Book Reviews

By Ned Blackhawk. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xi +372 pp. Cloth, $35.00.)

IN VIOLENCE OVER THE LAND Ned Blackhawk examines the way the immediate and displaced violence of imperial expansion deformed and reformed native societies of the Great Basin. Blackhawk describes how violence spread beyond frontier borders as succeeding native groups bitterly contested with each other for horses, weapons, space, manufactured goods, and the economic wares to ensure alliances with powerful imperial trade partners. He is not the first historian to describe the “rippling” spread of military technology through Indian groups after European contact, nor the violence that accompanied it. However, Blackhawk adds a unique insight by arguing that native history can be better understood by studying the varied adaptations natives made to violence. Imperial expansion, violence, and pain define the history of the American West, and it is important to understand the way Indians responded to that violence by “recalibrating” their societies, adapting new strategies of survival in response to colonial disturbance, and the changing imperial and native balances of power.

Blackhawk focuses the majority of his research on the Spanish borderland where the nexus of conflict, trade, and change occurred longest and most dramatically. Here Spain was expelled, re-conquered, and went through its own violent “recalibrations” adjusting to its Indian environment, while natives on the northern border underwent major cultural transformations, “recalibrating” themselves to the demands of equestrian militarism. These violent disruptions became bloody contests over resources, space, and alliances. Blackhawk demonstrates the tight interweaving of indigenous politics with imperial powers, and the way colonial violence was displaced deep into the interior. The web of “peaceful” trade networks ultimately displaced violence to the interior as slave traffickers harvested non-equestrian bands, and traders, trappers, and horse-raiders traveled interior trails along which they destroyed subsistence resources.

Blackhawk argues that how various bands responded to violence became mechanisms of survival. For example, after years of bloodshed, southern Colorado Utes ultimately adapted and moved toward negotiated trade alliances with New Mexico. Over time these skills led to their becoming “consummate” diplomats and offering military alliances that helped stave off the types of massacres that destroyed the Northwestern Shoshone at Bear River, the Cheyenne at Sand Creek, and decimated the Utah Utes through raiding warfare. These latter groups had adapted to the “violence” of deprivation with the violence of subsistence warfare (raids) that reaped the violence of state-sanctioned military reprisal. Alternatively, Southern Paiutes sought protective alliances from settler Mormons against predatory western Ute slavers.

Particularly insightful is Blackhawk’s powerful indictment against the long-term violence of intellectual arrogance. By wedding endemic poverty with derisive racial bigotry and making them biological determinants, men of influence like Mark Twain and anthropologist Julian Steward dehumanized non-equestrian “digger” Indians and influenced federal policy for decades. Like the mapmakers of the eighteenth century who “produced the knowledge from which conquest could flow,” Steward was an intellectual mapmaker who shaped a generation of ethnographers and policymakers and tried to suppress native self-determination in the name of biological and cultural inferiority and thus re-enslaved a modern people with a timeless primitivity. Though his theories are now dated, Blackhawk argues Steward’s work had already provided the ethnographic “lingua franca” for analyzing all American Indians, and his work remains a crippling legacy for studying the non-equestrian cultures of the Great Basin.

Although Blackhawk writes well, is well-read, and provides new insights into the nature of the early West, his book contains troubling flaws. He includes no bibliography, and a reader must comb his extensive footnotes to tease out his sources—an annoying lapse for a book. More serious is his inconsistency in identifying tribes and bands throughout the book, making it appear that he is either unwilling—or unable—to differentiate between indigenous groups, even when it is important to do so. For example, significant differences do exist between Northwestern and Western Shoshone, or Timpanogos and southern Colorado Utes, and the generic “Ute” or “Shoshone” is neither a sufficient (nor fair) identifier when discussing specific bands—especially in reference to commercial slaving, or Colorado and Utah Utes. Along with this inconsistency are occasional historiographic and ethnographic errors, moments of speculative history, and a few conclusions that remain arguable. For example, placing the Arze-Garcia expedition in Paiute country when they met “Guaracher” (Guasach) rather than on the Green River crossing in identifiably Ute country as generally accepted (negating his argument about displacing Paiutes), misspelling Antonga (Utah’s Blackhawk), suggesting eastern Utes trafficked in the western slave trade which they did not (they sold war captives), or that Utah Utes “ferried” their slaves to New Mexico when most evidence suggests they usually sold them to New Mexican traders who carried them to Abiquiu. While none of this negates the violence done to Paiute slaves, it raises questions about Blackhawk’s conclusions regarding which Utes were complicit in expanding the violence, against whom, and why.

