Book Notices

Don’t Shoot the Gentile

By James C. Work (Norman: University of OklahomaPress, 2011. 145 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

What was the experience of a young, non-Mormon English teacher at Cedar City’s College of Southern Utah in the mid-1960s? And why the admonishment against a violent act in the title? This delightful, humorous, and self-deprecating account reveals much about Utah’s unusual culture at a time when the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement dominated the national news. It is a personal history that exams assumptions, relationships, traditions, and motives. For those of the 1960s generation, and those who are not but are interested in what Utah was like nearly fifty years ago, this book holds a treasure of interesting insights and surprises.

Where Two Streams Meet: The Personal History of a Town

By Lyman Hafen(St. George: Tonaquin Press, 2011. 292 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the settlement of St. George—at the confluence of the Virgin and Santa Clara Rivers—Lyman Hafen, a fifth-generation southern Utahn and revered author, has published a collection of seventy-five short personal essays. They convey a sense of place and love of community that will resonate with anyone who feels a nostalgic tug to remember life in an earlier, perhaps less complicated time. This book might be described as a literary box of fine chocolates with its contents to be savored slowly one at a time.

Western Heritage: A Selection of Wrangler Award-Winning Articles

Paul Andrew Hutton, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.xvi +305 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

The center panel of Wilson Hurley Triptych’s, The Utah Suite: Monument Valley, a part of the Windows to the West series in Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, graces the cover of this collection of twelve award winning articles. While most of the articles focus on broad themes and topics in Western American History, Sally Denton’s “What Happened at Mountain Meadows?” will be of particular interest to readers of the Utah Historical Quarterly.

The Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes

John S. Dinger, ed.(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011. lxxxi + 616 pp. Cloth, $49.95.)

The separation of church and state (or religious practice and civic affairs) has been a point of discussion and often conflict since the early days of the United States and the settlement of Utah. Historians, politicians, and citizens have debated whether Utah was or even is a theocracy and what has been and is now the relationship of religion and government. This volume provides interesting insights into the nature of religious and secular activity during the Mormon pre-Utah period. With focus on the years from 1839 to 1845, minutes of the Nauvoo City Council and the Nauvoo Stake High Council illustrates the complexities, contradictions, conflict, and cooperation that characterized religion and government on the eve of Mormon settlement of Utah.

Zebulon Pike, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

Matthew L. Harris and Jay H. Buckley, eds. (Norman: University of OklahomaPress, 2012. x + 242 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

Co-edited by Br igham Young University History Professor and authority on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Jay Buckley, this volume offers an interesting examination of the other Jefferson Era explorer—Zebulon Pike. As the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806 began to open the door to the mountains and valleys of northern Utah, so did the Pike Expedition to the southern Rockies of Colorado and New Mexico that followed in 1806-1807 step onto the porch of southern Utah’s Canyon Country. Two of the seven essays in the volume are by Professor Buckley, “Pike as a Forgotten and Misunderstood Explorer,” and “Jeffersonian Explorers in the Trans-Mississippi West: Zebulon Pike in Perspective.”

Santa Rita Del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico

By Christopher J. Huggard and Terrence M. Humble (Boulder: The UniversityPress of Colorado, 2012. xvii + 252 pp. Cloth, $45.00.)

This volume in the Mining The American West Series, edited by Duane A. Smith, Rogert A. Trennert, and Liping Zhu, recounts the history of Santa Rita in the southwestern corner of New Mexico at the heart of the state’s most productive mining district. As early as 1758, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, cartographer for the 1776 Domínguez-Escalante expedition to Utah, drew a crude map plotting copper deposits in the area, and named the mountain range to the north Sierra del Cobre Virgen—or Virgin Copper Mountains. By 1803 the first copper ore shipments reached Mexico City. Apache hostilities and transportation difficulties curtailed development of the area until after the Mexican War when the United States acquired the territory in 1848 and extensive development followed. Open-pit mining commencing in 1910, four years after open-pit copper mining began in Utah. In 1933 Kennecott Copper Corporation acquired the operations and as the open-pit expanded the last buildings of Santa Rita were demolished in 1970—two years before those in Utah’s Bingham Canyon.

Blitz Kids: The Cinderella Story of the 1944 University of Utah National Championship Basketball Team

By Josh Ferrin and Tres Ferrin (Layton: Gibbs Smith, 2012. 184 pp. Paper, $14.95.)

Written by the grandson and son of one of Utah’s sports legends and a member of the University of Utah basketball team—Arnie Ferrin—this book recounts the story of the underdog Utes and their victory in the championship game against the Dartmouth College team in the 1944 NCAA basketball tournament. The University of Utah basketball team, with four freshmen starters because older players were serving in the military, was selected to play in the tournament at the last minute when the University of Arkansas team was not able to participate. During the regular season, the U of U basketball team played its games in a local church because the Einer Nielsen Field House had been converted into a barracks for soldiers. At a time when AfricanAmericans were unable to play on university basketball teams and when racism was further enhanced by wartime anti-Japanese sentiment, the Utah team included two JapaneseAmericans, Mat Tatsuno and the five foot seven inch Ogden native and starter Wat Misaka. As the authors write in their introduction, “For a few moments the country seemed to have forgotten its woes and fears as they united behind a team that by all rights shouldn’t have even been playing in the championship game”(10).

People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture

By Terryl L. Givens(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xvii + 414 pp. Paper, $29.95.)

Originally published in 2007, this paperback edition makes available to a larger audience an important study of the history of Mormon culture. After chapters that examine the foundations and paradoxes of Mormon cultural origins, the book is divided into two additional chronological parts—1830 to 1890, and 1890 to the present. The six chapters in each part looks at education and learning, architecture and city planning, music and dance, theater, literature, and the visual arts.

The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources 2nd ed.

By Donald L. Fixico(Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 2012. xx + 288 pp. Paper, $26.95.)

Anyone seeking to understand a Native American perspective on the exploitation/development of natural resources on reservation lands by non-Indian developers/capitalists would do well to read this volume whose first edition was published in 1998. The author, Donald L. Fixico, is of Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee Creek and Seminole heritage. He is Distinguished Foundation Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University. Part one of the book includes six case studies that consider such natural resources as land, water, oil, timber, fishing and hunting, and the controversy about spirituality in the Black Hills. Part two, entitled “Defense Strategies for Tribal Natural Resources,” examines such topics as the demand for natural resources, legal battles, environmental issues and tribal leadership. The book concludes with chapters on American Indian philosophy, global concerns, and healing the earth in the twenty-first century.

South Ogden

By Russell L. Porter (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2012.128 pp. Paper, $21.99.)

This volume in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series focuses its 128 pages of photographs on the city of South Ogden which celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary of incorporation in 2011. With a population of eight hundred residents in 1936, the city’s population is now in excess of sixteen thousand. Using a strictly chronological approach, each of the chapters covers a decade in the city’s history, beginning with the 1930s and 1940s and ending with the 2010s.