Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 2, 2017

Book Reviews

193 Cass Hite:

The Life of an Old Prospector James Knipmeyer • Reviewed by Robert S. McPherson

194

Coyote America:

A Natural and Supernatural History Dan Flores • Reviewed by Curtis Foxley

195 True Valor:

Barney Clark and the Utah Artificial Heart Don B. Olsen • Reviewed by Eric Swedin

Book Notices

197 Varmints and Victims:

Predator Control in the American West

By Frank Van Nuys

197 Twenty-Five Years among the Indians and Buffalo:

A Frontier Memoir

By William D. Street, edited by Warren R. Street

197 Island Adventures:

The Hawaiian Mission of Francis A. Hammond, 1851–1865 By John J. Hammond

IN this issue

Good history—produced through a devotion to truth, examination of evidence, and evocative prose—introduces readers to a world they thought they knew. Our lead article continues in the tradition of past issues to rethink our pioneer past, this time from the perspective of the Redds, a slave-owning family from North Carolina. John Hardison Redd and his wife Elizabeth owned a handful of slaves, six of whom emigrated to Utah with the family. Bound by legal obligations and family ties, blacks in Mormon country navigated waters fraught with prejudice and judgment. Even as power relations were unequal for slaves and black Utahns, they attempted with varying degrees of success to integrate into a social world that was not always friendly to them. Stories like that of the Redds present the opportunity to rethink family and community in territorial Utah. And they implicitly challenge pioneer narratives, moving beyond simplistic, sometimes paternalistic histories to reveal a past that is more personal and heartbreaking than we oft-times consider.

The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has spoken much about using a single object—say, a quilt—as a doorway to understanding larger issues. In that manner, our second article focuses on the popularity of a class of objects— the hoopskirt—to examine cultural exchange, religious condemnation, and female agency in nineteenth-century Utah. The development of the Bessemer process in 1856 facilitated the mass production of hoopskirts, and the fashion reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth: the same years when Euro Americans were arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. Latter-day Saint women learned about the hoopskirt through periodicals and, especially, emigrants from the states, but in their desire to be chic, they hit up against the admonitions of religious leaders who encouraged simplicity and self-sufficiency.

Material consumption also figures into our third article, an examination of the referendum over an income tax on chain stores operating in the state. After the turn of the twentieth cen-

tury, chain stores began sprouting up throughout the country, competing and in some cases crowding out smaller local stores. This trend was pronounced in Utah, as retailers sold and consumers bought goods available elsewhere in the United States. This is part of a larger story of the economic and cultural integration of Utah. It is also a political one: as businesses and other interests jockeyed to make known their views on economic freedom and rights, voters and politicians publically debated the relative virtues of local and chain stores. The 1942 chainstore tax referendum highlighted the divergent views over how to preserve local autonomy and signaled the growing consumer spending that would characterize the postwar era.

Carl and Mathilda Harline emigrated from Sweden to the Salt Lake Valley in 1891. There they raised a large family, their thirteenth child a boy—Leigh Adrian Harline—who reportedly preferred practicing piano to playing outside. Our final article tells the story of Leigh Harline, who became one of Hollywood’s foremost composers. Harline learned his craft from J. Spencer Cornwall and teachers at Granite High School and the University of Utah; his career was helped along much by the new platforms of film and radio. The setting also mattered: after a Utah upbringing, Harline moved on to California in the late 1920s, where he enjoyed broadcast success and, critically, became an employee of Walt Disney. Yet there was a circularity to Harline’s career, for he returned to Utah to compose music commemorating his heritage.

Our final piece contextualizes military records recommending a road to a new post in the Uintah Basin named after Major Thomas Thornburgh. The establishment of a Ute reservation at Ouray, Utah, occasioned the need for the fort and road. The route as it was originally intended was short-lived, but it became a military supply corridor, and sections of it became Highway 40. Publication of these records continues a UHQ tradition: preserving documents for future scholarship.

Spanish Fork Valley at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. The Redd family and their slaves emigrated from North Carolina and settled in Utah valley, transplanting their southern lifestyle and customs to rural Mormon country.

Courtesy of Amasa Mason Redd

Redd Slave Histories: Family, Race, and Sex in Pioneer Utah

BY TONYA REITER

On June 17, 1864, Emma Ainge, a twenty-two year old Mormon convert from England, stood in the First District Court in Provo, Utah Territory, and testified that the father of her newborn daughter was Luke Redd. Emma and Luke had been ordered to court to answer a charge of “lewdness resulting in her having a child.” 1 Emma’s baby, Flady, had been born less than three weeks earlier on May 28 in Spanish Fork, nine miles south of Provo. 2 Not all unmarried parents were charged with criminal conduct, but this illegitimate birth was exceptional because Flady’s mother was white and her father was black. Luke Redd had been born into slavery in North Carolina and brought to Utah by the John Hardison Redd family.

The circumstances of Flady’s birth forced the little Mormon community of Spanish Fork to confront one of the great taboos of the nineteenth century. She was the product of what critics of racial equality and integration feared most: “miscegenation.” Flady Ainge was the visible proof that religious, racial, and sexual mores had been violated. Brigham Young’s condemnation of mixed-race relationships and marriages did not prevent a few such connections developing or continuing in early Utah. Despite religious and societal disapproval, two of the Redd family slaves were involved in multiple illicit relationships with white Mormons.

The Redd family, black and white, was bound together by legal and formal ties that had begun in the South thirty years before their arrival in Utah ; ties that dictated reciprocal obligations between master and slave. Perhaps more importantly, they were also bound by familial ties that informed their relationships and behavior one to another. It appears that when John Hardison Redd, the patriarch of the family died in 1858, the younger slaves in the family group, Luke and Marinda, found it difficult to negotiate the transition to life after emancipation, and to establish family ties that would replace the bonds of slavery. Instead, they crossed racial and social boundar-

ies in an attempt to find a place in a white society that was somewhat alien to them. Their stories illustrate some of the legacies of Utah slavery.

At the time the Redd family entered the Salt Lake Valley, six people of color were bound to them in service. Who were these black servants? Like other American and Utah slaves, their stories must be culled out of reminiscences written primarily by and for the white families they served. John Hardison Redd stands at the head of a prominent Utah pioneer family whose members colonized early settlements, filled local leadership positions, and produced faithful LDS adherents who have researched and written family histories. Not all pioneers are so well remembered, particularly enslaved black settlers. The little that is recounted about their lives is most often seen as incidental to the central story of white actors. Hints we find about these black lives found in stories, journals, and letters must be combined with data from official sources and oral traditions to help us understand their histories and place in early Utah.

The stories about the African American Redd slaves found in family histories and in Kate B. Carter’s The Story of the Negro Pioneer offer glimpses into their lives as the servants of founding Mormon pioneers, but tell only part of the story. 3 What were their relationships to each other and to white members of the Redd family? What was their status in Utah both before and after slavery ended? When did their bondage end and how did they negotiate the transition to freedom? By looking at the Redd family, perhaps we can get a clearer picture of what slavery in Utah was like, at least for one family. The stories the Redds tell about themselves and their interactions with their slaves show something about how this white LDS family viewed their bondsmen and how the wider community interacted with its black neighbors. While we may never fully comprehend the complex relationships shared by Redd family members or their lives in bondage, the focus of this study is to tell fully the history of John Hardison and Elizabeth Redd’s slaves and, by so doing, illuminate what has been a little-known aspect of social life in early Utah County.

Daughters of Utah Pioneers members Kate B. Carter (center), Ida Kirkham (left), Rosella F. Larkin (right). Carter was the author of, among other works, The Story of the Negro Pioneer.

USHS

John Hardison Redd and Elizabeth Hancock grew up on farms in Onslow County, North Carolina, where they were married in 1826.4 They, like their parents, cultivated smaller holdings than the huge cotton plantations of the Deep South. In North Carolina, famers often worked the land alongside hired laborers and a few slaves.5 In 1820, prior to her marriage, Elizabeth’s father bequeathed two slaves to her. They were sisters. The first was a ten-yearold girl named Venus and the second was seven-year-old Chaney.6 Although they may have begun serving Elizabeth at an earlier date, the girls became her legal property when her father’s will was probated in August, 1824. When Elizabeth married John Hardison two years later, she brought both girls with her into her new home to act as her personal servants.7

During the first year of their marriage, in 1826, Elizabeth gave birth to a baby girl. She was Elizabeth’s first child, but not John Hardison’s. On May 7, 1821, he had posted a bastardy bond in the amount of two hundred pounds for the maintenance of a child born in Onslow County to a woman named Peggy Breece.8 Their child is not mentioned in family histories, but the 1830 and 1840 census listings of a “free white male” in the Redd household may be a refer-

ence to this child—and, if so, an indication that John Hardison may have brought him into his household.9

The Redds farmed in North Carolina for nearly twenty years before selling out to buy land and relocate in Rutherford County, Tennessee, in 1838. Family traditions say the Redds grew tobacco and purchased “many slaves” to work this land, though the veracity of the last claim is not certain. The 1840 census shows only a handful of slaves belonging to the household. While it is possible that the Redds may have purchased some field hands after 1840, and sold them prior to the end of the decade, John Hardison was taxed on only four slaves in 1849. 10

During the years they lived in North Carolina, the Redd family was unchurched, but their move to Tennessee brought them into contact with LDS missionary John D. Lee, who baptized them in 1843. In his journal on June 17, Elder Lee recorded the conversion of John Hardison, Elizabeth, and significantly, Elizabeth’s two black slaves: “I . . . administered or inducted the following persons in the Kingdom or Church Militant on Earth: JOHN H. REDD . . . ELIZABETH REDD, VENICE & CHINEA, 2 servants belonging to Br. J. Redd.”11

Family lore claims that soon after his conversion John Hardison came to believe that Joseph Smith disapproved of slavery. Redd family historians interpret this story as proof that The Redd family believed that because of this, John Hardison legally freed Venus and Chaney sometime between 1843 and their departure for Utah in 1850. In fact, even if John Hardison manumitted any field workers at this time, these two women had never belonged to him. They were the property of his wife, Elizabeth, and it seems she would have been the one to free them. Lura Redd recounts an incident that illustrates Elizabeth’s property, from a bequest, was understood to be hers, even after marriage. John Hardison and Elizabeth agreed to sell a parcel of land that Elizabeth had inherited and although she signed the deed of sale, she was not present when it was given to the buyer. The prospective purchaser sent an agent to her home to verify that John Hardison had her permission to sell the land and that she had actually signed the deed of her own free will. 12

To date, no available records have been found supporting the Redd family claim that either John Hardison or Elizabeth legally manumitted any of their slaves as they prepared to leave the South.13 The story of voluntarily freeing slaves is common in southern LDS convert family histories. When recounting their past, former slaveholding families often depict their emancipated bondsmen eager to stay with their white families out of loyalty and love for their former masters.14 While some family historians assume life could not have been better for their “faithful retainers” had they chosen freedom, when Lura Redd reports that her aunt was certain that Venus and Chaney longed to wait on “Missy” for the rest of their lives, she did, at least, question the decision her great grandparents made to bring their slaves with them. “I guess it was the right thing to do,” she wrote. “All things turned out well with them, and their lives were happier being together. None of them had to learn to adjust to new conditions and environment, at least as far as family surroundings were concerned.”15 Here Lura seems to be uneasy with the morality of the decision her forbears made to bring the black women and their children to Utah. She implicitly acknowledges that there was an alternative.

It is impossible to know how Venus and Chaney felt about migrating to Utah. Even the strong desire for freedom they must have felt would have been complicated by other considerations. Remaining in the South, as manumitted slaves after the Redds departed for Utah, presented the risk of being forced back into slavery. They had been with the family since childhood, so a desire for familiarity and security might have come into play. Not only did they have an established home with the Redds, they also shared ties to the LDS faith with them. Their religious convictions might have drawn them to Utah, as joining the Saints in the Rocky Mountains might have been a more appealing choice than staying behind, if a choice was actually offered.

When the Redds began their journey West in the spring of 1850, Venus and Chaney accompanied them—whether as an act of free will, as the family histories state, or because they were compelled to do so. There were also four younger African Americans in the party: Luke, Marinda, Sam, and Amy, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-two. Family traditions say the

boys belonged to Venus and the girls to Chaney. Venus and Chaney gave birth to these children during the years that they were bound to Elizabeth as slaves and after her marriage to John Hardison. Whatever other factors came to bear upon their move to Utah, the women had the interests of their children to consider. Venus, Chaney, and their children travelled with the Redds in the James Pace Overland Trail Company and arrived in Great Salt Lake City late in September 1850.16

Soon after their arrival, the U.S. Census was taken. For the Redd family, three aspects of their enumeration are worth noting. First, the Redd servants are listed on the original census version of Schedule Two Slave Inhabitants for Utah County, an indication that they entered Utah as enslaved people.17 The second enlightening feature is that Sam is listed as a “Franklin,” not a “Redd,” and that he was set to be free at the age of twenty-one. This means that while the Redd descendants had come to believe Sam was the son of Venus, he almost certainly was not. It is possible he was an indentured servant, not a slave, though no indenture document has been found to date. Where and when he joined the Redd family is unknown. Sam Franklin’s legal status was not the same as the other Redd bondsmen. His period of bondage had an end date, while the others were bound to the Redd family in perpetuity.18 The third feature of the census worth examining is that while Venus and Chaney are listed as “black,” their children are all classified as “yellow”—indicating they were known to be, or at least looked, biracial, begging the question of the children’s paternity.

While it may seem simple to jump to the conclusion that John Hardison was the father of Venus and Chaney’s children, proximity, alone, is not proof of parenthood.19 In this case, however, circumstantial evidence indicates that he was the most likely candidate partly because he was the only white adult male in the household at the times of their births. Family stories remark on Luke’s light eyes and hair and descriptions of Marinda note her fair skin, but the Redd historians made no effort to account for the children’s births or their biracial characteristics. While no contemporaneous records name the father—or fathers—of the young Redd slaves, DNA testing proves that Luke was the biological son of John Hardison Redd.20 Wheth-

er Chaney had children with John Hardison is still an open question.21 No descendants have been located or tested to date, but if Marinda and Amy were actually Chaney’s daughters, chances are good that John Hardison was their father, as well.

One of the most difficult things to understand about slavery is how a father could keep his own children as slaves. It may help to see that by so doing, the father had some control over the conditions under which his children lived. In the antebellum South and in territorial Utah, it would have been almost unthinkable for John Hardison to acknowledge biracial children as his own—especially children whose mothers were his wife’s slaves. While it might have been easier to sell or give away the younger slaves, he chose to make them part of his extended family and took on the role of pater familias of the Redd clan. He occupied a position at the head of the large family group that included white children, black children, and servants. John Hardison fulfilled his duty toward the biracial children and their mothers when he included them in his family unit and migration to Utah. By embracing all of them, he appears to be have made the best of tangled family relationships that had begun before his Christian conversion. Ironically, his family structure was not unlike an LDS polygamous household with multiple wives and children who were half-siblings, but the racial makeup of the Redd family did not allow him to legitimize the relationships. Despite that, he provided for all of them, and all seem to have had a place in the household as they took up residence in Spanish Fork.

From about the time he entered Utah, until shortly before his death, John Hardison kept a notebook in which he listed expenses, and business transactions. He also used the notebook as some people used a family Bible: as a place to record important family dates. Among the birth, death, and marriage dates of his immediate family, he wrote a detailed list of slave names, birthdates, and parentage. Someone who had access to the notebook after John Hardison’s death lined through the slave data and attempted to completely blot out the slave names and relationships.22

Despite later attempts to erase evidence that the Redd family, both black and white,

enjoyed a close, familial relationship, those connections and the family’s religious ties are implied by the Spanish Fork ward record that lists the baptisms performed on June 13, 1852. William Pace rebaptized John Hardison, Elizabeth, two of their daughters, and Venus. Chaney was rebaptized by Stephen Markham on the same day. The record indicates they were all rebaptisms “for the remission of sins.” Marinda and Amy were “added to the Church” that day by a first baptism and confirmation, along with two of the Redd’s sons. 23 There is no mention of Luke or Sam being baptized with the others.

For the Redds, life and work in Spanish Fork seems to have gone on much the same as it had in the South. The slaves worked alongside the white members of the family to cultivate a farm in the river bottoms. The Redd bondsmen might have been unaware that they were part of a small, but significant group of black

men and women enslaved to white Mormons in Utah. Mormon attitudes toward slavery and abolition had varied according to time and place, but they usually reflected moderation between hardline northern and southern extremes. After an influx of southern converts and their slaves between 1848 and 1850, European and New England Mormons were exposed to southern slavery for the first time. Despite the Redds and other black slaves constituting only a tiny percentage of the population of the new territory, early in 1852 the Utah territorial legislature, under the direction of Governor Brigham Young, passed An Act in Relation to Service.24 This act has been characterized as the slave code of Utah because it specified measures to be taken to legally utilize African slave labor, but a recent interpretation of the act points out the humane intent of the legislation and suggests it might have been intended to be a step toward emancipation.25

The Redd family and their slaves most likely lived in a typical Spanish Fork farmhouse like this one.

Under the new legislation, any person of African descent bound to service was required to freely give his assent to enter Utah. After arrival, the bondsman should have contracted a term of service with his master, even if the term was for his whole life. This contract, or registration, was to be made in the presence of a county probate judge and recorded by the court in a Probate Register of Servants. Registrations have survived for at least two slaves living in Salt Lake County.26 Both men are called “slaves,” not servants, in the registrations. They are registered as slaves for life, and significantly, there are no reciprocal contracts in which they agree to service.

After the passage of the act in 1852, almost all of the bonded African Americans who stayed in Utah continued living near, and working for, their masters whether they were legally considered slaves or indentured servants. The legislation probably did not materially affect their lives and may have been more important as a statement of Mormon religious and political attitudes toward chattel slavery than as an actual legal requirement. The southern converts who brought slaves into Utah were a wealthy and influential body. It might have seemed necessary to Young and the legislature to legalize the bonds already in place, thereby recognizing the slaveholders’ property rights, while at the same time mandating restrictions on the exercise of power over those in bondage.27

What is clear is that the philosophical underpinnings of An Act in Relation to Service and the ideas put forth at the time of its passage expressed beliefs and attitudes which made slavery under Mormonism distinctive. Slaveholders were to see their servants as something more than mere property; to acknowledge them as fully human with a degree of free agency. While Mormons were admonished to practice a type of benevolent slavery and avoid inflicting cruelty on their slaves, at the same time, they were told that it was God’s will that persons of African descent serve their white brothers. As Brigham Young stated, “It is a great blessing for the seed of Adam to have the seed of Cain for servants, but those they serve should use them with all the heart and feeling as they would use their own children and . . . treat them as kindly.” 28 Young spoke of the black man’s proper place

as a “servant of servants” until God rescinded the curse of Cain in the distant future, and he preached that as their service benefited the white race, it also benefitted the black race. Beyond any consideration of whether slavery should be practiced in the territory, in his speech to the Utah legislature on February 5, 1852, Brigham Young was explicit in explaining his views on black persons remaining subservient to whites and the inadvisability of allowing them to wield governing power, “Therefore I will not consent for one moment to have an African dictate to me or any Brethren with regard to the Church or State Government . . . If the Africans cannot bear rule in the Church of God, what business have they to bear rule in the State and Government affairs of this Territory or any other?” 29 Mormon theology assigned persons of African descent a permanent second-class status, making them a perpetual underclass. 30

John Hardison and Elizabeth did not register their slaves, nor did the 1852 act alter their lives, but the family encountered other difficulties during this period. Between 1851 and 1853, two teenaged children and Elizabeth Redd died. Chaney’s youngest daughter, Amy, died in November 1854. Interspersed with these unhappy events, three of the Redd children married and in early 1856 John Hardison remarried at the age of fifty-six. His new wife, Mary Lewis, was sixteen years old, just three years older than his youngest son. Mary gave birth to a baby girl in 1857.31 Redd family tradition holds that Venus and Chaney “transferred their allegiance” to John’s new wife and continued to serve the wider family, retaining their roles as nannies and nurses. A family member described the new Mrs. Redd as “’an old man’s darling.’ She had no work to do that she didn’t want to do. Those Negro mammies did it all—took care of the baby and ‘petted’ Mary.”32

Like other Mormons in the mid-1850s, John Hardison consecrated his property to Brigham Young as an act of religious devotion. A receipt for his consecrated goods lists household items and livestock.33 Unlike Mississippi Mormon John Brown or William Taylor Dennis, both of whom consecrated slave “girls” to the trusteein-trust of the church, John Hardison did not deed over any of the Redd slaves.34 Perhaps after Elizabeth’s death, John Hardison consid-

ered Venus and Chaney to be free, though both black women continued working for the family until John Hardison’s death. A Redd family historian describes the roles the two “mammies” filled at Elizabeth and John Hardison’s funerals. They were the “chief mourners at their funerals and . . . considered themselves fullfledged family members. Had they not been dependent on my Redd grandparents [John H. and Elizabeth Redd] for shelter, food and clothing even as much as any of the children?”35

It seems John Hardison died intestate, but his widow and eldest son divided his property soon after his death.36 In the document listing bequests written some time before Mary Lewis Redd remarried at the end of 1859, three of the Redd slaves are named and granted real property, farm animals, grain, and household goods. Venus, Marinda, Luke, and John Hardison’s six legitimate heirs received equal shares of land. In addition, Luke received five acres of farmland and a house to share with his mother and Marinda. Although there are no court documents or registrations that emancipated the Redd slaves, the inheritances they received upon their master’s death indicate they were considered free by the end of 1859 and were given a portion of John Hardison’s goods almost equal to what his widow and legitimate children were granted.37 Lemuel and Mary’s generosity towards the former slaves may have reflected John Hardison’s stated wishes or it may have been a reflection of their own good feelings toward the people who had served the Redd family for three decades. In any case, the Redd family freed their bondmen several years before the federal government passed the act to end slavery in the territories in 1862 and the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Chaney is not listed in the distribution list, and Redd family histories assumed that she died not long after John Hardison. This is not the case. While Venus stayed in Spanish Fork for the rest of her life working as a nurse and midwife, Chaney left the Redd family before 1860. She managed to bring two Missouri-born minor children to Utah before moving to St. George to work for the Samuel and Mary Ellis Cunningham family.38 She used the Cunningham surname on the 1870 census, and when she died in 1872, she was buried under that name next to several of the family’s deceased children.39 Her

sister Venus seems to have asserted her right to link herself with the black family they had been born into when, on the 1870 census, she gave her last name as Cupid, their biological father’s name.40

Neither the Redd histories nor other accounts indicate whether Chaney remained committed to the LDS faith, but her sister Venus continued to attend church late into her life.41 Venus received a patriarchal blessing in 1855. Although no lineage was given, she was promised a place in the kingdom of God and a crown of Glory. She was told that “there is no difference whether . . . bond or free . . . Thou shalt be blest . . . thou shalt rejoice in a day to come . . . and be satisfied with the dealings of a kind Providence toward thee.”42 In her lived experience, however, Venus recognized that her church did make distinctions between white members and those of African descent. Upon learning that she would not be able to participate in the LDS temple rituals, she is said to have scratched her arm until it bled and questioned whether her blood “was not as white as anyone’s?”43 Kate Carter recounts this story but does not give its source. While it could have actually happened, it sounds suspiciously similar to the many stories attributed to early black Mormons in which they said they would be glad to be “skinned alive” if that would take away the offending black color that kept them out of the temple. Regardless of this quote’s provenance, the story does get at the disappointment and distress felt by faithful black Mormons in the face of the priesthood and temple ban.

Venus is the only Redd slave whose entire life is documented by Redd family historians. Chaney’s move to southern Utah accounts for her disappearance from the record, but there may be more to it than that. Venus died in Spanish Fork in 1876, a faithful member of the LDS church and without any scandal connected to her life—a faithful “mammy” figure, remembered as “Aunt Venus” by the family.44 Less is known from Redd family narratives about Marinda, the likely daughter of Chaney; her life is not thoroughly documented in The Utah Redds and Their Progenitors. According to Hatch, Marinda kept the Redd surname, but moved away to find work.45 Other sources indicate that she married another former slave,

Alexander Bankhead and settled into family life in a small home near the center of Spanish Fork.46 Between her arrival in Utah as a “slim, happy, and very attractive” girl of about nineteen in 1850 and her marriage to Alex around 1870 accounts differ on Marinda’s life.47

In 1899, Julius F. Taylor, a journalist for the African American newspaper The Broad Ax, interviewed Marinda.48 She reportedly told Taylor that during the 1850 trek to Utah, while traveling through Kansas, a number of slaves in the group attempted to escape. Marinda tried to run away with them but was caught and forced to rejoin the company. She did not identify any of the runaways. Marinda also revealed that after she had been in Utah for a number of years living with the Redd family, she was “transferred” to another owner, “Dr. Pinney” of Salem, Utah.

Several things about Taylor’s article cast doubt on its complete accuracy, although it has been taken at face value and quoted extensively in Utah black histories. Taylor wrote that the Redd family travelled to Utah with the William Pace Company and, although the Paces were also from Tennessee, there is no record that they brought slaves with them.49 Neither did any slaves other than those owned by the Redds travel in the William Pace Company. Taylor incorrectly reported that Marinda was a resident of Salt Lake City. The Redds only stayed in the valley for a few months before moving on to Spanish Fork. Finally, The Broad Ax article is the only source that mentioned Marinda’s “transfer” or sale. No Dr. Pinney lived in Salem during that time. The article may have intended to refer to Dr. William Taylor Dennis.50

On November 7, 1862, Marinda gave birth to a mixed-race son named David William.51 Spanish Fork was a small, Mormon pioneer town in the early 1860s, making it unlikely that the identity of the child’s white father would not have been known by Marinda’s neighbors. In 1964, as Kate Carter was collecting reminiscences about black pioneers, she received a letter from a “Daughter” offering “special information” identifying the father of Marinda’s son. The letter writer claimed that it was one of the Pace boys; she named him as “Al” Pace.52 According to The Story of the Negro Pioneer, David William went by “Billy” as a child and attended school in

Spanish Fork with the neighborhood children. Carter wrote that Billy “was clean and careful about his appearance.”53 Another Spanish Fork historian remembered that he played banjo in a dance band.54 He visited Marinda often after moving away as an adult but none of the ladies of the DUP was able to document his life after he left his home town.55

David William, or Billy, was not the only mixed race child Marinda bore while she was unmarried. Four years after Billy’s birth, on April 12, 1867, she had another son, Edward T, who lived only six months and died on October 29.56 At the birth of her second illegitimate son, her LDS bishop, Albert King Thurber, reacted with a scathing sermon directed toward his congregation’s Aaronic Priesthood Teacher’s Quorum on September 22, 1867. In tones reminiscent of the days of the Mormon Reformation, Thurb-

Marinda Caroline Redd Bankhead. The provenance of this grainy image of Marinda from the DUP publication The Story of the Negro Pioneer is unknown.

er “denounced whoredom and said if Marinda Redd was found pregnant again death should be her portion and the same with all who whore with her. Whoredom among the young folks was also denounced and the teachers were to use their influence to stop it.”57 Apparently feeling the need to address his entire congregation, the following Sunday he “referred to whoredoms and said if there was any more whoring with black folks both black and white shall be killed.” He also “rebuked some of the young for their whoredoms and gave some good counsel to the young on the relations of the sexes.”58

In directing his rebuke to the Teacher’s Quorum of his ward, Bishop Thurber may have been mistaken about the identity of Edward T.’s father. When Marinda’s baby son was buried in the Spanish Fork City Cemetery, the sexton’s book listed him as Edward T. Dennis, his father as William T. Dennis, and mother as Marinda Redd. At some point, Edward’s surname “Dennis” was crossed out by hand and the surname “Redd” written above it, possibly to indicate the baby’s illegitimacy.59 William Taylor Dennis, a Mormon slaveholder from Tennessee, migrated to Utah in 1855 with his first wife, their children, and a few black slaves. He and his wife were closely connected to some of the other southern slaveholding converts in the territory. If Marinda was sold to Dennis as she claimed, it would necessarily have been between his arrival in 1855 and the end of 1859 when she received her inheritance from John Hardison Redd’s estate.60 Although it may have been the case that some bondsmen were held in Utah after the legal end of slavery, it is very doubtful that Dennis held Marinda as a slave as late as 1867 when Edward was born. Her description of their association as that of slave and master may have been a way to explain a sexual relationship with Dennis in which she felt subservient, coerced, or cruelly treated, although she may not have been legally owned by him. It is possible her labor was sold to Dennis for a period of time, but there is no evidence to support that supposition.

When Marinda gave birth to Dennis’s child, he was in his late fifties and had three plural wives. He reportedly had a nasty temper that flared into violence. His second wife sued for divorce in 1873, citing “the unpleasant feeling existing between them caused by . . . [Dennis]

having used violence towards her.” She claimed he had tied her up, thrown her around, and “threatened to take off her head.”61 If true, her complaints demonstrate how Dennis treated an “eternal” wife who shared his social standing. One wonders how he treated Marinda, a black woman whose relationship to him was neither legally nor religiously sanctioned.

Marinda’s marriage to Alex Bankhead might have been arranged by church leaders to end either her sexual exploits or exploitation.62 Originally owned by George Bankhead, Alex had been sold to Abraham Smoot before being freed.63 In 1870 he and Marinda are listed in the same household with Venus and Marinda’s son, Billy.64 Billy is counted as Alex’s stepson in the 1880 census.65 He was the only child they raised, as they never had biological children of their own. The same letter that named Billy’s father also said that Alex had been “casterized.”66 Assuming this means castrated, he would have been unable to have children with Marinda or anyone else.67 No other information is given about why Alex would have been subjected to such harsh treatment if the report is accurate. Alex and Marinda lived in Spanish Fork until their deaths. Julius Taylor’s article called them faithful members of the LDS church, named Marinda as a member of the Spanish Fork Relief Society, and reported her attendance at the Pioneer Jubilee in 1897.68

When Marinda’s life story is recounted in Carter’s The Story of the Negro Pioneer, the difficult episodes from her life are absent. By the time the histories of the early black pioneers in Utah became the subject of DUP interest, many of the facts about these people had died with them. Not only that, DUP depictions glossed over unpleasant or embarrassing details to make histories into inspiring lessons. The writers often knocked the raw edges off imperfect people to make their lives exemplary. They also made an effort to draw Marinda and other early black Utahns from the margins into the main current of local history and to acknowledge their contributions and similarity to themselves as they noted her “beautiful white wash” and her “wonderful” cooking.69 Their reminiscences give the impression that Marinda, at least in her later years, was respected and integrated into the white community. For instance, the Bankhead home was near the center of town,

John Hardison Redd’s notebook gives genealogical information about the Redd and Hancock slaves we would otherwise not have. The strikethrough text reads (with some added punctuation): “Moriah Daughter of Cupit and Amy was born October the 9th AD 1809; Venius Daughter of Cupit and Amy was born November the 25th AD 1810; Abram son of Cupit and Amy was born October the 9th 1812; Chaney Daughter of Cupit and Amy was born March the 20th AD 1817; Finitty Daughter of Cupit and Amy was born June the 26th AD 1819; Luke son of Venius was born Janry the 9th 1828; Thomas son of Moriah was born Janry the 23rd 1828.” On the previous page and also lined through was the line: “Amy Daughter of Chaney departed this life on Saturday morning the 4th of November AD 1854.”

Courtesy of Amasa Mason Redd

and Marinda received visits from white neighbors which she returned with gifts of bread. A DUP member remembered her father joking and dancing with Marinda in the home of mutual friends, which indicates that Marinda took part in the social life of the town.70 This is not to say that social relations between the Bankheads and white community members were always amicable; according to The Story of the Negro Pioneer, Marinda’s son, Billy, would get very angry when he was called “a nigger” by some of the other children. Neighborhood boys reportedly played a trick on Alex Bankhead by painting his horse blue and turning it out of the barn.71 Overall, the Bankhead family appears to have been an accepted part of the pioneer town, although they were still somewhat set apart, as they were referred to as “Aunt Rindy” and “Un-

cle Alex” rather than Brother and Sister or Mr. and Mrs. Bankhead.72

Like his mother and Marinda, Luke continued to live in Spanish Fork after the deaths of John Hardison and Elizabeth Redd. Family histories state he was given to the Redd’s oldest surviving son, Lemuel Hardison Redd to be his companion for life. Luke learned to read and write, according to census data. As a young man, he helped Lemuel, then a boy of fourteen to drive the family’s oxen across the plains on their way to Utah. Luke was handy, and the family relied upon him to mend farm implements and generally keep things in running order.73 He was expected to teach Lemuel the same skills, as he was about eight years his senior.

After Lemuel Redd married, he and his family were called by the leaders of the LDS church to settle a community in southern Utah in 1862. Luke helped move the family to New Harmony but soon returned to Spanish Fork to work the farm land he had received from the Redd family.74 He was in Spanish Fork in 1863 with his mother, according to Bishop Albert K. Thurber’s diary. On February 22, Thurber mentioned “taking” dinner at Luke and Venus Redd’s house. The “Canaanites” served cabbage and pork “with other good articles of food . . . on the table.” Bishop Thurber “enjoyed a good time” with them that evening.75 It must also have been around this time that Luke met Emma Ainge, the daughter of George and Elizabeth Halford Ainge. The attraction they felt for each other must have been strong enough to allow them to ignore social conventions of the pe -

riod and begin a controversial, but long-lasting relationship that eventually came to the attention of a member of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve.76

The Ainge family joined the LDS church in rural England and immigrated to Utah, settling in Spanish Fork in 1862.77 The Ainge’s second oldest daughter, Love, born in 1841, arrived in Utah and began calling herself Emma.78 A family history claims that she had wanted to marry prior to coming to America, but her father would not allow it. He might have lived to regret that edict when, after only two years in their new home in Utah Valley, Emma was brought to trial after the birth of her illegitimate biracial daughter.