While the early part of the book is richly detailed, as a reader moves deeper into the book it becomes less comprehensive, more shallowly researched, and events are glossed over. Consequently, he skims over the complexity of nineteenth century Colorado “diplomacy,” Utah Indian wars, and California/Oregon Trail violence. Chronology becomes elastic as Blackhawk uses individual events as evidence, but makes broad generalizations to summarize the American era as denouement rather than culmination of violence.

Thus, if a reader is expecting a comprehensive narrative history of the Great Basin, Violence over the Land, will disappoint. It is not, and was probably never meant to be one. However, the book is insightful, a valuable addition to Native American voices on Great Basin history, but should be read within the limits and context in which it was written. It is an argument about the impact of violence on Indian cultures in the early west, and remains a passionate and eloquent argument about the way different native societies adapted to their new and violent world, with a poignant demand for acceptance today.

SONDRA JONES University of Utah

By Dale L. Morgan; edited and introduced by Richard L. Saunders; ethnohistorical essay by Gregory E. Smoak. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007. viii + 424 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

THROUGH THE DEDICATION of scholars such as Richard Saunders, Dale L. Morgan continues to make significant contributions to the history of the American West thirty-seven years after his death. Saunders, a meticulous scholar in his own right, has done heroic work editing three of Morgan’s studies of Indian relations and the road across the plains: “The Administration of Indian Affairs in Utah, 1851–1858,” which appeared in the Pacific Historical Review in 1948; an unpublished study, “Indian Affairs on the California Trail, 1849–1860”; and the massive documentary collection, “Washakie and the Shoshoni,” which consisted of Morgan’s transcriptions of federal Indian correspondence published in ten parts between 1953 and 1958 in Annals of Wyoming . Saunders carefully updated or completed many of Morgan’s citations and wrote an excellent introductory essay that places the material in the context of Morgan’s life and the evolution of Shoshonean studies. Gregory E. Smoak’s ethnohistorical essay, The Newe (the People) and the Utah Superintendency,” is an essential overview that delivers on its promise to provide “a deeper understanding of the native people, their culture, and their history”(33).

Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trail brings to life two commanding figures, Washakie and Brigham Young. Mormon stalwart James S. Brown described the Shoshone leader as bold, noble, hospitable, honorableand considered him the best orator he ever met. Washakie was a superbly talented politician and the most powerful leader of the Eastern Shoshones, whose heartland straddled the overland road from the North Platte to the Wasatch Mountains. He brilliantly managed what historian John Peterson described as the “volatile triangle” of Mormons, government officials, and the tribes that complicated interracial relations in the Intermountain West. The Shoshones long boasted that they had never killed a white man, and Washakie used his fame as a peacemaker to secure a reservation in the Wind River Valley. As early as 1843, cartographer Charles Preuss observed that white incursions had already “ruined the country” of the Shoshones and they deserved compensation. Before the emigrants came, Washakie told Frederick Lander fifteen years later, buffalo, elk and antelope covered the hills; but now “he saw only wagons with white tops and men riding upon their horses; that his people were very poor, and had fallen back into the valleys of the mountains to dig roots and get meat for their little ones”(51).

