Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 83, Number 1, 2015

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U TA H HISTORICAL Q U A R T E R LY

EDITORIAL STAFF Brad Westwood — Editor

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ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS

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Jedediah S. Rogers — Co-Managing Editor

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Holly George — Co-Managing Editor

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Brian Q. Cannon, Provo, 2016 Craig Fuller, Salt Lake City, 2015

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Lee Ann Kreutzer, Salt Lake City, 2015 Kathryn L. MacKay, Ogden, 2017 Robert E. Parson, Benson, 2017

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W. Paul Reeve, Salt Lake City, 2018

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Susan Sessions Rugh, Provo, 2016 John Sillito, Ogden, 2017 Ronald G. Watt, West Valley City, 2017 Colleen Whitley, Salt Lake City, 2015

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In 1897, public-spirited Utahns organized the Utah State Historical Society in order to expand public understanding of Utah’s past.

Today, the Utah Division of State History administers the Society and, as part of its statutory obligations, publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0 042-143X), which has collected and preserved Utah’s unique history since 1928. The Division also collects materials related to the history of Utah; assists communities, agencies, building owners, and consultants with state and federal processes regarding archaeological and historical resources; administers the ancient human remains program; makes historical resources available in a specialized research library; offers extensive online resources and grants; and assists in public policy and the promotion of Utah’s rich history. Visit history.utah.gov for more information.

UHQ appears in winter, spring, summer, and fall. Members of the Society receive UHQ upon payment of annual dues: individual, $30; institution, $40; student and senior (age 65 or older), $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100.

Direct manuscript submissions to the address listed below. Visit history.utah.gov for submission guidelines. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.

POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly,

The Rio Grande Depot, home of the Utah State Historical Society.

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stanford kekauoha

300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah. history.utah.gov (801) 245-7231

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CONTENTS

5 In THIS ISSUE 70 BOOK REVIEWS

77 BOOK NOTICES 78 utah in focus

ARTICLES

20 Charcoal And Its Role

38 The Chocolate Dippers’

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Neither Poet nor Prophet: S. George Ellsworth and the History of Utah

By Robert E. Parson

in Utah Mining History

By Douglas H. Page Jr., Sarah E. Page, Thomas J. Straka, and Nathan D. Thomas

52 Tooele, Touch Typing, and the Catholic Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque

By Emma Louise Penrod

Strike of 1910

By Kathryn L. MacKay

60 Transformation of the Cathedral:

An Interview with Gregory Glenn

By Gary Topping

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Book Reviews

70 DAVID M. Wrobel Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression Reviewed by Michael Homer

71 Claudine Chalmers

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Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier in 1873–1874 Reviewed by Noel A. Carmack

72 Samuel Holiday and Robert S. McPherson

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Under the Eagle: Samuel Holiday, Navajo Code Talker Reviewed by Robert S. Voyles

73 Roger L. Nichols

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Warrior Nations: The United States and Indian Peoples Reviewed by Patricia Ann Owens

74 Norman Rosenblatt Dance with the Bear: The Joe Rosenblatt Story Reviewed by Allan Kent Powell

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75 Merina Smith Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830–1853

Reviewed by Todd M. Compton

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77 Mike Mackey Protecting Wyoming’s Share: Frank Emerson and the Colorado River Compact

77 Aaron Mcarthur St. Thomas, Nevada: A History Uncovered

77 Evelyn I. Funda Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament

S. George Ellsworth, the subject of our first article, was a leading practitioner of this “new” history.

Ellsworth obtained graduate training under Herbert Eugene Bolton at the University of California–Berkeley and spent his entire career at Utah State University. A bibliophile, he made important contributions to bolstering USU’s collection of what he called Utahnalia. Unlike the better-known Leonard Arrington, with whom he shared an intimate but at times strained relationship, Ellsworth was not a prolific scholar. Detailed and thoughtful, he labored fifteen years on Utah’s Heritage, a seventh-grade history textbook. Robert Parson guides readers in an intimate introduction to a master teacher and gifted, if at time conflicted, scholar who merits broader recognition for his contributions to Utah history. The other articles in this issue reflect Ellsworth’s dedication to telling lesser-known stories.

With our second article, a team of foresters and archaeologists have set out to remind Utahns of the place of charcoal in their state’s mining history. For many reasons, charcoal was a preferred source of heat in smelting; it was, therefore, critical to the mining industry. From whence, then, did smelters obtain the charcoal they needed to operate? The authors of this article have answered this question 1 Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 232.

The last two pieces in this issue remind us of Utah’s deep Catholic roots. Emma Louise Penrod probes into the naming of Tooele’s Saint Marguerite Catholic Church, skeptical that a church in a Utah town with almost no French roots derived its name from the French Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. She was right. The Marguerite in question was in fact a young Irish American girl, the niece of Frank McGurrin—a celebrated typist who helped popularize the QWERTY keyboard and nurtured the Catholic Church in Tooele. The article segues into a discussion of ethnicity and religion in small mining towns, like those close to Tooele, and the odd connection of the Catholic parish to the origins of modern touch typing. The final piece features a delightful conversation between the historian Gary Topping and Gregory Glenn, the founder and director of the Madeleine Choir School in Salt Lake City.

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The back cover of this issue features a commercial photograph of chocolate boxes from the J. G. McDonald Company. The message presented by these boxes is overwhelmingly one of beauty, elegance, and, above all, femininity. As our third article establishes, such a message belied the realities of life for the young women who worked at McDonald’s confectionery. In 1910, fourteen of those women formed a “Chocolate Dippers’ Union” and struck for higher wages. These women—all of whom were younger than twenty-five and all of whom lost their jobs—acted bravely and with few precedents close at hand. Though only the names of the Chocolate Dippers’ Union’s officers survive, that fragment of history provides a fascinating glimpse into their world: all five of the officers came from the homes of working-class English immigrants, converts to Mormonism.

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Charcoal burners, “chocolate girls,” Catholic priests, and a champion typist: these are a few of the characters who populate this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly. That contemporary historians consider such individuals worthy of study stems, in part, from the new social history of the 1960s and beyond. This school of thought challenged the “consensus” history that had emphasized common American values and character over ethnic, racial, and class distinctions. In the words of the historian Alice Kessler-Harris, the new social history documented “social relationships, social structure, everyday life, private life, social solidarities, social conflicts, social classes, and social groups.”1 In short, over the years, it has provided a more complete view of the past.

by documenting the remains of charcoal production sites throughout the state, as well as sites in Colorado and Wyoming associated with Utah mining. They are careful, too, to remind readers of the devastation caused by the charcoal industry: in the lives of the poorly paid, poorly housed charcoal burners; for the Native Americans whose food source the industry decimated; and, not least, in the forests altered by heavy, careless logging.

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The cover of Ellsworth’s seventh-grade Utah history textbook, published in 1972. —

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S. George Ellsworth and the History of Utah RO BE RT

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S. George Ellsworth occasionally proclaimed that as a professor at Utah State University (USU) he felt privileged to have taught the history of all three of the world’s great cultures: Rome, Greece, and Utah. He delivered this statement with such perfect deadpan that those uninitiated to his subtle humor never quite knew when, or if, to laugh. Furthermore, given his strong affection for Utah and Mormon history, Ellsworth likely did not intend his comparison to be entirely absurd.

While the careers of Utah’s more famous practitioners have been chronicled, Ellsworth’s contributions as a Utah historian remain largely unknown.1 He is by no means alone in this vacuum. There are many deserving of wider recognition. This essay will endeavor to place Ellsworth in the company of his more prominent contemporaries by emphasizing his unique historian–archivist approach to primary documents and by examining his impact as a teacher, researcher, writer, and facilitator and promoter of local, state, and western history.

Born into the Mormon community at Safford, Arizona, Ellsworth spent the earliest years of his life in Payson, Utah, where his father James managed a bank and later served a term as mayor. In 1924, the family moved to Salt Lake City, then to Ogden, before relocating to Long Beach, California. Although George spent much of his youth moving from one part of the country to another, the family remained deeply committed to its 1 While Ellsworth planned to write a memoir tentatively entitled “My Time in History,” he progressed only as far as an outline and a few drafts of chapters. See “My Time in History: An Autobiography (unpublished),” boxes 11–13, series 2, Papers of S. George Ellsworth, Mss 228, Special Collections and Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah (hereafter SCA). The lives of other Utah historians, Juanita Brooks and Leonard J. Arrington, for instance, have been the subjects of books both biographical and autobiographical. See Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: A Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988); and Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

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History seminar held in the Merrill Library’s Hatch Room, ca. 1960s. J. Duncan Brite, whose class Ellsworth took as an undergraduate, is at the head of the table .

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Mormon heritage and seemed always intent on returning to the Mormon West.2 Ellsworth graduated from Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1934, and after attending junior college for two years, embarked to the north-central states for an LDS church mission. Following his mission, he returned to Utah, where he registered for classes at the Utah State Agricultural College (hereafter USU) in Logan. As Ellsworth pursued his nascent interest in history he found the classes taught by J. Duncan Brite, Milton R. Merrill, and Joel E. Ricks particularly rewarding. Ricks had immersed himself in the study of the West, especially as it related to Mormon settlement, and had warm friendships with such luminaries as Herbert Eugene Bolton and Frederick 2 “Genealogy and Biographical information on James C. Ellsworth and James Henry Ellsworth,” n.d., box 1, fd. 2, Papers of James Clarence Ellsworth, Mss 228a, SCA.

Jackson Turner.3 Ellsworth supported himself as a janitor, a night watchman, and, drawing on his previous predilection for architecture, a draftsman, preparing plans for various campus projects.4 He earned twenty-five cents per hour through employment provided by the National Youth Administration. More than two thousand USU students depended on this New Deal Era program during the 1930s, one of inestimable value to the college, declared USU president E. G. Peterson. “No action of the Federal Government . . . has been more defensible from every point of view than this program of student aid.”5 After his graduation, Ellsworth accepted a position as principal of Virgin Valley High School in the remote Mormon community of Bunkerville, Nevada. While in Nevada, he met and married Maria Smith from the Mormon community of Snowflake, Arizona. Shortly after their marriage, Ellsworth enlisted for service during World War II, where he served 3 Although privately Ellsworth referred to Ricks as “the bulldozer,” who ran the department with an iron fist, he nonetheless exerted an enormous influence on him.

See “Utah State Years—Since 1951” box 13, fd. 6, series 2, Ellsworth Papers.

4 “Remarks before the Old Main Society, April 19, 1990,” box 9, fd. 4, series 2, Ellsworth Papers.

5 Biennial Report of the President to the Board of Trustees, Utah State Agricultural College, 1934–1936, p. 6, Record Group 2.1:63, SCA.

Ellsworth worked primarily with Bolton’s successor, Lawrence Kinnaird, as would several others (including Richard Poll and Everett Cooley) who also gravitated to Berkeley for graduate training. Ellsworth recalled the exhilarating academic atmosphere at Berkeley, where students experienced the “thrill of discovery,” were encouraged to apply “new approaches,” and received constructive criticism.

Kinnaird offered succinct advice, Ellsworth remembered: teach and learn while teaching, take your written and oral exams, and, most importantly, “finish and get out of here!”9 Partially as a result of his Mormon upbringing, which emphasized the blessings of hard work, but also from his impoverished college and military years, Ellsworth developed an indefatigable capacity for work. In a little more than four years he completed requirements for both the master’s and doctoral degrees.

Ellsworth’s conscientious work ethic served him well once he joined Joel Ricks and Duncan 6 Gary Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 20.

7 Thomas H. Johnson, The Oxford Companion to American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 93.

8 “Berkeley Years,” n.d., box 13, fd. 5, series 2, Ellsworth Papers.

9 Ibid.

Ellsworth’s affinity for bibliography distinguished him from other Utah historians. His writings were often more pedagogical than they were analytical, more educational than interpretive. In part two of the UHQ series, Ellsworth presented “A Guide to the Manuscripts in the Bancroft Library Relating to the History of Utah,” wherein he demonstrated his fondness for bibliography, as well as his aptitude for teaching.13 Ellsworth carefully annotated the guide. Each entry consisted of the full name of the document’s author, followed by the author’s 10 Educational Policies Committee, minutes, October 27, 1955, Record Group 4.3:35, SCA. 11 Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Utah: 1540–1887 (San Francisco: History Company Publishers, 1890).

12 George Ellsworth, “Hubert Howe Bancroft and the History of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (April 1954), 100.

13 “S. George Ellsworth, “A Guide to the Manuscripts in the Bancroft Library Relating to the History of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (July 1954), 197–247.

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Following release from the military in 1946, he entered the graduate program at UC–Berkeley, which had a long tradition as a training ground for Utah historians.6 Although not among these, Joel Ricks encouraged his young protégé to continue that tradition, hoping to unite him with his old friend, Herbert Eugene Bolton.

Ellsworth also received encouragement from Milton R. Hunter and Thomas C. Romney, both of whom had graduated from Berkeley under Bolton’s tutelage. Bolton was professor of Latin American history at Berkeley, serving as president of the American Historical Association in 1932. He also was curator of the Bancroft Library.7 Nearing the twilight of his career, the aged scholar often invited Ellsworth into his study adjacent to the library, where we “had many chats on many subjects,” Ellsworth later recalled.8

Brite as a junior member of USU’s History Department in 1951. One of his primary responsibilities was to develop a course specifically on Utah. Ellsworth pioneered the use of a wide range of primary documents to study the state’s past.10 He promoted this concept in two 1954 Utah Historical Quarterly (UHQ) articles describing the primary sources he had consulted in the Bancroft Library while pursuing his graduate degrees at UC–Berkeley. In the first, Ellsworth presented Hubert Howe Bancroft’s life history and work developing a manuscript collection on Utah history. In the 1870s, Bancroft had worked closely with the LDS apostle Orson Pratt, at the time serving as Church Historian, to convince the church to copy or loan its primary documents to him for use in preparing a history of Utah Territory.11 As Ellsworth asserted on more than one occasion, Bancroft’s History of Utah had enduring significance as a “standard narrative” of territorial Utah’s history. The documents he collected contained in the Bancroft Collection at UC– Berkeley gave “life and blood and emotion to the first thirty years of Utah history.” Although Bancroft never fully utilized these materials, Ellsworth envisioned them as a wellspring of historical information, awaiting “the searching eye of today’s historian.” Most importantly, however, the work was an “indispensable . . . bibliographic guide.”12

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as a clerk and later as a chaplain with the Army Air Corps.

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birth and death dates, where determinable; the subject of the manuscript, or title contained within quotation marks, if applicable; place and date of creation; number of volumes or pages; size of the document; analysis of the handwriting; and the document’s provenance, including brief descriptions of the writer, the subject and scope and content of the manuscript. While Ellsworth held true the “historian’s dictum” regarding the indispensability of documents

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He rarely threw anything away.

No document was dispensable . . . . all had significance in documenting the past. (“no documents, no history”), he was equally convinced in the essentialness of knowing “as much as possible about each document . . . its origins, authorship and backgrounds.”14 In this conviction, George Ellsworth was perhaps as much archivist as he was historian, although in his case, the two professions were inseparable. At the second home he and his wife purchased a short distance from their 300 East Street family residence in Logan, he used the main floor as his study. It was there, nearly a decade after his retirement and only a few years before his death in 1997, that he and I first became acquainted. He had invited us down to survey the contents of his life’s work in anticipation of him donating it to USU’s Special Collections.15 14 Ellsworth, “Hubert Howe Bancroft,” 101.

15 The preliminary details of Ellsworth’s donation had been worked out by Brad Cole before he left USU for a ten-year hiatus at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Department Head, Ann Buttars, completed the final details, including the naming of a room in the Merrill Library in his honor. The bulk of Ellsworth’s collection, however, remained in his possession, and the task of physically transferring the collection fell to my colleague John Powell and me.

Ellsworth unlocked the side door to lead my colleague John Powell and me up the short span of stairs, into the kitchen. The kitchen was used by one carefully screened graduate student, who otherwise occupied the basement floor. Beyond the kitchen we entered the main parlor. I recognized immediately that this was much more than a simple study. This was a library, or more accurately, an archive (he actually kept his book collections in several rooms up the street at the family home). Around the walls were rows of map, microfilm, and filing cabinets, along with shelves containing an array of document boxes, all labeled, numbered, and impeccably well ordered. A vintage Kodagraph microfilm reader occupied one corner, and in the center of the room was a large work table, constructed of cinder blocks and ply board. The configuration of the table left only enough space around the room’s perimeter to open file drawers and allow for a walkway.

The work area looked chaotic, but I recognized that the piles of papers and bundles of note cards represented what we archivists somewhat pretentiously refer to as “arrangement,” the process of establishing physical and intellectual control over archives. Although accomplished at archival arrangement (and even more so at archival description), it became clear to me during the succeeding years of processing his collection that Ellsworth was less proficient at the de-accession of materials.

He rarely threw anything away. No document was dispensable, no scrap or bit of information unessential. Both the weighty and trivial, the eminent and ephemeral—all had significance in documenting the past. Who besides George Ellsworth kept thirty years of mimeographed invitations announcing the annual steak fry of the Faculty Men’s Forum?

USU hails Ellsworth as its first archivist.16 Be16 This was an ancillary position, largely self imposed, and was in addition to his considerable teaching load.

In the recurrent language (probably suggested by Ellsworth) used to define many archival repositories, President Daryl Chase proclaimed in 1959 that “Utah State University Archives are those records which are adjudged worthy of permanent preservation for reference and research purposes,” including “all books, papers, maps, photographs, or other documentary materials . . . received by the University . . . as evidence of its functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities or because of the informational value of the data contained therein.” See “Abbreviated

Ellsworth’s resolve to preserve institutional records and other local archival materials had developed during a committee assignment he shared with the art professor H. Rueben Reynolds and the librarians King Hendricks and Milton Abrams in 1954. The committee proposed creating the Hatch Memorial Reading Room in the library. Having as its corpus the books, manuscripts, and furnishings donated by L. Boyd and Anne McQuarrie Hatch, the committee further suggested stocking the room with books and materials having “irreplaceability” or “uniqueness.” Particularly, the committee identified the books and materials with “local archival value.”19 Although this marks the beginning of what is now the Merrill-Cazier Library’s Special Collections, foremost on Ellsworth’s agenda at the time was to collect those materials that Collection Policy for Special Collections and Archives, Utah State University (draft),” November 1, 2002, 4, SCA.

To further the centennial history project, Ellsworth spearheaded a drive to microfilm public and personal historical records from Cache Valley. Armed with a camera borrowed from USHS and film purchased by the College Library, Ellsworth supervised the filling of twenty-nine rolls of film with diaries, scrapbooks, journals, and business records, as well as the official government records for towns in both Cache County, Utah, and Franklin County, Idaho.22 With Ellsworth’s usual attention to detail, his inventory of these historical resources included copious scope and content notes for each entry.23 Importantly, since it retained the film negative, the library planned to make copies and “negotiate with other institutions for an exchange of . . . materials,” further enhancing 20 Ibid.

21 Report of Activities, Summer 1954, p. 3, box 36, file of S. George Ellsworth, Record Group 8.7/1:49, SCA.

17 S. George Ellsworth, “Utah History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Utah Historical Quarterly 40 (Fall 1972), 360.

22 Geographically, Cache Valley includes Cache County, Utah, and Franklin County, Idaho.

18 Ibid., 366.

23 S. George Ellsworth, An Inventory of Historical Resource Materials for Cache Valley, Utah–Idaho, on Microfilm (Logan: Utah State University Library, 1957), preface.

19 “Abbreviated Collection Policy for Special Collections and Archives, Utah State University (draft),” 4.

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Ellsworth collaborated again with the college’s librarians, as well as with the Utah State Historical Society (USHS) and the LDS Church Historical Department, to cooperatively purchase three sets of microfilm containing Bancroft’s Utah-related documents, the same documents he had meticulously described in his 1954 UHQ article. Ellsworth further persuaded his library colleagues to purchase the territorial reports for both Utah and Idaho, which had recently been filmed by the National Archives.

Ellsworth discovered these in 1954 during trips he made to the National Archives and to the Library of Congress while serving as a visiting professor at the West Virginia University. He also canvassed other libraries and repositories in the East in search of records on Utah and Mormon history. As he informed USU President Daryl Chase, his quest yielded “mines of materials which will take a lifetime to study and digest.”21

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he respectfully referred to as Utahnalia. Defined by the committee as “the letters, diaries, journals or books of interest to this area,” these sources would be essential in writing a history of Cache Valley, slated for publication in 1956, the centennial year of its Mormon settlement.20

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ing a keeper as well as a user of primary documents made his approach to Utah history unique. Ellsworth’s collection of documents enabled him to visualize the panorama of history and to focus on the smallest details of an event—always with an eye for the connection between the two. Ellsworth knew the sources and was frequently critical of students and professionals who failed to consider them in their writing. An advocate for balance and impartiality, Ellsworth also encouraged the study of history from all perspectives, including those traditionally excluded from the historical record.

“It is relatively easy to write on the beginnings of mining . . . [or] to center on the wealthy owner,” he wrote, but much more difficult to tell “the story of the operators, the workers, [and] the townspeople.”17 But though Ellsworth was an incessant supporter of writing “bottom-up” history, he was also wary of over-specialization. There is “a tendency . . . to overdo microstudies,” he complained. “Soon we are knowing more and more about less and less, and ultimately we wind up knowing everything about nothing.” 18

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Everett L.Cooley, Joel E. Ricks, A. R. Mortensen, and S. George Ellsworth examining bound volumes of Cache Valley pioneer journals collected by Ricks.

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its Utah and Mormon collections.24 These resources, along with those collected earlier by professors Ricks and Brite, were to be housed in the Hatch Room, designated as the official archive of the Cache Valley Historical Society (CVHS).

It is more than coincidental that the CVHS began in 1951, the year George Ellsworth returned to his alma mater as an assistant professor of history. Joel Ricks had charted the course for establishing local historical societies while serving as president of the Board of State History. It remained, however, for the energetic Ellsworth to implement the plan in Cache Valley. In affiliation with the USHS, his History Department colleagues, and Leonard J. 24 S. George Ellsworth to Daryl Chase, January 24, 1958, box 36, Ellsworth file.

Arrington, then teaching economics at USU, he built a thriving local organization, which at its zenith included nearly two hundred dues-paying memberws.25 The CVHS charged ahead to complete the writing of Cache Valley’s centennial history. Edited by Joel Ricks and state archivist Everett L. Cooley, The History of a Valley stood in contrast to most local histories. Of the nine contributors, all were professionals, most had advanced degrees, and all but two held academic rank at USU.26 While Ellsworth only authored the 25 “Membership cards, 1955–1956,” box 1, fd. 8, series 7C, Ellsworth Papers.

26 Joel E. Ricks and Everett L. Cooley, The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah–Idaho (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing Co., 1956), xii–xiv, 479–80. Of its seventeen chapters, Leonard Arrington authored four; Joel Ricks, four; and Duncan Brite, two. Other contributors from the college faculty included William Peterson, who had devoted a lifetime to studying the geology of Cache Valley; A. N. Sorensen, emeritus English professor, who had previously served on the faculty at the Brigham Young College in Logan; and Eugene E. Campbell, who, while technically not a member of the faculty, directed the LDS Institute of Religion on campus and would continue on afterwards to a distinguished career in Utah and Mormon studies. Additional contributions to Cache Valley’s history were made by Gunnar Rasmuson, past editor of the Logan Journal, and Melvin R. Hovey, past president of the Cache Chamber of Commerce.

Writing Utah’s Heritage proved much more difficult than Ellsworth had initially thought.

Following a faculty meeting to discuss research and creativity in August 1955, Ellsworth proposed the idea to USU President Daryl Chase.

Ellsworth had already approached Arrington, USHS director A. R. Mortensen, and Richard D.

Reassured by these sentiments and armed with the preliminary results of Roylance’s research, Ellsworth made application to the College’s Research Council for funds to begin the project. Unlike the current school text, which he characterized as being “poorly organized, incomplete in its coverage, disproportionate in its treatment, considerably biased, and [including] little or none of the research done in so many fields,” Ellsworth proposed to write a history text that would “treat each period . . . proportionately,” extending to “economic development[,] the utilization, exploitation and conservation of natural resources, agriculture, farming and ranching, mining, industry, home production, communication, transportation, the distribution and consumption of goods, [as well as] social and cultural achievements.”34 Rather than limiting the scope of the work to “only the usual political, ecclesiastical and settlement history,” Ellsworth envisioned a text 31 “Documents relating to the beginning of the project,” n.d., box 10, fd. 9, Utah’s Heritage Research, Mss 228d, SCA.

29 Textbooks for Use in the Schools of Utah during 1986–87 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Office of Education, 1986), 155.

32 Ibid. Roylance went on to a short career with the Utah Travel Council, but is probably best known as an outspoken advocate for Utah’s red rock country—what he called “the Enchanted Wilderness”—and for his greatly expanded and enlarged revision of Dale Morgan’s 1941 classic WPA project, Utah: A Guide to the State. See Ward J. Roylance, Utah: A Guide to the State (Salt Lake City: The Foundation, 1982). Roylance and Ellsworth remained friends and corresponded intermittently for the balance of their lives. See box 5, fd. 12, series 1, Ellsworth Papers.

30 S. George Ellsworth, Utah’s Heritage (Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith, 1972), 5.

34 Ibid.

27 Publication costs probably contributed to the decision not to include footnotes. Furthermore, while Ellsworth, Arrington, Ricks, Brite, and other professionals were comfortable with the minutiae of citations, others such as Rasmusen and Hovey were less so.

