Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, Number 3, 1980

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GROWING UP IN UTAH

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY ( I S S N 0042-143X)

EDITORIAL STAFF MELVIN T. SMITH,

Editor

STANFORD J . L A Y T O N , Managing M I R I A M B. M U R P H Y , Associate T H O M A S J. Z E I D L E R , Assistant

Editor Editor Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS T H O M A S G. A L E X A N D E R , Provo,

1980

M R S . I N E Z S. C O O P E R , Cedar City, 1981 S. G E O R G E E L L S W O R T H , Logan,

P E T E R L. G O S S , Salt Lake City, G L E N M . L E O N A R D , Farmington,

1981

1982 1982

L A M A R P E T E R S E N , Salt Lake City, 1980 R I C H A R D W . SADLER, Ogden,

1982

H A R O L D SCHINDLER, Salt Lake City, G E N E A. S E S S I O N S , Bountiful,

1981

1980

Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, a n d reviews contributing t o knowledge of U t a h ' s history. T h e Quarterly is published toy the U t a h State Historical Society, 307 West Second South, Salt Lake City, U t a h 84101. Phone (801) 533-5755 ( m e m b e r s h i p ) , 533-6024 (publications).

Members of t h e Society receive the Quarterly, Beehive History, a n d t h e bimonthly Newsletter upon payment of t h e a n u a l d u e s ; for details see inside back cover.

Single copies, $2.50.

Materials for publication should be submitted in duplicate accompanied by return postage a n d should be typed double-space with footnotes a t the end.

Additional information o n requirements is available from t h e m a n a g i n g editor. T h e Society assumes no responsibility for statements of fact o r opinion by contributors.

T h e Quarterly is indexed in Book Review Index to Social Science Periodicals, America; History and Life, Combined Retrospective Index to the Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals, 1886-1974, a n d Abstracts of Popular Culture.

Second class postage is p a i d a t Salt Lake City, U t a h .

HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Contents SUMMER 1980 / VOLUME 48 / NUMBER 3

IN T H I S ISSUE

219

FROLICS AND FREE SCHOOLS FOR T H E Y O U T H F U L GENTILES O F C O R I N N E

BRIGHAM D. MADSEN

220

YOSHIKO UCHIDA

234

TOPAZ, CITY OF DUST GROWING U P GREEK IN HELPER, UTAH

HELEN

"OF BENEFIT AND INTEREST T O T H E CHILDREN OF SALT LAKE CITY"â&#x20AC;&#x201D; THE TRACY AVIARY

MIRIAM

ROWLAND HALL-ST. MARK'S SCHOOL: ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY A NEW C O M M U N I T Y : M O R M O N TEACHERS AND T H E SEPARATION OF CHURCFI AND STATE IN UTAH'S T E R R I T O R I A L SCHOOLS

Z.

PAPANIKOLAS

B.

R.

261

CLARK

271

S. PETERSON

293

MARY

CHARLES

MURPHY

244

BOOK REVIEWS

313

BOOK

323

NOTICES

THE COVER At play or at work Utah's children were typically American: the barefoot boy with a stick fishing pole and the dressed-up children with their storebought toys (George Edward Anderson photographs, courtesy Brigham Young University) ; the Boy Scout tuba player in an LDS church MIA band, Rowland Hall girls playing basketball, and coal miners age fourteen and over at Scofield (USHS collections) ; the Christian Otteson girls at a daily farm chore in Huntington (George Edward Anderson photograph, courtesy Rell G. Francis, Heritage Prints).

(v) Copyright 1980 Utah State Historical Society

J. M A X A N D E R S O N . The

Story:

Fiction

Polygamy

and Fact

.

.

B. C A R M O N HARDY 313

ROBERT M . KVASNICKA and H E R M A N J.

VIOLA. The Commissioners

of

Indian Affairs, 1824-1977

.

JULIE R O Y JEFFREY.

Women:

The

West, 1840-1880

.

P H I L I P J. R O B E R T S

316

K A T H R Y N L. M A C K A Y

317

Frontier

Trans-Mississippi .

.

.

.

Books reviewed R I C H A R D M . C L O K E Y , William

H.

Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West . .

M A R K P. L E O N E . Roots of

Ashley:

.

W I L L I A M W . SAVAGE, J R . The

History

His Image in and Culture

A. P. NASATIR 318

Modern

Mormonism

Hero:

.

ROBERT DALTON

319

P A U L A. H U T T O N

321

Cowboy

American .

.

.

In this issue "Happy are the people who have no history. History, as usually written, is principally filled with the wars, the troubles, and misfortunes of mankind.. . ."

So wrote Brigham Young in 1877, concluding happily that no history was being made within the territory at that particular moment. But if armies were not marching or epidemics raging, history was being made nevertheless. It was being made in the utterances of Brigham Young and thousands of other mortals, in their aspirations, transactions, and interactions, in their everyday mistakes and achievements.

Included among these people â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in fact numerically dominant â&#x20AC;&#x201D; were the children and teens. Typical of frontier communities, Utah's territorial population was a young one. To an atypical degree, this youthfulness extended into the twentieth century. Surely the history of Utah has been greatly influenced by the youngsters. For them hundreds of institutions have been created, countless plans formulated, and millions of thoughts thought and worries endured. Yet, little of this story has been told.

The half-dozen articles presented in this issue, though a beginning, do represent good range. Youthful experiences in a freighting town, in an internment camp, and in an ethnically mixed mining community as well as the development of an aviary, a private school, and an educators' community are included. The reader should be stimulated to recall memories of his own childhood, ought to be provoked by the juvenile disappointments and triumphs chronicled in these articles, and will likely be heartened by the perennial optimism of youth. He may even find, as did Brigham Young in a similar but more personal survey over a century ago, that his "sole leaps for joye."

â&#x20AC;˘f%

Boys in broad-brimmed hats and ill-fitting clothing posed on Corinne's Montana Street for photographer Andrew J. Russell. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum.

of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met at Promontory Summit to drive a golden spike, a group of former officers in the Union Army and some non-Mormon businessmen from Salt Lake City met on the banks of the Bear River near its confluence with the Great Salt Lake and laid out a Gentile town, Corinne, named by one of its founders, Gen. J. A. Williamson, for his fourteen-year-old daughter. T h e town, located on the west bank of Bear River about six miles west of the M o r m o n settlement of Brigham City, expected to capture the freight-transfer business from the new A B O U T SIX W E E K S BEFORE OFFICIALS

Dr. Madsen is professor of history at the University of U t a h . This article derives from research he did for Corinne: The Gentile Capital of Utah published by the U t a h State Historical Society in April 1980.

The Youthful Gentiles of Corinne

221

railroad for the teamsters and freighters who would carry needed goods to the north and also hoped to win the sympathy and support of other Gentiles, both locally and nationally, in a struggle to break the theocratic and economic control of Brigham Young and his Mormons over Utah Territory. Corinne never had more than a thousand permanent inhabitants, a figure that might swell to fifteen hundred people during the busy freighting season each summer. The Gentile period of Corinne lasted only about a decade, coming to an end in 1878 when the Mormonbuilt Utah Northern narrow-gauge railroad intercepted the Montana Trail and effectively cut off the wagon-freighting business from the small town. During the ten years of its uncertain existence, Corinne reflected the optimism and hopes of Utah Gentiles to fashion a successful livelihood and a satisfying life and culture in the midst of Mormondom.

To the young people of Corinne the raw, western, end-of-the-trail town provided a fascinating setting for participation in many activities.

They watched the daily trains coming from the East or from California, disgorging eager tourists excited at the prospect of seeing a real Mormon with his many wives or of following the signals of the brakemen switching off carloads of merchandise bound for Montana; the wagon trains camped north of the tracks with the oxen lowing, the mules braying, and the campfires twinkling at night; the Gilmer and Salisbury stagecoaches swinging to a stop in a glorious cloud of dust in front of the Uintah House after a three or four day-and-night ride from Helena or Fort Benton; the fifteen or more saloons ablaze with lights and crowded with thirsty and pleasure-seeking teamsters, miners, and cowboys; the careful and alert Marshal Dan Ryan making his obvious presence felt as he leaned against a bar with his six-gun hanging at his hip; the queer sights and sounds of Chinatown at the lower end of Montana Street; and the many Shoshoni Indians sitting along the board sidewalks playing their strange gambling games or returning on paint ponies to their camp a couple of miles north of town. As the well-traveled Baron de Hubner observed during his visit in 1871: The streets of Corinne are full of white men armed to the teeth, miserable-looking Indians dressed in the ragged shirts and trousers furnished by the Central Government, and yellow Chinese with a businesslike air and hard intelligent faces. No town in the Far West gave me so good an idea as this little place of what is meant by border-life; i.e. the struggle between civilization and savage men and things. 1

1

M . le Baron De H u b n e r , A Ramble

round the World

(New York, 1875), p . 120.

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The mothers and fathers of Corinne did not agree with the disdainful baron about the "savagery" of their town and were determined to create for their families a stable and enlightened culture that would provide Christian training for their children in contrast to the apparent barbarism of polygamous Utah. To this end the town leaders soon had enticed the religious leaders of three sectsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and the Presbyteriansâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to establish chapels in Corinne, aided by rather generous gifts from eastern missionary societies determined to convert the Utah Saints from their misguided ways. But, evidently, the sons and daughters of Corinne were not too often encouraged to attend Sabbath School, and divine service seemed to be a rather hit-and-miss affair. On special occasions when visiting church dignitaries were preaching, as many as four hundred people might crowd into the three small buildings, at least according to the exaggerated claims of the local newspaper editor. At other times, he noted twelve communicants in the Episcopal church, twenty-six members of the Methodist church, and a Presbyterian Union Sabbath School with an initial attendance of forty-one scholars.2 More commonly, the local newspaper had to record the melancholy news that "barely enough attend to break the hollowness of an empty house" and to recognize that there was serious talk of converting all three church buildings into warehouses, paint shops, or poor houses.3 Church-oriented residents of Corinne also attempted from time to time to get a Sunday closing law passed to ensure a tranquil Sabbath.

In 1876, for example, double petitions were presented to the city council, forty-two citizens asking for a closing law and ninety-one opposing such an order. The council voted with the majority. The atmosphere towards Sabbath observance was much different in Mormon Salt Lake City where fifteen boys were arrested and fined $2.50 apiece for playing baseball on Sunday.4 With three active churches in Corinne, some residents were concerned that a surfeit had been reached in religious structures while there was no school building. A day school branch of the Salt Lake Grammar School was conducted during the winter of 1869-70 by Nellie 2 Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Convocation of Clergy and Laity of the Missionary District of Montana, Idaho, and Utah, St. Mark's Cathedral, Salt Lake City, May 30, 1878 (Salt L a k e City, 1878), p p . 1 5 - 1 6 ; Corinne Reporter, J u n e 10, August 12, 1871, April 27, 29, 1872; Utah Reporter, April 7, 12, 14, 19, M a y 3, August 12, November 4, 1870.

3 Utah Reporter, September 28, 1870, November 30, 1872; Salt Lake Herald, December 2, 1872; Corinne Mail, November 16, 1874; Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 1876.

4 "Council C h a m b e r Corinne City M i n u t e Book," September 23, October 14, 1873, January 26, February 2, M a r c h 16, 23, 1874, April 4, 1876, U t a h State Archives, Salt Lake City; Corinne Reporter, October 15, November 15, 1 8 7 3 ; Utah Mining Gazette, M a y 30, 1874.

The Youthful Gentiles of Corinne

223

Wells in one of the churches. A ladies' sociable, held on January 13, 1870, to raise funds for seats and other conveniences for the church and schoolhouse, netted $126.25. This "first entirely Gentile school in Utah" enrolled thirty students and was followed, on April 18, 1870, by a district school of twenty-two students taught by a Miss Huntoon, just arrived from the East. But three days later the newspaper announced that Miss M. Q. Barnes planned to open a select school on May 2 and later reported an enrollment of twenty-two scholars, a nucleus for a possible high school.

Dennis J. Toohy, a local editor, visited the schoolroom and warned the parents of students not to expect too much in the way of maps, charts, globes, and blackboards. He invited the citizens to provide these necessities before the start of another term.5 The rapid comings and goings of various little educational units aroused the town fathers to the need for a more comprehensive public system. The Box Elder County Court had formed the Corinne School District, a rectangular area two-by-six miles with the town as the nucleus, in July 1870, but its organization was left to the citizens.6 The Corinne City Council awarded a bid for the emplacement of a stone foundation and was preparing to accept bids for the rest of the schoolhouse structure when, in a surprise move, the Opera House Association offered its building to the community for school purposes. The council accepted at once, agreeing to pay $1,730 down and the balance of $1,000 in six months.

The scholars of Corinne were invited "to come and enjoy the feast of education" under the tutelage of Principal H. H. Heckman and his assistant, Ettie Closser.7 The first year of Corinne's free public school was a decided success despite such minor problems as the need for another stove to heat the classroom and the effort to provide additional financing by such means as selling the old city hall.8 The basement was used for the primary grades, and the final enrollment figure showed that 129 pupils had recited 2,678 lessons with 2,373 being perfect, 293 imperfect, and 12 failures. After a month's vacation in March, the students returned to classes until commencement exercises on June 27, 1873. An interesting highlight of the year was a Valentine's Day masquerade ball held for the benefit of the 'Utah Reporter, February 3, 12, April 16, 21, May 10, 12, 1870, June 29, 1871.

Box Elder County Court Records, July 20, 1870, Utah State Archives.

7 Corinne Reporter, June 11, July 1, August 12, 20, 21, October 4, 21, 1872; "Corinne City Minute Book," June 3, 10, August 5, 19, 1872.

8 "Corinne City Minute Book," November 18, 1872; Corinne Reporter, November 14, 1872; Utah Mining Journal, October 31, 1872.

9

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public school at which two hundred couples danced until four o'clock the next morning.9 From this time on Corinne's free school offered public education to the youth of the town in contrast to the Mormon system of private schools. In an 1873 LDS conference sermon, Brigham Young hurled anathemas at the idea of a free school system, saying, "I am utterly opposed to free schools" and later adding, "I will not give one dollar to educate another man's child."10 With righteous indignation Corinnethians condemned the prophet's dearth of democracy in not caring about the education of Utah children.

To the young people of Corinne, the emphasis on schooling and the desultory attention to religion did not detract from the earthly pleasures of which there seemed to be an abundance in the Gentile town.

The most extravagant social events in Corinne were the celebrations staged in commemoration of the founding of the town and the nation. The first Pioneer Day, held March 25, 1870, on the anniversary of the sale of city lots, was an all-out affair starting with a sunrise cannonade followed by a thirteen-gun salute at ten o'clock in the morning, the exact hour the first lot was sold to Harry Creighton. Col. A. W. Taylor of the Oriental Powder Company had thoughtfully donated several kegs of powder to the Pioneers' Association to ensure adequate explosive demonstrations. At noon a mass meeting was held at the baseball grounds with a program that included an address by the historian of the Pioneers followed by another salvo of artillery. A baseball game ensued with guns being fired at intervals and another bombardment at the end of the game. In the evening a banquet was followed by an all-night dance.11 Of even more importance to Corinnethians than their founder's day was a celebration of Independence Day as a symbol of patriotism in the land of the suspect Mormon people. The first Fourth of July, in 1869, had gone by without any recognition because there had been some uncertainty about the longevity of the new town. But by the following year Corinne could present a prosperous appearance, and ambitious plans were laid for a magnificent holiday. A. M. Fitch threw open his newly completed bridge across Bear River free to all until after July 5, and three refreshment bowers were completed. Dr. O. D. Cass made a special 9 Corinne Reporter, November 19, 21, December 13, 1872, February 15, 22, March 22, May 30, June 28, 1873.

10 Salt Lake Tribune, October 11, 14, 1873, April 13, 1875.

11 Utah Reporter, March 22, 24, 1870.

The Youthful

Gentiles of Corinne

225

trip to Camp Douglas and returned to Corinne triumphantly with a big gun, a "splendid brass piece," for an appropriate noisemaker.12 The glorious day started with a 100-gun salute at sunrise, followed by a procession of military companies, the local fire department, the civic association, two baseball clubs, and most of the remaining citizens. The new Opera House was dedicated at 10:00 A.M., the program including a reading of the Declaration of Independence and an oration by Gen. George R. Maxwell. Then there were aquatic sports, baseball exercises, dinner, a "great fat man's race, when several leviathans of the mountains . . . contested] for the supremacy of weight and speed," a lean man's race, horse racing, the championship baseball game, a trial of Babcock fire extinguishers, a display of fireworks, and finally, at 9 P.M., a "great terpsichoreal" event in the opera house to close the day.13 The Utah Northern rail connection between Gentile Corinne and Mormon Logan, completed in 1873, inaugurated a feeling of detente wholly unexpected just a few months before, and this influenced that year's Independence Day. On June 20, without any warning, about 400 school children arrived in Corinne from Logan to visit the strange and exotic town beyond the Bear. Cool beverages were offered them, the mayor made a hasty speech of welcome, and the Reporter applauded this first excursion ever from the Mormon settlements to Corinne. A week later a party of Corinnethians reciprocated the visit by traveling to Logan where "they were very agreeably surprised, and almost overwhelmed with the extreme kindness and attention shown them by the honorable people of that place." The reception included conveyances to take them from the depot to the city hall, ice cold lemonade, the inevitable speeches, and an invitation to attend the Mormon conference then in session. Not to be outdone, the citizens of Corinne invited the Loganites to join them in their celebration of the Fourth of July at the Gentile headquarters and made grand preparations to receive the Mormon brethren and sisters in hospitable style. Three hundred curious Mormons from Logan and many more from Brigham City, Willard, North Branch, and other settlements traveled to Corinne to commemorate the day, to partake of the fifty mammoth hams, to be cooled by the ton of ice furnished by Mr. House, and to enjoy the program which featured an opening prayer by Rev. D. Jameson of the Methodist church and a benediction by Moses Thatcher, a Mormon leader.14 12 13 :!

Utah Reporter, June 29, July 1, 2, 1870.

Utah Reporter, June 17, July 2, 4, 1870.

Corinne Reporter, June 20, 28, 30, July 1, 2, 3, 5, 1873; Salt Lake Herald, July 6, 1873.

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The efforts to outdo the Mormons and to display Gentile loyalty by celebrations of Independence Day were matched in Corinne by a determination to defeat every Saints' team in the territory in the national pastime of baseball. In March 1870 the Corinne Base Ball Club was organized with J. Q. Harnish as captain. An exhibition game was played on Pioneer Day between the Corinne first nine and the second team, called the Pioneer Club for that day. The Reporter remarked on the magnificent appearance of the players who won admiring glances from the ladies present, or so thought the manly editor. The score was 79 to 20 for the Corinne club, the two teams having elected to use a live rather than a dead ball. A number of practice games were then played, and the newspaper followed these sporting events rather closely, commenting on such incidents as D. R. Short, captain of the second nine, being hit on the proboscis by a flyer, and Mr. Taylor of Chicago who acted as catcher and gave the boys some "valuable hints as to how things ought to be done" before knocking over several spectators while trying to catch a foul.15 As the players began to feel their oats, challenges were directed to the Eureka Club of Salt Lake City; to the Carlin, Nevada, team with whom the Corinnes were willing to compete for the championship of the Pacific slope; and particularly to the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, whose president replied that he was pleased to learn that the national sport had reached Utah and the West and indicated that his team would be pleased to play Corinne if the Red Stockings should again travel past the railroad town. An impromptu game was played at Corinne with the Box Elder Base Ball Club of the county, the latter losing by a score of 90 to 50 because, as the Reporter explained, "they have had but little experience in this game." A return game was scheduled as part of Corinne's July Fourth celebration for the territorial championship. The Corinnes apparently won this contest also. In another practice game, a team from the U.S. Thirteenth Infantry, just in town after a 400-mile march, met the Corinnes during a terrific dust storm and lost by a score of 62 to 41. In a more important match with a team from arch rival Ogden, the Corinnes bested the Junctionites 46 to 44 in an extra inning.16 But these games were only preliminary to the real contest between Mormon Salt Lake City and Gentile Corinne. On June 21, the following 35 10

Utah Reporter, March 15, 24, 26, April 28, May 10, 24, 1870.

Utah Reporter, April 5, 12, May 21, 31, June 5, 17, July 14, 1870.

The Youthful Gentiles of Corinne

227

challenge was printed in the Deseret News: "We, the Ennea Base Ball players of this city, considering ourselves champions of the Territory, are willing to meet any other club within the limits of the Territory who wish to dispute the claim and contest for the same." Corinne, the obvious target of this invitation, immediately accepted, and the first of three games was played at Corinne on July 4 with the Corinnes the victors by 42 to 31, 17 However, disaster struck the Corinnes at the territorial capital when the Enneas won an easy victory in the second game by a score of 74 to 23. A few days later a Montana visitor reported seeing a tombstone in the center of the town, arrayed in a flag of mourning and with the following epitaph touchingly inscribed: "Base Ball Club No. 24 of Corinne, U.T., died July 24, 1870, at Great Salt Lake City, for the want of breath. The members of this deceased club are requested to wear a badge of mourning for thirty days."18 With some determination, the Corinnes played several practice games in anticipation of the third and decisive contest at neutral Ogden on October 1. At the end of the game, a correspondent telegraphed the Utah Reporter, "Kill the fatted calf. Corinne walks away with the championship. Corinne 12. Enneas 8."19 Concern with Mormondom did not occupy all the time and thought of Corinnethians, and even the competition in baseball had engendered considerable enjoyment apart from the strong desire to defeat their Mormon neighbors. Corinne was a happy town, and with the cessation of the freighting business by December of every year the citizens were faced with a winter season devoid of much commercial activity and with time to pursue things social and cultural. The stagnant winter of 1869-70 had demonstrated the need of a public hall, large enough to seat four or five hundred people for lectures, concerts, meetings and for the traveling artists and exhibitors who stopped off at this midway station on the Central Pacific Railroad. The need was satisfied by the completion of the Corinne Opera House in October 1870.20 The typical opera house audience was rather well behaved, although sometimes a few roughs might upset the decorum of the various productions. Members of the audience were cautioned against whistles and catcalls, men from the freight lines and horse corrals were asked to 17

1870.

18

Utah Reporter,

July 8, 1870; Deseret News, J u n e 29, 1870; Salt Lake Herald, July 6,

Utah Reporter, July 27, 28, 1870; Helena Herald, August 2, 1870.

Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1870; Utah Reporter, October 1, 4, 10, 1870.

20 Rue C Johnson, "Frontier T h e a t r e : T h e Corinne O p e r a House," Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (1974) :286, 287, 2 9 2 - 9 3 , paints a delightful picture of the opera house a n d its use.

See also, Utah Reporter, October 16, 1869, May 2 1 , 1870.

19

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walk more quietly in their heavy boots during the musical numbers, and others were requested to leave their dogs at home. This last appeal was not always followed, the Reporter occasionally noting dog fights in the aisles. Within a month of the grand dedication, the local newspaper reported the structure was busy two or three times a week with lectures, concerts, and other performances.21 The social activity most often held in the opera house, and at times in other buildings in Corinne, seemed to be dances and formal balls.

During the early years a rather settled pattern developed for the important dance festivities: an opening ball in the early autumn, a Christmas dance, a New Year's Eve and sometimes a Valentine's Day Masquerade Ball, an evening in commemoration of the founding of the town, and a Fourth of July hop. There were special ballroom occasions such as the dedication of the opera house and the launching of the City of Corinne. And finally, there were dances announced for no reason other than the desire to dance.22 The dances usually started at 10 P.M., recessed for a midnight supper, and then continued until 4 A.M. or daybreak. At the Opera House, Winschell's building, the Uintah House, the Central Hotel, the Metropolitan Hotel, or at the Corinne Millsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the place didn't seem to matter â&#x20AC;&#x201D;couples numbering from forty to two hundred crowded on the dance floor. The local newspaper editors often could not contain their romantic memories of the previous evening as they described a dance as "an uncontrolled rollicking, rolling rout. . . simply a wild romp by all, unfettered by ceremony or tone" from which the participants could not depart without a sigh.23 A reader one hundred years removed from these congenial scenes is left with the strong impression that Corinne was a joyful town, a fun place to spend an evening. It can be understood why errant Mormons from nearby hamlets often drove their buggies to the Gentile town for a night of rhythmic bliss.24 Interspersed with the many dances were the private parties and community sociables that permitted the young people of the town to get together and the older people to observe their courting and coquetry.

21

Johnson, "Frontier T h e a t r e , " p . 2 9 3 ; Utah Reporter, July 22, October 11, 1870.

Utah Reporter, November 30, December 25, 28, 1869, M a r c h 19, 24, July 9, August 4 December 24, 1870; Corinne Reporter, M a y 23, 1871, J a n u a r y 4, J u n e 17, September 17, December 26, 1872, February 17, 1873; Corinne Mail, September 26, October 17, 1874, J a n u a r y 2, February 17, M a r c h 22, J u n e 16, 1875. At one masquerade ball a dancer a p p e a r e d ' a t t i r e d as a "Mormon-Native."

22

23 2

Utah Reporter,

* Utah Reporter,

December 23, 1869, July 9, 1870; Corinne December 25, 1869, July 9, 1870.

Mail, J a n u a r y 2, J u n e 16,

The Bear River, looking south from Corinne, provided young and old with many diversions such as fishing, boating, and bird hunting. Andrew J. Russell photograph, courtesy of the Oakland Museum.

At one affair given by Mrs. Alex Toponce in honor of her own birthday the town elite enjoyed themselves as they watched, among other things, two sedate businessmen, E. P. Johnson and N. S. Ransohoff, dance an Irish jig. One sociable held at the Opera House engaged the attention of two hundred guests; Gen. Patrick E. Connor bought the cake being raffled off, and all joined in such games as blindman's buff and drop the handkerchief. One Salt Laker who attended a party in Corinne in 1876 wrote that when he wanted "a good time hereafter," he would journey to Corinne which was "composed exclusively of Gentiles.""

