Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, Number 1, 2021

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Influenza’s Progress: The Great Epizootic Flu of 1872–1873 in the North American West

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CONTENTS

By Thomas G. Andrews

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Organizing Farmers in Utah:

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Charles G. Patterson and the Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, 1917–1922

By Matthew C. Godfrey

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Polygamy under the Red Cliffs: Women’s Voices and Historical Memory at Centennial Park

By Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller

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Constructing Zion: Faith, Grit, and the Realm of Possibilities

By Martha Bradley Evans

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In This Issue Reviews and Notices Contributors 2020 Award Winners Utah In Focus

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REVIEWS 79

Finally Statehood!

Utah’s Struggles, 1849–1896

By Edward Leo Lyman Reviewed by Kenneth L. Cannon II

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Prehistoric Suns: Ancient Observations in the American Southwest

Standing on the Walls of Time: Ancient Art of Utah’s Cliffs and Canyons

By Kevin T. Jones; photographs by Layne Miller Reviewed by Andrew Gulliford

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Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics Edited by Matthew L. Harris Reviewed by Patrick Q. Mason

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By Steve Mulligan Reviewed by James R. Swensen

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Despite our own considerable flu fatigue, we are proud to publish a history of such contemporary salience.

A century ago, when agriculture still dominated the Wasatch Front’s economy and landscape, beet farmers were essential machinery in a profitable business of sugar production.

Concerned about unfair wages of growers— and the unrighteous alliance of religious influence in corporate business—the progressive Charles G. Patterson organized a labor association designed to empower the lower cogs

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Our third piece draws on ethnographic observations and oral interviews from the women of Centennial Park, a polygamous sect on the Utah–Arizona border. Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller offers a textured history as told by women profoundly shaped by their peoples’ past—in particular, memories of the state of Arizona’s 1953 raids on Short Creek (now Colorado City). This piece provides first-person accounts of the raids, founding of Centennial Park, commitment to plural marriage, domestic living arrangements, business and educational activities, and strained relationship with the neighboring FLDS in Colorado City.

The resilience, determination, and faith of the Women of the Work, as they are known, is uniquely evident.

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in the sugar beet-production wheel. The brief but compelling history of the Intermountain Sugar Beet Growers Association—and the religious entanglements that continued to influence business in Utah—is skillfully told by Matthew C. Godfrey in our second article.

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Readers are probably familiar with the image reproduced on page 12 titled American Progress. Designed by George Crofutt and drawn by John Gast in 1872, the lithograph advanced the once widely held frontier ideology of American exceptionalism. Concurrent with its drawing, a virulent strain of influenza—at that time simply referred to as the flu—was just as relentlessly moving westward and infecting nine in ten of the continent’s horses. “The very same developments, powers, and technologies that George Crofutt and John Gast touted so unabashedly,” writes Thomas G. Andrews, “do much to explain why the novel influenza virus proceeded more quickly in some places and more slowly in others.” In a multilayered argument, Andrews shows in our lead article how the virus and forces of westward expansion were intertwined. Much more than a story of equine disease, Andrews’s work corrects erroneous narratives about the origins and spread of the disease and offers an illuminating history of colonial encroachment that left Native tribes bereft of their horse populations. Mercifully, the epizootic moved with less fury among the West’s Indigenous peoples.

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In This Issue

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We close with a smart conceptual essay on the spatial configurations of the Plat of the City of Zion. Using Block 88, where Brigham Young positioned his family complex adjacent the temple and tabernacle, Martha Bradley Evans traces the manifestation of an ideology and cultural vision on the cityscape that was continually in motion and adaptive. This long view of Salt Lake’s built environment is a reminder that far from being set in stone, spatial configurations are malleable. Bradley recently presented a version of this essay as the 2020 Juanita Brooks Lecture. We thank Dixie State University and the Juanita Brooks Lecture Series for support of publication.

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Tanned deer hide painting by George Bull Child, 1930s, depicting the massacre of a Piegan (Piikani) Blackfoot camp by U.S. troops, led by Major Eugene Baker, on the Marias River in northwestern Montana, January 23, 1870. Granger Historical Picture Archive.

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Nearly 150 years ago, Utahns of all sorts joined other human inhabitants of the northern Americas in confronting a disease outbreak that was similar to and yet also very different from the current COVID-19 pandemic. Between September 1872 and August 1873, more than 90 percent of horses in North America fell ill with a complaint that most physicians, veterinary surgeons, and practical animal workers diagnosed as “influenza.”1 Contemporaries often referred to the malady as the “horse disease” or “horse plague,” but the virus readily preyed upon other equines, too. In mid-February, a federal revenue inspector discovered influenza “raging in a most violent form” in northern New Mexico; burros, he reported, “are dying off in great numbers.”2 Another authority, meanwhile, claimed that “nearly every horse, mule and burro in and about Santa Fe” was “in some degree affected with this terrible scourge and we do not know how great a calamity it may prove before we are freed from it.”3 English-speaking North Americans knew this “terrible scourge” by many names. The most common, though, was the “epizootic.” Formed by modifying epidemic, with the ancient Greek zôia, animals, replacing demos, people, this moniker spoke to this novel strain of influenza’s focus on other-than-human hosts. The outbreak that I call the Great Epizootic Flu

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eventually killed 2–5 percent of the equines it sickened, usually via bacterial pneumonia or other secondary infections. Marked by a hacking cough, running nose, fever, chills, and prostration, this virulent outbreak first appeared near Toronto, Ontario. Spreading along rail-lines, canals, turnpikes, country roads, and steamship routes, the illness took just a month to engulf all of northeastern North America.

Over the next six weeks, it pushed south from Virginia to Georgia, across the Florida Straits to Cuba, and west to the Lower Mississippi Valley.

The malady reached Missouri in November, then struck the eastern counties of Kansas, Nebraska, Indian Territory, and Texas in late November and early December.

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Influenza’s Progress: The Great Epizootic Flu of 1872–1873 in the North American West

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The contagion next zeroed in on the Intermountain West. The region’s diverse human inhabitants shared a common reliance on horses, mules, and donkeys. The deaths of tens of thousands of equines caused Utahns and other westerners both financial loss and emotional distress. Although most animals who contracted influenza would eventually recover, the Great Epizootic Flu nonetheless constituted a calamity for the inextricably equine-powered societies of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and dozens of Indigenous nations.4 Commerce stalled, economic production slowed, and already troubled relationships between the

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West’s far-flung, deeply divided human populations intensified.

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On March 1, 1873, with the Great Epizootic Flu poised to invade California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, the Placer Herald, a newspaper published in the Mother-Lode mining center of Auburn, printed a pair of arresting stories. The first perpetuated and elaborated on old falsehoods, attributing the Great Epizootic Flu to ponies plundered by American troops from the smallpox-stricken camp of the Piikani (Piegan) leader Heavy Runner in the wake of the infamous Marias Massacre in north-central Montana Territory in January 1870. The second article, which appeared just below the first in an inner page of the Herald, marked the arrival at the newspaper’s offices of American Progress, a famous print designed by the travel impresario George Crofutt and created by the New York–based artist and lithographer John Gast.5 Destined to become one of the most iconic representations of U.S. frontier ideology ever produced, American Progress would almost immediately begin to appear in magazines, books, and other media.

Displayed in chromolithographic form on the walls of tens of thousands of North American homes during the late 1800s, Crofutt and Gast’s handiwork has more recently appeared in dozens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century history and art history textbooks.6 These short pieces drawn from the same column of a small-town newspaper spoke to undeniably human dramas of dispossession, violence, and migration. When placed in the context of the Great Epizootic Flu, though, this pair of news stories also offers a timely reminder of the roles that other-than-human entities have always played in shaping the history of Utah and the broader West. Using these two articles as its point of departure, this essay explores how the Great Epizootic Flu moved through the West and examines what these movements and the meanings various people made of them tell us about conquest and colonization, processes in which humans, other-than-human animals, and microbes all played central roles. The geography of the Great Epizootic Flu’s westward expansion mapped onto American Progress in revealing ways. The very same developments, powers, and technologies that George Crofutt

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and John Gast touted so unabashedly do much to explain why the novel influenza virus proceeded more quickly in some places and more slowly in others.

Counterintuitively, the grinding consequences of U.S. and Canadian conquest and colonialism—especially the decimation of Indigenous populations, the destruction of Native-held horse wealth, and the restriction of Native American and métis mobility—served to delay the virus’s advance through Indian Country and mask the epizootic’s impacts on Native Peoples. This dynamic complicates a pair of oft-told tales about the relationship between infectious diseases, the subjugation of Indigenous nations, and settler colonial expansion: first, the common association that Europeans and European Americans had long drawn between Native peoples and contagions—an association that often besmirched Indigenous Americans as threats to white populations; and second, the prevailing consensus among twentieth- and twenty-first-century epidemiologists and historians that novel pathogenic threats always struck Indian Country harder than neighboring regions of American and Canadian settlement. gh As February shaded into March, Joseph Walkup, the bearded 53-year-old editor of the Placer Herald, rightly suspected that it was just a matter of time before the malady breached the Sierras and descended on the gold country’s beasts of burden. Walkup had been warily eyeing the Great Epizootic Flu for months. Through wire-service reports and newspaper exchanges, Walkup had undoubtedly encountered the dominant narrative of the Great Epizootic Flu’s origins: the scourge that Americans initially called the “Canadian horse disease” had first appeared on Toronto’s market-farming outskirts in late September 1872. Yet in the short, untitled item he published in the Herald’s March 1, 1873, edition, Walkup chose instead to tell a story that was at once compatible with and distinct from the widespread reports that the outbreak had begun in Ontario.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Walkup pinned the outbreak on the wars of imperial expansion that U.S. forces had been waging for decades

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Illustration titled “Teaming in Nevada,” published in Crofutt’s Western World, March 1873 issue, as the epizootic flu was marching across the West. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.

against the Piikani (one of the three nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy [Niitsitapi], often referred to by Americans as Piegans) and other Indigenous peoples.7 “The horse epizootic,” the editor bluntly declared, “is traced to General Sheridan. It may be remembered,” Walkup spurred his readers, “that Phil Sheridan killed a lot of sick squaws and papooses of the Piegan Indians, on the plains, some years ago.” The Auburn scribe was undoubtedly referring to the bloodbath known as the Marias or Baker Massacre, a vicious January 1870 attack by U.S.

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troops on a peaceful Piikani village headed by Heavy Runner on the Marias River. Sheridan had provided the orders that authorized the attack, which Major Eugene Baker and his men then executed. Baker and his troops, Walkup alleged, not only mowed down at least 173 Piikani men, women, children, and elders—and possibly many more—but also “stole all their robes and ponies.”8 Walkup claimed that these plundered goods bore hidden pathogenic burdens. Piikani robes,

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the editor explained, “contained the virus of the small-pox.” Once these robes “got into the Eastern market,” they began to “spread the smallpox, which killed its thousands of victims.”9 Walkup also linked the Marias Massacre to the outbreak of horse sickness that was pushing into California as the Placer Herald went to press.

The “ponies” that had been “stolen at the same time” as the smallpox-infested robes, Walkup declared, “were afflicted with a terrible distemper [a term that encompassed several equine complaints, including influenza], but finally partially recovered.” Having regained their health, the Herald article asserted, these plundered ponies “were driven into Canada and sold, and from them the epizootic broke out, crossed over into the United States, and has well nigh swept all over the country.” Walkup concluded his story with a down-home moral: the Great Epizootic Flu, he declared, “is chickens coming home to roost with a vengeance.”

Walkup’s barnyard quip cast the horse disease as cosmic payback. Having slaughtered a smallpox-ravaged village inhabited almost entirely by non-combatants, U.S. troopers had reaped personal profit by unloading stolen robes and ponies on unsuspecting purchasers. Sheridan’s orders and the greed of Baker and his men not only dishonored the uniforms they wore, Walkup claimed, but also led to the sickening of thousands of people in the Northeast as well as millions of horses along the Great Epizootic Flu’s path from Toronto to California.

This little article raises big questions. Where did a Mother-Lode newspaperman come up with such a story, and why would he seek to attribute a virulent equine malady to the misdeeds of General Sheridan and his underlings on the distant Montana frontier? Could buffalo robes stolen from the Piikani actually have carried smallpox to the eastern states? And is there any reason to credit Walkup’s assertion that the ponies taken during the slaughter of Heavy Runner’s camp had initiated the Great Epizootic Flu? Delving more deeply into this article’s provenance reveals how partisan politics and the reproduction of misinformation through wire-service reports and newspaper exchanges gave rise to this startling denunciation of the Army’s actions

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Joseph Walkup, former lieutenant governor of California, was the Placer Herald’s co-owner and editor. Walkup attributed the epizootic’s origins to U.S. military aggression against the Piikani and other Indigenous peoples. Wikipedia Commons.

during and after the Marias Massacre. General Sheridan, the architect of William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea, was an ardent Republican and long-time crony of Ulysses S. Grant. This made him an obvious target for Joseph Walkup, the Herald’s co-owner and editor. Walkup, a staunch Democrat who had served his adopted state as lieutenant governor, was an Ohio-born carpenter who reached California in August 1849 but soon forsook mining to establish himself as a prosperous merchant and wheat farmer. Walkup likely decided to dredge up old controversies over Sheridan’s culpability for the Marias Massacre to stoke his readers’ outrage at the corruption of the Grant administration; his story about Piikani ponies and the Great Epizootic, after all, reached print less than six months after another Democratic paper, New York’s Sun, broke open the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Walkup’s partisanship combined with his combativeness to shape the style and purpose of this article.

The Auburn editor, as his counterpart at another gold-country paper aptly phrased it, “wielded a battle-ax rather than a rapier.”10 Walkup invoked barbed mistruths first bandied about in the sordid aftermath of the Marias Massacre to persuade his readership of

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Contrarians, including some of Bear Head’s fellow survivors, hewed to a different narrative. “After the firing was over,” a Piikani woman claimed, “the soldiers went through the camp and picked out what robes and blankets they wanted for themselves and the rest was all got together and burned also all of the lodges and some of the wounded people were burned up.”14 More dramatic still was the recollection of Horace J. Clarke, a métis Piikani who had helped guide Baker to Heavy Runner’s camp and who insisted that “several thousand buffalo robes were taken from the people” by cavalrymen.15 Back in 1870 and 1871, soldiers, settlers, and at least one eastern newspaper told similar tales.

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Although no direct evidence ever emerged to peg the arrival of smallpox in the eastern United States on bison robes from Heavy Runner’s people, an allegation to that effect later appeared in one major American newspaper.

Although the article in question was published in Cincinnati, it centered on events on the East Coast. “Prominent gentlemen here,” the Enquirer claimed with equal measures of gravity and vagueness on November 11, 1871, “attribute the spread of the small-pox in Philadelphia and other cities to the sale of buffalo robes there, taken from the Blackfeet and Piegan camps, where the disease prevailed two years ago.”17

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Other historians have detailed the memory fights that ensued between Montana settlers, Piikani survivors, eastern reformers, and military leaders including Sheridan, Baker, and Sherman.12 For our purposes, then, we need only focus on the narrower matter of whence Walkup derived these macabre tales that traced outbreaks of human and animal disease to stolen robes and plundered ponies. Most perpetrators, survivors, and bystanders of the massacre insisted that Baker and his men had immediately set fire to all Piikani “property” seized from the Piikani, including hundreds of bison robes.

Though just a boy at the time of the massacre, for instance, a Piikani known as Bear Head later remembered that “all of the robes and subsistence of the camp and everything else which belonged to the camp had been burned.”13

Despite a subordinate’s insistence that Baker “wouldn’t let us take anything,” least of all “anything that belonged to [the Piikani], for they had the smallpox among them,” the sudden appearance of hundreds of bison robes at Montana trading posts in the wake of the attack raised suspicions. Ignoring orders by the U.S. Secretary of War to quarantine “infected robes and furs,” an Indian Service functionary near Fort Benton permitted one such consignment of robes to be sold on the Montana market, claiming that this particular batch had “not spread or caused any contagion or disease among persons handling or using them.”

This probably enabled most of the robes taken from the Piikani to pass through Fort Benton en route to Indigenous trading partners as well as what Walkup referred to as “the Eastern market.”16

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Sheridan’s venality and Grant’s corruption.

As with most outrages perpetrated by the U.S. Army during the Indian Wars, Baker’s assault prompted scathing disagreements over meaning and memory.11 And as with similar acts of genocidal violence on the jagged edge of America’s expanding empire, the bare-knuckle business of controlling the narrative after the decimation of a peaceful camp populated almost entirely by women, children, and elders hinged on seemingly simple matters of fact: How many Piikani had actually succumbed to American bullets and bayonets? Which tribal leader was in charge of the village that Baker attacked? How many of the victims were men of fighting age—and how many were non-combatants?

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Joseph Walkup apparently encountered some version of this Enquirer article, for it dovetailed with the smear he leveled toward Sheridan in March 1873. The Enquirer story might also have inspired the California editor to invent a news story of his own in hopes of convincing readers that the Marias Massacre had sowed the seeds for the continent-wide outbreak of equine influenza that erupted thirty-three months later and nearly 2000 miles east of the Piikani homelands.

As Walkup must have understood, credible authorities on the Great Epizootic Flu had concurred from the scourge’s earliest days that the disease initially appeared outside of Toronto.

James Law, the Scots-born, Edinburgh-trained founder of Cornell’s veterinary school and author of the most detailed study ever written on

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the epizootic, emphasized that “unlike the majority of former epidemics whose origin has been obscure,” this equine affliction “appears to have sprung into existence in the center of the North American continent, and in a distinct locality, which can be definitely pointed out.” Law’s correspondence with his fellow Scottish emigrant and veterinary surgeon, Andrew Smith, co-founder of the eminent Ontario Veterinary College, pinpointed this “distinct locality” as “the townships of York, Scarboro’, and Markham, about fifteen miles north” of Toronto.18 Rather than a reflection of mainstream understandings, then, the Placer Herald’s tale of ill-gotten Blackfeet horses as the source of the Great Epizootic Flu seems to have built upon and perpetuated a fringe narrative. Walkup was almost certainly embellishing a rumor that had begun to circulate in the western U.S. press in mid-February, 1873, after the Helena (MT) Weekly Herald published a report from “a gentleman recently in the city from Benton”—Fort Benton, an old fur-trading post on the banks of the Upper Missouri River where tensions between Piikani and newcomers had long centered. The Helena paper paraphrased the Benton man’s “opinion that the disease known as the ‘epizootic’ originated among the ponies of the Peigan [sic] Indians.” The Helena Herald’s unnamed informant declared that “last spring these ponies (up in the British possessions) were all sick with a disease that had every symptom” associated with the Great Epizootic Flu. “A good many animals,” the Montana paper continued, “for want of proper care, died.” He alleged that the disease then spread from the Piikani homelands to “the ponies of the tribes further east, until, finally, it broke out among the ponies and horses in Canada.”19 Whether Walkup came across this story in the Helena Herald or elsewhere is impossible to know. Walkup’s next move, though, seems clear enough: he distorted the hearsay that emanated from Montana by combining it with the Cincinnati Enquirer’s spurious 1871 allegation that diseased robes stolen from Heavy Runner’s camp had caused smallpox to break out in Philadelphia and other unnamed eastern cities.

An experienced politician and journalist, Walkup knew that his act of historical revision in the service of assailing Sheridan, Grant, and the

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Republicans was more likely to gain traction if it squared with other accounts his readers had encountered. Confusion among Piikani and Americans alike regarding the number and fate of the ponies Baker’s command had stolen from Heavy Runner’s village ensured that the connections Walkup sought to draw between the Marias Massacre and the Great Epizootic Flu would ring like truth. No one disputed that many or perhaps even all of the Piikani ponies had changed hands in a threestep process. First, the Army allowed Montana settlers to recover horses they could show were their “proved property.” Several officers then claimed one or more ponies for their own use.20 Finally, Brevet Brigadier General Régis de Trobriand auctioned off approximately 250 horses at Fort Shaw on April 30 and May 1, 1870.

Although Trobriand described the remaining horses as “poorly looking animals,” he also declared their sale “a remarkable success,” smugly adding in a report to his superior that the “proceeds” from the auction “more than cover for the government the expense of the expedition” against the Piikani.21 Despite Trobriand’s snipe about the ponies’ unimpressive appearance, there is no reason to believe that these animals were suffering from influenza at the time they were sold, nor did this auction in Montana jibe with Walkup’s tale of soldiers driving Piikani ponies to Canadian markets. Anyone familiar with the Marias Massacre, however, would have known that Trobriand was an unreliable witness, prone to twist and turn the truth into whatever shape best suited his purposes.22 Piikani people, meanwhile, not only remembered the kinfolk and robes they had lost, but also the ponies Baker and his men had captured.

In the 1910s, these memories led three of Heavy Runner’s heirs—Comes with Rattles, Spear Woman, and Last Gun (also known as William Upham, Emma Miller, and Dick Kipp, respectively)—to petition the U.S. Senate for $75,000 to “reimburse” them, as one Montana senator explained in 1916, for Heavy Runner’s “death and for property taken from him at the time of the Baker massacre.”23 The affidavits gathered in support of the heirs’ petition disagreed wildly on how many equines U.S. cavalrymen had driven off. Bear Head described it simply as a “great herd.” Horace Clarke estimated the soldiers’ haul at 1300, while his fellow guide Joseph Kipp reckoned it at “something like Five thousand

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gh The second of the two curious stories to appear in the Placer Herald as the Great Epizootic Flu bore down on the Sierras also trafficked in myth-making, but this time with more obvious intentions and a more direct intellectual lineage. Instead of telling a shaggy-dog story about the Marias Massacre, corrupt troopers and military officers, and disease outbreaks that spread from Piikani camps to settlers and their livestock, this news article offered a brief but illuminating discussion of one of the most widely circulated illustrations of its time, an image that has loomed for nearly 150 years as what the cultural historian David Scobey astutely describes as “a handy meme for ‘Manifest Destiny’ or ‘the frontier thesis.’”26 Entitled “Beautiful Picture,” Walkup’s second article praised “a beautiful chromo[lithograph],

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Joseph Walkup lacked the ability to reproduce American Progress in his newspaper’s pages, so he painted a word-picture of Gast’s print instead. He began with the image’s “central figure,” described as “a female with a book” (the editor did not mention that Gast had titled the book “Common School”) who was “unwinding a telegraph wire that spans the continent.” As this goddess-like eminence glided westward above the Great Plains, her head emblazoned with what Walkup recognized as “the star of empire,” the West’s Indigenous occupants—“the buffalo, the savages, the bear, deer and other wild animals”—all took flight. Into the vacuum opened up by this bloodless exodus of wild beasts and peoples poured successive waves of newcomers, listed by Walkup as “the emigrant train, the prospectors, the pony express, and in the rear is the overland stages, followed by the husbandman and the railroad train.”31

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Alas, other discrepancies of fact between the affidavits gathered by Heavy Runner’s heirs—as well as disparities between their recollections of the massacre and its aftermath and official reports filed by U.S. Army officials in 1870—gave Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane the excuse he needed to undermine the heirs’ cause before the Senate.25 Last Gun, Spear Woman, and Comes with Rattles would never see a cent of reparations, nor would any other survivors of the Marias Massacre or descendants of those slaughtered by federal troops. As for Joseph Walkup, his casual effort to pin blame for the Great Epizootic Flu on the Grant régime languished inside a little newspaper that probably had a few thousand subscribers at the very most.

‘American Progress.’”27 The California newspaper went on to describe this 12- by 16-inch color engraving, which was based on an 1872 painting by John Gast that had been commissioned

by George Crofutt, a travel writer, “old-time Coloradan,” and editor of Crofutt’s Western World.28 Over the previous months, Crofutt had repeatedly used Western World to tout the print—“a present” that any reader could obtain for the low annual subscription price of $1.50.

Finally, after unexpected time-consuming delays, Crofutt crowed: “The great work has been accomplished—accomplished in America—and stands forth as one of the finest chromos of its class ever produced.”29 Crofutt received the first batch of 10,000 prints on February 15, 1873, at his Nassau Street office in Lower Manhattan; he and his small staff devoted the next three days solely to “the work of mailing them.”30 Thereafter, at least one copy of Gast’s image traveled by wagon, train, and postal carrier to Auburn, California, covering some 2,800 miles in less than two weeks before it arrived as a “present” on the desk of the Herald editor.

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head.” The estimates of other eyewitnesses, though, hewed much more closely to the figure of several hundred that Baker, Trobriand, Sheridan, and other military leaders had settled on in early 1870. None of the affidavits filed as part of the Heavy Runner heirs’ case to remedy what they called “a great wrong committed by Federal troops against us and our people” mentioned the ponies’ final disposition, probably because the case pivoted on a simpler fact that no one disputed: the animals, as Horace Clarke aptly put it, had been “taken from the people.”24 Where these creatures ended up was immaterial to the heirs in the case they were pressing against the government.

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This seventeen-line item in the Placer Herald seemed to draw liberally from the descriptions of American Progress that Crofutt began publishing even before he began to distribute Gast’s chromo to Western World subscribers.

It hardly seems a stretch, then, to use Crofutt’s writings on Gast’s artwork to flesh out the meanings that Walkup and his readers might

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American Progress, lithograph by John Gast after design by George Crofutt. Published in Crofutt’s Western World, 1873. Library of Congress, no. LCDIG-ppmsca-09855.

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Crofutt concluded with a breathless paean to Gast’s work and the scenes of conquest and displacement that lent American Progress its moral and narrative heft:

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Crofutt began his description of the Gast lithograph by framing what he saw as the central historical drama of the West. “This rich and wonderful country—the progress of which at the present time, is the wonder of the old world—was,” he noted, “until recently, inhabited exclusively by the lurking savage and wild beasts of prey.” Recent years, though, had witnessed the radical transformation of “the ‘Far West,’ which is destined,” Crofutt declared, “at an early day, to be the vast granary, as it is now the great treasure chamber[,] of our country.”

The mission of American Progress, the tourism impresario explained, was to illustrate “how this change has been wrought, and by whom.”33

Crofutt left no doubt regarding who had effected the “change” American Progress endeavored to celebrate. “The general tone of the picture on the left,” the region of the canvas to which Gast consigned Indian peoples and other wild creatures, “declares darkness, waste and confusion, while from the right, life, activity, light, flash their influences upon the scenes depicted.” Crofutt proceeded to tell how American Progress portrayed the West’s native fauna and peoples as “fleeing.” Running away from the “presence of the wondrous vision” presented by the ethereal female figure Crofutt named “Progress,” Indigenous westerners instead directed “their despairing faces” towards the blue waters of the Pacific, for “the ‘Star,’” Crofutt proclaimed, “is too much for them.”34

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have made of this “Beautiful Picture.” Especially relevant is Crofutt’s “Description of Our Oil Chromo Entitled AMERICAN PROGRESS!,” a half-page advertisement for Gast’s lithograph from the February 1873 edition of Western World. Because this advertisement reached the Auburn newspaperman even before American Progress itself, it helped to script how he and other viewers made sense of the mythic tableau that Gast had translated onto canvas based on Crofutt’s detailed instructions.32

What American man, woman or child, does not feel a heart-throb of exultation as they think of the glorious achievements of Progress since the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, on

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Text describing John Gast’s lithograph American Progress, which was reproduced in Crofutt’s Western World, April 1873. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.

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staunch old Plymouth Rock! What home, from the miner’s humble cabin to the stately marble mansion of the capitalist, should be without this Great National picture, which illustrates in the most artistic manner all the gigantic results of American Brains and Hands!

Who would not have such a beautiful token to remind them of our country’s grandeur and enterprise, which have caused the mighty wilderness to blossom like the rose!!!35 Joseph Walkup evidently agreed with Crofutt’s aesthetic estimation of this “Great National picture.” He entitled his story, after all, “A Beautiful Picture.”36 Like other members of the western press fraternity, Walkup commended American Progress on both artistic and ideological grounds.37 In recent decades, by contrast, American Progress has come under fire both for its uneven quality and its white supremacy.38 The forthright didacticism that so appealed to Walkup and so many of his contemporaries in the United States have nonetheless ensured the image a central, even outsized role in efforts by historians and other students of the past to reckon with the enduring legacies of “manifest destiny” and settler–colonial violence in the West.

Calling into question the agendas that shaped the production and initial reception of American Progress remains valuable and important.

