A Distant Reading of Utah Historical Quarterly Utah History in School Textbooks
— A scene from a Board of Education meeting about religious teaching in schools, 1956. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, photo no. 36353-14.
— Navajos Rysonn Bitsinnie (left) and Keef Yazzie on horseback in Monument Valley, 2018. Carol M. Highsmith, photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-highsm-53798.
UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Utah Historical Quarterly (UHQ) is Utah’s journal of record, published quarterly on behalf of the Utah State Historical Society since 1928. The UHQ’s mission, from its earliest issues to the present, is to publish articles on all aspects of Utah history, as well as to present Utah in the larger context of the West. Even as UHQ continues its commitment to themes traditionally associated with Utah history, it challenges readers and authors to think across state lines to the forces of history, physiography, and culture that link Utah to a host of people, places, experiences, and trends beyond its geopolitical boundaries. UHQ seeks a regional approach, reflecting Utah’s geographic and cultural position at the crossroads of the West.
UHQ’s editorial style emphasizes scholarly credibility and accessible language. Manuscripts dealing with any aspect of Utah history will be considered. Submissions based on allied disciplines—such as archaeology, folklore, or ethnography—are also encouraged, so long as the focus is on the past.
For submission and style guidelines visit history.utah.gov/utah-historical-quarterly. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.
UHQ welcomes letters to the editor. Letters are published occasionally and online. We reserve the right to restrict word count and edit content.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Holly George — Co-Editor
Jedediah S. Rogers — Co-Editor
Garrett Elkins, Editorial Fellow
ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS
Rebecca Andersen, Logan
Brian Q. Cannon, Provo
Farina King, Norman, Oklahoma
Jennifer Macias, Salt Lake City
Kathryn L. MacKay, Ogden
Jeffrey D. Nichols, Mountain Green
John Sillito, Ogden
Corey Smallcanyon, Provo
Stephanie Fuglaar Statz, Austin, Texas
James R. Swensen, Millcreek
In 1897, public-spirited Utahns organized the Utah State Historical Society in order to expand public understanding of Utah’s past.
Today, the Utah Division of State History administers the Society and, as part of its statutory obligations, publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0 042-143X; eISSN 2642-8652), which has collected and preserved Utah’s history since 1928. The Division, which is part of the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts, also collects materials related to the history of Utah and makes them available online and in a research library; assists communities, agencies, building owners, and consultants with state and federal processes regarding archaeological and historical resources; administers the ancient human remains program; administers the Utah History Day program; offers extensive online resources; and assists in public policy and the promotion of Utah’s rich history.
UHQ is published quarterly in winter, spring, summer, and fall by the University of Illinois Press for the Utah State Historical Society.
Members of the Society receive UHQ upon payment of annual dues: individual, $30; student and senior (age 65 or older), $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100. Visit history.utah. gov/become-a-member to join the Utah State Historical Society and receive your own copy of the journal. Institutional subscriptions are $40 for online only, $75 for print only, or $90 for both. To subscribe, see https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/uhq/subscription.html.
The contents and opinions published here do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Utah State Historical Society or the Utah Division of State History.
POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly
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UTAH DIVISION OF STATE HISTORY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
BOARD OF STATE HISTORY
Molly Cannon, Logan, Chair
Tara Beresh, Moab
Ignacio Garcia, Salt Lake City
Spencer Hall, Salt Lake City
David Rich Lewis, Logan
Margaret H. Olson, Park City
David Scott Richardson, Salt Lake City
ADMINISTRATION
Jennifer Ortiz, Director
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS
Leonard J. Arrington (1917–1999)
Will Bagley (1950–2021)
David L. Bigler (1927–2018)
Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981)
Juanita Brooks (1898–1989)
Olive W. Burt (1894–1981)
Eugene E. Campbell (1915–1986)
Everett L. Cooley (1917–2006)
C. Gregory Crampton (1911–1995)
S. George Ellsworth (1916–1997)
Austin E. Fife (1909–1986)
LeRoy R. Hafen (1893–1985)
A. Karl Larson (1899–1983)
B. Carmon Hardy (1934-2016)
Gustive O. Larson (1897–1983)
Brigham D. Madsen (1914–2010)
Dean L. May (1938–2003)
David E. Miller (1909–1978)
Dale L. Morgan (1914–1971)
William Mulder (1915–2008)
Floyd A. O’Neil (1927–2018)
Helen Z. Papanikolas (1917–2004)
Charles S. Peterson (1927–2017)
Melvin T. Smith (1928–2020)
Wallace E. Stegner (1909–1993)
William A. Wilson (1933-2016)
Thomas G. Alexander
James B. Allen
Maureen Ursenbach Beecher
Jessie L. Embry
Martha Bradley-Evans
Max J. Evans
Peter L. Goss
Michael W. Homer
Joel Janetski
Jeffery Ogden Johnson
Edward Leo Lyman
William P. MacKinnon
Carol Cornwall Madsen
Wilson Martin
Robert S. McPherson
Philip F. Notarianni
Allan Kent Powell
W. Paul Reeve
Richard W. Sadler
Gary L. Shumway
John Sillito
Gregory C. Thompson
Gary Topping
HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS
Kenneth L. Alford
Jill Mulvay Derr
Craig Fuller
Marlin K. Jensen
Stanford J. Layton
William P. MacKinnon
John S. McCormick
Darren Parry
Mae Timbimboo Parry
F. Ross Peterson
Linda Thatcher
Gary Topping
Richard E. Turley Jr.
Outside the Denver and Rio Grande Depot, 1910. Utah State Historical Society
71 Behind the Bears Ears
Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape
By R. E. Burrillo
Reviewed by Thomas E. Sheridan
72 Traders, Agents, and Weavers
Developing the Northern Navajo Region
By Robert S. McPherson
Reviewed by Bruce Gjeltema
73 Dutton’s Dirty Diggers
Bertha P. Dutton and the Senior Girl Scout Archaeological Camps in the American Southwest, 1947–1957
By Catherine S. Fowler
Reviewed by Jeanne Moe
74 Essays on American Indian and Mormon History
Edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink
Reviewed by Kathryn L. MacKay
75 Rails East to Ogden
Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad Story
By Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt, with contributions by Michael Sheehan, Kenneth P. Cannon, and Molly Boeka Cannon
Reviewed by Chelsea Rose
In This Issue
In 1957 the Utah state legislature moved to grant universal suffrage to American Indians in the state. The move overturned a Utah Supreme Court decision handed down the previous year denying the vote to individuals living on American Indian reservations. As Kyler Wakefield explains in the lead article, the long wait for Native people in Utah to achieve full voting status has extended well beyond the events of 1956 and 1957. Nineteenth-century federal American Indian policy known as allotment and assimilation, as well as the later policy of termination, provides the necessary frame to understand how sovereign tribal peoples with unique status in the American political system struggled for so long to secure the vote. Guiding readers through a sweep of this history, this piece powerfully details the struggle of American Indians in Utah to enjoy the full rights of citizenship and suffrage. Wakefield ends with the recent history of San Juan County as a case study and details some of the voting challenges that continue to this day.
We chose to pair the voting rights essay with a piece on the policy of termination and the Northern Utes, originally published in this journal in 1996. Senator Arthur V. Watkins—an architect and ardent champion of a termination policy, who sought to integrate American Indians into society by stripping them of their sovereign status—is a central figure. R. Warren Metcalf’s principal concern, however, lies with the Northern Ute. Watkins’s termination crusade precipitated a contest within the tribe over blood-quantum, ultimately leading the Uintahs to lose their membership and inheritance on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. In a newly written postscript, Metcalf writes that “the terminated Utes have been neglected, forgotten, and made victims of an alternative history that holds that they were never authentically Ute or, more perversely, that they asked to be terminated. Both contentions are flatly false.”
The second part of this issue is dedicated to the writing and representation of Utah history. For historians and longtime readers of this journal, Spencer Stewart and Eliza McKinney’s quantitative analysis of UHQ over nearly a century—a birds-eye view of Utah history as published in the state’s journal of record—will be both welcome and familiar. The data tells a story: 1,433 individual articles excluding book reviews, 839 different authors, and over 8 million total words. As editors, proud of the history published in these pages, our response is neither defensive nor an apologia. From this study, we are clearer eyed on the work of championing new voices and integrating women and minority groups into historical frameworks in more sophisticated ways. We are delighted to have this analysis and hopeful that it will further contribute to a more complete telling of the Utah story.
The work of historical representation is particularly consequential in grade school. Although a state law to teach Utah history in public schools has existed since 1996, Utah children have relied on textbooks for their history education for well over a century. In our final piece, Rod Decker evaluates the authorship, publishers, content, formats, and changes of fourteen Utah history textbooks published between 1908 and 2011. The earliest texts emphasized the pioneer era and a particular historical perspective informed by a tone of Mormon triumphalism. Even before midcentury, texts were beginning to give more space to Utahns beyond Latter-day Saints. Decker argues that the tendency for recent textbooks to subsume Utah history within national history and to minimize the role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah affairs does not adequately impress on schoolchildren how Utah is unique from other states.
Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression
BY KYLER T. WAKEFIELD
In 2020, the Native American Voting Rights Coalition published “Obstacles at Every Turn: Barriers to Political Participation Faced by Native American Voters” as a compilation of the historic and current inequality of voting rights in Indian Country. Starting in 2015, the coalition conducted field hearings across the continental United States and Alaska to develop a more complete understanding of how Native Americans face unique challenges in registering to vote, casting votes, and exercising political power. Although it’s commonly understood that voting is easier to do now than ever before, the hearings revealed this to be untrue for many Native Americans. The report discovered a multitude of factors that prohibit equal political participation, including but not limited to geographical isolation, poor infrastructure, technological barriers, language, low levels of education, depressed socioeconomic conditions, voter identification requirements, unequal access to in-person voter registration, lack of pre-election information, cultural or political isolation, and voter dilution.1
These current obstacles to suffrage are tied up in a long history of federal and state policies limiting the political rights of Native Americans and the sovereignty of tribal nations. The United States is home to 574 federally recognized American Indian tribes.2 As domestic dependent nations, they exercise criminal and civic jurisdiction, facilitate services to tribal citizens, and maintain government-to-government relationships with the United States.3 Although this right to sovereignty predates European settlement and does not uniquely derive from the federal government, centuries of history have dramatically impacted the means by which Indigenous nations can establish, protect, and maintain self-rule. Policies such as allotment, forced assimilation, and termination help to explain the long delay many tribal people experienced before exercising the franchise and the persistent obstacles to voting that they continue to face. This is true in Utah, the last state in the union to lift voting restrictions for Native Americans.
The belated right to vote for Utah Native Americans was more than a function of discrimination and racism, although these were at work in
the creation and administration of federal and state policy concerning tribal peoples. Decentralizing their racist roots is not an apology for these policies, but focusing historically on how, why, and for whom these policies existed promotes more holistic understandings of Native American voter suppression. For instance, many popular sources of historical information attest with varying degrees of accuracy to the fact that Utah was the last state in the union to guarantee the right to vote to Native Americans. Such sources mention key events of the history, such as Allen v. Merrell, but focus little on how federal policy directly impacted Native American voting rights in the state.4
This analysis contributes to the scholarly literature on Native American voting rights by more explicitly highlighting how shifts in federal policy were linked to suffrage in Utah.5 Specifically, attention to the policies of allotment and termination furthers historical interpretation of Allen v. Merrell (1956), a significant case in which the Utah Supreme Court ruled against universal American Indian suffrage. After midcentury, federal policy partially worked in reverse, allowing American Indians an opportunity to leverage it in favor of voting rights.
Paradoxically, this happened around the time of Allen v. Merrell, when termination influenced Utah legislators to reconsider the state’s statute prohibiting residents of reservations from voting. In southern Utah, Native Americans used federal policy to secure voting rights in San Juan County, where many additional barriers to voting remain today. American Indians are unique in the American political system, as has been their path to voting rights. Examining the layers that make this the case is informative and a first step to a more nuanced interpretation of Native American civil liberties in a pluralistic society.
Allotment, Paternalism, and Reservations in Utah
Utah became a state during an era when American Indian reservations across the country were reduced in size and subject to heavy federal administration. Under the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 and continuing until the Great Depression, federal policy makers worked to put tribal peoples on the path of American citizenship through policies of assimilation. These policies eliminated surplus land from reservations, created boarding schools, shifted economic practices away
An image from the early twentieth century of women, children, and men outside the Ouray Post Office building. Utah State Historical Society, Ottinger Photograph Collection, box 3, no. 145.
from the community toward individualism, regulated tribal social life and law, and offered citizenship for individuals who were willing to abandon tribal affiliations.6 Undergirding these aims was an ideology that defined Native American traditional cultures as burdensome to the republic and antithetical to American society. Philanthropists and politicians alike viewed tribal traditionalism as a limitation that prevented Native people from realizing the “progress” of civilization.7 Allotment, as this era came to be known, laid the groundwork for the disenfranchisement of Native Americans by drawing attention to federal and state
jurisdiction over land and peoples. Although reservations were federal lands, outside state jurisdiction, decades of allotment and assimilationist policies blurred the geographic and political lines between state and federal jurisdiction. As federal Indian policy shifted and American Indians became citizens of the United States, Utah’s election laws came into conflict with Native American voting rights. Allotment is not just background for the history of Native American suffrage in Utah; it directly influenced why American Indians were denied the franchise for decades after statehood and the Indian Citizenship Act.
A woman and baby, photographed in the early years of the twentieth century, on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. At the time this photograph was taken, the pressures of white settlement, allotment, and cultural assimilation into American society presented tremendous difficulties for the Ute people accustomed to traditional lifeways. Utah State Historical Society, Ottinger Photograph Collection, box 3, no. 134.
To foster assimilation and reduce the size of reservations, the federal government assumed a paternalistic role over Native American tribes. As a father supposedly teaches his children the values and skills needed to be successful, the government sought to turn Native Americans “away from traditional Indigenous roaming, hunting, and gathering” practices and to make them into individual citizens through “the cessation of communally owned tribal lands.”8 Under the Dawes Act, after a quarter century of farming and proof of adoption of “habits of civilized life,” American Indians could qualify for United States citizenship.9 The federal government distributed allotments based on tribal populations, offering lands to heads of households. Lands leftover were considered surplus and sold to non-Indians, acting as an additional driver of assimilation.10 By the Depression, tribes had collectively lost ninety million acres of land. Some tribes lost upward of 80 percent of their reservation lands—a loss felt economically and socially for generations.11
In Utah, allotment greatly affected the Utes of what is now the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.12 It was during this era when many of the modern political, geographic, and ethnic borders of the reservation were first created.13 Allotment-era policies furthered a trend of geographic and cultural displacement among Northern Utes. Although the lands of the Uintah and Uncompahgre reservations were not ideal for large-scale agriculture or ranching, federal policy pressured Utes to become farmers and ranchers anyway. Allotment is remembered by Utes as a period that “contributed to the destruction of Indian culture and tradition.”14 For Utes, concepts such as individual land ownership, fencing, and daily farm work were foreign. While reporting on the progress of allotment, a federal surveyor observed that they preferred to “drift from place-to-place stopping at intervals where the fishing and hunting is good or where their neighbors have plenty to eat.”15 Even after the allotment of their tribal lands, many Utes followed seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering opportunities. An ongoing trend since the arrival of the first Mormon settlers, traditional practices progressively grew more difficult as competition for resources grew. Ute leaders at the time nearly unanimously opposed allotment and every
attempt the US government made to parcel allotments to their people.16
Despite their opposition, the Utes could not overcome the broader spectrum of federal policy. On the Uncompahgre Reservation, surveyed for allotment in 1895, only eighty-eight allotments could be made on “almost a completely barren tract of land” in what is now the eastern portion of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.17 The federal government opened the “surplus” land for homesteading in 1898, and in 1906 reservation lands rich in mineral wealth were opened for purchase via executive order.18 Following allotment on the Uncompahgre Reservation, white settlers increased pressure for the same to occur on the Uintah Reservation. By 1905, what is now the western portion of the current reservation, located within Duchesne and Uintah counties, was surveyed and allotted. More so than on the Uncompahgre lands, white homesteaders eagerly sought title to surpluses of reservation land, which was comparatively favorable for agriculture and ranching. Although federal surveyors attempted to gain Ute consent, the commission sent to survey the lands reported that Utes “were unanimous and determined in their opposition to making cession to the government of any of their lands.”19
For Ute people, accustomed to traditional lifeways, the pressures of white settlement, allotment, and cultural assimilation into American society presented tremendous difficulties. They did not have experience or equipment to succeed in the highly competitive agricultural market of commercial farming.20 Instead of promoting self-sufficient economic practices, allotment forced Northern Utes to lease or sell thirty thousand acres of agricultural lands to non-Indian residents by 1920. Much of this land was later over-irrigated or overgrazed, leading to more land losses.21 Allotment left Utes on the northern and southern reservations impoverished economically and culturally as they entered the twentieth century.22
Statehood and Native American Citizenship
The allotment period produced political and geographic consequences that would restrict voting rights for many American Indians well into the twentieth century. Given that Utah
entered statehood during a period of increased federal management of Native lives and lands, both the state and federal governments were inclined to establish clear jurisdiction in reservation spaces. The Enabling Act (1894) authorizing the people of Utah to join the United States is indicative of the plenary power that the federal government maintained over Native Americans. When referring to Native Americans, the act asserted the federal government’s prerogative over their wardship status and established jurisdictional boundaries between Utah and tribal lands.23
Section 3.2 of the Enabling Act set the groundwork for Native American disenfranchisement in Utah in two primary ways. First, it reconciled the then-ongoing allotment process of Native lands with non-Native settlement, establishing a clear precedent of federal jurisdiction over American Indian reservations and residents. The act mandates that non-Native Utahns “forever disclaim” the right and title to lands held “by any Indian or Indian tribes” and that “Indian lands shall remain under the absolute jurisdiction and control” of the federal government. Federal jurisdiction remained until the government “extinguished” the rights to Indian lands. Extinguishing, in this instance, is a reference to the surplus reservation lands opened to homesteading after allotment or other acts of Congress that eliminated reservation lands. As passage of the Enabling Act was contemporary to the allotment of the Uncompahgre and Uintah Ute reservations, such a provision upholding federal jurisdiction on Indian lands was necessary to delineate federal and state jurisdiction and facilitate white settlement of surplus lands.
Second, Utah’s Enabling Act reflects assimilationist aims of federal Indian policy by indicating when the state could consider Native Americans as Utah residents, distinguishing them from other citizens. The wordy section on taxes reflects this sentiment, noting that nothing would prevent the state of Utah from taxing “lands owned or held by any Indian who has severed his tribal relations.” Presumably, this meant Native Americans who abandoned tribal affiliations and acquired the “habits of civilized life” necessary to earn citizenship of the United States. This distinction persisted to impact
voting rights even after Native Americans were universally granted citizenship in 1924, as Utah law tied voting eligibly to state residency.
The jurisdictional jargon of Utah’s Enabling Act appears in other state enabling acts from the time period and was emblematic of a legal “no man’s land” that Native Americans found themselves in.24 Citizenship was attainable yet conditioned on the abandonment of tradition, community, and culture. From a national perspective, determining when American Indians were qualified for citizenship was similarly inconsistent: being born within the territorial limits of the United States did not make them citizens, the federal government did. For example, when Oklahoma ceased to be Indian Territory and became a state, the federal government stipulated that American Indians living there were to be granted citizenship and American Indian men the right to vote.25 In 1919 Congress passed a bill granting citizenship and an honorable discharge to every Indigenous person who served in the United States military during World War I. In 1922, the office of Indian Affairs identified eight procedures that permitted Native American access to citizenship.26 Around the time Utah became a state, citizenship for American Indians was possible but exclusively tied to federal policy.
In this context, the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act can be seen as a reformative measure enacted to address confusion regarding Native Americans’ place within the legal system. Throughout American history, the United States has recognized inherent sovereignty among Native nations, equating them to foreign countries. The constitution authorizes Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”27 Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work, who endorsed the bill, claimed the legislation would “bridge the present gap and provide a means whereby an Indian may be given United States citizenship without reference to the question of land tenure or the place of his residence.”28
The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act marked the beginning of a shift in federal policy toward limited tribal self-rule. Instead of coercing individual Native Americans to abandon tribal communities, federal policy eased toward
recognizing tribes as legitimate, domestic-dependent political entities. A series of federal investigations throughout the 1920s made it abundantly clear that allotment was a failure. The most prominent was the 1928 Meriam Report, which documented the poverty, poor health conditions, meager education, inadequate housing, and significant land loss created by decades of allotment policy. The outcome of these reports influenced the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, which offered tribes that voted to adopt it opportunities to create federally recognized tribal governments with powers of limited self-rule. This permitted tribal nations to hire attorneys, pursue economic development, regulate resources, adopt constitutions, determine criteria for tribal citizenship, and generally gain more influence over reservation lands. Although tribes were still very much subjects of the federal government—as all tribal constitutions and bylaws were subject to federal approval—the IRA was a step toward limited self-governance. The legislation was not without flaws, however, as it supplanted traditional leadership through the creation of IRA-approved governments, creating new internal tribal conflicts.29
Some tribal nations in Utah resisted the reforms introduced by IRA, despite the legislation’s limited benefits. The Navajo Nation, for example, proposed the creation of a government that did not meet certain standards of the IRA. Eventually the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) worked with other tribal members to form a Navajo Business Council that survived and evolved into the present Navajo Nation government.30 Distrustful of the federal government, Northern and Southern Utes were initially opposed to or uninterested in forming IRA governments. However, pressure from federal agents resulted in votes of acceptance. Utes of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation retained their preexisting Business Committee as their IRA government. Composed of two representatives from each of the three prominent Ute bands, the Business Committee consisted of members who were more acculturated into mainstream American society. This increased internal division within the tribal government, which worsened over the next few decades.31 Both of the federally recognized Goshute nations (the Skull Valley Band of Goshute and
Confederated Tribes of Goshute) created governments under the IRA framework, although their structures differed from each other.32 Two of the five Paiute bands of Utah voted to accept the IRA.33
Briefly mentioning the IRA is germane to the history of Native American voting rights because it demonstrates the difficulty of defining Indian. The term is used to convey ethnological and political meaning, the latter paramount to Native American civil rights. Ethnically, the term refers to someone with Indigenous ancestors who is considered to be Native American in their community. Politically, the term is complicated, as it often relates to the distribution of federal and tribal services and political status.34 An individual may be fully or ethnically Indigenous, but if they are not a member of a federally recognized tribe, they do not have the same political experience as an enrolled tribal member. The relevancy to voting rights is that many Utah Native Americans, particularly those who live on reservations, are dual citizens of the United States and of a sovereign American Indian tribe.
By the mid twentieth century, approximately 2,800 to 3,700 Indigenous men, women, and children within the state of Utah lived on reservations. The lack of precision in the count may be attributed, in part, to the arbitrary political definition of Indian at the time. The 1950 Census categories included “full-blood Indians,” “persons of any degree of mixed blood enrolled at an Indian agency or reservation,” “persons of one-fourth or more Indian blood,” and “persons regarded as ‘Indians’ in the community of residence.”35 When the issue of voting rights made it to the Utah Supreme Court in 1956, interpretations of who was politically Indian, along with notions of tribal sovereignty, would impact how the court assessed suffrage.
Allen v. Merrell and Termination
By midcentury all American Indians were considered United States citizens by birthright, were a generation removed from forced relocation and assimilation, could organize federally recognized tribal governments, and possessed more legal means of advocacy: yet voting rights remained the prerogative of states. American Indian citizenship on a national level was
Form P8, Indian Reservation Schedule. This was the form census takers used to count Native Americans living on reservations during the 1950 census. Information about blood was later used by the Ute Tribe to determine which members to remove from tribal roles. Preston Allen, listed on line three, was one such member. United States Census 1950, 1950census.archives.gov.
unquestionable, but the lawmakers who passed the Indian Citizenship Act did not intend to universally enfranchise Indigenous voters.36 Many western states, unwilling to recognize Natives as eligible voters, maintained legal barriers to the vote. Idaho, California, and New Mexico denied the franchise to “Indians not taxed.” These states argued that because Native Americans were exempt from state property taxes, they did not merit the right to vote. A 1903 law passed in South Dakota barred Native Americans “maintaining tribal relations” from voting or holding public office.37 Until 1946 the state of Arizona withheld the franchise from any person “under guardianship.”38 Across the West, the legacy of colonialism created legal precedent that explicitly considered Native Americans as distinctly different from other US citizens. This legal otherness was used to justify the denial of their voting rights. In Utah, this occurred primarily among American Indians living on reservations.
In 1956, Preston Allen, a Whiteriver Ute from Altonah, Utah, applied for an absentee ballot.
Having participated in the previous general election as a registered voter, Allen was surprised to learn from the Duchesne County clerk’s office that his request was denied. County clerk Porter L. Merrell explained the decision was made because Allen lived “on an Indian reservation and did not establish a residence in any other precinct in the state of Utah” prior to the election.39 Justifiably confused, Allen sued on behalf of himself and others in the same situation with the assistance of the Ute Tribal Committee and National Congress of American Indians legal counsel.
The county had denied Allen the vote based on a recent interpretation of an old Utah statute that established voting prerequisites. In 1897, the Utah legislature, seeking to delineate between state and federal spaces as mandated in the Enabling Act, adopted a statute that stated “any person living upon any Indian or military reservation shall not be deemed a resident of Utah within the meaning of this chapter, unless such person had acquired a residence in some county in Utah prior to taking up his residence
upon such Indian or military reservation.”40 Before Allen was denied his ballot, Utah Attorney General E. R. Callister was asked to clarify the standing of the statute earlier in 1956. Callister interpreted it rigidly: “Indians who live on the reservations are not entitled to vote in Utah and a Board of County Commissioners has no duty to provide them with voting facilities. Indians living off the reservation may, of course, register and vote in the voting district in which they reside, the same as any other citizen.”41 With this interpretation, Callister ordered county clerks to deny voter registration to residents of reservations.42 Although residents of reservations who did not belong to a tribe or were not Native American would have been denied the vote under the same interpretation, these same individuals would have had an easier time establishing residency elsewhere compared to their Native American counterparts.
In Utah, as in other western states, determining how Native Americans fit into the eligible voting population was a matter of interpretation. In fact, the 1897 statute had been previously interpreted differently in favor of the right of reservation residents to the vote. In 1940, the Attorney General’s office opined that the state’s residency definition “should be resolved in favor of granting the franchise to the citizens residing in the Uintah Reservation rather than denying the same.” Unlike the Attorney General’s 1956 opinion, this interpretation recognized that historical circumstances had sufficiently changed since the late nineteenth century. Assistant Attorney General Grover A. Giles argued in 1940 that Utah’s code “contemplated a closed reservation,” noting “the unallotted lands were thrown open to entry, voting precincts have been established and state, county and school taxes have been levied and collected.” Elaborating, he noted how “the attitude of the Government towards the Indians themselves with relation to voting privileges has changed materially since the Utah statute in question was created.”43
Due to this opinion, Native Americans were legally able to vote from 1940 to 1956, but the original 1897 statute remained on the books. This was how Preston Allen and other residents of reservations were able to vote prior to Allen v. Merrell. The prior access to the vote
was well-known at the time, and the reemergence of the issue was “a serious bone of contention among the people of Uintah County.”44 As more non-Indigenous residents moved on or near reservations, the towns and cities that formed in their wake fell under state administration. The boundaries between tribal land, federal land, and state land grew increasingly complex.