28 Ricks and Cooley, History of a Valley, 458–78.

33 Box 2, fd. U-19, Record Group 17.2:17, SCA.

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Ellsworth took a keen interest in the work of Ward J. Roylance, who, as a graduate student at the University of Utah in 1957, made a study “to determine the need for a new textbook dealing with Utah.”32 He also spoke at length with educators and public school teachers, many of whom asserted that a “new book on Utah History is probably our greatest single text book need.”33

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Building the library’s collections, while preparing bibliographies and guides to these primary resources, enhanced Ellsworth’s ability to teach Utah history to college students. Even as this was his primary motivation, he recognized that public school teachers and their students also faced a dearth of materials to support the Utah history curriculum. He offered a corrective to that, penning the officially adopted textbook for seventh-grade students studying Utah history. Most students who attended a Utah public school from 1972 until the mid-1990s were familiar with Utah’s Heritage.29 It made an important contribution to the public school curriculum by providing teachers with a narrative of the past that not only advanced Utah history into the twentieth century, but through a reliance on primary sources also encompassed a “breadth of coverage” not found in previous textbooks.30

Poll, chair of Brigham Young University’s History Department, about collaborating on a college-level text. “Without doubt,” Ellsworth reasoned, “such a work could be re-written to suit the needs of a junior high text.”31 For a number of reasons, the glow on Ellsworth’s rosy optimism soon faded.

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chapter dealing with political developments, he more importantly penned the concluding bibliographic essay. His essay was encompassing.

Not only did it identify the sources used by the authors in writing The History of a Valley (an imperative given that the book does not contain footnotes) it also discussed general works on the history of Utah, Idaho, and Mormonism.27 Furthermore, by taking the reader through the steps of historical inquiry, the essay provided a methodological framework that could be followed by other students of Utah history. Once again, Ellsworth demonstrated his effectiveness as both bibliographer and teacher.28

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“comparing and contrasting” developments in Utah “with those of the contemporary West and Nation” and addressing the history of Mormonism as well as that of “Utah Jews, Catholics and Protestant groups,” and other underrepresented communities.35 The Research Council enthusiastically supported Ellsworth’s proposal, even amending its policies to allow him to use the funding during his sabbatical beginning in 1957. Ellsworth set a goal of completing the project during his sabbatical, with plans to present a published book to the Utah Textbook Adoption Committee in January 1959.

At the time of Ellsworth’s application to the Research Council it appeared very likely that the State Curriculum Committee would place Utah History within the ninth grade. Ellsworth had received some assurance from his contacts at the Department of Public Instruction, and the Curriculum Committee had, in fact, made that recommendation. Richard Poll, Ellsworth’s friend and colleague since their days together at UC Berkeley, spoke in favor of this arrangement. At Ellsworth’s solicitation, Poll urged the committee to move the curriculum to the ninth grade. Most compelling was seventh graders’ lack of maturity. “There are important problems in Utah history which require a degree of maturity and sophistication for their understanding,” Poll asserted. “It hardly needs to be argued that the histories of few states involve topics as demanding of careful, thoughtful classroom presentation as the history of Utah.”36 Despite these advances, in late 1956 the committee decided to leave Utah history as part of the seventh-grade curriculum. “This decision,” Ellsworth declared, “was unfortunate.”

Its placement “on the seventh grade level . . . [would require] emphasis . . . on . . . history as simple story,” not the sort of encompassing narrative he envisioned.37 Ellsworth knew, and Poll concurred, that the ninth grade was “as early as . . . matters of institutional analysis and development can be effectively considered.”38 The committee’s re35 Ibid.

36 See “Early textbook plans,” n.d., box 10, fd. 4, Utah’s Heritage Research; and Richard Poll to Ellsworth, July 23, 1956, box 4, fd. 31, series 1, Ellsworth Papers.

37 Ellsworth to Daryl Chase, November 1, 1956, box 10, fd.

4, Utah’s Heritage Research.

38 “Early textbook plans,” n.d., box 10, fd. 4, Utah’s

versal disrupted Ellsworth’s prospect of writing a comprehensive narrative that with some modification could serve both as a college text, as well as one for high school freshmen. Simplifying the narrative to a level appropriate for seventh graders proved tedious and time consuming. His dismay at having underestimated the difficulty of writing for an adolescent audience likely contributed to an extended illness that incapacitated him during much of his sabbatical. Ellsworth found it necessary to write the first draft at “average college level” and then painstakingly “rework, and rework, and rework” the manuscript into “another draft for a seventh grade textbook.”39 This procedure, he confessed, gave him little “conviction of success.”40 While Ellsworth had compiled an impressive amount of research material and had a clear outline for the book’s organization, he was unable to finish the chapters by his January 1959 deadline.

While the university remained supportive, continuing to provide modest funding for the Utah history project, Ellsworth was clearly discouraged.41 His discouragement was manifest further during fall 1960 when Milton R. Hunter published The Utah Story. This newly minted title, although “loaded with color pictures,” was simply a revision of Utah in Her Western Setting, Hunter’s previous textbook that Ellsworth and others had criticized as an unsatisfactory “educational tool.” “Even so,” he lamented, “since there is no other to choose from, schools will buy it and the market will be taken.”42 As Ellsworth recommitted himself to the classroom, his research and writing was further curtailed.43 His teaching duties were substanHeritage Research.

39 Ellsworth to D. Wynn Thorne, March 25, 1959, box 2, fd. U-19, Record Group 17.2:17, SCA. 40 Ellsworth to Thorne, March 15, 1961, box 2, fd. U-19, Record Group 17.2:17, SCA. 41 Milton R. Merrill expressed a guarded concern over Ellsworth’s ability to complete the textbook. See M. R. Merrill to Daryl Chase, July 11, 1961, box 36, Ellsworth file.

42 Ibid.

43 Ellsworth’s onerous teaching load is significant to understanding why it took seventeen years for him to complete the first edition of Utah’s Heritage and why six of the eight books written, cowritten, edited, or coedited

by Ellsworth appeared after his retirement.

Following the retirements of Joel Ricks and Duncan Brite, Ellsworth became department 44 Utah State Agricultural College Catalog, 1954 (Logan: Utah State Agricultural College, 1954), 126–27.

45 “On the Matter of History Teaching Load,” box 1, fd. 15, series 2, Ellsworth Papers.

46 “Awards and Honors,” n.d., box 12, fd. 9, series 11, Ellsworth Papers. The Sigma Nu Fraternity launched the Robins Awards to recognize student talent, student leaders, student athletes, student scholars, as well as faculty and alumni. The award was named in honor of William E. (Bill) Robins, a former student body president who, along with his wife Geraldine and two others, tragically died in an airplane crash.

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head in 1966.47 Even with new administrative duties added to an already busy schedule, Ellsworth still found time to establish the Western Historical Quarterly (WHQ) at USU. He approached USU Vice President Milton Merrill with the idea early in 1968, after the Western History Association (WHA) circulated its call for proposals for institutions interested in housing the offices of the WHQ. Ellsworth reminded the vice president of USU’s long involvement with western history. Not only had Joel Ricks taught the history of the American West, he had also established a warm, collegial relationship with two of the profession’s founding fathers, Frederick Jackson Turner and Frederick P. Merk, who taught at the institution’s National Summer School in 1924 and 1925, respectively.48 Although supportive, Merrill balked at the $30,000 budget. It “bowls me over,” he complained; “this would be most difficult.”49 In July 1968, Glen L. Taggart assumed the presidency of USU. Ellsworth wasted no time pitching the WHQ to incoming vice president R. Gaurth Hansen.50 Receiving Hansen’s approval, Ellsworth recommended that the university hire Everett L. Cooley as WHQ editor. Cooley had served as state archivist and had worked closely with Ellsworth when Cooley coedited History of a Valley. As director of the Utah State Historical Society he had also gained considerable experience editing the Utah Historical Quarterly.

Cooley was an excellent choice. Yet beyond 47 Junior faculty members who joined Ellsworth during the early 1960s included Stanford Cazier, Blythe Ahlstrom, and Douglas Alder. Cazier served as president of California State University at Chico from 1971 until 1979, and then as president of USU until 1991. Alder served as president of Dixie State College from 1986 until 1993. By 1969, when Ellsworth prepared to step down as department head to launch the Western Historical Quarterly, he had recruited an impressive number of young scholars to the department, many of whom would spend the balance of their careers at USU. Included in this list are R. Edward Glatfelter, Michael (Mick) Nicholls, C. Robert Cole, William C. Lye, and F. Ross Peterson.

48 S. George Ellsworth, “Ten Years: An Editor’s Report,” Western Historical Quarterly 10 (October 1979), 421.

49 M. R. Merrill to Ellsworth, February 16, 1968, box 15, fd.

9, Record Group 14.6/5-1:26, SCA. 50 Ellsworth to R. Gaurth Hansen, August 27, 1968, box 15, fd. 9, Record Group 14.6/5-1:26, SCA.

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tial. Not only did Ellsworth develop and teach the course on Utah history, but his responsibilities also included teaching survey courses in ancient world civilizations, modern world civilizations, current world affairs, and modern U.S. history. He also taught the four courses on the history of Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and on the Renaissance and Reformation period; a course on Hispanic-American History; the senior seminar for history majors; plus two graduate seminars, one on methodology and the other on the history of the Mountain West.44 Ellsworth joined in the campaign to reduce the faculty teaching load but still took the art of instruction very seriously. Far from delivering “extemporaneous talks . . . about events of the past,” he developed his lectures as “portions of a large scheme of narrative and interpretation [close] in character and relation to a musical composition.” Since history is continually being “re-investigated and re-interpreted . . . by scholars,” he believed that “these new finds must be studied if one is to keep alive in the field.” Ellsworth saw a “great danger of teaching antiquated history,” and he devoted several hours to the preparation of a single lecture. If the professor is “to cover the material and bring into focus the pertinent facts and interpretations,” he emphasized, then “he must be prepared. . . . The composition must be smooth running, continuous, related, and completed.”45 Students rewarded him for his commitment in the classroom by naming him Teacher of the Year within the College of Humanities and Arts in 1961, and again during the 1965 Robins Awards, where he was recognized as University Teacher of the Year.46 Although he received many awards during his career, few others resonated so deeply with Ellsworth.

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his qualifications as an editor, Ellsworth had a secondary motive for endorsing his candidacy. Since beginning his tenure at Utah State, Ellsworth had championed the collecting of research materials to study Utah history. Following his suggestion in 1954, the university had initiated an Institute of Utah Studies.51 Ellsworth envisioned an ambitious program not only to build library collections but also to promote and publish research on Utah history.

For lack of funding, the institute never materialized beyond holding a few summer workshops for teachers. With Cooley on staff, however, Ellsworth could now picture the institute in full flower and the fulfillment of his dream to make USU the preeminent center for teaching and researching Utah history.

Unfortunately, the University of Utah was also pursuing Cooley “to head up their new . . . library and archival program,” Ellsworth confessed. USU’s effort “will suffer in comparison for not having something so good or someone so able doing the same.”52 Even after Cooley informed Ellsworth that he felt obligated to honor the contract with the University of Utah, and not to “renege on his word,” Ellsworth continued to hold hope that he could be persuaded. He suggested offering a number of inducements to convince Cooley to change his mind and relocate to USU. Not the least of these was the opportunity of “special assignment . . . to find and obtain valued manuscripts and manuscript collections and rare books for the University library.”53 Ellsworth’s hope of embedding Cooley within the library meshed ideally with his vision for making USU the center for Utah studies.

Much of the early Utah and local collection had come to the library through Ellsworth’s initiative. In 1956, the library recognized his effort by naming him curator of manuscripts.54 This was largely a ceremonial appointment, and like his subsequent appointment three years later as University Archivist, was in addition to his 51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ellsworth to Hansen, December 5, 1968, box 15, fd. 9, Record Group 14.6/5-1:26, SCA. 54 Ellsworth to Leonard J. Arrington, November 15, 1956, box 8, fd. 14, series 5, Papers of Leonard J. Arrington, Leonard J. Arrington Historical Archives 1, SCA.

regular faculty position. Cooley’s decision to remain at the University of Utah disappointed Ellsworth, who for many years thereafter remained disenchanted with the direction of Special Collections and Archives at USU.55 Following Cooley’s decision, Ellsworth suggested that USU complete its negotiations with the WHA by naming Leonard Arrington editor and himself as the associate or managing editor.56 Arrington had only peripheral involvement with the negotiations on campus.

As president of WHA, however, he had been intimately engaged in promoting USU to the membership of that organization. Well known, widely published, and well connected in western history circles, Arrington enjoyed the WHA’s full support. Ellsworth acknowledged Arrington’s greater prominence in the profession and agreed that he was in the best position to be accepted as editor by the association.57 These long-time colleagues profoundly respected each other. Ellsworth credited Arrington for being the most “prolific writer on Utah history.”58 Arrington acknowledged Ellsworth’s substantial influence on his development as a historian.59 While laboring at the Huntington Library to complete the final draft of what would become Great Basin Kingdom in 1957, he frequently had sought Ellsworth’s assistance and counsel. Ellsworth even edited and critiqued the final draft just prior to 55 One certainly cannot fault the high regard Ellsworth had for Everett Cooley. Cooley peerlessly guided the Marriott Library’s Special Collections at the University of Utah from 1969 until his retirement in 1983. Concurrently, however, the young A. J. Simmonds built upon George’s beginnings a superlative Special Collections at USU, a fact that George Ellsworth never acknowledged. As late as 1978, Ellsworth continued to denounce USU’s Special Collections, characterizing it as “the poorest held by the colleges and universities of Utah.” He was even less charitable towards Simmonds, noting that “we need a thorough-going study of Special Collections: its purpose, its collections . . . its management, [and] its staff. It may be we will not get a change . . . without a change in personnel.” See Ellsworth to William F. Lye, April 10, 1978, box 7, fd. 4, Record Group 14.6:17, SCA. 56 Ellsworth to Hansen, December 5, 1968, box 15, fd. 9, Record Group 14.6/5-1:26, SCA. 57 Ibid.

58 Ellsworth to Hansen, August 28, 1968, box 15, fd. 9, Record Group 14.6/5-1:26, SCA. 59 Gary Topping, Leonard J. Arrington: A Historian’s Life (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 40–41.

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its submission for publication.60 Nevertheless, the WHQ editorial arrangement strained their long relationship. Ellsworth and Arrington approached their professions very differently.

Unlike Arrington, Ellsworth avoided the limelight.61 Ever the perfectionist, Ellsworth spent nearly fifteen years researching and writing his seventh-grade history text. Conversely, Arrington, the entrepreneurial historian, had employed graduate students and collaborated with other historians to publish nine books by 1972 when he left the editorship and USU to accept the calling as LDS Church Historian.

With Arrington’s departure, Ellsworth became 60 Arrington to Ellsworth, May 23, 1957, box 1, fd. 7, series 1, Ellsworth Papers; Ellsworth to Arrington, May 20, 1957, box 8, fd. 14, series 5, Arrington Papers. The copy of the draft manuscript of Great Basin Kingdom is found in Arrington, “Great Basin Kingdom: Draft MS before final submission,” microfilm, Utah Reel 500, SCA. 61 Arrington perceived this characteristic in Ellsworth when he confided “that he always knows how to do things better than others and this is true. He is a brilliant, imaginative person and whether it is doing carpentry work or printing or giving lectures . . . he can always do it better than anyone else.” See Arrington, Diary, March 22, 1973, box 29, fd. 1, series 10, Arrington Papers. Ellsworth offered some insight into his penchant for detail as he recounted WHQ’s history. See Ellsworth, “Ten Years: An Editor’s Report,” 423.

Aerial view of Utah State University, 1958.

Old Main, the bell-tower building, houses the offices of the History Department and since 1969 the Western Historical Quarterly.

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editor of WHQ, both in title and toil. Charles S. Peterson soon joined him as associate editor.62 With the quarterly on firm footing, Ellsworth could finally refocus his attention on completing Utah’s Heritage, published by Peregrine Smith in 1972 and soon adopted as the official text for Utah public school students. The Mormon History Association awarded Utah’s 62 Peterson became editor of WHQ when Ellsworth stepped down in 1979. Paul A. Hutton joined the editorial staff in 1977, becoming associate editor in 1979.

See Ellsworth, “Ten Years: An Editor’s Report,” 426n1.

Clyde A. Milner succeeded Hutton as associate editor in 1985 and became editor, along with coeditor Anne M. Butler, upon Peterson’s retirement in 1990. Butler became editor and Milner executive editor in 1998.

David Rich Lewis joined the editorial staff as associate editor in 1993, becoming coeditor and then editor in 2004 with the retirement of Anne Butler. A testament to Ellsworth’s vision, the WHQ still operates out of USU’s History Department, with Lewis as editor and Colleen O’Neill as coeditor.

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Officers of the Cache Valley Historical Society, 1950s. Ellsworth (standing, third from left) and Arrington (standing, far right) were long time associates.

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Heritage its Book of the Year award in 1973.

Teachers, as well, generally gave the book positive reviews. It is “beautifully written, thorough and scholarly,” one remarked, while another considered it the “best comprehensive study of Utah.” Interestingly, some teachers felt the book was too advanced for seventh-grade students, a problem Ellsworth had been grappling with since first beginning the project nearly twenty years earlier.63 Ellsworth revised and reissued the text in 1985 as The New Utah’s Heritage.

At the time of the text’s publication, Ellsworth had cemented his reputation as one of the state’s preeminent historians. In 1972, the editors of UHQ published a manuscript they had asked him to produce on “analysis of the 63 “Survey Results from Teachers, 1975,” box 26, fd. 6, Utah’s Heritage Research.

history of writing Utah history.”64 In his article Ellsworth paid tribute to a long list of authors and their works, from Bancroft to Arrington.

He provided the insight that could only have come from one who had heeded his own counsel “to keep alive in the field” by critically reading and studying each publication, both the old and the new.65 Ellsworth not only offered a retrospective on the writing of Utah history, but also looked forward to suggest areas of future scholarship. With uncanny perception, he raised questions about Utah history, many of which students and scholars have endeavored to answer. Still missing was that history of Utah that two decades earlier he had conceptualized as “the first real synthesis of all aspects of Utah developments”—the one he had intended to write but never could.66 Perhaps revealing some regret, Ellsworth relayed remarks made many years before at a Cache Valley pioneer day celebration by former USU president John A. Widtsoe. The one who 64 Ellsworth, “Utah History: Retrospect and Prospect,” 342. See also “Utah History: A Retrospect and Prospect (notes)” box 3, fd. 18–19, series 2, Ellsworth Papers.

65 “On the Matter of History Teaching Load,” 1955, box 1, fd. 15, series 2, Ellsworth Papers.

66 Ellsworth to Wilburn N. Ball, October 15, 1956, box 4, fd.

10, Utah’s Heritage Research.

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Robert E. Parson is University Archivist at Utah State University and a member of UHQ’s board of editors.

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Ellsworth in his office in Old Main, ca. 1970s.

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finally writes the definitive history of Utah, Widtsoe declared, must have “the mind of a historian, the heart of a poet, and the soul of a prophet.” Where we will ever find “a person of such . . . remarkable . . . talents and virtues, I do not know,” Ellsworth concluded. “I do not see him on the horizon.”67 67 Ellsworth, “Utah History: Retrospect and Prospect,” 367.

Ellsworth was never dismissive of previous chroniclers of Utah history, such as Orson F. Whitney, Andrew Love Neff, Leland H. Creer, and others. Several years after Ellsworth’s essay, Charles S. Peterson published a brief but effective history of Utah in commemoration of the nation’s bicentennial. See Utah, A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1977). In 1987, Dean L. May published Utah: A People’s History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987); and a year later Wayne K. Hinton authored Utah: Unusual Beginning to Unique Present (Northridge, CA: Windsor, 1988).

Additionally, Utah’s History by Richard Poll, Thomas Alexander, Eugene Campbell, and David Miller would be widely adopted throughout the state as a college-

19 At history.utah.gov/uhqextras we offer conversations with noted historians on Ellsworth and the historiography of Utah, a reproduction of Ellsworth’s 1972 UHQ article, a few documents from his papers, and Leonard Arrington’s diary on the founding of the Western Historical Quarterly.

level textbook. See Utah’s History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989). Thomas Alexander also penned the official centennial state history in 1996. See Utah, the Right Place: The Official Centennial History (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1996). In 1999, Richard N. Holzaphel published Utah: A Journey of Discovery (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1999), which in most instances supplanted Ellsworth’s Utah’s Heritage as the state’s seventh-grade Utah history textbook. Brian Q. Cannon, David R. Lewis, Jeffrey D. Nichols, and Paul W. Reeve are presently engaged with USU Press, an imprint of University Press of Colorado, to write and edit a new college-level text.

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This map shows Utah sites with constructed kilns, as well as sites associated with Utah resources. —

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Charcoal BY

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Charcoal has always been a preferred source of heat in metallurgy. It is the solid residue produced by carbonization or pyrolization when wood is “burned” in a confined space with limited (controlled) air at a high temperature (300ºC or 572ºF). Normally, in the open air, wood burns down to a small residue of ash. When carbonized with limited air, wood chemically decomposes instead into charcoal.2 Carbonization removes moisture and impurities, leaving a low ash content and low amount of trace elements such as sulfur and phosphorus. Thus it produces a “clean” heat that enhances the quality and malleability of a smelter’s output.3 Charcoal burns much hotter than wood (with twice the heat of seasoned wood) and more evenly and consistently than wood. It produces the intense heat needed to reduce iron oxide ore into pig iron (2,600 to 3,000ºF). Moreover, charcoal is much easier than wood to transport 1 Nell Murbarger, “Charcoal: The West’s Forgotten Industry,” Desert Magazine 19 (June 1956): 4.

2 Arlie W. Toole, Paul H. Lane, Carl Arbogast Jr., Walton R. Smith, Ralph Peter, Edward G. Locke, Edward Beglinger, and E. C. O. Erickson, Charcoal Production, Marketing, and Use, Report No. 2213 (Madison, WI: USDA Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory, 1961).

3 Charles E. Williams, “Environmental Impact,” in Industrial Revolution in America: Iron and Steel, ed. Kevin Hillstrom and Laurie C. Hillstrom (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 163–72.

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Most Utahns know about the importance of mining in the state’s early history. They are often surprised to learn that the charcoal industry was also a fascinating and critical part of Utah’s history. Charcoal’s role as the fuel for Utah’s early mining industry and its impact on the state’s forests are often overlooked. Charcoal production itself was one of Utah’s earliest industries. One author called it the “West’s forgotten industry,” and it seems forgotten in Utah, except where its remnants are scattered across the landscape.1 In this article we describe the primary charcoal production sites and regions and the condition of the charcoal kilns that remain as ghosts of the forgotten industry in Utah. We also provide background on the mining activity they supported and their role in powering the mining industry in the state. Unfortunately, in many cases we describe areas that once contained immense industrial endeavors that produced massive amounts of charcoal but that now contain few visible remnants.

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and Its Role in Utah Mining History

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and store because it has one-third of the weight and one-half of the volume of wood. Charcoal burners produced the ideal fuel for the smelting process. As wood became depleted near the smelters, woodcutters had to transport wood over greater distances and supply and transportation issues caused prices to rise.4 Thus, charcoal developed as its own industry, with its own set of complications, such as labor costs, raw material supply, and negotiations with teamsters.

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Charcoal represented the largest expense of a typical smelter. A cord of wood could produce twenty-five to thirty-five bushels of charcoal, with the price per bushel dependent on variables such as quality and transport distance.

Supply and demand, of course, greatly influenced price, which could vary from eight cents to sixty-five cents, while twenty-five to thirty cents was more normal. Some smelters used tremendous amounts of charcoal. For instance, the Bristol and Daggett smelter at Brigham Canyon used fifty-nine bushels to the ton of ore in 1872, and the Winnamuck Furnace accounted for 56 percent of its operating expense from charcoal.5 The difference of a single cent could make a great difference to a charcoal burner.

The largest charcoal market in Nevada experienced a small war in 1879 at the market’s center in Eureka that involved the governor calling out the state militia and resulted in the death of five charcoal burners and the wounding of six more by deputy sheriffs. All this was over a strike for two additional cents per bushel.6 The industry has a history that has been called “reviled, greedy, troublesome, wasteful, and corrupt,”7 and it was all those, plus fascinating. We attempt to relay some of the fascinating aspect of the industry.

4 Robert B. Gordon, American Iron: 1607–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 90–100.

5 Murbarger, “Charcoal: The West’s Forgotten Industry,” 4–9.

6 Thomas J. Straka, Robert H. Wynn, and Charles E. Burkhardt, “Charcoal Kilns of Eureka and White Pine Counties,” Central Nevada’s Glorious Past 28 (2009): 9–14. Massacre may be too strong a word, but the Eureka Historical Society used the word on a marker they placed on the mass grave in 1983. The grave is in one of the cemeteries on the hillside behind the County Courthouse.

7 Murbarger, “Charcoal: The West’s Forgotten Industry,” 4.

Utah’s mining industry boomed after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869; this in turn created a need for charcoal. The state’s mining history began in the early 1850s with a few short-lived iron missions in southern Utah. The first commercial mining activity began in the early 1860s when Patrick Connor’s California volunteer soldiers became prospectors and made the first precious metal strikes in the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains. Until 1869, the combination of high transportation and labor costs, charcoal scarcity, and the lack of experienced miners limited development.