Other interpretive possibilities, though, come into view when we examine Walkup’s response to the print in tandem with his invention of a spurious rumor pinning the fast-approaching Great Epizootic Flu on Piikani ponies and American armies of conquest. The confluence of this pair of stories with the spatial-temporal patterns by which the novel influenza virus colonized western North America, in short, opens up an epidemiological reading of American Progress. Ironically, the same dynamics that Crofutt sought to celebrate by commissioning Gast to create American Progress did much to shape the novel equine influenza virus’s course from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. While the epizootic spread more rapidly through settlement corridors and archipelagos linked by animal power than along newly completed railroad lines, the malady faced much slower going when it approached the region’s remaining strongholds of Indigenous

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autonomy. This pattern exposes a key contradiction of the fringe narratives that blamed Indian peoples and horses for spreading smallpox and influenza to northeastern North America: the epizootic reached Indian Country later and had less discernible impact on Indigenous homelands than it did on the corridors and archipelagos where settler colonial power was strongest. gh The Great Epizootic Flu invaded the West along two east-to-west corridors. The first of these led from the Missouri River ports of western Missouri, eastern Kansas, and eastern Nebraska to Nevada’s Comstock Lode via Colorado’s piedmont, Latter-day Saints strongholds in north-central Utah, and eastern Nevada’s mining camps. Although the epizootic initially spread more slowly along its second major pathway, which led from central Texas through southern New Mexico and Arizona, it nonetheless reached the Pacific Coast of southern California a few weeks before pushing through the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco Bay. From each of these corridors, the virus spun outward. By late summer 1873, every stretch of western North America appears to have suffered from the epizootic’s ravages.

The Great Epizootic Flu’s course and rate of westward expansion hinged on a number of variables. The disease made uneven progress on its way from Toronto to the mid-continental prairies and plains, reaching Kansas and Nebraska a week or more before it hit East Texas.

After crossing into the western half of North America, the malady continued to move at rates that varied from place to place. Most notably, it began to gobble up ground along its southern route in late January or early February even as it slowed along the more northerly course from Nevada toward San Francisco. Horses, mules, and donkeys living beyond these two main east–west corridors, meanwhile, remained largely unaffected by the disease until spring.

North Americans of the early 1870s disagreed vociferously about the nature of the Great Epizootic Flu and the means by which it spread from one organism to another. Intriguingly, though, the two most prominent claims regarding the epidemiology of equine influenza

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Plenty of mysteries regarding flu’s epidemiology remain. A large body of research nonetheless indicates that the viral particles responsible for the Great Epizootic Flu indeed spread through short-distance atmospheric transmission and direct exposure to infected animals. Most infections probably resulted when flu-afflicted equines and previously healthy animals shared space. Creatures infected by novel influenza virus, though, were also constantly shedding the virus into their surroundings, particularly by coughing, sneezing, whinnying, and running at the nose. The droplets thus produced carried influenza virus over short distances.

The incessant involuntary process of breathing, meanwhile, expelled flu-bearing aerosols into the air, where particles of flu virus could then travel distances of a mile or more, particularly in the cold, dry, and windy winter conditions that prevailed across much of the West.

When uninfected animals inhaled a sufficient load of the virus, influenza began to set in. The flu virus can remain infectious in the external environment for several days, so contaminated surfaces—the floors of railroad stock cars, the whips used by stagecoach drivers, horse gear and the contraptions used to hitch equines to conveyances, and even the skin, clothing, and footwear of people who came into contact with equines—may sometimes have played a part in

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Contemporary observers marveled at the epizootic’s prodigious capacity to infect entire populations of equines in mere days. The Salt Lake Herald-Republican, for instance, pronounced in early January that “the horse disease . . . has broken out almost simultaneously along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains for many hundreds of miles.”42 The Virginia City Enterprise published an even more detailed take on the horse flu’s capacity to spread in leaps and bounds. “Bateman,” whom the Nevada paper described as a “well-known surveyor” from the vicinity of Ely, regaled a Comstock Lode journalist with a “frightful account” of how “the disease spread over a thousand miles of ground with the swiftness of a flash of lightning. It was everywhere at once.” Having afflicted “nearly all the horses in Steptoe Valley and throughout the country,” the disease found new hosts to infect along the road connecting the booming mining camp of Pioche to nearby Mormon settlements as well as to the Salt Lake Valley.

After the novel virus made its way into the respiratory tracts of horses, mules, and donkeys, it attacked with stunning dispatch and ferocity. “Many wagons loaded with merchandise,” Bateman claimed, “are to be seen standing in the deserts, the animals belonging to which died of the disease, or so many of them that not enough were left to draw the vehicles.” So hard did the novel flu virus strike its victims, the surveyor alleged, that one wagoner found himself stranded on a desolate stretch of road after eight members of his twelve-animal team took ill with the epizootic, then died soon after.43

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Utah’s Deseret News, for example, invoked both of these routes of transmission in February 1873. The epizootic, it speculated, “may be infectious,” spread directly from one animal to another through some unknown means (germ theory only began to gain broader support later in the 1870s, and the pathogens we call “viruses” remained unknown for decades thereafter).

Yet not all observations of the horse sickness, the Deseret News hastened to acknowledge, seemed consistent with this hypothesis. “We hear of cases,” the Salt Lake paper noted, “where animals have been attacked by the disease, although carefully excluded from others.”

This seemed to leave but one other possibility: “The cause of the disease must be ‘in the air.’”39

transmitting the malady.40 Widespread allegations that the Great Epizootic Flu also afflicted humans, dogs, cats, poultry, and other species raise still another possible source of transmission: the “horse disease” may sometimes have spread via non-equine hosts, including humans.41 In the vast majority of cases, though, the novel influenza virus probably spread from equine to equine via direct contact or shorter-distance airborne mechanisms.

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published in western newspapers of the early 1870s—that the “horse disease” either spread through the atmosphere or via close bodily contact—are understood by scientists today as the primary pathways by which influenza viruses infect new hosts.

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Articles like this one captured the Great Epizootic Flu’s power to afflict equines across tens of thousands of square miles with alarming alacrity. When read beside other accounts in the western press and reports from government officials, such stories also enable us to reconstruct the contagion’s movements across space and time—and

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Adoniram B. Judson’s map of the outbreak’s spread in 1872–73, showing the advance of the flu through the West in uniform bands rather than in the more complex pattern explored in this essay. Map originally published in Judson, “History and Course of the Epizootic Among Horses upon the North American Continent in 1872–73,” American Public Health Association Reports 1 (1873).

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thus to develop robust explanations for why it covered ground more rapidly in some parts of the West than others. Contingencies such as prevailing weather conditions and the disease’s later arrival on the southern Plains compared to the Missouri River Valley helped account for the differential rates at which the novel flu virus subdued the West’s equines. More significant, though, was the interplay between the size and density of equine populations, the frequency and intensity of viral contact, and the vulnerability of potential hosts to infection.44 While chance inflected the patterns of flu transmission, the still-unfolding legacies of the West’s human and more-than-human history did far more to shape the course of the virus’s progress.

Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, waterborne trade routes fueled human epidemics in western North America. The smallpox virus that was ravaging Heavy Runner’s Piikani camp before the Marias Massacre, to cite an especially relevant example, had traveled up the Missouri River from American settlements to Fort Benton in late 1869, following the same waterway that earlier generations of the same virus had taken before depopulating Indigenous villages throughout the northern and northwestern plains in 1837–1838. In northeastern North America, the Great Epizootic Flu’s outward expansion from Ontario was widely blamed on railroads, for the outbreak seemed to spread most rapidly along the region’s track networks.45 On reaching the West in late 1872, by contrast, the novel influenza virus began to travel more quickly along roadways where animal-powered transportation endured than it did via train or steamship.

With some notable exceptions, there is little evidence that the Great Epizootic Flu extended its reach through the West by water, presumably because the region’s horses and other equines rarely traveled by boat.46 Instead, the epizootic mostly moved over land, as the timing of its arrival at the main port cities on the Pacific Coast shows. The disease reached Los Angeles and San Francisco after it struck Tucson, Arizona, and Carson City, Nevada. After hitting the California littoral in late March and April, it took the novel influenza virus more than a month to spread to Portland and Seattle, and not until midsummer would it attack British Columbia’s equines.47

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A closer look at the intricacies of the equine flu’s movements through the continental interior shows that railroads played surprisingly little role in spreading the virus. In late 1872 and early 1873, regular train service had begun on just one transcontinental line, the Union Pacific-Central Pacific (UP-CP). Several other transcontinental projects remained under construction. In the north, tracks stopped in western Ontario and eastern Dakota Territory; in the south, they extended no farther than eastern Texas. Between roughly the 97th meridian and the crest of the Sierra, the only railways in operation other than the UP-CP mainline were the Kansas Pacific and Denver Pacific, a pair of inter-connected lines that linked Denver to Kansas City and Cheyenne, respectively, as well as several short lines scattered through Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

We can test the relative importance of railroads in the Great Epizootic Flu’s westward expansion by examining how closely the spatiotemporal pattern of the disease’s spread followed these railway routes. Before reaching the central Great Plains, the virus’s expansion mapped quite closely onto Canadian and U.S. track networks. After reaching the eastern portions of Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas in late November and early December, though, the horse disease began to part ways with the transcontinental railway. In late December, Cheyenne, which lay on the UP, remained unaffected even as influenza began to strike equines in Denver, Georgetown, and other parts of Colorado’s piedmont and mineral belt. “There have been no mails or food up for two days,” one Colorado journalist kvetched, “breadstuffs are high and fears of a famine are entertained.”48 Wyoming’s capital lay due north from Denver and was connected by rail to Colorado, Omaha, and the East, yet Cheyenne remained disease-free. “The epizootic seems to be traveling south,” the Cheyenne Daily Leader averred on January 11, 1873, “and we hope that Wyoming, with its fine climate and pure atmosphere, will evade the grasp of the formidable foe.”49 Alas, the Great Epizootic Flu hit Wyoming’s largest town the next day, carried not by train but instead by several horses that a local man had recently used to visit Colorado.

“Within a few days,” the Daily Leader resignedly predicted, “the disease will probably spread among all the horses in this city, and our horsemen will have a busy time in taking proper care

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The epizootic rippled outward from Salt Lake to other parts of northern and central Utah as well as eastern Nevada. The virus hit Ogden and Ophir, Utah, by January 18; Eureka, Nevada, by the 24th; Corinne, Utah, in time to have become “sporadical” by the 25th; and Pioche, Nevada, by February 5.59 Many Utah mines temporarily shuttered their operations throughout the second half of January.60 On February 4, equines previously “affected with the epizootic” were reportedly “nearly all recovered.”

But with “snow blockades in the cañons of the Wasatch” remaining “serious,” a wire-service report claimed that “much distress is anticipated among the miners for want of food.”61

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Equines in that Utah rail center had first fallen ill with the Great Epizootic Flu on January 18, a week after a Deseret News story—ominously headlined “It Has Arrived”—told of how Salt Lake City’s equines had been “seized with violent coughing, wheezing, and other premonitory symptoms” of the flu.52 By January 20, the virus had become “very general, . . . spreading among horses and mules” in Salt Lake. Transportation to Camp Douglas, where the U.S. Army was then training watchful eyes on the region’s Mormons, stopped; nearly all “the stage and mail lines” serving Salt Lake City “[we]re hauling off their teams.”53 Wells Fargo’s decision to suspend stage service compelled “the mails . . . to be conveyed by men on foot” starting on January 27.54 A few days later, the horse disease “ha[d] driven all the horses from the streets,” including those who had drawn Salt Lake’s streetcars, leaving oxen to pull heavy loads through the city.55 “To meet the demand created by the prevalence of the Epizootic,” the Zion Commercial Mercantile Institution advertised

“A FINE LOT OF HORSE BLANKETS” to citizens eager to keep infected equines warm.56 Salt Lake’s drug stores began trumpeting all sorts of liniments and elixirs as ready cures for equine ills. Even fuel merchants tried to get in on the action, warning consumers to “look out for a coal panic” and promising to deliver them from winter’s chill by “provid[ing] the coal burning public with any quantity of good lump coal, free from rock and slack, at their standard prices.”57 In addition to the fears and inconveniences associated with sick horses and mules, Utah settlers also confronted a concurrent outbreak of a dreaded human disease—smallpox, which hit the territory’s children and Native peoples especially hard.58

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of their animals.”50 After ravaging Cheyenne, the novel influenza took less than a week to hit Laramie, fifty miles west of the capital and also on the UP line. Thereafter, the epizootic again slowed to a crawl. It took the virus until very late February or early March to reach Evanston, Wyoming, 300 miles west of Laramie on the UP, but just 80 miles from Ogden.51

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Street View of Salt Lake City, ca. 1870–1890. Note the presence of horses and their essential role in the territorial economy. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s15777.

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Already, many—perhaps even most—of Salt Lake City’s horses and mules had returned to work. Such animals, though, “still give evidence,” jeered the Tribune, “of having been in the pest house.”62 More than a month after the epizootic had first reached Salt Lake, the Tribune could finally claim with palpable relief that the malady had “got out of our midst at last, and our equines again begin to look fat and saucy.” At long last, ox teams had “go[ne] out of fashion,” the Tribune continued, “and business again begins to assume a brighter aspect.”63 During the same weeks that the Great Epizootic Flu was advancing from Colorado to Utah via the mining regions and ranching hinterlands that sprawled between the Front Range and the Wasatch Front, the malady was simultaneously expanding its range southward into New Mexico. Between late December and mid-January the virus jumped from Denver to Santa Fe—a distance of nearly 400 miles, most of it beyond existing railway tracks, and interrupted mail service between the New Mexican capital and the Colorado shipping centers of Pueblo and Kit Carson.64 In early February, one stage company official described “every one of their mules and horses” as “badly infected with the disease.”65 Already El Paso had begun to suffer from the novel influenza virus, which had traversed Texas during the preceding two months.66 During the first six weeks of 1873, then, the Great Epizootic Flu had parted ways with water- and train-based routes of transmission. After penetrating Colorado, it spilled over into Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico. From mid-February through May, the spread of the horse disease along a southern corridor linking El Paso with Los Angeles would go on to outpace its advance from the mining camps of eastern Nevada to San Francisco. During these same months, the virus would find a ready supply of new hosts along the stage routes that branched off to the north and south of the West’s primary east– west transportation routes.

In May, as the horse flu was finally relenting its hold on San Francisco, an editorial in that city’s Evening Bulletin reflected on the patterns of transmission that characterized the Great Epizootic Flu’s westward expansion. “There is a lesson for men in the late extraordinary malady by which our horses were affected,” the

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Evening Bulletin intoned, “which the functionaries, whose duty it is to preserve the health of the city, should not ignore. The horse complaint traveled across the continent,” the Bay-Area paper pointed out, “because there was a chain of animals along the line of railroad and continuous settlements for its transmission. We heard of it at Omaha before it made its appearance at Salt Lake.” The disease had likewise “developed at Oakland before a single case occurred” in San Francisco.67 To this writer, at least, the moral of the epizootic seemed clear as day: the same processes that Crofutt had touted as the embodiments of “American Progress” were also subjecting westerners to new pathogenic perils. The Evening Bulletin ominously noted “that the barriers which heretofore have kept pestilence away from us have been thrown down, and that for the future we shall have to take our chance with the other communities of the world when general sickness falls upon humanity.” Although this news report mistakenly identified railroads as key vectors in the epizootic’s westward expansion, its broader point was nonetheless perceptive. The rapidity and relentlessness with which the Great Epizootic Flu sickened equines throughout the North American West demonstrated how the conquest of Indigenous nations, the extension of transportation networks, and the globalization of trade were together upping the epidemiological ante for San Franciscans and their fellow westerners.68 Inspired by this San Francisco editor’s insight, we can reinterpret American Progress as a forceful study in viral transmission and pathogenic colonization. Such a reading of this iconic image begins by noting the composition Gast used to make Crofutt’s instructions manifest.

The artist divided his scene into two halves, separated by a diagonal line from the image’s top left to bottom right. New York, the metropolis that dominates the brightly lit upper-right corner of the picture, looms in this interpretation as the seedbed for the Great Epizootic Flu’s continental conquest. The trains that connected the Empire City to the main subject of American Progress—the western scenes that dominate the canvas’s bottom-left half— bear passengers, freight, and livestock across the continent, then peter out after reaching the Great Plains. Neither the railroads nor the

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gh But what of the other horses American Progress depicts? Living in small groups or herds cut off from the advancing settlers’ horses and mules, Gast’s Indian ponies gallop gamely, carry their people—and their peoples’ possessions—toward the blank spaces that loom beyond the canvas’s western edge, and share the Indians’ destiny of dispossession, dislocation, and disappearance. To make sense of how Indigenous peoples and the equines they claimed as their own fit into the picture of the Great Epizootic Flu’s westward expansion, we need to return to Joseph Walkup’s apocryphal account of diseased Indian ponies as the outbreak’s originators.

The Auburn editor’s made-up story offers plenty of room for cultural-historical interpretations. On one level, Walkup’s jab at Sheridan and Grant drew upon what U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Amasa Walker called “the conviction of the great body of citizens that the Indians have been in the past unjustly and cruelly treated”—a “conviction” that contributed to roiling controversy after the Marias

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Direct evidence of the Great Epizootic Flu’s impact on the West’s Indigenous nations proves surprisingly elusive. By and large, the horse disease seems to have reached the still-extensive homelands held by dozens of independent Native nations later than other parts of western North America and with less notable consequences.71 In January 1873, newspapers noted the virus’s arrival among Plains Indians, including Lakotas.72 The lengthy and detailed annual reports filed by the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, by contrast, hardly mentioned the epizootic, even though the 1873 report included the most comprehensive census the federal government had yet undertaken of human and equine populations in tribal communities. As tensions between U.S. military forces and two Indigenous nations—Modocs in northern California and southern Oregon and Apaches in the Arizona-Sonora border country—erupted into warfare in spring 1873, American cavalry forces found themselves temporarily hamstrung by sick horses even as the herds of their Indigenous opponents remained flu-free.73 Also indicative of the epizootic’s gradual incursions into Indian Country was the route it followed to British Columbia. Although the disease had likely struck the Red River region of Manitoba

by January 1873, the flu virus apparently stalled out on the Plains and in the Rockies, regions largely controlled by First Nations including the Piikanis.74 When influenza finally eluded the quarantine efforts of local and provincial authorities in May 1873, it almost certainly reached British Columbian equines from their counterparts in the Northwest United States, leading a Victoria editor to recall the outbreak

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Worthwhile as a rhetorical analysis of the Placer Herald story might prove, Joseph Walkup’s strange attempt to connect the Great Epizootic Flu to the Marias Massacre also raises a more basic question: What patterns did the outbreak assume in Indian Country?

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This is where the equines who play varied roles throughout the canvas’s imagined West come in. These creaturely kinds outnumber people in American Progress. When placed in the context of the Great Epizootic Flu that was convulsing New York during the very same weeks when Crofutt and Gast probably collaborated on this image, it is not a stretch to see many of the equines populating this famous scene—the trio of tiny mule teams pulling emigrant wagons across the mountains’ base, the sprinter spiriting a Pony Express rider below the floating female figure’s hips, the trusty steed who serves as the visual focus of the prospecting party in the central foreground, and the stage horses who trot just ahead of the telegraph wires—not just as crucial vehicles of U.S. empire, but also as key actors in the Great Epizootic Flu’s progress across the western interior.

Massacre and several other atrocities perpetrated in the service of American empire.69 No less important, the Herald story singled out Indigenous Americans as agents of contagion.70 By casting Native peoples as disease vectors, the article made an implicit argument for restricting Indian mobility and policing contact between Indigenous peoples and the settlers who were busily colonizing their homelands.

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telegraph wires drawn westward by the angelic woman clad in white could carry disease any further west, at least not until an all-white force of pioneers had finished dispossessing the West’s Indigenous peoples and driving off its native fauna.

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as “that fatal epidemic known as [the] American epizootic.”75

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U.S. and Canadian efforts to dispossess, marginalize, demobilize, and eliminate Native Americans had the surprising side effect of curtailing the Great Epizootic Flu’s expansion through Indian Country. Historians have rightly emphasized the devastation that infectious diseases wrought on Indigenous American populations. The deceleration of the Great Epizootic Flu on reaching Native nations was at once a result of previous human epidemics (including those caused by other strains of flu virus), and a reflection of the travails that confronted Indigenous peoples and equines as the U.S. and Canadian nations redoubled their efforts to expand westward in the early 1870s.

The novel flu virus, as we have seen, typically spread from equine to equine. The illness’s ability to extend its reach pivoted on several intersecting variables, particularly the size and density of equine populations and the frequency with which infected equines came into sufficiently close contact with previously unaffected animals to transmit the novel influenza virus to them.76 Given these characteristics, it stands to reason that the horse flu’s expansion through Indian Country in the early 1870s was likely hampered by the decline of human and equine populations in Indigenous communities because of violence, disease, and other factors.

U.S. and Canadian efforts to curtail the mobility on which Native independence pivoted, the decline of buffalo hunting, and direct U.S. assaults on Indigenous horse holdings all worked to reinforce the same outcome.

Indigenous methods of equine husbandry likely played at least some part in reducing their herds’ susceptibility to flu. Indian-kept burros, horses, and mules sometimes struggled to find enough nourishment; floods, droughts, and other climatic events recorded in the winter of 1872–73 often made it still harder for equines to get enough to eat.77 Indigenous veterinary skills, meanwhile, probably did little to stave off the novel influenza virus.78 Far more consequential than pasturage or medicine were Native American housing and fencing practices. During the height of the Great Epizootic Flu, veterinary surgeons, physicians, and other experts often argued that stables and barns facilitated flu’s

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transmission to new hosts.79 A Colorado rancher, for instance, reportedly discovered that of the seventy horses he kept “running out” on the range, “none . . . have shown any signs of the epizooty”; of the fifteen head he kept “stabled,” by contrast, “all . . . have had the disease.”80 The relative absence of stables, barns, and even corrals in many of the West’s Indigenous homelands, then, likely slowed the flu virus’s spread through Indian Country. Plains villagers such as the Mandans and Pawnees sometimes sheltered horses within their earth lodges; by the early 1870s, fences were becoming more common in many Indigenous homelands, especially on reservations and reserves established by the U.S. and Canadian governments.81 In late 1872 and early 1873, though, most of the equines that Native peoples claimed as their own still ran freely, spending even the harshest winter nights beneath the open sky amid circumstances ill-suited for communicating the novel flu virus to new hosts.82 Darker dynamics probably did more than freerange husbandry to slow the Great Epizootic Flu’s advances. By the early 1870s, equine populations were almost certainly declining among most Indigenous nations because of two interconnected developments. First, populations of all or nearly all Native American groups had contracted or even collapsed in the decades preceding the Great Epizootic Flu. These human tragedies not only lowered Indigenous Nations’ need for equines, but also undermined their capacity to maintain existing herds. And second, Indigenous herds flagged over the midto-late-1800s because intertribal conflicts and wars of resistance exacted a heavy and growing toll on Indian-held equines.

The Placer Herald’s article on Piikani ponies invoked a pair of driving factors in the severe demographic downturns that Indigenous Americans had suffered: epidemic disease and genocidal violence. While Joseph Walkup portrayed the discovery of smallpox in Heavy Runner’s camp following the Marias Massacre as mere coincidence, recent scholarship has detailed how settler colonial invasions and governmental policies combined to generate or stoke epidemics while exacerbating their consequences. Historians, anthropologists, epidemiologists, and demographers have shown how a witch’s brew of factors—including the

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Statistics from various parts of the West enable us to place these thumbnail sketches of communities in crisis in a broader context of demographic catastrophe. Native American populations in California stood at an estimated

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Sources from the early 1870s offer plenty of glimpses into the shorter-term manifestations of Indigenous holocausts that typically played out over years, decades, or even centuries. In addition to the Placer Herald’s invocation of the smallpox epidemic of 1869 to 1871—an outbreak that the historian Seth Archer claims killed at least 4,400 Indigenous individuals across the Northwestern Plains and adjacent parts of the Subarctic and Eastern Woodlands—the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ report mentioned an unspecified “terrible scourge” that had “swept off large numbers” of one Ute band during the winter of 1872–73.84 An agent to the Osage, meanwhile, pointed a finger at the climatic, economic, and cultural causes of respiratory disease among his wards; “during the extreme cold of the past winter,” he wrote in late summer 1873, “many of the Indians suffered a great deal from pneumonia.”85 Around the same time, two Crow leaders—Old Crow and Long-neck—made the same desperate plea to a U.S. treaty commissioner: “[T]ake the sickness away from us.”86 That same year, other U.S. Indian agents mentioned deadly outbreaks of measles, malaria, whooping-cough, and other maladies on the reservations under their charge.87 The annual reports of Canadian colonial bureaucrats are shorter and mention epidemics only in passing; the work of James Daschuk and others, however, has demonstrated how disease interacted with other factors to decimate First Nations peoples on the far northern plains.88

150,000 in 1846; by the early 1870s, no more than 30,000 Indigenous Californians survived.89 Even nations that had thrived into the 1840s, most notably the Lakotas on the northern plains and the Comanches on the southern plains, had been consigned to mourning the deaths of large numbers of their kinfolk during the 1850s and 1860s.90 For these nations and many others, the U.S. Civil War intensified the downward spiral of population. As Union forces unleashed ferocious assaults against Indian nations throughout the West, longstanding internal tensions within Native communities exploded into Indigenous civil wars, especially among the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory.91 Between 1861 and 1865, the western Cherokee population dropped from 21,000 to 14,000 because of scorched-earth conflicts that the nineteenth-century ethnographer James Mooney rightly described as having left “their whole country in ashes.”92 In 1800, the American Indian population of the United States had stood at an estimated 600,000, but the early 1870s saw this figure plummeting toward its all-time nadir of perhaps 240,000 in 1890.93 The situation was much the same in Canada, where an Indigenous and métis population estimated at 125,000 in 1867 was on its way toward its historic low of 113,724 in 1921.94

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loss of land and other key resources, disruptions to Indigenous foodways, purposeful efforts to cultivate Indigenous dependence on Euro-American trade goods, sexual assaults on Native American women and children, and forced dislocations from tribal homelands to reservations, reserves, and boarding schools— stressed Indigenous individuals and traumatized their communities. In the process, these factors blazed pathways that viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens readily exploited to decimate Native populations in many parts of the western interior.83

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Little direct evidence has survived to document how these infernal cycles of disease, dispossession, and violence affected Indigenous horse-holding. As native nations grappled with human tragedies of imponderable proportions, though, it seems hard to imagine any plausible scenario that would have enabled Indigenous peoples to sustain the size of their herds. Horses, mules, and burros had needs; meeting those needs demanded a great deal of time, energy, and expertise from Native societies, particularly those that made particularly heavy use of equines.

The much-studied case of the Comanches and their Kiowa and Plains Apache confederates reveals a relatively direct relationship between the labor demands of horse-keeping and demographic trends among these imperious allies.

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To solidify and perpetuate their commercial and military supremacy, the Comanches unleashed fearsome raids against other Native peoples as well as Mexicanos. Raiding parties returned from the borderlands with vast herds of equines, as well as significant numbers of Mexican, African American, Anglo, Indigenous, and mixed captives, whom the Comanches often used to husband the horses and other stock they had taken. This arrangement simultaneously met the Comanches’ labor needs and fueled impressive demographic growth during the 1700s and early 1800s.95 The same linkages that propelled the swelling of the Comanches’ ranks in the 1700s and early 1800s, though, began to operate in reverse after the U.S. victory in the Mexican War made it difficult—and eventually impossible—for the Comanches and their allies to offset rising mortality among their own people by taking captives and integrating them into the imperial polity.96 The Comanche example illustrates, in turn, a broader truth among the so-called horse nations of the Great Plains, Rockies, Columbia Plateau, and California’s inland valleys: tight bonds linked equine and human lives, and this dynamic operated as forcefully in the realm of demographics as it did in the domains of culture, economics, spirituality, and politics.

The precise mechanisms by which declines in tribal populations translated into smaller Indigenous herds remain unclear. Taken together, though, several well-documented practices probably played a part. Indigenous peoples commonly slaughtered horses and mules when they mourned their dead.97 As he traveled up the Missouri River in late May 1860, for instance, the ethnographer Lewis Henry Morgan recorded the story of a venerable Omaha leader. “Before his death,” Morgan reported, Blackbird “directed his followers to lash his body after death upon his best horse, and take [them] down to a high bluff on the river, and bury both horse and man together. . . .