With Callister’s 1956 interpretation against granting reservation residents the vote, Utah was the only state that did not guarantee that right to Native Americans. Allen’s attorneys and the Utah press knew this to be the case at the time.45 Although this prohibition was not explicitly based on race or ethnicity, the denial of voting rights to reservation residents disproportionally disenfranchised Native Americans. Attorneys representing Allen argued that the Uintah and Ouray Reservation was indeed within the territorial and jurisdictional limits of Utah and that denying residents suffrage was a violation of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. The defense argued that the statute and the interpretation of such could not have been discriminatory, because individuals who were not American Indians living on reservations (or military bases) would have also needed to establish residency elsewhere in Utah to qualify to vote. Ostensibly, the central tension was not regarding the right to vote but rather how the residency law should be interpreted. The court ultimately ruled against Allen in December 1956, basing its decision on three main reasons: tribal sovereignty, the high degree of control the federal government had over American Indian affairs, and taxes.46
The Allen decision stated that because Native Americans had “extremely limited” interactions with the state government, they had “much less interest in or concern with [the state government] than do other citizens.” The court opined that American Indians on reservations did not live “in communities, but in individual dwellings or hogans remotely isolated from others and from contact with the outside world” and that they were “neither acquainted with the processes of government” nor had “much concern with services and regulations pertaining to sanitation, business, licensing, school facilities, law enforcement and other functions carried on
Partial map of Duchesne County election precincts, circa 1950. Shaded areas represent reservation lands. Due to allotment, the borders between reservation lands and state lands became irregular and mixed. This was also known as checkerboarding. 1950 United States Census Archives, Duchesne County, Altonah election precinct. 1950census .archives.gov.
by the county and state governments.” Native Americans, according to the court, were “distinctly different” in that they “enjoy the benefits of [federal] governmental services without bearing commensurate tax burden and are not as conversant with nor as interested in government as other citizens.” Therefore, the court did “not see how it can be said with any degree of certainty that the statute is a denial of the right to vote on account of race, nor that it is so unreasonable or arbitrary that it is in clear conflict with the nondiscrimination and equal protection clauses of the Federal Constitution or of the Constitution of this state.”47
Some legal experts at the time disagreed with the court’s ruling. Shortly after the decision, an article in the Utah Law Review articulated the flaws in the court’s interpretation. Like the 1940 Assistant Attorney General opinion, the author viewed the 1897 residency statute as outdated. The article speculated that the “motive for adoption” of the statute was likely due to “friction” between Utah and the federal government. The author noted that at statehood Native Americans were not granted citizenship by birthright. Referencing subsequent changes in federal policy, the author questioned how the statute applied to Native Americans, who were now citizens of not only the United States but also of the state in which they resided. The article’s author also disagreed with the court’s argument regarding taxes. American Indians residing on reservations did not have to pay state property taxes and many other state taxes, but they did pay sales tax to the state when they purchased personal property.48
Preston Allen immediately appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court, and the court quickly accepted. However, the court never heard the case, because the Utah State Legislature voted unanimously only a little over a month after the ruling to amend the residency statute to allow reservation residents to vote.49 It is unlikely that the state would have won its case before the US Supreme Court, which possibly explains why the legislature hastily changed its statute.50
In addition to recognizing the case’s likely failure, the Utah legislature amended its discriminatory residency statute for another reason: to embrace a new shift in federal American Indian
policy that offered a simple corrective to the oddities of Native American political integration. Although Allen v. Merrell revolved around residency and the interpretation of such, the case was entangled with broader shifts in federal policy. Contextualizing the case within the ideology of federal policy known as “termination” further explains the conditions in which the Native Americans of Utah belatedly secured the vote.
Federal Indian policy from 1953 to the mid1960s is collectively called “termination,” as it featured a wave of policy makers and bureaucrats who sought to end the unique relationship of Native nations with the government and dramatically change how Native Americans fit within the body politic. This shift in policy was popular among conservative lawmakers and bureaucrats, many resolved to limit federal spending on programs they considered ineffective in favor of those that promoted individualism and capitalism.51 Whereas allotment represented a long-term federal effort to uplift Native peoples into citizenship and develop tribal lands economically, termination attempted to uplift them by freeing them from federal paternalism and political obscurity. Specifically, termination was meant to “make the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States.”52 Importantly, termination dissolved political sovereignty of tribal nations and tribal members. When tribes were terminated, they lost official recognition from the federal government as sovereign political entities, their members lost federal benefits and services, and remaining reservation lands held in trust with the federal government vanished. In total, the US government terminated over one hundred tribes and eleven thousand tribal members, including various Paiute bands in southern Utah and a few hundred Utes of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs (1947–1959) and one of termination’s staunchest supporters, used his influence to push termination onto American Indians within the state.53
Termination was an aggressive extension of an old debate over how to incorporate Native Americans into mainstream society. Some
lawmakers and Native Americans supported termination as a desegregation reform that simplified the intricacies of Indian citizenship and tribal sovereignty. Proponents of termination were convinced that, in conjunction with generations of intense federal management of tribal affairs, Native peoples were doomed if they remained under federal guardianship. They characterized the federal trust relationship in terms of wardship status and viewed termination as an act of liberation that would, in time, fully assimilate American Indians into the political system.54 Ernest L. Wilkinson, a well-known Native American claims attorney who practiced during the 1940s and 1950s, said federal paternalism caused many Native peoples to not “want to be made free.” He opined that “the Indians really expect the government, in large part, to take care of them.”55 Senator Watkins compared termination to the Emancipation Proclamation and was genuinely bothered by the idea that American Indians were politically different from other Americans.56 Firmly committed to termination, he pushed the policy, even in the face of Native American opposition. Congresswoman Reva Beck Bosone of Utah, a contemporary of Watkins, explained that she had a “profound respect for the Indian and a deep interest in seeing that he gets a square deal.” Bosone argued that federal policy made individual Native Americans perpetual dependents of the government, and she advocated for legislation that prioritized tribal readiness and consent to termination.57
Termination was heavily influenced by an ideology that favored individualism and fiscal restraint, but it may also have been an effort to repair the damages federal policies had created in Indian Country. For example, while many areas of the United States were experiencing unprecedented growth and opportunity during the postwar years, conditions in the Navajo Nation were comparatively bleak. Navajos had the lowest life expectancy in the country, an infant mortality rate ten times the national average, and the highest tuberculosis rate in the country.58 Education was a central need for the Navajo Nation in the postwar era, and in 1945 the Navajo Tribal Council acknowledged the Nation was “handicapped with poverty, poor health, limited resources, inability to speak
English, and lack of training for improving our condition.”59 In 1947, President Truman declared poverty in the Navajo Nation a national emergency, prompting the government to take significant action. Despite the passage of multiple acts that allocated millions to education and infrastructure, the majority of the twenty-four thousand Navajo children lacked consistent access to schools in the 1950s.60 The Utes faced similar conditions, some of which may have been created by policies implemented under the Indian Reorganization Act. In a 1950 letter to Senator Watkins, a group of Uintah Utes referred to the “endless disputes, bickerings, and general dissatisfaction” resulting from how the IRA pooled tribal resources with other Ute bands on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. Believing they had been “regimented into a socialistic existence,” some Uintah Utes advocated for changes to resource allocation that aligned “with the American concept of property rights” instead of those aligned with “communism.”61
Native Americans generally opposed termination because it threatened tribal sovereignty and voided federal obligations the United States owed to tribal nations. In 1954 the National Congress of American Indians drafted a “Declaration of Indian Rights” directly in response to the threat of termination. Instead of seeing federal oversight as wardship, delegates representing 183,000 American Indians described the federal trust relationship in terms of sovereignty and protection. Termination threatened to end this protection, destroy tribal governments, and “force our people into a life that some are not willing or ready to adopt.” The declaration described reservations as “ancestral homelands,” not “places of confinement.”62 The National Congress of American Indians’ declaration was prescient in the detrimental impacts of termination among tribal nations. For instance, Larry Echo Hawk, a prominent official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, former assistant secretary of Indian Affairs for the Department of the Interior, and member of the Pawnee Nation, later referred to termination as an “abysmal failure.” It was, he argued, a means for the government to dodge its responsibilities for Native people and an attack on tribal governments and their sovereignty.63
Termination policy overtly influenced how Utah lawmakers and the Utah Supreme Court assessed Native American political status. In 1953, the Utah House passed a bill declaring it “the public policy of the state of Utah to cooperate with the secretary of interior, other governmental departments and agencies, and Indian tribes in developing plans for an orderly termination of federal supervision over the persons and property of Indians to the end that Indians may become self-sustaining.”64 The state’s intention was to embrace termination, making Native Americans “subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges” as other citizens and “end their status as wards to the United States.”65 In the Allen decision, the court considered termination’s forthcoming application to Utah tribes to justify the ruling. After describing the 1953 legislation as “avowed,” the court noted that “notwithstanding the desirability of that objective [termination] and the considerable amount of legislation which has been proposed toward it, it cannot realistically be claimed that it has been attained, even in theory, much less so in fact. To assume it accomplished because we might wish it so, would be to blind ourselves to reality.”66 In other words, the court would have been more inclined to rule in favor of reservation residents’ right to vote if Native Americans ceased to be members of federally recognized tribes.
In addition to its impact on Allen v. Merrell, termination negatively impacted American Indians in Utah. Senator Watkins leveraged his position as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs to terminate five bands of Paiutes and 490 Uintah Utes of mixed heritage. Initially, he sought to terminate all of the tribal nations in Utah.67 In 1947, the assistant commissioner of Indian Affairs conducted a survey and compiled a list of tribes that were ready to end their unique federal relationship and could manage without federal services. To qualify, a tribe required a high degree of acculturation, sufficient economic resources, and a willingness to accept the changes brought by termination. None of the five Utah Paiute bands or any of the Utes of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation were listed as ready for termination.68
Congress terminated four of the five Paiute bands in Utah in 1954. The Shivwits (97
members), Kanosh (27 members), Koosharem (27 members), and Indian Peaks (26 members) Paiute bands were small, impoverished, and isolated targets. Watkins organized a meeting with the bands in 1953 in Fillmore, Utah, to argue his case for termination. Hardly in a space for conversation, Watkins told Paiutes of their pending freedom from the government while ignoring Paiute concerns of racist treatment from white people. Paiute leaders told Watkins about their poverty and how they relied on “white people’s junk” to build and furnish their homes. Paiutes had little contact with white communities, few high school graduates, and little economic opportunity. They followed traditional gathering practices during the winter months and left in search of seasonal farm labor during the spring and summer. Watkins persisted, as he was able to convince a few Paiutes to accept termination. This consent was far from informed and was based on empty promises. The Paiutes ultimately lost fifteen thousand acres of land and witnessed their incomes decrease further.69 Ironically, the band (Kanosh) that received the most federal assistance prior to termination was in the best economic condition compared to other Paiute groups.70 Restoration of federal Paiute recognition came decades later in 1980, as the four bands joined with the Cedar band to become the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.
Termination among the Northern Utes is beyond our scope here, but it is worth briefly recounting to demonstrate the intricacies of federal Indian policy and Native American political rights. After years of judiciary advocacy and immense legal work, Ute bands removed from Colorado won a massive settlement from the United States. During the removal to Utah, the United States undervalued ceded lands. In 1950 the government agreed to pay a thirty-one-million-dollar difference, which was the largest judgment rendered against the United States at that time. The White River and Uncompahgre Utes received 60 percent of the monies, while the Ute Mountain and Southern Utes received 40 percent. This amounted to roughly $10,000 per Ute tribal member. However, the tribes could not use funds without congressional approval. As the settlement coincided with the termination period, Watkins used his influence to tie the settlement funds to a termination plan.71
each band their share and then
into three separate independent “tribes.” J. Willard Marriott Library, Reva Beck Bosone Photograph Collection, photo no. p0127n01_11_092.
Mounting pressure to demonstrate tribal willingness to embrace termination, coupled with inter-band rancor over the division of the settlement monies, ultimately led to termination for 490 Utes of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. This contributed to the tribe adopting new standards to determine tribal membership based on blood quantum: those with less than 50 percent Ute “blood” were defined out of membership. This disproportionately unenrolled Uintah Utes, who had a history of incorporating members of other tribal nations into their social structure. Faced with continued pressure to develop a plan for termination, “mixed bloods” were sacrificed to meet the termination agenda. As was the case among the Paiutes, informed consent, although attempted, was never established.72 One terminated
Ute and long-time employee of the tribe called termination one of “the biggest injustices ever.” Further, “never advertised the way it should have been,” termination divided the reservation and its assets “foolishly” and sowed division within the community.73 Resistance to termination and a protracted effort to reconcile tribal assets during the partition prolonged official termination until 1961. Afterward, many Utes integrated into mainstream society, all the while fading into new cycles of poverty and hardship without federal or tribal resources.74
The federal government was well down the path of termination when Allen v. Merrell came before the Utah Supreme Court. In that decision the court drew on the ideology of termination to argue that Native American sovereignty
Wilbur Cuch, France McKinley, and Rudolph Nephi working on land status maps for the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Fort Duchesne, Utah. According to Dr. Sondra G. Jones, after hearing about Senator Watkins’s plan to step up pressure for Ute termination, McKinley, a tribal coordinating officer in the planning division, secretly met with tribal chairman Rex Curry and BIA representative Robert Bennett to consider how to respond. One of those men suggested giving
splitting
was mutually exclusive to full suffrage, at least until Utah tribes were removed from federal trust responsibilities. As the court heard arguments, the Paiutes were reeling from termination, and the Northern Utes were being pressured to comply with a termination agenda. The court’s anticipation of subsequent termination bills influenced its interpretation of how Native Americans, particularly those who lived on reservations, politically fit within the state.
Both Allen v. Merrell and termination challenge popular notions of political progress through integration, further highlighting the circumstances that must be recognized in any study of issues in Indian Country. Popular understanding of women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement establish an assumption that equal political integration, particularly through voting, is unambiguously progressive. This was not the case for Native Americans in Utah, who gained the right to vote during a time when it was assumed federal termination policies would continue. This was of course supplementary to previous generations of hardship. Termination helps demonstrate why Native American suffrage uniquely models the additional political complexity associated with political issues pertaining to Indigenous peoples. By abandoning Indigenous sovereignty, Native Americans could gain equal political rights like other US citizens, potentially defying the contemporary trope that depicted American Indians as overly dependent on federal aid. Termination may seem mostly beneficial and reformative, but when considered with the generations of warfare, epidemics, displacement, coerced assimilation, and federal mismanagement Native communities experienced, loss of sovereignty is a heavy price to pay for equal rights. This is a balance only applicable to Native Americans in the United States and ought not to be forgotten in current political discourse.
Voting in San Juan County
After Native people were legally considered residents of Utah and could no longer be denied the franchise on account of residency, struggles over voting rights persisted. The endeavor to access the franchise in San Juan County, in Utah’s southeastern corner, is a case
in point. Geographic, linguistic, and economic conditions unique to Native Americans acted— and continue to act—as significant obstacles to the vote. Consistent with voting barriers of the first half of the twentieth century, voting rights in San Juan County were tied to federal policy and action, but not separable from local factors. From the second half of the twentieth century to the present, Native Americans have experienced barriers to voting as a result of being poorer, more isolated, and less powerful than their non-Indigenous neighbors.
The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act initiated a shift in how Indigenous communities could use federal power to secure the vote. Consequently, federal courts could be used as an enforcer of Native voting rights against localities. The first example occurred in 1972, when two Navajos tried to run for a seat on the San Juan County Commission. When they attempted to register for the election, the county clerk informed them they needed fifty signatures to do so. The clerk knowingly failed to inform the men that the signatures would also need to be notarized. This resulted in the rejection of their bid.75 They filed a suit in federal court and argued this was an unnecessary barrier to participate in the election. The court ruled the Navajos had been “unfairly” treated when they were not properly informed about required legal procedures. The court elaborated on the decision by stating “there has been a history of intentional discrimination, first, on the part of the Federal Government and, in more recent times, on the part of the state.” The county was ordered to put the men on the ballot, although neither won his race.76
Language can act as a barrier for Native American voting. In 1975, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act so non-native English speakers could receive language assistance during elections. The amendment required counties to provide bilingual election ballots and language assistance if the minority language population exceeded 5 percent and had a substandard literacy rate. At the time the county’s population of Indigenous residents neared 50 percent, consisting of mainly Navajos but also some Utes and Southern Paiutes. A large proportion of the Navajo Nation could not read or speak English. This language barrier made registering to vote
or going to a polling station intimidating and burdensome. One county official told a Navajo frustrated by a lack of understanding the ballot that “if you don’t understand it, don’t vote on it.”77 Failing to provide adequate language assistance, the county settled a suit with the
Department of Justice in 1983 that made voting more accessible to Native people with little to no English abilities. The county established a bilingual voter registration program and created more registration sites near the reservation with bilingual workers. Radio announcements
A map of modern tribal lands in Utah. Courtesy BYU ARTS Partnership / Native American Curriculum Initiative, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
were to be made in Navajo and English about relevant election information.
Other barriers to suffrage have been more intentional, such as redistricting practices. In 1983, the Justice Department claimed San Juan County violated the Voting Rights Act by practicing voter dilution. The county’s large Native population had never elected a candidate as one of three county commissioners because voting was done through an at-large system. This meant the entire county was one voting district, giving an advantage to the slim majority held by individuals who were not American Indians. The county settled this case and agreed to create a new three-district system. As a result, in 1986 Mark Maryboy became the first Navajo elected to the county commission.78 These developments in the 1980s were a move toward more equal voting rights, but they did not come close to establishing consistent Indigenous access to the democratic process.
In fact, the three-district system—responsible for the election of the county’s first Native American commissioner—still restricted fair representation at the local level. The county failed to redistrict after the 1990, 2000, and, initially, 2010 censuses. District 3, created after the 1983 settlement within the reservation boundary, was home to three-fifths of the county’s Native American population. This packed Native voters into one district. The Navajo Nation took the county to court in 2016 and claimed this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In court, attorneys representing San Juan County admitted that “District 3 was intentionally created by the commission to have a heavy concentration of American Indians.” Although San Juan County argued that the districts complied with the 1983 settlement, a federal court ordered the county to redraw the voting districts.79
After redistricting, the 2018 elections resulted in a two-to-one county commissioner majority for the Navajos in San Juan County. Two of the three voting districts now have a Navajo majority: 66 percent in one district, 80 percent in another.80 The county commissioners’ office, led by Kenneth Maryboy and Willie Grayeyes, has more closely tied the interests of Native people to the work of the local government.
Commissioner meetings have been occasionally held on the Navajo Nation and broadcast online, and the Navajo-led commission has reversed the county’s official position on the Bears Ears National Monument. These developments have not come without opposition from county residents who are not Native American.81
Native American voting in Utah is not insignificant, but it does require particular effort to include Native Americans in the electoral process. Nearly 62 percent of eligible Native voters in Utah are not registered, and turnout is between 32 and 41 percent as of 2020. Yet in the Navajo Nation elections, for example, nearly half of all tribal members vote.82 This indicates that state-run voting functions do not adequately serve Native American communities and that broader voting obstacles are at work. One such obstacle is geography. Geography presents a real challenge to many American Indians, who often live far from polling locations. Navajos in southern Utah are particularly impacted by distance. The Navajo Nation is remote and massive; sometimes the best way to travel to a polling center is by horse.83 Roads and transportation are not as reliable on the reservation as they are in other portions of San Juan County.
Any resident of Utah who has voted recently may recall voting by mail, but this can, in fact, prove more difficult for Navajo voters. By 2016, twenty-one Utah counties were running elections by mail, including San Juan County. During that time, the county only offered one in-person polling place, the minimum required by law. A great number of Navajo homes across the reservation lack formal street addresses, making it impossible to register to vote and receive election materials. In 2018, the Rural Utah Project found that up to 18 percent of Navajo voters in San Juan County were registered in the wrong precinct. In place of addresses, field organizers used “plus codes” (a short location code, like an address) to register 1,350 voters in 2018.84 Because the county population is just shy of twenty thousand, these voters can make a significant difference in local elections. Unable to vote by mail without an address, too many Native voters are also unable to travel the great distance to cast a vote in person. Given
these challenges, it was clear that an opportunity existed for more in-person voting options so more rural residents unable to mail their ballots could more easily access the vote.85 Despite the challenges some Navajo voters face in mail-in elections, preserving the option to vote by mail or in person is essential to making the elections process available for all.
Conclusion
In the sixty years since statehood, Native Americans in Utah went from being “other” non-citizens to full-fledged residents. This required a high-profile court case, one that merely ended the official prohibition of Native Americans living on reservations from voting. Within another sixty years, Native Americans asserted their right to vote and hold office by leveraging federal power and tribal sovereignty. San Juan County’s place in this story demonstrates the transformative power of suffrage but also the lengths to which Native people and their allies must go to broaden their access to the democratic process.
Since the 2020 election, this type of progress has been jeopardized nationwide for the sake of election security. Seventeen state legislatures passed bills that generally make voting a more burdensome process. Dozens more were proposed across the United States.86 In early July 2021, the US Supreme Court validated two Arizona laws that restricted voting: one criminalized the collection of ballots by third-party community groups or campaigns, and another invalidated ballots cast in the wrong precinct.87 In Arizona, these measures greatly impact Native Americans—many of whom are citizens of the same Navajo Nation in Utah—who lack formal addresses, live vast distances from polling places, and lack access to the internet.88 In Montana, another state with a substantial American Indian population, the legislature passed a similar measure in July 2021 against ballot harvesting by third-party community groups or campaigns.89
In a moment when voting rights discourse is especially relevant, the history of Native American voting rights in Utah offers nuance to the discussion and to issues pertaining to American Indians more broadly. By contextualizing this history within eras of federal
American Indian policy, the prohibition of Native American voting rights in Utah can be seen as a consequence of federal policy based on assimilation. Suffrage came to a head in Allen v. Merrell, where the consequences of allotment and the ideology of termination influenced how the Utah Supreme Court ruled on Native American voting rights. Voting rights struggles persisted in San Juan County, where many additional barriers to voting remain today. These barriers are best examined in the context of federal policy toward Native people and the lasting, historical impacts of its implementation. This yields a more thorough understanding of why Native Americans do not enjoy the same voting access as other citizens, and helps contextualize the meaning of voting rights in Indian Country.
Notes
1. Native American Rights Fund, “Obstacles at Every Turn: Barriers to Political Participation Faced by Native American Voters” (Boulder, CO, 2020), 1–3, vote .narf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/obstacles_at _every_turn.pdf.
2. US Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs, “About Us,” accessed June 8, 2022, bia.gov/about-us.
3. David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 44.
4. Jennifer Robinson, “Utah and Native American Voting Rights,” Better Days, March 28, 2019, utahwomens history.org/2019/03/utah-and-native-american-voting -rights/; Katie Friel, Emil Mella Pablo, “How Voter Suppression Laws Target Native Americans,” Brennan Center for Justice, May 23, 2022, brennancenter.org/our -work/research-reports/how-voter-suppression-laws -target-native-americans; David Daley, “One Utah County’s Decades-Long Struggle for the Native American Vote,” Literary Hub, March 25, 2020, lithub.com/one -utah-countys-decades-long-struggle-for-the-native -american-vote/; Becky Little, “Native Americans Weren’t Guaranteed the Right to Vote Until 1962,” History, updated November 13, 2020, history.com/news/native -american-voting-rights-citizenship.
5. Matthew G. McCoy, “Hidden Citizens: The Courts and Native American Voting Rights in the Southwest,” Journal of the Southwest 58, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 302–7; Daniel McCool, Jennifer L. Robinson, and Susan M. Olson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96–97; Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 93; US Election Assistance Commission, “Voting Access for Native Americans: Case Studies and Best Practices” (Washington, DC, 2021); Willard Hughes Rollings, “Citizenship and Suffrage: The Native American Struggle for Civil Rights in the American West,” Nevada Law Journal 5 (Fall 2004): 138–39; “Obstacles at Every Turn,” 12.
6. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 110.
7. Wilkins, 111.
8. Jason Edward Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 2015), 96.
9. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 111; Black, American Indians, 96.
10. For example, the Uintah Reservation (the western portion of what is now the Uintah and Ouray Reservation) was created when various Ute bands that frequented the Utah Valley negotiated a treaty with Mormons to secure the lands to the reservation. Congress and the president later created the reservation; however, the US government never ratified the treaty the Utes made with the Mormons. If the federal government had the right to create reservations, it had the right to dissolve them. It was under this justification that the federal government allotted the Uintah Reservation in 1903–1904, despite total opposition from Utes. See Sondra G. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018), 174, 240.
11. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 111.
12. The Utes of the modern Uintah and Ouray Reservation mainly come from the Uintah, White River, and Uncompahgre bands. The latter two were removed from Colorado in the late 1870s, and the Uintah Band consisted of disparate Western Ute bands. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 8, 169–74, 225.
13. Most of the reservation was created during this time. Later changes followed. See Kathryn L. MacKay, “The Uncompahgre Reservation and the Hill Creek Extension,” Utah Historical Quarterly 83 (Summer 2015).
14. Fred A. Conetah, A History of the Northern Ute People, ed. Kathryn L. MacKay and Floyd A. O’Neil (UintahOuray Ute Tribe, 1982), 121.
15. “Allotment to Indians: Work of Uncompahgre Commission Nearly Done,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 10, 1898.
16. Conetah, Northern Ute People, 128, 121–22.
17. “Allotment to Indians.”
18. Theodore Roosevelt, Proclamation 632—Uncompahgre Indian Reservation, The American Presidency Project, accessed October 4, 2022, presidency.ucsb.edu/node /277131.
19. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 240–42, 240 (qtn.).
20. Jones, 270.
21. Conetah, Northern Ute People, 128. The Southern Utes lost 46 percent of their reservation to allotment. The Ute Mountain Utes managed to avoid allotment.
22. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 269, 273–75.
23. Utah Enabling Act, sec. 3, art. 2, accessed October 4, 2022, archives.utah.gov/research/exhibits/Statehood/1894 text.htm.
24. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington Enabling Act, sec. 4, art. 2, February 22, 1889, Washington State Legislature, accessed October 4, 2022, leg. wa.gov/History/State/Pages/enabling.aspx#:~:text =AN%20ACT%20To%20amend%20an,equal%20 footing%20with%20the%20original; New Mexico and Arizona Enabling Act, sec. 2, art. 2, June 20, 1910, accessed October 4, 2022, azlibrary.gov/sites/default /files/36Stat557_from_LOC_Collection.pdf; McCool, et al., Native Vote, 6.
25. Oklahoma Enabling Act, sec. 2, 1906, accessed October 4, 2022, govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf /stat/34/STATUTE-34-Pg267b.pdf.
26. McCool, et al., Native Vote, 7.
27. US Const., art. 1, sec. 8.
28. US House of Representatives, Report No. 222, 1924, quoted in McCool, et al., Native Vote, 7.
29. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 113–14.
