s name for the river, Rio Sulfureo, doubtless derived from the hot and sulphurous water that the Dominguéz party encountered near La Verkin. Barnes appears to have taken liberal license with Frémont’s name, both in assuming that it went back to the Dominguéz party and that it was called “Rio de la Virgen.” Although Frémont defined “Rio Virgen” as “River of the Virgin” in his 1845 report, nowhere did he call it “Rio de la Virgen.” This is telling, because he used prepositions and articles in other Spanish names he documented (Rio de los Angeles, Las Vegas de Santa Clara).

I

After publication of his second volume, Farnham appears to have collaborated with the cartographer Sidney Morse to create the Map of the Californias, published in Morse’s 1845 North American Atlas.42 The “Severe,” as described by the story of the trapper, appears on the map but stops short of the Colorado River.

The Sevier River also appears on the map but is unlabeled.

River by the derivation, and the Taos trappers and Mexican traders on the Old Spanish Trail referring to it as the Virgin. Farnham’s stories are compelling evidence for this: his multiple references to “Severe River” actually described two separate rivers known by that name.

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river would virtually disappear. Had the adventurous trapper run the high water through the gorge and emerged as the flood was dissipating, the story could be attributed to the Virgin—if one dismisses the idea that the Arapaho had stolen his traps, that the water was transparent at thirty to forty foot depths, and that Roubidoux’s fort was situated on the San Juan River.41 As anyone who has traveled down the Virgin River Gorge on Interstate 15 may have observed, the Virgin does diminish considerably after descending the gorge. Historically the Virgin’s flow would have been revived with the introduction of water from the Muddy River (which might have explained why the unfortunate trapper was looking for the river to the northwest). Currently, the confluence of the Virgin and Muddy Rivers is submerged by Lake Mead.

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Joseph Walker, best known for his explorations of the Sierra Nevada, had reportedly encountered Sevier Lake in 1840. Walker ascended the Sevier River, presumably following a path similar to that of the 1852 Smith/Steele expedition, as documented by Frederick M. Huchel in his article about the 1852 Rio Virgin Expedition.

That path ascended the main fork of the Sevier to its head, over the summit to the head of the east fork of the Virgin, and to the confluence of the Virgin’s east and north forks.44 Walker may have determined that this river had never been exploited by a beaver trap, thus a “virgin” river. The Wolfskill/Yount party, finding the St. George area to be enchanting, with deer elk and antelope unperturbed by the sight of humans,

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may have called it virgin for a similar reason.

When Walker joined Frémont’s expedition in 1844 during the fifteen-day lapse, he may have provided the name virgin and told Frémont that the Sevier River was the one they had yet to meet.

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If the name provided to Frémont actually was or meant “virgin” when he wrote his report several months later, the fact that he had been in the territory of the Catholic Spanish/Mexicans may have led him (or his wife) to assert that “virgin” was a noun rather than an adjective.

Another possibility is that Frémont was given a Spanish name that was corrupted to Virgin.

Leigh included a clue in his book, Five Hundred Utah Place Names, in his partial entry for La Verkin Creek: The name La Verkin was extant ‘when the first Americans began exploring the Rio Virgen region’ (Deseret News, April 3, 1852). This creek must have been named by Spanish explorers or traders from Santa Fe early in the 19th century, but the correct Spanish name was not absorbed into American toponymy; the name was badly corrupted.

There is no reference to its origin or significance in historic literature. Corruption of Spanish and Indian names was almost the rule rather than the exception in early American times in this region. As the creek is a tributary of Rio de la Virgen and the name of a tributary sometimes follows the prototype name, it is most probable that La Verkin is a shortened and corrupted form of the name of the mother stream: Rio de la Virgen. There is no k in Spanish; but the k sound in Verkin is quite similar to the Spanish g in Virgen.45 The April 3 article Leigh referenced was a letter to the Deseret News written by infamous Mormon pioneer, John D. Lee, who had led an expedition of Parowan settlers searching for a suitable wagon road to California. Lee stated: “We left our wagons and on foot and horseback traveled down ash creek over sand hills the distance of 12 miles which brought us near its junction with the Levearskin river,

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so called by the spaniards, a stream about as large again as ash creek some cottonwood and ash timber along it.”46 Given the current name of the creek, Leigh would understandably assume that the “Levearskin” Lee spoke of was La Verkin Creek. But another letter published in the Deseret News on August 7, 1852, refutes that assumption. As discussed in the Huchel article, another Parowan party led by John C. L. Smith and John Steele (with many members, including Lee, having comprised the earlier party) struck east to the Sevier River. Ascending the Sevier to its head, they dropped down to the East Fork of the Virgin, as Smith and Steele documented in their letter: “We . . . crossed another ridge to the South and came to the headwaters of the levier skin thence down the levier skin.”47 “Levearskin,” or “Levier skin,” refers to the Virgin River.48 Leigh’s analysis that “the k sound in Verkin is quite similar to the Spanish g in Virgen” requires a hard look. Pronounced correctly in Spanish, “Virgen” sounds like “Beer-hehn” or “Veer-hehn.”49 Leigh also omitted an explanation for the “s” in Levearskin. Whatever word(s) Lee, Smith, and Steele were trying to spell, it was not pronounced “La Virgen.”

Lee’s assertion that the “Spaniards” called the Virgin “Levearskin” was corroborated in a letter to Brigham Young after Lee’s first trip to the Virgin: “I have been gathering all the information that I could relative to the county [country?] from the Spaniards and Walker [Wakara] and have taken a map from them.”50 But as previously demonstrated, Mexicans probably called the Virgin west of this point “Rio Severe.” Regardless, “Levearskin” is too close to “La Virgin” to dismiss as the possible name that Frémont documented. It may be that someone speaking Spanish called it “La Vearskin.” A lesson from Potts’s name for the Green River could also be applied here. “Levear” or “Levier” looks an awful lot like “Sevier.” Just as “Seet kadu” could be corrupted to “Leichadu,” could “Severo” have been corrupted to “Levear Skin” and further corrupted to “La Virgin?” As with the Green River, someday the missing piece of this puzzle may be discovered.

As demonstrated by the naming of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers, determining the origins of place names often requires solving a

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1. Rufus Wood Leigh, “The Naming of the Green, Sevier and Virgin Rivers,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (Spring 1961): 137.

2. Leigh’s article was adapted from a more comprehensive work he titled “Indian, Spanish, and Government Survey Place Names of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateaus” that he was presumably writing at the time.

His 1964 obituary states that he was the author of Place Names of Colorado River and Plateaus—undoubtedly the same book as was listed in the 1961 article, though an internet search of both titles yielded no results. It appears that the information in his obituary was incorrect, and that the originally planned book had been released as two separate volumes: Five Hundred Utah Place Names (1961), and Nevada Place Names: Their Origin and Significance (1964).

3. Frémont’s writings include his report of his first two expeditions, published in 1845; Geographical Memoir upon Upper California, published in 1848; and a memoir of his life and travels published in 1887. Leigh’s use in “The Naming of the Green, Sevier and Virgin Rivers” of both Frémont’s life memoir and the 1845 report was superfluous, since Frémont republished the report in his memoirs. This article only references the report.

4. Luke Runyon, “How the ‘Grand’ Became the ‘Colorado’ and What It Says about Our Relationship to Nature,” KUNC, December 20, 2017, https://www.kunc.org /post/how-grand-became-colorado-and-what-it-says -about-our-relationship-nature#stream/0.

5. The Astorians were a party of explorers sent by John Jacob Astor to find an overland route to the mouth of the Columbia River. In an 1821 account, Wilson Price Hunt claimed that since the Indians said the river ran from Spanish territory to the Gulf of California, they called it Spanish River. Wilson Price Hunt, “Voyage of Mr. Hunt and His Companions,” journal entry dated September 16, 1811, in New Annals of Voyages: Geography and History, Vol. 10 (Paris: J. B. Eyris and MalteBrun, 1821).

6. The letters of Daniel Potts, employee of Ashley and Smith, reveal an interesting evolution of this name. In a July 16, 1826, letter to his brother, he called it “Seet Kadu.” Then, in another letter to his brother almost exactly a year later, he spelled it as “Luchkadee.” The same day (July 8) he wrote a letter to a “Dr Lukens” in which he called it the “Leichadu.” Potts stated in that letter that his exploratory group ascended the East

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Fork of the Sevier, then “we went east across the snowy mountain above mentioned to a small river which discharges into the Leichadu.” This river was the Paria, which drains to the Colorado. Jerry Bagley, The First Known Man in Yellowstone: The True Story of Daniel Trotter Potts (Old Faithful Eyewitness Press, 2000), 202, 205, 208.

The Taos Trappers were Americans, many of French descent, who traveled down the Santa Fe Trail from St. Louis, originally trapping fur in the southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, then moving north into the Uinta Basin of Utah.

Peter Stark, Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire, A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier (Harper Collins, 2015), 131–32.

Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, The Dominguéz-Escalante Journal (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1976), 64.

LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Old Spanish Trail: Sante Fé to Los Angeles, Vol. 1 in The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820–1875 (Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1954), 94. The article’s reference to “Rio Colorado of the West” is indicative of the fact that the Colorado was mostly known for its western reaches.

Near Westwater Creek is an inscription made by Antoine Roubidoux, also a Taos trapper with French roots who called it “R. Verte.”

A. M. Woodbury, “The Route of Jedediah S. Smith in 1826 from the Great Salt Lake to the Colorado River,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (Spring 1931): 44. In his memoir, written in 1830–31, Smith described traveling through Castle Valley, recognizing that the east-flowing streams ran to the “Colorado” (Green River). Upon reaching the Colorado at the mouth of the Virgin, he stated: “it could be no other than the Colorado of the west which in the Mountains we call seets-kee-der.”

Jedediah S. Smith, The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 47, 66. It would be eleven years until a map reflecting this knowledge, although still incomplete, would be published by Albert Gallatin, and another four years before Robert Greenhow published a map drawn by David H. Burr, Northwest Coast of North America and Adjacent Territories, 1840, that the name “Green River” was used. The geography of that region on both maps derived from the now lost maps created by Jedediah Smith, Ashley, and others in 1830–31.

Neither Smith nor Ashley had been as far south as the Green’s confluence with the Grand/Colorado and relied on information from Provost. As a consequence, on both this map and his more famous 1839 map, Burr placed the confluence a degree too far north, about at the location of the Ute Crossing.

John Charles Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843–‘44 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, Printers, 1845), 62.

The names of the rivers most likely came from Carson who, in the mid-1830s, attended rendezvouses at the site, now a National Historic Landmark.

Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 129.

Both Frémont and Preuss kept journals of the expedition, although Preuss’s can be characterized more as a diary.

Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 279.

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complex puzzle. Although Frémont’s reports and maps were widely distributed and many of the place names he documented or derived “stuck,” they do not tell the whole story. Relying on one source, instead of peeling back the layers of folklore sometimes associated with place names, can deny the true sources credit for their historical contributions. Uncovering available information and performing linguistic analysis can restore that credit. What is certain is that our understanding will continue to evolve in light of new evidence and reevaluation.

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17. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, Frémont and ’49 (New York: Putnam, 1914), 133.

18. Owens’s “many writers” probably reflects the wide repetition of Frémont’s 1845 report.

19. Charles G. Coutant, The History of Wyoming, Vol. 1 (Laramie, WY: Chaplin, Spafford & Mathison, 1899), 123.

20. Joseph J. Hill, “The Old Spanish Trail” Hispanic American Historical Review 4, no. 3 (August 1921). Much of this article was republished in Utah Historical Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1930) under the title “Spanish and Mexican Exploration and Trade Northwest from New Mexico into the Great Basin, 1765–1853.”

21. Theonorio, Miguel, et al., Rio Arriba, September 6, 1813. This is document 2511 in Ralph Emerson Twitchell’s Spanish Archives of New Mexico, II, an index to documents that came into the possession of the United States after the Mexican American War and that are archived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A microfiche copy of the archives is available in the research library of the Utah State Historical Society.

22. The Utah State Historical Society has a microfiche copy of the archives, including the affidavits.

23. This information comes from Armijo’s diary, a translation of which can be found on pages 159–65 of Hafen and Hafen’s Old Spanish Trail.

24. This would be the opposite path of Daniel Potts’ expedition.

25. This expedition by Armijo was excluded from the 1930 article in UHQ, probably because in the ensuing nine years, Hill’s route to the Sevier was the topic of controversy.

26. Later travelers along the north branch of the Old Spanish Trail would have realized that Armijo’s “Severo” could not have been the “Sebero” they left at the head of Circleville Canyon, because they would have had to cross it somewhere in the vicinity of Cedar Valley as it flowed south, but Armijo’s name switch persisted.

27. Leigh, “The Naming of the Green, Sevier and Virgin Rivers,” 141.

28. Dellenbaugh, Frémont and ’49, 256.

29. LaVan Martineau, The Southern Paiutes (Las Vegas, NV: KC Publications, 1992), 184. Mooyai means “to hang down the head,” and Seeve’u is the name of an animal that was seen only once on the banks of the river near Joseph. Martineau speculates on what the animal— described as “large”—may have been, discounting the idea of a buffalo and wondering if a nearby petroglyph of what looks like a mammoth or mastodon may be the source. What seems more likely is that it was a newly re-introduced horse that found its way to the area before the Utes made them a familiar sight.

30. Martineau, xviii. The Ute and Paiute languages are both of Numic derivation and tend to differ in dialects and accents.

31. Martineau, xix.

32. Warren Angus Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains: A Diary of Wandering on the sources of the Rivers Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado, 1830–1835, edited by Leroy R. Hafen, with a biography of Ferris by Paul C. Phillips (Denver, CO: The Old West Publishing Company, 1983).

33. Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains and in the Oregon Territory (Wiley and Putnam, 1843), 107.

34. Fremont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 272. When Frémont first heard the name, Sevier River, he consid-

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ered it a reference to the Virgin River. “According to the information we had received,” he asserted in the May 4, 1844, entry of his 1845 report, “Sevier River was a tributary of the Colorado, and this [a stream they had come upon, the Muddy River] accordingly, should have been one of it affluents. It proved to be the Rio de los Angeles (River of the Angels) branch of the Rio Virgin.

(River of the Virgin).” Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 266. When the expedition reached the Virgin on May 6, they called it the Sevier, as evidenced in Preuss’s diary. Frémont’s retrospective report reflects their erroneous belief at the time.

35. Frémont, Geographical Memoir, 9.

36. American Heritage College Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 1270.

37. Alpheus H. Favour, Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man (1936; reprint ed., University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 167.

38. Frémont could have bestowed the name Nicolette on an unnamed river, such as the Beaver. He seemed determined to both remove the name of Sevier and, after the Mexican American War, reluctant to revert to the Spanish derivative.

39. Frémont unfortunately did not elaborate who had provided the information that the led the expedition to believe the tributary of the Colorado they came upon in early May 1844 was called Severo, but the expedition did encounter a Spanish speaking Indian and a Mexican man and boy on the trail prior to reaching the Virgin. Note that Armijo was Mexican, not Spanish as Dellenbaugh claims.

Dellenbaugh, in Frémont and ’49, 255–56, claimed that although Jedediah Smith named the river the Adams River, some have suggested that Smith later renamed it “after one of his men, Thomas Virgin, who was wounded at the battle with the Mohaves and killed by the Umpquas.” In his previous book, Breaking the Wilderness, Dellenbaugh reveals the source for the idea that the Virgin was named for Thomas Virgin: the historian Hiram Chittenden in his 1901 A History of the American Fur Trade of the Far West. Maps and documents found since Chittenden’s theory give no indication that Smith intended to change his original name.

40. Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Travels in California, and Scenes in the Pacific (Sayton and Miles, 1844), 318–20.

The same story is repeated in the 1849 volume Leigh referenced on page 142 of “The Naming of the Green, Sevier and Virgin Rivers.”

41. The Arapaho ranged east of the Continental Divide and were very unlikely to have stolen traps anywhere near the Sevier or Virgin Rivers. The waters of neither reach depths of forty feet unless possibly under extreme flood conditions, at which point they would be clouded with sediment, not transparent. Although Roubidoux’s fort on the Uinta River is better known, he also established one on the Gunnison River, not the San Juan River, called Fort Uncompahgre.

42. Brother of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code.

43. Dellenbaugh is referencing another story in Farnham’s Travels in California. “Captain Young” is Ewing Young, and the story is as specious as Farnham’s trapper story.

44. Bil Gilbert, Westering Man (Atheneum, 1983), 173; Frederick M. Huchel, The Rio Virgin Expedition: A Chapter in the History of Southern Utah, 1852 (The Frithurex Athenæum, 2016).

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There (Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing Company, 1997), 303.

50. Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, July–December 1852, 234, Church History Library. Just who these “Spaniards” were is also enigmatic. Travel along the Old Spanish Trail had dwindled to a trickle by that point, though Hill, in his 1930 UHQ article, documented ongoing slave trading forays from Santa Fe. One party in particular was in the Sanpete Valley as Lee was moving his family south from Salt Lake City in late October 1851. Lee may have diverted his path to meet with them, knowing that they may have information useful to him in his upcoming exploration. Unfortunately, the whereabouts of Lee’s journals of that time period are unknown, and this cannot corroborated.

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46. John D. Lee, “Letter from Elder John D. Lee,” Deseret News, April 3, 1852. Lee dated the letter February 20, 1852.

47. J. C. L. Smith and John Steele, letter from Parowan dated June 26, 1852, Deseret News, August 7, 1852.

48. A Mormon party led by Parley P. Pratt had previously explored the region. On December 31, 1849, party member Robert Campbell chronicled: “cross a large branch of the Rio Virgin, 18 yards wide. 1 foot deep. Rocky bottom.” William B. Smart and Donna T. Smart, eds., Over the Rim: The Parley P. Pratt Exploring Expedition to Southern Utah, 1849–50 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999), 92.

49. Barbara and Rudy Marinacci, California’s Spanish Place-Names: What They Mean and How They Got

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Avoiding Mormons, Running Rapids, Encountering Western Utes: William Lewis Manly’s Voyage Down the Green River and across Utah in 1849

In 1869, with the financial support of the U.S. government, Major John Wesley Powell led a now-famous river expedition. Starting at Green River, Wyoming Territory, Powell and his men traveled down the Green to its confluence with the Colorado River, then down the Colorado to its confluence with the Virgin River in Nevada. The explorers traveled roughly a thousand river miles through Utah and Arizona territories.

Powell’s scientific exploration of the Colorado River and successful passage through the Grand Canyon gave Powell considerable notoriety and acclaim—and is remembered today as one of the great adventures of the American West.1

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Twenty years earlier, and far less well-known, a twenty-nine-year-old forty-niner named William Lewis Manly made history on the Green River, too. Scholarship from previous decades has concluded that Manly and a crew of men floated from where the emigrant trail crosses the Green River, twenty-seven miles upriver from present-day Green River, Wyoming, to the Uinta Basin near what is now the ghost town of Ouray, Utah.

In the 1909 edition of The Romance of the Colorado River, detailing his experiences as part of the second Powell expedition, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh recognized Manly’s accomplishments and was complimentary of his achievements in running the Green River in 1849. Without explaining why, Dellenbaugh stated that Manly disembarked in northeastern Utah, in the Uinta Basin. Dellenbaugh’s book was the first published reference to try to pinpoint how far Manly floated down the Green. Since that time, many books, articles, and other literary references by historians have followed Dellenbaugh’s lead.2 Given Dellenbaugh’s early assessment, and Manly’s own neglect to specify the end point of his river voyage, the longstanding interpretation that

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newspaper articles called “From Vermont to California,” published in the Santa Clara Valley from 1887 to 1890.4 There Manly told his readers that he had earlier sources, including a daily journal of his entire journey, “recorded in regular form, with day and date, not an incident of any importance left out, and every word as true as gospel.” From this and other sources he had written a narrative, but the manuscript and journal, which had been sent to his parents for storage, were lost to history when their old farmhouse burned to the ground. “Persuaded so earnestly by many friends to write the account,” he went on, he took up pen again in the 1880s.5 Memory may be an unreliable tool for writing history, but other sources along the way help confirm many aspects of Manly’s story.

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William Manly years after the events described in his 1894 memoir, Death Valley in ’49: Important Chapter of California Pioneer History, the principal account of his river and overland travels through Utah. Photographer unknown, courtesy of Doris Holloway Sleath and LeRoy and Jean Johnson.

Manly and his companions left the river in the Uinta Basin has mostly held sway.3 A reassessment of the evidence, however, including a careful review of Manly’s own account and corroborating sources regarding the river trip and the ensuing overland journey, leads instead to the conclusion that Manly floated 125 miles further, all the way to where the Old Spanish Trail crossed the Green, near the present-day town of Green River, Utah. This would bring the total to 415 miles, rather than 292, and would make Manly’s party the first Euro-American explorers to travel beyond the Uinta Basin by river, since the trapper William Ashley had ended his run of the Green in the Uinta Basin in 1825.

After encountering the Ute chief Wákara, the party abandoned the river and trekked another 175 miles overland to the Mormon settlements along the Wasatch Front before continuing on to California.