The horse was buried alive,” Morgan was told, “with Black Bird upon his back and a large mound raised over both.”98 Members of several tribal communities also ate equines—sometimes as part of their regular foodways, but more commonly because of subsistence crises initiated by cratering populations of bison and other game. “When pressed by hunger from scarcity of game,” one of Henry Schoolcraft’s informants wrote of the Comanches, “they

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subsist on their young horses and mules.”99 During the hungry days of the 1860s, a northern Ute man griped that his kinfolk “have to eat ponies. Don’t like it.”100 More significant, perhaps, was the active trade in horses that Native peoples conducted with outsiders; supplying fur trappers, ranchers, and even southern cotton and sugar plantations with horses and mules offered a ready means to turn surplus animals into trade goods.101 Abandoning equines whom Native peoples could no longer bear to keep offered still another means for unloading unwanted animals.102 Last but hardly least, warfare between native nations claimed the lives of large numbers of horses and mules, as widespread depictions of wounded and dying equines in Plains ledger art and other visual accounts of intertribal conflict shows.103 By the mid-1800s, the relationship between warfare and Indigenous horse-holding entered a new phase. As violence between settler colonial forces and Native nations grew more frequent, desperate, and deadly, the Indian Wars further corroded Indigenous horse-wealth. U.S. forces frequently killed or captured the animals upon whom Indian peoples literally mounted resistance movements against Americans and Canadians. A sensible tactic for common soldiers immersed in the fog of war, the seizure or slaughter of horses belonging to “hostile” native forces increasingly became a strategic aim of military commanders. In several instances, the leaders of victorious assaults against Native nations skimmed off the cream of the crop for their own personal use (as Régis de Trobriand did after the Marias Massacre), then ordered their men to kill the rest of the animals seized from Indigenous communities so their Native enemies could not re-enlist the creatures in their freedom struggles.104 When the Great Epizootic Flu reached the plains in December 1872, it entered a realm convulsed not just by fearsome demographic forces whose reach encompassed humans and equines alike, but also by a cascade of invading armies, fragmenting ecologies, and inrushing settlers. The novel influenza virus was also hindered by a related development: because of colonial policy and environmental change, Native peoples and the equines on whom they relied were almost certainly covering less ground and traveling less often than ever before.

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Distinctive as the Indian policies of the U.S. and Canada may have looked on their face, both emphasized the benefits of demobilizing Indigenous peoples. Governments on both sides of the 49th parallel reasoned that concentrating Native populations in smaller territories would pacify Indian nations, open up tribal lands for colonization, and facilitate the integration of Indigenous individuals and communities into the U.S. and Canadian bodies politic.105 This common rationale explains the shared provisions of the treaties that the two nations negotiated with sovereign tribal communities in the 1860s and early 1870s. Treaties signed on both sides of the so-called Medicine Line show that both settler colonial nations sought title to Indigenous lands. Both also endeavored to limit the mobility of Native peoples by forcing them to disavow intertribal warfare, creating reservations and reserves, promising means of subsistence to individuals and groups who remained within the boundaries of these circumscribed tribal domains, carving up communally held tribal lands into family allotments, forcing nomadic hunters to take up sedimentary agricultural lifeways, and removing Native children from their families (often by force) to distant educational institutions where teachers

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An Albert Bierstadt romanticized image of a Native American buffalo hunt, drawn ca. 1897. By the time of the Great Epizootic Indigenous Plains peoples, though historically reliant on horse power, owned and controlled reduced herds of horses and other equines. Library of Congress, PAGA 7, no. 4881.

and bureaucrats could better imprint their conquering ways upon them.106 Native peoples throughout the West actively resisted U.S. and Canadian colonialism, but these efforts faced growing strains by the early 1870s.

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These far-ranging attempts by governments on both sides of the border to neutralize Indigenous mobility meant that Native-held equines had fewer opportunities to contract the Great Epizootic Flu, whether from the herds of other Natives or those of settlers. U.S. and Canadian policies of concentration and control also empowered government officials to hold members of Indigenous nations accountable for raiding other peoples’ equines. Although tribal communities continued to plunder one another’s equines into the 1890s, raids had already become less common by the early 1870s, in no small part because federal and confederation bureaucrats sought to clamp down on the practice. U.S. and Canadian officials withheld annuities or rations from suspected offenders, prosecuted them for theft and related crimes in settler courts, and, in instances such as the buildup to the Marias Massacre, calling in the cavalry to punish Indians accused of taking settlers’ animals. Some Indigenous leaders

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responded to these crackdowns by taking the initiative and pledging to pursue peace instead of war with former Indigenous antagonists.107 For all of these reasons, horse raids had almost certainly become rarer, shorter, and less lucrative by winter 1872 than they had been in previous decades, when fortunate raiders sometimes took hundreds or even thousands of equines from their foes.108

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Indigenous peoples’ ability to secure another key animal resource—bison—was also waning. Although one Indian agent still counted “plenty” of shaggy bovines grazing along the Cimarron in the winter of 1872 and 1873, bison populations were entering free-fall.109 “In former times,” the agent for the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras noted, “the buffalo roamed over the country, but they have receded and are now some two or three hundred miles away.”110 Even in these more northerly reaches, though, the Plains Cree faced hungry years because of what one trader lamented as “the visible diminution of the buffalo, their sole support.”111 Sweet Grass, “the Chief of the Country,” implored Canadian officials to “make provision for us against years of starvation.”112 The buffalos’ demise likewise compelled members of many other horse nations to cut back on longer-distance travel.

The Great Epizootic Flu made slower work of the West’s Indigenous homelands than it did the intervening heartlands of settler colonial power, in short, because the monumental transformations that American Progress unabashedly extolled had reduced the number, density, and mobility of potential equine hosts among the West’s Indigenous nations. Together with husbandry practices that enabled most Indian-held horses, burros, and mules to continue ranging freely, the horrific decrease in Native American populations and the closely related decline in tribal horse-wealth combined with colonial demobilization policies served to slow the novel flu virus’s advance into Indian Country. By and by, the epizootic would engulf tribal communities—the virus was too astoundingly infectious for it to have been otherwise.

Its effects on Native peoples, though, seem to have attracted little notice from government officials, almost certainly because ailing horses ranked low on the list of existential threats

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confronting Indigenous nations when the novel influenza virus reached the West starting in late 1872.

The Great Epizootic Flu descended on Auburn, California, in the second week of April 1873.

By that time, the odd pair of short articles that Joseph Walkup had placed side-by-side on an inner page of the Placer Herald would certainly have faded from the memories of most readers. A century and a half later, though, these oddly juxtaposed articles of American Progress and the aftermath of the Marias Massacre can nonetheless help us see both this startling outbreak of animal disease and the historical context that shaped its westward course in a more revealing light. Look beyond the triumphal whitewash of Crofutt and Gast’s canvas, and American Progress rematerializes as a surprisingly comprehensive tableau reminding us that the processes of conquest and colonization that Crofutt sought to extoll were always more than human. Horses and mules, technological assemblages and pathogens, topography and climate—all of these actors and factors continue to deserve our attention as we ponder not only the past, but the present and the future, too.

As for Walkup’s other story, this trumpedup riff on conspiracy theories drawn from wire-service rumors drew imaginative connections between frontier violence, government corruption, and outbreaks of human and equine disease. In so doing, it jumbled beyond recognition the very real but much more tangled ties that linked settler colonialism, the plight of Indigenous Americans and the animals they claimed as their own, and the origins and movements of the novel influenza virus. The Great Epizootic, as we have seen, was hardly an agent of divine justice inflicted on Canadian and American settlers to avenge the misdeeds of Eugene Baker, Phillip Sheridan, and President Ulysses S. Grant. Instead, it was a manifestation of a virulent pathogen that had clearly evolved to take full advantage of the economic, ecological, demographic, and political circumstances it encountered on its transit across North America. That the horse disease reached Indigenous homelands later than settler hinterlands—and later still than it hit stage routes and other corridors where horses and mules continued to provide much

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10.

11.

12.

Notes The research for this paper began during leaves funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar’s Award. The author is grateful to Ryan Hall for providing copies of the Heavy Runner Records, Ari Kelman and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism, Seth Archer and Susan K. Kent for sharing unpublished papers, and Jedediah Rogers for his editorial patience and acumen.

1. Precise statistics on the Great Epizootic Flu’s attack rate are lacking; although my figure here is rough, it is nonetheless a plausible, even conservative figure.

2. Report from Mr. Fitz Maurice, n.d., in “[Veterinary],” “Mails, Epizootic, &c.,” Borderer (Las Cruces, NM), February 15, 1873.

3. “[Veterinary],” “Mails, Epizootic, &c.”

4. Here and throughout this essay, I will deliberately flout the common guidance of English style guides that reserve the pronoun “who” and its variants for human beings. While unorthodox, this grammatical choice better reflects the sentience and historical agency of the horses, mules, and donkeys that stand at the center of this story.

5. Untitled and “Beautiful Picture,” Placer Herald (Auburn, CA), March 1, 1873.

6. David Scobey, “Looking West from the Empire City: National Landscape and Visual Culture in Gilded Age New York,” in New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the

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As Utahns and people throughout the world grapple with the novel coronavirus pandemic, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that infectious diseases have ridden roughshod across western North America.

Horses are not people, of course, and much has changed since the early 1870s. A closer look at the Great Epizootic Flu’s tear across western North America nonetheless offers a reminder of the enduring power of novel pathogens to change the course of local and global history.

The strain of equine influenza that struck the West in late 1872, like the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, adeptly harnessed man-made technologies and systems to its own purposes. In the process, it revealed the porous nature of national borders and cultural divides, triggered partisan politicking, spawned deliberate efforts to misinform the public, and—not least—exposed the historical injustices and enduring disparities within and between the West’s peoples.

7.

Gilded Age, ed. Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner (New York: Routledge, 2019), 19.

For more on these terms, see Ryan Hall, Beneath The Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 14–15.

Untitled and “Beautiful Picture.” The best book-length studies of the massacre and the events which led to it is Andrew Graybill, The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (New York: Liveright, 2013), and Paul R. Wylie, Blood on the Marias: The Baker Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

Also useful are Blanca Tovías, “Diplomacy and Contestation before and after the 1870 Massacre of Amskapi Pikuni,” Ethnohistory 60 (2013): 269–93, and Rodger C. Henderson, “The Piikuni and the U.S. Army’s Piegan Expedition: Competing Narratives of the 1870 Massacre on the Marias River,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 68 (2018): 48–70, 93–96; Baker and others repeatedly invoked the figure of 173 dead, even though they changed their story over time about how many women, children, and other non-combatants this number included; see Wylie, Blood on the Marias, ch. 9.

On Sheridan’s role, see Paul A. Hutton, “Phil Sheridan’s Pyrrhic Victory: The Piegan Massacre, Army Politics, and the Transfer Debate,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 32 (1982): 32–43.

Untitled and “Beautiful Picture.”

Helen S. Giffen, California Mining Town Newspapers, 1850–1880: A Bibliography (Van Nuys, CA: J. E. Reynolds); “Sudden Demise,” Placer (Auburn, CA) Argus, October 18, 1873; “Death of Governor Walkup,” Placer (Auburn, CA) Argus, October 18, 1873.

The best such work is Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

See, in particular, Wylie, Blood on the Marias, and Henderson, “Piikuni and the U.S. Army’s Piegan Expedition.”

Bear Head affidavit, January 18, 1915, Heavy Runner Records, 1914–1921, MF 53, Montana Historical Society, Helena (hereafter Heavy Runner Records). See also Buffalo Trail Woman affidavit, January 16, 1916, Heavy Runner Records. For other evidence of soldiers destroying robes, see Joseph Kipp affidavits, February 8, 1913 and December 29, 1914, Heavy Runner Records.

For concurring evidence, see Henry Myers to Franklin Lane, January 11, 1916, Heavy Runner Records.

Mrs. Frank Monroe affidavit, January 18, 1916, Heavy Runner Records. Good Bear Woman’s affidavit mentioned that soldiers set lodges on fire, but made no mention of robes. January 16, 1916, Heavy Runner Records.

H.[orace] J. Clarke affidavit, November 9, 1920, Heavy Runner Records. On Clarke’s parentage, see Wylie, Blood on the Marias, 235.

Wylie, Blood on the Marias, ch. 11 (quote from 233).

Quoted in Wylie, 234.

James Law, “Influenza in Horses,” in Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1872 (Washington: GPO, 1872), 218. The other major report concurred on this point; see Adoniram B[rown] Judson, “History and Course of the Epizoötic among Horses upon the North American Continent,” Public Health Reports and Papers Presented at the Meetings of the American Public Health Association in the Year 1873 (New York and

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of the draft power—offered no consolation for Native peoples who found themselves staring down the barrel of U.S. and Canadian efforts to extend and consolidate power over Indigenous peoples, Indian lands, and the natural world.

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Cambridge, MA: Hurd and Houghton and the Riverside Press, 1875), 88–109. No historian of the epizootic has since questioned these findings.

19. “Origin of the Epizootic,” Helena Weekly Herald, February 13, 1873.

20. Wylie, Blood on the Marias, 188, 230–32.

21. Quoted in Wylie, 232.

22. Wylie, chs. 9–11; Henderson, “Piikuni and the U.S. Army’s Piegan Expedition.”

23. Myers to Lane. For more on the heirs’ push for reparations, see Henderson, “Piikuni and the U.S. Army’s Piegan Expedition,” 66–67.

24. Bear Head, Clarke, and Kipp affidavits, as well as William Upham, Emma Miller, and Dick Kipp to Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter CIA), March 16, 1914, in Heavy Runner Records.

25. Franklin Lane to Henry Ashurst, January 24, 1916, and April 25, 1917, in Heavy Runner Records. Local Indian Service bureaucrats, unlike Lane, found the heirs’ claims persuasive; see Arthur E. McFatridge to CIA, January 14, 1914, in Heavy Runner Records.

26. Scobey, “Looking West from the Empire City,” 17.

27. All citations from the Placer Herald, from “Beautiful Picture.”

28. “What the Western Press Says about Our ‘American Progress,” Crofutt’s Western World (April 1873), 56.

29. “Explanation and Response,” Crofutt’s Western World (March 1873), 40.

30. “Explanation and Response.”

31. “Beautiful Picture.” Helpful works for unpacking this image include Scobey, “Looking West from the Empire City”; Samantha Rothenberg, “Beyond ‘American Progress’: The Legacy of John Gast” (M.A. thesis, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2012); and Valerie J. Fifer, American Progress: The Growth of the Transport, Tourists, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-Century West (Chester, CT: Globe Pequot, 1988). Walkup mentioned individual aspects of the picture in nearly the same order as Crofutt had.

32. “Description of Our Oil Chromo entitled AMERICAN PROGRESS!,” Crofutt’s Western World 3 (February 1873), 32.

33. “Description of Our Oil Chromo,” 32 (emphasis in original).

34. “Description of Our Oil Chromo.”

35. “Description of Our Oil Chromo.” In later versions, this passage varies slightly in wording and punctuation. See “Description of Our Premium Oil Chromo, Entitled ‘American Progress,’” Crofutt’s Western World 3 (June 1873), 7.

36. “Description of Our Oil Chromo”; “Beautiful Picture.”

37. For a biased but suggestive sample, see “What the Western Press Says about Our ‘American Progress.’”

38. For a summary of recent critiques, see Rothenberg, “Beyond American Progress,” 32–34.

39. Deseret News, February 12, 1873.

40. Gerhard Scheuch, “Breathing Is Enough: For the Spread of Influenza Virus and SARS-CoV-2 by Breathing Only,” Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery 33 (2020): 1–5; Eunice Yuen Chi Shiu, et al., “Frequent Recovery of Influenza A but Not Influenza B Virus in Aerosols in Pediatric Patient Rooms,” Indoor Air (2020), DOI: 10.1111/ina.12669; Alexandra Sack, et al., “Equine Influenza Virus—A Neglected, Reemergent Disease Threat,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 25 (2019): 1188; Gabriele A. Landolt, “Equine

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Influenza Virus,” Veterinary Clinics of North America: Equine Practice 30 (2014): 512; and Anice C. Lowen, et al., “Influenza Virus Transmission Is Dependent on Relative Humidity and Temperature,” PLoS Pathogens 3 (2007), 1470–75. On the importance of droplets and fomites in transmission, see Landolt, “Equine Influenza Virus,” 511–12; Gabriele A. Landolt and Thomas M. Chambers, “The Clinical Features, Pathobiology, and Epidemiology of Influenza Infections in Horses,” in Animal Influenza, 2d ed., edited by David E. Swayne (Ames, IA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 513.

41. David E. Stallknecht and Justin B. Brown, “Wild Bird Infections and the Ecology of Avian Influenza Viruses,” in Animal Influenza, 153–176. On poultry as possibly suffering from epizootic in the West, see “Pacific Coast Items,” Los Angeles Daily Herald, December 27, 1873. On dogs catching “epizootic” or something like it, see “Brief Mention,” San Francisco Daily Bulletin, May 12, 1873; Weekly Trinity Journal (Weaverville, Cal.), May 17, 1873. Two interesting items on possible human cases are: W. C. McGregor to Deseret News, March 4, 1873, printed in “Parowan,” Deseret News, March 19, 1873; and “I.” to Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 27, 1873, printed in “Letter from St. George,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, March 14, 1873.

42. “The Horse Epidemic,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 9, 1873.

43. Virginia City (Nev.) Enterprise, February 1, 1873, reprinted in “Swiftness of the Epizootic,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 3, 1873.

44. Complaints of “stomach flu” notwithstanding, influenza A almost invariably targets mammalian respiratory systems.

45. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001); Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Robert T. Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); and Sean Kheraj, “The Great Epizootic of 1872–‘73: Networks of Animal Disease in North American Urban Environments,” Environmental History 23 (2018): 495–521.

46. The epizootic had to have spread by boat to Vancouver Island and the Hawaiian Islands.

47. See below.

48. “By Telegraph,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, January 1, 1873; “By Telegraph,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, January 3, 1873.

49. “By Telegraph,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, January 11, 1873.

50. “By Telegraph,” Cheyenne Daily Leader, January 13, 1873.

51. Letter from Click [pseud.] to editor, March 3, 1873, Cheyenne Daily Leader, March 7, 1873.

52. “Horse Disease,” Ogden Semi-Weekly Junction, January 18, 1873; “It Has Arrived,” Deseret News, January 15, 1873.

53. Dispatch from Salt Lake City, January 20, 1872, published as “The Epizootic,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 22, 1873.

54. “Wells Fargo’s Stages Stopped,” Deseret Evening News, January 27, 1873; “Resources of Utah,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 11, 1873. Some lines only resumed service in late March. Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 4, 1873; “Ophir Daily Stage,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 26, 1873.

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American Indians,” in Ethnoveterinary Research and Development (Wageningen, Holland: CTA, 1996), 60– 75. On vaccines, see Landolt, “Equine Influenza Virus,” 516.

79. See, e.g., “Videx” [pseud.], “Veterinary Department: Equine Epidemic Influenza—The Physiology and Pathology of the Disease,” Turf, Field, and Farm 16 (January 17, 1873), 38–39, and B.R. Kirk, “Thoughts in a Sick Stable,” Turf, Field, and Farm 26 (May 17, 1878), 305.

80. Undated item from Denver News, in Laramie Daily Sentinel, January 18, 1873.

81. Examples include ARCIA 1873, 216 and 249.

82. ARCIA 1872 and 1873 document the construction of animal housing on many U.S. reservations.

83. David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William & Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 703–42; Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Eric E. Jones, “Spatiotemporal Analysis of Old World Diseases in North America, A.D. 1519–1807,” American Antiquity 79 (2014): 487–506; Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World; Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited

by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015); Benjamin Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods,” American Historical Review 120 (2015), 100; and Tai S. Edwards and Paul Kelton, “Germs, Genocides, and America’s Indigenous Peoples,” Journal of American History 107 (2020), 52–76.

84. Seth Archer, “Smallpox and the Medicine Line,” unpublished paper presented to 2019 Western History Association, in author’s possession; ARCIA 1873, 56.

85. ARCIA 1873, 216.

86. Quoted in ARCIA 1873, 127, 129.

87. On measles, see ARCIA 1873, 225. On whooping-cough, see ARCIA 1873, 288 (Rio Verde). On “intermittent fever” and malaria, see ARCIA 1873, 288 (Rio Verde) and ARCIA 1873, 329.

88. James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013) 80–91.

89. Benjamin Madley, “Understanding Genocide in California under United States Rule, 1846–1873,” Western Historical Quarterly 47 (2016): 449. See also Rupert Costo and Jeanette Henry Costo, eds., The Missions of California: a Legacy of Genocide (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1987); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Brendan L. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Benjamin Madley, American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). The last two books make no mention of Joseph Walkup.

90. Pekka Hämäläinen and Richard White claim that Comanche and western Sioux populations rose through the 1840s and ‘50s, respectively Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 347–48; “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centu-

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55. “From Salt Lake City,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 1873; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 22, 1873.

56. Advertisement in Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 24, 1873.

57. “Coal! Coal!! Coal!!!,” in Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 31, 1873.

58. “Pacific Coast News,” Albany (OR) Register, January 31, 1873.

59. “Horse Disease”; “Ophir Mining Summary for the Week Ending January 18, 1872 [sic],” Salt Lake HeraldRepublican, January 25, 1873; “Pacific Coast News,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 24, 1873; “Western,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 26, 1873; “Latest Telegraph,” Houston (TX) Telegraph, February 6, 1873.

60. “News from Salt Lake,” item dated February 9, 1873, in Red Bluff (CA) Sentinel, February 15, 1873.

61. “Telegraph News,” Las Vegas (NM) Gazette, February 8, 1873.

62. “Limbering Up,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 5, 1873.

63. “City News,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 18, 1873.

64. For two different versions of the timing of the disease’s arrival at Santa Fe, see Borderer, January 11 and 25, 1873.

65. “Mails, Epizootic, &c.,” Borderer, February 15, 1873, reporting on correspondence from J. F. Bennett dated Santa Fe, February 2, 1873 (emphasis added).

66. “Editorial Items,” Borderer, February 8, 1873.

67. “The Lesson of the Epizootic,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), May 22, 1873.

68. “The Lesson of the Epizootic.”

69. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1872 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1872), 7 (hereafter ARCIA).

70. For a particularly relevant trio of examples, see “How Small-pox May Be Transmitted,” “Reappearance of the Epizootic,” and “Tame Injins,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 25, 1873.

71. ARCIA 1873, 3.

72. Cheyenne Daily Leader, January 13, 1873; “Items,” Helena Weekly Herald, January 30, 1873.

73. “The Indians and the Epizootic,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, April 6, 1873; “The Modoc War,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 19, 1873; Puget Sound Dispatch (Seattle, WA), April 24, 1873; “Skirmish at Colonel Mason’s Camp,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 16, 1873; “The Modocs,” Daily Alta California (San Francisco), April 22, 1873.

74. “The Epizootic,” Manitoban and Northwest Herald (Winnipeg), January 4, 1873; “Answers to Correspondents,” Manitoban and Northwest Herald, January 18, 1873.

75. “Municipal Council,” Daily Colonist (Victoria, BC), May 1, 1873; order from R.S.M. Bouchette, Ottawa, to Collector of Customs, Victoria, May 3, 1873, published in “The Epizootic,” Daily Colonist, May 6, 1873; “Embargo Established,” Daily Colonist, May 13, 1873; William McNeill, “The Epizootic,” Daily Colonist, April 2, 1881.

76. The vulnerability of equine individuals and populations to infection mattered, too, but is tougher to track in available sources.

77. On drought, see, e.g., ARCIA 1873, 193, 199, and 234. For floods, see ARCIA 1873, 240 and 248.

78. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, “I Stand for My Horse: Equine Husbandry and Healthcare among Some North

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ries,” Journal of American History 65 (1978): 329–30.

91. Pekka Hämäläinen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains: The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (2016): 481–509.

92. Quoted in Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, 107.

93. Thornton, 133; Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate,” 98.

94. John Douglas Belshaw, Canadian History: Post-Confederation (n.p.: BCcampus, 2016), retrieved from https:// opentextbc.ca/postconfederation/.

95. Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire; Brian Delay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, “A Different Look at Native American Depopulation: Comanche Raiding, Captive Taking, and Population Decline,” Ethnohistory 61 (2014): 391–418.

96. For a critique of the plausibility of captive-taking as a response to population losses, see Rivaya-Martínez, “A Different Look at Native American Depopulation.”

97. W. E. Walsh, “A Reexamination of the Historic Indian Burial from Yellowhouse Canyon, Texas,” Plains Anthropologist 42 (1997): 243; Richard White, Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 105; and Robert Neighbors to Henry Schoolcraft, “The Na-U-Ni, or Comanches of Texas: Their Traits and Beliefs, Their Divisions and Intertribal Relations,” n.d., in Winfrey H. Dormian, Texas Indian Papers, 1846–1859: Edited from the Original Manuscript Copies in the Texas State Archives (Austin: Texas State Library, 1960), 357.

98. Entry for May 21, 1862, in Lewis Henry Morgan, “Journal of an Expedition to the Rocky Mountains by the Missouri River in May, June, and July, 1862,” in Lewis Henry Morgan: The Indian Journals, ed. Leslie A. White (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 143–44.

99. Neighbors to Schoolcraft, 356.

100. Quoted in Thomas G. Andrews, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 72. See also D. O. Kennedy (Ochankugahe), Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 57–60.

101. Dan Flores, “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses: The Horse Trade in the Early American West, 1785–1825,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 58 (2008): 3–21, 94–96; Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the Northwest (Toronto: Willing & Williamson, 1880), 9; Report from Constantine Scollen to Alexander Morris, September 8, 1876, in Morris, Treaties of Canada, 248.

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102. See Richard Lancaster, Piegan: A Look from Within at the Life, Times, and Legacy of an American Indian Tribe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 218; J. J. Methvin, ed., Andele, the Mexican-Kiowa Captive: A Story of Real Life among the Indians (1899; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 38–40.

103. For examples, see the images in Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History, ed. Janet C. Berlo (New York: Harry N. Abramas, 1996), on 106, 108, 110, and 132.

104. For a few examples, see Lawrence Kip, Army Life on the Pacific: A Journal of the Expedition against the Northern Indians (1859), quoted in Susan K. Kent, “An Indian on Foot is No Indian at All: Imperial Struggles and Native Resistance in Interwar America,” p. 6, paper delivered at Imperial Legacies of 1919 Conference, University of North Texas, April 20, 2019, in author’s possession; J. E. Welch, “Account of the Battle of Summit Springs,” in Cyrus Townsend Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters (Garden City, NJ, 1913), 175–78; and Deanne Stillman, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (Boston: Mariner Books, 2009), 94.

105. Ryan Hall, “Negotiating Sovereignty: U.S. and Canadian Colonialisms on the Northwest Plains, in Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s, edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 132–52.

106. On Canadian allotments, see Report of the Indian Branch of the Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces (Ottawa: I.B. Taylor, 1872), 19–24; Report of the Indian Branch of the Department of the Minister of the Interior, For the Year Ended 30th June, 1873 (Ottawa: I.B. Taylor, 1874), 5; and Morris, Treaties of Canada, 287–88. On the U.S. case, see C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, The Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

107. Sweet Grass, quoted in Messages from the Creek Chiefs of the Plains, Saskatchewan, to Gov Archibald, n.d., in Report of the Indian Branch of the Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces, 34.

108. For mentions of raids in 1872–73, see ARCIA 1873, 6, 42, 153, 167, 201, 219, 231, 248.

109. ARCIA 1873, 221.

110. ARCIA 1873, 234.

111. “Extract of a Despatch, W. J. Christie, Chief Factor at Edmonton House to Lieut. Governor Archibald,” April 13, 1871, in Report of the Indian Branch of the Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces, 33.

112. Messages from the Cree Chiefs of the Plains, 33–34.

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G O D F R E Y

In 1917, Charles G. Patterson, a Utah attorney, spearheaded the organization of the Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers (IASBG) to serve as an advocate for beet farmers in the Intermountain West. With the advent of the First World War, the price of sugar had gone up, but Patterson believed that sugar companies were not passing the increased profits on to farmers and that someone needed to look out for the growers’ interests. He had previously published pamphlets castigating leaders of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, many of whom were also high leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons), which held a large amount of stock in the company. Believing that Utah-Idaho Sugar leaders were using their ecclesiastical connections to force Latter-day Saint farmers into growing beets for the company for whatever price the corporation dictated, Patterson wanted the IASBG to fight for fairer beet prices. Although other organizations such as the U.S. Farm Bureau already represented farmers’ interests in matters such as beet prices, Patterson believed they had largely been co-opted by sugar interests and that an independent organization was necessary.

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Organizing Farmers in Utah: Charles G. Patterson and the Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, 1917–1922

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Born in the midst of a battle over beet prices in 1918, the IASBG lasted only a few years before folding. This was in part because it was painted by ecclesiastical and business leaders as a radical socialistic organization—a depiction that prevented it from ever gaining much influence over farmers. Yet even though it operated for only a brief period of time, the agitation the organization made over beet prices pushed Utah-Idaho Sugar to increase the amount it paid farmers for the crop. Its brief history thus provides a window into power relationships between farmers and industry in the 1910s and 1920s—relationships that were complicated in Utah and Idaho by the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the sugar industry. It also suggests that even farmers’ organizations not heavily supported because of their “radicalism” could have an impact on the well-being of agrarians.