30. “Navajo Attitudes toward the Indian Reorganization Act,” in Discovering Multicultural America: African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans (Detroit: Gale, 2003); Elmer Ruco, “The Indian Reorganization Act and Indian Self-Government,” in American Indian Constitutional Reform and the Rebuilding of Native Nations, ed. Eric D. Lemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 51.
31. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute, 293–95.
32. Forrest Cuch, History of Utah’s American Indians (Salt Lake City: Utah Division of Indian Affairs, 2003), 116.
33. Becky Bartholomew, “Utah’s Paiute Indians during the Depression,” History to Go, accessed October 4, 2022, historytogo.utah.gov/utahs-paiute-depression/.
34. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 24–26.
35. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Resident Population on Indian Reservations 1950 (Washington, DC: [1956]), available online, accessed October 4, 2022, hdl.handle.net/2027/oksu.36135022330585; Brief of Appellant, Preston Allen v. Porter L. Merrell, No. 8589 (Utah, October 8, 1956), 10, accessed October 4, 2022, digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/uofu_sc1/2704.
36. McCool, et al., Native Vote, 8.
37. McCool, et al., 9–11.
38. McCoy, “Hidden Citizens,” 295.
39. Brief of Appellant, Allen v. Merrell
40. “Act Providing for Elections,” Laws of the State of Utah, 2d. sess. (1897), 163.
41. Appendix B, Brief of Appellant, Allen v. Merrell
42. “Utah Moves to Force Vote Denial Ruling,” Deseret News, September 11, 1956.
43. Biennial Report of the Attorney General to the Governor of the State of Utah for the Biennial Period Ending June 30, 1942 (Salt Lake City: Office of the Attorney General, 1942), quoted in Brief of Appellant, Allen v. Merrell, 41–44.
44. “Ute Tribe Asks Court to Study Utah Election Law,” Roosevelt (UT) Standard, September 20, 1956, 1; Biennial Report of the Attorney General, qt. in McCoy, “Hidden Citizens,” 304.
45. Brief of Appellant, Allen v. Merrell; “Ute Tribe Asks Court to Study Utah Election Law”; “Utah Moves to Force Vote Denial Ruling.”
46. McCoy, “Hidden Citizens,” 307.
47. Quoted in McCoy, “Hidden Citizens,” 307.
48. John H. Allen, “Denial of Voting Rights to Reservation Indians,” Utah Law Review 5, no. 2 (Fall 1956): 247–53.
49. An Act Amending Section 20–2–14, Utah Code Annotated 1953, H.B. 31 (1957), accessed October 4, 2022, images .archives.utah.gov/digital/collection/432n/id/52130 /rec/10.
50. McCoy, “Hidden Citizens,” 308.
51. Kenneth R. Philip, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination, 1933–1953 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), xii.
52. R. Warren Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 2.
53. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 20–21; Carolyn Grattan-Aiello, “Senator Arthur V. Watkins and the Termination of Utah’s Southern Paiute Indians,” Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (Summer 1995): 272.
54. Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 5, 64.
55. Quoted in Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 64.
56. Metcalf, 19.
57. Metcalf, 76.
58. Philip, Termination Revisited, 52.
59. Matthew Garrett, Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947–2000 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 44.
60. Garrett, 46–47.
61. Quoted in Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 47.
62. National Congress of American Indians to the President, March 10, 1954, accessed October 5, 2022, ncai. org.
63. Larry EchoHawk, Mary Ellen Sloan, Russell Jim, Joe De La Cruz, and Sol Tax, “The Legacy of the Termination Era,” in Indian Self Rule: First-Hand Accounts of Indian-White Relations from Roosevelt to Reagan, ed. Kenneth R. Philip (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995), 175–77.
64. Cited in Allen v. Merrell, 305 P.2d 490 (Utah 1956), https:// law.justia.com/cases/utah/supreme-court/1956/8589 -0.html.
65. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 21.
66. Allen v. Merrell, 305 P.2d at 490.
67. Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 101.
68. Grattan-Aiello, “Senator Arthur V. Watkins,” 272–74.
69. Grattan-Aiello, 274–78.
70. Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 111.
71. Metcalf, 58–59, 73.
72. Metcalf, 133–47.
73. Ute Indian Interviews, Lorena Denver Iorg, box 2, fd. 2, Doris Duke Oral Interviews, Accession 853, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
74. Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 203.
75. “Obstacles at Every Turn,” 119.
76. David R. Berman and Tanis J. Salant, “Minority Representation, Resistance, and Public Policy: The Navajos
and the Counties,” Publius 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 100; McCool, et al., Native Vote, 97.
77. “Obstacles at Every Turn,” 63.
78. McCool, et al., Native Vote, 99–105.
79. Carter Fox, “‘One Person, One Vote’: Navajo Nation v. San Juan County and Voter Suppression of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Journal 9, issue 1, article 2 (2020): 24–28.
80. Julie Turkewitz, “For Native Americans, a ‘Historic Moment’ on the Path to Power at the Ballot Box,” International New York Times, January 4, 2018.
81. Zak Podmore, “Here’s How San Juan County Reached This Historic Moment,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 7, 2019.
82. “Obstacles at Every Turn,” 83.
83. “Navajo Riders Set Out to Vote,” Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand), November 4, 2020, 30.
85. Justin Lee, “Native American Voting Rights” (plenary panel, Utah Annual History Conference, September 30, 2020), accessed October 5, 2022, youtube.com/watch?v =Uun0YbEZMcs.
86. Brennan Center for Justice, “Voting Laws Roundup,” May 28, 2021, accessed October 5, 2022, brennancenter .org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup -may-2021#footnote10_r72itni.
87. Devin Dwyer, “Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Restrictions in Major Voting Rights, Racial Discrimination Case,” ABC News, July 1, 2021, accessed October 5, 2022, abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court -upholds-arizona-restrictions-major-voting-rights /story?id=78182724.
88. Felicia Fonseca, “Tribes Say Voting Access Hurt by U.S. Supreme Court Ruling,” Associated Press, July 1, 2021, accessed October 5, 2022, apnews.com/article/joe-biden -voter-registration-voting-rights-business-election -2020-152573041f97f690381cd2a323db586c.
89. Maggie Astor, “How G.O.P.-Backed Laws in Montana Could Hurt Native American Voting,” New York Times, July 6, 2021.
Lambs of Sacrifice: Termination, the Mixed-blood Utes, and the Problem of Indian Identity
BY R. WARREN METCALF
In 1954 the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to implement policies that would halt federal supervision and trust responsibilities over several tribes of American Indians. These new policies, collectively known by the rather ominous sounding name “termination,” followed the will of Congress as expressed in House Concurrent Resolution 108. Passed in the preceding year, this document succinctly stated the determination of Congress to make Indians subject to the same laws and privileges as other U.S. citizens and to “end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.” The resolution further declared that all of this was to be accomplished “as rapidly as possible.”1
In due course, more than a hundred tribal groups would be subjected to the termination process. The question of how the mixed-blood Utes of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation of Utah came to be terminated is the subject of this study. These people were members, for the most part, of the Uintah band of the Ute Tribe. Their story is little known for several reasons—not the least being that scholars of American Indian history have not considered them sufficiently “Indian” to merit study. In this regard they are like other mixed-blood peoples who have been neglected simply because they do not fall within traditional areas of inquiry. As Jennifer S. H. Brown recently pointed out, Anglo-American thought contains a deeply embedded kind of “racial dualism,” which carries over into scholarly dichotomies of “Indian” and “white.”2
The mixed-blood Ute story has also been neglected because it does not precisely fit the pattern in which Indians serve as the victims of the dominant culture, although it is true that Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins, one of the leading congressional proponents of termination, deserves the disproportionate responsibility for what happened to these people. However, it also remains true that the actual work of terminating the mixed-bloods fell to other Utes and their leaders, assisted by sympathetic BIA officials and even representatives of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the mixed-blood Utes fell victim to the termination process largely as a
result of the actions of other Indians and even the nominal defenders of Indian rights. Moreover, the mixed-blood Ute story involves the kinds of controversies that scholars sometimes prefer to avoid: rivalries between tribal leaders, petty jealousies, distrust between tribal bands, and a bitter fight over tribal membership. This last point was especially exacerbated by the windfall of some $18 million received by the tribe as a result of successfully prosecuted claims cases against the United States. In short, what happened to the mixed-blood Utes defies many of the accepted interpretations of the termination era.
The Utes at Uintah and Ouray received the news of the $18 million judgment in July 1950 when tribal claims attorney Ernest L. Wilkinson met with the tribe and explained the conditions of
a settlement he had negotiated with the government. The situation was complicated by the fact that only two of the three Ute bands residing on the reservation, the Whiteriver and Uncompahgre bands, were party to the claims cases that produced the windfall award. This was so because these bands originally lived in Colorado and were removed to the Uintah Reservation in the aftermath of the 1879 Meeker Massacre. The claims cases derived from the value of the Colorado lands the Whiterivers and Uncompahgres lost when forced to relocate. The third band, the Uintah Utes, constituted the remnants of the several Ute bands that once resided in Utah and as a consequence had no legal claim to the judgment money.
Wilkinson knew that a hopeless tangle of lawsuits and countersuits would ensue should only
Arthur Watkins and students at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah. Utah State Historical Society Classified Photograph Collection, photo no. 18672.
two of the three bands share in the award, and so he engineered an agreement by which the two Colorado bands were compelled to share the money with the Utah Utes as a condition of the settlement. Naturally, this “share and share alike” arrangement engendered considerable resentment on the part of the Colorado Utes, but that was not all. The Colorado bands had an additional reason to resent the Utah branch of the tribe: a large proportion of the Uintahs had intermarried with Indians of other tribes. Hence, in the 1950s context of the term, many of the Uintahs were “mixed-blood” Indians— descendants of different tribes.3
The mixed-blood issue contributed significantly to the controversy over who should share in the $18 million award—an argument that erupted during a period of experimentation and preparation for both tribal and governmental leaders. In Washington, members of Congress debated and then embraced the philosophy of termination but left the actual task of creating terminal programs with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal leaders. Bureau officials, meanwhile, heeded the legislative mandate of House Concurrent Resolution 108 and began collecting information about specific tribes deemed “capable” of assuming the responsibilities rendered by the federal government. The huge Colorado judgment moved the Ute Tribe directly into this category, despite the fact that the tribe had previously been considered ill-prepared for termination. Suddenly tribal leaders found themselves subject to the demands of bureau and congressional policymakers, while tribal factions fought over control of the money. The ensuing disagreements reflected deep divisions within the tribe itself. As termination philosophy matured into policy, these accumulated pressures threatened the fragile equilibrium that existed among the three Ute bands.
Ute tribal leaders initially proposed to spend some of the money on a three-year development program (approved by Congress as Public Law 120 on August 21, 1951) to provide immediate relief for the poverty-stricken tribal members and to develop several experimental programs. Unfortunately, problems quickly emerged over the plan’s objective and which tribal factions would benefit the most from it.
The plan itself offered something for almost everyone, including a per capita payment authorized by the secretary of the interior. In October 1951 every enrolled member of the Ute Tribe received $1,000 in the form of an individual money account, subject to withdrawal upon the submission of a brief plan explaining how the funds would be used. The tribe offered very few restrictions on the money in the expectation that members would need the experience gained in handling large sums. According to Superintendent Forrest R. Stone, most of the Utes used the money to buy food and clothing and to pay old debts. He noted in his report to the bureau that almost every family bought an automobile or a truck, exercising “reasonably good judgment” in purchasing these vehicles, but added that there were also a “number of stupid transactions, both in the care that they have taken of their automotive equipment and the tendency to spread out in this direction far beyond their need.”4
The per capita distribution continued out of tribal funds over the duration of the three-year program. Additional features of the plan included a program designed to add new land to the reservation and provide more grazing property, to survey the carrying capacity of tribal grazing lands, and to fund improvements on existing range lands through the construction offences, stock ponds, and other useful projects. Other provisions of the program helped the members in a more personal way. A revolving credit fund of $1 million was established to provide loans to individual members, complete with a rather conservative Tribal Credit Committee. A housing rehabilitation program helped to remodel or build more than a hundred homes, with much of the lumber coming from tribal forestry reserves. The program also made arrangements to close the Uintah day and boarding school at Whiterocks and to transfer the Ute children to public schools in the Uinta Basin. A Reservation School Board was established to assist in this process and to act as a liaison with the local school boards.5
The Ute Planning Division intended that the various provisions of the three-year program would further the development of the tribe as a whole and foster the “rehabilitation” of individual members. But all of these provisions—range
enhancements, housing and credit programs, and involvement in the public schools—anticipated that participants would already possess a certain amount of experience in business, banking, and education. The assimilationist objectives of the program, therefore, made it inevitable that the most acculturated tribal members would be in a position to receive the greatest benefit from them. The per capita payment program formed the only exception to this general pattern, and government officials observed that the Utes took less interest in their farms, ranches, and off-reservation employment opportunities as a result of the tribal income.6
Not too surprisingly, tribal divisions widened between the more acculturated mixed-blood members and the full-bloods, especially as the mixed-bloods aggressively took advantage of the various provisions of the program. Over the course of the three years the program was in effect, for example, the average loan made under the credit program was $6,032.04 to the mixedbloods but only $3,279.81 to the fullbloods. The majority of self-supporting households on the reservation were those of mixed-bloods. According to the reports submitted by bureau personnel, the mixed-bloods made “substantial progress” over the course of the program while the full-blood Utes demonstrated “no comparative improvement.”7 The evidence suggests, in fact, that the full-bloods lost considerable ground in the late stages of the three-year program. In March 1954, to cite one rather telling statistic, eighteen cars were repossessed from full-bloods. When merchants in nearby towns took steps to collect large grocery accounts, one case resulted in a civil suit against a fullblood family for refusing to pay a $2,200 bill.8
Full-blood Utes increasingly felt that the tribal leadership, particularly the members of the Tribal Business Committee and the Planning Division, had fallen under the control of the mixed-blood members of the tribe. According to their argument, these leaders claimed to represent the whole tribe, but because they were more acculturated, better educated, and enjoyed a higher standard of living, they “lacked the perspective and appreciation of the peculiar problems of the full-blood people.”9 Bureau personnel tended to support this assessment. Robert L. Bennett, a BIA programming officer
who visited the reservation several times in 1953 and 1954, stated that the Uintah Agency staff spent 80 to 90 percent of their time working with the mixed-bloods. This was primarily so, he concluded, because the full-blood Utes did not know enough about the available services to take advantage of them.10
In the meantime, Senator Watkins began applying pressure on the Utes to produce what he called a “long-range rehabilitation” plan (his term for a termination program) in exchange for further installments of the award money. But Watkins discovered that the Utes could not be induced to formulate any type of program, terminal or otherwise, because of disagreements between the mixed-blood and fullblood factions. The mixed-blood group generated most of the early opposition to the planning effort and boycotted the “adult education” meetings sponsored by the Tribal Business Committee. The full-blood Utes also objected to the planning, both out of resentment toward the mixed-blood agitators and out of a growing sentiment that the programming effort failed to meet their needs. Rex Curry, the chairman of the Tribal Business Committee, sadly reported to Robert L. Bennett that the situation on the reservation had become “very confused” and that the tribe had been unable to make any “headway toward a beneficial program.”11
Ironically, on May 12, 1953, the very day that Curry informed Bennett of the conditions on the reservation, Bennett, accompanied by Associate Commissioner H. Rex Lee, visited the office of Senator Watkins to discuss the Ute situation. Bennett had already made plans to visit the reservation in an attempt to suppress the opposition to the planning effort, and Watkins assisted by writing a pointed letter for him to deliver to Rex Curry and the Tribal Business Committee. In response to the discord on the reservation, the senator wrote: “Congress will expect you to keep very fully and completely your promises made to the Committee when this legislation [the three-year program] was approved.” Then, addressing Curry, he added, “This applies not only to you and those representing the Ute tribes, but also the entire membership.”12 Watkins expected the tribal leaders to live up to assurances they had previously given to develop a long-range termination plan.
Bennett arrived at Fort Duchesne on May 19, 1953, and hand delivered Watkins’s warning. He and other BIA officials (most notably H. Rex Lee) had already decided to intervene in the affairs of the tribe, because, as Bennett noted in his official report, “the Bureau could not place the entire responsibility on the tribal leadership to attain what in the main are Bureau objectives.”13 In other words, Watkins, Lee, and Bennett felt that they could no longer wait for the tribe to do their bidding. Efforts had to be made to resolve the crisis and get on with the planning effort. To Francis McKinley and the Ute planning committee, however, interference from the BIA on behalf of a U.S. senator amounted to nothing less than economic blackmail. The Utes desperately needed the funding, but many intuitively distrusted the new termination policy. Few understood it, and unsettling rumors swept the reservation.14 After Bennett delivered the letter to Curry and the committee, someone mimeographed it and copies quickly circulated throughout the tribe. Bennett claimed that the letter had a positive effect, but later events proved his assessment far from accurate. Even he admitted that the threat of termination produced a certain amount of panic. In an official report to his BIA superiors he noted that “rumors are flying around here like bees about ‘30-day notices,’ etc.”15
Resolving the divisions within the tribe and developing a long range plan satisfactory to most tribal members consumed the remainder of 1953 and much of 1954. In October the Utes met in general council and adopted a plan for each community to submit proposals to an elected tribal planning board that would consist of nineteen elected members. Beyond the creation of the planning board, however, the Utes refused to take action. A month later Bennett again visited the reservation to stimulate the “programming effort.” When he arrived he found the Utes had adopted a strategy of “doing nothing” in the hope of eventually getting their money anyway. He made the belated discovery that the Utes preferred the status quo. After attending several meetings with tribal groups, he reported to his superiors that the Utes did not feel ready to manage their own affairs, although they also understood that they had to produce some kind of planning document for the BIA and Watkins’s committee. Bennett
concluded that “a program must be developed to meet this situation.”16 Exactly what he had in mind remained to be seen.
Meanwhile, Bennett also agreed to address the tribe over KJAM radio in Vernal on November 4, 1953. He told the Utes that they were at a “crossroads where they must choose a course which will affect their future and their children’s future for all time to come,” and this, he said, had come about “because of developments in Washington.” He then explained House Concurrent Resolution 108 and other related termination legislation in an attempt to impress upon the Utes the importance of creating their own plan. He also spent considerable time explaining how the Menominee Tribe had failed to prepare a plan and consequently had a termination program written for them— by Watkins, no less.17 While Bennett did not favor Watkins’s style of forcing the termination issue, he nonetheless hoped his remarks would scare the Utes into action. He later reported that the radio address was designed to promote and explain the tribal programming effort, but he also admitted that he exaggerated the termination threat to the Utes in an attempt to “stir up” the tribe. He did not realize at this point how dangerous the threat actually was.18
In the aftermath of Bennett’s November visit and radio address, the tribal planning board resumed its work in earnest. None of the elected board members had the slightest experience in creating a comprehensive, long-range termination program, and they naturally looked to Rex Curry and the Tribal Business Committee for direction. But Curry, an assimilated Ute and graduate of Brigham Young University, intended to follow Senator Watkins’s orders. Other members of the tribal leadership were dismayed by Curry’s cooperative attitude on the pending threat of termination. Francis McKinley, for one, found himself increasingly estranged from the process, and he strenuously objected to Watkins’s strong-arm tactics.
Most members of the Uncompahgre Band also resented the planning effort, and when the planning board issued its first preliminary proposals it appeared to John Tabbee and other well-informed Uncompahgres at Ouray that the new program would simply be an extension of the three-year program.19 As they saw it,
the new program would be no better than the old in that the mixed-bloods would once again receive most of the benefits. Some Uncompahgres even asserted that the “real” problems confronting the tribe derived from the fact that the mixed-bloods had taken over the tribal government.20 In protest of this perceived situation the Uncompahgre Band largely withdrew from the planning process, which had become quite acrimonious anyway. The argument over the mixed-blood issue came up in every meeting and invariably disrupted the proceedings.21
In light of these developments, the full-blood Uncompahgres decided that the threat of termination demanded that “something new and dynamic” be developed as an alternative. They concluded, therefore, to essentially “go it alone” and argued for a division of the tribe as the best way to confront the problems besetting them.22 Early in the new year, leaders of the Uncompahgre Band approached Francis McKinley with the idea of developing a new program, the main point of which would be to separate Uncompahgre assets from those of the rest of the tribe. This left McKinley in a difficult position since he intuitively sympathized with the Uncompahgres. Yet he was still the tribal planning officer, and support of their proposal meant that he would have to turn his back on Curry and the elected representatives of the planning board. Unsure of what approach to take at this fateful juncture, McKinley made plans to attend a special “emergency” conference in Washington, D.C.—a gathering specifically convened by the National Congress of American Indians to confront the threat posed by termination policy.
At this critical juncture Senator Watkins again decided to intervene. He had been observing the affairs on the reservation for more than a year, and his patience had come to an end. In February 1954 he delivered his ultimatum. Just before the February NCAI conference he wrote another letter to tribal business manager Rex Curry to explain exactly what type of program he would accept, stating that “further legislation for aid or assistance to the Utah Tribe [would] greatly depend upon the activities of the Tribe in performing in good faith the promise which they undertook in 1950, namely to formulate the report and plan” (i.e., a seven-year termination program). As if to underscore the gravity
of his threat, Watkins informed Curry that he expected the “final phase” of the Ute program to be tendered within ninety days and added that all of the essential elements could be easily found in other termination bills currently before Congress. If the tribe needed assistance in drafting the legislation, Watkins said he would be happy to provide it.23
Watkins also specifically instructed Curry and other members of the tribe to ignore Indian rights advocates from the NCAI and the Association of American Indian Affairs (AAIA).24 It is hard to imagine that the senator’s ultimatum would have surprised Curry. He was well acquainted with Watkins’s objectives and in certain ways even sympathetic to them. But tribal planning coordinator Francis McKinley and other tribal leaders, particularly those associated with the Uncompahgre and Whiteriver full-bloods, were stunned by this sweeping declaration of the senator’s intentions. They feared that Watkins planned to use the better educated and acculturated mixed-blood Uintahs to demonstrate that the Utes were prepared for termination legislation and thus “prematurely and unwittingly thrust the fullblood Utes into a way of life for which they were not prepared.”25
McKinley probably took umbrage at Watkins’s warning that Curry and the other tribal leaders should ignore Indian rights advocates from the NCAI and the AAIA. The admonition strongly hinted that Watkins knew all about the pending NCAI conference and its antitermination agenda.26 But McKinley decided to attend the conference anyway. The February 1954 “emergency” conference of the NCAI proved to be a pivotal event in the history of the organization because it confronted federal termination policy and specifically addressed the plethora of termination bills then emerging from Watkins’s senate subcommittee. Forty-three tribes from twenty-one states sent representatives to the conference, which ultimately adopted a “Declaration of Indian Rights” calling for the federal government to honor treaty obligations and trust responsibilities.
While there, McKinley encountered Robert L. Bennett, and he used the opportunity to explain the situation on the reservation and in particular to discuss at length the Uncompahgre
proposal to separate from the rest of the tribe.27 McKinley may have recognized a kindred spirit in Bennett, who by all accounts listened sympathetically. Bennett had already spent several months working with Watkins to draft comprehensive termination legislation for the other Indians in Utah, so he already had an intimate awareness of the senator’s intentions. Bennett listened carefully as McKinley told him about Watkins’s threatening letter of February 14 to Curry and the panic that it had generated on the reservation. A solution remained elusive, but Bennett agreed with McKinley on at least one important point: some method had to be found to subvert Watkins’s termination plan.28
After considerably more discussion, Bennett and McKinley hit upon the idea of separating the full-bloods from the mixed-bloods and dividing the tribal assets between the groups. To do this, however, they would have to overcome the probable opposition of Watkins’s main facilitator on the reservation, Rex Curry. Ultimately, the two men were able to convert Curry to the idea of allowing the full-bloods to “go it alone.”29 Forty-one years after the fact, Bennett reminisced that he, McKinley, and Curry held “a meeting out in a bean field . [and] decided that we would present a proposal which would terminate all the Mixed-bloods.”30
The three men drafted an agreement to partition the tribe and then took it to the Uncompahgre leaders who gave it an enthusiastic reception. The original plan called for a division of the tribe into the original three bands, with an additional group for the mixed-bloods. At later meetings held to allow comment on the proposal, some Whiterivers and full-blood Uintahs expressed concern about dividing the tribe by bands. At Fort Duchesne on March 16, a Whiteriver Ute named Wallace Jack accused the Uncompahgres of “kicking the Whiterivers out” and leaving them “no place to go.” Julius Murray speculated that the Whiterivers would also pull out, leaving the full-blood Uintahs at the mercy of the mixed-bloods. He said, “this is a very dangerous proposition. It is only the fullblood people who will suffer and the mixedblood people will take care of themselves.”31
When the Whiteriver and full-blood Uintahs objected to the proposal, McKinley, Bennett, and the Uncompahgre leaders elected to
change the method of dividing the tribe from a division by bands to a division between the mixed- and full-bloods.32 At this point in the negotiations the mixed-bloods demonstrated considerable opposition, the intensity of which alarmed the full-bloods in all three bands and united them behind the proposal.33
In many respects the new proposal to divide tribal assets between the mixed-bloods and the full-bloods represented a real breakthrough for Bennett, McKinley, and Curry because it simultaneously resolved two long-standing problems. First, it eliminated the age-old mixed-blood question and, second, it provided a sudden opportunity to protect the balance of the tribe by sacrificing the mixed-bloods to Watkins’s termination program. In his report to the bureau on April 15, 1954, Bennett suggested the latter point in several significant ways. He argued, quite directly in fact, that the partitioning process would result in the immediate termination of the mixed-blood Utes. The fullbloods would then be in position for “intensive work” with the BIA to prepare them for “eventual termination.”34
It stands to reason that if Bennett and the tribal leaders had, in fact, favored termination, they would not have taken steps to separate the more acculturated members from the rest of the tribe. The full-blood Utes virtually acknowledged this to be the case in the “Ute Ten Year Development Program.” This document, written after the division of the tribe, explained that the full-bloods were motivated out of “concern” that Watkins would focus his termination agenda on the Utes primarily because of the relatively high degree of acculturation possessed by the mixed-bloods.35 The document also described the aims and accomplishments of the three-year program for “assimilating the Ute Indian into the American culture and society with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the citizenship.” The termination of the mixed-bloods, it went on to state, essentially met this objective—a frank admission that more than half of the Uintah Band had been sacrificed to meet the terminationist agenda.36
Following the formulation of the plan to separate the mixed-bloods from the tribe, Bennett, McKinley, and Curry spent the first few weeks of March 1954 presenting the proposal
to several Ute communities across the reservation. The Uncompahgres at Ouray were the first to hear of it, and they received it enthusiastically. The comments of John Tabbee expressed the sentiments of most of the fullblood Uncompahgres. He said that Bennett had taken the original arguments of the Uncompahgres and given them “character and substance.” He also noted that the Uncompahgres had not been fully aware, until Bennett pointed it out, that the Uintahs “were getting the greater share” of the judgment money.37
In commenting on the threat of termination posed by Watkins, Tabbee spoke for many when he said, “We highly value our status as Indians. We know we have certain privileges which other people don’t have and it would be difficult to surrender them.”38 An influential Uncompahgre leader named Pawwinnee also addressed the Ouray group and seconded Tabbee’s sentiments. He noted, somewhat disingenuously, that the full-bloods had a basic idea of what to do all along but did not know how to proceed until Bennett arrived with the plan to divide the tribe. “Now,” he said, “it is up to us to develop it and give it substance.” He also warned that the full-bloods needed to “think about the future instead of how soon they are going to receive money. In planning think about our community and the future of our people. We have the poorest section of the reservation—no excuse for people who are supposed to have money.”39
Bennett, McKinley, and Curry received a considerably cooler reception in the predominantly mixed-blood communities in the northern part of the reservation. Bennett’s official report provides a good chronology of these meetings. On March 8 he wrote that the three of them came under “violent personal attack” from mixed-blood spectators at the Tribal Business Committee meeting. On March 11 more resistance developed in a meeting held at Fort Duchesne when the mixed-bloods attempted to have McKinley fired. Bennett later recalled that when the three leaders first presented the plan to the mixed-bloods, the meetings became quite “ugly” and featured a lot of name calling. He reminisced that on one occasion he sat between Curry and McKinley and literally held on to their coat tails, so that when they were insulted they could not jump up and respond.40
When Bennett left the reservation for ten days at mid-month, considerably more contention erupted as the mixed-bloods threatened law suits and “other actions” against the rest of the tribe. Bennett characterized the mixed-blood antagonism as personal and not directed against the merits of the plan.41 He had good reason to characterize the opposition this way because it deflected the criticism away from the partitioning proposal. In point of fact, the mixed-bloods had several reasons to object to the proposal itself. Albert H. Harris, a BIA employee and mixed-blood Uintah of Ute-Shoshone descent, offered some of them in his comments at the Fort Duchesne meeting. He argued that splitting the tribe would result in many committees “instead of one” and that it would bring “earlier taxation.” He felt that the tribe needed more time to consider the issues, especially given the terminationist mood of Congress. If they were all going to be terminated it would be easier to divide assets after the fact.42 In making this point Harris unwittingly touched the heart of the issue. He did not grasp, at that time, the real reason for partitioning the tribe: to protect the full-bloods from termination by sacrificing the mixed-blood Uintah population.
Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1964. Utah State Historical Society Classified Photograph Collection, photo no. 27168
Following his return to the reservation, Bennett continued to work with McKinley and Curry to refine the resolution for presentation to the tribe at the General Council meeting scheduled for March 31, 1954. The language and provisions called for the division of the tribal assets between the full-blood and mixed-blood groups. Mixed-blood members were defined as those having less than one half Ute Indian blood, and both groups would exercise jurisdiction and control of their own people and property.43 The resolution also contained an interesting proposal for the creation of a committee to draw up partitioning plans. Bennett and his confederates anticipated mixed-blood opposition— the proposed committee would consist of a majority of full-blood members (six to three over the mixedbloods). Also, the plans created by the new committee would require the approval of the Tribal Business Committee. In other words, the resolution made it clear that the partitioning of the tribe would be controlled by the full-bloods and that the mixed-bloods would have input in the process, nothing more.44
The situation came to a climax at the March 31 General Council meeting. What actually took place is a matter of considerable controversy, though it is known that Robert L. Bennett, Ernest L. Wilkinson, and John S. Boyden attended and that Wilkinson presented the prepared resolution calling for the division of the tribe and the termination of members having less than 50 percent Ute Indian ancestry.
The meeting had been orchestrated well in advance. Attorneys Wilkinson and Boyden, along with area director L. L. Nelson and BIA employees Bennett, McKinley, and Curry, met in the morning before the General Council meeting to discuss the proposed resolution and how best to present it to the tribe. In fact, Wilkinson, Boyden, and Nelson had already had plenty of time to discuss a course of action, since the three of them had ridden out to Uintah from Salt Lake City in Wilkinson’s car.45
According to Bennett’s official version of the meeting, the Utes received the proposal calmly and accepted it without serious opposition. He took pains to note that a mixed-blood Ute offered a motion to accept the proposal and
another seconded it.46 Unofficial versions of the meeting, however, tell a far different story. According to Waubin Waunzitz, who chaired the meeting, the proposal to divide the tribe was not even on the agenda. Waunzitz claimed that Wilkinson simply pushed him aside and took control. Wilkinson then presented the resolution and explained that the move would be in the best interests of the tribe. The mixedblood Utes, unprepared for this intrusion, had no answer for it. Finally, to placate the attorneys, Waunzitz called for a feasibility study on the proposal, but before a vote could be taken a large number of the Uintahs walked out. Many of those remaining either abstained from voting or thought that they were voting for the feasibility study.47 According to Bennett, 152 Indians voted in favor of the resolution, with only 8 voting in opposition. But exactly what they were voting for remains a controversy. Nevertheless, the results of this vote were used to justify dividing the tribe, and Watkins again got what he demanded.
After the fateful step of dividing the Utes, both groups had little choice but to go forward with their separate development plans. Once again, Watkins and his legislative mandate forced the issue. Deadlines had to be met. One of the last came on April 5, 1956, when the publication of the final rolls officially divided the Ute Indian Tribe. According to statistics compiled by the BIA, 1,314 full-blood Utes retained membership in the tribe, while 490 mixed-bloods found themselves scheduled for termination.48
The decision to divide the Ute Tribe and terminate the mixed-blood members’ gains added significance when cast into historical perspective, for the mixed-blood question has a long and illustrative history. Determining which version of tribal history to believe presents significant difficulty, particularly in light of the fact that the official version, developed by BIA programming officer Robert L. Bennett in early 1954 to justify his actions, proved to be highly selective.
According to the series of reports Bennett filed with his BIA superiors, the three bands on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation willingly shared their funds with one another for most of the first half of the twentieth century without regard to
the derivation of the funds. But in Bennett’s account, the turning point came in 1950 with the $18 million award. At the time of the settlement, claims attorney Wilkinson engineered a “share and share alike” agreement among all three bands, despite the fact that the judgment applied only to the two Colorado bands—the Uncompahgre and Whiteriver Utes. Many fullblood Utes, mostly Uncompahgre and Whiteriver, refused to vote on this measure, and it was passed over their abstaining protest.
Bennett asserted that the Uncompahgre and Whiteriver Utes subsequently believed that the mixed-blood Uintahs made much more effective use of the three-year program, a situation that provoked resentment since most of the money derived from sources intended for the two Colorado bands.49 In fact, Bennett made the rather questionable assertion that the mixed-bloods developed the plan largely for their own benefit. He also claimed that the Uintah leaders planned to use the forthcoming Spanish Fork judgment funds for their exclusive benefit, a revelation that increased interband antagonism.50
Bennett maintained that, regardless of which faction received the most benefit, the evolution of the three-year program demonstrated the divergent desires of the two groups. To bolster his claim he might well have pointed to the official report on the program which noted that “experience gained under the three-year program led to the formulation of legislative proposals to partition and distribute the tribe’s assets between the Mixed-blood and Full-blood members.” And further, “Probably the most significant result of the three-year program was to develop an accent on the divergent interests of the Mixed-blood and Full-blood members of the tribe.”51
Beyond the contentions made by Bennett, the larger question about the genealogy of the mixed-bloods remained. Specifically, who were these people? Ute tradition holds that the mixed-bloods were actually Indians of Paiute, Navajo, Shoshone, and other extractions who married into the tribe.52 The “Uintah” Utes descended from several Utah bands that once inhabited central and eastern Utah and evolved into a composite tribe after the removal of the Utah bands to the Uintah Valley following the Spanish Fork Treaty of 1865. Some of these earlier bands shared extensive cultural contact
with neighboring Indian peoples. The Pah Vant and San Pitch Utes, for example, lived near the Kwiumpats Band of Southern Paiutes and adopted similar methods of sustaining themselves in the desert environment.53 The Cumumba or Weber Utes lived in the present Ogden area and intermarried extensively with the Northern Shoshones. In fact, the Cumumba Utes may have been bilingual.54
An even more striking example of cultural exchange may be seen in the circumstances of the Sheberetch and Weeminuch Ute bands of southeastern Utah. These two groups, particularly the Weeminuch, operated in a region devoid of governmental control during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Far from the political and population centers of the state of Colorado and territory of Utah, the Sheberetch and the Weeminuch roamed freely between the Colorado Utes to the east, the Southern Paiutes to the west, and the Navajos to the south. They often served as intermediaries in the systematic cattle raiding that took place in the region. Navajos, for example, frequently used Weeminuch territory as an escape route for moving cattle northward out of New Mexico Territory. Much evidence suggests that the Weeminuch occasionally joined Navajos and Paiutes in raids on Mormon settlements in southern Utah. The Ute warrior Autenquer (or Black Hawk, as he is usually known in Utah lore) frequently included Navajo and Paiute warriors in his raiding parties.55
The salient point is that the Uintah Ute people had a long history of incorporating members of other tribes into their social structure. It is not at all surprising that they continued to adopt Shoshone, Paiute, and Navajo people into the band following the Ute removal to Uintah in the 1860s and 1870s.
Perhaps the most significant problem faced by the mixed-bloods of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation was the same as that faced by mixedblood people elsewhere in the United States: their relative lack of legal and social standing as a distinctive and legitimate cultural group. Recent scholarship has attributed the “invisibility” of racially or ethnically mixed populations to the “deeply embedded” racial dualism (white and Indian) in American thought. As Jennifer S. H. Brown noted, “there is no separate term in common American usage to designate people
who combine the two ancestries.”56 An outgrowth of this racial dualism is the traditional belief that mixed-bloods are marginal people “suspended between cultures” and incapable of inclusion into either group. Consequently, a common stereotype holds that mixed-bloods are somehow psychologically disadvantaged in terms of participation in these societies. A considerable amount of evidence demonstrates, however, that this perception is false. Anthropologists and sociologists have revised the stereotype by showing that such people tend to develop complex, bicultural methods of adaptation, or, as ethnohistorian James A. Clifton put it, they become “culturally enlarged.”57
Moreover, according to the notion of racial dualism, membership in cultural groups such as Indian tribes follows lineal descent—in the common idiom, “blood lines.” It springs from the European concept that one’s racial origins determine one’s identity and characteristics, a kind of rigid, biological determinism used to explain cultural distinctiveness. But these racial constructs are European in origin, entirely lacking in Native American cultures prior to European contact. Among these indigenous peoples, skin color and other racial characteristics
Ute Indian Agency Headquarters at Fort Duchesne on the UintahOuray Reservation. Photo by E. L. Cooley, May 26, 1964. Utah State Historical Society Classified Photograph Collection, photo no. 14599
were considered irrelevant. Membership in a clan or band depended instead on language, behavior, social affiliation, and loyalty. According to Clifton, the most common identity question asked of strangers was not, “What nation do you belong to?” or “Of what race are you?” More typically, strangers would ask, “What language do you speak?”58
The fact that Indian tribes came to define membership in terms of blood quantum merely reflects the acceptance of the European construct. But this tendency has confused the older, ethnically derived methods with the newer racial ones. The problem with identifying Indians by race is that it presumes certain intrinsic characteristics, and since membership in a particular race is derived entirely from parentage, as the theory goes, one can do little to alter or escape it. Indeed, in the Euro-American tradition, native peoples have been presumed to possess certain controlling characteristics of behavior and physiognomy.59
The Utes followed the standard administrative procedure of the 1950s in establishing their membership criteria, although in recent years defining tribal membership according to race
has come into serious question. In his definitive study of American Indians and the 1980 Census, C. Matthew Snipp noted that Indian tribes have historically relied upon an administrative definition derived from the “blood quantum” theory to delineate membership.60 This theory holds that the amount of blood a person possesses from a particular race determines the degree to which that person resembles and behaves like other members of that race.61 However, since racial blood types cannot be directly observed (again, according to the theory), the degree of blood quantum must be inferred from ancestry. As a consequence, most tribes came to rely on some type of benchmark for identifying ancestors considered to be “100 percent” members. Usually tribal censuses taken in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries served in this fashion. The Uintah and Ouray Utes used the 1934 date of tribal incorporation under the Indian Reorganization Act as the benchmark.
In more recent times, blood quantum definitions have been undermined by genetic science and social theory. Modern research has shown that genealogical bloodlines do not clearly determine who is an Indian and who is not, nor is there any biologically significant way of determining the degree of “blood” at which a person is considered to be an Indian. As a consequence, blood quantum definitions are no longer legally enforceable for most purposes.62
Standards of ethnicity constitute a potentially more accurate way of defining Indian identity, or, in this case, delineating membership in the bands of Ute Indians, for identity according to ethnicity derives from a common cultural and historical heritage. Typically, ethnicity follows certain standards of speech, dress, and behavior that are not fixed. In other words, people can learn or unlearn or, for that matter, adopt or reject these cultural patterns. Groups that define themselves ethnically have a potentially greater capacity for adopting or encompassing new membership.63 According to ethnohistorians such as Clifton, the pattern of biological inbreeding among people of European, African, and Indian descent has been so extensive that relatively few Indians can trace their ancestry exclusively to full-blood Indians. As Clifton put it, “the Indian population of North America is an amalgam of composite indigenous
American, European, African, and other ancestries.” In point of fact, he notes, many contemporary Indians have little or no “native American biological ancestry” at all.64
The logical consequence of this tendency to define Indian identity along blood quantum lines is that the process of determining tribal membership has invariably been politicized. At times when Indian identity has been little valued by the dominant society, membership in Indian tribes has been relatively inclusive. Robert L. Bennett noted, for example, that from 1911 through 1936, a period that might be termed the “highpoint” of assimilation policy as applied to the Utes, the three bands freely shared tribal funds, regardless of derivation.65 Unfortunately, the opposite tendency has also proven true. At times when Indian identity has been highly valued, either for cultural or economic reasons, tribes have been forced to adopt exclusive membership requirements. In the Ute case, with the tremendous increase in tribal funds from the Colorado judgment and from oil and shale royalties, both the full and mixed-blood Utes struggled to control the membership process. In other words, with the advent of new money, membership in the tribe became a sharply contested political battleground upon which the blood quantum argument merely served as a convenient excuse for fighting over the real issue—the question of who would get the judgment money.
One of the most obvious aspects of the struggle over tribal membership is that it coincided with Senator Arthur V. Watkins’s campaign to terminate the Utes, which induced the full-blood Uncompahgres to move beyond the usual political measures and take drastic steps to protect both their status as Indians and their tribal resources. Had it not been for Watkins’s interference, the membership issue would probably have subsided relatively quickly. A 1933 episode is instructive in this regard. During that year the Utes came into a substantial amount of money through the settlement of some claims against the United States. With the prospect of the membership receiving large per capita payments, a group of full-blood Utes petitioned the commissioner of Indian Affairs to halt the enrollment of mixed-blood Utes into the tribe. No action was taken, however, and following the disbursement of $1,100 per capita the entire matter faded from
view. A few years later, with the incorporation of the tribe under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act, the mixed-blood Utes were enrolled without significant protest.66
Twenty years after the 1933 incident similar circumstances arose; the latter episode concerned not only the divergence of the mixed-bloods and the full-bloods but also the bitter disagreement between the Colorado and Utah bands over rights to the Colorado judgment funds. The Uncompahgres held legitimate grievances against the formula employed by Wilkinson to share their money with the other Utes, and in time these grievances evolved into genuine animosity among the three bands.67 The Uncompahgres increasingly came to believe that the actions of the government “progressively reduced” their share of judgment monies. The so-called “share and share alike” agreement of 1950 vexed them most of all.68
When combined with threats from Watkins, either delivered personally through correspondence or vicariously through BIA personnel, the mixed-blood question assumed even greater importance for the Utes. Because the mixedbloods were considered neither fully Indian nor fully white, they found themselves without defenders or advocates in the fight over the money and the subsequent decision to partition the tribe. They became the sacrificial lambs of Senator Watkins’s termination program.
Notes
1. House Concurrent Resolution 108, U.S. Statutes at Large, vol. 67, 1953.
2. Jennifer S. H. Brown, “Metis, Halfbreeds, and Other Real People: Challenging Cultures and Categories,” The History Teacher 27 (November 1993): 21–22.
3. According to statistics compiled by the BIA in 1954, only 4 percent of the 672 members of the Uncompahgre Band had one half or less Ute “blood” (to use the blood quantum definition employed by the bureau); less than 1 percent of the 308 Whiteriver Utes were one-half degree or less Ute, while more than half—52 percent—of the 785 Uintahs fell into this “mixed-blood” category. See “Population Figures of the Enrolled Members of the Ute Indian Tribe, Uintah and Ouray Reservation, March 1954,” RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
4. Forrest R. Stone to Ralph M. Gelvin, February 7, 1952, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9020, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
5. Ibid.
6. “Annual Report to Congress—draft copy,” December 22, 1954, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file
9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
7. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954,” RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
8. Ibid.
9. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” RG 75, BIA, accession #59A-643, box 86, file 17541, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
10. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
11. Reginald O. Curry to Robert L. Bennett, May 12, 1953, RG 75, BIA, accession #68A-4937, box 63, file 8365–54013, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
12. Arthur V. Watkins to Reginald O. Curry, May 12, 1953, and William C. Reed to Reginald O. Curry, May 25, 1953, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
13. Robert L. Bennett to G. Warren Spaulding, June 24, 1953, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
14. Robert L. Bennett, Travel Report, Division of Program, May 25, 1953, RG 75, BIA, accession #68A-4937, box 63, file 8365-54-013, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
15. Ibid.
16. Robert L. Bennett to G. Warren Spaulding, “Field Trip Report,” November 19, 1953, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
17. “Radio Address Delivered by Robert L. Bennett, Program Officer, Over Radio Station K.J.A.M.,” November 4, 1953, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639=52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
18. Robert L. Bennett to G. Warren Spaulding, “Field Trip Report.”
19. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” 8.
20. Ibid., 9–10.
21. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray8 Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
22. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” 9, 14–15.
23. Arthur V. Watkins to Reginald O. Curry, February 18, 1954, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
24. See Watkin’s comments in “House Report No. 2680,” 83d Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, 1954), 7, 12.
25. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” 12–14.
26. Watkins to Curry, February 18, 1954.
27. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” 15–16.
28. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
29. Ibid.
30. Robert L. Bennett interview by Thomas Cowger, oral history interview, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 20–21, 1993, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 102.
31. “Notes, Bennett Field Trip, March 1954,” RG 75, BIA, accession #68A-4937, box 63, file 8365-54-013, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
32. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” 17.
33. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
34. Robert L. Bennett to Homer B. Jenkins, April 15, 1954, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
35. “Ute Ten Year Development Program,” 12–13.
36. Ibid., 28.
37. “Notes, Bennett Field Trip, March 1954.”
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. “Robert L. Bennett interview, May 20–21, 1993, 103.
41. Robert L. Bennett to Homer B. Jenkins, April 15, 1954.
42. “Notes, Bennett Field Trip, March 1954.”
43. Proposed Resolution, drafted for the General Council of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, March 31, 1954, RG 75, BIA, accession #68A-4937, box 63, file 8365-54013, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
44. Ibid.
45. L. L. Nelson to Ralph M. Gelvin, April 7, 1954, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 9639-52-075, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
46. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
47. Deposition of Waubin Waunzitz, September 18, 1969, Affiliated Ute Citizens of the State of Utah v. United States, in possession of Parker S. Nielson, Vernon, Utah.
48. “Bureau of Indian Affairs Memorandum,” Homer B. Jenkins, April 10, 1956, RG 75, BIA, accession #59A-643, box 86, file 17071, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
49. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.
50. Robert L. Bennett to Homer B. Jenkins, April 15, 1954.
51. “Annual Report to Congress—draft copy,” December 22, 1954.
52. Bennett frequently admitted this to be the case. See “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
53. Fred A. Conetah, A History of the Northern Ute People (Salt Lake City: Uintah and Ouray Tribe, 1982), 24.
54. Kathryn L. MacKay, “Indian Cultures, c. 1840,” in Deon C. Greer et al., Atlas of Utah (Ogden and Provo, Ut.: Weber State College and Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 77.
POSTSCRIPT:
55. R. Warren Metcalf, “A Reappraisal of Utah’s Black Hawk War” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1989), 61–63.
56. Brown, “Metis, Halfbreeds, and Other Real People,” 21.
57. James A. Clifton, “Alternate Identities and Cultural Frontiers,” in James A. Clifton, ed., Being and Becoming Indian (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989), 29.
58. Ibid., 11.
59. Ibid., 26.
60. According to Snipp, racial definitions generally fall into three categories: “mystical” definitions, which assert that modern racial groups have descended from mysterious ancient civilizations—a standard he terms the “most pernicious” and “far removed” from reality; “biological” definitions, which divide the human race into four main groupings based on genetic indicators; and “administrative” definitions which are created by bureaucratic and political institutions such as the Bureau of the Census or tribal governing bodies. See C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989), 28.
61. Ibid., 32.
62. Ibid., 34.
63. Clifton, “Alternate Identities and Cultural Frontiers,” 26.
64. Ibid., 23.
65. “Remarks by Robert L. Bennett on the Uintah and Ouray Program at Bureau Staff Meeting, 20 May 1954.”
66. For a brief overview of these events, see Reginald O. Curry to Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman, November 30, 1950, RG 75, BIA, accession #57A-185, box 196, file 13916, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
67. Robert L. Bennett to G. Warren Spaulding, “Field Trip Report.”
68. “Ute Ten Year Development Program.”
TIME DOESN’T HEAL ALL WOUNDS
R. WARREN METCALF
“Lambs of Sacrifice: Termination, Mixed-blood Utes, and the Problem of Indian Identity” first appeared in this journal more that twenty-five years ago. It grew out of a dissertation that eventually became a monograph about the termination of roughly one-third of the Northern Ute Tribe on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. I knew from the start that this story had a tragic ending, one without many redeeming characters. Once I got beyond figuring out the basic details of what had transpired during this chaotic period of Ute history, I sought to understand why it was done and who was responsible for it. I thought then, and I still think now,
that it was the product of many actors with conflicting agendas, all scrambling to respond to a crisis provoked by the one true ideologue in the story, Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah.
My interest in Watkins stemmed from the realization that termination policy was, at base, a congressionally driven policy. There were other hardcore terminationists in government, notably Commissioner of Indian Affairs Dillon S. Myer, and Representative E. Y. Berry of South Dakota, but they lacked the power to bring the policy to fruition. As chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, Watkins was
uniquely positioned to do that. And the winds of public opinion were blowing favorably at that moment. The end of Second World War and the defeat of Nazism brought America’s own harsh treatment of racial minorities into sharp relief. The prevailing sentiment of the early 1950s favored integration, and termination policy was formulated as a noble expression of that impulse. It is easy to accentuate the nativistic and racist tendencies of these men, but it is worth remembering that they thought of themselves as forward-thinking integrationists trying to end the shameful era of segregation and second-class citizenship.
Constrained by the limitations of publishing a journal-length article, I saved a study of their motivations for a book, Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah (University of Nebraska Press, 2002). Therein, I explore Watkins’s personal beliefs about American Indians, forged out of his upbringing on formerly allotted Ute land in the Vernal area and his steadfast belief in Latter-day Saint doctrine that Indians descended from Book of Mormon Lamanites, as well as the corollary doctrine that it was the duty of the faithful to bring these “fallen and degraded” people back to their rightful place in the House of Israel. My examination of Watkins’s religious beliefs provoked some criticism. I remember one reviewer, writing for this journal, who complained that “I just had to drag the Mormon Church into it.” Well, yes, I did. Why? Because the cast of bureaucrats and lawyers who created the misguided policy of termination took their cues from Watkins. His beliefs about Indians, at least those prevailing in his church at that time, were central to his motivation.
Arthur Watkins could not have effected termination policy alone. He had three well-placed allies: tribal-claims attorney Ernest L. Wilkinson, tribal attorney John S. Boyden, and Bureau of Indian Affairs official H. Rex Lee. All were devout Latter-day Saints. Of these, Wilkinson’s contribution was perhaps the most significant, because his successful prosecution of claims against the federal government on behalf of the Uncompahgre and White River Utes resulted in an award of $18 million dollars. Watkins’s control over access to those funds gave him the leverage he needed to coerce the tribe into a termination program. It is worth noting that Wilkinson and
Watkins used the same tactic of threatening to withhold judgment monies to blackmail the Menominee Tribe into termination.
As I researched the activities of these men, I found myself wondering if they acted as co-conspirators, working to affect the same outcomes on both tribes. The question formed a thorny research problem for me. Having received permission from the Wilkinson family to examine Ernest L. Wilkinson’s papers, then held in a spacious, locked “cage” in the Special Collections section of the BYU Harold B. Lee Library, I was at first overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the holdings. I was also cognizant of Wilkinson’s carefully cultivated image as a defender of American Indian rights as an attorney practicing in the US Court of Claims, as well as his fame and notoriety as a long-serving president of Brigham Young University. To my surprise, the archivists simply gave me a key to the “cage” to use as needed, and I remember one of them pointedly telling me, “Now don’t write anything that is going to get us fired.” I had no answer to that, except to think to myself that my obligation as a historian was to find the truth, not to protect their institutional prerogatives.
As I dug into Wilkinson’s voluminous correspondence, I found no evidence of a conspiracy. If he and Watkins operated of the basis of a partnership, they left no written evidence of it, at least none that I could find among the mountains of paperwork contained in that vault. But I did find something else. Wilkinson’s papers confirmed something that I long suspected: Ernest L. Wilkinson was a closeted supporter of termination policy, a fact that accounted for his seeming-collaboration with Senator Watkins. The two men acted in concert because they shared the same beliefs and worked to affect the same policies. Surely, Wilkinson would not have acknowledged this publicly, as it would have been damaging to his legal practice and his reputation as a defender of American Indians, but the proof was incontrovertible. In a private letter to Spencer W. Kimball, then a member of the LDS church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and one of handful of church leaders devoted to Indians, Wilkinson acknowledged his private belief that the Bureau of Indian Affairs should be “liquidated” and the Indians set out to “govern themselves.” He
attributed the failure of recent termination bills to opposition from the tribes—opposition that he believed stemmed from government paternalism and Indian dependency. When he wrote to Elder Kimball in July 1952, he was already deeply involved in setting up the Ute bands at Uintah and Ouray for receipt of the judgment money. In that context, his actions made sense. Before any entity formally dissolves, accounts must be settled and debts must be paid. Wilkinson insisted that the Uncompahgres and White River Utes share the money with their Utah cousins, the descendants of Ute bands collectively called the Uintah Utes, in part because these Indians had been removed from Colorado and relocated onto the reservation that had been assigned to the Uintahs. His financial arrangement, known colloquially as the “Share and Share Alike Agreement,” generated tremendous animosity between bands and set the stage for Senator Watkins’s demands for a termination program.