25 Utah Reporter, February 12, July 17, 1870; Corinne Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 1876.

Reporter,

November 21, 1 8 7 1 ;

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More serious cultural pursuits in the form of dramatic presentations also attracted good crowds in Corinne. On July 16, 1870, some of the local talent formed a dramatic association to produce amateur plays, but the organization was not successful partly because not one lady joined the troupe. The Reporter said they seemed to require more coaxing.26 Professional acting companies found it convenient to stop off in Corinne as part of their transcontinental tours, thus giving Corinnethians some legitimate and delightful productions. 27 Local groups such as the Ogden Dramatic Company offered creditable performances in Rip Van Winkle and other plays, although this particular offering unfortunately was produced without any scenery. By 1874 the better road companies were by-passing faltering Corinne, and the Mail hopefully reported talk of a theatrical troupe coming to the town to provide entertainment long missed. Further evidence of this lack came with the facetious announcement, "Another disappointment. Edwin Booth will not fill his engagement at the Corinne Opera House this season."28 One of the reasons for the dramatic and rather sudden decline in performances in the town was due to the numerous one-horse shows which had perpetrated inept performances before the unsuspecting townsmen. In one full column of fulminations and tirade, editor Toohy discoursed on one J. B. Robinson, "a peripatetic bilk," who left town without paying any of his bills, and on the five amateurs from Ogden who supported him. One later example of these wandering cheats, a Dr. St. Clair, was met by a small but appreciative audience that punctuated his performance with large Chinese bombs and caused him and his troupe to take the next freight train to Elko.29 There were also literary entertainments and variety shows to entertain the citizens during the dreary evenings of winter: traveling circuses; a Museum of Living Wonders featuring a French giant and a Lilliputian, an armless man, a memorial service to Samuel F. B. Morse complete with a panegyrical poem by Nat Stein, a $25,000 painted panorama of the great Northwest; the Royal Yeddo Troupeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jugglery and Magic, the Living Head (an illusion); and other entertainments. 30 30 Johnson, "Frontier Theatre," p. 288; Utah Reporter, June 23, December 6, 1870, January 26, 1871. " 2T Utah Reporter, January 6, 1871; "Corinne City Minute Book," January 2, 1871; Johnson, "Frontier Theatre," pp. 289-300; Corinne Reporter, December 12, 1871, May 19, 1873.

28 Ogden Junction, February 20, 1874; Corinne Mail, October 6, November 12, 1874; Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 1876.

28 Corinne Reporter, April 3, June 22, 24, 1871; Corinne Mail, September 7, 1874.

30 Corinne Mail, September 18, 1874; Utah Reporter, June 11, August 6, 1870; Corinne Reporter, April 11, June 5, 1872; Johnson, "Frontier Theatre," p. 291.

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But more than drama and traveling exhibits, Corinnethians seemed to love things musical. In June 1870 Miss Kline, just in from Sacramento, started a singing class; and before long there was a Corinne Serenading Club that apparently went around in the evening extracting favors from local businessmen as they sang by the light of the silvery moon. Commercial artists who visited the town included a Tyrolean troupe that featured a zither and a peculiar wood and straw instrument played by Professor Gschwawdner, the Great Western Minstrel Troupe, the Swiss Bell Ringers, the Rocky Mountain Vocalists of Montana, and a grand concert by Madame Anna Bishop, billed as a distinguished vocalist.31 Sometimes visiting performers would join artistic forces with local musicians for a concert. A Professor Farini, pianist and baritone singer, came in from Salt Lake City in the spring of 1871 and conducted a series of concerts which elicited ecstatic reviews from the local editor. The Professor's rendition of "Yankee Doodle" as a piano composition was "beyond our reach, for we have never heard so exquisite a performance on the piano before." At his last concert, Farini indicated he had decided to move to Corinne and give voice and piano lessons. But his fame was short-lived as reports began to come in from Salt Lake City, Denver, and other points that the professor had failed to pay certain obligations.32 Corinnethians preferred their own musical productions anyway, and the Opera House was usually filled to hear friends and relatives perform.

At one event the local newsman, as one who scarcely knew a "discord from a bed cord," advised the participants to sing well known and popular songs rather than those of higher artistic merit. Judging from the programs, most artists followed that advice.33 As one program was described: A pretty song by Lillie Greenwald was received with great applause.

Mrs. Glascott, who is ever a favorite with the lovers of music, appeared in those delightful songs "Sweet spirit hear my prayer" and "Her bright smile haunts me still." which were rendered in glorious style. "Driven from home," by Miss E. Closser, with her incomparable voice and cultivation, was worthy of that accomplished lady's effort, while raptures of applause followed the excellent singing of "Mignonette" by Miss Jennie Black.34

Usually, these entertainments also included tableaux representing such typical scenes as "Pocahontas Saving the Life of John Smith."35 S1 Utah Reporter, June 5, December 24, 1870; Corinne Reporter, May 10, Tune 16, 20, 24, 27, November 29, 1871, July 7, 1873.

32 Corinne Reporter, March 1, 26, June 1, July 1, 1871.

33 Utah Reporter, November 19, 1870.

34 Corinne Reporter, April 21, 1871.

35 Corinne Reporter, April 21, 1871, February 29,1872 .

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Minor diversions for both young and old in Corinne included ice skating on adjacent Bear River and roller skating in the Opera House at twenty-five cents per ticket, a sport that seemed especially popular judging from the many comments about it in the columns of the Reporter.

Occasionally, traveling billiard players would give an exhibition of skill.

Spelling bees captured the attention of Corinnethians during the long winter. For the betting fraternity there were cockfights at Burnetts.36 And for the outdoorsmen there were the wonderful hunting grounds of the Bear River marshes, an area so teeming with waterfowl that today the national government has set it aside as a migratory bird refuge.

To the westerner of the 1870s hunting game was such a natural part of everyday living that it is singular that any mention should be made of the practice, and yet much space was devoted to accounts of hunting parties. Toohy wrote of the geese, ducks, grouse, chickens, brant, snipe, plover, curlew, partridge, pelican, crane, gull, kingfisher, and many other varieties of birds. He concluded one account with, "a blind man can shoot a cart load of birds in one hour. . . . " Corinne nimrods brought in wagonloads of ducks. In one instance, three citizens from Salt Lake City shot 176 ducks in a single day. Successful fishing in Bear River was so common that only occasionally did the newspaper mention in rather matter-of-fact fashion that two thousand pounds of fish had been caught in Bear River in just a few days.37 One sport, horse racing, was a natural for a frontier trail town whose streets swarmed with teamsters, stagecoach drivers, and horse wranglers. At first the eager horsemen just laid out a straight course west of the town, set up some rickety bleachers with local bartender Cad Pace in a booth under the stand to dispense liquid refreshments and cigars, and awaited the challenges. There were always wagers, and newspaper comments usually included reports on the brisk side betting or that large sums of money had changed hands. Races accompanied the annual celebrations of Pioneer Day and Independence Day and on special occasions like the launching of the steamer—whenever a crowd was at hand.38 '•"Utah Reporter, December 2, 14, 2 1 , 1869; Corinne Reporter, April 12, August 19 26 September 6, October 13, 1871, January 6, 1872; Corinne Journal, May 9, 1871; Corinne Mail April 16, 1875. ' ™Corinne Reporter, July 15, August 19, 1871; Corinne Mail, September 2 1 , 25, October 28 1874, M a r c h 16, 25, 1875; Salt Lake Herald, January 9, March 17, May 27, 1875 ; Salt Lake Tribune, November 22, 1876. , , „ ™ Corinne Reporter, May 8, 9, 24, 1871, June 30, 1873; Utah Reporter, 5, 10, 17, 1870; Corinne Mail, July 6, 1875.

March 26 Tune

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In 1871 the townspeople completed a circular track east of the river, christened it the Lake View Track, and invited Salt Lakers and people from the other Mormon towns to participate in the racing events. As many as 2,000 showed up to witness the more exciting match races.

Finally, in July 1873 twelve prominent citizens of Corinne filed articles of incorporation establishing the Corinne Agricultural and Parks Association with a capital stock of 500 shares of $10 each and with the twin objects of building a fairground for exhibiting stock, vegetables, etc., "and also making a race track within the enclosure for the purpose of trying the speed of horses to be put on exhibition. . . ." The latter seemed to be the real purpose. Thereafter, races were run over the Agricultural Park Track.39 During 1872 and 1873 Corinnethians became quite excited over a trotting horse, Mountain Sheep, owned by a town resident. In several match races Sheep rather handily beat Omaha and Dolly Varden, the latter from Salt Lake City, until Toohy bragged for the benefit of his Salt Lake rivals that it was useless for them to bring in any more nags to race the matchless Sheep. Two months later Sheep proved unmanageable and lost a race to Honest Charley which caused great disappointment among the Corinne fans. The Mining Journal thought that Corinnethians were "getting horse racing on the brain."40 To the people of Corinne, young and old, the many diversions offered by their hustling, wide-awake town meant days and evenings filled with interest and enthusiasm. If no special events were scheduled, there were always the busy streets thronged with teamsters and horse wranglers, cowboys on their way to Montana with herds of cattle, soldiers en route to frontier posts, Mormon farmers with wagonloads of fruits and vegetables for sale, Chinese merchants, wandering Indians, shops and saloons with their doors nearly always open, and the trains puffing and steaming along Front Street with curious tourists hanging out the windows or debarking to mingle with the heterogeneous crowd. Gentile Corinne, in the 1870s, was a unique western town, the "Burg on the Bear" to its Mormon neighbors but the "Metropolis of the Hills" to its loyal and ever-optimistic citizens.

M Utah Reporter, May 10, 1870; Corinne Reporter, November 8, 18, 1872; Utah Mining Journal, November 11, 1872; "Box Elder County Association," July 31, 1873, Utah State Archives; Corinne Mail, July 6, 1875.

40 Corinne Reporter, November 18, 1872, April 21, June 20, 1873; Utah Mining Journal, November 18, 22, 1872.

Postcard view of Topaz.

Courtesy of the

author.

Topaz, City of Dust

BY YOSHIKO UCHIDA

WAS DECIDEDLY NOT BY CHOICE THAT I happened to spend eight months during World War II living in a cluster of dusty barracks located in the middle of Utah's bleak Sevier Desert. This unhappy circumstance occurred because I was one of several thousand Japanese-Americans incarcerated by our government in Topaz, Utah, one of ten wartime concentration camps established to house the Japanese uprooted from

IT

Ms. Uchida is a professional writer living in Berkeley, California. This article is excerpted from a book in progress.

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the West Coast of the United States. This mass evacuation, without trial, was the result of Executive Order 9066 that was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942 and placed 110,000 Japanese, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, under guard and behind barbed wire. Deprived of our constitutional rights as well as our privacy and our dignity as human beings, we were guilty of nothing more than that we resembled the enemy in Japan.

Until the war, my parents, older sister, and I lived in Berkeley, California, where I grew up and went to school. My father was an executive of Mitsui and Company, a Japanese business firm in San Francisco. Only hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI came to apprehend my father, and for three days we had no word where they had taken him. When he was finally able to contact us, we learned that he and hundreds of other Japanese businessmen and community leaders were to be sent to a prisoner of war camp in Missoula, Montana.

My mother, sister, and I were left behind in Berkeley to cope with the mounting anti-Japanese feelings (fed by long years of anti-Asian sentiment in California) and to face mounting rumors of a mass evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. The nightmare of evacuation became a reality in April 1942, and the U.S. Army gave us ten days' notice to get out of the home in which we had lived for fifteen years.

Allowed to take only what we could carry, we were shipped along with 8,000 Japanese of the San Francisco Bay Area to the Tanforan race track. There, for six months, we lived in a horse stall formerly occupied by a single horse. Shortly before we left, my father was released "on parole" from Montana and was able to join us in camp.

In September 1942 we were shipped by train to a concentration camp which we knew to be somewhere in Utah and was called Topaz. We had no idea how long we would be there. As the train approached our destination we watched the landscape closely, hoping it would give some indication of what Topaz would be like. We felt cautiously optimistic as we reached the town of Delta, for the land did not look too unfriendly or barren.

We were counted as we got off the train and then transferred to buses for the final leg of our journey to Topaz. As we rode along, we felt fairly hopeful, for we were passing pleasant little farms, green fields, and clusters of trees. After a half-hour, however, there was an abrupt change. All vegetation stopped. There were no trees or growth of any

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kind except clumps of dry greasewood. WTe were entering the edge of the Sevier Desert some fifteen miles west of Delta, and the surroundings were now as bleak as a bleached bone. Beyond the desert there were mountains rising above the valley with great majesty, but they were many miles away. The bus made a turn into the heart of the sun-drenched desert and there in the midst of nowhere were rows and rows of squat, tar-papered barracks sitting sullenly in the white chalky sand. This was Topaz, Utah.

As the bus drew up to one of the barracks, we heard the unlikely sound of band music. Marching toward us down the dusty road was a group of young Boy Scouts who had come with the advance contingent, playing bugles, trumpets, and drums and carrying signs that read, "Welcome to Topazâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Your Camp." It was a touching sight to see them standing in the burning sun, covered with dust and making such a determined effort to lessen the shock of our arrival at this bleak desert camp.

A few of our friends who had arrived earlier were also there to greet us.

They tried hard to look cheerful, but their pathetic dust-covered appearance told us a great deal more than their brave words.

We went through the usual arrival procedure which consisted of registering, having a brief medical examination, and being assigned living quarters. Our family was to occupy Apartment C of Barracks 2 in Block 7.

Henceforth our address would be 7-2-C, Topaz, Utah.

The entire camp was divided into forty-two blocks, each containing twelve barracks constructed around a mess hall, a latrine-washroom, and a laundry. The camp was one mile square and eventually housed 8,000 residents, making it the fifth largest city in Utah.

As we plodded through the powdery sand toward Block 7, I began to understand why everyone looked like pieces of flour-dusted pastry.

In the frantic and hasty construction of this barracks city, every growing thing had been removed, and what had once been a peaceful lake bed was churned up into one great mass of loose flourlike sand. WTith each step we sank two or three inches, sending up swirls of dust that crept into our eyes and mouths, noses and lungs. After two long sleepless nights sitting up on the train, this sudden encounter with the sun, the glaring white dust, and the altitude, made me feel weak and lightheaded. Just as I was on the verge of collapsing, we finally reached Block 7.

Each barracks, one hundred feet in length, was divided into six rooms for families of varying size, and we were assigned to a room in the center, about eighteen-by-twenty feet in dimension, designed for occu-

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pancy by four people. We found that our room contained nothing but four army cots without mattresses. The inner sheetrock walls and ceilings had not yet been installed, nor had the black potbellied stove that was left standing outside our door. Cracks were visible everywhere in the siding and around the windows, and although our friends had swept out our room for us before we arrived, the dust was already seeping into it again from all sides.

The instruction sheet advised us not to put up any shelves until the carpenters arrived from Tanforan to install the sheetrock walls. It also indicated that there would be flush toilets and individual basins (rather than the tin troughs of our former camp) in all washrooms. When I went to inspect these facilities for our block, however, I discovered that there were no seats on the toilets, no water in the laundry, and no lights in the showers or latrines. Our water was being pumped up from nearby artesian wells almost 1,000 feet deep, and twice during our first day the water was turned off completely.

We returned to our room after lunch in the mess hall, and although our mattresses had not yet been delivered, we were so exhausted we spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping on the springs of our army cots. The temperature in our room the next morning was well below freezing, and we soon discovered that the temperature variation in a single day could be as much as fifty degrees. Some days started at thirty and soared by mid-afternoon into the eighties and nineties, so although we wore winter wools in the morning, by afternoon it became imperative to change to summer clothing. When my sister and I would meet some of the incoming buses in the afternoon, we would come home parched, sunburned, and feeling like well-broiled meat.

Although evacuees continued to arrive each day, the blocks to which they were assigned were progressively ill-equipped to house them. People who arrived a few days after we did found gaping holes in the roof where the stove pipe was to fit, latrine barracks with no roofs at all, and mattresses filled only with straw. Those who arrived still later did not even have barracks to go to and were simply assigned to cots set up in empty mess halls, laundries, or the corridors of the hospital. Many evacuees found themselves occupying barracks where hammering, tarring, and roofing were still in progress; and one unfortunate woman received second degree burns on her face when boiling tar seeped through the roof onto the bed where she was asleep.

I experienced my first dust storm about a week after we arrived.

The morning had begun cold and brittle as always, but by afternoon a

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strange warm wind began to blow. I was in another block walking home with a friend when the wind suddenly began to gather ominous strength.

It swept in on great thrusting gusts, lifting huge masses of sand from the ground and flinging them in the air. The sand quickly engulfed us and soon completely eclipsed barracks that stood only ten feet away. We dashed into the nearest laundry barracks, but even inside the building the air was thick with dust. The flimsy structure shuddered with each blast of wind, and we could hear objects being lifted from the ground and flung against the building. During the hour or more that we waited, there were moments when I was gripped with terror. I thought surely the barracks would simply fly apart and we would be flung into the desert.

When at last the wind let up a little, we decided to try to get back to our own barracks. As I ran the wind blew sand into my eyes and nose.

I was breathing dust and my mouth was gritty with it. When I got to our room I found my mother sitting alone in a dust-filled room. She did not know where my father and sister were, but we hoped they were safe somewhere. There was no point in trying to clean our room until the wind stopped blowing, so my mother and I shook out our blankets, lay down on our cots, and waited for the storm to subside. It was a long afternoon, and the wind did not die down until long after the sun had set.

As mornings and nights grew colder, we looked with increased longing at the black iron stove that stood uselessly outside our barracks waiting for work crews to bring it inside and connect it. One day, almost a month after our arrival, a work crew composed of resident men appeared and finally installed our stove. We were now reasonably warm in our quarters, and our food wras beginning to improve. The correlation between good food and rising spirits was, I discovered, pathetically simple.

By now my father, sensing the tremendous needs of the struggling community, had volunteered to serve on several committees, two of which worked on the complex problems of employment and housing in camp.

He was also an active lay leader of the interdenominational church, and when the camp canteen was converted into a consumers' cooperative, he was elected chairman of its first board of directors.

My mother, in her own gentle and quiet way, continued to be a loving focal point for our family, converting our dreary barracks room into a makeshift home where we invited our friends as we did back in Berkeley. Having been a close family, ours did not disintegrate, as many did, from the pressures created when entire families were confined to living in a single room.

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My sister, Keiko, utilized her training in preschool education at Mills College in Oakland, California, to establish a nursery school system for Topaz as she had done at Tanforan, and I applied for work in the Topaz elementary school system. We both earned a salary of $19 a month for a forty-hour week, while workers in most other categories earned $16.

Blocks 8 and 41, located at opposite corners of camp, were designated as the two elementary school areas, and when I went with one of the white teachers employed at Topaz to inspect Block 8, we discovered that the school barracks were absolutely barren. There were no stoves, no tables or chairs, no light bulbs, no supplies, no equipment of any kind.

The teacher invited me back to her quarters to write up our report, and I was surprised to see how comfortable a barracks could be when it was properly furnished. Until I had seen her comfortable, well-furnished quarters, I had not realized how much I missed our home in Berkeley, and I thought of it with more than the usual longing as I walked back to our room in Block 7.

I was assigned to register children and to teach at the school in Block 41, located at the opposite end of camp, farthest from the Administration Building. All the teachers there were resident Japanese, while the white teachers were all assigned to Block 8, close to the Administration Building and to their own home barracks. When we went to inspect the barracks of Block 41, the situation was even more alarming than had been the case in Block 8. There were large holes in the roof where the stovepipes were to fit, inner sheetrock walls had not been installed, floors were covered with dust and dirt, and there were no supplies or equipment for teaching. I wondered how we could ever open schools under these conditions, but registration of the children proceeded as scheduled Monday morning, October 19. Because it was so cold inside the barracks, we set up tables outside in the sun and registered the children there.

The following day we had to send the children home because the barracks were still unusable and there were no supplies or equipment for teaching. On Wednesday the barracks still remained untouched, although construction of the watchtowers and the barbed wire fence around the camp was proceeding without delay.

It was impossible for the children to sit inside the unheated barracks which retained the nighttime temperatures of thirty and forty degrees.

We tried moving our classes outside, but the feeble morning sun could not dispel the penetrating cold, and after half an hour we sent our

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The Uchida family: Yoshiko, mother, father, and Keiko (sister).

Since the internees were not allowed to have cameras, this photographâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; probably taken when the two sisters left Topazâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;may have been made by one of the non-Japanese residents of the camp. Courtesy of the author.

children home once more. It was finally decided that the daily teachers' meetings would be held in the morning and classes shifted to the afternoon when the barracks, though still incomplete, would at least be warmer.

Before the inner sheetrock walls were installed at school, we had a severe dust storm that brought to a head a crisis that had long been brewing. About noon, gray-brown clouds began massing in the sky, and a hot sultry wind seemed an ominous portent of a coming storm. There was no word, however, that schools would be closed. Shortly after lunch, I started the seven-block walk to Block 41, wrapping my head in a scarf so my nose and mouth were covered as well. Before I was halfway to school the wind grew so intense I felt as though I were caught in a

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hurricane of dust. Barracks only a few feet away were soon completely obscured by walls of dust, and I was fearful that the wind might sweep me off my feet. I stopped every few yards to lean against a barracks and catch my breath and then plodded on to school. When I got there, I found that many of the children had braved the storm to come to school and were already waiting for me in the classroom.

It touched me deeply to see the eagerness of the children to learn despite the desolation of their surroundings and the meager tools for learning. At the time they seemed to adapt with equanimity and cheerfulness to this total and bewildering upheaval of their young lives, although the experience may well have inflicted permanent damage to their psyches.

I tried to conduct class, but dust poured into the room from all sides as well as from the hole in the roof which still lacked a chimney. It soon became obvious that we could not continue classes, and it seemed prudent to send the children home before the storm grew worse and stranded us all at school until evening. T h e teachers of Block 41 hurriedly dismissed school for the day, urged the children to be careful, and hoped they would make it safely to their home barracks.

T h a t night the wind reached such terrible force I was sure our barracks would be blown apart. Pebbles and rocks rained against the walls, and the paper we stuffed into the cracks was quickly blown back into the room. Dust seeped in like smoke. For hours the wind shrieked around us like a howling animal, rattling and shaking our flimsy barracks. I wondered what I would do if I ever had a roomful of children under my care during another such storm but faced the sobering reality that actually there was not a thing I could do. The wind stopped short of destroying our entire camp, but I learned later that many of the camp's chicken coops had been blown out into the desert.

T h e following day, the non-Japanese head of elementary schools reprimanded the teachers of Block 41 for having dismissed school without consulting him. With no telephones in the barracks, however, there was no way we could have reached him in the Administration Building at the opposite end of camp. H e had been unreasonable and inept in other matters as well, and this was simply the last straw. We were willing to put u p with the physical inadequacies and to work hard to overcome them, but arrogance and insensitivity on the part of a white employee was too much to bear. These were days of such frustration and despair that we were often close to tears, and the teachers of Block 41 were

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ready to resign en masse. The high school teachers, with problems of their own, were similarly demoralized. Only our superintendent, Dr. John C. Carlisle, who had the wisdom to accord us some dignity and understanding, prevented the mass resignations of the entire resident teaching staff. Eventually, with the appointment of a new and able elementary school head, things simmered down.

Toward the end of October we began to see snow on the mountains that ringed our desert, and even afternoons began to grow cold. A coal shortage soon developed and hot water was limited to two hours between 7:00 and 9:00 P.M., bringing on a hectic scramble for the showers each evening.

The sheetrock crews finally came to the block where I lived but moved at such a snail's pace that when the first snows fell in Topaz, they still had not reached our barracks. As if to compensate for this delay, we discovered one morning that small ten-by-twenty-inch mirrors had been installed over each basin in the washroom. By this time, however, we had grown so accustomed to living without mirrors that it was almost a shock to look up and see our sun-browned faces looking back at us.

A succession of dust storms, rain squalls, and a full-fledged snowstorm finally brought our limping schools to a complete halt in midNovember. Snow blew in from the holes that still remained in our roof, and we all shivered in ten-degree temperatures even though we wore coats, scarves, and boots. An official notice finally appeared stating that schools would close and not reopen until they were fully winterized with sheetrock walls and stoves. It seemed close to miraculous that we had been able to hold any kind of school for as long as we had, and I knew it was possible only because the children had been so eager to come and the residents so anxious to have some semblance of order in their lives.

Although my class had just begun a Thanksgiving project of cardboard cabins and pilgrims, we were happy to leave it half-completed on the table, hoping that when we returned our classrooms would finally be warm and livable.

As the cold, bleak winter months came upon us, the residents of Topaz grew increasingly frustrated and despondent in their isolated barbed-wire enclosure. Tensions and internal friction increased, and I, like most of the evacuees, felt a desperate need to get out of camp and back into the mainstream of life. I was fortunate to get a scholarship to Smith College to complete my education, and my sister was invited to a Quaker retreat in Pennsylvania. After what seemed an interminable

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wait, our indefinite leave papers arrived, and we were able to leave Topaz in May of 1943.

As we boarded the dusty bus for Delta where we would catch our train to the East, it was as though we had finally come to winter's end, and now, at last, were within reach of spring. The afternoon sun was already hot and a slight breeze filled the air with a fine haze of dust.

We looked out the bus window and waved to our parents and our friends, wondering when we would see them again. I watched from the window as long as I could, waving until my mother and father were two small spots in the cluster by the gate. I knew they were waving long after they could no longer see us. I turned then, and faced the road ahead. We were on our way back, at last, to the world we had left over a year ago.

The budding plum Holds my own joy At the melting ice And the long winter's end. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Yukari 1 1

The poem, written by the authors mother, was translated from the original Japanese.

Growing Up Greek in Helper, Utah

BY H E L E N Z . P A P A N I K O L A S

W L v F A T H E R CAME TO AMERICA D U R -

ing the panic of 1907 when men born in America were riding the rails in search of work. For one full day he worked in a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, factory. Amazed, he saw giant machines driven by electricity.

O n leaving work he ran a gauntlet of rock-throwing Poles and Americans and in the refuge of a Greek coffeehouse learned they were that anomaly of America, strikers, and he that equally strange being, a strikebreaker. H e washed dishes, slept on straw in an unheated stable, rode freights, dug a sewer in Oklahoma alongside a gang of blacks who laughed at this foreigner, unaware that in America no matter how lowly a white man, he did not work with Negroes. In snow-dusted sagebrush outside Leadville, Colorado, he built small fires to keep from freezing and went three clays without food. H e Mrs. Papanikolas is a Fellow of the U t a h State Historical Society and a member of the Board of State History.

The author in a pongee dress made and embroidered by her mother. Courtesy of the author.

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worked on railroad gangs, became a foreman because of his size and wrath, and used the name Nelson for a time to circumvent the prejudice against Mediterranean immigrants.

My mother came to America in 1912 from Constantinople with the Jewish family for whom she had lighted the Sabbath fires. Without a dowry she had no chance of marrying in her country. On board ship she met a Greek journalist who sent her into the unknown, to a Greek family in Salt Lake City. Fearful, she rejected a number of young Greek immigrants until an upheaval in her host's family forced her to choose the man who would become my father. They were married in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1915 and planted wheat under the homestead laws. In 1917 they moved to a Carbon County mining camp called Cameron, adjacent to Castle Gate, to open a coffeehouse for hundreds of unmarried Greek miners. My mother was tight-lipped about this venture: free from the restraints of parents, the young men kept the mining camp awake with the singing and dancing of their ancient culture. I was born in Cameron, and three months later my parents moved to Helper where rock-crowned Steamboat Mountain jutted up from slopes of juniper and boulders.