In 1864, when Bishop Thurber was called by the court to give evidence against Emma and Luke, they both were living within his ward boundaries and Emma, at least, was a baptized member of his congregation. Thurber reported to George A. Smith that on June 17, Emma stood in open court and named Luke as her baby’s father. Luke denied that the baby was his, but was scheduled to give his defense the following day. Unfortunately, the trial records are lost, along with Luke’s response to Emma’s charge. Her willingness to admit to an illicit sexual relationship with a black man makes her testimony convincing. By naming him, she subjected herself not only to the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child but to the further shame and stigma associated with interracial relations. It is not surprising that Luke did not openly admit his guilt in public. Thurber wrote that Judge Snow was trying to get the parties before him to acknowledge their wrongs and pay their fines. He hoped that “the arest [sic] and trial will put a stop to such conduct in Spanish Fork.”79 Despite Brigham Young’s insistence that the penalty for black-white sexual transgression should be blood atonement, it appears Judge Snow simply levied a fine on the guilty parties.80

Luke was the only known African American man living in the area at the time and therefore the obvious suspect merely by virtue of his race, but anecdotes about him in Redd family lore hint that he did not always “know his place” as a black man in Utah Territory. They tell of fights he started when called a “nigger” and of the times he relied on the Redd sons to

Albert King Thurber, bishop of the Spanish Fork LDS ward. Thurber testified against Luke and Emma, a white woman within Thurber’s ward, for a past indiscretion that resulted in the birth of their illegitimate, biracial daughter.

USHS

help him out of scrapes. Lura Redd recounts a story that demonstrates he must have been comfortable flirting with a white woman, even a married one. Luke put his arm around Louisa, Lemuel’s recent second wife, while she was boiling a pot of cereal. In response, she smacked his face with a large spoon dripping with hot mush.81 As related by Nelle Hatch, Luke “was handsome, and as fair in complexion as any white man. Only by the yellow in his eyes and his kinky hair did he betray his racial descent. His good looks probably got him into trouble a time or two, for it was not hard to find association among unsavory society. The result was that he had to change his residence on very short notice. His morals, I guess, were not of the best.”82

Emma, too, must have been willing to ignore social and church tenets. When all of her fami-

ly was rebaptized in 1864, she was not, and she apparently refused to end her relationship with Luke despite the sanctions imposed on her.83 While Bishop Thurber hoped that bringing Luke and Emma to justice would curtail their behavior, the trial seemed to have little effect on their conduct. Two years after her appearance in the Provo courtroom, Emma gave birth to a second child, this time a boy named John born on July 3, 1866. Both of Emma’s children are classified as “mulatto” in the censuses of 1870 and 1880, making it logical to believe that Luke was John’s father, as well as Flady’s.84 A DUP life sketch of Emma, written after her death, asserted that both children shared a “southern man” as their father.85 But other than Thurber’s letter reporting on the trial, no other contemporaneous records reveal anything about the couple, their children, and the impact of the trial on them.

Marinda’s first son had been born the year before Flady’s birth. The year following the birth of John Ainge, Marinda’s second biracial child was born. This chain of events in Spanish Fork put Bishop Thurber’s hellfire sermons

Lemuel Hardison Redd, John Hardison’s eldest surviving son. Luke was given to Lemuel so that the two could become companions for life. As Luke was eight years Lemuel’s senior, Luke was expected to teach him to work on the farm.

Courtesy of Amasa Mason Redd

Emma Love Ainge Harris. In 1874, she married John Harris, another English convert, as a plural wife and raised four children with him.

Courtesy of Debbie Spiers

into a slightly new context. From 1863 to 1867 the small pioneer town witnessed four mixed race children born out of wedlock. Interracial marriage was technically legal in Utah Territory during the 1860s and not outlawed until 1888 when the territorial legislature passed an anti-miscegenation law that was not repealed until 1963.86 So, while it would have been legal for Emma and Luke to marry, An Act in Relation to Service of 1852 forbade sexual acts between white persons and anyone of the “African race,” and it subjected the white participant, upon conviction, to a fine between $500 and $1000.

Despite any questions of the legality of mixed marriage, Brigham Young had declared that even if “the first presidency . . . and all the elders of Israel here declare that it is right to mingle our seed with the black race of Cain, that they shall come in with . . . us and [be] partakers with us of all the blessings God has given to us, on that very day and hour we should do so, the priesthood is taken from this Church and kingdom and God leaves us to our fate.”87 Young saw interracial marriages as a serious threat to the very foundation of the church: “let my seed mingle with the seed of Cain, that brings the curse upon me, and upon my generations—we will reap the same rewards with Cain.”88 Engaging in a mixed-race relationship, therefore, brought the curse upon the white participant and any children born from that coupling, ending the right to priesthood in that family. To be a party to such a relationship brought social disapprobation and, more importantly, the loss of a birthright for generations to come.

Nineteenth-century antipathy toward mixedrace sexual relationships and LDS beliefs about the secondary status of blacks undoubtedly impacted the development of the LDS priesthood ban for men of African descent. During the late 1800s, when Jane James and Elijah Abel requested LDS temple ordinances, church leaders sought to define policy regarding priesthood ordination of black men and to identify precedents in Joseph Smith’s teachings. Church leaders consulted Zebedee Coltrin, the last surviving member of the original Kirtland School of the Prophets and a close associate of Smith. Coltrin lived in Spanish Fork in the 1860s and must have been aware of the interracial relationships in his community and their consequences. Memory is not stat-

ic and the events that took place in Utah may well have shaped how Coltrin remembered the more distant past, influencing his opinions and attitudes. He reported that Smith had dropped Abel from the Quorum of the Seventies upon learning of his African descent. Coltrin’s assertion contributed to continuation of priesthood restriction and its attribution to Joseph Smith well into the twentieth century.89

By 1870, Marinda and Alex Bankhead had settled into family life. There are no indications in the historical record that Marinda engaged in any more illicit interracial liaisons. According to the census that year, Emma was living at her parents’ home with her two children. Luke relocated to New Harmony, Utah, where he is listed as “Duke” Redd in the census. He left behind some property for Emma’s children.90 Perhaps this was one of the times “he had to change his residence on short notice” with Lemuel’s help. In New Harmony, Luke worked as a carpenter, handyman, and possibly a barber.91

Luke’s misadventures in Spanish Fork were not the end of his involvement with white women. A rumor told in New Harmony since the late nineteenth century tells of an illegitimate baby born to Mary Ann Pace Goddard, a resident of the town and wife of William Pettibone Goddard. The child, named George Clarence, was born December 27, 1872, twelve years after the couple’s youngest child, and at a time when Mary Ann and her husband were not living together. The boy was given the Goddard surname despite the question of his paternity. Mary Ann lived next door to Luke Redd in the years immediately preceding the birth of the child.

Soon after Luke took up residence in New Harmony it is rumored he began a relationship with Mary Ann. She successfully hid the pregnancy that ensued, gave birth to her son on her own, and left him in a cellar or an out-building on her property. When one of her teenage sons heard the baby’s cries, he found him, and confronted his mother with the child. She admitted Luke was the father. From the moment his brother discovered him, Clarence was accepted and loved as one of the family. He was mainly raised by his older brothers who took him to their herding camps in the Pine Mountains near New Harmony as soon as he was old enough.92

By 1873 Luke had settled in California. Again, his relocation seemed to correspond conveniently with the birth of another of his illegitimate children. DNA testing has shown that Goddard descendants carry Redd Y-DNA, substantiating the rumor of Luke and Mary Ann’s relationship. The results show that Clarence Goddard was Luke’s son and John Hardison’s grandson.93 After Luke left Utah, it is doubtful that he ever saw any of the three children he left behind. He lived for a time in Nevada City, California, and then moved on to Colfax. He is found in voter registration lists in Colfax under the name of “Luke Ward Redd,” but a burial or death record has not been found. He is last listed in the 1880 census for Colfax, California.94

Through the 1860s and into the 1870s, the patterns that were set in slavery for the African American Redds continued to shape their lives. After the deaths of John Hardison and Elizabeth Redd, Venus’s life remained stable, and she continued working as a nurse and midwife in Spanish Fork. Chaney also spent her final years as a domestic working for the Cunningham family, using the skills she had developed

while enslaved. Unlike their mothers, Marinda and Luke had the freedom to choose their own paths earlier in their lives, but it seems they were somewhat adrift in a white world in which they found no natural home. Outside of their own family, there was no African American community in Utah County, and as slavery came to an end their attempts to integrate into white society were fraught with difficulty. Marinda, the only young black woman in Utah County, flouted convention and became the sexual partner of multiple white men. Whether she acted willingly or under some type of duress is unclear. It is difficult to see her experience as anything other than exploitation given her status. Evidence suggests that no formal church action was taken against her, and, in fact, her bishop tried to control the situation by demanding that the white men in her ward comply with church standards and take responsibility for stopping the misconduct. In the end, Marinda married another emancipated slave, and she was finally able to make what seems to have become a stable family life

with her husband and her son.

Flady Ainge Morrison (seated) and her children, from left to right, Flady Mae Morrison Snow, Clara Ella Morrison Burke, LeRoy (Roy) Christian Morrison, Ralph William Morrison, Maude Emma Morrison Barker, Millie Myrtle Morrison Hopper, Della Octavia Morrison. The family portrait was probably taken in Salt Lake City, circa 1939.

Courtesy of Tonya Reiter

Unlike Marinda, Luke seems to have been unable to establish a stable home and family life. Instead, he put himself in situations that made him unwelcome in the small Mormon communities of Utah. It is impossible to know if Luke knew the identity of his father, but if he did, it might help to explain why he had a hard time finding his place. He and Lemuel, his master, were actually half-brothers, but while Lemuel had a prominent position in pioneer society, Luke, as the son of an African mother, was viewed as a cursed offspring of Cain. When the Redd histories stated John Hardison’s sons helped Luke out of trouble, it is possible they referred to the times Luke needed to get out of town quickly before he faced what could have been dire consequences for his continued dalliances with white LDS women. Luke’s interactions with the Redd family and his neighbors must have been complicated by his biological relationship to John Hardison and the social and religious implications of that relationship. While he surely benefitted from the Redd’s help in avoiding retribution for his transgressions, he seems to have been unable to occupy a respected place in the primarily white Mormon communities where he lived.

While John Hardison and Elizabeth Redd lived, the connections that bound the white family and their black servants remained strong. The relationships that had begun in slavery grew

George Clarence Goddard. He married a white Mormon woman and raised his family in Cedar City.

into something closer to a real family bond after John Hardison’s conversion to Mormonism. Venus and Chaney were not only servants to the Redd family; they were also fellow members of “The Kingdom” who worshipped with the family they served. By converting to Mormonism, Marinda and Amy strengthened that tie of a shared faith. John Hardison’s biological connection to Luke must have contributed to his concern for the future lives of his younger slaves. By giving Luke to Lemuel, he may have hoped they would look out for each other as loyal companions. There seems to have been a mutual bond of affection between John Hardison and all his family members, whether legitimate or illegitimate. Toward the end of his life, he sent a letter to his son and daughter-in-law in which he wrote, “We all have a desire to see you, both white and black, and our ardent desires are for your temporal and eternal welfare, and truly hope the Lord may bless and prosper you.”95 He appears to have truly considered them all family, regardless of color. During his lifetime John Hardison Redd was the center that kept the large diverse family knitted together, but after his death, as the familial and formal ties that held them together loosened, his former slaves were forced to find family,

Courtesy of Elaine Goddard Rawley

The patterns that were set in slavery for the African American Redds continued to shape their lives.

meaning, and belonging in a world that was foreign to them. Some negotiated that transition successfully, but for others it was a more difficult journey.

The author wishes to thank Ainge, Goddard, and Redd family members as well as Pat Sagers, whose research and contributions have made writing this history possible. She is also very appreciative of the encouragement and valuable suggestions made by Paul Reeve, and Amy Tanner Thiriot, and the late Ronald W. Walker.

Notes

1. Albert K. Thurber, Provo, June 17, 1864, box 6, fd. 14, George A Smith Papers, Ms 1322, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

2. “Utah Death Certificates, 1904–1964,” s.v. Flady Ainge Morrison, 1953, accessed February 29, 2016, familysearch.org.

3. Kate B. Carter, The Story of the Negro Pioneer (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1965). Carter, then president of Daughters of Utah Pioneers, led an effort to gather all available information about Utah’s free and enslaved early black settlers. She compiled the information and published it in booklet form. The biographies in it are often inaccurate, biased, and incomplete but yet contain details that otherwise would have been lost.

4. Lura Redd, The Utah Redds and Their Progenitors, edited by Amasa Jay Redd (Salt Lake City: privately published, 1973).

5. Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 11.

6. “Record of Wills, Book A, 1800–1825, Onslow County, North Carolina,” s.v. Zebedee Hancock, May 1820, accessed January 19, 2017, files.usgwarchives.net/nc/ onslow/willa/hncock01.txt.

7. Redd, The Utah Redds, 180.

8. “Onslow County, NC – Court – Early Bastardy Bonds,” accessed January 19, 2017, files.usgwarchives.net/nc/ onslow/court/bstrdy01.txt.

9. “United States Census, 1830,” s.v. John H. Redd, Onslow, North Carolina, accessed April 28, 2015, familysearch. org

10. Redd, The Utah Redds, 197. This information was verified by Trent Hanner of the Tennessee State Library and Archives, email message to author, May 29, 2015.

11. Box 1, fd. 2, John Doyle Lee Papers, Accn 186, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

12. Hatch, Mother Jane, 7; Redd, Utah Redds, 181.

13. A search of the indexes to records housed in the Tennessee Library and Archives has revealed no official manumission records. Trent Hanner, email message to author, May 29, 2015.

14. Carter, Negro Pioneer.

15. Redd, Utah Redds, 211.

16. “James Pace Company,” Mormon Overland Pioneer Travel: 1847–1868, Church History Department, accessed January 19, 2017, history.lds.org/overlandtravels/ companies/230/james-pace-company-1850.

17. United States Census Office, Utah Territorial Census, Utah County, schedules 2-6, MS 2672, Church History Library.

18. After Sam’s appearance on the U.S. Census of 1850, there is only one other possible record of him in Utah. There is a Samuel Redd listed in the 1856 territorial census in Payson, Utah.

19. See Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: Norton, 1974), 133. It seems to be a typical modern assumption that plantation owners routinely fathered children with their black slave women, but these authors present statistical evidence that shows this was not the case. In fact, slave children fathered by whites on the plantation may have been as low as one or two percent.

20. Known descendants of John Hardison Redd participated in a Y-DNA test project through FamilyTree DNA. A male Goddard descendant who was tested carries the same Redd Y-DNA as members of the family who can show genealogically that they are direct descendants of John Hardison Redd. See “Redd Family History Y-DNA Project, Y-DNA Colorized Chart,” accessed January 19, 2017, familytreedna.com/public/reddfamilyhistoryydna project?iframe=ycolorized.

21. Marinda’s death certificate does not give a mother’s or father’s name and states that she did not know much about herself. Utah Death Certificates, 1904–1964, s.v. Marinda Bankhead, accessed September 11, 2015, familysearch.org.

22. John Hardison Redd, “Notebook,” held in private hands by Amasa Mason Redd, Salt Lake City. Redd’s notebook is an extraordinary record to find and gives genealogical information about the Redd and Hancock slaves we would otherwise not have.

23. Spanish Fork Ward Records, 1852–1864, Spanish Fork Ward, Utah Stake, LR 8611 29, Church History Library.

24. “An Act in Relation to Service,” box 1, fd. 55, Territorial Legislative Records, Series 3150, Utah State Archives and Records Administration, Salt Lake City.

25. See Quintard Taylor, “The Utah Slave Code (1852),” accessed October 1, 2014, blackpast.org; Christopher B. Rich, Jr., “The True Policy for Utah: Servitude, Slavery, and An Act in Relation to Service,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80 (Winter 2012): 54–74. The statute was only tested once, at which time the decision was made against “the Negro boy” Dan (the same slave registered by Williams Camp).

26. William Camp Slave Registration, July 10, 1856, box 4, fd. 26, reel 5, Series 373, Utah State Archives and Records Administration. Slaves were living in Salt Lake, Davis, Utah, and Iron counties, but the only registrations to be found are in the Great Salt Lake County Probate Court records. They are those made by Williams and Diannah Camp for two of their slaves, Daniel and Shepard. In the depositions they gave, the Camps tried to establish their claim to the two men by recounting how they came to own them and adding an affidavit by William Taylor Dennis attesting to their ownership of Shepard. The Probate Court clerk listed page numbers on which these affidavits were listed in the Probate Register of Servants, a document which so far, has not been found. From his list, we know that the registrations for Daniel

and Shepard, together with the Dennis affidavit were recorded on pages three through seven in the Probate Register. A bill of sale for a slave girl named Lucinda, sold by Abraham Smoot and purchased by Thomas Williams, was listed on page eight. If the Camp’s registrations of 1856 start on page three, it is unlikely the Probate Register was begun four years earlier in 1852. There would have been more than one or two other affidavits or registrations prior to these if the all the slaveholders in the territory had complied with the law. It appears that almost no one, including the Redds, registered their slaves.

27. Rich, “True Policy for Utah,” 55.

28. Brigham Young, February 5, 1852, box 1, fd. 17, Historian’s Office Reports of Speeches, CR 100 317, Church History Library.

29. Ibid.

30. For a more in-depth discussion of Mormon attitudes toward slavery, see Nathaniel R. Ricks, “A Peculiar Place for the Peculiar Institution: Slavery and Sovereignty in Early Territorial Utah” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2007).

31. Redd, Utah Redds, 221.

32. Ibid., 221.

33. Records of Utah County, 1851–1864, MSS 3905, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. For information on the Conservation Movement of the 1850s, see Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Fox, and Deal L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 63–78

34. John Zimmerman Brown, comp., The Autobiography of Pioneer John Brown, 1820–1896 (Salt Lake City: privately published, 1941). See also Records of Utah County, 1851–1864, MS 3905, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

35. Hatch, Mother Jane, 11. Hatch’s comments imply that while Venus and Chaney might have thought of themselves as members of the family, from her perspective, they were not. Their race and station in life set them apart from blood relations. She simplifies the complex adult sorrow they felt. Venus, at least, had given birth to one of John Hardison’s children, making her relationship to him more complicated than Hatch is willing to acknowledge.

36. “Division of John H. Redd’s Property,” fd. 8, Farozine R. Bryner Collection, 1847–1956, MS 8865, LDS Church History Library. Luke is named with the Redd surname in the document, Venus and Marinda are not. The “land” might refer to town lots in Spanish Fork and to farmland acreage.

37. She signed as “Mary Redd.” According to her history on FamilySearch.org her second marriage took place on December 21, 1959. In 1900 she reports having been married forty years. See United States Census, 1900, s.v. Mary Hawks, accessed March 6, 2015, familysearch.org.

38. “A Sketch of the Life of William Bailey Maxwell by Charlotte Maxwell Webb,” accessed October 17, 2004, familysearch.org; United States Census, 1870, s.v. W. B. Maxwell, Nevada, accessed October 17, 2004, familysearch.org.

39. Find a Grave, s.v. Chauncy Cunningham, accessed January 19, 2017, findagrave.com; United States Census, 1870, s.v. Samuel Cunningham, accessed January 19, 2017, familysearch.org. Thanks to Amy Tanner Thiriot, independent historian, for the theory that Chaney Redd

and Chaney Cunningham are the same person. Thiriot’s extensive research on Utah slavery will be published as Slaves in Zion: African American Servitude in Utah Territory by the University of Utah Press.

40. U.S. Census Bureau, “Spanish Fork, Utah, Utah Territory, 1870,” roll: M593_1612, film 553111, image 610, p. 307A, Family History Library. “Cupid” could be a misheard version of the more common slave name, “Cupit.”

41. Hatch, Mother Jane, 11.

42. Isaac Morley, Sr., “A Patriarchal Blessing Given on the Head of Venus, Daughter of Cupid & Amy,” March 1, 1855, Spanish Fork City, copy in the author’s possession. At the time Venus received her blessing, a person of African descent was thought to be a descendant of Cain and or Ham, and not of the house of Israel.

43. Carter, Negro Pioneer, 27. This type of story, reported by white Mormons, may show they empathized with black Mormons and recognized the difference between white and black was literally only “skin deep.”

44. City Recorder, Spanish Fork, Cemetery Deeds, 1866–1978, film no. 1654570, LDS Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; Hatch, Mother Jane, 11.

45. Ibid., 11.

46. Venus owned a lot in the same block. LaNora Allred, Spanish Fork: City on the Rio de Aguas Calientes (Spanish Fork, UT: printed privately, 2005), 40, 42.

47. Carter, Negro Pioneer, 26.

48. Julius Taylor, “Slavery in Utah,” Broad Ax, March 25, 1899, accessed April 30, 2015, udn.lib.utah.edu/ cdm/compoundobject/collection/broadax/id/3507/ show/3517/rec/52.

49. “James Pace Company,” Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel: 1847–1868, accessed January 19, 2017, history.lds. org/overlandtravels/pioneers/5893/james-pace.

50. Amy Tanner Thiriot has suggested that Julius Taylor’s Dr. Pinney was actually Dr. Dennis.

51. See FamilySearch, s.v. Marinda Redd, familysearch.org.

52. Ruth Brockbank, Spanish Fork, Utah, to Kate Carter, Salt Lake City, n.d. (ca. 1964), Daughters of Utah Pioneers Files, Salt Lake City, Utah. The “Al” Pace referred to in the letter is John Alma Lawrence Pace.

53. Carter, Negro Pioneer, 26.

54. La Nora Allred, DUP life sketch of David William Bankhead, Daughters of Utah Pioneers History Files, Spanish Fork, Utah.

55. Carter, Negro Pioneer, 26.

56. Spanish Fork, Utah Sexton, Cemetery records, 1866–1898, film no. 1654570, Family History Library.

57. Spanish Fork Ward general minutes, 1851–1883, Spanish Fork Ward, Utah Stake, LR 8611 11, Church History Library.

58. Ibid.

59. Spanish Fork, Utah Sexton, Cemetery records, 1866–1898, film no. 1654570, Family History Library. Edward’s medical attendant was Venus. He died of flux.

60. U.S. Census Bureau, “Spanish Fork, Utah, 1860,” roll M653_1314, film 805314, microfilm image 443, p. 971, Family History Library.

61. Probate Court (Utah County), Divorce Case Files, Series 20941, Utah State Archives and Records Service.

62. An idea suggested by Amy Tanner Thiriot in private correspondence with the author.

63. U.S. Census Bureau, “Great Salt Lake, Utah Territory, 1850,” roll M432_919, image 119, p. 58A, Family History Library.

64. “Inhabitants in Spanish Fork, in the county of Utah,

August, 1870,” s.v. Alexander Bankhead, Utah, accessed June 12, 2015, familysearch.org.

65. United States Census, 1880, s.v. Alex Bankhead, Spanish Fork, Utah, accessed June 12, 2015, familysearch.org.

66. Brockbank to Carter, n.d. (ca. 1964).

67. Castration was allowed as punishment by the South Carolina Slave Code of 1712, for example, for repeated escape attempts and it is possible to find references to castration being used to keep troublesome slaves in line or to fit them to be “house slaves.” On slave punishments allowed by early slave codes in Colonial America, see Paul Finkelman, ed., Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass: Three-volume set (The African American History Reference Series) (Oxford University Press, New York, 2006), 151.

68. Taylor, Broad Ax.

69. Carter, Negro Pioneer, 26.

70. Ruth Brockbank, “Blacks in Utah” File, DUP, Salt Lake City, Utah.

71. Ibid.

72. Carter, Negro Pioneer, 27.

73. Hatch, Mother Jane, 11.

74. U.S. Census Bureau, “Spanish Fork, Utah, 1860,” roll M653_1314, film 805314, image 443, p. 971, Family History Library. Luke’s land was evaluated at $200.

75. William G. Hartley, Another Kind of Gold: The Life of Albert King Thurber, a Utah Pioneer, Explorer and Community Builder (Dalton: C. L. Dalton Enterprises, 2011), 176.

76. Having grown up in England, Emma may not have shared the racial prejudices felt by Americans who found mixed race relationships distasteful.

77. “Names of Immigrants,” Deseret News, September 24, 1862, 98.

78. England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837–2008, database, s.v. Love Ainge, 1841, accessed February 28, 2016, familysearch.org.

79. Thurber to Smith, June 17, 1864, G. A. Smith Papers.

80. For Young’s statement on blood atonement, see Journal of Discourses Delivered by President Brigham Young, His Two Counsellors, and the Twelve Apostles, and Others, vol. 10 (Liverpool, England: Daniel H. Wells, 1865), 104–11. Unfortunately the trial records are lost.

81. Redd, Utah Redds, 50.

82. Hatch, Mother Jane, 11–12.

83. “Spanish Fork (formerly Palmyra) Ward records, Utah County, Utah, book A: baptisms, births, marriages, and deaths, 1859–1869,” microfilm no. 6031574, typescript by the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1942, LDS Family History Library.

84. United States Census, 1870, s.v. Emma Ainge in household of George Ainge, Utah; United States Census, 1880, s.v. Emma Harris, Pleasant Grove, Utah; both accessed June 18, 2015, familysearch.org. In early censuses, the census taker assigned racial designations based on how the person being enumerated looked. Emma’s children were really only one quarter black, but might have been described as “yellow” or as they were in this case, “mulatto” even though the last usually meant the person had one white parent and one black parent. For the date of John’s birth is from familysearch. org.

85. Vivian Harris Evans, Fern Thorne Bigelow, Mildred C. Cook, “Life Sketch of Emma (Love) Ainge,” DUP History Files, Salt Lake City, Utah.

86. Patrick Q. Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial

Marriage in Utah, 1888–1963,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Spring 2008): 108–31.

87. Brigham Young speech to the Legislature, February 5, 1852.

88. Ibid.

89. L. John Nuttall, Journal, May 30, 1879, L. John Nuttall Papers, MSS 790, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

90. United States Census, 1870, s.v. Duke W. Redd, Utah, accessed April 28, 2015, familysearch.org.

91. Hatch, Mother Jane, 12.

92. Author interview with Rolaine Grant King, resident of New Harmony, October 2104, New Harmony, Utah.

93. See note 20. Autosomal DNA links the Ainge and Goddard descendants and links both to the Redd family.

94. United States Census, 1880, s.v. L. W. Redd in household of Rob F. Rooney, Colfax, Placer, California, accessed June 1, 2015, familysearch.org.

95. Redd, Utah Redds, 217–18.

An image of David Hough’s 1846 patent for a hoopskirt. Hoopskirts, or crinoline, were structures used to support the full, stylish skirts of the nineteenth century.

U.S. Patent

Hoop Mania:

Fashion, Identity, and Religious Condemnation in Nineteenth-Century Utah

BY MICHELLE HILL

The hoopskirt usually conjures up images of Scarlet O’Hara and southern belles. The fashion for hoopskirts (or crinoline) in the mid-nineteenth century was not limited to the South, however, as it spread across the United States, even to remote places like Utah. With the arrival of the Utah Expedition in 1858, the isolation of the Mormons began to crumble. The increasing number of outsiders coming into Utah Territory brought changes in many areas of the pioneers’ lives, including fashion. Some of the women who accompanied the army were stylish officers’ wives acquainted with the latest styles hoopskirts. Their clothing, along with that of other newcomers to the territory, fueled debates over self-reliance, women’s roles and identity, and the encroachment of worldly influences. Mormon leaders decried women’s appetite for expensive imported fabrics, dresses, and accessories. Religious and social opposition to this new vogue existed outside of Utah as well.

Women’s fashion raised questions about sexuality, gender, class, and morality in Victorian Europe and the United States. The wider societal issues raised by dress in the nineteenth century were mirrored in the changing social and material culture of the Mormons caused by the de-isolation of Utah and documented in the continuing opposition Mormon leaders had toward fashion. Fashion was, for church leaders, a sign of encroaching worldliness as well as dependence on outside economic and social forces. The reactions of religious leaders in Utah (as well as throughout the United States), journalists, and women themselves demonstrate the power of social change as seen through controversial fashions like crinoline. And for those Utah women who wore hoops, the style may well have been not only an act of fashion but also one of self-expression.

When the first Mormon pioneers came over the plains to Utah in the 1840s, they wore clothing of the day. Their simple clothes were modified for the hard journey, although they might have brought some of their finery if they had room in their wagons. When the Latter-day Saints fled Nauvoo they left most of their belongings behind and were limited in what non-essentials they could bring in wagons. The supplies recommended for the trip to the Salt Lake Valley included a one-hundred-pound allotment for clothing and bedding per person, but often the wagons were overloaded with personal belongings and some needed to be thrown out.1 Fine silks and dresses with all the trimmings were most likely not allowed to take up vital space in the wagons, though women might have packed one nice dress for special occasions and kept this dress until it wore out.2

Once Mormon pioneers settled in the Salt Lake Valley, the desire for nice clothing from the East was apparently revived. Some of the earliest contact the Mormons had with the outside world was in 1849 with miners traveling across Utah to California. They bartered goods with the Mormons and brought in things like lace, gloves, and buttons that helped stimulate the early economy of Utah.3 However, geographical isolation and lack of money kept the women in Utah from keeping up with fashions as easily as the rest of the country. Over time, new emigrants came into Utah and brought with them much-needed supplies, including store-bought cloth, often at request of those already living in Salt Lake City.4 These droves of new emigrants—Utah’s population increased by almost 30,000 people between 1850 and 1860—might have brought with them updated fashions of the time, but it is unlikely.5 Throughout later emigrations, Brigham Young designated a limit on baggage, encouraging only a “change of clothing.”6 Most pioneers who came to Utah during this time were poor Americans or poor immigrants from Europe and, with the baggage restriction, they could have brought few of the latest fashions. This was one of the factors causing the clothing to have little embellishment and simple design during the first decade in the valley.7

One of the main ways Latter-day Saints learned about changes in eastern fashions was through the press. Periodicals from the states made it to

Utah through later pioneers, businesses trading with the territory, and a sporadic mail system that developed over the course of the 1850s. The mail was anywhere from a few weeks to a few months late on a regular basis because of the hardships of traveling through rough and sparsely populated terrain. Many articles in the Deseret News speak of mail coming from the East and the difficulties the mail faced.8 Despite this, eastern magazines managed to find their way to Utah. Excerpts from Graham’s Magazine show up in the Deseret News as early as 1851, demonstrating an interest in articles from women’s magazines. The Deseret News likewise made nods to Harper’s Magazine (1852), Godey’s Lady’s Book (1855), and Peterson’s (1855) early in the decade.9 Godey’s itself published a poem written by a Utahn in1853; by 1859, the journal reported that “Subscribers in Utah is an old story with us.”10 In 1861 the main mail route to California switched to the Central Route through Utah in response to the beginning of the Civil War, which likely improved mail service in Utah, further contributing to the breakdown of the area’s isolation.11 In addition to recent immigrants and mail, returning LDS missionaries also brought descriptions of changing styles and, occasionally, actual dresses.12

To understand how fashion evolved in Utah it is necessary to first discuss the styles of the 1840s and changes that occurred in the 1850s and 1860s. A typical dress of the 1840s consisted of a Y-shaped bodice that came to a point at a low waist and full skirts (fig. 1). This taste for full skirts had begun in the late 1820s, and the circumference of the skirts increased with every decade. To widen skirts, the creators of women’s fashion had to be inventive. At first petticoats were starched to achieve rigidity. When that was not sufficient, women wore layers of petticoats. As the fashion for fuller skirts increased through the 1830s, starched petticoats could not hold the weight of the fabric in the desired conical shape. Around 1839, crinoline fabric, which was stiffened with horsehair woven into cotton or linen, was invented, and this helped for a time. Other innovations, such as petticoats reinforced with cords or whalebone, attempted to keep up with the ever-increasing skirt size.13 The key invention that helped skirts reach their largest size was the steel cage crinoline, patented in England in 1856 (fig. 2).14

Improvements in steel manufacturing made by the Bessemer process in 1856 made this invention possible. The Bessemer process allowed for cheaper production of steel, which could then be used in commonplace products such as clothing.15 Other inventors capitalized on the basic format of the steel cage, and new prototypes came out every year, some made from steel and some from whalebone.

In the eastern United States the hoopskirt had gained a wide usage even before the steel version appeared. In fact the fashion was so common that easterners assumed that it was worn by everyone, including women in Utah. In July 1856, for instance, the New York Times mentioned a parade which a fake Brigham Young and six of his wives are fashionably dressed in hoopskirts, holding a sign lampooning two of the hot political topics of the day: polygamy and slavery. As the “Mormon Problem” of polygamy became an important national issue, Mormons continued to gain coverage in newspapers and illustrated weeklies of the day. With the mus-

tering of troops by President Buchanan in 1857 in response to reports of trouble in Utah Territory, representations of Mormons in the eastern media grew. Various cartoons published in Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Nick Nax between 1857 and 1858 depict Mormon women in fancy dresses with hoopskirts.16 An 1858 Nick Nax cartoon pictured Mormon women taking up the cause against the army, even standing watch with their hoopskirts lined up in rows to make it look like there were more troops in their “Crinoline Camps.” Punch, meanwhile, joked that President Buchanan should just send fashion magazines to Utah because “the necessity of Crinoline will destroy polygamy. It will render Brigham Young himself unable to support more wives than one.”17 The irony of these cartoons was that the major merchants had left Utah in the fall of 1857 after hearing about the troops.18 They would not have been around to supply any crinoline, even if that fashion had already reached the territory.