The allocation of the judgment money exacerbated another long-standing issue on the reservation: simmering resentments between the “full-blood” and “mixed-blood” factions. The more acculturated, mixed-race group made greater use of tribal programs and funds, and since the Uintah band had a greater share of the mixed-blood members, they became the target of full-blood animosity, and, ultimately, Watkins’s termination program. They might well have survived this purge but for the active role played by tribal attorney John S. Boyden. As the pressure grew to divide the tribe, Boyden embraced the plan to remove those members lacking one-half Ute ancestry. He crafted the necessary legislation and represented both parties in the negotiations. His actions violated all the norms that protect against such blatant conflicts of interest, but he got it done.
The question of blood-quantum became the primary battle ground over inheritance, both over the judgment money and, ultimately, the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. As noted in the article, blood-quantum had no scientific or legal legitimacy, but it served as an effective tool for the representatives of the Colorado Ute bands to evict roughly a third of the Utah Utes from their own reservation. The blood-quantum of the terminated Utes averaged 28 percent when calculated for Ute ancestry. However,
many of these individuals also had ancestors from other tribes, mostly Paiutes and Shoshones, so that their total Indian ancestry averaged 36 percent. But here, too, we find a historical anomaly, for the Utes of the western slope of the Colorado Rockies had a more insular historical experience and correspondingly lower rates of intermarriage with Anglo Americans. Earlier in their history, the Uncompahgre Utes lived adjacent to other Ute bands, as well as Comanches, Apaches, and Hispanic people in Colorado and New Mexico, but that happened long before the benchmark censuses declared that they were “100 percent Ute.” It is instructive to note that the Capote and Mouache Utes that evolved into today’s Southern Ute Tribe had a similarly long history of interaction and intermarriage, particularly from their cross-cultural exposure within New Mexican households, and so they employed a far lower, 25 percent blood-quantum membership requirement. According to the historian Sondra G. Jones’s recent study, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People, the Southern Utes, with a population of only 1,300 people in 2001, became one of the “wealthiest tribes in the nation, with a net worth in excess of $1 billion and a AAA bond rating from Fitch and Moody.” If, however, they had been subjected to the same blood-quantum membership requirement that Watkins and Boyden employed against the mixed-blood Uintahs, most of them would have been terminated.
Tragically, the terminated Uintahs lost their membership and inheritance at Uintah and Ouray simply and solely because of the intermarriage of their ancestors. That fact has special resonance for me. Having spent more than two decades since the publication of Termination’s Legacy working and teaching in Oklahoma, I could not help but see irony in the fact that the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful tribes in my home state, particularly the Cherokee and Chickasaw Tribes, rejected the notion of blood-quantum membership a long time ago. The tribal membership criteria are somewhat convoluted, but the basic requirement is for the applicant to prove descent from an ancestor whose name appears on the tribal rolls (the “Dawes Rolls”) that were compiled early in the twentieth century. Access to membership is relatively accessible to many, including those
who might not otherwise be considered “Indians.” And yet these tribes remain fiercely protective of their cultural inheritance and wield enormous political power, proving that exclusionary blood quantum requirements are hardly necessary to sustain a vibrant Native polity.
Adding to the tragedy of the Ute saga is the fact that almost all the tribal groups singled out for termination have had their tribal status restored by congressional legislation. The Menominees, Klamaths, and even the four tiny bands of Southern Paiutes singled out by Senator Watkins as his “examples” for termination have been restored to tribal status and have had reservation lands returned to them. In these cases, however, whole tribes fell victim to Watkins’s program. The terminated mixed-blood Utes, however, have not been restored to tribal status because the greater part of the tribe survived the threat of termination. The enrolled members of the Northern
Ute Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation have refused to support reunification or the restoration of the mixed-blood Utes as a separate tribal group. Instead, the terminated Utes have been neglected, forgotten, and made victims of an alternative history that holds that they were never authentically Ute or, more perversely, that they asked to be terminated. Both contentions are flatly false. In fairness to the tribal officials who agreed to this plan, it must be admitted that they, as representatives of the full-blood Utes, acted not only in self-interest but out of a genuine need to ensure the survival of the tribe. Had it not been for the extreme political pressure Senator Watkins placed upon them, the Ute Tribe would have very likely surmounted the challenge. Tensions between the more and less acculturated members would have remained, much as they do in every tribe, but the tribe as a whole would have survived and emerged intact.
Who Tells Your Story? Analyzing a Century of Utah History
BY SPENCER STEWART AND ELIZA MCKINNEY, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM DAKOTA BYBEE AND SETH VAN DUZOR
Much of historical research relies on the close reading of diaries, letters, and other primary sources. But this is not the only way to approach historical materials. A different method that has gained popularity in recent years is known as “distant reading,” a computational approach to extracting broader generalizations from large corpora of texts. Distant reading can take many forms, such as text mining, network analysis, or mapping. These approaches, as Ted Underwood argues, can help us understand the “longer arcs of change [that] have been hidden from us by their sheer scale.” It can help us see the “curvature of the earth” beyond the “mountains and political boundaries” that often preoccupy our attention.1 At times, distant reading can help confirm—perhaps with a greater degree of precision—what we have already inferred through more qualitative approaches to research. At other times, it can help uncover trends that we had not previously noticed due to increased scales of analysis.
In this essay, we use quantitative methods to explore some broad trends in Utah historiography as seen through the state historical journal Utah Historical Quarterly (hereafter UHQ). Utah historiography encompasses much more than just UHQ. But as a key publication for the Utah State Historical Society, the quarterly has nevertheless been a central component of how the history of Utah has been told. Our assumption is, therefore, that UHQ reflects many of the broader trends in Utah history. Those familiar with Utah history and Utah historiography likely will not be too surprised by our findings, especially our confirmation that the writing of Utah history has tended to focus on white Mormon men. However, by outlining some of the “longer arcs of change” in Utah history, we hope this distant reading of UHQ will provide some additional data points in the ongoing conversation regarding the past, present, and future of writing Utah history.
Data for this project consists of journal articles published in Utah Historical Quarterly from 1928 to 2021 as hosted on the Issuu platform.2 This platform has its peculiarities and occasional errors in the way that it divided up the journal into individual articles and extracted text from the scanned images (a process known as Optical Character Recognition). One such example is that it often lumps all book reviews into one file
rather than separating into individual reviews as found on other platforms such as JSTOR. Despite these problems, we have found that Issuu categorized correctly the majority of research articles and reprints of primary sources (e.g. diaries) originally published in UHQ. As such, we ultimately removed book reviews from our analysis and instead focused on research articles and primary sources. In total, this included 1,433 individual articles, 839 different authors, and over 8 million total words. The text length (which excludes book reviews) has fluctuated somewhat over time but remained relatively stable from the 1960s to the 2000s at around 100,000 words per year before increasing from 2016 to the present to around 150,000 words per year (see fig. 1).
This paper begins by discussing the intellectual contributions of UHQ and by situating the quarterly within its respective intellectual communities. By looking at authorship and citation data, we find that UHQ has retained its strongest connections to the overlapping field of Mormon studies, although it does retain a (weaker) connection to western American history. Building on this, we then explore
how this strong connection to Mormon studies has shaped the types of stories that have been told in the pages of the quarterly. By extracting time data, for example, we show how the quarterly has focused (with a few exceptions) on the history of the region after the arrival of Mormon pioneers in 1847. We also look at the frequency with which historical figures appear in the pages of UHQ to show that the most frequently referenced individuals have tended to be prominent leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By looking at the gender composition of these historical figures, we further show how women have been historically underrepresented in the quarterly. UHQ has a long tradition of printing social histories of Utah’s diverse racial and ethnic groups, but we do find that coverage has varied over time, and some groups remain underrepresented. To conclude, we explore how archives and authorship have potentially impacted the types of histories published in the quarterly.
Situating UHQ
Over the years, Utah Historical Quarterly has been a part of multiple intellectual communities. Established in 1928, the quarterly emerged
Figure 1. Number of words published in UHQ, 1928–2021.
out of a historical society where, upon its organization in 1897, “Utahns—mostly white Mormons, proud of their heritage—sought to commemorate their past.”3 Given this, the history of UHQ, especially in the early years, reflected general trends in Mormon historiography, including the perpetuation of a pioneer myth “master narrative” and the compilation and publication of historical records. By midcentury, however, the quarterly began to be elevated by figures such as Dale L. Morgan and A. Russell Mortensen who sought to expand the cultural and political boundaries of Utah by promoting more interpretive essays that situated Utah’s past within the larger context of the American West. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, we find articles that either attempted to situate Utah history in that context or adopted an expansive view of Utah history that extended beyond its political boundaries. This is reflected in titles such as “Temple Square: The Crossroads of the West” (1959), “The Kern Brothers and the Image of the West” (1960), “State Action in Relation to Preservation of Historical Resources in the Expanding West” (1961), and “Supply Hub of the West: Defense Depot Ogden, 1941–1964” (1964). This trend continued into the 1960s and early 1970s and coincided with the growth of the Western Historical Association, which had been established in 1961. Beginning in 1970, the association established its flagship journal, Western Historical Quarterly (hereafter WHQ), which was produced and published by Utah State University’s Department of History until 2015. USU professor Leonard J. Arrington, who by 1970 had already published two dozen articles in UHQ, was asked to serve as the first editor of WHQ. 4
The cross-fertilization between Utah and western American history can be further seen in the number of scholars publishing in both UHQ and WHQ over the past half-century. Since 1970, at least sixty-five scholars have published in both venues. However, it is important to point out that with only a few exceptions, most authors tended to publish their research in one venue more than the other. One of the most frequently published authors in UHQ, for example, is Thomas G. Alexander who published more than twenty articles in UHQ but only a couple in WHQ. We also find the reverse
trend, where a handful of prominent U.S. West historians only contributed one or two articles to UHQ, including scholars such as Maria E. Montoya, Richard Etulain, Howard R. Lamar, Michael Lansing, and David Rich Lewis. Despite early ties, the lack of a more sustained connection between UHQ and WHQ was likely the product of specialization that has taken place within the discipline of history since the 1970s. The results of the professionalization of UHQ, according to Jedediah Rogers, “was that while the journal became more professional and scholarly it also began to constrict, as the discipline became cast into silos. Consequently, state history’s association became more local than regional.” Over time, Utah history has become “a stepchild of Western history.”5
This trend toward the local in Utah history has had a more complicated relationship with the overlapping field of Mormon studies. In the postwar years of the quarterly, the traditional mythologizing of the Utah and Mormon past gave way to a more professionalized approach as exemplified in the publication of historians such as Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, and Leonard Arrington. Origin stories for what has come to be known as the “New Mormon History” often point to the publication of seminal works such as Juanita Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950 or Leonard Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom in 1958. Richard Saunders has pushed this dating back even further to Dale Morgan’s “The State of Deseret,” published in three successive issues of Utah Historical Quarterly in 1940.6 Debates regarding the origins and novelty of the New Mormon History aside, it is clear that the Utah Historical Quarterly served as an important venue over the years for many scholars associated with this new trend in writing about the Mormon past.
This connection between UHQ and Mormon history continued after the establishment of the Mormon History Association in 1965 and the publication of the Journal of Mormon History (hereafter JMH) beginning in 1974. For example, since the beginning of JMH, there has remained a fairly strong connection between the two journals with at least 118 scholars publishing in both JMH and UHQ. Collectively, these scholars have published at least 436 articles in JMH and 383 in UHQ. To put this in context,
the sixty-five authors who published in both UHQ and WHQ only published 105 articles in WHQ and 176 articles in UHQ. This stronger and more balanced connection between Utah history and Mormon history is further represented by prominent figures who have frequently published in both venues, including Leonard J. Arrington, Thomas G. Alexander, William P. MacKinnon, Jessie L. Embry, and James B. Allen. Many of these scholars would also publish in WHQ, but not nearly as consistently as in the other two journals.
Another way to position the quarterly within its broader intellectual context is to look at citations of articles published in the quarterly. Google Scholar lists that 196 UHQ articles have been cited 1,267 times in 973 different publications.7 Roughly half of all citations come from other journal articles (625 out of 1,267), one-fourth come from theses and dissertations (295), and another fourth from books (291) and book chapters (39). The remaining citations include court cases (7), various government and environmental reports (6), websites (3), and published speeches (1). UHQ citations appear
to be increasing over time (see fig. 2), although this could also be due to Google Scholar’s bias towards more recent publications. It could also be because the quarterly didn’t appear on national databases/platforms until UHQ editors placed it on JSTOR in 2018. Prior to then, the publication was undoubtedly more difficult for scholars and researchers outside of the region to find. There is a good deal of variation between when a given article is published and when it is cited. The most frequently cited articles were published between the 1940s and 1970s, with on average a roughly thirty-year gap between publication and citation (mean: 33.6 years; median: 32 years; sd: 21.7 years).8
Citation data underscores the broad intellectual impact that the quarterly has had on multiple academic fields. UHQ articles have been cited by over 150 different academic journals in the fields of history, folklore studies, anthropology, law, marketing, environmental sciences, biology, genetics, epidemiology, and more. A closer look at which journals are frequently citing the quarterly further highlights UHQ’s strong connection to Mormon studies. The journals most
Figure 2. Number of UHQ citations, 1944–2022.
frequently citing UHQ include JMH (59 citations), Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (46 citations), and BYU Studies (37 citations). The connection to western American history exists, with multiple citations from WHQ (11 citations) and Pacific Historical Review (13 citations), but Mormon studies journals are nearly six times more likely to cite UHQ articles than U.S. West history journals are.
The overall range of engagement with the quarterly has evolved over time. If we split up citation data based on the year that the UHQ article was published and which journals were citing it, we still find that Mormon studies journals such as JMH, Dialogue, and BYU Studies are consistently at the top of the list. Western American history journals tend to appear next on the list, but we are again talking about far fewer citations overall than Mormon studies publications. This is even the case when looking at some of the earliest articles published in UHQ from 1928 to 1949, which makes sense given the context within which the quarterly emerged. Interestingly, the period of professionalization at midcentury and the drive to frame Utah history in the context of the West led to the publication of articles that have a more diverse network than in preceding decades, including several journals outside the field of history. Given the average thirty-year lag between publication and citation, it remains to be seen which scholars will engage with UHQ articles published in recent decades. But available data suggests that the quarterly will remain diverse while also retaining a strong connection to Mormon studies. One notable data point is that the Journal of American History appears fourth on the list (behind JMH, BYU Studies, and Dialogue) for recent UHQ citations, a promising sign for the quarterly’s engagement with the broader field of American history.
While it is difficult to quantify, our overall impression is that articles that center on the Mormon experience in Utah tend to have a somewhat smaller but more centralized citation network (e.g., JMH, Dialogue, BYU Studies), whereas articles that are centered less on Mormonism and Mormon themes tend to have a larger but less centralized citation network.9 In other words, scholars publishing Mormon-centered content in UHQ are writing
within a more concrete community of scholars, of which UHQ is one of several publication venues. Conversely, scholars publishing articles in UHQ on non-Mormon themes are writing within a less tangible but potentially more expansive community of scholars, including outside the field of history.
Looking beyond journal articles, UHQ has also had an important impact on undergraduate and graduate education. Students writing theses and dissertations at Brigham Young University (39 students), University of Utah (24 students), and Utah State University (20 students) are most likely to cite articles published in the quarterly. But beyond these three, citations have come from students researching at 80 different institutions. These institutions are primarily scattered throughout the United States, but a smaller number were located in Canada, Europe, and Asia. Additionally, over a hundred different book publishers have printed books that cite the quarterly, most notably Utah State University Press, University of Oklahoma Press, University of Illinois Press, University of Nebraska Press, Routledge, and University of Utah Press.
Overall, UHQ has had and continues to have an impact on multiple intellectual communities. The quarterly’s identity as a local history journal has fluctuated over the years, but over the past half century, it has tended to lean strongly towards Mormon studies and to a lesser degree the U.S. West. But its reach goes far beyond Mormon studies and even history as a field of study. The documenting of various aspects of local history has extended its reach to the social and natural sciences, law, marketing, medicine, legal cases, and environmental reports.
In recent years, the quarterly’s editorial statement, published inside the front cover of each issue, has once again emphasized its desire to “publish articles on all aspects of Utah history, as well as to present Utah in the context of the West.” Reminiscent of midcentury efforts led by figures such as Dale Morgan, the statement further states that UHQ “challenges readers and authors to think across state lines to the forces of history, physiography, and culture that link Utah to a host of people, places, experiences, and trends beyond its geopolitical
boundaries. UHQ seeks a regional approach, reflecting Utah’s geographic and cultural position at the crossroads of the West.” It remains to be seen how these internal attempts to shift towards a more regional approach will shape the future of the quarterly and its engagement with academia and the broader public. Increased citations from the Journal of American History are a promising sign. But as we will see more below, the quarterly’s close ties to the field of Mormon studies is in large part a product of its predominate focus on the Mormon experience in Utah.
“When” is Utah History?
Given the context in which Utah Historical Quarterly emerged, along with its close ties to Mormon studies, the quarterly has tended to exhibit a strong Mormon orientation. One way to get at this is to explore the “when” of Utah history. Here we used a method known as Named-Entity Recognition (using the spaCy package in Python) that locates and classifies different elements of text into categories such as time expressions, locations, and even person names. The time expressions studied here might include phrases such as “In 1847”
or “On the evening of November 20, 1894,” from which we extracted references to specific years (i.e. 1847 and 1894).10 In total, we were able to locate 58,000 time references from which we then plotted the frequency each year appears throughout UHQ (see fig. 3). The results reveal how the quarterly has primarily focused on the history of the region after the arrival of the Mormon pioneers. Specifically, 93.5 percent of time references took place on or after 1847. Additionally, 42.5 percent of references occurred between the arrival of Mormon settlers in 1847 and Utah gaining statehood in 1896. The only year frequently mentioned before the nineteenth century is 1776, the year of Domínguez and Escalante’s famous expedition.
Looking beyond overall counts, the general trend has (unsurprisingly) been that more recent publications tend to focus on more recent events in history. If we look at time references in the quarterly by decade of publication, for example, the median year has steadily increased from 1861 in 1930–1940 to 1917 by 2010–2020. This trend has been good for postwar histories of Utah. When looking at the full dataset, post-1945 dates are naturally lacking given that the quarterly began publication in the 1920s.
Figure 3. Year references in UHQ
But if we look at published articles since 2000, roughly 31 percent of all referenced dates occurred on or after 1945, an increase from only 19 percent when looking at the entire dataset. However, this overall trend towards more recent dates, as well as a general decline in scholarly attention to the fur trade period of western history, has in many ways furthered the perception that Utah history began after the arrival of Mormon settlers in 1847. While 6.5 percent of time references in the full database referred to years before 1847, this has declined to just 3 percent since 2000.
“Who” is Utah History?
Related to the “when” of Utah history is the question of “who.” To understand this, we again used Named-Entity Recognition to extract a list of unique person names that appear on the pages of UHQ and then counted how frequently they appear. After cleaning the data, we were left with around 6,200 unique names that we then sorted based on frequency.11 A couple of trends emerged regarding representation in Utah history. Our concept of representation is simply that publications about Utah’s past should reflect the diverse people who have lived there. This might seem like an unrealistic expectation given that so much of history is framed through the lens of prominent political and religious figures who are predominately white men. We echo the desire of the current editors of UHQ to include more histories of underrepresented groups by underrepresented authors, but our intent here isn’t to proscribe a set of criteria for what is acceptable or unacceptable forms of history, especially given that representation will look very different depending on the topic of study. Nevertheless, we hope that quantifying some of the more obvious signals of (under)representation will contribute to ongoing discussions regarding what it means to write representative histories of Utah.12
Mormon Male Bias
When looking at the most frequently mentioned historical figures, we found several different categories of people. The largest category was prominent individuals in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, the top ten figures on the list fall into this group. Brigham Young is at the top with 4,110 references, followed by Joseph Smith (734 references),
George A. Smith (284), John Taylor (283), Reed Smoot (282), Wilford Woodruff (276), Joseph F. Smith (263), George Q. Cannon (249), Jacob Hamblin (228), and John D. Lee (219). Outside of this group, we also find frequent references to well-known frontiersmen and explorers of the Utah region, such as John Wesley Powell (162 references), Jedediah Smith (109), Jim Bridger (67), and Kit Carson (63). Another category is government officials, including presidents of the United States like James Buchanan (151 references), Theodore Roosevelt (98), Abraham Lincoln (87), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (86), as well as Utah politicians like Simon Bamberger (69 references) and William Spry (63). A final category includes historians like Leonard Arrington (123 references), Dale Morgan (103), Juanita Brooks (94), Andrew Jenson (76), and Wallace Stegner (57).
While these different categories reveal a degree of diversity in the telling of Utah history, the overall strong Mormon focus is undeniable. For one, Brigham Young is mentioned at least once in just over half of all articles (745 out of 1,433 articles or 51.9 percent). This doesn’t mean that he was the main subject of these articles, but it nevertheless highlights how Utah history is often framed through the lens of prominent Mormon religious and political figures. A further example of this is that Joseph Smith appears as the second most referenced historical figure despite having never stepped foot in Utah Territory.
Gender
The list of historical figures also highlights an overwhelming gender disparity. To explore this at scale, we ran the list of historical figures through a “gender prediction” program that uses historical census data to predict a given individual’s assigned gender at birth.13 While this method doesn’t account for complex gender identities, it is still illustrative in highlighting the sharp disparity in representation between men and women. Several prominent women stand out in the top 100 list, including Juanita Brooks (94 references), Eliza R. Snow (89), Emmeline B. Wells (85), and Susa Young Gates (66). But overall, of this list of over 6,000 historical figures, only 15 percent were women (927). Measured another way, the 927 women figures were collectively referenced a total of
4,663 times, only around five hundred more times than references to just Brigham Young (4,110). This gender disparity has indeed fluctuated over time (see fig. 4). The year 2020 with its special issue on the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment represented a high point for female representation in the journal, with women comprising one-third of all referenced historical figures. But overall, there remains a gap when it comes to the representation of women in the quarterly.
Indigenous and Minority Groups
Women aren’t the only group underrepresented in UHQ. Coverage of Utah’s Indigenous and minority groups is another complicated issue. In a 2001 edited volume of previously published UHQ articles, titled Being Different: Stories of Utah’s Minorities, former UHQ editor Stanford J. Layton argued that “Well before the New Social History became fashionable in academic circles, Utah Historical Quarterly had a deserved reputation for featuring immigrant peoples, making it a leading journal in the subject area.” In fact, by the 1970s there was not enough room in UHQ to print all of the articles
that were being submitted on Utah’s ethnic history. This led to the 1976 publication of The Peoples of Utah, a rich volume of stories edited by Helen Z. Papanikolas and published by the Utah State Historical Society.14 But what does representation look like over time?
Our list of historical figures includes people from these different minority groups, but it is much more complicated to classify this list into different racial/ethnic groups at scale. Instead, we decided to use simple word counts as a crude way to get at the representation of minority groups in the quarterly. For example, if we want to understand at a broad and abstract level the appearance of Utah’s indigenous groups, we can count how often words such as “Indigenous,” “Indian,” or “Native American” appear in the quarterly. Given that terms for different groups have changed over time (e.g. the term “Indigenous” didn’t appear in UHQ until the 2000s), we created lists of keywords for each group. How we lump these keywords together largely depends on the level of abstraction at which we wish to study change over time. Moreover, determining who to
Figure 4. References to male and female historical figures, 1928–2021.
include as a “marginalized” or minority group was also a subjective choice, one in which we drew inspiration from Papanikolas’s The Peoples of Utah and Layton’s Being Different. For our purposes here, we kept many of the groups quite large to explore broad and abstract trends (e.g. our Indigenous group includes Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, Navajo, and Goshute). We settled on six groups with a set of corresponding keywords that are meant to be more suggestive than comprehensive, and certainly will not capture all references to any particular group. Some keywords are missing from the list below to avoid double-counting. For example, we don’t include the term “American Indian” since counting the occurrences of “Indian” accounts for both “American Indian” and when “Indian” appears by itself. In other situations, we had to remove a word that is frequently used in contexts outside of a particular group, such as the word “Black,” which proved too difficult to distinguish at scale.
• Black/African American (keyword: “African American,” “Negro”)
• East Asian (keywords: “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “Korean”)
Out of these six broad groups, the one that appears most frequently in the quarterly is the Indigenous group. This dates back to early issues of the journal. The first year of publication (1928), for example, included articles such as “Indian Names in Utah Geography,” “Some Useful Early Utah Indian References,” “Utah Indians Past and Present,” “Gunnison Massacre–1853–Millard County Utah–Indian Mareer’s Version of the Tragedy–1894,” “Father Escalante and the Utah Indians,” and “Personal Recollections of the Wash-a-kie, Chief of the Shoshones.” Even since the 1950s, references to the Indigenous group have been two to
four times as frequent as the other five groups combined.
References to other minority groups have fluctuated significantly over time (see fig. 5). There was an overall spike in the 1970s that was in part related to a special issue on the Greek community by Helen Papanikolas. The 1980s to 2000s saw an increased interest in the Japanese and Chinese communities of Utah. This included a memoir by Yoshiko Uchida on her time in Topaz during WWII and a couple of histories of Keetley, Utah, with its Japanese American population.15 Publications in recent decades have included the stories of Chinese Utahns that move beyond their contributions to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. This includes the social history of local Chinese in such articles as “Utah’s Chinatowns” (1996) and “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century Salt Lake City” (2004).16 Data for the 2020s only includes two years (2020 and 2021), but so far there has been a stronger representation of Black/African American histories than in previous decades. This includes articles such as “The Last State to Honor MLK” (2020), “Race, Latter-day Saint Doctrine, and Athletics at Utah State University” (2020), “Utah in the Green Book” (2020), along with even newer articles (not included in our dataset) such as “Not in My Neighborhood” (2022) and “BYU Slavery Project” (2022).17
Of course, it should be noted that word counts do not get at how these groups are represented. It also does not mean that these histories are being written by members of the respective Indigenous or minority groups. These accounts are often filtered through the lenses of Mormon settlers, explorers, or non-Indigenous historians. Word counts also don’t always show how these groups have been represented relative to other more dominant groups or historical figures. For example, the Indigenous group is consistently referenced more frequently than “Brigham Young.” But looking at the other five groups, in only two decades are one of the minority groups referenced more frequently. The first is in the 1990s with the East Asian group and the second is the 2020s where in two years of publication, the Black/African American group has so far been mentioned more often than Brigham Young (see fig. 5).
The Utah State Historical Society has a lively tradition of publishing histories of Utah’s diverse past, including articles in UHQ and Papanikolas’s The Peoples of Utah. There is much to celebrate, but also room to grow. For example, we need more perspectives from groups that have been largely (and, at times, entirely) overlooked, such as the LGBTQ+ community. Looking forward, the Peoples of Utah Revisited is a promising initiative that should provide alternative perspectives in the telling of Utah’s diverse past.
The Recent Past
Recent trends in the representation of Utah’s women and other marginalized communities are promising but still mixed. To study this, we took a sample of a hundred research articles published between 2016 and 2021.18 Of these articles, two-thirds (66) have centered on the experiences of white men, whereas eighteen were about white women and only sixteen were about Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized groups. Moreover, recent histories are less focused on early Mormon settlers. Three-fifths of articles focus on the twentieth century, while only two-fifths focus on the nineteenth. There is
also a trend toward studying locations outside of some of the more prominent cities. By our count, the most frequently mentioned cities throughout all of the quarterly have been Salt Lake City (over 5,000 references) and Ogden (around 1,600). But within our sample of one hundred articles, three-fifths of the articles have focused on areas outside of the state’s largest cities. There also appears to be some correlation between the incorporation of more marginalized groups and a geographic focus outside major cities.
