Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 36, Number 2, 1968

VOLUME 36 * NUMBER 2

/

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

BOARD OF STATE HISTORY Division of Department of Development Services j . GRANT IVERSON, Salt Lake City, 1971 President MILTON c. ABRAMS, Logan, 1969

Vice-President EVERETT L. COOLEY, Salt Lake City Secretary DEAN R. BRIMHALL, Fruita, 1969 MRS. JUANITA BROOKS, St. George, 1969

JACK GOODMAN, Salt Lake City, 1969 MRS. A. c. J E N S E N , Sandy, 1971 T H E R O N L U K E , PrOVO, 1 9 7 1

CLYDE L. MILLER, Secretary of State

Ex officio HOWARD c. PRICE, J R . , Price, 1971 MRS. ELIZABETH SKANCHY, Midvale, 1969

MRS. NAOMI WOOLLEY, Salt Lake City, 1971

ADMINISTRATION EVERETT L. COOLEY, Director

T. H . JACOBSEN, State Archivist, Archives F. T. J O H N S O N , Records Manager, Archives

J O H N JAMES, JR., Librarian MARGERY w. WARD, Associate Editor

IRIS SCOTT, Business Manager

The Utah State Historical Society is an organization devoted to the collection, preservation, and publication of Utah and related history. I t was organized by publicspirited Utahns in 1897 for this purpose. I n fulfillment of its objectives, the Society publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly, which is distributed to its members with payment of a $5.00 annual membership fee. T h e Society also maintains a specialized research library of books, pamphlets, photographs, periodicals, microfilms, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts. Many of these items have come to the library as gifts. Donations are encouraged, for only through such means can the Utah State Historical Society live up to its responsibility of preserving the record of Utah's past.

The primary purpose of the Quarterly is the publication of manuscripts, photographs, and documents which relate or give a new interpretation to Utah's unique story.

Contributions of writers are solicited for the consideration of the editor. However, the editor assumes no responsibility for the return of manuscripts unaccompanied by return postage. Manuscripts and material for publications should be sent to the editor.

The Utah State Historical Society does not assume responsibility for statements of fact or opinions expressed by contributors.

The Utah Historical Quarterly is entered as second-class postage, paid at Salt Lake City, Utah. Copyright 1968, Utah State Historical Society, 603 East South Temple Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84102.

SPRING,

1968 * VOLUME 36 ' NUMBER 2

HISTORICAL QUARTERLY Contents E T I E N N E P R O V O S T , M O U N T A I N MAN AND UTAH PIONEER

BY LEROY R. HAFEN -

99

CLARION, U T A H , J E W I S H COLONY IN "ZION"

BY EVERETT L. COOLEY

113

T H E UNUSUAL J U R I S D I C T I O N O F C O U N T Y PROBATE C O U R T S IN T H E T E R R I T O R Y OF UTAH

BY JAMES B. ALLEN

132

DR. J O H N M. BERNHISEL: M O R M O N ELDER IN CONGRESS

BY GWYNN W. BARRETT

143

"THOSE G O O D PEAS," T H E M O R G A N CANNING COMPANY IN S M I T H F I E L D , U T A H

BY RUTH WEST GREGORY

168

REVIEWS AND PUBLICATIONS

178

The Cover Painting titled "Catching Up," by Alfred Jacob Miller while with the W. D. Stewart expedition to the West in 1837. Etienne Provost, the rotund figure with his hands cupped to his mouth, is shouting to gather in the horses and "the men immediately rise and run towards a cloud of dust from which the horses are seen emerging, — these are being driven in by the horse-guards from their range, some 2 or 3 miles, and the men secure each their own by lariats trailing on the ground from their necks, extending some 15 feet, — thence they proceed to their pickets, where they are secured for the night."

To make the reproduction more suitable for the cover, it has been reversed.

T H E W A L T E R S ART GALLERY, B A L T I M O R E , MARYLAND

EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR

L. COOLEY Margery W. Ward

EVERETT

MORGAN, DALE L., AND ELEANOR T O W L E S HARRIS, eds., The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson: The West in 1834,

BY DOYCE B. NUNIS^ JR.

178

V E T T E R L I , R I C H A R D , The

By A Thread,

Constitution

BY RICHARD D. POLL

179

S M I T H , PAGE, As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History,

BY EARL POMEROY

181

LEWIS, MARVIN, ed., The Mining Frontier: Contemporary Accounts from the American West in the Nineteenth Century,

BOOKS REVIEWED

182

BY MURRAY M. MOLER

K A R O L E V I T Z , R O B E R T F., Doctors of the Old West: A Pictorial History of Medicine on the Frontier,

BY HERBERT Z. LUND

_

183

R O U C E K , J O S E P H S., The Teaching of History,

BY DELLO G. DAYTON

184

F L O R I N , LAMBERT, Western Ghost

BY OLIVE BURT

Towns,

_

186

H A M M O N D , GEORGE P., ed., Digging For Gold Without A Shovel: The Letters of Daniel Wadsworth Coit, from Mexico City to San Francisco, 1849-1851,

BY S. LYMAN TYLER

186

AMARAL, ANTHONY, Will James, the Gilt Edged Cowboy,

BY STANLEY R. DAVISON

187

POURADE, R I C H A R D F., ed., Ancient Hunters of the Far West,

BY C. MELVIN AIKENS

187

M c D E R M O T T , J O H N FRANCIS, ed., The Frontier Re-examined,

BY GERALD D. NASH

189

L O R D , C L I F F O R D L., and CARL UBBELOHDE, Clio's Servant: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1846-1954,

BY HARWOOD P. HINTON

189

i:SM[mW^

lllliilllli ''••!r;;;^;mm:smMMh. " ':rr:MMMM•^SMMi •MM v V : ' : m--m:' ':•:'• : : c.;3 : p-i : -;: : ':mmm+mmmm:mmm, : mmm+mm

•

•

•

•

:

•

.

•

:

:.

:.

..

j:::::::::::-:

PMEMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM^":\r '""' ""••" '^mm'"m!Wmmi:!m±m^mm^ [MMM MMM. MMMMMM.

M\-yMMMMMZMMMrM'M:M.

""""" ''' mMMmffMMMMm' • • • • : : • • . •

:

•

•

'

•

•

. . , . ; • . • . ; • . • . • . : , . • : • • • • •

.

.

:

.

.

,

.

.

%:M:! MM Mfm iMMMft

•-•:•::;:: m m s x m M: WMMM

••

••

•

: • : . " • .

MV • " '. M

^MMSMMSMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

•'

m~'.

•

.

' , '

-

'Mv3,,,:<y

• • • • • : - . ; • ' • •

: • ; '

:

.

' . • . • ; •

:

.

T H E W A L T E R S ART GALLERY, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Etienne Provost, Mountain Man and Utah Pioneer

BY L E R O Y R. HAFEN

w

settled in Utah Valley in the spring of 1849, they built "Fort Utah" on the stream already called Provo River.

Inasmuch as "Barney" Ward, an old mountain man, was with the pioneer settlers, it is likely that he told them the name of the stream. But whether he gave any information about the man so honored is doubtful. The early trapper and fur trader whose name the river bears was already a legendary character, even though it had been but twenty-five years since he suffered the tragedy that gave his name to the river. The General Assembly of the State of Deseret, on January 31, 1850, created Utah County and designated "Provo" as county seat — apparently the first use of this name for the town.

In the fur trade literature of the Rocky Mountains, much fugitive information has been found about the man. A summary of this may doubtless have interest for Utah and especially for the citizens of Provo.

Etienne Provost was so early and so persistently engaged in the fur trade of the Far West that in later years he was called "The M a n of the Mountains." x In literature referring to him, Provost's name is given many spellings, the most common being Provot, Proveau, and Provost.

Since he did not write, we are unaware of his preference; but the early French spelling is Provost, and the pronunciation was Provo. According to his birth certificate in Notre Dame, Montreal, he was born in Chambly, Quebec, in 1785.2 His parents were Albert and Marianne (Menard) Provost. 3 Of his early life we have no account. Provost first appears in the records of the fur trade as a member of the Chouteau-DeMun trading H E N T H E FIRST MORMONS

Dr. Hafen, presently professor of history at Brigham Young University, is a well-known author, coauthor, editor, and for thirty years Colorado State Historian.

'U.S., Congress, House, Joseph Nicollet, Report, 28th Cong., 2d Sess., 1844-1845, House Doc. 52, reprinted as "Nicollet's Account, 1839," in South Dakota Collections, X (1920), 113.

2 Roy M. Provost, Long Beach, California, in a letter to the author dated July 24, 1964, said he saw the certificate at Montreal.

3 Stella M. Drumm, "Etienne Provost," in the Dictionary of American Biography XV (New York, 1935), 250. ' N o photograph of Etienne Provost has ever been discovered, but Alfred Jacob Miller, as the official artist of the W. D. Stewart expedition to the West in 1837, painted two pictures in which Provost appears. In the painting on the preceeding page Provost is the rotund figure riding a mule at the head of the caravan. Entitled "Threatened Attack —• approach of a large body of Indians," Miller described this scene by saying "a cloud of dust soon divulging a piratical horde of wretches, painted without regard to harmony of color, coming down on us at top speed, — armed to the teeth, and when they reached us, they commenced riding around in a menacing manner."

Etienne Provost

101

venture to the Rocky Mountains in 1815-17. This was the initial large company that exploited the fur resources of the upper Arkansas and Platte rivers. After two years of trade and two efforts to get favorable cooperation from the Spaniards of New Mexico, the Americans were captured and taken to Santa Fe. They suffered confiscation of their furs and other property. After their release and return to Missouri, "Etienne Provott" and ten other men of the party made a sworn statement about their treatment in New Mexico, saying in part, "We remained in prison (some of us in irons) forty-eight days." 4 When Mexican independence from Spain was achieved in 1821, a number of Americans, including some previously imprisoned by the Spaniards, again turned their faces toward New Mexico. During the year 1822 four American parties of traders and trappers journeyed to Santa Fe, and during the winter of 1822-23 several men pushed westward and northwestward across the Continental Divide to trap western waters. 5 Etienne Provost, who had formed a partnership with one Leclerc (Francois?) and was in New Mexico in 1823 and perhaps earlier, was probably among these.6 By 1824 Provost was not only on Green River, but had pushed over the Wasatch Mountains into the Great Basin. There he suffered a tragedy that gave his name to the river near Utah Lake. Warren A. Ferris, a fur man in the mountains, gives some details of the affair in describing the Snake Indians and one of their chiefs.

There is one evil genius among them, called the "Bad Gocha," (mauvais gaucheâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;bad left-handed one) who fell in with a party of trappers, led by a well-known mountaineer, Mr. E. Proveau, on a stream flowing into the Big Lake that now bears his name, several years since.

He invited the whites to smoke the calumet of peace with him, but insisted that it was contrary to his medicine to have any metallic near while smoking. Proveau, knowing the superstitious whims of the Indians, did not hesitate to set aside his arms, and allow his men to follow his example; they then formed a circle by sitting indiscriminately in a ring, and commenced the ceremony; during which, at a preconcerted signal, the Indians fell 4 "Statement and proof in case of Chouteau and DeMun of their loss and treatment by the Spaniards," U.S., Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 1st Sess., 1817-1818, II, p. 1957-58. All of the eleven men signed their statements with an "X." In a supplemental statement Michael Carriere said he served two years and was paid $200.00 in wages. Presumably Provost received the same amount.

5 "Answers of Augustus Storrs to Queries Addressed to Him by the Hon. Thomas H. Benton," reprinted in A. B. Hulbert, ed., Southwest on the Turquoise Trail: The First Diaries on the Road to Santa Fe (Denver, 1933), 93.

6 See Benjamin O'Fallon's correspondence from Fort Atkinson, August 1, 1823, to the governor of New Mexico, in James W. Covington, "Correspondence Between Mexican Officials at Santa Fe and Officials in Missouri: 1823â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1825," The Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, XVI (October, 1959), 22-24. Provost had been to New Mexico and returned to the United States by August 1, 1823.

102

Utah Historical

Quarterly

upon them, and commenced the work of slaughter with their knives, which they had concealed under their robes and blankets. Proveau, a very athletic man, with difficulty extricated himself from them, and with three or four others, alike fortunate, succeeded in making his escape; the remainder of the party of fifteen were all massacred. 7

Ferris, on his map of the fur country, placed Provost's name on present Jordan River, which runs from Utah Lake to Great Salt Lake.

So one would assume that he meant to report the misfortune as taking place on the Jordan River of today. Kit Carson told his biographer about the Provost tragedy and said that it occurred on the river named for Provost. But he did not indicate whether he meant the present Provo River that flows into Utah Lake or the Jordan, which runs from it. In any case the Utah Lake vicinity would be the locality of the massacre.

William Gordon, in his "Report to the Secretary of War relative to the Fur Trade," dated at St. Louis, October 3, 1831, said that in 1824 "8 men were killed at one time by the Snakes on the waters of the Colorado who were in the employ of Provost & Lubro [Leclerc]." In the tabulation at the end of the document, the party is given as "Provost & LeClerc's Company," and the place of the tragedy as "Reta [Euta or Utah] Lake." 8 What appears as a likely explanation of this tragedy is given by British traders. Peter Skene Ogden, in a letter of July 10, 1825, wrote: . . . We were also informed by the Americans the cause of the Snakes not being so friendly towards us as formerly, and which I regret to state the Americans too justly attribute to us, last Summer Mr. Ross consented most probably with such villains he had to deal with, he could not prevent them to go and steal the Snakes horses in which they succeeded, 12 of Mr. Ross's party were then absent in quest of Beaver and were with a large Camp of Snakes who were treating them most kindly, but on hearing this they pillaged them of all their horses and Furs, and in the scuffle they killed a Snake chief, shortly after a party of 7 Americans and one of our deserters fall on the Snakes Camp, and the Snakes lost no time in killing them all this also has greatly irritated the Americans against us, and they would most willingly shoot us if they dared. 9 7 W. A. Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains: A Diary of Wanderings on the Sources of the Rivers Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado . . ., ed., Paul C. Phillips (Denver, 1940), 308-9.

8 U.S., Congress, Senate, William Gordon, "Report to the Secretary of War relative to the Fur Trade," 22d Cong., 1st Sess., 1831-1832, Senate Doc. 90, p. 29. The number killed in the massacre varies in different accounts. Gordon, says eight. Peter Skene Ogden in a letter of July 10, 1825, also says eight (Fredrick Merk, "Snake Country Expedition, 1824-25, An Episode of Fur Trade and Empire," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXI [June, 1934], 68) ; but in another place Ogden says nine (Dale L. Morgan, The West of William H. Ashley: The International Struggle for the Fur Trade of the Missouri, the Rocky Mountains, and the Columbia, with Explorations Beyond the Continental Divide . . . [Denver, 1964]). Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains, says four or five escaped of a party of fifteen. Kit Carson says all were killed but four, but he does not give the number in the party (DeWitt C. Peters, The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson . . . [New York, 1858], 246).

9 Merk, "Snake Country Expedition," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXI, 67-68.

Etienne Provost

Portion of a map of the published in Life in t h e River "Proveau's Fork." granted by the Old West the company.

103

Northwest Fur Country as drawn by Rocky M o u n t a i n s . Note that Ferris Permission to reproduce this portion Publishing Company.

Reproduction

Warren A. Ferris and names present Jordan of the Ferris map was rights are retained by

Etienne Provost has been credited with the discovery of Great Salt Lake. 10 If the attack on his party by the Snakes occurred on the Jordan River, as Ferris indicates, then Provost must certainly have seen the lake at least in the fall of 1824, if not before. James Bridger has often been given the honor of the discovery of the lake, but there is no contemporary record of this; and it is of doubtful authenticity. It is very likely that the Hudson's Bay Company trappers under Donald McKenzie and Michel Bourdon saw the lake while trapping the upper Snake River, Bear River, and as far east as Green River in the years 1818 to 1822.11 10

See the note written by W. M. Anderson in 1834 and published in J. H. Simpson, Report of Explorations Across the Great Basin of the Territory of Utah for a Direct Wagon-Route from Camp Floyd to Genoa, in Carson Valley, in 1859 (Washington, D . C , 1876), 17.

11 Alexander Ross, The Fur Hunters of the Far West, ed., Kenneth A. Spaulding (Norman, 1956), 135-39, 152-53, 207-8.

104

Utah Historical

Quarterly

After the massacre of most of his men, Provost led the remnant back over the Wasatch Mountains. On Green River, near the mouth of White River is a very large grove of sweet (round-leaf) cottonwoods, the twigs and bark of which provide excellent winter horse feed.12 While Provost and some of his men wintered here, arrangements were made for his partner Leclerc to bring up supplies from New Mexico. 13 In the spring Provost led a trapping party northward, and on May 23 came upon Peter Skene Ogden's company on the Weber River, some distance east of present Ogden, Utah. The Britisher recorded in his diary that "early in the day a party of 15 men Canadians & Spaniards headed by one Provost & Francois one of our deserters, arrived." 14 In the afternoon a party of Ashley's men led by Johnson Gardner, also appeared, and confronted Ogden with a demand that he leave this territory, which Gardner said belonged to the United States. Being south of the 42nd degree of north latitude, they were all interlopers upon Mexican domain, except perhaps Provost, who was trading from a New Mexico base and presumably had a Mexican license.

Provost returned to the Uinta country, probably to receive expected supplies. On his way there, with twelve men, he met W. H. Ashley on the Duchesne River, June 7. Ashley, who had boated down the Green River and had cached supplies near the mouth of the Uinta, now employed Provost to return to Green River and bring back the cached goods. This accomplished, the two co-leaders pushed on through the Wasatch Mountains and descended to the headwaters of Provo River. 15 Ashley crossed Kamas Prairie and descended Weber River, while Provost made a trip to the lake to trade with the Utes, 16 After rejoining Ashley on June 21, Provost appears to have continued with him to the gathering place on Henry's Fork of Green River.

Here was held the first rendezvous in the Rockies. Provost was present, and he and his men traded eighty-three beaver skins to Ashley for $207.50 and received in exchange coffee, tobacco, cloth, ribbons, etc.17 Whether or not Provost remained after the summer rendezvous of 1825 to continue trade in the mountains or returned to New Mexico 12

The author visited this place in 1962, now known as Chipeta's Grove.

Pegleg Smith said that in February of 1825 some twenty-five of Provost's men returned from the Green River to Taos. See "Sketches from the Life of Peg-leg Smith," Hutchings' California Magazine, V (1860-61), 319.

"David E. Miller, ed., "Peter Skene Ogden's Journal of His Expedition to Utah, 1825," Utah Historical Quarterly, XX (April, 1952), 181.

15 Morgan, West of William H. Ashley, 117.

16 Ashley recorded on June 22 that "Mr. Provo who went to the lake to trade with the Euteaw Indians returned last evening." Ibid., 117.

17 Ibid.. 119.

13

Etienne Provost

105

is not definitely known. His partnership with Leclerc presumably was terminated at this time. Jim Beckwourth says that Provost was at the summer rendezvous of 1826, but we are not certain of this. 18 In any event Provost was back in St. Louis in September 1826, and was doing business with B. Pratte & Company. The account books of this organization give details. "Etienne Provos" received cash payments, September 22 to 30, totaling $458.25, and for the same period sundries of shoes, cloth, etc., amounting to $286.38. The cash received October 2 through 14 totaled $283.55 (and the last item was entered as "paid in full"). 19 The goods received in October indicated the stocking of a trading venture, for it included twelve barrels of whiskey, one of brandy, and one of rum; four dozen pipes and 186 pounds of tobacco; blankets, muslin, flannel, and sundries to total $1,770.20 Whether these goods were for an independent venture or one for the company is not clear.

B. Pratte & Company apparently was courting Provost. B. Berthold, a member of the company, wrote to J. P. Cabanne from Fort Lookout on the upper Missouri, December 9, 1826: "I dare not advise anything about the project with Ashley. However, it seems to me that it would be well for us to assure ourselves of Provost, who is the soul of the hunters of the Mountains," 21 In 1827 there were debits against Provost on the books in February, July, and August. Provost may have been in the regular employ of the American Fur Company in 1828, when this company was endeavoring to break into the trade of the Rocky Mountains, where Smith, Jackson, and Sublette were dominant. Provost would be an effective agent. It was reported that in the fall of 1828, he was sent by Kenneth McKenzie to contact the trappers of the mountains and to try to bring them with their trade to Fort Floyd, later Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone.22 Apparently, Provost remained in the mountains during the winter working for himself, for in early July he was at Fort Tecumseh on the 18 T. D. Bonner, ed., The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (New York, 1931), 66. Beckwourth appears to mix events of the 1826 and 1828 rendezvous.

19 B. Pratte & Company Journal M, pp. 349 and 353. The author went through the various journals and ledgers of the American Fur Company in the library of the Missouri Historical Society at St. Louis in the summer of 1967. The volumes are all part of the same series, numbered by a capital letter of the alphabet, although some bear different company names. Hereafter, the volumes will be cited by the company name it carries, type of book, letter, and page.

20 B. Pratte & Company Journal M, p. 357 and Ledger H, p. 207.

21 Morgan, West of William H. Ashley, 307â&#x20AC;&#x201D;8. The original letter, in French, is in the Chouteau Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

22 Hiram Martin Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West . . . (2 vols., New York, 1935), I, 330.

106

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Missouri and was acting very independently. McKenzie wrote to Pierre Chouteau, Jr., from the post on July 7, 1829: Provost is just arrived from his spring h u n t , h e is b o u n d for St. Louis h e will not give m e five m i n u t e s to w r i t e you . . . . Provost goes d o w n to St. Louis in order to get e q u i p p e d & come u p immediately t o t r a d e w i t h t h e Crows & t r a p a t t h e same t i m e . . . . I forgot t o say t h a t Provost w o u l d n o t give m e his spring h u n t , b u t h e owes m e nothing. 2 3

After arriving in St. Louis in the summer of 1829, Provost formed a trading agreement with the American Fur Company. In the company's account book, an entry is entitled "Etienne Proveau's Advanture," and the sub-title is "For the Following Sead [said] E. Proveau's advanture by him self (E. Proveau) in half with the American Fur Company."

Three pages follow listing items and their prices, including nine horses ($47.00 to $110.00 each), thirty beaver traps, gunpowder, lead, pack saddles, rifles, tobacco, alcohol, etc. Provost provided $1,450.17. Among the goods furnished by the American Fur Company were three dozen scalping knives, three dozen Wilson butcher knives, eighteen bunches of blue glass beads, and ten three-point blankets. 24 At the time of this business transaction, Provost married a French woman, Marie Rose Salle, clit Lajoie, on August 14, 1829.25 The accounts show expenditures on his wedding day for a razor, shaving box, brush, and a pair of three-point green blankets; and the next day the purchase of a "lot of ground, $100," and for "making plane and plotting for house, $5.00." 26 Etienne soon left on his trading venture, leaving a credit with the company to be drawn upon by his wife as needed. 27 He reached the mouth of Kansas River in early October 28 and was in the Crow country during the succeeding winter. 29 The "Proveau Advanture" appears not to have turned out well.

Apparently, Provost was induced to give up the partnership and accept 23 Dale L. Morgan and Eleanor Towles Harris, eds., The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson: The West in 1834 (San Marino, 1967), 345.

24 American Fur Company Account Book P, pp. 129 542â&#x20AC;&#x201D;44 under dates of August 13â&#x20AC;&#x201D;15 1829.

25 Drumm, "Etienne Provost," Dictionary of American Biography, XV, 250.

28 American Fur Company Account Book P, p. 544.

27 The books show cash paid "to his lady" as follows: August 29, 1829, $50.00; December 12, $25.00; January 28, 1830, $22.00; April 6, $50.00; April 10, $47.00; June 8, $25.00; July 13, $25.00; August 9, $50.00; and August 23, $25.00 (American Fur Company Account Book P, p. 544). Periodic amounts were given to her from September 13, 1830, to July 30, 1831, totaling $175.00 (American Fur Company Account Book R, p. 344).

28 American Fur Company Account Book P, p. 542.

29 McKenzie letter, May 5, 1830, in Chouteau-Papin Collection, Missouri Historical Society.

Etienne Provost

107

employment with the American Fur Company's Upper Missouri outfit, receiving $605.59 for his share of the joint project. 30 In January 1831 Provost carried dispatches from Kenneth McKenzie at Fort Union to Fort Tecumseh. The next month he set out with horses and goods to support Henry Vanderburgh on Powder River. 31 His service was highly valued, for while the usual trader was given $200.00 per year, Provost's salary was $1,000 for the first and second years and $1,400 for the third and fourth years,32 In the summer of 1832, Lucien Fontenelle and Provost led a "Mountain Expedition" of some 50 men and 150 horses from Fort Union to supply the company's trappers under Vanderburgh. T h e train got a late start (June 19) and did not reach Vanderburgh at Pierre's Hole, so he moved over to Green River and there met the Fontenelle and Provost pack train on August 8. 33 After delivering the goods, Provost returned with the furs in September to the Missouri River and then continued with them down to St. Louis. Here, on June 5, 1833, he was advanced $465.46 from the Upper Missouri outfit.34 Then he went back up the river to Cabanne's post, north of Bellevue, where he was met and described by the famous steamboat captain, Joseph LaBarge. LaBarge found that veteran mountaineer Etienne Provost, who at that time probably knew the western country better than any other living man. H e had just come in for the purpose of guiding Fontenelle and Drips, partners in the American Fur Company mountain service, and owners of the trading post at Bellevue, to the Bayou Salade (South Park, Colorado), where they intended to spend the winter trapping beaver. 35

The party did not go to South Park, but to the mountains and the rendezvous on Green River. Fontenelle remained with the trappers, and Provost brought the furs to the Missouri River, arriving at Fort Pierre on August 29. He then continued on to St. Louis. 36 For his year's service, ending in the fall of 1833, he was paid $1,400.37 Provost's accounts from October 10, 1833, to February 20, 1834, 30

American Fur Company Account Book T, p. 381, under date of October 10, 1830.

"Records of Fort Tecumseh, Upper Missouri near the mouth of Teton River," South Dakota Historical Collections, IX (1918), 147-49.

32 Upper Missouri Outfit Book T, p. 381 and Book W, p. 244.

33 Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains, 150, 156, 158.

34 Upper Missouri Outfit Book V, p. 142. His accounts during the preceding winter are also in Account Book V, pp. 41, 48, 50.

35 Hiram Martin Chittenden, History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River: Life and Adventures of Joseph La Barge (2 vols., New York, 1903), I, 38â&#x20AC;&#x201D;39.