We lived in one of the white frame Bonacci houses that lined the east side of the dirt road leading to town. The houses were of six rooms, divided in half for two families. We were a polyglot neighborhood.

Many families, mostly from the south of Italy, lived in "Wop Town" on a plateau on the other side of the river, several of them raising a large number of children in caves gouged out of the hillside by the first inhabitants, pioneer Mormons. Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes established themselves nearby in "Bohunk Town"; mainland Greeks in "Greek Town" near the grade school, and Cretan Greeks north of town. Eleven families lived in the row of houses: Italians, Greeks, Irish railroaders, Americans, all together.

My sisters and I were safe in this small world. All day freight and passenger whistles blew. Each steam engine had its special sound and call: two long and one short, one long and two short, three long, three short. Each engine had a life of its own.

In the backyard on hard-packed dirt girls jumped the rope, boys shot marbles. Mothers called to each other as they splashed buckets of disinfectants down privies and hung wash on lines stretched between wooden poles. My father's long underwear had a rust spot in the middle from the gun he kept pushed inside his belt. We seldom saw him. He

The Bonacci houses. The author lived in one side of the middle house.

Photograph by Terry Epperson.

had contracted to bring a water line through the steep canyon north of town into the county. On his nameday, Saint George's feast day, my godfather and other friends would sit in the living room under floating layers of blue tobacco smoke and sing of their white-kilted ancestors waiting for night to pounce on their Turkish masters.

In the backyard court several languages screeched in the air together with an original American dialect of the mothers' own invention.

"Go-a-Grina-wholgha. Get-a rossa warra an-a glickerina." I understood the dialect, but the druggist, hapless Mr. Greenhalgh, would cock his head sideways as if half-deaf, trying to catch a syllable to give him a clue toâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;rose water and glycerine.

Throughout the day neighborhood women came to the kitchen, often to have my mother interpret their dreams. Crowded by coal stove, sink with wooden drainboard, green cupboard, and oilcloth-covered table, my mother served coffee and read from her dream book. One cold day, the windows dripping moisture, diminutive Mrs. Bonacci brought an Italian woman to the kitchen. The visitor clutched her hands, protested, explained in Italian. My mother read aloud in the Greek dream

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book and then translated into Italian. (In the cosmopolitan neighborhood of the Holy City of Constantinople, she had learned Turkish, French, Italian, Spanish, and a little Yiddish.) The woman had dreamed that a large black bird had circled her daughter's head, alighted on it, and, its talons clutched in her hair, lifted the girl up and away. The book said the dream "foretold some sorrowful happening that would bring inevitable grief to the entire family."

The visitor screamed. She had promoted her daughter's engagement to a young man who was the girl's second cousin; it was too close a relationship, but there were no other young Italians ready for the responsibilities of marriage. The only alternative was to arrange a marriage for the girl with an older immigrant Italian. The mother had come from Italy as a picture bride for a man many years her senior and did not want her daughter to have the same fate.

On the other side of our three rooms lived an Italian family. The mother was plump and pretty, but my mother and Mrs. Bonacci shook their heads over her. The children in the backyard court whispered that when her bow-legged husband was on the graveyard shift at the mine, an Irish railroader came to visit.

In the house north of us were an American woman and her gloomy Greek husband, a barber with black-dyed hair. She often sat in the kitchen and whined about her husband's meanness. My mother sat, too, in strained politeness, glancing at her interrupted ironing and cooking.

The woman was a kleptomaniac. "She kept stealing," one of my mother's Greek Town visitors said. "Even after he beat her, she kept right on.

So, what could he do but throw her out of the house. That's what Greek men get for marrying American women!"

K&tMQXoe. —'FJv 6Aejrng xd{tf]?iOV tig TOV UTVOV crou, el- 81xag xal £15 xQiaoAoytag HeXeig jteoiTOon, e n 81 x a l em6ouATiv tfOQCOV crquaivsi f| xti|iT]Xo?. "Av 6AEsi\]g xaga6dviov OAOXATJQOV xa|iri?..a>v, jrooewfievov eig T?)V eoTflAov, rd.tyfrn\ niM.ovta v a JiQo&fhwv ex TOO Ta|eiotou f[ ex neXercojievJig akh\q xivbi; ejtiX£i£>rjaeco?" ' E a v xdd^aai ent xa{«]Xoui [latatav JtoAvteAeiav x a l xevdg s3tt8ei|eig em£f)Teig, 8id xa oraua QiAeig emcruori TT|V x ^ r y v x a l TOV IAVXTTJQI<Tfidv TOU xda|xov. ' E v v^vei r| KdjjnjXog oiifiaivei baSovhat; dbwaxov exOQOU, cbqpEXowrog jiaAAov r\ 6Ad3rrovTog* jrooaeu 8e x a l XEQ8TI 81A jrAeove^tav xal jroAAdxig 8n,Aol 6Ad6ny elgl TO y6w r\ TOV st<58a, t^v fl£Astg rwto<rcfj evexev cbtooaeljiag.

To dream of a camel signified many things: a loaded camel, a pleasant, fruitful life; unloaded, disaster; a caravan, great riches. From the Greek dream book owned by the author's mother.

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Beyond the kleptomaniac was a Greek family with something shameful about them, the portly father smoking cigars, home at all hours. It was a family without filotimo, without honor. When they first came to America, the man took his wife from one mining camp coffeehouse to another to dance with her tambourine. Good women, as everyone knew, never even looked into coffeehouses. When the children began coming and she could no longer dance, he became a labor agent and lived off cheating newly arrived immigrants.

The most frequent visitor to the kitchen was Mrs. Sarah "Killarney" Reynolds, the wife of an Irish railroader. It was from her my mother learned the American cooking we thought far superior to Greek honey and nut sweets: lemon meringue pies, Parker House rolls, fruitcakes, raisin oatmeal cookies. My mother used a bleached broomstick to roll out pastry. Back and forth her floured hands went, the little fingers turned inward giving a graceful look.

It was Mrs. Reynolds who told our mother to send us to the YMCA Sunday School, although she attended the small frame Catholic church near "Nigger Town," east of the railyards. It was unthinkable for Greek Orthodox to attend a Catholic church, and as for Mormons, polygamous until a few years past as were, still, the hated Turks who had conquered and ruled Greece for four hundred yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;hmm!

And it was Killarney Reynolds, seldom smiling even when she played Irish tunes on her accordion, who told my mother about visiting days at the Helper grade school, about American customs, about cures for childhood illnesses. Obediently, my mother pushed her index finger dabbed with Vicks down our throats. Killarney gave my sister Jo her American name. Jo had been named by her godfather after the Virgin, the All-Holy (Panaghia). Mrs. Reynolds advised an American name. Trying to explain who the All-Holy was, my mother said, "She was the wife of Joseph."

Mrs. Reynolds slapped one palm over the other. "Then call her Josephine," she said. And so, the odd, un-Greek name was given her instead of Mary, the Virgin.

Mrs. Reynolds also kept the baby Sophie all day when my mother, her heart weakened from the effects of the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, almost died in childbirth. Four children had been born in five years; the third girl cried out in her sleep and lost consciousness. Town and mine company doctors said she would outgrow it, but they did not know what "it" was. The Greek priest from Price was summoned and with incense and prayers cleansed the house of sin, known and unknown.

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Father Yianni was not allowed by the church board to wear his black robes and tall rimless black hat on the streets as earlier priests had done.

He came in an American suit and clerical collar. Father Yianni "did not have his papers." He was neither a monk nor a defrocked priest but an illiterate chanter who had been made a priest on the spot during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 when under his spurious black robes he had carried messages through Turkish and Bulgarian lines. WTith few priests in Greek-immigrant America, the Greeks took what they could get, and as one of the first immigrants, Gust Pappas, often said, "Price, Utah, was the Siberia for Greek priests in America." "Anyway," the Greek women said of Father Yianni, "for dispelling the Evil Eye, no one can beat him."

We were safe in the Bonacci court. Beyond, all kinds of danger Killarney Reynolds, the Zeeses' lay waiting: German shepherd dogs friendly Irish neighbor who named with bared fangs, owned by railroad one of their daughters and told about American customs. families to keep tramps away; big, them Courtesy of the author. white-haired, white-eyelashed American-Mormon boys; dark, angry-faced boys from Wop Town; and other vague dangers that roused fears in my stomach.

There were times when the backyard court was quiet. Mothers were inside, children nowhere to be seen, the railyards somnolent with only faint buzzing coming from the roundhouse. The American flag atop Balance Rock on the leftward crest of Steamboat Mountain hung limp; the junipers on the arid slopes gave off a hot pungent scent. A horsedrawn wagon sprayed water on the dusty road, and minutes later the sun dried it out.

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The author's parents, George and Emily Zeese.

Suddenly the ruthless heat was pierced with shouts. The Bonacci boys on the boundaries of their yard and white-haired boys across the dusty road were screaming at each other: "Dirty Wops, go back where you came from!" "Yellow Mormon cowards, take one step closer, we dare you!" "Eat-a da spaghet! Ha! Ha!" "Aw, go eat your Mormon mashed potatoes!" "Dirty Catholics, wear your religion 'round your necks!" "Sappy Mormons, wear your peekaboo garments!" Mrs. Bonacci ran out waving her broom, and sons and white-haired boys scattered at her torrent of South-Italian dialect. I learned early to keep the cross my godfather had given me at baptism hidden inside my collar.

Twice in the hot, dusty summer that I turned five years of age, I stood with my silent mother and looked out the living room window.

The first time a black hearse went by slowly, and a line of open touring cars followed. On the radiator cap of each car two blue and white flags were tied, pointing in opposite directions. Inside the cars sat blackdressed men and women holding smaller blue and white flags. I knew instinctively they were of usâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Greeksâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and that the flags were Greek.

The second time we watched soldiers, dressed like my godfather in his World War I picture, marching down the road, the khaki stripping wrapped around their legs thick with dust. Unshaven miners looked on

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and boys with mock serious looks on their faces walked stiffly at the side of the moving column, sticks on their shoulders.

Two months later I trotted at my sister Jo's side to my first day of school. Our mother sent us early "to get a good start." All summer long in the Bonacci court I had heard about two black girls pouring kerosene near the school staircase and throwing a match on it; of an Italian mother dragging a teacher by the hair to the school yard and beating her for sending her daughter to the principal who had left welts on her back with a rubber hose; of that dangerous place called the lavatory where the most terrible of all four-letter words was scratched on the gray-painted windows and metal stalls; and of the monstrous thing called recess where Americans and Mormons stood on one side of no man's land and immigrant children on the other, shouting and daring each other to cross over.

Inside the squat brick schoolhouse, I followed Jo down the hall thundering with the footsteps and voices of children. Jo pointed out my room. Two teachers with marcelled hair banged on the desk and ordered us to take turns standing and giving our names. The teachers then looked at each other and said either "High" or "Low." My sister, as the daughter of a businessman, had been put in the High the year before. Quaking, I said my name and one of the teachers said, "Low." When the teachers finished their pronouncements, we of the Low, mostly miners' children, American girls in faded ginghams too short or too long, immigrant girls in homemade dresses, and boys in old bib overalls were told to follow one of the teachers into another room. There I broke into sobs at my disgrace. The teacher put me in a closet and shut the door.

The year was 1922. The Greeks were in a turmoil I knew nothing about. Less than a mile from the schoolhouse, strikers were living in a tent town set up by the United Mine Workers. The miners had joined the national coal strike after the Italian labor organizer, Frank Bonacci, and another worker demanded of the Kenilworth mine manager why wages were cut while coal prices remained steady.

The Greeks, who had been brought to Carbon County nineteen years before as strikebreakers, became the leaders of the strike. They ambushed a train believed to be carrying strikebreakers and in the crossfire killed a deputy sheriff. One of their own had his arm almost shot off. His friends carried him to a doctor, who sewed his wounds while a circle of guns pointed at him, and then spirited him away to a hideout on the Ute Indian Reservation. The National Guard and townspeople rampaged through Greek coffeehouses, boardinghouses, and stores. A Greek

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striker, the man in the hearse, was killed on the outskirts of Helper by a deputy sheriff. Eight hundred Greeks followed his hearse from the Greek church to the graveyard, holding their Greek flags in defiance. Perhaps the feelings against the Greeks sent me to the Low. It took me five years to work into the High.

Because of the strike the Greek school we attended after American school was suspended for a few months. For one thing, the schoolteacher, the "Cretan Hothead," had fled town to save himself not only from Americans but from fellow Greeks as well. During the funeral march down Price Main Street he had bolted to the head of the procession where two strikers holding Greek and American flags preceded the hearse.

Screaming, "They slaughtered our lad!" he struck a match to set fire to the American flag and "fought like a tiger before he was pinned to the ground."

A series of old-country Greek teachers followed, and some took one look at the town and taught long enough to get the fare to leave on the next Denver & Rio Grande Western train.

I kept my Greek school book and tablet far back in my desk at American school. At the ring of the last bell I clutched them with the front covers against me to keep them from being seen. It did not help.

All the children knew we went to Greek school, and they followed and taunted us.

The school was held in various places. The black wooden railroad chapel adjacent to the railyards was closed to us because older boys had locked in our mincing, sneering teacher and run around the church throwing pieces of coal and rocks and breaking the windows. Usually the school was held in a store in Greek Town that had once been a butcher shop. A meat hook remained jutting from the wall, and one creative teacher hung recalcitrant boys on it by their bib overalls. We wilted in warm weather and froze in winter when only the teacher, next to the potbellied stove, was coatless. Boys on one side of the room, girls on the other, we struggled to learn a purist Greek we never heard spoken.

I entered Greek school with my book and tablet, dutifully and angrily.

Yet, when the anniversary of the Greek revolt against the Turks in 1821 approached and we students from the towns and mining camps gathered in the Price church basement to recite traditional poems of the guerrillas (klefts), I tried to put the same full-blown feeling into my delivery that I had witnessed in my classmate Flora Ossana's emoting "The Village Blacksmith."

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USHS collections.

Greek school was the symbol of the struggle of our parents to keep their ancient culture and our ambivalent reaction. Like the Bonacci court, it was of me, of my people; but when I said goodbye to my best friend, Helen Barboglio, and she went off to play, to read, to be free, I envied her Americanism, although her parents were immigrants, her mother English, her father Italian. Of all aspects of our culture, attending Greek school made us feel most different from others.

We were safe there, safe in Greek Town, and in the YMCA. A festive air traveled with us on Greek Town excursions when women held bounteous open houses for their husbands and sons on their name days.

We walked down Main Street past the Japanese Fish Market, the Japanese Noodle House, Japanese novelty store, Greek coffeehouses, Joe Barboglio's Helper State Bank, the Italian Quilico Furniture Store, and Ricci's Meat Market, the Chinese-American Cafe with two signs in the

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A dome oven of the type remembered by the author. Few of them remain today. This one in Carbonville was originally owned by Foto and Paul Liapis.

Photograph by Philip F. Notarianni.

window: Whites Only and White Help Only, the Greek stores: the Golden Rule, Sanitary Market, Toggery, Grill Cafe with a tank of green water in which trout swam, the Cretan restaurant and coffeehouse, and on beyond the school into Greek Town.

Clusters of houses were set here and there in the dessicated earth, each with a small garden and cascades of silver lace vines on the wooden porches. In the backyards, shiny and smooth from the lye and soap of wash waters, were wash houses, coal and wood sheds, rabbit hutches, chicken coops, pigeons, and domed earth ovens supported on wooden stilts.

The warm, yeasty scent of baking bread hovered over Greek Town, and mothers were quick to cut us large pieces and slather them with butter. The admonition we heard from our mother daily came with the offering: "Bread is holy! If you drop it, make the sign of the cross and kiss it before eating. If it can't be eaten, bring it to me to burn. Never throw bread in the garbage! Bread is holy!"

The mothers used high-pitched voices when visiting and their talk was punctuated with the proverbs we heard throughout each day: "What can you expect? 'An apple from the apple tree falls.' " "Worthless people!

'Stars fell and pigs ate them.' "

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There was much making of the sign of the cross over good news, bad news, easy births, and hard ones; when someone survived or someone died; on passing the church, leaving and entering the house, or beginning a task that required skill. The Greek Town fathers always made the sign of the cross three times before slaughtering a lamb to help them do it quickly to spare the animal undue suffering.

The other oasis in town was the YMCA Sunday School. The yellow brick building was the most imposing in Helper. The two-story front faced the railyards; the three-story back had a door that led directly to the basement hall used for Sunday School. On the first floor was a long room with windows on three sides and a bookcase on the fourth wall. From the shelves my sister Jo and I took home Gene Stratton Porter books and Fu Manchu mysteries.

After we began attending Sunday School at the Y, other Greek families also sent their children. We, Helen Barboglio, a Japanese girl, and non-Mormon "Americans"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Malekars, Holmeses, Metzesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; posed for a photographer one day with director Julius Shepherd and several women teachers. Mr. Shepherd may have been a minister, but he dressed in business suits. He was fragile and white haired. When he talked about the American Jesus, that blond, wavy-haired, blue-eyed man who knelt with hands clasped against a rock in the garden, his voice quavered. When we sang in the Y basement, a poignancy held me, sentimental as the words were about the kind, all-loving Jesus who forgave and understood and would lead us to heaven. But it was not the words of "I Come to the Garden Alone," "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord," or "The Little Brown Church in the Vale," it was the sad sweetness of the music that brought me close to tears for something I could not comprehend.

Mr. Shepherd and the American Jesus, the songs at the Y, harmonica and Victrola music were all lumped together for me: they were what America was. The dark, grieving Christ and long-faced saints on ikons, robed priests, incense and candles, Greek school, screeching mothers, men singing of their ancestors waiting to ambush the Turks: they were what Greekness was.

When my father became the coowner of a grocery store on his climb toward American success, we moved across the tracks to a four-room Bonacci house; the rooms were larger and the privy farther away from the house. The tracks were so close we could clearly see extraordinary men and women sitting at white-covered tables, roses in vases, waited

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on by white-coated blacks. We watched entranced as the trains moved slowly by, gathering steam until they rounded Steamboat Mountain.

The freights rumbled along with their cargo of glistening coal. Sheep, cattle, and pigs went by, leaving a stench; grapes, peaches, and pears scented the air briefly with a delicate sweetness. I learned the colors and insignia of all the freight lines: Burlington, Baltimore & Ohio, Great Northern, Union Pacific, Western Pacific, Chicago & Northwestern, Norfolk & Western, Santa Fe, Northern Pacific, Chicago, Milwaukee & Saint Paul, Erie Pennsylvania, and my favorite, the Denver & Rio Grande Western. It was ours.

In this second Bonacci house I came to know that Easter was the most important day of the year, that every day led inexorably to it and then Christ's journey to the cross began all over again. Fasting began in earnest two weeks before Easter for us; other families fasted the traditional forty days. Neither fish, fowl, nor meat could be eaten because of the blood in them, in memory of Christ's shedding his blood. Nothing that came from blooded animals was allowed: milk, eggs, cheese, yogurt.

Many Greek families lived on beans, lentils, and greens; some mothers would not even use olive oil because it was holy. Our food was bread, pickled peppers, squid with rice, spinach with rice, beans with rice, lentil and bean soups, and for something sweet, halvah, crushed sesame seeds mixed with honey to form a nougatlike confection. To still hunger between meals we munched on dried, salted chick peas. Bloodless shrimp, crab, and lobster were sold in the Japanese Fish Market at times, but we had little of it. Lent was not the time for delicacies, according to my mother. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches. My father and other Greek men did not fast as their families did. There was a vague dictate that men worked hard and needed meat, eggs, and cheese for strength.

Holy Week came and there was no playing at all, no listening to the new arched table radio or to the hand-cranked Victrola. The green blinds were pulled down. Mourning sighed in the house. Outside Mormon children played and called to one another, and never was the chasm so wide and so deep between them and us than at Easter. Mothers shook their heads over the Mormons. "What does Christ hanging on the cross mean to them? They even marry on Great Friday!"

All week liturgies were conducted in the dimmed church, reliving the events of Christ's life. On Great Thursday women sobbed and knelt on the wooden floor, spotted with years of candle drippings, as the black wooden cross was carried around the church. On Great Friday his

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flowered tomb studded with spring blooms was carried on the shoulders of four men while the congregation followed, singing the ancient dirges.

"O my sweet Springtime," the Virgin's lament began, "my most loved Child, wither has Thy beauty gone?"

On Great Saturday morning, the air quivering, expectant, we talked low, but as the day wore on excitement grew in the house. The waiting was hard. In the kitchen the activity for breaking the fast at midnight went on. Our mother was making the traditional food eaten after the midnight Resurrection liturgy. I would not enter to see the lamb's head with its blue-veiled eye soaking in cold water and my mother's washing the intestines inside and out before cutting them into small pieces to add to the chopped liver with dill, celery, and parsley to simmer. Others would eat the myeritsa; I would eat my mother's pastries, hardboiled eggs dyed red for Christ's blood, sweet sesame-sprinkled Easter bread.

The momentous happening came ever closer as we sat in church while the reading of the Psalms and the chanting of the Odes went on.

At midnight, all lights off, babies shrieked and were silenced. My heart pounded. A small candlelight came forward from the altar, the priest's face above it, cavernous. He called out, "Come ye, and receive the light from the unwaning Light and glorify Christ, who rose from the dead!" Dark forms went forward and held out their candles for light; other forms clustered about each new light. In a few moments the church was ablaze with hundreds of swaying flames. Louder and louder the people sang the song of Resurrection: "Christ has risen from the Dead. By death trampling Death, has bestowed life upon those in the tombs." Then we were home, the dining room crowded with unmarried men who lived in hotels. The joy in the house shimmered and would not die.

But other memories in the second Bonacci house were dark. On a cool blue March morning I was standing on the narrow sidewalk in front of the house when the earth moved under my feet once and then again. Mine, town, freight engine whistles shrieked. Women hurried out of their houses, boys ran toward town, women from the railroad houses east of the railyards half ran toward the depot. Our obese neighbor went in to call the telephone operator and came out puffing. "The Number Two Mine at Castle Gate has exploded," she said. Everyone moved toward the rail tracks and looked north where the tracks circled around Steamboat Mountain. In the crackle of burning cedars was a distant sound as of animals lowing. It was the wailing of the miners' wives and children slumped in the debris of the Number Two Mine.

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Killarney Reynolds and Dr. McDermid's wife called the town women to bring cooking utensils, food, and blankets. On the devastated ground they made open fires, cooked, and heated canned milk for babies while wives and children waited for the brown-helmeted disaster team to bring up the bodies.

Fifty of the dead men were Greeks, and their black-dressed widows, somber children looking on, sat at the side of coffins and keened the mirologhia, ancient laments for the dead that pierced the air with demands of the saints, the All-Holy, and Christ for taking their men at the peak of their manhood and leaving their families at the mercy of a strange land. They wailed over Charos ("Death"), who had no pity, coming on his black horse to take husbands and fathers, uncaring for those left behind. The dead who were recognizable had the final traditional picture taken in their coffins. These photographs were sent to parents or wives in Greece to prove that they had been given an Orthodox Christian burial.

Girls returned to American and Greek schools with their long braids tied with black ribbons and wearing black dresses that smelled of acrid dye. Boys wore black shirts with the same pungent odor and sweaters and jackets with black armbands sewed on the sleeves. When fights broke out at recess, children chanted, "Orphan! Orphan!"

My father, Stylian Staes—a sheep broker and the Greek vice-consul —and other Greek businessmen brought sacks of flour and left them on the front porches of the widows' houses. Black crepe hung from the doors.

Because they were in the forty days of deep mourning, widows remained inside and their children came out and pulled in the sacks. As the school year wore on, the children's black clothes faded to a bleached gray and the smell disappeared.

A year later at night, my mother, sisters, and I stood at the kitchen window and gazed at a cross burning in the railyards. One burned in the front yard of Killarney Reynolds. The next night we saw a cross of fire on a mountainside. On the other side of the narrow valley the Catholics burned a circle for the Irish word nought—a message to the Klan that they were nothing, their organization would come to nothing.

The Klan rampaged through stores, forced clerks and waitresses— "white girls" they were called—home and warned them not to work for Greeks. My face burned whenever the Mormon children said it: "White girls working for Greeks" and "Greeks marrying white girls." An Italian farmer surprised Ku Kluxers painting huge K K K signs on his barn,

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chased them with a rake, and fell dead of a heart attack. Just south of town on a cement railroad abutment a KKK sign dripped hasty white streams and was never removed.

The Klan threatened to kidnap Helen Barboglio whose father was the town banker. Unknown to Helen, bodyguards followed her to and from school. Two second cousins of my father came from McGill, Nevada.

We glimpsed them walking behind us on Helper Main Street, but thought they had come on one of their periodic visits. Our father was later than usual coming home. He and Joe Barboglio were warned to take the Greeks and Italians and leave town.

Everyone knew who the Ku Kluxers were. The railroad man living next door to us was one of them. "Don't worry, Mrs. Zeese," he told my mother. "It's not you foreigners we're after. It's the niggers." What horrible things had that small number of blacks who lived east of the railyards done? The blacks were taunted on the schoolyard, and an old-timer told my father, "You ought to keep the niggers out of your store if you want whites to buy from you."

It was in the backyard of the house that I heard children gleefully talking about "the nigger gittin hanged." He had shot a mine guard in Castle Gate and run to the house of another black. On the pretense of getting the hungry man milk and bread, the frightened friend walked to the boardinghouses and buildings on the camp's dirt road and told a barber and storekeeper where his fellow black was hiding. A posse caught him and wedged him onto the back seat of a car where he sputtered that he killed the guard because he had mistreated him. The car, with others following, sped out of Castle Gate, through Helper, Spring Glen, and Price, and stopped at a large cottonwood tree south of town. Men, women, and children in wagons and cars converged about the tree.

Men tied a new rope, just purchased at the Price Trading Store, around the black's neck and hanged him slowly. Twenty minutes after he died, the sheriffs arrived.

Not long after, while my mother visited in a Greek house and the women's voices shrieked in my ears, I turned the pages to a Greek house staple, the photograph album. There were the usual pictures of weddings, baptisms, naked boy babies propped against pillows to reveal their incipient maleness, girl babies in embroidered white dresses, picnics with men squatting to turn lambs on spits, dancing in rounds, and on the last page a black man dangling from a tree and under him men, women, children, their arms crossed, smiling for the photographer.