After 1869, smelting furnaces soon followed with new access to the railroads.8 Until about 1875, charcoal was the sole fuel of the Great Basin smelters, and it remained a primary fuel well into the twentieth century when coal and coke gained importance as smelter fuels.9 Utah mines needed charcoal, yet it could be a costly and difficult commodity to obtain. An 1873 federal report on mining in the Great Basin discussed the importance of charcoal to the state’s mining industry and its smelters; the report noted the tendency of charcoal prices to become precariously high, threatening the profitability of the smelters.10 Most of the charcoal in Utah at the time of the report was transported by rail from the Sierra Nevada in California, though some was produced in-state in the Wasatch Mountains and the districts farther south where pinyon pine is found. The California charcoal sold for twenty-five cents per bushel and the local, inferior charcoal sold for twenty-two to thirty cents per bushel. The smelter owners considered these charcoal prices to be high but the charcoal burners were close to abandoning the business for lack of a profit. It was, in other words, a difficult proposition on both ends of the trade. The report stated that:

8 Brigham D. Madsen, “General Patrick Edward Connor: Father of Utah Mining,” in From the Ground Up: The History of Mining in Utah, ed. Colleen Whitley (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006), 58–80.

9 James A. Young and Jerry D. Budy, “Historical Use of Nevada’s Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands,” Journal of Forest History 23 (July 1979): 112–21.

10 Rossiter W. Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining in the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1873), 300–301.

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Thus, though Utah miners needed charcoal for their smelters, its cost could prove troublesome.

Until the 1870s, most of the Great Basin charcoal was produced in charcoal pits (also called meilers) or soil-covered piles of wood.12 Charcoal burners located pits in the wooded areas near smelters. For those who know what to

The eleven sites associated with the Frisco Mining District offer some of the best remaining charcoal kilns in the state.

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look for, the remains of these pits are relatively easy to recognize in the woods: they are circular areas that still contain charcoal residue and are always located on very flat, level ground.13 The word pit is a misnomer; a charcoal pit is entirely above ground, built on a clean, level surface called a hearth. Most often woodcutters formed four-foot lengths of wood into a pile that was centered on the thirty- to forty-foot diameter hearth. A typical pit had three tiers of piled wood. The charcoal burner then covered the wood with leaves or other vegetative debris and earth. Once sealed, it was ready to be fired with hot coals from the camp fire.

Vents or holes at the bottom controlled air circulation. The pit might burn for a week to ten days; it was extinguished when the wood had completely carbonized. It remained closed for

11 Ibid., 385, 442.

12 Gustaf Svedelius, Hand-book for Charcoal Burners (New York: John Wiley and Son, 1875). The soil covering limited oxygen to the fire.

13 Thomas J. Straka and Robert H. Wynn, “Pit Production of Charcoal for Nevada’s Early Smelters,” Central Nevada’s Glorious Past 29 (2010): 12–16.

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The lowest rates are paid at the American Fork and Tintic [mining] districts, Utah, where timber is abundant; the highest at Little Cottonwood, Utah, which gets its coal from Truckee, California, by rail and at Eureka, Nevada.

In the latter place the enormous demand has materially influenced the price. . . . Even the most fortunate ones—those located high up in the mountains, where timber is comparatively plenty—cannot hope to escape in the next few years the danger of an enormous rise in the cost of wood and charcoal.11

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cooling for a few days, when the burner raked the charcoal out.14 If the charcoal pits were a distance from the furnace, teamsters would haul the charcoal to a charcoal house located at the furnace. Experienced Italian charcoal burners near Eureka, Nevada, had a reputation for producing the best charcoal in the Great Basin. Burners in some Utah locations, on the other hand, reportedly made the poorest local charcoal. The 1873 federal report noted that Utah charcoal burners composed pits of varying sizes and primarily from “cedar, quaking aspen, mountain mahogany, and nut pine wood.”

A pit made of one hundred cords of green wood would burn for “fifteen or twenty days, and yield from 2,500 to 3,500 bushels of charcoal.”15 In the early 1870s, charcoal burners constructed kilns of stone and, less often, brick to supplement charcoal production from pits. The principles used to convert wood to charcoal were identical to those used in the pits. Instead of a vegetation and dirt covering to limit oxygen, the kiln itself provided the protective covering. In Utah, kilns operated at their prime from 1879 to 1884.16 Utah still has a fair number of these ghosts of the mining era, clustered near the old mining regions.

People associated with charcoal production considered kilns to be an improvement over pits, and the subject received much discussion, especially prior to 1880. Some researchers suggested the kilns were necessary for processing some types of wood that required higher temperatures to burn properly.17 The key factor, however, was financial. Though the kilns cost more to construct and could not be moved like a pit, they offered advantages that incrementally exceeded the benefit of a charcoal pit’s mobility.18 Because kilns were permanent structures, the collier (or charcoal burner) had complete control of all the steps in the burning process.

14 Jackson Kemper III, American Charcoal Making in the Era of the Cold-blast Furnace, Popular Study Series History No. 14 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1941).

15 Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining, 385.

16 Martha Sonntag Bradley-Evans, “San Francisco Mining District,” in From the Ground Up, 370.

17 Young and Budy, “Historical Use,” 117.

18 T. Egleston, “The Manufacture of Charcoal in Kilns,” Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers 1 (November 1880): 56–64.

This improved both the quality and the density of the charcoal, led to increased and faster yields, and reduced labor requirements. Kilns decreased the chances of accidentally burning the wood completely and increased the uniformity of the burning process. Moreover, kilns yielded up to 20 to 25 percent more charcoal than pits. That charcoal was denser and cleaner (because it did not contain the sand and dirt from a pit covering) and it cost one-third less to produce. Additionally, some charcoal burners using pits transported their product large distances to the furnaces, which could cause a loss of 10 to 15 percent due to travel over rough roads. This meant an overall yield advantage of perhaps 33 percent for kilns over pit production.19 The skilled labor needed to build the kilns would be difficult to duplicate today. Stone charcoal kiln construction required specialized skills that came with Europe immigrants, such as the highly skilled carbonari from Italy and the Swiss-Italian border region. Charcoal kilns take a number of shapes: rectangular, square, round, conical, or dome shaped. Most kilns in Utah and the Great Basin tend toward the dome or beehive shape, though several are conical. Table one summarizes charcoal kiln locations in Utah.

The design of the beehive kiln is credited to J. C. Cameron, an engineer who introduced it in Marquette County, Michigan, in 1868. Cameron described it as a “a parabolic dome, with a base of twenty to twenty-four feet in diameter and an altitude of nineteen to twenty-two feet.” The beehive kiln had an estimated construction cost of less than $700. Although construction methods might have varied, Cameron’s illustrations show an external scaffolding that supported a series of internal scaffolds through the top of the kiln as it was being constructed. This internal scaffolding was laid against the walls that slanted inward toward the top of the kiln.20 The prevalence of parabolic kilns in Utah—the 19 John Birkinbine, “Our Fuel,” Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers,” 2(April 1881): 6679.

20 Philip F. Notarianni, “The Frisco Charcoal Kilns,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Winter 1982): 42. J. C. Cameron moved to Utah and took credit for the design of the beehive charcoal kiln in the Utah Mining Gazette, July 25, 1874.

TABLE 1. UTAH CHARCOAL KILNS SET NAME

ORIGINAL #

EVIDENCE

MINE DISTRICT

COUNTY

GENERAL LOCATION

Beehive State—is evidenced by use of the “beehive kiln” as the generic term for charcoal kilns in the state. Just so, most historical markers and summaries call charcoal kilns “beehive kilns.” Some of the best examples of parabolic kilns are the five kilns at the Frisco town site.

The Iron City and Leeds Creek kilns are good examples of conical kilns.

Charcoal kilns were made of stone, fire brick, adobe, or a combination of these materials. The right to manufacture the beehive kiln commercially belonged to the Morris and Evans partnership in Salt Lake City, a firm that was also the sole producer of fire bricks in Utah, according to the 1885 census.21 The walls of a 21 D. Robert Carter, “American Fork Canyon: Utah’s

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Carbonate West 2 2 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Carbonate Gulch 4 4 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Barrel Spring 3 3 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Three Kilns Spring 3 3 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

County Line 4 4 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Sawmill North 7 7 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Copper Gulch 1 1 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Cactus Mine 3 3 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Frisco 5 5 Frisco Beaver San Francisco Mtns.

Kiln Spring 5 5 Frisco Beaver Wah Wah Mtns.

Lamerdorf Canyon 4 4 Frisco Beaver Wah Wah Mtns.

Blue Cut 6 0 Carbon Cty. Carbon Spring Glen, south side Spring Glen 6 0 Carbon Cty. Carbon Spring Glen, north side Enoch 1 1 n/a Iron Enoch Iron City 2 2 Iron Springs Iron Little Pinto Creek The Dry Wash?

1 1 Iron Springs Iron The Dry Wash Leamington 4 2 Leamington Millard Leamington Gold Hill 2 2 Gold Hill Tooele Deep Creek Mountains Kelsey Canyon 2 0 Stockton Tooele Tooele Lake View 3 1 Stockton Tooele Tooele Pine Canyon 1 0 Stockton Tooele Tooele Rush Lake 3 0 Stockton Tooele N. of Rush Lake Settlement Canyon ?

0 Stockton Tooele Tooele City Soldier Canyon 4 4 Stockton Tooele Stockton Tooele City 1 0 Stockton Tooele Tooele Ophir 2 0 Ophir Tooele Ophir Deer Creek 10 0 Am. Fork Utah American Fork Cyn. Forest City 15 15 Am. Fork Utah American Fork Cyn. Broad Canyon (pits) ?

E. Tintic Utah E. Tintic Mountains Homansville 3 3 E. Tintic Utah Eureka M&M 10 0 Spanish Fork Utah Spanish Fork Cyn. Mill Fork 4 0 Spanish Fork Utah Spanish Fork Cyn. Leeds Creek 1 1 Silver Reef Washington Leeds Creek Spring/Poor Hollow 2 0 Apex Mine Washington Spring Hollow Evanston Vicinity 12 0 Salt Lake area Uintah, WY Piedmont, WY Hilliard 29 29 Salt Lake area Uintah, WY Hilliard, WY Piedmont 5 4 Salt Lake area Uintah, WY Piedmont, WY Sulphur Creek 2 0 Salt Lake area Uintah, WY Hilliard, WY 5mi S Bromide 4 4 Bromide Moffat, CO Douglas Mountain ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ TOTAL COUNT 178+ 110

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kiln get thinner as it gets taller; the base may be twenty-five to thirty inches thick and the top only twelve to eighteen inches thick. There were usually three primary openings: typically a very small one at the top used to draw in air and sometimes to fire the charge, a three-byfour foot opening about two-thirds of the way up the kiln used for loading, and a four-by-six foot opening at the bottom used for charging and discharging the charcoal and sometimes to fire the charge. Two to four rows of three-byfour inch vents at the bottom provided air circulation. Sometimes a chimney was left in the stacked wood, just like the pit, and used for the same purpose. Other times a channel might be built through the wood and filled with shavings and dry wood. The channel would be fired from the lower opening so that the fire was drawn to the upper opening.22 Kilns typically ranged in size from twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter and twenty to twenty-five feet in height. They held from twenty-five to forty-five cords of wood. They could be built into the side of a bank to make loading from the top easier; otherwise, a charcoal burner would need a ladder or ramp to reach the upper charging door. An example of size ranges is found at the kilns of American Fork Canyon, where one kiln was twenty-six feet in diameter and twenty feet tall and held twenty-five cords of wood; another kiln was twenty-nine feet in diameter and twenty-eight feet tall and held forty-five cords.23 The operations in American Fork Canyon also provide an example of the production costs of charcoal kilns. The high price of coke justified the use of charcoal there: in 1875, coke cost forty-five dollars per ton, while charcoal was eighteen cents a bushel (roughly twenty dollars a ton). A kiln holding thirty-five cords would produce between 1,000 and

1,200 bushels of charcoal. Pine cost $3.75 per cord and poplar cost three dollars per cord.

It took six men to do all the work and nine to ten days to burn the charcoal. At the end of every operation, the kilns received a whitewash. 24 Though charcoal kilns were more permanent than pits, they did not last indefinitely. Erosion of a kiln usually began at the top. Today, some extant kilns lack only a top, while others retain only parts of their sides; the fairly permanent foundation is all that remains of a few. There are five areas where intact, or nearly intact, charcoal kilns can be found in Utah: Frisco (thirteen kilns), Leamington (one kiln), Iron City (one kiln), Silver Reef (one kiln), and Lake View (one kiln); sites in Wyoming and Colorado, closely associated with Utah mining, have (respectively) three and four intact kilns. There are also dozens of locations that were important to the charcoal industry that still retain kiln remnants, though usually just the foundation (see table two). What follows is a geographic tour of kiln sites throughout the state. § American Fork Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah County had two sets of charcoal kilns. Now the existing remnants are just crumbling foundations or rocky circles in the ground with the last few stones still present.

American Fork District was organized in 1870; it comprised six square miles at the head of the canyon. The principal mine was the Miller Mining and Smelting Company, which built the Sultana Smelter on a flat near the mine. Forest City, eighteen miles from the town of American Fork, developed near the smelter and mine.25 In 1872 the American Fork Railroad was organized to connect Forest City to the Utah

Yosemite,” Provo (UT) Daily Herald, July 31, 2005; Heather R. Puckett, “A Cultural Landscape Study and History of the San Francisco Mining District and Frisco, Southwest Utah, United States” (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013), 5–69. Firebricks used to construct the Frisco charcoal kilns were pressed with the marks “M & E / UTAH.”

24 T. Egleston, “Manufacture of Charcoal,” 1881, 62; Birkinbine, “Our Fuel,” 74–75. Birkinbine explained that the interior of the kiln was whitewashed. Burning caused the kiln to expand, and cooling caused it to contract. This created small cracks and openings, allowing air to leak into the kiln. This could cause the entire contents of the kiln to burn down to ash.

22 James A. O’Neill, “Central Nevada’s Charcoal Industry,” Central Nevada’s Glorious Past 9 (May 1986): 12–15.

25 F. C. Calkins, B. S. Butler, and V. C. Heikes, Geology and Ore Deposits of the Cottonwood-American Fork Area, Utah, USDI Geological Survey Professional Paper 201 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), 140.

23 T. Egleston, “The Manufacture of Charcoal in Kilns,” Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers 2 (January 1881): 55–64.

TABLE 2. FRISCO CHARCOAL KILNS CONDITION ASSESSMENT

Southern Railroad. Due to steep grades, the railroad stopped about four miles short of Forest City. The town of Deer Creek developed at the terminus of the railroad at present-day Tibble Fork Reservoir. At the time the railroad was built, twenty-five stone, beehive-shaped charcoal kilns were built, which included fifteen at Forest City and ten at Deer Creek.26 A tramway built on a trestle connected these kilns to the Sultana Smelter.27 They ran constantly from 1872 to 1877, making charcoal for the Salt Lake Valley smelters.28 One author described the kilns as conical in shape and gave their capacity as twenty-five cords of wood, with a diameter base of twenty-six feet and a height of twenty feet.29 However, J. C. Cameron, who worked in Utah at the time, used the American 26 B. S. Butler and G. F. Loughlin, A Reconnaissance of the Cottonwood–American Fork Mining Region, Utah, United States Geological Survey Bulletin 620-I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), 165–226; Stephen L. Carr, The Historical Guide to Utah Ghost Towns (Salt Lake City: Western Epics 1987), 51.

27 Richard N. Holzapfel, A History of Utah County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Utah County Commission, 1999), 136.

28 B. S. Butler, G. F. Loughlin, and V. C. Heikes, The Ore Deposits of Utah, USDI Geological Survey Professional Paper 111 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 258.

29 Egleston, “Manufacture of Charcoal,” 1881, 57–58.

Fork kilns as examples of the beehive design.30 The Salt Lake Daily Tribune reported in November 1872 that Deer Creek location contained ten charcoal kilns constructed by the Miller Mining Company. The ovens ran at full capacity, requiring a minimum of twenty-five cords of wood each and the labor of forty men and fourteen teams daily. The Tribune described the kilns as beehive shaped and Of the same size and capacity as those at the Sultana Smelting works and are in the form of a semi-gothic dome, built of stone or brick, with iron doors and door frames. They are generally considered the best charcoal kiln built for their economy of construction, the quality and quantity of their product, and known as “The Cameron Bee-hive Charcoal Kiln.”31 Then, in 1878, the ore played out. The Mill30 J. C. Cameron Jr., “The Smelting Ores of Utah and their Economic Metallurgy,” Utah Mining Gazette, July 25, 1874, 381.

31 “American Fork, Silver Lake City,” Salt Lake Daily Tribune, November 21, 1872.

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Carbonate West 2 Carbonate Gulch 2 2 Barrel Spring 1 2 Three Kilns Spring 2 1 County Line 3 1 Sawmill North 6 1 Copper Gulch 1 Cactus Mine 1 1 1 Frisco 3 2 Kiln Spring 2 2 1 Lamerdorf Canyon 1 3 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 13 2 16 3 7 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Set count: 11 Kiln count: 41 * A set is defined as a group of kilns near enough to each other that one burn crew could have worked them.

1

SET NAME* ESSENTIALLY FRONT AND REAR FRONT ARCH DOOR WALLS ONLY LOW WALLS

INTACT ARCH DOORS INTACT ONLY AND/OR FOUNDATION ONLY _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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er mine soon closed, and the railroad tracks were taken up. The ten Deer Creek charcoal kilns were torn down to salvage lead in the bottoms.32 Today, the site may be under or adjacent to the Tibble Fork Reservoir. The bases of the kilns at Forest City, meanwhile, are lined up at the side of North Fork Road at the intersection with Shaffer Fork Road.

28

Big and Little Cottonwood canyons in Salt Lake County are just north of American Fork Canyon. Though some of the earliest mining in the state happened in these canyons, charcoal burning there occurred in charcoal pits, and the cutting of wood for charcoal took place from the earliest settlement.33 Truckee, California, and Piedmont, Wyoming, supplied most of the area’s charcoal, however.34 Moreover, not much smelting occurred in Big and Little Cottonwood canyons. The railroad made mining profitable and provided a connection to outside smelters.35 Several smelters operated in Little Cottonwood Canyon, but none lasted long.36 Only one large smelter was ever built in Big Cottonwood Canyon and it quickly proved unsuccessful in turning a profit.37 Finally, early settlers, who needed lumber for building and timbers for mining, denuded the canyons; few trees could have been left for charcoaling. Thus, an area where you would expect to find kilns has none.

the same areas that supplied the Big and Little Cottonwood canyons.38 In contrast, farther south in the Wasatch Mountains in Utah County, Spanish Fork Canyon had two sets of kilns. In 1881 the Provo businessman S. S. Jones was convinced to transport charcoal from Spanish Fork Canyon to the Horn Silver Mine’s Murray Smelter near Frisco. A new railroad was built through the canyon, and the charcoal produced closer to the mine was expected to be cheaper than that supplied via the Union Pacific Railroad. Jones selected Mill Fork as the location for the kilns as it was near the railroad, water, and pinyon pine. Construction of several beehive-shaped kilns started in September and by late October the kilns were ready to be fired. The first burn proved to be catastrophic because too much water was used to cool the coals and the resulting steam caused the kilns to burst.39 The kilns were rebuilt and future burns proved successful.

Jones prospered and in 1886 he purchased the nine McCoy and McAllister (M&M) kilns located about four miles farther up the canyon, about two miles from Clear Creek (present-day Tucker).40 He now owned fourteen kilns that produced forty carloads of charcoal monthly.41 Charcoal provided much of the employment 38 Salt Lake City Tribune, November 22, 1872.

39 Provo (UT) Daily Enquirer, October 29, 1881.

We found a similarly surprising lack of kiln activity for Bingham Canyon (West Mountain District). This area, which is located on the east side of the Oquirrh Mountains in Salt Lake County, saw some of the earliest mining development in Utah. Yet we found no mention of kilns in that canyon. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, in 1872 the charcoal supply came from Truckee, California, and Piedmont, Wyoming— 32 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 51.

33 Calkins, Butler, and Heikes, Geology and Ore Deposits, 72.

34 Ibid., 74.

35 Anthony W. Bowman, “From Silver to Skis: A History of Alta, Utah, and Little Cottonwood Canyon, 1847–1966” (master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1967), 21–23.

36 Ibid., 34.

37 Laurence P. James, Geology, Ore Deposits, and History of the Big Cottonwood Mining District, Salt Lake County, Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah Geological and Mineral Survey, 1979), 37.

40 Helen Z. Papanikolas, “Utah’s Coal Lands: A Vital Example of How America Became a Great Nation,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (Spring 1975):104–124.

Papanikolas’s article contains a photograph of the M&M charcoal kilns (p. 120). There were nine kilns north of the rail line about a mile from Clear Creek. Close analysis of the photograph shows the space between the fifth and sixth kilns from the left contains the foundation and rubble from a tenth kiln. Thus, the M&M location had a least ten kilns at one time.

41 Provo (UT) Daily Enquirer, May 13, 1890. According to the Daily Enquirer “S. S. Jones has five charcoal kilns running at full blast at Mill Fork, and seven at the M. M. kilns. Two more will soon be erected, making a total of 14 kilns owned by Mr. Jones.” The Mill Fork Cemetery is the best landmark remaining, and a short history posted there states that “There were three charcoal kilns located along the highway just west of this cemetery.

Men with teams and wagons cut Piñon Pine to burn in these kilns. One can walk for miles on the north side of the highway from Sheep Creek to Tie Fork and count thousands of Piñon Pine stumps left standing.” Which is it? Did Mill Fork have five kilns or three kilns? Most likely both sources are correct. Note that the first kilns burst, while others burned out and were replaced. The number of kilns at both sites fluctuated over time.

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in Mill Fork. An 1887 business publication described bustling appearance of the operation:

The McCoy and McAllister kilns that were once in Spanish Fork Canyon, ca. 1890.

—

utah state historical society

Mr. S. S. Jones, of this city, is an extensive burner and shipper of charcoal. His M. and M. kilns are situated about 4 miles above Mill Fork D. and R. G. Station. He sends off, on average, about 20 carloads per month, mostly to the Germania and Hanauer at Cottonwood. He now has 12 kilns running almost steadily. He employs 20 to 30 men and 15 to 20 teams.42 The number of Mill Fork and M&M kilns fluctuated between twelve and fourteen as older ones burned out and some were replaced. They operated into the 1890s.43 These kilns were on the north side of the then-existing railroad tracks. Neither set of kilns exists today due to extensive reworking of the railroad and highway beds.44 42 Utah Industrialist, June 15, 1887.

43 D. Robert Carter, “Mill Fork: Sired by Steam, Fostered by Fire,” Provo (UT) Daily Herald, November 20, 2005.

44 While these kilns no longer exist, their locations were

The literature can be confusing on charcoal kilns; not all planned kiln construction took place. In late 1894, local newspapers discussed well-developed plans for an ironworks and thirty-five charcoal kilns to be built at or near Willard. That construction never took place because of a lack of investment capital.45 Eastern Utah (Emery and Grand counties) had coke available by the time it was settled; limited charcoal burning (using pits) occurred there.46 recorded on early United States Department of Interior General Land Office cadastral surveys. The Mill Fork kilns are shown on an 1885 map of Township 10 South, Range 5 East, Section 12, by Steward M. Pancake, and the M & M kilns are shown on an 1883 map of Township 10 South, Range 5 East, Section 16, by Augustus D. Ferron.

45 Ogden Standard, November 12, 1894; Salt Lake Herald, October 7, 1894.

46 Edward A. Geary, personal communication, August 8, 2013.

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When the railroad reached Spring Glen, near the center of the state in Carbon County, the availability of pinyon pine attracted the town’s first industry—charcoal production.

John Thompson Rowley, an excellent charcoal burner, established the Blue Cut Charcoal Company there in 1889. S. S. Jones had previously employed Rowley in the charcoal business.

Rowley built his first six kilns just south of the Blue Cut sandstone bluff, about a mile south of Spring Glen.47 His company shipped charcoal to gold and silver smelters in Nevada, where it could be used instead of coke.48 The business was profitable and provided considerable employment in cutting and transporting wood and tending the kilns.49 The next year, in 1890, Rowley built an additional six kilns on the Andrew Simmons’s homestead in Spring Glen.50 By 1902, the Deseret Evening News noted that “the charcoal kilns of J. T. Rowley at Spring Glen are working full blast at this time, the product finding a ready market in Salt Lake City.”51 The business prospered for about fifteen years, benefiting the community financially, until the price of silver dropped.52 Tooele County was a major producer of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc. Accordingly, several sets of kiln remnants are present. John Hammond built the first charcoal kiln in the county in about 1869, just north of Rush Lake around the time the Waterman Smelter was being constructed.53 Two more were soon 47 “Spring Glen Photographs,” Western Mining and Railroad Museum, accessed October 1, 2013, wmrrm. com/springglen.html. This website contains photographs of the six charcoal kilns just south of Blue Cut and a photograph of the Dupin Mercantile in Spring Glen. Some of the bricks from the Blue Cut kilns were used in construction of the mercantile.

48 Nancy J. Taniguchi, Castle Valley, America: Hard Land, Hard-Won Home (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004), 67.

49 Nancy J. Taniguchi, “Common Ground: The Coalescence of Spring Glen, 1878–1920” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1977).

50 Teachers, Pupils, and Patrons of the Carbon County School District, “Spring Glen,” A Brief History of Carbon County, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.carbonutgenweb.com/1930b.html.