Key Indicators
Moving beyond these trends, our dataset provides some insights into what factors have shaped the orientation of Utah history. The two that we will explore here are the use of primary sources and authorship.
Archives and Primary Sources
The stories that historians can tell are often limited by available archives and primary sources. Taking again our sample of one hundred recently published articles from 2016–2021, of which one-third focused on underrepresented groups (women, Black, Indigenous, and other
Figure 5. References to minority groups, 1950s–2020s. Frequency refers to the number of times a group is referenced (based on keywords above), divided by the total length of text for each decade.
marginalized groups), we find that the most frequently consulted archives included collections held at the Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (27 articles), the Marriott Library at the University of Utah (26 articles), the Utah State Historical Society (22 articles), and the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University (19 articles). Some of these archives appear to be somewhat more useful for writing histories of underrepresented peoples. Nearly half of the articles using collections from the Marriot Library, for example, focused on underrepresented groups. This was higher than the other archives, with the Utah State Historical Society coming in next at around 37 percent, the Church History Library at around 30 percent, and the Harold B. Lee Library at 26 percent.
Diaries and correspondences comprise some of the more commonly cited archival sources in our sample. Roughly one in every three of these articles cited a diary, most of which were about white men. Roughly 20 percent of the articles (7 out of 33 articles) utilizing diaries were about white women, with less than 10 percent (3 out of 33 articles) focusing on other marginalized groups. Even more popular than diaries has been the use of correspondences with over half of our sample (53 articles) using letters as primary sources. These sources appear to be more useful than diaries for writing histories of Utah’s underrepresented groups (especially women’s history), as roughly one in three articles (or 18 out of 53) utilizing correspondences focused on underrepresented peoples.
Outside of the archives, one of the most common sources used in recent publications are newspapers, which we divided into four categories: Salt Lake Tribune (cited in 53 articles), Deseret News (cited in 49 articles), local newspapers (cited in 60 articles), and non-Utah publications (cited in 48 articles). When looking at articles about underrepresented people, there is not as much of a difference between these four categories of newspapers as one might expect. The local newspaper category is broad and includes several dozen smaller papers such as the Box Elder News or Garfield County News. Such papers are valuable sources for writing Utah history, which in our sample were collectively cited more often than both the Salt
Lake Tribune and Deseret News. Possible reasons for this are that, until recently, the Utah Digital Newspapers project only contained select years for the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News, while rural newspapers were more readily available and complete. Overall, articles about white men cite newspapers slightly more than articles about underrepresented groups, though both show high newspaper citations: 85 percent of articles about men cited newspapers, while 75 percent of articles about marginalized people did the same. How these different groups are represented or misrepresented in the newspapers is another fascinating question that goes beyond the scope of this paper.
Another surprising find is regarding the use of oral histories and material culture when writing about underrepresented groups—specifically how these methodologies do not appear to be utilized as frequently as we had expected. Roughly 35 percent of the papers making use of oral history collections (eight out of twenty-one) and conducting their own oral histories (nine out of twenty-eight) focused on underrepresented groups. Moreover, the use of material culture was utilized far less than oral histories, with only eleven articles making use of these types of historical sources, of which four were about underrepresented groups. The numbers for both oral histories and material culture are roughly in line with the overall percentage of articles covering underrepresented groups. For example, seventeen of the thirty-three articles (51.5 percent) on underrepresented groups utilized oral histories, whereas thirty-two of the sixty-seven articles (47.8 percent) on white men utilized oral histories. This is especially surprising given that a lot of oral history projects have focused explicitly on underrepresented communities.19 Despite providing alternative ways of studying these communities, oral histories and material culture do not appear to be utilized to a greater degree in these histories compared to articles focused on white men.
Authorship
Outside of archival holdings, an important factor that shapes who gets written about is authorship. This is perhaps best illustrated by once again looking at the gender discrepancy in Utah Historical Quarterly. To be clear, UHQ isn’t alone in this regard. The American
Historical Society has found that women only constituted 5.9 percent of full professors in history by 1979. This has improved significantly in recent decades where the proportions of dissertations by gender are now fairly even, but as Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen have recently shown, women continue to face additional obstacles when it comes to both publishing monographs and having them reviewed in journals like American Historical Review. 20
Women authors have similarly been underrepresented in the pages of UHQ. Several prominent women historians have published in the quarterly over the years, most notably Helen Z. Papanikolas, Juanita Brooks, Miriam B. Murphy, and Jessie L. Embry. But overall, women only comprise around one-fourth of all the authors who have published in the quarterly (221 out of 839). This representation has varied over time. There have been notable years in which women authors exceed half of all published authors. The year 1942 stands out as a bit of an anomaly with three of only five articles published that year being written by women (including one memoir). Other years were shaped by the appearance of special issues. In 1970, there was a special issue celebrating women in Utah history. In 1980, there was a special issue
on growing up in Utah, featuring articles by Yoshiko Uchida, Helen Z. Papanikolas, Miriam B. Murphy, and Mary R. Clark. And in 2020 there was a centennial celebration of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Overall representation has improved from the early years of the journal. But there are some glaring exceptions. In 2014, for example, it appears that only one research article was authored by a woman (see fig. 6).21
This gender gap in authorship is important for several reasons, but one of the most important reasons is that there is a strong correlation between authorship and references to women historical figures. Looking at just articles published in the quarterly since 1970, articles in which at least one of the authors is a woman are overall three times more likely to reference women historical figures than are articles without a woman author (see figs. 7.1 and 7.2). Specifically, when at least one of the authors is a woman, roughly one in every four referenced historical figures will be a woman. Articles without a woman author conversely only reference women historical figures around 8 percent of the time. Gender is just one example of a trend that we would likely see for other underrepresented groups in the quarterly as well.
Figure 6. Percentage of male and female authors, 1970–2021.
Figure 7.1. References to male and female historical figures by male authors, 1970–2021.
Figure 7.2. References to male and female historical figures by female authors, 1970–2021.
Conclusion
There is much to celebrate in the history of Utah Historical Quarterly. The quarterly has served as an important venue for public and professional history for nearly a century, and if current trends continue (see fig. 2), this repository of information will continue to be a valuable resource for future historians. As engagement with the quarterly grows and as the centennial anniversary of its establishment approaches, now seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the evolution of its history. This essay highlighted several themes such as the quarterly’s relationship to the fields of Mormon and western American history, the tendency to focus on white Mormon men, and how archives and authorship have shaped the writing of Utah’s history. Our intent is not to discredit certain topics or diminish the intellectual value of the quarterly. But we hope that this study will help facilitate further dialogue regarding scope and inclusivity in the writing of Utah’s past.
Notes
This paper emerged out of a digital history course at the University of Utah offered during the Spring 2022 academic year. We would like to thank Holly George and Jedediah Rogers at the Utah State Historical Society for their constant support of this project, along with Susan Rugh and Gary Topping for their helpful feedback.
1. Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), ix–x.
2. Beginning around 2018, UHQ’s archive has appeared on JSTOR. Since 2022, it has also appeared on the Scholarly Publishing Collective.
3. Jedediah Rogers, “Scholarship, the Public, and the Challenge of Local History,” in Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2021), 157.
4. On the Western Historical Association and WHQ, see Howard R. Lamar, “Much to Celebrate: The Western History Association’s Twenty-Fifth Birthday,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1986): 397–416. On UHQ’s relationship to Western history, see Rogers, “Scholarship, the Public, and the Challenge of Local History”; Gary Topping, “One Hundred Years at the Utah State Historical Society,” Utah Historical Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1997): 200–302. On Utah historiography more generally, see Gary Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Richard Saunders, “Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 87 (Summer 2019): 218–37.
5. Rogers, “Scholarship, the Public, and the Challenge of Local History,” 164.
6. Saunders, “Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History,” 233.
7. Data was retrieved from Google Scholar in April 2022. Note that Google Scholar is by no means a comprehensive resource, but this citation data is nevertheless illustrative of UHQ’s ties to different scholarly communities, along with its broad and important intellectual value.
8. The most frequently cited articles include Herbert E. Bolton, “Pageant in the Wilderness: The Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin, 1776” (1950) with 79 citations; Juanita Brooks, “Indian Relations on the Mormon Frontier” (1940) with 64 citations; Angus M. Woodbury, “A History of Southern Utah and its National Parks” (1944) with 44 citations; Stanley S. Ivins, “A Constitution for Utah” (1957) with 37 citations; Thomas G. Alexander, “An Experiment in Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage in Utah in 1870” (1970) with 37 citations; Sherilyn Cox Bennion, “The Woman’s Exponent: Forty-two Years of Speaking for Women” (1976) with 36 citations; and Helen Z Papanikolas, “Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah” (1970) with 32 citations.
9. Looking at two of the most frequently cited articles, for example, the citation source appears to be impacted by the degree to which an article centers the Mormon experience in Utah. The 1950 article on the Escalante Expedition of 1776, titled “Pageant in the Wilderness,” was cited 79 different times, mostly outside of the Mormon studies circle. This included citations in journals such as American Antiquity, Utah Geological Association, Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, Journal of the Southwest, and Pacific Historical Review. Conversely, Juanita Brooks’s “Indian Relations on the Mormon Frontier” has been most frequently cited by authors publishing in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Journal of Mormon History, followed by other journals such as Ethnohistory and Antipode
10. Expression taken from Tiffany H Greene, “History of Utah’s Rural Suffrage Movement, 1889–1896,” Utah Historical Quarterly 88 (Fall 2020): 16.
11. The original list included over 20,000 unique names. Given the length of this list, we decided to remove names that only appeared once and deleted entries that had been falsely identified as a person. We also included an “alternative name” variable to account for individuals being referenced in multiple different ways (e.g., B. H. Roberts, Brigham H. Roberts, and Brigham Henry Roberts).
12. On quantifying inequality, see Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).
13. On the gender prediction package, see Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen, “Jane, John . Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2015): http://www .digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/3/000223.html.
14. Stanford J. Layton, ed., Being Different: Stories of Utah’s Minorities (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), vii.
15. Yoshiko Uchida, “Topaz, City of Dust,” 48 (Summer 1980): 234–43; Sandra C. Taylor, “Japanese Americans and Keetley Farms: Utah’s Relocation Colony,” 54 (Fall 1986): 328–44; Marilyn Curtis White, “Keetley, Utah: The Birth and Death of a Small Town,” 62 (Summer 1994): 246–60, all in Utah Historical Quarterly.
16. Daniel Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns: The Development and Decline of Extinct Ethnic Enclaves,” 64
(Winter 1996): 70–95; Michael Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century Salt Lake City,” 72 (Summer 2004): 219–38, both in Utah Historical Quarterly
17. Matthew L. Harris and Madison S. Harris, “The Last State to Honor MLK: Utah and the Quest for Racial Justice,” 88 (Winter 2020): 5–21; Jessica Marie Nelson, “Race, Latter-day Saint Doctrine, and Athletics at Utah State University, 1960–1961,” 88 (Winter 2020): 22–37; Christine Cooper-Rompato, “Utah in the Green Book: Segregation and the Hospitality Industry in the Beehive State,” 88 (Winter 2020): 38–56; Tonya Reiter, “Not In My Neighborhood: The 1939 Controversy over Segregated Housing in Salt Lake City,” 90 (Winter 2022): 4–18; Grace Soelberg, “BYU Slavery Project,” 90 (Winter 2022): 73–76, all in Utah Historical Quarterly
18. This includes research articles from vol. 84 (Spring 2016) to vol. 90 (Spring 2022).
19. See, for example, the list of projects at the J. Willard Marriott Library: https://collections.lib.utah.edu/browse /topic/oral%20histories (accessed September 7, 2022).
20. Blevins and Mullen, “Jane, John . . Leslie?”
21. Note that in the summer 2014 edition, Janet Seegmiller wrote a two-page overview of the Palmer and Driggs Collections, Southern Utah University, but this fell outside of our corpus, which focuses primarily on longer research articles. See Janet Seegmiller, “The Palmer and Driggs Collections at Southern Utah University,” Utah Historical Quarterly 82 (Summer 2014): 234–35.
Utah History Textbooks and Utah History
BY ROD DECKER
From The Making of a State: A School History of Utah, published in 1908, to Utah Our Home, published in 2011, schoolchildren have learned Utah history from fourteen textbooks. This article reviews those books, sketches their legal and institutional context, recounts public arguments about them, and notes how their accounts of Utah history have changed. In their views and outlook, Utah history texts have followed United States history texts and Utah historical writing. Over the century and more they have been written, Utah texts have become broader in focus and more inclusive in coverage. Texts published in the past fifty years show Native Americans more respect and non-Mormons more attention than earlier texts did. School history texts have become more critical of Latter-day Saints and pay less attention to them. In fact, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is barely mentioned in recent textbook accounts of Utah history after statehood. I argue that this reduced attention to Latter-day Saints has led authors to overlook important developments in Utah politics and misrepresent contemporary Utah.
School Texts and the Law
Every school textbook is marked with an imprimatur. Each book was submitted to the State Instructional Materials Commission (as it is now called) and received official approval for use in classrooms. Only fourteen books have been approved. They constitute an officially defined sample of Utah historical writing. That sample does not accurately represent the whole of written Utah history. But authors study Utah history and try to select the best information for students, so texts do offer an imperfect-but-still-useful summary of historical understanding at the time they were written. Every text was written specifically to be used in schools. They were written simply so the fourth and seventh graders in Utah history classes could understand them; they neither footnote sources nor include a bibliography. School texts are published by businesses to make money. Because publishers and authors know their book will need approval from a state committee and will be read by children, they try to avoid controversy. They try not to offend any vocal group whose protests might prevent state approval or persuade schools not to buy the
The cover of second edition The Utah Journey, published by Gibbs Smith. Courtesy of Gibbs Smith Publishing.
book. “You can’t criticize anyone,” says author Richard Holzapfel about writing texts.1 School texts aspire to comprehensiveness. Their authors select a beginning of Utah history and then carry the narrative as close to the present as practicable. Thus, every text presents a view of the whole of Utah history up to the time it
Table 1: Fourteen Utah History Textbooks
was written. Texts may be the most widely read Utah history books. The author John McCormick says his text Discovering Utah sold 16,000 copies; his second text, The Utah Adventure, sold 20,000, while his co-authored A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary sold only 400 copies.2
Year Author Title Publisher
1908 Orson F. Whitney The Making of a State: A School History of Utah
1923 Levi Edgar Young The Founding of Utah
Deseret News Press
Charles Scribner
1933 John Henry Evans The Story of Utah: The Beehive State Macmillan
1946 Milton R. Hunter Utah in Her Western Setting
1960 Milton R. Hunter The Utah Story
Deseret News Press
Milton R. Hunter
1967 Faye Jensen Buttle Utah Grows: Pre Utah and Utah History, A Social Studies Approach Brigham Young University Press
1970 Faye Jensen Buttle Utah Grows: Past and Present Brigham Young University Press
1972 S. George Ellsworth Utah’s Heritage Peregrine Smith
1985 S. George Ellsworth The New Utah’s Heritage Gibbs Smith
1986 Nancy D. McCormick and John S. McCormick Discovering Utah Gibbs Smith
1997 John S. McCormick The Utah Adventure Gibbs Smith
1999 Richard Nietzel Holzapfel Utah: A Journey of Discovery
Gibbs Smith
2009 “The Committee” The Utah Journey Gibbs Smith
2011 John S. McCormick Utah Our Home Gibbs Smith
State law requires public schools to teach Utah history, a mandate the legislature did not enact until 1996, after most schools had been teaching state history in fourth and seventh grades for decades.3 In the early 1990s, the State Board of Education convened a committee to study the state history program. The committee recommended that the course should be divided: Utah history before statehood should be taught in fourth grade, and Utah history after statehood should be taught in seventh, instead of teaching all of state history in both grades. The division would reduce duplication and allow for teaching more geography, economics, and civics in seventh grade, thus making that course “more relevant,” according to Nancy Mathews, the state history curriculum specialist.4 But some Utah conservatives opposed the plan, saying it “would wipe Mormons out of Utah’s history.”5 (They feared Latter-day Saints would receive less attention in the seventh-grade course.) State senator Charles Stewart, a Republican from Provo, successfully sponsored a new law that required schools to teach the whole of Utah history, including “territorial and preterritorial developments,” thus barring the proposed change. The new law was placed in the “civic and character education” section of the state code, next to the mandate to teach “honesty, integrity, morality,” “respect for parents and families,” and “the benefits of the free enterprise system.” The stated goal was “to promote an upright and desirable citizenry.”6 Most schools continue to teach state history in the fourth grade and then again in the seventh grade with the legally prescribed aim of improving citizenship.
Long before they required schools to teach history, legislators provided for regulation of textbooks. Lawmakers created the State Textbook Commission in 1909, and the commission still meets, although its name has been changed to the State Instructional Materials Commission.
For decades, school districts were required to purchase only texts approved by the commission. Then, in 2014, the State Board of Education resolved that local school districts were free to buy texts they chose, and state approval became advisory. In 2019, state law said each school could choose its own texts.7 Though a few schools have used books that were not
recommended by the Instructional Materials Commission, authors and publishers still believe they need state approval to persuade most schools to buy their book and make it profitable.8
Utah School History and Other History
Changes in Utah history texts followed changes in United States history texts. Since the 1960s, United States history texts revised the old school history of successful nation-building led by white men by giving more space and respect to women, people of color, and later-arriving ethnic groups. National texts also became more critical of the white men who had been the heroes of earlier accounts.9 Beginning about ten years later, Utah history texts changed in similar ways, with recent immigrants, women, and people of color receiving more attention and white men and Latter-day Saints receiving less attention and more criticism. There were differences in the way changes came. Rewriting United States history roused public conflict, even “history wars” over how the nation’s past should be retold.10 Some states have also had lawsuits and legislative debates over state history texts.11 School history in Utah changed in comparative peace, though this article tells of a few disagreements. Another difference is that beginning in the mid-1970s, books and articles recounted the arguments over teaching American history in schools.12 In contrast, other than accounts of particular controversies, there is little such literature for the teaching of state history.13 I believe this article is the first attempt to show how any state’s history has been taught and how that teaching has changed.
Besides following national texts, Utah textbooks followed a change in the views of Utah historians, especially with respect to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “In the 1940s, the fields of Utah and Mormon history were inextricably intertwined,” Richard L. Saunders wrote in 2019.14 Early textbook authors saw Utah history as the story of the Latter-day Saint pioneers, the society they founded, and the fortunes of their successors. Levi Edgar Young said he wrote his 1923 school text to “stimulate a love for the pioneers.”15 Apparent in each of the early texts is the desire to tell the story of pioneer forebears and to preserve that story for
Utah children. These authors revered the pioneers. “No mountain was too high, or canyon too winding or difficult, or desert too parched, or narrows too impassable for those strong men and courageous women to attempt,” wrote John Henry Evans in his school text.16 The story told in early texts is how pioneers overcame hardship and prejudice to make the desert blossom and to win statehood and acceptance as Americans. In his essay, Saunders noted how beginning in the 1940s Juanita Brooks and other historians wrote more critically of Latter-day Saints. Gary Topping, in Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History, placed Brooks as part of a turning point in Utah historical writing in midcentury, which also included the work of Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Before the turning point, Topping wrote, most of Utah history was “a Mormon triumphalism that glorified the Mormon pioneer experience while turning a blind eye to its shortcomings and either denigrating or ignoring the contributions of other groups.”17 Among other examples of the old kind of writing, he cited two school textbooks, Levi Edgar Young’s The Founding of Utah and Milton R. Hunter’s Utah in Her Western Setting. (He also criticized Whitney’s “pro-Mormon” bias, though he referred to Whitney’s general histories rather than his school text.) Topping said the midcentury reconstruction of Utah history broke the grip of “a church-sponsored orthodoxy grounded in a selective body of facts,” and led historians to a more critical stance toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to a broader inclusion of different peoples and their viewpoints.18 That change affected subsequent Utah historical writing, including school texts.
As historians came to question the old place of Latter-day Saints in school history, so did teachers and, occasionally, the public. Both Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons worried school history might be biased, but they each feared bias against their side. John McCormick taught seminars in Utah history for schoolteachers. He reports that Latter-day Saint teachers feared their church would be treated unfairly, while non-Mormon teachers worried texts would show bias in favor of Latter-day Saints. The first public debate on texts I found were letters to the editor denouncing Milton R.
Hunter’s texts as pro-Mormon “propaganda.”19 Almost thirty years later, President Dallin Oaks, now of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, argued on the other side. He cited studies and complained that American History texts “have avoided reference to God or to religion.”20 Michelle Parish-Pixler of the Utah Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union replied in 1990 that Utah schools are controlled by Latter-day Saints and teach “academically discredited versions of LDS history.”21 More people worried over bias in schools and the teaching of Utah history than spoke publicly about them. A public opinion poll on “Mormon control of Utah public schools” was conducted in 1974. Sixty percent of all respondents said Mormons exercised at least some control of public schools. But Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons saw control differently. Forty-five percent of non-Mormons believed Mormons were “very much” in control of public schools, while only 12 percent of Latter-day Saints believed control was that strong. Respondents believed history courses were “the most common source of reference to Mormons or Mormon ideas” in public schools.22
Authors, Publishers, Scope, and Formats
Authors of early texts included Latter-day Saint leaders. Whitney wrote his text while serving as a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles.23 Young and Hunter both sat in the Quorum of Seventies, the next highest church governing body.24 Some authors were trained historians. Hunter, Ellsworth, McCormick, and Holzapfel earned doctorates in history from out-of-state universities. Young taught at the University of Utah, Ellsworth at Utah State University, McCormick at Salt Lake Community College, and Holzapfel at Brigham Young University.25 Evans, who wrote Joseph Smith: An American Prophet among other books on Latter-day Saint religion, taught at the LDS Business College.26 Buttle received degrees from Brigham Young University and taught in Utah high schools and junior highs.27 The three McCormick books were written for fourth-grade students; all the others were written for seventh graders. Ellsworth’s Utah’s Heritage won the Mormon History Association’s best book award in 1973, and later authors said they used that book as a model for their own.28
Publishing school texts has become a specialty, and publishers wield increasing influence. Gibbs Smith Publishing in Layton, Utah, brought out the last seven Utah history texts. (Peregrine Smith is an earlier name of that company.) Jared Taylor, head of the education division of Gibbs Smith, says that company publishes more state history texts for schools than anyone else.29 Besides The Utah Journey, Gibbs Smith published The Kansas Journey, The New Mexico Journey, and The Washington Journey, among others. Earlier school-text publishing was more diverse, and included self-publishing, academic, and commercial presses. Deseret News Press published Whitney’s text and Hunter’s first book. Hunter published his second text himself. New York publishers Charles Scribner and Macmillan published Young and Evans, respectively. Brigham Young University Press published both of Buttle’s books. Publishers have become more active in writing texts. For The Utah Journey, published in 2009, Gibbs Smith assembled a twelve-person team of historians, educators, and an editor. Richard Holzapfel, author of Utah: A Journey of Discovery, was most prominently mentioned in the team, but he didn’t have final say over the product.
The team, which I call “the Committee,” used material from Holzapfel’s book and from Utah’s Heritage to “develop” a new text.
Education officials have also asserted more control over the production of texts. In 1984, the Utah Board of Education formed a committee to develop “core standards” for most subjects, including state history.30 Most states have adopted such standards. In its introduction to the Utah standards, the board said, “the standards outline essential knowledge, content, and skills to be mastered.” The standards committee changed the name of the history course to “Utah Studies,” and adopted standards that include “economics, geology, geography, history, and political science/civics.”31 For example, standard 2.1 says: “Students will explain the causes and lasting effects of the Mormon migration to Utah.”32 Standard 5.3 says, “Students will use data regarding the key components of Utah’s economy to make recommendations for sustainable development.”33 Each of the twenty-eight standards for Utah Studies defines a learning requirement. The standards are periodically updated, the last time in 2016. They form a blueprint for writing any new text. “The
S. George Ellsworth in his office in Old Main, the bell tower building on Utah State University’s campus, circa 1970s. S. George Ellsworth Photograph Collection, USU_PH0025.
The cover of S. George Ellsworth’s seventh-grade Utah history textbook, Utah’s Heritage, published in 1972.
first thing we do is write to standards,” said Jared Taylor. “It’s the bible, the North Star; it’s what we do.”34
Even before state standards, authors, beginning with Hunter, had enlarged the scope of state history texts. The first four texts, including Hunter’s first one published in 1946, taught mostly history. But in his second book, Hunter condensed the history from his first and made room for a chapter of archaeology on Native Americans and a chapter on civics and state government. The biggest addition, however, was more than twenty chapters on contemporary Utah, especially the economy: “The Story of Uranium in Utah,” “The Story of Defense in Utah,” and “The Story of Utah’s Farms and Farm Marketing” were some of his chapter titles. Subsequent texts followed Hunter’s lead and included more academic disciplines in Utah history texts.
After midcentury, texts also became larger and more colorful. Whitney, Young, and Evans, the first three authors, wrote handbook-sized texts, about five-by-seven inches in plain, hardbacked covers. They had fifty to one hundred black-and-white photographs or maps scattered through 320 to 445 pages of text. Later texts are larger, up to 9¾ by 10¾ inches, with 220 to 510 pages. They have shiny, colorful covers featuring pictures of Native American art or Utah scenery. Almost every page in the latest texts has pictures or drawings. Some pages have four or five pictures, many in color. The text may be divided into two columns on each page, with small blocks of type set off by headings and many sidebars, presenting many short sections adapted to students’ attention. Besides leading change in textbook scope, Milton R. Hunter also led change in format and appearance. His first book was an old-style text, but his second began the trend toward bigger books, many pictures, and color.
Changes in Historical Content
Utah texts also changed the content of the history they teach, giving more attention to groups besides the Latter-day Saints. Buttle and Ellsworth were the first authors to say they would broaden their coverage in Utah history texts and include more information about other Utahns. Buttle said she wrote partly on “a crusade” to include non-Mormons in Utah history,
and Ellsworth promised his book would go beyond, “the usual political, ecclesiastical and settlement history.”35 Both also said the texts in schools at the time were “biased.” Ellsworth added that the current text was “incomplete in its coverage [and] disproportionate in its treatment.” (Both authors referred to Hunter’s texts, although neither named him.) Because Buttle and Ellsworth were the first Utah textbook authors to explicitly raise the issues of inclusion and bias, I call the nine texts that began with them “new” or “modern,” and the five texts before them the “old” or “early” texts. This change in Utah history textbooks came about ten years after the change in Utah historical writing referred to by Saunders and Topping. The procedure for this article was to read or skim the texts and to select topics for comparison. All the books were at hand during the writing except those written by Buttle, which were only available in a special collections’ library and had to be read on site. Indexes were used to find quotes and anecdotes that best illustrated how history changed from the early to the modern texts. This article will discuss differences in what textbooks said about Latter-day Saints, Native Americans, women, the environment, territorial religious politics, and later-arriving immigrant groups.