36 Morgan and Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 347.

37 Upper Missouri Outfit Book W, p. 244.

31

108

Utah Historical

Quarterly

amounted to $1,176.34.38 From the accounts it appears that he was converting his home into a lodging house. 39 On his next venture Provost took the route, new to the American Fur Company, by way of the Little Blue and Platte rivers. On the same trail and ahead of Provost, went the companies of William Sublette and Nathaniel Wyeth. W. H. Anderson, accompanying Sublette, mentioned in his diary on May 6 passing Provost and also Cerre (with supplies for Bonneville) .40 A report that Provost was attacked on the way by Pawnees was denied; instead, he reached the rendezvous at Ham's Fork safely, and in mid-July set out on his return. 41 From Bellevue, Lucien Fontenelle sent the furs (5,309 beaver and some other skins) down river to St. Louis and wrote on September 17, 1834, "I hardly think it necessary to have them [the furs] insured, although the river is very low, but the boat will be strong, and will have a crew formed of the very best kind of voyageurs under the eyes of Mr. Cabanne, and the superintendence of Etienne Provost." 42 The American Fur Company accounts show the amount due Etienne Provost on November 26, 1834, as $611.15. A subsequent entry lists $900.00 due him for services in 1835.43 In 1835 Provost traveled to Fort Lucien (Laramie) and returned to St. Louis in the winter. On January 31, 1836, W. L. Sublette wrote to Robert Campbell, "Since I came to St. Louis I have been informed that the two Prevoes has got in last evening and that they left Fontenell at St. Charles . . . . Report says Fontinell intends quiting the Company and Joining Prevo and Some Others and gouing Out that he has purchases Some goods in Liberty . . . ." 44 On February 9, 1836, Sublette wrote again: "The two Prevoes left him [Fontenelle] at Liberty, sending whiskey up to the Black Snake hills," 45 In the spring or summer of 1836, Provost, accompanied by Toussaint Racine, made a trip to "Fort Lucien." He was paid $225.00 for his 38

Ibid., Book U , p . 280.

M o r g a n a n d Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 347. Provost is listed as a tavern keeper in U p p e r Missouri Outfit Account Book X , p p . 56â&#x20AC;&#x201D;58, w i t h charges for such items as coffee, sugar, tobacco, a barrel of rice, one of r u m , a n d five barrels of whiskey ( $ 4 8 . 8 8 ) . T h e n in M a r c h 1834 there is a four-page "Invoice of Mdze sent to Lucien Fontelle in charge of Etienne Proveau to be sold in the Rocky M o u n t a i n s for the account a n d risk of the U . M . O . , 1834." A m o n g the items are blankets, coats, beads, rifles, shot, etc., to a total of $7,256.06 ( U p p e r Missouri Outfit Book Y, p p . 6 - 9 ) .

40 M o r g a n a n d Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 73.

41 Missouri Republican (St. L o u i s ) , August 26, 1834.

12 Chittenden, American Fur Trade, I, 308.

43 U p p e r Missouri Outfit Book X , p . 58.

44 Sublette letter to Robert Campbell, J a n u a r y 3 1 , 1836, in Missouri Historical Society.

T h e second Provost m a y have been Etienne's brother or nephew.

45 Sublette letter to R o b e r t Campbell, February 9, 1836, in Missouri Historical Society.

Photocopy in possession of author.

39

Etienne Provost

109

service; Racine received $ 150.00.46 They may have been escorting Joshua Pilcher, who, acting for the American Fur Company, went to Fort Laramie and the summer rendezvous and purchased the fort from Fitzpatrick and Fontenelle. 47 On July 20, 1836, Provost's account totaled $1,265.81, less $228.97 for land he purchased. 48 During the winter of 1836-37, Provost made a fifty-one-day trip to Council Bluffs, for which he was paid $100.00 on March 21, 1837. During his absence his wife received $80.00 from the company. 49 With the caravan taking trade goods to the summer rendezvous of 1837, Provost traveled as assistant to Captain Thomas Fitzpatrick. Also in the company was the famous Scotsman William D. Stewart and his personal party, including the capable artist Alfred Jacob Miller. No diary of the trip has come to light, but the numerous Miller paintings and accompanying written explanations by the artist give an important record of the journey. There were about thirty wagons and carts in the train.

Two of the paintings give pictures of Provost in his fifty-second year.

One shows the trapper train greeting a delegation of Indians. In the front line on his white horse proudly rode Stewart, and beside him are three other men. One of the men was plump "Monsieur Proveau, a subleader, with a corpus round as a porpoise," sitting on his mule. In a second painting Provost is shown, fat and round, standing beside his tent with hands cupped to his mouth giving a loud call to gather in the horses.50 In his fictionalized book Edward Warren, Stewart described "Old Provost the burly Bacchus" as "a large heavy man, with a ruddy face, bearing more the appearance of a mate of a French merchantman than the scourer of the dusty plains." 51 Provost came back from the rendezvous in late summer and was paid $600.00 for his season's work. In December he left St. Louis for the posts in the Council Bluffs region.52 When he returned to St. Louis on February 24, 1838, he brought news of the terrible smallpox plague that had wrought such havoc among the tribes on the upper Missouri. 53 40

Upper Missouri Outfit Book X, pp. 210, 383.

Pilcher reports progress in letter written June 21 at Fort Lucien, located in ChouteauPapin Collection, Missouri Historical Society. See also LeRoy R. Hafen, ed., The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West . . . (5 vols., Glendale, 1965-1966), I, 155.

48 Upper Missouri Outfit Book X, p. 257.

49 Ibid., 58.

50 Marvin Chauncey Ross, The West of Alfred Jacob Miller (1837) . . . (Norman, 1951), plates 76 and 197, with accompanying written descriptions.

51 Morgan and Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 348.

52 Ibid., 348.

53 J. A. Hamilton letter, February 25, 1838, in Chouteau-Papin Collection, Missouri Historical Society.

47

MMM m-m M,i: "-MMM'.- ..

•°MMM?.VMM'';\

'

Audubon and His Journals, BY MARIA R. AUDUBON

Etienne Provost guided James J. Audubon, the great naturalist, when he journeyed to the West gathering and sketching specimens for his collections. This is an Audubon sketch of one of the camps of the expedition.

Provost appears to have gone to the rendezvous of 1838, for which service he was paid $450.00; and in December of that year he was advanced $40.00 "for traveling expenses to Arkansas." 54 Jean N. Nicollet, with young John C. Fremont as second in command, explored and mapped the country between the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 1839. In their party that set out from St. Louis on April 4 went Etienne Provost. He was highly esteemed by the French scientist, who wrote in his report: I had brought up [to Fort Pierre, present South Dakota] with me from St. Louis only five men who for my purposes were certainly worth ten.

Four of them had proved themselves by numerous journeys across the prairies, as well as voyages over the Rocky Mountains. One of them was Etienne Provost, known as "L'homme des montagnes," •— man of the mountains. I may remark here that these western voyageurs are distinguished from the same set of men who do service in the northern lakes by their never singing; and although apparently sullen and discontented, are most faithful, cautious and courageous in the midst of all dangers. 55

Fremont's appraisal was almost identical. 56 Provost for his service.

The business accounts show that Provost was in in February, August, and November of 1840. This partnership with Clement Lambert. "Proveau and Keeper" did business during the winter of 1840-41. 57 1842 his name appears in many of the fur company S1

Morgan and Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 349.

"Nicollet's Account," South Dakota Collections, X, 112-13.

56 Ibid., 77.

57 Morgan and Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 349.

55

was paid $750.00 St. Louis, at least year he formed a Lambert, Tavern During 1841 and business accounts,

Etienne Provost

111

and from April to September of 1842 he worked for the Upper Missouri outfit at $50.00 per month. 58 Provost gave important assistance to James J. Audubon when the great naturalist ascended the Missouri River and gathered specimens for his collections and his famous drawings. Provost was paid $50.00 per month from June 13 to October 19, 1843. 59 Edward Harris, who accompanied Audubon and kept a good journal of the expedition, mentions Provost frequently. O n June 24, he wrote, Bell w e n t o u t w i t h Provost before breakfast to try a n d shoot a D o e in t h e p o i n t of t h e w o o d s a b o v e t h e F o r t by i m i t a t i n g t h e cry of a F a w n o n a n i n s t r u m e n t m a d e by Provost yesterday, h e did n o t succeed. After breakfast . . . I took Provost's call w i t h m e a n d tried it in a small island of t i m b e r . . . a t t h e first call a D o e c a m e w i t h i n 30 feet of m e .

J u n e 29. W e n t o u t w i t h Provost a n d killed t w o does by using his call to b r i n g t h e a n i m a l s close . . . .

J u l y 8 t h S q u i r e killed a deer, using Provost's call. 6 0

The party left Fort Union August 16 and returned down the river.

At St. Charles, on the bend of the river a little above St. Louis, Provost became "extremely drunk," left the party, and went by land to St. Louis. 61 Provost went up the Missouri River again in 1844 and was at Fort Union in October of that year. A year later his arrival at Fort Pierre on November 2, 1845, was noted. 62 His last voyage up river appears to have occurred in 1848 on a steamboat commanded by Joseph LaBarge. 63 Even though sixty-three years of age, Provost still commanded respect and exercised authority among both whites and Indians. Captain LaBarge states that on June 9 the Yankton Sioux were preventing the men from loading wood on the steamboat.

H e [Provost] t h e n w e n t o u t himself o n t o t h e b a n k w h e r e t h e I n d i a n s were, a n d said, " N o w , m e n , c o m e o u t h e r e a n d get this w o o d . " T h e y c a m e a n d l o a d e d u p . " N o w g o o n b o a r d , " h e said, a n d they w e n t entirely u n m o l e s t e d . Provost w e n t last, a n d before d e s c e n d i n g t h e b a n k , t u r n e d t o w a r d t h e I n d i a n s a n d asked t h e m : " W h y d o n ' t you stop t h e m ? A r e you afraid of me?" T h e t r u t h is they w e r e afraid of h i m . . . a n d u n d e r stood t h a t h e w o u l d s t a n d n o foolishness. 6 4 58

Ibid.

P. Chouteau Jr. & Company, Ledger GG, p. 348.

60 John Francis McDermott, ed., Up the Missouri with Audubon: The Journal of Edward Harris (Norman, 1951), 113-14, 119-20. For other incidents see pp. 27, 98, 103, 124, 137, 140, 165, 169, 172-73, and 176. ei Ibid,, 189.

62 "The Fort Pierre Letter Book," South Dakota Historical Collections, I X (1918), 211.

63 Morgan and Harris, Rocky Mountain Journals, 350.

04 Chittenden, Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri, I, 180.

59

112

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Chittenden tells of Provost's skill in managing recruits taken up the Missouri for service with the fur company.

It was a favorite pastime with that veteran mountaineer, Etienne Provost, who was often sent up in charge of recruits, to compel an early settlement which would determine all blustering and quarreling. H e would form a ring on the forecastle and compel every braggart to' make good his claims before the assembled passengers and crew. One after another would succumb, until one man would emerge from the contest victorious over all the others. He would then be awarded the championship, and receive a red belt in token thereof.65

Provost died in St. Louis on July 3, 1850.69 His funeral service was held in the St. Louis Cathedral standing west of the new, impressive, 630foot Gateway Arch in the Jefferson Memorial to Westward Expansion.

Provost's wife and a grown daughter survived him. His estate papers are preserved in the Probate Court Records at St. Louis, where the author examined them in July of 1967. A purported will of April 1, 1839, was denied by the widow and was not accepted by Probate Judge Peter Ferguson. "Mary Provot," the widow and her daughter Mary were the only heirs. An inventory of the estate and the final expenses are itemized.

The real estate and personal property included the home at Second and Lombard streets, St. Louis; some pieces of land in Lee County, Iowa; and lots in Keokuk, Iowa, and Nashville, Tennessee. Cash on hand was $102.70 and household furniture was appraised at $78.95. 67 Etienne Provost was indeed a legendary character in his own lifetime. When the Mormons founded a town beside Provo River in 1849 and named it Provo, they were probably unaware that the fabled character they honored was still alive in St. Louis.

65

Ibid., 128.

The notice in the Missouri Republican of July 4 said: "Died. Yesterday afternoon, about 4 o'clock Mr. Etienne Provot, an old resident of this

66

city.

"The friends and acquaintances of the family are invited to attend his funeral, This afternoon, at 4 o'clock, from his late residence on the corner of Lombard and Second streets, to the Cathedral burial ground."

67 Among the furniture and household items listed were: twelve chairs, $12.00; one rocking chair, $2.00; one bureau, $8.00; one spitton, 10 cents; one setee, $1.00; one clock, $8.00; one glass globe, 50 cents; one picture of President of the United States, 10 cents. The funeral expenses included: "Extra fine finished velvet coffin with handles and overcase delivered, $25; for Hears [hearse] and 5 carriages, $17.50; 6 pairs gloves and 2 pieces of crepe, $7; 16 W Spurm Candles at 45 cents, $7.20; burial service St. Louis Cathedral, $6; attendant clergyman to cemetery, $3."

"Final Medicine" from the druggist: "mustard, 10 0, Flaxseed 5 ÂŁ, Black tea, 5 f, rice 5ÂŁ, pins, 5<f, ginger 10 0, oil 5 f. Laudanem, 10 0, whiskey, 10 <2, vinegar 5 0, Brandy, 10 #, mustard 10 i\ total $1.00."

CLARION. UTAH

t

Jewish Colony in wZion"

BY EVERETT L. COOLEY

c<

did not end in 1877 with the death of the great colonizer, Brigham Young; nor did it end with the closing of the frontier in 1890. It is worth noting, however, that in their attempts to secure the main approaches to Mormon Country, the Mormons bypassed some good land. The settlement of this â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the filling in of the by-passed areas â&#x20AC;&#x201D; fell to later generations not normally classified as pioneers. And yet among the later colonists, there were some who were in every sense of the word, pioneers looking for their Zion in Utah. Such in fact was the small colony of Jews who came to Utah in 1911 under the leadership of Benjamin Brown, a modern Moses in the eyes of his contemporaries. x Although the modern colonists came by railroad instead of covered wagon, to an area surrounded by friendly Mormons instead of hostile Indians, the Jewish pioneers who attempted to establish a home at Clarion, Sanpete County, had to make personal sacrifices and adjustments in some ways comparable to the pioneers of earlier times. They had to break virgin soil to the plow; they were strangers in a foreign land; and they spoke a strange language. The colonists found themselves redesignated "Gentiles" by the Mormons, a term heretofore reserved for those not of their faith.2 'OLONIZATION IN U T A H

P

in the state's history of public assistance to encourage migration to Utah. The L.D.S. Perpetual Emigrating Fund, church teams, and detailed church supervision were all part of the early migration and settlement. After statehood the assistance offered new colonists came in the form of tax-supported irrigation projects, stays of foreclosure on lands taken up, and hired experts to instruct colonists in up-to-date agricultural and domestic methods.

However, long before the Clarion colonists were on the scene, the state was engaged in various schemes to attract settlers to locate within her borders.

RECEDENTS ABOUND

Dr. Cooley is director of the Utah State Historical Society.

The photograph of Benjamin Brown used in this article was furnished by his daughter, Mrs. Lillian B. Vogel. The photographs of Clarion, Utah, were furnished by the author.

1 Letter of Conrad Frischknecht to author, October 3, 1960. Mr. Frischknecht is a Gunnison resident who purchased a portion of the Clarion Colony land when the project was abandoned.

He is still farming the land.

2 Barbara Vogel, "Clarion's Call" (unpublished ms, Utah State Historical Society). This study by Mrs. Vogel (Van Nuys, California), granddaughter-in-law of Benjamin Brown, gives a good picture of the attitudes and feelings of the colonists. It is based on personal interviews with several former Clarion colonists who now reside in the Los Angeles area.

Clarion, Utah

115

Near the turn of the century, there was a veritable rash of expositions all over the country â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Louisiana Purchase Centennial in St. Louis, 1904; Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, 1905; AlaskaYukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, 1909; Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, 1915; and the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, also in 1915. Utah participated in all of these expositions by appointing commissions and making appropriations for exhibits varying in degree from a collection of mineral and agricultural products at Portland to the construction of a Utah Building in San Francisco. The money appropriated varied from $30,000 for Portland to $85,000 for the expositions at San Francisco and San Diego.

The object of Utah's participation was to draw settlers for both farms and industry. This was to be achieved through suitable displays of the products of the state's fields, orchards, mines, and factories.

In addition to the official displays of products, relief maps, illustrations, and literature, various business concerns supplied numerous circulars, brochures, and other enticements to attract attention to Utah.

Typical of these were the brochures of a land company in Millard County showing thriving orchards and raspberry patches and alfalfa growing as high as a man's chest, all producing record crops in the area of Lyndyll and Oak City. Similar circulars were distributed by an irrigation and land company on the Bear River near Corinne and land promoters in other parts of the state.

Furthermore, in 1911 the old Utah State Bureau of Statistics, reorganized as the Bureau of Immigration, Labor and Statistics, was charged with the responsibility of gathering important data on Utah's resources and disseminating such information to prospective immigrants to the state.

With such large-scale advertising focused on the state, it is not surprising that a group of Jews in New York and Philadelphia should consider Utah as a possible colonizing site.

The specific site selected by the Jews was located in Sevier Valley, Sanpete County, three miles west and north of Axtell and seven miles south and west of Gunnison. In all some 6,085 acres of land were taken up â&#x20AC;&#x201D; extending five miles north and south along the Sevier River and approximately three miles in width. The area was state land, administered by the Utah State Board of Land Commissioners, In order to make the lands more valuable, the Utah Land Board in cooperation with the office of the Utah State Engineer purchased lands south of Marysvale, Piute County, where they constructed a dam to

116

Utah Historical

Quarterly

impound the waters of the Sevier River. The waters of the reservoir were intended to irrigate some 35,000 acres of state and private land.

To bring the water onto the land, a dam was constructed on the Sevier River at Joseph that directed a portion of the river into the Sevier Valley Canal, which in turn carried the water the first twenty miles to the vicinity of Richfield. From that point on the Land Board constructed a thirty-four-mile extension of the canal northward into Sanpete County. 3 While the land falling under the canal was appraised at figures varying from $3.00 to $25.00 per acre, the state sold over 6,000 acres to the Clarion colonists for $11.20 per acre with an additional charge of $35.00 per share of water in the Piute or State Canal. 4 Title to the land and water was to remain with the state until final payment was made.

Precisely what drew the Jewish Colony to Sanpete County is difficult to determine. Utah was not the only state where attempts were made to found colonies. An article in The American Israelite of August 24, 1911, states: R a b b i A. R. Levy of Chicago, secretary a n d founder of t h e Jewish Agriculturalists' Aid S o c i e t y 5 of t h a t city, arrived in Salt L a k e City, ( U t a h ) , last week from a n official trip of investigation t h r o u g h o u t t h e northwest. T h e work of t h e society is t o p r o c u r e f a r m land a n d bring t h e Jewish people from t h e congested districts in t h e large eastern cities t o form colonies. A large n u m b e r of families h a v e been colonized in W y o m i n g a n d N o r t h D a k o t a with t h e most satisfactory results. R a b b i Levy leaves t o m o r r o w m o r n i n g , b u t will look i n t o t h e opportunities for t h e work in Utah.

I t is t h e contention of t h e Jewish organization t h a t their people w e r e originally farmers of t h e first water, b u t w e r e driven to commercial business by o u t e r forces, a n d it is t h e purpose of t h e society to b r i n g t h e p o o r J e w back to t h e farm. R a b b i Levy asserts t h a t t h e J e w will become a great factor in this kind of activity a n d will p r o v e even m o r e interested in it t h a n in t h e needle industry a n d clothes m a n u f a c t u r i n g , t h e Jews' two leading industries in America. G r e a t h e a d w a y has been m a d e in t h e work a n d over 500 families h a v e been h o m e s t e a d e d in t h e western states. R a b b i Levy, w h o was in Salt L a k e twenty years ago, says t h e g r o w t h a n d d e v e l o p m e n t is incredulous. " T h e state," h e says, "offers excellent opportunities for t h e extension of t h e work, a n d Jewish families will soon b e located w i t h i n its b o u n d a r i e s on small acreages."

8 The cost of the Piute State Reservoir (land and dam) was $790,000. The dam was ninety-five feet high with a capacity of 93,000 acre-feet of water. The cost to the state for the enlargement of the old canal and the extension along the west side of the Sevier Valley was $435,000.

4 State of Utah, Land Board, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Annual Reports of the State Board of Land Commissioners of the State of Utah for the Year Ending November 30, 1913 and for the Year Ending November 30, 1914 (Salt Lake City, 1915), 13.

5 The full name was the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society.

Clarion, Utah

117

This does not give the earliest indication of Jewish interest in Utah, but rather an indication that colonization was being carried on in other states at approximately the same period and for the same purpose. 6 The purpose of Jewish colonization is best set forth in a letter addressed to Governor William Spry by the leader of the Clarion Colony, Benjamin Brown.7 I wish, my dear Governor, I would have the power of expression to bring out in a consize form what I see in the altimate outcome of the success of our undertaking.

Our plant Clarion will certainly be the seed for one of the greatest causes not only for our Jewish people but as an exa[m]ple what could be accomplished with honest motive, sincerity and purpose in this great state of Utah.

T o me personally, as one belonging to a "peculiar" race which caused so much comment on itself of the entire world and which was distined so much to effect as well as being effected Benjamin Brown at age by the history of the world. thirty when he served as leader This seemingly little work we of the Clarion Colony. carry on at Clarion now, is of greater importance than some people presume.

I shall just mention some of the scores of striking fitures: Six million of our people who live and have lived for hundreds of years in a country which has the nerve to call itself "Christian," was trying to make believe the world that the Jew is only fit to be a petty trader, that he does not take a citizens interest in the land he lives, that he is not fit 6

See also The American Jewish Archives, VIII (October, 1956), 126, and Wilbur S. Shepperson, Retreat to Nevada: A Socialist Colony of World War I (Reno, 1966), 41-43.

7 Benjamin Brown to Governor William Spry, May 28, 1914, State of Utah, Governors' Papers (William Spry [1909-1917]), in the Utah State Archives, State Capitol, Salt Lake City.

118

Utah Historical

Quarterly

as a producer etc. . . . and the little work that is carried on at Clarion now is just going to be a living demonstration against the false and ironeous charges made against us. And think, my dear Governor, of the gratitude I feel to you when I find by your actions that you feel and so thoughrolly sympotise with our couse . . . .

The Clarion Colony had its beginning at a meeting in Philadelphia on January 10, 1910. At that meeting 150 Jews (95 from New York and 55 from Philadelphia) expressed their interest in taking up agricultural pursuits, and began to make plans by organizing the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association. The correspondence of the group indicates that the Association was incorporated under the laws of Delaware with B. Brown, president; L. A. Flax, vice-president and custodian; and J. Herbst, C.E., secretary.

Of these men, Benjamin Brown was to become the guiding force of the Colony, but other men of importance were Joseph Miller and Benjamin Fruckerman, graduates of the Baron de Hirsch, National Farm School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 8 Aside from Brown and the two graduates of the Farm School, who were also members of the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association, there existed another close tie between the officers of the Association and the Farm School. Joseph Krauskopf, president of the school and Rabbi Isaac Landman of the executive board, served as directors of the newly organized Colonial Association.9 The plans of the Association called for an initial settlement of some two hundred families in a colony in Utah with an eventual expansion to one thousand families. To effect this, all three groups â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Farm School, the Jewish Agricultural Aid Society, and the Colonial Association â&#x20AC;&#x201D; cooperated in contacting prominent Jews in the West to select a suitable location for a farm colony. One of these men contacted was the mining man and financier, Samuel Newhouse, of Salt Lake City. On behalf of the Association, Newhouse approached Governor William Spry, who responded with the following letter. 10 8 Benjamin Brown attended the Baron de Hirsch Farm School. See also Rabbi Charles J. Freund, "Significance of the Jewish Farm Colony," The Improvement Era, XVI (January, 1913), 249. Rabbi Freund claimed Brown was a graduate of the Pennsylvania Agricultural College.

9 Exactly how the Farm School and the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association tied in with the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, which originally investigated the possibility of colonizing in Utah, is difficult to determine. They apparently had similar objectives, but did not always seem to demonstrate a high degree of cooperation. In fact, during the second year of the Colony, the Aid Society was secretly working against it. See correspondence in Governors' Papers (Spry).

10 Governor William Spry to Isaac Landman, April 26, 1911, Governors' Papers (Spry).

Clarion, Utah

119

April 26, 1911 Mr. Isaac Landman National Farm School, Philadelphia, Pa. Dear Sir: It has come to my attention that you have made inquiry of Colonel Samuel Newhouse of this city as to fiscal and other conditions in the State of U t a h : the information being sought with the view of ascertaining a desirable section for locating some two hundred Jewish families in the West.

I am deeply interested in the subject matter of the communication above referred to, and it is this interest that leads me to address this letter to you.

Detailed information as to soil, crops, climate, etc., will doubtless reach you through other sources, but I desire to impress upon you, in a general way, the attractive nature of Utah as a section for colonization and home-building.

During recent years it has been my pleasure to visit a great many sections of the United States. I have made careful inquiry as to the resources and business conditions of the states which I have visited. From the observations I have made I am free to say that the State of Utah today offers greater undeveloped opportunities than any other State in the Union. While this may be regarded as a broad statement, we have the resources, in almost limitless variety, to verify the assertion.

Statements to the contrary notwithstanding, investigation will disclose the fact that the people of Utah are broadminded, aggressive, intelligent, loyal Americans, who are deeply interested in the development and upbuilding of their State and the west. They know how to' extend the helping hand to those who are building homes and rearing families. The spirit of pioneering, in its broadest sense, is with the people of this State. In civic affairs Utah is noted for its sane, liberal legislative enactments. Capital and energy invested in Utah are alike safeguarded by wise laws.

We have resources, we have opportunities, we need settlers and investments, and it is my pleasure to extend to you, on behalf of the State of Utah, a most cordial invitation to investigate the State, its resources, its people, and its prospects, feeling sure that such investigation will result in locating your colony in Utah.

Utah will welcome your people to its borders, Cordially, / s / William Spry Governor

In due time Benjamin Brown and J. Herbst, the civil engineer, came to Utah to examine available land. They were cordially received by Samuel Newhouse, George Auerbach, and others. Governor Spry gave a dinner in their honor at which representatives of Utah's State Land Board and Salt Lake City's Commercial Club were in attendance.

Apparently, what Brown and Herbst saw and heard impressed them; for upon their return to Philadelphia, Benjamin Brown wrote to Governor

120

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Spry that the Association was definitely interested in securing state lands under the Piute Reservoir Project in Sanpete County, and that he (Brown) was returning to Utah to "close the deal." " In August of 1911, 6,085 acres of state land were auctioned to the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association on the following terms: Land was sold at an average $11.20 per acre, with one-tenth of the purchase price required as a down payment, and the balance to be paid over a ten-year period with an interest charge of five per cent. The down payment of $6,815.20 was raised by the members who were required to invest $350.00 each in the Association. For this amount the members were entitled to be placed on the eligible list for the Utah land. Many of the members of the Association were poor people, recent immigrants from Russian who had to borrow the initial $350.00 entrance fee.12 They were, furthermore, ill-suited to the type of agriculture they were to encounter under irrigation. One of the graduates of the Farm School claimed he had to unlearn all the agriculture he had been taught, since his training was concerned with farming on small tracts under less arid conditions. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest handicaps the Colony had to overcome was the almost total lack of farming knowledge or experience among the members.