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Sugar beets siloed at Garland, Utah, 1905. Covering beets with straw and dirt helped to preserve them through the winter. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 3481.

By the time of the IASBG’s organization, the beet sugar industry was still relatively new in Utah. Industrialists in Germany and France had pioneered the extraction of sugar from beets in the early nineteenth century, but it did not become viable in the United States until the 1880s. In 1889, the Utah Sugar Company organized. Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the predominant religion in Utah—were instrumental in generating support for the fledgling beet sugar corporation and in helping to finance the company when it fell on hard times. Believing the growing of sugar beets to be an important cash opportunity for Utah farmers, church leaders also became important figures in the company’s hierarchy, which produced a web of conflicts between the financial interests of the church, its leaders, and its agrarian members.

At the church’s April 1891 general conference, for example, George Q. Cannon, a counselor in the church’s governing First Presidency and a stockholder in the Utah Sugar Company,

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expressed concern that Latter-day Saint farmers were not supporting the corporation by growing enough beets, ostensibly because they did not believe the company was paying enough for the vegetable. As an ecclesiastical leader, he told the congregation that “men should be willing—even if at a sacrifice, as some anticipate would be the case—to raise the beets at the price proposed” by the company. He then appealed to farmers “on behalf of the company . . . to devote a portion of your land to the culture of sugar beets this coming spring.”1 In such an instance, Cannon clearly believed that his personal financial interests—and those of other church leaders—should be supported by Latter-day Saints.

This melding of business and religion continued in 1907 when the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company formed from a merger of three companies.2 Joseph F. Smith, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ, served as the corporation’s president, and members of the church’s governing Quorum of the Twelve Apostles also served on

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The extent of sugar beet farming in the Intermountain West meant that there were numerous beet growers cultivating the crop. The land and farming techniques of growers were conducive to the growing of beets; one U.S. Department of Agriculture report stated that Utah was “the ideal beet-sugar state” because “methods of cultivation, irrigation, drainage, and fertilization were superior to those prevailing in ordinary farm districts in other parts of the country.”8 By 1920, 93,603 acres of sugar beets were under cultivation in Utah by 8,123 growers, producing $28 million worth of beet

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Another organization that promised to help Utah farmers was the Farm Bureau, which came into being in the 1910s across the United States.

Initially seen as a way to provide farmers with more access to agricultural education and scientific advancements through state extension services, the bureau soon became an organization of advocacy for farmers.12 The first farm bureau in Utah was established in 1915 in Weber County, and additional county bureaus were organized thereafter. In December 1916, the Utah State Farm Bureau Federation was formed to bring the county bureaus together.13 Its first order of business, according to one newspaper article, was to establish a committee “to meet with representatives of the sugar companies to get equitable rates for sugar beets.”14

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In the 1910s, farmers’ organizations were not a novel idea. Associations such as the Grange, for example, had existed for years. In Utah, some organizations had formed around the turn of the century to serve farmers in regional locations. One of these was the Cache Valley Farmers Association, which had made attempts as early as 1905 to get an increase in what agrarians were paid for their beets. This association “provided a forum for discussion but little else,” in part because growers in Cache Valley who were not part of the association refused to hold out for increased prices.11

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At the same time, a high demand for sugar and the decrease in production in Germany and France led to higher sugar prices for consumers; they rose from four cents a pound in the early 1910s to more than seven cents by 1915.5 Although the increase led sugar companies to provide more money to farmers for their beets, some growers believed that the corporations were making more in profits than they were passing on.6 However, individual voices did not hold much sway. Individuals such as Charles G. Patterson thus began calling for the organization of sugar beet farmers in Utah. “The reason the sugar company has been so arbitrary in its past dealings with the farmers is that it knew there was no organization among them,” one pamphlet declared. “There could be no unanimity of action among [farmers] and consequently nothing for the company to fear.”7

sugar. One publication called sugar beets “the securest portion of the agricultural picture” for Utah farmers.9 The beets that growers produced mainly went to two companies that had a stranglehold on the beet sugar industry in the Intermountain West: Utah-Idaho Sugar and the Amalgamated Sugar Company, both of which were largely controlled financially and administratively by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.10

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the board of directors. The church as an entity held stock in the company as well.3 The involvement of these church officials—and the church itself—in a commercial enterprise ignited a debate about religious influences on the industry’s competition and business practices. The debate accelerated after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 curtailed the production of beet sugar in both France and Germany. This presented opportunities for U.S. firms to increase their production and market share. Recognizing this, leaders of Utah-Idaho Sugar, including Charles W. Nibley, presiding bishop of the church and the largest stockholder in the company, advocated an aggressive plan of factory expansion in Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Nevada.

Other entrepreneurs had similar ideas, and new beet sugar enterprises appeared in the 1910s in areas where Utah-Idaho Sugar already had beet contracts with farmers.4

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Indeed, in 1916 there was much discussion about prices for beets. Part of this was fueled by a pamphlet published by Charles G. Patterson, a Utah attorney affiliated with the Progressive political party. Patterson was born in 1871 in North Carolina and had converted to the Latter-day Saint faith in 1890. He had served as a bishop in the church but by 1915 had become openly critical of church leaders, declaring that they unduly influenced both politics and economics in Utah.15 That year, Patterson

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34 Field of beets belonging to the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, Garland, Utah, August 1913. Rows of beets like this one were common along the Wasatch Front, signaling the prominence—and profitability—of the sugar industry. Shipler Commercial Photographers Collection, no. 14632.

openly protested Reed Smoot’s seating in the U.S. Senate because he secured it by virtue of his ecclesiastical position as a member of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.16 The attorney James H. Wolfe, writing to James S. Martin of the National Reform Association, supported Patterson’s efforts and argued that “the financial and political power of the small group of people (the First Presidency and the twelve apostles)” was more troubling than the church’s past practice of polygamy. Anything that could be done to combat such financial and political power, in both Wolfe and Patterson’s minds, would be desirable.17 Patterson’s 1916 pamphlet Business, Politics and Religion in Utah protested both the church’s influence in the sugar industry and the perceived unfair, dishonest, and unethical practices of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company. Patterson spent

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most of the pamphlet arguing that the price that Utah-Idaho charged for its sugar in the Intermountain West was exorbitant and unfair. Given that some of the sugar consumed in Utah was homegrown and produced, he especially objected to Utah-Idaho’s adherence to the industry practice of adding shipping costs from the eastern seaboard to the price of sugar, even when that sugar was produced locally. Patterson also claimed that the corporation could pay “reasonable dividends on the capital invested and accumulate a sufficient surplus to meet every contingency” by charging consumers $3.50 per hundred-pound bag of sugar. Instead, it charged between $8 and $10 per bag—something Patterson equated to extortion and robbery.18 In addition to his critiques about the price of sugar, Patterson attacked the low price that Utah-Idaho paid farmers for their beets,

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Patterson’s pamphlet caught the attention of Presiding Bishop Charles W. Nibley, who, in

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Yet Nibley contended that even with these lower prices Utah-Idaho still paid a fair price for beets and was not a monopolistic entity because “in any part of the Union . . . there is the opportunity for anyone to build factories and manufacture sugar.” However, Nibley continued, if there was already a sugar factory serving a region, it was “malignant waste” for anyone to come into that area and construct another factory. Anyone had the right to do so, “but is it good business or good sense to build two factories where one will do all that there is to do?”

Because Utah-Idaho officials stood “ready to extend their business and build factories wherever sufficient beets can be produced to warrant the erection of a factory,” he saw no need for any other company to try to gain a foothold in Utah-Idaho’s territory. “If the farmer was being oppressed and was not getting a fair price for his beets,” Nibley argued, “then there might be some reason for the farmers co-operating to try to force the building of a factory that would pay them more.” But because Utah-Idaho Sugar paid “about as fair” a price “as could well be expected,” there was no need for any kind of competition with the company.25

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The gist of Patterson’s arguments was that an organization with both power and money was serving corporate interests rather than the interests of the larger community. These were essentially the main points that muckrakers— journalists seeking to expose corrupt practices of business—and those in the Progressive and Democratic political parties were making against big businesses such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Refining Company and Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel.20 Patterson’s complaints about the price of sugar were also not unique; since 1910, high prices for food products were hot political issues, with the Democrats winning the White House and both houses of Congress in 1912 on a pledge to reduce the price of commodities, including sugar. The outbreak of the First World War led to another spike in food prices, and President Woodrow Wilson blamed industrial combinations as the culprits.21 For Patterson, though, the main points seemed to be that it was unfair of Utah-Idaho Sugar to add freight costs to its sugar prices, even though that was a standard that everyone in the sugar industry used; that the company should pay farmers more for beets; and that Utah-Idaho leaders had a special obligation to protect the interests of their community because its officials were also officers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

his ecclesiastical position, was responsible for the church’s financial affairs and who was personally involved with Utah-Idaho Sugar. Nibley wrote a rebuttal for the Salt Lake Tribune that, as characterized by Anthon H. Lund of the First Presidency, was “a defense of the Sugar factories . . . against some scurrilous writings by one Patterson.”22 Although not mentioning Patterson or his pamphlet by name, Nibley declared in the piece that “a number of publications have been issued and distributed among the people, evidently intended to inflame the public mind, to create hostility and bitterness toward the manufacturers of beet sugar in this and adjoining states, and also to put the Mormon church, which has always had a very considerable interest in this great industry, in a bad light before the people.”23 Nibley admitted that Utah-Idaho Sugar did not pay farmers as much for their beets as did manufacturers in California, Montana, and Colorado. He attributed this in part to the higher sugar content of the beets grown in those states and in part to the cost that Utah-Idaho Sugar had to pay to get its sugar to market, which was more than Colorado sugar producers had to pay.24

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asserting that company leaders sought to keep other beet sugar enterprises from getting a foothold in Utah and Idaho because “they were afraid another crowd would pay the farmer a fairer price for his beets.” Because Utah-Idaho Sugar had such strong ties to the Church of Jesus Christ, and because corporate leaders had asked for community support when the sugar business was still in its infancy, Patterson believed that the company’s actions were indefensible. “The sugar company never fails to take all it possibly can from the people its officers profess to love so much,” he declared. “If these men justify their actions in this matter by saying that what they have done is only business,” Patterson continued, “the reply is that they should not complain if the people whose confidence they have betrayed, begin to apply some business methods for their own protection.”19

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Charles Nibley in his later years, ca. late 1920s or early 1930s. A prominent leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nibley—the largest shareholder in the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company in the 1910s—championed Utah-Idaho Sugar’s factory expansion in the Intermountain West and vigorously countered Charles Patterson’s writings in the press.

Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 13199.

Indeed, Nibley continued, beet prices had gone up by fifty cents per ton in the past year, reflecting the increased price of sugar to consumers. In adjusting the beet price upward, Nibley claimed, the sugar company was assuming a significant risk. Farmers received a flat rate for their beets; if sugar prices suddenly plummeted, the company would be faced with a situation where it could not recoup the price it had paid the farmers. “The beet grower has a price fixed for his product that he can absolutely depend upon,” Nibley stated, but “the sugar company has no certainty as to that at all.” To Nibley, “it would be more fair if the farmer were to receive payment for his beets according to the yearly average price of sugar.”

Because the farmer received a flat rate and the price of sugar could fluctuate throughout the year, “the sugar companies take chances with respect to the price of their product which the beet growers do not take at all.”26 After reading Nibley’s explanations in the Salt Lake Tribune, Patterson privately responded to

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the presiding bishop, especially contesting the arguments about competition and monopoly.

According to Patterson, on these points Nibley was merely using “the same arguments which have been advanced since the beginning of the formation of monopolies and trusts”—arguments that had “been passed upon time after time by courts of all classes in this land and have uniformly been held to be unsound.” They were especially objectionable because nineteenth-century church leaders Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff had initially justified the church’s participation in the sugar industry by telling church members it would increase their self-sufficiency and prevent them from “paying tribute to outsiders in supplying their temporal wants.” Patterson objected that, although not an eastern monopoly, Nibley’s policies were still creating a stranglehold on Utah and Idaho citizens. Patterson also found Nibley’s opposition to the formation of new sugar companies to be hypocritical, given that previously Nibley had led an effort to establish a sugar factory in Lewiston, Utah, even though the Amalgamated Sugar Company already had a factory in the area. Nibley had eventually brokered a deal to sell the Lewiston factory to Amalgamated Sugar. “No one objects to you as an owner of sugar factories any more than we object to any man owning property,” Patterson concluded. “It is a man’s method of securing things which we complain about.”27 In addition to writing Nibley directly, Patterson published a revised edition of his Business, Politics and Religion pamphlet to respond to Nibley.28 When the Utah State Farm Bureau was formed, Patterson also hoped that it would facilitate the granting of higher prices for beets to growers.29 However, although the sugar companies increased the price for beets from $5.50 per ton in 1916 to $7 per ton in 1917, some farmers were not satisfied—and neither was Patterson.30 According to another pamphlet Patterson published in 1917, the price of sugar had increased by 60 percent, but the raising of beet prices to $7 represented only a 55 percent increase.

“This leaves you with a smaller proportion of the profits of the business,” he declared.31 Dissatisfied with the Farm Bureau’s efforts to represent farmers and effectively negotiate with sugar companies, Patterson—together

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Two days after the formation of the IASBG, the organization held another meeting to discuss the price of beets in 1918.36 Officials from the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company had already made a proposal to offer farmers a flat rate of $7 per ton for beets containing 15 percent sugar. In what was noted as “a radical departure

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Perhaps spurred on by the petition, Utah-Idaho Sugar and its sister company, Amalgamated Sugar, presented another proposal to beet growers in a meeting held in Salt Lake City in October. Under this proposal, farmers would have two options. They could either receive $7 per ton for beets and then split the profits 50–50 once the sugar companies had received $5.50 a bag for manufacturing, or they could accept a flat rate of $8.50 per ton. Representatives from the different county and state farm bureaus of Utah and Idaho recommended that the farmers accept the proposal, with J. W. Jones, a sugar beet investigator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stating that “$8.50 a ton was a fair price for the flat rate.”39 Farmers at the meeting were willing to accept the recommendation.

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The publication was wrong—at least in terms of the reaction of the IASBG. In September 1917, the association sent a petition to Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. Food Administration. Responsible for ensuring the country had enough agricultural goods available at fair prices during the war, Hoover pleaded with sugar beet growers to maintain and increase the acreage they planted to beets. Believing that Utah-Idaho’s proposal of $7 per ton meant that farmers would have to take a loss if they grew beets, the IASBG asked Hoover to investigate these charges and ensure that the beet growers received a fair price for their beets.38

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When August 23 came, more than two hundred people attended the organizational meeting, “crowd[ing] the floor and the balconies” of the House of Representatives room at the state capitol. According to one newspaper report, speakers “bitterly assail[ed] prominent members of the Mormon church who form the directing force of the Utah-Idaho Sugar company,” stating “that growers had been oppressed by the company and that the rights of the individual had been ignored.” The increase in the amount the companies paid growers for their beets was characterized as “hush money” and not a good faith effort to distribute to farmers the increased profits from sugar.34 With such declarations, the attendees incorporated the Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers; Patterson was appointed its secretary. The organization would be funded by a per capita annual membership fee of $5 and “an assessment not to exceed 20 cents a ton on the beets raised by each member.” According to N. P. Peterson, IASBG’s appointed president, the establishment of the organization meant that sugar companies would have to “deal with the growers on a sound business basis.”35

in policy,” the company also stated that after it had collected $1 per hundred pounds of sugar in profit, it would equally divide “all other profits above that figure . . . between the farmers and the company.” Because this proposal gave farmers something they had wanted in the past—a share of the profits from the higher prices of sugar—one publication stated that growers would “welcome with hearty approval” Utah-Idaho’s proposal.37

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with members of the West Side Commercial Club in Granger, Utah—began exploring the creation of a new association to provide “organized protection to the beet growers.”32 In August 1917, a notice was sent to beet farmers in Utah and Idaho, requesting their presence at a meeting in Utah’s state capitol building on Saturday, August 23, where a new association would be formed. This was necessary, the notice stated, because sugar manufacturers were “unfair, unjust, unpatriotic, unchristian and inhuman” in their dealings with beet growers.

They had “exploit[ed] the men, women and children of the state,” in part by never giving farmers “a fair price for sugar beets.” According to the notice, “the beet farmer is being skinned worse on his 1917 contract than he has ever been in the past.”33

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The IASBG, however, objected to the proposal and to the fact that it had apparently been communicated to Hoover that all beet farmers had agreed to it. The association sent a telegram to Hoover stating that he had “been wrongly advised as to conditions” in Utah and that “differences between sugar manufacturers and beet growers in Utah and Idaho” were so large that they threatened sugar production in those two

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states.40 In a separate communication to W. W. Armstrong, the Food Administration’s representative in Utah, the IASBG declared that the October meeting was “a ‘packed’ meeting of the ‘so-called’ farm bureau” that “did not represent the growers of either Utah or Idaho and had no authority to act for or on their behalf.”

Instead, the association alleged that the sugar companies “engineered the conventioned [sic], ‘packed’ it, and directed the proceedings to further their own greed for profits.” Rather than a good faith effort to try to increase the amount of money farmers received for their beets, IASBG saw the manufacturers’ proposal as an attempt “to stampede the growers into submission.”41

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The major issue with the price of sugar beets was how much it cost a farmer to actually grow them.

The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company estimated that it cost somewhere between $3.80 and $4.50 a ton to grow beets, meaning that a farmer would receive a net profit of around $76 an acre (or between $4 and $5 per ton, assuming that an acre of land produced fifteen tons of beets) at payment of $8.50 per ton.42 Members of the IASBG disputed that. Joseph Smith, one of the association’s officials, claimed that it cost farmers $9.59 a ton to grow sugar beets.43 This was reiterated in a pamphlet the IASBG published in 1918, which stated that it cost farmers about $9.80 per ton to grow beets. The pamphlet also declared that Farm Bureau representatives who negotiated the price of beets were aware of this cost but, because they were under the control of the sugar companies, refused to press for a higher price.44 It is difficult to determine which side was correct in their figures, but it does appear that the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company’s estimate of $4.50 per ton may have been closer to reality than the IASBG’s figure, at least in comparison to a January 1919 article in the Utah Farmer. That article gave figures for seven different farmers who had grown sugar beets. One farmer produced beets at a cost of $46 per acre and another at a cost of $79.40 per acre. Throwing out these two extremes, the other farmers produced beets at an average cost of $64.11 per acre, or $4.27 per ton.45 It is unclear how representative the farmers used as examples in the article were, but it does appear that the IASBG’s figures for raising beets was high.

Although Patterson portrayed himself and the IASBG as the true representatives of beet

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growers, others believed that they were only trying to gain notoriety, publicity, and power by creating discord between farmers and sugar companies. In making their critiques of Patterson and his organization, such detractors used rhetoric that immediately cast suspicion on IASBG motives. Because of the First World War, patriotism in the United States was at a high level, and many Americans were distrustful of organizations that they believed threatened democracy. Especially of concern was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 that placed a socialist government in place in Russia. Worried that democracy and capitalism could likewise be overthrown in the United States, organizations seen as socialist or with socialistic tendencies became frightening to many Americans.46 The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a labor organization formed in 1905 that preached the necessity of the working class taking over industrial means of production, was one of the main targets of concern. Since Patterson and the IASBG seemed to be attacking capitalism and business, opponents to the IASBG raised

Ian Turner, a Wobbly wearing a hat with a card labeled “Bread or Revolution” attached to the brim, 1914.

The perceived association of the IASBG with radical labor elements, including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), meant that the organization never gained widespread support among farmers. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–22190.

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Despite negative characterizations of Patterson and the IASBG, the ideas espoused by Patterson were not necessarily socialistic or in line with the IWW’s aims. Essentially, Patterson believed that farmers—who, in his mind, invested as much to grow sugar beets as companies did to manufacture sugar—should receive an equal share of the profits from the increased price of sugar. He was not espousing the overthrow of democracy, a redistribution of property, or the evils of a capitalistic system—just a more equitable distribution of profits. Yet because he was attacking a business and its leaders who happened to also be high officials in the Latter-day Saint church, he was painted as a radical reactionary by those leaders and also—as evidenced by the Richfield Reaper article—by rural residents of Utah who were largely members of the church. This characterization of Patterson was particularly effective. Opposition to socialists,

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Many listening to Nibley and newspapers disparaging Patterson and the IASBG found it easy to accept the socialistic depictions, in part because of Patterson’s vociferous opposition to the Latter-day Saint church. Indeed, the influence of religion on the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company was one of Patterson’s primary criticisms. Although churches in the United States turned to business for organizational ideas, and although some churches operated publishing entities and engaged in other commercial enterprises to further their evangelical mission, the predominant church in Utah had long taken a firm hand in economic affairs and directly managed and controlled industries such as sugar and salt production.51 Having religious leaders develop business policies that seemed to ignore the best interests of the farmers and consumers of Utah and Idaho—many of whom were members of the church—was abhorrent to Patterson.

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In a December 1917 letter to U.S. Senator William H. King from Utah, for example, Charles W. Nibley stated that Patterson was “not a beet raiser” but instead was “an I. W. W. agitator.”

Accordingly, he was “utterly unreliable and unworthy of notice.”47 An editorial in a Utah newspaper in the small southcentral Utah town of Richfield presented the same view, depicting Patterson and his organization as bearing “some of the earmarks of the Townley non-partisan league, the I. W. W., and the Bolsheviki element that is making efforts to gain a foothold in America.”48 Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also provided commentary in the Church’s general conferences that, although not directed specifically at Patterson or the IASBG, referred negatively to such organizations. The apostle Melvin J. Ballard, for example, declared in the October 1919 general conference that church members could not “solve the problems between capital and labor by joining unions, by joining the non-partisan league, by joining socialism.” He continued, “The very foundation of the Church depends upon the success of the tillers of the soil, the workers, and our interest is for them, and yet we do not become selfish nor sordid to join with one group of laborers against the interests of all others.”49

Wobblies, and radicals in the state was strong, especially from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was trying to disassociate from its own radical and “un-American” practices of the past.50 In addition to this war of words, socialists and Wobblies in Utah were subject to violence and limitations on their rights to speak in public.

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the specter of socialism and the IWW to scare farmers away.

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Accordingly, pamphlets from Patterson and the IASBG frequently addressed the religious aspect of sugar manufacturing in the Intermountain West. One 1917 pamphlet, for example, excoriated church officials leading Utah-Idaho Sugar as “Pharisees” and declared that, because of the church’s interest, the corporation was “NOT AS OTHER SUGAR COMPANIES ARE.”52 Another declared that were Jesus to be on the earth, “He would take these sugar manufacturers and judge them by the words they utter or by the acts they perform.”53 Yet another counseled farmers to guard against Latter-day Saint officials trying to use ecclesiastical influence to persuade farmers to ignore independent beet sugar concerns. Speaking about these leaders, the pamphlet directed farmers to “forget everything about them except that they are HIRED by the sugar company to boost for it.”54 Patterson’s frequent criticisms rankled many Latter-day Saints who believed in supporting church

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leadership. Patterson’s response to such unease was that a “member of the L. D. S. Church who thinks that he can advance the cause of his religion by covering up the sins of his leaders misinterprets the spirit of his gospel, libels the intelligence of the world’s enlightened millions and brings into disrepute and dishonor the church he would elevate.”55

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Officials such as Nibley regarded Patterson’s complaints as unfair. “My chief offense seems to be that I bought some stock” in the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, Nibley stated, “and luckily for me that stock advanced in price.” He continued, “If the Gentile had made the purchase he would be a shrewd, keen, wide awake, honorable business man.” But because Nibley was a Latter-day Saint, he was seen as “a thief and a robber.” “We are the most jealous and unreasonable people towards one another that exists anywhere,” Nibley declared. He did not believe that Joseph F. Smith, Heber J. Grant, and Francis M. Lyman—all high church officials and Utah-Idaho Sugar officers—could ever be “engaged in the most despicable work of extortion” that Patterson and others claimed they were. Nibley thus continued to refer to Patterson and those who disagreed with Utah-Idaho’s policies as “foolish scribblers.” They produced nothing but “scurrilous stuff” attempting to cause discontent with capitalism in general.56

matters complained of by the Intermountain association” could be resolved by appointing a committee with a representative of the growers, a representative of the manufacturers, and three representatives from the Food Administration. Although it does not appear that such a committee was ever formed, a series of meetings was held in Utah toward the end of January 1918 attended by representatives of farmers from the county farm bureau (and apparently not the IASBG) and manufacturers. Perhaps acting on the IASBG’s claims that a price of $8.50 per ton for sugar beets would not cover growers’ costs of production, participants debated the possibility of higher prices for beets.

They ultimately agreed on $9 per ton for beets with the provision that if the price of sugar went higher than what it currently was, growers would receive “one half of the advance over the present price.”58 Because participants had taken four days and nights to determine the price, the Farm Bureau told farmers they were obligated to accept it as fair and grow as many sugar beets as possible.59

The characterizations of Patterson as a radical and discontented Latter-day Saint would ultimately decrease his influence among farmers. Because of such opposition, Patterson’s movement was almost doomed to fail from the start—which was ironic, given the Latter-day Saint focus in the nineteenth century on the value of cooperation in industry. As the church tried to move more into the mainstream in the twentieth century, however, its leaders—including Nibley and Joseph F. Smith—became enthusiastic proponents of capitalism over cooperation.57

The IASBG was not willing to acquiesce, and at a meeting held in Tremonton, Utah, Patterson and other officers told farmers that they should hold out for $10 a ton. The growers pushed back, not convinced that it was in their best interest to seek that price or that Patterson truly wanted to see them prosper. Instead, some of them believed that Patterson was only looking out for his own interests. According to a newspaper report from the small northern Utah town of Brigham City, “Patterson was asked if he was not working for a selfish motive other than a patriotic one and upon being pressed admitted that his organization would ask a bonus of 20 cents per ton on beets raised by all the farmers, in lieu of its activity in securing the advanced price for the farmers.” After hearing this, the newspaper reported, “nearly all of the 300 farmers present at the meeting arose and left the hall.”60

Because of the perception of Patterson as a radical fomenting discontent, Senator King, acting on what Nibley had told him, informed Herbert Hoover that the IASBG was not truly representative of farmers in the Intermountain West. Even still, IASBG president N. P. Peterson earned an audience with Hoover in Washington, D.C., where the two agreed “that the

However, at least one Box Elder County farmer—Moroni Mortenson of Bear River—disputed this report, stating that such assertions were “unfair” and “untruthful” and that “uncalled for attacks” on Patterson needed to stop. According to Mortenson, the assertion that most of the growers left the meeting was “an absurdity,” and those that did leave did so “because

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To combat these characterizations, Patterson and the IASBG published pamphlets in 1918 explaining their motives and desires for sugar beet farmers. One of these, the lengthy Between the Millstones: The Arguments to the Jury in the Utah-Idaho Sugar Beet Case, detailed the campaign to obtain higher prices for the 1918 beet season and claimed that Armstrong, Brock, and James W. Jones of the U.S. Department of Agriculture were in the pocket of the sugar manufacturers. They used their positions to try to “shut out any opposition” to the proposals of the sugar companies and were directed in all of their actions by the corporations. The pamphlet also took issue with the notion that Patterson

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The question of the price for sugar beets did not end with the 1918 crop. Instead, it remained an issue with farmers, especially as the price of manufactured sugar steadily increased in 1918 and 1919. As such, the IASBG continued to agitate on behalf of farmers. Patterson wrote an article for the Salt Lake Telegram in March 1919 that argued that there was “a great falling off in acreage of sugar beets” in 1918 primarily because manufacturers did “not adequately” compensate growers for their beets. He advocated cooperation among farmers and manufacturers—primarily in terms of profit-sharing—so that farmers would be more willing to grow beets.67 Patterson and the IASBG also began exploring a more radical idea with other western sugar beet growers: the possibility of farmers, with the backing of the federal government, assuming ownership of sugar factories. A meeting of beet farmers was held in Fort Collins, Colorado, in December 1918 for this purpose, with no conclusive results.68

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Meanwhile, opposition to the IASBG increased—even though the organization’s agitation on behalf of farmers had impacted the price growers were receiving for their beets.

