In This Issue

This issue completes the seventy-fifth volume of the Utah Historical Quarterly. The first issue of the Quarterly appeared in 1928 under the editorship of forty-nine-year-old J. Cecil Alter, whose 1930 photograph is on the cover of this issue. The first issue of the Quarterly, thirty-two pages in length ,included a brief salutation from Albert F. Philips, president of the Utah State Historical Society, and articles by William R. Palmer, “Indian Names in Utah Geography,” and J. Cecil Alter, “Some Useful Early Utah Indian References.” Alter, who was in charge of Salt Lake City’s Weather Bureau, served as editor during the difficult years of the Great Depression and World War II. After publication of the first six volumes, the Quarterly was suspended from 1934 until 1939.Under Alter’s direction Utah Historical Quarterly resumed publication in 1939 and the journal has been the primary outlet for Utah history scholarship ever since. Miriam B. Murphy, associate editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly from 1971 to 1998,concludes her article, “J. Cecil Alter, Founding Editor of Utah Historical Quarterly,” Winter 1978, with this assessment: “Utah Historical Quarterly was fortunate to have had J. Cecil Alter as its founding editor. His standard of excellence, his intelligence—appropriately spiced with curiosity, imagination ,and wit—provided the journal with an invaluable legacy.” That legacy has continued under subsequent managing editors—A. Russell Mortensen,1950-1961;Everett L.Cooley,1962-1969; Charles S.Peterson,1969-1971;Glen M.Leonard,1971-1973;and Stanford J. Layton,1973-2002.

Our first article takes us back to 1910 and one of the twentieth centuries most important sporting events—the heavyweight championship fight between African American champion Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the original “great white hope.” Viewed by many as a contest to demonstrate racial superiority, if not racial equality, the fight drew national and international attention. Utah was no exception as Salt Lake City contended with other western cities to host the fight. Political, religious, and cultural issues played a role in Salt Lake City’s unsuccessful attempt to secure the contest, but both fighters visited Utah before the fight, and hundreds of Utahns headed west to witness the Fourth of July bout in Reno, Nevada. The Johnson victory and subsequent reaction in Utah and the rest of the nation reveals much about contemporary racial attitudes.

A few years earlier, in 1887, Salt Lake County undertook a bold experiment in the housing of prisoners with the construction of a radically designed rotary jail. The jail, located on the north side of 200 South between 300 and 400 West, opened on July 4,1887.Designers promised that the escape-proof, mechanized jail could be managed by a single jailer by limiting access to one entry and exit point for all of the pie-shaped cells. The story of the decision to construct the jail, its operation, and the prisoners who occupied it, make for a fascinating glimpse into the underside of Salt Lake City during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Our third article returns to the adventures of Leonard Herbert Swett as he recounts in a series of letters to his parents living in Chicago his activities with the United States Geological Survey team based at Kanab in 1880. A sequel to an article about his initial trip to Utah in 1879 published in the Summer 2007 issue of the Quarterly, this account takes readers from the Walker House in Salt Lake City to Beaver, Kanab, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon offering interesting insights into the people, communities, and geography along the way.

One of the many questions historians seek to answer about any community is the origin of its name. Often the origins of a name are well documented. For other communities, the origins are more obscure or multifaceted. The city of Logan in Cache Valley was long believed to have been named for Ephraim Logan, a fur trapper who had wintered in Cache Valley in 1824-25 and who was killed a few years later while leading a group of trappers into the “Snake Country” north of Cache Valley. While the Logan River was named during the 1820s for Ephraim Logan, our final article for this year takes us back to pioneer accounts of the naming of the settlement of Logan in 1859 to make the case that the half French, half Omaha translator Logan Fontenelle was a factor in the naming of Logan.

As we celebrate the completion of this seventy-fifth volume of Utah Historical Quarterly, we thank the hundreds of past contributors to the Quarterly and the many individuals who have served on the board of editors, and look forward to publishing the work of present and future historians and writers in the coming decades. May their efforts be as fruitful, stimulating, and valuable as those of their predecessors.