51 “Carbon County Affairs,” Deseret Evening News, January 23, 1902.

added. Though Hammond built the kilns, Archibald Shields, a brick maker, planned them.

The Deseret News described the kilns as thirty feet tall, with “thimble-like” domes.54 It took four to five days to burn the charcoal and one day to empty the kiln. The kilns were cleaned and repaired after each use, since the high temperature caused cracking. No evidence of the kilns remains at this location.

In about 1880 more kilns were erected about three miles east of Stockton at the foot of Soldier Canyon. These kilns, also known as the Waterman Coking Ovens, produced charcoal for the Chicago Smelter. Transportation costs played a major role in the location of charcoal kilns; the Waterman kilns were halfway between the timber source on Bald Mountain, to the east, and the Rush Valley Mine, three miles to the southeast.55 They too were supervised by Shields; as producers of the kiln bricks, Shields and his brother had an active part in much of the county’s charcoal making.56 A federal mining report confirms the presence of charcoal burning in the Tooele Mining District; it noted that in 1880, “In the neighborhood of Tooele City there are twelve stone beehive kilns constructed at intervals between 1874 and 1889.

They are run irregularly by Mormon owners, who sell the charcoal produced to the Stockton smelters.”57 There were easily twelve kilns operating then. To locate all of them today would be impossible.58 However, the foundation walls of the four Waterman Coking Ovens still remain, though the bottom three to four feet of the kilns are buried in soil and rock deposited by flood waters.

Three charcoal kilns were built in the community of Pine Canyon (also called Lake View and An 1886 United States Department of Interior General Land Office cadastral survey of Township 4 South, Range 5 West, Section 23, by Edward W. Koeber shows a kiln west of Stockton.

54 Gillespie, “Charcoal Kilns.”

55 Becky Bartholomew, “Charcoal Kilns and Early Smelting in Utah,” Utah History Blazer, May 1996, 18–19.

56 Ouida Blanthorn, A History of Tooele County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Tooele County Commission, 1998), 123, 361–62.

52 “History of Spring Glen,” Price (UT) News-Advocate, May 26, 1921.

57 S. F. Emmons and G. F. Becker, Statistics and Technology of the Precious Metals (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885), 455.

53 Gilberta Gillespie, “Charcoal Kilns of Pioneer Days Still Stand in Tooele County,” Deseret News, May 30, 1934.

58 Ouida Blanthorn, personal communication, August 9, 2013.

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Lincoln) northeast of the city of Tooele. These kilns operated from about 1870 to 1880. Only a single kiln, mostly intact, is still present today.

The remaining Lake View kiln has been proposed for restoration and stabilization by the county historical society. In addition to these three ovens, there was another kiln about 0.9 miles southeast of them, near the mouth of Pine Canyon. It no longer exists.59 Family tradition and documents both describe kilns elsewhere in Tooele County. While no evidence exists on the ground today, a family history states that the James David James family had several charcoal kilns in Settlement Canyon and provided charcoal to the many smelters in the area.60 There were two sets of kilns in Settlement Canyon on the southeast side of Tooele city. The lower set (of unknown number) was located just downstream of the present day Settlement Canyon Reservoir, within a modern residential area. The upper set of two kilns was located approximately 4.5 miles away, where Kelsey Canyon joins Settlement Can59 Alice and Ron Dale, personal communication, August 21, 2013.

60 Lewis Larsen, “Margaret Alice James Larsen,” Find a Grave, accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.findagrave. com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=53336603.

The remains of four kilns can still be found in Soldier Canyon just east of Stockton.

—

douglas h. page

yon. Nothing remains of either set.61 A charcoal kiln was located in Tooele off 200 West Street, but nothing remains of it due to urban development. A mining history of the county notes that besides Soldier Canyon, “Other kilns were located in Vernon, Pine Canyon, Tooele City, and Settlement Canyon.”62 The kiln mentioned at Vernon was likely a lime kiln.

Farther north, on the east side of the Oquirrh range, two more charcoal kilns were likely present in the Ophir Mining District. They do not exist today as the area has been developed.63 Finally, in far western Tooele County 61 Ibid.

62 Claude T. Atkin, T. Allan Comp, S. E. Craig, Larry Deppe, Frank C. Dunlavy, Bill Kelsey, Chris Weyland, and Orrin P. Miller, Mining, Smelting, and Railroading in Tooele County (Tooele: Tooele Historical Society, 1986), 36.

63 Alice and Ronald Dale, personal communication, August 10, 2013.

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near the Nevada line, a set of rock-based adobe charcoal kilns were located at Gold Hill.64 Only two foundations and a small sidewall portion remain today.

32

About two-and-a-half miles northeast of Eureka is the ghost town of Homansville in Utah County. Near U.S. Highway 6, just south of the old railroad bed, are the remains of three charcoal kilns. Stephen Carr reported the existence of two charcoal kilns, approximately eight feet in diameter, but our field investigation revealed three foundations, each measuring twenty to twenty-one feet in diameter.65 These were built in about 1871, and the charcoal likely went to the Wyoming Smelter.66 The East Tintic Mountains had a charcoal kiln location in Broad Canyon in Utah County, near the Tooele County line (close to where those counties intersect with Juab County).67 Efforts to locate the kiln revealed only a pit location, and any stone kiln might no longer exist, if it ever did.

Traveling south, two of four charcoal kilns remain along State Highway 132; they are about a mile east of Leamington on the northern border of Millard County. A historical marker at that site states that Nicholas Paul, Ole Jacobson, and Herman Lundahl built the ovens for George Morrison in 1882.68 A variety of transportation methods were involved in the different stages of charcoal production for these kilns. Wood was cut in the nearby canyons to the east and hauled by horse or mule—at a rate of one quarter cord per mule—to the canyon 64 Murbarger, “Charcoal: The West’s Forgotten Industry,” 4–9. The article contains a photograph of a rock-based adobe charcoal kiln taken about 1891 at Gold Hill. Adobe charcoal kilns are rare; another set, the Cottonwood Kilns, exists in eastern California near Owens Lake.

Thomas J. Straka and Robert H. Wynn, “Western Nevada and Eastern California Charcoal Kilns,” Central Nevada’s Glorious Past 29 (2010): 7–11.

65 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 95.

66 Phillip F. Notarianni, “Historic Resources of the Tintic Mining District,” Nomination Form for National Register of Historic Places, 1977, accessed September 29, 2014, http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/ Text/64000875.pdf.

67 An 1890 United States Department of Interior General Land Office cadastral survey of Township 9 South, Range 3 West, Section 3, by Robert Gorlinski shows an “old charcoal kiln” in or near Broad Canyon.

68 “Morrison Charcoal Ovens 1882,” Historical Marker Database, accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.hmdb.org/ marker.asp?marker=34859.

mouth. With four mules and three trips per day, one man could transport three cords of wood in a day. The wood then moved by wagon or cart to the kilns. The Utah Southern Railroad Extension had reached the area in 1879, and Morrison built his kilns near the tracks to the facilitate shipping of charcoal to smelters in northern Utah.69 Then in 1895, the Ibex Smelter was built two miles northwest of the kilns. For at least one year, the Morrison kilns supplied Ibex with charcoal; when the smelter shut down due to a lack of ore, the kilns presumably followed soon thereafter.70 About fifteen miles west of the present town of Milford in Beaver County is perhaps the highest concentration of charcoal kilns in Utah and the Great Basin. Two prospectors accidentally discovered silver-bearing ore there in 1875 and Frisco was founded in 1876. Their strike became the Horn Silver Mine, one of the richest silver mines in the world, and Frisco became one of the wildest mining boom towns in Utah.71 Then in 1885, the Horn had a major cave-in. Frisco started its decline soon afterward; it is now a ghost town.72 Numerous charcoal pits and kilns, constructed of native stone, surrounded the mines and the community of Frisco. Charcoal from pits sold for a few cents less than kiln charcoal because of its lower quality. A 1913 government report described the Frisco location in some detail and noted that it contained thirty-six beehive-type charcoal kilns, managed in eight groups.

According to the report, these kilns were near local wood supplies, ranging from six to eighteen miles from Frisco.73 69 Stella H. Say and Sabrina C. Ekins, Milestones of Millard: 100 Years of History of Millard County, 1851– 1951 (Springville, UT: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers of Millard County and Art City Publishing, 1951), 496; Edward Leo Lyman and Linda King Newell, A History of Millard County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Millard County Commission, 1999), 163.

70 “Morrison Charcoal Ovens 1882.”

71 Martha Sonntag Bradley, A History of Beaver County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Beaver County Commission, 1999), 118; Frank Robertson, quoted in the Deseret News, September 8, 1969, cited in Bradley, History of Beaver County, 119. Robertson, together with Beth Kay Harris, authored Boom Towns of the Great Basin (Denver: Sage Books, 1962).

72 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 109–11.

73 B. S. Butler, Geology and Ore Deposits of the San Francisco and Adjacent Districts, Utah, United States Geological

Survey Professional Paper 80 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913). Butler’s report (p.

114) contains the following description of the kilns: They “are made of granite float found in the neighborhood and a lime mortar. They are of various sizes, from 16 to 26 feet in diameter. It is the rule in this section to make the height of the kiln equal to the diameter. The thickness varies from 18 to 30 inches at the base and from 12 to 18 inches at the summit. There are two openings, closed by sheet-iron doors, one at the ground level, 4 by 6 feet, and the other in the side two-thirds of the distance to the apex, three by four feet. There are also three rows of vent holes, three by four inches, near the ground. The rows are about 18 inches apart, having vent holes three feet apart in each row.”

74 Notarianni, Frisco Charcoal Kilns, 40–46.

Some of Utah’s iron mining history includes charcoal kilns located near Cedar City in Iron County. In Utah’s early history, Mormon leaders did not encourage mining for precious metals. However, resources like iron or coal had productive use and were another matter.

The State of Deseret that Brigham Young attempted to establish in the Great Basin was to be self supporting. In 1849 he commissioned the Southern Exploring Company to locate resources in Utah’s southern region. They located “thousands of acres of Cedar, constituting an almost inexhaustible supply of fuel that makes excellent charcoal. In the center of these forests rises a hill of richest iron ore.”75 That hill was Iron Mountain, near present-day Cedar City. Iron ore is still being mined from this location today.

75 Gustive O. Larson, “Bulwark of The Kingdom: Utah’s Iron and Steel Industry,” Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (July 1963): 248.

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portion after its last use, but it was never used again. At the Barrel Spring site an arch doorway fell sometime between March 2012 and July 2013, leaving only one kiln with an intact doorway. For a time, the Three Kilns Spring site was used as a line shack by ranchers who installed wooden doors and a roof on one kiln.

Table one lists the general location of each set, along with other kilns throughout the state; table two lists the eleven sets and gives a general assessment of each set.

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The five Frisco kilns at the old town site, built by the Frisco Mining and Smelting Company, are probably the best-known charcoal kilns in Utah.74 The sets of kilns around Frisco vary in condition. The Sawmill North site is probably the best preserved of the eleven sets, with six of the seven kilns still largely intact. The Copper Gulch kiln had been partially cleaned with a fresh whitewash coating applied on the lower

The site located north of Sawmill Canyon has the largest number of intact kilns in the state.

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Most other sources also describe thirty-six kilns at eight locations; however, our field investigation located evidence of forty-one stone kilns at eleven sites. Those eleven sites are spread over two mountain ranges—with nine sites in the San Francisco Mountains and two sites in the Wah Wah Mountains—and span twenty-five miles from the Beaver-Millard County line in the north to Lamerdorf Canyon in the south. Charcoal pits were also common in both mountain ranges and can be found as far south as Blawn Mountain. The number and concentration of the kilns, with no doubt, had profound short- and long-term effects on the nearby pinyon-juniper forest and the composition and structure of these forests as we see them today.

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In 1850 iron missionaries traveled south from Salt Lake City to develop the resource and within two years the Deseret Iron Company was organized. This was one of the first locations west of the Mississippi to produce pig iron.76 The effort never fully succeeded, partially due to natural disasters and conflicts with local Native American groups. It ceased operation in 1858.77 Ten years later the Union Iron Works was established on Little Pinto Creek south of Iron Mountain and about twenty-three miles southwest of Cedar City. Iron City grew up around the iron works.78 Iron City had a smelting furnace, two conical charcoal kilns, a charcoal house, and the various buildings that make up a small town, including a post office.

Within a few years production was well over a ton per day. A railroad was planned to connect Iron City to the northern mining districts, but it never materialized. While the venture had some short-term success, it closed in 1876.79

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Iron City is now known as Old Irontown and is a part of Frontier Homestead State Park Museum. It consists of a set of protected ruins connected by footpaths. Historical markers interpret the ruins, which include the furnace, portions of the foundry and its chimney, and a restored charcoal kiln, along with the foundation of a second adjacent charcoal kiln. The restored kiln has a distinctive look as the top portion is the exposed brick lining and the bottom portion still has its original exterior rock surface. Its historical marker explains that one kiln had to burn for twelve days in order to produce fifty bushels of charcoal, the amount required to process one ton of iron ore.80 During our field investigation, we discovered a second charcoal production site just two miles northeast of the Iron City kilns in the Big Dry Wash. Pinyon-juniper clearing operations have twice disturbed this site. Though such activity would have destroyed and displaced any kiln

remnants, the rock we observed there indicates a good likelihood that a kiln was connected with this site.81 Just north of Cedar City another charcoal kiln once existed in Enoch at Johnson Fort, now the city park. The families of John Lee Jones and John Pittinger ran the kiln, which was part of a small family business venture, probably a blacksmith shop.82 A small ring of stones in the park, approximately ten feet in diameter, is identified as a charcoal oven. This is next to the remains of the furnace operation. We found no evidence to either support or refute the assertion that these stones are the remains of the charcoal oven.

There are other possible charcoal kilns in southwestern Utah associated with the Apex Mine. One source claims that “Beehive shape charcoal kilns were built at Spring Hollow and Poor Hollow, at the foot of the Pine Valley Mountains, to produce charcoal for the smelter.”83 Our field investigation located a charcoal pit site in Spring Hollow but no evidence of constructed kilns. The location of Poor Hollow is unknown.84 Another kiln is located in the Silver Reef district, along Leeds Creek and just west of the present-day town of Leeds in Washington County. In 1866 a prospector noticed silver in the sandstone in an area about eighteen miles northeast of St. George. The common view at the time was that it was not geologically possible for silver to exist in sandstone. For over five years the prospector worked in the general area and eventually convinced himself and a few others of the truth of his discovery. Salt Lake City bankers became 81 Marian Jacklin, personal communication, August 21, 2013.

76 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 149–50.

82 Ryan Paul, personal communication, August 15, 2013; ElRoy Smith Jones, ed., John Pidding Jones, His Ancestors and Descendants (Salt Lake City: American Press, 1972), 10.

77 Janet B. Seegmiller, A History of Iron County: Community Above Self (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Iron County Commission, 1998), 320–27.

83 George A. Thompson, Some Dreams Never Die: Utah’s Ghost Towns and Lost Treasures (Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 1999), 32.

78 Kerry W. Bate, “Iron City, Mormon Mining Town,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Winter 1982): 47–58.

84 Investigations into Spring Hollow and Poor Hollow included field surveys in Spring Hollow and consultations with Marian Jacklin, Dixie National Forest archaeologist; Geralyn McEwen, BLM archaeological technician, St. George; Glen Rogers, Shivwits Paiute Tribe; and Dick Kohler, president of the Washington County Historical Society.

79 Nell Murbarger, Ghosts of the Glory Trail (Las Vegas: Nevada Publications, 1956), 77–80.

80 Iron City charcoal kiln historical marker, Frontier Homestead State Park Museum, Cedar City, Utah.

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involved, and in the mid-1870s the Salt Lake Tribune published the location of the strike, which resulted in a mining boom.85 Miners from nearby Pioche, Nevada, soon arrived.86 Many other participants in the Reef boom were workers displaced by the end of construction on the transcontinental railroad; accordingly, Silver Reef had a large Chinatown.87 Though the town of Silver Reef had a mile-long Main Street, paved with smooth river rocks and boasting a boardwalk on both sides, it also had a reputation as one of the wildest towns in the West.88 The peak of the boom lasted from 1878 to 1882. By 1884 most of the mines had closed.89 Demand for smelter fuel quickly developed and local men financed a charcoal

85 Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Washington County Commission, 1996), 112–17.

86 Leonard J. Arrington, “Abundance from the Earth: The Beginnings of Commercial Mining in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Summer 1963): 214–16.

87 Murbarger, Ghosts of the Glory Trail, 162–67.

88 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 138–42.

89 Gary Topping, “Another Look at Silver Reef,” Utah Historical Quarterly 79 (Fall 2011): 310–16.

Old Irontown in Iron County has a restored charcoal kiln, one that is a good example of a conical-shaped kiln.

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kiln near Silver Reef.90 Italian stone masons built the Leeds Creek kiln in about 1885 of sandstone blocks and mud mortar. The kiln’s Roman-style arch and the nearby Italian Wash support the idea of Italian labor in the construction. Pinyon pine and scrub oak, logged from the Pine Valley Mountains, filled the kiln.

Teamsters then hauled the charcoal produced in Leeds Creek to the smelter in Silver Reef.91 90 Marietta M. Mariger, Saga of Three Towns: Harrisburg, Leeds, Silver Reef (Panguitch, UT: Garfield County News, 1951), 95–96.

91 “Leeds Creek Kiln,” Washington County Historical Society, accessed May 11, 2014, http://wchsutah.org/ miscellaneous/leeds-creek-kiln.php. The kiln’s historical marker, which mistakenly describes this conical oven as “beehive-shaped,” notes that it “measures 20 feet in diameter at its base and stands 25 feet high.” It has a “Roman arch entryway [that] was sealed with a metal door and the upper entry on the opposite side was used to fill the kiln with wood.”

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Though charcoal production occurred throughout much of Utah, some areas of the state were not conducive for the creation and use of charcoal kilns, largely because they did not have the desired tree species in sufficient quantities to justify the long-term investment in constructed kilns. For instance, the charcoal burning that took place in northern Utah occurred in pits, rather than kilns. Furthermore, much of the local ore was transported for processing in Tooele County, and the demand for charcoal was never high.92

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Several Wyoming kilns have a Utah connection: most of the wood processed at these Wyoming kilns came from Utah; ore smelters in Utah and Colorado then consumed the charcoal.93 The Bear River has its headwaters in northeastern Utah and then flows north into Wyoming. The Upper Bear River supported substantial timber supplies, and the region was a source of lumber, railroad ties, mine timbers, and wood for charcoal production. Harvesting—principally of lodgepole pine, Englemann spruce, and aspen—started in about 1870.

For approximately a decade, the Upper Bear River had a colorful logging industry. A large sawmill existed on the Bear River at Evanston, Wyoming (near the Utah border). Most of the timber was floated down the river or transported by flume. Thirty-six miles of flume flowed from the mountains of Utah north to Hilliard, Wyoming, about fourteen miles southeast of Evanston and on the main line of Union Pacific Railroad. The main line was thirty miles long, about half in Utah and half in Wyoming. Both timber for railroad ties and cordwood for the kilns travelled on the flume. When the price of cordwood dropped, the flume was sold and eventually dismantled.

Twelve charcoal kilns were constructed in the immediate vicinity of Evanston, fed by fourfoot long cordwood floated down the Bear River. The charcoal industry flourished at Hilliard during the late nineteenth century.

Hilliard had approximately twenty-nine kilns constructed from rock; these too were fed by the 92 Ronald Cefalo and Kaia Landon, personal communication, August 13, 2013.

93 L. J. Colton, “Early Day Timber Cutting Along the Upper Bear River,” Utah Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 1967): 202–208.

flume.94 Today, the kiln site is privately owned and has been used for stock pens and equipment storage, leaving only remnants of the original kilns visible. Two kilns were constructed about five miles south of Hilliard on Sulphur Creek.

Finally, five kilns were built at Piedmont, Wyoming, about twelve miles northeast of Hilliard.

One author reported that wagons and sleds supplied the Piedmont kilns.95 However, Piedmont is significantly distant from the timber sources; we suspect that the adjacent rail line might have supplied wood to these kilns from the flume in Hilliard. We found no record to support or debunk particular wood sources. Three of the Piedmont kilns have been restored, one has only foundation walls, and nothing but a mound of rubble remains of the fifth kiln.

Just across the Utah state line in Moffat County, Colorado, near Greystone, are the best surviving examples of charcoal kilns in Colorado.

The capital, men, and teams that developed this mining region all came from Utah, and in its early days, this was considered a Utah enterprise. The Salt Lake Herald stated, “This mine is located just over the line in Colorado, but is owned by Utah men, and is considered as tributary to Vernal, the owners being mostly Vernal men.”96 Four beehive style charcoal kilns were constructed in 1898.97 These kilns have been protected and afford an excellent overview of intact charcoal kilns.98 Charcoal produced from them went to the nearby Bromide Mining and Milling Company’s smelter facility. § It is not surprising that the charcoal industry 94 Different sources report different numbers of kilns at Hilliard. Colton, “Early Day Timber Cutting,” 207, reported that thirty-two kilns were located there.

However, Elizabeth A, Stone, Uinta County: Its Place in History (Laramie, WY: Laramie Printing Company, 1924), 178–81, and Margaret M. Lester, From Rags to Riches: A History of Hilliard and Bear River, 1890– 1990 (Evanston, WY: First Impressions, 1992), 7, both reported that thirty-six kilns were located there. The Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1878, reported twenty-nine kilns were operating there.

95 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 149–50.

96 Salt Lake Herald, December 13, 1897.

97 Salt Lake Herald, October 4, 1898.

98 S. V. Beckett, “Bromide Charcoal Kilns,” Nomination Form for National Register of Historic Places, 2000, accessed September 29, 2014, http://pdfhost.focus.nps. gov/docs/NRHP/Text/00000740.pdf.

The unrestrained use of the timber by the miners and Mormons is working its speedy destruction. It is not only cut freely for the mills, but for making coal, and immense quantities are annually consumed by forest-fires, the result of carelessness or neglect, or of willful determination to destroy. It is abundant now, but in a few years will be very scarce and valuable. 101 For Native Americans, pine nut groves that had supported them through long winters over untold centuries were destroyed to supply wood 99 Murbarger, “Charcoal: The West’s Forgotten Industry,” 4–9.

100 Ibid.

101 Rossiter W. Raymond, Silver and Gold: An Account of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry of the United States, with Reference Chiefly to the Precious Metals (New York: J. B. Ford, 1873), 304.

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DOUGLAS H. PAGE JR. is a retired forester who had a thirty-five-year career with three state and two federal agencies in six states, with most of his career spent in Utah. He lives in Cedar City.

SARAH E. PAGE is a professional archaeologist for HDR, Inc. in Salt Lake City.

THOMAS J. STRAKA is a forestry professor in the School of Agricultural, Forest, and Environmental Sciences at Clemson University in South Carolina.

NATHAN D. THOMAS is the deputy preservation officer and state archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management, Utah State Office in Salt Lake City.

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WEB SUPPLEMENT See history.utah.gov/uhqextras for an image gallery and for historical articles about kilns throughout the state.

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Charcoal production was integral to the mining history of Utah. The state would have certainly developed differently without it and the extant remnants of Utah’s charcoal industry stand as testament to its importance. The remaining structure of the industry deserves protection and interpretation. Many of these remnants are the most visible evidence that mining activity existed in an area. Time is taking its toll on these relics and, perhaps, this article can spur interest in protecting a valuable part of Utah’s history. We also described charcoal production areas that no longer contain significant tangible evidence that the industry existed. In a few cases, that evidence is in danger of vanishing.

Unless more active management and preservation efforts are exerted, there will be fewer and fewer ghosts to show the industry existed.

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Though the charcoal industry has only a small place in state history, it had a huge impact on Utah’s forests, altering and reshaping them.

As one observer put it, charcoal production swept “over the West like a pestilence, leaving behind tens of thousands of acres stripped of timber.”100 The use of charcoal by the smelters had consequences beyond the fuel supply and charcoal prices. Mining meant that demand was heavily concentrated in certain areas of the state, and most of Utah is not heavily timbered.

Forest devastation was reported in some areas, and concern developed for the long-term wood supply for mining, commercial, and private uses. One 1873 report noted that:

to the charcoal kilns. Often, loggers paid little attention to the legal requirements of harvesting on the public lands. The industry was scarred by bloodshed, discrimination, and corruption. It was an exploitive industry, with aspects that some might not wish to remember, but it played a major role in developing the state, and its contribution is known by few.

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has a modest place in Utah history. The industry never had much glory. Perhaps that is why so little of it is preserved. With the exception of the collier who had the skill to actually turn wood into charcoal, the charcoal burners were often disparaged. They worked in the low-skilled labor market and would earn less than half the wages of a common laborer in the mines. They lived in crude huts or dugouts, with none of the modern conveniences of the day. The charcoal-burners were “dregs of the Western labor barrel,” only welcomed in town when they had their ten dollars of weekly wages to spend.99

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Young women at work in the shipping room of the J. G. McDonald Company, July 1911 (detail). —

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The Chocolate Dippers’ Strike of 1910 BY

KAT H RY N

L.