The records of the Utah State Land Board contain the applications of 152 Jews for title to land and water under the Piute Reservoir Project.

The "Private Sales Files" is a most rewarding source of information on each applicant. If an alien, the applicant had to file a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen. The Declaration gives place of birth and residence, date of birth, and occupation. 13 From this source we learn that Hyman Dinerstein was an "operator" (factory worker), residing at 77 Second Avenue, New York, who emigrated to the United States on the vessel New York from Vilna, Russia, and arrived in New York on July 24, 1904. Other Declarations give information on Jeremiah Andrews, a laundryman from Minsk, Russia; Boris Sxraly, a tailor from Tirospol, Russia; Morris Weissenberg, an artist from Jitomir, Russia; Leon Sandratzky, a machinist from Odessa, Russia; Sam Levitsky, a furrier from Kiev, Russia; Harry Brazin, a mirror 11 Letters of Benjamin Brown to Governor William Spry, June 8 and June 28, 1911, Governors' Papers (Spry).

12 Colonists had to be residents of the United States at least two years before they were eligible to become a member in the Association. See Freund, "Jewish Farm Colony," Improvement Era, XVI, 107. The method of selecting who should proceed to Utah to take up land was by drawing names from a hat. Vogel, "Clarion's Call."

13 Utah State, Land Board, "Private Sales File," Numbers 2986-3000 (Utah State Capitol).

Clarion, Utah

121

maker from Kremcnchuk, Russia; and so on. Other trades represented were bricklayer, civil engineer, laborer, trimming dealer, picture frame maker, cabinet maker, machinist, druggist, carpenter, weaver, electrician, bookbinder, railroad conductor, cutter, student, and one honest-togoodness f a r m e r â&#x20AC;&#x201D; H a r r y Tucker, twenty-six years of age, from Walinsky, Russia. For the most part the men were in their twenties and early thirties, physically in the prime of their lives.

Not all of the Association members moved to Utah, but within a month of the purchase of the land in August 1911, twelve pioneers were sent to Clarion to prepare for the later and larger migration. 14 Although outfitted with the best equipment, they lived in tents. Crops they planted and harvested were owned by the Association, and the workers themselves were paid a $15.00 weekly wage until such time as the individual colonist moved onto his forty acres of land to be tilled as he chose. But in the beginning it was a cooperative effort â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all produce going into a common storehouse. By spring planting time in 1912, 1,500 acres had been cleared, plowed, and planted to wheat, oats, and alfalfa.

Meanwhile on November 11, 1911, Benjamin Brown reorganized the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association under Utah laws, with a capitalization of $30,000 and Gunnison as the principal place of business.15 T h e stockholders, twelve in number, were the recent arrivals from the East. The officers and directors were identical with the stockholders, with Benjamin Brown listed as president and director.

Of special interest to show the breadth and scope of the Association is Article I V of the Articles of Incorporation.

T h e objectives and purposes of this corporation shall be: T o organize, found, establish, locate and encourage a Colony, in the County of San Pete, State of Utah, and in other counties in the State of Utah, or in other States and Territories of the United States, and other countries outside of the United States; and for the purpose of encouraging, aiding, assisting and providing for such colonies to plant, grow and cultivate all kinds of grains, fruits and vegetables; to* cut timber and deal in lumber; and to buy, sell and generally deal in lumber; and to1 buy, sell and generally deal in marble, stone, minerals and metals; 1 6 . . . to build, establish and maintain a canning factory, and to buy and sell canned goods; to> establish, operate and conduct a hotel, store, packing house, warehouse, saw mill, and such other kinds and classes of mercantile and other businesses as may 14 All but one of the twelve were foreign-born Jews. See Freund, "Jewish Farm Colony," Improvement Era, XVI, 249.

15 Articles of Incorporation of Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association, File Number 9318, Utah State, Secretary of State (Utah State Capitol).

16 This is a period in Utah history when several companies and individuals were attempting to develop marble quarries for the new State Capitol under construction.

122

Utah Historical

Quarterly

be beneficial or desired; to raise, buy, sell and generally deal in cattle and animals of all kinds . . . to deal in, buy, sell, acquire, lease, sub-let, or farm-let real-estate, and to plant, improve, cultivate and develop the same . . . .

To purchase, construct, lease, operate and maintain electric lighting and power plants, buildings, constructions, machinery, appliances, equipments, fixtures, easements and appurtenances.

To purchase, construct, lease, operate and maintain telephone lines and lines for electric light and power purposes.

To purchase, construct, lease, operate, and maintain tramways, rights of way, easements and appurtenances.

To acquire by discovery, location, lease, license, bond, option, purchase, franchise, grant, gift, device, conveyance, agreement or otherwise, and to hold, possess, enjoy, construct, repair, develop, mine, work, operate, and exploit, lead, iron, coal, placer or lode gold, silver, or other mines, tunnels and mining and tunneling property, and any right title or interest therein, . . .

There seems to be no limit to the kind of activity the Association might become involved in. But then these were the ideas of the man Benjamin Brown who has been labeled "a dreamer" by a business associate. Eventually, however, Brown's dreams were fulfilled in another undertaking. 17 But in regard to the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association, the ideas never progressed beyond the dream stage.

Difficulties soon arose at the Colony. The original subscription money was gone, the second year installment on the land payment was due, and nothing had been paid on the water shares â&#x20AC;&#x201D; payment which did not fall due until water had been actually delivered. Additional colonists were desirous of moving on to their land. By September of 1912 the Colony had grown to include twenty-three heads of families, four single men, eleven wives, and twenty-two children â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a total population of sixty. By spring it was hoped the families of all the married men could be added to the Colony. Plans were laid for settling fifty-two families on their farms by spring 1913. Houses (mostly shacks) were pushed to completion to be ready for the incoming colonists.

But all this stretched the resources of the Association beyond its capacity, and relief was sought in several areas. One was in the form of a claim for damages pressed by the Colony through the law firm of Booth, Lee, Badger, Rich, and Parke against the State of Utah for failure " L e t t e r of H . M . Blackhurst to the author, September 29, 1960. M r . Blackhurst was one of the officers along with Benjamin Brown of the U t a h Poultry Producers Co-operative Association. Utah Poulty Co-operator, I ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 7.

After leaving U t a h , Brown became involved in a n o t h e r cooperative venture, "Jersey H o m e steads," a 1,200-acre "village" in Hightstown, New Jersey. See R a l p h F. Armstrong, "FourMillion-Dollar Village," Saturday Evening Post, 210 ( F e b r u a r y 5, 1938) a n d Utah Poultry Co-operator, I I ( 1 9 4 7 ) , 13.

Clarion, Utah

123

Improvement

Era (1912)

Governor William Spry speaking at a Harvest Celebration held in Clarion August 18, 1912. Rabbi Charles Freund reported that there were "over one thousand people" celebrating on this day â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a "day of triumph for the Clarion Colony."

to deliver the promised amount of water to the Colony's lands. 18 The amount of damages asked was $14,250. This figure was arrived at by comparing the quantity of grain produced on lands with sufficient water as compared to the quantity produced on lands suffering from lack of water.

Since the State Board of Land Commissioners was unable to make the payment, a claim was presented to the 1913 State Legislature. 19 There is no question that the Colony was entitled to reimbursement, for the new canal was far from reliable. Several breaks occurred which left the Clarion farmers without water for several days at a time. Then, too, an equitable system of apportionment had not been worked out.

18 This is a rather unusual claim in that the Association had never paid for any of the water â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not even the first installment. Their reasoning was the water failure produced a crop failure, hence a payment failure.

19 In an unsigned manuscript entitled "In re Clarion Colony, Utah," loaned the author

by Mr. B. M. Roe of Salt Lake City, it is claimed the Utah Legislature paid this claim. This may be true, but the author has been unable to locate any record of payment in the files of the legislature or the office of the State Auditor.

124

Utah Historical

Quarterly

The necessary weirs and dividing gates had not been installed to insure the Jews on the end of the canal their fair share of water. There seems to be ample evidence that the old farmers higher up on the canal had all the water they wanted, while the newcomers lower down on the canal went without. Even when a canal rider was employed, the situation was not altogether corrected. Headgates found closed on a regularly scheduled tour along the canal would be found open when an unscheduled ride was made. There seems to have been unfair advantage taken of the untrained, non-English speaking Jews.

But the Colony could not survive from its income of only $14,000 the first year, especially since disbursements were $18,413. So other sources of revenue were sought besides the claim against the state. All the members were induced to transfer to the Association by trust deed their individual contracts with the state. Then the Association transferred all of its assets to a new organization, The Utah Colonization Fund, Incorporated.

The Fund was incorporated in June of 1912 by several leading Jewish residents of Salt Lake City.20 Its objectives and purposes (Article I V ) , outside of the first paragraph "To aid and assist the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association, its associated companies, the members thereof, and other like associations . . .," were almost identical to those of the Association, which the Fund was designed to assist. The Fund was capitalized for $ 100,000 with par value of the stock set at $ 100.00. Names of the principal stockholders were Adolph Baer, of Baer Mercantile Company; Adolph Simon, of Paris Millinery Company; George S. Auerbach; Louis Cohn; Samuel Newhouse; David Spitz; Nathan Rosenblatt; Edward Rosenbaum; and Daniel Alexander. In addition three members of the Colonial Association — Benjamin Brown, Bernard Horowitz, and Abraham Wernick — were listed as stockholders, the last three holding most of the stock.

The Association was really attempting to raise money ($150,000) on land they did not hold title to — in fact on land for which only one payment had been made. Therefore, the officers of the Association were engaging in a practice which was highly irregular if not wholly illegal.

Certainly the subscribers to the Fund must have been aware of this and subscribed to stock in the sense of a contribution to a needy cause. 21 20 Articles of Incorporation of U t a h Colonization F u n d , Incorporated, File N u m b e r 9620 (Secretary of S t a t e ) .

21 " I n re Clarion Colony," 7—8, states t h a t the F u n d issued $150,000 w o r t h of first mortgage c o u p o n bonds bearing a four p e r cent interest rate against the property of the Association. Some $20,000 was raised — $5,000 by Jews of Salt Lake City a n d $500.00 contributed by t h e " M o r m o n

Clarion, Utah

125

Unable to find sufficient financial support for his colony in Utah, Benjamin Brown, armed with a letter of introduction from Governor Spry,22 traveled east to contact wealthy Jews. One of the first to be approached was Julius Rosenwald, of Sears Roebuck Company in Chicago. Apparently Mr. Rosenwald agreed to purchase one-half of the unsubscribed bonds issued by the Utah Colonization Fund, provided the Jewish Agricultural Aid Society would subscribe to the other half.23 The representatives of the Agricultural Aid Society, of New York, while impressed with the leadership of the Colony and the progress church, which was glad to have our people with them and would have made their contribution larger, were it not for the fact that they were then compelled to take care of about 4,000 of their exiled people in Mexico." See also Freund, "Jewish Farm Colony," Improvement Era, XVI, 106-7.

22 Governor Spry was carried away by his enthusiasm for the project. He stated, "It is a pleasure to state that the lands at and near Clarion, . . . are among the very choicest agricultural lands in the state, . . ." Governor William Spry to "To Whom It May Concern," September 6, 1912, Governors' Papers (Spry).

23 Correspondence exchanged between Governor William Spry and Isaac Landman in 1912-13, Governors' Papers (Spry).

An abandoned house (known as the Lieberman home) of one of the colonists who remained at Clarion after the breakup of the Colony. The well, which served the Colony, can be seen next to the house.

,0-

-A?**

126

Utah Historical

Quarterly

already made on the farmlands, were of the opinion $600,000 were needed to settle all the 152 families of the Association in Utah instead of the $150,000 Brown was trying to raise. And as security, the Association was offering only about $45,000 in capital investments. With such a precarious financial arrangement, the Aid Society rejected the pleadings of Benjamin Brown and Rabbi Landman and refused to subscribe for one-half of the bonds. Furthermore, members of the Aid Society advised Mr. Rosenwald of their decision and of the unsound financial condition of the Colony. So rather than a $65,000 bond subscription, Mr. Rosenwald purchased $2,500 — more by way of a contribution than an investment.

By such contributions and a more bountiful harvest, the Colony held on through 1913. There were fifty-two families farming at Clarion by the summer of that year. A school, which also served as a church, and thirty-three homes were constructed, but some families still lived in tents. A statement of the Colony's leader in October 1913, claimed that $100,000 had been invested in the Colony, but further financing was needed. 24 So once more the president of the Colony, Benjamin Brown, took to the road to raise funds, He enlisted the support of Governor Spry, Senator Reed Smoot, and other state officials — particularly members of the Land Board. Governor Spry, Attorney General A. R. Barnes, and President W. D. Candland of the State Board of Land Commissioners also journeyed to New York to assist the Colony in obtaining more financing. However, their efforts were in vain. The Agricultural Aid Society refused to support the Colony and discouraged any further migration to Utah.

There was ample reason for such an attitude. The Colony after three years of operation had proved to be unprofitable. Each year the income had declined in proportion to the disbursements. T h e deficit for 1913 was $3,788.13; for 1914, $89,128.52; and for 1915, $81,993.89. For all their expenditures the colonists were paying nothing to the state, either on the principal or the interest, for their lands and water.

Although the final outcome of the venture seemed apparent to everyone on the outside, those intimately connected with the Colony — Benjamin Brown, Isaac Landman, and Governor Spry — worked hard to keep it alive.

Through the influence of the governor, the Land Board granted one extension after another to give the floundering Colony "one more 24

Benjamin Brown to Governor William Spry, October 25, 1913, Governors' Papers (Spry).

127

Clarion, Utah

chance." In 1915 the legislature was once again petitioned to help the Colony due to the failure of an adequate water supply. But it refused to respond.

It now became very apparent that payments could not be made on the land or the water. Finally on November 5, 1915, the State Land Board was forced to take the following action. 25 Be it resolved t h a t t h e said certificates of sale a n d t h e said proposed w a t e r contracts . . . be a n d they a r e hereby declared to* be forfeited a n d cancelled, all right, title a n d interest reverting a n d revesting in the State of U t a h . . . .

Meanwhile Simon Bamberger and other wealthy Jews of Utah came to the aid of the colonists by giving them sufficient funds to return to the East or rehabilitate themselves in the West. 26 Even with the colonists abandoning the project after the State Land Board had cancelled the contracts, Benjamin Brown still held on. He directed further appeals to Governor Spry to intercede in the Colony's behalf with the Land Board â&#x20AC;&#x201D; either to extend credit or refund the one 25 State of Utah, Land Board, "State Board of Land Commissioners Minute Book," November 5, 1915, p. 167 (Utah State Capitol). .

20 Letter of Julian Bamberger, a son of Simon, to author, August 18, 1960, and letter of Herman Brownstein, who was a child at Clarion, to author, October 20, i960. See also Vogel, "Clarion's Call" who quotes Henry Modell to the effect that some of the colonists elected to go to Los Angeles over returning to the East because of the cheaper fare to the West Coast and the reluctance of the colonists to return to friends who knew of the Colony's failure.

Mr. Bert Jenson, resident of Clarion, acquired some of departure of the Jews. He stands near the foundation Cisterns were built underneath the floors of the homes. can be seen. In the background can be seen the remains foundation.

the colonists' lands after the of the Nathan Brown home.

An opening into the cistern of the community storehouse

128

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Not many physical evidences of the Clarion Colony remain today.

On a bluff overlooking Sevier Valley is located the small cemetery whose headstones are broken and will soon vanish, thus obliterating what should be a permanent resting place for some of Clarion's colonists.

payment on the land, or failing all else permit the colonists to reap the benefits of their improvements when the land was resold at auction. 27 The governor took pains to inform his petitioners that the one payment had long since been deposited in the state treasury and spent, that a receiver for the creditors had been appointed by the court, and that he (the governor) had done everything in his power to save the Colony. Their requests for further help could not be met. 28 On January 18, 1916, the lands of the Jewish Colony at Clarion were offered for sale at public auction. The Deseret News for that day carried not a single word on the plight of the ill-fated colonists of Clarion. 29 It did, however, one week later carry the following headline: CONT R I B U T E F O R SUFFERING JEWS. However, the suffering Jews were not at Clarion or in Utah, but those of the war zone in Europe 2 ' Mr. Harry S. Joseph was appointed the receiver for the Colony by the district court at Manti. He claimed that the colonists owed $75,000 in addition to what was owed the state — bringing the total indebtedness to "upwards of $500,000." The appraisal value of buildings, livestock, and equipment equaled only $14,000. ("Land Commissioners Minute Book," November 17, 1915, p. 186 and January 6, 1916, pp. 23Iff.) The Board permitted the improvements to be sold separately so that the proceeds could be used to benefit the creditors of the Colony. {Ibid., January 25, 1916, p. 242.) ^Governor William Spry to Isaac Landman, February 8, 1916, Governors' Papers (Spry).

29 Very little newspaper coverage was given to the Clarion Colony. Copies of the Gunnison newspapers can not be located. The Manti Messenger of December 31, 1915, carried merely a paid advertisement of the State Land Board announcing a land and water sale •— six thousand acres with water, three thousand improved, to go to the highest bidder. The terms were ten per cent down and the balance on a yearly basis over a ten-year period.

Clarion, Utah

129

where World War I was raging. Twenty-five hundred dollars were collected from an audience in the Assembly Hall, where the work and culture of the Jews were praised by Professor Levi E. Young and Reverend Elmer J. Goshen, but not a word was said about the struggling colony in Utah that had attempted to make a new way of life for refugees from the ghettos of Russia.

In conception the Clarion Colony was a noble and notable undertaking. Had it fulfilled only a small portion of the objectives of the parent organization, the Colony would have made a significant imprint on the economy of the state. But, as it was, it died with a debt of more than $300,000 owed the state, and numerous investors lost all of their savings.

In answer to the question why the Colony failed when all around were examples of success under even more unfavorable conditions, one must conclude that the motivation was not so great for the Jews as for Utah colonists of an earlier period. From testimony gathered through correspondence from participants and persons living in the surrounding area, it is apparent that the colonists lacked a determination, a will to succeed as farmers. Their farm career was a temporary employment until they could return to their particular trade. This attitude is even expressed in the objectives of their Association, where greater emphasis was placed upon various businesses than upon farming. Furthermore, authoritarian leadership and organization among the Jews were absent when compared to earlier group cooperative colonization. A religious zeal to succeed, so prominent among the Mormons, was lacking in the Jewish experiment. 30 Undoubtedly, the area selected for the Colony was an unfortunate choice and, therefore, contributed to the failure of the project. According to a report by the Sanpete County agricultural agent, the site of the Colony is not extremely productive at the present time. 31 Where there 30 This statement does not imply that all Mormon colonization efforts were successful.

Abandoned towns dot the landscape where various ventures failed. The Limhi colony in the Salmon River country of an early period and the Hawaiian colony at Iosepa in Skull Valley, Tooele, are examples where even Mormon organization and determination were not enough to insure the success of the colonies. Another example is beautifully described by Dale L. Morgan in The Humboldt, Highroad of the West (New York, 1943) in the chapter entitled "Rain." One particularly significant paragraph sums up Mormon attitude.

"In the beginning none but the Mormons was willing to accept the West on those terms.

The price of desert settlement was a lower level of subsistence, a greater measure of hardship and deprivation, a lesser return for the heart's blood. While other Americans went on to Oregon or California, the Mormons settled in the mountain-desert to work out their destiny. And from their center stake of Zion, planted in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, they carried the warfare to the desert."

31 Letter of Dennis Funk to author, September 20, 1960, and letter of Conrad Frischknecht to author, October 3, 1960. Mr. Frischknecht is presently farming a section of the Colony site.

130

Utah Historical

Quarterly

is sufficient water (about three times as much as the Jews had) good crops of alfalfa are raised today. But the soil is unsuited for grains or truck gardens because it is too shallow. Only about half of the six thousand acres is farmed at the present time, the remainder is suitable only for grazing.

The forty-acre tracts designed for the colonists were economically unrealistic. Under high-priced irrigation systems, much larger farms are needed to support a family. And one wonders what part the forced purchase of land and water played in the Colony's failure. Pioneers of an earlier period found land and water for the taking. The Jews were faced with immediate debt. Certainly the fact that the Jews were unprepared for the type of agriculture they were forced to pursue was a significant factor that led to the failure of the Colony. The state even hired men trained in irrigation methods to work with the Jews to show them the proper techniques. 32 Still, they failed to comprehend or carry out the procedures necessary for successful irrigation. Perhaps an overall understanding of farm methods was lacking. At least this is the belief of the residents of the neighboring communities. There the story is told of the colonist who complained his cow would give no milk after but a few weeks of milking. The difficulty arose from the fact he extracted only the amount of milk he wanted at the moment â&#x20AC;&#x201D; one day two quarts, another day one quart, and perhaps the next day, none at all. 33 Another story is told of the colonist who tried to let his horses drink at a stream by jacking up the hind wheels of the wagon to which they were hitched, rather than removing the check rein from the names. 34 Apocryphal or not, the stories reflect the attitudes of surrounding neighbors toward the "unusual" methods of the Jewish colonists.

Was there nothing then left behind by the colonists, besides stories to add to Utah's folklore?

Yes, there is a significant legacy to Utah from the Jewish colony.35 Benjamin Brown, although called a dreamer, was also a man of determination. He, his brother Nathan, and ten or twelve other families remained on the land and paid rent to the state. They began to raise 32

Letter from Hugh Kearns to author, November 18, 1960.

Interview with Clyde C. Edmunds, August 18, 1960.

34 Letter of Conrad Frischknecht to author, October 3, 1960. Mrs. Vogel in her study points to similar experiences among the colonists, some of whom preferred to compose poetry about the land rather than cultivate it. Vogel, "Clarion's Call," passim.

85 A visit today to what was Clarion evokes a feeling of sadness. There remain a few crumbling concrete floors and foundations with the cisterns underneath. Only the barest outline of the school and common warehouse are visible. The cemetery, perched on top of a bluff overlooking the area, has all but disappeared. Two broken headstones mark the spot where the only permanent colonists remain.

33

Clarion, Utah

131

chickens and looked to Benjamin Brown to market their eggs and poultry.

Brown opened a grading plant at Gunnison, and soon turned to California for a market. He then expanded his supply area to Sevier and Juab counties and formed the Central Utah Poultry Exchange. Brown was joined by Clyde C. Edmunds, Harry H. Metzger, George A. Brown, and Albertus Willardson, and in February 1923 the Utah Poultry Producers, Incorporated, was organized on a semi-cooperative basis. Their business eventually spread to the markets of New York. On December 27, 1923, the Articles of Incorporation were amended, and the Utah Poultry Producers Cooperative Association was born. 36 Since then the organization has expanded into the Intermountain Farmers Association which serves the interests of Utah farmers, doing $9,125,000 worth of business in 1967.

Thus, while the Jewish Colony itself failed, some of its members remained in Utah to make significant and lasting contributions to the economy of the state.

36

Glen T. Nelson, "Membership Relations of the Utah Poultry and Farmers Cooperative" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1947), 1-2; also Utah Poultry Co-operator, I, 7.

"Clarion was the most of my vivid recollection and review of tales and legends of that area.

"My sister Claire was named after the place of great dreams and efforts of our family there. My sisters Claire and May and my brother Myer 'Mike,' of Blessed Memory also was born there."

(Letter to author from Benjamin Kristol, Merion, Pennsylvania, September 1, 1965)

" . ' â&#x20AC;˘ ,

The Unusual Jurisdiction Of County Probate Courts In The Territory of Utah

BY J A M E S B. ALLEN

8k ',M&

0

ne of the curious problems growing out of the Mormon-Gentile conflict in Utah's territorial period concerned the jurisdiction of the county probate court. It was in 1852 that the powers of the probate court were defined by the territorial legislature. 1 The law provided that a probate judge for each county should be elected by the legislative assembly and commissioned by the governor. The judge was to hold office for four years, and in case of a vacancy the governor could fill the office by appointment until the assembly met and elected someone.

The probate judge had jurisdiction in the probate of wills, the administration of estates of deceased persons, and the guardianship of minors, idiots, and insane persons. The controversial part of the law was section 30, which added to the authority of the court as follows: The several Probate courts, in their respective counties, have power to exercise original jurisdiction both civil and criminal, and as well in Chancery as at Common Law, when not prohibited by legislative enactment; and they shall be governed in all respects by the same general rules and regulations as regards practice as the District Courts. 2

Appeals from decisions of the county probate court could be made to federal district courts, and the clerk of probate was required to file a transcript of the proceedings in such cases with the clerk of the district court within twenty days from the day of appeal.

County probate courts in the Territory of Utah were thus granted original jurisdiction in both civil and criminal actions. This had the unusual effect of giving them concurrent jurisdiction with United States district courts in all civil and criminal cases. Criminal jurisdiction was not an ordinary privilege of probate courts, and this bestowal of authority was soon to cause serious controversy between the two factions in early Utah. That this was a legal dispensation, however, seems unquestionable D r . Allen, past contributor to the Quarterly, Y o u n g University.

is associate professor of history at Brigham

1 Acts and Resolutions passed at the Second Annual Session of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, . . . 1852 (Great Salt Lake City, 1 8 5 3 ) , 42, sees. 23â&#x20AC;&#x201D;33. (Hereafter cited as Laws of Utah with the year.)

2 Ibid.. 43, sec. 30.

For district court purposes Utah is now divided into seven districts, and the district court meets in each county seat within its jurisdiction at least three times a year. The Fifth District Court holds sessions in the Juab County Courthouse in Nephi, which was constructed on the southwest corner of the intersection of Main and Center streets. On February 19, 1883, arrangements were completed for the purchase of the land, and the front portion of the building was erected shortly thereafter. An addition on the back of the courthouse was completed in 1937.

134

Utah Historical

Quarterly

in view of the fact that the Organic Act for the Territory of Utah declared that the jurisdiction of the probate courts should be "as limited by law," 3 the term "law" interpreted to mean that which was passed by the territorial legislature. Furthermore, several United States judges who served in Utah agreed that it was within the province of the legislature to confer such power. 4 In effect this law gave the Mormon church extensive influence in civil affairs. Not that the church had any official role in territorial or county government, but the fact remains that while the probate judge was an elected officer, he was usually a Mormon bishop or held some other important church position, and thus was influenced strongly by church ideology and practice. The probate judge, incidentally, also presided over the regular "county court," which was the executive and legislative body for the county.5 This individual, then, because of his position in the community, was usually one of the most influential men in almost all of Utah's early counties.