The main source for Manly’s account comes from his 1894 memoir, Death Valley in ’49: Important Chapter of California Pioneer History, which was an expanded version of a series of

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Aside from the question of journey length, Manly’s experience makes for a quintessential adventure tale, and it adds a new entry to the canonical accounts of navigating the Green River in the nineteenth century—those of Powell and Ashley. Manly’s account corroborates these other men’s records and provides unique details of both the Green River and overland travel through central Utah in the mid-nineteenth century. Further, Manly’s encounter with the famous Ute Wákara provides an insightful example of interactions and power dynamics between white and Indigenous peoples when they crossed paths in little populated areas of the West. Wákara’s band had the clear upper hand in the encounter, both in terms of supplies and their knowledge of the terrain, and their generosity to Manly and his companions—as well as Manly’s lifelong gratitude to Wákara—paint a striking picture of humanity between potential rivals.6 Born to Phoebe Calkins and Ebenezer Manly on April 20, 1820, Lewis Manly (as he was known) spent his early life in the small farming community of St. Albans, Vermont, only fifteen miles from the Canadian border.7 There, raised with “New England ideals,” Manly learned an abiding dedication to family and country. In fall 1829, his family decided to start a new life on what was then the western frontier—the village of Ypsilanti, thirty-five miles west of Detroit in Michigan Territory. As he grew to adulthood, Manly became more and more interested in exploring the western territories, deciding at

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During the winter of 1848–49, he started hearing reports of gold in California, and he found himself with a head start: he was already further west than most gold seekers and believed he had the temperament and skills to make a

living in the far West. He signed on as a driver for a wagon company leaving western Missouri late that next spring.10 Along the way, it became increasingly apparent that the group was too late to make it over the Sierra Nevada before the end of the season, and the company captain started talking about wintering in Salt Lake City, as many other forty-niners ended up doing that year.11 Many overland travelers looked forward to passing through the Mormon settlements, with their promise of rest, restocking, and some life luxuries.12 Manly, on the other hand, was not thrilled at the prospect.

The Latter-day Saints he had encountered in the past were rough, unkempt characters who only wanted to talk about seeking revenge against Missourians for their past persecution. He found them to have a “back woods” air and suspected they were horse thieves. “I had heard much about the Mormons,” he later wrote, “and I am sure I would not like to meet them if I had a desirable mule that they wanted, or any money, or a good-looking wife.”

Talking with a handful of like-minded fellow travelers, Manly convinced himself that “the only way to get along at all in Salt Lake would

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one point that he would “rather live on the top of the Rocky Mountains and catch chipmunks for a living” than to stay in Michigan.8 He left home in 1840 at age twenty, trying unsuccessfully to make it on his own as a laborer in the frontier town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin Territory. When the work dried up, he made his way back home, but the rugged wilderness life seemed to call him. After a couple months, he again set out for Wisconsin, this time opting to rely on his hunting and trapping experience to get by. He built a cabin and made a canoe, hunted bear and deer, tanned hides, and fashioned his own buckskin clothing. In May 1840 he and a partner headed for Prairie du Chien weighed down with fur pelts of otter, mink, beaver, and other animals, and his buyer proclaimed the men “the best fur handlers he had seen.”9 Manly spent the next several years in a similar manner.

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Green River, Wyoming, probably late nineteenth century. Here, Manly and six other California-bound men abandoned the emigrants’ trail, salvaged a small ferryboat, and set off on the river thinking it a shorter path to California. This was two decades before completion of the railroad, visible in this photograph, and John Wesley Powell’s famous expedition on the Green and Colorado Rivers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 14823.

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be to turn Mormon, and none of us had any belief or desire that way.”13

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When the wagon train reached the Green River crossing near what is now Green River, Wyoming, on Sunday, August 19, Manly started formulating an alternative: float the Green River all the way to California. He consulted with fellow travelers, including a surgeon and a military officer, both of whom expressed their understanding that “the stream came out on the Pacific Coast and that we had no obstacles except cataracts, which they had heard were pretty bad.” He also consulted one or more maps lent to him from military personnel. No single map has been found from the period that includes all the landmarks Manly names on his voyage, but John C. Frémont’s most famous map, documenting his 1842 exploration of the Rocky Mountains, includes everything but Ham’s Fork. A later map of Frémont’s, from 1848, includes Ham’s Fork, Browns Hole, the Uinta River, and the Grand, but omits Fort Uinta. One of the men who accompanied Manly down the river, Morgan S. McMahon, later referred to “our little map,” indicating that they copied down the geographical information and carried it with them.14 In a memorable passage, Manly outlined his thinking: “We put a great many ‘ifs’ together, and they amounted to about this:—If this stream were large enough: if we had a boat: if we knew the way; if there were no falls or bad places: if we had plenty of provisions: if we were bold enough set out on such a trip, etc.: we might come out at some point or other on the Pacific Ocean.” Although many of those propositions would remain “ifs,” the idea drew closer to becoming a reality when Manly found a small ferryboat, about seven feet wide and twelve long, that was half submerged in the sand along the opposite shore.15 Wasting no time, Manly approached his employer about his plan and was surprised when the man offered no objection but offered to buy his pony. Manly then recruited six other men to go along with his uncharted adventure: Morgan S. McMahon, Charles and Joseph Hazelrig, Richard Field, Alfred Walton, and John Rogers.16 They salvaged the flat-bottomed boat, traded for supplies, and pushed off on August

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20, 1849.17 Manly records that the men were in high spirits, congratulating one another that “it looked as if we were taking the most sensible way to get to the Pacific, and almost wondered that everybody was so blind as not to see it as we did.”18 At first the waters were calm and the going easy. At several points in his narrative, Manly referred to his rate of travel, which he estimated at thirty miles a day.19 Then, on about the fifth day, after traveling ninety-seven miles, Manly was asleep on the flat-bottom boat when the men saw that the river was flowing into an upcoming mountain and became alarmed that it might be funneling into a large hole. “The boys thought the river was coming to a rather sudden end,” Manly recalled. “For the life of me I could not say they were not right, for there was no way in sight for it to go to . . . and I told the boys I guessed we were elected to go on foot to California after all, for I did not propose to follow the river down any sort of a hole into any mountain.” To their relief, “just as we were within a stone’s throw of the cliff, the river turned sharply to the right and went behind a high point of the mountain that seemed to stand squarely on edge.”20 This optical illusion is still visible, though less dramatic as several hundred feet of the canyon are covered by Flaming Gorge Reservoir.

Crudely maneuvering their flat-bottomed ferryboat with setting poles and paddles, Manly and his men were able to find their way through the first canyons—later named by Powell as Flaming Gorge and Horseshoe, Kingfisher, and Hidden Canyons—without mishap. The crew were awed by this unfamiliar environment. “I don’t think the sun ever shone down to the bottom of the cañon,” Manly wrote, “for the sides were literally sky-high, for the sky, and a very small portion of that was all we could see.”21 Their first major difficulty came soon after, in Red Canyon, where they had to carefully maneuver around “rocks as large as cabins.” They took everything off of the ferryboat, and Manly peeled off his heavy clothes before steering out into the current while the others held the boat with a line. He maneuvered the watercraft to where it would successfully skirt the boulders and yelled to the men to let go. Then he jumped overboard and swam furiously for

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As the crew stood with poles in hand, watching their vessel being ripped apart by the river, Manly as captain quickly formed another plan. Again noting his extreme reluctance to head for the Mormon settlements, and perhaps still considering a water route easier than an overland one, he decided to use his experience as an outdoorsman and build new boats. They set immediately to work, chopping down two ponderosa pines and hollowing them out into fifteen-by-two-foot canoes.

They worked in shifts and continued night

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After a night camping above the falls, Manly first determined that the safest route past the rocks was on the far side of the river, so he and the crew attempted to cross with the boat.

When this failed, perhaps because the flat-bottom ferryboat was not built for such careful maneuvering, they tried directing the empty boat down the chute from shore. They were at a disadvantage, however, having only one rope, and as the boat picked up speed, the other six men used poles to prod it in the right direction.

Then disaster struck. The current was simply too strong, and the boat pitched dangerously.

“When the boat struck the rock we could not stop it,” Manly recounted, “and the gunwale next to us rose, and the other went down so that in a second the boat stood edgewise in the water and the bottom tight against the big rock, and the strong current pinned it there so tight that we could no more move it than we could move the rock itself.”24 There was nothing they could do. The ferryboat was lost.

There followed three or four days of easy travel through what came to be known as Browns Hole and later Browns Park. Then they came the 2,000-foot-high Gates of Lodore.27 As it did for Powell and his crew decades later, portaging became the order of the day. The going was slow and frustrating, as time and again “the only way we could get along was to unload and take our canoes over, and then load up again, only to travel a little way, and repeat the operation.” Manly and company were now making only four or five miles a day, but they proceeded past obstacles like the later-named Upper Disaster Falls, Lower Disaster Falls, and Triplet Falls without incident. But now Hells Half Mile loomed directly below, another stretch of dangerous whitewater. Manly made it through and went to shore to signal to his men to portage, but instead they stayed in the channel.28

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But the river runners had no chance to celebrate, as almost immediately they came to an even more daunting obstacle. Ahead of them, at another whitewater section now submerged by Flaming Gorge, the river dropped ten or twelve vertical feet around another massive boulder.

Manly noted seeing the marks of a previous traveler at this location, William Ashley: “I saw a smooth place about fifty feet above where the great rocks had broken out, and there, painted in large black letters, were the words, ‘Ashley, 1824.’” Powell would later make the same observation and name the landmark for the earlier explorer: Ashley Falls.23

and day with two axes they had acquired from the wagon train; “we never let the axes rest,” Manly reported. When finished, they secured the canoes together to make a catamaran-like craft. Immediately it became clear the canoes weighed down with the men and their supplies were too heavy, so they stopped again and built a third canoe, this one an enormous twenty-five or thirty feet long. Though Manly did not report how much time the first two canoes took to complete, he wrote that constructing the third required a “night and day” of back-breaking labor.25 Manly took charge of this longer canoe, dubbed “Pilot,” which was followed down the river by “No. 2.”26

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shore, keeping hold of the towline lest they lose the boat.22

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Manly could then do nothing but watch helplessly as the following events unfolded: Alford Walton in the other canoe could not swim, but held onto the gunwale with a death grip, and it went on down through the rapids.

Sometimes we could see the man and sometimes not, and he and the canoe took turns disappearing. Walton had very black hair, and as he clung fast to his canoe his black head looked like a crow on the end of a log. McMahon and I threw everything out of the big canoe and pushed out after him. I told Mc. to kneel down so I could see over

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220 Map of Manly’s river and overland travels, and of McMahon and Field’s overland travels in the late summer and fall of 1849. Map created by Deb Miller, Utah Division of State History.

him to keep the craft off the rocks, and by changing his paddle from side to side as ordered, he enabled me to make quick moves and avoid being dashed to pieces. We fairly flew, the boys said, but I stood up in the stern and kept it clear of danger till we ran into a clear piece of river and overtook Walton clinging to the overturned boat; McMahon seized the boat and I paddled all to shore, but Walton was nearly dead and could hardly keep his grasp on the canoe.29 Manly was very fortunate not to have lost a man, and he gave credit to a large boulder in the river at the end of Hells Half Mile, which created a large back eddy that allowed Walton’s

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canoe to slow and gave Manly and McMahon time to rescue him.

With the unknown ahead, and having just experienced their most traumatic day on the river, the men were “in low spirits” and “in silence” as they pushed off the next morning. To their relief, the rapids quickly became less challenging, and they were out of the Canyon of Lodore and back to the calm waters in Echo Park. As that section of the river gave way to Whirlpool Canyon, Manly’s account becomes sparse on details. From that point until he prepared to leave the river, he reported only the following in Death Valley in ’49: We kept pushing down the river. The rapids were still dangerous in many

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The absence of detail is perhaps more understandable given that, as previously mentioned, Manly’s original notes of the voyage were destroyed. By the time he composed his later works, “From Vermont to California” (1887) and Death Valley in ’49 (1894), pieced together from recollections many decades after the events he describes, he may have forgotten details. It seems entirely possible that Manly and his crew passed through Desolation and Gray Canyons without incident and that, after describing his earlier, more memorable adventures in more detail, he reduced so many later canyon miles into a brief summary. In this reading, references in Death Valley in ’49 to “after a day or two we began to get out of the canyons” were to Whirlpool and Split Mountain Canyons, while “now been obliged to

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In any case, Manly’s failure to report on Desolation and Gray Canyons is a stark incongruity to the conclusion that Manly ran the river over a hundred miles beyond the Uinta Basin, and the preceding supposition is not a strong argument. It is strengthened, however, when one factors in the geographic and topographic clues Manly left us. To consider this evidence, we have to look at Manly’s post-river journey overland through central Utah.

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Another challenge to the conclusion that Manly went farther is his report that he spent three weeks on the river.32 If that were the case, they would have had to average an unlikely twenty miles a day to arrive at the Spanish Trail in three weeks. As this article later shows, though, the crew emerged from the wild lands of central Utah on September 30, 1849, which based on Manly’s account was nine days after he left the river. That leaves thirty-three days floating the Green, or a much more reasonable twelveand-a-half-mile daily average.

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This is the biggest challenge to the conclusion that Manly traveled all the way to present-day Green River, Utah, in Gunnison Valley. If Manly departed the Green River in the Uinta Basin in what is now Duchesne County, he passed only through Whirlpool Canyon, Island Park, and Split Mountain Canyon, which would fit with the description “after a day or two we began to get out of the canyons.” If instead the party traveled another 125 miles, Manly failed to account for Desolation Canyon and Gray Canyon, the latter of which the river historian Roy Webb describes as “the deepest and longest of the canyons of the Green.” Similarly, as the scholar James Aton writes in The River Knows Everything, “At its nadir at Rock Creek, Desolation measures deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Its ‘gorgeous layered geology’ and sharp-lined, castellated ridges are unique in canyon-country geology.”31 How could Manly have missed describing these canyons entirely?

follow the cañon for many miles” and mountains providing “no chance to for us to climb up” described the much longer Desolation and Gray Canyons.

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places, but not so frequent nor so bad as the part we had gone over, and we could see that the river gradually grew smoother as we progressed. After a day or two we began to get out of the canyons, but the mountains and hills on each side were barren and a pale yellow caste, with no chance for us to climb up and take a look to see if there were any chances for us further along.

We had now been obliged to follow the cañon for many miles.30

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First, Manly himself records crossing paths with the Old Spanish Trail. “We crossed several well marked trails,” he wrote, “running along the foot [hills], at right angles to our own. This we afterwards learned was the regular trail from Santa Fe to Los Angeles.”33 The crossing of the Green River in Gunnison Valley was along the northern-most portion of the arcing Spanish Trail that detoured north to avoid the mazes of the canyon country cut by the Colorado River.

Manly also indicated that their overland journey proceeded “some miles to the northwest” to a canyon that led up a mountain range “leading north” to the Mormon settlements. If Manly had begun his land journey in the Uinta Basin, which is to the east-northeast of Spanish Fork Canyon, the mountains he would have summited to the northwest would have been the Uinta Mountains, and such a path could not have led him where he ended up: the south end of Utah Valley, more than fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. But it aligns well if one assumes he began in Gunnison Valley in the

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San Rafael Desert, traveled northwest to the Wasatch Plateau, and proceeded north across those highlands until he approached Spanish Fork Canyon. A useful contrast to Manly’s description is the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in the same season of the year, seventy-three years earlier, which crossed the Green River in the Uinta Basin and then made their way to Spanish Fork Canyon. In the journals of the expedition, the direction of travel is unmistakably west and southwest.34

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Finally, and in contrast to the Dominguez-Escalante expedition’s travels across the Uinta Basin including eight documented river or stream crossings, Manly’s travel from the Green River to the mountaintop is unmistakably characterized as dry and barren. He reports no river or stream crossings, running water, or even timber for three days until reaching the base of a mountain; in the meantime they resorted to burning sagebrush and found water in “pools or holes in the flat rocks which held the rain.”35 As they traveled northwest toward the mountain—known today as the Wasatch Plateau—Manly and his companions “came near the spurs of the mountain which projected out into the barren valley.”36 Such a description matches precisely the towering Book Cliffs, rising two thousand feet from the valley floor on the southern and western end of the Tavaputs Plateau. These cliffs clearly extend like spurs out into the barren Gunnison Valley, just as Manly described.

The company of forty-niners first glimpsed the wide desert valley as they floated out of Gray Canyon on September 21. Despite the increasingly barren surroundings, they felt confident that they could run the river to the Pacific Ocean within several weeks’ time. Manly remembered thinking, “We had now passed the troublesome part of our journey, and would be able to reach the sea coast in a few more days.”37 Suddenly they heard gunshots. The tops of Native American tepees came into view, and they saw someone walking along the river not far away. He had a gun at his shoulder, and pointing it at the boats, he gestured for them to come to shore and enter the camp.38 When they did so, they were beckoned into a tepee and found themselves face to face with Wákara, the famous Western Ute.

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William Lewis Manly’s first observation of Chief Wákara accentuated their similarities, calling the Ute “a man of the mountains.”39 Manly and Wákara were two very different people, with diverging agendas, cultures, ethnicities, and religious beliefs. Certainly both brought their own self-interest to this encounter—with Manly in particular going to misrepresent himself as a matter of self-preservation. Yet they shook hands and stood together to learn from the other. Physically surrounded with blankets, knives, and guns in Wákara’s lodge, they symbolically chose to weave themselves together in a blanket of mutual respect, rather than choose a path of deadly force.

Wákara was the chief of the Western Utes and loomed large as the popular leader of a band of roving Utes who traded and raided to gain economic prosperity. To Mormon settlers he was the most prominent Indian in Utah, and he often conversed and brokered alliances with Brigham Young, who appears to have assumed

Sketch of Chief Wákara (left) and his brother Arapeen (right), made by Frederick J. Piercy and used in James Linforth’s From Liverpool to the Great Salt Lake Valley (1855). Utah State Historical Society, no. 14421.

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The ensuing conversation relied on impromptu sign language as much as verbal communication. In Manly’s telling, Wákara relied on a limited English vocabulary, aided by hand and body gestures and punctuated by onomatopoeic utterances for emphasis. Inquiring after their intentions, Wákara soon came to understand that they were headed far to the west, though he could not understand their chosen course to get there.45 Wákara started drawing in the sand, and what followed, according to Manly, was a combination geography lesson and dramatic enactment. The Ute sketched out the emigrant trail they had been following before embarking on the river, the location of various settlements, and the course of the Green River. In short, he mapped out, with detailed accuracy, the terrain Manly’s company had just passed through, demonstrating to the white men his intimate familiarity with the land.46 Then he explained what was coming downriver:

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The first word out of Wákara’s mouth when he met Manly’s crew was “Mormonee?”—asked as a question. Either based his own observation or tapping into the general impression in the United States of Latter-day Saints–Native American alliance, Manly perceived that it was in his best interest to represent himself as a follower of Brigham Young.43 The tables had turned; where Lewis Manly had tried so desperately to avoid the Mormon settlements, now he realized their lives may depend on Wákara believing they were Mormons. “So we put our right hand to our breast and said ‘Mormonee,’” he reported, “with a cheerful countenance, and that act conveyed to them the belief that we were chosen disciples of the great and only Brigham and we became friends at once, as all acknowledged.”44

He showed two streams coming in on the east side and then he began piling up stones on each side of the river and then got longer ones and piled them higher and higher yet. Then he stood with one foot on each side of his river and put his hands on the stones and then raised them as high as he could, making a continued e-e-e-e-e-e as long as his breath would last, pointed to the canoe and made signs with his hands how it would roll and pitch in the rapids and finely capsize and throw us all out. He then made signs of death to show us that it was a fatal place. I understood perfectly plain from this that below the valley where we now were was a terrible cañon, much higher than any we had passed, and the rapids were not navigable with safety.47 Presumably Wákara was referring to his knowledge of the canyon country including the Grand Canyon itself, which, though far downstream, presented the most daunting obstacle to the forty-niners’ journey. Manly’s earlier account in “From Vermont to California” also notes that Wákara explained that “we could ride to the mouth of the next big river in one day, and we supposed this was the Grand [or Colorado] River.” In fact, Powell later took three days to get from the Old Spanish Trail to the confluence with the Colorado, but the estimate is much more reasonable than assuming Manly was several more days upstream in the Uinta Basin.48 A contemporary account by a man named William Lorton, who met Manly right after he arrived in Utah Valley ten days later, noted in his journal, “I went to meet them and learned they were Green River floaters that had . . . made canoes, and floated down Green River to the Colorado,” showing Manly’s understanding that he had arrived in close proximity to the Colorado River.49

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Wákara was in charge of the entire Ute population (a mistake Wákara in turn appears to have not bothered to correct).40 The recent introduction of large-scale Euro-American immigration into the Great Basin disrupted traditional indigenous subsistence patterns, prompting Wákara’s focus on exploiting trade markets along the migrant trails.41 An infamous slave trader, he also traded with and exacted payments from travelers on the Old Spanish Trail.42

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Wákara went on to warn the adventurers that rough waters were not the only danger lying ahead: “Walker shook his head more than once and looked very sober, and said ‘Indiano’ and reaching for his bow and arrows, he drew the bow back to its utmost length and put the arrow close to my breast, showing

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how I would get shot. Then he would draw his hand across his throat and shut his eyes as if in death to make us understand that this was a hostile country before us, as well as rough and dangerous.”

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The lands of Wákara’s Western Ute people covered lands surrounding the Green River from the upper stretches of the Green and Yampa River confluence to below the confluence of the Green and Colorado. Just as Wákara indicated, south and east of the Old Spanish Trail was the territory of what the Western Utes would have considered a more hostile tribe, the Sheberetch or Elk Mountain Utes. And further down the Colorado River were other indigenous people, including the Navajo and Paiute, whom Wákara would have viewed with suspicion and who were regularly the victims of his raiding and kidnapping.50 Now the river crew had to make a fateful decision: ignore this knowledgeable stranger’s advice and push on with their original plan, or trust him and seek his guidance on how to make it to the Mormon settlements on the other

side of the Wasatch Mountains. For Manly, the choice was clear: “Chief Walker and his forefathers were born here and know the country as well as you know your father’s farm,” he told the men, “and for my part, I think I shall take one of his trails and go to Salt Lake and take the chances that way.” Not everyone agreed.