J. A. Brock, the representative of the Sugar Division of the Food Administration in Utah, warned agriculturists about organizations such as the IASBG. “Certain individuals appear to be trying to discredit the work of the state farm bureau,” he declared. These individuals were either outsiders or “professional agitators” and were “distinctly unfriendly to American sugar production.” To Brock, such “agitators” wanted “to cripple one of the nation’s important energy producing industries” and were not truly interested in the welfare of farmers. They were unpatriotic enemies of the United States.63 For individuals such as Brock, the Farm Bureau seemed a much safer place for farmers to find representation because the bureau depicted itself “as a rock against radicalism” and an antidote to “bolshevism.”64 Farmers who joined the bureau were generally “from the more progressive and more prosperous class[es]” as well; they tended to be from the wealthier walks of life.65

and the IASBG were unpatriotic, claiming instead that sugar officials had shown no interest in sacrificing for the greater good of the United States. “It is a notorious fact that those in control of these concerns have unceasingly labored with the Food Administrator to secure the largest measure of profit from the business,” the pamphlet declared. “So far no intimation of sacrifice has emanated from the sugar companies.” If the companies continued to exhibit such a selfish attitude, the IASBG “invite[d] the Government to take over the factories and operate them for the public welfare.”66

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of the lateness of the hour and the distance to drive home.”61 Mortenson’s statement seems to have some truth; the 20 cents per ton charge had been in the IASBG’s bylaws as a membership fee, reported in newspapers upon the IASBG’s organization, and not something the association was trying to hide.62 Regardless, most Utah farmers decided that the $9 per ton price was adequate. Nine dollars per ton thus became the price for beets in 1918.

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Patterson also believed that the importation of Mexican labor by the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company was adversely affecting the price of beets.

During the First World War, the company took advantage of relaxed restrictions on Mexican immigration and imported large numbers of Mexican workers to help harvest sugar beets.

Speaking “in the name of the sugar beet farmers of Utah and Idaho,” Patterson declared that no grower wanted workers from Mexico, because such laborers “liv[ed] in squalor and filth.” The employment of these workers at low wages, he continued, was “used by the sugar companies to hold down the price of the crops produced

by American citizens.” “KEEP THE PEONS IN MEXICO,” Patterson concluded. “THEY ARE NOT NEEDED OR WANTED HERE

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42 Piles of beets at a loading station in Salt Lake County, September 1917. Shipler Commercial Photographers Collection, no. 18333.

EXCEPT BY THE GREAT SUGAR CORPORATIONS WHO DESIRE TO EXPLOIT THEM AGAINST AMERICAN FARMERS.”69 Such claims, although overstated (numerous farmers in Utah and Idaho employed Mexican labor),70 indicate that Patterson and the IASBG were interested in protecting only the interests of white farmers and not of ethnic groups participating either as growers or as agricultural labor. They also followed the lead of other labor organizations in the United States, such as the American Federation of Labor, which claimed that the importation of Mexican labor kept wages paid to white labor low.71 In 1919, the IASBG began representing agricultural producers of all crops, not only sugar beet farmers. Accordingly, in summer 1919, the organization changed its name to the Intermountain Farmers Association (IFA) and held conventions “for the purpose of fusing all economic

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agricultural, horticultural and dairying organizations of the country into one federation.”72 At one of these conventions held at Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, U.S. Senator Thomas P. Gore, a Democrat from Oklahoma, spoke, but fewer than 100 people attended, dampening the enthusiasm of the gathering.73 The IFA continued but had difficulty generating support among growers. Most Utah and Idaho farmers seemed content to allow the more conservative county and state farm bureaus to represent their interests, something that the Farm Bureau actively promoted. According to a front-page article in the Utah Farmer targeting associations such as Patterson’s group, “the Farm Bureau will prevent or make difficult the organization of leagues of farmers which have for their purpose radical changes in our structure of government.” “The farmers have no legitimate interest[s] which are antagonistic to

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By 1922, Patterson’s influence had waned, and the bottom had dropped out of the sugar industry due to a crash in prices and the effects of curly top, a disease caused by the white fly that severely damaged sugar beet crops. Several beet sugar factories closed in the 1920s, and growing sugar beets became less appealing for farmers.

The number of growers cultivating the vegetable declined from 8,123 in 1920 to 6,497 in 1922, and the acreage of beets planted dropped from 93,603 to 58,003 in that same time frame.82

Because of his rocky relationship with the church, Patterson also continued to run into problems with Latter-day Saint farmers. Although he had previously served as a bishop, his attacks against church leaders who were officials in Utah-Idaho Sugar soured his ecclesiastical relationships. In 1920, he was excommunicated from the church “for publishing the facts about sugar profiteering by the Mormon prophet,” according to one account.78 This separation of Patterson from the church made him even more untrustworthy in the eyes of Latter-day Saint farmers, and they continued to be reluctant to join an organization led by someone out of harmony with their ecclesiastical leaders.

Perhaps realizing the discouraging prospects for sugar growers, and perhaps because of his limited success in organizing Utah farmers, Patterson abandoned his efforts for beet growers in the Intermountain West. After 1922, there is no record of IFA activities in Utah or Idaho.83 By 1924, Patterson and his wife Viola had moved to Portland, Oregon, where Patterson applied to practice law before the Oregon Supreme Court.84 Patterson’s interest in farmers did not wane, however; he had become secretary of the Grange Mutual in Oregon by 1937, and he spoke at Grange meetings on insurance in the 1930s as well.85 Viola died in 1934; Patterson followed in 1953.86

In the early 1920s, Patterson turned to other ventures to try to help beet growers gain

The short history of the IASBG and the IFA shows that these organizations were born

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The depictions of the IFA and Patterson as radical, un-American, and intent on subverting capitalism and democracy continued to curtail the organization’s influence. After Patterson organized a branch of the IFA in Richfield, Utah, for example, the Richfield Reaper warned farmers against affiliating with “this alleged I. W. W.-Bolshevik bunch” and stated that “the Farm Bureau will secure for the farmers all that is equitable and just.” “Other organizations of as unsavory a reputation as some that might be mentioned should be let severely alone,” it declared. The newspaper also depicted the IFA as “radical” and “opposed to most everything proposed by the government.”77

more leverage over sugar companies. In 1920, he was involved with the formation of the Pioneer Sugar Company, a farmers’ cooperative intent on establishing a sugar factory in the Salt Lake Valley. However, the company overextended itself and was never able to build anything.79 Patterson’s name was also floated as a possible candidate for governor in the Farmer-Labor political party—a party that allied with Utah socialists in 1920—and he became secretary of the National Beet Growers Association in 1920.80 He also continued his fight for better sugar prices for farmers—for instance, urging farmers in Blackfoot, Idaho, in 1920 to reject Utah-Idaho Sugar’s proposal for a $12 per ton flat rate for beets. He published at least one other pamphlet attacking Utah-Idaho Sugar and advocating for growers in the 1920s, and he continued to be depicted by sugar company interests as “not a reliable nor responsible man,” “not a good citizen,” and “under surveillance” by the federal government for disloyalty.81

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the legitimate interests of merchants or bankers,” the article continued, and “no advantage should be secured for the farmers which produces an undesirable impediment to any other group of workers.”74 The fact that proponents of the Farm Bureau and agricultural extension services such as Perry G. Holden spoke at the Latter-day Saint general conference only solidified the notion that good Mormon farmers should look to the Farm Bureau for representation.75 Utah-Idaho Sugar officials also refused to attend any meeting with beet growers not organized by the Farm Bureau. Thus, when Patterson held a meeting trying to recruit farmers on the eve of the formation of a Farm Bureau unit in Layton, Utah, only about ninety farmers attended. Of those ninety, only thirty united with Patterson.76

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in an attempt to reduce the power of sugar manufacturers and to give farmers a stronger voice in the prices they were receiving for sugar beets. Because Charles G. Patterson— one of the main proponents of the organization—spoke and wrote so vociferously against the sugar companies, he and the IASBG were quickly branded as radical and un-American, reducing their influence among Utah farmers. Patterson’s attacks on high church officials who were also leaders in the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company increased the distrust with which Latter-day Saint farmers regarded him, and his complete break with the church in 1920 probably cemented the doom of the IFA. The fact that the Farm Bureau only gained in strength during the 1910s as an organization for farmers also made it difficult for Patterson’s independent organization to make much headway, despite his attempts to portray the bureau as in league with the sugar companies.

When Utah-Idaho Sugar refused to hold any meetings with sugar growers that were not under the sponsorship of the Farm Bureau, it made Patterson’s efforts to recruit farmers even more difficult. In addition, the devastating crash in sugar prices and the problems generated by the curly top disease meant that fewer farmers were growing sugar beets, which perhaps in their minds, decreased the need for Patterson’s association.

Yet exploring the brief history of Patterson and the organizations he led showcases some of the efforts made in Utah and Idaho to organize farmers in the 1910s. Although conservative organizations such as the Farm Bureau would ultimately win out in the effort to speak on behalf of farmers, it was not the only organization claiming to look out for the interests of growers. Not everyone agreed with the conservative efforts of the Farm Bureau, and the IASBG and the IFA provided an alternative voice—at least for white farmers. And it is clear that Patterson and the IASBG did have a significant impact on the prices farmers received for beets, especially in 1917 and 1918. The history of the IASBG thus provides more information about the influence that a highly controversial organization had in the Intermountain West in the early twentieth century, and about the man largely responsible for it.

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Notes 1. “General Conference,” Deseret Evening News, April 6, 1891, p. 4.

2. The history of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company has been told by a number of historians. Leonard J. Arrington provided a history of the company from its formation to 1966, while I wrote a history of government investigations into the corporation in the 1910s.

Arrington’s work does not mention Charles G. Patterson or the IASBG. My work briefly discusses Patterson and the association, but it does not provide as much detail as this article as to who Patterson was or the history of the IASBG. Leonard J. Arrington, Beet Sugar in the West: A History of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1891–1966 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966); Matthew C. Godfrey, Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907–1921 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007), 102–11.

3. Godfrey, Religion, Politics, and Sugar, 19, 24, 26–48.

4. Godfrey, 160. For example, the Beet Growers Sugar Company was established in Rigby, Idaho, in 1917, and the Gunnison Valley Sugar Company began operating in Gunnison, Utah, in 1918.

5. Godfrey, 94.

6. C. G. Patterson, Business, Politics and Religion in Utah: The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company Versus The People of Utah and Idaho, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: The F. W. Gardiner Press, 1916), 14–15; “Beet Sugar Costs and Beet Prices,” Facts About Sugar 3 (December 9, 1916): 362.

7. Who Gets the Profits from Sugar Beets?, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: The F. W. Gardiner Co. Press, 1917), 10.

8. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Progress of the BeetSugar Industry in the United States in 1909 (Washington, D.C., 1910), 37.

9. Thomas G. Alexander, “The Burgeoning of Utah’s Economy: 1910–19,” in A Dependent Commonwealth: Utah’s Economy from Statehood to the Great Depression, edited Dean L. May, Charles Redd Monographs in Western History No. 4 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1974), 37–39; Arrington, Beet Sugar in the West, 201.

10. For a history of the Amalgamated Sugar Company, see J. R. Bachman, Story of the Amalgamated Sugar Company (Ogden, UT: Amalgamated Sugar Company, 1962).

11. John L. Powell, “The Role of Beet Growers in the Cache Valley Sugar Beet Industry, 1898–1981” (master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1995), 47–49.

12. Nancy K. Berlage, “Organizing the Farm Bureau: Family, Community, and Professionals, 1914–1928,” Agricultural History 75 (Autumn 2001): 409–10; Louis Bernard Schmidt, “The Role and Techniques of Agrarian Pressure Groups,” Agricultural History 30 (April 1956): 52.

13. V. Allen Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go: A History of the Farm Bureau Federation (Salt Lake City: Utah Farm Bureau Federation, 1975), 8–9; “Head of the State Farm Bureau,” Ogden Daily Standard, December 5, 1916.

14. “Head of the State Farm Bureau,” Ogden Daily Standard, December 5, 1916.

15. It is unclear exactly what Patterson’s status was with the church in the mid-1910s, but he was apparently still a member until 1920 when he was excommunicated.

“Mormon Excommunicated,” Christian Statesman 54 (August 1920): 377.

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Sugar Business [Salt Lake City: The F. W. Gardiner Co. Press, 1917], 3.)

31. Who Gets the Profits from Sugar Beets?, 6, 17.

32. “Beetgrowers Form Protective Society,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 26, 1917, p. 24.

33. “Beet Growers to Fight for Fair Share of Profits,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 16, 1917, second section, p. 1.

34. “200 Organize to Fight for Bigger Share of Profits,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 26, 1917, second section, p. 1.

35. “Beetgrowers Form Protective Society,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 26, 1917, p. 24. For a copy of the organization’s bylaws and the text of a speech that Peterson gave at the organizational meeting, see Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, Salvation for the Sugar Beet Grower: The Law Governing Members of the Inter-Mountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers (Salt Lake City: Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, n.d. [1918]), 14–20.

36. “Growers of Sugar Beets Meet Today,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 25, 1917, p. 16.

37. “Utah-Idaho Co. Adopts New Profit Sharing Plan,” Facts About Sugar 5 (August 25, 1917): 147.

38. “U.S. is Asked to Intervene in Sugar Row,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 30, 1917, p. 7; “Government Wants Farmers To Grow More Sugar Beets,” Utah Farmer 4 (November 3, 1917): 10.

39. “Agreement Reached on 1918 Sugar Beet Prices,” Box Elder County Farm Bureau News 1 (November 1, 1917): 1, 3. See also “Sugar Beet Contracts for 1918,” Utah Farmer 4 (October 18, 1917): 2.

40. “Beet Growers Assert They Will Battle Sugar Men to End,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 13, 1917, p. 16.

41. “Beet Growers Appeal from Sugar Prices,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 13, 1917, p. 1.

42. “Utah Idaho Sugar Will Share Profits with Beet Growers,” Richfield (UT) Reaper, August 25, 1917; “Profits from Sugar Beets as Compared to Wheat,” Utah Farmer 14 (September 22, 1917): 2.

43. “Higher Prices Are Sought for Beets,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 19, 1918, p. 4.

44. Between the Millstones: The Arguments to the Jury in the Utah-Idaho Sugar Beet Case (The People are the Jury) (Salt Lake City: Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, 1918), 123.

45. “What Beet Growers Are Doing,” Utah Farmer 15 (January 11, 1919): 2.

46. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 287–92.

47. Charles W. Nibley to Senator William H. King, December 28, 1917, box 2, fd. 6, MS 1287, CHL. 48. “Another Organizer Makes Appearance Among Dear Farmers,” Richfield Reaper, December 6, 1919, p. 1.

49. Elder Melvin J. Ballard, Sunday, October 5, 1919, in Ninetieth Semi-Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1919), 117–18.

50. In the April 1920 general conference, for example, President Heber J. Grant read excerpts of speeches from senators from Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona speaking favorably about the Latter-day Saints. One statement was from Senator Charles Thomas of Colorado. He described in glowing terms a settlement of church members in the San Luis Valley in Colorado because “they obey and support the authorities. Bolshevism, anarchism, and socialism are foreign to the

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16. C. G. Patterson to Rev. James S. Martin, December 23, 1915, James S. Martin Papers, MSS 567, L. Tom Perry Special Collections and Archives, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter BYU Special Collections); “Protests Against Senator Smoot Have Arrived at Washington,” Sun (Price, UT), December 3, 1915, p. 3. In the 1910s, the National Reform Association, through its periodical the Christian Statesman and the sponsorship of lectures, waged a war against the Latter-day Saints because of plural marriage and what it considered to be the church’s undue influence in politics and business in Utah. See Bradley Kime, “Exhibiting Theology: James E. Talmage and Mormon Public Relations, 1915–20,” Journal of Mormon History 40 (Winter 2014): 212–13; Kenneth L. Cannon II, “‘The Modern Mormon Kingdom’: Frank J. Cannon’s National Campaign against Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History 37 (Fall 2011): 93–94. For a detailed history of the National Reform Association, see Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865– 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.)

17. James H. Wolfe to Rev. J. S. Martin, December 22, 1915, Martin Papers, BYU Special Collections.

18. Patterson, Business, Politics and Religion in Utah, 13–15.

19. Patterson, 10–11.

20. Richard C. Brown, “The Muckrakers: Honest Craftsmen,” History Teacher 2 (January 1969): 52–53. See also Josephine D. Randolph, “A Notable Pennsylvanian: Ida Minerva Tarbell, 1857–1944,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 66 (Spring 1999): 216; Louis Filler, Muckraking and Progressivism in the American Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 247.

21. David I. Macleod, “Food Prices, Politics, and Policy in the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (July 2009): 368, 388–89, 392, 399.

22. Anthon H. Lund, Journal, June 19, 1916, in Danish Apostles: The Diaries of Anthon H. Lund, 1890–1921, John P. Hatch, ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006), 612.

23. C. W. Nibley, “Facts are Given about the Sugar Industry,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 1916, p. 32.

24. Nibley.

25. Nibley.

26. Nibley.

27. Charles G. Patterson to Bishop C. W. Nibley, July 5, 1916, box 6, fd. 22, MS 1287, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL).

28. Patterson to Nibley, July 5, 1916; Patterson, Business, Politics and Religion, 21.

29. C. G. Patterson to D. D. McKay, December 5, 1916, in Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go, 9.

30. “Utah Beet Growers to Accept Flat 1917 Rate,” Facts About Sugar 4 (January 13, 1917): n.p.; “Beet Growers to Receive Higher Prices Next Year,” Facts About Sugar 3 (December 23, 1916): 393. Farm Bureau representatives had proposed a “sliding scale rate for beets containing more than 15 per cent sucrose,” but the sugar companies refused to grant it. (“Utah Beet Growers to Accept Flat 1917 Rate,” Facts About Sugar 4 [January 13, 1917]: n.p.) Patterson implied in a 1917 pamphlet that his communications with Nibley were key in getting these increases. (Profit Sharing in the

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atmosphere of that community. They can not take root in such a soil.” President Heber J. Grant, Sunday, April 4, 1920, in Ninetieth Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1920), 9. For more on church leaders’ opposition to socialism, see John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011), 344–45, 348–49, 382–83.

51. For more on the connection between business and American churches in the early twentieth century, see Timothy E. W. Gloege, “Fundamentalism and the Business Turn,” in The Business Turn in American Religious History, edited Amanda Porterfield, Darren E. Grem, and John Corrigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 46–58.

52. Profit Sharing in the Sugar Business, 18.

53. See Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, The Insides of the Beet Sugar Manufacturers Union: Take A Look (Salt Lake City: Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, [1918]), 8.

54. Cracking Nuts in Utah: Little Essays on Tender Subjects (Salt Lake City: n.p., 1922), 11.

55. Who Gets the Profits from Sugar Beets?, 22.

56. Charles W. Nibley to William R. Palmer, September 1, 1916, box 2, fd. 5, MS 1287, CHL. 57. For more information on Nibley’s views about business and capitalism, see Matthew C. Godfrey, “The Shadow of Mormon Cooperation: The Business Policies of Charles Nibley, Western Sugar Magnate in the Early 1900s,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 94 (Summer 2003): 130–39.

58. “Nine Dollars a Ton For Sugar Beets This Year,” Utah Farmer 14 (January 26, 1918): 1; “Beet Men Asking for Higher Price,” Ogden Daily Standard, January 17, 1918, p. 2; “Higher Prices Are Sought for Beets,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 19, 1918, p. 4.

59. “Sugar Beet Price for 1918,” Utah Farmer 14 (January 26, 1918): 6.

60. “Beet Growers Will Not Fight for $10 for 1918 Beets,” Box Elder News, January 29, 1918, p. 3.

61. “Says Published Statements Untrue,” Logan (UT) Republican, February 16, 1918, p. 5.

62. Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers, Salvation for the Sugar Beet Grower, 16–20; “Beetgrowers Form Protective Society,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 26, 1917, p. 24.

63. “Sugar Output of Utah and Idaho,” Utah Farmer 14 (February 2, 1918): 14.

64. Samuel R. Berger, Dollar Harvest: The Story of the Farm Bureau (Lexington, MA: Heath Lexington Books, 1971), 93; Godfrey, Religion, Politics, and Sugar, 110.

65. Robert P. Howard, James P. Howard and the Farm Bureau (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1983), 76–77.

66. Between the Millstones, 30–34, 52–53.

67. “Grower Points Out Beet Industry Problems,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 4, 1919, p. 10. Note that Patterson is misidentified as “A. G. Patterson.”

68. “Farmers May Own Sugar Factories,” Idaho Republican, November 26, 1918, p. 4.

69. Intermountain Association of Sugar Beet Growers By C. G. Patterson, Secretary, to Hon. John L. Burnett, Chairman, Committee on Immigration, House of Representatives, January 29, 1919, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject correspondence files, pt. 2, Mexican Immigration,

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1906–1930, reel 8, Research Collections in American Immigration (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1992), emphasis in the original.

70. An investigation into the condition of Mexican workers in Idaho, for example, revealed that nearly two hundred were employed by farmers in southern Idaho.

William J. A. McVety to His Excellency, Moses Alexander, October 24, 1918, box 16, fd. 2, Moses Alexander Papers, AR 2.0011, Idaho State Archives, Boise, Idaho.

71. Lori A. Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 20.

72. “Farmers Meet in Salt Lake Today,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 3, 1919, p. 24.

73. “Gore Says League Will Be Accepted,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 5, 1919, p. 22.

74. “Support the Farm Bureaus,” Utah Farmer 16 (August 2, 1919): 1.

75. Ninety-First Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Deseret Book Company, 1921), 147–55.

76. “Beetgrowers Urged to Fight U.S. Department,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 21, 1918, p. 2.

77. “Another Organizer Makes Appearance Among Dear Farmers,” Richfield Reaper, December 6, 1919, p. 1.

78. “Mormon Excommunicated,” Christian Statesman 54 (August 1920): 377.

79. “Plan of Pioneer Sugar Company Explained,” Journal (Logan, UT), March 1, 1921, p. 4; “Farmers Cooperative Project Started,” Fort Collins Courier, August 12, 1920, p. 2; Charles L. Schmalz, “Sugar Beets in Cache Valley: An Amalgamation of Agriculture and Industry,” Utah Historical Quarterly 57 (Fall 1989): 379.

80. “Farmer-Labor Ticket Chosen,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 16, 1920, p. 14; “Beet Growers Delegation Stirs Up Discussion on Sugar Profiteering,” Fort Collins Coloradoan, February 21, 1920, p. 1; “Telegram to Beet Growers,” Idaho Republican, March 5, 1920, p. 1; John Sillito, “Socialist Party of Utah,” https://www.uen.org/utah _history_encyclopedia/s/SOCIALIST_PARTY.shtml.

81. “Sugar Factory Representatives and Beet Growers Effect Compromise,” Idaho Republican, March 15, 1920, pp. 1, 8; Cracking Nuts in Utah: Little Essays on Tender Subjects (Salt Lake City: n.p., 1922).

82. Godfrey, Religion, Politics, and Sugar, 198–99; Arrington, Beet Sugar in the West, 105–7, 201.

83. One should not confuse the Intermountain Farmers Association that exists today with the organization Patterson headed. The organization that is still in operation was formed in 1923 as the Utah Poultry Producers Association.

The name was changed to the Intermountain Farmers Association in 1960. Paige Wiren, “Utah’s Intermountain Farmers Association,” https://utahstories.com/ 2016/11/utahs-intermountain-farmers-association/.

84. “Former Resident Dies on Coast,” Pleasant Grove (UT) Review, April 13, 1934, p. 5; “New Attorneys in State,” Statesman Journal (Salem, OR), June 11, 1924, p. 5.

85. “State Grange Officers Due Here Tuesday,” Evening Herald (Klamath Falls, OR), September 25, 1937, p. 3; “State Grange Conference,” Medford Mail Tribune, December 10, 1936, p. 5; “County Granges Set State Record,” Eugene Guard (Eugene, OR), October 11, 1935, p. 1.

86. “Former Resident Dies on Coast,” Pleasant Grove Review, April 13, 1934, p. 5; “Oregon Death Index, 1903– 1998,” database, FamilySearch, http://FamilySearch.org.

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At the state line along Utah State Route 59, between Zion and Grand Canyon National Parks, are the well-known twin polygamous communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. Heading south into the open desert, with the red and buff sandstone headland Canaan Mountain looming to the east, few notice an unmarked, paved road that veers off to the right just south of town. This road leads to Centennial Park, a largely hidden polygamous enclave. In the early 2000s, the media firestorm that focused on Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) largely left Centennial Park untouched. Its residents, who call themselves “the Work” of Jesus Christ, purposefully stayed out of the spotlight for decades. But in 2003, women leaders of the community formed an organization called the Centennial Park Action Committee (CPAC) to educate outsiders about their unique form of plural marriage, community customs, and lives in what is sometimes called “the principle,” or the “New and Everlasting Covenant” of celestial marriage. Frustrated with media conflating all polygamous groups together with the FLDS in often sensationalized and one-sided accounts, women of the Work wanted to share their experiences and tell their own history in an effort to differentiate themselves from the FLDS and other groups practicing plural marriage. Risking potential costs to themselves and their community, CPAC leaders consciously decided to open to the outside world.

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Polygamy under the Red Cliffs: Women’s Voices and Historical Memory at Centennial Park

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Of the at least twelve organized fundamentalist Mormon groups in North America, some maintain very strict separation from the larger society, while others are integrated to a high degree into the mainstream.

Centennial Park represents a group that has taken a middle approach between these poles. They have embarked on a path of selective adaptation to mainstream culture; the outreach and advocacy work of CPAC is part of this strategy. Their modern cultural history provides an important case study of a community whose practice of plural marriage differs

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Priscilla Hammon and the CPAC committee. Priscilla and her husband, a son of J. Marion Hammon, were central to the founding of Centennial Park. She and her husband helped build the community. Priscilla is a founder of CPAC and a vocal spokesperson in the organization to the present. Courtesy of CPAC.

significantly from and represents a progressive, middle-ground approach among various Mormon fundamentalist sects. Taking an ethnographic approach, augmented with primary and secondary sources to verify historical claims and other statements, this article examines this cultural history as CPAC women present it. In a larger fundamentalist Mormon culture dominated by male voices and authority, women of the Work began to negotiate their roles as supporters of polygamy, using history—particularly the devastating mid-twentieth-century government raids on their community—to formulate their positions and to detail women’s agency and empowerment as they feel it exists in Centennial Park.1

Establishing CPAC When women formed CPAC, polygamy, or more correctly polygyny—a man having more than one wife—was in the national spotlight. Popular television shows routinely highlighted individuals harmed by Warren Jeffs and other leaders of the FLDS, from underaged girls forced into

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marriages to much older men to sexual assault, fraud, and other crimes. Programs often conveyed stereotypes about women in plural marriages. The women of Centennial Park believed that these media programs did not reflect their experiences.2 One of CPAC’s creators, Maryann, a woman in her early sixties who lives in a household with her husband and his three other wives (“sister wives”), recalls that the actual catalyst for the initiative was the Polygamy Summit organized by the Utah Attorney General’s office in St. George, Utah, in 2003.3 “We always knew that people looked at us as a problem, but we had kind of lived a life and wondered why we were looked at as a problem.” On the attention given the FLDS, Maryann says, “We have determined that it’s necessary for us to speak up, because I think most people just put all polygamists into one pot and feel like we all believe the same things. It’s Warren Jeffs-equals-polygamy in the minds of the masses. We have an even greater job to do to stand up and say, ‘No, that’s not the belief system that we hold to.’” Although

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Another CPAC organizer, Nadine, a professional educator, summarizes the group’s purpose: “We just felt like if we just went down the road, people would eventually realize we’re just human beings.”5

FLDS, Government Raids, and Historical Memory The physical proximity of Centennial Park to Colorado City is no accident. The two communities and their histories are closely related.

Both trace their origins to the early Mormon fundamentalist movement and the founding of Short Creek (later Colorado City) in the 1920s and early 1930s. Decades before, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had publicly disavowed polygamy. In 1890 Wilford Woodruff, president of the church, issued his famous “Manifesto” discontinuing plural marriages.

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During the early 1940s, fundamentalist leaders instructed J. Marion Hammon from St. Anthony, Idaho, who was then in his early thirties, to move to Short Creek to oversee the trust. The creation of the UEP allowed the Priesthood Council, a body that presided over most fundamentalists in Utah until a major split in the leadership in 1952, to govern the community as a small theocracy. At least for a time, Short Creek’s isolation kept state authorities from interfering. Residents of Short Creek retained close ties to other practitioners of plural marriage in the Salt Lake City area during these years.8

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There was so much negative attention brought to polygamy and to our lifestyle that when we read about the summit that was being held in St. George, we got together as ladies and decided that maybe it’s time for us to stand up and be heard. . . . We just showed up unannounced, and so we started filing in, and there weren’t enough chairs, and pretty soon there were a hundred plural wives all around the outside of the room just standing, lining the walls. . . . Our whole purpose of being there was that we did not want them to talk about us without us [present].