Figure 1. The dresses in this image reflect typical fashion of the 1840s, with Y-shaped bodies, tight sleeves, low sloping shoulders, and full skirts. This style of shoulder and skirt inhibited movement.

Godey’s Lady’s Book, March 1844

Figure 2. A steel cage crinoline, circa 1860, in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Mormon women struggled to live in a harsh environment but desired to preserve civility in their homes and regain some of what they were used to in the eastern United States or Europe.19 Despite this desire to emulate current fashions they most likely did not wear the clothes ascribed to them by the eastern weekly magazines at this stage. In addition, mail service from the East was sporadic during the Utah War.20 Thus the women of Utah were not receiving many fashion magazines that would have helped them dress as depicted in the newspapers. It was not until the firm encampment of the army and the return of non-Mormon merchants in 1858 that the stage was set for eastern goods to flood into Utah.21

Although women in Utah probably knew of the hoopskirt from eastern newspapers and women’s magazines, fashion in Utah was still a bit behind the times in the mid-1850s. References to hoopskirts in Utah were rare before the arrival of the Utah Expedition, while many references to hoops and “hoop mania” appeared shortly thereafter and in the following years. Albert Sidney Johnston’s army brought with it officers’ wives and the new governor’s wife, Elizabeth Cumming, who were apparently well

versed in the latest styles. Account books from the sutlers of Camp Floyd record purchases of fabric, ribbon, whalebone, and hoops, confirming that the officers’ wives and women of the camp continued to dress in their eastern fashions (fig. 3).22 The appearance of more and more outsiders during and after the arrival of the army seems to have accelerated the desire for current fashion amongst the women of Utah. With the expedition came merchants who provided hoops to the army women. The establishment of these merchants may have assisted in creating a market for the product outside of newly arrived women.

With the army now based at Camp Floyd, the accounts of hoops began in earnest in the newspapers. The first written account mentioning hoops that is not an excerpt from an eastern newspaper comes from a poem written by W. W. Phelps about the twin sisters of wealth and poverty in the May 11, 1859, issue of the Deseret News. Wealth of course was the sister bedecked in hoops. As a prominent Mormon, Phelps’s poem probably held more sway with the women then previous articles found in the Deseret News.

The next reference to hoops comes from Utah’s second-oldest and generally anti-Mormon newspaper, the Valley Tan. This article documents the introduction of hoops into the satirical arsenal used by the editors of the Valley Tan in their tense battle of words with the prevailing Mormon culture. In late August 1859, the Valley Tan abstracted a sermon given by Elder Heber C. Kimball and embellished Kimball’s actual remarks by including a humorous section on hoopskirts that appeared nowhere in his original address. Kimball reportedly said, “I don’t know what to think of those hoops:—the darn things swell so. I’ve a notion to try ’em myself. I don’t believe they’d keep me from bursting. Now I’ll bet there’ll be five women wearing hoops to where there wasn’t one before.”23 The Journal of Discourses records no such remarks. It does, however, note a diatribe against the army in which Kimball stated, “There were never such things known in these valleys before the army came. I never knew of such drunkenness, whoring or murder, until then.”24 Church leaders were fearful of the negative influence the army would have on Mormon women. As Kimball had cautioned the Latter-day Saints on an earlier occasion, “I understand those offi-

Courtesy Utah State Archives

cers out yonder have got a good many women with them and I do not believe there are twenty in the whole camp but that are whores, and they designed to come here to set you a pattern and to moralize this community.”25

Days later, the Valley Tan chronicled the “Progress of Hoop Mania” with an account—most likely satirized—of a young woman coming to the newspaper’s print shop. She was looking for raw hide hoops for her dress because someone had told her this was a tan shop. The printers gave her instead a copy of their last issue recounting Heber C. Kimball’s rant against hoops and pointed her out the door. She promptly went on her way to find a real tan shop, not deterred in her quest for some hoops.26 The Hoop Mania recorded in 1859 in Utah reflects the Crinoline Mania recorded in the July 18, 1857, issue of Punch. The dates of these two articles demonstrates how the mania for fashion in Utah was at least a full two years behind that of Europe. Despite its satirical slant, the belief expressed in the Valley Tan that leaders of the Mormon church were against hoops was not untrue. Multiple sermons given by Young, Kimball, and other LDS leaders from as early as the 1850s chastised women for their unrighteous and often financially burdening desires for the latest fashion. Mormon leaders and

non-Mormons alike also equated consumption of goods, especially fashion, with a woman’s level of spirituality or morality. The Deseret News reflected an obsession with female extravagance throughout the latter half of the 1850s.27 Conversely, Young believed Mormon women should set the moral example: “We have the words of life; we are the head; and we should lead in fashions and in everything that is right and proper; and not be led by the world.”28

Advertisements for imported hoopskirts appeared in Utah for the first time in September 1859 in the Deseret News with a notice from Rogers, Shropshire, and Ross for crinoline and other fine ladies’ fashions. Such advertisements continued until 1871, as the fashion changed in 1868 from hoops to bustles.29 Brigham Young initially vehemently opposed imported goods because he feared dependency on the national economy, thus setting the stage for non-Mormon merchants to set up shop. Eventually so many non-Mormon merchants were selling imported goods that Young began advocating cooperatives stores run by Mormons so they could regain some control of trade in the territory.30

Although shopkeepers advertised hoopskirts as early as 1859, the fashion did not seem to catch on more widely for a few more years, either because of a lack of money or a lack of fashion sense by the women of Utah Territory. Either way, visitors to the territory remarked on the decided lack of hoops amongst the Mormon women. Clara E. Downes, an immigrant passing through Utah in 1860, visited a Mormon worship service and recorded, “There were about 1,000 present the people were dressed very plain fashion there was none. Some had hoops and some were hoopless.”31 Other accounts indicate that it took years for hoops to catch on. The American Traveller reported upon a visit to Provo in 1858 that “crinoline is unknown in the valleys of the mountains.”32 A little over a year later a Boston paper wrote—perhaps with exaggeration—that “when the army entered Utah, the women were barefooted and ragged, and now are comfortably clad, and even hooped. Crinoline has become fashionable in Utah.”33 However, in 1860 the famous English explorer Richard Burton visited Utah and described the clothing as made of plain cloth, occasionally silk, and sometimes faded finery such as you would see in “an Old-Country Vil-

Figure 3. Detail of a page from an 1859 Camp Floyd account book, with a line reading “1 Set Brass Hoops for a Lady.”

Figure 4. Eliza R. Snow, as photographed by Marsena Cannon in the early to mid-1850s. Here, Snow wears a dress with the Y-shaped bodice and straight sleeves of the 1840s, as well as the long corset style, popular until 1853, that flattened women’s chests. The date for this photograph is based on the 1846 Mormon exit from Nauvoo; it seems there was no cameraman among them until Cannon arrived, as evidenced in his advertisement for daguerreotypes in the December 1850 Deseret News.

Courtesy of the LDS Church History Library

lage.”34 As late as 1863, the adoption of the style was still spotty, but by 1865 it had become common, although Utah remained years behind the fashion centers of the eastern United States.35 Many of these reports should be read with caution because they often contradict each other and many of them seem to be sensationalized.

Reading between the lines, however, reveals that contemporary fashion was slowly making its way into Utah, mirroring the breakup of isolation, an increased desire for outside commercial goods, and a decrease in the LDS church’s ability to so tightly dictate its members’ indulgence in worldly dress and behavior.

Photographs and material evidence support the timeline established by written accounts for the adoption of hoops, with the first photographic evidence of women in Utah who might

be wearing hoops dating from around 1860 to 1863.36 Images of prominent women show the shift in fashion amongst Mormon women from the 1850s to the 1860s. One photograph of Eliza R. Snow, probably from the early to mid-1850s, shows her in late 1840s fashion (fig. 4).37 In an 1866 photograph Snow wears a dress in an 1860s style (fig. 5) that would require a hoop, demonstrating that even the most prominent Mormon women had adopted the hoopskirt at least by this late date. A photograph of Sarah Carmichael from 1862 definitively shows that she is wearing a hoop, since the chair next to her has flattened the front of her hoop and pushed it out in the back (fig. 6). The establishment of Camp Douglas in 1862 may have furthered the hoop craze since the wives of officers appear to have worn hoops as well, as seen in an undated photograph from Camp Douglas. The presence of crinoline at Camp Douglas can be fur-

Courtesy of the LDS Church History Library

Figure 5. Eliza R. Snow, 1866, photographed by Savage and Ottinger. Snow’s dress here is typical of the 1860s and has the typical bell shape created by a hoop.

Figure 6.

Courtesy, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU

ther corroborated by the many advertisements for crinoline in the Union Vedette newspaper, which was published at the camp, from 1863 to 1865.38 Many other photographs of women support these findings,39 and two surviving wire hoops—likely from the late 1860s—document the use of hoops in Utah (figs. 7 and 8).40

Other photographs illustrate that even Brigham Young’s family was not immune to the fashion changes. Images of his wives, for instance, show the change over time toward the adoption of hoops. In a photograph from the late 1850s, Margaret Pierce Young wears a pointed bodice in the style of the late 1840s to early 1850s, demonstrating that some women had at least one fancy dress and that the fashion was still somewhat behind.41 A photograph of Brigham with Amelia Folsom Young, likely taken in 1863, shows Amelia in a dress consistent with east-

Figure 7. A wire hoop owned by Pamela Barlow Thompson, who was born in 1844. Although a handwritten note dates this item to 1855, it is highly unlikely that Thompson would have worn a hoopskirt at age eleven. In addition, steel wire hoops were not invented until 1855. This hoop might have been manufactured in 1855 but it is not likely that is was being used in Utah by Thompson in 1855.

Utah Pioneer Costume and Manners Project, item 238. University of Utah

ern fashions, although decidedly subdued in color and decoration. The full skirts seem to match those of other women in hoops. Finally, in a group portrait from circa 1862, Young’s ten oldest daughters wear clothing appropriate for young women of the 1860s, off-the-shoulder dresses with wide skirts similar to those seen in pictures from the East (fig. 9).42

By the 1860s many prominent people, including Brigham Young’s wives and daughters, wore current fashions that reflected their status and relative wealth.43 Yet these fashions seemed to contradict sermons given from Young’s own mouth, as well as from Heber C. Kimball and

Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael, circa 1862, photographed by Savage and Ottinger. Notice how the chair presses on Carmichael’s dress and pushes the hoop back.

ligious injunction to be humble and at the same time a zeal to excel and bring Mormon culture to a higher standard.47 In one sermon, Brigham Young lauded home manufacture that was plain and useful and in another sermon urged the Saints to create “silks and satins of the finest quality and patterns from the looms of Deseret, onward and upward until the whole earth in filled with the glory of God.”48

Figure 8. A

Phoebe, who were also sisters. Records do not state which wife owned this hoop. A handwritten note dates this piece to 1853, which is unlikely since wire hoops were not invented until 1855.

Elizabeth

Utah Pioneer Costume and Manners Project, item 574. University of Utah

other church leaders. In 1852 Young had instructed men and women to provide for their families with homemade products. Ten years later he still implored, “I have seen the handsomest homemade plaid in this city that I ever saw in any country. I would like to see them wear it when they go to parties, instead of donning silks and satins.”44 Mormon beliefs about worldliness came from the general Puritan leanings of many religious groups in America, which emphasized that a plain and simple but clean appearance was best suited to a religious person.45 The LDS Doctrine and Covenants commands “let all thy garments be plain, and their beauty the beauty of the work of thine own hands.”46

Latter-day Saints struggled between the re-

Mormon leaders were not the first to champion home manufacture for self-sufficiency and as a guard against worldliness. Home manufacture became a leading symbol of American virtue in the years leading up to and following the American Revolution; imported clothing was, in turn, a symbol of dependency on, and thus subjugation to, a foreign entity.49 The same desire for independence from any foreign group, which the Mormons considered the United States to be, was a consistent theme of their sermons.50 Despite railing against imported clothing, these sermons were not about punishing the Saints with ugly homemade clothes but rather were more of an attempt to support an independent economy that did not rise and fall with the economy of their perceived persecutors. The beginning of the Civil War provided proof to Mormons that the policy of self-sufficiency had been a good one.51

Hoops were first specifically singled out as an object of ridicule by church leaders in a June 7, 1863, sermon by Brigham Young, who was again urging homemade items over imported fashions:

It has been strenuously argued by our ladies that hoops are cool and comfortable fashion, but I cannot understand how they derive the benefit that is claimed for crinoline when the accustomed quantity of clothing is still worn. . . . “We put on crinoline and the accustomed number of garments in the summer to keep us comfortably cool and in the winter to keep us comfortably warm.” I argue that a dress made of Utah yarn, worn over a reasonable quantity of underclothing, would be more light, comfortable and healthy than the style of dress now used by our ladies.52

wire hoop owned by one of the plural wives of John B. Maiben,

and

Young and other leaders set themselves up as examples to the church members in their sermons. He declared, “I am perfectly able to send to the East and buy what I and my family need, but there is a mighty influence in a good example, and what would my precept be worth without my example.”53 Heber C. Kimball was the most adamant of the church leaders advocating for home manufacture and against worldly fashions. In a December 1857 sermon Kimball boldly stated, “I am opposed to your nasty fashions and everything you wear for the sake of fashion,” continuing, “You may take all such dresses and new fashions, and inquire into their origin, and you will find, as a general thing, they are produced by the whores of the great cities of the world.”54 Kimball promised, “I am going to work to put into the earth every kind of seed, and I want my wives to take an interest in these things, in raising the flax and making the cloth.”55 Earlier, Kimball had stated that one of his wives was a spinner of wool who

never wore calico, which apparently elicited a response of laughter from the crowd, since he responded “You may laugh at it.”56 It seems. Kimball often promised women in his household would get their act together, since he was still promising it in 1862.57

Even though Kimball and Young preached against elaborate fashions, their wives and daughters apparently had other ideas. Both men often revealed a lack of control over their families’ actions. In 1857, speaking generally, Kimball stated “I have one or two women that I cannot control, and never did; and I would as soon try to control a rebellious mule as to control them.”58 In sermons from the 1870s, many years after hoops had gone out of fashion, Young disclosed he was still trying to get his wives and daughters to give up their apparently unceasing appetite for fashion. He remarked in 1870:

Figure 9. The ten oldest daughters of Brigham Young and his plural wives; these young women were all born in 1849 and 1850. This photograph was likely taken in 1862 but probably not before 1860, because the girls look about thirteen or fourteen years old.

Utah State Historical Society

Some, no doubt, feel ready to say, “Why, Brother Brigham, do not you know that your family is the most fashionable in the city?” No, I do not; but I am sure that my wives and children, in their fashions and gewgaws, cannot beat some of my neighbors. I will tell you what I have said to my wives and children; shall I? . . . I have said to my wives, “If you will not stop these foolish fashions and customs I will give you a bill if you want it.” That is what I have said, and that is what I think. “Well, but you would not part with your wives?” Yes, indeed I would. I am not bound to wife or child . . . but the Gospel of the Son of God.59

In another instance, Young set himself and his family up as paragons of virtue by noting that “My wives dress very plainly” but then qualified that statement: “I sometimes ask them the utility of some of the stripes and puffs which I see on their dresses.”60 After so many deprivations in isolation, the small rebellions of the women of Kimball and Young’s families demonstrate a larger struggle for Mormon women searching for autonomy. Hoopskirts and other styles might well have represented a form of self-expression to these women, one they were unwilling to give up.

Many later sermons continued to exhort women to plainness as new fashion trends passed through Utah, demonstrating that LDS leaders could not control the women in their own families or the women of the church in general.61 An anecdote about Mary Hafen, a pioneer of Washington County, further reinforces the idea that Brigham Young’s wives did not practice what they preached as they traveled around the territory advocating simplicity of dress:

They told us how it was the wish of the President that we should do away with all our extravagances in dress and habits. I looked around at the women in the audience. We were all in homespun, coarse and faded-looking. . . . And the speaker wore a silk dress with wide bands of velvet ribbon and lace edging. I sat there and listened as long as I could stand it, and

then I said, “Which do you want us to retrench from, Sister Young, the bread or the molasses?”62

Although few indications exist of how women themselves felt about the rebukes from their male leaders, this brief exchange reveals frustration with the constant harping from Salt Lake City on the subject of dress. Likewise, Susa Young Gates, writing about the retrenchment efforts, reported that “the sacrifice was big to them; small wonder there was shrinking and doubt.”63

Brigham Young was not the first religious or social leader to preach against fashions like the hoopskirt nor was he the last. Since the 1600s, many predecessors of the hoopskirt had been maligned by pastors and priests who feared that these fashions gave women more freedom from the heavy skirts of earlier times and represented foreign influences from places such as France.64 Likewise, periodicals in the nineteenth century regularly reported on reverends and pastors questioning the morality of fashionable clothing and going so far as to say wearing hoops was unchristian and indecent, a message surprisingly similar to Young’s.65

There was more to the question of hoopskirts than morality, however, as the story of Mary Hafen’s bread and molasses demonstrates: it was also an issue of class, something Mormons felt keenly. While LDS church leaders frowned upon class distinctions, some people in Utah managed to be more prosperous than others. More importantly, Mormons wanted to aspire to the levels of civility they had enjoyed before they joined the church and left their comforts behind; they wanted to show that they had achieved a level of refinement comparable to their non-Mormon counterparts.66 After years of hard living on the plains and no matter the exhortations against fashion by their leaders, many Mormon women wanted to be like other Victorian women.

Generally, in the nineteenth century—an age of increasing democratization of fashion due to factory-made clothing and a rising middle class—the lower classes tried to emulate the fashions that had begun with the wealthy.67 Fashion was a place where people could demon-

strate aspirations to higher social classes, and “consumption became almost a symbol of what it was to be middle-class.”68 Fashion was a sign of leisure, and leisure was a sign of wealth.69 However, there was a fine line that women had to walk to not be overly ostentatious or else they risked crossing over into vulgarity. Dress was thus an indication of the wearer’s level of morality.70 Extravagance could also be a sign of immoral women who worshipped fashion and bankrupted their husbands to buy yards of fabric, something often mocked in the leading magazines of the day.71 Mormon culture also equated loose women and excesses of dress.72

Just so, the silliness of the hoopskirt was a favorite topic in the contemporary press. An 1857 issue of Punch, for instance, illustrated the impracticality of sitting in hoops with a drawing of a young woman encased by her hoops.73 Although this embarrassing faux-pas was possible, the spring-like quality of the steel or whalebone actually caused the hoops to collapse upon sitting and most women would have known how to sit properly in their skirts before going out in public. Punch might have known that was the case, but it was underscoring the absurdity of a fashion that men did not like and did not see as practical. Story after farcical story exists of women being unable to fit in carriages, having their skirts flipped over, knocking down plants and children, and even being lifted in and out of crinolines with a crane.74

The conflict over women’s fashions in the nineteenth century reflects the larger struggle of women’s control over their clothing and bodies, and society’s reaction to changing female roles. Accordingly, contemporaries and scholars alike have offered a host of interpretations of hoopskirts. The Victorian period was the heyday of the so-called cult of true womanhood, when both men and women advocated a return to traditional domestic roles for women. The popularity of this movement was a reaction against trends seen in society that were threatening the stability of traditional gender roles and sexuality.75 Proponents of true womanhood elevated women as keepers of civility and portrayed them as passionless figures who helped control men’s lust.76 Pride in the woman’s sphere was a hallmark of the philosophy of true womanhood and can be seen in the satisfaction Mormon women took in their domestic production and

female associations.77 Meanwhile, many female defenders of polygamy used the philosophies of true womanhood to explain how polygamy was the perfect system for corralling men’s appetites.78 In one interpretation, the cult of true womanhood and its interest in elevating women went hand-in-hand with the choice of women to wear hoops, because “women willingly adopted the hoop as a means of protecting, controlling, and, ultimately, liberating female sexuality.”79 Hoops could represent the protection of women, as they kept men at a distance, and a mimicry of pregnancy, reaffirming the purpose of the anatomy of women.80

If hoops have been portrayed as a barrier to sexuality, they have also been seen as a sign of eroticism and immorality. Some historians have offered a feminist reading of Victorian women’s clothing, remarking on its physical and social restrictiveness as well as the coinciding objectification of women by men. Notably Helene E. Roberts called Victorian women “exquisite slaves,” suggesting “an underlying masochism.”81 In this case, the restrictive clothing did the abusing, caging the wearer and inflicting physical pain upon her for the gaze of the man.82 The hoopskirt also had erotic elements, which were noted by some contemporary men. The swinging crinoline allowed for glimpses of ankles and legs, and the possibility of the hoop overturning and revealing undergarments was titillating.83 And according to nineteenth-century feminist dress reformers, women’s fashions were a tool of men to rule women and incite lust.84

Other historians question this interpretation because of the amount of vitriol leveled against the hoopskirt in the male-dominated media of the nineteenth century: men mocked the fashion at every opportunity. Lynda Nead posits that men hated the hoopskirt so much because it posed a safety risk and because its physical size symbolically showed the expansion of women beyond their place in society, literally and figuratively crowding men out.85 Newspapers and magazines of the day record the struggle men had with the hoopskirt; as one scholar puts it, “the hoop represented a female-dominated sexual and social space, which they could neither share nor control. Their only weapon against this female fortress was satire, and it proved ineffectual.”86

Teachings from the leaders of the church suggest that Mormon men also hated contemporary fashions and were concerned about gender roles but not as much about eroticism of women’s clothing. Louis Kern, in his study of sexuality in religious utopias, briefly discusses fashion and sexuality in Mormon culture. He states emphatically, “Mormons, although concerned about economy, were more concerned with the seductive and contraceptive aspects of female fashion than anything else.”87 Little evidence exists to support this assertion; in fact the opposite is more correct.88 Church leaders condemned fashion in an attempt to stem the tide of worldliness in consumption and excess.89 Young called for modesty for both men and women but rarely in reference to clothing. LDS authorities preached warning sermons encouraging the women not to become like women of the world rather than chastisements for inciting a mass hysteria of lust among the men. Young and Kimball were much more concerned with the economic impact of worldly fashions and the encouragement of home manufacture.

Contemporaries also often ridiculed hoopskirts for distorting women’s natural shape and way of walking.90 Both male doctors and female dress and health reformers saw the fashion as artificial and therefore immoral. Men advocated that women return to a natural shape so they could get back to their natural role of procreation.91 Feminist dress reformers wanted a return to a natural shape for opposite reasons. They felt that if women could show their natural form then they would be freed from social constraints and allowed all rights that men had.92 However, the general complaint for most women’s fashions, especially crinoline, was simply that they were ridiculous—as were their wearers.93

All told, the sheer volume of anti-crinoline sentiment in the media demonstrates that men were not in favor of many of women’s fashions, which contradicts many of the arguments of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists. Accordingly, other historians have interpreted Victorian fashion in ways that relate to female agency rather than male pleasure. David Kunzle argues that Victorian women wore fashionable clothing not as “exquisite slaves” but rather in subversion of social norms—in-

cluding those from medical and religious leaders—in an attempt to assert their own identity and because they liked it.94 In this interpretation, the woman who wore hoops was not a “sexually and creatively inhibited Victorian woman” but rather a deliberately sexual and creative Victorian woman.95 Fashion, especially in the rising consumer culture of the nineteenth century, was a tool used by both men and women to indicate social status, morality, and gender. For women, fashion was a place not dominated by men where they could take control of their sexuality, construct an identity, and be daring and creative.96 This was true for Mormon women, as evidenced by the “passive rebellion” of the women in the families of the leaders of the church, not to mention the women of the entire church.97

Nineteenth-century Mormons were an interesting mixture of traditional values and revolutionary views on relationships and roles for men and women and society. Noted religion scholar Lawrence Foster has remarked that the Mormons were “more Victorian than . . . Victorians,” especially in their views of male authority and patriarchy.98 In fashion, however, women had an aspect of their lives they controlled because they were the sole creators of clothing. Rather than signifying sin or corruption to women, the desire to add ribbons and frills to their dresses was an act of reclaiming some of the civility they had left behind and expressing themselves individually. It is not surprising that women put much of their self-expression and pride of creation into production of silk, cotton, and wool and the making of clothing.

In some ways, many Mormons were actually more progressive in gender roles than the rest of Victorian society, as seen by their promotion of women’s education and voting rights, as well as their participation in dress reform.99 Mormon women were interested early in clothing reform, which often went hand in hand with female liberation and suffrage, forming a Female Council of Health in 1851 to discuss alternatives to the long skirts and heavy petticoats of the day.100 As frontier women they needed clothing that allowed them to work with more ease of movement. Eventually the “Deseret Costume,” a variation on the Bloomer costume (fig. 10), was created; even Brigham Young promoted it.101 In reality most Mormon women did

trousers. Men considered trousers as solely the prerogative of men.103 For men, these liberations in clothing represented a loosening of morals and sexuality and a movement to be more socially free as men were. Most of the objections to the bloomer and the hoop voiced in the media focused less on morality and more on the blurring of traditional gender roles. A fear that women would become more like men was a major point the detractors of dress reform made.104

Church leaders’ views did echo general fears across the country that women were getting out of their spheres and “endeavoring to be a man,” as the Deseret News put it in 1862.105 Likewise, Kimball warned against women who wore unmentionables (meaning trousers or drawers) and did men’s work.106 It is important to note that the theme of women becoming like men, which runs through the discourse of Victorian society, was also being dealt with in Utah. Concerns about extravagant dress and dress reform were just one side of the ever-evolving debate over the place of women in society.

Figure 10. The famous bloomer costume, named after the suffragist Amelia Bloomer. Dress reform for women represented freedom from the heavy petticoats of the 1820s to 1840s, and women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Bloomer advocated for it. When the crinoline was invented, Bloomer relinquished the bloomer costume, stating that the crinoline was freeing enough to allow her to return to dresses.

not wear the bloomer or Deseret Costume and, like Amelia Bloomer herself, they may have found hoopskirts convenient enough that the bloomer was not needed.102

Other changes in fashion during this period included the adoption of women’s bifurcated underpants, called drawers or pantaloons. Bifurcated undergarments protected women from accidently exposing too much leg because of the swaying of their hoopskirts. The drawers also protected their modesty if, heaven forbid, the wind caught their dress or they sat awkwardly and the hoop lifted up. However, the widespread adoption of drawers was uniformly ridiculed because bifurcated garments were seen as masculine and dangerously too close in style to

In 1867, Mormon leaders took an important step in addressing changing roles for women by reestablishing a church-wide Relief Society. As Kami Wilson puts it, “the Relief Society became the answer to the woman question in Utah. The society provided a structure within which women could improve themselves, function outside of the home in building the kingdom of God, and stretch the borders of their sphere in an acceptable and appropriate manner.”107

The 1860s signaled a decade of increased adherence to the ideals of retrenchment and home manufacture as outside forces threatened the isolation of Utah and the arrival of the Transcontinental Railroad finally blew it apart. However, it was these very outside forces—including occupying forces, the Overland Mail, and the trade with new mines—that bolstered the economy in Utah enough to fund the Mormons’ experiments in self sufficiency.108 The coming of the train prompted one last call for the Mormon women to band together against the forces of Babylon. The reformation of Relief Societies from 1867 to 1868 served to help women avoid the temptations the railroad would bring. Additionally “Retrenchment Societies” of young women, encouraged plain dress and homemade cloth-

Library of Congress

ing. Later, in the 1870s and 1880s, the LDS church addressed problems with buying from non-Mormon merchants by creating cooperative stores, but these cooperatives were created after the heyday of the hoopskirt.109 By the time the train arrived, hoops had begun to go out of fashion so the preaching of the leaders turned away from the evils of hoopskirts; however, there was no shortage of worldly women’s fashions for to focus on.

Brigham Young was one of many people in the increasingly industrialized society of the mid-nineteenth century who looked back to as previous age and saw its home manufacture as more simple, ideal, and pure.110 Mormon leaders continued to support home manufacture for many years after the fashion for hoops had changed and with the arrival of the train the warnings grew in force. Then, eventually, as it did during the American Revolution, rough homespun gave way to readymade. Mormons let go of the virtues of clothing made by hand and turned instead to store-bought clothing as a symbol the success and refinement of God’s chosen people.111

For a brief time, hoop mania captivated the women of Utah. The timing of this trend coincided with a breakdown of isolation. The historical evidence of hoopskirt advertisements, diaries, letters, and photographs demonstrate that hoops were being worn by some in Utah at least by 1860. The fashion was probably not widespread until 1863 at the earliest and then only among the relatively wealthy and prominent and those of middle class who aspired to follow them. Despite their isolation, the Mormons struggle with hoop mania mirrored larger issues of sexuality, gender, class, and morality being debated throughout the United States. In addition, hoop mania was a symptom of a larger dispute over the roles of women in Mormon society. The fears of the Mormon leaders were justified in that the fashions and women of the outside world did set a pattern, and the women of Utah followed suit, at least with hoops.

Notes

1 Nauvoo Neighbor, October 29, 1845. This is a list of recommended provisions and weights for the journey. See

also Polly Aird, “Bound for Zion: The Ten- and Thirteen-Pound Emigrating Companies, 1853–54,” Utah Historical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2002): 318; Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, ed., Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000), 19.

2 Ruth Vickers Clayton, “Clothing and the Temporal Kingdom: Mormon Clothing Practices, 1847 to 1887” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 1987), 41.

3 Fairfax Proudfit Walkup, “The Sunbonnet Woman: Fashions in Utah Pioneer Costume,” Utah Humanities Review 1, no. 3 (July 1947): 219.

4 Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “Women’s Work on the Mormon Frontier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49, no. 3 (1981): 284.

5 U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1901), 2–3.

6 Brigham Young to Franklin D. Richards (September 30, 1855), Millennial Star, December 22, 1855. See also Young to Orson Pratt, January 31, 1857.

7 Walkup, “Sunbonnet Woman” 204.

8 Deseret News, May 14, 1856.

9 Deseret News, January 25, 1851, February 21, 1852, February 1, 1855, October 3, 1855.

10 Perry E. Brocchus, “A Grave in the Wilderness,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, August 1853, 546; “Godey’s Arm Chair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, July 1859, 90.

11 A. R. Mortensen, “A Pioneer Paper Mirrors the Breakup of Isolation in the Great Basin,” Utah Historical Quarterly 20 (1952): 85.

12 Walkup, “Sunbonnet Woman,” 205.

13 Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (London: B. T. Batsford, 1954), 93; David Hough Jr., Hoop skirt, U.S. Patent 4584, June 16, 1846.

14 Clothide Amet and R. C. Milliet, British Patent 1729, July 22, 1856.

15 Sarah Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for Clothing, Their Makers and Wearers, 1839–1900 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986), 36.

16 Harper’s Weekly, October 10, 1857, November 28, 1857, and May 22, 1858; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 19, 1857; Nick Nax, June 1858.

17 Punch’s Almanack for 1858.

18 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 188, 192.

19 Beecher, “Women’s Work,” 278.

20 Deseret News, August 5, 1857, November 4, 1857, February 10, 1858, and March 10, 1858.

21 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 192. Reports in the Deseret News corroborate the lack of hoopskirts in Utah before the arrival of the Utah Expedition. The earliest mention of hoops appears in February 1856. Additional articles from May 1857 and February, April, and September 1858 reprint information about hoops from eastern periodicals. The local newspaper coverage of hoops indicates that before and directly after the army arrived, mention of hoops only appears in reprints; further, hoops were not yet advertised by local merchants.

22 Account Book, Camp Floyd, 1859–1860 (Radford, Cabot, and Co.), January–June 1859, MIC A 256, Utah State Archives and Record Service, Salt Lake City, Utah.

23 Valley Tan, August 31, 1859. The Valley Tan reported that Kimball’s speech occurred on August 21, 1859, in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, while in the Journal of Discourses it is recorded as being given on August 28.

24 Heber C. Kimball, August 28, 1859, in Journal of Dis -

courses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (London and Liverpool: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854–1886; reprint, Salt Lake City, 1967), 7:235.

25 Heber C. Kimball, December 27, 1857, Journal of Discourses, 6:192.

26 The phrase “valley tan” came to mean anything manufactured in Utah Territory, essentially home manufacture, so it was ironic that an article about a woman trying to keep up with the latest fashions was published in the Valley Tan

27 Kami Wilson, “Substance versus Superficiality: Women’s Prescribed Roles in Early Territorial Utah, 1850–70,” Journal of Mormon History 32, no. 2 (2006): 155. The Deseret News excerpted many eastern periodicals regarding female extravagance, demonstrating that moral authorities elsewhere in the nation considered it a problem.

28 Brigham Young, May 17, 1868, Journal of Discourses, 12:220.

29 Deseret News, September 28, 1859; Casey Finch, “‘Hooked and Buttoned Together’: Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female Body,” Victorian Studies 34, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 346.

30 Eileen V. Wallis, “The Women’s Cooperative Movement in Utah, 1869–1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 71, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 316.