Morgan’s article on Brigham Young’s administration of Utah’s Indian affairs paints a very positive view while noting that his term as superintendent “was from beginning to end a stormy one”(82). In 1852, subagent Jacob Holeman defined the conflict of interest that soured Indian relations in Utah under Young’s supervision: Holeman complained to Washington that the Mormon prophet was “making use of his office, as superintendent, and the money of the Government, to promote the interest of his Church”(61). Yet O. H. Irish, one of Young’s most talented successors, acknowledged it was his duty to use the Mormon leader’s influence to implement the government’s policies.

These documents clearly describe the Shoshone struggle to defend their homes from intruders, whether they be miners, Mormons, or the military. In 1867, Utah Superintendent F. H. Head forthrightly defined the philosophy that had been used to justify stealing tribal lands since the founding of the American Republic: “It has been the correct theory of government that since the Indians do not make the highest use of the soil, we may take it from them”(366).

The proliferation of primary sources available on the Internet raises the question of how long documentary histories such as this will be viable. Much of this material is available at the Nevada Observer web site and elsewhere. But the carefully edited Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trail provides a wealth of background information and insights not found in the ether. The collection is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the evolution of relations between American sojourners and native peoples on the overland road. Saunders’ masterful editing makes this wonderful compilation good to the last page of the book’s thoroughly remarkable appendix.

WILL BAGLEY Salt Lake City

Edited by Michael Harold Paulos. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008. xxxiii +709 pp. Cloth, $49.95.)

THE FOUR VOLUMES of transcripts of the hearings before the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections on the right of Senator Reed Smoot of Utah to retain his seat came to my attention nearly fifty years ago and again while researching for various works including Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 (1986). The Mormon Church on Trial offers an abridgement of some of the most important testimony and statements.

The book begins with valuable introductory material. An editor’s preface precedes an introduction by Harvard Heath that places Smoot’s career in context and considers the importance of the hearings and the surrounding political events. The editor then lists the members of the senate committee and offers a chronology of the protest, hearings, and eventual senate vote. Transcripts of the hearings and the closing statements follow. The text ends with a statement by Franklin S. Richards, principal attorney for the LDS church, and an index.

Footnotes and headnotes throughout the text add valuable comments. These include insightful documents from Smoot, Carl Badger, other observers, newspapers, and citations from knowledgeable historians. Nevertheless, I found as superfluous the editor’s comments that J. Reuben Clark had marked particular sections in his copy of the hearings.

The hearings are significant. Following Smoot’s 1903 election, a group of prominent anti-Mormon clergy, business people, and lawyers protested. They charged that Smoot and the other LDS general authorities continued to promote illegal polygamy and polygamous cohabitation and that Smoot had taken oaths inconsistent with his obligations as a senator.

These charges were so general that the committee justified investigating virtually all aspects of the recent social, economic, and political history of the LDS church. Moreover, the rules of evidence in judicial proceedings did not apply. Witnesses testified to unsubstantiated fabrication and hearsay, and the committee gave such testimony as much credence as verifiable evidence. The committee’s general counsel, Robert W. Tayler, and chair, Julius Caesar Burrows, made certain all of it appeared in the record.

Smoot’s attorneys Waldemar Van Cott and Augustus S. Worthington tried to confine the investigation to evidence that would prove him personally unfit for office. The wide-ranging investigation and the admission of hearsay and fabrication made their mission impossible.

Even credible testimony hurt Smoot’s case. Credible witnesses showed that the church leadership on the general and local level had interfered in political, economic, and social affairs far beyond what most Americans thought acceptable. Most significantly, friendly witnesses like President Joseph F. Smith testified that Mormons continued illegal polygamous cohabitation.

In addition, credible testimony showed that new plural marriages had taken place since the Manifesto. Several of those who had entered in or performed such marriages were simply too old or infirm to travel to Washington to testify. Two members of the Twelve, however, who had encouraged, participated in, and performed such marriages–John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley–were relatively young, and they could have testified. Instead, they avoided the service of summons and declined to appear voluntarily. By doing so, they hurt Smoot’s case, perhaps as much as if they had testified.