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A little over a year later we moved to a large brick home my father built in the section of town where doctors, attorneys, and businessmen lived. We were climbing farther up the fabled ladder America provided immigrants. There were no privies, no coal stoves in the neighborhood, certainly no wash houses, chicken coops, or earth ovens. Saturday nights resounded with parties that would last until morning. Boys, some we knew, delivered bootleg whiskey wrapped in newspapers.

Five years later in 1933, in the deepest misery of the depression, two unionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one Communist, the other the United Mine Workersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; vied for the out-of-work miners' membership. Freight trains went by carrying, at first, young men looking for work; then older men crowded among them, each holding a small bundle of possessions; then boys appeared; then families, mothers holding babies, children dangling their feet out of the open freight cars; then old men and women. They were all going to California to look for work. The mines were closed or working half-shift. Mine company houses were boarded up as miners left, heading too for California. We moved to Salt Lake City where my father opened one grocery store after another until he had eleven. For us the depression was a continuation of our mother's old-country frugality. Our parents were modestly well off by American standards, immensely so by those of the impoverished country they had left. But sleep came uneasily for a while. The long calls of steam engines were absent.

There was a void in the night.

Sometime during the decades that followed I learned that the trains did not have a life of their own. Those distinctive, haunting calls that had lulled me to sleep were the signals of engineers. Each had his special whistle that alerted his wife to get his food on the table. Sometimes on clear silent nights, the distant blare of a diesel engine comes across the Salt Lake Valley. I regret it is not the call of the old steam whistles, but it is better than nothing.

Today almost all of the Greek Town people are gone. The Greek language is heard less often. Proverbs are seldom used to instruct, to moralize. Bread is thrown into the garbage. The grandchildren of Ku Kluxers and immigrants have married each other. But the faces of those Greek Town mothers and fathers remain deep in my memory, not as they were in their feeble years but as they were in their short-lived era as young matriarchs and patriarchs. A literary critic has complained that the characters in the novels of the great Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis are bigger than life size. That critic would have known better if he had lived in Greek Town.

"Of Benefit and Interest to the Children of Salt Lake City" the Tracy Aviary

BY MIRIAM B. M U R P H Y

iL

Girls admire seals at the Tracy Aviary. Seals were amotig the few animals other than birds exhibited there. Tracy Aviary scrapbook, USHS collections.

11 A.M., SATURDAY, JULY 2, 1938, the Tracy Aviary in Liberty Park opened its grounds to the public. Sea Scouts acted as guides to the new four-acre facility with its several hundred birds and a few other animals, notably a quartet of shy seals. By the end of the year an estimated 60,000

A T

Ms. Murphy is associate editor of Utah Historical Quarterly.

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people had toured the avian displays provided by banker Russel Lord Tracy for the children of Salt Lake City.1 During the next four decades this wildlife oasis in the heart of the city would welcome millions.

Many years before he conceived the idea of a public aviary, Tracy collected and displayed birds in cages in the yard of his home at 1285 Second Avenue. As more visitors came each year to look at them, he realized that his collection could best be viewed in a public park. Tracy discussed his idea with the Salt Lake City Commission, requesting that they set aside land in Liberty Park, construct the necessary housing for the birds, hire a caretaker, and appoint a board to supervise the facility.

For his part, Tracy agreed to turn over to the city aviary equipment and some 200 birds. In addition, he would contribute $5,000 to purchase more birds. Another $5,000 would be forthcoming at the end of the first year if the aviary's operation proved satisfactory.2 The new Tracy Aviary Commission held its first meeting on April 18, 1938, at the Alta Club. The commissioners were James W. Collins, Tracy's business associate and almost like a son to him; Frank S. Emery, manager of an insurance agency; and Calvin Behle, an attorney for Utah Power & Light Company. Tracy and city parks commissioner P. H. Goggin were ex officio members. Collins was named chairman and Behle secretary of the group. Emery and Tracy were to inventory the latter's collection, and Tracy was authorized to buy additional specimens. The commission discussed buying "seals and attractive monkeys as an added attraction to the children . . . ," but "the Aviary was in no sense to compete with . . . the Zoo." Meanwhile, architect Slack W. Winburn was to plan the bird and flight pens, and the city was to fence and landscape the site.3 The search for an aviary superintendent uncovered no qualified local candidates, so the TAC looked further afield. Finally, an employee of the Los Angeles Zoo, Calvin D. Wilson, was hired at a monthly salary of $120. Wilson's employment was fortuitous. He became a tremendous asset to the aviary and managed its day-to-day operation for thirtyseven years.4 'Deseret News, July 2, 1938; T r a c y Aviary Commission Annual Report, 1938, T A C Collection, B-l62, U t a h State Historical Society, Salt Lake City (hereinafter cited as T A C Report, followed by the y e a r ) . T h e reports are in looseleaf binders, arranged by year, and some contain minutes, correspondence, photographs, and other material.

"Salt Lake Tribune, May 18, 1945; T A C Report, 1938. ' T A C Report, 1938.

4 Ibid. Subsequent T A C Reports give overwhelming evidence of Wilson's value as an employee. For example, in addition to caring for the birds and other animals and maintaining the physical plant, he also kept a fatherly eye on the thousands of children who visited the site and patrolled the area almost every night to deter theft a n d vandalism.

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Once the aviary had opened the prime concern became winter housing for more than 500 birds. Collins investigated the possibility of using the old Chase mill adjacent to the aviary grounds for that purpose.

Evidently nothing came of the idea, for Tracy advanced the money to build a winter aviary. T h e bird inventory by then included several varieties of cardinals, cockatoos, cranes, doves, finches, lovebirds, parrots, macaws, peafowl, tanagers, toucans, and whydahs, among other species.

Despite the steps taken to protect this valuable collection, some birds and animals died during the first year of what were probably unforeseeable circumstances. A greater hill mynah was killed by toucans, a Japanese robin by troupials, and four blue tanagers and an aracari by rats. Five pheasants drowned, and a military macaw was A W O L somewhere in the city. 5 During the next seven years, 1939 through 1945, the aviary facility was enhanced and the bird and small animal collections augmented. T h e grounds were expanded to the south to make room for larger birds and deer. Improvements, besides the winter building, included a new monkey cage, two bird shelters, an island in the lake for waterfowl, walks around the seal pond, a rock shelter for barbary sheep, and the planting of many trees. T h e T A C was eager to emulate the best contemporary zoological practices. T o that end, superintendent of city parks Joseph L. Sloan reported on a trip to the East in the fall of 1944. He was impressed with the exhibits he saw: "Natural surroundings are used extensively. We have carried this out in connection with the building of the new BARBARY ROCK as a shelter and display for two Barbary Sheep donated to the Aviary

by Dr. Leslie B. White.""

Calvin Wilson, who was praised by the T A C for his intelligence and ability to care properly for the birds and animals, remained the only aviary employee until 1942, although the city furnished groundskeeping services and Tracy often provided several men to work on specific projects. National Youth Movement laborers were also used. Wilson, in addition to his regular duties, began at this time to enlarge the collection of birds by trapping at the Bear River refuge. Sloan reported that as a result of Wilson's efforts the aviary had "one of the finest displays of 5 T A C Report, 1938. T h e aviary was open from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M., hours that brought a few complaints from the public, although a 4 P.M. closing was typical for most aviaries. Several hundred visitors was the minimum daily attendance the first year. Tracy advanced $3,000 to build winter housing because city funds were inadequate (that sum was returned to him in January 1933) and $12,075 for bird purchases (of which $3,000 was to be reimbursed). Without Tracy's gifts and ready cash advances it is doubtful the aviary would have survived. " T A C Reports, 1939-45.

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A/am bird building, aviary no. 2, and the aquarium building shortly after the Tracy Aviary opened at Liberty Park. Tracy Aviary scrapbook, USHS collections.

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North American wild life in the country. Also, we have enough surplus to use for trading purposes with other Zoos and Aviaries."7 From the beginning Tracy encouraged the TAC to acquire "any rare birds" or small animals it could find. The annual report for 1944 stated what was at least an informal policy: Any exhibition of living animals and birds is constantly changing and it should be the policy of the Tracy Aviary Commission and the Parks D e p a r t m e n t to acquire unusual species seldom seen elsewhere, and certain key species, because of the representative and illustrative scientific value.

To that end, limited as the aviary budget was, the TAC searched worldwide for possible acquisitions. Tracy, who continued his financial support of the aviary, secured kangaroos and wallabies from Australia and Japanese sika deer. Many birds and small animals were purchased from southern California dealers, including the Zoological Society of San Diego. Texas furnished a vulture and Connecticut some shell ducks.

Among the more expensive bird purchases were a gnu ($300), a male breeding ostrich ($200), a pair of very rare crowned pigeons ($200), a cassowary ($100), a king vulture ($65), and a pair of peach-face lovebirds ($50). 8 Tracy was very much involved in drafting and carrying out plans for the aviary from its inception until his death in 1945. He was a philanthropist of a higher order than most in that he committed his time and energy, as well as his money, to the projects he initiated. No detail escaped his attention. He envisioned the aviary as a place where children, especially, would learn and enjoy learning about birds, including rare and exotic species. But that was not enough. He wanted to see the whole child develop as a useful citizen. For years he had encouraged the young boys who sold newspapers on the streets of the city to bring their report cards to his office. There the wealthy financier would counsel the boys to work a little harder at school and reward them with money and other prizes for doing so.9 _ ; T A C Reports, 1939, 1942, 1938, 1944. A Mr. Fine was hired in 1942 as an assistant to Wilson.

8 T A C Reports, 1944, 1943.

9 Russel L. Tracy, Some Experiences of Russel Lord Tracy, 1860-1941 (Salt Lake City: Author, 1941), pp. 131-55. Tracy 'began working with the young boys who sold newspapers on the city streets in 1902 and continued funding prizes and an annual Thanksgiving dinner for them until 1941 when, as he sadly noted in a letter to Charlie McGillis of the Tribune and Telegram, an era had ended; young boys of seven to ten years of age no longer sold newspapers because new ordinances restricted such jobs to boys sixteen or older. Ibid., pp. 149-50. Tracy counted Gov. Herbert B. M a w as the outstanding example of a former newsboy he had helped on the path of achievement. Ibid., pp. 145-46.

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Just as Tracy thought the newsboys should broaden their horizons through education, so he thought the aviary should do more than teach an appreciation of wildlife: In order to develop honesty, self-reliance and moral uplift among the children we placed a large rack containing two or three hundred bags of popcorn, peanuts, etc., food for the water fowl and monkeys, which we sell at one cent a bag (actually less than cost). There is a bank attached to the rack with a sign reading, "Put a penny in the bank and take a bag."

The first few months many bags were taken and few pennies deposited, but the plan was explained to older children who became guardians or teachers and instructed the younger children with the result that most of the children are now teachers and correct any who would take a bag and not deposit a penny. The past year there has been practically as many pennies deposited as bags taken. 10

The children of Utah never have had a more generous or understanding benefactor.

Tracy's concern for children was nurtured by his own childhood experiences and by the loss of both his sons, Edward and Russel, Jr. Born in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1860 to Congregationalist parents, Tracy carried with him memories of daily family prayer that included always a petition for the poor and of sharing food with the less fortunate at Thanksgiving, a custom he later emulated. After attending Oberlin College for two years, he became ill and was ordered by his doctor to go to Minnesota. Thus began a transient life that included periods of relative inactivity and of employment that gradually led him further west. Then, in 1884 he conceived the idea of a mortgage and business loan company which he established in Cheyenne and moved to Salt Lake City in 1892."

Tracy died on May 17, 1945, at age eighty-four. He had created a fifty-year trust for various purposes, including the aviary. The aviary, the Boy Scouts, and the Tracy Club were to divide 27 percent of the trust income "providing the Board of Directors of Tracy-Collins Trust Company feel that these projects have been taken care of satisfactorily; if not, they are directed to place the funds in other charities." During the first decade of the trust's life the aviary received about $20,000.12 By the time of Tracy's death annual attendance at the aviary was well over a half-million, and the value of the bird collection was esti10

Ibid., p. 165.

n

I b i d . , p p . 9-32, 8 9 - 9 3 . E d w a r d died in infancy and Russel, Jr., in early manhood.

Tracy Wigwam, the Boy Scout c a m p in Mill Creek Canyon east of Salt Lake City, was conceived in 1921 as a memorial to his sons. See ibid., p . 157, and Salt Lake Tribune, M a y 18, 1945.

12

T A C Report, 1949. T h e Tracy Club is a lodge in Idaho for the bank's employees.

Thanksgiving dinner for newsboys hosted by Russel L. Tracy, November The boys second, third, and fourth from the left are Steve, Mike, and John Sargetakis. Courtesy of Steve Sargetakis. Insets: Russel L. Tracy, James W. Collins, bottom. USHS collections.

1933. top;

mated at $33,000.13 The TAC continued an aggressive policy of buying or exchanging birds and small animals, but sometimes the commissioners had second thoughts about the acquisitions: I n years gone by, we have attempted, with the funds we had on hand, at first to acquire a larger number of birds. Now we are attempting to secure the best quality and the rarest birds that can be had. We sometimes lli

TAC Reports, 1946-47.

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m a k e mistakes a n d I fear we have the past year in expending m o r e t h a n $1600.00 for one shipment of birds from South America. While it is true these are very rare birds, the cost of securing them is exorbitant. W e received from South America two pair of Hyacinthine M a c a w s , one p a i r of R e d a n d Blue M a c a w s a n d [three] pair Black Neck Swan. F o u r . . . Black Neck Swan died in air shipment, b u t the sellers have agreed a n d g u a r a n teed to replace them. W e are sure that this method of purchasing birds will be discontinued. T h e p a r t i c u l a r ones referred to could not be obtained in any other way a n d there are few of t h e m in South America. 1 4

In another and more humorous instance the aviary had second thoughts about its mouflon ram and decided to give the rambunctious animal to a Mr. Cope of Phoenix. "We are glad this animal is gone," superintendent Wilson noted, listing among the aviary needs for 1951, "Repair fence damaged by Mouflon Ram." Despite such setbacks, the aviary was very successful in establishing good foreign and domestic connections that facilitated trades and purchases. Sloan was praised for his "ingenuity" in securing "one of the finest collections in the country" of Australian cockatoos and parrots. Other gifts and purchases of note included Abyssinian blue-winged geese, a sandhill crane, and Andean condors.15 The growing collections made demands on the aviary facilities.

Parrots, for example, required a six-month quarantine. To accommodate that need Wilson supervised the building of a quarantine station. Among the other improvements the commissioners deemed "absolutely necessary" in 1952 were new wiring and a concrete base for the large flight cage, a seventy-five-foot cage for the condors, a flamingo shelter, a cage for the Java peafowl, and cages for the valuable parrot collection that the aviary had never been able to display.1'5 On August 14, 1954, James W. Collins died, ending sixteen years of service to the aviary. His life was closely interwoven with that of his mentor and friend Russel Tracy and illustrates again the latter's deep concern for children. Collins was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1884 and moved with his family to Salt Lake City where at age fourteen he introduced himself to Tracy, inquiring of the businessman, " 'Mister, have you any work I could do to keep me off the streets during the summer vacation?' ' Tracy, whose business was modest at that time, questioned the boy carefully about his personal habits and school work and then suggested that Collins apply to several larger firms and report back.

34

TAC Report, 1948.

TAC Reports, 1950, 1949. ]B TAC Report, 1952.

15

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Discouraged by his lack of success, Collins returned to Tracy's office several days later and while standing on one foot with legs crossed said, " I guess they don't like m e ; they all tell me I am too little or that they have no use for a boy."

T h e result was that [Tracy] said they would have to make a place for the boy. and he was engaged as the second employee [of the firm] at $2 a week or $8 a m o n t h for the summer.

Several weeks later Tracy suffered an accident that left him temporarily blind. Collins led him from home to office for more than a month and greatly endeared himself to his employer who received permission from Collins's mother and the superintendent of public schools to have "the boy continue his studies at night school and . . . in the daytime . . . be trained for a position" in Tracy's business. Collins later succeeded Tracy as president of the Tracy Loan & Trust Company and participated in all of the older man's charitable activities. Tracy went so far as to saythat without Collins "there would be no Tracy Aviary."17 The aviary's need for new fencing and cages, painting and repairs remained constant. Another constant was the income generated by the Tracy trustâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;more than $3,000 annually by the 1960s. For several years the money was allowed to accumulate, a policy not intended by the donor.

The TAC report for 1968 explains why: O n e of the reasons a substantial a m o u n t of the annual contributions has not been spent for the purchase of new livestock, which was Mr. Tracy's desire, is because of inadequate winter housing for additional birds.

A committee was appointed to draw' up long range plans that bore fruit in June 1970 when the new Calvin D. Wilson bird pavilion was dedicated.

The large octagonal structure accommodated forty-two winter-housing cages inside and fourteen large outside exhibition cages to "display exclusively new and colorful varieties of birds never before seen at the Tracy Aviary."18 By 1971 the aviary encompassed eleven acres at Liberty Park and displayed some 250 species and subspecies, including 70 waterfowl. In September of that year when the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums held its convention in Salt Lake City, Tracy Aviary received many compliments from the visitors and established valuable 17 Deseret News, August 14, 1954; Salt Lake Tribune, August 15, 16, 1954; Tracy, Some Experiences, pp. 107-9.

18 T A C Reports, 1968-71. See also, Tracy Aviary Scrapbook in TAC Collection for photographs, program, and news clippings pertaining to the new pavilion.

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contacts that led to the acquisition of new stock through trades. The aviary continued an active purchase program as well, until 1973 when an outbreak of Newcastle disease on the West Coast made foreign birds unobtainable. In addition to trades and purchases, the aviary's collections continued to increase through Wilson's success at breeding in captivity a number of rare species such as the leadbeater cockatoo, ruddy duck, and trumpeter swan. The completion in 1974 of a flightless bird area and a monkey building further enhanced the facility.19 Several major changes affected the aviary in the mid-1970s. Calvin Wilson retired on July 1, 1975, and Richard T. Andrews who had been a zoologist at Hogle Zoo was hired to assume the duties of aviary director and curator. The following year, Salt Lake City decided to include the aviary in a study of the zoo undertaken by Zooplan Associates, Inc. Mayor Ted L. Wilson advised those concerned to "keep an open mind" about any recommendation to combine the zoo and aviary boards. Zooplan suggested just such a merger for "more efficient administration, improved planning and improved opportunity of financing." In June 1977 the TAC unanimously approved the merger and its own dissolution. The Utah Zoological Society board would be expanded to include at least three of the TAC members, the administration of the aviary would be transferred to the UZS, and the aviary would remain indefinitely at Liberty Park with the name Tracy to be forever associated with that facility. The future of Tracy's dream "to create something of benefit and interest to the children of Salt Lake City" seemed assured.21 ,!l T A C Reports, 1971-74. In 1972 Wilson received a Citizen Award from the Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Sport Fisheries, for his years of caring for sick and wounded birds turned over to him by the bureau. The National Audubon Society endorsed the award by extending its congratulations.

20 T A C Reports, 1974-77.

Maypole dance at Rowland Hall. USHS collections.

Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School: Alternative Education for More than a Century

BY M A R Y R. C L A R K

is rich and varied, as old in some cases as the original settlements themselves. One element of that heritage is U T A H ' S EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE

Mrs. Clark is director of studies at Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School.

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the significant contribution made by mission schools.1 In the latter part of the nineteenth century, schools such as those established by Episcopalian missionaries in Salt Lake City set new standards for education in Utah. 2 Speaking of the high level of education achieved by the public school system in 1915, Superintendent D. H. Christensen said, Among the contributing factors an important place must be given to the mission school. . . . With this school came the enrichment of the curriculum.

Music and art soon became daily exercises, nature study was introduced into the primary grades, and the study of Latin, of algebra and geometry by pupils in seventh and eighth grades under trained teachers was not uncommon. The standard had been set, the transition was under way. Public sentiment was crystallizing. If the public school was to compete with the mission school it must have an enriched course of study and professionally trained teachers.3

In addition to providing an enriched curriculum taught by a welltrained faculty, the Episcopal schools in Salt Lake City, like several other mission schools in the state, led the way in providing high school education for both boys and girls.4 Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School, which originated with the early mission schools, has a unique history that reflects not only the development of educational standards in Utah but also the changing role of private schools in America.

T H E MISSION SCHOOLS

"The Episcopal Church considers education as the chief handmaiden of religion."5 So wrote the Reverend Thomas W. Haskins recalling the early days of the Episcopal Mission in Salt Lake City. Haskins, then a deacon, together with the Reverend George W. Foote, established the 1 Although recognizing that the mission schools contributed to the development of education in U t a h , most writers have been primarily concerned with the schools' p a r t in Mormon-Gentile political, religious, and economic conflicts between 1867 and 1896. See Robert Joseph Dwyer, The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study in Religious and Social Conflict (1862-1890), 2d ed. rev.

(Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1971), chap. 6; C. Merrill Hough, " T w o School Systems in Conflict: 1867-1890," Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (1960) : 113-34; James R. Clark, "Church and State Relationships in Education in U t a h " (Ed.D. diss., U t a h State University, 1958), p.

2 5 9 ; Wain Sutton, ed., Utah, a Centennial History, 3 vols. (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1949), 2 : 6 2 2 - 2 5 .

2 See Salt Lake Tribune, May 25, 1976; Clyde Wayne Hansen, "A History of the Development of Non-Mormon Denominational Schools in U t a h " (M.S. thesis, University of U t a h , 1953), pp. 20-36.

8 D . H . Christensen, "Mission Schools in U t a h , " Utah Educational Review, fanuary 12, 1915, p. 13.

4 William B. Smart and Henry A. Smith, eds., Deseret, 1776-1976: A Bicentennial Illustrated History of Utah by the Deseret News (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing Co., 1975), p . 161.

3 Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, Reminiscences of a Missionary Bishop (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1906), pp. 369-70.

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first non-Mormon day school in Utah. Securing a half-ruined adobe bowling alley on the east side of Main Street between Second and Third South, the clergymen spent $1,000 donated largely by friends in New York to remodel it into a two-room schoolhouse equipped with plain pine desks. It opened with sixteen students on July 1, 1867, the day before Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle arrived in the Salt Lake Valley by stagecoach.6 Within a week enrollment had more than doubled, due largely to the efforts made by Warren Hussey, banker and promoter, and Theodore Tracy, Wells Fargo agent, to recruit students from among their friends and business associates.7 Haskins became the first headmaster, and both he and Foote taught in the school for a few hours each day. Sarah Foote, Mrs. Tuttle's younger sister, was employed for thirty-five dollars a month to take charge of the advanced students, while a Miss Wells, an apostate Mormon who had come across the plains at the age of six, taught the youngest students in return for the salary of twenty-five dollars a month. 8 Books were supplied by benefactors in the East, as were many scholarships of forty dollars a year. While the younger children learned the basic "three R's," the older boys and girls studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics under the tutelage of the clergy, as well as English composition and rhetoric as taught by Miss Foote.

The mission school attracted students from the entire community and soon outgrew its original quarters. In 1900 Bishop Tuttle recollected: For the first year we were in the old bowling alley which was situated where the Walker House now stands. For the second year we occupied Independence Hall. Now, for this coming third year, we rented Groesbeck's old store on Main Street, for $40 a month. Here, overflowing into two other old stores contiguous, St. Mark's school was housed, until we had built the new schoolhouse, opposite the City Hall, in 1872. The school had opened in 1873 with one hundred and eighteen scholars. Miss Davenport, an experienced teacher in the public schools, from Brooklyn, was to be the caretaker. After making my Idaho visitation I was myself to assume direct personal charge. 9

One of the aims of the school was to give boys and girls a thorough and practical high school education. Special courses were offered to prepare boys for entrance to eastern colleges.10 In the words of a modern historian, " I b i d . , p p . 371-72.

7 Ibid., p. 109.

8 Ibid., pp. 109-10.

9 Ibid., p. 245.

30 "St. Mark's School," typescript, Archives Collection, Alumni Office, Rowland St. Mark's School, Salt Lake City.

Hall-

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The education offered by St. Mark's and the other mission schools was usually of a standard somewhat above that of the common schools. A pupil at St. Mark's from 1870 to 1874 later commented that "scholastically [St. Mark's] was quite up to the then average of American schools." 11

In this endeavor, the school was supported by orthodox Mormons as well as by apostates and Gentiles. Converts to the LDS faith from Great Britain were "at the center of Utah's intellectual and artistic life."12 In nineteenth-century England the Anglican clergyman was often the most educated man in the parish, and boys who wished to sit for college qualifying examinations were sent to him for tutoring, regardless of their religious affiliation. If this was one reason that some orthodox Mormons were willing to send their children to school with the children of apostates and Gentiles, another was that there were no good public high schools in the territory before the arrival of mission schools.13 So Bishop Tuttle was able to relate: Apostate Mormons hailed with delight the opening of our schools and gladly sent us their children, willingly paying for their instruction if they were able to do so. Even some of the orthodox Mormons sent their children.

They said they wanted their children to get a good education, and they declared that our schools were the best places in the country for them to get this education. They said furthermore: We can look after our children in the home and on Sundays, and can see to it that they do not embrace the heresies of the mission schools. Therefore we have no hesitation in sending them to you for the good mental training they will get from you.14

Partly as a result of its early success and partly because of the influx of Gentiles into Salt Lake City following the completion of the transcontinental railroad, St. Mark's School continued to grow. In 1871 it enrolled 310 students.15 However, the school was also affected by other local events. The Godbeite schism and the New Movement which challenged the economic policies of LDS leaders,1 rt the rising agitation for free schools,17 and the increasing number of Gentiles determined to wipe 11

Hough, " T w o School Systems," p. 120.

Frederick S. Buchanan, " I m p e r i a l Z i o n : T h e British Occupation of U t a h , " in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: U t a h State Historical Society, 1976), p. 88. " S m a r t a n d Smith, Deseret, p . 161.

11 Tuttle, Reminiscences, p p . 373â&#x20AC;&#x201D;74.

13 Christopher R. Clark, " R o w l a n d H a l l - S t . Mark's School Educational Facilities" (M. Arch, thesis, University of U t a h , 1979), p p . 3-4. " G u s t i v e O. Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San M a r i n o , Calif.: Huntington Library, 1971), p p . 3 4 - 3 6 .

17 Stanley S. Ivins, "Free Schools Come to U t a h , " Utah Historical Quarterly 22 ( 1 9 5 4 ) : 333â&#x20AC;&#x201D;36.

12

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out polygamy18 produced a large wave of anti-Mormon sentiment in the valley. "The 'reform' challenge was met with excommunications, and when the leaders . . . found themselves outside the Church, they formed temporary alliance with their Gentile friends to organize the Liberal party in February of 1870."19 Another common endeavor for these leaders in the years following was support of the Episcopal mission schools. Their names are prominent in school registers both as parents of enrolled students and as members of the schools' board of directors.20 While they strengthened the schools by providing some local financial backing, they were also influential in developing the educational objectives of Bishop Tuttle for the schools.