That was our first opportunity . . . to stand up and speak for ourselves following the 1953 raid. Our mothers came home from that raid, buried their heads in the sand, and started raising large families and figured if we just kind of lived our lives under the radar that the law would leave us alone again.4

Fundamentalists did not believe the 1890 Manifesto was a revelation from God, however; they continued the practice. Scholars have documented, and the LDS church now acknowledges, that hundreds of post-1890 plural marriages were approved by church leaders until 1904 when the church president Joseph F. Smith officially prohibited them.6 After that, LDS leaders engaged in a campaign to locate and excommunicate polygamists. As such, fundamentalist Mormon leader John Y. Barlow and others established the community of Short Creek at an isolated high desert location along the Utah–Arizona border so they could live the principle of plural marriage in relative peace. Residents established the United Effort Plan (UEP), a common law trust, to hold land in common for followers. In time, the rising polygamist enclave caught the attention of mainstream Mormon leaders. Members of the community were excommunicated en masse in 1935.7

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she was raised in the fundamentalist community at Colorado City, Maryann felt it changed drastically under Warren Jeffs. “What I see in the FLDS today is as foreign to me as anything I’ve ever known as far as religion goes.” On the importance of the summit in St. George, Maryann notes:

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In 1935 Utah passed the nation’s strictest anti-polygamy law, significantly increasing the penalty for cohabitation to a felony with a maximum sentence of five years. That year the first raid on Short Creek occurred. Almost a decade later, in 1944, the FBI engaged in a second and even larger raid, arresting almost all major fundamentalist leaders across Utah, including John Y. Barlow and about fifty others. Many were convicted and sentenced to five years in prison; after serving up to seven months, fundamentalist leaders were released after vowing to end their practice of polygamy. But most went back to their old lives living plural marriage. This intransigence and other issues led

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50 Polygamist family in Short Creek, Mohave County, Arizona, 1953. The same year this photo was taken the Arizona state government raided the community, prosecuting the men and taking into custody the women and children.

Although the case against them was eventually dismissed, and the members of the community returned to their homes, the ordeal became seared in the community’s memory. Utah State Historical Society photograph no. 14943.

directly to the Short Creek Raid of 1953, the most significant event of the fundamentalists’ early history.9 It has had the most lasting impact on the collective memory of the people at Colorado City and Centennial Park.

CPAC still recall the hurtful rhetoric used by state officials and the trauma the raid inflicted on their community. Maryann was directly impacted, as a young girl of seven years. As she emotionally relates:

At 1:00 a.m. on the morning of July 26, 1953, over one hundred Arizona National Guard members and law enforcement officers stormed the town.10 Later that day, Arizona Governor J. Howard Pyle declared the roundup a success in a radio address, saying the state “has concluded a momentous police action against insurrection within its borders. . . . It mobilized and used its total police power to protect the lives and future of 263 children. They are the product and the victims of the foulest conspiracy you can imagine,” a whole “community dedicated to the production of white slaves.”11 Members of

My mother had been taken away in a 1953 raid, when Arizona [officials] came into the town; then the town was called Short Creek. And he came in, full force, Governor Pyle from Arizona with a hundred law enforcement officers at 4 o’clock in the morning and raided the community. . . . There was [sic] about one hundred officers that came in from Mesa and Phoenix, I guess it was every officer they could possibly find. Two officers came to our door and pounded on it and

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After we got to Phoenix, they pulled all the women and children aside and they told my mother to get on a milk truck. . . . We just rode with the milk man until we got to the people’s residence. . . . We knocked on the door and Mrs. Rogers opened the door and she just took one look at us and there was my mother eight months’ along and three little girls and the first thing she said was, “Oh, I ordered a boy.” . . . We were taken to . . . a little shed as our home that . . . barely fit two single beds in it. Just three weeks after we got there, my mother went into labor. Mrs. Rogers just took her to the hospital and dropped her off at the steps of the hospital and said, “Sorry I can’t do any more for you, you’ll have to go in on your own from here.” . . . [Mother] was in labor so

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The ordeal of suffering through an armed police raid and witnessing their fathers arrested and taken away would leave lifelong scars on people of the community. Maryann’s mother was eight months pregnant at the time. As Maryann remembers, “Within three days all of the mothers and children on the Arizona side had been taken by bus to Phoenix to be dispersed among better families, so to speak, in their minds, where they might be able to eventually adopt out the children and jail all of the fathers and do away with polygamy once and for all.”12

Nadine still bristles when she thinks about how the dominant culture at the time of the raid— and to this day—looks down upon her faith. She is dismayed by what she considers a callous disregard of human rights. Nadine believes that even today, despite multiculturalism, it is acceptable for others to show prejudice toward her faith and to feel they know what is best for her people’s children.13 These feelings originated with the 1953 raid. As Maryann relates about her experience:

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said, “Open up or we’ll break the door down.” It was just my mother and three little girls. I remember sitting up out of our bunk beds and she opened the door and the officers came in and started [rummaging] through all our stuff. They were looking for evidence against my father to put him in jail.

Through the course of the day, they told us we needed to go down to the school. The officers were there and they put my father, and all the fathers, and locked them up in our school kitchen. I remember standing on an old table that was outside the window.

The kitchen window had a screen that was broken, and I stood there and held his hand and he said, “Always remember that I love you, and always remember to say your prayers.”

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Unidentified members of the Short Creek community, photograph taken at the time of the July 1953 raids. The boy’s smile for the camera belies the trauma that the raid inflicted on members of the FLDS community. Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, MSS C 400, photograph no. 26750.

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they put her out so that she wasn’t aware when the baby was born. And they didn’t allow her to see our baby sister for 48 hours. She kept asking them why. We found out a week after (from a lawyer) that the reason was that they planned to destroy all the paperwork and adopt all the kids out and they didn’t want her to get attached to the baby.

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The Split and Genesis of Centennial Park

Instead of the intended effect of breaking the community, the state actions hardened its members’ resolve to survive. After the failed placement with Mrs. Rogers, Maryann with her mother and siblings moved to various places in Arizona and northern Utah. It took them fourteen years to make their way back to Colorado City.14 Nearly three hundred men and women were taken into state custody; for over 160 women and children, like Maryann’s mother, it took two years or more before they made it back home.15

As a sign of their resilience and of the breathing room allowed by the states’ hands-off approach, by the late 1950s and into the 1970s the fundamentalists once again thrived on the Utah–Arizona border. To signal a new start after the stigma of the 1953 raid, the town changed its name to Colorado City in 1961.19 Nadine remembers, “As the community gathered together after the raids, in the sixties we had . . . ‘the Golden Era.’ There was just an immense amount of growth, a lot of community togetherness into the early seventies.” Under Marion Hammon’s leadership, Colorado City prospered, with its residents constructing large sprawling homes and operating agricultural and construction businesses. The town was hooked up with electricity, modern water and sewage systems, and telephone services. The fundamentalists built a modern school, the Academy, to educate their children.20

The raids against members of the FLDS were psychologically damaging to community members, especially young children like Maryann.

Nadine has remarked that the raids damaged trust between the community and the state.16 The 1953 raid, in particular, left a mark on public opinion and a lasting impression on officials in both Utah and Arizona who feared a repetition of bad publicity. Photographs of children separated from their parents disturbed many in the general public. The 1953 raid was denounced in the Arizona state house, with one senator calling it the “blackest blot” on the state’s history. Governor Pyle later remarked that the raid ruined his political career.17 For the next half century, the state retreated from vigorous enforcement of anti-polygamy laws, although public sentiment against plural marriage remained decidedly negative. In the 2010s, state officials in Utah and Arizona publicly stated that they would not prosecute otherwise law-abiding citizens for the crime of polygamy.

From the 1950s into the 1980s, Arizona did not entirely leave the group alone, however; it periodically challenged polygamists teaching in the public schools and serving as law enforcement officers in the community. The raids feature prominently in the historical memory of the fundamentalists.18

While Colorado City was modernizing, a significant division emerged in the community between the followers of Hammon and the supporters of Rulon T. Jeffs. An accountant from Sandy, Utah, Jeffs was caring for the ailing Leroy S. Johnson, a founder of Short Creek who had succeeded to senior apostle of the Priesthood Council in 1954. Although the most senior apostle was its head, holding the important authority to call a new apostle upon the death of a member, the council essentially held its authority in common; each member could authorize and perform plural marriages and other ordinances. By the early 1980s, President Johnson, affectionately called “Uncle Roy” by his followers, was still the senior apostle, followed in seniority by Hammon and next Jeffs. Johnson was in his nineties, however, and extremely ill with shingles. At the time Uncle Roy was still revered by the people who later settled Centennial Park, but he was rarely seen and rarely spoke in public. The women of the Work believe that in his weakened state, Johnson came under the control of Jeffs.

A rumor arose that Johnson proposed bypassing Hammon as senior apostle upon his own death in favor of Jeffs using an obscure theory known as the “One Man Doctrine.” It proposed that only one man on earth had complete authority from God to lead the people in both temporal

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Centennial Park was established in the resulting schism within the Priesthood Council over Johnson’s plan to name Rulon Jeffs the One Man prophet of the faith. In 1984, Johnson and Jeffs eliminated Hammon and Timpson as trustees of the UEP, removed them from their roles at the Academy, and later evicted them and their followers from their own homes.22 Nadine relates how her people view the priesthood split. “It’s a leadership question. They have a one man prophet. We have a council of clergy. That’s the core of the split. They wanted . . . to empower one man [Rulon Jeffs] completely. We had a belief in a council of clergy, and that difference is what caused the initial separation.” Nadine and others firmly believe they are holding true to fundamentalist Mormon teachings by retaining council rule.23 After being expelled from the council, the school, and their homes, Hammon and Timpson’s group sued the UEP trust for ownership of the Academy and homes that they had built with their own hands and savings. However, they only received a life estate in their homes, meaning they could only live in them until their deaths but could not own them outright. The ruling convinced Hammon and Timpson that

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they needed to form their own town.24 In short order, Johnson and Jeffs’s group, composed of about 80 percent of the original community, incorporated both the town of Colorado City in 1985 and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1991.25 After Johnson’s death in 1986, Rulon Jeffs claimed the role of One Man prophet of the faith, a position he held until his death in 2002. Rulon’s son Warren succeeded him as prophet of the FLDS. The One Man Doctrine enabled both Rulon and Warren Jeffs to take almost complete control over the FLDS church.26

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and spiritual affairs. Marion Hammon and his ally on the council, Del Timpson, publicly rejected the One Man Doctrine. At a rare appearance at church in 1984, Johnson rose and denounced Hammon and Timpson, expelling them from the council.21

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The Academy building in Centennial Park, 1986. The fact members built a school as one of the first community buildings demonstrates the importance of education to the congregation.

Courtesy of Centennial Park Action Committee.

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Establishing the Community of Centennial Park Because most of the Hammon and Timpson followers still lived and had businesses in Colorado City, they looked for a new place to settle nearby. With help from a fundraising campaign among members, they bought a ranch of approximately one thousand acres to build Centennial Park.27 Jeffs’s followers had tried to block the sale for fear of what they considered an “apostate” group living nearby. Jeffs thereafter ordered his people to shun their former congregants. The new community set up an entity, the Deseret Trust, to hold the land in common.

It soon became clear to leaders, however, that they could lose individual lots to sheriff sales if occupants failed to pay taxes. As a result, the Priesthood Council decided to have individual titles issued for each lot. In contrast, Rulon and later Warren Jeffs utilized their control of the

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UEP trust lands to evict rivals and any person who fell out of favor with their leadership.28

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The Centennial Park group dedicated its new town on September 27, 1986, one hundred years to the day after LDS church president John Taylor had purportedly received a revelation to never surrender plural marriage; they named it Centennial Park in its honor. Centennial Park grew into a neatly kept, prosperous community of approximately twelve hundred residents.

Followers of the Work also have a congregation in the Salt Lake City area, with both groups totaling approximately two thousand.29 The town was designed with streets in a grid pattern, many named after their leaders. In time, all the streets were paved. Land was set aside near the entrance of Centennial Park for a commercial center, eventually housing a health clinic, some small stores, and a grocery store. Unlike those in Colorado City, the businesses were privately owned. Centennial Park’s modern and prosperous appearance stands in stark contrast to the dirt roads and often dilapidated, unfinished houses of nearby Colorado City.30 Maryann, who still lives in Colorado City with a life estate on her home, elaborates on the differences between the two towns: Centennial Park is much newer than Colorado City, so if you drive through . . . you’ll see a vast difference of the housing conditions. In Colorado City, [homes are] still on the UEP Trust property . . . and the state regulates that now because of Warren [Jeffs’s imprisonment]. By default, they [have lost many homes]. Because we were built on the trust property, we’re not able to go get loans to finish our homes in Colorado City . . . whereas in Centennial Park, people have been able to finish their houses. It’s subdivided and in your deeds, and that allows them to finish their homes. And they just live by a little higher standard all the way around.31 From the start, the cultural and social heart of Centennial Park was its worship hall, one of the first buildings built and dedicated in 1986 and still used for weekly services. A basic two-story unadorned white stucco structure, it holds the whole congregation. Services are presided over

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by the six members of the Priesthood Council who sit on a stage with other church leaders.

The officiating apostle selects speakers from the council or male priesthood holders from the congregation who talk about devotion, responsibility, and, often, their town’s history. A large choir of men and women sing from seats at the back of the stage. Women of the Work emphasize that anyone is welcome to attend services and learn about their faith.32

Theological Basis for Plural Marriage CPAC leaders are well versed in the history and theological underpinnings of plural marriage, knowing that their practice of polygyny is the primary reason for the existence of their community and its separateness from the surrounding society. Centennial Park traces its origins to the teachings of Lorin C. Woolley. In the late 1920s, Woolley claimed to have been present at an 1886 meeting where President John Taylor announced a revelation he had received about continuing plural marriage and ordained Woolley and four others to a council with authority to continue performing and sealing plural marriages.33 The scholar Brian C. Hales notes that the 1886 revelation, which LDS leaders later dismissed as fraudulent, appears to have been written in Taylor’s hand and “seems to be genuine.”34 Followers of the Work are taught about the 1886 revelation and council ordination from an early age.

Nadine and others believe they are following the original teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith. When in 1890 Woodruff issued the Manifesto expressing his intention to abide by and to encourage others to adhere to the anti-polygamy laws of the land, the women at Centennial Park believe the church had corrupted itself by making compromises to American culture and its government. CPAC leaders believe that the mainstream LDS church is straying from the true path.35 Nadine recalls what she has been taught about the 1890 Manifesto and LDS church president Joseph F. Smith’s Second Manifesto of 1904, which strictly abandoned the practice of plural marriage. “The 1890 Manifesto was a proclamation to the world, and it wasn’t [listed as] a revelation . . .

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The women of Centennial Park, while noting they live outside the law regarding plural marriage, take pride that they reside in a prosperous, patriotic, law-abiding community.38 Their people’s business acumen is a special point of pride. They remark that several men on their Priesthood Council are very wealthy. One council member is, in fact, a multimillionaire who owns a major hotel chain. He has a mansion in Centennial Park and a personal plane to fly him to business appointments. Besides this man’s home, the town also has many other extremely large houses, testifying to the prosperity of members. In 2020, one house owned by the Knudson family was valued at $2.4 million, while another owned by the Timpson family was valued at $1.5 million. Most residents are engaged in the building trades. Residents have established cabinet shops, poultry businesses, landscaping firms, and even a candy-making enterprise. Entrepreneurship and job creation are celebrated in the community.39 A central institution that helped build the town of Centennial Park and binds the community together across generations is the “work mission” young men choose to undertake after high school. Started by town founder Marion Hammon in the 1950s, missionaries perform volunteer labor in Centennial Park or paid labor in nearby towns, donating their pay to the church,

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From about the early 1960s, we were able to build our own academy, a private high school that’s still functioning in Centennial Park today. I graduated from there [and my husband did]. . . .

Our family has graduated 15 students from there so far, and they have gone further into education at the surrounding colleges. . . . For many years, the polygamist culture was accused of not valuing education of our children.

We do, we highly value education for our children. We also have the new Mohave Community College out there in Colorado City.42

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in return for room and board in a community member’s home. Nephi, a grandson of Hammon, says that young men agree to do a work mission in part to give back time to their community but also as a way to prove they are serious about their faith. A mission typically lasts two years, but some can last for four years or longer.40 The women of CPAC also view work missions as a vital form of vocational training. Darlene explains the perceived benefits: “I have a couple of missionaries who are living with me and they’re in construction; they have worked for Salisbury Homes and a bunch of other big builders in southern Utah and in framing concrete. They have had a lot of opportunity to learn and to be an apprentice in those fields.”41

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so we didn’t feel like it was one. The mini manifesto, the declaration that came in 1904 by Joseph F. Smith, was more of an adamant stand, but . . . hasn’t been canonized by the church either, and there were marriages after that.”36 Most scholars of Mormon polygamy recognize that hundreds of polygamous marriages were approved by a member of the First Presidency post-1890, mostly in Canada and Mexico, but the 1904 Manifesto clearly banned the practice; two apostles, Matthias F. Crowley and John W. Taylor, were removed from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for refusing to abide by the 1904 Manifesto.37 As Nadine’s comments reveal, women of the Work believe that they are following God’s law of plural marriage and are thus justified in breaking the laws of the land and operating outside mainstream convention.

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In 2008 the Masada School received a Blue Ribbon award from President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program. Nadine and others emphasize that their people have valued education for generations and are continuing the educational traditions of their ancestors.

Warren Jeffs, in contrast, ordered the Colorado City public schools shuttered in the early 2000s; the FLDS then focused on homeschooling, teaching only religiously themed lessons.43 Centennial Park parents encourage their children to pursue higher education as well. Like

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Aerial view of the Masada school and Centennial Park, 2004. Courtesy of CPAC.

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most parents, they hope their offspring will return to the community. But as Nadine remarks, they do not fear that their children will gain an education and then leave fundamentalism, as stereotypes about polygamists portray.44 Some have studied engineering and have come back to teach math; others have studied medicine, nursing, dentistry, or business management and returned to serve the community. Many students recently such as Merilee and Mathew attended Southern Utah University and returned to Centennial Park to further the community’s development.45 Nadine provides an example of how her professional growth was seen as a family affair, including the input of her sister wives: When I did my master’s degree, we . . . made the decision for me to go do it as a family. What I told the family is “I will go, and I will do this as quickly as I can.” I signed up for a bunch of credits, and my dean said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Is there a policy against having that many credits?”

“No, there’s just no way you can do a master’s program with that many credits in a semester.” “Oh, I’m not your regular person. You don’t know

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my life.” I went that whole year. I didn’t fix one meal, I didn’t do one batch of laundry, and I didn’t do any cleaning. I did classes, work, homework, and whatever time I had left, I was able to spend with my children.46 As Nadine’s case suggests, it is not uncommon for plural households to have one or more sister wives working outside the home to contribute to the family income. In these instances, one sister wife may be designated the “home mother” with more traditional household duties related to childrearing and housekeeping for the entire extended family.47

Marriage Customs within the Work Women of the Work believe that their group continues the marriage practices of their ancestors, while under Rulon and Warren Jeffs, the FLDS church pursues its well-known divergent path. Even before Rulon Jeffs’s assumption of control of the church at Colorado City, an underlying cause of the split regarded women and unquestioned patriarchal authority. Hammon and Timpson encouraged women to speak openly and to utilize their talents—whether in

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Members of the Work are also traditional in their selection of a spouse, a process governed more by the Priesthood Council and spiritual guidance than modern conceptions of love and individual choice.50 Women of the Work do not date, since in their view dating can cloud their judgment, but they do have some control over the selection of a marriage partner. As Darlene states, “Although men have to prove themselves through hard work and devotion to faith, [marriage] is not driven by men. The women are the ones that are making the choice.”51 Some young women feel called to marry a single man they grew up with, a teacher at the local school, a well-respected older man with many wives, or perhaps someone they are aware of from afar.

In certain cases, young women ask the Priesthood Council for recommendations of young

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It was a lovely experience growing up because I saw a lot of contrast. I love and adore my other mother, and I can tell you as a teenager when you’re struggling . . . you just feel like your parents cannot even relate to where you are coming from. . . . But I was very fortunate in having a younger mother that was a little closer to my generation that loved and adored me like a mother but was able to step outside of my relationship with her as a mom and say, “Look, I know where you’re coming from, and this is some good, sound advice.” And I was able to hear it from her when my mom was not able to even articulate the same conversation because it was so personal for her, this relationship with me. . . . I was defensive. She was defensive. And I’ve seen this . . . with my peers, with my children, having someone else who loves and cares for you and supports you in that parental role, that is able to give you that kind of guidance that you need when it’s so critical and so important, to me that is a huge benefit of the way that I was raised.55

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An additional wife joining a family is a complicated process. Families work together to create consensus about a new woman entering a household, and they establish delineated roles for each member afterward. Most women say they view it a blessing to have a sister wife join the family.53 With few exceptions, the women of CPAC extol the virtues of having sister wives and multiple mothers in one household, even pitying what some refer to as “single moms” for not having “a sister wife to help them out.”54 The women of CPAC emphasize the great joys and blessings that they feel stem from the multiple mother figures in their lives. As Darlene explains:

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Although women in Centennial Park assert greater power than women in many other polygamist sects, certain aspects of their lives remain strongly patriarchal. Theology and tradition mandate that the Priesthood Council is composed of men and that only men hold the priesthood. As seen in Nadine’s home, some plural households make important decisions, including distribution of funds and career choices, by consensus among adults. However, traditional norms mandate that the family patriarch should lead the household. One student who attended SUU in the 2010s, Mark, reported that in his household with dozens of siblings and multiple mothers in one of the town’s largest houses, his father gave out allowances to the dozens of family members as he saw fit.49

men to marry.52 The congregations at Centennial Park and near Salt Lake City are rather small in size, and would-be spouses often turn to related communities and various independent polygamist groups for potential marriage partners.

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the home or in the business world. Hammon challenged other leaders when he employed women in city government. Women are encouraged to wear their hair and to dress as they please as long as they respect the community’s rules of modesty about the human body. Nadine describes women’s role in marriage: “One of the things I think is powerful about the way we live is that all women are given the option to marry if they choose and have the rights of being a wife and mother and that the women are in charge of that process.” By comparison, Warren Jeffs uses the “Law of Placing” to assign girls to older men as wives, while also reassigning long-time wives of rivals to more loyal men.48

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Many women of the Work acknowledge the difficulties involved as well. One of the challenges of living the principle involves a first wife accepting one or more plural wives into their household. Members of CPAC feel that women are central to this decision.56 The women also recognize the burdens placed on men and all family members living in a plural household. As Maryann says, “It’s a huge job for a man. . . . It is a huge commitment, and it takes quite a man to take care of a family that size.” Nadine adds that women have “an immense amount of leeway given to them in terms of having the rights to be a wife and mother. Part of what we believe about priesthood is that [it helps] facilitate the process for women, and for a man to reject her, I think there would have to be some real reasons.”

Darlene continues, “We also look at another person coming into our family as a blessing. As challenging as it might appear or whatever might be involved, we see that as a blessing. And . . . who would want to deny a blessing?” Maryann adds, “It’s a commitment for the ladies to be able to work together. We have to establish multiple relationships within the family.”57

Unlike portrayed in media, it is not acceptable for a married man to go out and seek another wife. As Darlene argues, “How would you feel if your husband was married to you and dating another girl?” According to the women of the Work, single women initiate the process of joining an existing household. A form of interview is involved, where women have an equal voice in agreeing to a proposed union. As Janelle relates, “When my sister wife came into the family . . . I listed out all my concerns with my husband about what I would ask if someone were to come into our family, or what would I want? What are our family values? We . . . listed out everything that was really important to us, and we all sat down and talked about it and went down through everything. And when she agreed with our goals as a family, then everybody was okay, and we went for it.”58 Reaching consensus among current women in a household, potential women to join, as well as the man was a primary goal in the process.

To take into account varied personalities, the group allows flexibility in living arrangements.

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Aerial view of Centennial Park. The buildings in the foreground are locally owned industrial businesses. Courtesy of CPAC.

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As Darlene’s comments reveal, despite the benefits, living plural marriage has its challenges.

Nadine sees plural marriage, like her religion’s other principles, as an opportunity to address numerous human weaknesses, including jealousy, selfishness, and envy to live more godly to prepare for life after death. Women of the Work believe in a premortal existence and that plural marriage allows more spirit children there to attain earthly bodies. Fundamentalist Mormons, referring to a passage of scripture in the LDS Doctrines and Covenants, believe that plural marriage is a requirement of salvation.61 The people of Centennial Park in fact believe that God lives and is a product of plural marriage. As Maryann relates, “I believe in a Father in Heaven who has many Mothers in Heaven.

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Legal Issues

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One difficult issue that parents deal with is accepting when their child decides not to follow their example of plural marriage. Although heartbroken when in 2019 two of her sons rejected plural marriage, Nadine did not end her relationship with her sons.63 Darlene relates, “I have siblings that are more comfortable living [outside the church] because they don’t have to feel the pressure of what we are choosing . . . even though we love them. They’re welcome to come and stay at my house.”64 This openness contrasts markedly with other groups like the FLDS who generally cut off all contact with family members who have left their faith.

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It’s unique for everyone. I have a sister wife that struggles a lot with the lifestyle. She wasn’t raised in it, [and] . . . she was [married to our husband] a year before I was, and she, too, was a plural wife, but she chose to live by herself. . . . So we focus [on the decision as] . . . a matter of prayer. . . . Is this who I want to live eternity [with]?

Is this where our Father in Heaven wants me? So when I had this conversation with her, she said “I’m not going to pretend that this is easy for me and that I’m happy about this . . . but I do recognize your commitment to your faith, my husband’s commitment to his faith, and I don’t want to be the person that stands in the way of you two being together if you’re meant to be together.” . . . I can’t help but appreciate that because it made a spot for me in his life, and as much as I want to be open and welcoming for another woman to come into our family, I too want that, regardless of my human nature and my jealousies and my weaknesses.60

I don’t believe one Mother could have brought forth this many spirit children to populate the earth. So I believe that if I want to become like my Father in Heaven, I too should learn His way.”62

The women involved with CPAC have a firm grasp of legal issues related to polygamy. Contemplating their status has led some to embrace legal and civil rights discourses from diverse perspectives. They have also consulted an LGBTQ rights activist to learn strategies to further marriage equality, as many see their situations in similar lights.65 Asked about the prospect that her marriage might become legal, as occurred with same-sex unions after a 2015 Supreme Court decision, Nadine comments:

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In some homes all spouses live under one roof, often eating cafeteria-style meals, while in others a woman can choose to live separately with her children.59 Some CPAC women openly discuss the challenges of coping with different personalities and living arrangements among family members. As Darlene relates:

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I have mixed feelings about it . . . because today that means that the government is meddling in my marriage. . . . Do I want the right to walk into my husband’s hospital room and have a say? I do. Would I love to be able to be put on his beneficiary for insurance? I would love that. There’s some pieces of this that I would love, but I am happy to give those pieces up just to have the freedom to not have . . . the government trying to regulate this.

That’s my answer. Our goal is to get it decriminalized.66 Since the time of these oral interviews, CPAC’s larger effort that plural marriage gain more acceptance and legal sanction has borne some fruit. In February 2020, the Utah legislature

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approved a bill that would reduce polygamy from a felony to an infraction, akin to a traffic ticket with no jail time. CPAC had sent lobbyists to advocate for the bill. When talking about signing the law, Governor Gary Herbert noted, “With marriage laws being what they are today, and the liberalization of and more broadening of it, eliminating [polygamy] from being a felony to a lesser offense is probably warranted.”

This law is certainly a cause for rejoicing in Centennial Park and a reward for their hardfought campaign, although it is not applicable to members who live in Arizona.67

Relations with the FLDS and Colorado City Community Women in Centennial Park express an aching desire to reconnect with their estranged relatives among the FLDS. Darlene relates, “It’s really sad because the schism affected brothers and sisters, parents and children. Families were split . . . so we have a lot of family members who are part of the FLDS today that haven’t spoken to us for many, many years.” Maryann concurs: “We would all choose to maintain contact with all of our sisters if we could. I have three dozen siblings, four of us in Centennial Park and . . . most of the [rest] are in the FLDS, and I live in the same community with them, on the same street as them, two houses away from some of them, and have zero contact. . . . If they even see me on the street, they turn away and walk away.” Nadine explains: “After the split we were the apostates in many people’s minds. . . . Many people have asked us . . . why don’t they come to us for help because we are just right across the main highway. . . . It really harks back to the fact they see us as terrible human beings, as the enemy, as these apostates.”