Given the lax rules of evidence and the pervasive prejudice against Smoot and the Mormons, it seems a miracle that he survived at all. Even though the evidence showed that Smoot, himself, had done nothing illegal, the committee voted to recommend his expulsion, and a majority of the senate agreed. Since, however, Smoot had already taken his seat, expulsion required a two-thirds majority; and the opponents lost by five votes. Politics undoubtedly played a significant role in his victory.

Sadly, anyone who follows current events will recognize that virulent anti-Mormon prejudice persists today, more than a century after the hearings.

THOMAS G. ALEXANDER Brigham Young University

By David R. Berman.(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. xiv + 386 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

FROM THE FIRST, radical movements have been an important part of the history of the United States. Every generation, including the present one, has seen the emergence of a radicalism that called for thoroughgoing, fundamental change in the organization, structure, and operation of society, as opposed to small adjustments, and offered alternative visions of how to live and organize life; and that emphasized inclusion and redistribution, seeking to enlarge the sphere of freedom and opportunity, ie, a radicalism, not from the right of the political spectrum, but from the left. Though such movements are often seen as essentially a footnote, marginal to the main story and meriting nothing more than passing interest, paying serious attention to them is important. Doing so can illuminate the past in new ways. A different picture can emerge, not only in details, but in essentials, challenging the “master narrative” and requiring us to think differently about the past, and also, then, about the present and the future.

Left radicalism was particularly significant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when capitalism was at its most naked, and to that period David R. Berman turns both his attention and his considerable knowledge, focusing on the Intermountain West and the “hotbed” of radicalism existing there between 1890 and 1920. Specifically he discusses Populism, Socialism, and radical labor unionism, in particular the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World, with an emphasis on socialism. The belief of these groups that the United States was in crisis; American democracy in a state of near collapse; and life under a capitalistic system fundamentally unfair, both impoverishing people and preventing them from reaching their full potential as human beings; that government functioned as a tool for privileged groups and against the well-being of the majority of people; that only the most thoroughgoing social and political change could bring about social and economic justice resonated with, and motivated, tens of thousands of people, and struck fear into the hearts and minds of many more. Readers of this journal may be particularly interested to know this was as true of Utah as it was of any other area in the Intermountain West. The conventional wisdom that Utah has never had a radical past, at least not one of any importance, is both simplistic and a-historical, essentially equating Utah’s politically conservative present with its past, and over-simplifying both. Radicals in Utah called not only for a change in economic and political arrangements, but for an entirely new way of life—a point that Berman might have given more attention to—and, while he draws on most of the relevant secondary literature in sketching Utah radicalism, he overlooks recent work on socialism in particular that would have expanded the story he tells.

Historians have paid attention to radicalism in individual Intermountain States during this period of time, but Berman is the first to consider it in the region as a whole. His intent is to begin to recover that aspect of the region’s past, specifying its thematic patterns, its turbulence, passion, conflict, risk-taking, ethical witnessing, and violent confrontations. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of radicalism in the region and throughout the United States. It is deeply researched, bringing together the secondary literature on the subject and Berman’s own considerable research in primary sources. The book proceeds chronologically, and while the discussion is wide-ranging, it is organized around election cycles. One of its great strengths is the discussion of the larger context— as he says, “the broader environment in which the radicals functioned, the havoc they raised, and the reaction to them”(xiii).

Berman’s basic conclusion about the importance of radicalism in the region is a familiar one about the impact of radicalism in general—Eduard Bernstein first made it in behalf of the reformist wing of the Second International in 1899. “The contributions of the Populists, Socialists, and radical labor unions,” Berman says, “rested largely in building the agenda for change and, perhaps most of all, in frightening the powers that be into making reforms that helped democratize the political system, increase public control of corporations, and further protection of

working people” (295-96). Radical movements, in other words, were responsible for much of what we take for granted today, including the right to vote; reasonable work days and conditions; the continued, if unfulfilled, promise of equality of opportunity; and the guarantees, however tenuous and fragile, of freedom of speech and assembly. Without movements for radical change emphasizing inclusion, social justice, and egalitarianism, our society would be less democratic, less open, less tolerant, less free, and less humane.