M AC K AY

39 In January 1910, “chocolate girls” at the McDonald Candy Company in Salt Lake City went out on strike after officers of that firm refused the workers’ request to increase their wages by five cents per board foot of candy.1 The striking workers organized the Chocolate Dippers’ Union of Utah No. 1, the first union of women workers in Utah.2 In contrast to these women, the vast majority of women wage earners in Utah, as in the nation, were neither activists nor overtly political in their concerns for their working conditions. And this union was short-lived; the strikers did not achieve their goal of winning higher wages. In fact, all the strikers lost their jobs. The efforts of these women to improve their work situation in one of Utah’s major industries marked them as exceptional rather than typical. However, to study this group of fourteen courageous women is to deepen our understanding of women’s paid work experiences in Utah in the early twentieth century.3 1 Salt Lake Tribune, January 21, 1910, 14.

2 Some women workers had been allowed to join other unions, most notably the Salt Lake Typographical Union, the oldest union in Utah. By 1910 there were sixty-one labor unions in Utah. J. Kenneth Davies, Deseret’s Sons of Toil: A History of the Worker Movements of Territorial Utah (Salt Lake City: Olympus, 1977), 169. Nationally in 1910, only 1.5 percent of women workers belonged to trade unions. By 1920, the percentage had increased to 6.6. Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 21.

3 See Miriam B. Murphy, “Women in the Utah Work Force from Statehood to World War II,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 139–59, and “Gainfully Employed Women, 1896–1950,” in Women in Utah History: Paradigm or Paradox?, ed. Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005).

TABLE 1. PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN TEN YEARS OF AGE AND OLDER GAINFULLY OCCUPIED

YEAR

UNITED STATES

UTAH

1890 17.4 10.5

1900 18.8 13.5

1910 23.4 13.5

1920 21.1 13.7

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Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Facts about Working Women: A Graphic Presentation Based on Census Statistics and Studies of the Women’s Bureau (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925). See also Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880-1923 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1924).

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The three decades between 1900 and the outset of the Great Depression were decades of significant female participation in the labor force in the United States. The Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor reported in 1925 that previous census data showed the proportion of women ten years of age and over who were gainfully employed rose from 17.4 percent in 1890 to 21.1 percent in 1920. During these decades there were also numerous investigations into the nature and conditions of women’s work, which revealed patterns for women’s work: occupational segregation by sex, consistently lower female wages, and broad popular notions about female employment as a temporary stage in the life cycle, as supplemental to households headed by men.4 Of the forty-eight states, Utah ranked forty-first in percentage of women gainfully employed in 1910. By comparison, in the highest ranked state, South Carolina, more than 33 percent of women worked. Despite the small percentage of women working, national trends were evident in Utah: increasing numbers of female wage workers, investigations into conditions for those workers, and work experiences that reaffirmed rather than challenged socially assigned roles for women as dependent and passive.

In 1910, few national laws prevented women from working at any job. However, arguments for laws protecting women workers from certain occupations and long hours were well entrenched by this time. The state of Utah, for 4 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Martha May, “Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage,” in Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 1–21.

instance, had barred women from working in any mine or smelter since 1907 and in any place that served intoxicating liquors since 1911.5 Even national woman suffrage leaders argued that protective legislation was necessary to preserve woman’s special attributes of compassion and nurturance.6 Buoyed by the 1908 Supreme Court decision in Muller v. Oregon, which upheld statutes limiting the workday for women, nineteen states passed such laws between 1909 and 1917. Utah was one of those states.7 In addition to protective legislation, widespread concerns existed about which paid work was conducive to the morality of women and which was not. As the researcher Helen L. Sumner noted in a 1910 Senate report on conditions for women wage-earners, “the proper sphere of woman has long been a subject of discussion.”8 In Utah, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints directed that discussion in such periodicals as the Young Women’s Journal (1889–1929). Through its years of publication, the Journal did feature many articles about female entrepreneurs and successful women in science, education, and general business. However, the editors also warned of negative consequences for women wage earners, which included damaged nerves and the development of a lust for gold.9 5 U.S. Senate, Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, Vol. 19, Labor Laws and Factory Conditions, 61st Cong., 2d sess., S. Doc. No. 61-645 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 832–35.

6 Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), chapter 7.

7 Report on Condition, 19:832.

8 Report on Condition, Vol. 9, History of Women in Industry in the United States (1910), 13.

9 Vella Neil Evans, “Mormon Women and the Right to Wage Work,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Winter 1990): 47–63.

TABLE 2. GROWTH OF THE CANDY INDUSTRY

Pounds of candy 110,342,540 1,400,000,000 Retail value of candy $44,700,000 $1,219,000,000 Per capita consumption 2.2 lbs.

13.2 lbs.

1880

1920

Candy was also a growth industry in Utah. In 1900, the twelve candy companies in Salt Lake 10 U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Wages of Candy Makers in Philadelphia in 1919, Bulletin no. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), and Women in the Candy Industry in Chicago and St. Louis, Bulletin no. 25 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923). In the later bulletin, the researchers noted that “few industries have grown so rapidly and extensively as the candy industry in the United States.” The number of women employed in candy making nearly doubled from 1910 (1,133) to 1920 (2,186). See also Wendy A. Woloson, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in NineteenthCentury America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

11 Statistics from the 1914 Census of Manufacturers, as quoted in Wages of Candy Makers, 12, 14.

12 Jane Dusselier, “Bonbons, Lemon Drops, and Oh Henry!

Bars: Candy, Consumer Culture, and the Construction of Gender, 1895–1920,” in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 13–49.

A number of factors supported the development of this industry in Utah: a dry climate that was ideal for “ripening” chocolates, the numerous local suppliers of fruits and dairy products, 13 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Vol. 8, Manufactures, Reports by States (Washington, D.C.: United States Census Office, 1902), 8:892–93. This report also noted that in the entire state, twenty-four candy companies employed an average of 58 men and 101 women over age sixteen.

14 In order of the total value of products, the leading industries in Utah in 1910 were printing and publishing, steam-railroad repair shops, candy manufacturing, breweries, bakeries, foundries, and machine shops.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Vol. 9, Manufactures, Reports by States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 9:1226, 1230.

15 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, Vol. 9, Manufacturers, Reports by States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 9:1489.

16 “Confectionery and Bakery Products,” in Report of the Industrial Commission of Utah, Public Documents of the State of Utah, 1917–1918, Part 2, 153.

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The Census Bureau reported in 1914 that 2,391 candy factories throughout the country employed 53,658 workers, 60 percent of whom were women.11 Ironically these candy workers manufactured a product that was then particularly associated with women and children. Advertisements and popular publications depicted the eating of candy as a feminized activity, as even a leisure-time activity for white, middle-class women.12 However, candy was actually produced by women working long hours in uncomfortable conditions, for low wages.

City employed thirty-nine men age sixteen and older, seventy-five women age sixteen and older, and four children.13 By 1910, the manufacture of confections was the third leading industry in the state.14 The census reported that the candy industry had shown an increase in all important items. According to the census, “From 1904 to 1909 there was an increase of 251, or 74.5 percent, in average number of wage earners, of 947,000 or 94.2 percent, in value of products, and of $344,000 or 108.4 percent in value added by manufacturing.” By 1920, confectionery had become the principal industry in Salt Lake City in terms of the value of the product.15 Women made up the majority of workers through these growth years. The Industrial Commission of Utah noted in 1918 that the nine reporting companies employed 310 men and 589 women and paid $694,000 in total wages.16

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Candy making counted among the paid work deemed by Utahns and Americans to be socially acceptable for women. Candy manufacturing was a growth industry in the United States at the turn of the century. By 1910, the national output per year equaled nine pounds of candy at fifteen cents a pound for every man, woman, and child in the country—a total worth of $135,000,000.10

1

Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Women in the Candy Industry in Chicago and St. Louis, Bulletin no. 25 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923).

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McDonald candy boxes, 1910.

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and the many sugar factories in Utah, the result of the promotion of that industry by the LDS church. Church officials urged Mormon farmers to grow sugar beets and Mormon families to consume Utah sugar.17 The Industrial Commission of Utah explained: Statistics are quoted to show that the per capita consumption of sugar in Utah is larger than anywhere else in the world. Several reasons are assigned: One is that a large propor 17 In 1907 most of the sugar factories were united under the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, a $13,000,000 combination that was essentially promoted by the LDS church.

Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 386–89.

tion of the people abstain, as a matter of principle, from the use of narcotics and stimulants. It is quite frequently noted that the man who does not smoke or drink is a larger user of candy than the man who does. A physiological cause is assigned, but the fact remains that the consumption of candy in Utah is by no means confined to the young woman with the “sweet tooth.” Then too, Utah is a sugar-producing state; and with a supply of sugar always available, it is only to be expected that its consumption would also be heavy.18 In fact, promoting the candy industry in Utah became the stuff of boosterism, with candy manufacturers such as W. F. Jensen of Logan declaring: “It is your duty to help build up such an important industry. Why help build candy factories in Milwaukee, Chicago, New York or any other far-away city, when it would be to your own and your neighbors’ personal interest 18 “Confectionery and Bakery Products,” 153. See also “Utah Made Candy Has International Reputation,” Utah Payroll Builder, October 1925.

TABLE 3. CONFECTIONERY MANUFACTURING IN UTAH YEAR

NUMBER OF FIRMS

SALARIED OFFICERS

WAGE EARNERS

WAGES (THOUSANDSOF DOLLARS)

1899 9 45 153 51 1904 12 54 335 103 1909 17 150 586 204 1914 25 33 762 1919 31 184 1013 540 1927 21 162 617 474

The McDonald Company was a family business. John Taffe McDonald, a Scots-Irish convert to Mormonism, had come with his parents to Salt Lake City in 1849. Three years later he opened a general mercantile business on Main Street; in about 1862 he started a small candy factory to supply the business. He and his wife, Eleanor A. Crossland, raised their eleven children in living quarters at the back of the store.

As the children grew, they worked at night in the family kitchen wrapping salt water taffy.22

The various jobs at McDonald, as at other candy factories, were gender specific. A few women and a greater number of men were salaried employees, most working as clerks in the office.

The company’s sixteen traveling salespersons were all men. The cooking of the candy was done by men and was considered a skilled occupation. Men cooked the creams and fondants in huge kettles and poured them into molds.

When the molded centers had hardened, they were placed on large sheets of oiled paper and sent to the dippers. Men also cooked the chocolate used in dipping. The dippers, however, were women.

19 W. F. Jensen, “The Candy Industry and What It Means to Cache Valley,” Utah Payroll Builder, April 1920, 24.

Jensen was manager of the candy company that bore his name. The Payroll Builder was a publication of the Utah Manufacturers Association.

Chocolate dipping was considered a skilled job.

In fact, it was said that a good dipper was born with a certain knack for it. It required quickness and judgment in regard to the condition of the chocolate, which had to be kept at the

20 Robert Mitchell, “Candy Industry Makes Big Gains,” Deseret News, December 27, 1965, 22.

21 Biennial Report of the State Dairy and Food Commissioner, Public Documents of the State of Utah, 1909–1910, Part 2, 241.

22 “Half Million Spent in McDonald’s Growth,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 4, 1967, 4.

23 “Great Growth Utah Industry,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 31, 1909, 11. See also “A Train One Mile Long Loaded with Utah Sugar Required to Supply Sweets for this Utah Factory,” Deseret Evening News, May 13, 1916, sec. 3:1, and “101-Year-Old S.L. Landmark Becomes Keeley’s Property,” Deseret News, April 5, 1953, 11.

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In territorial Utah most of the candy not made at home was manufactured by small, family operated businesses, often in connection with a grocery. The H. A. Tuckett Co., which incorporated in 1889, became the largest candy maker in the territory, doing an annual business in 1892 of $150,000, with forty-two “experienced” operators.20 By 1910, however, Tuckett’s had disappeared and five companies dominated the Utah candy industry: the Startup Candy Company of Provo, the Shupe-Williams Candy Company of Ogden, the Murdoch Candy Company of Logan, the Sweet Candy Company of Salt Lake City, and the J. G. McDonald Company, also in the capital city.21

In 1889, McDonald’s son James Gailard (1865– 1940) married Edith Cartwright. J. G. took over the family business and the next year sold the building to an employee, J. H. R. Franklin, who set up a candy and fountain business. J. G. McDonald then built a two-story factory a few blocks to the south and west and concentrated production entirely on candy making. In 1909, the company built an even larger plant, planning to double the output of candy and produce chocolates exclusively. The McDonald Company began turning out 20,000 pounds a day.

About three hundred men and women were employed during the peak season from October to December.23

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to assist in the up building of the factories in your own community.”19

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Machinery used in the McDonald mixing room, with three young women in the background, July 1911.

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melting point. Dippers used wire forks and their fingers to dip the fondants and creams into pools of chocolate, providing each piece with a “signature” of ridges and curls. An experienced dipper could dip sixty pounds of chocolates per day.24 Researchers for a 1913 congressional report suggested that the average dipper worked through about seventy-five to eighty pounds of candies a day, with the fastest accomplishing from 115 to 120 pounds per day.25 After workers had dipped the chocolates, they placed the candies on large trays and sent them to cool rooms to ripen. After that, the chocolates went on to the packers, all of whom were women. These workers packed the chocolates 24 Wages of Candy Makers, 18.

25 Report on Condition, Vol. 18, Employment of Women and Children in Selected Industries (1913), 124.

in paper cups and then in boxes in certain patterns to make them weigh out correctly.

Toppers brushed the top layer of candy to give a sheen, put in a lace paper mat and a layer of cotton, and closed the box. Other packers put the boxed candy into larger boxes for shipping.

Packing was not considered skilled work.

Dipping and packing were tedious, monotonous duties. Workers averaged nine hours a day, although during rush season ten and twelve hour days were not uncommon. In the slack summer season, workers were dismissed or employed only part time. Weekly wages varied. Forewomen might earn over twelve dollars a week, while dippers might earn from nine to twelve dollars. Packers, the largest group of female workers, might earn from five to seven dollars. The lowest paid workers were those doing miscellaneous work such as carrying trays and “floor work.” In a 1914 study of “Women at Work in Salt Lake City,” the average wage of the fifteen candy workers who filled out the survey cards was reported to be $5.46 per week.26 One 26 The occupations of the fifteen workers included dipping, gathering stick candy, packing salted peanuts, packing peanut brittle, rushing chocolate trays, running

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of the workers listed her cost of living for a year as $251. If she had regular employment, she would have made $234 for the year.27 In addition to paying poorly, the work was messy. Pieces of filling and chocolate dropped on the floors and were trodden in. Starch from the molding trays coated the stairs and floors.

Typically the workers did their own cleaning, scrubbing tables and floors daily and weekly.

Dippers’ hands were in the melted chocolate, which dirtied their nails and any part of their clothing they touched. Candy companies often provided only inadequate washroom facilities. Although many companies pictured their workers in spotless white aprons and caps, cutting machine, breaking honeycomb, packing, and weighing. Madeline Stauffer Lambert, “Women at Work in Salt Lake City” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1914), 40–43.

27 The average hourly pay of manufacturing production workers in 1909, the first measured year, was about $3.80 (in 1999 dollars). In 1900, the average manufacturing work week was fifty-three hours. Donald M. Fisk, “American Labor in the 20th Century,” Compensation and Working Conditions, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed August 29, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/opub/ mlr/cwc/american-labor-in-the-20th-century.pdf.

McDonald candy machinery, August 1904.

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workers could not actually remain so immaculate.

And yet, despite the uncomfortable working conditions, low wages, and long hours, hundreds of women sought employment in the candy factories in Utah and throughout the United States. Why? Most likely because such work was an alternative to domestic service jobs.28 As W. F. Jensen, the manager of his own can28 For comments from domestic servants regarding their limited choices for employment, see W. Elliot Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee, Women in the American Economy: A Documentary History, 1675 to 1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 248–50.

Surprisingly, in 1900, twice as many men as women worked in domestic service. However, it was an area of gainful employment more important to women than men; only one in ten male workers were in this category, while four out of ten women workers were. Joan Younger Dickinson, The Role of Immigrant Women in the U.S. Labor Force, 1890–1910 (New York City: Arno, 1980), 96.

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dy company in Logan stated, “Other desirable employment for women is scarce.” Jensen also supposed, in a statement probably not based on experience, that “the wholesome and pleasant nature of the work is an incentive to women to enter the industry. Where could one find a line of work with fewer objectionable features than is presented in the positions in these factories or behind the counters in these stores while making and selling dainty, delicious confections?”29

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Through most of the twentieth century, the proportion of women in Utah gainfully occupied remained below the national average.30 However, thousands of women worked because they supported themselves (as so-called women adrift) or because they contributed to the family income. How many additional thousands might also have taken wage work if more such work had been available in an economy heavily dependent on agriculture and mining jobs—work not considered suitable for women?31 The fourteen skilled chocolate dippers who struck the McDonald Company in 1910 protested long hours, low wages, and child labor. In the statement issued by the newly formed Chocolate Dippers’ Union, the women asked for an eight-hour day and a flat salary of ten dollars a week. They denied McDonald’s assertion that the dippers earned from nine to fourteen dollars a week, declaring instead that those wages were for the months of October, November, and 29 Jensen, “The Candy Industry,” 24.

30 U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Facts about Working Women: A Graphic Presentation Based on Census Statistics and Studies of the Women’s Bureau, Bulletin no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925), 10. See also Michael Vinson, “From Housework to Office Clerk: Utah’s Working Women, 1870–1900,” Utah Historical Quarterly 53, no. 4 (1985): 326–35. Since 1980, Utah women have participated in the labor force at a higher percentage rate than the national average.

See “Hard at Work: Women in the Utah Labor Force,” Utah Department of Workforce Services, accessed June 20, 2011, http://jobs.utah.gov/wi/pubs/hardatwork/ womenspub.pdf.

31 In her 1914 survey, Madeline Lambert noted that nearly one-fifth of the adult women in Salt Lake City were wage earners. About 40 percent of them worked as domestic servants. Others were stenographers and office clerks (1,600), candy workers (250), knitting factory workers (65), box factory workers (26), milliners (50), laundry workers (550), and telephone operators (295). Lambert did not survey professional women, such as teachers and health workers. Lambert, “Women at Work in Salt Lake City,” 5.

December, “when the dippers worked from ten to twelve hours a day, and even at that [the dippers] cannot make over $12 a week.”32 The union officers further noted the incongruity of J. G. McDonald’s protest that he was running his business on “charity.” The officers sneered: “If that is the case, it occurs to us that he would better discontinue the practice of employing mere children in his factory at ridiculously low pay. Some of the little girls are not more than twelve years. . . . All of them ought to be in school.” An officer reported: I asked one the other day if she didn’t go to school, and she burst out crying, saying that she would dearly love to go to school, but that she couldn’t afford it.

If Mr. McDonald is running his business on charity, it seems to me that he might send these children to school— that would be real charity.

We all felt sorry for those little children, and we tried to show them how to dip. The result of this has been that they are now working in our places and trying to do the work that experienced work women have been doing.

The product shows it.33 The officers confidently stated that they had the “assurance” of dippers in other factories that they would join the union. Further, they appealed to women outside the factory to support their cause. Female consumers of candy were urged to look for and buy only handdipped, rather than machine-coated, chocolates as a way of encouraging the companies to hire experienced hand dippers. However, other dippers did not join the union and the strikers found no solidarity among women consumers.

32 “Chocolate Girls Organize Union,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 23, 1910, 1.

33 Ibid. A 1913 Senate report noted that “On the whole confectionery seems to show a lower age level than any other industry studies. It has the largest proportion under 16, the largest proportion aged 16 and 17, and the smallest proportion aged 20 and over.” Report on Condition, 18:19.

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The McDonald dippers acted bravely. They were all young women under the age of twenty-five, as were 75 percent of female factory workers nationwide. Of the fourteen strikers, only the names of the officers of the Chocolate Dippers’ Union survive in public records: Sarah Rindfleisch, president; Emma Marcroft, vice-president; Lilah Teberg, recording secretary; Ella Roscoe, treasurer; and Lillian Cooper, sergeant-at-arms. These five women were all daughters of working-class parents, English converts to Mormonism who had immigrated to Utah. It is intriguing to speculate what influence their working-class English heritage had on the dippers’ action. Trade union activities, including strikes, were much more prevalent in England than America during the nineteenth century.

In the years from 1895 to 1905, only 8 percent of the strikes ordered by labor organizations in the United States involved union women, and in only 83 of the 1,262 strikes involving women did the women act alone.34 The chocolate dippers who protested against McDonald had few precedents to guide them. Perhaps the New York City shirtwaist-workers’ strike of 1909 34 Report on Condition, Vol. 10, History of Women in Trade Unions (1911), 204.

The J. G. McDonald shipping room, July 1911.

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to 1910—the famous Uprising of the 20,000, made up largely of young immigrant women— inspired them. Both the Salt Lake Tribune and the LDS church–owned newspaper, the Deseret News, widely reported on that strike, which was still ongoing at the time of the chocolate dippers’ strike.

The McDonald strike might also have originated in the workroom social life that was part of young women’s employment experience. The historian Leslie Trentler notes that because working-class girls lacked the social opportunities their brothers enjoyed, workrooms provided many of them with a “place of refuge from family and neighborhood surveillance and an opportunity for free sociability with peers.”35 None of the five union officers lived in the same neighborhood; therefore, they would not have attended the same Mormon ward (or congre35 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 61.

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gation). Instead, the long hours spent sitting at the dippers’ tables offered these women an opportunity to create bonds of friendship out of the connections of class, religion, national origins, and sex they already had.

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Though only the names of union officers survive, kinship ties—as well as friendship and shared complaints—might have connected the fourteen women. Several of the officers had coworkers who were also their relatives. Perhaps their relatives were the other strikers. All the officers were working-class daughters who lived in the parental home. These circumstances made them typical of the majority of female wage earners in the United States at the time.

In the 1910s, less than half of wage-earning families were solely supported by the paycheck of the husband or father.36 Likewise, the facts of the union officers’ lives, as well as those of their family members, place them squarely within the working class. Sarah Rindfleisch, president of the Chocolate Dippers’ Union, was 24 years old in 1910. Her father Carl was an engineer at the Salt Lake Brewing Company. The family had migrated from London in 1899. Not only did Sarah work for wages, her sisters did as well: Dorothy as a dressmaker, Margaret at Paris Millinery, and Minnie as a clerk and later, in the 1920s, as a saleswoman at Vogue millinery. Four years after the strike, Sarah married John Cameron Jr., a Utah native, in 1914. Cameron had been married to her sister Amelia, who had died in 1909. Sarah did not work for wages after her marriage.

Emma Marcroft, the union’s vice president, was one of ten children of Robert (described in public records simply as a laborer) and Mary Ann Page Marcroft, also immigrants from England.

McDonald Candy also employed Emma’s sister Eleanor. After Emma lost her job as a result of striking, she went to work for J. H. R. Franklin, a competitive candy company. Eleanor became a seamstress. By 1920, Emma was working at a department store and living with Eleanor and her husband Harry D. Morris, a dyer at a cleaning company. Emma never married.

36 W. Jett Lauck and Edgar Sydenstricker, Conditions of Labor in American Industries: A Summarization of the Results of Recent Investigations (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1917), 253.

Lilah Teberg, the recording secretary, was the child of August J. Teberg, a teamster. Lilah had worked as a maid before getting the job at McDonald in 1908. Salt Lake City directories make no mention of the Teberg family after 1910. Similarly, Ella Roscoe, treasurer, does not appear in city directories, though other Roscoes are listed as carpenters, teamsters, bartenders, laborers, and laundresses.

Finally, sergeant-at-arms Lillian Cooper—like her fellow officers—came from a working-class family of English immigrants. Her cousins, Ethel and Evelyn, also worked as chocolate dippers. After the strike, Lillian found employment at the Union Paper Box Company; Evelyn married Ren Hansen in 1914; and Ethel went to work for Sweet’s Candy Company, where she remained for the next several decades, never marrying. Eventually, Ethel and her mother lived with the Hansens.37 This group of strike organizers presented their case to the Salt Lake Federation of Labor on January 28, 1910. Or rather, the strike was reported at the federation’s semi-monthly meeting, since women were not allowed to actually speak at the meeting. The union men endorsed the strike and organized a committee to arrange a dance for the benefit of the chocolate dippers.38 The dance occurred in late February and was described as a financial success.

The strike continued through April, but by June it had failed and the union was dismantled.39 However, in a rather ironic twist, some conditions at the McDonald Candy Company did change. From 1911 to 1914, J. G. McDonald expanded his factory to five stories and created a garden on the top floor. The roof garden became a showplace for the factory that the 37 Thirteenth Census; Fourteenth Census.

38 Salt Lake Federation of Labor Minute Book 2, January 28, 1910, box 19, Utah State Federation of Labor Records, 1919–1956, MS 13, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. The Salt Lake Federation of Labor had been affiliated with the American Federation of Labor since 1905; it rechartered in 1908. It is significant that the men supported this union. Nationally men tended to be hostile toward women’s unions. Perhaps these men felt there was no competition for jobs assumed to be women’s work. See Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History, 26–30.

39 Salt Lake Federation of Labor Minute Book 2, February 11, March 11, and April 22, 1910.

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company widely publicized, calling its product, thereafter, Roof Garden chocolates. The sheer fantasy nature of the roof garden seemed incongruous with the gritty tedium of the work that went into producing the candies. The Utah Pay Roll Builder noted in 1918 that among “all other factories in the world,” the J. G. McDonald alone could boast of a providing a roof garden for its employees: Here a luncheon period, a time of relaxation and rest and a refreshing walk among birds, foliage and flowers is afforded. This bower of beauty commands an unbroken view of the entire valley and at once forces the employees to forget the humdrum of the day’s laborious tasks. In short, it has proven

A woman and a chimpanzee in the McDonald roof garden, June 1916.