Modern authors revised some Latter-day Saint stories. All the texts, for example, tell of swarms of crickets that ate settlers’ crops in 1848, and of seagulls that ate the crickets and saved pioneers from starvation. The first three texts emphasize, without endorsing the belief, that the pioneers prayed for help and saw the gulls as a miracle.36 Hunter went further: “Then the miracle happened,” he wrote, implying the miracle was a fact.37 By contrast, Buttle and Ellsworth tell of crickets and gulls but say nothing of prayer or miracles. The Utah Journey, the latest seventh-grade text, says of seagulls and crickets that “the story falls more within the realm of legend than historical accuracy.” The older texts recounted the religious explanation of the incident in full and left open the possibility that it might be true. The new texts either leave out possible religious explanation or imply politely that it isn’t true.
38
While texts became skeptical of divine action in the cricket story, they shifted blame on the 1857
Mountain Meadows Massacre. At Mountain Meadows, Mormon settlers from communities in and around Cedar City, perhaps aided by Paiutes, killed about 120 men, women, and children traveling through Utah.39 Although several books have been written about the massacre, beginning with Juanita Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950, the textbook accounts are brief, none longer than two pages. Whitney and Young, the earliest texts, acknowledged whites were among the murderers but blamed Native Americans. “The Indians often perpetrated deeds which were terrible and which we wish had never happened,” Young summed up.40 Evans blamed John D. Lee, a Latter-day Saint leader in charge of a church project to help Indians learn to farm. He correctly noted Lee alone was later tried and executed for the crime.41
In his 1946 text, Hunter mentions the massacre in one sentence: “Some white men assisted
the Indians in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took place in the fall of 1857.”42 His second book made no mention of Mountain Meadows. The McCormicks also left it out of their first text, deeming the tale too bloody for their fourth-grade readers. Later, John McCormick regretted that decision and included Mountain Meadows in his second and third texts.43 Ellsworth’s anguish at the horror of the deed seeps through his account. He suggests Latter-day Saints joined the massacre to keep good relations with the Paiutes.44 Holzapfel, writing in the 1990s, changed the story, placing more blame on Latter-day Saints.45 In The Utah Journey, the Committee adopted Holzapfel’s account, partly copying his words. That text says, “John D. Lee, and other members of the militia convinced the generally peaceful Paiutes to join them at Mountain Meadows.”46 Over one hundred years of school history, then, blame for the Mountain
John Henry Evans and Levi Edgar Young are shown here in a L.D.S. College faculty photograph, circa 1900. Evans and Young later authored Utah history school texts. Utah State Historical Society Classified Photo Collection, photograph no. 07043.
Meadows massacre moved from Native Americans to Latter-day Saints.47
Shifting Mountain Meadows blame from Paiutes to pioneers is part of larger changes in what texts say about Native Americans. Among the first four texts, only Young writes of Native American prehistory.48 Other early texts introduced Native Americans mostly when Europeans met them. In those accounts, missionaries, traders, and pioneers occupy the center of the story. Then, beginning with Hunter’s second book, texts began including a chapter on prehistoric tribes and the archaeological record dating back thousands of years. In this way, Europeans become part of a much longer history rather than the beginning of the story. The texts also differ in how they treat Native Americans after Utah statehood. The first four texts scarcely mention Native peoples in the twentieth century. Then Hunter, in The Utah Story (1960), included a chapter on contemporary Native peoples, focusing on how some tribal members had adopted white ways while others had not.49 Following Hunter, authors told of Native Americans after Utah statehood, but instead of writing a separate chapter, as Hunter did, they scattered information throughout their books. As examples, Ellsworth gave the fullest account of changing federal Indian policy and its effects on Utah tribes, while McCormick and Holzapfel included short portraits of contemporary Native American activists and artists.50
There were other differences. The pioneers looked down on Indigenous peoples, and the authors of the old texts did too. “The Utes were a degraded people who lived in huts and wigwams and lived mainly by hunting and fishing,” wrote Whitney.51 Modern texts are more respectful in language and attitude. Early texts celebrated the derring-do of trappers and mountain men when they faced Native Americans and told stories like those in cowboy-and-Indian movies, popular when those texts were written.52 Later texts do not tell tales of boldness and bravado against Indigenous people. Holzapfel and McCormick explain that mountain men were racist and exploitive, and the judgment of history has turned against them.53 Texts cited Brigham Young’s oft-quoted saying that “It is cheaper
to feed the Indians than to fight them.”54 Early texts pointed to Young’s peaceful Indian policy and to Latter-day Saint farms and missions for Native Americans as evidence that Latter-day Saints were kinder to Native Americans than settlers were elsewhere.55 “At all times were the Indians approached with the highest Christian Charity,” wrote Levi Edgar Young.56 In contrast, new texts looked at outcomes: McCormick notes, and the Committee quotes him, that “In 1846, before the pioneers came, there were about 20,000 Indians, and almost no whites. By 1900, there were only 2,500 Indians and 300,000 whites.”57 Unlike the old texts, recent authors see white conquest as a calamity for Native peoples.
The texts also diverge over resistance and violence. Early texts depict Native Americans who wanted peace as good and those for war as bad. For example, both Whitney and Young tell of an argument between chiefs Sowiette, who was for peace, and Wakara, who favored war. Sowiette whips Wakara, who is depicted as weak, even cowardly.58 Wakara later led the Walker War against the pioneers. The old historians believed Native American violent resistance was wrong. In contrast, Holzapfel, the Committee, and McCormick seem to see some justification for resistance. All of them, for example, tell how Chief Blackhawk, Utah’s most successful Native American fighting leader, was reburied by his people with honor.59
The Bear River battle and massacre of 1863 shows the largest revision in judgment on warfare. Whitney begins his account of the “battle” of Bear River by noting that a band of Shoshones killed some miners passing through Cache Valley. A survivor went to a federal judge who issued a warrant for the arrest of three chiefs of the band. With the warrant, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led 275 soldiers north from Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City to fight about an equal number of Shoshone men.60 The latest seventh-grade text, written by the Committee, does not mention dead miners or courts, but says, “many times ruthless or frightened travelers shot friendly Shoshones,” thus making the background to the tragedy killings by whites rather than by Shoshone. Colonel Connor, the same text reads, “intended to kill all the Indian people at the camp whether or not they were
guilty of a crime.”61 Both Ellsworth and Whitney tell of hours of fierce and deadly fighting before the soldiers defeated the Shoshone.62 The Committee’s text, by contrast, tells nothing of battle: “The soldiers massacred about 300 men, women and children before burning the tepees and riding away.”63 No school account tells how soldiers killed wounded warriors and raped women after the battle, nor does any mention the 120 women and children survivors helped by local Latter-day Saints.64 Over 108 years of Utah textbooks, Bear River turned from a victorious “battle” by federal troops into a “massacre” and a white atrocity.
Like Native Americans, women also become more prominent in the new histories. Whitney, the first author, put seventy-one pictures of prominent people in his text; seventy of them were men (sixty-seven white men and three Native American chiefs). He included one woman, Julia Dean Hayne, a touring actress who played the old Salt Lake Theater. In comparison, the latest seventh-grade text, developed by the Committee, has twenty-six “Utah portraits”— pictures and accompanying biographical text of historical Utah people. Eighteen of them are men (including four Native Americans and one African American), and eight are women. In the older texts, women are almost absent from the main narratives. But in The Utah Journey, polygamy, for example, is explained mostly from women’s viewpoint. The pages on education feature women, and women are often quoted in discussions of ethnic groups or when the text recounts experiences of ordinary people. Even so, most of the main narrative is about men, and the textbook changes with respect to women are less marked than those concerning Native peoples or ethnic groups.
Authors of the older texts took pride in Utah’s national parks and monuments and employed their most poetic phrases in praise of Utah scenery. “Nature has chiseled out a veritable temple of beauty,” said Young of Zion Canyon.65 Whitney alone wrote before Utah had parks or monuments, and he had little praise for scenery. He said Utah was “the great American desert,” a name that emphasized the pioneer achievement in making it blossom.66 Whitney is the only author who mentions the Salt Lake County smelters that around the turn of the
twentieth century emitted sulfurous smoke damaging crops on nearby farms. Court cases forced some of them to close.67 With those exceptions, the older texts don’t discuss measures to protect the environment.
Environmental issues in John McCormick’s The Utah Adventure provoked Utah’s most publicized textbook argument. When the textbook commission received the fourth-grade text in 1997, it appointed reviewers and suggested teachers might use the book in classes on a trial basis. Bonnie Morgan, the state director of curriculum, praised the “well-written content, maps, and colorful illustrations.” But then San Juan County Commissioner Ty Lewis complained the book was “a blatant attempt by the federal government and environmentalists to try to brainwash our young students into believing their ancestors were petty opportunists having no conscience about the lands for which they had stewardship.”68 The Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank, and a few individuals joined in the complaint. Among other things, they pointed to questions designed to spark class discussion. “What if,” the book asked, “we cut down all the forests for buildings?” What if “companies only cared about making money and did not care about our land, water, and air?”69 Although opponents of the text were not numerous, they were vocal and effective. Textbook commissioners asked for changes before they would approve the book. They were late: ten thousand books had already been purchased and were in student hands.
The editor Susan Meyers, who spoke for the publisher, however, quickly agreed to make changes. Publisher and author cut out the questions that offended the protestors. They also eliminated a quote by the American nature writer Barry Lopez—“To stick your hands into the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece.” They cut a section heading, “The Earth is Our Mother.”70 In all they changed twenty-three pages of the text and sent the new pages to schools that had already bought the book, so they could be substituted for the old offending pages. Commissioners then approved the text. Both the complainants and the publishers said they were happy with the outcome.71 “I was happy enough,” McCormick said later, meaning he would rather have
made the changes than have lost approval for the book.72 Even after the changes, McCormick’s text still praised environmental protection, and so do all of the modern school texts.
Before he wrote Utah’s first school history, Orson Whitney published a four-volume History of Utah, in which politics were central, as they were in books by his contemporaries B. H. Roberts, and Edward Tullidge.73 (Topping scored these three authors for the “depressing sameness” of their “pro-Mormon” interpretations.)74
The clash of beliefs and ways of life, the struggle for control, and the Latter-day Saint capitulation were the central story of Utah before statehood in many early histories. But the second Utah textbook, by Levi Edgar Young, says little of the religious-political disputes. The word “polygamy” does not occur in Young’s book. None of the other texts since tells territorial political history so fully as Whitney’s or so sparsely as Young’s. Each tells of the Latter-day Saint–non-Mormon disputes in paragraphs scattered across chapters on territorial history. Texts tell of doomed statehood petitions to Congress. They show a map of the sprawling, Latter-day Saint–proposed state of Deseret and the congressional actions that cut it down to the much smaller state of Utah. Beginning with Ellsworth, every text shows pictures of polygamists in prison. Texts differ in their depictions of nineteenth-century political quarrels, but the differences follow no clear pattern.
The five older Utah texts scarcely mentioned the ethnic groups that came to Utah after the Latter-day Saints. They celebrated Utah’s first Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish congregations, and the growth of those religions. They noted that Chinese and Irish men built the transcontinental railroad. They boasted of the size and riches of Utah mines but said nothing about the immigrants who worked the mines and mills. A change began with Ellsworth. In his 1972 book, he included more information than his predecessors did on Greeks, Japanese, Hispanics, Slovenes, Pacific Islanders, and African Americans.75 But Utah civil rights leader Alberta Henry wrote a letter reproaching Ellsworth for using the word “negro” and for scanting Blacks in Utah history: “Less than 300 words in the back of the book and two sentences on slaves does not seem adequate,” she
wrote. And she noted there was only one picture of a Black person in the book—a member of the Utah Stars professional basketball team. “You can see the frustration of black children living in the present but having no past,” she wrote.76 After he read Henry’s letter, Ellsworth mended his ways. In The New Utah’s Heritage (1980), he included a new chapter, “Utah’s Ethnic Heritage,” with sections on five groups of color, including information on African Americans with five photographs. On ethnic groups as on other subjects, textbook authors followed Utah historians. Between Ellsworth’s two books, Helen Papanikolas edited The Peoples of Utah, which focused on ethnic history.77 Following her, historians wrote more than ever before on the many peoples of Utah.
After Papanikolas, textbook attention to Utah’s diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious communities also increased, and they have become the most important post-statehood theme in recent Utah history texts. “That is above everything our premier goal,” says publisher Jared Taylor. “We want children to see people like them who contributed to the history of their state.”78 Recent texts abound in stories of Japanese, Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Hispanics, African Americans, Pacific Islanders, and refugees. In outline, the story of many groups is like the story of the pioneers: strong men and courageous women overcame poverty and prejudice to win opportunity for their descendants and acceptance as Americans. Modern authors anticipate an audience of young people from many backgrounds, and almost every child who reads a Utah history text finds reason for pride in his or her heritage.
But as newer immigrants come to prominence after statehood, Latter-day Saints almost vanish. In recounting post-statehood history, texts rarely tell of the church as an institution or of Latter-day Saints acting as a group or acting as members of their religion. For example, The Utah Journey, the most recent seventh-grade text, makes four mentions of the Latter-day Saints in the 129 pages of the book that cover Utah since statehood, and the longest of the four is one sentence. The others are bare mentions of the church in lists.79 Utah Our Home, the most recent fourth-grade text, only mentions the church once, in three sentences on the
Welfare Plan.80 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints draws the attention of every text before statehood and, overall, receives the most attention of any group. But schooled by the historians who demanded less attention for Latter-day Saints and more for other groups, the new texts no longer see the contemporary church as an agent of Utah history or a participant in important stories.
Not only Latter-day Saints but Utah itself grows faint in Utah history texts. After statehood, modern texts tell their story in a succession of periods and events such as the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, New Deal, World War II, the civil rights movement, and so forth. Texts also tell of the telephone, the electric light, the automobile, and other life-changing inventions. These narratives are national stories. Jared Taylor of Gibbs Smith Publishing notes his competitors sometimes write a national narrative for state-history texts and then use that narrative for every state. They change pictures and sidebars to adapt the book to the particular state the book is about. In contrast, “We build a textbook from the ground up,” Taylor says. But even a text such as Holzapfel’s Utah: A Journey of Discovery, which is rich in Utah anecdote and incident, is organized along national lines. In that and other recent texts, the overall story could serve with a few changes as a narrative in other state’s history. The two Utah stories after statehood most fully treated in school texts are the Topaz Japanese American internment camp during World War II and the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Other than McCormick’s Utah Our Home, which tells of progressive state legislation passed in the first decades after statehood, texts do not tell of decisions made by Utahns after statehood that affected their state, their lives, or their future.81 Utah in recent decades is not shown as a community that decides and acts based on its own history and beliefs. Rather, Utah history consists mostly of effects within the state of decisions, actions, and changes coming from elsewhere.
Utah history disappears into American history partly because historians see Utah disappearing into America. They believe Utah assimilated, so Utah’s history has been largely subsumed in national history. “Utah Joins the
Mainstream,” is the title of the McCormick’s chapter on Utah after statehood. “Utah’s Life Reflects the Nation,” is the Committee’s title for their corresponding chapter. The story told in history textbooks is that Utah had been different from the United States in territorial times but then changed to become like America. Ellsworth writes: “During the territorial period, Utah tried to be different, and she was different in many ways. . . . During her life as a state, Utah became less unique and more like other states. Increasingly the Utah experience in the twentieth century becomes more closely identified with the nation and the world.”82 In their belief that Utah assimilated into America, textbook authors agreed with academic historians. For example, Professor Richard Poll looked at the whole of Utah history in 1978 and said, “The state and the nation have become so interlocked, one might ask what meaningful distinction remains.”83 Utah school textbooks agree with Poll: there is little meaningful distinction setting Utah apart from the United States.
This assimilationist view seemed correct forty years ago. But since then, Utah has changed and become different from the United States again in politics and demographics. From statehood until the election of 1976, Utahns had been politically assimilated, voting in the American mainstream, changing parties along with the nation, and voting mostly for presidential winners. But in the 1976 election, Utah voted the most strongly of any state for the loser, Republican Gerald Ford, and Utah remained firmly Republican thereafter. Utah turned Republican only because Latter-day Saints became strongly Republican. Utah non-Mormons, of any religion or none, voted mostly Democratic, partly in opposition to the Latter-day Saint–Republican juggernaut.84 Utah had the most religiously polarized electorate of any state.85 None of the school texts mention these new differences.
History might illuminate the religious-political division. It echoes the political division of Utah Territory in the nineteenth century. Then, Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons divided politically, partly because they disagreed over polygamy. Now, Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons divide politically mostly because they disagree over modern changes in morality concerning sex and families. Latter-day Saints
adhere to traditional families of a married man and woman and their children and to an old morality that supported such families. That old morality says sex is legitimate only between a married man and woman, and society should regulate abortion, pornography, and other practices to protect and encourage traditional families. But Americans changed, and most now believe in a new morality with greater liberty for individuals and greater equality for women, gays, and others. Battles over morality roiled Utah politics starting in the 1970s; abortion, pornography, birth control for teens, the Equal Rights Amendment, censoring cable TV, sex education, and same-sex marriage each provoked an argument that lasted for years in the state. Every year saw at least one of those fights, and some years saw two or three at once.86 In each of those battles, Latter-day Saints struggled to preserve government support of the old morality. As in territorial times, Latter-day Saints were a Utah majority, and so they won most of the battles in Utah. But non-Mormons predominate in America; so, in Utah Territory, the federal government intervened against polygamy, and in recent decades, federal judges overturned most Utah attempts to keep the old morality in state law.87 Moral and family differences also showed in Utah demography and the families of ordinary people. Utah became the state with the highest percentage of married adults, the lowest percentage of out-of-wedlock births, the highest fertility, and the youngest population.88
From statehood to the mid-1970s, Utah assimilated with the rest of the country, but then Utah diverged again. Within Utah, Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons separated politically a second time over moral differences that resembled those driving the old territorial separation.
Political division between Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons is an unwelcome heritage. That division brought strife and sorrow to Utah Territory. Now religious division makes Utah a one-party-dominant Republican state. Political and religious differences reinforce each other. Non-Mormon Democrats are a permanent minority, excluded from many state decisions. Some state policies are denigrated as sectarian, rather than inclusive and democratic. Neither Latter-day Saints nor non-Mormons,
neither Democrats nor Republicans, wanted religious-political division, and all are reluctant to acknowledge its return. Still, the division has determined state elections. Understanding it would help students become knowledgeable citizens, which is the stated legal purpose of teaching Utah history.
“How do you explain that to fourth graders?” author John McCormick asks.89 So far, history texts don’t explain that, and texts are unlikely to include the religious-political division until it is written into state standards. Our plight might help us sympathize with early textbook historians. Young would not say “polygamy,” Hunter suppressed Mountain Meadows, and we cannot deal in school texts with our religiously divided voting.
Conclusion
Utah school history texts changed from a pioneer-centered history to a multi-group view of Utah history. Native Americans, non-Mormon groups, and women receive more respect and attention in the new texts than in old ones. The new texts are more critical of the pioneers, their stories, and some of their actions. In these respects, Utah texts have become fairer and more accurate.
Texts followed Utah historical writing. When school texts were pioneer-centered, Latter-day Saint leaders wrote school texts promoting a Latter-day Saint view of Utah history for an audience of mostly Latter-day Saint school children. Then, Juanita Brooks, and other historians looked critically at Mormon-Utah history. They researched new sources. Helen Papanikolas and others included new groups. Historical writing became more critical of Latter-day Saints and more inclusive of others, and school textbooks followed. In addition, Utah schoolchildren were less Latter-day Saint than textbook authors had assumed. Modern authors and publishers saw their audience as children from diverse backgrounds, and they tried to include some history of the heritage of every child.
School texts also followed Utah historical writing in seeing the long-term trend of Utah history as assimilation with the United States. Pioneers had been different from Americans,
but they and their descendants became similar. As Latter-day Saints became more like other Americans, Utah became so like the United States that one could ask what meaningful difference remained.
But contrary to the assimilationist view, Utah, beginning in the 1970s, changed and became different again from America in politics and demographics. There were three related changes: First, Latter-day Saint voters became strongly Republican, while non-Mormons became Democrats, and Utah entered a Republican ascendancy. Second, Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons argued with each other over abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, and other moral questions. On most of those issues, Utah reached a decision through normal democratic processes, but then federal courts overturned the Utah decision. Third, Utah demographic differences from America became larger. Utahns married more, had more children, and bore fewer children out of marriage than other Americans. These three developments shared a cause: Americans changed their sexual and family morality toward more freedom and equality. Latter-day Saints resisted the change and adhered to the old morality that supported traditional families.
No school text mentions these developments. Moral and political differences based in religion are controversial, and textbook authors and publishers avoid controversy. Moreover, textbooks failed to see the changes partly because Utah historical writing saw Latter-day Saints as less important to modern Utah, and saw Utah as assimilated to America. Historians weren’t looking for Latter-day Saint–led divergence from the United States. Gary Topping said that of the five historians who brought change to the writing of Utah history, “all lived to see their interpretations become accepted in whole or in part as a new orthodoxy.”90 The orthodoxy brought a more inclusive and more critical outlook to textbook histories but inclined them to overlook Latter-day Saint activity that differed from orthodox expectations.
To be sure, Utah is part of America, and its national affinities tower over its differences. A national view is needed to cover and explain most of post-statehood Utah history. But Utah has also shown the importance of factors unique to
the state, and they require more attention than they receive in school texts.
The past fifty years show Utah remains its own community, able to make its own decisions. More specifically, Latter-day Saints retain the capacity to adhere to their own tradition and beliefs and to carry Utah with them against a national trend. Readers will differ on how they regard Latter-day Saint politics in Utah, but Latter-day-Saints remain central to Utah history.
Notes
1. Richard Nietzel Holzapfel, interview by Rod Decker, May 19, 2021. The notes of all interviews are in the author’s possession.
2. John S. McCormick, interview by Rod Decker, April 12, 2021. The book was an academic monograph published by Utah State University Press in 2011, John R. Sillito co-author.
3. Utah Code, 53G-10-204(3)(c).
4. Samuel Autman, “Critics Say Altering History Curriculum Erases the Mormons,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 5, 1995, B1.
5. “Critics Say Curriculum Change May Wipe out Mormon History,” Daily Herald, May 5, 1995.
6. Utah Code 53G-10-204.
7. “State Textbook Commission,” Laws of Utah 1909, Ch. 54 (Salt Lake City: Shelton Publishing Co.), 76; “A brief history and overview of Instructional Materials in Utah,” Utah State Office of Education, 2018; Utah Code 53E-4-403, effective May 14, 2019.
8. McCormick and Holzapfel interviews. Seth Sorensen, author of The Utah Story (Springville, UT: Bonneville Books, 2011), says his book was used as a text in fourthgrade classes in several schools in the Nebo School District, though it was not written as a text or submitted to the Instructional Materials Commission. Sorensen, phone interview by Rod Decker, May 27, 2021.
9. Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
10. See Trey Popp, “The History Wars,” Pennsylvania Gazette, August 16, 2021; David Wright, “History Wars,” New Yorker, June 9, 2021. Two earlier controversies are recounted in Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 98–121; and Allan O. Kownslar, The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–62 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020).
11. Lowen v. Turnipseed, 488 F. Supp 1138 (N.D. Miss. 1980).
12. Larry Cuban, Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016); Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial (New York: Vintage, 2000); Fitzgerald, America Revised
13. Among histories of how state texts treated race, see Alan Weider, “South Carolina School History Text-
books’ Portrayals of Race an Historical Analysis,” Counterpoints 47, no. 1 (2013).
14. Richard L. Saunders, “Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 87, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 223.
15. Young, The Founding of Utah, vii.
16. Evans, The Story of Utah, v.
17. Gary Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 42.
18. Topping, 8
19. Nancy R. Hunter, “Book to Scrutinize,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 1961; George R. Tucker, “How about Texts?” Salt Lake Tribune, July 1, 1963.
20. Wall Street Journal, May 23, 1990.
21. Salt Lake Tribune, July 8, 1990.
22. Fredrick S. Buchanan and Raymond G. Briscoe, “Public Schools as a Vehicle of Social Accommodation in Utah: The Strangers within Our Gates,” 98–126, in Social Accommodation in Utah, ed. Clark Knowlton (Salt Lake City: American West Center, University of Utah, 1975).
23. “Church Leaders Pay Tribute to Work of Orson F. Whitney,” Deseret News, May 16, 1931, A1.
24. “LDS Official Dies at 89 after Illness,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 14, 1963; “Elder Milton R. Hunter Dies,” Ensign, August 1975.
25. Robert E. Parson, “Neither Poet nor Prophet: S. George Ellsworth and the History of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 83 (Winter 2015); Holzapfel interview; front material in The Utah Journey. Holzapfel is now Senior Manager of the Missionary Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hunter and Ellsworth earned their doctorates from the University of California, Berkeley; McCormick from the University of Iowa; and Holzapfel from the University of California, Irvine.
26. Utah Author Dies in Salt Lake,” Deseret News, March 25, 1947.
27. “Faye Jensen Buttle,” Herald (Provo, UT), August 5, 1974.
28. Holzapfel interview.
29. Jared Taylor, interview by Rod Decker, April 9, 2021.
30. Utah Core State Standards for Social Studies, adopted by the Utah State Board of Education, December 2016, introduction.
31. Utah Core State Standards, 1.
32. Utah Core State Standards, 5.
33. Utah Core State Standards, 8.
34. Taylor interview.
35. For Buttle, see George C. King, “Non-LDS Feel Excluded in Local Activity,” Herald (Provo, UT), May 7, 1970. For Ellsworth, see box 2, fd. U-19, Papers of S. George Ellsworth, Record Group 17.2:17, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, cited in Parson, “Neither Poet nor Prophet,” 13.
36. Whitney, The Making of a State, 26–28; Young, The Founding of Utah, 158–59; Evans, The Story of Utah, 63–69.
37. Hunter, Utah in Her Western Setting, 179–84.
38. The Utah Journey, 123, quotes the former Utah State Archaeologist David B. Madsen.
39. While John D. Lee and others said that Paiutes participated, Paiute oral history claims that no members of the tribe were present. See, e.g., Mike Taylor, “September 11 significant to Utah Native Americans,” Indian Country Today, September 13, 2018, indiancountry
today.com/archive/september-11-significant-to-utah -native-americans; Cecilia Rasmussen, “A Shameful Chapter in Mormon History,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2003. Casey Olson devoted a dissertation to the teaching of the Mountain Meadows Massacre: “The Evolution of History: Changing Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah’s Public-School Curricula” (PhD diss., Utah State University, 2013).
40. Young, The Founding of Utah, 292; Whitney, The Making of a State, 103.
45. Holzapfel, Utah: A Journey of Discovery, 171–72.
46. The Utah Journey, 153.
47. See Sondra Jones, “Saints or Sinners? The Evolving Perceptions of Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah Historiography,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Winter 2004).
48. Young, The Founding of Utah, 23–45.
49. Hunter, The Utah Story, 204–14.
50. Ellsworth, Utah’s Heritage, 483–87; McCormick, The Utah Adventure, 124; Holzapfel, Utah: A Journey of Discovery, 190–91.
