Book Reviews

By Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xvii + 284 pp.Cloth, $29.95.

In that banner year of 1776, the first recorded Europeans—part of a small, ill-advised, illplanned, and ill-provisioned party—managed to track and map an irregular 1,700-mile oval around the Four Corners of today’s New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah (then part of Spanish New Mexico). A mere ninety-nine years later, in 1875, came the well-advised, meticulously planned, and abundantly provisioned Hayden Survey. Although the authors of the present volume have no reason to mention the Domínguez-Escalante “expedition” of 1776 and its cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, the contrast is stark. Not only had the sovereignty of this vast region changed, but also the occasional New Mexican traders to the Ute Indians had given rise to a tsunami of Anglo settlers, miners, and ranchers that threatened the very existence of the Ute people. One thing hadn’t changed; there was little water.

Masterfully compiled and interpreted, this documentary chronicle focuses on the 1875 summer field session of the larger U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories, 1867–1879, directed by Ferdinand V. Hayden. The ultimate goal of the so-called Hayden Survey, really a series of civilian scientific surveys that vied for federal funding with the conventional, less scientific military surveys of the time, was “to produce a series of thematic maps giving visual expression to the region’s economic potential—geology, natural resources, topography—everything that settlers, miners, entrepreneurs, and policy makers would need for an orderly, efficient, and profitable development of the region” (15).

After a festive parade of men and mules down Denver’s main street on June 7, 1875, this particular Hayden survey broke “into small field groups, each with a topographer and geologist working in tandem, supported by two or three packers and a cook” (16). Map 1 details how widely five of the “divisions” dispersed into New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but mostly into Colorado. Creatively chosen primary sources— newspaper articles by “guest” journalists, along with correspondence, diary entries, field notes, and memoirs—sweep the reader along with these “men creating maps while experiencing a hearty adventure” (xiii).

Perhaps the best remembered of Hayden’s illustrious subordinates in the field that summer (while Hayden himself delayed in Washington, D.C., directing the operation from there) was William Henry Jackson who led the “Photographic Division.” Jackson had worked for Hayden before, most notably in Yellowstone. His was the only division not assigned to a specified geographical area. He was to go wherever to get spectacular photos of the Colorado Rockies, for which he packed a 20 by 24 inch camera, glass plates, and portable dark room. Nothing furthered Hayden’s purposes more than breathtaking graphic imagery.

In the field, while members of the various divisions climbed crests, set up tripod and plane table, sketched prominent features, noted bearings, and applied triangulation, they always had to find water and hope not to arouse local Native peoples. A real scare occurred in mid-August 1875. The Western or Grand River Division under Henry Gannett and the Primary Triangulation Division led by James Terry Gardner, while traveling between the La Sal and Abajo Mountains in Utah (both of which appear on Miera’s map of 1777), actually engaged in a two-day running firefight with a band of Utes. To enable their escape, the intruders jettisoned much of their gear. “What we saved,” wrote Cuthbert Mills, “were the scientific records of the work done on the trip, all the mules except four, and our lives” (186). As a field epilogue, during the 1950s and 1960s, what was left of the discarded equipment became the object of a treasure hunt. Much of what was recovered resides today at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming.

In 1777, Bernardo de Miera drew in Santa Fe the earliest map, his “Plano Geografico,” of the Four Corners, long before there were any corners. In 1877, Hayden published in Washington, a stunning Atlas of Colorado, mainly the work of master geologist, artist, and cartographer William Henry Holmes. The dizzying precision of the geological cross-sections, the panoramas, and the maps, especially sheets IX and XV, both labeled “SW. Colorado and Parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah,” would have struck Miera speechless.

— John L. KessellUniversity of New Mexico

By Laurie J. Bryant

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017. xv + 295 pp.Paper, $24.95.

With A Modest Homestead, Laurie J. Bryant provides the reader with an insightful look into “ordinary houses and everyday life” in early Salt Lake City (5). United by their faith and their belief in the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the original Mormon settlers of the Salt Lake Valley shared another characteristic: they constructed most of their first homes of adobe. Trees and timber were comparatively scarce and the few sawmills and brick kilns needed to produce conventional lumber and bricks could not keep up with demand for housing materials. Thus, the pioneers resorted to adobe, a building block composed of mud and straw, hand formed into bricks, and left to cure in the hot sun. Bryant’s curiosity about the approximately 200 adobe brick buildings in Salt Lake City that she has documented, as well as the people who built and lived in those houses, form the basis of this book.

Bryant does not focus on the glitterati of the day: the prominent church leaders and their welldocumented lifestyles; rather, she explores the lives of the everyday men and women whose legacies have largely gone undocumented. Some of these people, through the sheer commonness of their daily lives, and others, who had little to no literacy skills, left behind little evidence of their lives. Bryant took on a Herculean task and succeeded in her goal of illustrating the commonalities of the pioneers as they strove to achieve a permanent settlement.