In the late nineteenth century there were several types of private day schools in the eastern states: independent academies run by boards of trustees, church schools, and privately owned schools operated by individuals. Preparatory schools of each type provided a basic education for boys and girls under the age of ten or twelve. In addition, some "grammar" schools prepared boys with a solid foundation in Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics in order to enable them to pass the college entrance examinations of that time. Since college education for women was rare, most schools for older girls prepared them for their place in society, trained them in the arts, or prepared them to become teachers of young children or girls.21 Before 1871 the teachers at St. Mark's School tried to provide all these kinds of education in one building. As the enrollment grew, the task became more complex. The school needed to be divided, yet hundreds of forty-dollar scholarships were given every year to provide an advanced education for both boys and girls in the territory. In addition, there was a great need to train young men and women as teachers.

The solution to the problem was a pragmatic one. Bishop Tuttle reported to the Board of Missions in 1871 that Haskins had established St. Mark's School for Girls: "Not content with his 'St. Mark's Grammar School,' he opens this year a new school for girls only. . . . The school for girls will be held in the basement of our new' St. Mark's Church." 22 In 18

Dwyer, The Gentile Comes to Utah, p. 151.

Larson, "Americanization," p. 36.

20 See registers for St. Mark's G r a m m a r School, St. Mark's School for Girls, and Rowland Hall in U t a h State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City.

21 See Porter Sargent, " T r e n d s in Private Schools," Nation's Schools, July 1947, p p . 2 0 - 2 2 ; Joan N. Burstyn, "Women and E d u c a t i o n : A Survey of Recent Historical Research," Educational Leadership 31 (Spring 1973) :99~101 ff.

22 Daniel S. Tuttle, "Fifth Annual Report to the Board of Missions," Bishop Daniel Tuttle's Missionary Reports, 1862-1895, microfilm, Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of U t a h , Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, University of U t a h Li'brary, Salt Lake City.

1B

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St. Mark's Grammar USHS collections.

School at its First South

Quarterly

location.

actuality, the school was not for girls only. It was designed "to meet the special educational needs of girls, although boys under 10 years of age were received and prepared for entrance into . . . St. Mark's Grammar School."23 Because of the similarity of the two names, the new endeavor was often called simply the Basement School. "This was entirely a selfsupporting school," said Bishop Tuttle, 24 referring to the fact that no scholarship students were enrolled in it and that it received no support from the Episcopal mission organizations in the East. The members of the parish did much to keep the school self-supporting. In addition to their regular contributions to the parish, they paid tuition that was slightly higher than that charged by St. Mark's Grammar School. Charlotte E. Hayden was employed as teacher and manager of the school, but she was assisted by ladies of the parish as well as by the clergy of the cathedral. "Many of the first students were boarded with nearby Episcopal families further illustrating parish support." 25 One who might have given 23

Untitled typescript, Archives Collection, Alumni Office, Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School.

Tuttle, Reminiscences, p. 373.

25 John Dixon Stewart, "A History of St. Mark's Cathedral Parish, 1867-1967," multilithed, (n.p., n.d.), p. 17.

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this kind of support was Haskins himself. At about this time, he married, and in 1871 he bought the George D. Watt house from banker Warren Hussey.26 In 1873 St. Mark's Grammar School moved into its own building at 141 East First South.27 Built at a cost of $20,000, and reputed to be the finest of its kind in the territory, it was described as "a large and commodious structure, containing a large chapel, and a sufficient number of classrooms."28 During the school year of 1876-77, the school had a total attendance of 463 students. The Primary Department had six grades, and the Intermediate Department two. The school also included a Grammar Department divided in the manner of eastern preparatory schools into four "forms" and a Classical Department. It also boasted of "a Philosophical Apparatus . . . added to the school at a cost of nearly $500" and a library containing "at present some 650 volumes." The school year began on August 20 and ended with "General Exercises" on June 14 after two full days of examinations. Parents received monthly reports of students' scholarship and conduct and were informed that "a critical and interested examination of these documents cannot fail to stimulate the exertions of the pupil, and enlarge the idea of the value of his work."29 St. Mark's School for Girls also sent written monthly reports to parents. Its students were divided into three classes or departments.

Students in the Primary Department received lessons in writing, mental arithmetic, reading, oral instruction, geography, physical exercises, spelling, drawing, and vocal music. These subjects were also taught in the Intermediate Department, as were United States history, composition, written arithmetic, recitations, and grammar. The course of study in the Grammar Department included: high school arithmetic, rhetoric, grammar and analysis, natural philosophy, Latin, geometry, universal history, physical geography, algebra, English literature, astronomy, and physiology.30 The older girls probably took some of these courses at St. Mark's Grammar School. At the Basement School they received supple28 National Register files and Avenues Historic District files, Preservation Office, U t a h State Historical Society. After his ordination in 1869 Haskins became the chaplain at Camp Douglas and could no longer teach at the school, although he continued to serve as its headmaster until his resignation when he was replaced by the Reverend G. B. D. Miller, Bishop Tuttle's brotherin-law.

27 Clark, "Rowland Hall-St. Mark's," p. 4.

28 Cordelia Allen Smith, World's Fair Ecclesiastical History of Utah (Salt Lake Citvy 1896), p p . 195-97. ' 28

Eleventh '•'•° Eighth

Annual Annual

Register of St. Mark's Grammar School (Salt Lake City, 1877).

Circular of St. Mark's School for Girls (Salt Lake City, 1877).

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mental training in religion, dance, art, music, and domestic science. Since "the successful mining men and ranchers of this area wanted their daughters to develop into young ladies," 31 the school tried to offer the girls an education similar to that provided in the East by ladies' seminaries.

Its purpose was "to train healthy, companionable, and self-reliant Christian women." 32 As the teaching staff grew and Bishop T u t t l e was able to e x p a n d the facilities, this effort developed into an institution better qualified to fill the need. T h e lot on " A " street and First Avenue with an adobe house was purchased . . . with funds provided by the family of Benjamin R o w l a n d , in whose honor the n a m e of the school was changed to R o w l a n d Hall. 3 3 THE

SCHOOL ON T H E H I L L

Historical material concerning the founding of Rowland Hall is sketchy, inconsistent, or inaccurate. Those most concerned with the early establishment of the school left either no records at all or only brief recollections made many years later. T h e Utah Gazetteer and Directory for 188434 states that Rowland Hall began in 1880, and the school has traditionally accepted that date as the year of its establishment. However, the earliest Rowland Hall catalogues are those inscribed "Second Year," printed in 1882, and "Third Year, 1883-84," printed in 1883.

A small circular announces that "Rowland Hall . . . A H O M E SCHOOL AND 35 SEMINARY For Young Ladies O P E N S Monday, August 29th, 1881."

All other primary sources confirm this date as the formal beginning of the school in its present location. There is evidence, however, to support the assertion that the actual founding of the school preceded its opening.

Haskins bought the property the same year that St. Mark's School for Girls opened. It was a thirteen-room adobe farmhouse built between 1855 and 1860 by George Darling Watt, 3 ' 1 "the first person baptized into the Mormon church in Great Britain, private secretary to Brigham Young, publisher of the Journal of Discourses and a leading proponent of the Deseret Alphabet." 3 7 T h e property included only a few acres of the twenty-acre productive farm on which Watt had raised choice fruits "'Stewart, "St. Mark's Cathedral Parish," p. 17.

Eleventh Annual Circular of St. Mark's School for Girls (Salt Lake City, 1880).

33 Stewart, "St. Mark's Cathedral Parish."

34 Utah Gazetteer and Directory, 1884 (Salt Lake City, 1884), p p . 278-93.

35 U t a h State Historical Society Library.

M I d a Watt Stringham and Dora Dutson Flack, England's First "Mormon" Convert: The Biography of George Darling Watt (n.p., n.d.), pp. 86-87. " Buchanan, "Imperial Zion," p. 9 1 .

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and produce as well as silkworms that fed on the leaves of the mulberry trees he planted in 1855. It did, however, include part of his apple orchard and a healthy meadow of lucerne in addition to those nut and mulberry trees that grew close to the house.38 When Haskins resigned in 1872 the house was deeded to Thomas Wilson, a parishoner of St. Mark's Cathedral. 39 Since many of the older students who attended St. Mark's School for Girls in its early years boarded with clergy or parishioners, it is possible that the Watt-Haskins house was "a home away from home" for some young women before it became Rowland Hall. It is also likely that the house was purchased to provide either a boarding department or a more suitable location for the Basement School which had outgrown its quarters. Because of the confusion between it and St. Mark's Grammar School, it probably needed a new name as well as a new location. As usual, the funds to build or purchase a new building were lacking. It was the Reverend Reynold Marvin Kirby who finally effected the transfer of the Watt-Haskins house to Bishop Tuttle for the new site of the girls' school.

Kirby came to Salt Lake City from Albion, New York, in the spring of 1871, a year and a half after the death of his young wife, Virginia, who was the daughter of Benjamin Rowland, a wealthy Philadelphia industrialist. Kirby helped to establish St. Mark's Hospital and served as its first superintendent. He was also vice-president of the board of directors of St. Mark's Grammar School where he taught higher mathematics. On January 9, 1873, he married Jane (Jennie) McLaren, the daughter of a New York clergyman. Their four children were all born in Salt Lake City. The youngest girl, born on June 21, 1880, was named after his first wife, Virginia Rowland, and her mother, Virginia Lafayette Rowland.40 At about this time, Mrs. Rowland and her daughter Josephine visited the Kirby family and became interested in the work of the Episcopal missionaries in Salt Lake City. In memory of her late husband, Mrs. Rowland donated $5,000 of the $8,000 needed to purchase the Watt-Haskins house. Kirby and Bishop Tuttle raised more than $2,000, but the balance, together with the cost of refurbishing the house, left a standing debt of $2,000 which Bishop Tuttle reported to the Board

38

Stringham and Flack, England's First "Mormon," p p . 62, 87, 110.

National Register files and Avenues Historic District files. *°Kirby's obituary is in Herald Recorder (Potsdam, N . Y . ) , February 9, 1906. See also Carlton Lee Starkweather, A Brief Genealogical History of Robert Starkweather (Occoauan Va., 1904), p. 71. ' :i9

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of Missions a month before the school opened. In an optimistic tone, he added: So it comes to pass that I a m preparing for a movement forward. O n August 29th "Rowland H a l l " is to be opened, a Boarding School for Girls in Salt Lake City. And may the Lord prosper this our new undertaking! 4 1

Rowland Hall opened with one boarder and two teachers. Most of the high school girls enrolled in the regular course were day students who came from St. Mark's School for Girls and the Grammar School. The Preparatory and Primary departments of Rowland Hall were still held in the basement of St. Mark's Cathedral under the supervision of Charlotte E. Hayden.42 Farnetta Alexander, the school's first boarder, was enrolled in Miss Hayden's Preparatory Department and probably walked to and from the cathedral during her first year of residence. The new principal, Lucia Marsh of Philadelphia, and science teacher Isabella E. Douglass both lived at the Hall. Miss Douglass later recalled: In 1880 I was teaching in Wolf Hall, Denver, Col. and became acquainted with Miss Lucia Mason Marsh and grew very m u c h attached to her, so when Bp. Tuttle offered her the Principalship of R o w l a n d Hall, I felt I would like to go too. And after some correspondence with Bishop Tuttle it was arranged. I n August 1881 I met Miss M a r s h in Chicago a n d went out to Salt Lake. We were met on our arrival at the Station by Rev. George Miller w h o told us that Rowland Hall was not quite ready for us and took us to Bishop Tuttle's for a week. T h e next m o r n i n g we were taken u p to the Hall and chose our rooms, etc. and the Bishop told us of his designs for the school, and said we have corraled only one boarder as yet b u t I a m corresponding with several parents and think we shall soon have several, and he thought it best to begin with this one, Nettie Alexander of Bosem a n , M o n t a n a , and a number of day pupils who had been attending school in the basement of St. Mark's u n d e r Miss Semons, a n d a nicer better lot of girls I never met anywhere. . . . By Christmas we h a d several boarders. . . . We opened school with some pupil teachers but they soon dropped out and then the Bishop secured Miss E m m a C h a n d l e r and also Miss Abby M a r s h as Art Teacher. . . . Miss Lucia M a r s h was m u c h loved a n d was eminently fitted for her position but unfortunately her health failed and she was obliged to go to California, where she died in December, 1887. 43

Daisy M. Senter was the school's first graduate in 1882. The ceremony took place in St. Mark's Cathedral where she was escorted to her place by Gen. Macdowell McCook.44 Theresa Godbe, daughter of the " Tuttle, "Fifteenth Annual Report."

Rowland Hallâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;A Home School for Girlsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Second Year.

43 Douglass to the Right Reverend Arthur Moulton, undated copy, Rowland Hall Collection, Utah State Historical Society Library.

44 The Lantern, March, 1941 (Rowland Hall magazine), p. 1.

42

Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School

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leader of the Godbeite Movement, graduated in 1883 and became a public schoolteacher. Many years later she recalled the early days of Rowland Hall: T h e r e was one boarder and thirteen girls, the original thirteen, w h o came from St. Mark's School for Girls held in the crypt of the cathedral, a n d a few others. But the school grew rapidly. Prof. Radcliffe taught the piano, Miss Fidelia Hamilton, vocal music and M a d a m e Fitzgerald, a Parisian married to an Irishman, French. T h e building was an old dwelling house, and consisted of drawing room, library, two school rooms, dining room, kitchen, and sleeping rooms u p stairs. T h e grounds were beautiful in the natural state, full of grand old trees. We had swings, croquet and a small ball ground. 4 5

Another student recalled that all the rooms on the lower floor were used for classrooms during the day, and after lessons were used by the family.46 An early essay on the history of the school reports: T h e grounds, u p to a few feet from the entrance, were covered with a fine healthy growth of alfalfa which furnished nourishment for the Bishop's and Chaplain's cows and for various stray animals of the neighborhood. Instead of tennis and basketball the girls used to take their exercise in chasing away the alien herd, so that the Bishop's cow might not lack its daily rations. 4 7

Kirby served as the school's chaplain for only a few months. In August 1882 Bishop Tuttle reported his transfer to the Diocese of Albany.

The bishop also told the Board of Missions of the growth of Rowland Hall in its first year and of the support he had received from ladies in the East. One woman in Philadelphia and another in Boston had each sent him $1,000 for the school. Donations also came from others: I n founding a library for the Hall, the booksellers have generously helped me. M . W. Appleton of N . Y. gave precious personal attention to the selection of good books; and his firm, and H a r p e r Brothers, and Routledge & Son, and Scribner's Sons and Lippincott & Co., sent m e $550 worth of books, for the nucleus of an excellent library.

Last year we began with one boarding pupil in R o w l a n d Hall, a n d ended with nine. This year seventeen have already applied for entrance, a n d I fear embarrassment in providing room for the steady inflow. 18

The following year the bishop reported even more generous donations: 45 Theresa Godbe, "Reminiscences of Rowland Hall," undated holograph, Rowland Hall Collection.

46 Salt Lake Tribune, M a r c h 30, 1941.

47 " T h e History of Rowland Hall," Crimson Rambler (1927 yearbook), p. 77.

48 Tuttle, "Sixteenth Annual Report."

282

Utah Historical Quarterly Our boarding school for girls, Rowland Hall, though only in its second year, awakens great hopes for its future. Seventeen boarders and thirty day students were in it last year.

The late Mrs. J. McGraw Fiske of Ithaca, N. Y. left in her will the sum of $10,000 for our Mission. I have devoted it to the help of Rowland Hall. The one-half is invested at eight per cent per annum as an endowment for the "McGraw Fiske Scholarship"; the beneficiary of the same to be always the daughter of a clergyman attending the Hall. The other half I have also invested, retaining it for the purpose of enlarging and improving the Hall, the need for which will soon press.

Mrs. V. L. Rowland, of Philadelphia, the founder of the Hall, has sent me $500 to be expended for the nucleus of a library, to be called the "Virginia Rowland Kirby Library." By this and such like gifts, . . . the library, as a most important appliance of the school, will grow with its growth and strengthen with its strength. 49

Three years later, Tuttle left Salt Lake City to become the bishop of Missouri. In October 1886 at the General Convention in Chicago the Reverend R. M. Kirby was elected his successor. Unfortunately, his wife, Jennie, had died the preceding April, leaving him with four small children to raise, so he declined the position.50 "The Right Reverend Abiel Leonard was finally prevailed upon to accept the post, and was consecrated in Saint Louis, January 25, 1888."" He arrived in Salt Lake City the following month and immediately took an active interest in the development of Rowland Hall.

In its early years the school was, like many female seminaries, primarily a finishing school dedicated to the "physical, intellectual and moral training" 52 of girls in order that they might become "not merely accomplished, but sensible, practical, and earnest minded women."53 Those girls who wished to prepare themselves for one of the few occupations open to women were more likely to attend a school like St. Mark's, which was more academically oriented. However, by the time Utah achieved statehood, St. Mark's School had closed to support "the betterment of the public schools."54 Rowland Hall remained open, and Bishop Leonard, together with a new principal, Clara Colburne, and a new staff hired in 1894, strived to model the school after the best seminaries in

49

T u t t l e , "Seventeenth Annual Report."

Kirby obituary.

31 Dwyer, The Gentile Comes to Utah, p. 151 n.

32 Catalogue of Rowland Hall, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1890-91, 33 Ibid.

54 Hough, " T w o School Systems," p. 128.

50

p 13

Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School

283

the East which "offered women an opportunity to study academic subjects to an advanced standard.""5 The catalogs do indeed list an impressive array of academic and cultural subjects, but the reality of school life before the turn of the century is better revealed in the Mission Message,â&#x201E;˘ a short-lived publication containing articles and news items from each of the Episcopal schools in the Missionary District of Nevada and Utah: A typewriting machine . . . [has been moved] into the Hall, and eight of the young ladies are learning the beautiful and accuracy-teaching art.

A girl who throws her dress or bonnet down on a chair will make a poor wife in nine cases out of ten. If the world could see how a girl keeps her dressing room, some u n h a p p y marriages would be saved.

April li Every Thursday afternoon, Miss Almy conducts a class at Rowland Hall, and instructs the maidens in the Delsarte system of calisthenics and the graceful art of Terpsichore.

November 1888 T h e scientific d e p a r t m e n t . . . has been anticipating its work in chemistry by sending for a quantity of apparatus, consisting of test tubes and racks, Wolff bottles, generating flasks, beakers, candle bombs, etc., but the most interesting of all is that for the separating of water into its constituent elements by the process of electrolysis.

Saturday evening, the 12th, the girls at Rowland Hall had a fancy dress party . . . an hour of rare fun and enjoyment which made the young hearts beat with a thrill of cheer, no matter how far down they might have been in the valley of discouragement at some interminable algebra examples or translation.

J a n u a r y 1889 Some beautiful work in the angular handwriting has been done during this year, under both Miss Haight and Miss Hayden. T h e angular hand seems to have come to stay, and is taught in all female schools of reputation. N o lady of the present day can afford to write in the old-fashioned round hand.

M a y 1889

05 Joan N. Burstyn, "Women and Education: A Survey of Recent Historical Research," Educational Leadership 31 (Spring 1 9 7 3 ) : 173.

08 Mission Message was a monthly periodical "Devoted to the Interests of Christian Education in the Missionary District of Nevada and U t a h . " Publication evidently began in 1887, but the date of its demise is not known. There are ten issues in the Archives Collection of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah, dated from April 1888 (vol. 1, no. 7) to May 1889 (vol. 2, no. 9 ) .

They contain articles and news from all of the Episcopal schools in the district. The quotes are primarily from a column entitled "Rowland Hallâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Facta et Fama."

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Utah Historical Quarterly

Further insight into life at Rowland Hall at the turn of the century is found in the recollection of Martha Humphrey, science teacher and assistant to Miss Colburne: It was September 1895 that I arrived in Salt Lake City. . . .

The enrollment was not large, and the physical set-up was quite limited, but the spirit of the school was buoyant. . . .

The atmosphere of the boarding department was quite homelike, and when the regulation boarding school pranks had to be carried out, such as midnight feasts, my room was commandeered as the half partitions in the dormitories were wholly unsuitable.

Gradually the fresh decorations in the living rooms and bed rooms, and finally, the then new school building and chapel made for more gracious living.

The tennis court was built, and in constant use during recreation.

We also worked hard to get together old examination papers and other pertinent material to prove to Smith and other colleges that we were worthy to be admitted to their ivied halls without examinations.

As I remember, we had a high scholastic standard in the three R's and allied subjects and also had time for music, art, . . . and even drama. 57

By 1901 Bishop Leonard had spent more than $20,000 in enlarging the school to accommodate 50 boarders and nearly 150 day students, but he still dreamed of a new classroom building that would contain science laboratories, several music and art studios, an assembly hall, a gymnasium, and a chapel.58 Soon after the turn of the century the school received a legacy of $33,000 from the estate of Pittsburgh industrialist Felix R. Brunot, and the bishop's dream seemed destined to become a reality.

He hired an architect and proceeded with plans.59 Leonard died before his plans could be carried out, and the work of enlarging the school was left to his young successor, Franklin Spencer Spalding. The building that was finally constructed in 1906 was designed

by Theodore Davis Beale to blend with and echo the style of the original Watt-Haskins house. The plans also called for the erection of a monastic style chapel on the second floor of a structure connecting the new school building with the old farmhouse. This was completed in 1910 with funds granted by Caroline R. Lippincott in memory of her mother, Virginia Lafayette Rowland.60 " H u m p h r e y to Mrs. Tainter, December 10, 1954, Archives Collection, Alumni Office, Rowland Hallâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;St. Mark's School.

58 Abiel Leonard, The Growth of Rowland Hall, circular dated 1901.

59 U n d a t e d newspaper articles in a scrapbook ( 1 9 0 6 ) , Archives Collection, Alumni Office, Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School.

60 Ibid.

Swimming, dance, and music were popular at Rowland Hall.

At lower right freshman girls are hazed by older students who make them act like babies. Courtesy of Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School.

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Quarterly

Life at Rowland Hall in the first few decades of the twentieth century was similar in many respects to what it had been before the turn of the century.61 Styles changed, but people did not. Boarders envied the relative freedom of the day students, but enjoyed the camaraderie of illicit late-night "gab" sessions and pajama parties. The faculty held out staunchly against the wearing of make-up and silk stockings and kept watchful eyes on those who insisted on breaking the rules of what one teacher called "their Adamless Eden." The traditional Candle and Carol Service at Christmas and the dance festival in May were important events in the school year, as were the opening tea, the bazaar, the Halloween skits, the senior play, the Junior-Senior Prom, and the beautiful graduation ceremony at the cathedral. Despite these traditions, there were significant changes that affected school life.

School yearbooks emphasize the growing importance of athletics in the twenties and thirties. The school had an Athletic Association, and girls worked diligently to fulfill the requirements it set for the awarding of the coveted R and H. Basketball seemed to be the most popular sport.

Every class had a team, as did the faculty, and competition for the allschool tournament championship was keen. The girls ice-skated and skied in the winter. In the spring and fall they participated in field hockey, track events, fist ball, baseball, and tennis. They also went hiking and horseback riding. The regular physical education class requirements included gymnasium practice, swimming, folk and aesthetic dancing, marching, and setting-up drills. The athletic program had changed considerably from the days when the girls played croquet on the lawn and took healthful walks around the school grounds for exercise.

Although boarders were still not allowed off the campus without a chaperone, they could visit day students on weekends and attend one movie a week in the company of other boarders. However, the most significant change of all was in the educational philosophy of the school.

More and more women were encouraged to enter college after completing high school, and private girls' schools throughout the country became preparatory schools. According to one educator, "Those who tried to run nineteenth century finishing schools in the twentieth century failed."62

81 T h e information about student life is from school yearbooks and literary magazines, the Rowlanda ( 1 9 0 8 - ) , U t a h State Historical Society Library; the Crimson Rambler (1923-), The Lantern ( 1 9 4 0 - ) , and The Lamplighter ( 1 9 4 5 - ) , Archives Collection, Alumni Office, Rowland H a l l - S a i n t Mark's School.

62 Burstyn, " W o m e n and E d u c a t i o n , " pp. 173-74.

Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School

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High schools, both public and private, espoused the dual purpose of preparing students for "college and life thereafter."63 The principal was responsible for the course of study, which often reflected her educational philosophy as well as college admission requirements. In 1921 Alice B. MacDonald wrote: Rowland Hall is what is called an accredited school; that is, the large colleges of the country, both in the East and in the West, accept our credits and recommendations for admission of our candidates. . . . . . . We agree that the college course is not the best course for all girls. . . . The school is therefore offering, in addition to the college or classical course, two others: one including two years of Latin and French, and other without Latin. In both courses a certain number of electives are allowed.64

Six years later Miss MacDonald's attitude had changed somewhat.

There is a strong feeling, based on experience, that high school courses should not be too elastic and that they should be so arranged and planned as to give a strong foundation in what are called the humanities. Rowland Hall, accordingly, expects every pupil to take at least two years of Latin, including Caesar; and three years of French, or four years without Latin; two or three years of Mathematics; four years of English, as much History as the program will allow, and one science. Furthermore, if girls expect to enter College, the above are the required courses.

Colleges admitting students only by College Board Examinations require three or four years of Latin, as the case may be.65

Rowland Hall encouraged its college-bound seniors to take the College Board examinations long before this practice became common in Utah's public high schools. In 1928 the new principal, Callie B. Gaines, explained, "Since 1918 Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, and Mt. Holyoke have admitted no students by certificate. All . . . are required to take the College Board examinations. . . ."6e This requirement was instituted by colleges in order to enable them to evaluate candidates from public and small private schools on an equal basis with those from the more prestigious preparatory schools. Therefore, schools like Rowland Hall encouraged or required their students to take the examinations. Although teachers did not teach for these tests, they did tend to emphasize those academic skills that would better prepare their students for them. In the following decades this had a narrowing effect on the curriculum of most 03 M a r g a r e t Hill Greenberg, "Way Back T h e n , " Independent School Bulletin 35 ( M a y 1976):56.

64 Alice B. MacDonald, "A Word from the Principal," The Utah Trust 1 ( M a y 1921) : 3 , > Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of U t a h .

63 Rowland Hall School for Girls, 1927-28 (Salt Lake City, 1927).

60 Gaines to Patrons and Friends, July 30, 1928, Rowland Hall Collection.

The traditional Candle and Carol service became a coed activity.

Below: Girl crucifer leads procession at service in Rowland Hall's St. Margaret's Chapel. Courtesy of Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School.

private schools, and Rowland Hall was no exception. Many students found their studies demanding and sometimes dull, but most graduates praised the school for the excellent college preparation they received.