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a panacea for many of the ills which affect the modern day factory.

“It is one of our biggest assets,” said Mr. McDonald, “It has been the means of making every man, woman, boy and girl feel his or her well-being is looked after by management.”40

40 “McDonald Chocolate Co.,” Utah Payroll Builder, August 1918, 17.

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50 J. G. McDonald window display, Salt Lake City, November 1913. Notice the use of female images in advertising chocolate.

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The Pay Roll Builder did not report whether or not the employees actually felt “looked after.”

Undoubtedly, they would have been better off if McDonald had spent the money on higher wages rather than on fancier facilities. McDonald’s female candy workers continued to put in long hours for low pay—though they never again struck or organized a union—and the roof garden continued a to be highly promoted feature of the company through the 1920s. The McDonald Company was bankrupted in 1969.

The creation of Chocolate Dippers’ Union seems to have had no direct influence on wage work for women. However, in 1911, the state legislature passed a law limiting the hours of labor for women workers. The measure established the nine-hour day and fifty-four hour week. Domestic service and farm labor were not included. Then in 1919, the state amended the law to provide for an eight-hour day and a forty-eight hour week.41 In 1913, following the lead of Massachusetts, Utah and eight other states passed a minimum wage law for women. The Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs strongly supported this law, which was sponsored by three female members of the state legislature—Anne Wells Cannon, Ann Holden King, and Edyth E. Read. Advocates of the law declared that “the greatest material service we can render the future woman and girl workers is to rearrange such environment and education as will give 41 See Owen Franklin Beal, “The Labor Legislation of Utah: With Special Reference to the Period of Statehood” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1922), 54–57.

them individual independence, self-supporting producing power.”42

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Finally, in 1917 and with the backing of Governor Simon Bamberger, the Utah legislature passed a law that allowed working people to organize labor unions “for the purpose of lessening the hours of labor, increasing wages, [or] bettering the conditions of [their members].”43 Thus within a decade after the chocolate strike, the State of Utah created laws limiting working hours for women, providing a minimum wage for women, and ensuring the legality of unions.

All these laws came too late to be of much use to the members of the Chocolate Dippers’ Union of Utah No. 1. However, these young women raised concerns about decent wages and safe working conditions that remain relevant for today.

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42 H. T. Haines, Utah’s Minimum Wage Law for Females, Passed by the State Legislature of 1913, Became Effective May 13, 1913 (Salt Lake City: Imperial, 1914).

43 Beal, “Labor Legislation of Utah,” 117. A letter from J. J. Sullivan, Utah Federation of Labor, is also referenced as reporting that about 25 percent of all wage-earners in the state belonged to unions.

51 Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042-143X) is published by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101-1182. The co-managing editors are Holly George and Jedediah S. Rogers, with offices at the same address as the publisher. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the society or its magazine.

The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 2,150 copies printed; 1,613 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 1,584 total paid circulation; 79 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; 1,663 total distribution; 487 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; total, 2,150.

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Kathryn L. MacKay is Professor of History at Weber State University and a member of UHQ’s board of editors.

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WEB SUPPLEMENT Visit history.utah.gov/uhqextras for historical advertisements using women and their bodies to sell goods and projects.

The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 2,000 copies printed; 1,578 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 0 dealer and counter sales; 1,543 total paid circulation; 135 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 322; total, 2,000.

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An unidentified woman with an Underwood typewriter, ca. 1918. —

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P E N R O D

In the fall of 2013, not long after I had accepted a new job with the local newspaper, I had a direct encounter with one of Tooele’s many historical mysteries. As the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin’s newly appointed religion reporter, I set out to acquaint myself with the various religious congregations and denominations in the area, beginning with an article about our local Catholic population. I happened to begin this new assignment in September, a few weeks before the local Saint Marguerite Catholic Church would celebrate the feast of their parish’s patron and namesake saint, Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. I thought I would write a feature article about Saint Marguerite, using the interview and research process as a means to learn more about the Catholic Church in general and the local Catholic community in particular.

As the local parish’s current pastor, the Reverend Samuel Dinsdale, taught me about Saint Marguerite, it struck me that the Tooele parish’s choice of namesake seemed unusual. Saint Marguerite was a seventeenth-century French nun, and Tooele is not exactly a bastion of French influence.1 The History of Tooele County lists large groups of immigrants from England, Italy, Ireland, and Greece, with a few other families from various other countries—but France is not among them.2 Saint Marguerite was popular among Irish immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, providing a possible connection, but Dinsdale was skeptical of this theory.3 If Irish immigrants in Tooele had named the church for their favorite saint, why had they not used her Anglicized name, Margaret Mary, which was far more common? The 1 Mary Bernard Doll, “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09653a. htm.

2 Orrin P. Miller, History of Tooele County, vol. 2 (Tooele, UT: Tooele Transcript Bulletin, 1990), 87–88, 125–30.

3 David W. Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 1 (1975): 82.

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and the Catholic Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque

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French spelling was so unusual, Dinsdale said, that he had actually called regional authorities to verify the church’s name when he was first assigned to the area. They confirmed it: the name of the church was Saint Marguerite Catholic Church—spelled the French way—but no one knew why.4

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Dissatisfied with this answer, I dug into the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin’s archives. The newspaper was originally founded in 1894 and purchased by James Dunn in 1898; the Dunn family has maintained ownership ever since.5 The company, in cooperation with other historians and the University of Utah, has preserved copies of the twice-weekly newspaper from 1894 to the present day, with the exception of issues that were destroyed in a fire in 1932.6 One article led to the next, and before long I began to piece together the story of how the Tooele parish received its name. According to the newspapers of the day, Tooele named its Catholic church for a young Irish girl who died in Michigan just a few months prior to the church’s 1910 groundbreaking.

This fact alone is not outside Catholic norms.

According to Gary Topping, archivist for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, there is no specific rule that says a parish must or must not be named for a certain individual.7 And there is certainly precedent: Monsignor Jerome Stoffel, for example, named the chapel in Logan for Saint Jerome.8

sizable Catholic population during most of the town’s early years. The Reverend Louis J. Fries, author of One Hundred and Fifty Years of Catholicity in Utah, estimated that there were no Catholics residing in Tooele until 1907.9 However, thanks to the rapid growth of outlying mining communities such as Ophir and Mercur, Tooeleans had a large number of Catholic neighbors as early as the 1870s.

The Reverend Patrick Walsh, one of the first Catholic priests in Utah and the pastor who built and oversaw Utah’s first Catholic church, periodically visited Catholics in a mining camp south of Tooele as early as October 1871.10 The Catholic population at the camp was highly transient, so Walsh visited according to the community’s needs at the time, and no permanent church was established for the camp.

Walsh made a more regular habit of conducting Mass in Ophir, one of the most prosperous mining towns of its day.11 After an initial visit in 1872, Walsh celebrated Mass in Ophir on a monthly basis from 1874 until 1878, the year most of Ophir’s major mines were abandoned.

The Ophir congregation had no dedicated church building; rather, the congregation met in a small hall.12

Like many Utah communities, Tooele was settled by Mormon pioneers, and so lacked any

In 1873, Bishop Lawrence Scanlan became the pastor of Salt Lake City’s church of Saint Mary Magdalene, and soon after he was assigned responsibility for all Catholics living in Utah’s outlying areas as well.13 During his first year of this assignment, Scanlan visited Mercur, another prosperous mining town in Tooele’s vicinity.

A sparse Catholic population resided in Mercur in 1894, when Scanlan returned to organize regular worship services for the community.

Four years later, Mercur’s pastor, the Reverend A. V. Keenan, solicited donations for the construction of a dedicated church building. The success of his efforts led to the construction of Tooele County’s first Catholic church in 1904.14

4 Samuel Dinsdale, interview with the author, October 2013.

9 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:183.

5 Mildred Mercer Allred and Orrin P. Miller, History of Tooele County, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Tooele Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1961), 104.

10 “History of the Diocese,” Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, accessed October 2, 2014, www.dioslc.org/history; Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

6 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:107.

11 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

7 Gary Topping, e-mail message to the author, February 28, 2014.

12 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

14 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

But this is where our story becomes more intriguing—Marguerite McGurrin had never set foot in Tooele. She is connected to this desert town through her uncle, the famous stenographer Frank McGurrin, who evidently helped fund the construction of the parish’s original church building.

13 “History of the Diocese.”

About a year after taking the position in Salt Lake City, McGurrin issued his famous challenge to fellow stenographers in the industry’s trade press: he proposed to meet all challengers in any U.S. city west of Chicago, and there engage in a sort of typewriting race.21 He offered a winner’s purse of more than one hundred dollars and soon had contestants responding to his challenge.22 News of the contest began to 15 Ibid.

16 Tooele (UT) Transcript, December 20, 1907, November 20, 1908.

17 Orrin P. Miller, ed., Mining, Smelting and Railroading in Tooele County (Tooele, UT: Tooele County Historical Society, 1986), 80.

18 Allred, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

19 “Rites Held for Club Founder,” Oakland (CA) Tribune, August 19, 1933.

20 “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

21 F. E. McGurrin, “Still Another Challenge,” Typewriter Operator 1, no. 10 (1888): 51.

22 Franke E. McGurrin, “A Challenge for Speed,”

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circulate in other trade journals and throughout the popular press.23 By the time McGurrin squared off with his top competitor in Cincinnati for a grand prize of five hundred dollars, the contest had become something of a national event.

Because the rules of the contest allowed typists to compete on the instrument of their choice, the popular press depicted the contest as the final test between two of the top typewriter brands of the day: the Remington with its QWERTY-style keyboard, which McGurrin favored, and the Caligraph his rival, Louis Traub, favored.24 Unlike the Remington, the Caligraph had a double keyboard with a full set of capital and lower-case letters, which made for twice as many keys.25 Proponents of the Caligraph argued that the double keyboard eliminated Typewriter Operator 1, no. 11 (1888): 56.

23 “A Speed Challenge,” Cosmopolitan Shorthander 9, no. 5 (1888): 123.

24 “Typewriter Operators,” Cincinnati (OH) Commercial Gazette, July 26, 1888.

25 Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 234–35.

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Around 1910, Scanlan agreed to include Tooele on a route he traveled once a month to hold Mass for Salt Lake City’s outlying Catholic communities.18 Frank McGurrin first appeared in Tooele at roughly the same time. Taken from the perspective of Tooele’s history, McGurrin is a mysterious character. He was born in Michigan, went on to study law, and was admitted to the bar in 1884.19 However, it does not appear that he ever actively practiced law. Instead, he followed his passions for shorthand and typewriting, and in 1886 he landed a job as a court stenographer in Salt Lake City.20

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History of Tooele County attributes the arrival of Tooele City’s first notable Catholic population to the construction of the International Smelter.15 A coalition of mines in Bingham Canyon began seriously exploring Tooele for the site of a smelter in late 1907, and a series of events involving litigation, pollution controls, and smelter closures led to the expedited construction of the International Smelter in Pine Canyon.16 The construction brought a flood of immigrants to Tooele. Though the smelter is known locally for the large number of Greeks, Italians, and other southern Europeans who came to work at the plant, many of the company’s earliest hires were Irish—and most, if not all, of them were devout in their Catholic or Protestant faiths.17

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The cornerstone ceremony for St. Marguerite Catholic Church, Tooele, April 13, 1910.

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56 the need for a shift key, allowing the typist to produce one letter per stroke and, in theory, resulting in greater typewriting speeds. And at first, the Caligraph appeared superior, with Caligraph-trained typists boasting the fastest-known typing speeds.26

In addition to crediting the superiority of the Remington design, the newspaper reports noted that “Mr. McGurrin in copying did not look at his instrument at all, and his fingers flew over the keyboard with the precision of blind Tom at a piano.”29 Traub was likewise a touch-typist capable of typing on unmarked keyboards, but he used an eight-finger method then favored by Caligraph users.30 McGurrin not only helped popularize the QWERTY keyboard format we use today, but as he continued competing in well-publicized typing competitions and came to be known as the world’s fastest typist, he popularized modern touch typing as well.31

But in 1888, McGurrin won his fateful contest, typing at an average speed of ninety-seven words per minute. Newspaper coverage attributed the win as much to the Remington design as to McGurrin’s skill as a typist, and as McGurrin continued to improve and hold demonstrations throughout the nation, the popularity of the Remington continued to grow.27 Conventional wisdom holds that the hype created by McGurrin’s success ultimately made QWERTY the dominant keyboard layout, but the debate whether McGurrin’s speed was the conquest of man or machine continues to this day.28

McGurrin would later explain that he actually taught himself to type by touch after his employer teased him about his typewriting capabilities.32 McGurrin learned to operate a typewriter while working as a clerk for D. E. Corbitt around 1878 in Grand Rapids. He and his employer developed something of a contest to see who could type faster on the device, and eventually McGurrin reached the point that he could consistently outdo his employer. Corbitt, out of frustration, claimed that he had seen a girl at another office taking notes without looking at the typewriter keys. Stymied,

26 Ibid.

30 Zarnowski, American Work-Sports, 120–21.

27 Frank Zarnowski, American Work-Sports: A History of Competitions for Cornhuskers, Lumberjacks, Firemen, and Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 120–21.

31 “The Typewriting Trial,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 12, 1891.

28 Ibid.

29 “Typewriter Operators.”

32 Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict, The History of Touch Typewriting (New York: Guilbert Putnam, 1900), 6–10.

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McGurrin resolved that he could teach himself to do whatever a girl could do—and in the process adapted his method to include typing with all ten fingers, rather than just two or three. McGurrin later learned that Corbitt invented the story about the female typist to “get the conceit” out of him.33

Inside the original St. Marguerite church building, which was replaced in the 1970s.

November 1910.

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After some time, McGurrin’s interest in typing began to fade—newspaper coverage from 1894 suggests he may have fallen out of local political favor and consequently lost his job with the Salt Lake court—and he turned his attention to business and banking.34 He worked for many years for the Salt Lake Security and Trust Company, eventually becoming the company’s president. He later became president of the Commercial Bank of Tooele as well.35 In 1915, McGurrin retired and moved from Utah to California, where he took up golf and acquired a large collection of trophies.36 He died there in 1933.37

Beyond the 1915 mention that he had headed a bank in Tooele, there is little other evidence to connect McGurrin to the area. However, routine newspaper items such as marriage announcements and obituaries easily establish that the McGurrin family was actively involved with the Catholic Church wherever they happened to reside.38 Newspaper coverage also suggests that McGurrin himself was acquainted with Bishop Scanlan. The two frequently encountered each other at various social events, and on at least one occasion, Scanlan oversaw a typewriting contest side-by-side with McGurrin.39 McGurrin had volunteered to teach children in an orphanage how to operate typewriters by touch, and he concluded the course with a typewriting contest.

33 Ibid.

34 “Stenographers Examined,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 15, 1894; “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

utah state historical society

35 “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

36 “Important Business Change Effects Local Capitalists,” Brigham City (UT) Box Elder News, July 15, 1915.

37 “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

38 Ibid.

39 “Children Make Records on Typewriters,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 27, 1899.

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Given that Scanlan and McGurrin ran in the same circles, it isn’t too far-fetched to suggest that McGurrin learned of the plight of Catholics in Tooele—who desired to have a church of their own but evidently did not have the funds to construct one—in relatively short order.40 If he were the president of the local bank at the time, and if he happened to have some spare cash on hand and a disposition for charity, then it makes sense that McGurrin might have felt inclined to donate toward a church’s construction.

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Reports from the Intermountain Catholic suggest that this is exactly what happened, although they leave out a good deal of the back story and explanation. In May 1910, just a few short weeks after the Tooele community began to lay the foundation for a church, McGurrin himself presented the cornerstone during an elaborate ceremony.41 The parish was named “Saint Marguerite’s Catholic Church” that day, at McGurrin’s request, in honor of his seventeen-year-old niece.42 As best I can tell, Marguerite McGurrin never visited Tooele herself. She lived with her family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and passed away November 5, 1909, after an extended illness.43 Though there is little known about her, her father, Charles McGurrin, was also a world-renowned stenographer.44 Charles and Frank were evidently very close as brothers and often traveled across the country to visit one another.45 Later articles about the construction of Saint Marguerite Catholic Church suggest that perhaps both Frank and Charles contributed to the financing of the building.46

Marguerite. There was not only a sizable contingent of Irish Catholics in the area at the time, but several early parish leaders also had Irish heritage.47 After Scanlan—who was Irish himself—personally dedicated the building, some time passed before the parish had a permanently assigned priest.48 Then, in about 1915, the Reverend James O’Grady was appointed to oversee the parish.49 Many others followed, including the Reverend Frederick Murphy (1917), the Reverend H. Connery (1918), the Reverend Morgan O’Brien (1922), and the Reverend William Kennedy (1925).50 Regardless of the reason behind the name, the wealth of Irish influence within Tooele’s parish suggests that Saint Marguerite was a fitting patron, just as the parallels between Saint Marguerite’s life and Marguerite McGurrin make the namesake parish a fitting memorial to the McGurrins’ beloved daughter and niece.

Like Marguerite McGurrin, Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque was born to a well-off, well-respected family—only several centuries earlier, in L’Hautecour, France.51 Alacoque fell ill as a child. Paralysis confined her to bed for four years and toward the end of her illness, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary and vowed to devote her life to religious service.

Sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction.

Were it not for the newspaper articles that provide evidence to the contrary, one could easily find some tenuous connection between Tooele, Catholic Irish-American immigrants, and Saint

Alacoque’s father passed away while she was still a child, and the family member to whom her father’s estate fell refused to return it to the girl’s mother, which left the family destitute for a number of years.52 During this time, Alacoque had recurring visions of Jesus Christ. Later, after the family’s return to high society, Alacoque had another vision in which Christ reminded her that she had vowed to dedicate herself to her religion. With that, she entered a Sisters of the Visitation convent in 1671.53 She continued to have visions of Christ, who instructed her to teach others of his love and compassion for all mankind.

40 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

47 Miller, History of Tooele County, 2:129.

41 “Cornerstone is Laid,” Intermountain Catholic, May 19, 1910.

48 W. Paul Reeve, “Father Lawrence Scanlan Established Catholic Church in Utah,” Utah History Blazer, September 1995; “St. Marguerite Church Dedicated”; Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:185.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 “City and Neighborhood,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 5, 1890.

46 “St. Marguerite Church Dedicated,” Intermountain Catholic, November 26, 1910.

49 Allred, History of Tooele County, 1:185.

50 Ibid.

51 Doll, “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.”

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

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At first the Catholic Church denounced Alacoque and her visions, and both lay people and church leaders persecuted her for much of her life. Local animosity ended when a newly elected superior chose Alacoque as her assistant; still, her teachings would not be accepted until seventy-five years after her death in 1690. The Catholic Church officially recognized her as a saint in 1864.54

Outside the original church building, November 1910.

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Marguerite-Marie Alacoque remains a popular figure among Catholics in Tooele. To this day, the festival held in her honor by the Tooele parish each fall is well attended by the local parishioners and many non-Catholics alike.55 She taught her pupils to be especially faithful in observing Mass on the first Friday of each month, and her first Friday Mass continues to be the most well-attended Mass in Tooele, second only to Christmas and Easter.56

Despite his contributions to the community, Frank McGurrin has been largely forgotten in Tooele’s history and contemporary life. No streets or parks bear his name, nor does his mention surface in books on local history. But his niece, through her namesake church, has been quietly immortalized—perhaps just as McGurrin intended.

54 F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

55 Dinsdale, interview. Saint Marguerite’s official feast day is observed on October 16, but the local parish usually celebrates its fall festival a little earlier, to avoid bad weather.

56 Doll, “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque”; Dinsdale, interview.

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Emma Penrod is a journalist and historian in Tooele, Utah. She covers religion, health, and the environment for the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin and does historical research in her free time. She is the author of Images of Rail: Tooele Valley Railroad.

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Transformation of the cathedral: An interview with gregory glenn G A RY

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Since completion of the Cathedral of the Madeleine under Bishop Lawrence Scanlan in 1909, and especially after its colorful redecoration in 1917 under Bishop Joseph S. Glass, it has become one of Salt Lake City’s most celebrated architectural monuments. The cathedral underwent a further transformation during the 1980s from an almost exclusively Roman Catholic structure to an authentically public building—“A Cathedral for All People,” as the slogan had it during its extensive renovation from 1991 to 1993. Today there are few people with a cultural bent in Salt Lake City who have not attended at least some of its free public concerts, lectures, or dramatic performances.

That renovation was an immense project costing 10.4 million dollars. In addition to a seismic retrofitting of the structure itself, it included cleaning the murals and other interior painting that had become dulled by air pollution over the decades; removing, cleaning, and reassembling the stained glass windows; redesigning the sanctuary area; commissioning a new set of paintings for the Stations of the Cross; acoustical improvements; and construction and installation of a new organ, among other less

Gregory Glenn with the Cathedral of the Madeleine Choir, 2011.

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courtesy intermountain catholic

dramatic improvements.1 The transformation included more than just physical aspects, for such programs as the annual Madeleine Festival of Arts and Humanities and the annual Eccles Organ Concert series, among other events, made the cathedral a public cultural center as well as an architectural and artistic marvel.

1 The Stations of the Cross are ordinarily paintings or sculptures arranged around the sides of a Catholic church and depicting various events during the passion of Christ. Their number has varied considerably over the centuries but eventually became standardized at fourteen. Bishop Lawrence Scanlan’s stations were bas-relief sculptures that were replaced during Bishop Joseph Glass’s redecoration with rather gloomy oil paintings. During the 1990s renovation, they were deemed unsalvageable and new paintings were commissioned and executed by University of Utah art professor Roger “Sam” Wilson.

The interview took place on February 9, 2009, in the cathedral rectory. It is part of the Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, under whose permission it is presented here.

Gary Topping: I wonder first of all, Greg, just to kind of establish a context for this, if you could tell us a little bit about your personal background—where you grew up, and your education, and stuff like that.

Gregory Glenn: Sure. I grew up in the state of Washington, in the Olympia area, and eventually moved to Seattle to do my undergraduate work, which was in music, specifically in organ performance. After a few years of pastoral work in a parish there in Seattle I went back to school at Catholic University in Washington D.C., and did my graduate degree in theology with an emphasis in liturgical studies, then also did work in choral conducting and Gregorian Chant studies. Then, completing my graduate work, I took the post here as the Diocesan Director of Liturgy in September 1988 and became the Director of Liturgy and Music for the cathedral in 1990, doing both jobs, and then in 1991 I came just to the cathedral, as we were getting busy for the restoration.

2 Gary Topping, The Story of the Cathedral of the Madeleine (Salt Lake City: Sagebrush Press, 2009).

GT: Did you come from a musical family?

GG: I did. My grandfather was an organist, all of my uncles are musicians, and my father is.

GT: You came by it naturally, then.

GT: I do, too. It kind of grows on you, doesn’t it?

GG: Yes, it does.

GT: So you had not met Monsignor Mannion before you applied for the job?

GG: No, he left the university before I began.

He completed his doctoral work before I arrived there. It was only through Father Austin.

GT: So let’s start talking about the cathedral renovation. What exact role did you have in that?

GG: I came into the process somewhat halfway. A lot of the groundwork had been laid. For 3 As noted above, Monsignor M. Francis Mannion was rector of the cathedral from 1986 to 2000. He is a widely recognized and published authority on liturgy and theology, most memorably Masterworks of God: Essays in Liturgical Theory and Practice (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004), which contains much of the theoretical underpinning for the cathedral renovation. At this writing, Mannion is pastor emeritus of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Murray and a weekly columnist for the Intermountain Catholic, the diocesan newspaper.

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GG: [Laughter] I know, I know. While I was at Catholic University, my graduate program director, Father Gerard Austin, made me aware of the position opening here. Monsignor Mannion had studied at Catholic University, did his doctorate there, and had studied with Father Austin.3 Father Austin became aware of this position through Monsignor Mannion. So I did apply because of that and was accepted in the post. I was expecting to be here three to five years, [laughter] and I’ve been here ever since.

It’s been a great thing. I very much like Utah.

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GT: Now the first thing I need to ask is how in the world you found out about the Diocese of Salt Lake [City]. That’s the question that all of us Utah Catholics are liable for sooner or later: how in the world did you wind up here?

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GG: Yeah, it’s in the blood, I’m afraid. [Laughter]

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That transformation was largely the work of three great leaders: Bishop William K. Weigand, who led the diocese from 1980 to 1995; Monsignor M. Francis Mannion, cathedral rector from 1986 to 2000; and Gregory Glenn, founder and director of the Madeleine Choir School, who arrived in Salt Lake City in 1988 and continues at this writing as head of the school. While I was preparing a new history of the cathedral as part of the celebration of its centennial in 2009, it was my privilege to conduct extensive interviews with all three.2 What follows is a transcript of the interview with Glenn, which is the most concise of the three interviews. In some ways, it is the most interesting, because of the breadth of Glenn’s involvement, his role in creation of the Choir School (which is the only institution of its kind in the United States), and not least because of his eyebrow-raising account of the exhumation of the remains of Bishop Scanlan!

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example, the organ had been chosen. The builder had been chosen and the design of the organ had been chosen. That’s one thing I would have wanted to have some influence on, but could not. Much of the basic work for the restoration and design work had been done. They were entering the phase of design development and the final choices about things, so I did not get a chance to be involved in all of that. Also, with the actual construction, I do remember Ash Wednesday of 1991 (I believe that’s the right date) when the building was going to close the next day, on Ash Wednesday they had already come in and started to do some of the work. I recall the next morning going into the cathedral and seeing them literally ripping things out, and I thought to myself and actually commented to Monsignor Mannion, “I think this may be a huge mistake.” [Laughter] It looked so devastating to see them destroying things. But it turned out fine.