Morgan S. McMahon, who had often accompanied Manly in “Pilot,” rejoined, “I don’t believe a word of it.” He felt that continuing down the river was much safer than “wandering across a dry and desolate country which we knew nothing of.” He and Richard Field ultimately decided to continue down the Green against Wákara and Manly’s advice. Decisions made, the white and Ute explorers joined in light-hearted festivities, complete with meat to dine on and “a sort of mixed American and Indian dance . . . till quite late at night.”51 In the morning, Lewis Manly, Charles and Joseph Hazelrig, Alfred Walton, and John Rogers prepared for the next leg of their journey. They traded with the Ute band, giving over clothing, needles and thread, and other equipment for two good horses. It is significant that although

The Green River near where Manly and his companions meet with Wákara and his party, disembarked on the river, and began their overland trek across the San Rafael Desert. Photograph by Michael Kane.

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Almost immediately they heard the clatter of hooves behind them and saw Wákara speeding to catch up with them. Manly’s companions were sure the Ute had changed his mind and now intended them harm. But, in fact, Wákara had noticed they were heading the wrong direction and had missed the indistinct horse trail he had directed them to follow.55 It is interesting to note that in the next three days Manly’s company twice encountered the Old Spanish Trail before reaching the canyon indicated by the Ute leader.56 Wákara could have simply directed them to follow the more established trail, but perhaps he knew his route to be shorter, or water easier to find. In any case, the men did follow his advice and found enough water each night to make do.

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The Indians here [in the American West] have the reputation of being blood thirsty savages who took delight in murder and torture, but here, in the very midst of this wild and desolate country we found a Chief and his tribe, Walker and his followers who were as humane and kind to White people as could be expected of any one. I have often wondered at the knowledge of this man respecting the country, of which he was able to make us a good map in the sand, point out to us the impassable cañons, locate the hostile Indians, and many points which were not accurately known by our own explorers for many years afterward.

He undoubtedly saved our little band from a watery grave, for without his advice we had gone on and on, far into the great Colorado cañon, from which escape would have been impossible and securing food another impossibility, while destruction by hostile indians was among the strong probabilities of the case. So in a threefold way I have for these more than forty years credited the lives of myself and comrades to the thoughtful interest and humane consideration of old Chief Walker.53

With Manly’s preparations made and supplies in order, Wákara pointed the men toward the Latter-day Saint settlements. “I then went to Chief Walker and had him point out the trail to ‘Mormonie’ as well as he could,” Manly wrote.

“He told me where to enter the mountains leading north and when we got part way he told me we would come to an Indian camp, when I must follow some horse tracks newly made; he made me know this by using his hands like horse’s forefeet, and pointed the way.”54 Bidding an emotional farewell to McMahon and Field, they set out in a northwest direction.

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Wákara had all the leverage in this transaction, the men being far from their destination and wholly dependent on him for supplies and direction, he gave them fair trade, and they even felt as though they came out on top. According to Manly, Wákara invited the white men to accompany his party as they proceeded east to hunt bison. Though Manly declined, he developed a trust and respect for the Ute. While others in his party spoke derogatorily and distrustfully of the Indians, Manly (perhaps his attitude colored by the ensuing decades reflecting back on the episode of the 1840s) held them in high regard, as equals or even their superiors in the circumstances they found themselves in.52 Writing much later, Manly displayed an abiding antipathy for Indigenous people but demonstrated a high opinion of the group he had encountered on the shore of the Green River:

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On the third evening, after crossing through Castle Valley, they came to the canyon that led to the top of the Wasatch Plateau just southeast of present-day Castle Dale, Utah.

This was most likely Rock Canyon, which is marked on an 1873 map with the notation “Supposed Course of Arapene’s Trail.”57 Arapeen was Wákara’s younger brother and was often his companion as he moved throughout the landscape.58 Upon reaching the top of the Wasatch Plateau the next morning, instead of continuing on Wákara’s trail into the Sevier Valley, Manly’s party turned north across the top of the Wasatch Plateau.59 Here, in late September at above 10,000 feet, the weather was much colder, and they encountered snowbanks.

The men suffered from a lack of warm clothing.60 As Wákara had indicated, they came to a Ute encampment the first day, but when the

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From the head of Rock Canyon looking east toward the San Rafael Desert and the Book Cliffs (left). At the top of this canyon, Michael Kane discovered now-weathered carvings in a rock wall. These engravings appear to spell out MANLY (right), AL (potentially Alfred Walton), and RO (potentially John Rodgers). Photographs by Michael Kane.

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women there recognized the travelers’ horses as Wákara’s, the men worried they would be taken for horse thieves, so they passed by and set up camp a mile further on. That evening, some of the Utes visited their camp, held a good-natured shooting contest (which Manly admits he handily won), and gave Manly’s men some venison.61 After the rendezvous with Wákara’s Western Utes, Manly’s account turns brief and vague for the next four days of travel. One detail of the stretch along the Wasatch Plateau was that wild game was rare, “so that hunger was all the time increasing.” They considered butchering one of their horses but abandoned the idea after locating a trail that descended north below the timberline into a valley, which would have been the northern end of the Sanpete Valley, close to the location of present-day Indianola, Utah. They continued into Spanish Fork Canyon and on the ninth day of overland travel, September 30, to their great relief they entered Utah Valley, where they encountered an emigrant camp at Hobble Creek.62 A month and half had passed since embarking on the Green.

Completely worn out, the men camped with the wagon train, where they were fed a hearty meal and told the emigrants of the “hardships we had passed through.”63 As previously noted, one of the people who listened to these stories was California-bound William Lorton, who recorded their words in his diary. The account is an important contemporary corroboration of the almost-unbelievable adventure:

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September 30th was the Sabbath. . . . I see 5 men with 2 horses packed coming down the big kanyon to the S. east.

I went to meet them & learned they were Green River floaters that had . . . made canoes & floated down Green River to the Colerado [sic]. They said they had had a hard time of it & nearly all lost their lives dashing amonge the rocks & down rappids & over falls. They had all lost their fire arms except one, & would have starved to death but for Indian Walker who gave them as much as they could eat, & traded the horses to them for amunition & clothes, put them on a trail & told them it was 8 sleeps to the valley.

The Indians were very kind to them.

They had hardly any clothing & shoes on them. They said it had been very cold on the mounts, that they had seen mountains of every shape & form.

Walker, who is named after the great mountaineer, gave them a map of the country in the sand. He would heap up the sand for mountains, the valleys in between & mark out the roads & rivers with a stick.64 Manly and the others ultimately decided to join this wagon train on the “Southern Route” to California—a longer route to the gold country that avoided late-season passage over the Sierra Nevada. Head of the train was Captain Jefferson Hunt, a Latter-day Saint who had traversed the route in 1847 and 1848.65 Although Manly heard Hunt “had more than one wife,”

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McMahon and Field spent nine days with Wákara’s band and apparently received special treatment as “honored guests.”69 McMahon remarked that the entire party was mounted on horseback. If the party had traveled twelve to fifteen miles per day, they would have gone 120 miles east in nine days, far enough to reach the Colorado, but McMahon indicated they did not, suggesting a slower pace. Having women and children on foot, as well as a herd of livestock, would have slowed the party down.70

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And what of Morgan McMahon and Richard Field, the two men who stayed behind with the intent to continue their river voyage? Fortunately we know their story because Manly published a long letter from McMahon in Death Valley in ’49. The two men appear to have struggled with indecision in Manly’s absence. They worked on their boats for a day or two, all the while hearing more warnings from Wákara. Finally abandoning that plan, they decided to strike out after Manly and rejoin them. But they doubted their navigational skills, and just as they had saddled up, Wákara convinced them to instead accompany

his band in the opposite direction—northeast toward the headwaters of the Colorado—on their hunting expedition.68 McMahon’s account provides yet more evidence that Manly’s party was in Gunnison Valley when they split up. From the Old Spanish Trail crossing at the Green River, they would have had to travel east along the southern slopes of the Book Cliffs. McMahon and Field hoped to end up back on the emigrant trail they had left in August, making the expedition a circular detour.

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his purported knowledge “about the road” probably dispelled any misgivings Manly had about being led by a Mormon.66 The company departed soon after, and the next chapter of Manly’s life was no less dramatic, as he rescued his fellow travelers after they became stranded in Death Valley. These historical events are beyond the scope of this article, but previous scholarship completes the picture for interested readers.67

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The Wasatch Plateau, facing north. Manly’s party appears to have traversed the plateau, descended into the north end of Sanpete Valley, and entered Utah Valley via Spanish Fork Canyon. Photograph by Michael Kane.

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It was a rough journey for the white men.

While the rest of their party seemed unaffected by the scant food, the two were certain they were starving to death, despite hunters in the group killing an occasional mountain sheep or rabbit and sharing the meat. As the days wore on, the food supply dwindled and Wákara’s party continued east, the two men became increasingly discouraged and hoped to turn north toward the California Trail. On the ninth day, the group encountered the fresh tracks of another Indigenous group, and Wákara decided to head southeast to join them. Since this was the opposite direction McMahon and Field were trying to go, they parted ways with Wákara and travel north, hoping to reach Fort Bridger or another white settlement along the emigrants’ trail. On about October 3, 1849, the two men and a horse and mule set out on what McMahon called “a perilous voyage through deserts, and over rough mountains.”71 They killed rabbits along the way and were not in dire straits until their third day alone, when they found some red berries that Field ate hungrily. Soon he was violently ill, suffering from what sounded like life-threatening abdomen pain and severely dehydrated, with no water in sight. They suffered on, with Field mostly slumped over the mule, surviving on the occasional bit of rainwater. Based on their point of departure from the Green River at the Old Spanish Trail, their travels would have taken them up the Book Cliffs and across the East Tavaputs Plateau. On the sixth day since leaving Wákara’s party—fifteen days since leaving the Green River—they turned directly west, hoping the change of direction would lead them to the river more quickly.72 Eventually, they found themselves back at the life-giving Green River. They recognized their surroundings from having passed by on the canoes earlier: “According to our map, our recollections of different objects, and present appearances, we were now a little above the mouth of the Uinta [Duschesne] River which comes in from the northwest.” McMahon’s account, then, is another strong piece of evidence, by a corroborating witness, that the Manly party did not end their river voyage in the Uinta Basin; the Ute band had traveled east or northeast for several days, in the direction of the Colorado headwaters, and McMahon and Field continued “for

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a time northeast but, after passing that range [the Book Cliffs] we bore to the northwest.”73 It seems impossible, therefore, that McMahon left the river in the Uinta Basin, traveled east, northeast, north, and west for weeks, and ended up close to where they started.

Their troubles were not over, as Field again battled food poisoning and they nearly drowned trying to cross the river, but at least they now knew where they were. They found their way up the Duchesne River to Fort Uinta (a landmark included on McMahon’s “little map”74) and on to the snow-covered Uinta Mountains, which they successfully crossed. After many hardships in this stage of their journey, including more near-death experiences, they disagreed on which direction to proceed and abruptly parted company, both eventually finding their separate ways back to Fort Bridger and arriving in Salt Lake City. After all their work to avoid doing so, the two men ended up wintering in the Mormon capital, then successfully journeyed to California together the next spring. As both McMahon and Field left the Salt Lake Valley and the friendships they made with the Mormon pioneers, they followed the Hastings Cutoff trail due west, across the Nevada wilderness and over Donner Pass. When they arrived at Sacramento on July 4, 1850, they “pitched their tent under a large oak tree where the State Capitol now stands.”75 Their journey west was complete.

In his published account of his adventures, Manly reflected on what his life meant and what he tried to stand for. “Looking back over more than 40 years,” he wrote, “I was then a great lover of liberty, as well as health and happiness, and I possessed a great desire to see a new country never yet trod by civilized man. . . . I am content.”76 By the time he published a book about his experience, he was in his mid-seventies and had lived a long life since the days of ‘49. But the vivid and careful details found in his account attest to the fact that his journey to California, with its detour through the wilds of Utah, was a seminal experience of his life. His story stands with the best of adventure tales from white explorers in the American West, and the research presented here would make his party the first to run a sizable stretch of the Green River.

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1. For book-length treatments, see, for example, Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon (New York: Harper Collins, 2001); and Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

2. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, The Romance of the Colorado River, 3d ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1909); Roy Webb, If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986); and LeRoy and Jean Johnson, eds., Escape from Death Valley: As Told by William Lewis Manly and Other ’49ers (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1987).

3. On pages 60–61 of his Colorado River Country (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), the historian David Lavender concluded, based on Manly’s mention of the Old Spanish Trail, that the party went as far as “near the site of today’s Green River, Utah,” but Lavender devotes only a few paragraphs and a single endnote to the story.

Likewise, more recently, the historians Tom McCourt and Wade Allinson wrote in passing that Manly traveled all the way to the Old Spanish Trail. (Tom McCourt and Wade Allinson, The Elk Mountain Mission: A History of Moab, Mormons, The Old Spanish Trail and the Sheberetch Utes [Price, UT: Southpaw, 2017], 2.)

4. William Lewis Manly, Death Valley in ’49: Important Chapter of California Pioneer History. The Autobiography of a Pioneer, Detailing His Life from a Humble Home in the Green Mountains to the Gold Mines of California; and Particularly Reciting the Sufferings of the Band of Men, Women and Children Who Gave “Death Valley” Its Name (San Jose, CA: Pacific Tree and Vine, 1894).

5. Manly, 437–39.

6. Because her work represents some of the most recent and best scholarship on the Ute people, we are following the spelling of Wákara found in Sondra G. Jones’s Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019). Alternate spellings in historical sources include Walkara, Wakara, and Walker.

7. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 11–12, 64.

8. Manly, 30.

9. Manly, 21, 23–24, 56.

10. Manly, 64.

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Notes

11. For information on forty-niners in Salt Lake City, see Brigham D. Madsen, Gold Rush Sojourners in Great Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1983).

12. See Brian D. Reeves, “Two Massachusetts Forty-Niner Perspectives on the Mormon Landscape, July–August 1849,” BYU Studies 38, no. 3 (1999): 123–25.

13. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 66, 68, 70.

14. Manly, 288; Frémont, Map of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 (Washington, DC: US Senate, 1845); Frémont, Map of Oregon and Upper California from the Surveys of John Charles Frémont and Other Authorities (Washington, DC: US Senate, 1848).

15. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 74, 76. See also Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, August 1887, 110.

16. McMahon is only ever called “M. S. McMahon” in Manly’s book; on his full name, see Van Buren County, Iowa, Records, March 28, 1848, familysearch.org; Alumni College of Physicians and Surgeons, Keokuk Medical College, Records, 1850–898, University of Iowa, Iowa City; 1860 U.S. Census, Union, Davis Co., IA; California State Library, California History Section, Great Registers, 1866–98, Collection Number 4-2A, microfilm 978,585, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; and 1870 U.S. Census, San Jose, Santa Clara Co., California. Biographical information on the other men is hard to come by.

17. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 76, 288.

18. Manly, 76.

19. See, for example, Manly, 77.

20. Manly, 78. The idea that rivers ran underground in the American West was not uncommon; earlier in the 1840s John C. Frémont reported the widespread belief among white trappers that the waters of the Great Salt Lake emptied via a “terrible whirlpool” and “found their way to the ocean by some subterranean communication.” Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: Blair and Rives, 1845), 132.

21. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 79.

22. Manly, 79–80.

23. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 80; Dellenbaugh, Canyon Voyage, 112.

24. Manly, 80–81.

25. Manly, 81; Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, August 1887, 110.

26. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 279–280.

27. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, October 1887, 126. See also Anne Zwinger, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist’s Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the West (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 155.

28. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” 126.

29. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 86. Powell experienced a similar capsizing and near-drowning at this point in the river. See Michael Patrick Ghiglieri, First through Grand Canyon: The Secret Journals and Letters of the 1869 Crew Who Explored the Green and Colorado Rivers (Flagstaff, AZ: Puma Press, 2003), 113–14.

30. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 89.

31. Roy Webb, “Green River,” Utah History Encyclopedia, accessed August 24, 2018, https://historytogo.utah .gov/utah_chapters/the_land/greenriver.html; James M. Aton, The River Knows Everything: Desolation Canyon and the Green (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), iv.

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Beyond that, Manly’s account captures something about the American spirit in the mid-nineteenth century. Though limited to his point of view—which is unquestionably different from how Wákara would have told the story, or how other any Indigenous person would have told of the invasion of white settlers in that period— Manly provides us with a glimpse of the sense of confidence and thirst for prospering in an “unpeopled” land that drove him and countless others to make their way west by any means necessary. That drive to conquer the wilderness, multiplied thousands of times, shaped the contours of history in ways that still echo today.

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32. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 496; Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, December 1887, 192.

33. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 98. See also Paul T. Nelson, Wrecks of Human Ambition: A History of Utah’s Canyon Country to 1936 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014), iii–v. Manly’s group was traveling at a right angle to the trail because at Wákara’s suggestion they had followed a shortcut traveling northwest, while the Old Spanish Trail curved to the southwest.

34. The Dominguez-Escalante journal entries in late September 1776, described their journey through what is now Wasatch County, Utah. September 20: “We went southwest . . . then swung west . . . and at a quarter league’s travel south-southwest we turned west again . . . crossed the river, and to the southwest we went.” September 21: “We set out . . . toward the southwest . . . a quarter league we swung west. . . . [A]fter going one league south-southwest . . . we took the southern slope of a forested narrow valley . . . after going west for half a league . . . this ridge we went southwest for a quarter league . . . after having traveled a league west.”

September 22: “We set out to the southwest . . . traveled six long leagues. . . . [T]hey must have amounted to three leagues toward the west-southwest.” September 23: “Heading southwest . . . we turned west.” Ted J. Warner, ed., The Dominguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776, transl. Fray Angelico Chavez (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 60–63.

35. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 98, 99.

36. Manly, 98.

37. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, October 1887, 126.

38. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, November 1887, 142.

39. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 91.

40. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 83.

41. See Bryan Howard Justesen, “Brigham Young and Chief Walkara: A Study of Colliding Concepts of Authority” (Master’s thesis, University of Utah, 2003), 19.

42. See, for example, Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 35, 53; Allan Nevins, Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 385–86; Conway B. Sonne, World of Wákara (San Antonio, TX: Naylor, 1962), 46; and LeRoy R. Ann Woodbury Hafen, Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fé to Los Angeles; with Extracts from Contemporary Records and Including Diaries of Antonio Armijo and Orville Pratt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954), 369.

43. On American perceptions of Mormon-Native alliances, see Brent M. Rogers, “A ‘Distinction between Mormons and Americans,’” Utah Historical Quarterly 82 (Fall 2014): 250–71. For example, Rogers quotes Indian Garland Hurt saying he “became impressed with the fact that the Indians had made a distinction between Mormons and Americans, which was calculated to operate to the prejudice of the interests and policy of government towards them” (p. 259).

44. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 91.

45. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, November 1887, 142.

46. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 83.

47. Manly, 94.

48. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, August 1887, 142. See also Ghiglieri, First through Grand Canyon, 165, 171.

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49. William B. Lorton, Diary, September 30, 1849, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

50. See Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 27, 53.

51. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 94–96.

52. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, November 1887, 142.

53. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 98–99.

54. Manly, 95.

55. Manly, 98. McCourt and Allinson point out that this must have been the trail Wákara had recently traveled on to reach the Green after having spent time in Manti.

McCourt and Allinson, Elk Mountain Mission, 2.

56. Manly, “From Vermont to California,” Santa Clara (CA) Valley, November 1887, 142. According to the historians Gregory Crampton and Steven Madsen, “From Little Holes, the trail advances westward, threading its way through Furniture Draw, and then crosses Buckhorn Flat to reach the Black Hills and its northernmost point—approximately 39 12’ north latitude. From the Black Hills, the trail drops down [heading south] to Huntington Creek in Castle Valley.” Gregory C. Crampton and Steven K. Madsen, In Search of the Spanish Trail (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 1994), 59.

57. A. D. Ferron, map of Township 19 South, Range 7 East, Salt Lake Meridian, Utah Territory, 1873. Manly’s account reports that they arrived at the canyon on their second day after leaving the Green River, but the distance is more than fifty miles, so it appears his memory was imprecise and he forgot a day of travel.

58. See Parley P. Pratt, statement, qtd. in William B. Smart and Donna T. Smart, Over The Rim: The Parley P. Pratt Exploring Expedition to Southern Utah, 1849–50 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999), 41.

59. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 100.

60. Lorton, Diary, September 30, 1849. By contrast, a traveler journeying west from the Uinta Basin to Spanish Fork Canyon would stay at lower elevations, the highest being near present-day Strawberry Reservoir at about 8,500 feet.

61. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 100.

62. Manly, 100–101.

63. Manly, 101.

64. Lorton, Diary, September 30, 1849.

65. LeRoy R Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Journals of Fortyniners: Salt Lake to Los Angeles (Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Co.), 24–28.

66. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 105.

67. Tom Sutak, Into the Jaws of Hell (Danville, CA: Pine Park Publishing, 2012); Leroy and Jean Johnson, Escape from Death Valley; Hafen and Hafen, Journals of Forty-niners.

68. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 280.

69. Manly, 281.

70. Tom Sutak, working paper, in the authors’ possession.

71. Manly, Death Valley in ’49, 283–84.

72. McMahon did not mention crossing the White River, directly north of the East Tavaputs Plateau. He does emphasize that they had been without water for four days by the time they again reached the Green River.

Manly, 285.

73. Manly, 285–88.

74. Manly, 288.

75. Manly, 289–318.

76. Manly, 498.

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From Edinburgh to Salt Lake City: Archibald Geikie’s Travels in the American West in 1879

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In 1875 the British science magazine Nature published a two-part article entitled “American Geological Surveys.”1 Its author, Archibald Geikie, was the director of the Geological Survey of Scotland and a professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh. Geikie briefly reported on the pioneering surveys of Clarence King, John Powell, and Ferdinand Hayden in the Rockies of the “Western Territories,” and remarked that the reports of these surveyors were “full of fresh illustrations of the principles of geology, such as the dependence of scenery upon rocky structure, the order of succession of formations, the plication of mountain chains, the phenomena of volcanic actions, the functions of rivers and glaciers as geological agents.”2

Sir Archibald Geikie’s painting of Smith’s Fork on the northern slope of the Uinta Mountains. The lake and mounds of glacial deposits (moraine) are seen in the painting. Smith’s Fork is today a part of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest.

Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.

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As a modern science, geology was born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the UK and Continental Europe—a history well documented. Less examined has been the professional and intellectual relationships between European and American geologists during the nineteenth century. Not all European geologists were then interested in the mapping done in the New World, but some appreciated the significance of such work and the fertile landscape of North America for geologic investigations. During the 1840s, Sir Charles Lyell, arguably the most eminent British geologist of the nineteenth century, made two trips to the United States and wrote Travels in North America (1845) and A Second Visit to the United States (1849). Geikie, who was very much influenced by Lyell, illustrates a prominent bridge between the UK–US geologic communities of his time. Moreover, both Lyell’s and Geikie’s travels to the United States can be viewed as part of what has been called “the gentlemen’s geology,” or science of the elite and romanticist characteristic in the UK and much of Europe in the nineteenth century.4 Beginning in the 1830s and continuing well into the century, the United States government coordinated and funded extensive expeditions and mapping surveys of the region—surveys

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that not only generated scientific knowledge of the region but were ultimately instrumental in the unification of the United States as a vast continent nation and its rise as a world power.5 Among the pioneering surveyors of the American West working in the last half of the nineteenth century were Clarence Rivers King (1842–1901), John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (1829–1887), Clarence Edward Dutton (1841–1912), and Grove Karl Gilbert (1843–1918). From 1867 to 1872, King, under the direction of the War Department, mapped a vast area along the fortieth parallel north from northeastern California through Nevada and Utah to eastern Wyoming.

Powell, an army officer who had lost most of his right arm in the Civil War, is best known for his explorations on the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869, but he had an influential career, including as director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Hayden, a physician-turned-geologist, conducted several expeditions in the Rockies between 1856 and 1871 under the direction of the Department of the Interior. He was especially known for the mapping of the Yellowstone region and Colorado. Dutton published his surveys of the High Plateaus of Utah in 1880 and the Grand Canyon in 1882. Gilbert reported on the geology of the Henry Mountains of southeastern Utah in 1877 and on Lake Bonneville in 1890. Geikie met or corresponded with all of these great American geologists and had read their reports with a keen interest.6

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Why would a Scottish geologist across the Atlantic show so much interest in the geologic mapping of the American West? This question is actually a portal of entry into an important chapter in the natural history of the American West. Indeed, Geikie’s 1875 article was the beginning of his life-long interest in the Rockies, which culminated in his travel to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana in 1879—a fascinating but little-known story. A major motivation for preparing this article is that some of the best books on the geographic and geologic exploration history of the American West— among them works by Wallace Stegner, Richard Bartlett, and William Goetzmann—make no mention of Geikie’s 1879 field trip and related writings.3 Geikie’s travels, given his stature as a preeminent geologist, illustrates not only trans-Atlantic cooperation in the development of geology during the nineteenth century but also the paramount position of the American West in the history of the field.

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Archibald Geikie was born into a middle-class family in 1835 Edinburgh, then a thriving city of science and commerce. After finishing the Edinburgh High School, Geikie apprenticed in a law office as a preparation for a banking career, but instead of taking to the law or finance, he read every available geology book and befriended scientists in Edinburgh. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen Geikie, a selftaught geologist, geologically mapped islands off the coast of Scotland, and his reports drew attention and admiration from professional geologists. He entered the University of Edinburgh in 1854 but had to soon leave to support his family. At age 20, Geikie began a career at the Geological Survey of the Great Britain, and in 1858 he published his first book, The Story of a Boulder, which proved to be popular. His work so impressed Sir Roderick Murchison,

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Sir Archibald Geikie (1835–1924) was born and educated in Edinburgh. He rose to be one of the greatest British geologists of his time serving as the director of the Geological Survey of Scotland (1867– 1881), professor of geology at Edinburgh University (1871–1881), and director of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom in London (1882–1901). He was also a prolific author and his Textbook of Geology (first published in 1882; fourth edition, 1905) were widely used in the UK and the USA. Cassell’s Universal Portrait Gallery, 1895, London, p. 449.

the Geological Survey’s director-general, that he nominated Geikie as the director of the new Geological Survey of Scotland in 1867 and professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh in 1871.7 By 1879, upon first travelling to the United States, Geikie had developed a wellknown and respected professional reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Henry Drummond (1851–1897), Scottish biologist, lecturer, writer, and Evangelist preacher, who was educated at the University of Edinburgh and the Free Church of Scotland. He led an unmarried life devoted to natural science, Christianity, and the reconciliation of the two. Drummond, a former student of Geikie at Edinburgh, accompanied him on the 1879 trip to the American West. Frontispiece of The Life of Henry Drummond by George Adam Smith, 1898.

Geikie had two specific geologic objectives in visiting the American West: first, to observe the erosional power of rivers in shaping landscape, and second, to examine the widespread volcanic activity in the Yellowstone region. Both of these were related to the geologic problems that had occupied his mind for years and were hotly debated by European geologists.

centuries centered on the processes that shaped the irregular surface of the Earth. Various ideas were proposed. Some believed that the present mountains and valleys were primitive features dating back to the time of creation. Some invoked the Biblical story of the Flood. Some advocated the role of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Others believed that the Earth began initially as a hot ball of rock, but as it gradually cooled the surface shrank and wrinkled. The collapse of blocks of rock created an irregular topography. Still others proposed the idea that marine action had eroded and sculptured the Earth’s topography when land had formerly been inundated. All of these ideas trivialized the role of rivers, glaciers, and winds as important earth-shaping agents.8

One of the major scientific debates among natural scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth

One group of geologists, including Geikie, emphasized that flowing water, moving glaciers,

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The second geologic question in Geikie’s mind was related to the origin of widespread volcanic rocks in the British Isles and Iceland where no cone-shape volcanic mountains and craters are present or eroded. How did these volcanic rocks originate?

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Geikie and Drummond began sailing to the New World on July 31, 1879. Upon arrival in New York, they were received by Hayden, who arranged recommendations from the secretary of war and the quartermaster general for the resident military officers in the “Far West” to show hospitality and assistance to the Scottish geologists. Geikie had extended similar professional kindness earlier that year when he wrote a letter of recommendation urging the selection of Hayden as director of the newly established U.S. Geological Survey—a position Hayden lost to his rival, Clarence King.12

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Except in their mountain tributaries, [European rivers] flow over comparatively low land. Their gentle declivity prevents them from attaining any great erosive power, and as one result of this characteristic, they have cut comparatively few deep narrow winding gorges. The geological structure of this continent is moreover so complicated, that hard and soft rocks are thrown together in rapid alteration, and little scope is afforded for the excavation of continuous ravines.

The climate, too, being comparatively moist, much general disintegration of the surface takes place, and the detritus washed off by rain loads the rivers nearly to the maximum of their transporting power. . . . But perhaps the most important factor has been the glaciation of the Ice-Age. A large part of the area was under ice at that period. The minor pre-glacial contours were then in great measure obliterated, either by being ground down by the movement of the icesheets, or by being buried under the mass of clay, earth, and stones spread out over the lower ground and valley on the retreat of the ice. . . . The European rivers therefore do not offer illustrations of the river action in its most active phase.9

These geologic puzzles spurred Geikie and his companion, Henry Drummond, to the American West on a trip that was not apparently a formal or funded project. Drummond was a former student of Geikie in the Geology Class of 1871 at the University of Edinburgh; in 1877 he became a lecturer in natural science at the New College of the Free Church of Scotland in Glasgow where he was also trained as an evangelist minister. Geikie and Drummond’s 1879 trip to the United States is documented in two articles by Geikie published in the 1881 issues of Macmillan’s Magazine, which were reprinted in his 1882 book Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad.10 Geikie also briefly wrote about this trip in his autobiography, A Long Life’s Work, published shortly before his death in 1924.11

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and blowing winds in the course of geologic time are powerful enough to erode and shape the Earth’s landforms. This idea, then called “erosionalism,” is consistent with our understanding of how Earth’s topography is shaped by variable erosion. However, to prove “erosionalism” geologists like Geikie had to travel and document the processes of erosion in action. This could be better done in the American West than in the British Isles. In an article entitled “The Cañons of the Far West,” Geikie explained why:

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On August 1, a day after their arrival, Geikie and Drummond were traveling west in a Pullman railroad car, passing the blue waters of the Hudson River toward Chicago. “A project which had been little more than a dream for many years,” Geikie wrote, “was now at least actually realized.”13 As the train was approaching Chicago, they heard a shooting that broke the window glasses of an unoccupied train car. “This was our first experience of ‘Western Life,’” Geikie later wrote. “We looked next morning in the papers for an account of the ‘outrage’ as it would have been termed by our penny-a-liners at home. It was not mentioned at all. We found, however, records of so many successful shootings.” At Chicago they boarded the Union Pacific. After crossing the Mississippi (where a stop in Rockport, Illinois gave them an opportunity to “dip our hands in the great Father of Waters”) and Missouri Rivers,

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A map of the US Rocky Mountain states showing the travel routes of Sir Archibald Geikie in 1879 with major stops.

The inset map is for the Yellowstone National Park. Map drawn by the author.

the two men eventually had a view of “the first summits of the Rocky Mountains [rising] like blue islets out of the sea.” They had reached the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado with views of the snow-capped summits of Pikes Peak (4,302 m), Longs Peak (4,346 m), and “a host of other broad-based cones towering far up in to the clean air.”14 The core of high mountains, if exposed, is made of granite and gneiss, metamorphic rocks deeply rooted in the Earth’s crust. Geikie describes this geologic structure in terms of how it is related to mineral deposits and booming mining towns: “The rise of the granitic axis has brought up with it that incredible mineral wealth which, in a few years, has converted the loneliest mountain solitudes into busy hives of industry.”15 The men made stops in Denver and the gold mining towns of Golden and Boulder in Colorado. Geikie did some landscape paintings of these places. On August 18, according to Drummond, a man came to their hotel at Boulder and asked the hotel manager if there were

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any ministers in the town, as a miner had died some ten miles away. Drummond volunteered to perform the burial service of the dead miner who happened to be an Englishman. “Before I came home they gave me tea, and loaded me with specimens of gold,” Drummond wrote.16 Moving northward, Geikie and Drummond left Colorado for Wyoming. Traveling along a stretch of the north-south running Rockies convinced Geikie that the range was not continuous but rather broken up with the occasional lowlands. As an example, he mentioned Laramie Plains, to the west of which a dry-desert tract of land “for some 150 miles or more” with localities named “Red Desert, Bitter Creek and Salt Wells, and others sufficiently denot[ing] the sterile character of this region.”17All of these places are located in southern Wyoming, along today’s Interstate 80.

Traveling on the Union Pacific from Cheyenne, they eventually reached Fort Bridger in southwest Wyoming where Drummond sent

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From their base at Fort Bridger, Geikie and Drummond made an excursion into the Uinta Mountains which are “one of the most interesting ranges in North America; for, instead of following the usual north and south direction, it turns nearly east and west, and, in place of a central crystalline wedge driven through the younger formations, it consists of a vast flat arch of nearly horizontal strata that plunge steeply down into the plains on either side. . . . The broad central mass of the range is constructed

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Their next stop was Utah’s Salt Lake Valley, where “the Mormons have given a look of long-settled comfort” and “have converted the strip of land between the base of the heights [Wasatch] and the edge of the water [Great Salt Lake] into fertile fields and well-kept gardens.”23 They took the Union Pacific train at Ogden Junction to reach Salt Lake City, “where a few days were agreeably spent.”24 At the hotel, Geikie met Captain Clarence Dutton and Major John Powell. They took Geikie and Drummond to visit Fort Douglas, a military post east of Salt Lake City on the Wasatch foothills. In Salt Lake City, Geikie also met a Mormon elder (whose name he does not mention): “It turned out that he had once been Secretary at Edinburgh to the Forth and Clyde Canal Company, before the days of the railways, and had been induced to join the Mormons early in the career of Joseph Smith.”25

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The northern slopes of the Uinta Mountains are characterized by a series of “forks”—glaciated rivers valleys that originate at the mountain summit and descend into the valleys facing Wyoming. Geikie wrote that as they were riding along one of these streams they observed a deserted site with stakes “as if for low huts and wigwams” apparently “constructed by the Indians for bathing purposes.”22 At one point the party climbed to an elevation of 11,000–12,000 feet. On the way back to camp they lost the trail through the forest. As night was already coming they found an open space where they made a camp fire and went out to look for fresh water. On their return, they were stunned to see that the fire had spread to the surrounding pine trees. Luckily, there was no wind, and by the morning the flames had died down. They returned to Fort Bridger that day.

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Judge Carter took his guests to see the “Bad Lands” of southern Wyoming. Badlands is a translation of the Canadian French term les mauvaises terres and refers to a type of arid, hot terrain shaped by marine sedimentation and the massive erosion by water and wind.

Some of the remarkable badlands are in North America. Geikie, coming from the UK, was so impressed by this landscape that he gave a rather detailed definition of these “tracts of irreclaimable barrenness, blasted and left for ever lifeless and hideous.” He described these “unequally eroded” formations of sandstone, clay, marl, or limestone as “strata extend[ing] nearly horizontally for hundreds of square miles. . . .

Here and there isolated flat-topped eminences or buttes, as they are styled in the West, rise from the plain.” He reports the temperature at day time to be as high as 90° F in the shade while at night down to 19° F.20

of a flat arch of dull-red sandstone.”21 In this excursion to the northern slopes of the Uinta Mountains, they were accompanied by a guide named Dan, an old trapper who had long hunted in the mountains.

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a letter dated August 21 to his mother: “At last we are in the heart of the mountains, and very comfortably quartered, with a famous man in these parts, Judge Carter, to whom Geikie had introduction. We make this house our home for a couple of nights, and go cruising among the mountains during the day. Then we go off for a few days’ camping, and return here for a night next week on our way further west, and north to the Yellowstone.”18 Judge Carter was William Alexander Carter (1818–1891) who in 1857 moved from his birthplace of Virginia to Fort Bridger, then an important station on the emigrant road to Salt Lake City and the Pacific Coast. At the time of Geikie’s travels the fort was no longer a military post and was “falling into disrepair.” Geikie referred to Carter as “patriarch of the district”—“postmaster, merchant, farmer, cattle-owner, judge, and general benefactor of all who claim his hospitality.”19

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In their visit of the Great Salt Lake, Geikie noted that the lake shore was “a level plain of salt-crusted mud,” adding that “the Mormons and the Gentiles of Salt Lake City make good use of their lake for bathing purpose. At convenient points they have thrown out wooden piers

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Geikie’s painting of camping in the Uinta Mountains. Exact location is unknown. Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.

provided with dressing-rooms and hot-water apparatus.”26 Geikie and Drummond also joined the swimming party. They felt the heaviness of the salty water, making it possible to float in a sitting posture. They enjoyed their floatation experiments. Geikie pondered: “It was strange to reflect that the varied beauty of the valleys in the neighbouring mountains, with their meadows, clumps of cottonwood trees, and rushing streams, should lead into the lifeless stagnant sea.”27 Geikie refers to a detailed study of the Great Salt Lake by G. K. Gilbert,28 and remarks that the former lake—called Lake Bonneville by Gilbert—was much larger than the present Great Salt Lake; it was filled with fresh water, measuring about 300 miles north-south and 180 miles east-west at its greatest height of 940 feet above the present level. The lake had an outlet into the Snake River in Idaho, draining into the Pacific Ocean. The lake became salty by excessive evaporation of its waters over time. Geikie adds that water level in the Great Salt Lake

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continued to fluctuate: from 1866 to 1872 it rose eleven feet but had declined by 1879.29 Geikie and Drummond made a field trip to the Wasatch Mountains whose summits, as Geikie observes, were covered with snow in the month of August, consistent with 1869–1871 paintings of the Wasatch Mountains made by Gilbert Munger, the artist at the party of Clarence King’s Fortieth Parallel survey.30 “This range,” Geikie writes, “serves at once as the western boundary of the plateau country and as the eastern rim of the Great Basin, into which it plunges as a colossal rampart from an average height of some 4000 feet above the plain.”31 Geikie made an interesting inference from the moraine sediments in the Wasatch canyons brought down and deposited by glaciers “I further noticed at the Little Cottonwood Cañon that the moraines descend to the edge of the highest terrace, and that the glacial rubbish forms part of the alluvial deposits there. Hence, we may infer that at the time of the greatest

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Geikie investigated this interpretation on his field trip to the Little Cottonwood Canyon. He noticed that no pebbles of the granite were to be found in the Paleozoic sediments, which would be the case had the granite been older and the source of sediment deposits. Geikie also observed that sediments close to the granite slabs had become metamorphosed by the heating effect of the granite; sandstone became quartzite, and limestone became white marble. Moreover,

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Clarence King, who served as the first director of the US Geological Survey, ignored Geikie’s paper and interpretation. In 1900, John M. Boutwell, a USGS geologist based in Utah, at the request of S. F. Emmons, examined the granite body in Little Cottonwood Canyon and confirmed that it had, indeed, intruded the Carboniferous sediments as Geikie had suggested.

Boutwell reported to Emmons that Geikie’s interpretation appeared to be correct. Wanting to see the evidence for himself, Emmons conducted his own investigation and, in 1903 (two years after King’s death), published an article in the American Journal of Science (the same journal Geikie had published) entitled “The Little Cottonwood Granite Body of the Wasatch Mountains,” accepting King’s and his own mistake. As Emmons wrote, “A reply to Professor Geikie’s criticism, on part of Mr. King and myself, has awaited the opportunity of making a further study of the region,” which were carried out in the “seasons” prior to publication.36 Boutwell’s

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Another important discovery made by Geikie during their field trip to the Wasatch Mountains is related to the age of huge granitic bodies that make up some of the high summits in the Little Cottonwood and Big Cottonwood Canyons.

How did this massive granite form? Clarence King (together with his assistant Samuel F. Emmons and the German geologist Ferdinand Zirkel) had opined in his 1878 geologic report that the granitic core of the Rockies belonged to the oldest geologic time—the Archean age (today known to be 4 to 2.4 billion years ago).

The Rockies, in his interpretation, were once a very old large island, and during Paleozoic times (540–250 million years ago) sandstone and limestone were deposited on the sea surrounding the island.33 In other words, the granite was older the adjacent Paleozoic sediments.

Geikie also observed intrusion (dikes) of granite within the sedimentary rocks. Based on these lines of evidence, Geikie concluded that the white granite in the Wasatch Mountains was younger than the entire Paleozoic sediments.

In other words, the igneous rock had intruded the Paleozoic sediments. Geikie published these observations in the American Journal of Science.34 In his 1882 Textbook of Geology, Geikie also repeated his interpretation, referring to the granite body in Little Cottonwood Canyon as being of “post-Carboniferous age.”35

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extension of the lake the Wahsatch Mountains were a range of snow alps, from which glaciers descended to the edge of the water.”32 This is indeed one of the earliest references to the glacial origin of Little Cottonwood Canyon.

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Geikie’s painting of the mouth of American Fork Canyon, Wasatch Range. The ridge on the right is the Great Blue Limestone of Mississippian age. The high ridge on the left is the Tintic Quartzite of Cambrian age overlying the Precambrian Mutual Quartzite (front side). Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.

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own report was published in 1912.37 Radiometric dating of the Wasatch granite has since determined it to be of Oligocene age (about 35 million years old), much younger than the Paleozoic sediments. The intrusion of the granite marks the beginning of the Basin-and-Range tectonics in the Great Basin over the past 35 million years.38

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After “a few days agreeably spent” in the Salt Lake Valley, Geikie and Drummond embarked on the next phase of their travels: north to the Yellowstone region in the northwestern corner of Wyoming bordering Idaho and Montana.

Geikie described the method of transport from the Ogden station to Fort Ellis, a U.S. Army post in Montana under the command of Quartermaster Lieutenant Alison who would be their host: The first part of the journey passed pleasantly enough. . . . We started in the evening, and sitting at the end of the last car enjoyed the glories of a sunset over the Great Salt Lake. Next day about noon brought us to the end of the railway in the midst of a desert of black basalt and loose sand, with a tornado blowing the hot desert dust in the blinding clouds in the air. . . .