JOHN MCCORMICK Salt Lake Community College

By Jean Miles Westwood, edited by Linda Sillitoe. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007. vii + 230 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

JEAN MILES WESTWOOD was a “first”: The first woman to be chair of a national political party. She was “Madame Chair”when all past major political party leaders had been “chairmen.” She was the first member of her faith to occupy such a high secular partisan position. She was the first party chair from the rural western state of Utah — literally, a girl born and raised in the coal mining area of rural Price, Utah,to hold a powerful political position traditionally held by those from eastern states. She was, indeed, qualified to lead the Democratic National Committee, however, her life’s path was one of being a team-player in political campaigns rather than a lifetime spent in hot pursuit of the political party’s powerful national post.

Madame Chair, edited by Utah writer Linda Sillitoe and published ten years after Jean Westwood’s death in 1997, features a Foreword by Utah historian and writer Floyd A. O’Neil. This autobiography, in fifteen chapters and 216 pages, tells good stories: the behind-the-scenes party worker; the 1968 story of the Democratic Party coming apart at the national convention in Chicago as well as in Utah; coping with defeat, and implementing unprecedented party reforms; and the inside story of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign —from beginning to end. She was there when the Republican Party’s “Watergate” scandal erupted. accepting the role of Party Chair after defeat in forty-nine of fifty states, accepting the painful calls of her Party colleagues later to resign. When Watergate figures were coping with prison sentences and Richard Nixon had resigned, Jean Westwood had returned home to the West tolive her last two decades quietly with family and friends.

Jean Westwood’s life is seen in historical perspective. She had effectively penetrated a large section of the political and historical “glass ceiling.” She had emerged to be the first woman leader of a major political party in 1972—nine years before Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981. Twelve years before Gerradine Ferraro was the first woman candidate for Vice President of a major political party. Thirty-four years before Nancy Pelosi was chosen by her peers to be the first woman Speaker of the House. Thirty-six years before Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign to become the first woman nominee of a major party for President. A woman who is a “first” is a woman to be respected, because a leader who seeks change is all-too often a person criticized for achieving change.

Jean Westwood was indeed a “pioneer” who became a “first” and a role model for many. However, predictably, her first-time national status was a threat to traditional advocates of the status quo. Although Jean Westwood was a wife and mother, she was also a successful businesswoman and political leader, party activist and Mormon feminist. This combination caused many men and many women to perceive the shy woman from Utah to be endangering American traditional roles and cultural patterns. She would be praised, and she would be condemned. Nevertheless, she was willing to be a visible leader in America’s political process. She was willing to be a “first.” In doing so, Jean Westwood changed American political history.

TIM CHAMBLESS University of Utah

By Eric A. Eliason. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xvviii + 186 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $20.00.)

THE STORY GOES that LDS president Heber J. Grant and Seventy J. Golden Kimball are standing beside each other in the restroom of a Salt Lake café. A third man enters, recognizes Kimball, and asks how he is doing?

The aged Kimball readily admits that he is having trouble urinating. “But I’m standing here next to a prophet of God, and I can see that he can’t pee either. So I guess I’m doing alright.”

This may well be the only J. Golden Kimball story not included in Eric Eliason’s work on Mormonism’s “Will Rogers,” a plainspoken church authority renowned for a left-handed directness that many still enjoy today.

Born in 1892, the son of Heber C. Kimball and Christeen Golden, the younger Kimball rose to church prominence as one of the First Seven Presidents of the Seventy (he was never an apostle). His high-pitched and colorfully blunt sermons increased his popularity as a speaker and he soon packed chapels and tabernacles wherever he appeared.

Kimball’s sermons and daily conversations were laced with “damn” and “hell,” words he claimed were leftovers from a larger cowboy vocabulary. This common man approach to sometimes thorny theological issues set him apart from his more staid brethren and caused him to be well received by non-Mormons as well.