In disputes over the probate court, Gentiles naturally alleged that these irregular powers were conferred in order to nullify, as far as possible, the authority of the higher courts which were presided over by federally appointed judges. 6 In any event the move could be considered a strategic maneuver on the part of the church-dominated legislature, for it allowed cases to be tried before men of the community instead of before federal judges from the East who were usually not in sympathy with local problems or with Mormon philosophy. Although district courts had appellate power over probate courts, comparatively few cases ever reached the federal district judges until after the probate court's original jurisdiction had been withdrawn by Congress.

Mormons argued that these unusual powers were necessary in the probate courts, for it was impossible to obtain justice in the counties at the hands of federal officials at the time the law was passed. Reason for this claim may be seen in the fact that until 1853 there was no functioning Territorial Supreme Court and only one federal judge to serve all the districts. Three United States judges, Lemuel H. Brandenbury, Perry E. Brocchus, and Zerubbabel Snow, had been appointed for the Territory of 3

Laws of Utah, 1855, 115, sec. 9.

Andrew Love Neff, History of Utah, 1847 to 1869, ed., Leland Hargrave Creer (Salt Lake City, 1940), 703.

5 For details on the county court see James B. Allen, "The Development of County Government in the Territory of Utah, 1850-1896" (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1956), Chap. III. 6 Hubert H. Bancroft, History of Utah, 1540-1886 (San Francisco, 1889), 487-88.

4

County Probate Courts

135

Utah and arrived in July of 1851. The first two were so far out of sympathy with the Mormons that they quickly made themselves unpopular.

A conference of the church was held early in September and the new judges, along with B. D. Harris, federally appointed secretary, were honored with a request to sit on the platform with the church leaders. Justice Brocchus was invited to speak to the congregation, and immediately took the opportunity to rebuke and correct Mormon society. Brigham Young arose and, in defense of the Mormons, roundly criticized Brocchus as "either profoundly ignorant, or wilfully wicked." 7 Brocchus and Brandenbury, as well as Secretary Harris, finally left the territory, taking all government funds with them and leaving Justice Snow as sole federal judge in Utah for the next two years. For this reason it was felt necessary by the territorial legislature to authorize Snow to hold court in all districts, and at the same time to grant criminal and civil jurisdiction to county probate courts. 8 The problem of "runaway" judges did not end here. Other federal appointees were equally at odds with the Mormons and sometimes left after hearing only a few or no cases. Justice Charles B. Waite left the territory in 1863 after holding only one term of court at which not a single case appeared on the docket. 9 Probate Judge George W. Bean records the following concerning his court trying criminal cases: T h e Legislature of 1865-66 . . . chose m e to succeed t h e H o n o r a b l e Z e r u b b a b e l Snow, as Probate J u d g e of U t a h C o u n t y . . . .

I t will be r e m e m b e r e d t h a t District J u d g e C r a d e l b a u g h dismissed t h e C o u r t a n d , as we say, " F l e w the C o o p " as h e never r e t u r n e d , a n d h e n c e the P r o b a t e C o u r t h a d to take over criminal cases.

I w e n t a b o u t m y duties, a p p o i n t e d J. B. M i l n e r as prosecuting Attorney, L. J o h n N u t t a l l , Clerk; W m . B. Pace, Sheriff, a n d we soon got in line.

I n d u e time the question of jurisdiction c a m e u p , a n d crime b e c a m e m o r e frequent a n d desperate since t h e a r m y days, with some few m e n . Of course, m e n accused of cattle stealing, selling liquor to I n d i a n s , hiring t h e m to steal cattle, etc. were tried in o u r C o u r t until District J u d g e s could be b r o u g h t for the various districts according t o p o p u l a t i o n a n d politics. W e h a d G r a n d Juries a n d parties were tried a n d indicted a n d p u n ished t h e same as in U . S . District Courts. 1 0 7 B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (6 vols., Salt Lake City, 1930), III, 522-23.

8 Edward W. Tullidge, Tullidge's Histories . . . (2 vols., Salt Lake City, 1889), II, 323-25.

9 Neff, History of Utah, 704.

10 Flora Diana Bean Home, comp., Autobiography of George Washington Bean, A Utah Pioneer of 1847, and His Family Records (Salt Lake City, 1945), 148-49.

U T A H STATE H I S T O R I C A L SOCIETY

U N I V E R S I T Y O F U T A H S C H O O L OF A R C H I T E C T U R E

Both the Washington County Courthouse (left) and the Wasatch County Courthouse (right) witnessed many sessions of the district court within its walls. The Washington County Courthouse in St. George, Utah, designed by Truman O. Angell, architect of the Salt Lake Temple and many other structures in Utah, has been saved from destruction by civic minded residents of southern Utah. Erected in 1870, within ten years after the arrival of the pioneer company who settled St. George, the building has been preserved because of its architectural and historic value. A new courthouse for Washington County was dedicated in April of 1966.

The Wasatch County Courthouse was constructed between 1878-82 and remodeled in 1924. Forming part of a unique town square, the courthouse was the object of preservation efforts for two years by local residents and persons throughout the state who looked toward preservation of this town square which contained buildings used for early religious, civil, penal, and social functions.

Preservation efforts met with failure when in October of 1967 the old courthouse was demolished to make room for a new structure.

Not only were there judges who left Utah Territory in disgust, but some of those who remained were antagonistic toward the Mormons and openly attempted to set aside the jurisdiction of the probate courts. Judge C. M. Hawley, for instance, holding court in the Second District at Beaver in 1870, held that probate courts had no jurisdiction in criminal cases and ruled against a certain probate court decision. This action had the effect of releasing from custody a prisoner who had been convicted of assault with intent to kill and had been sentenced to two and one-half years in prison. 11 It was the polygamy issue that particularly irritated most of the judges. They often found they could do very little about the practice even though, after 1862, there existed a federal statute against it. The 11

Orson F. Whitney, Popular History of Utah (Salt Lake City, 1916), 267.

County Probate Courts

137

naturalization of aliens, one of the civil functions granted to county probate courts, was especially important because of the fact that many polygamists were petitioning for, and receiving, naturalization papers in these courts. District courts, on the other hand, often refused such petitions. Federal Judge James B. McKean, for example, in the 1870's, went so far as to inquire of applicants for citizenship whether or not they were polygamists or believed in polygamy. Any answer which would indicate the affirmative was construed by him as grounds for refusing their petitions. Says Mormon historian B. H. Roberts: U n d e r t h e practice of t h e federal courts of U t a h , in this period, in t h e m a t t e r of naturalizing aliens, " n o M o r m o n s ' need apply," m i g h t as well h a v e been posted over the court e n t r a n c e , unless h e was willing to deny his religious faith. 1 2

This conflict was one of the causes of the Utah War of 1857. Bancroft declares that "the official who did more than any other . . . to bring about the Mormon war was Associate Judge W. W. Drummond." 1 3 Coming to Utah in 1854, Drummond had immediately begun to criticize its laws and institutions, especially polygamy, and he was the first judge to challenge the legality of the probate court powers as defined in 1852.

He declared he would set aside the findings of these courts in all cases except those which lay strictly within what he considered their rightful jurisdiction.

The 1860's saw a high point in the conflict. Justice Thomas J. Drake, holding court in Provo, had refused to recognize the right of the probate courts to issue naturalization papers. 14 Justice Charles B. Waite, with the apparent approval of Drake and Governor Stephen S. Harding, was attempting to secure congressional amendment of the act which created the territory. The amendment would limit criminal jurisdiction in the probate courts and deny them jurisdiction in civil actions. 15 The bill, which was sent to Washington and introduced in the Senate, further provided for the organization of a militia in Utah under command of the governor (who was a federally appointed official). The Mormons were naturally indignant at such a move, and at a mass meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, March 3, 1863, called for the resignation of the federal 12 Roberts, Comprehensive History, V, 388. This traditional Mormon view of McKean should be balanced by reading Thomas G. Alexander, "Federal Authority Versus Polygamic Theocracy: James B. McKean and the Mormons, 1870-1875," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, I (Autumn, 1966), 85-100.

13 Bancroft, History of Utah, 490.

14 Robert Joseph Dwyer, The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study in Religious and Social Conflict (1862-1890) (Washington, 1941), 43.

15 Neff, History of Utah, 703-4.

138

Utah Historical

Quarterly

officers and sent a petition for their removal to President Abraham Lincoln. The judges, of course, wrote Lincoln their opinion that the Organic Act was entirely inoperative, and they refused to hold any terms of the district courts until supported by military power. This, they felt, should be at least five thousand well-armed men. The government failed to meet their request, and shortly thereafter Judge Waite left the territory and established himself in Idaho.

That extensive criminal prosecution was carried on in county probate courts is well illustrated by an examination of court records and also by remarks of men who participated in the proceedings. George W. Bean reports for the year 1866: I accepted the office of Prosecuting Attorney for U t a h C o u n t y a n d proceeded to punish t h e offenders against t h e Laws, in taking unlawfully, m a n y cattle belonging to t h e G o v e r n m e n t from C a m p Floyd a n d elsewhere. I prosecuted before J u d g e A a r o n J o h n s o n , (Bishop) of Springville, being the P r o b a t e J u d g e , a n d the U . S . C o u r t s lying d o r m a n t , it w a s considered necessary for t h e public safety, t h a t criminals b e prosecuted in t h e P r o b a t e Court. T h e r e were several m e n a n d boys of t h e C o u n t y who 1 resented the lawless actions of C r a d e l b a u g h a n d t h e soldiers a n d b e c a m e reckless a n d m a d e b a d records i n g r a n d larceny, robbery a n d other crimes.

I set to work a n d kept t h e C o u r t going most of the year, a n d prosecuted one h u n d r e d a n d t w o cases a n d convicted all b u t two. T h e p u n i s h m e n t s were mostly fines from $10.00 to $200.00 each, as i m p r i s o n m e n t seemed to be a n expense a n d n o benefit accruing. 1 6

The history of Weber County shows that here, too, numerous civil suits, habeas corpus cases, and all sorts of crime from misdemeanor to murder were tried before the probate judge. 17 The probate court records of Utah County show that before 1874 many kinds of criminal cases were tried in that court. An unusual example was that of Daniel Hopkins, tried on March 27, 1860. Hopkins was accused of passing false money and pleaded guilty. He acknowledged that he received $2.00 in beer, $8.00 in specie, and a pair of boots for the false coin. The jury, for some unexplained reason, found him not guilty.18 Many cases could be cited, however, in which fines and prison terms were levied for criminal action.

The records of Utah County show that this probate court was active also in granting petitions for U. S. citizenship. Samuel S. Jones, for 16

Home, George Washington Bean, 138.

Tullidge, Tullidge's Histories, II, 335.

18 Utah County Clerk, "Probate Record, Utah County: (Trials)" (Provo, Utah), 33-34.

17

Oct. 19, 1859-Feb., 1866.

County Probate Courts

139

example, received his citizenship on May 23, 1864,19 and on February 9, 1866, several persons who had been citizens of England were now made American citizens.20 The details of cases brought before probate courts were sometimes rather humorous. Such an example is found in the journal of John Woodhouse, clerk of Beaver County, who tells the story of an unusual divorce case in 1859.21 The suit concerned a man who had gone to town with his sons to buy material for shirts. Finding that he did not have enough money for all of them, he bought the material anyway and planned to have his wife make the shirts two inches shorter than usual. His wife, however, was extremely independent and refused to make them any shorter. She wanted to make them longer, rather, to allow for shrinkage.

A quarrel followed and she finally sued for divorce. When the case came to court and the time came to divide the property, each party wanted the other to have the cow and another argument commenced. The court finally adjourned in order to let them settle the matter themselves. A few days later Woodhouse went to the workshop of the defendant and was told that the couple could not decide what to do so they wanted to let the matter drop and stay as they were. This, of course, was agreeable with the county clerk, but the family still had to pay the costs incurred, including the clerk's $2.00 fee. The defendant had no money so he gave Woodhouse a new wheelhead and was told to see the judge about the balance of the costs.

In 1874 the problem of Utah's probate courts was extensively aired

by Congress, and the resultant bill was a victory for those who wished to take away the questionable jurisdiction. The bill (H.R. 3089) was evidently presented to a Congress with preconceived prejudices against Utah. Said Representative Lorenzo Crounce of Nebraska, who was one of Utah's few friends in the House: I regret, sir, the sentiment t h a t I see displayed a r o u n d m e . W i t h i n t h e h e a r i n g of m y voice, w h e n I was c o n t e n d i n g here t h a t this bill should be submitted to p r o p e r consideration by t h e H o u s e a n d t h a t t h e previous question should not be insisted o n w i t h o u t full discussion of its several p r o visions, I h e a r d gentlemen say t h a t they did not care w h a t was in t h e bill; t h a t they were going for it a n y h o w . Sir, if we act in such a spirit as that, w h a t h o p e is there for any people w h o are to be r u n by t h e U n i t e d States Government?22 19

Ibid., 313.

Ibid., 488.

21 James Mercer Kirkham and Kate Woodhouse Kirkham, eds., John Woodhouse, Pioneer Journal (Salt Lake City, 1952), 30-31.

22 U.S., Congressional Record, 43d Cong., 1st Sess., 1873-1874, II, Part 5, 4468.

20

His

140

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Such sentiment apparently continued for when the question was taken, there were 159 yeas to 55 nays, 75 not voting.

The bill was presented by Congressman Luke P. Poland, its author, with several allegations of what Utah had done with respect to its courts.

He charged that the territory had kept itself aloof from the rest of the United States, that federal officials sent to Utah had been driven away, and that these officials had never been allowed to exercise any authority as officers of the United States over the territory. He further stated that the territorial legislature, "filled entirely by Mormons, controlled entirely

by Brigham Young and the 'twelve apostles,' " elected territorial officials to take the place of all federal officers and elected probate judges to checkmate the power of the United States. All federal officials, he said, were "the merest figure-heads."23 The continued pattern of debate against the Utah courts was criticism of the Mormon hierarchy who, it was stated, were doing all within their means to put federal power into the hands of local county officials, who were in turn controlled by the church and would protect its peculiar institutions, particularly polygamy.

In defense, Utah Representative George Q. Cannon argued that if this legislation were passed then the same reasons existed for similar legislation for all territories of the United States. All of them had elected their own local officers, sheriffs, county attorneys, etc., and many had probate courts which possessed jurisdiction sufficiently broad as to be open to the same objection being made against the courts of Utah. He cited the Territory of Colorado as one example. 24 In answer to the statement that federal officials had been driven away, Cannon merely challenged the accusers to produce a "single item of evidence to sustain the charge . . . ."

Cannon next showed why he considered it wise and proper for Utah's legislative assembly to have conferred upon the probate courts the jurisdiction complained of: It will be remembered that what is now the State of Nevada once formed a part of the Territory of Utah. At the present time that Territory [Utah] extends three hundred and sixty-four miles east and west. Its inhabitants are settled mostly in towns and villages. For this Territory and population Congress has provided three courts; first district court, 2S

Ibid., 4467.

Ibid., 4470. The Territory of Montana might also be cited as an example of where the federal government had given criminal and civil jurisdiction to the probate courts: "The probate courts of the Territory of Montana, in their respective counties, in addition to the probate jurisdiction, are authorized to hear and determine civil cases wherein the damage or debt claimed does not exceed five hundred dollars, and such criminal cases arising under the laws of the Territory as do not require the intervention of a grand jury." U.S., Statutes at Large, XIV, 426.

24

141

County Probate Courts held at Provo; second district court, held at Beaver; third district court, held at Salt Lake City. Of these courts the first two mentioned hold one term a year, and the last mentioned two terms a year. The time during which the first and second district courts have been in session, up to within the last three years will not average two days in each year, and there has been a year or more at times when no district court has been held outside of Salt Lake. The district court in Salt Lake has been in session but a small part of the time.

Some of the judges appointed in years past to the first and second districts never saw the places appointed for holding their courts. Recently the judges of these districts have held courts regularly in their districts, and the judge of the first district has a residence in his district, and probably the judge of the second in his also; but of this I am certain. If he has., he is, I believe, the first judge who has resided there. The probate courts had therefore the necessity to be endowed with extensive jurisdiction as the people would have been compelled, to punish crimes, to have recourse to lynch law. But suppose these courts had been in regular session; Saint George, a city of two thousand . . . is situated in the southern portion of the Territory in the second judicial district, and one hundred and twenty miles from Beaver, where the court is held; the facilities for traveling would enable a citizen of Saint George to arrive at Beaver in

District court sessions are still being held in the Beaver County Courthouse (left) and the Sevier County Courthouse (right). Construction on the Beaver County Courthouse in Beaver, Utah, was begun in the 1870's but was not completed until June of 1882.

The building was partially destroyed by fire in August 1889, but was immediately rebuilt with some improvements. The building has been modernized and is in use today.

Sevier County Courthouse in Richfield, is the county's second courthouse. The first courthouse was completed and dedicated in June of 1877. This building no longer exists. Based on the plans of the Juab County Courthouse, with local adaptations to meet Sevier County needs, the present courthouse was constructed in 1892. The building is still in service for county business.

U T A H STATE H I S T O R I C A L SOCIETY

'MMM(A

K:r :.;.. •MMM

MM\MMM: MUM:M

H;

''MM- limMSSl.'.;.: :\y.:

,i-;., Mff;.'mi i M\\m MMMMMMMM^-

• • : • 'MMMIM-,,-

. • . ; ....:...,:

:

' '% "': ' : M '

•

:

f

_',. Li.. -

n ::

ilMim^M'' : i(MMMM

W'^mWiMMm

:

mMJMM

Mv.?$£

142

Utah Historical

Quarterly

a b o u t three days. W o u l d it not, u n d e r these circumstances, be highly inconvenient for h i m to transact any business in the district court . . . .

O t h e r towns in the T e r r i t o r y are similarly situated, . . . a n d , w i t h o u t local courts of some kind, they are wholly w i t h o u t protection by judicial authority in p r o p e r t y or person. U n d e r these circumstances, can it b e said t h a t t h e Legislature of U t a h acted unwisely in conferring jurisdiction on the p r o b a t e courts? W o u l d they n o t have fallen far short of their d u t y h a d they neglected to t h r o w a r o u n d their infant settlements, so widely separated, such protection as the p r o b a t e courts have a f f o r d e d ? 2 5

I n attempting to meet the objection that probate courts were highly prejudiced in favor of the Mormons, Cannon produced a list of eightyfour civil cases which h a d been tried by jury in Salt Lake County and involved Mormons and non-Mormons. O u t of these, fifty-nine were decided in favor of n o n - M o r m o n s and dissenting Mormons, while only twenty-five were decided in favor of Mormons. Replying to the criticism that M o r m o n bishops were judges, Cannon justified it by picturing U t a h ' s unique ecclesiastical a n d political situation: Sir, there is probably no officer in t h e U t a h Territory, if h e belongs to the M o r m o n people, w h o does not hold some position i n the C h u r c h . T h e M o r m o n people d o n o t believe in salaried p r e a c h e r s ; b u t they believe it to be the privilege of every w o r t h y m a n of t h e organization to be a n elder, a n d , w h e n called u p o n , to m a k e himself useful in p r e a c h i n g . . . . Bishops, p r o b a t e judges, m e n of different vocations in the c o m m u n i t y , a r e t h u s called u p o n to speak to the people, so t h a t if you say t h a t a m a n m u s t not exercise political functions in U t a h because h e is an officer in the c h u r c h you exclude from all offices in the T e r r i t o r y every respectable M o r m o n . 2 6

Despite the pleadings of M r . Cannon, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the Poland Bill. After a Senate a m e n d m e n t the bill was signed by the President on J u n e 22, 1874. T h e extensive powers of U t a h ' s probate courts, and hence the influence of county probate judges in civil and criminal affairs were thus effectively limited.

T h e Poland Bill ended the controversy over the criminal jurisdiction of the probate courts. T h e probate judge, however, still r e m a i n e d under fire until 1888, when the E d m u n d s - T u c k e r Act m a d e his office appointive by the President of the U n i t e d States. 2 7 T h e same act also vested in the district courts exclusive jurisdiction in the granting of divorces, thus displacing the probate courts even more. I n 1896, w h e n U t a h became a state, the probate court, a n d hence the office of probate judge, was finally abolished.

25

U.S., Congressional Record, 43d Cong., 1st Sess., 1873-1874, II, Part 5, 4470-71.

Ibid., 4471.

27 U.S., Statutes at Large, XXIV, 639.

26

V

/

Dr. John M. Bernhisel: Mormon Elder In Congress

r

.M

.: '-M-M

\

lohn

M. Bernhisel (1799-1881)

BY G W Y N N W . BARRETT

w

selected an agent in 1849 to treaty with Congress in behalf of "Deseret," they chose one of their own number, an intelligent, cultivated, New York physician who had been an intimate companion of Joseph Smith. Dr. John Milton Bernhisel had demonstrated his complete acceptance of the doctrines promulgated by the martyred prophet since his first association with the Mormons in New York. The quiet, unassuming doctor, now in his fifty-second year, returned to the Salt Lake Valley in 1851 only to retrace his steps when "called" to return to Washington as the first delegate to Congress from the new territory Congress preferred to call Utah.

Delegate Bemhisel's Washington decade was only a brief span in a long life of four score and two years, most of which has been virtually neglected by scholars. When compared with the dissimilar experiences that he had during his seventy years of private life, the politico-statesman role seems unnatural unless one understands that the physician, the epitome of loyal, dedicated service, willingly responded to every assignment given him by his church.

Dr. Bernhisel left his successful practice and urban environment at the midpoint in his life and subjected himself to the rudeness of a frontier society to which he never became completely acclimated. Responsive and loyal when called upon to remain on the east side of the river and salvage Nauvoo property, to endure the crudity of a Winter Quarters log cabin, or to influence congressional committees when he bore the stigma of one of the "twin relics" himself, this man with uncommon characteristics, when compared with his compeers, remained orthodox and true to the faith and leadership which he had voluntarily accepted.

Some facets of John Bemhisel's personal, as well as public life, when taken alone, might support the supposition that a keen sense of loyalty and integrity, not religious conviction, guided the affairs of the doctor.

Dr. Washington F. Anderson, of Salt Lake City, however, was convinced that his close friend John Bernhisel was thoroughly converted to Mormonism. While riding together one day to see a patient in a rural area, the doctor discussed doctrinal issues explained to him by his late confidant and friend Joseph Smith. When Dr. Anderson asked him if he really believed that such a Utopia could be realized, Dr. Bernhisel, raising his hands said, "as surely as the sun now shines in Heaven." 1 H E N THE COUNCIL OF FIFTY

Mr. Barrett is currently teaching history a t Brigham Y o u n g University while he completes his doctoral dissertation. I n J u n e of 1968 he will assume the position of associate professor of history, Boise State College.

1 Washington F. Anderson, "Reminiscence," Miscellaneous Bernhisel letters, etc. ( H u n t i n g ton Library, San M a r i n o , California), n.d.

John M. Bernhisel

145

John Milton Bernhisel was not a demonstrative, emotional man, but a sensitive, thoughtful individual within whom, we may conclude, conviction was rooted much more firmly, and conversion quite obviously more complete than that of many of the opportunists who gravitated to Mormonism during the Nauvoo period.

PENNSYLVANIA FARM BOY

Six months before the death of George Washington, and six years preceding the birth of Joseph Smith, Samuel and Susan Bower Bernheisel greeted their first son, the second of nine children. In his will, grandfather Johannes Martin Berntheusel, bequeathed his property in Tyrone Township, Cumberland County, to his wife Anna Christina Chateau, and his son Samuel. Here John Milton was born June 23, 1799.2 The county records of Martin's benevolent grants for a church, school, and cemetery, as well as the large tracts of land transferred to his sons, serve to illustrate that Samuel became the possessor of considerable means. 3 The Bernhisel acres were near Loysville, about fifteen miles west of the great bulge in the Susquehanna River and ten miles north of Harrisburg, in that part of Cumberland County that became Perry County in 1820. Here grandfather Martin gave land for a church building which was shared by the Lutherans and the Presbyterians. He also helped to establish the subscription school in the neighborhood where John received his formal education until he was old enough to live away from home.

In Philadelphia, about one hundred horseback miles east of his farm home, John studied in preparation for application to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania. The records show that, in 1818, he attended the lectures of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, a firm advocate of Andrew Jackson's favorite remedy for "distressing attacks," bleeding. 4 Dr. Physick's methods had a profound influence upon his students.

After a year or more of medical training, the young doctor settled in Harrisburg where he remained long enough to renew old friendships and acquire a "numerous circle of friends." Four months after his 2 Sunshine Foulke Chambers, Foulke, Lupfer and Allied Families (Pennsylvania, 1 9 5 2 ) , 102â&#x20AC;&#x201D;14. Note t h a t the spelling of Bernhisel varies.

3 Silas Wright, History of Perry County in Pennsylvania (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1 8 7 3 ) , 259.

4 J o h n Spencer Bassett, The Life of Andrew Jackson ( G a r d e n City, New York, 1 9 1 1 ) , I I , 173.

146

Utah Historical

Quarterly

birthday, on the morning of November 1, 1820, he left Harrisburg by stagecoach for a visit to the family farm. Recalling this visit several years later, John wrote, "on the evening of the same day [I] arrived at the place of my nativity, the spot at which I had passed my earliest infancy, the theatre of my juvenile sports." 5 In mid-November he left Perry County on horseback for a six-day journey to Pittsburgh, where he remained a few days before going on to Ohio.

FOUR YEARS IN T H E W E S T

If John Bernhisel kept a journal during his long and eventful life, it is a most elusive document; for family, friends, and scholars interested in his personal life have had to rely upon letters, primarily, when the accounts of friends or associates do not tell the story. Fortunately, John was a good correspondent, and a long letter written to an unknown friend, probably at Harrisburg, has been preserved. It is in this letter that John explained his purpose in going to Pittsburgh, and described his activities up to 1825, when he returned to his medical studies in Philadelphia. 6 John traveled west from Pittsburgh to the Western Reserve "which was my place of destination when I left Harrisburg . . . having resolved on going to Ohio, and commencing the practice of medicine." Of all the towns that he visited, Cincinnati impressed the young doctor the most. "The commercial metropolis of this great and flourishing state . . . delightfully situated . . . [grew] moderately until 1814-15, when the hotbed of the banking system began to operate completely . . . and bloated it." No reason is given for his not staying in Cincinnati instead of going twenty-five miles north to Trenton, a small village with "twenty or twenty-five dwelling houses, and eighty or ninety inhabitants." Here John "entered on the exercises of . . . [his] profession with all the enthusiasms and high expectations which young men generally launch out upon the tempestuous reign of life." After "above twelve months" he decided to leave Trenton and moved on to Missouri, where he remained but a short time.

In the autumn of 1823, John made his way to Nashville where he "had the honor of seeing the justly celebrated and immortal General 5 John M. Bernhisel, "My Dear Sir," personal letter, Sparta, Alabama, December 1, 1825 (H. F. Bernhisel, Lewiston, Utah).