During the depression the school suffered severe financial difficulties.

The Episcopal Missionary District could no longer support the school, which was again heavily in debt. Students did not have the money for tuition and scholarship funds were depleted.67 "Bishop Moulton was in difficult financial troubles in his role as District Administrator and was Stewart, "St. Mark's Cathedral Parish," p. 35.

Rowland

Hall-St. Mark's

School

289

sorely pressed to continue the operations of Rowland Hall, St. Mark's Hospital and other problem areas of the district." 68 T h e situation seemed hopeless.

In 1933 the Episcopal National Council recommended closing Rowland Hall for lack of support and finances, and the school was kept open only through the heroic efforts of local patrons and alumni. The ingenious argument made to the National Council was that if the school did close it would lose its tax exempt status, and the resulting taxes would compound the deficit.69

As a result, the school was incorporated as an independent, nonprofit institution with a self-perpetuating board of trustees. T h e years that followed were difficult for the administration and the trustees. T h e enrollment was smaller than it had been in early years; however, under the determined leadership of Fanny B. Jones the school maintained its traditional ties with the Episcopal church and its reputation for academic excellence.

COEDUCATION AND N E W TRADITIONS

Despite the Great Depression, World W a r I I , and the problem of fluctuating hemlines, Rowland Hall upheld its established traditions and standards. In 1948 the new headmistress, Elizabeth T. Corr, endeavored to prepare young women "for college and for life" in much the same way that her predecessors had done twenty-five years earlier. Life, however, was becoming more complex. Sputnik streaked across the sky in 1957 and marked the beginning of a new educational era for both public and private schools. In the meantime, another event that marked the beginning of a new era for Rowland Hall caused more immediate concern. A boys' school was established on the adjoining property.

In response to the need expressed by parents for a college preparatory school for boys, Bishop Richard S. Watson reestablished St. Mark's School in 1956. T h e bishop's residence, the Rawlins house at 231 First Avenue, and the Caine house at 67 B Street which had previously been used by Rowland Hall were remodeled slightly to house the new school. Robert Bolbach of Toledo, Ohio, was chosen headmaster.

I n three years the enrollment increased from 28 to 88. I n 1956-57 grades 7, 8, and 9 were taught. Thereafter, a grade was added each year 68

ibid.

James W. Beless, Jr., " T h e Episcopal Church in U t a h : Seven Bishops and One H u n d r e d Years," Utah Historical Quarterly 36 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 93.

89

Boys' traditional river trip became coed, and the fence that once separated the two schools was removed.

Bottom: the youngest students at the school in a musical presentation. Courtesy of Rowland HallSt. Mark's School.

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Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School

291

until a full secondary school program was established by September 1959.

The academic program, geared to the needs of college-bound boys, was rigorous. The athletic program emphasized sports the boys could continue as adults, such as tennis, golf, swimming, and skiing, although the soccer and basketball teams did compete with those of other high schools.70 By 1961, with enrollment at 110, Bolbach, the bishop, and members of the board of trustees began to consider moving the school to a new location.71 However, the cost of securing an adequate facility and the expense of staffing and maintaining two schools in separate locations proved to be prohibitive. The merger of St. Mark's School with Rowland Hall was a more feasible alternative and followed a national trend among private schools.72 In 1964 the fence separating the two institutions was removed, and Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School was established.

Mrs. Corr retired in 1966 after coordinating the merger of the two schools and supervising the staff's adjustment to coeducation. The transition was perhaps more difficult for the students than for the faculty.

Although the new school emblem was successfully designed to include both the Rowland Hall cross and motto and the St. Mark's winged lion, combining other traditions and practices of school life proved more difficult. At first the students felt awkward in class and tended to segregate themselves on opposite sides of the classroom. For several years the boys and girls insisted on retaining their traditional activities such as the senior boys' river trip and the senior girls' trip to San Francisco. Under the guidance of its present headmaster, William M. Purdy, who was appointed in 1969, the school became one in spirit, redefining its academic objectives and establishing new traditions while retaining the best of the old.

Conditions in the 1970s brought about further change. Increased enrollment necessitated the construction of a new upper school building, designed to echo in modern form the original buildings. Economic and other reasons forced the school to close its boarding facilities in 1976, thus ending a ninety-six-year tradition. Students from other countries and states now live in the Salt Lake City area with families who supply them with room and board as part of a family live-in program.

70 Robert Bolbach, "St. Mark's School," 1959, typescript, Rowland Hall Collection. T h e school was proud of its academic credentials. In 1959 the Science Research Associates placed St. Mark's in the top 1 percent of the nation's secondary schools, and graduates were accepted by such prestigious universities as Yale, Stanford, M I T , and others. " R o b e r t Bolbach, "Report to Parents," 1961, typescript, U t a h State Historical Society Library.

72 "Introduction," Sargent's Guide to Private Schools, 1974 ed.

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The school presently enrolls approximately 300 students in prekindergarten through grade 12. The curriculum at all levels is demanding yet flexible enough to meet individual needs. The program of studies in the upper school is considerably broader than it was twenty-five years ago. Although it is still primarily a college preparatory program, it includes a variety of electives in addition to those courses required for graduation. Special features include a coordinated early childhood and extended care program; a lower school French program; an interim program in which students study one subject, frequently off campus, and take trips to major cities or western areas of historic and scientific interest; and a winter sports program.

Although it has redefined its educational programs and objectives over the years to meet changing realities and needs, the school still strives to foster intellectual excellence, individual creativity, and spiritual growth.

With an educational heritage as rich and varied as that of Utah itself, Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School continues to provide a viable alternative to public education in Salt Lake City.

The Pinto Ward chapel and school, built in 1866, illustrates the tendency to merge church and state in early Utah history. USHS collections.

A New Community: Mormon Teachers and the Separation of Church and State in Utah's Territorial Schools

BY C H A R L E S S . P E T E R S O N

1978 U T A H N S OBSERVED an extended court case dealing with released time and public school credit for religious instrucI N

T H E S U M M E R OF

Dr. Peterson is professor of history at U t a h State University a n d a Fellow of the U t a h State Historical Society. This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Mormon History Association meeting in San Francisco, December 1978.

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tion at the Logan LDS Seminary. Contradicting testimony, angry charges, and the physical breakdown of the judge at a critical point introduced elements of sensationalism that attracted wide interest. Among other things the "released time-public credit" case demonstrated that the proper adjustment of religious and public roles in education was still a vital issue to many Utahns. For some the location of seminaries adjacent to public schools, lunch room habits of seminary teachers, and indeed the very social relationships that developed in the seminaries represented church invasions of public functions. For others, where one ate lunch, like released time and public school credit, were conveniences utterly devoid of offense. In the end the judge issued a split decision under which released time provisions remained standing and public credit fell, enabling both sides to claim victory.

Whatever the merits of the released time and public credit issues, it may be noted that the case was an expression of a long-term process by which the educational realms of church and state are being defined.

As suggested by the Logan Seminary case, this process has often been a matter of court action. But it has also involved political conflict, sectarian competition, administrative adjustments, and the growth of the idea that public education is vital in America and that it should be devoid of religious content.

In Utah history questions about the roles of church and state in education were most hotly contended during the latter third of the nineteenth century as part of the general effort to bring the Mormons into a fuller conformity with national political and social norms. At the conclusion of that period Mormons yielded in their determination to teach religion as part of the public school curriculum and generally accepted the national formula by which religious neutrality was maintained in public schools. The long, slow process of this adjustment was marked by bitter feelings. This article proposes to call attention briefly to a general development of this change and to give a somewhat more detailed account of a group of new Mormon converts who helped adjust the roles of church and state in Utah education.

It is not easy to understand today just how foreign modern educational concepts would have seemed to the first generation of Mormons.

It is true Joseph Smith's teachings included the ideas that "the glory of God is intelligence" and that "man is saved no faster than he gains knowledge." 1 It is also true that Brigham Young founded two institu1 Doctrine a n d Covenants 9 3 : 3 6 and Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings loseph Smith . . . (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1938), p p . 137, 217.

of the

Prophet

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tions of higher education and that Mormon converts of the first years included numerous people with some learning as well as a few doctors and lawyers. Yet, for the earliest Mormons many of the attributes of education were alien indeed. Life was literally a training ground for eternity. In it, temporal training had its place, but education in the formal sense was suspect as part of the worldly tradition of class distinction, inequality, and selfishness from which Mormons were trying to withdraw. There was a dearth of qualified teachers in the early Utah years; and many who were educated either could not afford to teach or were diverted from it by pioneering, concern with salvation, or the conviction that the great teachers, after all, were life's experiences and the Holy Ghost. Under these circumstances Mormons who did possess a conviction that schooling was important often had to turn to outside teachers to give their children proper opportunities. The much-talked-of University of Deseret was for two decades virtually unstaffed and unattended, little more than a paper school. The Mormon set of mind was authoritarian rather than questing. When it did question it tended to pursue such tangential schemes as the Deseret Alphabet by which Mormons hoped to promote a great breakthrough in human communications.

Schools ran spasmodically in makeshift facilities or met in churches that doubled as public buildings. Teachers were poorly paid and taught only elementary subjects. Not only were there no high schools and no university students, but education was often feared and distrusted as were legal theory, medicine, and philosophy. Virtually no Mormons went outside to school. Even Brigham Young's older sons were deprived of this opportunity and went into church service in part because it was the only option open to them. 2 Implicit in the foregoing is the fact that separation and specialization were beyond most early Utah Mormons. They were unable to appreciate them as concepts and unable to apply them practically in their lives. Early Mormonism was a lay religion that made only scant distinction between the temporal and the spiritual. The overriding purpose of the gospel was to bring all things into one under God. Divisiveness was an anathema whether it appeared in the form of dissenting doctrines, political parties, or separate public and religious instruction. Furthermore, Utah's pioneer 2 Several of Brigham Young's younger children were sent east to school. See Dean C. Jessee, ed., My Dear Son: Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1974). For another who later left U t a h for an education, see Gene A. Sessions, ed., Mormon Democrat: The Religious and Political Memoirs of James Henry Moyle (Salt Lake City: Historical D e p a r t m e n t of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1975), p p . 7 5 - 7 6 , 128-50.

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Mormons were thoroughgoing generalists who performed all manner of services for themselves because specialization was physically beyond them.

Thus, to a degree uncommon among Americans of their time, they were poorly prepared by values or circumstances to distinguish between public and religious roles in education or to recognize teaching as a distinct profession.3 Elsewhere in the United States public education had been initiated by the last third of the nineteenth century, and a growing number of Americans had exchanged suspicion and fear for confidence that learning promised the good life.4 A conviction was also spreading that learning was the right of all Americans rather than the citadel of snobbery or the preserve of class distinction. To safeguard themselves against each other America's Protestant churches had also given their support to religiously neutral public schools where if their own principles were not taught, at least conflicting concepts were also restricted. In addition, Protestants were beginning to teach doctrines of enlightened and educated patriotism that some scholars now call the "religion of the republic." 5

3 My views on the limits of education in early U t a h ( 1 8 4 7 - 6 9 ) are worked out in " T h e Limits of Learning in Frontier U t a h : A Reinterpretation," keynote address at the U t a h Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, November 1978. Earlier studies useful in formulating my thoughts on both the early and late periods of territorial education include: Stanley S. Ivins, "Free Schools Come to U t a h , " Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (1954) : 3 2 1 - 4 2 ; "Latter-day Saint Schools" in K a t e B. Carter, ed., Heart Throbs of the West, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of U t a h Pioneers, 1 9 3 9 - 5 1 ) , 1 1 : 9 3 - 1 4 5 ; " T h e University of U t a h and O t h e r Schools of Early Days," Heart Throbs, 1 2 : 1 - 5 2 ; Levi Edgar Young, Dr. John R. Park, In Memoriam (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h , 1908) ; Ralph V. Chamberlin, Memories of John R. Park (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1949) ; Ralph V. Chamberlin, Life and Philosophy of W. H. Chamberlin (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1925) ; John Clifton Moffitt, John Rocky Park in Utah's Frontier Culture (Provo, 1947) ; Reinhard Maeser, Karl G. Maeser (Provo: Brigham Young University, 1928) ; Alma P. Burton, Karl G. Maeser, Mormon Educator (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1953) ; Arthur M. Richardson and Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr., The Life and Ministry of John Morgan (Salt Lake City, 1965) ; M. Lynn Bennion, Mormonism and Education (Salt Lake City: LDS D e p a r t m e n t of Education, 1939) ; J o h n Clifton Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah (Provo, 1 9 4 6 ) ; Ralph V. Chamberlin, The University of Utah: A History of Its First Hundred Years, 1850 to 1950, ed. Harold W. Bentley (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h Press, 1 9 6 0 ) ; Ernest L. Wilkinson, Leonard J. Arrington, and Bruce C. Hafen, eds., Brigham Young University: The First One Hundred Years, 4 vols. (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1 9 7 5 - 7 6 ) , vol. 1; Royal Ruel Meservey, "A Historical Study of Changes in Policy of Higher Education in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (Ed.D. diss., University of California, 1966) ; T. Edgar Lyon, "Evangelical Protestant Missionary Activities in M o r m o n Dominated Areas, 1865-1900" ( P h . D . diss., University of U t a h , 1 9 6 2 ) ; Laverne C. Bane, " T h e Development of Education in U t a h , 1870-1896" (Ed.D. diss., Stanford University, 1940) ; John W. Fitzgerald, " O n e H u n d r e d Years of Education in a U t a h Community" ( E d . D . diss., Stanford University, 1948).

4 For well-known references to these developments see Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p p . 1 0 5 - 2 5 ; Merle Curti, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier Country (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp.

379-80.

5 Sidney E. M e a d deals with this topic generally in his The Lively Experience 1963), especially pp. 134-55.

(New York,

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297

Not surprisingly, the Protestants contributed to a division between the church and state functions of education in Utah. In the years immediately after the Civil War the home mission movement focused its attention on the West, and ministers and missionaries plied the frontiers waging war against crudeness, ignorance, crime, lawlessness, and prostitution, as well as against polygamy. Although a young Congregational missionary named Josiah Strong almost singlehandedly brought religion, refinement, and order to neighboring Cheyenne, Mormon Utah proved virtually impervious to the first missionary efforts.6 Not even the sons of the Prophet Joseph Smith, then well on their way to Protestant conformity, made discernible inroads during missionary visits of the 1860s.

Almost as if to confirm Mormon distrust of education, it was through schools that the home missions finally established a beachhead. Beginning with the Saint Mark's Episcopal School in 1867, home mission schools expanded steadily until by the 1880s upwards of one hundred of them employed more than 300 teachers and enrolled a maximum of more than 9,000 students, including many Mormon and Jack-Mormon young people.7 To begin with, most of the mission schoolsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like the Mormon-controlled common schoolsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;offered only elementary courses; but by the mid-1880s they operated many high schools, and education assumed an increasingly evangelistic character as an attempt to capture the minds and aspirations of the young was added to the enthusiasm and fervor of religious faith.

With a show of tolerance Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders first welcomed the Protestants, making facilities available and encouraging Latter-day Saints to attend their meetings. But the threat to Mormon young people quickly brought this era of good feeling to an end.

The mission schools were opposed from the pulpit, where Protestant teachers were denounced and the Saints counseled to send their children only to the Mormon schools. Fraternization was frowned on, and teachers and missionaries were avoided and even occasionally harassed. A good example of the latter unfolded at southern Utah's St. George where G. M. Hardy's meetings were broken up by braying donkeys and pranksters togged out as the fabled Three Nephites.8 6 See Dorothea R. Muller, " C h u r c h Building and Community Making on the Frontier, a Case Study: Josiah Strong, H o m e Missionary in Cheyenne, 1871-1873," Western Historical Quarterly 10 ( 1 9 7 9 ) .

7 Daniel S. Tuttle, Reminiscences of a Missionary Bishop (New York: T h o m a s Whittaker, 1 9 0 6 ) ; Ivins, "Free Schools"; Lyon, "Evangelical Protestant Missionary Activities"; E. Lyman Hood, The New West Education Commission, 1880-1893 (Jacksonville, Fla., 1905), p. 2.

8 J u a n i t a Brooks, Uncle Will Tells His Story (Salt Lake City: Taggart & Co., 1970), p p . 46-47.

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Fear that free public schools would exclude spiritual instruction firmed into determined opposition toward tax-paid compulsory education as well as efforts to improve the quality of Mormon teaching. In the struggle to achieve these ends Mormon legislatures cautiously worked out a series of laws under which it was possible to make modest gains in teacher training, administrative reorganization, consolidation of schools, and standardization of textbooks. Other significant reforms, however, were adamantly opposed. Tax-supported or free schools were rejected out of hand as were all efforts to make school attendance mandatory. 9 In much the same manner as Mormons supported woman suffrage to demonstrate that polygamy was not repressive, church members worked energetically to make the system succeed and pointed with pride and satisfaction to its very real accomplishments.

After 1880 changing times and stringent federal laws altered Mormon views about education and reduced the extent to which they could control public schools. As a consequence, dramatic changes were accepted if not indeed embraced. Beginning in the mid-1880s the Latter-day Saint academy system provided an effective counter to the Protestant high schools.10 Then in 1890, in a development that was only eclipsed by the dropping of polygamy, Mormons accepted tax-supported public schools and compulsory education. Thereafter, a church education system was quickly established.11 Facilitating the transition to secularized, free public schools were a group of educators who emerged as a distinct and specialized community within Mormon society in the decades preceding the 1890s. Actively sponsored by Mormon leaders, this community adapted national and educational trends and principles to the Utah situation and contributed to a growing ability to distinguish between and segregate the functions of temporal and spiritual learning. In addition, they eased earlier fears of learning and encouraged Mormons to regard education as a new frontier for youth. In time, Mormon educators emerged as a new elite, attracting a growing number of followers who found new professional and economic options and created a folk history that did much to define 0

Ivins, "Free Schools."

10

Meservy, " H i g h e r Education in the C h u r c h , " p p . 1 2 5 - 6 7 ; Bennion, Mormonism and Education, p p . 1 4 7 - 2 0 1 ; Frederick S. Buchanan, " T h e Rise of the M o r m o n Academy," paper in author's possession; D . Michael Q u i n n , " U t a h ' s Educational I n n o v a t i o n : L D S Religion Classes, 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 2 9 , " Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975) : 379-89.

11 Ivins, "Free Schools"; Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History (New Haven, C o n n . : Yale University Press, 1966), p p . 3 8 5 - 8 7 , 389, 4 0 5 ; Quinn, L D S Religion Classes."

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Educators Warren N. Dusenberry and Wilson H. Dusenberry advanced the educational level of schools in Provo before moving on to other interests. USHS collections.

roles within the new community and to fix its place in the larger Mormon society. Few in number, the first generation of this developing community consisted, with two or three notable exceptions, of new converts, most of whom were Americans who came to Utah as part of the general westward movement and stayed to teach and join the Mormon church.

The pages that follow will undertake to portray this group and characterize their achievements.

Among the earliest members of this nascent community were Provo's Dusenberry brothers, Warren and Wilson. Of Pennsylvania Dutch background, they had been raised in Illinois. After acquiring a common school education they came west in 1860, pausing in Provo before proceding to California where Warren attended Vacaville College, an obscure frontier institution, and Wilson the community schools. Age twenty-six and twenty-one and possessed of boundless energy and expansive temperaments, they returned to Provo in 1862 where Warren immediately began teaching in the ward schools. In 1863 they founded the private "First Dusenberry School," which operated successfully for several years, and in 1864 they joined the church.12 In 1869 they established an advanced school, which quickly became the Timpanogos Branch 12

1:34-35.

Quoted from Wilson Dusenberry Diary in Wilkinson et al., Brigham

Young

University,

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of the University of Deseret. Drawing more students than the parent school, the Timpanogos Branch continued under Warren's direction at the heart of central Utah's cultural development until 1875 when Brigham Young stepped in to create Brigham Young Academy. Warren served as principal of the academy for the first term.

During this period the Dusenberrys had struggled to bring discipline to "brats determined on having a spree," chilled when the "Young-uns kicked the stove down," and found tuition collecting to be the "toughest part of launching an educational enterprize." They also found teaching to be "a carnival of joy"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;producing the deepest "ties of affection."13 Adding literary, athletic, musical, and dramatic programs to more conventional instruction, they had Provo's schools "jogging along very well" and contributed to a real cultural advance in a town that had previously merited the saying "Provo or Hell."14 In the long run the Dusenberry brothers proved to be too expansive to remain in the developing school community. Commercial enterprises and political activities attracted them both, and Warren became increasingly preoccupied with law. But for a dozen years they added color and zest as well as direction to Provo's educational development.

Similar in many respects was John Morgan. Born and raised in the Midwest, he fought in the Civil War, studied for two years at Eastman's Commercial College in New York, and then made an unsuccessful business attempt in Tennessee. In 1866 he accepted a contract to drive cattle to Salt Lake City for William Jennings, a Mormon businessman.

Morgan liked Utah and decided to stay, opening Morgan's Commercial College in January 1867 and joining the Mormon church that November.

With an emphasis on the practical that must have warmed Brigham Young's heart, Morgan based instruction on experience in simulated businesses, intending to "gradually merge the school into a 'bona fide' Mercantile Institution."15 In time a normal course was added and, as a public service, a library opened. Tuition was pegged at the stiff rate of $15 per quarter, although for $35 (later $50) "a life scholarship" could be purchased that admitted the holder to the entire course and refresher classes at any time.16 13 34

ibid.

Ibid., 1 : 3 6 ; Bennion, Mormonism and Education, p. 46.

Morgan's Commercial College, the Pioneer College of Utah (Salt Lake City, 1869), p. 2.

18 Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr., "Morgan College" in Carter, Heart Throbs, 1 2 : 1 2 - 1 3 . See also John Morgan Collection, U t a h State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City, for paid up scholarship in the name of T. B. Brinton; and Levi Mathers Savage, "Journal of Levi Mathers Savage" ed. by R u t h S. Hilton, mimeographed (Provo, Ut., [1955]), p. 8, for reference to a $50 fee for lifetime scholarship.

15

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CONSTITUTION

BLDG

20 S0.MA1

N'"MORGAN

COLLEGE

Morgan's Commercial College was housed in the historic Constitution on Salt Lake City's Main Street. Photograph has been retouched at some time. USHS collections.

Building

With segregated courses for men and women, Morgan's school was an immediate success. For the 1872 school year 689 students enrolled, although many were qualified only for primary work.17 As suggested by a class roster for 1869, most of Morgan's students were from Salt Lake City, with only 33 of 273 coming from elsewhere in the territory and, interestingly, 5 from midwestern states.18 Some 2,000 or more students probably attended in the eight years of the institution's life. In this light it is obvious that Morgan's College not only provided practical training but created a broadened community for young people. Bashful, workhardened boys from the "clodhopper wards" associated on a par with the self-confident daughters of Brigham Young, at least one of whom led people to believe "she had never done any kitchen work even down to setting a table." 19 Almost afire with a passion to learn, avid youngsters 17 Ralph V. Chamberlin, Life Sciences at the University of Utah: Background and History It Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950), as cited in Morgan, "Morgan College," p. 15.

(Salt 18 See the list of students in Richardson and Morgan, The Life and Ministry of John Morgan, pp. 51-52.

19 Sessions, Memoirs of James Henry Moyle, pp. 66, 74.

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Quarterly

from the territory's villages were thrown together with both young and old of the Mormon elite and sometimes maintained continuing connections with them that influenced the church's development.20 Understandably, John Morgan was gratified at the college's success.

Among the achievements to which he felt it contributed was the growth of teaching as "a profession, instead of employment to be changed at the first opportunity." 21 Many years later his biographer claimed that the University of Deseret's first real steps towards an advanced course of study came as a result of Morgan's remarkable success.22 WThatever the case, Morgan did recognize that the times required higher education.

Not only did he apparently make it pay (at least until after the panic of 1873), but as an educator he attained a position in Mormon society only a little behind the established leaders of church and business. It seems likely that his subsequent role as a prominent missionary and general authority depended in part on the start thus acquired.

Other early Utah educators of American background include Francis Marion Bishop, Henry Schultz, Joshua Reuben Clark, Louis Moench, and the Cook sisters, Mary and Ida lone. Bishop fought in the Civil War, studied science at Illinois Wesleyan, and came to Utah with John Wesley Powell. Bishop soon became a Mormon, married the daughter of Apostle Orson Pratt, and taught science at the University of Deseret for several years in the mid-1870s before establishing an assay business in Salt Lake City. Little of the eulogistic folk history related to other teachers was attached to him, and one is inclined to conclude that Bishop's teaching appointment may have been related to his father-in-law's position or to his association with the Powell surveys. If nothing else, his period as a professor points up the connection between the emerging Mormon educational community and developments in the Midwest and nation as a whole.23 20 For an example of a village M o r m o n who a t t e n d e d Morgan's College and established associations t h a t lasted a lifetime, see Savage, "Family History J o u r n a l " ; Charles S. Peterson, ed., " 'Book A â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Levi Mathers Savage': T h e Look of U t a h in 1873," Utah Historical Quarterly 41 (1973) : 8 , 9. F r o m a later period the diary of J o h n M . W h i t a k e r records similar results from Whitaker's experience at the University of Deseret. Original in Archives Division, Historical D e p a r t m e n t , C h u r c h of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City.

21 Cited in Richardson and Morgan, Life and Ministry of John Morgan, p. 50.

22 Ibid., p. 70.

23 W. L. Rusho, "Francis Bishop's 1861 River M a p s , " Utah Historical Quarterly 37 (1969) : 2 0 7 - 1 3 ; D o n D . Fowler, ed., "Photographed All the Best Scenery": Jack Hillers's Diary of the Powell Expeditions, 1871-1875 (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h Press, 1972), p. 17; Elmo Scott Watson, ed., The Professor Goes West: Illinois Wesleyan University Reports of John Wesley Powell's Explorations, 1867-1874 (Bloomington, 111.: Illinois Wesleyan University Press, 1954). Wallace Stegner says that Bishop was a g r a d u a t e of Illinois State Normal University with which Powell also h a d connections; see Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Boston: H o u g h t o n Mifflin Co., 1953), p p . 124, 140.