With this cessation of the railway all comfort in travelling utterly disappeared. A stage, loaded inside and outside with packages, but supposed to be capable of carrying eight passengers besides, was now to be our mode of conveyance over the bare, burning, treeless, and roadless desert. The recollection of those two days and nights stands out as a kind of nightmare.39 They stopped in the towns of Virginia and Bozeman in Montana (located along today’s Interstate 90) before reaching their destination. Fort Ellis, just to the east of Bozeman and north of Wyoming, was established in 1867 to provide troops in military campaigns against the Indians. It was closed in 1886, seven years after Geikie’s visit. Geikie remarked: “Of Fort Ellis and the officers’ mess there, we shall ever keep the pleasantest memories. No Indians had now to be kept in order. There was indeed nothing to do at the Fort save the daily routine of military duty.” Lieutenant Alison gave two guides

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to Geikie and Drummond for their travels in Yellowstone Park. The first, Jack, was a trapper and miner who has lived in the wilderness for years; the second, Andy, was a cook and a leader of the mules. Geikie was especially impressed by Andy’s field skills—his cooking, campfire stories and travel experiences: “Andy, in particular, would never be outdone. Nothing marvelous was told that he could not instantly cap with something more wonderful still that had happened in his own experiences.”40 In 1872, the US Congress and President Ulysses Grant designated Yellowstone as the country’s first national park (and probably the first national park in the world as well). Geikie longed to “see the wonders of the Yellowstone—that region of geysers, mud volcanoes, hot springs and sinter-beds, which the United States Congress, with wise forethought, has set apart from settlement and reserved for this instruction of the people.”41 Geikie found night camping at the Yellowstone Park to be delightful: “Wrapping myself in the buffalo-cloak, with which Quartermaster Alison had so kindly provided, I used to lie apart in the open for a while, gazing up at the deep sky, so clear, so sparkling, so utterly and almost incredibly different from the bleared cloudy expanse with which we must usually be content in Britain.”42 However, Geikie’s expedition was of a scientific nature, and in particular he wanted to see the widespread volcanic activity as well as glacial phenomena in Yellowstone. Fortunately, he gives a rather detailed description of his trip to Yellowstone not only in his 1881 articles in Macmillan’s Magazine cited above, but also in a paper in The American Naturalist.43 Most of Geikie’s landscape paintings during his US trip were also from Yellowstone. Moreover, Drummond’s diary of their field trip to Yellowstone is extant; it begins on September 2, the day the party left Fort Ellis and ends on September 12.44 Drummond’s writing, often in a telegraphic style, is witty and descriptive. For instance, this entry dated Monday, September 8, combines the day’s route and activities with terse scientific and geographic observations: Followed trail through magnificently timbered country with parks, glades, and streamlets, then across prairie country to head of Alum Creek

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Volcanic activity also shaped this ancient landscape. Geikie observed that volcanic eruptions were at least of two kinds: The light-colored, silica rich trachyte rocks erupted first, and the dark-colored basalts erupted much later as debris of trachyte were deposited in river beds long before the eruption of basalt: “The oldest lavas were trachytes and their allies, while the youngest were as invariably basalts, the interval between the eruptions of the two kinds having sometimes been long enough to permit the older rocks to be excavated into gorges before the emission of the more recent.”47 Unlike Etna or Vesuvius, which were “emitted from central volcanic cones,” Geikie observed, volcanic

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Along the Gardiner’s River (Gardner River), a tributary of the Yellowstone, Geikie noted the spectacular columns of geysers and hot springs. Desiring to take a hot bath, he found a location where “the water, after quitting its conduit, made a circuit round a basin of sinter, and in so doing cooled down sufficiently to let one sit in it.”49 From the Gardiner’s River, they “made a detour over a long ridge dotted with ice-borne blocks of granite and gneiss, and crossed the shoulder of Mount Washburne by a col 8867 feet above the sea, descending once more the Yellowstone River at the head of the Grand Cañon. The whole of this region consists of volcanic rocks, chiefly trachytes, rhyolites, obsidians, and tuff.” They came upon the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone—“a ravine from 1000 to 1500 feet deep”—where at the head they “stood on the brink of the great chasm silent with amazement” in view of Yellowstone Falls.50

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For Geikie, the Yellowstone River, as a prominent feature, provided a geographic framework of the park, “its head-waters close to the watershed of the continent, among the mountains which, branching out in different directions, include the ranges of the Wind River, Owl Creek, Shoshonee, the Tetons, and other groups that have hardly yet received names.” He traced its course “through a series of remarkable cañons” and eventually “into the Missouri.”46 Geikie described how the long and broad river valleys in Yellowstone were shaped by both forceful fluvial and massive glaciers—the latter leaving their records as moraines and erratic boulders.

It is well known that Yellowstone like the Wind River Range in Wyoming and Sierra Nevada in California is home to alpine valley glaciers.

But what was the extent of the glaciation in the American West during the Pleistocene Ice Age? From the evidence of eroded valley walls with rocks polished and striated by the former glaciers, Geikie estimated that the thickness of the ice must have been from 800 to 1600 feet above the present river plain.

eruptions in Yellowstone occurred through “numerous longitudinal fissures in the crust of the earth, many of which are now revealed as dykes of basalt running for miles through the other rocks.” These “fissure eruptions” along the “vast Snake River volcanic plain” answered the puzzle that had long perplexed Geikie “as to the origin of the Tertiary basalt-plateaux of Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. The problem with which they had puzzled me for many years was here solved. They were now recognized to be an older and more wasted example of the same type of fissure eruptions.48

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deposits, effluvium [from] steaming springs, sulphur mountain, Solfataras.

Trail through timber again. Over the Divide. Down steep forest-clad hill to the east fork of Madison River. Fire Hole River. Through long swamp timber again. Camp in glade by river-side.

Seven hours in saddle. Lunch, bathe, bear, theological discussion with Jack.

Geology, volcanic all day. Obsidian blocks everywhere; schistose obsidian.45

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Their next goal was “the Geyser Basin of the Firehole River—a ride of two days, chiefly through forest, but partly over bare volcanic hills.”51 Here Geikie mentions visiting two spectacular geysers, Old Faithful and Castle Geyser, in the Upper Geyser basin, as well as mud volcanoes in the Lower Geyser basin. Many of the mud geysers, Geikie observed, were no more than a foot high. Riding through the upper part of the Firehole River, “a densely-timbered gorge with picturesque volcanic peaks mounting up here and there on either side far above the pines,” they eventually reached “a watershed 7063 feet above the sea, and stood on the ‘Great Divide’ of the Continent.”52 Drummond, who recorded this ascent as taking place on

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September 12, recorded having taken a trail through “Tangee Pass” (probably Targhee Pass, elevation 7,072 feet). “The ascent is very gentle,” he wrote, “and it is almost inconceivable that this should represent the Divide between the Atlantic and Pacific waters.”53

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On the last day of their excursion in Yellowstone Park, they surprisingly encountered a group of Native Americans, who spoke a little English and were armed with rifles, but they were found to be very friendly and were riding to Montana for a council of Indians. Geikie and Drummond said goodbye to Jack and Andy at a railway station in Idaho (Geikie only noted that it was located “in the bare, desolate valley”) that had been opened a week or two before. The train would take them back to Ogden. “Our two companions [Jack and Andy] were now to turn back and take a shorter route to Fort Ellis, but would be at least ten days on march.”54 From Ogden Geikie and Drummond returned east by rail, which Geikie reported as being “tolerably rapid and continuous until we reached Niagara, where we took time to see the Falls.” After a few days in Canada, they went on to Boston where Geikie gave a series of lectures on “Geographical Evolution” at the city’s Lowell Institute, founded in 1839 by an endowment from an American businessman and philanthropist John Lowell, Jr. At the time of Geikie’s visit, the founder’s cousin, John Amory Lowell, was leading the institute. Lowell invited Geikie to “his charming residence at Brooklyn, and gathered there a group of the most notable men of Boston and Cambridge.” “At dinner,” Geikie continues, “he placed me between Longfellow and Oliver W. Holmes. There were present also Charles W. Eliot, the distinguished President of Harvard University, and William Rogers, one of the oldest and most honoured of the geologists of the United States. The poet was quiet at dinner. . . . Mr. Holmes, on the other hand, was full of talk.” Geikie later wrote that two years after his trip to the United States, he had sent two of his articles in Macmillan’s Magazine to Holmes. “I have read your adventures and your scientific experiences in Wyoming which you have kindly sent me,” Holmes replied. “I am all ready to become an ‘Erosionalist’ under your agreeable guidance.”55

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While in the east coast and before departing the United States, Geikie also met with James Dwight Dana (1813–1895), probably the most prominent American academic geologist during the nineteenth century.56 A week before the meeting Dana wrote Geikie expressing his “rejoice to know that you will give me the pleasure of an excursion with you on Saturday next,” October 11.57 Geikie and Drummond’s last stop was Philadelphia where they spent a few days with Hayden, the geologist friend who had received them upon their arrival in New York. In his autobiography, Geikie concludes his 1879 overseas travel as follows: “After a journey by sea and land of some 15,500 miles I was back in Edinburgh before the date for the opening of the session at the University. The three months of absence were time profitably spent.”58 On November 10, 1879, according to a report in Nature, “Prof. Geikie reopened the class of geology in the University of Edinburgh by giving an account of his recent exploration of the western territories of North America. There was a large attendance of students and others.”

Geikie opened his lecture remarking that “[h] ad geology begun in those western territories, instead of among the old broken, and contorted rocks of Europe and the east of America, its progress, at all events in some departments, would have been far more rapid than it had been.”59 gh The account of Geikie’s travels in the American West illustrates two important facts. First, the landscape and geology of the American West played an important role in the development of the discipline of geology in the nineteenth century. Second, Geikie, both as an eminent geologist and as a prolific writer, was a bridge between the American and British geological communities. Indeed, Geikie kept an active correspondence with prominent American geologists of his time, including Dana, Gilbert, and especially Hayden, who had arranged Geikie’s 1879 travels in the American West.

He wrote several reviews of the USGS and its geologic reports for Nature. He also wrote an obituary of Ferdinand Hayden when the latter passed away in 1887.60

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A granite body named Geikie Laccolith in the Henry Mountains of southern Utah in honor of Sir Archibald Geikie.

The mapping and naming of this granite intrusion into the surrounding sediments was by the eminent American geologists Grover Karl Gilbert reported in his 1880 report, a year after Geikie’s visit to Utah. Laccolith is a term for a lens-shaped igneous body intruding the overlying rocks and uplifting the area.

As mentioned at the outset of this article, Geikie’s travels to the American West are not usually documented in histories of exploration of the American West. This may be due to two reasons. First, in contrast to the great surveys of the American West organized and funded by the federal government, Geikie’s 1879 travels and field trips were unofficial and not documented in official survey reports. Second, he published the initial reports of his American travels in Macmillan’s Magazine, a British publication targeted to a British audience, not an American one. Macmillan in London was the main publisher of Geikie’s books. Macmillan had been founded in 1843 by the brothers Daniel and Alexander Macmillan from the Isle of Arran (where the young Archibald Geikie had conducted geological field work). The Macmillan and Geikie families enjoyed an intimate relationship. Alexander Macmillan welcomed Geikie to his circle of friends, and it was there

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that Archibald Geikie had met his wife, Anna Maria Alice Gabrielle Pingatel, in 1871.61 In 1881, two years after his return from the “American Far West,” Geikie moved from Edinburgh to London to serve as the director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom, a position he held until his retirement in 1901.

He continued his interest in the surveys and reports of the American West. In later years, both Geikie and Drummond returned separately to the United States. In 1893 Drummond visited Boston to deliver a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute where Geikie had lectured in 1879.

In 1897, the year Drummond died of bone cancer bone, Geikie visited Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore to give a series of lectures on “The Founders of Geology,” later published as a popular book, in which he referred to the “various surveys” and “admirable work” of Powell, Newberry, King, and Hayden. Of the USGS Geikie

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said that the “magnitude and excellence of the work already accomplished by this organisation place it in the fore-front of all national geological enterprises.”62

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Geikie was a man of the Victorian Age during which “gentlemen geologists” pioneered mapping and mineral exploration of Earth. Geikie’s engagement with American geology and geologists during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the federal investment in the “Great Surveys,” coincided with major political reconstruction and rapid industrialization in the United States following the Civil War. Geikie’s 1879 travel to the American West epitomized the characteristics of this historical period during which Utah’s landscape was an active scene of mining, mapping, and transformation. Nevertheless, these important field trips by Geikie in 1879 have largely been ignored in the historiography of the America West geology.63 Geikie’s presence is imprinted on the Utah landscape, however. Grove Karl Gilbert honored Geikie by naming a granite body in the Henry Mountains of southern Utah after him.64 Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I am grateful to Jonathan Craig who introduced me to this little-researched topic of Geikie’s visits to and writings on the American West. Julia Tanner and John Betterton of the Haslemere Educational Museum in Surrey were hugely cooperative with information about Geikie. Comments by two anonymous reviewers as well as edits by Jedediah Rogers greatly improved the paper. I alone, however, am responsible for the content.

Archibald Geikie, “American Geological Surveys,” Nature 12 (August 5, 1875): 265–67, and Nature 13 (November 4, 1875): 1–3.

Geikie, “American Geological Surveys,” vol. 12, 265.

Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954; New York: Penguin Books, 1992); Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966). Goetzmann shows that the various apparently unrelated surveys of the West during the second half of the nineteenth century were actually coordinated and funded by the US government with a strategic thinking behind it.

Roy Porter, “Gentlemen and geology: The emergence of a scientific career, 1660–1920,” Historical Journal, 21, no. 4 (December), 809–36. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Lyell donated books to help found the Chicago Public Library.

See Robert Kaplan, Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (New York: Random House, 2017).

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6. Rasoul Sorkhabi, “Sir Archibald Geikie: the North American connections,” in Aspects of the Life and Works of Archibald Geikie (London: Geological Society Special Publication 480, 2019), 113–38.

7. Rasoul Sorkhai, “Archibald Geikie (1835–1924): A Pioneer Scottish Geologist, Teacher, and Writer,” GSA Today 30 (June 2020): 34–36.

8. The British historian of science Gordon L. Davies, in The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology, 1578–1878 (New York: American Elsevier, 1969), has discussed the various ideas regarding the irregular Earth’s topography or what he calls the “denudation dilemma.”

9. Archibald Geikie, “The Cañons of the Far West,” Proceedings of Royal Institution of Great Britain (1882– 1884), 10, 268–71.

10. Archibald Geikie, “In Wyoming,” Macmillan’s Magazine 144, no. 264 (1881), 229–40; “The Geysirs of the Yellowstone,” Macmillan’s Magazine 144, no. 264 (1881), 421–35; Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad (London: Macmillan, 1882), ch. 9, “In Wyoming,” 205– 34, and ch. 10, “The geysers of Yellowstone,” 235–73. I will refer to these two chapters in subsequence citations.

11. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 177–88.

12. Geikie to Hayden, December 31, 1878, Papers of Sir Archibald Geikie, Coll-74/13/1, University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland. Geikie’s letter was in response to Hayden’s letters dated November 24, 1878, and December 13, 1878, Coll-74/12/1, Geikie Papers.

13. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 205.

14. Geikie, 212, 215.

15. Geikie, 216.

16. George A. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1898), 170 17. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 220.

18. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 167.

19. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 221. For those interested in research about Judge William Alexander Carter, it should be note that his collection of papers and correspondence (1858–1875) are housed at the Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah: http:// archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv02105.

20. Geikie, 223.

21. Geikie, 226, 228.

22. Geikie, 231. Although the Ute had been forced by the US government onto the Uintah Reservation beginning in the 1860s, at the time of Geikie’s visit some Utes continued to hunt and gather in the Uinta Mountains. For more information, refer to Fred Conetah’s A History of the Northern Ute People (Uintah-Quray Ute Tribe, 1982).

23. Geikie, 235, 236.

24. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 183.

25. Geikie, 184.

26. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 237. Geikie does not indicate whether his visit to the lake was at Black Rock or Garfield Beach, both located on the lake’s southeastern shore.

27. Geikie, 238.

28. Gilbert’s preliminary results on the survey of Great Salt Lake and its former extent named Lake Bonneville by Gilbert were first published in Exploration and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, vol. 3. Geology, part 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875),

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46. Geikie, “The geysers of Yellowstone” (1882), 248–49.

47. Geikie, 252. Trachyte is a type of volcanic rocks that has more silica than basalt; therefore, it is lighter in color and in weight than basalt.

48. Archibald Geikie, A Long Life’s Work: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1924), 182–83.

49. Geikie, 253.

50. Geikie, 257–58.

51. Geikie, 260.

52. Geikie, 268.

53. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 186.

54. Geikie, “The geysers of Yellowstone” (1882), 273.

55. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 184–86.

56. Dana and Geikie had much in common: Both were prominent “gentlemen” geologists and highly productive writers in their own countries. Also geology ran in their families: Dana’s son, Edward Salisbury Dana (1849–1935) and Geikie’s younger brother James Murdoch Geikie (1839–1915) were both well-known geologists.

57. D. C. Gilman, The Life of James Dwight Dana (New York: Harper), 334.

58. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 187.

59. “Prof. Geikie on the Geology of the Far West,” Nature, November 20, 1879, 67–69.

60. Archibald Geikie, “Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden,” Nature, February 2, 1888, 325.

61. A. J. Sanders, “A Long Life’s Relationship: Archibald Geikie, Alexander Macmillan and his Publishing House,” in Aspects of the Life and Works of Archibald Geikie (London: Geological Society Special Publication 480, 2019), 139–48. The same year that Geikie met his wife, Alexander Macmillan’s wife, Caroline, died of illness. The following year, MacMillan married Jeanne Barbe Emma, the older sister of Alice Gabrielle.

62. Archibald Geikie, Founders of Geology, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1905), 461.

63. For instance, neither of the following works refers to Geikie’s field trips to the American West: George P. Merrill, The First Two Hundred Years of American Geology (New York: Harper, 1969); Cecil J. Schneer, ed., Two Hundred Years of Geology in America (Hanover: University of New Hampshire, 1979).

64. Grove Karl Gilbert, Report on the Geology of the Henry Mountains (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, Government Printing Office), p. 15.

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88–104. His full report, Lake Bonneville, was published as the U.S. Geological Survey Monograph 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1890).

29. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 239–41.

30. Gilbert Davis Munger (1837–1903) was an American landscape painter and worked for geologists. During 1869–71, he was a member of King’s survey and painted the Wasatch Mountains. They were published as part of King’s report in 1878. For more information visit: https://gilbertmunger.org/ 31. Geikie, 236.

32. Geikie, 243.

33. Clarence King, Systematic Geology: Report of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, Professional Papers of the Engineer Department, U.S. Army. Volume 1. Descriptive Geology. Volume 2. Systematic Geology (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878).

34. Archibald Geikie, “On the Archaean Rocks of Wahsatch Mountains,” American Journal of Science (1880), 19, 363–67.

35. Archibald Geikie, Textbook of Geology (London: Macmillan, 1882), 646.

36. S. F. Emmons, “The Little Cottonwood Granite Body of the Wasatch Mountains,” American Journal of Science 16, no. 92 (1903): 139–47, qt. on 142. Emmons was at the time of publication president of the Geological Society of America.

37. John M. Boutwell, Geology and Ore Deposits of the Park City District, Utah (U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 77). Boutwell, who died in 1968 at age 94, donated his papers, letters, maps, field notebooks, and mineral collections to Brigham Young University where they are stored as the J. M. Boutwell Papers, MSS 1647, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library.

38. K. N. Constenius, “Late Paleogene extensional collapse of the Cordilleran foreland fold and thrust belt,” Geological Society of America Bulletin (1996), 108, 20–29.

39. Geikie, “The geysers of Yellowstone” (1882), 244.

40. Geikie, 255.

41. Geikie, 243.

42. Geikie, 255; Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 180.

43. Archibald Geikie, “Ancient Glaciers of Rocky Mountains,” American Naturalist (1881), 15, 1–17.

44. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 170–88.

45. Smith, 175–76.

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An Advertisement for Becker’s Becco, the company’s non-alcoholic near beer, from 1922. Brewers hoped near beer would keep their businesses going during Prohibition, but the product failed to live up to their expectations. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Becker Brewing and Malting Company Records Addendum, USU_CAINE COLL MSS 31.

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As the locomotive’s wheels ground to a halt, Albert E. Becker descended from a railcar in Ogden, Utah’s Union Station on July 7, 1891.1 Traveling from Winona, Minnesota, Albert arrived in Ogden to inspect the Becker family’s most recent business venture, a modern brewhouse on the banks of the Ogden River. The year before, William Schellhas, a business partner of the Beckers, had invested $50,000 to purchase land, construct a brewery, and install complex brewing equipment. Schellhas’s first batch of “Rocky Mountain Amber” received high praise from the citizens of Ogden.2 In 1892, Schellhas sold his shares of the Schellhas Brewing Company to Albert, his brother Gustav (Gus), and their father John Becker. As a result, Gus became president, with Albert taking the position of vice president of the newly incorporated Becker Brewing and Malting Company.3

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Beehive Brews: A Heady History of the Becker Brewing and Malting Company

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The Becker Brewing and Malting Company, with their “Becker’s Best” brand beer, became one of Utah’s most successful beer-producing operations, and one of the most significant breweries in the American West.

The Beckers grew their business in the thirty years before Prohibition, expanding into other western markets including Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, Wyoming, and California. The Becker brewery became one of only 255 American breweries to continue operations during Prohibition by selling “near beer,” soda, and ice.4 In comparison, there had been more than twelve hundred breweries in 1917.5 After Prohibition’s repeal, the Becker brewery thrived in the 1940s but experienced a slow decline in the beer trade after World War II. Eventually, stiff competition from large national companies forced the Beckers to close their doors in 1964.6 The dissolution of the Becker plant, after nearly seventy-five years of operation, marked the end of Utah’s—and one of the nation’s—most successful regional brewing companies.

Given current misconceptions about Utah, the success of the Becker Brewing and Malting Company may seem unusual. Today, Utah is known nationally for its strained relationship with alcohol. Two thirds of Utah’s population belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which urges its members to abstain from alcohol consumption.7

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Ranked by Time magazine in 2013 as the worst state in the nation for drinking, Utah’s dry population and strict liquor laws earned them an unfavorable reputation among those looking for a drink.8 Home to the infamous “Zion Curtain” until 2018 (a reference to partitions separating customers from where drinks are mixed), Utah also possesses some of the most stringent liquor laws in the country.9 Moreover, a 2015 survey found that Utah had the fewest bars per capita in the country, earning Utah the moniker of “most sober state,” and in 2017 the Smithsonian Magazine reported that “ordering a drink in Utah has long been a surreal experience.”10 Despite contemporary opinions, Utah possesses an incredibly rich brewing past. The Becker Brewing and Malting Company was one of several breweries to take root in the state.