8 Ibid., At this point the format of the letter changes. John may have been writing this letter with publication in mind. He later refers to "extracts of my letters . . . in some Pennsylvania papers." In a letter to George A. Smith, written while visiting with his mother in Pennsylvania, Bernhisel said that he did not keep a journal. See Bernhisel to Smith, Tuscarora Mountain, September 11, 1854, p. 1, Bernhisel Letter File (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Historian's Library, Salt Lake City).

John M. Bernhisel

147

Jackson." In April 1824 he left Nashville and spent the next two months in Lexington, Kentucky, where he drank from the Blue Lick Springs "for the benefit of my health," and enjoyed the "intelligent and refined" society in which the "ladies for beauty, modesty, delicacy, and uneffected politeness . . . are not surpassed by those in any of the eastern cities," The summer months of 1824 were spent in Woodruff County just a few miles west of Lexington. Here John met Henry Clay, the speaker of the national House of Representatives, whom he described in considerable detail. The "wise and virtuous" Clay, John said, "was not only an eloquent and accomplished Orator, but an ardent and magnanimous Patriot [whose] countenance . . . strongly expresses energy, firmness, and intelligence." Clay made quite an impression on his young admirer, who filled a page with interesting complimentary observations, noting that as a presidential candidate Clay "has . . . great claims on the national confidence." 7 PHILADELPHIA

After nearly five years "abroad" John returned to the University of Pennsylvania. With several years of practical experience behind him, John continued his studies under Dr. Philip Syng Physick, graduating in 1827, after completing a dissertation on apoplexy* During this period he was certified to practice medicine at the Aims-House in Philadelphia.

It is quite likely that he continued this service as well as private practice for several years. However, by the end of Jackson's administration he had moved to New York City where he opened his office in rented quarters at 176 Hudson Street. 9 NEW

YORK CITY

Doctor Bernhisel accepted Mormonism and joined the church during the first decade of its existence. The details of his conversion are not clear.

However, on April 15, 1841, while practicing medicine in New York City, he was ordained a bishop. In the months that followed he was in frequent correspondence with Joseph Smith, to whom he sent $500.00 for the purchase of a tract of land in Nauvoo. 10 In this letter, dated July 12, 1841, after disposing of his personal affairs, Bishop Bernhisel turned 7

Bernhisel, "My Dear Sir," December 1, 1825.

L . R. C. Agnew and G. F. Sheldon, "Philip Syng Physick (1768-1837), The Father of American Surgery," Journal of Medical Education, XXXV (June, 1960), 541â&#x20AC;&#x201D;47; John M. Bernhisel, "An Inaugural Dissertation on Apoplexy" (M.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1827).

9 John M. Bernhisel to Joseph Smith, New York City, July 12, 1841, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library).

10 Ibid.

8

148

Utah, Historical

Quarterly

to church business and added "I have delivered your message to the Brethren here respecting . . . baptism for the dead. We were rejoiced that you were delivered out of the hands of wicked and ungodly men.

It was reported that you designed making us a visit about the latter part of May . . . it is superfluous to add that we are disappointed." 1X The following month, not having received an acknowledgment from Joseph Smith, the doctor wrote him to check and see if his bank certificate had been safely received, then renewed his request that land be purchased for him, acting in this matter "as if you were purchasing for yourself." 12 Three weeks later, having received a letter from Joseph Smith on September 5, John sent "as a small testimony of my gratitude to you for the valuable service you are rendering me" a copy of John L. Stephen's Incidents and Travels in Central and South America. He then added his condolences in regard to the death of Joseph's brother Don Carlos. 13 With his land purchase completed, Dr. Bernhisel made preparations to leave his medical practice in New York City and move to Nauvoo.

Shortly before doing so he addressed a final letter to Joseph Smith, in which he said he hoped to be ready to depart from New York City the latter part of the month or about April 1. Assuming that he carried his "recommend" with him, he must have been delayed a month longer than he expected, for this document was endorsed April 23, 1843. 14 NAUVOO

There were opportunities for civic responsibilities in the Mormon capital, but a special council was, by far, the most significant and influential organization. Several months after Dr. Bernhisel arrived in Nauvoo, he met with Joseph Smith and eight others on a Thursday morning, September 28, 1843, in a room over the prophet's store. That evening the same group met in the doctor's quarters in the Mansion and unanimously elected Joseph Smith president of the special council. 15 The nature of the deliberations of this Council are not clear, but it is significant that those present took a prominent part in the organization 11 Ibid. Less than two years later, Bernhisel served as "proxy" for numerous baptisms performed in the Mississippi River and the Nauvoo Temple for deceased notables.

12 John M. Bernhisel to Joseph Smith, New York City, August 18, 1841 (Brigham Young University Library, Provo).

13 John M. Bernhisel to Joseph Smith, New York City, September 8, 1841, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library). " J o h n M. Bernhisel to Joseph Smith, New York City, March 8, 1843 (Utah State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City).

15 B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (6 vols., Salt Lake City, 1930), VI, 39.

John M. Bernhisel

149

of the Council of Fifty which played an important role in the temporal affairs of the "kingdom" for the next forty years, and perhaps longer.

John was a member of this body for the rest of his life, but never mentioned it in his correspondence. Others were not so secretive, however, for John D. Lee, Hosea Stout, and L. John Nuttall all mentioned the activities of the Council, or " Y T F I F " in their diaries and journals. 16 In March of 1844 the "charter" members of the council met with thirteen new members including Brigham Young, Willard Richards, and Heber Kimball, among others, to discuss migration proposals that had been submitted by Lyman Wight and George Miller. It was at this meeting that Joseph Smith charged this council with the specific responsibility of supervising the migration to the West. 17 The council membership was soon increased to fifty, this being considered the optimum size for a governing body concerned with the social, economic, and political welfare of an ever expanding society.

Dr. Bernhisel did not build on the property which he acquired through correspondence before moving to Nauvoo. For a short time he lived at the home of an old acquaintance John Snyder, but soon accepted the prophet's invitation to move into the Mansion House, where his quarters on the second floor became the scene of important council meetings, Joseph Smith enjoyed the companionship of this quiet, scholarly gentleman. Just a week or so before the important meeting in which the Council of Fifty was planned, Joseph had spent an evening "conversing with Dr. John M. Bernhisel." 18 In December the prophet recorded a conversation in which he had related to the doctor "my commencement in receiving revelations." 19 On several occasions, and perhaps frequently, the two men found time for a leisurely ride and pleasant conversation. In May, a few weeks before the assassination, they rode out, "to the praire which is now very green" with two of the Smith boys, Frederick and Alexander. 20 Four days later, Joseph "went 16 J u a n i t a Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1861 (2 vols., Salt Lake City, 1964) ; Robert Cleland a n d J u a n i t a Brooks, eds., A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876 (2 vols., San M a r i n o , 1 9 4 4 ) ; L. J o h n Nuttall, " T h e Diary of L. J o h n Nuttall [1876â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1884]" (4 vols., typescript Brigham Young University L i b r a r y ) .

Lee refers to the Council as " Y T F I F . " 17 B. H . Roberts, ed., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (7 vols., Salt Lake City, 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 3 2 ) , V I , 2 6 0 - 6 1 . (Hereafter cited as Roberts, Documentary History.)

18 Ibid., V, 525.

19 Ibid., V I , 149.

20 Roberts, Comprehensive History, V I , 342.

150

Utah Historical

Quarterly

to Dr. Bemhisel's room and had counsel with Brothers Richards and Phelps." 21 Several doctors, attracted to Mormonism during the early years of the church, took up residence in Nauvoo, but there were few, if any, who had had the training and experience of John Milton Bernhisel. On numerous occasions he was called upon to administer to the needs of the people. In December 1843 he dressed the wounds of Richard Badham who had been stabbed in the stomach by robbers. 22 Soon after this he treated William, the son of Lorenzo Young. 23 Somewhat later he attended to the wounds of a Mr. Moore who had been accidently shot.24 When "Cyrus Daniels was shot through the right arm just above the elbow . . .

Br. Turley set the bones . . . then Dr. Bernhisel was sent for who undone his arm and set it over again." 25 In November 1845 Dr. Bernhisel conducted a post-mortem examination of the body of Joshua Smith who had claimed, shortly before his death, that he had been poisoned by the Carthage militia. Bernhisel found that the victim was right, poisoning had taken place. 26 Just five days before Joseph and his brother Hyrum were killed, a council meeting had been held in John's room in the Mansion House.

It was during the course of this meeting that John C. Calhoun's two sons arrived for an interview with the prophet, interrupting the meeting.

Both the doctor and John Taylor were tired, having just returned from a conference with Governor Thomas Ford in Carthage, so when Joseph left the room they lay down and were soon asleep. The next morning they learned that Joseph and Hyrum had crossed the Mississippi during the night. 27 In their last meeting the prophet had informed Dr. Bernhisel and the others that he had "determined to go to Washington and lay the matter before President Tyler." 28 They had also talked about crossing the river, but no decision had been made the night before.29 The doctor 21

Ibid., 4 0 3 .

Roberts, Documentary History, V I , 110.

23 James A. Little, "Biography of Lorenzo D o w Y o u n g , " Utah Historical Quarterly, XIV ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 69.

24 Roberts, Documentary History, V I I , 390.

2o Brooks, Diary of Hosea Stout, I, 7 1 .

20 Roberts, Documentary History, V I I , 513.

27 B. H . Roberts, The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo (Salt Lake City, 1 9 0 0 ) , 4 2 3 . F a w n M .

Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith The Mormon Prophet (New York, 1 9 4 5 ) , 383.

28 Roberts, Documentary History, V I , 545.

29 Roberts, Rise and Fall of Nauvoo, 424.

22

John M. Bernhisel

151

crossed over to visit Joseph on the Iowa side. About 4:00 P.M. the group started back, paused briefly in Nauvoo then went on to Carthage. Later Dr. Bernhisel told John Taylor that Joseph, "looking him full in the face, and solemn as eternity, said I am going as a lamb to the slaughter." 30 On June 14, at the request of Joseph Smith, John Bernhisel had addressed a letter to Governor Ford in which he confirmed the correctness of Smith's report concerning the action the Nauvoo City Council had taken with regard to the destruction of the press of the Expositor, a newspaper published by a group of disgruntled Mormons. In this letter he gave this personal testimony about the character of the prophet; "Having been a boarder in General Smith's family for more than nine months . . .

I have concluded to give you a few of my impressions of him . . . a man of strong mental powers . . . much energy and decision of character, great penetration, and a profound knowledge of human nature." More than a page of sincere complimentary observations preceded this interesting concluding statement, "It is almost superfluous to add that the numerous ridiculous and scandalous reports in circulation . . . have not the least foundation in truth." 31 Obviously John Bernhisel accepted Joseph Smith to be just what he purported, a prophet of God. During the last days immediately preceding the Carthage massacre the doctor was in constant touch with Joseph.

Throughout the imprisonment, he was either at the jail or on errands.

On June 26, the doctor had a conference with Ford and returned to the jail to report that the governor was apparently doing all he could. When the trial was set, he was to have been a witness for the defense, but death brought to a sorrowful and abrupt conclusion, in June 1844, the warm, personal relationship enjoyed by John Bernhisel and Joseph Smith for less than a year.

A few months before his death, Joseph Smith helped to create the image which may have served to influence the decision of those who later selected John Bernhisel as their agent to Congress. Politics were frequently discussed by the two men. In February 1844, in preparation for his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Joseph sought out the doctor "who proposed some alterations in my views of government. Phelps read the same and the doctor seemed better pleased with it than before." In May John Bernhisel became the New York City representative at the "State Presidential Convention" held in Nauvoo.

30

Roberts, Documentary History, VII, 120.

Ibid., VI, 467â&#x20AC;&#x201D;68; John M. Bernhisel to His Excellency Governor Ford, Nauvoo, June 14, 1844, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library).

31

152

Utah Historical

Quarterly

As a member of the "Central Committee of Correspondence," the doctor's name appeared on a letter which optimistically proclaimed that "General Smith's prospects are brightening every day." In a letter to James Arlington Bennett, who was to be the candidate for the vice presidency, Willard Richards said, "Come and see us, Bro. Joseph's, Young's, and Bemhisel's respects to you." 32 Notwithstanding his lack of political experience, Bernhisel was becoming implicated in the political aspirations of the prophet. Clearly the confidence the church leader placed in the doctor started him along a path that led to political prominence in Mormondom.

After the prophet's death, work on the single-spired temple located on the hill overlooking the city, was pushed with renewed vigor. Before leaving New York City, Bernhisel had collected funds and made personal contributions for the building of the temple. 33 Between December 1845 and the following February when the exodus for Winter Quarters commenced, the temple was used for the special religious services for which it was being constructed. Jesse Crosby wrote in his journal "endowments commenced about the first of December . . . as many as 500 went through in 24 hours, this not common . . . all work stopped 8th Feb . . . ." 34 Although he had received his own endowments in December 1843, John Bernhisel was in the temple and participated in the services during this time. He was sealed to his wife Julia Ann Haight Van Orden, whom he had married in the early part of 1845. He was also sealed to Dolly Ransom, Catherine Paine, Fanny Spafford, Catherine Burgess, her daughter Elizabeth Barker, and Melissa Lott Smith, all on January 20, 1846. The marriage to Melissa was for "time only" for she was sealed to Joseph Smith "for eternity" on the day the temple was closed, February 8, 1846.35 William and Julia Ann Van Orden had arrived in Nauvoo in the fall of 1843 with their children, Charlotte, Peter, Mary Helen, Everett, Sarah, Antonette, and Arthur, whose ages ranged from three to thirteen.

Two weeks after the martyrdom, Julia Ann became a widow when William died from complications that followed a severe cold. In another two weeks he was followed in death by his youngest son, Arthur. The 32

Roberts, Documentary History, V I , 211, 2 3 1 - 3 3 . " T e m p l e F u n d s , " Times and Seasons ( N a u v o o ) , I I I , M a y 16, 1842, states " a certificate of deposite . . . by Doct. J o h n M . Bernhisel . . . has been received . . . a n d passed to the credit of the Individuals n a m e d in the accompanying letter. G o a n d D o Likewise."

34 Jesse W. Crosby, "History a n d J o u r n a l of Jesse W. Crosby" (typescript, Brigham Young U n i v e r s i t y ) , 29.

35 Copies of these records are in the possession of the author.

33

John M. Bernhisel

153

widow was left with six children to support, a story-and-a-half brick house on Mulholland Street, and 160 acres of land. Julia Ann rented the land to William's half-brother E. A. Carine, and then married Dr. Bernhisel the following spring. 36 After selling her house and trading her farm for two teams and two wagons, pregnant she set out for Winter Quarters on September 20, Peter driving one team and a hired man the other. Within a few years Peter and Everett established homes of their own and encouraged their mother to live with them. 37 Although the doctor had satisfied the marital demands made upon him through vows in the temple, he did not interpret the law as literally as many within the church did. After the departure of Julia Ann, his matrimonial responsibilities were reduced to the care of Catherine Burgess and her daughter Elizabeth, both of whom had been sealed to him the previous January. Born in Lancashire, England, in 1831, the daughter of Thomas Barker, Elizabeth won the affection of her patient, patronizing husband. The difference in their ages surely contributed to this deference, for other members of the family remembered him as a strict disciplinarian who imposed his personal habits and idiosyncrasies upon them. No personal letters or journals from this period survive to document his feelings.

Bernhisel did not leave Nauvoo with Julia Ann because the Council of Fifty had decided the previous January that he and others should remain behind to dispose of property, outfit emigrants, and complete the Nauvoo House and temple. 38 By January 13, 1847, he had finished as much of his task as was practicable. A letter to Heber C. Kimball at Winter Quarters written on that date said, "I intend to leave as early in the spring as I can," because there were but few left in the city needing his help. 39 John Bernhisel was forty-six and Julia Ann forty when they were married early in 1845. After so many years of bachelorhood, the ordeal of adapting to a wife and family was no less trying for the doctor than was the family's efforts to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of a new husband 36

Mary Helen Grant, "Incidents in the Life of Mary Helen [Van Orden] Grant," Journal of (April, 1917), 173-74.

Ibid., 176.

38 On January 18, at a meeting held in the attic of the temple, Almon Babbitt, John Heywood, J. S. Fullmer, H. W. Miller, and John Bernhisel were selected by the Council of Fifty to stay behind and dispose of property, the proceeds to be used to outfit those who otherwise would not be able to leave. A week later Brigham Young appointed Bernhisel and Miller trustees for the Nauvoo House while the rest of the committee was committed to finishing the temple. Brooks, Diary of Hosea Stout, I, 86.

39 John M. Bernhisel to Heber C. Kimball, Nauvoo, January 13, 1847, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library).

History,^ 87

154

Utah Historical

Quarterly

and father. He was probably no less sensitive to the doctrine of plural marriage than were the members of his family, and it seems likely that Julia Ann was never asked to share her home in Nauvoo with another wife before she left in the summer of 1846 with her children.

Before Bernhisel left for Winter Quarters, Emma Smith offered to loan him Joseph's manuscript copy of the Bible. H e kept it for three months while he made a copy for all except "some few additions and changes that were made in some of the books." 40 Returning the original manuscript to Emma, he brought his copy with him to Utah, eventually presenting it to the Mormon church library.

W I N T E R QUARTERS

Julia Ann gave birth to a son December 21, 1846, in a log cabin built for the family by George Grant, a cousin of daughter Charlotte's groom, Ira West. After assisting the family through the winter, Grant went on to the Salt Lake Valley in Brigham Young's company. Walking back to Winter Quarters, he arrived in November 1847 not long after Dr. Bernhisel, Elizabeth, and Catherine arrived. On December 10, Mary Helen Van Orden and George Grant were married in a ceremony performed by Ezra Benson at Julia Ann's bedside. Both mother and baby had been ill for several long spells during the past year. 41 Brigham Young, Willard Richards, and Heber C. Kimball, now recognized as the First Presidency of the church, were among the notables who were in Winter Quarters during the winter of 1847. On December 10, the same day his stepdaughter, Mary Helen, was married, Dr. Bernhisel reported to the First Presidency concerning Nauvoo House affairs thus completing the assignment with which he had been charged.

William Clayton, John D. Lee, and other members of the Council of Fifty were also at Winter Quarters at this time. During the spring they made preparations to abandon their log and sod house town where Florence, Nebraska, would soon be established.

Busy getting ready to depart in May, John Bernhisel was not immune to the same problems that plagued many of the pioneers. Hosea Stout noted in his journal that they were visited by marauding Pawnees who took advantage of the distraction that favored them during a heavy rain, 40

Nuttall, "Diary," II, 335-36. " Grant, "Incidents," Journal of History, X, 179.

John M. Bernhisel

155

and stole two horses from "Dr. Barnhisels . . . he recovered them by following them across the Platte at the mouth finding them asleep." 42 Soon to become life-long neighbors, the Bernhisels and Claytons traveled to the Salt Lake Valley with the Kimball company of 226 wagons and 662 people. On Saturday, May 27, 1848, John D. Lee's group came to a stream where they "found Dr. Burnhisel and a No. of the Brethren camped." Three weeks later, when Thomas Ricks, Howard Egan, and William Kimble gave chase to Indians who had stolen some cattle, their gunshot wounds were dressed by the doctor. 43 SALT LAKE VALLEY

President Kimball's company arrived in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, Sunday, September 24, just four days behind Brigham Young's, and nearly three weeks before Willard Richards'. The arrivals increased the population to five thousand, most of whom heard the sermons preached that important day when the decision was made to leave the log forts that had been constructed the previous year, and build individual houses. Brigham Young and Heber Kimball then proceeded to apportion off the land to applicants who were required to pay $1.00 for surveying and 50 cents for recording the land. Houses, it was revealed, should be placed twenty feet back from the inner line of the proposed sidewalks.44 Most of the choice lots surrounding the Temple Block went to members of the Council of Fifty. John Bemhisel's one-and-one-quarter acre lot was on the northeast comer of North Temple and First West (West Temple), extending one-half block north and one-quarter block east. Immediately to the west, across the street, was William Clayton's comer, and next door, to the north, Clayton's brother-in-law, Lorin Farr. 45 John Pack acquired the corner of First North and First West.

Here on this corner, the first classes of the University of Deseret were conducted in 1850. Dr. Bernhisel became a member of the first Board of Regents and remained on the Board until 1858.

AGENT TO CONGRESS

"Let every man of the Council use his influence to put down extortion by reasoning with the People and getting up Prayre meetings and 42 Brooks, Diary of Hosea Stout, I, 3 1 1 ; Cleland a n d Brooks, A Mormon Chronicle, I, 3 1 , 4 0 ; Paul E. D a h l , William Clayton: Missionary, Pioneer, and Public Servant ( C e d a r City, 1 9 5 9 ) , 132.

43 Roberts, Comprehensive History, V I , 319.

44 Ibid., 336.

45 D a u g h t e r s of U t a h Pioneers of Salt L a k e County C o m p a n y , comp., Tales of a Triumphant People: A History of Salt Lake County, Utah, 1847-1900 (Salt L a k e City, 1 9 4 7 ) , m a p insert between pages 338â&#x20AC;&#x201D;39.

156

Utah Historical

Quarterly

preaching to the People and thereby draw their attention from fidling, dancing, and fudling [drinking]," said Brigham at a "convention of the Council" held at the Kimball's January 6, 1849. It was on this occasion that "J. M. Burnhisal was appointed or delegated to go to the City of Washington," with a petition asking Congress for a territorial government. 46 Dr. Bernhisel's commissions as agent and then delegate came from the Council, though his name was presented to the people on the regular election ballot every two years without opposition.

On February 24, John D. Lee recorded, the "Legislative council met at W. W. Phelp's school Room." After "Prayer by Counsellor Burnhisal . . . the members proceeded to buisiness" a part of which was to approve of Brigham Young's decision to produce a sleigh robe of fox skins for Dr. Bernhisel to present to Colonel Thomas Kane on his way to Washington. This was not the first public responsibility bestowed upon the doctor since arriving in the valley. O n December 9, 1848, he 48

Cleland a n d Brooks, A Mormon

Chronicle,

I, 86.

Plat of Temple Block and the surrounding area showing the location of the Bernhisel property. The map was drawn from a plat map of Salt Lake City compiled by Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr., and on file in the Utah State Historical Society Library. i

.:

;

nspfi] tUttuM;

i

s£ tat

MM:-, A

1 3

"B^borrci

te.

jafiur

: ' : iSsfcj >£ CJ s.

a.Njouuft

;: H ",: "•'WM -i2 : my: ; 3C

tt.KWrinNey -i N KVIHITHE-J

MA//V

(»

"g>.^OV>fCt,

Ul

•

-:

5

-

J.L WE^WOOC ; OH^DE:

A. CURE m'6 To* 2 t g J.N\-^EBNmSEL

Wtt.*

H: 7 <* u .

«c MMM

SfflE

* « . .: : : .£ «C°pc->-i

_1 mrjuiiWPS AM Ifyaa B.h\»«,nK

?~/sesr h'esr Sr/eeer W.Tf.ftc<cc

:

u

3 ; • • . . ' • • . . ' .

LLL,;#T. CBHISTER.

^

CI A-SHIITM

i:#V.i : ::::::::::::::

•yl;•

.

.

.

.

.

••.':

•:.-

P P PRATT

• • • • • •

3 " j h3i ; : ; ; .

: : ... : : :o

1*

...:•-••

•MM':-M<" M <£S?

J . \fftW tffTT

0."Pr?OTT

<3

: c:

Ul- r^ltmftRDi.

•J>.P."P*ftTT

l^Otttf S l t t t H

i

:

-:u t :

:

Uj.^itKftRDS

MtmMMjm,

M

i

imsjifii

i

•

ft

:

^>rfi.££ r

Uicoof*

*fi>. ^joiHfCr

P.tVraorf I.JOKMSCM

' : • :

cJ3

"B-Younffr h.m.iMrmrm:. ; o. u p ?

R.tflwx«

lllllsill A.i^oeiNS

•

"E> .^OUtTGr

- k

I

:

-i

TB-Noower

:

mSjisSi

r

ce.

£&£%•%* ?tro^s

1

$

£ :"'.

3

<S

or a'..

-#iii:

• : <j,

•*?

.:

•

•••

- L

; . : .

John M. Bernhisel

157

had been appointed marshal by the Council of Fifty, a position which he held until his departure for the East the following May. 47 Until the plans for the two-story Bernhisel residence drawn by temple architect Truman O. Angell were completed in 1860, the family occupied somewhat less commodious quarters during the years when the doctor spent most of his time in Washington. 48 When Dr. Bernhisel left the valley May 3, 1849, he bade farewell not only to Julia Ann and young John Milton Bernhisel II, now two-and-a-half years old, but to Elizabeth and baby William, born on February 28. The doctor left his families as comfortably situated as conditions would permit, however, his wives had little or no attachment for one another, consequently the family did not stay together. Julia Ann with all her children, including Milton, settled with her daughter Mary Helen Grant at Kaysville in the fall of 1851, after the doctor had returned home. 49 47

Ibid., I, 80.

Truman O. Angell, "Plan for Dr. Bemhisel's House" (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library).

49 Grant, "Incidents," Journal of History, X, 181.

48

About 1865 looking southwest from North Main Street. The Endowment House is in the northwest corner of Temple Square. The Bernhisel residence is directly across the street, the two-story structure in the center of the photograph.

U T A H STATE H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y

158

Utah Historical

Quarterly

In May of 1849 Brigham Young assigned his brother, Lorenzo, who was going east on business, to act as guard for John Bernhisel, and to see him safely through as far as the Missouri River. The doctor carried with him a letter of introduction to Stephen A. Douglas and instructions to call on Thomas Kane before presenting a memorial to Congress, In March he had served as a member of a committee appointed to draft a constitution for the State of Deseret, however, his instructions were to ask for a territorial form of government. 50 The journey east proved to be arduous. On May 6, "Bro. Bemhisel's wagon tipped over into the creek and we were obliged to camp for the night. It rained and was very dark. We were tired and glad to crawl into bed without supper." The next day, Lorenzo Young recorded, "Doct. Bernhisel and myself visited the very same spot where petitions to the all-wise God" had been offered when Brigham Young was ill during the journey in 1847. Here they again paused for prayer. 51 Under the constitution of the "State of Deseret," which John Bernhisel had helped to prepare, Almon W. Babbitt was elected by the general assembly and left for Washington in July of 1849 as Deseret's "delegate to Congress." 52 Babbitt had joined the church in 1830. Later, while a member of the Illinois State Legislature, he had been instrumental in securing the Nauvoo Charter. Babbitt, along with Dr. Bernhisel and several others, had remained in Nauvoo as trustees in 1846-47. Now he followed the doctor east with a memorial designed to supercede the original petition.

When Almon Babbitt arrived in Washington he expected to be seated. Congress, reacted adversely, refusing to recognize the "delegate" from Deseret. The Compromise of 1850, providing territorial status for Utah, not statehood for Deseret, was already under discussion. When Babbitt and Bernhisel returned to the valley in July 1851, they were accompanied by several of the new territorial officials. Patient lobbying on the part of Dr. Bernhisel had helped secure the governorship for Brigham Young.