A Modest Homestead contains two sections. In the first, an extended introduction and background, Bryant presents the context necessary to understand the place of adobe in Salt Lake City’s emergence from a seemingly desolate landscape. She also describes the difficulties of fully illuminating the backgrounds of Salt Lake City’s adobe buildings and their first inhabitants, including the pioneers’ relative lack of time or skills to record the everyday details of life, the resulting scarcity of documentation in the public record, and the sociocultural environment of the early city. Still, Bryant writes, adobe buildings “are a life-sized link to the owners and builders,” their details lending clues to the world of nineteenth-century Salt Lake City (46).

The second section describes ninety-four of the extant adobe houses that the author identified in her research, with the houses organized by the historic ward designations of the LDS church. Each description includes a drawn image or photograph of the house, its street address, a narrative sketch of the early building form and, when it is available, a brief genealogy of the people who inhabited the home. The descriptions are supported by copious endnotes that provide evidence of the broad range of resources Bryant used in her extensive research. Collectively, these descriptions, when placed in context of each other, form an almost palpable glimpse of everyday life. To aid the reader in following and locating the people identified in the book, the author has included each person mentioned individually in the index. This strategy enables the reader to not only identify them but also make the connections between those associated with several buildings. As I read the descriptions, there were numerous times when I wanted to venture out and visit these buildings in person. Toward that end, I would have enjoyed seeing vicinity maps for each ward showing the locations of the houses described therein; unfortunately these were not included.

A Modest Homestead enhances the historiographical niche that expands the awareness of the life of the common men and women of the era, their hardships and shortages, and their ability to succeed in establishing a community. This book will appeal to a variety of readers. Social historians and genealogists who enjoy learning about the early pioneers will appreciate the insights provided. Architectural historians will gain an enhanced perspective on the physicality of the built environment during the pioneer era and the transformation that occurred in the late-nineteenth-century Salt Lake City. Lastly, explorers of the urban condition will enjoy seeking out and observing firsthand the actual buildings identified and described in the book.

Overall, this book introduces the reader, and potential future researchers, to the use of adobe brick in Salt Lake City in an engaging manner that, as noted earlier, will be useful for a variety of people who follow Utah history. In and of itself, A Modest Homestead encompasses a rich array of information on the early pioneer families that will serve as a starting point for other researchers, and the methodology and resources Bryant employed will provide a precedent for similar histories in other communities.

— Robert A. YoungUniversity of Utah

By Silvio Manno

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016. xvi + 278 pp. Paper,$29.95.

In this work, Silvio Manno painstakingly describes events leading up to and resulting from a violent confrontation near Eureka, Nevada, on August 18, 1879, the so-called Fish Creek Massacre. Five striking Italian and Swiss-Italian charcoal burners died in gunfire after weeks of negotiations over the price of charcoal and the formation of the Charcoal Burners’ Protective Association (CPBA). Facing their demands, corporate leaders had predictably called on the governor, who deployed the militia, while the sheriff arrested twenty-two Italians, including union leadership. Another attempted arrest led to the killings. Subsequent legal responses included a coroner’s investigation, grand jury inquiries into the culpability of the lawmen and the burners, and the arrival of the Italian Consul from San Francisco in the midst of this inquiry.

Manno’s work displays clear strengths and weaknesses. His fluency in the Italian language has allowed him to use sources inaccessible to English speakers, such as official Italian documents and a conference paper presented in his native language. His friendship with Italian Americans in Eureka, some of them descendants of charcoal burners, facilitated access to privately held papers. Yet this book is hamstrung by the author’s unfamiliarity with the historical method and significant sources, both primary and secondary. In his “Author’s Notes,” Manno explains that he spent ten years researching this book, simultaneously “garnering the wherewithal of scholarship” to create a work that “tested my impartiality” (247). An Italian immigrant himself, Manno clearly reveals his sympathy for the burners in his flowery “Conclusion” (225–32). His attempt at impartiality has led him to provide lengthy paraphrases and elaborate speculation based on newspaper articles, particularly from the pro-business Eureka Daily Leader and the Eureka Daily Sentinel, which constitute the principal sources for this entire work. His reliance on these papers skews this study in painful ways. Descriptions of all the newspaper articles discussing the massacre, for example, with digressions into their reliability, mean that one has to dig hard to discover what happened at Fish Creek. Manno provides no succinct explanation. In another example, the outcome of the grand jury investigation of the slayings ends with the exoneration of the lawmen and the release on bail of “the Italians who had been jailed on charges of assault with intent to kill and perjury” (222). According to the author, “the virtual dearth of information exhibited in the local press after the grand jury’s verdict [means that] the subsequent condition of the charcoal burners remained unknown” (223). One longs for more information from appropriate legal sources.