Eliason examines the folkloric nature of Kimball, putting into context the stories told about the LDS church’s “swearing apostle.” All of the more commonly known “J. Golden” stories are featured in the work, including several in which Kimball swears in General Conference.

Although Eliason clearly distinguishes between the folklore and the actual records of Kimball’s sermons, he also points out that just because something is labeled folklore doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. But Kimball’s unabated popularity among Mormons makes an even larger point: that even if it isn’t, it damn well ought to be.

Eliason focuses on this telling nature of why such stories endure in a culture that would seem to reject them. He also makes clear Kimball’s contribution to the Mormon transition into modern society, examining Kimball as a “performerhero”in a “cross-cultural perspective” and illustrating just how a self-deprecating humor can ease tensions between groups that are often unnecessarily at odds.

The book is broken into chapters, or thematic elements of the Kimball stories, highlighting just what made them work then and, more importantly, why they still do.

With the exception of Porter Rockwell, no other figure in Mormon history is as colorful as “Uncle Golden.” He remains endeared among Mormons primarily through stories that promote determined individuality in the face of sometimes overwhelming ecclesiastical correlation.

It is Mormonism’s attachment to one man’s departure from mandated convention that causes Eliason’s work to say as much about Mormons today as it does about Uncle Golden then.

ROBERT KIRBY Herriman

Edited by Cardell K. Jacobson, John P. Hoffman, and Tim B. Heaton.(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008. xxiv + 462 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

RESEARCH on Mormonism can only be described as seminal. Although O’Dea began studying The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a doctoral student associated with Harvard University’s Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures,it was his 1957 landmark study, The Mormons, that established him as a key scholar of Mormon society.

The Mormons, which remains one of the one of the most widely referenced social scientific studies of Mormonism, is now a little more than fifty years old, and despite its probing analysis of Mormon society and its landmark status, enough has happened to Mormonism to merit a volume of critical essays that both revisit O’Dea’s findings and highlight important areas of study he left unexplored. As the editors of the book under review put it: the “essays … examine where O’Dea ‘got it right’ as well as where tensions remain” (xi).

The book is organized into three parts. The first section, comprised of essays by Lynn England, O. Kendall White, Douglas Davies and Terryl L. Givens, seeks to understand O’Dea’s work in its context and interrogates some of the analytical frameworks he used—especially his mastery/mystery dichotomy—for understanding the Mormon mind and Mormon society. The second section, with essays by Carrie Miles, Janet Bennion, Armand Mauss, Melvyn Hammarberg, Michael Nielsen, Barry Balleck, Loren Marks, and Brent Beal, deals with contemporary social issues in the Mormon context. The essays in this section address the place of women in the LDS church, the church’s racial policies, Mormon attitudes toward sexual identity, and the relationship of the Latter-day Saints to American society. The essays in the volume’s final section, written by Armand Mauss (his second contribution to the collection), David Stewart, Henri Gooren, David Knowlton, and Sarah Busse Spencer, discuss the international dimensions of Mormonism.

For readers interested in Utah or western history, some of the essays in this retrospective will be of greater interest than others. The piece by Davies, for instance, examines the way O’Dea used the concept of mastery, which was to some extent inherent in Latter-day Saint theology, to understand nineteenthcentury Mormonism. According to Davies, O’Dea was able to explain Mormon cooperative experimentation (which reached its pinnacle in the establishment of communal societies in places like Orderville, Utah) as founded on individual Mormons’ active self-mastery and the curbing of self-interest for the good of the whole. A similar yearning to master nature also guided Mormons in their early water management efforts in the Great Basin. Mastery, however, also had its darker side, argues Davies, at least as O’Dea understood it. Following O’Dea’s logic, Davies claims that it was the Mormons’ “desire for mastery over their enemies,” particularly in the territorial period of Utah’s history, that led to historical black marks like the Mountain Meadows Massacre (58-59).