En route to Washington in 1849 John had stopped in Nauvoo and New York while Wilford Woodruff had gone on to Massachusetts. From Lock Port, New York, the doctor penned a letter to Brigham Young in 50

Roberts, Lorenzo ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 168.

52 Roberts, Frontier in Utah 51

Comprehensive History, V I , 4 3 3 .

D o w Young, " D i a r y of Lorenzo D o w Y o u n g , " Utah Historical Comprehensive History, (Chicago, 1 9 4 2 ) , 90.

V I , 4 3 3 ; Nels Anderson, Desert Saints:

Quarterly, The

XIV Mormon

John M. Bernhisel

159

which he warned that a "dire calamity" in the form of "thousands of gold hunters" was about to "befall our quiet and peaceful retreat . . . [for] vast numbers . . . [are] determined to . . . quarter upon you during the approaching winter . . . this is deeply to be deplored." With regard to Nauvoo, he commented on the desolate and gloomy appearance of the temple which had burned, and was now used as a sheepfold and cowpen.

The Icarian community then established in Nauvoo was on the verge of collapse, thought the doctor. When he called at the Mansion House he said that Emma "received me in the kindest, and entertained me in the most hospitable maner, yet she did not make a single inquiry about the church, or any of its members â&#x20AC;&#x201D; she has become quite corpulent . . . Mother Smith inquired of you and others. " 53 MORMON ELDER IN

CONGRESS

Several years after his disaffection with the church, Edward W. Tullidge wrote a monograph on the congressional history of Utah in which he concluded that "Utah can scarcely be said to have possessed any political . . . history until the period of the war . . . John M. Bernhisel . . . something of a Mormon elder in Congress . . . had served his constituents faithfully, but no feature stands out of that service so prominent as to require special mention" 54 The record shows, however, that the doctor was an indefatigable lobbyist who made a favorable impression upon congressional leaders as well as Presidents, and was instrumental in procuring appropriations for a territorial library, roads, mail, and telegraph service. More important, perhaps, as far as the Mormon church was concerned, was the role he played during the Utah War. On August 4, 1851, John Milton Bernhisel became Utah's first territorial delegate to Congress, serving for four terms in the Thirtysecond through the Thirty-fifth Congresses, Succeeded by William Hooper in 1859, after requesting that he be allowed to remain with his family, he returned to Washington for the Thirty-seventh Congress in 1861, and then retired.

53 John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, Lock Port, New York, September 10, 1849, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library). Between Nauvoo and New York, John visited with the families of William Marks and George Adams then went on to Michigan to see if the Strangites were prospering. "Beaver Island is cold and barren . . . and contains about forty male members with their families." He then reported on the whereabouts of John Page, John Bennett, Sidney Rigdon, the Laws, Gladden Bishop, Martin Harris, and "all the lions" at Kirtland. After commenting on Benton and Clay as well as their political views, he closed his letter with, "True patriots we, for be it understood, we left our country for our country's good."

54 Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine, I (April, 1881), 371.

160

Utah Historical

Quarterly

After the public announcement of polygamy as a doctrine of the Mormon church in 1852, the Utah delegate was subjected to not infrequent derision from the floor of the House. The scrupulous, impeccable doctor, ever faithful to the doctrines of his church, found it easier, nevertheless, to carry out his duties and even defend the position of the church, when he could answer, "one," to those who wanted to know how many wives he had. During the summer of 1851 he had reverted to monogamy.

Julia Ann was settled with her family in Kaysville, remaining there until her death in 1869. Elizabeth's mother, Catherine Burgess, was "freed" from her covenants with the doctor in August 1851. Melissa Lott, Joseph's wife, who had been sealed to him "for time," remained in Nauvoo and married Ira Willes in 1849.55 "The President and Mrs. Fillmore request the favor of Dr. Bemhisel's company at dinner on Thursday February 12th at 6 o'clock." This invitation, and a similar one from President and Mrs. Pierce, found among John Bernhisel's personal papers, are interesting, but notes and letters reveal that the delegate, whom Tullidge considered ineffective, enjoyed an even more intimate relationship with Lincoln. In a letter to Elizabeth dated December 12, 1861, he recalled a visit with President Lincoln; "On the 6th instant . . . he received me very kindly and apparently very cordially. He is affable and agreeable, and I had quite a pleasant visit. On Tuesday he sent me a card, and wished to see me again, and I called on his Excellency again the next day." In March 1862 he told Elizabeth about a "large party at the President's. It is supposed to have been the most splendid party ever given in America.'53 5 6 THE

UTAH

WAR

Delegate Bernhisel had also written to Brigham Young on December 12, 1861, with regard to his visit to the White House. When he arrived at the executive mansion he "found a number of gentlemen waiting . . . to see the President, however, when he commenced receiving, he sent for me first. . . ." The delegate then assured Lincoln that "we [are] firm for the constitution and the Union," this being the "language of Ex-Governor Young's dispatch," which had just been received.57 55 Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 460. In December of 1854 Bernhisel wrote the following to Brigham Young: "I wish that those brethren who indulge in the thoughtless practice of writing letters on the subject of poligamy [sic] . . . would cease to do so. These letters find their way into the newspapers, and aggrevate and perpetuate that deep rooted and bitter prejudice which is operating so much to our injury." John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, Washington City, December 14, 1854, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library).

56 John Milton Bernhisel to Elizabeth, Washington, D . C , December 12, 1961, and March 12, 1862 (H. F. Bernhisel, Lewiston, Utah).

57 John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, Washington, D . C , December 12, 1861, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library).

John M. Bernhisel

161

The years immediately preceding Lincoln's election were difficult ones for Utah's delegate. He was present at the celebration in Cottonwood Canyon, July 24, 1857, when the first announcement about the Utah Expedition was made by Brigham Young. On September 14 he left for Washington in the carriage of the amiable Captain Stewart Van Vliet.58 As early as 1852 Dr. Bernhisel had recommended to President Fillmore that a commission be sent to Utah to investigate conditions there, but this had not been done. When he arrived in Washington in 1857 accompanied by Jedediah M. Grant, a debate took place in the House before the delegate from Utah was finally seated. Dr. Bernhisel left his seat vacant until the House reached its decision.

In July of 1858, in a note published in the New York Weekly Herald he said, "I believe the President to be a man from whom the truth may be kept by court intrigue; but I trust him as one in every case incapable of perfidy." The doctor then advised his readers to "distrust the letters with which the journals now abound, coming, or purporting to come from the station of the army of Utah." He was referring to epistles such as that written by an officer on duty at Camp Scott in 1858 who said, "Bernhisel is among you, cognizant of the treason of his people, dispensing liberally from the church fund to crush and put down the t r u t h . . . . " 59 The principal endeavor during John Bemhisel's congressional years was the promotion of the admission of Deseret into the union as a free, independent state. This, along with the removal of federal troops, was consistently pursued by the doctor. In a note to his new Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, December 22, 1862, Lincoln said, "Please see Dr. Bernhisel, of Utah, who thinks a Regiment of troops at Salt Lake, are not needed there, and might go elsewhere." 60 WALTER MURRAY GIBSON

Among the most interesting, if not the most profound experiences afforded the doctor while in Washington was his contact with promoters, some of whom were quite sincere. One personality was Walter Murray Gibson, who eventually joined the church and filled two missions. In a letter to Dr. Bernhisel, Gibson mentioned his program: 58 59

K a t e B. Carter, comp., Our Pioneer Heritage

Otis H a m m o n d , ed., The 1 9 2 8 ) , 298.

60

Utah Expedition,

Copy of this letter in possession of the author.

(9 vols., Salt Lake City, 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 7 ) , I, 70.

1857â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1858 . . . (Concord, N e w H a m p s h i r e ,

162

Utah Historical

Quarterly

New York, Nov. 26, 1858 My dear Sir: I have some intention to visit Utah and design to start for that territory, enroute to the Pacific Coast . . . I hope to accomplish a long cherished purpose of establishing a colony upon an island of Central Oceania . . .

I wish to have some correspondence with your constituents . . . and . . . the name of anyone in this city . . . who enjoys the confidence of the principle persons of your constituency. I wish to tell him freely, the objectives I have in view in visiting Utah Yours very respectfully Walter M. Gibson Hon. J. M. Bernhisel Washington, D. C.

"Kipikona," as he was later to be called, contacted Dr. Bernhisel in Washington and proposed the seeking of a congressional appropriation for the purpose of moving the Mormons to the western Pacific. Dr. Bernhisel did not promulgate the plan, but, nevertheless, both Brigham Young and James Buchanan were given an opportunity to consider the idea. 61 In the fall of 1859, Gibson went to Utah where he enjoyed the confidence of Brigham Young, gave lectures in the tabernacle and social hall, and was baptized by Heber Kimball January 15, I860. 62 After filling a brief mission in the Eastern States, Gibson departed for the Pacific, November 21, 1860, with an engraved gold watch and a unique commission from Brigham Young. 63 Dr. Bernhisel was in Salt Lake City at the time superintending the construction of his new house. He and Gibson had arrived in Salt Lake City about the same time, and may have made the journey across the plains together.

J.M.B.: PRIVATE CITIZEN It has been suggested that Delegate Bernhisers failure to consummate the work of the Constitutional Convention of 1862 by getting Utah into the union resulted in a "fall from grace" and, consequently, his " W a l t e r M . Gibson to J. M . Bernhisel, New York, N o v e m b e r 26, 1858, "Small Safe" (L.D.S. C h u r c h Historian's Office). " D o the Mormons I n t e n d to Leave U t a h , " Valley Tan (Salt Lake C i t y ) , October 19, 1859.

62 " C a p t . Gibson's Lectures a n d Sermons," Deseret News (Salt Lake C i t y ) , M a r c h 4, 1860; A n d r e w Jenson, " W a l t e r M u r r a y Gibson," The Improvement Era, I V (November-December, 1 9 0 0 ) , 5â&#x20AC;&#x201D;13. O n page 5 Jenson lists a m o n g his sources The Shepherd of Lanai, a political tract written by T h o m a s G. T h r u m a n d published by him in H o n o l u l u in 1882. Formerly a friend, by 1880, T h r u m was a n outspoken political enemy of Gibson.

63 " T a b e r n a c l e , " Deseret News, November 21, 1860. Brigham Young's commission to Walter Gibson authorized him to "negotiate with all the nations of this world." I n spite of this rare commission, Gibson concentrated his interests in Hawaii. I n 1864 he was excommunicated from the church because he would n o t submit himself to the priesthood a n d t u r n over to the c h u r c h all he h a d accumulated. Gibson became the premier of H a w a i i in 1882 a n d m a d e notable contributions to the health a n d welfare of the H a w a i i a n people.

John M. Bernhisel

163

withdrawal from public life, but the evidence does not support this view.

The doctor was sixty-four years old when he returned from Washington in 1863, requesting beforehand in a letter to Brigham Young that he be allowed to retire from public service.64 Contrary to most opinion, John Bernhisel did not retire to his new home in Salt Lake City and fade away into the background. For nearly two more decades, he was a familiar and respected figure in medical, business, and political circles in Utah. Too, his growing family needed and received an increasing share of his time. The seven children frequently saw their half-brother Milton who was at home both in Kaysville and Salt Lake City. In 1870, soon after the death of his mother, Milton, along with his half-brothers Peter and Everett Van Orden, pioneered in Cache Valley, founding a settlement they called Lewiston. 65 In addition to his medical practice, which he resumed in 1864 from an office in his home, Dr. Bernhisel was an investor and participant in a new enterprise promoted by the leading members of the Council of Fifty.66 Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution was organized during the winter of 1868 with Brigham Young as president, John Milton Bernhisel, vice-president and William Clayton, secretary. Section Four of the Z C M I constitution specifically stipulated that "the officers of this Institution shall. . . each and every one . . . be stockholders in this institution." 67 Coincidentally, perhaps, the "New Movement," led by William Godbe, Henry Lawrence, Edward Tullidge, and others, started at about the same time. Lawrence had put $30,000 into Z C M I and became a director, but later withdrew. John Bernhisel had no official connection with the "Godbeites," nor is it likely that he was even sympathetic, for he was vice-president of Z C M I as late as 1873.68 Dr. Bernhisel had practiced medicine for twenty years before coming to Utah. Considering his five years in the old West, between 1820 to 64 J o h n M . Bernhisel to Brigham Young, Washington, D . C , December 27, 1862, Bernhisel Letter File (L.D.S. C h u r c h Historian's L i b r a r y ) .

65 J o h n M . Bernhisel I I I , History of Lewiston (n.p., 1966), 14-16.

66 Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty (East Lansing, Michigan, 1 9 6 7 ) , 223-27. L e o n a r d J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1900 (Cambridge, 1 9 5 8 ) , 248. _ m E d w a r d Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City, 1 8 8 6 ) , 390. T h e Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City) of O c t o b e r 16, 1868, lists William H . H o o p e r as vice-president of Z C M I , a n d "A First Record Book 'A,' " p. 18 ( Z C M I executive offices, Salt Lake City) confirms this. However, H o o p e r was the territorial delegate to Congress at this time, a n d Bernhisel presided over the O c t o b e r m e e t i n g of the Board of Directors in 1871, a n d probably served as vice-president during most, if not all, of Hooper's congressional years. See Z C M I " A First Record Book 'A' " p. 73, a n d "Book 'B,' " p. 1.

68 A copy of this certificate of election in 1872 by Z C M I stockholders is in the possession of the author.

164

Utah Historical

Quarterly

1825, as part of his training, his experience as a doctor began when he received his degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1827. At the time, he was already working at the public Aims-House in Philadelphia, where he probably remained for several years was duty elected to the ofp.ee nf f/.C*j~ I'A/^t./^t'^^fl/^ before moving to New York City. of Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution, for the year ending He was here about ten years, and .(9ch£ms57£j A.D. 187JMby a majority of tlie votes cast by the four years in Nauvoo where his Stockholders of said Institution, at an election held at Salt Lake: City, practice was less formal than it _jQch£U&£-JL&L A. D. 187iL- as appears of record in the had been in the East.

Office of the Secretary of said Institution.

Health problems and diseases in i l l Wl%M$i W§tVW$ we hereunto set our nineteenth century Salt Lake City hands and affix the Seal of said Institution, this-Acc^Aj___day nf <Oc£tr6eAM included infantile diarrhea, tyA.D. 187^phoid fever, and diptheria, all evidence of poor sanitation, milk and •esident. water pollution, and ignorance on the part of mothers and physicians. 69 These problems, along with births, accidents, and occaLATTER-DAY S A I N T S H I S T O R I A N ' S LIBRARY sional gunshot wounds kept the Certificate furnished doctor busy. He was a familiar John M. Bernhisel upon his election sight in his long frock coat and as vice-president of ZCMI. high silk hat, however, there were those who considered his methods antiquated and preferred to call on the younger doctors.

John Bernhisel was one of the few graduates of university medical schools, to come to the Salt Lake Valley before the completion of the transcontinental railroad. There were other types of "doctors," however.

Willard Richards was one of several "Thompsonian" botanical physicians who owned a $20.00 certificate which gave him the right to "administer, use and sell the medicine secured by Samuel Thompson, by Letters of Patent from the President of the United States." 70 While serving as the president of the "Board of Examination of Physicians" in the 1860's, John ' Holiness to the Lord.

f

69

Ralph T. Richards, Of Medicine, Hospitals, and Doctors (Salt Lake City, 1956), 20.

Ibid., 16; Blanche E. Rose, "Early Utah Medical Practice," Utah Historical Quarterly, X (January, 1942), 17.

70

John M. Bernhisel

165

Bernhisel was neither an opponent nor an advocate of Thompsonian methods.

A surgical operation performed by Dr. Bernhisel and Dr. Washington F. Anderson was reported in the Deseret Evening News, June 1, 1869. In this case the doctors found amputation to be necessary. In February the News described another operation by the same doctors. In another case, "Andrew Love had been under Dr. Bemhisel's treatment for a . . . kidney complaint and he was given up." At this point Priddy Meeks, a Thompsonian, administered "nothing but burdock and dandelion, and he soon recovered to the joy of all." 71 In the 1870's, neighbor and friend of many years, William Clayton, invested in the "Homeward Bound Lode" while serving as secretary of the Wasatch Mining Company. 72 Clayton withdrew from this venture with experience, but nothing more to show for his precious investments.

John Bernhisel followed a similar course during this same period, and with the same results. The experience was most unfortunate, for neither was able to recoup his losses â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it was too late; both had but a few years yet to live.

SCHOOL OF T H E

PROPHETS

A membership list of the Council of Fifty was attached to the minutes of a meeting held at the Council House Saturday, April 10, 1880. The first name on the list was that of J. M. Bernhisel, who had given unfailing interest to the Council and allied endeavors from the day he joined the church in New York City some forty-three years before. He was also concerned with both the School of the Prophets and the United Order.

A meeting, for example, was held in his home, June 14, 1874, for the purpose of organizing a branch of the "United Order of Zion" at Brighton. 73 On numerous occasions Dr. Bernhisel participated in the meetings of the School of the Prophets. 74 He must have attended regularly for irregular attendance was given as the reason for disfellowshipping several members in 1869. This being the case, the School of the Prophets may have been a vehicle for the control of political, social, and economic institutions along with the Council of Fifty. At any rate, John Bernhisel 71

"An Unusual Operation," Deseret Evening News, June 1, 1869; February 2, 1870.

Dahl, William Clayton, 217-18.

73 Andrew Jenson, ed., [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] Historical Record, VIII (1889), 287.

74 Robert H. Sylvester, "Dr. John Milton Bernhisel, Utah's First Delegate to Congress" (Master's thesis, University of Utah, 1947), 94.

72

166

Utah Historical

Quarterly

belonged to both august bodies, serving them faithfully through a long and interesting era.

William Clayton was conversing with his friend John about the old days at Nauvoo five minutes before his death December 4, 1879.75 Three days later, John Bernhisel was among the many who listened to John Taylor deliver the funeral sermon in the new Seventeenth Ward chapel on First North. Less than two years later the church president spoke over the remains of the Honorable John Milton Bernhisel from the same pulpit. The doctor passed away on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the inception on the Council of Fifty, September 28, 1881. Prayers at the funeral were offered by Daniel H. Wells, and Wilford Woodruff. The speakers, in addition to John Taylor, were George Q. Cannon and William H. Hooper.

On Monday, October 3, Charles Walker made the following notation in his diary, "I see that Dr. J. M. Bernhisel is dead." Orson Pratt had passed away on that very day, and Walker paid a brief tribute to both Pratt and the doctor. "Both of these men were staunch old members in the church and joined in the early days. Peace be to their ashes." 76 The newspapers belatedly published John Bemhisel's obituary explaining that "the immediate cause of death was intermittant fever, from which he had been prostrated four or five days, but he was aged and feeble before." 77 The Salt Lake Tribune received the news from "an old Scandinavian gentlemen . . . [who] appeared grief-stricken and cried as one who had lost a near and dear friend." 78 The newspapers were still carrying accounts of President Garfield's death at the time.

Nearly a month after the Bernhisel funeral the Deseret News, in an article, "The Late Honorable John M. Bernhisel," said that "there is no evidence that he . . . ever faltered a moment in his faith." 79 This tribute would have appealed to the doctor, for the last few years had been some of the most difficult of his life.

Shortly before Bemhisel's death, the family home had been sold to the church for $7,500, so in October Bemhisel's widow, Elizabeth, moved to more modest quarters at 363 Sixth East. It was here that she died on January 4, 1909.80 On December 17, 1888, at a meeting of the apostles K

Ibid., 232-33.

Charles L. Walker, "The Diary of Charles L. Walker [1854-1899]" (2 vols., typescript, Brigham Young University), II, 729.

77 "Dr. Bernhisel Dead," Deseret Evening News, September 28, 1861.

78 "Death of Dr. Bernhisel," Salt Lake Tribune, September 29, 1861.

79 "The Late Honorable John M. Bernhisel," Deseret Evening News, October 21, 1881.

80 Nuttall, "Diary," II, 293; "Journal History" (L.D.S. Church Historian's Library), January 4, 1909.

16

John M. Bernhisel

167

of the church, the decision was made to sell the "Bernhisel House and lot to Bp. Preston [who] had expended some $10,000 of tithing funds in putting the House and grounds into good shape to suit him." 81 John Milton Bernhisel lived a most interesting, eventful, and productive life. The congressional years were important, but when they are considered within the total scope of the delegate's life, recognizing the part that he played in the development of Mormon institutions, his services in Washington represent a splendid performance by a dedicated Mormon elder in the service of his church. This organization he loyally served as well as the people of Utah Territory.

Deseret was to have been a unique communitarian society, and John Bernhisel participated in the western phase of the evolution of this objective, the United Order. In the process the cultivated, sedate doctor, on intimate terms with three church presidents, was motivated by a profound attachment to Joseph Smith and his philosophy that developed during their brief association in Nauvoo. Mormonism appealed to the doctor because it embraced the total political and social well-being of the community. When Brigham Young attempted to continue the building of the temporal and spiritual kingdoms, he received the wholehearted support of the intimate friend and companion of Joseph Smith, John M. Bernhisel.

81

Nuttall, "Diary," II, 293.

44

a

&Tose Qood ^eas 99

THE MORGAN CANNING COMPANY IN SMITHFIELD. UTAH

James Anderson

Joseph Anderson

BY R U T H W E S T GREGORY

I

.N 1904 JAMES A. ANDERSON, of Morgan, Utah, and James Pingree, cashier of the First National Bank of Ogden, organized a canning company in Morgan with capital of $10,000, thereby giving birth to the Morgan Canning Company.

Mr. Anderson, formerly employed by the John A. Guild Store in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he had sold canned peas packed in Long Mountain, Colorado, felt peas could be as profitably packed in Utah as they were in Colorado. With his beginning capital James Anderson erected a small building to house one viner and a line of pea processing machinery. The combined equipment and factory cost approximately $12,000.

Unfortunately, the first year the company lost money. And although another loss was sustained the following year, it was reduced somewhat over the previous year. Because of a poor market, no profit was realized from the eight thousand cases of peas canned in 1908. At the close of the year, Mr. Pingree called a meeting of the stockholders for the purpose of changing the management. At the meeting James Anderson stated that the canning venture had seemingly failed, and he would purchase the stockholders stock in the amount which they paid for it. Everyone sold except a Mr. Scoville of Ogden. Three years later the Andersons bought him out. This transaction gave James A. and Joseph Anderson sole ownership of the canning company.

A bounteous harvest was produced in 1909, and the canning business was an assured success if money could be secured to purchase cans. The farmers were willing to wait for their money until the pack was sold, but the day soon arrived when a carload of cans was standing on the tracks and there was no money to release it. Loads of peas were waiting to be threshed, but it appeared everything would be shut down. Jim Anderson, however, secured a loan in time and the cans were released. A small profit was realized, and the Anderson brothers were assured the business would succeed.

In 1910 the company packed thirty thousand cases of excellent quality peas. In 1911 the previous year's production was surpassed. The _ Mrs. Gregory, a resident of Smithfield, has been personally interested in the Morgan Canning Company because her father, Frank LeRoy West, was one of the many men who played an important role in the building and operation of the canning establishments in both Morgan and Cache Valley.

The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of the many individuals who helped in writing this history, among them are the founders and employees of the Morgan Canning Company and their descendants. Special thanks are given to Mrs. Sylvia R. Toolson, of Smithfield, for her help in writing this article.

The photographs used in this article were furnished by the author.

170

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Morgan Canning Company's struggle for existence was paying off â&#x20AC;&#x201D; each year was better than the last. This growth necessitated enlarging the plant and reorganizing its personnel.

Immediate needs had been met by enlarging the original factory, but by 1916 the company had so outgrown its capacity that a new plant was necessary. A large, modern factory was constructed about a quarter of a mile from the old site. Mr. Anderson's experience and powers of observation as he visited other canning plants were utilized in installing the latest and best equipment in the new factory. The factory was now able to produce twelve thousand cases of peas per day. In half a day, the new plant packed as much as the first factory packed in an entire season.1 The demand for the Anderson product was so great the brothers began searching for a location for a northern factory. Pea seed was planted in several valleys in the Intermountain Area to help the Andersons decide where it would be most profitable to locate their new factory.

U.S. Farm Bureau members in the Smithfield vicinity were interested in securing a new industry in that area, and a committee was appointed to contact the Anderson brothers about the possibility of locating their proposed factory in Smithfield. Frank Winn, secretary of the Farm Bureau, was appointed chairman of the committee. William H. Hillyard and Peter Hansen were committee members appointed to work with Mr. Winn.

The minutes of the Smithfield City Council dated March 12, 1918, state that a special meeting was called to hear from members of the Farm Bureau. J. H. Meikle, president of the Bureau, stated, t h a t a m o v e h a d been o n foot for sometime t o i n d u c e the A n d e r s o n brothers to build a c a n n i n g factory a t Smithfield. T h r o u g h their negotiations w i t h t h e Anderson p e o p l e t h e m e m b e r s of t h e F a r m B u r e a u h a d arrived at the conclusion t h a t it was necessary as a n i n d u c e m e n t to the A n d e r s o n people to build a t Smithfield, t h a t a building site of six acres of g r o u n d be given free. 2

James Anderson appeared before other privileges for the proposed On March 20, 1918, J. H. City Council of the desire of the

the council and explained the need for factory.

Meikle again spoke to the Smithfield members of the Farm Bureau and the

1 The information concerning the establishment of the factory at Morgan, Utah, was taken from The Fine Arts Study Group, comp., Mountains Conquered: The Story of Morgan with Biographies (Morgan, 1959), 138-40.

2 Smithfield City, "Minutes, 1918-1919," March 12, 1918 (Smithfield, Utah).

Morgan Canning Company

171

people in general for the city to purchase the site for the canning factory.

The following resolution was then presented to the council.

Whereas, it is necessary for the people of Smithfield to furnish a site for a canning factory free of charge, as an inducement to> the Anderson brothers of Morgan County, Utah to erect and operate a factory for the canning of peas and probable other farm products if conditions are favorable and whereas the members of the Farm Bureau of Smithfield has labored hard to land the factory at Smithfield, being on a competitive basis with the farmers of Hyrum who are zealous of getting the factory at that place and whereas, City Council has been waited upon by the members of the Farm Bureau who earnestly solicit the City Corporation in raising money to buy the Charles Collett 3 property on Main Street as suitable for said factory and whereas, the members of the Farm Bureau represent a goodly number of the farmers of Smithfield and other citizens and businessmen feel that the City Council should appropriate $1650.00 from the City General Fund for the purpose above referred toâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Now therefore, be it resolved by the Mayor and City Council of Smithfield City, Utah that the city recorder be and he is hereby authorized and required to draw a warrant on the city treasurer for the sum of $1650.00 and use the same for the purpose above referred to. 4

The resolution was unanimously adopted. A motion was also passed to enter into a written agreement with the Anderson brothers concerning the gravel necessary for factory and road construction and also for running a water line to their factory property.