31 Fred E. Woods, “Surely This City is Bound to Shine: Description of Salt Lake City by Western-Bound Emigrants, 1849–1868,” Utah Historical Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2006): 347. This is the earliest eyewitness account outside a newspaper indicating that some women had in fact adopted the fashion and some had not. Other evidence about the spotty adoption of hoops before 1857 comes from a humorous account in diary of a woman traveling the California Trail on June 19, 1857. She records that a wedding took place where the bride wore hoops, “We have read of hoops being worn, but they had not reached Kansas before we left so these are the first we’ve seen and would not recommend them for this mode of travelling.” If hoops had not reached Kansas by 1857 they were most likely not in more isolated Utah either. Sandra Myers, Ho! For California: Women’s Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1980), 111.

32 American Traveller, August 7, 1858.

33 Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser, November 19, 1859.

34 Richard Burton, City of the Saints (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1862), 259.

35 Dennis R. Defa, ed., “The Utah Letters of Alexander C. Badger, Jr.,” Utah Historical Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1990): 75; Union Vedette, August 17, 1865.

36 One way to determine if hoops may have been worn under the dress is if it is consistent with the styles of the late 1850s and early 1860s that necessitated hoops. Most photographs of such dresses that can be dated are no earlier than 1860. Hoops might have been adopted earlier in Utah, but this is not documented in photographs.

37 Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 15–16, 98; Nelson Wadsworth, “Zion’s Cameramen: Early Photographers of Utah and the Mormons,” Utah Historical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1972): 33.

38 Crinoline advertisements in the Union Vedette start November 27, 1863, and continue through 1865.

39 Two photos dated to circa 1860, one of Wilford Woodruff and his wife Sarah Brown and their three children

and another of an unidentified couple, may show more current fashions, but without firmer dates, it is hard to know for sure when women in Utah started wearing hoops. A Savage and Ottinger photograph of Sarah Kahn, a prominent businessman’s wife, was taken in at least 1862 (but more likely in about 1866) shows hoops. Two full-length photographs by Savage and Ottinger, one of Mrs. H. S. Eldridge and the other of Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael, help confirm what is difficult to ascertain in seated photos: that hoops were worn in Utah at least by around 1862.

40 Fairfax Proudfit Walkup, Utah Pioneer Costume and Manners Project, 1944–1947, University of Utah Research Committee, Utah Humanities Research Foundation, Item 574.

41 Nelson B. Wadsworth. Set in Stone, Fixed in Glass: The Great Mormon Temple and Its Photographers (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992). The pointed bodices of the late 1840s and early 1850s appear in photographs tentatively dated about five to ten years later than these fashions. This is corroborated by actual articles of clothing that have survived until today that demonstrate the Y-shape bodice was used throughout the 1850s.Walkup, Utah Pioneer Costume and Manners Project, Item 572.

42 Severa, Dressed for the Photographer, 108–109.

43 Wilson, “Substance versus Superficiality,” 154.

44 Brigham Young, January 26, 1862, Journal of Discourses, 9:173.

45 Richard Lyman Bushman, “Was Joseph Smith a Gentleman? The Standard for Refinement in Utah,” in Nearly Everything Imaginable: The Everyday Life of Utah’s Mormon Pioneers, eds. Ronald W. Walker and Doris R. Dant (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 32; Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003), 24.

46 The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1981), 42:40.

47 Bushman, “Was Joseph Smith a Gentleman?” 35.

48 Brigham Young, September 28, 1862, Journal of Discourses, 10:6.

49 Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1555–56.

50 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 112, 195–96.

51 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 195.

52 Brigham Young, June 7, 1863, Journal of Discourses, 10:204.

53 Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 10:203. Young made this remark at a time when most of the Saints were not in as enviable a financial position as he was.

54 Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, 6:191.

55 Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, 6:191.

56 Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, 6:132.

57 Beecher, “Women’s Work,” 285.

58 Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, 5:277.

59 Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 14:19.

60 Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 18:74; see also Young, Journal of Discourses, 15:39.

61 Young continued to rail against the women of the church up until the month before his death. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 19:75.

62 Juanita Brooks, Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1982), 112; see also, Gary Topping, “Another Look at Silver Reef,” Utah Historical Quarterly 79, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 301.

63 Susa Young Gates, History of the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1911), 10.

64 Shaun Horton, “Of Pastors and Petticoats: Humor and Authority in Puritan New England,” New England Quarterly 82, no. 4 (December 2009): 617, 629; Kimberly Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex: The Campaign against the Hoop Petticoat in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 10.

65 New York Times, September 15, 1858; W. N. Pendleton, “The Philosophy of Dress,” Southern Literary Messenger, March 1856, 199.

66 Foster, “Frontier Activism,” 13; Clayton, Clothing and the Temporal Kingdom, 152; Wallis, “Women’s Cooperative.” 331.

67 Victoria Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 71, 75; Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” 16–17.

68 Kay Boardman, “‘A Material Girl in a Material World’: The Fashionable Female Body in Victorian Women’s Magazines,” Journal of Victorian Culture 3, no. 1 (1998): 107.

69 Boardman, “Material Girl,” 97, 106; Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 11.

70 Boardman, “Material Girl,” 99, 106; Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 75.

71 Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 24; Lynda Nead, “The Layering of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 45, no. 5 (2013): 499; Punch May 2, 1857; Harper’s Weekly, October 31, 1857, 689–90.

72 Orson Hyde, October 6, 1854, Journal of Discourses, 2:87; Jedediah M. Grant, March 2, 1856, Journal of Discourses, 3:234; Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, 6:191.

73 Punch, September 18, 1858.

74 Punch, September 20, 1856, and February 6, 1858. True reports exist of women whose skirts caught on fire, which underscored, for opponents of hoopskirts, how foolish the fashion really was. New York Times, July 27, 1857, and March 16, 1858; Times, February 13, 1863, November 14, 1863, and January 23, 1867; Guardian, October 16, 1861; Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 75. Courtaulds textiles mill banned its workers from wearing hoops in 1860.

75 B. Carmon Hardy, “Lords of Creation: Polygamy, the Abrahamic Household, and Mormon Patriarchy” Journal of Mormon History 20, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 122, 124; Lawrence Foster, “From Frontier Activism to Neo-Victorian Domesticity: Mormon Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” Journal of Mormon History 6 (1979): 8.

76 Julie Dunfey, “‘Living the Principle’ of Plural Marriage: Mormon Women, Utopia, and Female Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” Feminist Studies 10, no. 3 (1984): 524, 529, 532.

77 Jill Mulvay Derr, “‘Strength in Our Union’: The Making of Mormon Sisterhood,” in Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, eds. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 169–70.

78 Karen M. Morin and Jeanne Kay Guelke, “Strategies of Representation, Relationship, and Resistance: British Women Travelers and Mormon Plural Wives, ca.

1870–1890,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, no. 3 (September 1998): 454–55.

79 Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” 7.

80 Horton, “Pastors and Petticoats,” 7; Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” 19–21.

81 Helene E. Roberts, “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman” Signs 2, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 556

82 Roberts, “Exquisite Slave,” 557.

83 Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 59, 114; Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 22–23.

84 Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 146–47.

85 Nead, “Layering of Pleasure,” 497–500.

86 Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” 22.

87 Kern, Louis J., An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, the Mormons and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 201.

88 Kern, An Ordered Love, 200-203. Kern uses many sources that are from non-Mormons and have anti-Mormon bias as well as recollections of people whose accounts differ from the Journal of Discourses and are not corroborated by other sources. Kern also makes conclusions about Mormon leaders that are not supported by any sources and wrongly attributes things that Heber C. Kimball said to Brigham Young,

89 Kern, An Ordered Love, 201. Kern portrays Brigham Young as a man who was “greatly allured by feminine dress and whose utterances exude an impotent rage at the teasing titillation of women beyond his power to control.” This implies, incorrectly, that Young was solely concerned about the sexual aspect of women’s clothing. Fashions and loose women were sometimes equated but there is no evidence of Young or any of the leaders expressing rage at being titillated by the women of the church. Kern also discusses a supposed quote from Heber C. Kimball wherein he states that women’s fashions were destroying their ability to procreate and thus put off their sole duty to be “breeders,” as Kern calls them. The quote, as found in the Journal of Discourses, which actually refers to men’s pantaloons, reads “Our boys are weakening their backs and their kidneys by girting themselves up as they do; they are destroying the strength of their loins and taking a course to injure their posterity.” Kern, An Ordered Love, 203; Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, 6:191.

90 Nead, “Layering of Pleasure,” 496, 500.

91 Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” 16.

92 Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 146–47; Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons and Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 83.

93 Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 147.

94 David Kunzle, “Dress Reform as Anti-Feminism, a Response to Helene E. Roberts’s ‘The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman,’” Signs 2, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 570–79; see also Nead, “Layering of Pleasure,” 502.

95 Boardman, “Material Girl,” 104.

96 Nead, “Layering of Pleasure,” 492, 507; Boardman, “Material Girl,” 97; Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 61; Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” 22; Dunfey, “Living the Principle,” 524.

97 Beecher, “Women’s Work,” 284.

98 Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 239.

99 Foster, “Frontier Activism,” 3, 9; Wilson, “Substance versus Superficiality,” 160; Hardy, “Lords of Creation,” 145. Mormon women attended one of the first coeducational colleges in the United States, established in 1850, and were allowed to vote by 1870. Brigham Young adamantly supported education for women in practical skills rather than things like learning French and needlework. Frontier life generally did a lot to even the playing field for both men and women, as women’s labor and talents could not be ignored when people were fighting for survival. Mormon women were able to do work that, under normal circumstances, was considered man’s work. This is true of frontier lifestyle in general, though, and was not specific to the Mormons. What was specific to the Mormons was polygamy, which could promote autonomy for women. Since their husbands were often gone on missions or occupied with church leadership roles, these women ran businesses and farms in their absence.

100 Richard L. Jensen, “Forgotten Relief Societies, 1844–67,” Dialogue 16, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 107.

101 Fischer, Pantaloons and Power, 98, 101; Dexter C. Bloomer, Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer (Boston: Arena, 1895), 72; Anita A. Stamper and Jill Condra, Clothing through American History: The Civil War through the Gilded Age, 1861–1899 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011), 111, Foster, “Frontier Activism,” 13; Wilson, “Substance versus Superficiality,” 150. Harper’s Weekly reveled in the connection between Mormons and the bloomer. One cartoon depicts an “American Harem” with Brigham Young and his wives in which some of the Mormon women wear bloomers. Detractors wanted to show the bloomer as something that strange, fringe people wore, thus devaluing the costume and the feminists who supported it. Harper’s Weekly, October 10, 1857; Fischer, Pantaloons and Power, 74.

102 Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 10:204.

103 Fischer, Pantaloons and Power, 21; Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 198.

104 Stamper and Condra, Clothing through American History, 109–110, 132; Fischer, Pantaloons and Power, 83, 98–100; Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 43.

105 Deseret News, September 3, 1862.

106 Heber C. Kimball, April 2, 1854, Journal of Discourses, 2:154. Women were to be led and not to lead their husbands; a natural order, which if reversed, would lead to the downfall of nations. Hardy, “Lords of Creation,” 119–152. In 1868 views on female enfranchisement changed and the Deseret News proudly proclaimed, “Women can be enfranchised without running wild or becoming unsexed.” Deseret News, March 20, 1869.

107 Wilson, “Substance versus Superficiality,” 168.

108 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 196.

109 Wallis, “Women’s Cooperative,” 316; Waugh, Corsets and Crinoline, 93; Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 252–53.

110 Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies,” 1584.

111 Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies,” 1578; Wilson “Substance versus Superficiality,” 151; Clayton, Clothing and the Temporal Kingdom, 152; Fischer, Pantaloons and Power, 75.

Sears, Roebuck and Company. In the early 1890s, Sears experienced great success selling goods via catalogues. The company opened its first brick and mortar store in 1925 as more people were moving out of the countryside and into cities and were less interested in shopping from a catalogue alone. By 1933 Sears had opened four hundred stores across the nation.

Chained Stores: Utah’s First Referendum and the Battle over Local Autonomy

BY TED MOORE

On January 20, 1941, Utah Senate president Wendell Grover introduced a bill to the legislature that would have levied a graduated income tax on chain stores operating ten or more units within the state. This tax was not unique to Utah and actually came at the tail end of a national movement that saw twenty-eight states and several cities pass similar legislation. Senate Bill 44 eventually became law after much debate and controversy, but it was never enforced because, for the first time in Utah’s history, voters used the referendum process to overturn a bill passed by the legislature. During the referendum campaign local and national businesses fought each other to sway voters through the legislative process, the court of public opinion, and the newspapers. This battle over corporate regulation and influence reveals the complicated and varied visions Utahns held regarding the economic opportunities, freedoms, and rights that they believed citizenship should offer, who would shape and define what those were, and how they should be secured. While both sides of the debate argued for preserving local and individual autonomy, each side sought to secure it in different ways; one emphasized communal prosperity through increased economic centralization and regulation, while the other stressed greater freedom for the individual through fewer regulations, more choice, and lower consumer prices.1

Up until the 1870s, most Americans lived in rural areas as farmers who largely produced and traded with others for what they needed. Retail activity in the United States was dominated by small, independent merchants who were neighbors and friends to their customers. These retailers served a social and cultural function by providing a public space

for people to interact and associate with one another. Their small and poorly stocked shops supplemented the goods most families could not produce for themselves. Merchants usually purchased merchandise in small quantities from supplying agents who represented wholesalers. The limited number of products purchased, combined with the agents’ sales commissions, drove up prices. This poor distribution system meant that manufactured goods were too expensive for most people to purchase in large quantities, especially in the rural areas of the South and the West.2

By the 1890s retailers in Canada and the United States had developed new marketing and distribution strategies that helped make manufactured goods more accessible and affordable. The first new successful business models were mail-order catalogues and department stores. Sears & Roebuck, for instance, grew dramatically in the years after its founding, roughly doubling its sales from $388,000 in 1893 to almost $800,000 in 1895—and by 1908 seeing its annual sales soar to more than $40 million. Thanks to wholesaler catalogue stores

like Sears, rural Americans purchased the same products as their city cousins and, in doing so, began to be more fully incorporated into a culture of corporate-driven consumption.3

Those who consumed these mass-produced items were also actively participating in the process of identity making. American manufactured goods represented national ingenuity, superiority, and prosperity. Commercial goods became visible markers of social class status, cultural identifiers, and national unifiers as people in Nephi, Utah, purchased the same items that sold in Chicago or New York City. Urban shoppers were also in the midst of a similar revolution as large department stores challenged the primacy of the smaller shops. The department stores lured customers through new forms of advertising from ads in popular magazines to elaborate window displays, more selections, credit options, and services such as home delivery.4

Local department stores took the lion’s share of retail business in the first decades of the twentieth century, but they saw competition for con-

Rowe and Kelly Company. Many department stores effectively used elaborate window displays to attract passersby into their stores.

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sumer dollars from chain stores. The first national chain store company in the United States was A&P Grocers which began business in 1859. By 1880 over a hundred small A&P stores were operating in and around New York City. It was not until after World War I, though, that these types of businesses began to fully capitalize on America’s enthusiastic turn towards consumption. Individual chains grew rapidly, especially in rural areas. For example J.C. Penney expanded from 312 stores in 1920 to 1,452 by 1930, with over half of these stores in towns of five thousand or fewer. In the same decade Walgreens expanded from twenty-three to 440 stores, and the A&P grocery chain increased to 15,737 stores. By the end of 1929 chains had accounted for almost eleven percent of all retail stores but more than twenty-two percent of total retail sales nationwide. In some areas, chains controlled even more of the market. For example, they accounted for more than forty-five percent of all shoe sales, ninety percent of all variety-store sales and almost forty percent of all grocery sales nationwide.5

As the chain stores proliferated critics charged that the chains were antithetical to American values. They saw them as monopolistic, and anti-democratic, and threatening to the econom-

ic well-being of small business owners. These concerns are reflected in Alabama Senator Hugo Black’s warning to Congress in 1930:

Chain groceries, chain dry-goods stores, chain clothing stores, here today and merged tomorrow—grow in size and power. We are rapidly becoming a nation of a few business masters and many clerks and servants. The local man and merchant is passing and his community loses his contribution to local affairs as an independent thinker and executive. A few of these useful citizens, thus supplanted, become clerks of the great chain machines, at inadequate salaries, while many enter the growing ranks of the unemployed. A wild craze for efficiency in production, sale and distribution has swept over the land, increasing the number of unemployed, building up a caste system, dangerous to any government.6

Chain stores had several key advantages over their independent competitors that allowed them to sell their products for less. First, they served as their own wholesalers and distributors, buying directly from manufacturers and avoiding the added costs of middlemen. In addition to a more efficient distribution system, chain store corporations systematically leveraged their size advantages over local, independent stores. For example, chains required “brokerage fees” to market a company’s products. By 1936 A&P was garnering six million dollars in advertising allowances and another two million dollars in brokerage fees from food manufacturers annually. As part of the advertising allowance contracts the chains created special in-store displays for the products, sent out circulars, ran radio ads, placed these products in the most prominent spaces throughout their stores, and agreed to run special sales that offered the products at well below regular prices.7

When manufacturers resisted or refused to comply with the brokerage fees, retailers “hid” their products at the back of the store and did not advertise their goods in weekly fliers until the fees were again paid. Locally owned stores could not leverage these types of deals because they could not provide as wide a distribution for

As the chain stores proliferated critics charged that the chains were antithetical to American values.

the products. As one Fleischman’s Yeast official explained, “Now any discounts or payments that we make to A&P and Kroger for cooperation are due to the fact that they are the two accounts in the country that can give us a broad market operation in promoting the sales of our yeasts.” Fleischman’s yeast paid $12,000 a month to A&P in brokerage fees because it gave them distribution access in over 14,000 stores, something a local grocery store could not do.8

Critics also charged that the chains squeezed farmers causing them to lose as much as three billion dollars a year in revenues from having to accept lower prices and that the chains paid lower wages to their workers. The chains recruited, trained, and paid their managers well in an effort to create company loyalty, and they made up the difference by often employing female teenagers as counter-help at a time when most store clerks were adult men.9

To fight back local merchants organized “trade at home” clubs with local umbrella trade organizations with names such as the “Allied Businessmen’s Association” and the “Community Builders.” In 1930, of the over 260 anti-chain organizations in the nation, only thirty-one were located outside of the South or Midwest, and 69 percent were in towns of less than 10,000. These groups called for boycotts of chains as well as organizing politically to pressure local and state governments to enact protective legislation, which was first attempted in Missouri in 1926.10

The courts routinely struck down early chain store laws for being discriminatory and arbitrary as they tended to only target national chain stores. Despite these failed attempts, in 1929, North Carolina and Indiana both enacted laws that managed to survive court challenges by imposing taxes on the second store operated by any owner. By taxing all multiunit retail operations the laws escaped charges that they arbitrarily discriminated against some chains while exempting others. Ultimately twenty-eight states passed anti-chain taxes between 1929 and 1941, thus setting the precedent for Utah’s legislation that same year. Of the state laws, twenty-two managed to survive court challenges and hostile referenda over the next decade.11

In addition to the local and state efforts, there had also been an attempt at the national level to regulate chains. A group of independent store owners persuaded Congress to launch a series of investigatory hearings led by a congressman from Texas named Wright Patman. Many Americans blamed the Great Depression on too much corporate power and influence and they believed that more corporate regulations would help right the economy. This political climate meant that calls for more regulations to try and level the playing field could more easily find traction. As a result, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act in 1936. This law made it illegal for producers to offer their product at a discount to some retailers but not to others. The legislation also forbade retailers from selling their merchandise at a discount for an extended period of time in a specific region. Patman’s success emboldened him in 1938 to unsuccessfully introduce an anti-chain store bill that would have levied a tax of $49,000 per unit annually on any chain that operated 500 or more stores.12

Patman’s failure reflected an ideological and policy shift that was taking place at the federal level. New Deal policy makers ultimately decided that regulations on corporations had reached its peak of effectiveness in combatting the Great Depression and they needed to do more to incentivize larger companies to start hiring more people. This could come through lower prices on products which would encourage consumption, which would spur more production and jobs. This would ultimately come at a cost to the small, locally owned businesses. As Professor of Law Richard C. Schragger notes, up through the late 1930s, “The anti-chain store movement urged federal and state interference into the workings of the national market in order to preserve local economic and political independence, not to supersede it. And it insisted that the government act to ensure both the prosperity of the nation as a whole and the prosperity of the particular communities in that nation.”13

By 1940, though, the federal and state governments, in partnership with large corporations, had begun to push the idea that, “Being an avid, loyal consumer was everyone’s civic responsibility . . . True Americanism depended on spending . . . business (and government)

Walgreen Drug Company, on southeast corner of 200 South Main Street, Salt Lake City, ca. 1930s. Walgreen expanded from twenty-three to 440 stores between 1920 and 1930. In 1934 the company opened its first “super store” in Tampa, Florida, which was more than twice the size of the average store. This was soon followed by the store pictured here in Salt Lake City.

thus placed consumer choice at the center of American liberty.” American corporations in particular pushed the idea that the freedom to choose in the marketplace is what helped to define freedom and citizenship and what made America unique. Thus, lower prices, along with increased competition from national chains, fit this new ideological re-conception of the economic structure that favored national wealth over local economic prosperity. It is in this shifting context that the Utah legislature began seriously considering its own tax on national chain stores in 1941.14

References to a chain store tax in Utah begin to show up as early as 1933 in conjunction with a state imposed two percent sales tax and several other tax measures to cover government short-falls as the Great Depression worsened. The proposed chain store bill failed and the issue flew under the radar for several more years even though Idaho and Colorado passed bills in 1933 and 1934, respectively. In Idaho, the state

defended the tax on the basis that it would garner between $60,000 and $100,000 in tax revenue to fund public schools. Safeway and J.C. Penney took the state to court but dropped the suit and began paying the tax on their combined seventy-eight stores after the Idaho Supreme Court ruled in the state’s favor and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.15

In Utah by 1941 the number of national chain store units had reached as high as 387 compared to 6,000 independent stores. Yet the chains, depending on the industry, accounted for anywhere between 13 and 20 percent of all retail sales in the state, and that cut of the pie was steadily increasing.16 With this mounting economic threat to local merchants, anti-chain legislation, or Senate Bill 44, was introduced by Senate president Wendell Grover from Murray and Senator Thomas Bailey representing Juab and Tooele counties. Grover had a reputation and a track record of being a sympathetic champion for workers’ rights while Bailey was the

H. C. Shoemaker was district manager for Sears, Roebuck and Company and the spokesman for the Utah Chain Store Association. Shoemaker opposed Senate Bill 44 because he felt that the bill would curb the success of chain stores and hurt taxpayers.

owner of the Bailey Grocery Company in Nephi and served as the director of the Commercial Bank of Nephi. The proposed tax was designed to discourage the national chains from further expansion in the state by taxing fifty dollars per unit for any company that had less than one hundred stores nationally and up to $500 per unit on companies that had more than five hundred stores nationwide. In other words, if a national chain had just one store in Utah but one hundred stores throughout the nation, the company would be taxed for all stores. Federal courts had already declared this part of the law to be legal since chains used their national infrastructures to subsidize local stores through advertising, marketing, and distribution. The more innovative aspect of Utah’s law rested with the clause that any preexisting store that expanded its square footage or relocated would face additional taxes.17

The legislation attracted immediate opposition from the national chains. The chain stores, having fought this national trend elsewhere, pre-

emptively created the Utah Chain Stores Association in 1939 and published a pamphlet that would serve as the basis for their campaign in 1941. Among the document’s highlights were the claims that the chains contributed to the state’s economy by paying higher wages than local retailers, that they had annually paid more than $16.6 million dollars to Utah’s farmers and manufacturers, and $1.1 million dollars in local and state taxes, and that only three cents of every dollar spent in their stores was profit. The association was also very upfront in warning that they would pass along any new taxes to the consumer. Finally, the national chains cautioned that a tax would force them to leave the state and prevent them from buying surplus agricultural products from local farmers, thus resulting in financial ruin for those independent producers.18

Consequently, resistance to the tax also came from many agricultural organizations. Some of the groups that fought against the legislation included the Utah Beet Growers Association, Utah Wool Growers’ Association, the Dairymen’s Association, and the Celery and Onion Growers Associations. A spokesperson representing Utah’s livestock and poultry producers also opposed the bill and echoed the chains’ threats by explaining that the tax would “close outlets for their products.”19

The local groups leading the defense of the tax were the Utah Retail Grocers’ Association, the Utah Pharmaceutical Association, and the wholesale grocery firms. Donald P. Lloyd, a former secretary of the Utah Retail Grocers’ Association and a manager of the Associated Food Stores, claimed that the bill had not been designed to eliminate chains but to curb their growth to protect Utah-based business owners. His argument postulated that government policies should protect local economic opportunity. Lloyd asserted that chain stores, “bludgeoned their way to over 20 per cent of the retail business in the state. We do not want to destroy the chain stores. But we feel they have made all the advances they are entitled to in this state. Senate Bill 44 is designed to maintain the status quo. Its purpose is to curb monopoly and stimulate individual enterprise.”20

As S.B. 44 was being debated in the legislature, proponents and opponents marshaled their forces and made their cases across the state to

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various clubs and influential community organizations. H. C. Shoemaker, district manager for Sears & Roebuck and the spokesman for the Utah Chain Store Association, presented the main brief for the opposition. He argued that the bill “was not a revenue measure because it would hurt the taxpayer, and the real purpose of the legislation was to destroy chain stores in the interest of a few disgruntled competitors.” Chains annually spent $27 million in the state by purchasing excess farm produce, he argued. If the bill passed it would harm farmers, producers, laborers, and consumers through higher prices.21

Proponents of the legislation countered with several arguments that centered on fairness and the preservation of economic autonomy. Logan city commissioner Vern Muir for example, complained that chain operators in Logan benefitted from many services, such as utilities, that local residents had paid for in taxation. H. G. Ericksen, a Mt. Pleasant food distributor, offered that “chains mean the disappearance of small business owners.” Without much evidence, he also accused the chains of depressing farm produce prices through their buying and selling tactics.22

The Utah Senate, which was controlled by the Democratic Party with nineteen of the twen-

ty-three senators, was highly divided on the issue. In fact, the political divisions over the bill are not easy to categorize as they cut across party and geographic lines. For example, Democratic senator Stanley Child of Salt Lake City was in favor of the legislation: Grant Macfarlane, also a Democratic senator representing Salt Lake City, led the opposition against it. Thomas Bailey from rural Juab County was for the bill, while Abel S. Rich of rural Box Elder County opposed it as “un-American.” Both sides defined the bill in terms of their own definitions of personal freedoms, and they linked their arguments to economic “rights.” Those for the bill considered chain stores to be the enemy of free market capitalism and a stifler of community prosperity, while those opposed to the tax interpreted the bill as the enemy of the free market because it offered protective privileges to a few at the expense of the many.23

When the bill came up for debate, Grant MacFarlane along with his fellow democratic colleague Abel S. Rich led the charge to defeat the measure. MacFarlane waged a filibuster against the bill by first threatening to read Gone with the Wind, but ultimately by delivering a “history lesson” on retail stores beginning with the Roman Empire. This prompted the Senate president to call a special session devoted exclusively to the legislation. The following day George Miller of Carbon County interrupted the filibuster and proposed that discussion be limited to ten minutes per person. Ira Huggins of Weber County objected by commenting that the suspension of the Senate rules was “mob rule.” The Senate’s “gag rule” issuance was met with even more heated debate when Huggins and Arthur O. Ellett of Utah County traded insults. Ellett, who was for the tax, accused Huggins of using “obstructionist politics.” Huggins responded by saying he would “say the meanest thing possible” about Ellett and then called on everyone to “examine his (Ellett’s) record.” Ellett then replied that “the record will show that I haven’t held the floor as long as has Senator Huggins.” They started yelling at each other until order was finally restored. Eventually the Senate passed the bill thirteen to ten, with ten Democrats voting for its passage along with three of the four Republicans.24

The House had three alternative versions to the Senate bill, so it decided to wait on the

outcome in the Senate before taking up the issue. Under the Senate Bill, banks, gas stations, and utility companies with showrooms that displayed and sold appliances were exempt from the tax. One amendment in the House attempted to de-exempt these entities and reduce the threshold of when the tax kicked in from ten units down to four, but it failed. The legislation passed the House with less theatrics, thirty-nine to nineteen, but many Representatives were still conflicted over the legislation. For example B. L. Frandsen of Carbon County reported receiving several telegrams from constituents opposing the tax, including one from the Price Chamber of Commerce, while he also received several from local farmers who were for the bill. L. N. Marsden Jr., a Republican from Iron County, voted against the bill because he thought it was wrong in principle, even though he was an independent owner who had been hurt by the chains. Meanwhile, Don Clyde, a Democrat from Wasatch County, opposed the bill in principle, but voted for it because so many of his constituents approved of it.25

Members of the House and Senate also faced a fierce lobbying campaign laced with intimidation and deception. Senate President Grover complained being, “subjected to unusual pressure with respect to this bill. I was called at my home last night and asked whether I preferred this bill or the housing bill.” Clifton Kerr, a Republican from Box Elder County owned a wholesale clothing company and requested to abstain from voting after being notified by both the chains and independent stores he supplied that “my vote on this bill would determine my business in the future.” House rules forced him to vote and he ultimately sided in favor as, “experience had shown that there is an inequality between chain and independent merchants.” Finally, Ray H. Leavitt of Utah County complained that he had received twenty-nine unaddressed telegrams opposed to the tax.26

It is clear that the state Democratic Party was already split philosophically on many economic issues—one faction hoping to secure local and state prosperity through protective and regulatory legislation, another believing that the key to the state’s economic security would only really happen through a “freer” local free market. This split had manifested itself in sev-

eral issues prior to the chain tax. In the 1930s the state legislature had created “protective tariffs” for Utah businesses and farmers with a series of regulatory trade barriers. For example, an excise tax and a special licensing fee for non-Utah-based margarine manufacturers protected the state’s butter producers; beers, wines, and liquors distilled outside the state as well as many other out of state manufacturers faced a six percent “import” tax.27

Once the chain store bill was passed many of these same tensions plagued Utah Governor Herbert Maw. The chain store tax bill was introduced at the same time that the governor was aggressively attempting to lure more manufacturing, outside capital, tourists, and permanent residents into the state. While the bill was being debated, Maw persuaded the legislature to reorganize the state government and give it more centralized powers as part of his economic strategy. The result was a new division within the state bureaucracy, the Department of Publicity and Industrial Development. This department’s mandate was to lure more tourists and industry into the state through tax incentives, aggressive lobbying in Washington D.C. and by creating a national advertising campaign that touted the state’s natural advantages as well as its business-friendly laws.28

The chain tax seemed to contradict the governor’s goals of encouraging more local economic autonomy at the expense of the consumer paying a little more. The tax better reflected the national government’s shift towards encouraging consumption, broader prosperity, and privileging consumer choice and lower prices at the expense of some local autonomy. As the governor considered the bill, his office was flooded with letters from a wide range of organizations that represented agricultural and labor interests such as the Motion Picture Projectionists Local, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, the Northwestern Turkey Growers Association, and the Salt Lake Union Stock Yards, as well as from private citizens, (such as the president of the Box Elder News Journal), urging a veto. This group of letters complained that the law would ultimately be a tax on the consumers, and that Utah producers might face retaliation in other states through exclusion from the chain-controlled distribution networks.29

Herbert B. Maw, Utah governor from 1941 to 1949. Caught between drawing more business to the state and upholding the chain store bill, Maw created a new governmental division called the Department of Publicity and Industrial Development. This new division attracted outside industry to the state by way of tax incentives combined with business-friendly laws.

will, within a period of a few years, obtain a virtual monopoly on the retail business of Utah.30

Within five hours of the governor’s signature the Chain Store Association announced a petition drive to force the state’s first referendum. It would follow a similar strategy developed in California in 1936 where it discovered that a well-organized political campaign was more effective than trying to overturn already established laws in the courts. The California Chain Store Association had learned in its campaign there that despite consumers’ preferences of paying lower prices, they hated the chains. The California Chain Association hired Lord & Thomas, one of the most successful advertising agencies in the country, to run what would be a successful publicity campaign to overturn the law.31

Publically, the governor told petitioners that he was awaiting the attorney general’s opinion on the bill’s legality before making a decision. In some personal communications, however, he acknowledged the difficult political situation he was in. “The bill creates some issues,” Maw acknowledged to a trusted friend and advisor. “On the one hand, the Chain Stores are gradually eliminating the competition of small merchants because of their great financial power which makes it possible for them to purchase their products at a lower wholesale rate and to construct more attractive places of business.” The governor wondered if the benefits of limiting the chains outweighed the economic advantages, but he ultimately signed the bill, publicly explaining that, “If the present expansion program of the chain stores is permitted to continue, they

The strategy in Utah mirrored the one in California. The goals were fairly straightforward— convince voters that the tax would force the chains to leave the state or have to charge higher prices to stay in business. In either case it was the consumer who would have to pay the cost, either through higher taxes to make up for the loss of the stores leaving the community or through higher prices. The chains made the case that either way, the annual cost of living for Utah residents would increase by hundreds of dollars. The chain stores’ campaign began by first targeting employees and suppliers. For employees, the chains promised better working conditions, more company-sponsored recreational activities, to be more flexible with working hours, and acknowledging events like employees birthdays. The chains also struck an accord with the American Federation of Labor that in exchange for its opposition to the chain legislation it would allow the A.F. of L. to organize grocery workers.32

The chains also met with farmers’ groups, promising to jettison injurious practices, including unreasonable discounting, and pledged to purchase surplus crops in return for their support. One example of this involved about two hundred potato growers in southern Utah. The Bryce Canyon Potato Marketing Association had attempted to sell their crops to ZCMI, Pacific Fruit Company, and Success Markets. These stores turned them down because the price was higher than what they would pay

Anti-chain store tax advertisement in the Milford News, September 24, 1942. The reference to the Chain Store “Death Tax” was a marketing tool to suggest the effect the tax would have not only on chain stores but local communities as well.

purchasing potatoes from Idaho. Safeway approached the association in November 1940 when rumors about the chain tax legislation began percolating. Safeway purchased the grower’s potatoes at the price they asked and was able to sell them in Arizona and California. The association credited Safeway with saving their crops and the farmers subsequently lobbied the governor to veto the chain legislation when it was passed.33

The chains had also already created what they called local advocacy groups that claimed to be “disinterested citizens,” focused on better community public relations.