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GT: It may be some consolation to you to know that he felt the same way. He told me he used to walk through there and it was just completely torn up and would wonder if you were ever going to be able to get it back together again GG: Yeah, that was a common anxiety.

GT: I did not know that you had not been involved in the choice of the organ. Could you tell me a little bit about the organ? One question I had was . . . I had read somewhere, it may have been in that little brochure that Monsignor Mannion wrote about the renovation, that the previous organ was really not suited for liturgical or classical performance, that it was more of a theater organ or something like that. Do you know anything about that? What would that mean?

GG: I played the organ that was here before.

It was a fine instrument. It was something of a hodge podge of a number of different instruments put together. It was in very, very bad working condition. One couldn’t say that it was a horrible organ, but what one would say is that, number one, it wasn’t suited to liturgical use because it wasn’t able to really lead the congregation in singing nor to accommodate some of the other things that had come about because of the Second Vatican Council restorations.

GT: Can you explain that a little bit?

GG: Yeah. For example, we now have the use of many antiphons in the liturgy, and the old organ struggled to provide leadership for those antiphons, whereby a single melody line would be spelled out in clarity for the congregation.

So that was one thing. A number of other things are in terms of a performance basis, to invite a recitalist in to perform, the old organ would not have been the kind of organ one could do a concert on. It just didn’t have all of the basics that a good quality organ has. So we wouldn’t ever have been able to have the organ recital series. A third thing that is also true is there is a great tradition of pipe organ literature, music, for use at the Mass. It’s a very solidly Catholic entity, and there was a lot of the literature that could not be played, and so that was a part of the motivation for the new instrument. But the most basic one was that the old instrument was in a state of severe decay. It was going to take a massive amount of restoration. Parts of the old organ have been incorporated into the new one.

That’s kind of a continuity with the past.

GT: Just the pipes, right?

GG: The pipes. There are a couple of the wind chests in the pedal division that were from the old organ that were restored and returned to the organ.

GT: What would you say that the great virtues of this new organ would be? I assume you really love playing it.

GG: Yeah. It’s an instrument now that can accommodate almost any of the organ literature.

So myself and the cathedral organist, Douglas O’Neill, were able to play any of the tradition of Catholic Church music because of that. We’re also able to attract and invite performers to come and to offer the instrument as a concert instrument for the general public. This has always been something that cathedrals have done throughout Europe and something that we’re now able to do here in Salt Lake City.

It’s also an instrument that is what’s called mechanical action, which means it returns to a pre-Industrial Revolution style of building organs whereby the actual connection between the keys and the pipes is all mechanical, with

GT: So by that you mean you can depress the key part way and let just a little bit of air into the pipe: GG: Yeah, there’s a small area where you can make it sound—and the children enjoy this—it almost can sound like a train whistle! [Laughter] GT: And the actual action of the keys, would it require a good deal more finger strength to play that?

GG: A little bit, yeah. We find some American players who balk at playing the instrument because it seems too heavy, but all the European artists that we’ve had here have all said that it’s kind of a standard weight in terms of playing the manuals.

GT: So they would have mostly mechanical action organs in Europe?

GG: Yes. A large percentage of them are mechanical action.

GT: The Eccles Series [of organ concerts] is funded on a year to year basis by the Eccles family, is that correct?

GG: It is. It also receives funding from the Utah Arts Council, and the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks fund. Doug O’Neill, our organist, works on that every year. The Eccles Foundation gift is the primary amount, and then we have a Friends of the Eccles Festival, and

GT: Now you mentioned that Doug O’Neill works on that. Who chooses the artists who perform? Is there a committee or something?

GG: There is a committee. There’s a committee made up that represents various constituencies here in the city. We chair that committee because as the cathedral we’re responsible for it. We’re also responsible to the Eccles Foundation. We do have a committee with representatives of very different groups in the city.

GT: Could you give me some examples?

GG: One example is Rick Elliott, who is the chief organist at the tabernacle. He’s on the committee. There are professors of organ at BYU, the instructor of organ up at the University of Utah, and some members of what is called the American Guild of Organists. They are also part of that committee.

GT: The committee would be how large?

GG: Only six to seven. Committees can take on a large . . .

GT: It’s easier to make a decision if you have fewer members, right? [Laughter] GG: Exactly!

GT: Okay, how about the Choir School?4 Can 4 The nature of a choir school, which is never precisely defined in the interview, could be roughly described as a charter school affiliated with a cathedral with an emphasis on instruction and performance of liturgical music. The Madeleine Choir School website, http:// utmcs.org/, offers a much more accurate and elaborate

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GG: Absolutely, yeah. And we always intended that. Cathedrals have always been places for the arts, to nurture the arts, even outside of the liturgy. So while the literature that is played is in conformity with the sensitivities of the building, it’s very much a public event. People are very welcome.

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GG: The advantage is that you have more control of how the organ speaks, by your playing.

With other instruments, such as the large instrument found on Temple Square, they are electronically controlled, so you don’t have the nuance that you would have with mechanical action. This is now in fact the largest mechanical action organ in the city. So we’re very fortunate to have it.

GT: Which is what the Eccles family wanted, I think. I believe that was the stipulation in order to get the donation, that there had to be a series of public recitals?

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GT: What does that mean? What’s the advantage of that?

many of the people who attend provide regular financial support. So it’s become more of a community-based project.

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the exception of one valve that releases air. So when the player plays, he actually has a mechanical control of the speech of the pipes. This is not something that’s common, especially in this area. There are very few mechanical action instruments.

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you explain the inception of that, and whose idea that was and how that got started? I know it started out pretty modestly.

What we did was we auditioned children from all of the Catholic schools, and the schools were very accommodating. We sent letters to children who seemed to have a particular ability in this area and invited them to take part. We were very surprised by the interest, the very overwhelming interest early on. We launched right in, began the Boy Choir and then the Girl Choir.

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GG: Yeah. Well, it was my idea. It had a great deal of support from Monsignor Mannion. We began in 1990 by just simply recruiting children from around the diocese for an after school program. We had our first meeting of the students on the nineteenth of March in 1990. That is now the Founder’s Day for the Choir School.

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GT: How many kids were involved there in the beginning?

GG: Early on, seventy. Thirty-five in each group. It was a big group. It’s kind of funny because that’s been some time now, and I’m still in contact with many of my former choristers from those very first days. One is a professor of music at a junior college in Kentucky. Another now teaches at the Choir School, as a seventh grade math and science teacher. So it’s been kind of funny to see all those people move along.

GT: And how did the kids get here? Their parents brought them?

GG: The parents brought them. As you know, it started while the cathedral was closed, so we began in the basement of St. Ann School and eventually we moved the rehearsals back to the cathedral, for the opening of the cathedral, September 31 of 1992.

After this program continued to kind of flourish for a while, many of the parents determined that something along the lines of the European choir schools was something that might be of interest to them. This was always in the back of my mind. In fact it was something we

description of the program.

sort of subtly talked about with the architects who were designing the lower floor of the cathedral. Not very seriously, but just as a possibility. We launched into a feasibility study in 1995, and we were kind of overwhelmed, first by the response of the parents. We were a little stunned by the negativity of some members of the Catholic community about starting another school, and mostly the very strong negativity from the other Catholic schools. There was a lot of negative feeling about the school. But we steered through that and announced the opening; Bishop Niederauer approved the opening of the school on the 25th of May in 1996.5 We announced the opening and the school was full the next day. So it was a pretty amazing thing. I have to credit those parents because they were taking an enormous risk. When they signed up their child, they had to withdraw their registration from the other Catholic schools of the diocese. We had no teachers, no principal, no desks, no books—nothing. They were committing themselves to starting this school. My hat is off to them. They were tremendous pioneers in getting this off the ground, and I still am very grateful to them. Also to Elizabeth [Betsy] Hunt, who is now the principal of Cosgriff School, as the founding principal.6 She did a marvelous, marvelous job of getting this thing off the ground.

GT: Catholic school students get a subsidy from their parish. Was that part of where the animosity was toward the cathedral school? They were going to be coming here instead of to that parish [school]?

GG: To some degree, although that wasn’t the primary concern. Most of the parishes already pay subsidies to other schools, because students in their parishes go to other schools. The largest motivation for the negativity was it was such an unusual thing. Anything with the arts has trappings of elitism, which is a very unfortunate thing, because we are hardly elitist. That was something, to be honest, of a cheap shot taken at the arts. It’s a very common criticism.

5 Bishop George H. Niederauer succeeded Bishop William K. Weigand in 1995 and continued until 2006, when he was named Archbishop of San Francisco. At this writing he is retired from that position.

6 Cosgriff School is a Catholic elementary school affiliated with St. Ambrose parish.

GT: And did you point out also that other parishes could benefit from this? These kids aren’t just going to be serving the cathedral.

GG: That’s right. That’s right. And they have been. There are several music directors here who are our graduates. I think we’ll see more of that.

GT: So how did you fare in the basement, in Scanlan Hall? That must have been pretty cramped. That was the point at which that was kind of subdivided into classrooms, right? That was part of the renovation.

GG: It was cramped. That’s right. It was meant to be kind of joint use of Religious Education and other programs and potentially the Choir School. The Choir School did well down there, even without the playground. We had fourth through eighth grade, but we were bursting at the seams. We were crawling all over each other. Many of the early parents kind of looked on it very romantically. They see those as being the very best days of the school. There was no playground, however, and the children were underground a large percentage of the day, and

that obviously wasn’t the best advantage.

7 The “red house” is the Bishop Hunt Center, east of the cathedral rectory.

8 The Sacred Heart Center is located on the northeast corner of the cathedral block, at 33 C Street.

9 The property referred to here is located at 205 East 1st Avenue.

10 The McCarthey family had previously funded the creation of the football stadium at Judge Memorial Catholic High School.

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Suddenly, Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s announced that their property was going to become available because they were moving to a new campus.9 That couldn’t have been more ideal. However, it was rather daunting to raise 1.4 million, which was their asking price for that property.

So under Betsy Hunt’s leadership, largely, we set about the task of raising that money. Two million dollars came from the McCarthey family under the leadership of Jane McCarthey, who was thrilled to be finally giving money to something other than sports.10 [Laughter] She was quite excited that she was going to be able to do this. It was the last project she did before her death. We were very, very glad to name the main classroom building the Jane McCarthey Building. So we were really thrilled about that.

The first million dollar gift actually came from Bob Steiner. His wife, Jacqueline Erbin, had passed away in childbirth. She was very devoted to young children, and so the other main building is named Jacqueline Erbin Hall. And then another million dollars came through the work of Bishop Niederauer with the Daniel Murphy Foundation. The Daniel Murphy Foundation provided the other million. So altogether four million was raised. We were able to purchase and now we own the land free. It’s a fantastic two-acre campus with five buildings. While those buildings are decaying a bit and we have a lot of work to do, we’re in a great place. Close to the cathedral, and with a nice playground.

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So early on we began looking for potential property and for other solutions to the situation. We had a design to completely redo the red house and create that as a school.7 It was a very ingenious design, actually, but it didn’t solve our playground issues. We looked at a spot in the open field behind the Sacred Heart Center, and we looked at property all around this neighborhood.8 Nothing really kind of showed itself.

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That was part of it, also just whether we needed another Catholic school here in the diocese.

What we tried to say was we probably don’t need another Catholic school in the diocese, but what we do need is a choir school, because a choir school provides a particular formation for young men and women who have this God-given ability to be of service to the Church. Making a musician does not happen in four years of undergraduate education. It happens over the course of a very long period of time. We’ve seen this truth kind of borne out. For example, one of our young women just graduated with her master’s degree in organ performance and choral conducting from Yale. Two are at Dartmouth right now. A young man from the Choir School is serving in one of our large parishes here, also in Ohio and in Kentucky. We have a number of young men and women who are involved in music ministry as well elsewhere.

One of our young graduates just applied, is a final candidate, for the Director of Music job in the Cathedral of Fort Worth. So it is working.

Yeah, we didn’t need another school, but we did need a choir school to provide the music for our services and also to provide this formation.

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That was also difficult for the choir. It was easy to attract members to sing in a neo-Gothic building, but it was not so easy to attract them to sing in a basketball gymnasium. But my hat’s off to those wonderful founding members of the cathedral choir, keeping things together through those years. It was an opportunity for us to reflect on things and do some planning for moving back into the cathedral. So it was a good time of intensive work, preparation, building up repertoire, figuring out a pattern for how things were going to develop. We used that to our best advantage.

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Gregory Glenn at a “hard hat party” during the cathedral’s renovation, 1991.

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courtesy archives, roman catholic diocese of salt lake city

During that time I was able to go, with Monsignor Mannion’s assistance, to London and spend several months there studying the choir school and the choir at Westminster Cathedral, which became then the pattern for how we established the Choir School here in Salt Lake City. That time for me was invaluable. In fact, I’m always amused: I think I learned more in that two months about some aspects of church music than I did in many of my courses in my undergraduate and graduate work. That was a very valuable time. I was able to bring all that back to the founding of the Choir School, and also to the pattern of our liturgical music.

GT: Where did you rehearse? Did you rehearse at Lowell also?

GT: Let’s see, I thought I would ask you about the interim period when we were at what we fondly called “St. Lowell.”11 What was that like?

I can remember the choir singing and you were playing away on this battered old upright piano. [Laughter] GG: [Laughter] It was pretty horrible. It was a real test. Something to Monsignor Mannion’s credit was his ability to kind of keep the community together during that period of time.

It has happened in many places that when this kind of thing happens people go to other churches. They scatter. He started a program [laughter], remember, I think we were all wearing buttons for a few weeks that said something about our commitment, “I’m Committed to Staying.” I know it involved a button. It was a down-to-earth campaign.

11 Lowell Elementary School at 134 N Street, where cathedral services were held during the closure.

GG: No, we rehearsed in the basement of this building [the cathedral rectory], in the basement of the rectory, because we only had access to the Lowell school on the weekends. We had a small, very cramped room down in this very basement. It’s now the music library, in the basement of this building. [Laughter] GT: I thought that was kind of fun, myself. I thought it was like camping out. I wasn’t about to go anywhere.

GG: There were many of us that felt that way.

No, that was great. Those were great days.

GT: Now what else have you been involved in?

You’ve been involved in the Madeleine Festival [of Arts and Humanities], I suppose?12

12 The Madeleine Festival takes place annually during the Easter season. It consists of a wide variety of musical and dramatic performances and lectures.

GT: I forgot, one more thing I wanted to ask you about the Choir School, I believe it has expanded since it started in the number of grade levels. Could you talk about that a little bit?

GG: Right. We started with grades four through seven. We had a hundred children enrolled in that four through seven. We were severely petitioned to open an eighth grade in that first year, which we originally were not going to do. We didn’t think children would want to come out of their school for one year.13 We had thirteen children basically on their knees [laughter], asking us to open the eighth grade, so we did have the eighth grade. We ended up with 110 that first year.

The school gradually added, in 2002 we added the second and third grade. For the first several months they were in the house on the corner, in 13 There are only three high schools in the Diocese of Salt Lake City: St. Joseph in Ogden, Judge Memorial in Salt Lake City, and Juan Diego in Draper. The other schools terminate with the eighth grade.

GT: How did you find Bishop Weigand to work with?

GG: I only knew Bishop Weigand in his last five years, five or six years here. When I came to Salt Lake City, I came originally to work for him, in the diocesan liturgy office. He was a bit more experienced as a bishop by the time I arrived, and so I found him very, very good to work with. He was a very fine Christian man.

My fondest memories of him are just the surety of his faith. He was tough and he was demanding, but at the same time he was fair and he listened to you. He believed in the best things 14 Cobblecrest, on the southeast corner of the cathedral block.

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GG: Monsignor told you about all the trials and tribulations of the restoration. I have to say that it was a very exciting time. It was an amazing time. I look back on it and wonder how we did it. There were twelve hour days almost every day, in between managing all the work that was going on. One of my fondest memories—I don’t think Monsignor told you about this—was his famous memorandum trying to negotiate between the architects and the organ builder, who were both very difficult to get to sit down at a table and negotiate. There was a long correspondence, a very difficult communication, and it was coming right down to the wire. The design for the gallery had to be finished. So there’s a famous memo which I still have. It was sent to the organ builder and to the architect, basically laying down the gauntlet, saying if you don’t converse by such-and-such a date, I believe Monsignor threatened to paint the organ case baby blue [laughter], and something about a horse head with the architects [?].

It was a call to action [laughter] that I won’t ever forget.

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GG: It’s funded by the Friends of the Madeleine Festival, again, a larger community of people who contribute annually to the support of the festival, by the Salt Lake Arts Council, Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks, and by the Utah Arts Council. Its funding comes completely from outside sources; in other words, not a dime of cathedral parish money is spent on the festival. It’s really kind of a remarkable grass-roots effort. It’s been recognized around the community. It’s pretty amazing for what it accomplishes, given its small budget.

GT: What other stories do you recall about the restoration of the cathedral?

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GT: How is that funded?

the dining room and the living room.14 That was very difficult. That was the fall of 2002. Then we moved to the new campus in December of 2002. The following fall we began the first grade and kindergarten. Then two years ago we also began the prekindergarten program. Now we have prekindergarten through eighth grade, with about 240 students.

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GG: Yeah, I haven’t been involved so much in the leadership of that as I have just in providing arts events over the years. The Madeleine Festival was launched in 1987, the year before I came. And it was still in somewhat of a very primitive stage at that point. Then in 1988 to 1989, Marrie Hart took over the leadership of the festival and really developed it to the standard that it currently is. So I did work with her in shaping artistic events and providing ideas and things of this kind. Leadership has passed on now to Anne Collopy and Drew Browning.

So things are going well.

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of liturgy and the best things of music, and he supported those things.

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I had a wonderful conversation with him on the day of Bishop Federal’s funeral.15 He had come back for that funeral Mass. The children performed for the funeral Mass, and we had done a setting of Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, which is a very stunning piece of music. To the credit of the children, they learned it in five days. Bishop Weigand was carrying on about how wonderful they were. He said to me, “You know, Greg, if you had come to me and asked me for approval of the Choir School, I would have said no.” And he said, “And it would have been a terrible mistake.” So he was a very gracious man, who knew his faults, but I very much enjoyed working for him.

GT: Monsignor Mannion told me that Bishop Weigand never overrode any of the decisions of any of the committees that were involved in the renovation.

GG: No, he respected the advice of experts.

That left the cathedral not with those, for lack of a better term, kind of architectural tumors that can sometimes happen because someone intervenes in the last stage of something.

GT: One of the things that I found Monsignor Mannion most proud of is the sort of seamless way that the renovations kind of fit in with the stuff that was left alone. It’s an integral structure.

GG: That’s been one of the comments from many people who have visited it. They wouldn’t really know that it had been restored. It has the look that it’s been like that. We were concerned that the new marble . . . in many cathedrals that I can think of—for example, Detroit, where an older building had new renovations installed, there’s this kind of giant modern lip installed, and we were terrified that that would be what the new altar and the chancel would look like.16

15 Bishop Joseph Lennox Federal served from 1960 to 1980 and was Bishop Weigand’s immediate predecessor. He died in 2000.

16 A chancel is a platform raised a few steps above the main floor of a church, upon which the altar is placed. The most conspicuous change in the cathedral renovation was installation of a huge stone chancel that brings the altar out into the midst of the church, in conformity with the Vatican II mandate that Holy Communion be celebrated something like a family meal.

We worked very hard to make sure that everything was integrated. It turned out that it would.

When the altar was being installed, there is a time capsule located under the altar. I don’t expect it will ever be possible to retrieve it, because I think to get it you’d have to destroy the altar. It’s quite a ways down underneath.

But it’s there. It contains a homily that Monsignor Mannion preached at the funeral Mass of a young man who died very tragically, a man by the name of John Wells. That funeral homily is found there. There’s a musical composition of mine that was dedicated to Adine Bradley, who was the organist here at the cathedral for something like sixty years. She was in the later years of life, so we had a concert given in her honor and this piece was composed for her. Julie Angelos, the old office manager, her mother’s rosary is placed there. I think that’s it. It’s in a small metal box.

GT: With all of that whole apparatus of the chancel and the altar and that, were there reinforcements that had to be installed below that, down to the foundation?

GG: Yeah. In fact, the old crypt where Bishop Scanlan used to be buried downstairs had to be destroyed because some kind of reinforcing beam or pillar had to be installed.17 There are new pillars found in the social hall downstairs that are directly beneath the chancel area. They’re covered with plaster, so they look like they’ve always been there. Yeah, there was quite a bit of superstructure there, although the largest piece of superstructure is found beneath the organ, amazingly. And not for the organ. It was part of the earthquake plan that ties the two towers together. They have the structural field that goes all the way up the towers.

Well, to tie that together they had to create this massive steel frame in the organ gallery. It’s probably one of the most reinforced organ galleries in the world! [Laughter] I can remember 17 At the time of the dedication of the cathedral in 1909, James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, who had presided over the dedication, suggested to Bishop Scanlan that he might consider being entombed in his own cathedral. Scanlan obviously warmed to the idea, but the cathedral architect, Carl Neuhausen, had not been asked to provide a vault where such a burial could take place, and the bishop’s remains were placed into a very cramped space in the basement.

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There is a ring that he was given when he became the Bishop of Salt Lake City by the Archbishop of Cashel, one of the older archdioceses in Ireland. This ring has a long history. I think it has medieval roots, if I remember correctly.

18 Scanlan’s remains today are in a crypt beneath the location of the original main altar on the main floor of the cathedral.

19 Monsignor Mannion had similar feelings. In a oneparagraph deposition in his papers in the Diocesan Archives recorded two days after the fact, he remembered seeing “the thin frail frame of an old man withered with age yet preserved like an old flower after many years. He was wearing faded purple vestments, a miter and a pectoral cross. He had a ring on his prayer enfolded hands. We were amazed at how tall he was.

Contrary to my expectations, the experience was not at all jarring or disturbing, but was deeply moving and awe-inspiring. I thought how privileged I was. The O’Donnells [proprietors of one of the Catholic funeral homes in Salt Lake City] were quite overcome with the honor of it all and expressed a deep bond with their great-great grandfather who buried the bishop in 1915.

All in all, an historic, thought-provoking and humbling experience.”

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It’s only with subsequent reading of the early history of Utah that I even more and more recognize what an incredible man this was, what he accomplished in his years of work here in this diocese. So our great founder is now with us in the upper church, and that’s good.

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He was exhumed. That was one of my strange jobs in the restoration process, to oversee his removal from the crypt. No one up here, in the rectory house, would do that. [Laughter] So I was given the job. When he was taken out of the marble sarcophagus, his casket had completely decayed. Not completely, but it has pretty much been destroyed. So his body was removed and placed on a noble stretcher, and I was instructed to go down and look at it. I remember he was inviolate. His body was all present. His skin was there. He looked very much like a dried flower, that kind of appearance. He was all intact. He had his crosier and his miter, the old pontifical sunburst gloves; his hands were folded. He was a very tall man, very tall. That was a very striking moment.19

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GG: It was, although I also have to say that it was not a very noble place to bury him. The doorway exists today; it was a safe, the kind of door you would have on a safe. The room itself was very awkward; one couldn’t go in there very easily.

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GT: So that was the reason for moving Bishop Scanlan’s crypt upstairs.18

Bishop Federal, when I came back upstairs after doing this—and by the way, the funeral directors were all in space suits [laughter], and here I was, exposed to whatever . . . if I might contract some very strange disease in the future, you’ll know why [laughter]. But anyway, I came upstairs and Bishop Federal was at dinner. I was a bit shell-shocked by the whole thing, and the first thing he asked me was, “Did you get the ring?” I said to him, “Well, no, I didn’t get the ring.” I wasn’t about to take the ring, you know. [Laughter] It was one of those Young Frankenstein moments. But no, the ring is still there.

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it going up and thinking, “My goodness, this is enormous!” But it’s because they had to tie the two towers together.

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Gary Topping is archivist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City

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WEB SUPPLEMENT Visit history.utah.gov/uhqextras for recordings of the choir in 1960.

BOOK REVIEWS

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Global West, American Frontier:

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Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression BY

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WRO BE L

Albuquerque: Univesrity of New Mexico Press, 2013. xv + 312 pp. Cloth, $39.95

David M. Wrobel acknowledges that his book on the history and development of travel writing, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression, “covers a good deal of ground,” just as the title suggests, including a short treatise on the history of the West and a concise historiography of travel writings (focusing on the one hundred years from the 1840s to the 1940s) from the same region (9). He also traces travel writing about the West through various prisms, including accounts written by world travelers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tourists who visited the West in automobiles, regional guides written during the Great Depression, and more recent accounts by Jack Kerouac, J. B. Priestly, and John Steinbeck. The range demonstrates the continuing vitality of the genre.

Wrobel’s book includes some discussion and analysis concerning travelers who visited the Mormon West, including Howard Stansbury, Mark Twain, Jules Remy, Richard Francis Burton, Solomon Carvalho, and Mrs. Benjamin Ferris. He notes that these writers were all very (and perhaps primarily) interested in the practice of plural marriage. Burton, Remy, and Stansbury nevertheless wrote accounts that presented a relatively positive picture of Utah, whereas Carvalho, Ferris, and Twain were so struck by the Mormons’ idiosyncrasies that they were less inclined to write approvingly

about them. In fact, most travel writers who visited Utah Territory preferred to perpetuate stereotypes rather than craft fresh, firsthand observations of people and place.