The essay by Michael Nielsen and Barry Balleck also will be of interest to students of Utah history for the way it places Mormonism’s relationship to the American state in historical context, beginning with the theocratic government of the Utah Territory in the nineteenth century. Referencing O’Dea, the authors point out that this relationship continues to be fraught with occasional tensions, despite the expansion of Mormonism beyond its early Utah context and its unfolding into a worldwide church. In the estimation of Neilson and Balleck, war and military policy have often brought the strains between church and state to the surface. Indeed, while the Mormon hierarchy has tended to adopt a pro-government posture since Utah won statehood in 1896, the LDS church has also chosen at times to oppose policies it believes are not in the best interests of the people who live in the Intermountain West, Mormonism’s cultural heartland. The church’s resistance to a Utah deployment of the MX missile in the 1970s is just one example of this stance.

BRANDON JOHNSON Utah Humanities Council

By Jack L. August, Jr. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007. xix + 172 pp. Cloth, $32.95.)

OCCASIONALLY IN HISTORY it seems that the right person is in the right place with the right preparation, disposition and demeanor to perform the right action in the right way to achieve the right, critically important result, such as George Washington and his unique combination of will and leadership during and after the American Revolution. On a more limited scale (in particular, Arizona and the other states within the Colorado River drainage, including Utah), the Wisconsin-born, Phoenix lawyer, Mark Wilmer, is portrayed here, deservingly, in that same light of honor.

The account provided is simultaneously a brief biography of a seasoned, skillful and thoroughly professional trial lawyer and an overview history of one of the landmark cases in western water law, Arizona v. California, decided in 1963 by the United States Supreme Court, in which Wilmer played the decisive role. In short, Arizona and California were embroiled in a long-standing dispute over the waters of the Colorado River. A 1922 compact allocated the main-stem waters between the upper and lower basins, guaranteeing 7.5 million acre-feet per year to the lower basin (basically Arizona, California, and Nevada), with a similar amount for the upper basin. With the exploding growth in southern California during the 1930s and 1940s, California had developed a strategy to put water to beneficial use as rapidly as possible, in order to buttress its “first in time, first in right” claim to the lion’s share of the Colorado in the lower basin, taking advantage of slower developing states such as Arizona.

Wilmer was brought onto Arizona’s legal team when its case before the appointed Special Master was floundering and appeared lost. Wilmer’s thorough research engendered a novel theory that Congress, in the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act and other related enactments, had already apportioned the Colorado’s water among the lower basin states. In a rather brazen move, Wilmer asked the Special Master to scrap Arizona’s case in chief, already fully presented, and substitute for it his new theory of the case, even though California was only part way through its response. If Wilmer’s theory were upheld, it would guarantee Arizona enough water to justify the eventual Central Arizona Project (CAP) and render California’s claims to more water than its allotted 4.4 million acre-feet inconsequential.

Both the Special Master and later the majority of the Supreme Court adopted Wilmer’s views, and Arizona pulled off an improbable victory that enabled it to develop the water infrastructure it presently enjoys. In many ways too lengthy to explore here, Arizona v. California was the defining, crystallizing feature in what is known as “the law of the river,” the Colorado River. It established the federal role on the river and clarified not only the diversions each state could take, but also recognized the pivotal role of Congress’ enactments. It recognized “Congressional apportionment” of the river, rather than relying purely on prior appropriation. The American Southwest would be a far different place had California won that lawsuit.

For Utah specifically, the greatest relevance of this decision probably lies in the Court’s holding that “the [Boulder Canyon Project] Act was not intended to give California any claim to share in the tributary waters of the Lower Basin states,” (89), but only in the main-stem water now delivered from Glen Canyon Dam above Lees Ferry. This means that California cannot claim any water from the Virgin River Basin, the only part of Utah in the Lower Basin; that issue remains solely one among Utah and downstream Arizona and Nevada, just as California could not claim water from the Gila River in Arizona.

This book would serve as a useful primer to a beginning lawyer or to any interested student of the law of the river. Aside from some slightly distracting defective editing and proofreading, it is a valuable overview of this critical bit of regional history and a fitting tribute to a dedicated, professional lawyer able to serve well in the right place and time.