This strategy had been put into operation in 1939 out of concerns over the possible passage of the Patman law, and now the chains amped up their efforts. They created groups with names intended to link chain stores to the community. For example, the “Salt Lake Citizens” group began a series of public seminars “educating” the public to vote “intelligently” on the referendum. The group claimed to have created a committee of “public-spirited citizens who have no special interest in chain stores, but who have volunteered to fight the ‘death tax’ as a matter of principle.” 34

Early on, the local chain store advocacy groups decided to target women in their campaign as well. Women were seen as the primary consumers in the home and by the end of World War I, advertisers had focused much of their attention on this demographic. Advertisers developed and spread the idea that “consumer sovereignty was women’s sovereignty,” and that brand-name choice was “a means for women both to exercise their superior taste and judgment and to defend their individual rights as consumers.” Thus, the chain store advocates routinely met with women from various LDS wards who were also members of the Democratic Party. They also visited some of the many women’s clubs to make their case and successfully convinced two influential organizations, the Women’s Legislative Council of Utah and the women’s auxiliary of the American Federation of Labor, to oppose the tax.35

The association’s campaign was having the desired effect. By May 1941 the group had secured enough signatures on its petition drive to force the state’s first referendum of its kind. Governor Maw had been warned by some of his advisors of the possibility of a referendum challenge even before he signed the bill into law so he had already been strategizing on how to alienate the least number of voters on such an evenly divided issue. He announced that he believed in the initiative and referendum process and that the people of the state ought to decide the matter, thus positioning himself politically as someone responsive to the will of the people and the legislative process.36

Perhaps the most effective tool that the chains used was an unprecedented media blitz. The

chains launched a publicity offensive through every major newspaper and radio station that especially targeted rural Utahns. The campaign message explained that, “under-consumption rather than over-production throws the marketing machinery out of gear and results in irregular and unsatisfactory prices for farm products.” The chains’ media campaign slogan was “No. 2 is a Tax on YOU,” a reference to the proposition’s position of number two on the ballot. The advertisements consistently referred to the law as a “death tax,” and each piece of propaganda consistently struck the theme that if the law was upheld it would mean a higher cost of living, lower wages, and economic ruin for the state by means of less consumption.37

A good example of the type of strategy that the chain store association used can be seen in this radio advertisement: “Consumers know that such a pyramiding tax burden would raise the cost of living. Labor knows that it would wipe out jobs. Property owners know that it would vacate stores and lower property and rental values. Civic leaders recognize that a law stultifying distribution seriously would impair the economy of the entire state and discourage the healthy flow of new capital and new enterprise of all kinds.”38

As noted previously, the Utah Chain Association created a pamphlet in 1939 to combat the Patman legislation proposal, and it reintroduced that literature in the referendum campaign. The pamphlet offered a myriad of statistics claiming that chain stores paid far better than independent stores, that each chain’s average annual profit was only $271.40, and that their small-town stores “brighten up main street, offer fresh, new merchandise in wide variety, and make shopping in the small town just as interesting and economical as shopping in the nearby city.” The pamphlet also drew quotes from Franklin Roosevelt and economists about how the country’s weak economy was the result of poor distribution networks. It then proceeded to explain how the chains were successful by developing more efficient, modern distribution systems. Using quotes from President Roosevelt that resonated with the public, the pamphlet argued that chains would lower prices and help cure a nation that was still “ill-nourished, illhoused, and ill-clothed.”39

The chains’ public media fight was also assisted by the alliance of the newspaper industry. The Utah State Press Association unanimously adopted a resolution opposing the chain store tax, calling it “a test tube for freak, business-baiting laws.” It justified its stance to residents by arguing that “such taxes are not in the public interest since they are paid by the consumer in higher prices for the necessities of life.” Many newspapers, though, had a financial stake in this issue, which caused them to offer favorable editorials in support of the chains. In 1939, for example, the corporate chains paid at least $600,000 in advertising to Utah’s newspapers. Many of the papers adopted the same language in their editorials that were used by the Utah Chain Store Association in its campaign by routinely referring to the bill as the “death tax.”40

Many newspapers also published accounts of financial ruin and economic devastation from around the country where the chain store tax was in effect. The Davis County Clipper quoted a warning from a group of independent grocers in Massachusetts, that a similar “death tax” in Georgia forced the independents to leave that state because the distributors refused to pay the tax, thus leaving them without suppliers. They cautioned that the best course of action for Utah’s merchants and consumers to prevent financial devastation was to oppose the legislation.41

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the chains also attempted to capitalize on the United States’ full-scale entry into World War II, by appealing to Utahns’ patriotism and emphasizing the link between freedom and consumption. The Chain Association sent a petition to Governor Maw requesting him to call a special session of the legislature to postpone the potential referendum vote until after the war ended. It also published a similar plea in every newspaper in the state, asking the governor and the legislature to suspend the law and calling on independent store owners to support a suspension of the vote as a show of patriotism. The association warned that without unity the nation could end up “paying taxes to the axis,” and that Hitler’s success came from his ability to divide his enemies through “propaganda and fifth column infiltration within the borders of each victim nation.” The Chain Store Association hoped that with a postponement of the

referendum until after the war most Utah residents would forget about or change their opinions of the chain stores. Ironically, they tried to exploit the divisions in the state over the chain store tax that they created and to then call upon the state to coalesce against an enemy that used internal divisions to invade other nations.42

When the tax proponents rejected the legislative moratorium, it only served to give the chains additional ammunition for their campaign. The Chain Association launched another state-wide advertising blitz announcing that its affiliated stores defended “real” American ideals and values. The chains pledged that (unlike independent stores) they would, “be aggressive in trying to sell war bonds and stamps . . . work hard to make sure that the flow of necessities continues for the moral on the homefront . . . keep prices as low as possible . . . work with Utah agriculturalists to make sure their products are sold and help them expand their markets to other states (and) . . . help all local chain stores in the state in their charitable and civil defense efforts.”43

Proponents of the bill were less experienced and not as well organized in shaping public opinion or understanding shifting political trends. The combination of a new government emphasis on consumption and consumers along with the marketing efforts of national corporations to link citizenship, freedom, and democracy with consumption and choice made for a compelling argument. When combined with the fact that the Great Depression and a war threatened these components that were now used to define the American identity, it is not surprising that the chains were able to shape the debate in a manner that convinced most Utahns to favor their perceived ability to protect their standard of living at the expense of a few dollars of lost profit for local merchants.

J. J. Bowman of Kaysville, who was the president of the Utah Retail Grocers’ Association, revealed the independents’ initial lack of understanding of the shifting political climate:

Utah’s independent retail grocers, while opposed to the further encroachment of absentee-owned stores during the next 18 months, nevertheless look forward with confi-

dence to the general election. . . . Our confidence has been greatly stimulated . . . by Utah labor representatives, 20 of whom were in the legislature and voted in favor of the chain store bill by consumers, who have discovered that the charge is ridiculous that the chain store bill will raise the price of commodities; and particularly, by the countless civic and professional leaders in every part of the state who are in a position to see the gradual strangulation of independent enterprise as the chain store system clouds a greater area of our state with every passing year.44

By July of 1942, however, the pro-tax advocates began to realize that the chains were successfully shaping the debate. Shifting strategies by using much of the same rhetoric as the chain store coalition, they tried to couch the argument in terms of choice, democracy, independence, and American identity as well by associating economic opportunity and freedom with independent stores, and painting unregulated chains as akin to “monopoly and serfdom.” For example they began describing a vote for Proposition 2 as a “Vote for Independence.” They argued that since the bill was approved by the legislature and signed by the governor, it was part of the democratic system. They also contended that, “control was not considered necessary until a chain had gained such gigantic size that it suffocated individual enterprise. That is the one issue of this controversy: Whether individual enterprise is to be preserved in Utah.”45

As the referendum neared, pro-tax groups also started using language linking the chains and a lack of economic and political freedom to Wall Street. As one political ad proposed, “It is up to us to decide whether our sons will go into business for themselves . . . or whether we wish to see all our retail trade pass into the hands of Wall Street controlled firms.” Another advertisement published just before the referendum posited that “the great middle class, which has been the backbone of our state and nation and the barrier between democracy and dictatorship will be the ones who suffer most from absentee control by corporate wealth.”46

ZCMI shoppers at the hosiery counter, March 21, 1945. Women were seen as the main consumer demographic and so many intentionally targeted them in their ad campaigns. This photograph hints at the consumer craze that characterized the postwar economy. The craze was so large that in 1943 Salt Lake City’s department stores placed an ad seeking five hundred female sales clerks to meet the demand for more store help. They partnered with the city’s vocational education program in the high schools to start training clerks.

USHS

These attempts at reshaping the meaning of the legislation came too late. The reality is that the anti-chain group was simply not as well organized or funded. The chains also had one more important factor in their favor, by 1942, Utah’s retailers were experiencing record sales. In January 1941 retail sales in the state increased 36 percent over those from the same month of the previous year. This dramatic increase continued even after U.S entry into World War II. Holiday spending in 1942 shattered all previous records in the state as well as nationally, store purchases were up a whopping 78 percent statewide beginning in October of that year.47

The consumer buying frenzy of 1942 helped to diminish the immediacy of the economic threat posed by the chains. Thus, when voters went to the polls that November, they overwhelming rejected the tax by a count of 91,271 to 40,496. In some of the more rural counties the ratio

against the tax was five to one. The chain stores’ public relations blitz, the attention on war, and the improved economy all played a role. Additionally, other factors help explain the vote overturning the legislation. Unlike mail order stores, the chains employed locals, paid some taxes, spent a lot of money on advertising in the local newspapers, rented real estate, and participated in local business organizations.48

Moreover, independent merchants were not universally loved. They were generally hostile to organized labor, and while they offered credit to farmers, they often charged higher prices for those goods. Some residents in rural communities also believed that having chains was good for independent businesses. The chains attracted more people from the outlying region who would also visit locally owned shops, and they forced the independents to be more efficient and innovative, leading to lower their prices.49

The chains successfully controlled the campaign rhetoric and helped to shape the identity of rural towns while also making themselves an important part of that identity. They did this by emphasizing that having a store from a national company represented a necessary link to modernity, stability, and freedom. The chain store coalition also fostered a psychological and emotional relationship with townsfolk as evidenced by one of the statewide ads it ran during its referendum campaign. J.C. Penney had thirty-four stores in Utah by 1942 with all but two of them located in small towns such as Eureka, Helper, and Milford. The advertisement reminded Utahns that J.C. Penney had operated locally for over twenty-five years and that the reader probably had purchased their babies’ and children’s clothes from the store. It also cautioned that if the tax passed then these community institutions would likely leave and the townsfolk would lose “an old friend.”50

The story of Utah’s first referendum thus shows the limits of state authority and the strong influence of corporations, especially as the economy improved. By voting down the chain store tax, Utahns believed they were voting for greater personal and local autonomy from state government controls, but they ultimately accepted a constricted yet protected sphere for themselves. In an unpredictable world the chains were able to dictate the dialogue regarding how residents defined themselves as Americans. The chains shaped the issues to mean that fewer regulations equaled greater personal freedom and choice, and they linked this to the idea that democracy could operate through the “unrestricted” consumption of consumer goods. Thus, a store like J.C. Penney was part of the local identity—an “old friend” that represented individual choice and competition. Chains were also backed by national corporate resources and would remain local anchors of economic stability as well as a cultural link to the rest of the nation in times of uncertainty. However, as chains proliferated they increasingly stifled competition and drained more money away from local economies. Eventually, most chains left the small towns, leaving those communities void of goods, services, and even less economic opportunity.51

Notes

1 Senate Journal, Twenty-Fourth Session of the Legislature of the State of Utah (Salt Lake City: Seagull Press, 1941), 73.

2 Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002), 10–20; Marina Moskowitz, Standard of Living: the Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

3 Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, 10–20; Moskowitz, Standard of Living.

4 Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, 10-20; Moskowitz, Standard of Living. Sales at Macy’s in New York for example topped $100 million dollars by 1929, or the equivalent of about $1.3 billion in 2013 dollars.

5 Alan R. Raucher, “Dime Store Chains: The Making of Organization Men, 1880–1940,” Business History Review 65 (1991): 152; Godfrey Montague Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 1859–1950 (New York: Chain Store Publishing Corporation, 1952), 20–22, 25.

6 Richard Schragger, “The Anti-Chain Store Movement, Localist Ideology and the Remnants of the Progressive Constitution, 1920–1940,” Iowa Law Review 90 (2005): 1025–26.

7 By contrast to the brokerage fees, in 1936 J.C. Penney paid $72,129, Safeway a little over $90,000, and Woolworth’s a little over $50,000 in taxes. See Alfred G. Buehler, “Chain Store Taxes,” Journal of Marketing 1 (Jan. 1937): 185; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 78–80, 206–218.

8 C. W. Hunt, Chairman, Federal Trade Commission in response to Senate Resolution #224, Seventieth Congress, Report of the Federal Trade Commission, “Chain Stores: Chain Store Leaders and Loss Leaders,” January 15, 1932 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932); Lebhar, Chain Stores, 208–209, 213–15.

9 Wages for chain store managers tended to be much higher than in local stores. In the Grant Stores chain managers in the smaller volume stores were paid $3,000 to $4,000 per year in the 1920s, while salaries for the most profitable stores netted $12,000 to $25,000 annually. See Raucher, “Dime Store Chains,” 132, 144–45; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 969; Charles F. Phillips, “The Chain Store in the United States and Canada,” American Economic Review 27 (March 1937): 88–90. Federal records from the Bureau of Statistics and the U.S. Department of Commerce report support the negative claims against the chains. In 1929 there were 7,061 retail chain companies. By 1939, despite the Great Depression, there were 8,959. In 1929 these companies owned 159,688 stores or units nationwide. By 1939 this number had been reduced to 132,763. Nationally in 1939 1,624,655 independent stores garnered 74.7 percent of total sales. By contrast, the 128,195 chain units controlled 21.7 percent of all sales. Local chains controlled only 3.8 percent of the market. If one factors in the salary of managers, then the chains did pay their employees more on average than local chains and local independents.

10 F. J. Harper, “A New Battle on Evolution: The Anti-Chain Store Trade-At-Home Agitation of 1929–1930,” Journal of American Studies 16 (December 1982): 412–18.

11 Hugh A. Fulton, “Anti-Chain Store Legislation,” Michigan Law Review 30 (December 1931):274–79; Maurice

W. Lee, “Recent Trends in Chain-Store Tax Legislation,” Journal of Business of the University of Chicago (July 1940): 256–61.

12 Schragger, “The Anti-Chain Store Movement,” 152–54; Lebhar, Chain Stores, ch. 9; David A. Horowitz, “The Crusade Against Chain Stores, Portland’s Independent Merchants, 1928–1935,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 89 (Winter 1988), 342–43; Parowan Times, December 23, 1938, 2; “Weekly News Analysis,” Piute County News, December 23, 1938, 2; “Tax on Chains Held Suicidal,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 12, 1940, 2; “Patman Bill Foes Finish Testimony,” Salt Lake Telegram, May 9, 1940, 4; “Group Tables Chain Tax Bill,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 18, 1940, 4.

13 Schragger, “The Anti-Chain Store Movement,” 105.

14 Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 300; Schragger, “The Anti-Chain Store Movement,” 105.

15 “Intermountain News,” Davis County Clipper, October 6, 1933, 6; “Intermountain News,” Parowan Times, June 1, 1935, 4; “Idaho Chain Store Tax Under Attack,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 22, 1933, 12; “Call for Drastic Economy,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 26,1933, 4; “Chain Store Tax Upheld by Court,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 29, 1933, 6; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 129, 238; “Weekly News Analysis,” Piute County News, December 23, 1938, 2.

16 The actual number of chain stores in the state is unclear. Publications of the chain stores variously claim at least 202 national chain stores in 1935 and 387 corporate chain units as of 1937. A referendum voter information pamphlet pegs the number at 123. See “Information For Voters Regarding NO. 2,” box 24, fd. 30, reel 46, Lieutenant Governor Election Papers, Series 364, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City; Utah Chain Stores Association, Inc., “Utah’s $27,000,000 Industry,” [1939], 3–4, PAM 1004, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City; “Call for Drastic Economy,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 26, 1933, 4; “Throngs Hear Pros, Cons of Chain Store Tax Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 1, 1941, 7.

17 Senate Journal, Twenty-Fourth Session, 73; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Utah, Twenty-Fourth Session of the Legislature (Salt Lake City: Arrow Press, 1941), 398; “Wendell Grover is Aggressive Liberal; Helped Old Folks,” Murray Eagle, September 19, 1940, 1; “Chain Store Legislation Should Not Be Punitive,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 4, 1941, 6; “Governor Signs Chain Tax Bill; Firms Open Fight,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 1941, 1; “Death Claims State Senator,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 20, 1941; Senate Bill No. 44 in box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor Herbert Maw Correspondence, 1941–1948, Series 221, Utah State Archives.

18 Utah Chain Store Association, Inc., “Utah’s 27,000,000 Industry.”

19 Clyde C. Edmonds, Utah Poultry Producers Cooperative Association, to Governor Herbert Maw, March 20, 1941, box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor Maw Correspondence; “Throngs Hear Pros, Cons of Chain Store Tax Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 1, 1941, 7.

20 “Throngs Hear Pros, Cons of Chain Store Tax Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 1, 1941, 7.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Senate Journal, Twenty-Fourth Session, 417, 507–508, 605; Journal of the House of Representative of the State of Utah, 398, 632–33; “State Senate Clashes Over Tax on Chains,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 25, 1941, 1.

24 Senate Journal, Twenty-Fourth Session, 507–508, 511, 600, 604–605; “Filibuster Bars Vote on Chain Store Tax Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 11, 1941, 1; “Bill on Chain Tax Sidetracked in State Senate,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 4, 1941, 1; “Chain Store Tax Passes Utah Senate,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 12, 1941, 1; “Senate Passes Chain Tax Bill,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 11, 1941, 1; “Chain Tax Wins Utah Senate Test,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 1941, 1. MacFarlane’s material for his filibuster came from the Chain Store Association’s 1939 pamphlet, “Utah’s $27,000,000 Industry,” wherein it spends several pages offering a “history” of retail and chain stores dating back to ancient Chinese and Roman empires.

25 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Utah, Twenty-Fourth Session of the Legislature, 398; “House Votes Chain Store Tax, 39 to 19,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 13, 1941, 1; “Chain Tax Notes Swamp House,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 12, 1941, 7.

26 Senate Journal, Twenty-Fourth Session of the Legislature of the State of Utah, 1941, 605, 632–33, 647; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Utah, Twenty-Fourth Session of the Legislature, 398; “Chain Tax Notes Swamp House,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 12, 1941, 7; “House Votes Chain Store Tax, 39 to 19,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 13, 1941, 1; “Chain Stores Tax Passes Utah Senate,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 12, 1941, 1.

27 “These Warring 48 States,” Salt Lake Telegram, May 11, 1942, 6; “Chain Tax Wins Utah Senate Test,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 1941, 1.

28 “Maw Denies ‘Dictator’ Aims in Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 8, 1941, 9; “Maw Wages Own Campaign to Boost Advertising Fund,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 8, 1941, 9; “Maw Plan Gets Right of Way in Lower House,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 20, 1941, 1; “Showdown Nears on Maw Plan in Utah Senate,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 27, 1941, 1.

29 Northwestern Turkey Growers Association, Salt Lake City, to Governor Maw, March 11, 1941; R. H. Hunt, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joins of America, Salt Lake City, to Governor Maw, March 13, 1941; J. E. Ryan, Box Elder News Journal, Brigham City, to Governor Maw, March 13, 1941; Merrill Parkin, Salt Lake Union Stock Yards, to Governor Maw, March 15, 1941; R. B. Peck, Motion Picture Projectionists Local 250, Salt Lake City, to Governor Maw, March 18, 1941; all in box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor Maw Correspondence.

30 “Governor Signs Chain Tax Bill; Firms Open Fight,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 1941, 1; Governor Maw to J. E. Ryan, March 18, 1941; Governor Maw to J. E. Wilson, Milford, Utah, March 22, 1941; both in box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor Maw Correspondence.

31 Secretary of the State of Utah, “Copy of the tally of petitioners for the Chain Store Tax Referendum,” May 2, 1941, box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor Maw Correspondence; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 223–26. For a referendum to be placed on the ballot the petitioners had to gather the signatures of 10 percent of registered voters who had voted for the governor in the previous election, and the voters had to come from at least fifteen of the twenty-nine counties.

32 Utah Chain Stores Association, Inc., “Utah’s $27,000,000 Industry”; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 228–33.

33 N. O. Henrie, Bryce Canyon Potato Marketing Association, Panguitch, Utah, to Governor Maw, March 13, 1941, and Utah State Federation of Labor to Governor Maw, March 13, 1941, box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor

Maw Correspondence; “Maw Scans Store Tax, Waits Ruling,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 14 1941, 7; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 228–30.

34 Utah Chain Stores Association, Inc., “Utah’s $27,000,000 Industry”; “Group Forms Fight on Chain Tax,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 14, 1942, 8; “Murray Girls against Store Tax,” Murray Eagle, October 1, 1942, 1; “Bountiful To Oppose Chain Tax,” Davis County Clipper, October 2, 1942, 1.

35 Charles F. McGovern, Sold American, 80; “Club Hears Discussion on Chain Store Tax,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 26, 1942, 13; “Labor Auxiliaries Oppose Chain Tax,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 15, 1942, 11; “Women’s Republican Club Sets Labor, Chain Store Tax Forum,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 30, 1942, 10; “Women Approve Chain Store Tax,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 27, 1941, 14.

36 Memo to Governor Maw, n.d.; memo from Governor Maw, n.d.; Utah Secretary of State, “Copy of the tally of petitioners for the Chain Store Tax Referendum,” May 2, 1941; all in box 4, fd. 50, reel 8, Governor Maw Correspondence.

37 “State Okeys Petition of Chain Stores,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 8, 1941, 17; Utah Chain Stores Association, Inc., “Utah’s $27,000,000 Industry,” 31.

38 “State Okeys Petition of Chain Stores,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 8, 1941, 17; Morgan County News, September 25, 1942, 4; Garfield County News, October 1, 1942, 4; Kane County Standard, October 2, 1942, 8; “Utah Merchants Warned against Chain Store Tax,” Millard County Chronicle, October 15, 1942,

39 Utah Chain Store Association Inc., “Utah’s $27,000,000 Industry.”

40 Ibid.; “Press Group Hits Chain Stores Tax,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 29, 1942, 13; “Press Opposes Chain Store Tax,” Roosevelt Standard, February 13, 1942, 4; Editorial, Morgan County News, October 9, 1942, 1; “Labor, Farmers Against Tax on Chain Stores,” Murray Eagle, October 8, 1942, 1; “Local Group Passes Resolution Against Chain Store Tax Bill,” Piute County News, October 30, 1942, 1; Editorial, Iron County Record, October 1, 1942, 5. In a random survey of newspapers to assess the amount of advertising space purchased by the different types of businesses to ascertain in some way how much the chains’ advertising dollar influenced the state’s newspapers, I found that the Deseret News on March 5, 1941, featured seventeen advertisements— twelve for national companies like Ford and Wonder Bread and five for local businesses. Iron County Record, December 4, 1941, published forty-two advertisements, thirty-four for local companies. The problem with a survey like this is that the advertising circulars and inserts either didn’t survive or are not available.

41 “Utah Merchants Warned Against Chain Store Tax,” Davis County Clipper, October 16, 1942, 1.

42 H. Tracey Fowler, Utah Chain Association, to Governor Maw, February 14, 1942, box 12, fd. 53, reel 25, Governor Maw Correspondence; “Let’s Stand Together,” Garfield County News, February 19, 1942, 4; “Let’s Stand Together,” Murray Eagle, February 19, 1942, 4; “Press Opposes Chain Store Tax,” Roosevelt Standard, February 13, 1942, 4; “Chain Store Tax is a Threat to Our Freedom,” Rich County News, October 9, 1942, 1; Davis County Clipper, February 20, 1942, 4; “A Proposal to Defer the Chain Store Tax Referendum in the Interest of a United War Effort,” Manti Messenger, February 20, 1942, 8; Millard County Chronicle, March 26, 1942,

8; Morgan County News, February 20, 1942, 4; “Let’s Stand Together,” Murray Eagle, February 19, 1942, 4; Murray Eagle, February 19, 1942, 3; “Plea for United War Effort Spurned,” Park Record, March 26, 1942, 2; Iron County Record, February 19, 1942, 4; San Juan Record, October 22, 1942, 5; “Let’s Stand Together,” Garfield County News, February 19, 1942, 4.

43 “Plea for United War Effort Spurned,” Manti Messenger, March 27, 1942, 4.

44 “Grocers’ Unit Challenges Chain Stores,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 9, 1941, 17.

45 “Businessmen Form League,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 29, 1942, 8.

46 “Tax Law Is Is [sic] Upheld,” Murray Eagle, September 24, 1942, 1; “Vote For No. 2,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 2, 1942.

47 “Retain Volume Gains in S.L.,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 11, 1942, 11; “Yule Buying Shatters All U.S. Records,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 20, 1942, 17A; “Yule Shopping Earliest Ever, Survey Indicates,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 18, 1942, 6; “S.L. Tops List in Sales Gain,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 1, 1942, 14B; “Utah Leads Entire West in Retail Sales Increase,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 24, 1942, 24; “Utah Leads Nation in June For Gains in Retail Sales,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 3, 1942, 9; “S.L. Department Sales Shoot Upward,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 1, 1942, 23; “Utah Stores Start Year With Big Gain,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 8, 1941, 28.

48 For example, in San Juan County the vote was 502 against and 83 for the tax, while in Garfield County it was 880 against and 171 in favor. See “Official Certified Election results by the Sec. of the State of Utah,” November 25, 1942, box 24, fd. 34, reel 47, Board of State Canvassers, Series 364, Utah State Archives; F. J. Harper, “A New Battle on Evolution: The Anti-Chain Store Trade-At Home Agitation of 1929–1930,” Journal of American Studies 16 (December 1982): 421–22; “Chain Store Tax Heads For Defeat, Salt Lake Tribune, November 4, 1942, 1; “Utah Voters Repudiate Chain Stores Tax Law,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 1942, 16; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 233.

49 Harper, “A New Battle on Evolution,” 421–22; Lebhar, Chain Stores, 233.

50 For a list of openings and closings by state, see box 221, fd. 4, J.C. Penney Archives, A 2004.007, Southern Methodist University Archives; “Do You Want to Lose an Old Friend,” Davis County Clipper, October 16, 1942, 7.

51 Up until 1931 J.C. Penney avoided placing stores in larger cities. In that year it built its first in Seattle, Washington. With the success of that store it then began a slow transition away from smaller towns to larger cities. See David Delbert Kruger, “Main Street Empire: J.C. Penney in Nebraska,” Nebraska History 92 (Summer 2011): 60–61; David A. Fleming and Stephan J. Goetz, “Does Local Firm Ownership Matter?” Economic Development Quarterly 25 (August 2011); David Neumark, Junfu Zhang, and Stephen Cicarella, “The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets,” Journal of Urban Economics 63 (March 2008); McGovern, Sold American; Schragger, “The Anti-Chain Store Movement.”

The composer Leigh Harline as a young man. This photograph of Harline, who was born and raised in Utah, was taken in Los Angeles.

Courtesy Jo-An Harline Lyman

“When You Wish Upon A Star”:

The musical Legacy of Utah Composer Leigh Harline

BY SANDRA DAWN BRIMHALL AND DAWN RETTA BRIMHALL

Gene Simmons, the Israeli-American rock star, has written that when he first heard the song “When You Wish upon a Star,” he “could barely speak English but I knew the words were true. Anybody can have what they want, the world and life can give its rewards to anyone.”1 To many, like Simmons, the song is the encapsulation of the American dream. Leigh Adrian Harline, who composed the melody for “When You Wish upon a Star,” embodied that dream. He was born on March 26, 1907, in Salt Lake City, the youngest and thirteenth child of Swedish converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Carl Ersson Harline and Johanna Mathilda Petersson.2 As a member of a large immigrant family, Harline knew well the initiative and hard work that were required to build a new life in a strange land. From an early age, he demonstrated exceptional musical talent and, despite the early death of his mother, he persisted in his musical training and honed his skills. When he reached adulthood, at the start of the Great Depression, he moved to California where he doggedly pursued his dream of becoming a successful composer in another “promised land.” Harline’s success rested on many things: the opportunities available in twentieth-century Utah, the technological innovations of radio and film, and, not least, his own talent.

Leigh’s parents, who met as teenagers while working on the same farm, were married on October 23, 1881, in Simtuna, Vastmanland, Sweden. After their marriage, Carl abandoned farm work, possibly to improve his social standing, and joined the army. Soldiers, who trained with the army for only a few weeks each year, were entitled to a small house, an acre of land, and a little cash. Carl supplemented his army pay by moon-

lighting as a shoemaker and by working for the farmer who owned the property where the house stood. It was the custom for a soldier to take on the name of the house where he resided and since the house was named Harlän, Carl changed his surname from Ersson to Harlän, and later, to Harline.3 Carl and Mathilda’s first child, Karl, died in 1882 when he was a year old. Four other children, all daughters, were also born in Sweden. Mathilda joined the LDS church in May 1888, despite the objections of Carl and her family. Carl was baptized approximately two years later.4

In 1891 the family immigrated to the United States with their four daughters against the wishes of both their families. Mathilda’s motivation for the move appears to have been primarily religious while Carl’s incentives seem to have been a mixture of family, religious, and economic factors.5 Mass emigration from Sweden to the United States began in the mid1840s, slacking off during the Civil War and resuming afterward. In the 1880s more than 330,000 Swedish immigrants moved to the United States and the numbers continued to

remain high as late as 1890. The 1910 U.S. Census records show that more than 650,000 persons in the country were Swedish-born. Most Swedish immigrants came to America due to economic pressures at home and the often exaggerated promise of opportunity abroad. Approximately 8,000 of those immigrants, like Carl and Mathilda, were LDS converts who settled in Utah.6

The Harlines arrived in Salt Lake City on May 12, 1891. Two days later, their two-year-old daughter Anna Maria, who had been ill during the last part of the journey, died from measles. Carl was so devastated from her death that he never completely recovered. The couple’s son Oscar, who was born three months after Anna Maria’s death, wrote, “It was a terrible experience for a young family to have to encounter, no means, poor of this world’s goods. . . . And one must also remember that they could not speak a word of English.”7

Carl and Mathilda moved ten times before finally purchasing five acres of land and building a home, located at 3405 South 1100 East, in

The Carl and Mathilda Harline family, about 1910, at their home in Salt Lake City. Leigh Harline is on the front row, second from the left.

Courtesy Jo-An Harline Lyman

1905. Leigh was born in this home—a two-story yellow brick structure that had a parlor, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, and pantry on the ground floor and two bedrooms and closets upstairs. There was no furnace, electricity, telephone, or indoor bathroom.8 The couple taught their children to work hard and to be honest and dependable. Religion was also emphasized in their home. Oscar recalled, “Mother was a more serious person, very good-looking, very religious, and a wonderful housekeeper. Father was a happy-go-lucky sort, always singing or whistling—he had a good voice.”9 Olive enjoyed watching her father mend shoes and she recalled that he was “a very musical whistler” who often whistled Swedish tunes when his mouth was free of nails.10

When Leigh Harline was six years old, he began taking piano lessons on the family piano, which had been furnished by the generosity of his oldest sister who was married and working. He soon became so proficient that he accompanied his first-grade classmates as they marched in school programs.11 According to his niece, Jo-An Harline Lyman, “He enjoyed playing the piano so much that his mother had to ask him to stop practicing and go out and play.” Harline, however, later recalled that when he was young he tried to evade practicing until he became fascinated with composing. He also acknowledged that his “aptitude for music was inherited.”12

As a teenager, Harline studied piano under J. Spencer Cornwall, who later became the conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.13 Local newspapers from the period chronicled the young man’s growing reputation as a musician. The “Tattle of the Tuneful” column in the Salt Lake Telegram reported on November 1, 1919, that Harline accompanied students from the Gustav Schuster Music College during a program presented in an LDS chapel.14 On May 9, 1920, the Salt Lake Tribune listed him as one of the soloists who performed at a free concert held at the Salt Lake Ladies’ Literary Club.15 The same newspaper reported on another occasion that “Master Leigh Harline” would perform at Whitmer Hall during the Schuster Music College’s annual concert.16 In addition to performing in these more established venues, the young Harline also played for local audiences via the new medium of ra-

J. Spencer Cornwall, who later served as conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, was Leigh Harline’s piano teacher.