51. Whitney, The Making of a State, 7.
52. E.g., Hunter, Utah in Her Western Setting, 66–69, 251–65; Young, The Founding of Utah, 132–40.
53. Holzapfel, Utah: A Journey of Discovery, 67; McCormick, Utah Our Home, 156.
54. Hunter, Utah in Her Western Setting, 286.
55. E.g., Evans, The Story of Utah, 209–12.
56. Young, The Founding of Utah, 268.
57. The Utah Journey, 144.
58. Whitney, The Making of a State, 69; Young, The Founding of Utah, 269. Young cites Edward Tullidge, History of Provo, as source for the story.
59. Holzapfel, Utah: A Journey of Discovery, 133; The Utah Journey, 172; McCormick, Utah Our Home, 203.
60. Whitney, The Making of a State, 140. Historians give varying numbers of soldiers and Shoshones. Young, Evans, Hunter, and Buttle do not mention the Bear River Massacre in their texts.
61. The Utah Journey, 170; Holzapfel, Utah: A Journey of Discovery, 131, and McCormick, Utah Our Home, 202, treat the incident as a white massacre of Native Americans.
62. Ellsworth, Utah’s Heritage, 229–30.
63. The Utah Journey, 170.
64. Brigham D. Madsen, The Shoshone Frontier and the Bear River Massacre (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), gives a full account of the incident.
65. Young, The Founding of Utah, 17.
66. Whitney, The Making of a State, 1.
67. Whitney, 311
68. Dan Eagan, “Critics Claim History Textbook Is Trying to ‘Brainwash’ Kids,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 26, 1997.
69. Kathrine Kapos, “History Rewritten for Utahns,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 5, 1997. The questions were on page 20 of the text before revision.
70. McCormick found these changes by comparing copies of the book before and after changes.
71. Katherine Kapos, “Panel Tackles Disputed Book,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 4, 1997.
72. McCormick interview.
73. Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons Co., 1892–1904); B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), with volume 5 dealing with territorial politics; Edward Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Star Printing, 1886).
74. Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History, 14
75. Ellsworth, Utah’s Heritage, 490–91.
76. Alberta Henry to S. George Ellsworth, January 26, 1984, copy in author’s possession. I thank John McCormick for telling me of the letter and sending me a copy.
77. Helen Z. Papanikolas, ed., The Peoples of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976).
78. Taylor interview.
79. The Utah Journey, 240, 244, 277, and 290.
80. McCormick, Utah Our Home, 264.
81. McCormick, Utah Our Home, 257.
82. Ellsworth, Utah’s Heritage, 329.
83. Richard Poll, et al., eds., Utah’s History (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 678.
84. Rod Decker, Utah Politics: The Elephant in the Room (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2019), 17–32.
85. Patrick Fisher, Demographic Gaps in American Political Behavior (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014), 59.
86. Decker, Utah Politics, 33–74, details these controversies.
87. See, e.g., Jane L. v. Bangerter, 102 F. 3d 1112 (abortion); Planned Parenthood Association of Utah v. Matheson, 582 F. Supp. 1001 (birth control for teens); Community Television of Utah v. Wilkinson 611 F. Supp. 1099 (cable TV); Kitchen v. Herbert, 961 F. Supp2d 1118 (same-sex marriage).
88. See Daphne Lofquist, et al., “Households and Families: 2010,” Economics and Statistics Administration, United States Census Bureau, Washington, D.C., 2012, 10; National Center for Health Statistics, “Percent of Babies Born to Unmarried Mothers by State,” 2019, cdc. gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/unmarried/unmarried. htm; “Utah Demographic Fact Sheet,” January 2012, 1, 2, Kem Gardner Policy Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah.
89. McCormick interview.
90. Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History, 32.
BOOK REVIEWS
Behind the Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape
By R. E. Burrillo
Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2020. 407 pp. Paper, $19.95
R. E. Burrillo’s Behind the Bears Ears is a chatty, entertaining ramble through the cultural and natural landscapes of Bears Ears National Monument from the earliest humans to the present. An archaeologist, Burrillo is at his best in the eight chapters devoted to the Native peoples who have inhabited or migrated through southeastern Utah over thousands of years. Along the way, he discusses how archaeology, like any science, changes its narrative of “prehistory” in the light of new evidence.
One example is the long-held belief that Paleoindian big game hunters were the first humans in North America at the end of the last ice age. Burrillo notes that while only one confirmed Clovis point has been found in the region, it is extremely difficult to find the material remains of small, mobile groups of people, especially those who did not make pottery. He also discusses the accumulating evidence for the pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas.
In the process, Burrillo takes an informative side trip through the history of North American archaeology itself. The New Archaeology we learned as graduate students in the 1970s wanted to be science, not history, “figuring out the nuts and bolts of human behavior” rather than “what happened in the past” (25). This “suturing” of anthropology and history actually began decades earlier, when cultural anthropologists like Robert Lowie and structural-functionalists like Fred Eggan dismissed Native oral traditions as “myth.” Collecting those oral traditions no longer became an important part of the toolkits of Southwestern anthropologists, archaeologists, and some other scholars. That meant a century of knowledge about the past was not systematically recorded
as Native elders passed away. “History” was relegated to the written records of Europeans and European Americans, with all their ethnocentric biases and blind spots. The dynamism of history—its contingencies, creativity, and sheer human messiness—was largely eliminated from both archaeological and ethnographic accounts of Native peoples. This ahistorical myopia perpetuated stereotypes about Native peoples, including the widespread misconception that most have disappeared.
Burrillo is at his best when he recounts a century of archaeological research in and around Bears Ears. His overview of research at Chaco Canyon, the mammoth Glen Canyon Project, and the Cedar Mesa Project not only captures the evolving nature of Southwestern archaeology but gives it a human face with its parade of very human archaeologists from Richard Weatherhill and Earl Morris to Jesse Jennings and Bill Lipe. And Burrillo himself. The book is as much a chronicle of his own career as a working archaeologist and his explorations of one of the most starkly beautiful environments on earth as it is a cultural history of the region itself. He was lucky enough to work for Rosemary Sucec, who pioneered the consultation of Native elders in the National Park Service. Burrillo doesn’t systematically examine the oral traditions about Bears Ears passed down by generations of Hopis, Zunis, Diné, Paiutes, or Utes, but he does acknowledge that they are valid lines of evidence about the past.
His coverage about the Europeans and European Americans who came later is more cursory. His chapter on “The Conquerors,” i.e., Spaniards, is adequate but does not incorporate the groundbreaking research of Richard and Shirley Flint on the Coronado expedition or the Hopi oral traditions about a village on Antelope Mesa being destroyed by Coronado’s soldiers. The following chapter on “The Wranglers” races through Latter-day Saint settlement of the region but doesn’t delve into the deep ties the descendants of those pioneers maintain in southeastern Utah today. Any balanced account of the controversy
over Bears Ears National Monument, which, admittedly, is not the primary focus of Burrillo’s book until its final chapter, needs to understand and respect those ties.
That final chapter focuses on the attempts to preserve Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. Burrillo is an outspoken advocate of increased federal protection, passionately aligning himself with environmentalists, archaeologists, and, most importantly, Native activists. To his credit, however, he does concede that some of those who oppose such protection raise valid points. As archaeologist Winston Hurst points out, “top-down protectionist efforts equate to ‘an end-run around the local populations who are most powerfully positioned to protect the land or abuse it.’” Not all those local people are “pillagers” like poachers.
Burrillo frequently mentions his friend, the conservationist Jonathan Bailey. The University of Arizona Press just published a book by Bailey and Stephen Strom entitled The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Traditions and Preserving Storied Lands. In it, Bailey and Strom document a series of success stories in collaborative conservation in Emery County and other Utah counties north of Bears Ears. Those efforts took decades to accomplish, and everyone involved had to compromise. My suspicion is that a similar process will be necessary to reach a stable level of protection for Bears Ears. Without it, federal land agencies will continue to be viewed as colonial presences rather than partners by many local peoples in the region.
–Thomas E. Sheridan University of Arizona
Traders, Agents, and Weavers: Developing the Northern Navajo Region
By Robert S. McPherson
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. x + 267 pp. Paper, $24.95
Traders, Agents, and Weavers by Robert McPherson complements his Both Sides of the Bullpen (2017) in the investigation of the culture and
economy of the trading post system on the Navajo reservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The current volume shifts the focus from the smaller posts in Utah and Colorado, which he focused on in Both Sides of the Bullpen, to an investigation of the area bordered by the San Juan River and the Chuska Mountains in northwestern New Mexico. That is the location of the Toadlena, Newcomb, and, especially, Two Grey Hills trading posts. Broadening his attention to the relationships among the posts, various Anglo and Navajo actors, and the nearby US Government Shiprock (Northern Navajo) Agency, McPherson highlights further aspects of the trading post dynamic.
The Two Grey Hills trading post is only slightly less known than the Hubbell trading post in Ganado, Arizona, and the Crystal trading post in Crystal, Arizona, for its role in developing and marketing a distinctive, high-quality weaving style in rugs produced by Navajo weavers in the local area. McPherson uses the story of this trading post and its proprietors as a case study to combat what he considers the unfair criticism of Anglo traders in various government reports (including the 1973 report by the Federal Trade Commission) and in some histories of trading posts (including Kathy M’Closkey’s 2002 Swept Under the Rug). He argues that far from routinely perpetuating fraud and theft, the Anglo traders served as middlemen to “bridge the cultural gap and provide what exchange what both sides desired” (265) and “were a good group of people who befriended and took care of their customers” (xv).
The first four chapters provide the history of northwestern New Mexico from the prehistoric urban Pueblo period in the tenth and eleventh centuries through the end of William Shelton’s tenure as agent at the Northern Navajo agency in 1916. Chapters five, six, and seven chronicle the “classic” era of the region’s trading post culture from 1903 through the 1950s. McPherson outlines external and internal dynamics and the daily patterns of post life as experienced by both the traders and their clients. He also explains the distinctiveness of the Two Grey Hills rugs and their weavers. The final chapter lays out how the federal government’s program of stock reduction, the social impact of the Second World War, the collapse of both lamb and wool
markets, the extension of paved roads, and the adoption of trucks signaled the end of the relevance of trading post economics and culture.
McPherson deftly blends his long personal study of ethnography and careful listening to Diné voices with archival documents in this work. His meticulous attention to interviews and original documents gives us a fresh look at the lives of Special Commissioner Herbert J. Hagerman, Agent William T. Shelton, and the missionaries and the traders who helped make Two Grey Hills and other posts successful in the advancing of Navajo weavers and the marketing of their rugs. However, McPherson’s discussion of Navajo economics and culture and Navajo perspectives is limited by a reliance on Anglo ethnography and the author’s further mediation and takes less advantage of investigations of governmental policies, political economies, and traditional Navajo concepts and values that have been explored by a generation of contemporary Diné and Indigenous scholars. Broadening the conversation would have contributed balance to many of his analytical conclusions.
Traders, Agents, and Weavers follows the changes of the life encountered in the trading posts and the surrounding region of northwestern New Mexico, providing a fascinating and engaging resource for historians and students of intercultural dynamics and anyone interested in the history of the transition of the Navajo people into the modern America of the mid-twentieth century.
–Bruce Gjeltema
University of New Mexico–Gallup
the American Southwest, 1947–1957
By Catherine S. Fowler
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xx + 350 pp. Paper, $39.95
How is it possible that I did not know about Dutton’s Dirty Diggers and their excellent adventures in the American Southwest? Why didn’t I get to go on an Archaeological Mobile Camp
when I was a teenager? I knew nothing about this fascinating chapter of southwestern archaeology, Dr. Bertha Dutton, or the more than two hundred senior girl scouts who used the road less traveled to learn about the archaeology, cultures, and environment of the magnificent Southwest.
Bertha P. Dutton, an archaeologist and ethnologist, was truly a giant and an unsung heroine of archaeology, cultural outreach, and public education in the years when America was emerging from World War II amidst great societal changes. Catherine Fowler’s Dutton’s Dirty Diggers is a fine tribute to Dutton, who planned and led expeditions of teenage girls into remote regions of the Southwest for eleven years. In the later years of the program, she even involved veteran mobile campers in real archaeological excavations at Pueblo Largo. Her work became a model for Girl Scouts USA’s programs for older girls for thirty years.
Born in 1903, Bertha, or “Bert” as she was known to most, developed a lifelong interest in cultures and ancient history. In the 1930s, she attended the University of New Mexico where she studied archaeology, ethnology, and geology. Eventually, she earned a doctoral degree in anthropology and worked in the field throughout her life. Bert devoted much of her time “to educating the public about lifeways of the Indigenous peoples of the region and their histories. . . . She firmly believed that sound information led to better and more nuanced and genuine cross-cultural understanding—a strong message of cultural anthropology to which she was fully committed” (12–13).
I am particularly impressed with the curriculum for the Archaeological Mobile Camps, which typically used two-week on-the-trail experiences to focus on “centers of great archaeological importance . Pueblo and Navajo Indian territory . . . [and] the greatest wonders of nature” (78). In her message from 1950, Bert described the program:
En route, a program constituting a study of human life in its out-of-door setting will be conducted, and with the natural world for its laboratory, and with both ancient and living com-
Dutton’s Dirty Diggers: Bertha P. Dutton and the Senior Girl Scout Archaeological Camps in
munities for its books. This camp will introduce to the young citizens of the United States, the anthropological background of the Southwest, and will serve to widen and sharpen their perspective of the science of man from the standpoint of general education and culture (79, emphasis in original).
Dutton was clearly far ahead of her time for her inclusion of living communities in the understanding of past cultures and the cultural geography of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, non-Native people in many parts of the United States rarely have a chance to meet an Indigenous person. Under Bert’s careful planning, more than two hundred young women (Bert’s “daughters”) got to meet Indigenous peoples in their home territory and learn about their cultures directly from them. It must have been a significant experience for many of them judging from the paths their lives took into advanced degrees in anthropology, biology, and history. The author, a Digger herself, earned a doctoral degree in anthropology, taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, and specialized “in ethnoarchaeological, ethnobiological, and linguistic research of Great Basin Indigenous peoples” (235). At least two Diggers became lawyers. Many became nurses and teachers who taught a wide variety of subjects. Others went on to become artists and musicians. Those who did not pursue careers maintained their interest in history and archaeology and cultivated knowledge both locally and in other parts of the world. Many remained involved in scouting for much of their adult lives. When Bert was asked if she thought she had any influence on her “Digger Daughters,” she was characteristically modest, “I guess I gave some guidance . . or just as a friend” (239).
Dutton’s Dirty Diggers is a good read for anyone interested in the history of archaeology education in the Southwest, the history of the Girl Scouts of the USA, or the changing face of the nation after the war. Bumping over unpaved roads in ancient vehicles with at least one flat tire almost every day, transporting water in a dry environment, camp cooking, and flooded tents: the girls loved it and sang their hearts out the entire trip. While I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I must confess that I cringed a bit when
reading about the removal of human remains during excavations at Pueblo Largo. Although I understand that it happened and was accurately reported, I was surprised to find no explanation of this extremely sensitive issue and its ramifications for archaeological practice since the late-twentieth century.
Thank you for showing me a part of southwestern history that I never knew and a wonderful portrait of a life so well lived. I laughed, I cried, and I will never forget Bertha Dutton and her Dirty Diggers.
–Jeanne Moe Institute for Heritage Education
Essays on American Indian and Mormon History
Edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xxxiv + 372 pp. Cloth, $45.00
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the most successful religions to have emerged from the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s. Today it boasts a membership of over 16 million worldwide and an estimated net worth of several billion dollars. Its foundational text, the Book of Mormon, purports to be a story of the peoples of the America prior to European colonization. These peoples supposedly descended from refugees from Jerusalem who came to be divided into Nephites and Lamanites, the latter of whom bested the former and came to populate the Americas.
Although Joseph Smith Jr. founded the LDS church in New York state, under his successor Brigham Young, it came to dominate Utah and the Intermountain West as part of the conceit of Manifest Destiny. The Mormon takeover of the territory of the Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Navajo was as racist and ruthless as other invasions, even as it was also fraught with efforts at peace and reconciliation.
This collection of essays came out of a seminar hosted by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University in 2015. Participants “sought to make American
Indians the subjects rather than the objects of discussions in relationships with Mormons.” The resulting anthology includes “personal testimonies” such as Michalyn Steele’s “Sovereignty and the Corn Soup Social,” in which she describes a peaceful embrace of both Seneca and Mormon culture. It also includes case studies of “Mormonism and the Catawba Indian Nation” and “A History of the LDS Northern Indian Mission, 1964–1973.”
One of the most poignant essays is “When Wakara Wrote Back” by Max Perry Mueller. Walkara was the powerful Timpanogos Ute chief and slave trader who was able to stall but not prevent Mormon takeover of the land and resources his people held. In the world that would soon overpower his, words on the page mattered more than words in the air. Walkara, who spoke several languages, came to understand this, and so he “wrote” a letter to Brigham Young: a letter of looping lines that cannot be read literally but that can be read as an attempt to “repeal a violent army of colonizers” (the Mormons) who were bent on destroying the Ute way of life.
One of the most provocative essays is “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in which Elise Boxer denounces the LDS church as a “colonizing enterprise” and the Book of Mormon as “a powerful tool to subjugate Indigenous Peoples.” By promoting the Book of Mormon as the history of the original inhabitants of the Americas, Boxer argues, the church obliterates any Indigenous histories; by privileging Mormon settler stories, the church erases any Indigenous claims to land.
In “Reclamation, Redemption, and Political Maneuvering,” Erika Bsumek interrogates the Mormon beliefs of Senator Arthur Watkins and the lawyer Ernest Wilkinson in their push for the federal termination program of the 1950s, which left several tribes stranded and at the mercy of rapacious bankers and developers. On the other hand, Farina Noelani King uncovers a tangled web of cooperation and confrontation as Hawaiian missionaries worked in Navajo country in the 1960s and 1970s. Some returned to settle there, sharing beliefs in the beauty of harmony, “Aloha in Diné Bikéyah.”
In efforts to decolonize Mormonism, Thomas W. Murphy offers “Other Scriptures,” suggesting
a parallel between Joseph Smith, a “seer from a colonializing society,” and Handsome Lake, a Seneca seer who created the Code, in which he attempted to simplify the spiritual practices of the Iroquois. Lori Blaine Taylor, in “Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country,” refutes the idea of a collaboration between Smith and Handsome Lake as “wishful thinking.” However, Michael B. Taylor’s “In the Literature of the Lamanites,” is an invitation to consider Native writers who depicted Latter-day Saints as a way to “create more bilaterally respectful and beneficial future relationships.”
How has the LDS church reframed relationships with Native Americans? The Indian Student Placement Program, ably described by Megan Stanton, has been dismantled, as has the American Indian Studies Program at BYU, which R. Warren Metcalf writes about. The LDS church is ending its ethnocentric dramas, such as the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which had been performed annually in Palmyra, New York, since 1937. And the church nowadays explains the Book of Mormon as a spiritual guide not necessarily as a literal history of American Indians.
Hafen and Rensink’s volume could serve as a guide for further decolonization of the LDS church. It is thick with documentation: there are seventy-three pages of endnotes. The authors are earnest and skilled in their efforts to explore the intertwined histories and experiences of Mormons and Native Americans. This is an anthology that should be widely read.
–Kathryn L. MacKay
Weber State University emeritus
Rails East to Ogden: Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad Story
By Michael R. Polk and Christopher W. Merritt, with contributions by Michael Sheehan, Kenneth P. Cannon, and Molly Boeka Cannon
Cultural Resource Series No. 29, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2021. 321 pp.
Rails East to Ogden comes on the heels of the large push of scholarship that led up to the sesquicentennial of the completion of the first
Transcontinental Railroad, and it provides an in-depth look at the construction and maintenance of one of the most famous sections of the line, the Promontory Route. Following the model of Anan S. Raymond and Richard E. Fike’s 1981 Rails East to Promontory (and its 1994 update), the current authors wrote this expanded volume to once again invite the readers to “use this publication like a historian sitting in the passenger seat” (14). In addition to adding the extra track from Promontory to Ogden, the authors include new information derived from the extensive historical research and archaeological data obtained over the past thirty years. While the volume still reads more like a technical monograph than a popular history, it represents a laudable effort to get archaeological and historical information out of the gray literature and into a more public-friendly format.
Those familiar with the Transcontinental Railroad know that its completion, marked by the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869, forever changed the United States. However, most are likely unaware that this did not mark the end of its construction story. In fact, as this volume illustrates in great detail, the Promontory Route would remain a work in progress for over three decades. Beginning with the establishment of the Lucin Cutoff in 1903, the Promontory Route was eventually abandoned and left to become an archaeological remnant of a monumental moment in American history. Its significance was recognized in the 1950s, leading to the establishment of the seven-acre national historic site in 1957 and culminating in the creation of the expanded Golden Spike National Historic Site in 1965.
The authors use trestles, culverts, ruins, and broken glass to highlight how these archaeological remains tell the story of the railroad well beyond the national historic site boundary. When paired with the opportunities and challenges presented by the rugged landscape, these features reflect the human choices, skill, and effort of those who constructed the line. Yet this is not a linear story to tell (forgive the pun here).
This book is not summer reading; it is adventure reading. Ditch the beach blanket and find the nearest four-wheel-drive vehicle. While this book will most likely appeal to railroad
enthusiasts, historians, and archaeologists, do not underestimate the wow factor of stone and wooden culverts that were so skillfully constructed that they have survived for a centuryand-a-half. In contextualizing these otherwise unremarkable features within the larger story, they become tangible connections to the men who constructed them, the goods that were hauled over them, and the undeniable way this transportation route transformed the nation— for better or for worse.
The book is divided into sections that introduce us to Promontory Route and welcome us to explore its history in a variety of ways. A section on railroad infrastructure (with a glossary in the appendix) will help readers understand the scale of the undertaking of building a railroad and how to recognize the remnants on the landscape today. The profile of the fifty-three stations along the route shows the resources needed to maintain and run the railroad and provides vignettes into seldom-seen aspects of railroads, including the often-invisible individuals and communities who made them possible. An overview of the archaeological work along the line allows readers to see what types of artifacts remain; what investigations have been done, are in progress, or are planned for the future; and how this work is generating new and important information. In presenting this story so transparently, the authors acknowledge the risk of bringing the unsupervised public to these isolated and vulnerable resources. A chapter on looting and vandalism aims to deter these acts and encourages the readers to join the authors as stewards of this important part of American history.
The strongest feature of the book is the exhaustive data that the authors and their colleagues have gathered in order to provide such a comprehensive overview of the line. Having spent many hours researching railroad history myself, I admire and appreciate the clear creativity and commitment from the authors to tease out as much information as possible. Case in point: when faced with the difficult task of tracking census data across the rural route, the authors meticulously retraced the footsteps of individual census takers—sometimes on a daily basis—in order to identify the specific dates that would have enumerated the
individuals working at the small stations along the line. That valuable demographic data was then used to explore the social composition and working conditions within the station camps over time.
I have not read the Raymond and Fike volume that this book pays homage to, and I am not entirely clear from the introduction if this volume represents an expansion of that original text or an entirely new work. Regardless, it is clear that this book has expanded the story, in particular in regards to the role and experiences of the Chinese railroad workers who were central to it. The authors have worked closely with the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association and have dedicated the volume to founding member Judge Michael Wei Kwan. The authors’ archaeological investigations in Utah contributed to Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project, which generated an impressive amount of research and publications in preparation for the 150th anniversary of the Golden Spike. In addition,
the project created a cross-disciplinary and international conversation that has amplified and improved Chinese diaspora scholarship on the topic of railroads and beyond. This volume, in particular its commitment to community outreach and public accessibility, continues on with that work.
Due to the scale of this story and all it contains, it seems reasonable to anticipate that we will see future iterations of it. I hope the next volume will expand on the relationships between Indigenous populations and the construction of the railroad. A “Railroads in Native America” gathering was first held in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2019 and again in Ogden, Utah, in 2022, indicating that exciting new scholarship is being generated that will continue to enhance our understanding of the construction, use, and impact of the Transcontinental Railroad across Utah and beyond.
–Chelsea Rose Southern
Oregon University
Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation
The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042–143X) is published quarterly by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84101–1182, and the University of Illinois Press, 1325 South Oak Street, Champaign, Illinois, 61820. The editor is Holly George, with offices at the same address as the Utah State Historical Society. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the society or its magazine.
The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 1260 copies printed; 847 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 847 total paid circulation; 29 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution, 876; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 384; total, 1260.
The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 1259 copies printed; 880 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 0 dealer and counter sales; 883 total paid circulation; 3 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution, 883; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 376; total, 1259.
CONTRIBUTORS
ROD DECKER’s book, Utah Politics: The Elephant in the Room, was published in July 2019 by Signature Books. He studied at the University of Utah, University of Chicago, and Harvard; was a soldier in Vietnam and a Utah political reporter; married the late Judge Christine Decker; and has three children and six grandchildren.
ELIZA MCKINNEY is a graduate student at the University of Utah studying gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century United States. They live and work in Salt Lake City, Utah.
WARREN METCALF, at the time this article was originally published, was an adjunct professor of history at Idaho State University. He is currently an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, where he specializes in the history of American Indians and the American West. His research interests include the intersections between American Indians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a topic that forms the subject of
his book Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah, and his current writing project, Native Pygmalion: The Mormon Attempt to Recast American Indian Identity
SPENCER STEWART is a digital historian who specializes in the history of modern China. He received a doctorate from the University of Chicago and is currently a post-doctoral fellow with the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia. His interests include computational methodologies, the history of science and technology, agricultural industrialization, and learning more about his home state of Utah.
KYLER T. WAKEFIELD is a current student in the Master of Public Service program at Utah Valley University. He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in American Indian Studies from Utah Valley University in 2020. His research interests include Indigenous history, colonialism, and public history.
UTAH IN FOCUS
Among the unheralded makers of Utah history was Marguerite Sinclair, the office manager and first fulltime paid employee at the Utah State Historical Society. The beating heart of USHS from 1937 until her resignation in 1949, Sinclair was curious, hardworking, and talented. Governor Herbert B. Maw later wrote that her “vivacious personality and considerable talent as a singer charmed legislatures, and her public relations skills brought many new members to the Society.” Her energy and talents not only elevated USHS’s public visibility but also, with the mentorship of Dale L. Morgan, its scholarly respectability. Sinclair worked to professionalize the cataloging and filing of USHS’s small but significant collection of books and manuscripts, as shown in this undated image.
Despite her essential role at the historical society, Sinclair never felt, and apparently never was, truly appreciated for her work and talents. She privately confided to Morgan that UHQ editors J. Cecil Alter and Herbert Auerbach “would pile all the editing and heavy responsibility on me and yet give me no authority.”
Upon her rather sour departure in 1949, Sinclair thanked Morgan for being “the only one who cared enough about my work to send me a word of appreciation for the things I really strove to do for the society. . I fought for it and loved it almost fiercely. I think that is one of the reasons you mean so much to me is because you loved it too.” Utah State Historical Society, photo no. 13536.