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"Poor Henry Schultz," as Karl Larson, historian of southern Utah, has called him, came to Utah to teach at Saint Mark's Episcopal School.24 He lost his job when he joined the Mormon church but, with the mission spirit still strong, traveled in 1874 to St. George where he proposed to establish a normal school. In this undertaking his interests corresponded with those of Apostle Erastus Snow who arranged for him to be paid from the local tithing office, which was to be reimbursed from tuition payments. St. George had few surplus resources at best and with a temple under construction carried an almost unbelievably heavy church burden.25 Schultz learned quickly that to arrange for pay was one thing and to get it another. Soon a cankered dialogue was running with Schultz complaining that it was "an utter impossibility, to be satisfied" unless his "Real Wants" were met.26 He also appealed for food, clothing, and $30 per month to meet his bills. Almost dumbfounded at his presumption, Snow sputtered that this was "more than our own families consume" and assured him that it was impossible to guarantee even $12 or $15 a month. Ultimately, Schultz left in frustration, but not before an effort to operate on a private tuition basis had shown that without the support of local leaders it was impossible to attract "enough Scholars" to pay even for "fuel of Said School."27 Much more successful in coping with the Mormon frontier was Joshua Reuben Clark. Son of a Church of the Brethren minister, he was born in Ohio, raised and educated near South Bend, Indiana, and fought in the Civil War before coming to Utah by way of the Montana gold fields in 1867. He was immediately attracted to Mormonism and joined the church within a few weeks. Settling in Grantsville west of Salt Lake City, he taught in the public schools, headed the Tooele County Educational Association, served many terms as county school superintendentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; giving that elective position elements of professionalism it lacked in most rural countiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and was a leader in cultural endeavors of every kind. His interest in books was broad, and Dwyer's Book Store was one of his regular stopping places in Salt Lake City. His role was largely confined to Grantsville and Tooele County, but in that local context his contributions were 24

Mormon

A. Karl Larson, Erastus Snow: The Life of a Missionary and Pioneer Church (Salt Lake City: University of U t a h Press, 1971), p. 585.

for the

Early

25 A good account of the problems at St. George a n d the building of the temple is found in A. Karl Larson, "I Was Called to Dixie," the Virgin River Basin: Unique Experiences in Mormon Pioneering (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1961).

26

Moffitt, History

27

Ibid.

of Public Education,

pp. 314-16.

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large, both as a teacher and an administrator and as an almost legendary figure around whom educational traditions and loyalties formed and by whose values young people were inspired. Although his son J. Reuben Clark, Jr., achieved great renown as a member of the First Presidency of the church, it is worth noting that the elder Clark was recognized more in the context of a developing local educational community than as a church leader.28 Louis Frederick Moench was an educator in the complete professional sense of the word and more than most depended entirely upon education for his livelihood and his position in the community. Born in Germany in 1846, he left his native land as a youth, migrating to upstate New York in 1856. Possessed by an almost insatiable thirst for learning, he moved west, studying at Chicago's Bryant-Stratton College before striking out for California in the mid-1860s. En route his wagon burned, and he was forced to stop at Salt Lake City where he remained. By 1868 he had joined the Mormon church and signed on as a teacher at the University of Deseret. Thereafter, he worked closely with the educators in the territory; taught at Brigham City; founded private, public, and church schools at Ogden; served as superintendent of schools in Weber County; and laid the groundwork for Weber State College. Failing health in the early 1890s led him to study medicine briefly in Cincinnati, after which he opened a practice at Pocatello, Idaho. By 1894, however, he was back at Weber Stake Academy. Still plagued by ill health, he served as principal of church academies in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah after the turn of the century.

A brilliant and scholarly man, Moench lacked the expansive selfconfidence one sees in the Dusenberrys and John Morgan. On the other hand, his achievements were broad, and he touched hundreds of scholars, including such figures as David Eccles and Charles W. Nibley, with an enthusiasm for music and drama as well as the humanities and sciences.29 He was supported and put forward in Mormon society by church leaders as an educator and contributed significantly to the scholarly community 28 Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Co., 1 9 0 1 - 3 6 ) , 3 : 4 9 ; David H . Yarn, Jr., Young Reuben: The Early Life of J. Reuben Clark, Jr. (Provo, U t . : Brigham Young University, n . d . ) , p p . 17-20, 4 5 - 4 9 .

See also Alma A. Gardiner, " T h e Founding and Development of Grantsville, U t a h , 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 5 0 " (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1959), and John L. Clark, Tucson, Ariz., to author, M a r c h 30, 1978.

29 Record of Moench's activities is found scattered in newspapers, church reports, and letters of the time. See also Walter A. Kerr, "Life of Louis F. Moench, Founder of the Weber Stake Academy (Weber College)," paper presented to U t a h Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 1 9 5 1 ; and Louis F. Moench and John R. Park, " R e p o r t " in Biennial Report of the

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generally. He rightly deserves to be regarded as the father of education in Ogden and Weber County.

Playing prominent and complicated roles in the emerging community of learning were Mary and Ida Cook. Educated in New York normal schools, they came to Utah in 1870 after Mary, who was fifteen years Ida's senior, had taught at reputable schools in Chicago and Saint Louis.

Within a year they were baptized Mormons and began to win acclaim for the excellence of their teaching and their efforts to grade the "irregularly schooled Utah children."30 This resulted in Mary's selection to head a model school in connection with the University of Deseret's teachertraining program. Soon dubbed "an Apostle of education" by historian Edward W. Tullidge, she presided for a short period over the university and continued to hold forth in her school at the Social Hall for several years before she made an unsuccessful attempt to solve the problems at St. George that had laid "poor Henry Schultz" low.31 Thereafter, she gradually disappeared from prominence. Ida, on the other hand, moved aggressively for more than two decades, playing an especially important role in Cache Valley until 1891 when she, like her sister, left the state.32 They were extraordinary women, but they were women, and therein lay limitations. Both found real opportunity and were given positions of eminence and responsibility, yet neither had opportunity to travel on church assignments in behalf of education as did some male educators who, on the face of the record, seem little if any more qualified. In addition, each was nominated to the office of county school superintendent, but both were finally excluded from that office because they were women. Like other Mormon teachers their careers crossed back and forth over the confused lines of private enterprise, religious influence, and public obligation, but for them as women it added up to a little different experience.

Although a remarkable number of leaders in the emerging community of educators were recent converts to Mormonism from the Midwest, several important exceptions exist. Robert L. Campbell and John Territorial Superintendent of District Schools (Salt Lake City, 1880) ; Leonard J. Arrington, David Eccles: Pioneer Western Industrialist (Logan: Utah State University, 1975), pp. 45, 55.

Eccles, whose schooling was brief, was typical of many Mormons who felt that advanced education produced "learned fools"; and he resisted the desires of his wife to send his own sons to college, although later in life he became a board member for Weber Academy in which capacity he served ably and with enthusiasm (p. 134). For reference to Ni'bley's indebtedness to Moench, see Kerr, "Life of Louis F. Moench."

30 Jill Mulvay, " T h e Two Miss Cooks: Pioneer Professionals for U t a h Schools," Utah Historical Quarterly 43 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 397. ::1 Ibid., pp. 4 0 3 - 4 . :,s Ibid., pp. 4 0 8 - 9 .

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Taylor stand out because of the very absence of other British, among other reasons. Converts from the British Isles came largely from the working classes and from the great industrial cities but included many individuals of intellectual inclination and scholarly attainments. Rather than finding their roles in education, however, most of these turned to business, to the clerical offices of the church, or to journalism and writing.

Indeed, the record suggests that British converts lacked the sense of educational mission that so often came from the postfrontier areas of America. 33 Robert Campbell was born in Scotland where in 1842 he joined the church to which he thereafter devoted his life. During the period under discussion he simultaneously held the offices of chief clerk at the Church Historian's Office, Salt Lake County and territorial superintendent of schools, and clerk for the all-Mormon legislative assembly. In addition, he was a sometime teacher.34 As superintendent of territorial schools he advocated graded schools, tax support for education, and standardized textbooks; and during the time of Mormon concession that marked the 1872 statehood drive he even advocated free public schools.35 Significantly, he was also one of the primary supporters of the Deseret Alphabet. In view of all this one is inclined to regard Campbell as a transitional figure. That he was an educator and a professional cannot be doubted. Yet, he was also a jack-of-all-trades sort of Saint whose real specialization was Mormonism and whose only real community appears to have been the church.

Even more than Robert Campbell, John Taylor's contributions to education were incidental. A "spared martyr," his wounding at Carthage Jail when Joseph Smith was assassinated and his almost miraculous survival marked him as one of the great heroes of the church. Born in Westmoreland County, England, in 1808, he acquired "some proficiency in . . . Latin and Greek . . . and the higher branches of mathematics," but also served as an apprentice to a cooper and a turner.36 As a Mor3 * Articles by Ronald Walker have interpreted the Godbeite dissent as a reflection of dissatisfaction among certain intellectually inclined Latter-day Saints of English background. Interestingly, none of these appears to have been prominently connected with the development of education. See Walker's "Commencement of the Godbeite Protest: Another View," Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (1974) ; " E d w a r d T u l l i d g e : Historian of the M o r m o n C o m m o n w e a l t h , " Journal of Mormon History 3 ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; a n d " T h e Stenhouses a n d the Making of a M o r m o n I m a g e , " Journal of Mormon History 1 ( 1 9 7 4 ) .

34 Jenson, LDS Biographical Encyclopedia, 3:613.

35 See the territorial school reports for 1862 to 1874, especially 1872 in which Campbell indicates t h a t county superintendents favored free schools and that public sentiment was "sufficiently ripe to justify favorable legislation"; also see Moffitt, History of Public Education, p. 122.

38 B, H . Roberts, The Life of John Taylor (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1973), p. 2 1 .

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mon leader he was gifted, articulate, and courageous. He read widely and by contrast to Brigham Young, who was not at home with the written word, he was a brilliant journalist and polemicist, if not indeed a man of letters. He distrusted scientists and once said they could do no more than "leap in the dark."37 For philosophers he often expressed contempt.

"Ignorant, learned fools," their "foolish dreamy . . . theories" could, as one pleased, be called "philosophy or fried froth."38 No Mormon leader saw the threat of sectarian teachers and mission schools to Latter-day Saint youth in more urgent terms. "Shall we allow our children to be taught by them?" he once asked. "No never. . . . Let us (not) give them over to the powers of darkness to be taught by the enemies of God and his people."39 It was in this connection that John Taylor made vital contributions to education. Days before Brigham Young's death in August 1877 he was elected territorial school superintendent, a position he held for the next four years. Along with the burdens of presiding over the church, Taylor administered the schools from his church offices and in some degree through his son-in-law and private secretary, L. John Nuttall.

Taylor made matters of education the subject of long, cogent reports in which church and state are thoroughly mixed and spoke regularly about schools in his sermons.40 In addition, Mormondom's most prominent educators were selected to travel as Taylor's special envoys. Mixing church and state inextricably, they made hundreds of visits in which they met with church leaders and school trustees, addressed public and church meetings, and conducted the business of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, a church auxiliary.11 Taylor's dual role as church president and public school superintendentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;together with his management of school duties through emissaries who differed little if at all from the subordinates who represented him in ecclesiastical businessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;mixed church and state with a forthrightness remarkable even in Utah. This was a significant development because of what it suggested to Mormons generally and to the Gentiles of Utah and the nation. On the other hand, it also contributed to a growing ten37

Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, 1 8 5 4 - 8 6 ) , 2 0 : 119.

Ibid.

39 Ibid., 2 0 : 1 3 4 - 3 5 .

40 Biennial Report of the Territorial Superintendent of District Schools . . . 1878 and 1879 (Salt Lake City, 1880), Biennial Report of the Territorial Superintendent of District Schools . . .

1880 and 1881 (Salt Lake City, 1882) ; Journal of Discourses, 1 9 : 2 4 8 - 4 9 , 2 0 : 1 1 9 - 2 0 , 134-35, 179-80, 2 1 : 3 6 8 - 6 9 .

41 Report . . . 1880 and 1881.

38

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Karl G. Maeser and John R. Park capped their careers as educators by heading the state's two major universities: Brigham Young University and University of Utah. USHS collections.

dency toward specialization that in the long run helped to separate church and state in the territory. In this connection, it is important to note that the traveling educational authorities enjoyed the full benefit of Taylor's position. They also shared in the rhetoric of praise that Mormons lavished upon their leaders. Together with the tradition of gratitude and appreciation already accumulating around the persons of prominent educators, this deference contributed to the enviable and distinctive status that teaching and teachers were coming to enjoy in Mormon society.

Ranked with Louis Moench as Taylor's chosen educational missionaries were John R. Park and Karl G. Maeser. More than perhaps any others, Park and Maeser stood at the center of educational developments in late nineteenth-century Utah. 42 Their backgrounds differed in important respects, as did their careers, and yet many important parallels exist. Maeser was German and well educated in that country's teachertraining institutes. In 1855 he joined the church in Germany, making him the first of the new educators discussed here to become a Latter-day Saint and also the only one not converted after arriving in Utah. Park, like so many other first-generation Mormon educators, was from the Midwest. He was educated at Ohio Wesleyan Academy and at a medical affiliate of the University of New York, and in 1861 headed west. Maeser See books cited in note 2 above.

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was considered something of a prize catch, and a honeymoon of sorts marked his entry into the church. Park came to Utah quietly, left, returned, and joined the church utterly without fanfare. In America, Maeser headed Union Academy, a well publicized boys school that died aborning in Salt Lake City, and taught in the Young family school. Park made the tiny hamlet of Draper into what locals, impressed with the University of Michigan's prominence, extolled as the "Ann Arbor of the Rockies." In 1867 Park was hired to head the University of Deseret.

Nearly ten years later Maeser was sent to replace Warren Dusenberry at Brigham Young Academy with the charge to "not teach even the ABCs without the Spirit of God."43 Each man remained at the head of his respective institution, defining the character of church and public education in a Mormon-dominated society, until the 1890s when each left to undertake broader responsibilities. Park took over as state superintendent to work out the delicate balances of a free public school system both Gentiles and Mormons could live with. Maeser became head of the church's educational system, which was moving rapidly toward its twentieth-century patterns.

Both men attracted followers by the hundreds in a society where previously only church leaders and perhaps a few business leaders claimed followings. Indeed, the loyalty of the followers had been reserved mainly for the church itself by the hierarchical character of its leadership. Consequently, it was a clear measure of changing times when followers of Park and Maeser left a record of loyalty and appreciation rarely equalled even in the adoring literature that honored leaders of the church.44 Of greater consequence than eulogies, however, was the fact that Park and Maeser were emulated in spirit, conduct, and professional connections by a growing community of young people who, in turn, were loved and respected in their own right, thereby touching the entire Mormon society.

Suggestive of this, and yet entirely typical, were the comments of James H. Moyle about "Dr. Park, who so quietly and modestly moved in that community": Who can now tell what part the University of Deseret played in the great drama, and just why there was attracted to it a simple, obscure character like Dr. John R. Park, a physician who was promoted from school teacher 43

Burton, Karl G. Maeser, p. 26.

A good place to make comparison of this kind is in Sessions, Memoirs of James Henry Moyle. Moyle observed many church leaders and was very close to some. His observations are always respectful but rarely affectionate, and by comparison to his warm assessment of John R. Park they are sometimes downright cool.

44

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H o w choice and rare a character he was. It is thus to my school teachers, the Deseret University, and Dr. Park that I attribute my opportunity for mental development and elevation from the humble walks of a west-side clodhopper to wider fields of growth and progress. 45

One more point should be made with respect to Park and Maeser before turning to some concluding remarks. The relationship they enjoyed with students depended to only a limited degree upon original thought. They and their contemporaries were not prolific thinkers and scarcely merit being called men of letters in the ordinary sense. Maeser was a moralistic thinker whose writings are admirable for their clarity and language yet are little more than a collection of homilies.46 Nowhere is\ there evidence that he tried to work elements of the social gospel, social Darwinism, or other popular doctrines of the day into his writings.

The biographer of Utah's George Sutherland, a Maeser student who was perhaps the most influential figure on the conservative Supreme Court of the 1920s and 1930s (and one of Utah's most forgotten figures) attributed Sutherland's unswerving commitment to social Darwinist principles to Maeser.47 This, however, appears to be an unwarranted conclusion. Although subsequent teachers at Brigham Young University made halting attempts to reconcile Mormon thought to Darwinism, there is no evidence whatever that Maeser did.48 Indeed, in an 1898 book, he spoke out forthrightly against it in a way that would have pleased John Taylor and doubtless did please current church leaders.49 Park rarely went into print on this or any other subject, apparently preferring quiet personal instruction to the end of his days.

Thus, after 1867 education in Utah changed. Its development corresponded closely with an expanding emphasis on education nationally and was hastened by the arrival of the transcontinental railroad. The 43

Sessions, Memoirs of James Henry Moyle, p. 66.

See his School and Fireside (n.p., 1898).

Joel F. Paschal, Mr. Justice Sutherland: A Man against the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 8-9.

48 For discussions of Mormon thought relating to social Darwinism, see, for example, N. L. Nelson, The Mormon Point of View 1 (October 1 9 0 4 ) : 3 6 4 - 6 7 ; Chamberlin, Life and Philosophy, esp. chaps. 6 and 7; Richard Sherlock, " T h e Controversy over Evolution and Science in L D S History," paper prepared at Harvard University.

49 Maeser, School and Fireside, pp. 2 8 - 3 1 .

48

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success of the Protestant churches in making the schoolroom a .primary line in the campaign to Americanize and "Christianize" the Mormons shook Latter-day Saint leaders out of an educational complacency induced by the demands and isolation of pioneering. Increasing importance was placed on school attendance, and the church began to give more than nominal support to higher education. Stung by the Protestant effort to entice away its young through learning, Mormon society was also forced to accept branches of learning for which there had been no enthusiasm earlier. Also, doors of position and respect were opened to educational leaders, allowing them to be counted as a new elite.

Significantly, the leading figures in this development were new converts, mostly from the American Midwest, who had much in common with the Protestant missionaries and who had themselves lived through periods of frontier development similar in many respects to what was then underway in Utah. By contrast, few old-line Mormons and fewer British and Scandinavians emerged as leaders in the first generation of this educational renaissance. One also sees forming within the larger Mormon society a specialized community of educators with its own commitment to learning, its own social lines and traditions, and a new set of economic and intellectual opportunities. Second-generation educators soon joined them, but the founding fathers, especially Park and Maeser, were dominant figures in Utah education throughout the remaining years of the century.

Some advance was also made toward defining those elements of education essential to the church and those essentially public. As the era had begun lines dividing the two spheres either had not existed or had been hopelessly intertwined. The situation was complicated for a time immediately after 1867 by what may be called entrepreneurial schools or institutions run largely for profit. By 1880, however, private enterprise was receding as a factor, and higher education, at least, was following two courses: one religious and one public but both very much under Mormon influence as Maeser and Park pursued their separate paths at the Brigham Young Academy and the University of Deseret. Through the efforts of these men the institutional foundations of separation were pretty well defined in higher education by the 1890s.

Another development that contributed to separation of church and public education was the emergence of a specialized community of educators who, unlike John Taylor and Robert L. Campbell, could be Mormon and involve themselves in education without formally represent-

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The Franklin School in Salt Lake City in the mid-1890s symbolizes the separation of the public schools from direct church influence.

USHS collections.

ing the church in the process. In terms of institutions, some progress had been made toward relieving the tensions between the Mormons and the larger society. On the other hand, Mormon society was becoming more complicated as an educational community grew within it and new values were entertained. With such considerations in mind, it is apparent that growing separation of church and state in education during these years contributed significantly to the settlement of the Mormon conflict and to the social pattern by which Utahns have since lived.

The Polygamy Story: Fiction and Fact. By J. M A X ANDERSON. (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1979. X + 166 p p . $4.95.)

This is an important book, though less for the subject it addresses than certain ancillary questions it provokes.

T h e book's purpose is to demonstrate that the Lorin Woolley story, so essential to contemporary M o r m o n F u n d a mentalism, is historically suspect in any n u m b e r of regards; that those advocating the practice of polygamy since it was abandoned by the M o r m o n church have been inconsistent a n d disingenuous; a n d that the Lorin Woolley story has been modified from time to time for the purpose of rendering it historically a n d doctrinally more acceptable.

Woolley is described as a small, insecure m a n motivated by dreams of grandeur. I n n u e n d o , deceit, and subterfuge were employed by Woolley and his followers to establish the belief that he a n d a few others were specially set apart

by President J o h n Taylor to continue the practice of polygamy. Those involved in the early years of the movement, particularly Woolley, are shown to have h a d lapses of memory, conveniently restored, and to have made a variety of claims and predictions m a n y of which failed. T h e author gives considerable attention to the revelation Taylor is alleged to have received on September 27, 1886, and succeeds in disentangling it from the Woolley account itself. T o o long, Woolley's claims and the said revelation have been thought to go h a n d in hand. Proof of one was considered a strong defense

of the other. T h e author makes a convincing case for viewing them as separate historical problems. Most likely, Woolley's story was a later fabrication intended to derive credibility from the 1886 event. I consider Anderson's study of this matter, albeit only partly developed, to be the most valuable contribution of his book.

Few areas of Mormonism so beg for objective research and explication as that of polygamy, both old and new.

Anderson has clearly devoted a great deal of time to the subject. This leaves one regretting the anti-Fundamentalist animus so visible throughout the book.

T h e work suffers most from a polemical occupation with detail. H e argues, for example, that as shown by exhumation in 1928, Joseph Smith had not been resurrected at the time of the putative 1886 visit and so, contrary to Woolley's attestations, could not have shaken hands with mortals present; and, t h a t the brilliance ascribed to President Taylor's countenance after emerging from his night-long conversations with heavenly visitors exceeds w h a t precedent will allow. T h e effect apologetic zeal has in distorting an investigator's perspective is perhaps best illustrated when Anderson labels as a "significant question" Woolley's claim, after more than forty years, to recollect musical numbers sung by a heavenly choir and Anderson's failure to identfy the songs in an

LDS hymnal.

314 Despite its narrow concern with disputation, the book does succeed in gathering into one place a considerable amount of material bearing on Mormon Fundamentalist beginnings. The Lorin Woolley story itself, from its first appearance in 1912 through subsequent amended editions, is provided here.

Other questions associated with Mormonism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are also explored.

This is always done, however, with the single object of finding error or falsehood in the Woolley account. Nowhere is comparable attention given to the contradictions and difficulties found in official Mormon descriptions of polygamy and its decline. For instance, Woolley claimed George Q. Cannon and others formally considered a Manifesto to discontinue polygamy as early as 1886. This is part of the Fundamentalist a r g u m e n t t h a t describes President Woodruff as yielding to such proposals in contrast to the more stalwart Taylor who resisted and warned against them.

After convincingly demonstrating that certain portions of Woolley's statements concerning the alleged 1886 Manifesto are incorrect, Anderson goes no further in pursuit of origins and influences contributing to the Manifesto issued by the church four years later. Rather, this was the work of God and Woodruff alone. Regarding plural marriages in the post-Manifesto period, although Fundamentalists are scored in the book for once issuing a formal pledge to cease the practice and then violating their promise, there is no criticism of approved polygamous marriages after 1890 by church authorities themselves.

The book closes on an appeal to trust in the leadership of contemporary orthodox Mormonism.

At this point one would ordinarily sum up his judgment of the book and bring the review to an end, in this case praising the author's extensive research into manuscript and other sources while

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faulting the partial and construed appropriation made of them. It is in this regard, however, that a larger, more critical question arises. This relates to some of the manuscripts cited in the book. They seem not to be available for general scholarly examination and appear to have been shown to the author for special use in his book alone.

The documents concerned are the George Q. Cannon Journals and President John Taylor's Office Journals.

Other items such as the John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley "files" nowhere appear as such in the church's library or search room catalogues.

As most students of Mormon history know, these are part of a larger body of manuscripts the church has long withheld from public view. Consequently, when this reviewer saw them at the bottom of Anderson's pages among his references, he happily inferred that the bar to their examination at last had been lifted. Assuming the book was honestly presented for the scrutiny of others interested in the topic and that the materials cited were genuine, it seemed appropriate to ask to see them, especially in connection with responsibilities associated with this review. Formal letters were sent asking for permission to see the materials in question.

Although it was explicitly stated that only those precise items footnoted by Anderson were being requested and that this was being done for the purpose of reviewing his book in this journal, the requests were denied. (The reader should know that these denials did not issue from the church's official historians who, under the direction of Leonard Arrington, are carefully and honestly reporting their research among available manuscripts in the church's archives.) When the petitioner asked why he was refused privileges tendered to Anderson, he was told to ask the author of the book himself.

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Book Reviews and Notices All this raises questions of a serious n a t u r e a b o u t the good faim a n d intentions of those responsible for administering the church's archival holdings.

T o allow one researcher the published use of materials denied another, stating only t h a t the documents in question are restricted, is patently unfair a n d constitutes a violation of the Code of Ethics subscribed to by both the Society of A m e r i c a n Archivists a n d the American Library Association. T h i s is troubling enough. But w h a t is involved here has to d o only with verification of the citations in the book concerned. In other words, we are denied the right so m u c h as to ascertain w h e t h e r in this case alone we are being told the truth. O n e is led back to the earlier concern. If indeed it is a serious work, intended for readers seriously interested in M o r m o n c h u r c h history, surely there can be n o opposition to verifying citations on w h i c h claims m a d e in the book are based. If this c a n n o t be done, one must only conclude t h a t either there is something to be feared by an examination of such materials, t h a t they have not been correctly read, or else, contrary to our assumption, the work is an imposture.

While the level of professional services in the L D S archives has unquestionably improved over the last several years a n d deserves high praise in many regards, the policies involved in this case can only frustrate scholars, regardless of religious predilection. A broad, statesmanlike posture by the church would surely recognize that, in the final analysis, everyone is best served by the sunlight a n d fresh air of free, unencumbered inquiry. It would seem obvious t h a t the credibility of works like Anderson's m u s t rest on resilience to examination, including a scrutiny of their sources. I t does the book a n d its a u t h o r a disservice, weakening the church's p o sition itself, when authorities impose

restrictions rendering historical t r u t h finding a n d its verification impossible.

Finally, there is one thing m o r e t h a t gives the book significance. Anderson's account of F u n d a m e n t a l i s t beginnings should remind any M o r m o n reader, if only half aware, of things familiar: charges of deceit; diminutive characterizations of the movement's early leaders; the pointing to inconsistencies a n d prophetic failures; the criticism of evolving accounts of the initial, authorizing revelation; an a p p e a l t o the safer course of established authority. W i t h persecution a n d obloquy largely things of a n era gone by, a n d with the p h e n o m e n a l growth of its membership, the M o r m o n c h u r c h is launched on an increasingly secure, broad-based career. W h a t was a heretical, polygamous, American sect is now a popular, monogamous, worldwide church. T h i s kind of transition gives Anderson's study a special place in view of F u n d a m e n t a l i s t claims t h a t theirs is a restorationist movement. History, as so m a n y times before, has doubled back upon itself. A n d it is as an instance of this ancient p a t t e r n t h a t Anderson's work says so m u c h . F o r it is not the p h e n o m e n o n of radical renewal alone b u t also the censuring response by the older, accepted order that betrays the replicating p a t t e r n involved. Piqued by allegations of apostasy, the c h u r c h , t h r o u g h quasi-official publications such as this, focusing on the eccentricities of F u n d a m e n t a l i s t leaders a n d the errors of their reported past, presents us with a specimen, an evidence of the historical stage to which M o r m o n i s m has evolved.