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dio (KDYL), which aired its first broadcast in May 1922.17

Harline attended Granite High School from 1921 to 1923, where he demonstrated not only his musical talent but also his initiative and leadership skills by organizing his own dance orchestra when he was fourteen years old. 18 He belonged to both the school orchestra and band and he was also enrolled in an Advanced Placement Music class. The orchestra teacher, Adolph Brox, was a musician of high repute who had his own studio in Sugar House where he taught violin, clarinet, and saxophone. Under Brox’s direction, the Granite orchestra “was pronounced by many critics as the best orchestra in the state” with its twenty-eight players.19

On April 22, 1922, tragedy struck the Harline family when Mathilda passed away after a series of strokes. Leigh’s older brother, LeRoy, wrote of his mother’s death: “My beloved mother, my best pal, passed away. Home was home no longer.”20 Carl died seven years later on October 31, 1929.21 The death of Leigh’s mother when he

was only fifteen years old affected his academic performance. His high school transcript reveals that prior to Mathilda’s death, he received B’s in all of his classes, except music, where he received all A’s. After her death, his grades all dropped to C’s, except in music where he continued to earn top marks. 22

Although Harline left high school at age sixteen without receiving a diploma, he continued to actively pursue his musical studies as well as his dream of becoming a composer. Harline demonstrated his versatility as a musician on January 20, 1925, when he was selected to be part of a string trio that performed at the C. G. Conn Music Store’s golden anniversary celebration held in downtown Salt Lake City.23 Then in October 1925, Harline’s dance orchestra made its professional debut at a local night club. The Salt Lake Telegram reported: “Leigh Harline’s orchestra opened an engagement last night at the Black Cat, 341 South Main Street. Mr. Harline, leader of the Collegian orchestra, is a native of Salt Lake and well known composer and pianist.”24

A Deseret News article provided additional evidence of Harline’s developing talent as a composer when it announced that the Salt Lake LDS Grant Stake’s quarterly conference, held on December 20, 1925, would feature a “Christmas anthem” composed by Harline, the stake organist, with words written by Ruth May Fox, “a poet of high local standard.” The News described Harline as “a well-known local young musician,” but his work with Fox—who would become the general president of the LDS Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association in 1929—also spoke to his rising reputation.25

Harline resumed his formal education when he enrolled at the University of Utah as a non-matriculated student for the academic year 1926 to 1927 and as a freshman from 1927 to 1928. According to his college transcript, his classes were predominantly in music,26 some of them only “open to graduates and students of ability and training.”27 Despite the difficulty of these music classes and the fact that he was an underclassman, Harline earned excellent grades, demonstrating prodigious talent. He financed his education from the money he received from

Leigh Harline’s dance orchestra, “The Collegians,” which made its professional debut on October 27, 1925, at the Black Cat in Salt Lake City. Harline is seated at the piano.

Courtesy Cathy Adams Lewis

his orchestra, which continued to play in local venues in Salt Lake City.28 Harline was prominent in university musical circles, and in 1926 his musical comedy Blind Man’s Bluff, which he wrote with Beth Whitney, was performed by members of the Chi Omega sorority.29 The people and institutions of Salt Lake City provided the young Harline with opportunities to develop his skills, work across musical genres, and obtain an education.

Harline left the university before graduating in late 1927 or early 1928 and moved to San Francisco. In a 1940 interview, Harline said his reason for leaving was that “he met a girl visiting from Los Angeles, promptly lost his heart, and followed her to the coast where they were married.” Jo-An Harline Lyman believes another reason he left Utah was that there were more opportunities for a music career in California.30 According to family records, Harline married Catherine Collette Palmer, a UCLA student, in 1928 in California. Palmer, who was born in Ohio about 1908, was the daughter of Byron and Maude Palmer, her father a physician in Venice, California.31 As time would tell, California—especially with its growing film industry— did provide favorable circumstances for the Utah musician.

Harline began his career in California as an organist, performing for KFRC radio in San Francisco.32 During the years from 1927 to 1937, San Francisco was an important origination point for many national radio broadcasts. In 1926 Don Lee, a wealthy automobile dealer, purchased KFRC. The following year, he also purchased KHJ radio in Los Angeles. Lee spared no expense to make the stations the finest in the nation and both had a large staff of announcers, musicians, singers and entertainers that allowed the stations to operate continuously without seeking outside talent. Besides Leigh, KFRC launched the careers of other notable performers such as Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter.33 Harline’s talent as a composer, as well as a musician, was recognized almost immediately, including in his hometown. The Salt Lake Telegram reported: “Leigh Harline . . . has achieved wide recognition in San Francisco as a composer of popular songs. . . . Mr. Harline’s latest composition is ‘I Gotta Tell Someone,’ published by a San Francisco Music firm.”34

The importance of national technological networks to Harline’s professional growth became increasingly clear with the development of the Don Lee stations. On July 16, 1929, the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) network, which had launched in 1927 and had no affiliates west of the Rockies, persuaded Don Lee to sign an affiliate agreement. KFRC and KHJ became the first CBS stations on the West Coast.35 Sometime between August 1929 and July 1930, Harline left San Francisco and transferred to KHJ radio in Los Angeles. His multiple talents soon attracted the attention of the media in Southern California: “A radio organist, balladist, composer and singer—no wonder Leigh Harline made a hit with the radio fans of KHJ, Los Angeles. A good-looking chap is Leigh, and his wardrobe is one of the snappiest in radio land. He’s heard every day, making several appearances during operating time of the station.”36 In 1932, Harline, still working for KHJ, provided the music for the first transcontinental broadcast to emanate from Los Angeles.37

Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928 and, by 1929, the cartoon character had achieved national recognition. Mickey Mouse’s “barnyard origins,” cheerfulness, and determination made him an “ideal mascot” for a nation struggling

Harline’s notable success coincided with the meteoric rise of another creative genius during the Great Depression— Walt Disney.

through disaster.38 The social and economic difficulties of the Great Depression subtly influenced Disney’s creative output, but more directly, they provided his studio with personnel—artists who welcomed the opportunity for regular employment. Disney’s genius was not restricted to his considerable talents; he also “displayed an uncanny knack” for recognizing the gifts of his employees and cultivating those talents to “elevate the quality of the films.”39 Leigh Harline was among those people.

In 1932 Disney hired Harline to work in his studio’s music department with Frank Churchill. Disney brought Churchill on in 1931 to replace Carl Stalling, who had been the studio’s music director and artist-in-residence until he left in 1930. Stalling briefly returned to Disney in 1932, and the three men—Stalling, Churchill, and Harline—composed more than fifty scores for the studio’s Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies shorts during the first half of the 1930s. Harline’s musical sophistication became apparent almost immediately so Disney assigned him to work on some of the more “musically ambitious” shorts. One of the first projects that

Leigh scored alone was the 1933 Pied Piper, a retelling of the famous myth. He was also the composer for the music in the Old Mill and Music Land. 40

According to the composer and author Ross Care, although Churchill and Harline were both “consummate melodists,” their musical styles were as different as their “personal and musical backgrounds.” Churchill, who was an accomplished pianist, composed music that could be performed on the piano and that you “could whistle or hum easily.” Although Harline was not as talented a pianist, he had a “broader musical education” that enabled him to compose more complex music with melodies and structures that could not be communicated with “just two hands and a piano.” Wilfred Jackson, a Disney producer and director, who worked with both composers, observed that with Harline’s music, “you mostly just had to believe that Leigh knew what he was doing and that it would turn out all right in the end, and, as time went on, we found out that it always did.”41

The KHJ Radio Orchestra in Los Angeles, with Harline seated at the piano. In both Utah and California, the new platform of radio provided an important means for Harline’s professional growth.

Courtesy Cathy Adams Lewis

Harline’s compositions for the Silly Symphonies not only turned out, they are now ranked among “some of the finest, and most inventive music ever created in Hollywood.”42 The success of the Silly Symphonies made Walt Disney, and not just Mickey Mouse, a box office star, and, as a result, the major studios clamored for a chance to distribute Disney’s productions.43 This enabled Disney to build his animation empire that continues to thrive today.

As Harline’s career blossomed, his family also grew. On December 4, 1930, Catherine gave birth to a baby girl the couple named Karen. Two years later, on December 17, 1932, another daughter, Gretchen, was born. According to the 1930 census, they were renting an expensive apartment in downtown Los Angeles for one hundred dollars per month that, ironically, had no radio.44 Catherine’s personality and her talents complemented those of Leigh. According to Gretchen:

Mom was a wonderful lady. She was a kind of Bohemian in many ways. . . . So interested in people and in books and music. She was a rare book dealer and could carry on a wonderful conversation with anyone at any time . . . but most of the time she would rather listen. She would weave on a full-size loom in the playroom making tablecloths and scarves and even material for my Dad’s suits. She was truly creative, never did the ‘usual.’ She was quietly beautiful and brilliant.45

Like Catherine, Leigh also enjoyed literature and he was reputed to have a fine collection of first editions, among them works of D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ernest Hemingway. He also enjoyed badminton and was an “amateur sculptor of ability.”46 During July and August 1953, Leigh and other Hollywood elites such as Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, Claudette Colbert, Van Johnson, Arlene Dahl, Clifton Webb, Ginger Rogers, Fred MacMurray, Deborah Kerr, Ira Gershwin, Harpo Marx, Henry Fonda, and Olivia de Havilland demonstrated their talents as painters and sculptors at the Festival of Arts held in Laguna Beach.47According to Karen, Leigh also loved gardening and he was particularly fond of roses.48 Family members recall that Leigh owned

a blue and white Japanese bowl—four feet in diameter—that the actress Ruth Warrick liked to sit in before she began a new film because she thought it brought her good luck. “Daddy didn’t like it when people sat in that bowl,” Karen said.49

Harline’s success with Disney resulted in his receiving assignments to compose music for the studio’s first two animated features, Snow White and Pinocchio. Churchill had originally been assigned to Snow White but when he was unable to finish the project, Harline and another composer, Paul J. Smith, were called in to finish the job. In response to an interviewer’s question about this assignment, Harline replied that blending his music with the work of the previous composer and avoiding “any hint of

Catherine Palmer Harline with her two daughters, Karen (left) and Gretchen (right).

Courtesy Cathy Adams Lewis

patchwork” was a difficult task to undertake.50

When Snow White was released on December 21, 1937, the American journalist and writer Westbrook Pegler applauded the film, calling it the “happiest event since the armistice.”51 Pegler and others viewed Snow White as a “pleasant diversion” from the troubles of the 1930s, especially the recession of 1937 and 1938.52 In 1938, Harline, Churchill, and Smith were nominated for an Academy Award for the best musical score for Snow White

The music for Pinocchio was entirely Harline’s creation and not a combined effort with other composers. According to the Disney historian J. B. Kaufman, Pinocchio is a rarity among the Disney features of this era because it is the work of a single composer. “Harline’s musical statement in Pinocchio is as wide-ranging as the film itself.”53 Moreover, Harline and lyrist Ned Washington, along with the other musical directors, were allowed a certain amount of latitude in deciding the placement within the film of the songs, although Disney was “deeply involved in the music.”54

When Pinocchio was released in February 1940, the New York Times hailed it as the “happiest event since the war,” and described it as being “superior to Snow White in every respect but one: its score.”55 Surprisingly, many critics echoed the same sentiment, although they “heaped superlatives” on other aspects of the film.56 Yet, despite the negative reviews, “the songs were being taken up by singers and orchestras and ‘When You Wish upon a Star’ was beginning to create its niche in American popular music.”57

In 1941 Harline and Washington won an Academy Award for the best original song, “When You Wish upon a Star,” for Pinocchio. Harline, Washington, and Smith also won another Academy Award for the best original score for the same film. Washington attributed the popularity of the song to its universality, which “allowed you to supply your own wish.” He also said that Pinocchio contained “every entertainment value.”58

Cliff Edwards, who played Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio’s “official conscience,” sang “When You Wish upon a Star” in the film. Edward’s rendition of the song has since become a clas-

sic. For example, another musical legend, Neil Diamond, once said, “There’s nobody who is going to top Jiminy Cricket’s version of ‘When You Wish upon a Star.”’ Although Diamond had performed Harline’s song, he joked that he was “resigned to playing second bill to an insect—a cartoon insect at that.” Like Gene Simmons, Diamond also found the song inspiring in his youth: “I saw Pinocchio when I was a little boy about Pinocchio’s age and it left a really deep impression on me as a kid. To me, it was my story, the story of a little boy who was trying to find himself and become a real person and a real man.”59 The song impacted not only performers such as Simmons and Diamond but the common man as well. A Methodist pastor, Dr. Paul E. White, wrote in a 1975 newspaper essay:

I seem to remember that it was in the Disney cartoon Pinocchio that I first heard the song ‘When You Wish upon a Star.’ My father was dead, we were poor. I was in college and a war was coming on, having already started in Europe. . . . The trouble with most of my dreams was that legs were not always added to complete the experience. . . . The world is full of those who take action without prior thought and those who do a lot of thinking without adding the action.60

Pinocchio experienced outstanding business the first week of its release but after that box office sales slowed.61 It has been suggested that one of the reasons for Pinocchio’s lukewarm success was that viewers rejected any “Disney feature that wasn’t a duplicate of Snow White.”62 Pinocchio cost the studio $2.6 million but only $1 million of that outlay was recovered on its first release.63 When the domestic market proved unreliable, Disney looked to foreign markets, specifically, Sweden, Holland, and France to boost sales. As hostilities escalated across Europe, however, Disney abandoned any European ambitions. He was reported to have originally been “very, very depressed” regarding the film’s 1940 box office returns.64 Pinocchio finally made a profit with its 1945 reissue, and many today consider it among the “finest Disney hand-animated films that’s ever been made.65

In a 1971 interview, Disney’s animation director

Wolfgang (Woolie) Reitherman recalled that when “When You Wish upon a Star” won the Academy Award for best song, everyone at the studio “realized that it was . . . socially significant. Walt decided that the tune was not only a reflection of the optimism that characterized the end of the depression, but was also representative that he liked to dream big, to attempt the impossible. As time went by, the song became one of Walt’s favorites.”66 Disney apparently had great respect for Harline and his abilities as evidenced by another recollection of Reitherman. On one occasion, “Walt listened to some music Leigh Harline had written for a film and he didn’t like what he heard. They had a long discussion about the score and Harline began to get upset. ‘Look Walt,’ he finally said. ‘Could you do any better?’ ‘No,’ Walt said, ‘but you can.’”67

It seemed with the success of the Silly Symphonies and Snow White and the limited success of Pinocchio and Fantasia (which were released at almost the same time) that Disney could do no wrong. However, by late summer of 1941, trou-

ble brewed at the Disney studio when many of the animators who worked on Pinocchio went on strike. The studio’s financial woes, caused by high expenditures and low profits, changed some workers’ perception of Disney from a “folksy cartoonist to a worry-racked capitalist.” The employees also complained of pay inequalities, limited bonuses, and inadequate screen credits. Most likely, the unionization of Hollywood entertainment workers in the 1930s was also an important factor. The strike lasted for nine weeks with the result that many of the animators quit Disney for other organizations and new projects.68

Whether or not the strike directly impacted Harline is unknown, but he also left Disney during this time to freelance at other studios, including Columbia, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Goldwyn-RKO.69 In July 1942, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Harline had been signed by producer William Cagney as the musical director for the first United Artists film in which James Cagney, the famous actor,

The Utah State Symphony performing in the Salt Lake Tabernacle with Werner Janssen conducting. Janssen commissioned Leigh Harline to compose Centennial Suite for the centennial of the arrival of Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley.

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starred.70 Harline’s music was also performed by notable singers such as Frank Sinatra and Shirley Temple.71 Besides composing the musical scores for films, he often conducted the studio orchestras.72 He also wrote for symphonic orchestras. Harline demonstrated his sense of humor in one of his compositions, the Civic Center Suite, which was performed in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio. The suite’s four movements were entitled “Council Meeting, “The D. A. Calls It Luncheon,” “Taxpayers,” and “Election Night.” According to a 1971 article, an adding machine clicked away with the orchestra during the “Taxpayers” movement, acting “as a rhythmic counterpoint to the wailing motif of the taxpayers.”73

That same sense of fun apparently enriched Harline’s personal life. Although Leigh’s colleagues described him as “quiet and studious,” his daughter Gretchen wrote that his success “soon propelled him and his family into the world of Hollywood celebrity. . . . The Harline home was filled with music and parties, artists,

authors, actors and friends.”74 Gretchen recalled that during one party, she and her sister Karen,

were upstairs, supposedly sleeping, but we were bouncing up and down on the bed to the music of Fats Waller and Elliot Paul, who were playing jazz on the piano. Sylvia Sydney and Gilbert Roland, two of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen in my life, were there along with Cesar Romero and a lot of others. The parties were wonderful and we got the leftover hors d’oeuvres.75

Besides the parties, the Harline girls enjoyed visiting their father at the movie studios, where they met other celebrities such as Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire, and Shirley Temple. According to Jo-An Harline Lyman, Cary Grant came to one of the Harline parties, and Karen and Gretchen made such a fuss over him that Leigh was embarrassed.76

On one occasion, Catherine was called upon to testify in court for one of her movie star friends. When Joan Blondell divorced her husband in 1935, the San Bernardino County Star reported: “Mrs. Leigh Harline, girlhood chum of the actress in the days when Joan was a travelling vaudeville performer—before she became ‘Miss Dallas of 1925’—accompanied her to court, and corroborated the actress’ testimony.”77 When Blondell was in her early teens, her family temporarily gave up vaudeville and lived for eight months in Venice, California, the same community where Catherine was raised. The two women probably met during this short period that Blondell was able to regularly attend school.78

Despite Leigh and Catherine’s affluence and glamorous lifestyle, all was not well between them. The couple, however, apparently hid their marital discord from their daughters. Gretchen wrote: “We had never heard a cross word, never heard any arguments. Then one day, my mother and daddy and their two best friends went away on what we thought was a vacation. We had no inkling of what was happening. Turns out they went to Reno and got quickie divorces. Mother came back to the house; daddy didn’t. He married the wife of his best friend.”79

Leigh Harline in later years.

Courtesy Cathy Adams Lewis

According to Clark County, Nevada, court and marriage records, it was Catherine and not Leigh who filed for the divorce in Las Vegas, which was granted on February 6, 1942. Leigh, who was listed as a resident of California, was not present but entered a written appearance before the court. The court, which expressly reserved jurisdiction relating to the support and custody of the couple’s minor children, granted Catherine custody of Karen and Gretchen. Three weeks after the divorce, on February 28, 1942, Leigh married Catherine (Anne) Darby, a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada. Their marriage application stated that Darby had obtained a divorce from her husband, who was unidentified, the day before on February 27, 1942. Although Catherine filed for the divorce, the fact that Leigh and Ann were married so soon after the Harline divorce was final indicates there was some factual basis to Gretchen’s story.80

The divorce was extremely hard on Leigh’s first wife and his daughters. Gretchen recalled that her “Bohemian mother was never happy again.” Karen and Gretchen, however, apparently held no hard feelings toward their stepmother. “When you saw my daddy and Anne together, you knew they had to be together.” Catherine took her daughters and moved to New York, where she enrolled them in the Hewlett School for Girls, located in East Islip, Long Island. Although Gretchen loved the boarding school, Karen did not.81

The first year after the divorce, the girls visited their father in California during their Easter, summer, and Christmas vacations but after that, despite Leigh’s protests, they only visited during the summers. According to Gretchen, her mother had refused to accept alimony and she could not afford for her daughters to travel to California more than once a year. Karen remembers her father as a modest man who didn’t like to talk about himself. “Dad was the nicest human I ever knew. He never swore. He was easygoing, sweet.” She also recalled that Leigh did most of his composing on the piano at home. “He would come home from the studio, presumably with an assignment and work on the piece all night so it would be ready by morning.” On one of her trips from New York City to Los Angeles, Karen encountered Fred Astaire on the train and he danced with her in the club car.82

When she was a teenager, Karen asked her father to attend her parties. “He would come and play the piano. I was probably the only teenager who wanted her dad at parties.” In remembrance of her father, Karen has collected hundreds and hundreds of Pinocchios.83 Leigh’s talents were also popular at Harline family reunions, which he faithfully attended every year in Utah. Jo-An Harline Lyman recalled, “He would compose a song for everyone’s name by assigning a note for each letter. He was always really friendly and very kind.”84

Despite the upheaval in his personal life, Harline continued to succeed in the world of Hollywood music. In 1943, he was nominated for two more Academy Awards. The first was for the best musical score of a dramatic or comedy picture for Samuel Goldwyn’s Pride of the Yankees. The film, which starred Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, and Babe Ruth, celebrated the life of Lou Gehrig. The second was for the best scoring of a musical picture for the Columbia Pictures film You Were Never Lovelier, which starred Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, and Adolphe Menjou. The next year, Harline was nominated twice again for the scores of The Sky’s the Limit, a RKO musical comedy starring Fred Astaire and Joan Leslie, and for Johnny Come Lately. 85

Besides composing music for motion picture studios, Harline continued his association with radio. Another milestone for him was his appointment as the musical director for the Ford Summer Theater, a Los Angeles radio program that aired in the summer of 1946. Each week, Harline composed and conducted original music for the program that covered a wide range of American musical genres.”86 Hoagy Carmichael and Ann Jeffreys appeared as the first guests on the show.87 Long after Harline’s teenage performances on Salt Lake City stations or even his first years with Disney, the relatively new media platforms of radio and film continued to provide avenues for his professional growth.

In 1947 Harline returned to Utah in a professional capacity. An article in the Salt Lake Telegram reported that Utah’s upcoming centennial celebration was the theme for one of nine concerts to be presented by the Utah State Symphony, under the direction of the noted composer and conductor Werner Janssen. Janssen commissioned Harline to compose the score

for one of the concerts, which would be based on the story of the Utah pioneers.88 Jo-An Harline Lyman recalls that on the night of the concert, she and her parents met Leigh, who was wearing a tuxedo with long tails, at the Hotel Utah and then accompanied him to the Salt Lake Tabernacle.89 Harline told a reporter from the Salt Lake Telegram, “In composing this suite I have not striven to depict the trek across the plains. . . . Rather, I have tried to portray the beginnings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the religious mood of the people at that time. . . .The suite is in three movements, titled ‘The Beginning,’ ‘The Martyrdom,’ and ‘The New Home.’”90 Harline, who had been nurtured and educated in Utah, was well suited to the task of using his musical skills to interpret his religious heritage.

Sometime between 1942 and 1947, Leigh and Anne purchased a home in Portuguese Bend, Long Beach, where they were both active in community affairs.91 On one occasion, Leigh was the guest conductor for a high school orchestra’s final concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall. The orchestra had been honored to represent California at a 1947 western musical education conference held in Salt Lake City.92

In addition to the volunteer work he performed for his community, Harline also gave service, free of charge, to the LDS church, although he was no longer a practicing member.93 In 1964 Wetzel Orson (Judge) Whitaker, head of Brigham Young University’s Department of Motion Pictures, commissioned Harline and Crawford Gates, another prominent LDS composer, to write and produce the musical score for a new LDS church film, Man’s Search for Happiness. The film was part of the church’s pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. According to a memorandum Gates wrote to two of his colleagues, Harline prepared the “musical sketches” and Gates orchestrated them for a full orchestra. During their collaboration in Los Angeles, the two composers worked eighteen hours a day. The completed score was then recorded by Hollywood motion picture studio musicians.94

After the project was completed, Gates wrote Whitaker, expressing his appreciation for the assignment and the opportunity to work with Harline: “I found Leigh to be the wonderful-

ly talented composer of his international reputation and a ‘top pro’ in every division of his work. It was a real thrill to see him do such a superlative job on the score, including the last sequence which his additional work and the build and excitement appropriate to the film’s structure and spirit.”95 Gates also wrote to Harline, praising him for his talent as a composer and his “remarkable professional knowledge in the particular features of motion pictures.” He closed the letter with the words, “You could not have extended me more helpfulness and kind and gracious consideration . . . I want you to know that I am deeply grateful.”96

Other voices in Utah also praised Harline for his musical talent and accomplishments. A Salt Lake Tribune article published during this period praised Harline as “Utah’s gift to Hollywood, where, for the past 30 years, he has been a leading composer of background scores for some of the best movies.” Likewise, the University of Utah Alumni Association honored Harline in 1963 with a distinguished award given for “outstanding achievements in music and civic affairs.”97 A few years earlier, in 1959, the Salt Lake Tribune columnist Dan Valentine had paid homage to several Utah composers: “I’ll wager that Salt Lake City has more famous composers per capita than any other large city in the nation. . . . Of course, there’s Otto Hardin, who wrote the beautiful words for ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ along with the lyrics of dozens of other musical comedy hits. Ever heard of ‘When You Wish upon a Star?’ It was written by Leigh Harline.”98 Valentine’s column, as well as other newspaper articles, provide evidence that although Harline had not lived in Utah for thirty years, his activities and accomplishments were still considered “local” news.

Harline’s Hollywood achievements continued into the 1960s. Regarding his 1963 Harline Academy Award nomination for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, the News and Telegram described him both as “one of Salt Lake City’s most illustrious native sons,” and “among Hollywood’s top arrangers.99 During his career, Harline was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and he won twice, for Pinocchio. Ross Care has written that the secret to Harline’s success was the originality of his work. “His music is distinctly non-derivative, possessing its own unique sound. As early as

the mid-1930s, he had formulated a distinctively ‘American’ sound.”100 The inspiration for some of Harline’s music may have come from the folk songs that his father whistled while repairing shoes so long ago. Care notes that the composer “had a genuine interest in folk melodies and harmonies. . . . Heard today, most of Harline’s compositions sound remarkably contemporary and undated, including even his earliest scores for Disney’s 1930s shorts.”101

Harline also had a skill for blending music from different genres. In 1965, a Canadian newspaper noted that the Seven Faces of Dr. Lao was a “treat for the ear with Leigh Harline’s intriguing score, combining music of the American west and oriental themes.”102 Jo-An Harline Lyman observed: “One of the amazing things about Leigh was that he could write the music for Pinocchio and then write something so different for The Enemy Below soundtrack.”103 A few of the more famous movies that Harline scored include Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, The Farmer’s Daughter, The Boy With Green Hair, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, Warlock, and It’s a Wonderful Life, for which he wrote the stock or background music. The 1959 film Warlock, which starred Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, and Richard Widmark, is of particular interest to Utah residents because it was filmed in Moab and the setting for the movie was a Utah mining town in the 1880s.

It is difficult to say for certain how many songs Harline wrote during his lifetime. Various sources estimate that he composed music for approximately 154 films. His daughter, Gretchen, said that more than four hundred songs have been attributed to her father and that he was considered to be a genius.104 However, “When You Wish upon a Star,” as well as the entire score for Pinocchio, is widely regarded as Harline’s true masterpiece and the American Film Institute has ranked the song as seventh in its list of the top one hundred songs from American movies.105

“When You Wish upon a Star” is the Walt Disney Company’s “signature song”: Harline’s music sets the backdrop for the opening of many a Disney picture, as Jiminy Cricket’s song plays and the Disney castle appears. In 2001, Harline posthumously received the “Disney Legend’s

Award” as part of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Walt Disney’s birth. In a letter to his family, Roy E. Disney wrote: “This award is presented to individuals whose body of work has made a significant impact on Disney over the years. . . . Leigh is truly deserving of this award. . . . His dedication and contributions to the Disney Magic are invaluable.”106 Both of his daughters Karen and Gretchen attended the awards ceremony. Fittingly, the song written by the son of Carl and Mathilda Harline plays a significant role at Christmas each year in Scandinavia. Every Christmas Eve since the late 1950s, Swedes have watched a Donald Duck Christmas special, From All of Us to All of You or Kalle Anka. At the end of the program, “When You Wish upon a Star” is sung in Swedish.107

Leigh Harline passed away on December 10, 1969, at the age of sixty-two, in Long Beach from cancer. His early death “robbed Hollywood of a highly capable musician.”108 The boy from Utah had not only fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a composer, but also the hopes of his Swedish parents who had come to the United States seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Harline’s music succeeded beyond his dreams: it is beloved throughout the world and it has had a lasting impact on the American culture. On June 23, 2010, the Library of Congress selected “When You Wish upon a Star” as one of twenty-five recordings that has been “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”109

Notes

1 The authors would like to thank Jo-An Harline Lyman, Karen Harline Adams, and Cathy Adams Lewis for their contributions to this article. “Stories,” KISS Monster, accessed December 19, 2016, kissmonster. com/song_stories/song_stories_gene_11.php, quoting Kerrang! no. 160, October 31, 1987.

2 Craig Harline, Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 31–36. Johanna was known throughout her life by her middle name, Mathilda.

3 After the family arrived in Utah and the oldest daughters started attending school, they were told by their teachers that if they wanted to pronounce their name “Harleen,” they need to change the spelling of their name from “Harlän” to “Harline.” Harline, Conversions, 36.

4 Ibid., 34–36.

5 Ibid.

6 Craig Harline, Conversions, 35; “Swedish Immigration to North America,” Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, accessed December 20, 2016, augustana.edu/general-information/swenson-center. Much literature exists on the Scandinavian experience in Utah and the West. See, for instance, William Mulder, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957, 1985); William Mulder, “The Scandinavian Saga,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976), 141–85; Rachel Gianni Abbott, “The Scandinavian Immigrant Experience in Utah, 1850–1920: Using Material Culture to Interpret Cultural Adaptation” (PhD diss., University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2013); Jennifer Eastman Atteberry, Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

7 Harline, Conversions, 35. During the voyage, Mathilda had to continually nurse Carl, who suffered from seasickness, as well as all four of her daughters, who caught the measles. FamilySearch database, accessed December 20, 2016, familysearch.org, s.v., Oscar Joseph Harline, KWCD-L6R.

8 Oscar Joseph Harline.

9 FamilySearch database, accessed December 20, 2016, familysearch.org, s.v., Oscar Joseph Harline, KWCD-L6R.

10 FamilySearch database, accessed December 20, 2016, familysearch.org, s.v., Olive Geneva Harline, KWCQ-PTS.

11 Deseret News, February 1, 2002.

12 Jo-An Harline Lyman, interview by Sandra Dawn Brimhall and Dawn Retta Brimhall, August 1, 2013, in possession of the authors; Ogden Standard Examiner, June 20, 1940. According to Leigh’s niece, Jo-An Harline Lyman, the Harlines were a musical family. Leigh’s sister, Hilda Harline Riches, wrote musical numbers for LDS church productions and she set poems to music for the missionaries from her congregation. Hilda’s daughters, Sylva Riches Luck and Grace Riches Parrish, were accomplished pianists, organists, vocalists, and choristers. One of Leigh’s nephews, Lloyd Harline, was also a prolific composer who wrote more than one thousand songs, including one for each family member.

13 Sheree Maxwell Bench, “‘True to My Own Convictions’: A Conversation with Carol Cornwall Madsen,” Mormon Historic Studies 9, no. 1 (2008): 89. According to J. Spencer Cornwall’s daughter, Carol Cornwall Madsen, he was the superintendent of music in both the Granite and Salt Lake City school districts before being appointed as the conductor of the Tabernacle Choir in 1935. Leigh attended Granite High School from 1921 to 1923 and this might have been how he became acquainted with Cornwall. Although some secondary sources state that Harline studied piano and organ with Cornwall, Madsen told the authors on July 18, 2016, that her father never taught organ, although he might have taught Harline piano. She said Harline’s name was well known among her family members but she knew of no sources regarding the two men’s student–teacher relationship.

14 Salt Lake Telegram, November 1, 1919.

15 Lyman, interview; Salt Lake Tribune, May 9, 1920.

16 Salt Lake Tribune, April 17, 1921.

17 Salt Lake Telegram, September 7, 1922; “Utah Broadcasting History,” Utah History Encyclopedia, accessed January 9, 2017, uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia.

18 Deseret News, December 12, 1969.

19 Granite High School, Granitian, 1922 to 1923, Granite

School District Office, Salt Lake City, Utah.

20 FamilySearch database, accessed December 20, 2016, familysearch.org, s.v., Joanna Mathilda Petersson, KWX-QTJ.

21 FamilySearch database, accessed December 20, 2016, familysearch.org, s.v., Carl Ersson Harline, KWCX-QTK.

22 Granite High School academic transcripts for Leigh Harline, 1921 to 1923, Granite School District, Salt Lake City, Utah.

23 Salt Lake Telegram, January 15, 1925.

24 Salt Lake Telegram, October 27, 1925.

25 Deseret News, December 19, 1925. Ruth May Fox, a poet, writer, and advocate for women, was called by LDS Church President Heber J. Grant in 1929 to serve as the third general president of the LDS church’s Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association.

26 Microfilm roll 8, University of Utah Student Permanent Records, 1914–1936, Acc0016, University of Utah Libraries, University Archives and Records Management, Salt Lake City, Utah. These music courses included Classic, Romantic and Modern Musical Form and Appreciation; Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Harmony; Counterpoint; and Private Piano.

27 University of Utah Catalogue, 1927–1928, vol. 18, July 1927, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

28 Salt Lake Tribune, January 17, 1926.

29 Utah Daily Chronicle, November 21, 1926. In November 1926, Harline was inducted into the Beta Theta Pi fraternity in the President’s Suite of the Hotel Utah.

30 Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 20, 1940; Deseret News, February 1, 2002. The interview in the Ogden Standard-Examiner implies that Leigh may have met his wife at a dance where his band was playing.

31 Lyman, interview; 1920 U.S. Census, Venice, Los Angeles, California, family 48, page 2b, Catherine C. Palmer, digital image, accessed December 21, 2016, ancestry. com. According to University of California, Los Angeles, records, Catherine Collette Palmer was a junior there in 1928. The El Rodeo yearbook states that she was a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority. See digitallibrary.usc.edu.