Women of the Work still worry about these estranged family members, fearing Warren Jeffs may decree a mass suicide or other catastrophe.68 After Jeffs became prophet of the FLDS in 2002, many members were excommunicated and expelled. Because Rulon and Warren Jeffs’s followers were taught that members of the Work, even their own siblings, were evil apostates “in league with Satan,” few reached out to their neighbors for help.69 Maryann remarks, “There’s a whole section of their community now that have come out of the FLDS

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and they’re trying to put their lives back together . . . [They are] coming to our schools and . . . our store, and coming to our doors and saying, ‘We’re sorry for the way we’ve treated you all these years.’ . . . So there’s a lot of healing going on in the community right now.”70 In this regard, women of the Work have been active in safety net organizations. Maryann continues, “every other month we get together with all different kinds of outside agencies to try to open doorways for people to gain assistance, especially those who are coming out and don’t quite know what to do with themselves. . . . Recently Centennial Park has been called upon, for instance, to do a food drive.”71 Since 2015, major changes have taken place in Colorado City. The FLDS exodus has accelerated, with many ex-members continuing to reconnect with their estranged relatives in Centennial Park.72

CPAC and Alternative Discourses about Women in Plural Marriage Women of the Work feel that by opening to the outside society, telling their stories, and asserting themselves as women actively living plural marriage, they can affect change and help dispel myths about polygyny. The Polygamy Summit of 2003 spurred women leaders to establish CPAC. As a group, they have since tried to inform audiences about how the Work’s form of plural marriage and their community life at Centennial Park differs from popular media portrayals of polygamy, especially from sensationalized accounts on the abuses of Warren Jeffs and the FLDS church. In comparison to other sects, the Centennial Park group represents a middle-ground approach to polygamy in modern America. They embody an alternative between groups like the FLDS who attempt almost complete isolation from the dominant society to others who are highly integrated into modern urban life. Through their outreach with CPAC, these women have helped establish their own narrative and create their own discourse about plural marriage. They have departed from the public silence of their mothers and grandmothers to tell their own truths despite potential negative consequences. Learning from other groups who utilized human rights discourses to change marriage laws in the United States, women of the Work

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1. Nadine, interviews by author, March 28–30, 2020.

For more on the value of an ethnographic approach utilizing oral interviews and observation informed by scholarly knowledge in conveying the voices of marginalized peoples and cultures, see Donal Carbaugh, “Cultural Discourse Analysis: Communication Practices and Intercultural Encounters,” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 36, no. 3 (2007): 167–82.

Because of the current illegal nature of polygamy and/ or bigamy, at the request of CPAC leaders when quoting individuals, I will use pseudonyms and only first names in this article. Quotations are drawn from several sources. I hosted two student-oriented discussions, each approximately two hours long, on the campus of Southern Utah University with CPAC on November 17, 2014, and April 16, 2015. They were recorded with the permission of the participants. Special Collections at Southern Utah University made transcripts of these discussions, totaling thirty-eight, single-spaced pages in length. I also spoke with thirteen individuals from Centennial Park between 2008 and 2015. All interviews cited were conducted by the author. The author also visited the community on several occasions to conduct personal observations and field work. Transcripts are located at Special Collections, Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah (hereafter SUU).

2. Opening comments, CPAC panel, transcripts, SUU. 3. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff organized the summit to aid individuals wanting to leave what his office viewed as abusive polygamous lifestyles. The meeting included representatives from Washington County, Utah, and officials from Arizona, including the Mohave County Supervisor (where Colorado City and Centennial Park are located), local Arizona law enforcement, and an Arizona state senator representing the district.

Though not officially invited, fifty-five women in plural households and their teenage daughters attended.

Nancy Perkins, “Polygamous Wives Defend Their Lifestyle,” Deseret News, August 23, 2003, accessed July 20, 2020, deseret.com/2003/8/23/19743593/polygamous -wives-defend-their-lifestyle.

4. Maryann, transcripts.

5. Nadine, transcripts.

6. See D. Michael Quinn, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Spring 1985): 9–105.

7. Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 9–13; Jacob Marinus Lauritzen, Hidden Flowers: The Life, Letters, and Poetry of Jacob Marinus Lauritzen (Brigham City, UT: Bradbury Printers, 1982), 102–4; Brian C. Hales, Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations after the Manifesto (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006), 221, 266, 341, 283; Colorado City General Plan, March 15, 1993, Hayden Library, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

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Notes

8. General Plan, March 15, 1993, and Town of Colorado City General Plan, October 15, 2002, Hayden Library, ASU; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 353; Nephi, interviews; Heber B. Hammon and William Jankowiak, “One Vision: The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of a Fundamentalist Community,” in Modern Polygamy in the United States: Historical, Cultural, and Legal Issues, ed. Cardell Jacobson and Lara Burton (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–59; Catherine, interview; Benjamin Bistline, The Polygamists (Scottsdale, AZ: Agreka LLC Publishers, 2004), 21–26, 34–35, 48, 55–56, 69–70.

9. Marianne T. Watson, “Short Creek: ‘A Refuge for the Saints,’” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36 (Spring 2003): 75–86; Bistline, Polygamists, 18; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 248, 273; Ken Driggs, “Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: A History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (Spring 2005): 65–78.

10. Wiley S. Maloney, “Short Creek Story,” American West (March 1954). For a thorough account of the raids, see Martha Sonntag Bradley, Kidnapped From That Land: The Government Raids on Short Creek Polygamists (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993).

11. Governor Howard Pyle, Radio Address, transcript, Short Creek File, Polly Rosenbaum Archives, Arizona State Archives, Phoenix, Arizona; “Short Creek Becomes Ghost Town,” Arizona Republic, June 27, 1954.

12. Maryann, transcripts.

13. Nadine, interviews.

14. Maryann, transcripts. Part of the Maryann quote is from Michael K. Ault, “Straight is the Gate: An Ethnographic Study of the Centennial Park Polygamist Community” (master’s thesis, Southern Utah University, May 2012).

15. Martha S. Bradley, “The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Summer 1990): 15–18; Ken Driggs, “Twentieth Century Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons in Southern Utah,” Juanita Brooks Lecture, Dixie College, 1990; Maryann, transcripts.

16. Nadine, transcripts.

17. “Address Given by Senator Jim Smith on the Floor of the Senate,” March 31, 1954, and December 30, 1953, Short Creek File, Arizona State Archives; Maryann, transcripts; Catherine, interview; Ault, “Straight is the Gate,” 19.

18. In the Supreme Court of the State of Arizona, County of Maricopa, Clyde Mackert et al. vs. Arizona State Board of Education, July 24, 1954, Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, Records of Clerk, Phoenix; Richard S. Jessop to Board of Education of Arizona, May 12, 1954, box 8, fd. Short Creek Material, Public Instruction/M.L. Brooks, Supt. Series 1951–1954, Arizona State Archives; “Short Creek School Closed amid Strip Controversy,” Mohave County Miner, May 9, 1957; Nadine, transcripts.

19. General Plan, October 15, 2002; “New Road Planned for Arizona Strip: Short Creek,” Arizona Republic, April 9, 1961.

20. Nadine, transcripts; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 290, 320; General Plan, March 15, 1993.

21. Nephi, interviews; Catherine, interviews; Hammon and Jankowiak, “One Vision,” 44–46; Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), 184.

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believe that only by telling their stories and asserting their rights can they find a measure of acceptance and, ultimately, marriage equality in modern America.

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22. Nadine, transcripts; Alva, interview; Hammon and Jankowiak, “One Vision,” 56–65.

23. Nadine, transcripts; Nadine, interviews.

24. Nadine, interviews; Nadine and Darlene, transcripts; Hammon and Jankowiak, “One Vision,” 61–66.

25. General Plan, October 15, 2002; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 271, 321.

26. Darlene and Nadine, transcripts; Hammon and Jankowiak, “One Vision,” 61–66.

27. Nadine, interviews; Nephi and Alva interviews; sermon heard by author, 2015.

28. Information on the town founding and land tenure from sermon heard by author and interviews of Nephi and Alva, spring 2015. Information on shunning from Nadine, interviews.

29. N. Timpson interviews; Ault, “Straight is the Gate,” 22; General Plan, October 15, 2002.

30. Mohave County, Arizona, Assessors Office, map, accessed April 2, 2020, www.mohavecountyus; General Plan, October 15, 2002; Darlene and Maryann, transcripts.

31. Maryann, transcripts.

32. Observation of author, 2015.

33. D. Michael Quinn, “Plural Marriages After the 1890 Manifesto,” speech, August 11, 1991, accessed April 2, 2020, www.salamandersociety.com; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 37–43, 145–57; Nadine, interviews.

34. Alva, interviews; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 37, 90, 145– 49; Quinn, “Plural Marriage”; Driggs, “Twentieth Century Polygamy.”

35. Nadine, transcripts.

36. Nadine, transcripts.

37. Nadine, transcripts. For analyses of post-1890 plural marriages, see Quinn, “Plural Marriage”; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 171–84; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 7, 66–68, 96–97, 156–60, 193, 202. For fundamentalists’ beliefs about authority, see “Affidavit of Rulon T. Jeffs,” September 15, 1987, Complaint of Samuel S. Barlow v. John A. Blackburn, et al., March 10, 1988, Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, Records of Clerk, Phoenix; Joseph White Musser, Journal of Joseph White Musser (1872–1954) (n.p., n.d.) in Americana Collection, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter HBLL).

38. Nadine, interviews.

39. Sermon heard by author, March 2015; Mohave County, Arizona, Assessors Office, www.mohavecountyus; Alva and Nephi, interviews; Karl F. Brooks and Douglas D. Alder, “The New Polygamy,” in History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Washington County Commission, 1996).

40. Hammon and Jankowiak, “One Vision,” 59; Nate Carlisle, “Polygamous Towns Gradually Becoming Conventional,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 1, 2016; Nephi, interviews.

41. Darlene, transcripts; Nadine, interviews.

42. Maryann, transcripts.

43. Nadine, interviews; Alva, interviews; Maryann, interviews.

44. Nadine, interviews.

45. Merilee, interview; Mathew, interview; Nephi, interviews; Maryann, transcripts; Masada Charter School,

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accessed September 10, 2018, www.masadaschool.org; Janelle, transcripts.

46. Nadine, transcripts.

47. Catherine, interviews; observations of author, 2015; Nadine, interviews.

48. Nadine, transcripts; Julene, interview; Stella, interview; Catherine, interview; Hammon and Jankowiak, “One Vision,” 58; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 320.

49. Correspondence between Mark and David Lunt, spring 2015.

50. Testimony of CPAC panel, 2015; Bradley, “The Women of Fundamentalism,” 18–19; Hales, Modern Polygamy, 321; Kathryn M. Danes, “Defining Polygamous Patterns,” in Modern Polygamy in the United States, 129– 30.

51. Nephi, interviews; Jenny, interview; Darlene, transcripts.

52. Nadine, interviews.

53. Statements of CPAC, transcripts. For an analysis of women’s roles in modern plural marriage, see Janet Bennion, Evaluating the Effects of Polygamy on Women and Children in Four North American Fundamentalist Groups (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) and Carrie A. Miles, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” Earthly Experience of Celestial Marriage, Past and Present,” in Modern Polygamy in the United States, 189–201.

54. Maryann, transcripts.

55. Darlene, transcripts.

56. Maryann, transcripts; Nephi, interviews; Ault, “Straight is the Gate,” 33.

57. Maryann, Nadine, and Darlene, transcripts.

58. Janelle and Darlene, transcripts.

59. Jenny, interview; Julene, interview; Stella, interview; observations of author, 2015.

60. Darlene, transcripts.

61. Nadine, interviews; Catherine, interview; Bradley, “The Women of Fundamentalism,” 25–26; Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families, 6, 187–88; Doctrines and Covenants 132:4; Joseph Musser, Journal, unprocessed (2015), Special Collections, HBLL. Currently, the FLDS take a harder stance, arguing a person is damned if he does not take additional wives. Affidavit of Rulon T. Jeffs, September 15, 1987, Complaint of Samuel S. Barlow v. John A. Blackburn, et al., March 10, 1988, Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, Records of Clerk, Phoenix.

62. Maryann, transcripts.

63. Nadine, transcripts.

64. Darlene, transcripts.

65. Ault, “Straight is the Gate,” 58.

66. Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), accessed July 20, 2020, lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p /casebrief-obergefell-v-hodges; Nadine, transcripts.

67. Nadine, interviews; Nate Carlisle, “Utah Legislature Votes to Decriminalize Polygamy,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 28, 2020.

68. Nadine, interviews; Darlene, Maryann, Nadine, transcripts; Catherine and Alva, interviews.

69. Alva, interviews; Nadine, interviews.

70. Maryann, transcripts.

71. Nephi and Catherine, interviews; observations of author, 2015; Maryann, transcripts.

72. Nadine, interviews.

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E VA N S

Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, portrays a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that reveal the complex intersection between “real” cities that we build and those that are imagined and exist only in mind. Having traveled much of the world, Polo spins tales of grand and exotic cities. As he speaks, these cities begin to sound like each other and even like places Khan has himself visited or imagined. Khan pushes back on his colleague, asking, “Are these cities real?” And then he describes a city from his own imagination. The line between reality and imagination becomes incredibly confused. Once again, Khan’s city is strikingly similar to one Polo has described. Khan asks Polo to name the city; he responds:

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It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities, we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.1 Like Polo, for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the City of Zion embodied both a desire for heaven and a profound fear of the alternative. This study will seek to understand the imaginative spaces of the Latter-day Saint world. I will use a single city block as a metaphor for core concepts that drove the construction of architecture, city spaces, and what the Mormons called Zion, both places and ideas. Block 88 in Salt Lake City displays the Mormon blueprint for the good society, for Zion. This included ideas about relationships between individual members or residents, between human beings and God, and human beings and the spaces they inhabit or imagine in the hereafter. It was also about the components of a good life—a

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64 Photograph of a lithograph by Augustus Koch titled Bird’s eye view of Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, 1870. Block 88 is positioned at the mouth of City Creek Canyon and to the right of the block containing the temple, which, although appearing complete in this image, would not be finished for another twenty-three years. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 17851.

family and home, a community and neighbors, and opportunities to expand and grow. Located in the metaphoric rather than actual center of the city, it presents a series of templates for the perfect world as sketched out by Latter-day Saints during the nineteenth century through the Plat of the City of Zion. The Plat, like Polo’s imagined city, represented the hope for a better way of being in the world. It was an imagined utopian dream space that materialized, in part, in more than four hundred towns in the Great Basin area.

The philosopher Henri Lefebvre proposed three analytical categories about space: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived. Lefebvre recommended an approach he called “spatiology” that identifies the link between physical space or natural space, mental space or formal abstractions about space, the core concepts that

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generate form. Lefebvre describes social space as the space of human action, conflict, and sensory phenomena.2 The community-building efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century reveal a series of conceptual maps: the idea of Zion, the interpretation of sacred space, and particular ideas about family and kingdom. Their millennial expectations heightened the significance of building efforts on the earth. They felt obligated to construct a world pleasing to God. The resulting sacred and profane spaces expressed particular ideas about community, gender, theology, and religious authority. When the Latter-day Saints built towns, they constructed space that contained a sacred narrative. Kitty-corner from the most sacred space, the LDS temple, were both the Bishop’s Storehouse and the profane areas of the barns in Brigham Young’s family compound.

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The place-based version of the ideal society was positioned in the historical context of American town-building more broadly. Previous attachments, assumptions, and traditions colored attempts at designing something new.

As important as their hopes for a future world were memories of the past. This has always been true of the story of American cities, which have looked symbolically to Eden and to a New Jerusalem.4 The idea of the American city originated in an aggregate of social, religious, economic, and political forces, along with the aspirations of human beings for a better world. Several scholars have traced the underlying conceptions that sometimes produced town plans that looked similar, a type of lineage of the idea and form of the city in the New World. The grid plan, for instance, in Philadelphia, formed a precedent for an endless stream of American towns laid out orthogonally. Most of the founding cities in the American experience were planned physically and socially before anyone actually settled in them.5 Woven through the narrative of the Latter-day Saint attempt to build yet another new world were purely American attitudes that conceived

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In 1833 the Latter-day Saint prophet Joseph Smith Jr. presented a revelation to his people called the Plat of the City of Zion. The Plat outlined a template for the settlement of cities dedicated to God, what the Mormons would call Zion. Each town was to be laid out according to the cardinal points of the compass— north, south, east, and west—and proceed outward from a central square, the center of the Mormon world. Blocks were to be ten acres each with individual lots at an acre and a half. The cities of Zion would grow to more than twenty thousand residents before the church would build another one, and in this way would spread the Mormon way of being in the world across the western United States.

The Plat of the City of Zion was a map, drawn

by Frederick G. Williams, with notes in margins describing a set of instructions about how to build cities that would be the setting for a religious drama.

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of an experimental landscape seeking the pattern for perfect living. The scholar Sylvia Fries ties this to the act of remembering. She argues that “no less important than new environments to the formation of a society, and especially of its self-perception, is the role of memory and expectations formed of the past” in the conceptualization and construction of new places.6 Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier created new types of individual and democratic ways of being together in community. But equally significant, city-building included the creation of political systems that distinguished the American landscape from that of Europe.

The American city was the primary setting of the representation of imagination and was a social construction indigenous to this continent.

As Fries remarks, “what we say can not only be equated with what we make but alone adequately mirrors our conception of the world.”7

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The Mormon experience played out in the context of the nineteenth-century American landscape that the cultural geographer J. B. Jackson described as the “last and most grandiose attempt to create an earthly order in harmony with a cosmic order.”3 The influence of the Puritan city upon a hill ran through nineteenth-century America. It inspired countless dreams of a new world, a world of the imagination not so different from the one portrayed by Polo in Calvino’s story. Endless miles of forests met pioneers carving their way through mountain ranges and valleys in between. Prairies stretched to the edge of the sky and beyond.

Bodies of water, dark and raging through canyons or near the land’s edge, threatened destruction. The complex American landscape formed the backdrop to numerous utopian experiments. Efforts to build Zion by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exemplified this phenomenon. When the Latter-day Saints built towns, they were conceiving, constructing, and practicing sacred space.

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Moreover, the Mormon grid plan reflected the most characteristic American town planning gesture, the checkerboard pattern.8 Orthogonal systems prevailed throughout the settlement of the West, reflecting an American propensity for creating order in what were often untamed lands. John Reps argues convincingly that the grid was the quintessential pattern for American town-building regardless of where they appeared. “As in virtually all other periods

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The Mormon effort to build regular cities dedicated to God was firmly rooted in American traditions of urban planning. Settlers during the colonial and frontier eras laid out towns with straight streets meeting at right angles, in geometric rectangular blocks. The Plat of the City of Zion resembled Philadelphia’s original plan, which contained five squares laid out by William Penn and Savannah, Georgia, with its gridded system of town squares and surrounding streets; in some ways, the Plat also recalled the cities prescribed by the Spanish crown in Law of the Indies in what would become the American West. The Mormon cities of Zion exemplified a preference for order, visible and tangible patterns of streets laid out without

regard to geography, diversity, or sometimes even convenience. Richard Wade, a historian of the urban West, points to the practical advantages of the grid, which “simplified the problems of surveying and minimized legal disputes over lot boundaries. It also gave at least the illusion of orderliness which settlers associated with cities they had known in the East.” But as Wade suggests, the regularity runs deeper than this and represents the dominance of human beings over nature. For example, straight lines rather than curved ones demonstrated the difference between cities and the country.10 Such neatly planned cities could provide psychological comfort amidst the dislocating of experience of journeying into the American landscape.11 This was the case in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early eighteenth century and in Mormon Zion building in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the legacy of colonial cities was “the more general one of a concern

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of wholesale colonization in world history, early colonial and later frontier towns were planned mainly on a geometric pattern of rectangular blocks, straight streets, and right-angle intersections.”9

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Plat of the City of Zion, originally drawn in the handwriting of Frederick G. Williams, June 1833, duplicated by the Salt Lake Tribune. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 27774.

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It is usually the case that specific technical procedures dictate the creation of maps that depict topography or construction plans. Maps of Salt Lake City exhibit initial land distributions, the division into voting or ward districts, and the placement of buildings or other built features, such as the public works wall that surrounded both Temple Square and Brigham Young’s family compound to the east.13 The resulting patterns or morphologies detailed on maps function as signs and reveal the ethnic, political, religious, and social world of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints.

The Latter-day Saint City The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged out of the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious ferment that seized religious

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The Latter-day Saint city that the Saints idealistically called Zion helped critique the social alterations taking place in the world around them. Social disorder changed traditional social structures and moral control mechanisms for the city. These devices had been initially designed to preserve traditional values and a way of life rooted in the rural landscape. The narration of the Mormon exodus out of the Midwest describes the conflict and persecution that drove them from Ohio and Missouri, then Illinois, and into the West. The Mormon pioneers saw the potential for the West to become another manifestation of God’s kingdom. Like Polo’s imagined city, they anticipated future towns and farm fields, fertile with crops ready to sustain a growing population of Saints. Through a process centralized in both the person of Brigham Young and in the church center of Salt Lake City, the Latter-day Saints surveyed and distributed land, planted crops, and dug irrigation canals, building what they considered to be sacred cities after the model of the Plat of the City of Zion. Initially, theological ideas shaped space and influenced decisions that they made about the placement of streets, houses, the relationship between community institutions, and the way the city embraced the landscape. The Plat created an explanatory narrative that wove history, theology, and social life into one. The Plat helped it make sense, constructed meaning. Religious people, for Mircea Eliade, often attempt to reside as long as possible in a sacred universe, space made over to mirror their sense of a wholly different order, “a reality that does not belong to our world.”14 The image of the Plat, when built by the Latter-day Saints, had a metaphoric quality that contributed to a group identity and perpetuated a particular interpretation of history.

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Like much of his instruction to his followers, Joseph Smith packed his pattern for settlement—The Plat of the City of Zion—in the rhetoric of revelation. The Plat provided a pattern for settlement and the Mormon world could be built with towns, connections, and commandments. It delineated boundaries deep as chasms that surrounded insiders and identified outsiders. In practice, the movements of the city’s inhabitants defined what this meant in Salt Lake City. In a complicated dance, pioneer men and women inhabited space and filled it with ordinary activities. They moved through streets, buildings, alleys, or fields. They practiced and lived in the space and gave it a new meaning. Importantly, their lives consecrated the land and dedicated it to God. Salt Lake City was a sacred city made meaningful through a web of relationships that created a pattern of being on the earth and a physical connection to that of the heavens. From the 1830s, this venture at building the City of God had heightened significance for the Latter-day Saints. For them it was Zion, the fulfillment of prophecy, and proof positive that they were a righteous people obeying God’s will.

authority and distributed it among a general population of believers through personal revelation. The Latter-day Saint prophet, Joseph Smith, delivered a message of the restoration of ancient teachings of authentic religious ideas and priesthood authority from God.

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for the formal modeling of open spaces into complementary geometric forms which characterized the architectural attitudes of their designers.”12 The sacred cities of the Latter-day Saints combined formal modeling principles with theological concepts that had heightened meaning for the church and its people.

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Symbolically vibrant urban places express concretely the potentiality of sacred and secular power, articulated in virtually all aspects of life. In a way, a city like Salt Lake City represented the cosmos, the center place of the

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Mormon world, evidence of what was possible.

For Latter-day Saints, the Plat became a sort of memory device that helped them remember a particular past and imagine a bright future. Its physical lines reflected theological concepts and everyday realities. The centrality of the church in the lives of its people was made evident by the outlines of the Plat, articulating connections and materializing commandments that worked as boundaries surrounding insiders and identifying outsiders.

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Part of the explanatory narrative was about persecution, but it was also about hope, persistence, and the willingness to try anew. Although Smith used the Plat as a pattern for building communities in Missouri and Illinois, the Latter-day Saints never built a town that was entirely true to the prescriptions of the Plat, including Salt Lake City. Nevertheless, the power of the ideas at the core of the Plat—that of Zion; of consecration, stewardship, and cooperation; of emphasis on community or living near one’s neighbors; and of the centrality of religion in group life, as symbolized by the central square—began a discourse about what it meant to be a member of the church and of this particular community of Zion. The Plat contained detailed instructions about how Zion should be located, constructed, and lived. Covering an area of 640 acres, or the equivalent of a single square mile, it mirrored the township prescribed by the Land Ordinance of 1785 and first laid out in the Northwest Territory. Homes were found on amply sized lots (half an acre) on ten-acre blocks in town, with houses uniformly set twenty-five feet back from the street, and farm buildings located on the north and south sides of the city in strips of land 330 feet wide and one mile long. The land extending beyond was originally shared farmland. Farmers would populate Zion, and the original plat had no provision for a commercial zone. Again, private homes and public spheres were separate.

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City was an intentional center place: the prototype for the settlement of the region, initially conceived of as a sacred city. It communicated a clearly identifiable, tangible, as well as metaphorical nexus of literal ideas about Zion.

Rather than aesthetic considerations, regularity or order were premiere values represented in the plan.15 Towns planned according to the

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Plat extended the center in a movement in each direction from the sacred to the profane in the process, endowing space with new meaning and connection to this essential core idea. The social interaction of Latter-day Saints with this space and with each other added a third dimension to this montage. Distinctive doctrines such as consecration or cooperation wove a web, a city that mapped ideas about the community in space.

Salt Lake City’s central orientation created the point from which everything in the Great Basin evolved. Critical in the formation of identity, meaning, and practice, the establishment of Temple Square and Salt Lake City as the center place had profound significance for the settlement of Utah. The pervasiveness of cardinal imagery in Zion was to extend from the Midwest to the West. As soon as the first city reached twenty thousand inhabitants, a new one would be needed. Once the Latter-day Saints marked off and built a village, according to Smith’s instructions, they were to “lay off another in the same way, and so fill up the world in these last days, and let every man live in the city for this is the city of Zion.”16 Smith’s vision was broad and sweeping, envisaging nothing short of the continuous settlement of the American West.

The urban theorist Kevin Lynch famously asked what the form of a city meant to the people who lived there, a concept he described as “legibility.”

Legibility was also about the ease with which inhabitants could navigate the city. Unarguably, the sacred city was legible in Lynch’s parlance; its strict grid, oriented to the lines of the compass at the heart of the plat, the centrality of the temple block, and the close coordination of settlement and religious activities all contained meaning.17 Zion would expand across the continent in a systematic, orderly manner. Each new city would, ideally, be a perfect semblance of the first. Congruent with immigration into the West and the peopling of the frontier, the settlement of Zion mirrored the American dream, the belief that God had chosen this land for a special mission. Importantly, it was the responsibility of God’s people to settle it. In that, the Plat was both theology—church doctrine and teaching— and a vision or dream of the good society.

For the Mormon settlers of Salt Lake City, distinctive doctrines such as consecration or cooperation wove a web—a city that mapped ideas

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In towns based on the Plat, the orthogonal orientation of both buildings and town streets radiated out from the axis mundi or center place.

What resulted was a hierarchy of spaces with the most sacred core at the center and the cooperatively farmed “big field” at the periphery.

Families lived in town lots, half an acre in size, and traveled a distance to farm on the outskirts of town. The Plat spoke to the importance of community, of the coming and living together thus expressed spatially, clearly delineated on both maps and in life practices. Wide orthogonal streets that met at right angles imposed order on the earth, defying natural landscape forms, to gentrify or accommodate the instruction to lead ordered lives according to God’s teachings. As was literally true of the numbering system that began at the southeast corner of Temple Square, views to the temple from family homes would have oriented individual members toward the center, reinforcing the

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Just as the layout of Salt Lake City depicts Zion with its strong central space—the temple and tabernacle, cooperative mercantile home store, and commercial structures lining Main Street— Brigham Young’s family compound illustrates the core ingredients of a family kingdom: houses, other amenities, and room enough for his multiple families to live comfortably. In a similar way, Block 88 explains the evolution of the city from its start as a sacred city, the headquarters of a church, to a more secular, cosmopolitan city that valued the arts and education.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Block 88 has been oriented to Temple Square in physical and metaphoric ways. The buildings there have housed visitors to the temple and church conferences held at the tabernacle. Both church administration buildings were located on South Temple Street on Block 88, as were the headquarters of the church’s tithing system (the Bishop’s Storehouse). Until the early twentieth century, the tithing yards spread messily to the center of the block and marked the dedication of pioneer settlers who gave to the church despite their poverty.