The Polygamy Story is both less a n d more than the title suggests.

B. C A R M O N H A R D Y

California

State

University Fullerton

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The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1824-1977. Edited by ROBERT M. KVASNICKA and HERMAN J. VIOLA. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Xviii + 384 pp. $19.75.)

One could hardly expect a book made up of short biographical essays on each of the forty-three men who have held the position of commissioner of Indian affairs to include an in-depth analysis of government-Indian relations in the past 150 years. The editors do not pretend that their book will fulfill such an ambitious goal. However, this collection of essays is far more than a series of biographical portraits.

The essays, each written by a distinguished scholar of Native American history, describe the ups and downs and twists and turns in U.S. government policy toward the Indians. The later essays, particularly, concentrate less on biographical information about each commissioner and more on the man's philosophy, his relations with other policymakers, and the effects of his administration on the Indian tribes.

Francis Paul Prucha's essay on Thomas J. Morgan, commissioner from 1889 to 1893, is an example of a well-written blend of biography and policy. The eleven-page essay on Francis E. Leupp (1905-9) by Donald L. Parman is another. The Leupp article is one of the longest in the book.

Of course, as with any work consisting of forty-three essays written by thirty-one authors, there are occasional weaknesses in continuity and uneven treatment of some individuals. It is to the credit of the editors that this is noticeable only in the early essays where biographical material was scarce and a discussion of policy was probably not possible for lack of source material. An example of the continuity problem is evident in the essays on William P. Dole and his successor, Dennis N. Cooley. One has the feeling after reading the Cooley article that important facts have been left out of the Dole essay.

The essays on Ezra A. Hayt and James W. Denver are among the weakest. The Hayt article comes across as an apology for the corruption-ridden administration of the man who was commissioner from 1877 to 1880. The Denver essay has more fundamental problems. For example, die author writes that Denver's "lifelong fixation with land is reflected" in the fact that "about a half dozen printed legal briefs concerning land" were found in his personal papers at his death. On the contrary, evidence of so few legal materials of that type in any lawyer's papers would indicate a mere passing interestâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;hardly a fixation. The author of the Denver article draws numerous other conclusions that are not justified by the evidence.

The only criticism of the well-researched and well-written essays on the twentieth-century commissioners is that several former commissioners who are still living apparently were not interviewed. If they were interviewed it is not so cited in the bibliographies.

The useful bibliographical material, particularly relating to National Archives collections, is of added value to the work. As coeditor Robert M. Kvasnicka wrote in his concluding chapter: "Thanks to the contributors to this book, the job of discovery has been reduced considerably, but the challenge of producing in-depth studies of most of the commissioners remains."

This book serves mainly as an excellent survey of the subject and sources.

For a general outline of BIA policy over the years as well as for biographical data on the makers of that policy, the book should be "must reading" for students of government-Indian relations.

P H I L I P J. ROBERTS

Wyoming State Archives, Museums, and Historical Department

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Book Reviews and Notices Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880. By (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. Xvi + 240 pp. $11.95.)

Julie Roy Jeffrey explains in her introduction to Frontier Women that she has two purposes. One is to "remedy the neglect" of women—almost half the pioneers crossing the Mississippi—by the many historians "sharing the nation's interest in the frontier." The other is to disprove the "feminist" theory that the West offered women special economic and political opportunities which they used as "means of liberating themselves from stereotypes and behaviors" that were "constricting and sexist." Jeffrey succeeds admirably with the first but disappoints in the second.

Relying on journals, reminiscences, and letters written by pioneer women, bolstered by some census data and an extensive bibliography of secondary sources, Jeffrey describes the experiences of white, Protestant, American women in the trans-Mississippi West during the frontier period. She struggles to reconcile her two purposes. Frontier women are shown departing "from social and behavioral norms" in their "determination to turn wilderness into civilization" and "accepting] the costs involved in the transformation." They are also shown refusing, for the most part, "to claim that their new activities were appropriate for all women." Jeffrey concludes that frontier women, as a group, "were very conscious of conventional female norms, eager to observe and spread them."

Jeffrey wants to discredit the stereotypes of women as reluctant emigrants, as lonely, often-pregnant slaves on the farming frontier, as dominated by men on the urban frontier, and as absent from the mining frontier. She therefore describes women's participation in the decisions to move West, women's coequal work on the family farms, women's involvement in social, commercial, and religious systems and organizations

JULIE ROY JEFFREY.

in the western cities and towns, and women's search for riches in the mining camps—as prostitutes and as respectable entrepreneurs.

Yet, Jeffrey wants also to disprove the theory that because "frontier conditions forced them into manly pursuits and led them to modify some of their standards," women "pressed for liberation from female norms and cultures."

She suggests that the cult of domesticity which described the model of female behavior as pious and submissive was so widely promoted and so widely accepted in nineteenth-century America that it overwhelmed any reality that was contradictory. The cult of domesticity developed out of the industrialization that broke apart the family as a selfsufficient economic unit. It served as the rationalization that women's subsequent separateness from and subservience to men actually made women morally superior and, therefore, responsible for the "civilizing" of society—within the home.

Rightly explaining away western triumphs for woman suffrage as exceptional, describing women's organized campaigns against gambling, prostitution, and drinking in attempts to civilize the frontier as ineffectual and short-lived, and noting that the popularity of coeducation in the West was economically motivated, Jeffrey mistakenly concludes that the frontier experience did not encourage women "to break with prevailing concepts of the sexual order."

Jeffrey's summary of the legal and economic status of women in the West is incomplete. Her assumption that the cult of domesticity, which was created by urban, middle-class easterners, was accepted by all strata of western women is unsupported. Her exploration of the relationships of experience, consciousness, and convention is unconvincing.

And most dissatisfying of all, her de-

318 scription of the cult as maintaining a new position of women, without recognizing it as building on already existing systems of patriarchy and male power, as but merely the latest effort to justify sexism, is misleading. Those frontier women whose experiences did enable them to become consciously independent and self-directed broke with not just the cult but also with entrenched religious, cultural, and legal traditions.

Frontier Women does have many strengths. Attention is paid to the often overlooked single women on the frontiers. A chapter on the Mormon frontier is included which contains clear, concise descriptions of Mormonism, the institution of polygamy, women's varied responses and adjustments to both, and

Utah Historical

Quarterly

the complex and often contradictory position of women in that society. And there is a rich use of statements by individual frontier women that enlivens and personalizes the history.

Despite the justification for the irritating lack of footnotes that Frontier Women is "intended for the general reader rather than the scholar," this is not a light, simplified collection of generalizations. It is a thoughtful, provocative contribution to the history of the West and of womenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;useful to the scholar as well as the general reader.

KATHRYN L. MACKAY

American West Center University of Utah

William H. Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West. By RICHARD M. CLOKEY. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Xiv + 305 pp. $18.95.)

When I read that Richard M. Clokey, who devoted his doctoral dissertation to William H. Ashley, worked fifteen years before he could assemble, digest, and synthesize the whole of Ashley's biography, I, among others, was not surprised. Indeed, that Professor Clokey could have done the excellent job he did within a decade and a half is a tribute to his ability and tremendous research. Years ago I stated that if one of our mountain men fur traders should be served with a full biography, that individual ought to be William H. Ashley. Born in Virginia, he migrated at an early age to west Tennessee and wound up in Missouri before that area was purchased by the United States. He was a businessman, frontiersman, real estate promoter, trader, merchant, lead miner, gunpowder manufacturer, plantation owner, brigadier general of the militia, participant in the War of 1812 on the Missouri frontier, politician, "Counterfeit Jacksonian." lieutenant governor, twice unsuccessful candidate

for the governorship of Missouri, congressman from Missouri for three terms, financier, and explorer. What a unique and remarkable character fitting an American frontiersman! Yet, he never received a full biography, nor was his grave marked until a hundred years after his death.

Starting as a partner with Andrew Henry in 1821, Ashley and his men made the first real entries into the Rocky Mountain fur trade, changing the character of the trade to trapping, and creating the rendezvous system.

Ashley made two or three journeys himself; however, his significant part was in financing the trade. This phase of Ashley's life has been generally known, mostly through the work and scholarship of Dale L. Morgan, upon whose findings Clokey leans heavily.

Clokey has very definitely summarized the developments of the fur trade, weaving his findings around the activities of Ashley. Equally important, it appears to me that Clokey has done an

Book Reviews and Notices outstanding work in presenting his subject as a strong and vibrant human being. He gives a vivid picture of Ashley as a settler and land promoter.

Although overshadowed by Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, Ashley became a spokesman for western expansion in spite of his limitations as an orator.

Coming from a relatively unknown Virginia family, Ashley achieved much in his life. He started without family background, fortune, or higher education, but each of his three marriages helped him to climb higher on the ladder of success.

Clokey has succeeded in giving William Ashley the historical niche he right-

319 fully deserves. The volume contains many useful illustrations, a tremendous bibliography, and an adequate index.

Clokey's concluding sentence is: "Both as a moving force in his own right, and as a representative frontiersman who capitalized upon the magnificent opportunities for success in the early nineteenth century, he [Ashley] deserves more than historians or the American public have given him."

Richard M. Clokey has done exactly this.

A. P. NASATIR

San Diego State University

Roots of Modern Mormonism. By MARK P. LEONE. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Xvi + 250 pp. $15.00.)

There is little doubt: Mark P. Leone's Roots of Modern Mormonismâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a captivating piece of research and insight into Mormon floweringâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is indispensable for anyone interested in this religion which originated in the United States and currently is viewed as the quintessence of successful American religions. The scholar intrigued by Mormonism and its evolution 18501900 will find the work especially useful.

An impressive publication, it opens up Mormonism as an example of a small group's managing to remain alive where the prevailing national ethos was basically alien. Leone answers this question: How do subordinate groups endure, particularly if they are antithetical to state philosophy?

Mormonism was thus in the nation yet not of it because of Joseph Smith's failure to condone materialist capitalism. (Infant Mormonism was philosophically nonmaterial and socialistic.) According to Maryland anthropologist Leone, the Mormon empire, founded in the Great Basin after the migration

westward of the faiLhful of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was a religious Utopia that blossomed into an indubitable theocracy governed by a lay priesthood. In time the Mormons developed pragmatically significant rituals, forms that help explain an institutional dynamism delivering them from alienation to full membership in the United States. Leone advances the thesis that the Latter-day Saint's major metamorphosis is from a self-governing communist theocracy to a republican, capitalist, and corporate religious apparatus supporting and valuing the free enterprise system it had formerly condemned â&#x20AC;&#x201D;and condoning the changes because this is what the Union wished.

The wonder is that Latter-day Saints fail to perceive the contradiction between Joseph Smith's vision of the church and what it is today. Did Mormon leaders after founder Joseph Smitii perceive that church existence depended upon their ability to conform to the Union without eviscerating Smith's doctrine? Managers of the contemporary

320 church bureaucracy regularly impose concepts and operations that they do not justify scripturally. Giving the priesthood to black males, changing weekly church meeting schedules so that the faithful come together only on Sunday, and altering the conventional Mormon underclothing to appear less peculiar: are canonical precedents demanded?

Changes seem pragmatic and consequential, based on continuing success in this capitalistic world rather than on any abiding nonconsequential rules.

Leone sees Mormonism sailing with the prevailing state winds and aiming for a comfortable port. Joseph Smith's doctrines do not now provide the compass for decisions by the hierarchy.

By adopting what Joseph Smith abhorred as capitalism, the Latter-day Saints have endured as other minorities have withered. Presently, the church is a wealthy corporate entity. Detailing this transformation, using settlements along the Little Colorado River as his vantage point, is the aim of Leone's writing. He provides fascinating particulars supporting his theme. Analyzing tithing records of the Snowflake community, for instance, helps to demonstrate how the church worked as a managed economy and how ceremonies enhanced subsistence. The payment of a tithe was a rite dictated by God: distribution of in-kind tithes to the needy Saints was a corollary. Like tithing, the quarterly conference practice was a required religious observance, used at the same time to help the Saints prosper: coming together was not only an opportunity to worship, it was also an opening to issue directives for the select production of goods exchangeable from one Little Colorado community to another.

These philosophical underpinnings for early Latter-day Saint perseverance are now hardly more than poltergeists in the attics of old Mormon buildings. According to Leone, Joseph Smith's theo-

Utah Historical Quarterly cratic and social vision does not intrude seriously into the typical Mormon Sunday School class. Practicing Mormons in an adult course meet together and throw out opinions which are generally agreed to by a moderator/ teacher and other class members. A variety of subject views will be tolerated. The teacher does not pretend to have at his grasp a dogma from the wellspringâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;absolute and against which every comment offered during the class period may be judged for its veracity. Why not? Because, as Leone insists, there are no closed issues. Yet, there is strength in the toleration and acceptance of various opinions, for everyone comes away satisfied that his interpretation is within the bounds of the gospel, that he is a human being competent to interpret. In fact, the current practice is for the teacher to follow a manual others are encouraged to purchase and read. Sunday School course material being used for adults during 1980 is mainly biographical, drawn from former church presidents' lives. The purpose is to draw out lessons for class members' ethical demeanor from history. The material is prescriptive, not descriptive. Parallels are drawn further from the scriptures.

But fundamental issues of doctrine with ensuing debate rarely arise. Such considerations are far removed from Joseph Smith's communal ideal as Leone sees it. Smith "gave himself free rein to create a completely new system" that denies creation but includes the notion of individual infinite existenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;each person continuing on after this mortality as a sentient, creative being with the personal goal of Godhood. Along these lines of Mormon theology author Leone manages a refreshing interpretation; at the least, his style is refreshingly clear and to the point.

Nonetheless, the reader may find Leone's sallies into pragmatism and existentialism heavy going in his latter chapters. The case for Mormon existen-

Book Reviews and Notices tialistic overtones is not new. T h e author alludes to Latter-day Saint e m p h a sis on living in the present. Further, he contends that M o r m o n s are memoryless, that is, that they fail to retain any coherent historical perspective broad enough to include a picture of past Mormonism that would relate the movement, for example, to aspects of United States secular historyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an economic, political, and industrial view. M o r m o n history as it is fed to the average Latterday Saint seems narrowed to faithpromoting chronicles of pioneer leaders.

And a telling contention of Leone's is that the selected view of these models commonly taken makes them seem like contemporaries: it is as though Joseph Smith a n d Brigham Young died only yesterday. Everything is current m o t i o n : the present governs the future and there is no past time.

T h e t r u t h found in M o r m o n i s m is dynamic in the sense that it is pragmatic and existential: people are free agents w h o must control their environment t h r o u g h positive action and create a form of t r u t h founded in effects m a d e by such exertion, although existentialism in the doctrine does not extend to activism relating to current social issues such as the I r a n i a n crisis or the M X issue. M o r m o n s d o not debate a social issue to go forth and act on it as Sartre would have approved; moreover, the hierarchy does not recommend such action. But it seems the church hierarchy can be goaded into reaction by an issue such as the E R A that threatens to destroy the very fabric of the church, upon which its material success rests.

321 Leone's work is admirable, yet not without problems. I n my opinion, he dees not give enough space to the Book of M o r m o n as a significant m a r k of peculiarity when the church is losing its distinction. Yet another difficulty for those readers unfamiliar with M o r m o n ism is his minor deviance from fact.

T h e author states that a Latter-day Saint must attend a temple at least once a year to remain in good standing.

Such a contention belies logic, for m a n y of the faithful live totally out of reach.

Another instance of error is his assertion that holders of the Melchizedek priesthood are called priests. T h e y are designated as elders. T h e r e are other distortions of fact: "Testimony Sunday usually begins with a brief time set aside for children from age five, to give their testimonies [italics a d d e d ] . " This image is unsatisfactory. T h e functioning church deserves more firsthand experience a n d less secondhand description.

But this publication will prove durable. T h e author's ability to synthesize the past and present of the C h u r c h of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints concerning its evolution from a c o m m u n a l istic to a capitalistic minority is of m o ment. In the process Leone explains the church organization so a student m a y understand, and he does it in an energetic, compelling expository style. Every serious examiner of the M o r m o n s must read Roots of Modern Mormonism.

ROBERT DALTON

Dixie

College

The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture. By W I L L I A M W. SAVAGE, J R . ( N o r m a n : University of O k l a h o m a Press, 1979. Xii + 179 p p . $12.95.)

If we are not infected with the bug to some degree ourselves, we certainly know someone who is. "Cowboyitis" strikes down men and women of all ages, educational backgrounds, and pro-

fessions. T h e stockbroker, insurance agent, and college professor are as likely to be victims as the truckdriver, construction worker, or cab driver. This social disease is epidemic both east a n d

322 west of the Rocky Mountains and the telltale symptoms are well known. The stricken soul comes home from a hard day at work and slips into his faded Levis (preferably a size or two too small) and shiny Tony Lama boots.

With an oversized Stetson daringly tilted back on his head he settles into an overstuffed easy chair, lights up a Marlboro, flips open a tall can of Coors, and watches the Denver Broncos brutalize some hapless opponent on the television.

William W. Savage, Jr., in The Cowboy Hero attempts not only to diagnose this national affliction but manfully searches for the causal virus as well.

The book's title could be a bit misleading, for although the first and final chapters offer something of an overview of cowboy historiography (such as it is), the book is really not concerned with history. That is not a critical loss, for the author's intent is to be contemporary rather than historical. Savage traces the cowboy hero from William "Buck" Taylor up through Tom Mix, Bill Boyd, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne; however, he is more concerned with how modern American culture uses and abuses the cowboy's heroic image than with the genealogy of the cowboy hero.

Savage tackles such issues as the cowboy cult of dress and mannerisms, country and western music (with emphasis on the Waylon Jennings-Willie Nelson sound), the marketing of cowboy imagery to sell breakfast cereal, cigarettes, beer, rifles, automobiles, and just about anything else that some advertising executive dares to place the cowboy seal of approval upon, and the place, or non-

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place, of females in the universal cowboy order of things. A chapter on the use of the cowboy image in athletics will surely win the author no friends among the fans of such diverse sporting events as rodeo and wrestling. Savage's most biting comments, however, are reserved for members of what he calls the "cowboy establishment" (most notably the conservative, monied groups dealing in cowboy art and collectables), a body of "experts" all-knowing when it comes to spurs, chaps, and the latest prices for Russell and Remington paintings, while at the same time vigorously opposing the efforts of historians to uncover the factual cowboy. On occasion the author's tone can be strident, opinionated, and a bit overbearing, not only when it comes to the "cowboy establishment" but also in his comments on music, films, and other writers who have attempted to deal with this subject. Savage's ready wit and clever style allow him to get away with much of this, but the reader ought to be aware that sections of the book are more editorial than historical.

Every reader will undoubtedly have some cherished personal belief attacked before finishing the book.

Still, this is a book that all who share an interest in our western heritage and in how that heritage has contributed to the development of a distinctive national character, should read. It is a perceptive book that will provoke and challenge the reader, be that person a scholar, a western history buff, or simply a searcher in quest of personal and national identity.

PAUL A. HUTTON

Utah State

University

Water for the West: The Bureau of Reclamation, 1902-1977. By M I C H A E L C. R O B I N S O N .

(Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1979. Iv + 117 p p . Paper, $6.00.)

A readable chronicle of the efforts of a federal agency to conserve a n d m a n age a vital resource. T h e achievements of the bureau are prodigious a n d can be catalogued in terms of miles of canals dug, n u m b e r of d a m s built, or a m o u n t s of hydroelectric power generated. A m u c h m o r e revealing measure, however, a n d one that emerges in this account, is in the interplay of political, technical, a n d administrative feats t h a t h a d an overwhelming social consequenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the creation of life-sustaining habitats in the arid West.

This book is recommended to those interested in environmental or western history, public works, engineering, or n a t u r a l resource m a n a g e m e n t .

Nicholas Groesbeck Morgan: The Man Who Moved City Hall. By J E A N R. P A U L S O N . (Provo, U t . : Press P u b lishing Limited, 1979. Xvi + 194 pp.)

Biography of a civic leader whose story parallels the growth of Salt L a k e City from gas lights to parking terraces.

T h e city hall of the title is the gracious, historic Council Hall which was threatened with demolition in 1950 when M o r g a n intervened.

T h e book is compiled primarily from personal and family records a n d includes photographs of interest to local, social, and sporadic historians.

State and Local Government in Utah.

(Salt L a k e City: U t a h F o u n d a t i o n , 1979. Vii + 216 p p . Paper, $6.00.)

A fourth edition by this nonprofit, public service agency of current information on state a n d local government a n d its financing. I n the face of this no-nonsense presentation of h a r d factual d a t a , the foundation's claim of accuracy a n d objectivity would be difficult to challenge. T h i s is an excellent handbook for public officials, businessmen, teachers, civic a n d trade organizations. as well as the weary a n d wary interested citizen w h o suspects his tax dollars disa p p e a r into t h e twilight zone.

Science and Religion 1860.

By

in America:

HERBERT

1800â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

HOVENKAMP.

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Xii + 273 p p . $16.00.)

Professor H o v e n k a m p traces the attempt and failure of orthodox Protestants to reconcile theology a n d scripture with nineteenth-century science, especially biology a n d geology. I n some regions of the country this a t t e m p t is still being m a d e .

Guide to the Smithsonian Archives 1978.

(Washington, D . C : Smithsonian I n stitution Press, 1978. Xxvii + 298 pp.)

T h e Rolls-Royce of archives guides, the Smithsonian's guide could serve as a model for institutions with the budget of the Smithsonian. People who enjoy obscure entries in encyclopedias will even find it fascinating to read.

Utah Historical Quarterly

324 Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums.

By EDWARD P. ALEXANDER.

(Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1979. Xii + 308 pp. Cloth, $12.95; Paper, $7.95.)

Noteworthy for its chapters on the modern functions of museums such as exhibition, interpretation, and community service, this work will be of great interest to both museum professionals and museumgoers. With the Children's Museum at Wasatch Springs still a gleam in city fathers' eyes, the Utah State Historical Society's museum still being born, and the Utah Museum of Natural History still in its youth, Professor Alexander's work is especially relevant to all Utahns.

Guide to Manuscript Collections in the National Museum of History and Technology, 1978. (Washington, D . C : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978. Xiv + 143 pp.)

The Museum of History and Technology is the kind of delightsome place that only a grown-up boy or girl can appreciate. Among the disparate artifacts, documents, etc., catalogued here are papers on Utah reclamation and irrigation dams, World War I venereal disease posters, and photographs of Latin American musical instruments.

Women might be especially interested in the papers of Samuel Guthrie, the discoverer of chloroform. Originally used chiefly for childbirth, chloroform was opposed by many who thought that God and Nature had intended women to suffer during labor. Queen Victoria, however, once replied to a protesting group of English bishops: "We are having the baby, and we shall have the chloroform."

As for this Smithsonian Guide, we are amused and fascinated.

Puritan Boston and Quaker

Philadel-

phia. By E. DIGBY BALTZELL. (New

York: The Free Press, 1979. Xii + 585 pp. $19.95.)

On the face of it, this book does not seem to be of much relevance to those interested in Utah history, although we do learn that John White Geary, the founder of a family of Proper Philadelphians. was offered but declined the governorship of Utah Territory. Perceptive readers, however, may find some interesting parallels betweeen Puritanfounded New England and Mormonfounded Utah, especially the roles played by prominent and wealthy citizens in government.

The book is also fascinating for its asides on contemporary affairs and mores, such as this footnote: "In our day, religion has been replaced by the worship of art, and the best people parade from gallery to gallery along 57th Street or Madison Avenue on Saturday, just as their ancestors once paraded down Park Avenue after attendance at church or synagogue. Status after death is now assured by such galleries as the Guggenheim and the Hirschorn."

A Guide

to Manuscript

Compiled

by

ELLEN

Collections.

ARGUIMBAU.

Edited by J O H N A. BRENNAN (Boulder: Western Historical Collections, University of Colorado, 1977. Xii + 112 pp. $5.00.)

Western history scholars will be grateful to Arguimbau, Brennan, and their undergraduate assistants for producing this guide. Fanciers of contemporary cartoons will be grateful that at least 159 of Pat Oliphant's originals are in safekeeping. It would be fortunate if the University of Colorado could acquire all of Oliphant's work for the Denver Post.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY D e p a r t m e n t of C o m m u n i t y a n d E c o n o m i c D e v e l o p m e n t D i v i s i o n of S t a t e H i s t o r y BOARD OF STATE

HISTORY

M I L T O N C. A B R A M S , Smithfield, 1981

President D E L L O G. D A Y T O N , O g d e n , 1983

Vice-president M E L V I N T . S M I T H , Salt Lake City Secretary T H O M A S G. ALEXANDER, Provo, 1983 M R S . E L I Z A B E T H G R I F F I T H , O g d e n , 1981

W A Y N E K. H I N T O N , C e d a r City, 1981 T H E R O N L U K E , Provo, 1983

DAVID S. M O N S O N , Lieutenant G o v e r n o r /

Secretary of State, Ex officio M R S . ELIZABETH M O N T A G U E , Salt Lake City, 1983 WILLIAM D . O W E N S , Salt Lake City, 1983 M R S . H E L E N Z. PAPANIKOLAS, Salt Lake City, 1981 T E D J . W A R N E R , Provo, 1981

ADMINISTRATION M E L V I N T . S M I T H , Direct or

S T A N F O R D J . LAYTON, Managing

Editor

JAY M . H A Y M O N D , Librarian DAVID B. M A D S E N , State Archaeologist

A. K E N T P O W E L L , Historic Preservation Research W I L S O N G. M A R T I N , Historic Preservation Development T h e U t a h State Historical Society was organized in 1897 by public-spirited Utahns to collect, preserve, a n d publish U t a h and related history. Today, under state sponsorship, t h e Society fulfills its obligations by publishing the Utah Historical Quarterly a n d other historical materials; locating, documenting, a n d preserving historic a n d prehistoric buildings a n d sites; and maintaining a specialized research library. Donations and gifts to the Society's programs or its library are encouraged, for only through such means can it live u p t o its responsibility of preserving the record of Utah's past.

MEMBERSHIP Membership in the U t a h State Historical Society is open to all individuals a n d institutions interested in U t a h history.

Membership applications and change of address notices should be sent to the membership secretary.

Annual dues a r e : Individual, $7.50; institutions, $10.00; student, $5.00 (with teacher's statement) ; contributing, $15.00; sustaining, $25.00; patron, $50.00; life member, $150.00. Your interest and support are most welcome.

t.o°