Early in 1918 Charles Fry, an employee of the Morgan Canning Company, was sent to Smithfield in order to contract the planting of five hundred acres of peas in that vicinity. Frank Winn, of Smithfield, was employed by the Anderson brothers to accompany Mr. Fry and help him in this task, but Mr. Fry returned to Morgan with only a portion of the necessary acres contracted.

In March 1918 Jack Rich, a field man from the Morgan Canning Company, traveled to Smithfield in an attempt to secure the remaining necessary contracts. Again Frank Winn was employed to acquaint Mr. Rich with the farmers and to encourage them to support this new project.

Unfortunately, when Jack Rich had to return to Morgan he still lacked forty acres of the necessary contracts. William L. Winn, father of Frank, told Mr. Rich to report the full five hundred acres contracted and said he would see that they were planted if he had to plant them himself.

Later in March the seed peas were shipped by the Utah-Idaho Central Railroad to Smithfield and stored in a warehouse. Three varieties 3 Mr. Frank Winn, in a personal communication with the author, stated this was Delbert Collett's property.

4 Smithfield City, "Minutes," March 20, 1918.

172

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Morgan Canning Factory in Smithfield, erected in 1919.

of peas, Early Alaska, Yellow, and Green Admiral were planted that year.

The cost of seed peas to the farmer was $8.00 per bushel.

Two weeks after Jack Rich returned to Morgan he was asked to move his family to Smithfield to act as field man for the new factory.

The machinery for the factory was brought in from Morgan on a two-ton Federal truck, which was used later to haul the first load of lumber for the factory from the Anderson Lumber Company in Smithfield.

The next few months Smithfield was a beehive of activity. The peas were being planted and the factory and machinery had to be ready to care for the crop at harvest time. Jack Rich assisted the farmers with planting, irrigating, and harvesting the crops. W. R. Eddington, superintendent of the Morgan Canning Company, and F. LeRoy West, formerly employed at Morgan, moved their families to Smithfield and became foremen in the construction of the first viners and warehouse.

This warehouse, sixty by thirty feet with a cement foundation and brick walls, was started in March of 1918 and completed on July 3 of that same year.

The first pea crop was harvested that same July. The farmers mowed the peas with a hay mower and then hand loaded them by

Morgan Canning

173

Company

i v u f - W J"1;. |; ' .VVmftixmn

tyiti.wj^yÂŤ^ijuH

Farmers hauling peas into the viner at the first factory in Morgan, about 1918.

pitchfork on to the wagons to be hauled to the viner shed. At the viner they were unloaded by hand, threshed from the pods by machinery, and transported by conveyor belt to the factory, a distance of about thirty feet. The peas were then run through cylinder-type graders, blanched Morgan Canning Company in Morgan about 1918. ..

174

Utah Historical

Quarterly

and carried on to picking belts where women picked out and discarded the cull peas. From the picking belts the peas were carried to the filler, then to the closing machine, and to the cookers. After cooking the cans were placed in large cooling vats and after cooling were stored in the warehouse where they were to be labeled and boxed for shipping.

In 1918, thirty thousand cases, twenty-four cans to each case, were canned of the Yellow and Green Admiral pea varieties. The Early Alaska variety, ready for harvest before the canning plant was completed, was left in the fields to seed. This seed was threshed and stored in the viner shed to be milled later. That year the farmers realized a yield of one and one-fourth to one and one-half tons per acre.

Most of the Morgan Canning employees returned to Morgan that first winter, but Jack Rich and Jack Howard remained in Cache Valley and were employed at the Amalgamated Sugar Factory. The new Morgan Canning Factory in Smithfield induced quite a migration of Morgan residents to Smithfield. They were seasoned employees, well qualified in their trades and were also general handymen wherever they were needed. 5 As building and canning activities of the new company increased, capable men of Cache Valley joined with the Morgan employees. In several cases both husband and wife worked for the factory and many times their children became Morgan Canning employees.

The first office building was a small frame shack built as a lean-to on the east side of the warehouse. When the new office was constructed, F. LeRoy West purchased this small office building, which is still in use today.

Meanwhile in the fall of 1919 the Anderson brothers began drilling test holes to see how deep they would have to dig for a firm footing for the foundation of a new factory. Villadsen Brothers of Salt Lake City, with Tom Knudson as foreman, were the contractors for this building.

Everyone worked diligently through winter and spring to complete the new building before the pea harvest in 1920. Cement was poured all winter by using gravel that was heated by steam-filled pipes running under the gravel. This also kept the cement from freezing while it was setting. Also built at this time was a new office located just east of the factory. Both buildings were ready for occupancy in July 1920 and are still in use at the present time by the California Packing Company.

5 It would be impossible to name all the men who participated in the establishment and development of the Morgan Canning Factory, but a few important individuals besides those named in the text were W. R. Eddington, Jack Howard, Joseph S. Rasmussen, Henry B. Fry, Theodore and Ivan Geary, Norris Wadsworth, Myron Condie, George Phillips, and Preston West.

Morgan Canning Company

175

Smithfield City was unable to furnish enough water to operate the plant so a well was dug in the northwest corner of the warehouse. This well was not successful and caved in. The second well was dug at the north end of the warehouse in the spring of 1920. It was constructed by digging four-foot depths at a time, pouring cement into forms, and allowing the cement to harden. Then four more feet of dirt were removed below the cement ring and this was left to settle. After settling, four more feet of cement were poured and this method continued until an eightyfive-foot well was completed, which supplied most of the water for the factory until 1928.

Several viner sheds were built in different areas of Cache Valley to help in the threshing of the peas. During the construction of these sheds, workers were transported by railroad and accommodated with sleeping cars, work cars, and a cook car. One day while working on the viner shed at Wellsville, an employee placed some tar on the stove in the cook car to melt. When LeRoy West went to see if the tar was melted he found it ready to boil over. He grabbed the bucket handle to throw the hot tar outside, but he could not get the door opened fast enough.

The bucket of hot tar dropped on the floor setting fire to the sleeping car. The car was completely destroyed with the men's clothing, tools, and personal belongings. The burning car was hurriedly unhooked and pushed away from the cook car. After that incident, the men lived in tents.

Viner sheds were built at Hyde Park, Greenville (North Logan), Providence, Miliville, Hyrum, and Wellsville from the fall of 1919 to the spring of 1920. Peas from these outlying districts were threshed, boxed, loaded onto flat cars, and hauled to the factory in Smithfield by the Utah-Idaho Central Railroad. This was a slow process, and the peas were on the road so long many of them soured and had to be discarded. Some time later peas were hauled into the factory by trucks.

In 1924 the Anderson brothers branched out again in their building program and constructed a bean processing plant at Hyrum, Utah. This factory employed 77 men and 153 women on double shift during the bean run, with an annual payroll of $24,000 a year. The Andersons also purchased a milk factory at Franklin, Idaho. Sometime later this building was converted into a canning factory.

The employer and employee relationship of the Morgan Canning Company was very close. The Anderson brothers were concerned about

'76"

Utah Historical

Quarterly

the welfare of their employees and their families. Entertainment for employees and their families was provided at opportune times. Each Christmas employees received a bonus in their pay envelopes, and they and their wives were occasionally entertained at a party at the Joseph Anderson home in Logan. LeRoy West well remembers the many Christmas toys and cedar chests he made for his children and others in the Morgan carpenter shop with the permission of his employers. H. B. Fry was in charge of organizing socials and benevolent assistance for employees.

When the new east warehouse was constructed about 1923, the employees helped lay a hardwood dance floor and built an entertainment room on the second floor at the south end of the building. This was equipped with a kitchen, tables, dishes, and the necessary items for the parties, dances, and dinners that were held there during the winter months. Following each pea campaign the employers would entertain the employees and their families, During the winter months, steady employees of the company labeled cans, made packing boxes for shipping, and performed other needed repairs. Seed peas were shipped in from Idaho and these were cleaned and sorted during the winter and provided employment for many people.

At the early plant in Morgan, women earned the tremendous amount of $.12 an hour, with floor ladies earning the fabulous wage of $.22 per hour. Mary Howard remembers when women threatened to strike for higher wages at the Morgan plant and management's reply was to go ahead and strike, the women would be replaced with Mexican labor.

Steadily employed men earned $140.00 per month, with an average work day of ten to twelve hours. During an emergency, George Phillips worked seventy-two hours without leaving the factory in Smithfield. One man said he worked twenty-five hours in one day because he did not take a noon hour.

The factory at Smithfield used only one shift of workers who would often start a shift at 5:00 or 6:00 A.M. and work through until after midnight. Women sometimes worked nineteen hours, and during a campaign it was not uncommon to work all night. There was no cafeteria so everyone carried a lunch or wives or family members of the employees brought the workers a hot meal to the factory. Joseph Anderson often brought hot rolls and drinks in to revive the employees at work; and after each campaign was over the employees were treated to sandwiches and drinks or a breakfast.

Morgan Canning Company

177

The Morgan Canning Company, true to the expectations of James and Joseph Anderson, became a very successful business enterprise.

Unfortunately, James Anderson contracted pneumonia and died very suddenly in November of 1926. The employees of the Morgan Canning Factory were saddened by his loss. Three months later Joseph Anderson died of a heart attack.

Although the widows of James and Joseph Anderson attempted to keep the factory operating, without the leadership of the Anderson brothers, the factory only limped along. In the spring of 1928, the plants were sold to the Utah Packing Corporation, now the California Packing Corporation. Many of the Morgan Canning Factory employees stayed on with the new company, and in some cases their children have gone to work for the company, which is still operating at the present time.

U T A H CLAIMS WORLD'S LARGEST PEA CANNERY "Smithfield has a capacity of 25,000 case of peas per day. A woman who boasted that she 'put up' 300 quarts of fruit and vegetables each season was told that the Smithfield plant could do the work in 20 seconds. . . .

"The main factory is 80 feet wide and 84 feet long. Its three stories are built of brick and concrete. The two warehouses are of the same construction. One is 350 feet long by 70 wide. Another is 370 by 7 1 / 2 feet. .. .

"The plant has a fully equipped machine shop to keep the equipment operating at all times."

Western Conner and Packer (October, 1926)

REVIEWS AMD PUBLICATIONS The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson: The West in 1834.

Edited by DALE L. MORGAN

and ELEANOR T O W L E S HARRIS. (San

Marino: T h e Huntington Library, 1967. 430 pp. $12.50) " All those conversant with the literature of overland travel and the fur trade of the F a r West know that whenever Dale Morgan's name appears on a published work, the end result will be spectacular. This volume, jointly prepared for publication with Mrs. Harris, is positively no exception. In the bargain it is beautifully designed and printed.

But more. This long-awaited publication of Anderson's complete record of his 1834 trek to the Rocky Mountains is invaluable for the study of the American fur trade. Originally intent on traveling with a company of U.S. Dragoons to Santa Fe, Anderson departed Louisville, Kentucky, March 11. "Thinking better, or worse of the matter as time will show," he changed his mind. I n St. Louis, April 20, he cast his lot with William L. Sublette. When Anderson returned to St. Louis on the evening of September 29, after having accompanied Sublette's trade caravan to the Green R i v e r in present-day Wyoming, h e brought back with him a two-volume manuscript diary. This document is the core of the present book. I t is without question one of the most important furtrade documents for the year 1834.

In preparing the diary for publication, the editors have performed a pioneer

service in textural comparison and criticism for documents relating to the history of the American West. A word of explanation. Anderson used his original diary as the basis for two rewritten accounts of his adventures. The first was a completely rewritten version which is appropriately called the Journal. Discovered in 1948, this 139-page manuscript, along with the two-volume diary, is incorporated in this book. Late in life, Anderson prepared four articles detailing his trip, March 11 to June 20, for the Circleville, Ohio, Democrat and Watchman. These appeared in SeptemberOctober 1871. This published version is referred to as the Narrative. Combining these three documents, the editors have published the diary (printed in italics) on the left-hand side of the page; on the right-hand side of the page in parallel dates first appears the text of the Narrative, through June 20, followed by the Journal, June 21â&#x20AC;&#x201D;September 29. O n occasion extracts from the Journal prior to June 21 are incorporated in the Narrative through the use of brackets. Annotation of the documents thus printed in juxtaposition are keyed to dates rather than to arabic footnotes; such notes, however, are conveniently placed at the bottom of the appropriate page.

As a final touch in the organization of the material, Anderson's ethnological notes, three articles published in the American Turf Register, and an 1860 letter to the National Intelligencer complete the documentary corpus. I n sum, a stunning editorial achievement.

179

Reviews and Publications Anderson's contribution to the history of the West in 1834 is of singular importance. We are given a complete trail record for Sublette's caravan; the great overland trail marks are given detailed attention, including a history of the place names "with critical attention to chronology"; the founding of Fort Laramie is witnessed. Most of all, Anderson reports "the Rocky Mountain fur trade in a period of stress," including a "dayby-day record" of the 1834 rendezvous.

As if such data were not sufficient to warrant publication of Anderson's diarynarrative-journal, the editors have provided in the Introduction a critical bibliographical summary of all travel accounts west through 1835, both published and unpublished. To round off the frontal material, a twenty-two page biography of Anderson is included. At the end a detailed bibliography and superior index complete the standard features.

Not content with the introductory information, s t a n d a r d features, and superlative editing of the documentary corpus, the book concludes with a lengthy section (140 pages) entitled, "A Galaxy of Mountain Men: Biographical Sketches." This is no mean attraction for it consists of forty-five sketches, including eight devoted to Indians, of mountain men who were active on the 1834 scene. Varying in length and content, none of the biographies are footnoted. But Morgan's scholarly reputation should suffice to blunt any criticism there.

Without question this book is a landmark in historical editing and scholarship, not only for the history of the fur trade and overland travel, but for the history of the American West. It stands as another testament to that indefatigable scholar, Dale Morgan, and his colleague in this enterprise, Eleanor Harris.

DOYCE B. N U N I S , JR.

Associate Professor of History University of Southern California

The Constitution

By A Thread.

By (Salt Lake City: Paramount Publishers, 1967. 311 pp. $4.75)

RICHARD VETTERLI.

When the message of a book is regarded as sufficiently urgent to justify organizing a publishing enterprise to bring it forth, the task of pronouncing a negative judgment on the effort is not intrinsically pleasant. Still, there is little to praise about The Constitution By A Thread except the dedication of its author: "I seek only to do what I can for the cause of freedom, as every American must" (p. 20).

What Mr. Vetterli does for freedom is to marshal some new quotations and terminology against the same enemies that he attacked in his earlier Mormonism, Americanism and Politics (1961).

Here is the challenge: "Today America stands at the crossroads of decision. With each passing day she draws closer to> that point prophesied

by Joseph Smith, that the Constitution of the United States would hang as it were by a single thread. This is the baleful legacy of modern 'liberalism.' If the trend is to be reversed, an informed citizenry must reject the collectivist, the appeaser, the welfare stater, the cowardly and the amoral. In short, the continued survival of the United States depends upon its citizens' ability to eschew completely the 'Liberal-Freudian' ethic, and somehow return to leadership American Constitutionalists who have been richly imbued with the Western Ethic. ". . . It is time that the Mormon people rallied closer than ever to their Prophet, cleansed themselves of all degrading moral, political, and economic doctrines, and reasserted themselves as instruments in the hands of the Almighty to help preserve and protect that great nation through which God Himself has chosen to establish His earthly Kingdom" (pp.

297-98).

ISO By the time the "baleful legacy" has been defined, all of the following have been identified with i t : Rousseau, Thomas More, Pythagoras, Plato, Robespierre, Marx, Locke, the Utilitarians, the Classical Economists (p. 127), the Utopian Socialists, the Anarchists, Emerson, Hawthorne, Horace Greeley, Napoleon I I I , and Disraeli, plus such broader classifications as "most of the academic social scientists and historians" (p. 208) and "the small pocket of modern 'frustrated and rather low-grade intelligentsia,' that has unfortunately cropped up in certain areas within the Church" (p.

298).

Chapter titles like "Communism," "The Secret Combinations," "The New Liberal Intellectual," and "The Freudian Ethic" indicate the direction of the attack. Each chapter has three elements.

First comes a generalization about Mormon doctrine, usually unexceptionable.

Next comes an extended partisan diagnosis of some facet of the contemporary world predicament, with such ultraconservatives as Dan Smoot, Clarence Manion, Human Events, National Review, and the Veritas Foundation cited as authorities. Finally comes the wedding of the L.D.S. doctrine to the farright analysis. The authorities cited here are "Mormon stalwarts," and when identified they turn out to be J. Reuben Clark, Jr., Ezra Taft Benson, Ernest L. Wilkinson, and W. Cleon Skousen (pp.

52, 109, 154, 220, 292). The views of these eminent advocates are already well known, and they are much better studied in the sources from which this compilation was made.

There is no bibliography, but the notes at the end of each chapter disclose that Mr. Vetterli relies on three types of sources: (1) Standard textbooks and collections of readings in political science, economics, and history. Their use is marginal.

Utah Historical

Quarterly

(2) Argumentative publications from conservative and radical-right authors.

One finds a number of classical and contemporary names from the left and center quoted, but in most cases these quotations h a v e been gleaned from books and tracts which support Mr. Vetterli's opinions. The footnotes to the chapter on "Secret Combinations" (pp.

156â&#x20AC;&#x201D;60) are illustrative.

(3) L.D.S. publications, with heavy emphasis on the spokesmen mentioned above and on selected quotations from church presidents which fit the book's thesis. One does not find Joseph Smith's call for a national bank, a protective tariff, Presidential power to whip the State of Missouri into line, or his affirmation : "In the United States the people are the government, and their united voice is the only sovereign that should rule . . . ." {History of the Church, VI, 197-209). Nor does one find Heber J. Grant's endorsement of the League of Nations and his criticism of Senator Reed Smoot for using the Book of Mormon in the campaign against the League. {Ninetieth Semi-Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, October 3, 4, 5, 1919, pp. 1220.) Nor does the chapter on "War, Peace and World Government" mention David O. McKay's judgment that "there is enough good in the U.N. to justify its existence." {Deseret News, June 5, 1953, p. 1.)

For the historical origins of the collectivist conspiracy, Mr. Vetterli turns to such secret societies as the eighteenth century Illuminati. This approach to the past has been in vogue with Robert Welch and other far-right spokesmen since the recent republication of the works of Nesta H. Webster, who flourished immediately after World War I. According to this arch-Tory Englishwoman, the current centers of the world conspiracy were the Freemasons and the Jews; indeed, she even cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. {World Revolution, 1921, pp. 297-305 and pas-

181

Reviews and Publications sim; Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, 1924, passim.) That Mr. Vetterli rejects, or at least omits, her anti-Semitism and anti-Masonry while treating her as authoritative on other equally tenuous conspiratorial hypotheses is indicative of the kind of selective "documentation" to which such scholarship is prone.

Examples could be multiplied. Daniel Webster, the Whig nationalist and loose constructionist, is made to appear an opponent of Constitutional change by a statement made when he was twenty years old (pp. 76-77) ; by the same technique John C. Calhoun could be made to appear an advocate of "liberty and union, one and inseparable . . . ." A q u o t a t i o n from J o h n K e n n e t h Galbraith's Economics and the Art of Controversy (1955), "No present or future administration really has the non-Keynesian choice," becomes in Mr. Vetterli's paraphrase, " I n 1955, 'liberal-intellectual' J. Kenneth Galbraith reported that the United States Government no longer had a non-Keynesian (socialist) choice" (p. 210). T h e Benjamin Franklin proposal for prayers in the Constitutional Convention is given, but instead of pointing out that the proposal was not, in fact, adopted, this book quotes with approval, "The results which followed are warming evidence of the wisdom of such a course and of its value as a continuing practice" (pp. 74-75).

The Constitution By A Thread is shot through with contradictions and errors.

On the authority of Dan Smoot (p. 57), the United States is not a democracy; on the authority of the Founding Fathers (pp. 65, 69-70), it is. The world Communist movement is divided on page 144, but a united conspiratorial movement on page 145. "Liberals" are divided on Vietnam on page 213, but all doves on page 216. The U.S.S.R. is becoming more secure and less tyrannical on page 294, but it cannot feed its people on page 296. Historian Carl Wittke is always cited as Wettke (pp.

122, 157), and Seymour Martin Lipset is Seymore Martin Lipsit (p. 178) and Lipsit throughout. Other errors include Nickolai (Nikolai) Lenin (p. 177), Engles (Engels) (p. 128), and Francois Nell (Noel) Babeuf (p. 122) ; "amalgam" comes out "amalgum" twice on pages 180-81. T h e Index is incomplete and no better proofread than the book.

One can only hope that an attractive title and dust cover will not induce large numbers of Latter-day Saints to purchase a book which contributes nothing of value to the understanding of Mormon doctrine, world history, and the real problems which L.D.S. and other citizens are called upon to face today.

RICHARD D. POLL

Professor of History Brigham Young University As A City Upon A Hill: American

History.

The Town in

By PAGE SMITH.

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. xi-f 332 + xviii pp. $6.95) This book is not "the first comprehensive historical study of the American town," as the publisher calls it on the dust jacket, nor does the author pretend that it is. Rather, as he points out in the Introduction, he develops some "conjectures and hypotheses" about the dimension of life in towns in American culture, concentrating on what he calls colonized or covenanted (as opposed to cumulative) towns, and especially on those towns that were heirs to the covenants of Puritan New England. Such emphases are altogether natural in a brief series of preliminary interpretative essays by a historian, essays that he has illustrated by examples from published works to which his hypotheses have sensitized him. They would be natural even for a historian not the biographer of John Adams. The qualities that made New Englanders influential insured that they left substantial record of their influence, and especially along lines that Page Smith develops, as on religion, law and

182 lawyers, temperance, and the town in American literature.

Although Smith draws on ideas from a variety of social scientists, his principal concern is with the Puritan values of community, which he traces from the founding of the Bay Colony. Thus while he may recall such writers of the time of the New Dealers' concern with the declining agricultural community as Arthur E. Morgan {The Small Community, Foundation of Democratic Life . . . [1942]), he says less of its economic basis, its relationship with the countryside, which during the agricultural revolution of the last thirty years have shifted more drastically than before. He has not chosen so much to relate the town to the general urbanization of American life as to emphasize how the covenantal relationship in the town met important psychological needs that tend to remain unsatisfied when the covenant declines or when townspeople move to the city.

Thus his interests are closer to those to T. Scott Miyakawa {Protestants and Pioneers; Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier [1964]) than to those of Charles N. Glaab and A. T. Born {A History of Urban America [1967]), or Edmund de S. Brunner {American Agricultural Villages [1927]).

In a page-long footnote to his conclusion (pp. 305-6), Smith calls attention to what he calls pseudo communities serving the function of towns, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Synanon, and the civil-rights movement. But he does not have much interest or hope in relationships subsequent to the most New England-like towns of the Middle West.

He considers holiness and pentecostal churches (pp. 77â&#x20AC;&#x201D;82) only to point up the psychological uses of redemption that the Puritan churches offered, and without exploring their social roles along lines suggested by Timothy L. Smith and Walter R. Goldschmidt. Most surprisingly, he goes no farther west than Colorado. I do not expect writers on large themes to mention the small western

Utah Historical

Quarterly

town where I was born, though it is only five miles from the site of Smith's campus, where he interviewed a relative of a member of the faculty on his small town in Ohio; but it and other small farwestern towns seem to be communities to those of us who lived there. They and southern towns (which he also passes over) await their historian. He completely passes over the towns of Utah, which Lowry Nelson, Leonard Arrington, and others have described, and where the covenant was and is as effective as anywhere.

As in any widely ranging and pioneering work, one can easily quarrel with some of Smith's generalizations and assumptionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that Populism was confined to single-crop areas (p. 120 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which does not account for far-western Populism) , that small-town America was hostile to individualism (pp. 26-27).

Amana, Iowa, does not remain "isolated and exclusive," renouncing "all contacts with the outside world" (pp. 24-25), which affords a good market for its air conditioners. But this is an important contribution, attractively and provocatively written. It should stimulate further investigation, as the author hopes.

EARL POMEROY

Professor of History Stanford University The Mining Frontier: Contemporary Accounts from the American West in the Nineteenth Century. Collected and Edited by MARVIN L E W I S . (Norm a n : University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. xxii+ 231 pp. $4.95) Marvin Lewis, a San Diego, California, librarian, has gone through the files of scores of publications of the early West to find news stories, poems, and cartoons that tell the story of the mining frontier. H e has done it well. His selections cover a wide variety of situations that the miners who' were so important in the opening of the West got them-

183

Reviews and Publications selves into -—- shootings, mine accidents, saloon brawls, making and losing a fortune are all included.

Each of the fifty-seven individual accounts carries a notation as to its source and, when known, the author and the date. They are divided into three logical groupings — placer mining, hard rock mining, and Comstock mining. As a native of Virginia City, it was only natural that I would turn first to Part Three, covering the glorious days when the Comstock Lode was in full flower. The musty files of the Territorial Enterprise and the Chronicle that used to be stacked in the closet next to the pressroom where I worked as a youth came back to> life as I read Mr. Lewis' selections.

Typical was the item written by Mark Twain for the Enterprise on January 16, 1870, that described "Silverland Nabobs." It was not written in the hard, fast style of today's newspapers. Instead, it had the flavor of a story well told that Samuel Clemens — Mark Twain — accomplished with mastery.

"One of the curious features of Pacific Coast life is the startling uncertainty that marks a man's careers in the mines," he wrote nearly a century ago. "He may spring from poverty to wealth so suddenly as to turn his hair white, and then after a while he may become poor again so suddenly as to make all that white hair fall off and leave his beak as clean as a billiard ball. The great Nevada silver excitement of 1858-9 was prolific of this sort of vicissitudes.

"Two brothers, teamsters, did some hauling for a man in Virginia City and had to take a small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $300 cash. They gave an outsider a third to open the mine and then went on teaming. But not long. Ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each owner $8,000 to $10,000 a month — say $100,000 a year.

"They had that handsome income for just about two years — and they dressed in the loudest costumes and wore mighty

diamonds, and played poker for amusement, three men who had seldom seen $20 at one time in all their lives before.

One of them is tending bar for wages now, and the other is serving his country as Commander-in-Chief of a street car in San Francisco at $75 a month, and he was very glad to get that employment, too."

Twain went on from there. So did the other newspapermen of the early West whose mining frontier stories are so colorfully collected in this pleasant book put together in a sprightly manner

by Marvin Lewis.

MURRAY M. MOLER

Ogden

Associate Editor Standard-Examiner

Doctors of the Old West: A Pictorial History of Medicine on the Frontier.

By ROBERT F. KAROLEVITZ. (Seattle:

Superior Publishing Company, 1967.