32 Modesto (CA) News-Herald, May 29, 1928; Oakland (CA) Tribune, August 24, 1928, August 13, 14, 1929.

33 Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105; Jim Cox, American Radio Networks: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 104–105; Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 202n3; John F. Schneider, “San Francisco Networks of the 1930s,” Old Radio, accessed December 23, 2016, www.oldradio.com/archives/prog/westcoast. networks.

34 Salt Lake Telegram, December 28, 1928.

35 Ibid.; LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 214.

36 Capital Times (Madison, WI), July 13, 1930.

37 Ross Care, “The Film Music of Leigh Harline,” Film Music Notebook 3, no. 2 (1977): 32–48.

38 Robert S. McElvaine, The Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (New York: MacMillan, 2004), 239.

39 Ibid.; Ashby, Amusement for All, 258; Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 63–64.

40 Ross Care, “Symphonies for the Sillies: The Composers for Disney’s Shorts,” Funny World, issue 18, 39–40.

41 Ibid., 43–44.

42 “The Disney Legends Awards” program, quoting Wilfred Jackson, December 5, 2001, courtesy Jo-An Harline Lyman. Copy in authors’ possession. See also Ross Care, “Make Walt’s Music: Music for Disney Animation, 1928–1967,” in The Cartoon Music Book, eds. Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2002), 24, 26–28.

43 J. B. Kaufman, Pinocchio: The Making of the Disney Epic (San Francisco: Walt Disney Family Foundation, 2015),

44 1930 U.S. Census, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, family 292, roll 136, page 14b, Leigh Harkinet (Leigh Harline), digital image, accessed December 22, 2016, ancestry.com. The 1940 census states that Harline’s income was more than $5,000 per year. 1940 U.S. Census, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, roll T627, page 4A, Leigh A. Harline, digital image, accessed December 22, 2016, ancestry.com.

45 Mary Neiswender, Doc Anderson (Poulsbo, WA: Six Stars, 2002), 214.

46 Margaret Adamic, e-mail of “Leigh Harline Biography” to Sandra Brimhall, April 24, 2015, courtesy Walt Disney Company, 500 Buena Vista Street, Burbank, California.

47 Covina (CA) Argus, July 9, 1953.

48 Karen Harline Adams, telephone interview with the authors, August 6, 2013.

49 Ibid.; Lyman, interview.

50 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 121.

51 New York Times, February 8, 1940.

52 McElvaine, Great Depression, 892.

53 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 122.

54 Middlesboro (KY) Daily News, April 19, 1940; Kaufman, Pinocchio, 122. Kaufman notes however, that on some cues, Harline had a collaborator, Paul J. Smith, who was a “talented musician in his own right.”

55 New York Times, February 8, 1940.

56 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 279.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Care, “The Film Music of Leigh Harline”; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 26, 1998. Ned Washington was a prolific American lyricist and songwriter. He was nominated for eleven Academy Awards from 1940 to 1962. In 1952 he won another Academy Award for the best original music for High Noon. Clifton Avon Edwards, who was known as “Ukulele Ike,” was an American singer and voice actor. He was extremely popular during the 1920s and 1930s and, in 1929, his rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain” was number one on U.S. pop music charts for three weeks.

60 Maryville (MO) Daily Forum, December 26, 1975.

61 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 280.

62 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 285. According to Kaufman, by the mid-1940s “the Disney universe had expanded so dramatically that most viewers had learned to expect a tremendously varied range of subjects, styles and ideas.”

63 Lansing (MI) State Journal, January 12, 1980.

64 Richard A. Jewell and Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (New York: Arlington House, 1992), 145.

65 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 285–86; William O’Connor, Daily Beast, February 7, 2015. O’Connor was quoting Dave Bosser, the producer and creative director of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

66 Provo Daily Herald, July 5, 1971.

67 Dixon (IL) Evening Telegraph, October 19, 1973.

68 Tom Sito, “The Disney Strike of 1941,” Animation World Network, July 19, 2005, accessed December 22, 2016, awn.com/animationworld/disney-strike-1941-

how-it-changed-animation-comics; see also, Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), chapter 11.

69 “Disney Legends Awards” program.

70 Salt Lake Tribune, July 7, 1942, August 20, 1944.

71 Salt Lake Telegram, April 22, July 24, 1946.

72 Big Spring (TX) Daily Herald, April 22, 1943.

73 Salt Lake Telegram, December 4, 1941; Hamilton (OH) Journal News, April 22, 1971.

74 Neiswender, Doc Anderson, 218.

75 Ibid.

76 Kaufman, Pinocchio, 121; Lyman, interview.

77 San Bernardino (CA) County Sun, September 5, 1935.

78 Matthew Kennedy, Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 18.

79 Neiswender, Doc Anderson, 218.

80 Clark County, Nevada, Decree of Divorce, February 6, 1942, No. 13321; Clark County, Nevada, Affidavit of Application for Marriage License, No. 62326; Clark County, Nevada, Marriage License, February 28, 1942, No. 62326, 134707, C1546874. Although the divorce decree did not expressly state that Catherine Palmer Harline was a resident of Nevada, she must have been to obtain a divorce there. During the 1940s, Nevada required that a person must live in the state a minimum of six weeks to obtain resident status. Although Clark County divorce records were searched, we could not determine the name of Catherine Darby’s first husband. 1910 U.S. Census, Owatonna, Steele, Minnesota, family 64, page 4a, George F. Darby, digital image, accessed December 21, 2016, ancestry.com; Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, History of Rice and Steele Counties, Minnesota, Vol. 2 (Chicago: H. C. Cooper, Jr., 1910), 1538–39. Catherine Anne Barnard Darby (she went by Anne) was born in Minnesota on April 13, 1908, to George Franklin Darby and Eleanor Frances. George Darby—who was the son of Benjamin E. Darby, the proprietor and editor of the Owatonna, Minnesota, People’s Press—assisted his father with managing and editing the newspaper. According to Wedge, Catherine was named after her grandmother Kate Annie Barnard.

81 Neiswender, Doc Anderson, 219. Leigh Harline’s niece, Jo-An Harline Lyman, who met Anne at family reunions in Utah, said that Anne was well liked by family members.

82 Adams, telephone interview; Neiswender, Doc Anderson, 220; Deseret News, February 1, 2002.

83 Deseret News, February 1, 2002; Lyman, interview.

84 Lyman, interview.

85 Care, “The Film Music of Leigh Harline.”

86 John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of OldTime Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 257.

87 Lincoln (NB) Star, June 30, 1946.

88 Salt Lake Telegram, November 2, 1946.

89 Lyman, interview.

90 Salt Lake Telegram, November 2, 1946.

91 Portuguese Bend homes, including the Harline residence, made headlines in March 1957 when a “creeping catastrophe” caused their beach front property and more than one hundred other homes along the beach to slowly sink into the sea. According to the Santa Cruz (CA) Sentinel: “In the middle of the night . . . at the home of movie composer Leigh Harline, there was a nightmarish rending crash. Harline and his wife awoke to find doors, windows and drawers splintered and jammed shut. Floors, walls and roofs were torn and twisted.” Heartbroken, Leigh and Anne were forced to abandon their home and move to another location.

Santa Cruz Sentinel, March 16, 1957. According to a letter from Crawford Gates to Leigh Harline, dated March 7, 1964, Leigh owned a home in the Hollywood Hills area, located at 7555 Lolina Lane. Crawford Gates Papers, MSS 7762, Music and Dance Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

92 Independent (Long Beach, CA), March 17, 1947. Leigh served on the Municipal Arts Commission and he was a member of the Mayor’s Music Advisory Board for three years. He also was a member of the Musician’s Union, Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Screen Composer’s Association, Composer’s Association, Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, the Bohemian Club, and Beta Theta Pi. FamilySearch database, accessed December 20, 2016, familysearch. org, s.v., Leigh Adrian Harline, KWVP-N9F. Anne was also very supportive of the arts and she belonged to the Community Arts Association of Palos Verdes. Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach, CA), July 16, 1950.

93 Lyman, interview; Crawford Gates to Georgia Gates, February 18, 1964, Crawford Gates Papers. In this letter, Gates wrote that Harline had returned the money the LDS church had given him to compose the score for Man’s Search for Happiness.

94 Lyman, interview; Memorandum from Crawford Gates to David and Jean, February 13, 1964, Crawford Gates Papers. Harline also composed the score for the 1968 LDS film In This Holy Place. See the finding aid for the Leigh Harline papers.

95 Craword Gates to W. C. Whitaker, March 7, 1964, Crawford Gates Papers.

96 Crawford Gates to Leigh Harline, March 7, 1964, Crawford Gates Papers.

97 Salt Lake Tribune, February 23, 1964; Deseret News, December 12, 1969 (qtn.).

98 Salt Lake Tribune, April 15, 1959. Valentine went on to name several other composers such as Harold Orlob and Mary Hale Woolsey, who wrote Springtime in the Rockies.

99 News and Telegram (Sulphur Springs, TX), March 9, 1963.

100 Ross Care, “The Film Music of Harline.” Karen and Gretchen each owned one of their father’s two Oscars.

101 Ibid.

102 Chilliwack (BC) Progress, April 14, 1965.

103 Lyman, interview.

104 Neiswender, Doc Anderson. p. 214.

105 Ross Care, “The Film Music of Harline”; “AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Songs,” American Film Institute, accessed December 21, 2016, afi.com/100Years/songs.aspx.

106 Deseret News, February 1, 2002.

107 Jeremy Stahl, “Nordic Quack: Sweden’s Bizarre Tradition of Watching Donald Duck Cartoons on Christmas Eve,” Slate, December 22, 2009; “How to Celebrate Christmas in Sweden,” December 11, 2012, Life at SLU, accessed December 21, 2016, blogg.slu.se/life-atslu; National Public Radio, “How Donald Duck Helps Swedes Celebrate Christmas,” All Things Considered, December 24, 2014, npr.org/2014/12/24/372940340/ how-donald-duck-helps-swedes-celebrate-christmas.

108 William Darby and Jack Du Bois, American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915–1990 (Jefferson: McFarland, 1999), 370.

109 “The Sounds of Fighting Men, Howlin’ Wolf and Comedy Icon among 25 Named to the National Recording Registry,” News from the Library of Congress, June 23, 2010, accessed December 23, 2016, loc.gov/today/ pr/2010/10-116.html. The University of Cincinnati has the largest collection of Leigh Harline’s music, with

thirty-seven boxes of his musical scores and compositions. We contacted the university, hoping to locate more primary sources regarding Harline. Unfortunately, the collection does not include biographical material, correspondence, or journals. The website for the collection is ead.ohiolink.edu/xtf-ead/view?docId=ead/OhCiUAR0316.xml;query=;brand=default.

CONTRIBUTORS

TONYA REITER is an independent historian living in Salt Lake City.

MICHELLE HILL has a master’s degree in Art History from Brigham Young University. From 2010 to 2011, she was the Museum Curator at Camp Floyd/Stagecoach Inn State Park, when she became interested in Victorian-era fashion. She recently worked at the Steves Homestead Museum, a Victorian mansion in San Antonio, Texas, and she teaches Humanities at San Antonio College.

TED MOORE is an assistant professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University, specializing in urban history. He has published several articles, including two in the UHQ: “Fast Revolutions: Bicycles, Paved Paths, and the Creation of a Middle-Class City in Salt Lake, 1890–1903” and “Speed Merchants: The History of Professional Cycling in Salt Lake City, 1898–1914.” When not teaching, he enjoys spending time with his wife, Julie, and children, Theo and Genevieve, and riding his bike.

SANDRA DAWN BRIMHALL, who resides in West Jordan, Utah, is a writer and independent historian. She received a BS in Mass Communications from the University of Utah in 1975. In 2014, Sandra and her daughter, Dawn Retta Brimhall, were joint recipients of the BYU Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award. Sandra was also the joint recipient with her son, Clinton Robert Brimhall, of the 2015 Clarence Dixon Taylor (third place) Historical Research Award, also from the Redd Center.

DAWN RETTA BRIMHALL—who graduated from Brigham Young University in 2011 with a BA in History Teaching and a minor in Geography—resides in Houston, Texas. She teaches United States History at Davis Senior High School in Houston.

FLOYD A. O’NEIL is a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society and the former director of the American West Center at the University of Utah. Shauna O’Neil is an attorney living in Salt Lake City.

WILLIAM P. MACKINNON is a Fellow and Honorary Life Member of the Utah State Historical Society. Since 1963 his articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in UHQ, and in 2016 Arthur H. Clark published the second volume of his documentary history of the Utah War (At Sword’s Point). He has been presiding officer of the Mormon History Association, Santa Barbara Corral of the Westerners, and the Yale Library Associates. Additionally, MacKinnon has been a vice president of General Motors Corporation, chairman of Children’s Hospital of Michigan, and president of MacKinnon Associates, a management consulting firm. He resides in Montecito, California.

The Park City to Fort Thornburgh Road

BY FLOYD A. O’NEIL AND SHAUNA O’NEIL

When Colorado became a state in 1876, many of its citizens were concerned about the amount of land held by the Ute tribe. A chance to alter that situation came in 1879 when the Utes of northern Colorado resisted national Indian policy prescribing forced acculturation. The dispute led to an armed struggle between the US Army and the Utes of northwestern Colorado. In that armed encounter, known as the “Meeker Massacre,” Utes repelled the military’s advances and the army suffered many casualties, including the leader of the expedition Major Thomas Thornburgh. The Utes killed the Indian agent Nathan Meeker and some of his employees and kidnapped part of his family and staff.1

A second military force was sent; Ouray, a Ute leader of the Taviwache or Uncompahgre band of west central Colorado, intervened and negotiated a bloodless truce. But the struggle was a motivating factor in creating a “Utes must Go” campaign. The suggested area for this relocation was to the “vacant” lands in Utah. Thus the leaders in Colorado were able to use political pressure in Washington to remove the Utes from their traditional lands. This was implemented by Executive Order of President Arthur and laws passed in Congress. Utah and the federal government were at odds over the issue of polygamy, and the federal government was unwilling to grant favors to the people of Utah Territory.

The Utes in the White River area were removed to the Uintah Reservation, an area designated for the Indians of Utah. Both the Uin-

tah and the White River bands were outraged at their removal. But the treatment of the Uncompahgres was particularly unjust. Although this band had no part in the conflict referred to above, and in fact their leader, Ouray, had been instrumental in stopping the bloodshed, the Uncompahgre were also removed to Utah. The land chosen for them and made into an adjacent reservation was desert, bleak and almost totally without farming land. At first the Utes showed signs of resistance. The response of the national government was to send military force. That force was sent to Colorado under the command of General Ranald S. Mackenzie, who had used great violence against Indians in Texas. He was a man the Indians feared.

To remove the Uncompahgres from Colorado, Mackenzie “brought his main force to join Beaumont’s column, giving him several thousand infantry and cavalry troops scattered throughout the valley. He found the tribal elders were keeping the Uncompahgres under control.”2 The Utes delayed the process with negotiations until August when Mackenzie spoke to the Utes in a meeting: “It is not necessary for me to stay here any longer. You can settle this matter by discussion among yourselves. All I want to know is whether you will go or not. If you will not go of your own accord, I will make you go. When you have sufficiently discussed this matter and have arrived at a conclusion, send for me. Remember, you are to go, at once.”3

Thus, the Utes left the beautiful Uncompahgre Valley. Mackenzie watched the Utes travel

down the road to their new reservation, herded along by the soldiers. A witness described their departure: “Sheep were abandoned, blankets and personal possessions strewn along the road, women and children were loudly wailing.” This rich, proud, powerful people had been reduced to poverty by a single act of the government. Within days of the Utes’ dispossession, settlers began establishing homesteads and laying out towns in the rich Uncompahgre Valley.4

When the dispossessed arrived at their new location, they could hardly believe the desolation. Their new location was called Ouray, after their leader who had recently died. The new reservation, huddled against the Green River, was surrounded by land so poor that one government official described it

As uninhabited even by birds and beasts. Only a lonely raven could occasionally be seen upon a bleak and barren mountain crag, when it appeared as if he had only stopped to rest, in his weary flight to a better land. Practically timberless, and being fruitless and grassless and waterless, it is but a wild and ragged desolation; and virtually valueless for any purpose whatever, unless it be for the minerals that may be found beneath the surface.5

So poor indeed was this land that for the next fifty years, the U.S. government issued rations to keep the refugees alive. The Utes already occupying the Uintah Basin were angered at the potential forced sharing of the meager resources that the area provided.

Federal officials decided to establish a fort to force the Utes to stay and to keep peace with the other Utes. The new fort was named for the fallen soldier Major T. Thornburgh. In August 1881, Captain H. S. Hawkins of the Sixth Infantry, along with four companies, established his headquarters near Ouray. The location of the first Fort Thornburgh was adjacent to Ouray, where a new agency was founded. Federal officials relocated the fort to an area north of Vernal in Ashley Creek Canyon, partly due to the soldiers’ negative influence on the Indians. Even that location was not successful and the army closed the post in July 1884.

Fort Thornburgh was a difficult place to maintain from its founding. The Uintah Basin was remote, supply lines were long and difficult. One route was from the railroad in southwestern Wyoming. Freight from that location had to be carried over the lofty Uintah Mountains. A second was a crude route from Park City over Daniels Summit, then nearly 100 miles over broken country to the Uintah Ute agency, Ashley settlement and for a short time to Fort Thornburgh. This was the passage chosen by the army, and they decided to improve the road and make it a military supply corridor. The reconnaissance was conducted by Lieutenant A. L. Wagner of the Sixth Infantry.

The notes on the survey are as follows: 

Headquarters Fort Thornburgh, Utah

September 21st 1881.

To the Assistant Adjutant General, Headqrs. Department of the Platte, Omaha, Nebraska.

Sir:

I have the honor to forward the Itinerary, prepared by Lieut. Wagner, 6th Infantry, of the road from Park City, Utah to this post. The total distance is 142.69 miles, which will be shortened at least two miles in this vicinity.

I believe Lieut. Wagner’s personal observations and measurements over the road actually travelled to be as accurate as circumstances would admit, but I do not agree to that part of his report which mentions that the distance could be reduced 3 or 4 miles by adopting the road explored and reported upon by Lieut. Byrne, 6th Infantry. That road crosses the Duchesne by a ford below the mouth of Lake Fork runs down the south side of the Duchesne and recrosses to north side near the mouth of the Uintah, thus making one additional crossing. The road travelled by the command leaves the Duchesne at

or near this ford and goes by what is known as the Dry Gulch road; for 5 ¼ miles it travels on the regular Uintah Agency road, then turns east around the hills on north side of the Duchesne and runs down to mouth of the Uintah. This distance is 15.93 miles, odometer measurement, the road requiring no work. Lt. Byrne reported the road on south side of Duchesne as requiring some work and the estimated distance 17 miles. It took him 5 hours on horseback; it took me 4 hours and 18 min. on horseback by the Dry Gulch road to reach the same point on the Uintah. The Dry Gulch road is accurately laid down on the map of Utah issued in 1878 by the Department of the Interior and leaves Uintah Agency 13 miles to the N.E. The road on south side of the Duchesne ought to be shorter, but Lieut. Byrne estimates the distance by this road from Lake Fork crossing to Uintah crossing at 24 ½ miles; the odometer measurement by the Dry Gulch road is 21.34 miles, so the two roads are probably very nearly equal in length, but the Dry Gulch is the better.

I am Sir, very respectfully, Your obedient servant. (Sgd.) H. S. Hawkins Captain 6th Infantry, Commanding Post. Inclosure (Lieut. Wagner’s Report)

Fort Thornburgh, Utah. September 20, 1881

To the Adjutant, Fort Thornburgh, Utah Sir:

In compliance with Par. 1, Orders No. 45, Headquarters Battalion 6th Infantry, Camp near Park City, Utah September 3 1881, I have

Map of the Park City to Fort Thornburgh road.

National Archives and Records Administration

the honor to submit the following report upon the condition of the road between Park City, Utah, and this post, in advance of the detailed map which I am now preparing. I submit, herewith, as supplements to this report two itineraries of the road in question; one containing notes of compass bearings and extracts from my topographical notes; the other being merely a list of camping places and important points with distances recorded.

The road from Park City to Provo River is a good mountain road upon which no important repairs are needed. The bridge across Provo River is old and should be repaired, if not entirely rebuilt. This bridge is an ordinary plank bridge consisting simply of a flooring of planks laid upon timber “stringers.”

The bridge in Daniel’s Cañon, 21.63 miles from Park City is old and in urgent need of repairs; as the flooring is broken and the stringers are unsound. This bridge must be repaired soon, or a new one will be necessary. It is a rough country bridge consisting simply of a flooring of planks laid upon timber stringers. The bridges in the same cañon (24.6; 26.6 and 28.8 miles from

Park City respectively) should be repaired. Probably only slight repairs will be needed on these structures. There are several saw mills in Daniel’s Canon at which material for these repairs could be obtained cheaply. The road through Daniel’s Canon is very bad. The grades, as a rule, are not heavy; but the road is full of boulders and ruts. The road should be repaired by removing these boulders and filling the ruts with gravel or corduroy. The road through this cañon is lined with willows which in many places arch over the road, and striking in the faces of the teamsters distract their attention from their teams. These willows should be cut down for a distance of 4 or 5 feet on each side of the road. The willows thus cut down could be utilized in corduroying the road.

In Strawberry Valley there are three brooks with marshy crossings. Each train should corduroy these crossings with willows. This would be the work of but a few minutes. I do not think that bridges are necessary at these points, which are 36.1; 36.34 and 38.28 miles respectively from Park City. In leaving Strawberry Valley near Cold Cañon another marshy stream is crossed. This stream should be bridged. It

with the Fourth U.S. Infantry. On September 29, 1879, he was killed commanding an expedition to protect the Indian agency of Nathan Meeker in an event known alternately as “Meeker’s Plow Share Incident” or the “Battle of Mill Creek.” The late major’s name graced a short-lived army fort placed at the newly formed Uintah Reservation in Utah in 1881 and abandoned by 1884.

points. At a point 48.38 miles from Park City the road ascends a steep grade which could not be reduced without more labor than the result would be worth; but the road might be improved by removing stones and filling ruts. The same may be said of the steep hill by which the road descends into Deep Creek Cañon. At the bottom of this cañon, the road, in some places, is marshy and should be corduroyed with saplings.

At Currant Creek the road descends into a cañon by a very heavy grade. It would require a great deal of labor to reduce this grade; but the roadway, which is rough, stony and uneven could be easily improved. The grade by which the road leaves this cañon is light.

The road enters Red Creek Cañon by descending a high hill with steep grade. The roadway at this place should be improved by removing stones and filling ruts. The road in leaving this cañon passes up a high hill with an unusually heavy grade. It is impossible to ascend this grade with an ordinary wagon load without doubling teams. This grade should be abandoned, and a road should be constructed by following the sloping side of a ravine a few yards to the left of the present road. A road with easy grade could thus be constructed. This would require the labor of 20 men for 10 days or two weeks; but I regard this work as imperatively necessary, as the road in its present condition cannot be used in winter when the hillside is covered with snow and ice.

At 73.76 miles from Park City the road descends a long hill with heavy grade. It would require a vast amount of work to reduce this grade; but the roadway which is full of stones, ruts and pitches, should be improved by the removal or reduction of these obstacles.

would require stingers about 30 feet in length; and as the banks are low and marshy, the bridge should be raised and approaches constructed. The road from this point across the valley to Cold Cañon is very marshy and bad; but a good road branches off to the left and follows the direction of the hills around the valley. This road should be used and the valley road abandoned.

In Cold Canon the road should be improved by removing boulders from the roadway, filling ruts, and reducing the grade at various

Along the Duchesne River, between 82 and 85 miles from Park City, there is a series of washouts which will seriously endanger the road at the next spring rise of the river. Most of these could be avoided by establishing a road nearer the hills on the right bank of the river. Such road should cross the river continue at a point 79.88 miles from Park City and then continue on the right bank, as near the hills as possible, for about 7 miles.

Major Thomas Tipton Thornburgh, an artillery school instructor, a professor of military science at East Tennessee University, a paymaster, and ultimately commander of Fort Fred Steele, Wyoming Territory,

National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

At Point of Rocks, 92.59 miles from Park City, the road descends a long hill with easy grade. A little work on the roadway is all that is required at this point.

At Blue Hill, 97.96 miles from Park City, the road descends into Desolation Valley. The grade at this point is steep; but the principal difficulty lies in the fact that the road is full of rocks and shelving pitches, which could, however, be removed with comparatively little labor.

Between Blue Hill and Fort Thornburgh the road requires no work that could not be easily done by passing trains. At 111.77 miles from Park City a road branches off to the right and follows the course of the Duchesne River to Ft. Thornburgh. This road was recently reported upon by Lt. Chas. Byrne, 6th Infty. I am unable to state, from my own knowledge, anything about this road; but from the information I have received I believe that the distance from Park City to this post could be reduced 3 or 4 miles by adopting and improving this road. Nearly, or quite, the same result could be obtained by opening a road from the mesa at this post, around Rocky Hill, and thence in a straight line to the point where the road now in use descends a hill 9 miles from the post. The opening of this road would require the labor of 6 men for 2 weeks.

In conclusion, the road from Park City to this post can, with the improvements I have mentioned, be made as good as mountain roads usually are; but I do not think that it can be used in winter. I have carefully questioned teamsters, frontiersmen and other citizens acquainted with the route, and they have invariably informed that Daniel’s Canon and Strawberry Valley are impassable in winter, owing to heavy snow drifts.

I am, Sir, very respectfully, Your obedient servant.

(Sgd.) A. L. Wagner

Lieut. 6th Infantry

Acting Engineer Officer 

As noted in the report, the route could not be used in winter. A new route of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, completed in 1882, used an existing road from Price, Utah, through Soldier Creek, Nine Mile, and Gate canyons. That route made the Park City to Fort Thornburgh road unnecessary. The struggle to haul freight from Wyoming over the Uintah Mountains on the Carter Road and from Park City on the road to Fort Thornburgh ended with construction of the shorter and more passable route. Not only was the rail line built, but a telegraph line was constructed in 1887.

In the twentieth century portions of the old Park City to Fort Thornburgh road were developed and are now present-day U.S. Highway 40.

Notes

1. Joseph G. Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 45–50.

2. Charles M. Robinson III, Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie (Austin, TX: State House Press, 1993), 269.

3. Ibid., 279.

4. Ibid., 280.

5. George M. Gordon, Special Indian Agent, Fort Duchesne, Utah, to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, July 31, 1889, 15–17, manuscript, Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration.

Uninvited, Unwelcome, and Uncomfortable:

Utah Assignments of Colonels E. J. Steptoe and C. F. Smith

ESSAY BY WILLIAM P. MACKINNON

Ron McFarland. Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars: Life on the Frontier, 1815–1865. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. vii + 249 pp. Paper, $39.95.

Allen H. Mesch. Your Affectionate Father, Charles F. Smith. Plano, TX: N. P., 2016. x + 335 pp. Paper, $39.95.

In 2008 I predicted the continued discovery of documents that would illuminate Utah’s tumultuous territorial period, with much of this material unearthed by researchers in nontraditional disciplines and unlikely locations.1 The events of 2016 were good examples of this phenomenon, as with the discovery of the July 1847 plat of Great Salt Lake City by Rick Grunder, a dealer in Mormon manuscripts based in Upstate New York. So too with the recent publication of books by Ronald E. McFarland, professor of English at the University of Idaho, and Allen H. Mesch, a chemical engineer and retired petroleum consultant writing history in Texas. With Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars and Your Affectionate Father, Charles F. Smith, McFarland and Mesch have broken new ground by publishing the letters of two West Pointers posted to antebellum Utah. This

REVIEW

Col. Charles F. Smith, photographed shortly after his promotion from lieutenant colonel in 1861.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

material does much to reveal the reactions of these military men to the isolated, exotic society they encountered in the Great Basin of the 1850s.

For both colonels Steptoe and Smith, duty in Utah preceded combat elsewhere that shaped the balance of their careers and reputations. In Steptoe’s case, nine months in Salt Lake City during 1854–1855 led to his surname’s brief entry into the English language as a pejorative verb, President Pierce’s nomination of him to succeed Governor Brigham Young, and his pursuit of a three-part mission to deliver hundreds of dragoon recruits and animals to the Pacific Coast, survey an improved road from Utah to California, and capture the Indians responsible for the 1853 Gunnison massacre near Fillmore, Utah. Thereafter (1858) Steptoe suffered military defeat and reputational damage in Washington Territory at the hands of an ad hoc tribal confederation armed with ammunition he believed might have been provided by “the Mormons.”2 Charles F. Smith, who served at Camp Scott and Camp Floyd from 1857–1860, is forgotten in today’s Utah other than perhaps as the officer whose death at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862 unexpectedly cleared the way for Ulysses S. Grant’s meteoric rise to greatness.

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Edward Jenner Steptoe

Prior to his defeat in the Northwest, Steptoe’s reputation was admirable, although not of star quality. Steptoe has never inspired a full biography, a reflection of his post-1858 eclipse, the paucity of available personal papers, and the fact that he spent the entire Civil War on medical leave. Ron McFarland has attempted to remedy this neglect with a study intended to correct longstanding errors while making “a case for what was gained from some of Steptoe’s un-successes, most notably in Utah and in his defeat at the Battle of To-hotsnim-me in the Washington Territory.”3 The author does this with eight chapters and an epilogue that proceed chronologically. Through this structure the author focuses on six questions dealing with Steptoe’s competence and leadership in the West after

service in Florida’s Second Seminole War and the Mexican-American War:

What did Steptoe accomplish in the Utah Territory (1854–1855) and why did he decide not to accept the governorship of that territory offered by his friend and former comrade-inarms, President Franklin Pierce? How “disastrous,” really, was his defeat in the Washington Territory, especially considering the consequences thereof? Why did he risk moving into potentially hostile Palouse country in his march toward the Colville gold mines? To what extent was he responsible for the size of his command and its equipment? That is . . . [Was] he somehow negligent? How did his heavily outnumbered command escape annihilation that mid-May afternoon and evening in 1858? Did his defeat in the Washington Territory destroy his health, leaving him, as some have suggested, a broken man?4

On balance, McFarland succeeds in providing answers to these questions while shedding light on Steptoe’s views about other issues: slavery (conflicted), Indian victimization (simpatico), and the desirability of a military career (ambivalent-to-negative). He also discusses less global matters such as whether Steptoe ever married (Mary Rosanna Claytor, 1860) and the inspiration for his given names (the famous British physician Edward Jenner). In so doing the author uses most of the important secondary sources in addition to primary materials that include military correspondence in the National Archives, the fewer than forty of Steptoe’s personal letters held by the Washington State Historical Society and descendants, and the private papers of soldiers with whom he campaigned. McFarland may be the first scholar to exploit fully some of these materials, as with the journal of William Antes, a dragoon private who served under Steptoe in Utah, and a rare photograph of the colonel taken in 1860.

How effectively has the author used this research? The results are uneven, with many of the book’s shortfalls rooted in his

lack of background in military and Mormon history compounded by unsupportive editing. Consequently McFarland refers to Mormons as Latter Day rather than Latter-day Saints (5, 83), describes artillery pieces as ordinance instead of ordnance (54, 116), and renders officers as offers (81). The book’s explanation of the crucial distinction between brevet and substantive rank is inadequate (64), and there is no discussion of the extent to which promotions for Steptoe and even the talented Robert E. Lee were agonizingly slow because of the army’s static size and the absence of a retirement system to eliminate the blockages posed by aging, ailing senior officers unwilling to leave the service.5 Because of the publisher’s shortsightedness, Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars lacks the maps essential to following the author’s discussion of Steptoe’s campaigns in Florida, Mexico, Utah, and Washington.

More importantly, McFarland’s fifth chapter on Steptoe’s sojourn in Utah often falls short of providing the context needed for one to understand the complex scene Steptoe encountered there. As a result some readers will miss the implications of Steptoe’s arrival in the territory just as Brigham Young’s four-year term of office was expiring or, for that matter, the fact that Young was not only governor but served as Utah’s U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs.6 McFarland’s explanation of the close relationship between Steptoe and Franklin Pierce is important and done well, but it appears in a chapter following the one where it is most needed to understand the president’s impromptu nomination of the colonel to succeed Young. McFarland explains Steptoe’s protracted, Hamlet-like agonizing before declining this appointment, but he misses the opportunity to analyze how such indecisiveness related to a disengaged leadership style that permitted the colonel’s troops to riot in the streets of Salt Lake City and later to engage tribal adversaries in Washington without the preparations requisite for survival, if not success.

The author breaks new ground in discussing the possibility that Steptoe suffered undiagnosed mini-strokes while campaigning in both Utah and Washington Territory, but he avoids connecting them to the quality of Steptoe’s

command decisions under pressure as well as to the broader context of the pervasive physical and emotional ailments besetting the antebellum army’s most senior leaders. Also missing is a comprehensive assessment of the duplicitous behavior of Steptoe’s closest Utah ally, Chief Justice John F. Kinney, or for that matter recognition that in 1854 the judge christened a son Edward Steptoe Kinney.