Despite persistent misconceptions, Utah’s historic brewing industry consistently mirrored national manufacturing trends. This history illustrates the Beehive state’s incorporation into mainstream American market culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and challenges perceptions of Utah as a dry state. Indeed, the Becker company’s corporate archive demonstrates that Utah’s early twentieth-century brewers and beer drinkers shared a similar experience to their counterparts across the country, even with the state’s Mormon heritage.

When placed in the context of the American brewing industry, the notion of Mormon peculiarity surrounding alcohol in the state breaks down. As the historian Leonard J. Arrington claimed, “despite their assertions of ‘peculiarity’ much of what was done by the Mormons was truly American.”11 One of the nation’s leading brewing families, the Beckers of Ogden rubbed elbows with members of the Busch, Miller, and Coors dynasties, demonstrating just how connected the Utah industry was with the national scene.12 The study of beer in Utah, therefore, challenges simplistic historical stereotypes and shows that when it came to enjoying a pint of cold lager during the hot desert summer, Utahns of the past—Mormons and non-Mormons alike—operated in shades of gray.

While American brewing history has received periodic attention from historians studying food and business, it is surprisingly understudied, and the history of brewing in the American

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West even less so.13 While the academic literature on brewing may be limited, the field has experienced a renaissance over the past twenty years.14 Adding to a narrative that often centers on the Midwest and East Coast regions, this article incorporates Utah’s unique brewing environment into the growing conversation of America’s brewing history.15 Using the Becker Brewing and Malting Company as a case study, this article explores the impacts of national brewing trends and perceptions of the beer industry within Utah and demonstrates the predominant role these factors played in both the successes and failures of Utah’s early twentieth-century breweries.

The founder of Becker Brewing, John S. Becker, immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1847.16 As one of nearly one million Germans to arrive in the United States between 1850 and 1859, John Becker joined the company of other German immigrants who founded brewing companies.17 Adolphus Busch, the man behind Anheuser-Busch, and George Ehret, president of New York City’s massive Hell Gate Brewery, both migrated to the United States in 1857.18 The Best family, the founders of Pabst Brewery, settled in Milwaukee thirteen years earlier in 1844.19 Wherever German families settled in the United States, breweries seemed to open, even in Utah.20 The diaspora of Germans to the United States led to a sharp rise in both beer production and consumption throughout the country. Before the influx of German immigrants, Americans generally wetted their whistles with rum, whiskey, hard cider, and the occasional ale.21 According to the historian W. J. Rorabaugh, whiskey in the 1820s was cheaper than milk, wine, coffee, and tea, and on average an adult male consumed a half pint of the stuff daily.22 German immigrants, however, brought lager-style beer with them, which altered traditional drinking habits in the country. Lager utilizes a bottom-fermenting yeast and requires weeks of aging in cold storage. The resulting brew is light, bubbly, and contains relatively little alcohol when compared to spirits. Not only did this new beverage delight the tastebuds of American consumers, but its low alcohol content also fell in line with nineteenth-century morals regarding drink and intoxication, especially as industries tried to maximize worker productivity.23 Many

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The Mormon studies scholar Paul Y. Hoskisson outlines several stages of the Word of Wisdom’s

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Early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—today known nationally for their abstention from alcohol—shared pre-Prohibition views of beer and spirits with many other Americans. The “Word of Wisdom,” lifestyle and dietary guidelines recorded by church founder Joseph Smith in 1833, advised against imbibing “wine or strong drink”: “That in as much as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good.”26 Although LDS leaders today interpret this verse to mean total abstention from all alcoholic beverages, this interpretation came about only after a century of negotiating the meaning of Smith’s revelation.27

development in the initial years of the church.

Hoskisson argues that the statute was initially observed as a commandment in 1833. Adherence became a requirement to maintain a good standing in the church.28 While Mormons were commanded to abstain from tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol, exceptions were made for the medicinal application of these substances. This practice fell in line with the general acceptance of the medicinal quality of spirits in the United States.29 A decade later, church leadership even relaxed liquor laws to appease non-member residents of their communities. Smith endorsed the desire of Theodore Turley, a faithful member, to construct a brewery in Nauvoo in 1843.

As a result, by the time of Smith’s death in 1844, Hoskisson notes, “the standard set in Kirtland had been abandoned.”30 Uneven adherence to the Word of Wisdom continued as the Saints settled the Utah Territory, where church leaders tolerated a degree of personal interpretation. The varied observance of the LDS health code continued among some church members until Prohibition, when church leaders formalized obedience to the Word of Wisdom as one

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Americans viewed lager as a beverage of moderation and a healthy alternative to hard liquors such as whiskey and rum.24 As a result of lager’s explosive popularity, beer consumption in the United States increased by nearly 1000 percent between 1840 and 1900.25

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Photograph of the original Becker Brewing and Malting Company brewery on the banks of the Ogden River, c.

1893. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Gustav Lorenz Becker Photograph Collection, USU_P0361.

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of several requirements to enter LDS temples.31 The as-yet-unformalized interpretation of the Latter-day Saint health code, combined with the growth and diversification of Utah’s population facilitated by the arrival of railroads in the Utah Territory in the latter half of the nineteenth century, fostered conditions for the success of the Beckers and other brewers in nineteenth-century Utah.32

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Prior to the Becker family’s arrival in Utah in 1890, John S. Becker had spent much of his life working as a brewmaster for William Schellhas in the latter’s Winona, Minnesota, brewery.33 In the late nineteenth century, the East Coast and Midwest were saturated with local brewing firms. In 1890 alone, 2,156 breweries supplied Americans with their favorite brews (in comparison, the United States would not again surpass this number of breweries until 2011).34 In response to these crowded conditions, Schellhas and the Becker family settled on Ogden as a logical location for a new brewing company.

As a growing city of twelve thousand residents with heavy railroad traffic, “Junction City” (as it was then known) acted as a distribution center for much of the American West. A promotional brochure from the city published in 1888 aiming to attract new business ventures extolled Ogden’s advantages as a growing manufacturing center situated in a salubrious mountain climate. The booster promised that with the continual development of rail traffic, “Ogden is just entering upon an era of unprecedented prosperity.”35 The growing number of diverse citizens, travelers, and railroad workers that passed through Ogden would provide the Beckers with their local consumer base.36 Furthermore, Utah’s largest city, Salt Lake, already boasted several established brewing firms, such as the Salt Lake Brewing Company and the Fisher Brewing Company.37 The Becker Brewing and Malting Company rose from humble beginnings but expanded rapidly, quickly becoming the city’s primary brewing enterprise. William Schellhas constructed the original brewhouse among a glade of trees on the banks of the Ogden River. The facility contained modern brewing equipment but was constructed using hewn rock and timbers.38 In 1897, the brewery produced ten thousand thirty-one-gallon barrels of beer

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annually.39 During their first decade, the Beckers experienced a lively beer trade and updated their facilities to capitalize on the growing demand for their products. In 1905, the company built a new four-story brewery that contained an ice-producing plant, malt house, bottling department, with direct access to a rail line that aided in importing raw materials and exporting beer throughout the Mountain West.40 Louis Lehle—a prominent brewery architect from Chicago whose prior worked included Milwaukee’s massive Blatz and Schlitz Breweries—designed the Becker’s new facility.41 By the early twentieth century, the Beckers had expanded their production capabilities to twenty thousand barrels of beer annually, doubling their capacity in a decade.42 Business was booming.

In addition to improving their brewhouse, the Beckers also used common industry growth tactics to stimulate their beer sales.

One of the most significant tactics adopted by the Beckers included the tried-and-true practice of regional price-fixing. By 1892, using new methods developed by Pasteur and bottling technology perfected by the Crown Cork and Seal Company, large brewing companies like Anheuser-Busch sold their beer across the country.43 To compete with the massive eastern firms, western brewers and wholesale liquor dealers often worked to fix the price of these “imported” brews and then undercut them with their own cheaper, locally produced beer. In December 1895, the Becker Brewing and Malting Company obtained the rights to sell and distribute Anheuser-Busch beer in Ogden.44 Two years later the Beckers reached an agreement with other beer distributors in the city, who sold other national brands, to fix the price of eastern beer at ten dollars per barrel on draught beer and eleven on bottled beer.45 The Beckers then sold their own beer at nine dollars a barrel and offered a three-dollar rebate for returned empty bottles.46 In addition to maintaining an affordable beer, price-fixing helped the Beckers emerge as champions of local industry. On January 1, 1896, the Ogden Daily Standard praised the Becker Brewing and Malting Company as a “striking example of home industry, as it employs Utah men only, consumes Utah raw materials, and the stock is owned in Ogden.” The paper

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The copious amounts of alcohol consumed by Americans made the success of the tied house system possible. During the nineteenth century, average annual beer consumption by Americans jumped from 2.3 gallons per person in 1840 to a staggering 23.6 gallons in 1900.50 This surge in consumption corresponds with the proliferation of saloons across the country, where the vast majority of beer was consumed. Utah was no exception.51 In 1908 nearly a thousand liquor dealers operated in the state, along with six distillers, five breweries, and more than six hundred saloons—one for nearly every six hundred people.52 In comparison, Utah claimed about one bar per five thousand people in 2015.53 While state-specific consumption data for the early twentieth century is not readily available, Utah exhibits a similar trend in the nationwide abundance of liquor and beer retailers, with over 237,468 establishments in 1910, leading up to the enactment of Prohibition.54 The vast number of saloons, tied or not, gave brewers plenty of options for selling their beer.

Due to a desire to keep operating costs to a minimum, however, tied houses were often built on the cheap. Many gained an association with prostitution, gambling, and other vices, which fueled the causes of temperance groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League.55 In addition to their reputation as dens of vice, saloons also have a

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In his report to the United States Brewers’ Association in 1908, W. F. Schad stated, “At least twenty percent of the saloons of [Salt Lake City] should be cut out, for the reason that they are mostly low dives, catering for their trade to women of ill repute and the lowest class of men.”58 Again, broader trends regarding the liquor business can be observed in Utah. Not only did hundreds of saloons call Utah home, but many also acquired the same infamy as their counterparts across the country. The anti-saloon crusaders prevailed in shuttering the nation’s watering holes. Utah, however, became the exact middle state (twenty-fourth out of forty-eight) rather than an early adopter of statewide prohibition.59

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Another critical strategy adopted by the Beckers and other brewers across the nation was the establishment of local tied houses. These contractual agreements established a system where a brewery would provide the funds to open a saloon or cover a liquor license fee in exchange for the proprietor agreeing to serve the brewery’s products exclusively. This agreement “tied” the saloon to the brewery. Tied houses played an essential role in the existence of local and regional breweries, allowing them to continue successful operations even though the large shipping firms held overwhelming economies of scale.48 The Beckers established one of many tied houses as early as 1893 with Ogden saloon owner George Thompson.49

long history of serving as community institutions. As the historian Elliott West notes, migrants to the American West often turned to shared alcohol cultures and saloons as valuable community-building centers.56 In urban locales, saloons often provided free lunches to their patrons and served as informal political establishments and clubs for the working class.57 Despite these important social functions, the unsavory reputation of the saloon—including Utah’s six hundred—and its association with immigrants added fuel to the fire of middle-class Protestant reformers.

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continued by concluding that Becker’s beer “is as fine a beer as the best brands manufactured in the east.”47

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The traditional explanation for Utah’s relatively sluggish adoption of statewide prohibition credits political debates within the state’s Republican Party about how to best retain power. The Republican “Federal Bunch” led by Reed Smoot, Governor Spry, and LDS church president Joseph F. Smith initially decided that keeping Utah wet was in their best political interests in the early twentieth century.60 State prohibition is additionally politically nuanced when incorporating the uneven adherence to the World of Wisdom, as outlined by Hoskisson. Health exceptions for alcoholic beverages for members continued to the eve of prohibition. For example, during this time LDS leaders, such as apostles Anthony H. Lund and Matthias F. Cowley, enjoyed the occasional glass of currant wine or pint of beer. George Albert Smith, who succeeded Heber J. Grant as church president in 1945, consumed brandy for medicinal purposes.61 Furthermore, Edgar Brossard—a key figure in establishing an LDS mission in Paris, France—was a

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frequent Becker customer. Brossard in fact ordered several barrels of beer from the Beckers in 1914.62 That these high-profile members maintained their good standing in the church while imbibing alcoholic beverages suggests that prohibition was not a clear-cut issue. Differing opinions on the morality of alcohol consumption among key church leaders helps explain the lack of a unified push among the faithful to outlaw alcohol in the state earlier. While some anti-liquor crusaders within the church like Heber J. Grant lamented the alcohol consumption of his fellow members, at the turn of the century, drinking and maintaining a good standing within the church were not yet mutually exclusive.

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The debates over alcohol, especially beer, as beverage of moderation or intoxicating liquor not only raged among politicians and leaders of the LDS church, but also among the general populace. In the early 1900s, Utah newspapers brimmed with articles and advertisements boasting the nutritive qualities of beer. In 1915 the Salt Lake Herald-Republican ran the headline “Beer Best Brain Food, says Prof. Chandler” of Columbia University, who had argued that beer contained the same food qualities

and nutrients as bread (since they were both made from grains and yeast).63 The Beckers, along with brewers across the country, capitalized on this mainstream perception, and in the three decades before Prohibition frequently featured claims about beer’s healthfulness in their advertisements. In 1906 a Becker Brewing and Malting Company postcard ad featured the testimony of a young girl claiming that a doctor’s prescription for their beer made her sick mother healthy again.64 Becker’s full-page ad in the Ogden Daily Standard featured multiple paragraphs describing the “nutritive value of beer,” claiming that Becker’s Best, being “food as well as the healthiest of all drinks, will help you to conserve your energy.” The ad also targeted women consumers by suggesting that a pint of Becker’s Best could even help ease the burdens and stress of housework.65 Due to the activism of Progressive-era reformers, however, the medical arguments for spirits began to ring hollow.66 While brewers and allies played up the benefits of their brews, anti-liquor crusaders pushed their own science that labeled beer as poison. In 1915 the Women’s Christian Temperance Union decried “Beer

This photograph depicts Gus and his wife Thekla picnicking under a tree. The whole Becker family enjoyed outdoor recreation and often hosted family gatherings and business meetings in the mountains above Ogden. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Gustav Lorenz Becker Photograph Collection, USU_ P0361.

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Word of Wisdom scholars state that Prohibition became the turning point in removing the long-standing medical exemption for alcohol.71 Thereafter, LDS leaders revoked medical

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Due to the federal tax revenue generated by beer sales along with the product’s popularity, brewers initially thought themselves safe from the anti-liquor crusade. However, beer’s distinction from other liquors would not last.

The income tax amendment, passed in 1913, eclipsed beer sales as a governmental revenue stream, and with the rising tide of anti-German sentiment during the First World War, German American brewers became the target of temperance groups and other anti-German forces in the country.73 Due to wartime hysteria and the prevailing connection of brewers to Germany, drinking and producing beer became synonymous with disloyalty to the United States.74 In 1918 the U.S. Senate held hearings and trials in which several senators accused the United States Brewers’ Association (USBA) of aiding and abetting Imperial Germany by funding political races for pro-German politicians.

The USBA had in fact funded the campaigns of anti-prohibition politicians and temperance advocates who used anti-German sentiments to tarnish the image of America’s beer producers.75 By now Americans were lumping beer in with other corrupting alcohols to be outlawed with the adoption of the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment.

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On February 28, 1917, the high deserts of Utah became even drier with the statewide prohibition of alcohol. While the war had waged in moral, scientific, and medical terms, the potential loss of political power ultimately played a key role in Utah’s late adoption of prohibition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Reed Smoot, a Utah senator and LDS apostle, along with LDS church president Joseph F. Smith, feared that outlawing liquor would create a rallying cry for non-Mormon interests and jeopardize their political grip on the Salt Lake City government. This apprehension led to Governor Spry, a member of Smith’s and Smoot’s “Federal Bunch,” vetoing two prohibition bills in 1909 and 1915. The temperance movement in Utah, however, was pan-religious, and several key LDS leaders who desired and preached prohibition, namely Heber J. Grant, worked with the Anti-Saloon League and leaders of other faiths to pass statewide prohibition legislation.68 Though the political agendas of Smoot and Spry stalled statewide prohibition, the crusade against the saloon gained ground in Utah as critical LDS church leaders joined forces with progressives and other religious leaders. W. F. Schad reported that “the ministers of Salt Lake City, outside of the Catholic and Jewish Denominations have an Assn., [sic] called the Ministerial Union of Salt Lake City. . . . They are naturally for prohibition and using every effort to get the Mormon Church to join them in this fight.”69 Governor Simon Bamberger, a Jewish immigrant who had run as a Democrat on a prohibition platform in 1916, signed the Young Prohibition bill into law in 1917.70

exemptions commonly practiced among both LDS and broader American communities (common beliefs held that spirits aided in digestion and beer constituted an invigorating health tonic and food beverage). Leaders moved to strictly enforce the Word of Wisdom, including a churchwide ban on all alcohol consumption.72

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a[s] Poison” in the Iron County Record. Guest author T. D. Crothers, a scholar of inebriation and medical superintendent of Walnut Lodge Hospital in Connecticut, wrote that “beer is a most insidious poison because it produces other poisons, and starts new processes of degeneration that are unknown until the final collapse reveals them.”67 The debate surrounding beer continued in Utah and national newspapers, but by the outbreak of World War I the scales had shifted in favor of the prohibitionists.

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The anti-German sentiment sweeping the nation did not stop the Beckers from trying to save their good name. On April 18, 1917, the Ogden Daily Standard reported that Gus Becker sent President Woodrow Wilson a personal telegram “tendering the use by the government of the great brewery plant in Ogden for any purpose in support of the national cause.” The Daily Standard stated that “Mr. Becker’s offer to the government is regarded as merely another evidence of the sincere patriotism of himself and his family.”76 However, it appears that President Wilson declined Gus’s offer.

Even though the Beckers’ brewing business fell victim to the economic impacts of nationwide wartime anti-German hysteria that swept

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beer into the sights of anti-liquor crusaders, the family still enjoyed a favorable reputation in Ogden, and their patriotism was touted in local newspapers.

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Throughout the heated political battles, the Beckers realized that despite their popularity, their small amount of political capital would be of little use in preventing state prohibition. So they pivoted their efforts to prepare for business operations in a dry state. One drastic measure was shifting the entirety of their beer-producing operations to Evanston, Wyoming. The Beckers opened a new brewery, still named the Becker Brewing and Malting Company, to serve their customers in the remaining wet states of Wyoming and Nevada.77 The Evanston brewery opened in November 1917 and operated for just two short years. With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment on the horizon, the board of directors saw the writing on the wall and liquidated the Evanston brewery on January 15, 1919.

Gus Becker purchased the remaining shares, which included the land, title, and rights of the Evanston brewhouse for $70,000.78 With their Evanston brewhouse closed, the Beckers returned their focus to Utah, looking to national trends to stay solvent during the dry years of Prohibition. The Beckers had invested in “near beer,” a non-alcoholic beverage made with malt and hops, labeled Becco, as early as 1911.79 Other leading brewers also devoted resources to developing alternative drinks to beer. From 1906 to 1916, the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association worked to perfect its own line of near beer that they released under the name of Bevo.80 Pabst also released its line of near beer, Pablo, in 1915.81 It was not until the 1920s, however, that the renamed Becker Products Company aggressively marketed their near beer.82 This, in addition to heavily investing in the soda and ice business, enabled the Beckers to operate the only brewery in Utah and one of only 255 breweries nationwide during Prohibition.83 The Beckers’ new products were met with much acclaim throughout the state, and production of Becco and soda soon outstripped the company’s previous manufacturing—from 60,000 barrels of beer in 1917 to 75,000 barrels of Becco and soda in 1924.84 From 1920 through

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the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and beyond, Americans developed a penchant for soda, particularly ginger ale and Coca-Cola.85 The Beckers cashed in on this trend at the right time, and their soda production allowed the firm to sustain growth leading up to the Depression.

The Beckers’ successful pivot to non-alcoholic beverages earned accolades from LDS church president Heber J. Grant, who in a personal letter praised Gus Becker for the quality of the company’s products and commitment to following dry laws.86 While many Americans hoped the national ban on alcohol would solve society’s ills, Prohibition in fact exacerbated some issues and spawned a host of new ones. After more than a decade of struggling to enforce dry laws, halt organized crime, and prevent deaths from illegally produced adulterated alcohol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt effectively terminated the nation’s legal beer drought on March 21, 1933. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which amended the Volstead Act to accommodate the production of 3.2 percent alcohol content beer.87 Prohibition officially ended eight months later when Utah ratified the Twenty-first Amendment—the twenty-sixth and deciding state to do so.88 Despite the new emphasis placed on temperance both nationally and within the church, Utahns favored repeal for several reasons.

While Utah did not experience the same degree of violence in other states during Prohibition, the state had its fair share of bootlegging and shootings during the 1920s and 1930s.89 The primary purpose, however, was for economic factors. The prospect of new tax revenue and jobs motivated Utah voters, as it did for many in other states, to vote for repeal during the depths of the Great Depression.90 When the state temporarily closed the Becker Products Company for producing and selling beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content before the repeal of the state’s own liquor laws went into effect on January 1, 1934, one month after the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, the Ogden and Salt Lake Chambers of Commerce pleaded with Governor Blood to intervene. They argued that the community of Ogden wanted the brewery operating again. The Chamber of Commerce supported the Beckers because their brewery provided one hundred desperately needed

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An aerial photograph from the late 1930s of the Becker Products Company in Ogden, Utah. The Becker’s demolished and rebuilt their original brew house into the four-story brewery pictured here in 1906. The brewery was located at the corner of 19th Street and Lincoln Ave in Ogden. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Gustav Lorenz Becker Photograph Collection, USU_P0361.