192 pp. $12.95) The reader, especially a native of the West, who has seen remnants of frontier medicine persisting to the present day, anticipates many things on examining this book. It is expensive. It has a handsome jacket cover and contains many interesting pictures. It includes a wide range of subjects such as the advent of medicine in the West, the development of hospitals and drug stores, commonly prescribed remedies, quackery, means of transportation, the doctor in politics, etc.

Chapter headings such as "From Medicine Men to Men of Medicine," "Purge, Blister and Bleed," "From Shanks Mares to Stanley Steamers" show that the author intends to be humorous.

After the first inspection, however, the book proves to be a disappointment. The text attempts some sort of continuity, but it is not scholarly or even well written. The style is breezy, tossing off random pieces of information that only partially satisfy the reader. There are details which appear to be fanciful and these detract from a feeling of historical

184 authenticity. On page 113 we read: "Emergency operations performed on a kitchen table, a parlor sofa (after the cats had been chased off) or an unbolted door thrown over two sawhorses were not conducive to high recovery rates."

Sometimes the information is confusing. Dr. Henry R. Porter, to whom three photographs are devoted, served with Major Reno's battalion at Little Big Horn not with Custer's ill-fated group, yet one photograph is described as showing him revisiting the "scene of the massacre in which he played such a dramatic role."

Humor depends on catch-phrases.

Alliteration is favored ("rough and rugged"; "pastes, poultices, and potions"; "cordwood, chickens, canned goods, calves and cabbages"). Exclamation points are freely used tO' emphasize statements. There are folksy expressions ("That's why . . ."; "No wonder . . ."; "A far cry from..."; "a mite m o r e . . . " ) .

Photographs take up most of the pages, and they alone in their frankness and nostalgia contribute the interest and enjoyment of the book. Some are worthwhile additions to a western collection.

Others such as the postage-stamp size, underexposed picture of the grave of Surgeon Josiah S. Wieser are of little pictorial or historical value. Why some portraits deserve a full page and others a small space is not apparent. Pictures of medical students at the dissecting table are rather gamy for public distribution and not strictly pertinent to' western medicine. One such picture should have been enough but there are four. The most distasteful of these occupies a full page (p. 54) and does not identify the time, place, or the individual doctors present. It is odd that one picture on page 19 proves to be an enlarged and cropped part of a patent medicine label shown on page 150.

The Bibliography is a list of fifty-four books and publications but they are not integrated with the text. There is a detailed Index.

Utah Historical

Quarterly

Very little of the material pertains to Utah.

This is basically a picture book which in places is entertaining, but it is not a significant historical contribution.

HERBERT Z. L U N D ,

M.D.

Greensboro, North Carolina The

Teaching of History. Edited by S. ROUCEK. (New York: Philosophical Library, Incorporated, 1967. 282 pp. $10.00)

JOSEPH

The Teaching of History is a symposium prepared by distinguished scholars which is directly concerned with the subject as reflected in the title. The volume is appropriately initiated by a chapter entitled "Philosophies of History and the Teacher." There then appear chapters entitled as follows: "Europe's Past and America's Experience," "Russian, Soviet a n d Satellite History," "Asian History: A Kaleidoscopic View," "African History," "The Middle Eastern History," "Latin American History," "American History at the College Level," "American History on the High School Level," "Teaching History on the Elementary School Level," "The Problem of Children's Historical Mindedness," "Problems in Teaching the Introductory Survey Course in European History," "Problems in the Teaching of the History of Science," "History Tests: Uses and Abuses," "Teaching Civics," and "Teaching Art History in Relation to Social History."

The foregoing chapter titles have been listed intentionally to suggest the scope of the volume. A major criticism of the reviewer is that an attempt was made to do too much within the scope of the relatively limited 282 pages. Admittedly, however, each of the chapters does have some relationship to the title of the book.

The volume, though perhaps most valuable for elementary and secondary teachers of history, has much that is

Reviews and Publications helpful and meaningful for teachers on the college level â&#x20AC;&#x201D; especially those associated with introductory survey courses.

A serious concern was expressed not only as to- what should be taught but how it should be taught. These problems are compounded not only by the rapid accumulation of knowledge, but also by the proximity of the world and its interrelatedness.

In the chapter on Africa the author was critical not only of how little is being taught about a significant emerging area but also of what is being taught. His thesis is that African history is being taught from a non-African (essentially European) point of view instead of an African base. The reviewer felt at times that this position was being taken too strongly.

The chapter on "Russian, Soviet and Satellite History" indicated that history as taught in the Soviet Union and the satellite nations is quite unlike that t a u g h t in western Europe and the United States. Facts are distorted and the past record rewritten u> explain the coming of an ideology and give support for it. Contemporary history in the Communist orbit is written and used to maintain the ideology. History about developments outside the orbit is presented in terms of the class struggle and economy determinism. In the satellite areas special efforts are made to use history to discourage nationalism.

There was indication throughout the volume that history should not be taught as a series of isolated facts but that it should be presented around significant topics, with some probing in depth and the use of thoughtful interpretation. Although the thoughtfully prepared lecture was referred to as an acceptable teaching method, it was suggested that more careful attention could be given to the use of audio-visual materials and that provision should be made for discussion and direct exchange between students and faculty members. The use of a single textbook was criticized.

185 In the area of evaluation, there was criticism of the excessive use of so-called objective examinations (necessitated somewhat by large classes). Although these exams were deemed acceptable if carefully and thoughtfully prepared, it was pointed out that opportunity should be provided for use of essay exams and that the teacher-student relationship should be sufficiently close as to provide other bases for evaluation.

The volume suggested that history could be enriched and made more meaningful by borrowing from other disciplines in the social sciences. In the chapter on "Problems in the Teaching of History of Science," it was suggested that greater attention might be given to new interdisciplinary areas such as cybernetics, general systems theory, and simulation theory.

History teachers at all levels, supervisors and those in the school system associated in any way with the history curriculum and its development will find much of value in this small volume.

Each of the chapters is documented and has a brief but carefully selected and annotated Bibliography.

The reviewer wonders why a sociologist was asked to write the chapter entitled "American History on the High School Level." Certainly there are qualified people in the field of history who could have discussed the topic. Unfortunately, too frequently history has not been presented ably and interestingly at the high school level because people have been assigned to teach it who' are improperly trained. The information in this volume would, if considered thoughtfully, help to1 improve history teaching at all levels. It would be too- much to expect the volume to answer all the questions and solve all the problems.

DELLO G. DAYTON

Dean School of Arts, Letters & Science Weber State College

186 Western Ghost Towns. By LAMBERT FLORIN. (Seattle: Superior Publishing Company, 1967. 176 pp. $12.50) I n his Introduction Mr. Florin explains how he came to be intrigued by western ghost towns. He followed the same road so many have traveled: An article, a picture, a yarn — and he was captivated enough to spend his next vacations hunting out these romantic vestiges of a past glorious day, when gold or silver was come by so easily that it just had to be spent in lavish extravagance.

So>, Mr. Florin with his companion, Dr. David C. Mason, has followed the graveled roads and the sagebrush-covered trails to photograph and learn the stories of once booming towns in the West. Montana and Nevada have received the greatest attention, with seventeen towns in the former and twenty-two in the latter state being treated and photographed. Utah and New Mexico are not included, but the author promises to get them in a later volume.

The photographs are exceptionally fine and as varied as possible. Naturally there are many tumble-down houses, saloons and halls, and a number of churches. But these are interspersed with close-ups of grave markers, of construction details, and of gates and doorways that actually seem to breathe the spirit of a bygone day.

And there is some history — rather sketchy and provocative — whetting the appetite for more. And there is some folklore — though not nearly enough.

But since the book is chiefly photographic, text is kept to a minimum. Take Bodie, California, for instance. It was this ghost town that first set Mr. Florin exploring. And there are so many humorous and fascinating stories about this once rip-roaring mining town that it seems a shame not to have at least a few of them preserved here, along with the wonderful photographs.

Tonopah, Nevada, has but one page and one small photograph, but Lead-

Utah1 Historical .Quarterly ville, Colorado, is given a good deal of space.

Of course selections had to be made, and the author had a perfect right to play up the towns he wanted. Altogether, he did an excellent job and the book is one to treasure.

Maps by Dr. Mason show the routes to the described towns; and short sections explain what a ghost town is and how visitors should behave — what they can legitimately pick up and what they should leave alone. As a guide to the ghost town buff, or simply as a treat for the arm-chair explorer, Western Ghost Towns is a book to enjoy.

OLIVE BURT

Author Salt Lake City Digging For Gold Without A Shovel: The Letters of Daniel Wadsworth Coit, from Mexico City to San Francisco, 1849-1851.

Edited, with an Introduction by George P. Hammond.

(Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1967. 116 pp. $22.50) In addition to being a successful businessman, Daniel Wadsworth Coit was an accomplished artist who had perfected his technique under the supervision of European masters. Through his letters and his sketches, there is skillfully reproduced for us the documentation of an unusually interesting and romantic era in history.

Mexico during and after the close of the war with the United States, and California during and following the discovery of gold were places of excitement.

Coit had a favorable opportunity to view and to interpret the scene by the use of two media: the letters to his wife and the sketches.

The Introduction and the notes by Dr. Hammond, able historian of the Southwest and director emeritus of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, in a capable way bring

Reviews and Publications the individual letters and the sketches into focus to elucidate Coit's role as a business representative for family interests in Mexico, in supplying an exchange for the gold discovered by California miners, and as a depictor of the social scene in Mexico and California.

T o Lawton and Alfred Kennedy, printing and bookmaking are a work of art. In this instance the work of the editor, the publisher, the printer, and the binder are all masterfully done.

Quality workmanship is recognized by the buyer in his willingness to reward the craftsmen.

S. LYMAN TYLER

Director Bureau of Indian Services University of Utah Will James, the Gilt Edged Cowboy. By ANTHONY

AMARAL.

(LOS Angeles:

Westernlore Press, 1967. xvi + 206 pp. $7.50) Most readers of Will James have had an uneasy feeling that there was something they did not know about the man, and the details provided in Lone Cowboy seemed to fall short of supplying the answers. Among the few whoi expressed doubt and irritation at the discrepant statements in the James autobiography were J. Frank Dobie and Ross Santee, but it has remained for Anthony Amaral to solve the mysteries. He not only explodes the impossible yarns which have made up the standard life story of Will James, but also delivers the correct facts.

All of which leaves this reviewer, for one, wondering how he ever could have believed the tale about an orphan youngster wandering through the West with an old trapper as late as 1905 under conditions which surely were gone fifty years earlier. Rather than spoil the story for prospective readers, we will only say here that Will James was not born in a covered wagon amidst Montana range lands, that he was a city kid from back East.

187 Further mystery has centered around James's virtual disappearance in the late 1930's, following a decade of fame and wealth when his books sold fast and Hollywood bid high for the film rights.

The sordid solution is that he was too far gone in alcoholism for scheduling public appearances, and that he even spent part of 1937 in the Montana mental hospital at Warm Springs.

It was natural when reading this biography to leave it long enough for another look at the James books which had been so fascinating when they were new. Little trace of the early appeal was visible, possibly because of the odor of fraud now hanging over the pages, but also because of the obvious crudity of bad spelling and worse grammar. This time the books were easily laid aside. As Amaral says, "Lone Cowboy . . . will be somewhat desecrated, and with it, a myth of a man and his work." Even the pictures seem to have lost something important.

Amaral has done a sharp job of detecting, but a less glittering one of writing up his findings. The shortcomings are mostly of the kind that English teachers would mark "vague" or "awkward," but a few involve grammar. The ad on the dust jacket joins in, remarking that James's autobiography now "has just fell apart."

Despite the tragedies involved in the story, it should be read by all western fans and students of western literature.

Unsavory as the truth may be, it needs to be known.

STANLEY R. DAVISON

Professor of History Western Montana College Ancient Hunters of the Far West. Edited

by RICHARD F. POURADE. (San Diego: Union-Tribune Publishing Company, 1966. 208 pp. $9.50) Ancient Hunters is a report of the prehistoric researches of Malcolm J. Rogers, long-time director of the San

188 Diego Museum of Man. The book deals with the archeology of southern California and adjacent regions in Baja California, Nevada, and Arizona which Rogers roamed for over forty years, assembling a vast collection of artifacts.

Rogers died in 1960, leaving his collections from over six thousand sites, twenty volumes of field notes, and a draft of a manuscript which was to be a synthesis of his many years of work. From these materials Richard F. Pourade has prepared Ancient Hunters in Rogers' name.

H. M. Wormington, E. L. Davis, and Clark W. Brott contributed chapters which supplement the text based on Rogers' research.

The book is divided into five parts.

Part I, "Discovering the San Dieguito People," is by Pourade. This section summarizes Rogers' forty-plus years of research in the deserts of the Far West and Southwest.

Part II "The Ancient Hunters," by Rogers, is the longest and most important section of the book, wherein the evolution of the San Dieguito concept over many years of field investigation is described. The development of Rogers' ideas is not amenable to brief summarization, and cannot be treated in detail in this review. It is possible, and necessary, however, to- discuss one fundamental principle which guided Rogers in all his attempts to understand the materials he observed and collected, and which formed the basis for all his interpretations. Rogers was a keen observer of patterns in the phenomena he studied.

He made himself aware not only of patterns of artifact types which occurred together, but also of larger patterns, which included not only the artifacts, but the distinctive relationships of certain artifact complexes to certain kinds of geological-geographical situationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; locations of artifact complexes with reference to ancient lake beaches or stream beds, occurrence of particular types of artifacts along ancient "trails," and the degree of natural patination on man-

Utah Historical

Quarterly

worked stone artifacts relative to the degree of patination of the unworked stones in the desert pavement in which, or upon which the artifacts were found.

From the study of these patterns, Rogers was led to postulate a division of the basic cultural pattern he came to call San Dieguito into four regional "aspects": the Central, Southeastern, Southwestern, and Northern which occupied the greater part of the Far West and Southwest in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Baja California. From these patterns also, bolstered by information from the stratified C. W. Harris and Ventana Cave sites, Rogers postulated a three-part sequence that he considered to represent the evolution of the San Dieguito' Culture.

A major failing of this section of the book, perhaps inevitable under the circumstances of posthumous publication based on an uncompleted manuscript, is that the full range of objective data upon which Rogers based his interpretations is not presented. The concise and well-illustrated summary of selected "typical" sites and artifacts of the San Dieguito complex by Clark W. Brott (Part V, "How Stones Became Tools and Weapons") remedies this deficiency to some extent, however, and enhances the value of the book proportionately.

From the viewpoint of the professional archeologist, Ancient Hunters is significant for the summation it provides of Rogers' lifelong concern with an area in which he was the undisputed archeological pioneer. The book reinforces Rogers' position as the founder of a concept that is basic to the understanding of Desert West prehistory. This is not to say, of course, that all of Rogers' interpretations are unchallenged by other archaeologists.

For the non-professional, the Introduction by Pourade and the concise and informative general essays by Wormington (Part I I I , "When Did Man Come to North America") and Davis (Part IV, "How Did They Live and How Long Ago") adequately caution the

189

Reviews and Publications reader about the tentativeness of some of Rogers' interpretations, and place his contributions in the broader context of American prehistory. The crisp, clear format, excellent editing, and superabundant illustrations, including many beautiful color plates, make the book a pleasure to' read.

C. MELVIN A I K E N S

Assistant Professor of Anthropology University of Nevada The Frontier Re-examined.

JOHN

FRANCIS

Edited by

MCDERMOTT.

(Ur-

bana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. vii + 192 pp. $6.95) For more than three-quarters of a century, historians of the West have been fascinated by the Turner hypothesis. The present volume represents still another manifestation of that interest. Professor McDermott, the editor of this book, feels that the Turner thesis has produced many distortions in western history. As a means of correcting such distortions, he helped to organize a conference on the frontier at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville during November of 1965 where these essays were first presented. In his introductory remarks McDermott noted that a fuller understanding of western history required more intensive study of at least four phases of western development that were neglected by the Turnerians. These included a more detailed investigation of the role of business in the region as well as of civilization and culture on the threshhold of a supposedly barbaric frontier. In addition he urged a greater emphasis on the examination of dominant individuals who helped to shape regional progress, and on class structure and social distinctions in what was not always a model democratic society. In very loose fashion the articles in this work are designed to fill these gaps.

McDermott and his contributors do not intend to suggest a theory or a conceptual framework for interpreting the

West. Rather, they have produced a series of short narratives about widely differing topics pertaining to the frontier.

Mostly the authors cover familiar territory, and draw heavily upon their previously published writings. One of the most useful papers in this collection is

by O. W. Holmes who discusses National Archives records relating to the administration of the territories. He suggests numerous important, but neglected topics requiring further study. Others discuss nineteenth century western cartography, religion, documentary art, fiction, and the fur trade. The book is handsomely produced and contains some fine sketches and cartographic reproductions.

GERALD D. N A S H

Associate Professor of History University of New Mexico Clio's Servant: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1846-1954. By CLIFFORD L. LORD and

CARL UBBEL-

OHDE. (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967. xi + 598 pp. $10.00) In 1900, when it moved to new quarters on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin already had attained the status of an honored institution.

Founded in 1846 (two years before statehood ), the Society had been blessed with strong, imaginative leadership and a friendly state legislature. Its holdings â&#x20AC;&#x201D; manuscript and printed â&#x20AC;&#x201D;- were rich, and a rewarding program of education and service had been launched. The years that followed saw great stress placed on building its collections and enlarging its image as an educational agency. By the mid-1950's the Society enjoyed a preeminence among historical organizations throughout the United States. The story of these fruitful years is ably retold in Clio's Servant by Clifford L. Lord and Carl Ubbelohde. Historian Lord, now president of Hofstra University, was

190 director of the Society from 1946 to 1958; Professor Ubbelohde, of Western Reserve, worked at the Society while completing his doctorate at Wisconsin.

Their book is basically an administrative history. Soundly researched, thorough, and well-written, it offers valuable insights into the problems and possibilities in operating a historical society, and is a model institutional study.

The first half of the book describes the first fifty years of the Society's growth.

Its halting beginnings (with due credit to the founders) are explored, and the dedicated efforts of Corresponding Secretary Lyman C. Draper, who from 1853 to 1887 gave direction, form, and substance to the Society, are delineated.

Under Draper's successor, Reuben G. Thwaites, a dynamic Madison newspaper editor, the collections and artifacts were moved from the Capitol to the University campus. T h e antiquarian atmosphere soon vanished as professors and students began to use Society facilities. Thwaites also expanded the services of the Society throughout the state, promoting pageants and celebrations. In the last half of the book, Lord and U b belohde describe the achievements of the succeeding directors — Milo Quaife, Joseph Schafer, Edward P. Alexander, and Clifford Lord. Each administration is measured against the "Golden Years" under Thwaites — particularly in terms of effectiveness in the realm of public relations. Occasionally in this period the story becomes pedestrian in the discussion of personnel and growth patterns.

Employees who made enduring contributions to the Society — Daniel Durrie, Louis P. Kellogg, and Charley Brown, to mention a few — receive generous mention.

This is an interesting and unique volume. Every facet of historical society operations — library, museum, publications, field services, public relations, and the politics of administration — is covered. Problems arising from weak leadership, internal jealousies, rigid policies,

Utah Historical

Quarterly

and national depression are also frankly discussed. Complementing the book are twenty-seven illustrations, notes (at the rear), a discussion of sources, and an index. Students of social and institutional history will find this study stimulating, for the Society early became known for innovation and experimentation. It should be required reading for every historical society director.

HARWOOD P. H I N T O N

Associate Professor of History University of Arizona

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS The Commerce of the Prairies by Josiah Gregg.

E d i t e d by M I L O

MILTON

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967) QUAIFE.

Although no such stream of travel poured over the old Santa Fe Trail as that which followed the Oregon Trail to California and the Pacific Northwest, the Santa Fe story is in many respects even more interesting and picturesque.

The importance of Josiah Gregg's narrative, covering the years 1831-44 and originally published in 1844, was at once apparent. It has long been recognized as the classic account of this part of America's historical past. T h e present book, edited by Milo M. Quaife and first published in 1926, is abridged from the original two-volume edition and includes only those chapters devoted to Gregg's personal narrative.

The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874.

By the EARL OF DUNRAVEN. Introduction by MARSHALL SPRAGUE. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967) Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, who produced this book about his adven-

Reviews and Publications tures in the American West, was one of those talented writers from abroad who visited the United States and helped Americans to appraise their country at a time when they were too busy building a nation to think about it. The Great Divide, which the earl wrote at the age of thiry-four, was the most popular of his half-dozen books about his travels.

After its initial appearance in 1876, it ran through several English editions and an abridged American edition titled Hunting in the Yellowstone.

The book delights us today as it delighted readers almost a century ago, partly because of the joyous vigor, humor, and sensitivity of the writing. And the writing is superb because the author is superb â&#x20AC;&#x201D; one of the most attractive and entertaining of men, wise, witty, perceptive, and vastly amused by everybody's pretensions, including his own.

Quarter Horses: A Story of Two Centuries. By ROBERT MOORMAN D E N HARDT. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967) There is a need as well as a reason for this book, says the author, since "there are no other books covering the history of the Quarter Horse. All that is available is an article here and a chapter there. If you know the past, you can understand today and anticipate tomorrow. For this reason the serious Quarter Horse breeder and enthusiast cannot use his horses wisely today, or mate them intelligently for tomorrow, without knowledge of his breed's origin, development, and principal bloodlines. The background of this great American breed is not only information of vital interest to the consumate horseman, but also a fascinating story in its own right."

The author traces the European origins and, from colonial times, the development and use of the quarter horse in the United States. He covers the outstanding horses, performance records, early breeders, and the establishment of the American Quarter Horse Association.

191 The Rising Tide: The History of San Diego. By RICHARD F. POURADE. (San D i e g o : U n i o n - T r i b u n e Publishing Company, 1967) This book presents a close look at what happened to southern California in the twenties and thirties and how the first automobile migrations forecast the future of California as the most popular state in the Union. The story unfolds from the experience of one city and one region.

The Rising Tide is the sixth book in a series devoted to' separate periods of California's history. No expense has been spared in publishing this series, commissioned by James S. Copley, chairman of The Copley Press, Incorporated.

Each volume is lavishly illustrated, with many photographs and maps in full color. Twenty-two paintings were specially commissioned by Mr. Copley to illustrate events for which contemporary illustrations were lacking or which could best be told by creative interpretation.

This is Zion: An interpretation of a colorful landscape in picture and story.

By ALLEN HAGOOD. (Salt Lake City: Zion N a t u r a l History Association, 1967) This is Zion is an inexpensive booklet which relates the beauty of Zion with natural forces that are shaping the park landscapes. The text is unconventional in its presentation of the subject in aesthetic as much as in scientific terms.

A geologist, Mr. Hagood's objective is to offer an impression of beauty that is dependent on geologic change. This is Zion is written to' interpret the mood of earth processes rather than to instruct the reader in static results of past events.

The pictures required hundreds of hours of personal time in the field and darkroom, and Mr. Hagood has succeeded in producing a lovely, pictorial remembrance booklet of Zion National Park.

192

Utah Historical

American Indian Life. Edited by ELSIE C L E W S PARSONS. Illustrated by C. GRANT LAFARGE. Reprint. (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1967) Beyond the Desert. By EUGENE M A N LOVE R H O D E S . Introduction by W. H. H U T C H I N S O N . Reprint. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967) The Buffalo

Wallow:

A Prairie Boy-

hood. By CHARLES T E N N E Y JACKSON.

Reprint. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967) Century

in the Saddle.

By

RICHARD G O F F and ROBERT H. M C C A F F R E E .

Illustrated by WILLIAM J. CULBERT-

Quarterly

ARTICLES O F I N T E R E S T American Heritage, The Magazine of History — X V I I I , O c t o b e r 1967: "Canyonlands [National Park]," by ROBERT L. REYNOLDS, 53-63 The American West — IV, November 1967: "Western Limits of the Buffalo Range," by FRANCIS HAINES, 5ff.

Annals of Wyoming—39, October 1967: "Brigham Young—Chief Washakie I n d i a n F a r m Negotiations, 18541857," edited by R H E T T S. JAMES,

245-56

drawfrom ColoCom-

El Palacio, A Quarterly Journal of the Museum of New Mexico — 74, Autumn 1967: "Where did the Pueblo people come from?" by FLORENCE HAWLEY ELLIS, 35-43

The Conquest of Apacheria. By DAN L. THRAPP. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967)

Idaho Yesterdays, The Quarterly Journal of the Idaho Historical Society — 11, Summer 1967: "CCC, Six Months in Garden Valley [Donald Tanasoca's Reminiscences]," edited by E L M O

SON, and with reproduction of ings by FREDERIC REMINGTON Century Magazine. (Denver: rado Cattlemen's Centennial mission, 1967)

Francis Mora, Last of the Catalans. By REV. FRANCIS J. WEBER.

(LOS An-

geles: Westernlore Press, 1967) Great Gunftghters of the Kansas Cowtowns, 1867-1886. By NYLE H. M I L LER and J O S E P H W. SNELL. Reprint.

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1967]) Index to History of Nevada: &

West.

By H E L E N

J.

Thompson POULTON.

(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1966) Lines West: A Pictorial History of the Great Northern Railway Operations and Motive Power from 1887 to 1967.

By CHARLES

R.

WOOD.

(Seattle:

Superior Publishing Company, 1967) The War on Powder River. By HELENA HUNTINGTON SMITH. Reprint. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967)

RICHARDSON,

16-24

New Mexico Historical Review—XLII, October 1967: "Diary of the Mormon Battalion Mission, John D. Lee (concluded)," by JUANITA BROOKS, 281—

332 Pacific Northwest Quarterly — 58, October 1967: "Religion and the Idaho Constitution," by D E N N I S L. T H O M P -

SON, 169-78 Western Museums Quarterly—IV, September 1967: "A New Museum for Utah [Utah Museum of Natural History]," by D O N V. HAGUE, 1-11

The Westerners New York Posse Brand Book — 14, No. 3: "Randolph Barnes Marcy, A Westerner's Biography," by J O S E P H P. PETERS, 57ff.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Membership in the Utah State Historical Society is open to all individuals and institutions who are interested in Utah history. We invite everyone to join this one official agency of state government charged by law with the collection, preservation, and publication of materials on Utah and related history.

Through the pages of the Utah Historical Quarterly, the Society is able to fulfill part of its legal responsibility. Your membership dues provide the means for publication of the Quarterly. So, we earnestly encourage present members to interest their friends in joining them in furthering the cause of Utah history. Membership brings with it the Utah Historical Quarterly, the bimonthly Newsletter, and special prices on publications of the Society.

The different classes of membership are: Student

$

3.00

Annual

$

5.00

Life

$100.00

For those individuals and business firms who wish to support special projects of the Society, they may do so through making tax-exempt donations on the following membership basis: Sustaining

$ 250.00

Patron

$ 500.00

Benefactor

$1,000.00

Your interest and support are most welcome.

Utah State Historical Society