Likewise, contextualization and subsequent analysis is weak. For context, Manno utilizes sporadic quotations from Patricia Nelson Limerick’s iconic Legacy of Conquest, from Andrew Rolle’s The Immigrant Upraised, and from a scattering of other works that lean toward studies of violence and immigration. He ignores comparative labor studies, such as Allan Kent Powell’s fine Utah-based work, The Next Time We Strike, which would reveal well-known patterns in labor conflict in the American West near the turn of the twentieth century. Such a study would also indicate what is not typical about the event Manno describes. Specifically, the author intriguingly notes but does not analyze a social clash between wealthy Swiss-Italian and Italian merchants and their destitute charcoal burning compatriots. Yet some of the more well-to-do ethnic Italians supported the burners, even initially heading their union. Manno mentions that the mining companies had tons of charcoal stockpiled before engaging with the unionizing burners. Why then were the burners not simply ignored, and the stockpiles used to run the furnaces? Surely if the charcoal burners were as impoverished as Manno declares, they would be forced to move on. Their union is portrayed as weak and disorganized, so did it really constitute a threat? Perhaps company records or the governor’s correspondence could enlighten us. The arrival of the Italian Consul is unusual. Most frustrating, Nevada’s political context is unclear. After describing a number of telegrams sent to Nevada’s governor that resulted in deploying the militia to Eureka, Manno notes in passing that “during the violent outbreak, Governor John H. Kinkead was in Bodie, California.” The lieutenant governor was in San Francisco, so the Nevada government was headed by “Senator W. R. King, president pro tempore of the state senate” (152). Unlike most protagonists, who tend to enjoy lengthy biographies (sometimes based on census records in addition to the newspapers), King is not profiled in this book. He apparently had an important role in the confrontation, which deserves further explanation.

Overall, this work is a beginning. Manno has effectively fulfilled his purpose in resurrected a single, harsh clash from the oblivion of history. But he leaves the reader with many more questions than answers.

— Nancy J. TaniguchiCalifornia State University, Stanislaus

By Kerry William Bate

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. xxi + 389.Cloth, $39.95

The Women: A Family Story won the Mormon History Association’s Best Personal History/ Memoir book award in June 2017 because it is well written and utilizes a variety of sources that provide an insider’s view of a southern Utah family over multiple generations. Bate worked on this book for thirty years, publishing four articles on the subject in Utah Historical Quarterly and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought between 1986 and 1995. The present volume focuses on the story of four generations of women in one family: Catherine Campbell Steele (1816–1891), Young Elizabeth Stapley (1847–1938), Sarah Catherine “Kate” Roundy (1866–1949), and Sarah Elizabeth Sylvester (1888–1938).

Additionally, readers learn much about extended family members, making The Women a genealogical treasure trove. Fortunately, Bate often connects individuals with their relationship to the broader family, thereby helping readers navigate the many people mentioned in the book. This history also includes family stories about neighbors, local community and church leaders, and even a visit by Warren G. Harding to southern Utah in 1923. It’s not a surprise that “this large multigenerational family had conflicts” (228). However, Bate weaves together a story than includes family loyalty, love, forgiveness, and respect.

The matriarch of the family, Catherine Campbell Steele, was a Mormon convert in Ireland. She and her husband, John Steele (1821–1903), immigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois, arriving shortly after the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. had been killed. Later, John enlisted in the Mormon Battalion. The couple eventually arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Their daughter, Young Elizabeth, was the first Mormon born in Utah— an honor that followed her throughout her life. In 1850, the family “was called to . . . [help] found a settlement more than two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City . . . in Southern Utah” (18). They arrived in an open valley on January 13, 1851, and participated in building the new community, Parowan.

Bate uses traditional historical sources, such as diaries, letters, business and church minutes, and contemporary newspaper reports, to tell this story. However, he extends his research to include family and community folklore, personal histories, family artifacts, and, most importantly, oral histories—the foundation of this book. Though ostensibly the story of four generations of women, The Women is also about Bate’s great-aunt Reba Roundy LeFevre (1904– 2001), to whom it is dedicated. Readers must refer to the family pedigree charts often to keep the main characters straight. Unfortunately, one chart identifies Reba’s birth and death incorrectly (xxi). Obviously, if she had died in 1903, Bate could not have interviewed her or attended her funeral. In the end, the story is familiar and could easily be that of almost any Euro American family, whether they were Catholics living in Maryland, Southern Baptists living in Alabama, or Congregationalists living in Maine. If readers were to change the names and change the locations, Bate’s family story— highlighting birth, death, tragedy, triumph, and survival—would be a typical American story.

Family history books based on oral histories present challenges. As the dust jacket of The Women notes, “Family history, usually destined or even designed for limited consumption, is a familiar genre with Mormon culture. Mostly written with little attention to standards of historical scholarship, such works are distinctly hagiographic forms of family memorabilia.” Family history works often make mortals into super heroes, with flawed relatives and neighbors perhaps included as part of the story as a way of highlighting the main character or specific branch of an extended family. In this way, readers learn about a family through the eyes of those who have left their version of the story. In one sense, The Women is also Bate’s story, for readers learn as much about him and his great-aunt—especially her memories and family lore—as they do about the four generations of women at the heart of the book.

As Reba opined about her family, “They were struggling human beings, so no use throwing a silk mist over their lives” (ix). Bate doesn’t put “a silk mist over their lives,” and as a result, readers know more about these people, who by and large would have been remembered only by a tombstone inscription.

— Richard Neitzel HolzapfelBrigham Young University