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A photograph of the Becker Brewing and Malting Company of Evanston, Wyoming taken in the late 1930s or 1940s. The Beckers opened the Evanston plant in 1917 to brew beer for Western states after Utah went dry in 1916. The plant closed in 1919 with the enactment of national prohibition. The family revived the plant following repeal in 1933 to supply full-strength beer to Western markets. Their Ogden plant produced beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content for Utah markets. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections and Archives, Gustav Lorenz Becker Photograph Collection, USU_P0361.

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jobs.91 In response, Governor Blood signed “Permit No. 1” on June 26, 1933, which allowed the Beckers to ship their beer to thirsty customers in eleven states. Gus boasted that with the ability to export their beer, the Ogden brewery could now employ 125 workers and would contribute between $100 and $200 worth of tax revenue to the state per day.92 The Beckers were back in business.

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As the Becker family rebuilt their beer business after repeal, they continued to produce their flagship 3.2 brew, Becker’s Best Pilsner, at their Ogden location for local consumption. Since Utah liquor laws prohibited the manufacture or sale of beer with more than 3.2 percent alcohol content by weight, the family revived the defunct Becker Brewing and Malting Company of Evanston, Wyoming, where it launched a line of full-strength beer—Becker’s Uinta Club.93 The return of legal beer (including Becker beer) to Evanston resulted in three days of revelry. One spectator at Evanston’s beer celebration on May 20, 1933, noted that “never did I see such unreserved surrender to the God of Pleasure.”

The author also observed “cars of many makes and models, many having Utah license plates” among the merrymakers.94

levels both in Utah and across the nation. Due to the near collapse of their industry, coupled with the popularity of soft drinks and cocktails, per capita beer consumption had dipped to 7.9 gallons in 1934, less than half from twenty years earlier.97 In response to the scarcity of demand, industry leaders—including Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Jacob Ruppert Brewing Company of New York and the longtime president of the United States Brewers’ Association (USBA)— suggested that brewers flood the market with cheap beer that cost American consumers only a nickel per glass.98 He reasoned that pre-Prohibition prices would draw consumers back to their pint glasses.

New liquor revenue for the state became a bright spot in Utah’s financial situation during the 1930s. Even though since 1921 strict abstention from alcohol had become necessary to maintain good standing with the LDS church, liquor sales in Utah rebounded rapidly following repeal. Aside from those who crossed state lines to carouse in Evanston in 1933, many Utahns chose to patronize local joints and the newly established state liquor stores.

The USBA Brewers’ Almanac reported that between 1934 and 1939, the state of Utah collected $683,000in tax revenue from beer sales. Utah taxed beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content at $1.20 per barrel until the state legalized full strength beer on March 25, 1935. After that, 3.2 beer was taxed at $0.80 per barrel with full strength taxed at $1.60 per barrel.95 The Salt Lake Telegram reported that in 1939 alone, Utahns spent nearly $4 million in the newly created state liquor stores.96

This strategy, however, proved to hurt small firms that lacked the production capacity and technology to profit from this approach.

Small brewers also struggled due to skyrocketing malt prices caused by the nationwide droughts of the 1930s. For many, it was financially impossible to lower their selling price while also paying more for their principal ingredient. Utah’s most celebrated brewer and second vice president of the USBA, Gus Becker, protested against this strategy. At the annual brewers’ convention in 1938, he urged brewers to slow production. Becker, who was in fact a western romantic, compared the race to produce cheap beer in the decade after repeal to the “blind, mad dash of herded cattle that are startled from sleep at night.” Instead, he encouraged cooperation and long-term industry planning. Becker further cautioned his fellow brewers that “over-selling customers in ‘volumania’ is the twin folly to over-expansion.”99 He reasoned that slow growth, rather than the rapid increases in production volume and brewhouse expansions called for by Ruppert’s plan, was far more viable for regional breweries. Becker advocated for quality and product profitability over what he termed “mere bigness.” In many ways, Becker’s approach to brewing foreshadowed the ethos adopted by today’s craft brewers who stress quality over quantity. This practice became a central tenet of Becker’s presidency when he assumed the office following Jacob Ruppert’s death in 1939.

Despite the welcome revenue from beer sales, consumption failed to reach pre-Prohibition

The nation’s brewers elected Gus Becker president of the USBA on October 3, 1939. In his

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Despite the struggles between small brewers and their colossal counterparts during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Beckers once again innovated to grow their business. They joined other brewers in a nationally coordinated advertising campaign to win over American consumers. The USBA decided that beer needed to be viewed as acceptable for home consumption and marketed as a moderate, wholesome beverage. The historian Nathan Corzine shows how this PR strategy is highly visible in ads, which featured men and women in traditional gender roles, the husband performing a stereotypical masculine task while his observant and caring wife provides him with his favorite beer.102 The historian Lisa Jacobson, also analyzing advertisements, suggests that brewers used wartime ads in the 1940s to associate beer with traditional American life to disassociate their product from the infamous saloon. During the war, America’s brewers, under the direction of their

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inaugural address “When One Brewer Puts Another Out of Business He May Be Working with the Enemy,” Becker urged cooperation among brewers to prevent a second prohibition. Only by working together and supporting smaller firms, he determined, could the industry remain strong, healthy, and counter their perceived threats of a second prohibition brought on by another war with Germany.100 He argued that small brewers provided valuable links between the industry and the community, helping them maintain a positive image by employing local labor and integrating into the business community. Yet the fact that an increasingly smaller number of large firms in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and New York produced ever more beer suggests that brewers did not respond to Becker’s pleas. The largest firms continued to cut prices and stress production volume, thus increasing their market shares.101 “Mere bigness” won out for now.

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Wartime advertisement for Becker’s American Pilsner, 1944.

During World War II, American brewers launched a nationally coordinated advertising campaign stressing beer’s importance to American home life and values.

This campaign successfully politicized American beer as a patriotic product, something brewers failed to do during the First World War. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Becker Brewing and Malting Company Records Addendum, USU_ CAINE COLL MSS 31.

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trade association, launched a “morale is a lot of little things” campaign to tie the enjoyment of a cold glass of beer with friendship and a homecooked meal. This successfully “repoliticized” beer and laid a foundation for the modern patriotic associations with the beverage.103

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These themes can also be observed in Becker beer ads in various Utah newspapers. In 1944, the Becker Products Company released an ad featuring a husband at home cleaning dishes with the caption, “Of course, he’d give a hand with the dishes . . . whether or not! But how he does appreciate her gesture of gratitude—putting that sparkling glass of Becker’s Beer within arm’s reach. . . . Just a little touch of home life that makes tonight memorable and tomorrow night a joyful anticipation.”104 In addition to overt references to the “morale is a lot of simple things” campaign, the ad also plays on stereotypical gender roles and appeals to consumer patriotism by encouraging the purchase of war bonds. When marketing beer, the Beckers believed that national messaging would also be effective in Utah.

Once brewers effectively “repoliticized beer,” and no real threat of a second prohibition was evident, the large eastern firms began to ramp up beer production and advertising campaigns, which put most of their remaining small competitors out of business.105 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Miller, Schlitz, and Coors flooded the American beer market with cheap, heavily advertised beer. Local firms could no longer maintain a price advantage or compete with the slick marketing campaigns of the large firms, and the number of breweries declined rapidly. The two local breweries in Utah that had survived Prohibition—Becker Brewing Company of Ogden and the Fisher Brewing Company of Salt Lake City—competed for sales in the fierce beer market until Fisher closed in 1957.106 Nationwide, fewer firms cornered a larger share of the beer market: the five largest breweries held 24 percent of the market share in 1950 and a full 85 percent in 1985.107 While financial data for the Becker Products Company is rather limited, extant documents from its last two decades show the firm in steep decline. Gus Becker, the company’s flamboyant

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and charismatic president, died of a heart ailment in 1947.108 His brother Albert succeeded him as president until his death in 1961.109 The few remaining financial documents from the company show that the 1950s were not a prosperous time for regional brewers. From fiscal years 1958 to 1959, Becker beer sales decreased by 7,563 barrels of beer, shrinking from 57,567 to 50,004. As a result, their net profits tumbled 26 percent, falling from $11,308 to only $8,394.110 The Beckers were not alone in their losses, as regional breweries across the country saw their profits slowly dry up as consumers turned to national brands.111 In the 1960s and 1970s, many American regional breweries shuttered their doors.

While the Beckers’ beer sales plummeted, alcohol consumption in Utah did not. From 1947 to 1949, the state collected nearly $600,000 each year in tax revenue from beer sales.112 In fact, in fiscal year 1956, the Utah Foundation reported that state consumers spent a combined nearly $3 million on alcohol and tobacco, most from booze.113 Unfortunately for the local brewing industry, consumers appeared to be purchasing out-of-state brews and consuming more spirits and less beer.114 In 1964 the Becker Products Company could no longer sustain profits among the tough competition from national brands and a shrinking consumer base.

The Becker factory ceased production, and the company sold off its assets through the 1960s and 1970s. Twenty years later, the city of Ogden demolished the abandoned building that had once been Utah’s longest continually operating brewery.115 When placed in the broader national context, the Beckers’ story demonstrates that national industry trends had a profound impact on Utah’s regional brewers.

Fortunately for today’s many microbreweries and their thirsty customers, local brewing only temporarily ceased in Utah and the United States. In the 1980s the craft beer revolution began to pick up steam, and for the first time, after thirty-five consecutive years of decline, the United States added breweries in 1982.116 In 1986, Greg Schirf established the state’s first craft brewery, Wasatch Brewery, in Park City.

Since then the number has only increased. As of 2019, Utah boasted forty-two craft breweries. Together they produce nearly two hundred

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Albert E. Becker inspects the beer from the brewing kettle in the new family brewery, undated. Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Gustav Lorenz Becker Photograph Collection, USU_P0361.

thousand barrels of beer each year.117 Even though modern Utah has a reputation for difficulty in acquiring alcohol, the state continues to follow national trends, offering award-winning craft brews to those willing to partake of them, including some members of the LDS church.118 Recent scholarship suggests that many Mormons hold a more nuanced stance toward alcohol than might be expected, and that Utah politicians are liberalizing the state’s notoriously draconian liquor laws in response to demands from the national beer industry.

On November 1, 2019, Utah increased the legal alcohol content limit on beer sold in grocery stores and gas stations from 3.2 percent to 5 percent. This marked the first time the state increased legal alcohol limits since the repeal of Prohibition.119 This move falls in line with Oklahoma and other states that have removed their 3.2 percent restrictions.120

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As the history of the Becker Brewing and Malting Company reveals, Utah shares many common practices of alcohol consumption with the wider American public, including a general acceptance of beer consumption. Before state prohibition in 1917, the LDS church allowed members who consumed alcohol to remain in good standing due to the perceived health benefits of spirits. In fact, current church policies regarding alcohol consumptions were not broadly enforced until prohibition became the law nationwide. The Becker Brewing and Malting Company manufactured products that reflected consumer tastes and kept abreast of industry technological innovations and marketing techniques. Further, as this article illustrates, it was the formation of the national brewing oligopoly that played a more significant role in putting the Beckers’ brewery out of business than local political and religious factors.

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Despite its low rankings for ease of alcohol consumption, Utah and its colorful history may surprise those who take a closer look. Brewpubs and small regional breweries have opened and expanded throughout the state, and Utah’s strict liquor laws have shifted, albeit slowly, to mirror policies of states possessing similar regulations on alcohol sales. When one takes a step back and places the state’s beer history within a wider context, Utah may not appear so peculiar after all.

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Notes 1. “Hotel Arrivals,” Ogden Standard, July 9, 1891.

2. “Ogden’s New Brewery,” Ogden Standard, March 15, 1891.

3. “New Brewing Company,” Ogden Standard, May 25, 1892.

4. Samuel A. Batzli, “Mapping United States Breweries 1612 to 2011,” in The Geography of Beer, edited by Mark Patterson and Nancy Hoalst-Pullen (Dordecht: Springer, 2014), 38. Brewers at the turn of the century used the term “near beer” to describe non-alcoholic beer.

5. Brewers’ Association, “Historic U.S. Brewery Count,” accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.brewersassociation .org/statistics-and-data/national-beer-stats/.

6. “Historic brewery’s saga ending,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, 1984, box 7, fd. 8, series 3, Becker Brewing and Malting Company records, Caine MSS 31, Utah State University Merrill-Cazier Library, Logan, Utah (hereafter BBMC records).

7. Matt Canham, “Salt Lake County is becoming less Mormon—Utah County is headed the other direction,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 16, 2017.

8. Christopher Matthews, “The 3 Best and 3 Worst States in America for Drinking,” Time Magazine, December 5, 2013.

9. The Zion Curtain refers to a law in Utah requiring alcoholic drinks to be poured and mixed behind a barrier, out of sight of restaurant patrons. In 2020, the Utah legislature also voted to increase the alcohol content of beer purchased in grocery stores from 3.2 percent to 5 percent. Amy Held, “Utah’s ‘Zion Curtain’ Falls and Loosens State’s Tight Liquor Laws,” National Public Radio, July 2, 2017, accessed April 26, 2020, https://www .npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/02/535259524 /utahs-zion-curtain-falls-and-loosens-states-tight -liquor-laws.

10. Ashton Edwards, “See where Utah ranks on list of ‘drunkest’ states in U.S.,” Fox13, March 18, 2015, accessed March 17, 2020, https://fox13now.com/2015/03/17/map -shows-which-state-has-the-most-bars-per-capita/; Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian Magazine, July 5, 2017, accessed April 26, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag .com/smart-news/utah-just-did-away-liquor-hiding -curtains-180963949/.

11. Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (1958; Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1993), xxii.

12. The American Brewer, vol. 67 no. 2 (1934), 15. Gus Becker became president of the United States Brewers’

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15.

16.

17.

Association in 1939. The organization’s past presidents and board members consisted of some the most iconic names in brewing, including the Busch, Miller, Coors, and Pabst families.

Several non-academic historians have written brewing histories for popular audiences. Some of these works fail to meet academic standards of source citation and context. Despite these shortcomings, popular works offer valuable insights into local history and provide an excellent starting place for anyone interested in researching their region’s brewing heritage. A few examples include Dell Vance, Beer in Beehive: A History of Beer in Utah (Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 2006); Dane Hucklebridge, The United States of Beer: The Freewheeling History of the All-American Drink (New York: William Morrow, 2016). Arcadia Publishing’s American Palate series features a host of brewing history for different states and cities written by popular authors.

For works on American brewing history, see Thomas C. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company: The History of an American Business (New York: New York University Press, 1944); Stanley Baron, Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962); A. M. McGahan, “The Emergence of the National Brewing Oligopoly: Competition in the American Market, 1933–1958,” Business History Review 65, no. 2 (1991): 229–84; Martin Stack, “Local and Regional Breweries in America’s Brewing Industry, 1865 to 1920,” Business History Review 74, no. 3 (2000): 435–63; Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (Orlando: Haricourt Inc., 2006); Lisa Jacobson, “Beer Goes to War: The Politics of Beer Promotion and Production in the Second World War,” Food, Culture, and Society 12, no. 3 (2009): 275–312; Martin Stack, “Was Big Beautiful? The Rise of National Breweries in America’s Pre-Prohibition Brewing Industry,” Journal of Macromarketing 30, no 1 (2010): 50–60; Nathan Corzine, “Right at Home: Freedom and Domesticity in the Language and Imagery of Beer Advertising, 1933–1960,” Journal of Social History 43, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 843–66; Ranjit S. Dighe, “A Taste for Temperance: How American Beer Got to Be So Bland,” Business History 58 (2016), 752–84.

For works on Prohibition, see Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of Prohibition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Lori Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Lisa McGirr, The War On Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016); W. J. Rorabaugh, Prohibition: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

“John Becker Dies in California City,” obituary, 1918, p.

232, box 5, fd. 38, Gustav Lorenz Becker photograph collection, P0361, Utah State University Merrill-Cazier Library, Logan Utah (hereafter Becker photograph collection).

Library of Congress, “Germans in America,” accessed November 2, 2017, https://www.loc.gov/rr/european /imde/germchro.html. German immigration was driven by a number of factors, including the failed revolution of 1848 and economic opportunities. For a study of German immigration, see Don Heinrich Tolzmann,

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“Larger Brewery Planned,” Ogden Daily Standard, February 4, 1905; “Banquet for Traveling Men,” Ogden Evening Standard, June 8, 1911.

41. “Larger Brewery Planned,” Ogden Daily Standard, February 4, 1905; National Parks Service, “Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company Brewery Complex,” National Register of Historic Place Form, March 15, 1986, accessed April 26, 2020, https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/Get Asset/NRHP/86000793_text; National Parks Service, “Blatz Brewery Complex,” National Register of Historic Place Form, November 29, 1990, accessed April 26, 2020, https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/590a9e4e-3630 -495c-87c0–25aefc36bed6.

42. “Will Double Capacity,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 15, 1905.

43. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company, 125–26.

44. Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association to the Becker Brewing and Malting Company, December 4, 1895, addendum, item 6, box 1, fd. 17, series 3, BBMC. 45. Price fixing agreement, July 26, 1897, addendum, item 1, box 4, fd. 9, series 3, BBMC. 46. Emil Hansen to Becker Brewing and Malting Company, July 2, 1914, box 16, fd. 6, series 1, BBMC. 47. “Becker Brewing Co. Section,” Ogden Daily Standard, January 1, 1896.

48. Stack, “Local and Regional Breweries in America’s Brewing Industry,” 435.

49. Tied-House Contract, April 14, 1893, box 4, fd. 9, series 4, BBMC records.

50. West, “Beer,” 15.

51. Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 139–40.

52. Brent G. Thompson, “‘Standing between Two Fires’: Mormons and Prohibition, 1908–1917,” Journal of Mormon History 10 (1983): 36. Utah’s population in 1910 stood at approximately 373,000. US Census Bureau, “Utah Resident Population, 1850–2000,” 2000, accessed November 3, 2017, https://www.census.gov/dmd/www /resapport/states/utah.pdf.

53. Ashton Edwards, “See where Utah ranks on list of ‘drunkest’ states in U.S.” 54. Brewers’ Almanac (1940), 23.

55. Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 139–40.

56. West, “Beer: A Western—and Human—Tradition,” 14– 23.

57. McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 15–16; Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 89.

58. Hearing, S. Res. 307 and 439, 1115.

59. Thompson, “Standing Between Two Fires,” 35.

60. Thompson, 35. The “Federal Bunch” was a group of leading Utah Republicans in the early twentieth century, who, under Smoot, Spry, and Smith, received positions through political patronage.

61. Alexander, “The Word of Wisdom,” 78.

62. Edgar Brossard to the Becker Brewing and Malting Company, August 27, 1914, sales order, box 15, fd. 64, series 1, BBMC records; Edgar B. Brossard Papers, finding aid, MSS 004, Utah State University Merrill-Cazier Library, Logan, Utah. A barrel of beer refers to a thirtyone-gallon container and is the standard unit of measurement in the brewing industry.

63. “Beer Best Brain Food, Says Prof. Chandler,” Salt Lake Herald–Republican, May 15, 1915.

64. Becker Brewing and Malting Company, “Advertisement for Becker’s Best (2 of 29), 1906,” USU Digital Exhibits, accessed March 17, 2020, http://exhibits.usu .edu/items/show/12738.

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The German American-Experience (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000).

18. Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 56.

19. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company, 6.

20. US Senate, Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary United States Senate Relating to the Charges Made Against the United States Brewers’ Association and Allied Interests, S. Res. 307 and 439, Doc. No. 62, 66th Cong., 1st Sess. (1919), 1:1116.

21. Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 15. Ale, which is brewed in the English tradition, uses a top fermenting yeast and does not require the cold storage of German-style lager.

22. Rorabaugh, Prohibition: A Concise History, 2.

23. Rorabaugh.

24. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company, 12–17, 71.

25. West, “Beer: A Western—and Human—Tradition,” Journal of the West 55 (Spring 2016): 15. Per capita consumption increased from 2.3 gallons in 1840 to 23.6 gallons by 1900.

26. Doctrine and Covenants 89:5.

27. For work on the Word of Wisdom, see Thomas G. Alexander, “The Word of Wisdom: From Principal to Requirement,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14 (Autumn 1981): 78–88; Paul Y. Hoskisson, “The Word of Wisdom in Its First Decade,” Journal of Mormon History 38 (Winter 2012): 131–200; John E. Ferguson III, Benjamin R. Knoll, and Jana Riess, “The Word of Wisdom in Contemporary Mormonism: Perceptions and Practice,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 51 (Spring 2018): 42.

28. Hoskisson, “The Word of Wisdom in Its First Decade,” 131–200.

29. Many Europeans and Americans also consumed fermented beverages and spirits because they provided a safer source of hydration than the brackish and contaminated water found in urban and industrial centers.

McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 6.

30. Hoskisson, “The Word of Wisdom in Its First Decade,” 180, 189, 199.

31. Hoskisson, 199.

32. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 385.

33. “Obituary of John S. Becker, 1918,” p. 232, box 5, fd. 38, Becker Photograph Collection.

34. Brewers’ Association, “Historic U.S. Brewery Count,” accessed December 21, 2020, https://www.brewers association.org/statistics-and-data/national-beer -stats/.

35. McDaniel, “Ogden: The Junction City of the West,” 2, 39–40.

36. “Prospect of a Brewery,” Ogden Daily Standard, March 7, 1890; E. A. McDaniel, Ogden: The Junction City of the West (Salt Lake City: Tribune Print, 1888), 1.

37. The Salt Lake Brewing Company was established in Salt Lake’s Tenth Ward in 1873. The Fisher Brewery opened in 1884. “City News,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 5, 1873; “The New Brewery,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 1, 1885.

38. “Original Becker Brewing and Malting Company Brew Plant, c. 1893,” USU Digital Exhibits, accessed April 26, 2020, http://exhibits.usu.edu/items/show/12856.