A. SCOTT LOVELESS Brigham Young University

Edited by Stanford J. Layton. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008. xi+ 271 pp. Paper, $23.95.)

“THE SKELETON IN GRANDPA’S BARN” And Other Stories of Growing Up in Utah presents episodes in Utah history from the viewpoint of children, a crucial and often overlooked perspective. Stanford J. Layton, former editor of Utah Historical Quarterly, has chosen eighteen excellent articles previously published in the Quarterly, each accompanied by an historic photograph, dealing with topics that reflect the state’s history and that range from hilarious to tragic.

That contrast becomes evident in the first two articles. Fae Decker Dix recalls her acute teen-age angst when her father refused to follow the instructions of the LDS church’s music committee to soften the militant lyrics of several old Mormon hymns. When he belted out the old lyrics, louder than the rest of the choir sang the new ones, her sister found a method of revenge that could occur only to a Mormon child and that left me laughing out loud. Immediately following that is Saline Hardee Fraser’s memories, carefully recorded and annotated by her daughter, Marinane, of March8,1924. She traces her experiences and emotions as the family hears the explosions at the Castle Gate Coal Mine and subsequently learns that both her father and grandfather were among the 172 miners killed.

Eleven of the eighteen articles are first person accounts. Seven describe the authors’ lives in specific Utah towns: LaMar Petersen recalls his family home and his father’s store, which included the post office, in Eden. Robert S. Mikkelsen describes growing up with Union Pacific trains running near his home in Echo and then the town’s death when those trains stopped coming. Josephine Pace remembers the buildings, but most of all the people of Kimberly. “Growing up Greek in Helper,” Helen Z. Papanikolas felt safe in her small town of Greeks, Italians, Irish,and Americans, despite forays by the Ku Klux Klan. Fawn M. Brodie remembers the debts and difficulties associated with the family farm in Huntsville.

Yoshiko Uchida recalls a very different kind of town, Topaz, the camp hastily cobbled together to contain Japanese Americans interned during World War II. From the poignancy of a Boy Scout marching band greeting new arrivals at the gates of the still incomplete town to dust and cold that drove people inside inadequate buildings, she helps readers feel her own emotions and those of the children in the nursery school where she and her sister worked.

Herbert Z. Lund, Jr. remembers the skeleton of a murderer executed at the Utah State Prison “bedded down with old issues of the Improvement Era.” His father, a physician at the prison, had been given the remains and boiled it to a skeleton in a field north of Beck’s Hot Springs (reportedly terrifying a passing hobo) to make it into a teaching specimen. Nevada W. Driggs shares her mother’s stories collected from the pioneers of Parowan, including her grandmother’s recollections of a nearly frozen John C. Fremont recovering in her bed.

Seven articles are academic in approach, from David A. Hales’s collection of stories about gypsies coming through towns to Miriam B. Murphy and Craig Fuller’s study of children’s winter games in ice and snow. Gary James Bergera uses Everett Ruess’s writings to examine his mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert. Sondra Jones compares whites raising Indian children purchased in New Mexico (to be slaves) and Utah (to be redeemed) and finds striking similarities between the treatment children received in both states. Davis Bitton compares views of late nineteenth-century Mormon frontier youth from LDS members and gentiles.

Two articles focus on polygamy. William G. Hartley’s “in-depth look at an everyday, garden variety plural LDS family during its child-rearing years”(141-43) between 1865 and 1896 presents a careful study of the ordinary elements of growing up and the children’s subsequent behavior as adults, while Martha Sonntag Bradley’s discussion of children hiding from federal authorities when one or both parents were sent to prison in the late nineteenth century may well offer insights into the feelings of FLDS children recently taken from their parents in Texas.

The Skeleton in Grandpa’s Barn , the fourth volume in Signature’s Favorite Readings series, entertains while it informs. Each selection is fascinating by itself, and collectively they present a broad and inclusive picture of significant elements in Utah’s history.

COLLEEN WHITLEY Brigham Young University