Yet Ron McFarland’s study of this neglected frontier army officer is well worth reading. Unlike many biographers, McFarland has resisted the temptation to produce hagiography. He addresses his subject’s setback in Washington Territory in direct, forthright fashion. Those particularly interested in Colonel Steptoe’s Utah experience may also wish to consult David H. Miller’s aging but still-valuable master’s thesis on the subject.7

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ferguson Smith

On September 9, 1861, while Edward J. Steptoe convalesced at his home in Confederate Virginia, the U.S. Army promoted him from the substantive rank of major in the Ninth U.S. Infantry to the lieutenant colonelcy of the Tenth. It was an advancement made possible by Charles F. Smith’s transfer out of that regiment earlier in the day to command another unit in the broader Civil War. Smith, a Pennsylvanian, had graduated from West Point ten years earlier than Steptoe, and during 1838–1842 he returned to the academy as commandant of cadets. It was a role in which he instructed several men with whom he later served in Utah, including Barnard E. Bee Jr., Edward R. S. Canby, Lafayette McLaws, John Fulton Reynolds, and Fitz John Porter. In 1848 Smith emerged from the Mexican War with three brevets for valor. In Mexico he had seen it all. Consequently, when Congress expanded the regular army in 1855 by creating four infantry and cavalry regiments, Smith was made the new Tenth’s executive officer in the substantive grade of lieutenant colonel. In that role he oversaw recruitment of the regiment’s troops from scratch and the appointment of a talented officer cadre (some former students) that soon turned the unit into an elite military organization. After less than

two years of frontier duty in Wisconsin and Minnesota Territory and sporadic combat with the Sioux, the Tenth was ordered to the Utah Expedition.

Smith’s sterling combat record, relatively senior rank, and the high regard in which he was held brought him assignments as temporary commander of the Tenth, Camp Floyd, and then the Department of Utah while his various superiors were absent, but his involvement in the active phase of the Utah War has gone unnoticed by historians. Consequently, most accounts of the conflict mention him only as commanding a small battalion composed of two of his regiment’s ten companies plus some of the civilian appointees and newspaper reporters accompanying the army during the fall 1857 march to Fort Bridger. In a few cases Mormon writers have also mentioned an incident immediately following the Utah Expedition’s triumphal march through Salt Lake City in which a visiting Nauvoo Legion officer witnessed and recorded a caloric outburst by Smith in Albert Sidney Johnston’s headquarters tent: “Several officers and gentlemen were present. Lieut. Col. Smith of the Tenth Infantry made some remarks disrespectful about the Mormons. One of the company said ‘sir, you had better be aware how you talk about the Mormons, as they might hear you.’ He said he did not care a damn who heard him, he would like to see every damned Mormon hung by the neck. This same Smith is considered one of the flowers of the army.”8

Charles F. Smith’s near-anonymity in Utah is attributable to the absence of any published letters, diaries, or memoirs generated by him, in contrast to the plethora of such material flowing from or about the Tenth Infantry’s other officers and enlistees. 9 Now Allen H. Mesch has filled this gap with a stunning cache of letters Smith wrote from frontier posts to his young daughter, Fanny Mactier Smith, during the period of December 1855 to February 1861. Mesch discovered this material in the unexploited Charles F. Smith Family Papers at the U.S. Military Academy and figuratively rescued it from the cuttingroom floor, self-publishing it after it had fallen victim to a wrenching 90,000-word reduction to his earlier biography of Smith. 10

For Mesch’s tenacity in recycling this wonderful primary source material excised by a publisher, I am both surprised and grateful.

In writing to daughter Fanny in Annapolis, Maryland, Charles Smith revealed not only his own jaundiced views about Mormonism and its leaders but also occasional tidbits about his brother officers that permit us to piece together answers to some of the Utah Expedition’s mysteries. For example, I have long wondered why Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston selected First Lieutenant Cuvier Grover of the Tenth Infantry for the daunting assignment of Camp Scott’s provost marshal during the winter of 1858, a role in which Grover policed Johnston’s unruly garrison with “unlimited power as such. Life and death is in his hands.”11 Johnston and Grover left no explanation of this unusual, hazardous assignment, but one likely clue lies buried in Smith’s earlier April 6, 1856, letter to twelve-year-old Fanny from Fort Crawford, Wisconsin. There the colonel casually informed his daughter that “Lt. Col. Canby and myself are going in the stage tomorrow . . . as witnesses before a civil court in Lieut. Grover’s case. You may have heard he killed a soldier last autumn, one of a party of seven deserters who were running away. I was President of a [military] Court of Inquiry by which he was exonerated & have to testify to that fact.”12 Two years later and supported by eight of Johnston’s toughest infantry sergeants, Grover had the requisite grit and reputation to keep order in the biggest garrison in North America. He would need both qualities to control a camp swarming with gamblers and killers the likes of William C. Quantrill (soon the Civil War’s most notorious guerrilla), where Chief Justice Delana R. Eckels and his clerk were assaulted by drunken troops of the Tenth Infantry in May 1858 and where Thomas L. Kane feared assassination from soldiers, camp followers, and hostile Mormons.13

Sometimes similar insights emerge from what Colonel Smith did not write to Fanny as well as what he did communicate. Two such subjects come to mind: the reputation of the Tenth’s regimental commander, Colonel Edmund Brooke Alexander, and Smith’s view of his frequent, duty-imposed separations

from family. In Alexander’s case we are aware from other sources—the letters of Captain Gove and the journal of Captain Tracy—that some of the Tenth’s company commanders viewed him as a fussy and timid “old woman.” This was disrespect rooted in Alexander’s rigid enforcement of sometimes unpopular regulations, his unwillingness to take command of the Utah Expedition as the senior officer present before Johnston caught up with his troops at Ham’s Fork in early November, and his relatively civil correspondence with Brigham Young before Johnston’s arrival. Smith, the officer with the longest-term relationship and closest proximity to Alexander, neither expressed nor repeated any such criticism of Alexander. His was a reserve that reflects either unusual self-control or a factual situation that calls into question the fairness of traditional criticisms of his commander, especially in light of Alexander’s two brevets for valor in Mexico and his selection in 1855 to lead one of the army’s new regiments. With respect to the family separations endured by Smith, he clearly felt the sacrifice keenly, but his letters are free of the self-pity and anger that pervade the letters of Randolph B. Marcy or George B. McClellan.14

What Smith did express was a deep-seated contempt and hostility for Mormons and Mormonism that mirrored the attitudes of virtually the entire Utah Expedition, from Albert Sidney Johnston on down, as well as the civilian correspondents who sent dispatches to New York newspapers. In this sense, Charles F. Smith was surely a man of his times.

Among Smith’s most fascinating letters was the one he wrote on April 14, 1858, to describe the controversy then roiling Fort Bridger: whether the recent departures of Alfred Cumming and Thomas L. Kane for Salt Lake City without an army escort was a courageous bid to supplant Brigham Young and assume Cumming’s new office in the face of armed Mormon opposition or part of a byzantine deal staged by Kane with Young’s cooperation to create the appearance of bravery where none existed. Suspecting manipulation by Kane, most of the Utah Expedition’s officers subscribed to the latter view. Charles F. Smith confided his own assessment of this complex political issue to his

teenaged daughter:

If the Governor’s mission is to assert his lawful authority as the chief ruler of the people . . . it would be one to command respect, altho’ knowing the people with whom he is to deal, it would be an act of consummate folly; for it’s certain that in such a case they would treat him with official indignity—laugh at him, deride him, and very likely set him on a mule with his face to the tail of the animal and turn him out—possibly in this direction probably towards the Pacific. If he goes to make terms of composition [accommodation] with that people it would be an unpardonable weakness. There can be no terms made with mutineers or rebels with arms in their hands, such people must lay down their arms and submit to the laws unconditionally before lawful authority can hold intercourse with them; failing to do this they must be coerced. But as I said in the beginning under no circumstances should he have gone in except under the flag of his country— this he has not done.15

By January 1861 Fanny Smith was of an age that prompted the colonel to share with her his smoldering rage over the stewardship of the Buchanan administration. In his penultimate letter from Camp Floyd, Charles Smith assailed not the administration’s handling of the Utah War but its posture during the unfolding secession crisis: “The Army has, thank God! Got rid of the roguish administration of Mr. [Secretary of War] Floyd; would to God the country of could only have, months ago, got rid of that miserable imbecile that rejoices in the initials J. B. If he could but hear the curses both loud & deep that are (here) showered on his head for his unreasonable course in permitting matters to go on as they have in Charleston harbor, especially in regard to [resupplying Fort Sumter and Maj. Robert] Anderson, . . . his old bones would rattle in his skin.”16 It was a view and tone worthy of Brigham Young.

Unlike McFarland’s book, Your Affectionate Father provides several maps of Minnesota and

Utah to help readers follow Colonel Smith’s western campaigning; Mesch also makes good use of the images of Camp Floyd and forts Leavenworth, Kearny, Laramie, and Bridger taken during the summer of 1858 by Samuel C. Mills and Edward Jagiello, the photographers who accompanied the Utah Expedition’s topographical engineers.

For readers intrigued by the primary sources about Utah discussed in this review essay, the discovery and publication of more such documents await us. Foremost among researchers likely to break new ground soon is the indefatigable Ephriam D. Dickson III, the deputy chief at the Field Museums Branch, U. S. Army Center of Military History. From him we can expect several studies of the unexploited letters written by the Utah Expedition’s Captain James Hervey Simpson, U.S. Topographical Engineers, and Second Lieutenant George E. Ryan, Seventh U.S. Infantry—materials retrieved by Dickson from such varied places as a Buffalo, New York, newspaper and the archives of a Catholic university. Meanwhile, Vern DeLong, a Pennsylvania businessman, is editing the letters of First Lieutenant Joseph C. Clark Jr., Fourth U.S. Artillery, a trove created at Camp Floyd in 1860–1861 and discovered by DeLong’s family in the proverbial farmhouse attic nearly ten years ago.

The beat goes on.

Notes

1. William P. MacKinnon, Predicting the Past: The Utah War’s Twenty-First Century Future, Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series, no. 14 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009).

2. In a June 12, 1858, dispatch to the New-York Tribune from Camp Scott (published July 7, 1858), reporter A. G. Browne Jr., told his readers that Buchanan’s peace commissioners Ben McCulloch and Lazarus W. Powell were gentlemen “secure from being Steptoed by any influences which [Brigham] Young can bring to bear on them.” This was a reference to the perception among the army that during the spring Governor Cumming had been suborned by Young in much the way that many people believed Young had overinfluenced Steptoe during the winter of 1855. For the colonel’s comments about Mormon “tampering” with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, see Steptoe to Mackall, May 29, 1858, Letters Received, HQ Dept. of the Pacific, RG 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

3. Ron McFarland, Edward J. Steptoe and the Indian Wars: Life on the Frontier, 1815–1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 1.

4. Ibid., 1–2.

5. Because of these promotional impediments, Lee served as a captain of engineers as late in his career as 1855. In 1857, the long-serving colonel commanding the Fourth U.S. Artillery left the army only by virtue of death in his ninety-third year. During April 1858 Buchanan and Floyd felt they had no other choice but to appoint Brevet Major General Persifor Frazer Smith to command the Department of Utah notwithstanding his incapacitation by a chronic ailment; the next month he died at Fort Leavenworth, throwing the army into another succession crisis. Persifor Smith’s successor, Brigadier Gen William S. Harney, was so emotionally unstable that the army had court-martialed him four times, and a civil court in St. Louis had tried him a fifth time. Three months after Harney’s selection for this command, the need arose for a senior officer to lead an Indian campaign in the Pacific Northwest in the wake of Steptoe’s defeat. Again the options atop the army were so narrow that Secretary of War Floyd informed the president, “On this point, I am pretty clear, in my own mind, and cannot doubt but that Genl. Harney is the proper man. I am not sure how Genl. Scott would take this proposition, but Harney is really the only general officer—[A. S.] Johnston alone excepted—who has the physical capacity to conduct such a campaign as this.” Floyd to Buchanan, August 5, 1858, James Buchanan Papers, Collection 91, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

6. For Young’s anxiety over the approaching end to his gubernatorial term and his advice to President Pierce about the need to reappoint him, see Young to Pierce, March 30, 1853, box 50, fd. 1 (reel 63), Brigham Young Collection, CR 1234/1, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL), and MacKinnon, “Sex, Subalterns, and Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2008): 226–60.

7. David H. Miller, “The Impact of the Gunnison Massacre on Mormon–Federal Relations: Colonel Edward Jenner Steptoe’s Command in Utah Territory, 1854–1855” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1968).

8. Historical Department Office Journal, 1844–2012, entries for June 27–29, 1858, CR 100/1, CHL.

9. These individuals include captains Alfred Cumming, Jesse A. Gove, Albert Tracy, and Henry Heth; first lieutenants Lawrence A. Williams and Nathan A. M. Dudley; Second Lieutenant Clarence E. Williams; and privates Henry S. Hamilton, Theodore Boos, and James M. Uhler.

10. Allen H. Mesch, Teacher of Civil War Generals: Major General Charles Ferguson Smith, Soldier and West Point Commandant (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015).

11. Capt. Jesse A. Gove to Mrs. Gove, January 6, 1858, Otis G. Hammond, ed., The Utah Expedition, 1857–1858: Letters of Capt. Jesse A. Gove, 10th Inf., U.S.A., of Concord, N.H., to Mrs. Gove, and Special Correspondence of the New York Herald (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), 113.

12. Allen H. Mesch. Your Affectionate Father, Charles F. Smith (Plano, TX: N. P., 2016), 58–59.

13. John W. Phelps, Diary, June 12, 1858, Series III, S.8, John Wolcott Phelps Papers, MssCol 2399, New York Public Library, New York, New York; William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 2: A Documentary History of the Utah War, 1858–1859

(Norman, OK.: Arthur H. Clark, 2016), chapters 10 and 12.

14. William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), 204–206 and Part 2, chapter 1.

15. Mesch, Your Affectionate Father, 153–55.

16. Ibid., 198–99.

BOOK REVIEWS & NOTICES

CASS HITE:

The Life of an Old Prospector

BY JAMES KNIPMEYER

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. xi + 269 pp. Cloth, $36.95.

As thousands of visitors flock to the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area each year, many are unaware of the fascinating history that played out two hundred feet beneath their boats or in the side canyons they pass by. Equally unfamiliar are many of the names that dot the land—Ticaboo, Cass Creek, Hite (Marina), Hoskaninni Mesa, Dandy Crossing, and Copper Canyon—all important places of activity attached to personalities in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Mining and miners gave rise to these names as main actors in exploring and opening for production the resources in this dramatic but barren landscape. Among the most prominent of these men was Cass Hite, whose name has become synonymous with mineral exploration along the Colorado River and its tributaries, the discovery of Natural Bridges National Monument, and the establishment of the town of Hite. He also prospected in many of the mountain ranges of Utah, only to return to where he was most at home: the red rock desert of southeastern Utah. This book is about that man’s life and the contributions he made under trying circumstances.

Born in 1845 on an Illinois farm, Hite engaged in a variety of occupations in his early years, none of which had staying power like that of mining. Once old enough to strike out on his own, he headed west, learning his trade through relatively brief experiences in Montana, Idaho, Arizona, Texas, and other western states before reaching southeastern Utah. Here he became enamored with a rumored silver mine known to Hashkéniinii (often misspelled as Hoskaninni), a local Navajo leader who had avoided going

to Fort Sumner during the Long Walk period of his people. The two became friends but the Navajo would not reveal the ore’s exact location. Hite never stopped asking and never stopped looking—earning him the name of Hosteen Pish-la ki (Hastiin Béésh Łigai, or Mister Silver). For over thirty years, excepting a few intermittent forays into the mountains of northern Utah, Hite plied his trade of placer mining along the Colorado River and its tributaries. Not until shortly before he died in 1914 at the age of sixty-nine did he turn loose of his sluice box, rocker, and gold pan.

Jim Knipmeyer has written a highly factual account derived from a variety of sources. Indeed, he sticks to the facts, but if there is conjecture, he takes the reader through his reasoning process. Newspapers, court records, census materials, diaries, correspondence, mining records, and rock inscriptions, as well as secondary sources, come together in a convincing narrative about an important personality. One of the unifying elements that appears throughout the book is an autobiographical poem that Hite composed at age sixty. Many of the stanzas reflect important events in his life. The author has paid a lot of attention to developing his sources and, with one or two exceptions, has exhausted the possibilities.

If the land could talk, it would tell the tale of countless other miners who have tried to wrest their livelihood from this stingy environment, but unfortunately, their stories are lost. While it would be stretching the truth a bit to suggest that Cass Hite was a typical prospector, certainly many of the things he encountered—the backbreaking pick and shovel work done on the sand bars and shore of the Colorado, the boomand-bust nature of the business, the difficulty of obtaining supplies to sustain operations, and the rampant rumors of quick wealth quashed by the reality of mining flour gold—certainly were not unique to his experience. It was the

same stream that all of the miners had to swim in, even those who could bring large investment capital to the table, as did Robert B. Stanton, who ended up in similar circumstances as some of the most uncomplicated and least expensive mining efforts. Hite, on the other hand, usually made enough to subsist with comfort in his simple life.

One might ask how Knipmeyer’s book fits in with the recently (2012) published King of the Colorado: The Story of Cass Hite by Tom McCourt. Both authors would agree that they were writing to different audiences. McCourt is a storyteller who has stayed primarily with the facts but has taken literary license to insert dialogue, repeat some of the rumors or apocryphal stories, and paint verbal images of events. In short, he provides an interesting narrative that breathes life into his characters to enhance his tale. Knipmeyer, in contrast, searched twenty-five regional newspapers for any trace of Hite’s activities or whereabouts, photographed extensively the terrain and historical remains of this era, hiked much of the land in search of inscriptions, and therefore has offered a strong historical recreation based in fact. There is room for both types of writing. Hite himself was a great storyteller, like McCourt, who left some unanswered questions for others, such as Knipmeyer, to unravel and place in an interesting factual narrative.

Cass Hite is recommended reading for those who wish to understand the man and what it took to work in a difficult land before today’s conveniences were even imagined. This book is well researched and well written: a fitting tribute to a person who left names upon the countryside and an interesting history of a time often forgotten but worth remembering.

— ROBERT S. MCPHERSON USU Eastern Blanding Campus

Coyote America:

A Natural and Supernatural History

BY DAN FLORES

New York: Basic Books, 2016. 288 pp. Cloth, $27.99.

The year of 2016 has been a busy one for Dan Flores. In March, the University of Kansas Press published his long-awaited monograph, American Serengeti. In that work, Flores examines the decline of large charismatic mammals on the Great Plains, including pronghorns, bison, grizzly bears, and coyotes. A few months later, Basic Books published Coyote America, the companion to American Serengeti that focuses solely on coyotes. Styled as “a coyote biography,” Coyote America recounts how the relationship between Americans and coyotes has changed over time (19). To Flores, coyotes are many things. They are predators and victims. They are indigenous deities and cartoon characters. They are rural and urban. Most of us already knew these things about coyotes. Something we did not know, something that Flores teaches us, is that coyotes are mirror-images of ourselves.

American perceptions of coyotes have changed over time. Some of the earliest North Americans viewed coyotes as deities. For example, some Aztecs participated in a religious cult devoted to coyotes call Coyoacan. “Their rich mythology,” Flores writes, “produced numerous coyote gods, including Coyolinauatl, ceremonies for whom featured acolytes costumed with tails, sharp snouts, and erect ears” (10). Other indigenous cultures also deified coyotes, such as the pueblo peoples who lived in Chaco City. Coyotes, however, were not perfect deities. Rather, they possessed human flaws such as greed and hubris. Further linking coyotes with humans, several indigenous religious stories contained tales of coyotes taking human form. Indeed, to many Native Americans the coyote was a mirror-image to humanity. Early European and Euro American explorers had different perceptions of coyotes. Members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition were perplexed when they first observed coyotes. Unsure what to make of these creatures, these explorers classified them as prairie wolves. As naturalists journeyed through the American West, they documented the lifestyle and appearance of these so-called prairie wolves and debated just how to classify them. Meanwhile, travel writers, such as Mark Twain and Isabella Bird, condemned coyotes as deplorable and miserable creatures. By the twentieth century, most Americans designated coyotes as predators worthy of extinction. Sheep raisers were the

loudest voices that called for coyote extinction. As a result of their efforts, individual states and the federal government launched coyote extermination programs.

Despite the so-called war on coyotes, the coyote population in the United States has boomed. Their growing numbers are linked to three traits that they share with humans. First, and perhaps most important, coyotes are socially flexible. They can be solitary or social as conditions warrant. This trait, what scientists call fission-fusion, allowed coyotes to thrive where wolves and foxes faltered. Second, similar to how humans can plan their family sizes, coyotes can assess the size of the surrounding coyote population and adjust their litters accordingly. This is accomplished by howling and listening for responses. Finally, coyotes are omnivores. Not tied to solely meat or vegetation for calories, coyotes can adapt to the food sources around them.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Coyote America details coyotes living in big cities. Once again, Flores compares coyotes to humans in order to explain this phenomenon. Both humans and coyotes travel to and live in cities in order to find new opportunities. While people congregate in cities because of job opportunities, coyotes have followed after us in pursuit of the rodent population our garbage and infrastructure invites. Offering counsel to pet owners, Flores explains that urban coyotes rarely attack cats and dogs in search of food. “Despite the cat-killer urban legend,” Flores writes, “in city after city the science indicates that pets provide only about 1 to 2 percent of the average coyote’s diet” (197). Instead of killing for calories, urban coyotes attack pets if they deem them to be contesting their territory.

Coyote America is not a traditional history. Rather, it is a mixture of history, folklore, science, and Flores’s sage observations. Oddly, this book does not have footnotes, endnotes, or other forms of citation except for a small bibliography. Rural Utahns will be most interested in the chapters detailing the war against coyotes. Meanwhile, urban Utahns will find the chapter on city coyotes the most enlightening. However, not everyone will enjoy this book. As Flores notes, “coyotes have joined religion, the Iraq War, Obamacare, and climate change as one

more thing the culture warriors in American have to disagree about” (16). Left-leaning culture warriors tend to sympathize with coyotes and appreciate them as a form of wildlife. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to regard coyotes as pests. Because Flores clearly champions and loves coyotes, liberal readers are more likely to enjoy this book than their rightwing counterparts. Overall, Coyote America is a fascinating read that might prove too quirky or quarrelsome for some readers.

— CURTIS FOXLEY University of Oklahoma

TRUE VALOR

Barney Clark and the Utah Artificial Heart

BY DON B. OLSEN

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. 432 pp. Cloth, $44.95.

On December 2, 1982, Barney Clark, a retired dentist from Washington, was on the edge of death with a heart so damaged by disease that the doctors were afraid that he would not last the night. The operation scheduled later that day was moved forward and the doctors at the University of Utah operated in the middle of the night to implant a mechanical Jarvik-7 artificial heart in the dentist. Clark had volunteered for this operation, knowing that he was part of an experiment, the first person to deliberately have his heart removed and replaced by an artificial heart. He was not the first person to receive an artificial heart, but the few previous efforts had been desperate emergencies to use experimental artificial hearts to sustain life until a heart transplant could be found. All had failed.

The Clark operation received enormous press attention from dozens of reporters. One consequence of the media attention was a focus on Robert Jarvik, whose name was on the heart he designed. It seemed obvious that he was the inventor of the miracle, and Jarvik became a household name. This irritated many of the other members of the large team who had worked for years on the heart—which had multiple designers—and who saw glory that should have

been shared was instead directed toward one person. This single-minded focus is common in the stories of inventions because it fits into a comfortable stereotype of genius. Members of the press were complicit in this error because they wanted to tell powerful stories, which are usually based on individuals who are named and identifiable. Jarvik encouraged such a focus.

Such an impressive event demanded a major book, and so a publisher hired a husband and wife pair of professional writers to conduct interviews with all the involved parties and write such a book. The publisher later cancelled the project, but the voluminous material was saved and eventually the book was written by one of the participants. Don B. Olsen wanted to set the record straight and honor the memory of Barney Clark, whom he saw as a man with “true valor.” Trained as a veterinarian, Olsen had been a key leader of the artificial heart project for years; he later became head of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah and helped found the Utah Artificial Heart Institute. The narrative is well written and, while medical terms are used so that a doctor can follow the details of what is happening, the writing is also accessible to the educated person.

The story of the Utah artificial heart began during World War II in Nazi-occupied Holland. Frustrated by patients who died of failed livers, a young doctor, Willem J. (Pim) Kolff, invented a kidney dialysis machine to filter the urea out of their blood. Most patients were so sick by the time that Kolff resorted to using the machine that they died. Persistence led to success by the end of the war, with patients living longer and some patients even being able to stop using the machine when their liver naturally recovered. Kolff was not the first to try dialysis, but his machine was one of the more successful efforts and it established his reputation. Kolff became interested in building other inventions to mechanically replace organs within the body and he moved to the United States to work at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Kolff later moved to the University of Utah, continued his efforts by founding the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, and became known as the father of artificial organs. The institute put much of its effort into artificial hearts,

besides working on other organs, including kidneys. A series of hearts were developed, and Kolff named the hearts after team members who worked on the designs. The artificial hearts were placed in sheep or calves in order to develop better materials and designs, as well as the medical procedures necessary to keep patients alive. Kolff hired Olsen as a veterinarian to take care of this side of the effort. After hundreds of animal experiments, the Utah scientists were ready for a human patient.

Scientific ethics scandals in the 1960s and early 1970s led to the federal government to require institutional review boards (IRBs) to approve any scientific experiments that involved human subjects. Implanting the artificial heart into a human subject required an extensive review process at the University of Utah, especially because the experiment had not been done before and the subject would most likely die. The review led to permission.

Six days after his operation, Clark had a series of severe seizures that damaged him neurologically; he never regained his old personality. Clark passed away 112 days after his operation, after his artificial heart had beat almost thirteen million times. For reasons that were not even clear to the participants, another person was not implanted with an artificial heart at the University of Utah, even though there were plans to do so. The effort moved to other universities, though the Utah team continued its animal research and created a Utah Heart that is widely used today. In 1995, several other patients in Utah received artificial hearts at area hospitals, not the university hospital.

A truism of the history of technology is that rarely is any invention the result of a single person’s genius; rather, most inventions are merely the latest innovation building on a long line of innovations. Inventions are not just things but are objects embedded within a larger context. The artificial heart required decades of research, hundreds of animal experiments, and painstaking gains in materials, drugs, and surgical techniques. Kolff’s dream of artificial organs has not been realized in a partially bionic person, but as of today over a thousand patients world-wide have received artificial hearts, most of them directly descended from the Jarvik-7

design or other Utah efforts. In 2011, an Italian man received a heart transplant after living for 1,374 days on his artificial heart, setting a new record.

—ERIC SWEDIN Weber State University

Varmints and Victims: Predator Control in the American West

BY FRANK VAN NUYS

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. xiv + 338 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

In this collection of essays, Frank Van Nuys traces the evolution of predator management in the West from the early focus on extermination of predators and preservation of game animals to the conflict-laden shift toward conservationism still underway today. Van Nuys draws on a rich pool of primary source material that includes game and fish warden reports, livestock association records, government reports, newspapers, and other sources. Various perspectives on predators, many at odds with one another, are discussed within; these include the destructive us versus them mentality of early settlers and Native American practices of coexistence and reverence. With its broad scope and attention to detail, Varmints and Victims is a thorough account of the evolution of American attitudes toward predators from early hostility to the conservation of today.

Twenty-Five Years among the Indians and Buffalo:

A Frontier Memoir

BY WILLIAM D. STREET

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. xxi + 525 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

This literary memoir, written by William D. Street and edited by his grandson, describes

Street’s experiences growing from a boy to a man on the frontier plains of western Kansas. Offering a first-person perspective, Street’s memoir is notable for its focus on everyday people and activities on the frontier; however, those described are primarily the “heroic white men”—so often the focus of attention in accounts from that time period. The overarching message of Street’s memoir is a familiar one: that the frontier was a meeting place of civilization and savagery, a place of opportunity and danger, and a place as dangerous as it was beautiful. The ever-changing careers of Street, from soldier to cowboy to cavalryman, reflect the ever-changing nature of the frontier during the transitory period in which this memoir takes place.

Island Adventures:

The Hawaiian Mission of Francis A. Hammond, 1851–1865

BY JOHN J. HAMMOND

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2016. 520 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

Island Adventures is an account of Francis Hammond’s work establishing the LDS church in Hawaii from 1851–1865 as a missionary and, eventually, as a mission president. From his conversion in 1847, Hammond was fiercely devoted to the Mormon religion and the expansion of the LDS church. Though less academically inclined than his missionary partner and future Utah territorial delegate George Q. Cannon, Hammond proved indispensable in the church’s early work in Hawaii due to his practical knowledge and ability to keep a level head during crisis. Island Adventures draws on the journals of Hammond and his wife, as well as previous scholarship on Hammond, the LDS church in Hawaii, and early Mormon missionary work.

B. CARMON HARDY

1934–2006

Scholars and friends of history lost an esteemed colleague with the death of B. Carmon Hardy on December 21, 2016, three days short of his eighty-second birthday. Few historians have been as innovative, influential, and admired as Dr. Hardy, who did so much to expand and transform how we interpret the past.

Born in Vernal, Utah, to LaRue Mignon Hunting and Blaine C. Hardy in 1934, Carmon was a child of the Great Depression. He spent his first nine years in Utah and Arizona and graduated from high school in Wapato, Washington, in 1953. His father was a high school vocational agriculture

teacher, so “most of my time and interest was taken up with various agricultural projects and activities in farm youth organizations,” he recalled. He worked on farms and ranches, serving as president of the Washington State Future Farmers of America before deciding late in his college career to major in history.

Carmon met his lifelong love, Kamillia Marlene Compton, at a costume ball in 1950. The couple wed on July 31, 1954, and became the parents of five children. After graduating from Washington State University in 1957, he received his master’s degree from Brigham Young University in 1959 and his doctorate from Wayne State University in 1963.

Dr. Hardy launched his academic career in 1961 as an assistant professor at Brigham Young University. Beginning in 1966, he served for more than fifty years at California State University, Fullerton as a professor of history, department chair, and professor emeritus. He was a masterful writer and compelling lecturer. Carmon dedicated his extraordinary gifts to expanding his students’ worlds. The timbre and cadence of his gentle, quiet voice could command the attention of any audience. He received California State University’s Meritorious Performance Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1988 and the History Students’ Association Award for Outstanding Mentoring of Students in 2002. Carmon inspired thousands of students throughout his teaching career. His ten grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren recall how his historical storytelling kept them spellbound.

Professor Hardy’s scholarship knew no borders. He wrote a textbook on world history and articles about the Emperor Julian, historiography, and the United States Constitution. Carmon published articles on the Third Amendment, which banned the quartering of soldiers in private homes, and the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures: more than forty years ago he developed cogent arguments about the American right to privacy, anticipating contemporary scholarly debates.

Carmon’s work often drew on his Utah roots.

He began his groundbreaking work on Mormon settlements in Mexico with his dissertation, “The Northern Colonies in Northern Mexico, A History, 1885–1912”; he went on to help Nelle Spilsbury Hatch preserve the heritage of Utah families who established prosperous Mexican settlements at Colonia Dublán, Nuevo Casas Grandes, and Colonia Juárez in the face of enormous hardship. No one has surpassed his 1969 article “The Trek South: How the Mormons Went to Mexico,” published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. His 1980 article with Victor Jorgensen, “The TaylorCowley Affair and the Watershed of Mormon History,” launched the revolution in scholarship about post-Manifesto polygamy and official Mormon church support of plural marriage after 1890. His masterful Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage won the Mormon Historical Association’s Best Book award for 1992. Kathryn M. Daynes of Brigham Young University called his 2007 documentary history, Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy: Its Origin, Practice, and Demise, “a treasure trove both for scholars and casual readers, a model of scholarship that unfolds a compelling story.”1

After receiving an MA in 1987, Kamillia pursued a career in art, presenting shows and teaching courses in drawing, monotypes, and pastels, most recently at Santa Ana College. During their semi-retirement, the couple visited Europe, where Carmon presented a keynote address to an international audience. An engaging, eloquent, and compassionate writer, Carmon took a sympathetic view of humanity. His 2008 article, “Polygamy, Mormonism, and Me,” shows how he did his best to deal with Mormon subjects “as accurately and fairly as possible, placing all under the same lamp as I would if recounting a military exploit of the American Civil War or the policies of a medieval Catholic pope.” He remained “proud that my Mormon forebears walked across the continent, broke their plows subduing the saltcrusted plain, fought the crickets, and raised up cities in the dry valleys of the Rocky Mountains. If I now disagree with some of their precepts, I yet hope to emulate their courage in setting a different course, in honoring my own deepest convictions.”2

Professor Hardy was a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society, which awarded him its Dale Morgan Prize in 1980 and the Smith-Pettit Foundation Best Documentary Book in Utah History Award in 2008. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought honored him with its Best Article Award in 1991. His last major work was a privately published memoir, “Return to Uruk: Life’s Journey.” Carmon’s many friends will miss his gentle manner, honesty, integrity, and courage. We will all benefit from the enduring legacy of this great writer and scholar, son of Utah, and citizen of the world.

Notes

1. Kathryn M. Daynes, review of Mormon Polygamy: Its Origin, Practice, and Demise by B. Carmon Hardy, BYU Studies Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2009): 178.

2. B. Carmon Hardy, “Polygamy, Mormonism, and Me,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 99, 100.

Will Bagley and Michael W. Homer

UTAH IN FOCUS

A model walks down the runway at the Hotel Utah, April 30, 1962, as part of a fashion show based on the theme “This Is My Life.” Peerless Beauty and Barber Supply—a business that had operated in Salt Lake City since at least the early 1930s—sponsored the event. As with this

model, other women in the show wore elaborate coiffures and space-age costumes.