In This Issue

If not an Alta prostitute as local lore has it, then who was Patsey Marley? Not even a woman, our readers will learn in the lead-off article Patsey was in fact Patrick Marley, an enterprising Irish immigrant who scraped a hard-earned buck from several Alta mines in the 1870s, scrapped as a prize fighter in the local saloons, and scrimped on his spending habits until dying a pauper in 1916.Yet he was not without friends In fact, at least one of them "nominated" him to the highest office in the land, and several others pooled their money to buy him a respectable funeral and burial Patsey is just one of four such colorful characters whose stories are sketched here and whose enterprises helped shape the early history of Little Cottonwood Canyon Unlike them, however, he snatched a special piece of immortality by having his name attached to a beautiful hill high in the Wasatch

No less colorful was Legh Freeman, an itinerant newspaperman who is the subject of the next selection. Bringing his "press on wheels" to Ogden in 1875, this free-swinging gadfly launched his semi-weekly Ogden Freeman at a time when Brigham Young was still admonishing his people to patronize Mormon businesses. Into this setting add Freeman's flamboyant and melodramatic personality, and the account that follows will not soon be forgotten by anyone who appreciates the often vituperative and usually hyperbolic tone of late nineteenth-century journalism

Equally entrepreneurial but more stable and respectful of local customs, the Dun n family is the focus of the third article Hearing that Navajo Mountain Trading Post was for sale, Ray Dunn made an acceptable offer to founder Ben Wetherhill and moved his family to that remote southeastern Utah spot in 1932 For most of the next fifty years, the Dunns owned and managed the post, enduring the tedium of winter isolation, enjoying their relationship with the Navajo people and a few other traders, promoting tourism, and simply making a living in a place that was still considered the frontier -when men were walking on the moon

Not far away, either in time or location, is the setting for our next feature—a look at the company doctors in the coal camps of eastern Utah Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of these physicians and their patients, a picture emerges of providers who did their best to care for people who were often poor, sometimes non-English speaking, and nearly always distrustful of anyone representing the company Such earthy practitioners as Dr Eldon Dorman promoted stability and comfort in those communities and left behind a corpus of stories, yarns, and memories that will amuse and entertain students of history for many years to come.

We close with a photo essay of LDS meetinghouses in Utah Drawn from the Hal Rumel collection, these beautiful images reflect a remarkable variety of architectural styles—a variety not seen or even imagined with such buildings today Like the subjects of the preceding articles, these distinctive creations suggest the spontaneity of a less structured, less homogenous time Whether those times were better is open to debate, of course, but no one would argue that they were dull. With the clarity of a Rumel photo, the distinctive nature of these earlier times and places will emerge from the pages that follow to charm and entertain the discerning reader.