39. “Whence Comes Good Beer,” Ogden Daily Standard, June 17, 1897.

40. The new brewery was situated along Lincoln Ave near the Ogden River in downtown Ogden.

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65. “East or West, It Is The Best,” Ogden Daily Standard, July 24, 1917.

66. Rorabaugh, A Short History of Prohibition, 43.

67. “Temperance,” Iron County Record, April 23, 1915.

68. Thompson, “‘Standing between Two Fires,’” 35, 37–39, 41–49.

69. Hearing, S. Res. 307 and 439, 1116.

70. Thompson, “‘Standing Between Two Fires,’” 51.

71. Ferguson III, Knoll, and Reiss, “The Word of Wisdom in Contemporary Mormonism,” 42.

72. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic, 117–19.

73. Amy Mittleman, Brewing Battles: A History of American Beer (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 71–96.

74. Tammy M. Proctor, “‘Patriotic Enemies’: Germans in the Americas, 1914–1920,” in Germans as Minorities during the First World War, edited by Panikos Panayi (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 226–27. For more on German–Americans during the war, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

75. US Congress, Senate, 1919, Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda: Report of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary United States Senate Relating to the Charges Made Against the United States Brewers’ Association and Allied Interests, S. Res. 307 and 436, Doc. No. 61, 65th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1–3; Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 179–81.

76. Ogden Daily Standard, April 18, 1917.

77. “Utah Goes Dry,” Utah Brews: The Untapped Story of Ogden’s Becker Brewing and Malting Company, USU Digital Exhibits, accessed April 12, 2020, http:// exhibits.usu.edu/exhibits/show/beckerbrewing/state prohibition.

78. Chester C. Wilcox, “Liquidation of the Becker Brewing and Malting Company Legal Contract, 1919,” USU Digital Exhibits, accessed April 12, 2020, http://exhibits .usu.edu/items/show/12841. The Eighteenth Amendment would be ratified the following day (January 16, 1919).

79. Advertisement of Becker’s Best, 1911, addendum, item 4, box 3, folder 1, series 3, BBMC records.

80. Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 183.

81. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company, 209.

82. Advertisement for Becker’s Becco, c. 1920, addendum, item 41, box 3 folder, 1, series 3, BBMC records; Advertising pamphlet for Becco, c. 1925, addendum, item 1, box 3, fd. 18, series 3, BBMC records.

83. Samuel A. Batzli, “Mapping United States Breweries 1612 to 2011,” 38.

84. “Becker Enterprise Pioneer Brewers,” Ogden Standard, July 20, 1917; “Becker Products Display One of State Fair Features,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 5, 1924. Becker drinks won ribbons at the state fair held in 1920. “Becco Wins Blue Ribbon at State Fair,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 10, 1920.

85. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company, 333; Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 207.

86. Letter from Heber J. Grant to Gustav L. Becker, January 6, 1928, pg. 107, book 1, box 1, Becker photograph collection.

87. Ogle, Ambitious Brews, 196; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, xx.

88. Historical note, Convention to Ratify the 21st Amendment, Administrative Records, Series 6300, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah; John Dinan and Jac C.

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Heckelman, “Support for Repealing Prohibition,” Social Science Quarterly 95 (September 2014): 636–51.

89. Helen A. Papanikolas, “Bootlegging in Zion: Making and Selling the ‘Good Stuff,’” Utah Historical Quarterly 53 (Summer 1985): 272.

90. Ogle, Ambitious Brew, 192.

91. “Questions and Answers on Repeal,” Provo Evening Herald, October 27, 1933; “Blood is Urged to Save Utah’s Beer Industry,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 12, 1933.

92. “Ogden Brewer Gets First Beer Permit,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 26, 1933.

93. Becker Products Company, “Becker’s Golden Jubilee Booklet, 1940,” USU Digital Exhibits, accessed April 12, 2020, http://exhibits.usu.edu/items/show/12815; Becker Brewing and Malting Company, “Advertisement for Becker’s Uinta Club (1 of 3), 1938,” USU Digital Exhibits, accessed April 12, 2020, http://exhibits .usu.edu/items/show/12780.

94. Dave Smith, “Evanston’s 3.2 Percent Beer Celebration,” Rich Country Reaper, May 26, 1933.

95. Brewers’ Almanac (1940), 41, 68.

96. “Liquor Revenue of Utah Listed,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 18, 1939.

97. Brewers Almanac (1940), 27, 33–34. In 1939, per capita consumption of beer in the United States hovered near 12 gallons, down from 21 gallons in 1914. Per capita consumption in Utah remained close to the national average throughout the 1930s. Per capita consumption in Utah rose from 6 gallons to 8.6 by 1939. In comparison, the per-capita consumption nationally increased from 7.9 in 1934 to 12.3 gallons by the end of the decade.

98. Jacob Ruppert, “Ruppert Urges Five-Cent Beer,” American Brewer 67, no. 10 (October 1934), 13.

99. Gustav L. Becker, “Brewery Management,” American Brewer 71, no. 2 (February 1938), 11.

100. “Modern Brewer Magazine, 1939,” book 1, box 11, Becker Photograph Collection.

101. McGahan, “The Emergence of the National Brewing Oligopoly,” 231. From 1939 to 1958 the largest five breweries in the nation nearly doubled their market share from 16 percent to 30 percent.

102. Corzine, “Right at Home,” 843–44.

103. Jacobson, “Beer Goes to War,” 276–80.

104. Advertisement for Becker’s American Pilsner, 1944, addendum, item 61, box 3, fd. 1, series 3, BBMC records.

105. Corzine, “Right at Home,” 858.

106. The Fisher Brewing Company operated from 1884 until 1920 and from 1934 to 1957 when the company was sold to California brewer Lucky Lager. The greatgrandchildren of the firm’s founder, Albert Fisher, reopened the family brewing business in Salt Lake in 2017. Christopher Smart, “What Ever Happened to . . .

Fisher Brewery?,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 30, 2016, accessed December 23, 2020, https://archive.sltrib.com /article.php?id=4270530&itype=CMSID. 107. Batzli, “Mapping United States Breweries,” 39.

108. “Pioneer Brewer Dies at Ogden of Heart Ailment,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 13, 1947.

109. “Albert Becker Death Certificate,” Department of Health, Office of Vital Records and Statistics Death Certificates, Series 81448, Utah State Archives, accessed April 26, 2020, https://archives.utah.gov/research /indexes.

110. Becker Products Company, “Becker Products Company Financial Documents, 1959 to 1960,” USU Digital Exhibits, accessed April 26, 2020, http://exhibits.usu

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115. “Historic brewery’s saga ending,” Ogden Standard–Examiner, 1984, box 7, fd. 8, series 3, BBMC records.

116. Batzli, “Mapping United States Breweries,” 40.

117. Brewers’ Association, “Utah Craft Brewing Statistics 2019,” accessed April 26, 2020, https://www.brewers association.org/statistics/by-state/?state=UT. 118. Recent scholarship suggests that while the LDS church’s stance on alcohol has remained unchanged since 1921, some contemporary Mormons still practice a nuanced interpretation of the scripture. Ferguson III, Knoll, and Reiss, “The Word of Wisdom in Contemporary Mormonism,” 50.

119. Lindsay Whitehurst and the Associated Press, “Utah Gets Serious About Beer, As State Law Ups Alcohol Limit,” Fortune, accessed March 18, 2020, https:// fortune.com/2019/11/01/utah-beer-percentage-utah -beer-law-change-2019-utah-beer-funeral/.

120. Kathy Stephenson, “Another state ditching 3.2 beer, what’s in store for Utah?,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 9, 2016.

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.edu/items/show/12818.

111. Regional brewery financial records are scarce. The Becker Product Company’s marginal returns in Utah, however, mirrors the financial woes experienced by another regional brewery in Defiance, Ohio. Untitled newspaper clipping, October 22, 1938, Scrapbook, 1938–2006, Oversized Box 2, Diehl Inc. Records, MS 1057, Jerome Library, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio; Financial Records, 1949, Oversized Box 1, Diehl Inc. Records.

112. Utah Foundation, “Utah State government financial summary for the years 1948–49 and 1950–51 Bienniums, report no. 51, 1949,” https://digitallibrary.utah.gov /awweb/main.jsp?flag=browse&smd=1&awdid=7.

113. “Tobacco and Alcohol Sales Bring Tax Money of $19.8 Million in Utah,” Times–Independent, May 2, 1957.

114. Becker Products Company, “Becker Products Company Financial Documents, 1959 to 1960,” USU Digital Exhibits.

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Thus, the scholars who wrote each chapter take a facet of Powell’s writing, thinking, or actions, hold it up to the present, and see how it bears up now. Robert W. Adler, for example, examines Powell’s advocacy for the development of water resources by communities in what we now call watersheds, rather than by big government or big capital. Adler’s chapter and the eleven others offer fascinating insights, are well written, and are well researched.

Powell’s greatest relevance to our times was in showing the environmental reality of the Colorado River Basin and the Intermountain West; namely, that its aridity would always be a limiting factor. And Powell’s communitarian approach to water resources is not dead, as a case study of the Dolores River by Amorina Lee-Martinez and Patricia Limerick demonstrates. The Bureau of Reclamation has mostly

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Despite his prophetic skills, Powell was all too human and often got it wrong. As numerous authors point out, he did not foresee the ways in which land and water agencies would have to account for environmental factors like beach preservation in the Grand Canyon or endangered species like the Colorado pikeminnow.

Nor could he have foreseen the recreation boom of the post–World War II era that even took his riveting account of his 1869 trip as a sort of wild-river bible. These are just a few of the ways Powell, like almost all of us, was hemmed in by his times.

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The sesquicentennial of John Wesley Powell’s epic 1869 trip down the Green and Colorado rivers inspired this anthology’s editors to ask the question: how do Powell’s ideas about the Colorado River Basin and the West stand up a century-and-a-half later? To answer it, they divided the book into Powell’s three main professional interests—water, public lands, and Native Americans—and let numerous scholars sort out the rest. Throughout, the authors do not just restrict themselves to the past and present. They give us much to chew on in looking forward. As the twelve excellent chapters included herein show, there is still much to learn—negatively and positively—from the one-armed Civil War veteran. Sometimes Powell’s vision peered through the fog and beyond; other times the fog of his time clouded his view.

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Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95

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Edited by Jason Robison, Daniel McCool, and Thomas Minckley

followed Powell’s idea to construct reservoirs at higher locations because most farms sit at lower elevations. Finally, as Jack Schmidt eloquently notes in his afterword, and as other scholars mention throughout, Powell always made a strong case for using science and rational planning to plot the future of land and water issues.

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Vision and Place: John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin

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Perhaps the most important topic covered within these chapters is that of Native Americans. Unlike many of Powell’s ideas about water, which were ignored in his day and ours, his influence as the head of the Bureau of Ethnology mattered then and matters now. Even though Powell was somewhat progressive for his time in being an assimilationist (rather than an annihilationist), he appears very ethnocentric, even racist, now. Powell certainly acknowledged the extraordinary diversity of Native American tribes and was no social Darwinist, but he always presumed the superiority of Euro-American civilization. The only thing missing from this section, from a Utah point of view, is an assessment of what Powell contributed to the scholarship of Numic-speaking tribes, namely the Utes and Paiutes.

Every one of these essays contributes significantly to the discussion, and it is hard to say which is best. Two of them held personal interest to me: William Debuys’s chapter, “Stewart Udall, John Wesley Powell, and the Emergence of a National Commons,” and Weston McCool’s

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and Daniel McCool’s chapter on Powell and Native Americans, “‘We Must Either Protect Him or Destroy Him.’”

This book is timely because the Colorado River Basin currently faces its toughest rapids, particularly because of climate change. The scholars here expertly use Powell to guide us into the “Great Unknown.” Buy this book, read it, and listen closely.

James M. Aton —Southern Utah University

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In addition to twelve fine chapters, the editors provide important contextual essays that introduce each of the three sections. Plus, the renowned legal scholar Charles Wilkinson and the legendary river geomorphologist Jack Schmidt write a wonderful foreword and afterword, respectively.

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“Feed My Sheep”: The Life of Alberta Henry

By Colleen Whitley Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xiv + 228 pp.

Cloth, $34.95

Twentieth-century women in Utah, especially those who are not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, rarely get their due in historical literature. In “Feed My Sheep,” Colleen Whitley aims to introduce readers to a powerful and influential woman named Alberta Henry. Born to a sharecropping family in Louisiana, Henry’s life brought her to Utah; her participation and involvement with Black churches and communities of color in the state led her to a life of activism and the presidency of the Utah chapter of the NAACP. The legacy that she built in Utah brought many people into her life, including Colleen Whitley, the author and compiler of this biography. The image that Whitley creates of Henry is that she was somewhat of a reluctant hero. Opportunities to serve and advocate for minority students and communities always found Henry; she never had to apply for any of the many positions she held. As an African American woman active in the Baptist tradition, Alberta Henry answered the call to “feed my sheep” where she saw a need, and her activism was an extension of her faith.

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This biography is presented in an unusual format. In 1998, as an editor for a volume on significant women in twentieth-century Utah, Whitley began working on a chapter about Henry. Worth Their Salt, Too was published in 2000, after Henry had retired and was no longer the president of the NAACP. The two became friends as Whitley interviewed Henry and spent long hours poring over Henry’s papers. Henry hoped that these interviews would be used to construct the story of her life, but she unfortunately passed away before such a book could be produced. As a labor of love for her friend, Whitley took it upon herself to finish Henry’s biography and the result has been published by the University of Utah Press.

Readers will quickly note that Henry’s voice is very present in the biography as Whitley included extensive passages from the oral history interviews that she conducted with Henry.

These lengthy quotations are printed in a different font from the main text of the book and provide the volume with its framing structure.

Whitley weaves Henry’s oral history passages in with historical context, additional research, and commentary. This is not typical for a traditional biography, but it represents the way that Whitley was able to research her subject: through oral history interviews. However, this approach made Whitley dependent upon the information that Henry shared and the way that she shared it. And while memories are imperfect, it is significant that Henry’s own voice and experiences were the driving force in this narrative. For example, Whitley follows Henry’s reaction to the LDS church lifting the priesthood and temple ban for its members of Black African descent with contextual information about the racial restrictions in Latter-day Saint history.

Alberta Henry’s life underscores the importance of local history in the larger civil rights history, rightfully and effectively bringing the story of that movement westward. Henry’s life also demonstrates the hard work and activism that continued after national civil rights legislation had been passed and after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some of her major contributions included supporting students through the youth NAACP program and pushing the Utah state legislature to follow

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Jessica M. Nelson —Joseph Smith Papers

Color Coded: Party Politics in the American West, 1950–2016

By Walter Nugent Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. x + 374 pp.

Cloth, $34.95

One of the main questions in American political development is how change happens. To explain how major political change happens when individuals are generally socialized into the political identities of their parents, scholars have developed the theory of realignment—the shift in voter preference from one party or affiliation to another. One failing in this theory is that we have not seen a national realignment since 1932. This causes many scholars to question the validity of the theory as an explanation for how an entire region or nation would shift from one party to another. However, it is clear that there was a post-1960s realignment in the southern states from predominantly Democratic to predominantly Republican. A corresponding, reactive realignment happened in the northeastern states from predominantly Republican to predominantly Democratic.

These shifts were such that the political world changed drastically in the last sixty years in

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Focusing on state election data allows us to see what happens uniquely in a state over the years. Generally, election analyses focus on national elections (i.e., how Coloradoans vote in the presidential election), but down-ballot state and local contests reveal political change that is not visible at that national level. By focusing on the state data, such as gubernatorial races or state legislature seats, Nugent is able to flesh out how politics evolved specifically for the people of the western states. For example, Nugent lasers in on the northern “Panhandle” of Idaho as a locus of Democratic strength in a Republican state and can explain why. He does this for each state which provides thorough insights on each western state’s partisan affiliations. This nicely ties the work of Daniel Elazar, the political scientist who posited that there are political subcultures in states which can explain policy differences, to political development which explains how a state’s politics uniquely developed given the political culture present there.

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Nugent’s work examines political change—or the lack thereof—in the western United States.

Before reading this book, my sense of how western states had evolved was less developed than my sense of what had happened in the south and northeast. Generally, the work about political change focuses on a north-south frame and presents data about the eastern part of the country. Perhaps because political change did not happen uniformly across the western region, we missed the political transformation.

Nugent shows that political change happened state by state and in unique ways: some states realigned, some states stayed the same over time, and some states have moved back and forth. Nugent provides a deep, rich history of states in the West, which is appealing to historians, but also makes use of available data, which is not always easy at a state level and is appealing to political scientists.

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While the format makes for an unconventional biography, Whitley has completed a critical work of local history that will be a tremendous resource on Black history and activism in the state of Utah. She has ensured that Alberta Henry’s contributions to Utah communities will not be forgotten now that researchers can access a biography of this notable woman containing her own words and memories.

those two regions. While the verdict in political science is out on the value of realignment theory, understanding political change in regions is an important phenomenon to grasp.

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the federal government’s establishment of the Martin Luther King holiday. When the state sought to execute two Black men convicted of murder, she rallied for a stay of execution for William Andrews who had not killed anyone but had been an accomplice to the murders.

Henry objected to the death penalty for Andrews on the grounds that execution was an extreme response that had not been pursued for white convicts like Mark Hoffman, who had also murdered multiple people.

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This work is an excellent assessment of thousands of elections across seven decades in nineteen different states. Using this robust data analysis, Nugent categorizes “switchers”

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Utah is one of the states that Nugent categorizes as a “stayer—reliably red,” which puts it in a group with Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alaska. While readers may have originally lumped Utah in with Idaho, it is very interesting to place the state in a more diverse group for a variety of reasons. The “stayers” are all reliably red but Nugent points out that Utah is so for different reasons than Kansas. Students of Utah history will thoroughly enjoy the explanation of decades worth of data that lets us see the vibrant red of today’s Utah against the backdrop of seventy years of Republican Party victories.

Leah A. Murray —Weber State University

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(states that have drifted from the Democratic to Republican camp, or vice versa), “stayers” (states that have remained reliably Republican or Democratic over the decades), and “swingers” (states that have gone back and forth throughout the years). In this way you can see how Montana is similar to Arizona, which may not be at all clear from a national lens. Nugent’s starting point—1950—situates this work squarely in relatively recent history, which makes his analysis useful to understand political developments continuing in the present day. Placing the spotlight on states that do not always get the attention in national scholarship adds to our fuller understanding of the dynamic politics in this country.

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MICHAEL DAVID KANE received a PhD in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism from the University of Utah and an MBA from Utah State University. He is author of the forthcoming Country Never Yet Trod: William Lewis Manly’s 1849 Voyage Down the Green River. As a university instructor, businessman, and outdoor adventurer, he feels most at home exploring and experiencing the wide-open spaces of the American West.

CODY PATTON was born and raised in Ogden, Utah. He earned a BA in history from Utah State University in 2018. While at USU, he worked with manuscript curator Clint Pumphery to curate an exhibit on the Becker Brewing Company. He is currently working toward his PhD in American history at Ohio State University. His dissertation focuses on the environmental and business history of American brewing.

RASOUL SORKHABI, PhD, is a research professor at the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute and an adjunct professor at the Department of Geology & Geophysics.

He has conducted geologic research in various parts of the world and is author of numerous articles including some on the history of geology. His website is: www.rasoulsorkhabi.com.

LISA TETRAULT is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the history of gender, race, and

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American democracy—with an emphasis on social movements and memory. She is author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014), which won the Organization of American Historians’ Mary Jurich Nickliss book prize, and is currently at work on a genealogy of the Nineteenth Amendment, as well as a book-length project about where and how women’s suffrage fits into the political landscape after the American Civil War. NATHAN N. WAITE is an associate editorial manager for the Church Historian’s Press in Salt Lake City. He received an MA in American Studies from the University of Utah and is coeditor of A Zion Canyon Reader (2014) and Settling the Valley, Proclaiming the Gospel: The General Epistles of the Mormon First Presidency (2017). Born and raised in St. George, he returns to southern Utah as often as possible to hike, trail run, and canyoneer.

SHERI WYSONG moved to Utah in 1979 and has lived on the banks of the Sevier River since 1984. After twenty years of watching the river, she was surprised to learn the name was supposedly derived from its severe or violent nature. Her curiosity piqued at why the Sevier would be singled out as such, particularly over other Utah rivers, she began an engrossing hobby of studying maps and other resources for the origin of enigmatic Utah place names.

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Home to an ever-changing company of working-class men, the Lincoln House on 68 East 1st South was one of Salt Lake City’s longest running hostelries. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, it offered modest rooms for travelling businessmen and transient laborers. By the 1940s, it gained a reputation as the last refuge of the down-on-your-luck man. Archie Chamberlain—pictured behind the cigar counter—met his share of colorful customers as the Lincoln House’s longtime front desk clerk.

It is also where he also met his future wife, Mary Nordstrom, who briefly worked there as a chambermaid.

After their marriage, Archie and Mary rented a place in the Avenues before moving to their new home on Navajo Street on the city’s west side, where Archie could commute to work on the Poplar Grove streetcar line. At home, Mary

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raised chickens, sold eggs, and read palms. In 1917, thirty-eight-year-old Archie collapsed and died while chopping wood in the yard, leaving behind Mary and two children, Matilda and Archie.

Archie’s curtailed life leaves us with many gaps to fill. We know that as a young boy, he lived with his mother near the shores of Bosham, a fishing village on England’s south coast.

Around age nine, he was adopted into his Aunt Ellen’s family, and with them immigrated to Utah in 1888. With what must have been a fresh and frightening new start, Archie worked odd jobs for several years before landing at the Lincoln House at age 22. There he worked until his death.

Courtesy of UHQ editorial fellow Cathy Gilmore, Archie’s great granddaughter.

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