Wrobel observes at the beginning of his book that Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America established a certain benchmark that has become “a core text in the annals of American exceptionalism.” Thus, although almost two thousand travel accounts were published in the United States between 1830 and 1900, Wrobel focuses his work on “travelers’ accounts of potentially enduring value, ones that do follow in Tocqueville’s footsteps.” In particular he is interested in accounts that focus on the “nations’ norms as well as its exceptions, its commonalities as well as its peculiarities” (6–8).

The author mentions one contemporary example of a travel writer who attempted but failed to follow in Tocqueville’s footsteps.

Bernard-Henri Lévy visited America in the twenty-first century and entitled his memoirs American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. Wrobel believes that Lévy “demonstrates a penchant for finding and fixating on the extraordinary for the sake of shock value” (7). He mentions Lévy’s foray into Las Vegas to demonstrate this tendency, but he could have also included Lévy’s description of Utah as “a surreal and artificial place, octagonal and rigid, built in the nineteenth century in the middle of the desert.” In fact, Lévy noted that when he interviewed Mormon church president Gordon B. Hinckley he found him to be “cautious and dapper, dressed in a double-breasted navy-blue suit with gold buttons, closer to a Cinzano drinker than to a WASP Dalai Lama.”1

1 Bernard-Henri Lévy, “In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part Three),” trans. Charlotte Mandell, Atlantic, July/ August 2005, accessed October 22, 2014, http://www. theatlantic.com/.

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MICHAEL

HO M E R

Salt Lake City

Chronicling the west for harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier in 1873–1874 BY

CLAUDINE

C H A L M E RS

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xiv + 229 pp.

Cloth, $45.00

Prior to modern-day photojournalism, correspondent illustrators visually captured the scenes and events of the day. These “special artists” documented the people and battles of the Civil War, innovations in technology, newly established settlements, unknown lands, and

The purpose of Frenzeny and Tavernier’s assignment, as described by Chalmers, was to enlighten eastern readers with visuals of the epic migration and settlement of the West following the construction of the transcontinental railroad. “There were substantial settlements in Utah, California, and Oregon, but the country’s vast interior was still largely unpopulated and little known,” she writes. “By providing easier access to this new country, ever-lengthening rail lines unlocked the mysteries of the American West and greatly accelerated the tempo of the nation’s westward migration” (13). Chalmers points out that it was no coincidence that the artists were sent on assignment when the movement west was at its zenith: “The two artists were hired to chronicle the frontier at a time when the entire American nation seemed to be marching west, an unparalleled migratory tide that had increased tenfold at the end of the Civil War” (13).

At the start of their journey in July 1873, the two artists depicted the stepping off point for many westward travelers, a crowded emigrant

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The independent scholar and California historian Claudine Chalmers has written a fascinating account of two well-paired artists sent overland to document the burgeoning regions between New York and San Francisco. Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier in 1873–1874 adds tremendous insight into this long-forgotten chapter of the history of illustration. The book deals with the experiences of special artists Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, Frenchmen who immigrated to New York to work for Harper’s Weekly. Best known for its reporting of the Civil War, Harper’s was America’s leading news and political magazine. The magazine regularly featured illustrations by renowned artists Winslow Homer, Theodore Davis, and Frederick Remington and satirical editorial cartoons

by A. B. Frost and Thomas Nast. As a result of their coast-to-coast assignment for Harper’s, Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier also became household names in America for their illustrative reporting of the frontier West.

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Nevertheless, Wrobel’s book is a well-written, multilayered study that contextualizes travel adventures written about the American West with narratives about other far-flung regions of the world. The book includes fifty-three interesting illustrations as well as comprehensive endnotes and a very useful bibliography. Wrobel’s Global West, American Frontier is a good read for both serious students of the American West and casual readers.

the untamed American frontier for readers in eastern cities.

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My only criticism of Wrobel’s work is that he emphasizes English-speaking travelers (with a few notable exceptions, including the French traveler Jules Remy, the Austrian writer Ida Pfeiffer, and the German author Friedrich Gerstäcken), which is ironic, given his initial observation that Tocqueville is the best model for travel writers. Wrobel could have discussed other continental Europeans who followed Tocqueville’s model, such as the Corsican diplomat Leonetto Cipriani, the French geology professor Louis Laurant Simonin, the French feminist Olympe de Joural Audouard, and the French journalist Jules Huret, as well as others, whose works, like Tocqueville’s, focused on both commonalities and peculiarities and have achieved various degrees of enduring value.

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boarding house in New York, followed by a brimming emigrant wagon, a loaded train, and scenes of day-to-day life on the overland route.

During their stay in Colorado during the winter of 1873–1874, Frenzeny and Tavernier acted as consummate observers of life and labor.

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In the spring of 1874, the artists made side trips from Denver to northern Arizona and New Mexico, capturing a Hopi pueblo scene at Acoma. Later, Tavernier traveled to Wyoming and Nebraska, where he illustrated settlers driven from their homes by Indian raids at Fort Russell and Laramie and a rarely seen Indian Sun Dance. Meanwhile, Frenzeny traveled to Salt Lake City and Ogden to illustrate Mormon polygamy, men quarrying stone for the church’s temple, and Ute Indians trading in a frontier town. Frenzeny arrived in San Francisco a month before Tavernier to document the Chinese presence in the city, including Chinese fishermen, laborers, the Chinatown market, and a gambling den. After Tavernier reached the Bay City in August to rejoin his companion, he finished their assignment by producing sketches of the San Francisco suburbs.

No one can doubt the originality of Chalmers’ research on the two artists and their illustrations. Readers should know, however, that Robert Taft covered Frenzeny and Tavernier’s pictorial record of the American West in Kansas Historical Quarterly (1946) and then in an excellent reference work Artists and Illustrators of the Old West (1953). Although Taft’s study was original and informative, it does not provide the level of insight of Chronicling the West.

Chalmers’s perceptive commentary surpasses Taft in the fact that she examines the images as visual anecdotes, providing meaningful context and commentary on their creation.

For its illustrative and documentary quality, Chalmers has also written a superior companion to Richard Reinhardt’s enjoyable Out West on the Overland Train: Across-the-Continent Excursion with Leslie’s Magazine in 1877 and the Overland Trip in 1967 (1967). Reinhardt reprinted the serialized articles from Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper as a commemorative look at Frank Leslie’s famous 1877 transcontinental excursion. Along with the reprinted articles, Out West on the Overland Train contained reproductions of the magazine’s original wood-

cut illustrations by Leslie’s own special artists, Walter R. Yeager and Harry Ogden. Chalmers’s historical insight, however, takes Chronicling the West past the commemorative intent of Reinhardt’s book. The qualities that distinguish it from Reinhardt’s book are inquiry and elucidation.

In keeping with other books in this series, the University of Oklahoma Press has produced a beautifully designed volume. The book is lavishly illustrated with magnificent reproductions of Frenzeny and Tavernier’s woodcut illustrations. It also includes more than a dozen plates showing the artists’ original drawings and ink wash sketches for the magazine.

In addition, the book contains a complete list of the one hundred engravings in an appendix.

Those who have an interest in the settlement of the West will not only value Frenzeny and Tavernier’s illustrations as visual artifacts, but they will appreciate Chalmers’ intelligent commentary. She presents a well-researched and engaging examination of the early days of journalistic illustration and the opening of the West to settlement. Her investigation of these two special artists’ “iconic images” led Chalmers to conclude that their vision “started to actually define the West for the people of a young nation still in the making” (200).

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C A R MAC K

Utah State University Eastern

UNDER THE EAGLE: Samuel Holiday, Navajo Code Talker BY

SA MU E L

A N D

H O L I DAY

R O B E R T

S.

MC P H E R SO N

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xii + 266 pp.

Paper, $19.95

Under the Eagle is the story of Samuel Holiday, from his childhood on the Navajo reservation in Monument Valley through his subsequent life. Although the main focus is Holiday’s experiences as a World War II code talker, it is also an account of his journey through life guided

He was assigned to the Twenty-fifth Marines, Fourth Marine Division. His first combat action was the taking of Kwajalein Island, a short and vicious four-day fight, followed by actions in Saipan (June 15–July 9, 1944), Tinian (July 24–August 1, 1944), and Iwo Jima (February 19–March 26, 1945). These were some of the hardest fought battles in the Pacific, and they left a lasting impression on Holiday. Not only did he have to face the Japanese, but on at least two occasions he was mistaken for a Japanese infiltrator dressed in Marine uniform, taken prisoner, and almost shot before someone could vouch for him.

After returning from the Pacific, his work as a

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R O B E R T

S.

VOY LE S

Fort Douglas Military Museum

Warrior nations: The United States and Indian Peoples BY

R O G E R

L.

N I C H O LS

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xiii + 237 pp.

Paper, $19.95

During my career as a college history teacher, I have scanned scores of United States history textbooks. Most contain a mere chapter on the American West, with a few paragraphs on the “Indian Wars.” I always found that unsettling, and I knew it to be unfair both to the subject and especially to the novice history students.

The topic is complex with multifaceted themes and deserves more attention, but, after all, these were survey textbooks, most written without a frontier or conquest focus.

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Following the entrance of the United States into WWII, Holiday volunteered for defense work and attended a training school in Provo, Utah, operated by the National Youth Administration. It was while he was at the school that he received his notice to report for a physical examination. Passing the examination, he was sent to San Diego for Marine Corps boot training in Coronado, California. From boot camp he was assigned to a communications school at Camp Pendleton and joined other Navajo recruits. Upon completion of this training, he received a ten-day furlough. While at home, he received a ceremony to protect him and was given an eagle feather and some corn pollen in a small medicine pouch. Holiday carried this pouch throughout his service in the Pacific.

This book is remarkable because it immerses the reader not only into Holiday’s physical and spiritual journey but also into the cultural beliefs of the Navajo. The author is to be commended for introducing the non-Native American reader to this perspective. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in one Marine’s experiences during World War II and the subsequent impact these experiences had on his life.

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McPherson begins the book with an explanation of why and how he decided to tell Holiday’s story, followed by a history of the origin of the code talker program in the United States Marine Corps. He then narrates, in Holiday’s voice, a life story, from his early life on the reservation, through boarding school in Tuba City, to his summers working on projects for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

code talker went unrecognized, and since the program was classified, he was not able share his experiences with others. As with so many veterans, the war left him with many adjustment concerns afterwards, including a deep depression. His mother arranged an Enemy Way ceremony to drive away the enemy demons.

Finally, in late 1960, the Fourth Marine Division recognized the code talkers in its reunion program. This was the beginning of national recognition of their service that led Holiday to numerous speaking engagements, including a trip to Japan. Finally, the ghosts subsided and he was at peace.

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by the Navajo tradition—a tradition that gave him the strength to endure the Pacific arena during the war. Robert S. McPherson has written a biography/autobiography that is more than a historical narrative of one man’s experience in war but also a story of Navajo cultural traditions. McPherson has spent more than three decades studying these traditions and he effectively weaves them into Holiday’s story.

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With his new book Warrior Nations, Roger L. Nichols, Emeritus Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, fills the gap. He examines eight conflicts to substantiate his theory that America’s wars against the Native Americans were due to demands for land and territorial expansion of the United States. These conflicts are the Ohio Valley War, 1786–1795; the Red Stick War, 1813–1814; the Arikara War, 1823; the Black Hawk War, 1832; the Minnesota Sioux War, 1862; the Cheyenne and Arapaho War, 1864–1865; the Chiricahua Apache War, 1861–1872; and the Nez Perce War, 1877. The conflicts, lasting from a few weeks to several years, contained similar characteristics, including intertribal conflict over leadership and religion, cultural change, economic and political pressures, fraudulent treaties, outside influence from the British (the Ohio Valley War) or Spain and Mexico (the Apache War), and the never-ending land hunger of Anglo Americans. All involved the use of federal troops and all received national attention. Nichols writes that during the conflicts U.S. officials, as well as Anglo settlers, “remained ignorant of, rejected, or ignored the deeply held Indian beliefs about local band independence” (11). This fact isn’t lost on readers who remember that not many years before the outbreak of the first conflict analyzed in this volume, the Ohio Valley War, the American colonists had waged war against Great Britain for the principles and ideals of independence.

Each of the eight fact-filled chapters dissects the events of one conflict and ties them together based upon six key ideas of the author: first, the ethnocentric and racist ideas of the Anglo settlers; second, unending demands for land by the Anglo Americans; third, the U.S. government’s unwillingness to punish or prevent anti–Native American violence; fourth, militarized village society and related ceremonies; fifth, Native American customs that required young men to protect their clan; and sixth, Native Americans’ determination to preserve their lands, cultures, and independence. Nichols states, “Together these elements played central roles in helping to cause almost all of the wars examined here” (12).

Writing in the summary, he concludes, “To

label the conflicts examined here ‘Indian Wars’ diverts attention from their basic causes and begins the analysis from the wrong point of departure. They need instead to be considered wars of American aggression that were central to the territorial expansion that created the nation’s present land area” (189). Warrior Nations offers a concise thesis and framework for studying Anglo–Native American conflicts, and it is quite possible that readers will rethink what they know about this history. The book allows them to examine why and how the conflicts began and what was the desired outcome and to look at history from the bottom up—in other words, not just from the perspective of the winners. This volume is a readable, informative tome for everyone who loves western history and wants to be challenged by new ideas and innovative interpretations.

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PAT R I C I A

A N N

OW E N S

Lawrenceville, Illinois

DANCE WITH THE BEAR: The Joe Rosenblatt Story BY

N O R MA N

R OSE N B LAT T

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013. xix + 205 pp.

Cloth, $44.95

Among the movers and shakers of twentieth-century Utah, few individuals surpass Joseph Rosenblatt in impact and long-term influence on the state. Rosenblatt’s influence as a successful international businessman, community leader and critic, philanthropist, and bridge between Utah’s Mormon and non-Mormon communities is still felt in the economic, educational, and cultural life of the state. The son of an orthodox Jew who left his native Russia in 1884, Rosenblatt embraced the business opportunities his father found so attractive in the new world while jettisoning many of the beliefs and practices of the old world orthodoxy. His “approach to religion was truly ecu-

In Dance with the Bear, Joseph Rosenblatt emerges as a paradox. While supporting right to work legislation, he had, at least for a time, a good relationship with the machinists union that represented the workers at his EIMCO plant. While castigating the Utah Education Association and public education in general, he gave one-on-one help to two Salt Lake City west-side schools. While continuing to send paychecks to a loyal employee no longer able to work, he could “walk through the shop, and say, ‘Who’s that guy and where did he come from?’

And he might tell you to get rid of him, without talking to him but just seeing him” (56). As the beneficiary of a supportive father and family in launching his business career, he found his own children, “based on their past performance, their education and work habits,” incapable of running EIMCO (76). While donating his home of many years to the University of Utah as a residence for the president and providing a generous endowment for awarding the prestigious annual Rosenblatt Award to a faculty member, he also led the intense fight to prevent renaming the university’s School of Medicine after James L. Sorenson.

One of the most challenging bears with which Rosenblatt tangled was as chairman of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government—better known

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A LLA N

K E N T

P OW E LL

Salt Lake City

Revelation, resistance, and mormon polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830–1853 BY

ME R I N A

SMI T H

Logan: Utah State Univesrity, 2013. x + 267 pp. Cloth, $29.95

In this book, Merina Smith asks why nineteenth-century Mormons accepted polygamy, given their monogamous, sometimes puritanical background (which often caused the “resistance” mentioned in the title). Her answer is twofold. First, she argues that Mormonism began in a period of millenarian religious move-

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Dance with the Bear is an arresting title for this biography. It comes from the description that beginning operators used to explain their first encounter with the EIMCO Rocker Shovel, a hard rock loading machine that revolutionized the mining industry and brought substantial wealth to the Rosenblatt family. However, as Rosenblatt’s son Norman Rosenblatt writes, the title is a good metaphor for his father’s life.

“The bear assumed many faces over ninety-six years: the International Association of Machinists, Caterpillar Inc., the Utah Legislature, the Salt Lake City Council, at times the University of Utah president’s office—even members of his own family” (xvii). In each case, Rosenblatt knew where he wanted to go and expected others to follow.

as Utah’s Little Hoover Commission. Established in 1965 to reform and streamline state government, the commission met with strong resistance from state agencies, commissions, and lobbyists. Even voters did not approve a proposal to abolish the cumbersome Board of Examiners in favor of a stronger Office of the Governor. Nevertheless, many commission recommendations were implemented over the years, and Rosenblatt received praise for his work as chair.

Rosenblatt’s role with the Little Hoover Commission including its successes and failures might have been developed further in Dance with the Bear. The corporate history of EIMCO and other business ventures need more elaboration although a paucity of written records makes such an undertaking difficult. At times the focus moves from Rosenblatt to tangential aspects such as biographical information about winners of the Rosenblatt Award. But even with these criticisms, Norman Rosenblatt must be commended for his effort in writing a balanced biography of his father, no easy task for any writer.

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menical. He had no tolerance for religions—including his own—when they flocked together or fenced others out” (168).

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ments that frequently were open to significant experiment and novelty. Second, she contends that Mormon polygamy occurred within a convincing theological narrative that was based on the Bible and modern Mormon revelation such as Doctrine and Covenants 132, which discusses polygamy and refers back to Biblical figures such as Abraham and Sarah. She writes that, given Doctrine and Covenants 132, “it is not difficult to understand why polygamy was called the ‘capstone’ of Mormonism. It was the expression of a consummate family-centered theology. . . . The language could hardly be more vehement about the necessity of practicing the new and everlasting covenant, nor could the promises be greater” (162). Polygamy was at the center of “the highest level of salvation and exaltation,” and this exaltation was family centered (246).

Smith looks at the beginnings of polygamy and notes the relevant doctrinal developments that occurred during this period and the reasons why early Mormons “converted” to the practice. She tracks Emma Smith’s resistance to polygamy and her use of the Mormon women’s association, the Relief Society, to work against it. (Joseph Smith had directed someone to write down Doctrine and Covenants 132 to try to convince Emma that polygamy was a divine commandment.) Merina Smith’s sources include William Clayton’s extraordinary diaries as well as the lesser known story of John Solomon Fullmer and his plural family. She continues the polygamy story from the martyrdom of Joseph Smith to the succession crisis (in which some non-polygamists departed from the main church), then to “open” polygamy under Brigham Young in Utah.

Merina Smith’s initial question was a thoughtful one, and her answers were also thoughtful. Her book is a valuable contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue on Joseph Smith’s practice of and teachings on polygamy. In trying to understand how the early Latter-day Saints resisted then accepted polygamy, she has supplied a useful interpretation of the practice.

The book is admirably evenhanded, given the highly charged subject of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, which has sometimes been avoided by conservative Mormons. It is an example of the

growing opinion that early Mormon polygamy cannot remain a taboo subject.

A few quibbles. Merina Smith has read deeply in the secondary literature on polygamy and Joseph and Emma Smith and on polygamy in Nauvoo. However, she did not go beyond secondary works into the primary literature on some of Joseph Smith’s wives. This certainly was a limitation she set herself as she wrote the book. Nevertheless, this omission sometimes kept her from making strong judgments on some of the issues she discussed. For example, she stated that Sarah Ann Whitney “purportedly” married Joseph Smith, and she often used similar language in discussing his other wives (186). If the author did not solidly accept these women as wives of Joseph Smith, there was little point in discussing them. At one point Merina Smith seemed to accept that Fanny Alger married Joseph Smith in Kirtland; later, she seemed to reject pre-Nauvoo plural marriages (49, 66). In addition, the author did not discuss the handwritten memoir of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney—a very important record of a young woman’s resistance to polygamy, and how Joseph Smith dealt with it.

Despite these minor points, Merina Smith has written an engaging and thought-provoking account of early Mormon polygamy.

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TO D D

M.

CO MP TO N

Cupertino, California

M IKE

M ACK E Y

St. Thomas, Nevada: A History Uncovered BY

AARON

M C A RT H U R

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013. xiv + 156 pp. Paper, $24.95

St. Thomas, Nevada, existed for six years as a Utah Mormon settlement and then, after a boundary change, sixty-seven years as a Nevada desert town until the construction of the Hoover Dam drowned it under Lake Mead. The town’s history can be seen as a

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Sheridan, WY: Western History Publications, 2013. x + 227 pp. Paper, $24.95

Weeds:

I

Mike Mackey introduces his book as one about a peace treaty, implying a feat of extraordinary diplomacy and compromise. The “treaty” is the 1922 Colorado River Compact, an effort to fairly regulate the use of the Colorado River, increasingly vital to seven states including Utah.

Protecting Wyoming’s Share takes the perspective of Frank Emerson, a Wyoming commissioner who participated in the negotiations.

Through his acts and words, the book traces the problems of water usage and appropriation that made the compact necessary through the interstate politics of the project to ratification and its consequences.

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Frank Emerson and the Colorado River Compact

microcosm of the West, a story of the life of Native inhabitants disrupted by the coming of miners and farmers and the speculation and administrative development that accompanied them. However, the town’s placement also endowed it with an additional, unique set of issues: boundary disputes between states, western water issues, and the social aspects of dam construction.

A Farm Daughter’s Lament BY

E V E LY N

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Protecting wyoming’s share:

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BOOK NOTICES

F U N DA

Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2013. 336 pp. Paper, $21.95

In this literary memoir and cultural history, Funda writes of the experiences of her Czech immigrant ancestors and her parents, who farmed land in Emmett, Idaho. Mostly she writes of her own experiences and how her identity as a farmer’s daughter and her relationship to the land and farming shaped her.

With family as the framework, she writes of farming practices, rural life, changes on the land and in communities, stories, connections, love, strife, and loss.

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Bingham, 1915 Unemployed men lined up in the town of Bingham, Utah, where gold, silver, lead, and copper were mined. By 1912, southern Europeans made up the majority of laborers in Bingham.

At its peak, the town was seven miles long but less than a city block wide. Bingham was unincorporated in 1971 and demolished to make way for further mining development.

OUTSIDE THE DENVER AND RIO GRANDE DEPOT, 1910/UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

U TA H D I V I S I O N O F S TAT E H I S TO R Y U TA H S TAT E H I S TO R I C A L S O C I E T Y DEPARTMENT OF HERITAGE AND ARTS

Eugene E. Campbell (1915–1986)

Carol Cornwall Madsen

Everett L. Cooley (1917–2006)

Philip F. Notarianni

C. Gregory Crampton (1911–1995)

Floyd A. O’Neil

Gregory C. Thompson, Salt Lake City, 2015, Chair

S. George Ellsworth (1916–1997)

Charles S. Peterson

Dina Williams Blaes, Salt Lake City, 2017

Austin E. Fife (1909–1986)

Richard W. Sadler

John D’Arcy, Salt Lake City, 2018

LeRoy R. Hafen (1893–1985)

Gary L. Shumway

Yvette Donosso, Sandy, 2015

A. Karl Larson (1899–1983)

Melvin T. Smith

Ken Gallacher, Salt Lake City, 2018

Gustive O. Larson (1897–1983)

William A. Wilson

Maria Garciaz, Salt Lake City, 2015

Brigham D. Madsen (1914–2010)

Deanne G. Matheny, Lindon, 2017

Dean L. May (1938–2003)

Robert S. McPherson, Blanding, 2015

David E. Miller (1909–1978)

David L. Bigler

Steven Lloyd Olsen, Heber City, 2017

Dale L. Morgan (1914–1971)

Craig Fuller

Patty Timbimboo-Madsen, Plymouth, 2015

William Mulder (1915–2008)

Florence S. Jacobsen

Wesley Robert White, Salt Lake City, 2017

Helen Z. Papanikolas (1917–2004)

Marlin K. Jensen

Wallace E. Stegner (1909–1993)

Stanford J. Layton

Thomas G. Alexander

William P. MacKinnon

Brad Westwood, Director and State Historic

James B. Allen

John S. McCormick

Preservation Officer

Maureen Ursenbach Beecher

F. Ross Peterson

David L. Bigler

Richard C. Roberts

Max J. Evans

William B. Smart

Leonard J. Arrington (1917–1999)

Peter L. Goss

Melvin T. Smith

Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981)

B. Carmon Hardy

Linda Thatcher

Juanita Brooks (1898–1989)

Joel Janetski

Gary Topping

Olive W. Burt (1894–1981)

William P. MacKinnon

BOARD OF STATE HISTORY

ADMINISTRATION

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS

HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS

The activity that is the subject of this journal has been financed in part with Federal funds from the National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior and administered by the State Historic Preservation Office of Utah. The contents and opinions do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of the Interior or the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, nor does the mention of trade names or commercial products constitute endorsement or recommendation by the Department of the Interior or the Utah State Historic Preservation Office.

This program receives Federal financial assistance for identification and protection of historic properties. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, as amended, the U.S. Department of the Interior prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, or age in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to: Office for Equal Opportunity, National Park Service, 849 C Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20240.

THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF U TA H H I S TO R Y COV E R

F RON T

COVER

— The altar of St. Mary in the Cathedral of the Madeleine, Salt Lake City, 1909.

Utah State Historical Society

Chocolate Dippers’ Strike of 1910 The Catholic Church in Utah

S. George Ellsworth and Utah History Charcoal’s Role in Utah’s Mining History

B AC K

— Candy boxes from the J. G. McDonald Company, ca. 1910. Utah State Historical Society

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