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In Utah, Brigham Young interpreted Zion by building his family kingdom on Block 88, which was adjacent to Temple Square, bordering South Temple and State Streets. With the first distribution of land, Brigham Young secured his family’s position at the center of Salt Lake City. Young owned the majority of land on Block 88, where he carved out the components of the good life—the complex architecture of plurality, a schoolhouse, and outbuildings to supply his large family with food, education, and recreation. Distinctive as the homes of the church president and leader of a territorial government, the Beehive House and Lion House represented an unusual family dynamic and adaptation to a particular way of being together in a family.20

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Family Compound: The Family Kingdom Materialized in Space

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Upon selecting the site, church leaders established the basic organizational system of the city by dividing it into nineteen wards.18 These wards were ecclesiastical units like a parish, but also organizational units used for the census.

The map detailing these ward arrangements employs familiar rhetorical devices about life in the city, the emphasis on order, on community, on the relationships between one family and another. A ward was a religious idea, as well as a pattern of organizing relationships in Zion. Each ward contained nine blocks that functioned as a small community and were controlled by a bishop. Orthogonality, regularity, and cardinality characterized the earliest plat maps, which suggested strict equality in the distribution of land.

The actual allocation of land failed to be equal from the first. Church leaders, especially those with large families and plural wives, received the largest allotments of land and in prime locations. The twelve apostles selected prime lots for their wives, families, and friends. After the first division of property, they divided the other blocks into units “as they saw fit.”19

centrality of religion in the lives of believers— regardless of whether they were working in their fields, picking fruit in the family orchard, or hanging wash out to dry on clotheslines.

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in space. Salt Lake City became a city virtually overnight when wagon trains of Mormon pioneers began to descend into the valley after July 1847. The fact that they were a group with a clear plan and an influential leader in Brigham Young facilitated the rapid settlement of the region.

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The storehouse was the most potent symbol of the Mormon law of consecration and

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Detail of Nicholas Groesbeck Morgan Sr.’s “Pioneer Map, Great Salt Lake City” or “map of Plat ‘A,’” published in the early 1950s.

This map appears to have been based on the original 15 by 9 block configuration of the first survey of Salt Lake City in August 1847. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 27771.

70 stewardship. Here devoted members made inkind contributions ranging from dairy products to farm equipment. Livestock corrals located behind to the north and east became known as the tithing yard. Some members produced tithing in the form of labor. Public works projects—like the wall that would eventually surround temple square or Brigham Young’s own home, irrigation canals, road systems, or work on the temple itself—gave willing workers plenty to do.21 The church built the Bishop’s Storehouse in 1850 on the southeast corner.

Builders constructed this two-story structure of adobe bricks on a stone foundation and scored the plaster wall surface to imitate stone.22 The symmetrical arrangement of the Bishop’s Storehouse’s elevations suggests a Greek Revival influence, although the building was a simple vernacular structure. Beneath the words “DESERET STORE” proudly displayed above the entrance door read “HOME MANUFACTURE,” signifying Young’s mantra about the importance of self-sufficiency. The 1862 veranda created a comfortable waiting area,

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providing a unique vantage point of Salt Lake’s growing Main Street. The Deseret Evening News operated out of this building between 1851 and 1854, and then again between 1862 and 1903.

To the east of the block, the Eagle Gate pronounced arrival at State Street and South Temple Street. Initially a wood eagle and beehive, designed by Hiram B. Clawson and put in place in 1859, it was replaced by a new design by Joseph Don Carlos Young in 1891. Covered in copper, the structure spanned a newly widened street and more grandly presented this symbol to the city.23 The Eagle Gate and the Bishop’s Storehouse served as bookends of the street on which church headquarters and the homes of the church president were located.

Young’s primary residence was the Beehive House on South Temple, the centerpiece of his family complex. Next door, the Lion House housed many of his plural wives and their children. The White House, located east of Block 88 on First Avenue, was the home of one of

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The provocative west elevation of the Lion House, built in 1854, is a suggestive architectural

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Construction on the Beehive House began in 1853. By fall the adobe brick walls and the roof had been completed. By the next spring, the Young family moved into this Georgian-style house complete with classical Greek Revival features—a boxed cornice, roof parapet, and widow’s walk. The elaborate plan of the home and its connections to both the president’s office and a family store on the back of the structure mirrored the complexity of Young’s personal life and his role in the community. The main level included two parlors, a family breakfast room, a sewing room, a pantry, and storage rooms. On the second floor, a coved-ceiling room housed formal parties. The rear wing that stretched to the north had a kitchen and dining room for workers on the first level and storage on the upper story. For this complex living arrangement to work, members of the family had to be flexible. Young’s first wife, Mary Ann Angell, and her children lived in the home until she moved to the White House nearby to the east in 1860. At that time Young’s plural wife Lucy Ann Decker and her children replaced Mary Ann Angell in the Beehive House. Decker’s role in the family expanded with the entertaining that went on in this house, which was Brigham Young’s most public residence, and the management of staff who assisted with the complicated family network. In 1889 the house doubled in size with an addition to the rear.

This cluster of homes near the symbolic center of the city’s system of town blocks—their physical dimensions, materiality, and visual prominence in positional terms—expressed a desired social order and Brigham Young’s position in it.

These architectural and design decisions concerning the structures on Block 88 reinforced the church president’s authority, his centrality to the kingdom-building enterprise, and his free practice of the principle of plural marriage.

Although other church leaders owned more than one lot in the city, this consolidation of prime real estate in the block immediately east of Temple Square made Young’s family homestead the most prominent in the city.

emblem of plurality in Utah Territory. Family members sometimes called the Lion House the “Big House,” not so much a reference to its total square footage as to the number of family members who lived there. Named for the stone lion over the front porch, the Lion House was Gothic Revival in style and consisted of three primary levels. In terms of architectural types, the Lion House is more reminiscent of a small hotel than a family home. In the basement was a large dining room, kitchen and washing facilities, a schoolroom, and a storage room for the enormous amounts of milk, fruit, and other foodstuffs required to feed this large family.

The family met nightly for family prayer in the large parlor, or prayer room, on the main level.

Some wives with small children occupied the bedrooms located to the rear of this level as well. The top floor, the most interesting floor, included twenty small rooms, each marked on the exterior by a peaked gable window reserved for wives with no children or some of the older children who lived at home or helped with the house. The attic above that was used for storage. Behind the building, and again attesting to the complicated family situation and the significant number of family members living in the house, was a two-story outhouse facility. The number of wives and children who lived in the Lion House at any given time varied considerably. As children grew, or the needs of wives changed, families moved in or out of the house.

Wives who lived elsewhere in the territory or the city visited from time to time.24

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Young’s wives. Other structures on the block included the President’s Office and various outbuildings.

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It was requisite that Brigham Young’s wives learn to cohabit whether in the same house or nearby. Those who were sealed to him before they traveled to Utah had bonded in Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and formed relationships that connected them throughout their lives.

Polygamy put limits on individual privacy and required women to exercise considerable flexibility in their claims on living arrangements, which were often in flux and dictated by their husbands. Although Brigham Young’s family is an extreme example, it highlights spatial issues that would have been magnified by the demands of plurality.

When the Mormons first arrived in Utah Territory, they erected an adobe brick fort just west of the center of the city and Temple Square.

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The women married to Brigham Young who had crossed the plains the first year lived in the fort—in shared quarters or single rooms with their children—and were rarely alone. Nevertheless, Young visited them upon occasion, and in fact, some of them became pregnant from those visits. Although none of his wives made specific mention in their journals or letters about how they made these arrangements, it is clear that they were expected to be accessible, to welcome his visit, and to make whatever accommodations were necessary to make him feel comfortable. The small chambers in the fort offered the worst of all possible conditions for cohabitation, but plurality was about procreation and the building of family kingdoms.

Making babies was the Lord’s work, in this way of thinking, and accessibility of both person and space was an essential ingredient.

Tom Carter recommends we consider the architecture of polygamy as the “architecture of accessibility—an architecture that helped make women available to men.” Like the slave plantation or even the company town, ready access to women or slaves or workers was critical to the implementation of, in this case, ecclesiastical goals, the fulfillment of both prophecy and religious obligation.25 Once land distribution began and town lots were distributed to the various family heads (including each of the plural wives), some wives moved out of the fort to log houses in other parts of the downtown area. Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, for one, moved into the old “Log Row” (which included seven or eight rooms in a row) along with her sister wife Louisa Beaman, among others. She next moved into a small adobe home, and then to the Lion House with her daughter from Brigham, Zina Presendia. She conceived and bore Zina Presendia while living with her sister wives in the limited spaces of the log row, as had several other wives and children. The architecture of such primitive and straightforward structures as the fort, the log row, and even Zina’s final adobe cabin did not articulate the language of accessibility with hallways, thresholds or doorways, and other mediators that controlled interaction or conveyed a particular message about who was welcome and who was not. Instead, in this phase of settlement, life practices

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represented the concept of conjugal accessibility and its importance in theology and belief.

The Mormon doctrine of plurality played out in a patriarchal world where husbands (and priesthood holders) ruled, but it also held ultimate responsibility for the satisfaction of a religious mandate.

One can only imagine the complicated practices between Brigham Young and his fifty-six wives, although it is possible to find patterns in birth dates and rates, and the locations where women lived (in St. George, at the Farm House, or in other areas) and when. Young spent the most time with wives who were in their childbearing years, or who had small children. Other women like Eliza R. Snow or Zina Diantha, who had been the wives of Joseph Smith, were also important to him as leaders in the women’s auxiliaries and various home industry enterprises, many of which played out in the buildings on the Young family block.

Sacred Space An architecture of accessibility communicates the “right to make use of” something particular. But the space embodied in Mormon temples is exclusionary space, or space accessible only to the most elite.26 The architecture of accessibility is a built environment that makes it possible for an individual or group to make use of another through a particular place. Those in power have free access to all spaces, whereas those without power or secondary in the ranking have limited access or controlled access to the spaces of either buildings or environments.

Access defined or monitored with a series of thresholds controlled who could and could not enter, and helped individuals comprehend the parameters of their lives and their practice of the doctrine of a plurality of wives. The incidental result of such limits on those of secondary status like the women living within plural marriages is that it held them suspended in a ready position—always available, or accessible, to priesthood male figures. This was true for polygamous women despite considerable variation in how it played out in everyday life.

Joseph Smith first described temple worship in revelation, but its practice by the Mormon people became central to group identity, cementing social relationships that for them had

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Moreover, the temple created liminal space, a “realm of pure possibility [or potentiality] when novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.”27 “Liminality is not only transition . . . but also potentiality, not only ‘going to be’ but also ‘what may be,’ a formulable domain in which all that is not manifest in the normal day-day-day operation of social structures” that is particularly powerful in the lives of persons of faith who hope for heaven or lives that release them from the difficulties of their lives on earth.28 The space of the Salt Lake Temple was hierarchical. Participants moved through a series of thresholds and spaces, ascending to the pinnacle through ritual. In the process,

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The Latter-day Saint concept of the Kingdom of God materialized in spaces that brought people together in community. Their towns helped define their relationships with each other, explained their connection with God and heaven, and participated in boundary-making and the interpretation of difference. Ritualized spaces brought people together for lectures or sermons, for spiritual manifestations and sacred ordinances, and the performance of religious identity and idea. These spaces created geometric patterns or gestures that characterize religious belief.

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The experience of the temple was not available to those outside Mormonism but reserved for the faithful, believers. The ordinances performed there ushered Mormons into a particular heaven that excluded others. In the highly symbolic and liminal environment of the temple, space negotiated access to heaven. Architecture played a role in this by creating a series of physical and tangible thresholds and markers along the path. But what is important to the experience of liminal space is a changed mind, or consciousness to embrace the potentialities of heaven. To move literally and figuratively into not only the “Celestial Room,” the final and most holy chamber in the temple, but also the imagined celestial realm of heaven, temple ritual mirrored the experience that believing Mormons assumed would be their fate upon death and movement into the afterlife.

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The interior space created by the Mormon temple tested and interpreted accessibility, inclusion and exclusion, or the sacralization process. The temple was exclusive and sacred, and access to it was intended for only the most faithful. It revealed social hierarchies that distinguished between insiders and outsiders, as well as priesthood hierarchies that guaranteed certain conditions in the afterlife for members.

The temple became a sort of challenge to the world outside of Mormonism, a proud claim to truth, access to God, and boundary around the Mormon vision of heaven and life on the earth.

The temple was a sacred landscape where the performance of ideas about heaven and earth drew lines between the most faithful and those without faith. Temple worship played out beyond the public view and was available to only the most devout. Temple worship included movement through a series of spaces and thresholds that required passwords, new names, and a suspension of belief.

worshipers shed secular influence and concerns to commune more fully with God, in the company of others, to share a vision of heaven.

For those who had access to the temple, anything seemed possible and within reach there.

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significance both on earth and in heaven, and rooted shared understandings of theology in the sacred spaces of temples. In the Latter-Day Saint tradition, first in private homes, then in Utah in endowment houses, sacred ordinances that became temple worship and the sacred spaces of temple interiors were practiced by the Mormons through ritual, which held the Saints in a liminal space where they could imagine more for their lives than the dusty streets of the frontier city of Salt Lake. Liminal space is suspended apart from the rules of ordinary life to give a sense of limitless possibilities or potentialities.

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The Genteel City It also has been convincingly argued by the historian Richard Bushman and other scholars that the pioneers were familiar with the “Genteel” city—a city of culture and the “proper” society. The Genteel city moved the Mormon city of Salt Lake beyond its original religious orientation to demonstrate civility and the desire to create the “good society” in physical terms.29 Not long after settlement, Brigham Young felt the Saints needed a grander setting for theatrical performances. When completed, the Salt

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Lake Theater was considered one of the most architecturally significant buildings constructed during Brigham Young’s lifetime. Young encouraged his people to live righteous lives but also to enjoy themselves. Theater, dance, and music became enticing escapes from the grind of community building. First in the Social Hall, and then in the more elaborate Salt Lake Theater, they joined for cultural activity, a welcome counterpoint to the seriousness of living righteous lives.

The Salt Lake Theater, located a block south of President Young’s Beehive House and financed in part by the sale of surplus goods acquired from Johnston’s army when it vacated the territory, was by far the largest adobe and stone structure in the territory at the time. Designed by church architect William Folsom, it was completed and opened not long after in March 1862.

The architect and British convert E. L. T. Harrison designed the interior in the best tradition of contemporary English styling. The Greek Revival style featured a tripartite façade, freestanding fluted Doric columns, and peripteral design with pilasters moved around the central block.

Beneath the cornice, an entablature with metope-and-triglyph motifs—a low-pitched hipped roof capped by an attic clerestory window—provided lighting for the interior.30 The center of governmental and other public functions was the Council House. Designed

by Truman Angell Sr. in 1849, this distinctive territorial building originally sat on the southwest corner of South Temple and Main Streets.

Sturdy, unpretentious, and formal, this multipurpose facility provided the physical location for the organizational meetings of Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution, the territorial legislature, and for several years (until 1883 when it was destroyed by fire) the Deseret News printshop. The Church of Jesus Christ used the upper floor for endowment ceremonies before they built the Endowment House on Temple Square. The building was quite simple in conception at forty-five feet square. A delicate stringcourse aesthetically separated and defined the two stories and distinguished the line between the first level made of sandstone from nearby Red Butte and the second floor of adobe brick. Overall the design was based on square proportions, featuring a significant cornice, low-hipped roof, and cupola, all fully in line with the Greek Revival style. The symmetry of the exterior was not continued on the

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interior, which instead had an asymmetrical arrangement of the assembly hall and two rooms on each floor.

Brigham Young’s son, Joseph Don Carlos, drafted a proposed redesign of the Main Street and South Temple elevations of Block 88 in 1887.

His vision included a commercial zone developed along Main Street that was conscious of the centrality of the block and its varied functions to the religious and temporal life of the city. The streetscapes reflect a curious mixture, true to the theocracy that existed at the time, between the sacred and profane vocabularies of distinctive Mormon spatial and social practices. Although never materialized, the proposed Philharmonic Hall was situated broadly in the center of the block for public gatherings. To the north the Temple Hotel provided easy access to the temple block for travelers intent on attending temple rituals. New immigrants gathering to Zion could find cheaper accommodations in nearby homes or other hotels. Reflecting the Victorian rather than the Neo-Classical style of the next generation of buildings, and moving away from the strict regularity of the Greek Revival buildings of the first generation of structures, the streetscape of Carlos Young’s mind revealed a turning toward the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated styles of the day. Generally, Mormon architectural styles ran parallel to or lagged slightly behind national trends.

The redesign of Block 88’s west and south streetscapes illustrates the tension between the old and the new, a yearning toward greater sophistication and style, more like a Genteel city than the frontier city of earlier decades.

Still, an amalgam of the sacred and secular, this imagined or proposed streetscape nevertheless speaks volumes about where they hoped to go next, like a city of the imagination in Calvino’s story. Amelia’s Palace, constructed between 1873 and 1881 for a favored younger wife of Brigham Young in the Second Empire mansion-style across the street on South Temple, exhibited a different kind of yearning for the sophisticated and a more cosmopolitan recognition of wealth and influence.

Michel deCerteau’s work helps us understand spaces like those of Block 88 and Temple Square. He defines space as a “practiced place,” which holds meaning based on the relationship

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Amelia’s Palace, constructed for a favored wife of Brigham Young in the Second Empire mansion-style. Across the street from Block 88 on South Temple, the structure’s juxtaposition against older, traditional structures reflects tension between the sacred and the secular in the growing city. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 7450.

between place/memory/circumstance.31 “Walking is present, discrete, and ‘phatic’ within a spatial system; as the walker actualizes some of the possibilities of the system, he also increases the possibilities and prohibitions and can ‘initiate, maintain, or interrupt contact’ with the system based on the choices made.” To “practice” space in this way is to play fort/da in, with, and through a place.32 Such spaces become filled with meaning through the interactions of human beings with particular religious beliefs and, for believers, are thus strategies for communing with God. Through built landscapes, religious ideas are practiced and interpreted through life experiences, making belief and faith tangible, observable, and understandable. Religious lives play out in space.

Confronts the World After the turn of the twentieth century, architecture continued revealing the evolution and maturation of the Church of Jesus Christ. The construction of Hotel Utah and the LDS Administration Building, and the act of tearing down

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the remaining remnants of the tithing yard, resulted in the performance of a very particular type of religious identity—an emphasis on the worldwide church. The Lion House remains on Block 88 as a quaint curiosity rather than as a centerpiece. The Hotel Utah, built in 1911 and designed by Parkinson and Barnstorm of Salt Lake City and Los Angeles in a Neo-Classical or Italian Renaissance style, is a modern building made of concrete and steel, with a sheath of white matte glazed enameled brick and decorative white matte glazed enameled terra cotta.

A roof garden found on the concrete roof above ten stories and three hundred fifteen hotel rooms provided a view of both Temple Square and Block 88. Hotel Utah had an eighty-eight square foot lobby and grand mezzanine level balcony. Young and Son Architects designed the 1917 LDS Church Office Building as a steel frame structure fireproofed with reinforced concrete. The building is five stories, sitting on a solid granite basement with a dominant projecting plinth of granite and reinforced concrete. Neo-Classical in style, twenty-four Ionic

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Drawing of the roof garden at Hotel Utah, looking towards Salt Lake Temple, ca. 1910–1920. Utah State Historical Society, Mss C 376, Utah and the West Postcard Collection.

columns surround the building. A prominent entablature complete with lion heads carved in granite tops the wall. Another building on the block, designed by George Cannon Young in a classic modern style and built in 1962 on the site of the LDS Business College, is the headquarters of the Relief Society.

Completing this suite of self-consciously public buildings is the LDS Church Office Building, built in 1975 and designed by George Cannon Young under the influence of the work of Corbusier. This welded steel skyscraper moves twenty-eight stories into the sky and has a three-story parking garage. Entered from both the north and the south, the building’s dominant central vertical tower is flanked by two four-story wings complete with bas relief sculpture depicting a map of the world, emphasizing that Mormonism had transcended the intense locality of Block 88 to become a worldwide church.

Conclusion The Plat of the City of Zion was a practical device for the colonization of the Great Basin Kingdom, but it was also a narrative device that embodied

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the vision or dream of the “good society.” Moreover, it was an idea about a city of God. As in Calvino’s conversation between Khan and Polo, cities are more than material or even spaces that are inhabited; they reside, in part, in the imagination and are the representation of desires and fears. At once conscious and unconscious, cities reveal rationality and emotion that sweeps them toward an uncertain future. The Plat was conceived of as a setting for Zion, a specific set of life practices, and a millennial vision. It helped constrain the imagination and consolidate it in tradition and authority.

The messages maps and images give about the meaning of Salt Lake City’s central spaces reveal a series of paradoxes between the sacred and profane and between the communal and the individual. The lines drawn through space ran deep. Salt Lake City changed in form and meaning from a sacred city to one with genteel character—to a commercial city secular in ways more like other western cities than not. The original definition inscribed in its center space by the temple, wide streets, and the grid plan created a discourse, a sort of point–counterpoint. Salt Lake City was unique among American cities

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1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1972), 37–38.

2. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).

3. J. B. Jackson, “The Order of a Landscape,” Interpreting the Ordinary Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 154.

4. This is Sylvia Doughty Fries’s argument in The Urban Idea in Colonial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), xiv.

5. Fries, xvi.

6. Fries, xiv.

7. Fries, xv.

8. John Reps, “Towns, Time and Tradition: The Legacy of Planning in Frontier America,” in Classic Readings in Urban Planning, ed. Jay M. Stein (Chicago: American Planning Association, Planners Press, 2001), 9.

9. Reps.

10. Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959), 28.

11. Fries, Urban Idea in Colonia America, xvii.

12. Fries, 30.

13. One visitor to the city described the wall in 1858: “The reader will not fail to notice the splendid wall of cobble-stone, laid in cement, which surrounds the whole block (Block Eighty-eight). This wall is three feet thick at the base, ten feet high, and a foot in thickness at the top. It is divided into sections of about twenty feet by round abutments rising two feet above the remainder of the structure . . . which are designed to be surmounted at some future time with marble busts of the prominent men in the Church. The wall itself is to be finished off with a coating of cement. Very strong, double gates are placed at convenient points—.” “Salt Lake City,” Harper’s Weekly, September 4, 1858, 565.

14. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1957), 11.

15. Wade, Urban Frontier, 24.

16. Wade; Doctrine and Covenants, 29:8, 33:6, 45:46.

17. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).

18. The original plat, as surveyed and platted by Henry G. Sherwood in August 1847, included three blocks east,

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nine blocks south, five blocks west, and approximately five blocks north. The blocks were ten acres, each divided into lots of about one and one-eighth acres each.

For a discussion of the original survey and its significance, see the roundtable discussion “Cartography and the Founding of Salt Lake City,” Utah Historical Quarterly 87 (Summer 2019): 8–43.

19. Ronald R. Boyce, “An Historical Geography of Greater Salt Lake City, Utah” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1957).

20. This same social structuring of space was evident in plantation landscapes as well—the landscape of power and authority. In Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 228, John Michael Vlach argues that “[p]lantation White slave owners made choices about their plantations. At every turn in ‘the world the slaveholders made,’ one encountered the results of their decisions. Planters selected the types of structures to be built, their locations, size, mode of construction, and style of decoration and not only the look of the land around them but also, to a great extent, the conditions and circumstances where their slaves lived and worked.

We can regard the physical settings that they established then, as a direct material expression of their social power.” A wall was built around Young’s estate, defining the edge between his world and that outside. His daughter, Clarissa Young Spencer, described it in 1940: “The entire estate was surrounded by a cobblestone wall nine feet high, with gates placed at convenient intervals. Father had a threefold purpose in having this wall constructed. In the first place it was built as a protection against floods. The stream from near-by City Creek Canyon at times swept down the street. . . . The second reason was that employment might be furnished for the emigrants . . . , and finally the wall was useful as a protection against the Indians who were still troublesome during the fifties and sixties.” Clarissa Young Spencer and Mable Harmer, One Who Was Valiant (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1940), 55.

21. Work on the wall that would surround the temple began in 1851. Eventually, the settlers started working on a wall around the periphery of the city which was intended to be twenty-one miles long, twelve feet high, six feet thick on the bottom and two and a half feet thick at its rounded top (they only completed about half of the wall).

22. “Salt Lake City,” 564.

23. Richard F. Burton described it in the early 1860s: “The gateway was surmounted by a plaster group, consisting of a huge vulturine eagle, perched, with wings outspread, neck bended as if snuffing the breeze of carrion from afar, and talons clinging upon a yellow beehive— a most uncomfortable and unnatural position for the poor animal. The device is doubtless highly symbolical, emblematical, typical-in fact, everything but appropriate and commonsensical.” Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints: Among the Mormons and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 234.

24. Colleen Whitley, Brigham Young’s Homes (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002).

25. Thomas Carter, “Living the Principle: Mormon Polygamous Housing in Nineteenth Century Utah,” Winterthur Portfolio 35, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 223–51.

26. Carter.

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in its explicit orientation to the group, its origin as a religious idea, and its location at the edge of a mountain range.33 The resulting paradoxes that characterize its evolution only served to augment or magnify those original characteristics. Added to the original paradigm were layers traced by generations of newcomers, changed economic and political conditions, the impact of technology, and the spatiality of social life.

Block 88 and the city it illuminates are in a way a canvas, not blank but malleable, a palimpsest that can be erased and altered to create linkages rather than blockages, common ground instead of exclusion. It is a discourse that continues to the present.

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see Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846–1906 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007).

31. Michel deCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.

Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.

32. deCerteau, 110.

33. For additional insights into the origins of Western cities, see Gunther Barth, Instant Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

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27. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), 97.

28. Victor Turner and Edith L. B. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 3.

29. Richard L. Bushman, “Mormon Domestic Life in the 1870s,” Mormon History Lecture Series, No. 5, May 1, 2000.

30. For more discussion about how western towns tried to establish their American and Victorian credibility,

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CFP: Peoples of Utah Revisited In anticipation of the 250th anniversary of 1776, the Utah State Historical Society is revisiting The Peoples of Utah, published in 1976. The original Peoples of Utah, which surveyed a number of racial and ethnic communities in the state, has become a foundational resource in Utah history. Our new project specifically seeks to build on and expand the focus of the original and, in so doing, broaden the scope and inclusivity of Utah history. What does it mean to be a Utahn?

What major forces have shaped Utah’s population growth and development—especially in the past 100 years?

This project will be born digital, in the form of a major website; a companion hard-copy publication might also occur. We are seeking short articles (3,000–7,000 words) based on original research in history and related fields, including geography, archaeology, historic preservation, sociology, folklore, demography, and law.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: •

roups whose numbers have increased in Utah in the past fifty years (e.g., Latinx, Asians, G African Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Africans).

•

Native Americans (e.g., communities [urban, rural, reservations], change, resilience, rights)

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Migrants and refugees of war, poverty, and violence

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LGBTQ+ Utahns

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Reception of new groups (e.g., services, anti-immigrant sentiment)

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Push and pull forces

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Law (e.g., effects of the Hart-Cellar Act)

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Distinctive communities (e.g., religious or avocational)

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Folk traditions and foodways

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Rural, urban, and suburban communities

Articles should be written in a scholarly but accessible style: thoroughly researched and cited but written for a general audience. We will consider the work of scholars, students, and the public.

Other forms of presenting data may also be submitted, such as maps, lesson plans, videos, or charts. Prospective authors should send a brief proposal to uhq@utah.gov by June 1, 2021.

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As Lyman details better than anyone has before, even as Mormon Utah worked to be admitted to the Union in its earliest attempts, the illegal shadow state of Deseret was operating at a high level. Brigham Young so deeply believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ that he made sure that the government of Deseret was in place to rule if that happened. Federal authorities were bound to be suspicious given that Young and others ran political affairs through an undisclosed secret state and did not always hide their actions.

One of the attractions of this book is its rich introduction to the large cast of characters from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, territorial appointments, U.S. Congress, presidential administrations, railroad barons, and, perhaps most intriguing, lobbyists, journalists, and other influencers of public opinion. Lyman discusses the different strengths and weaknesses of those who led Utah’s repeated statehood battles in Washington—from the diplomatic, suave, and educated John M. Bernhisel, whose efforts were sometimes undermined by Utah’s legislature, to the rougher William H. Hooper,

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Professor Lyman presents hobgoblins of the Saints in Utah Territory such as James McKean, Robert Baskin, and George Maxwell with insight and aplomb, but he also explores national leaders’ criticism of these local antagonists of the Mormons, who sometimes took things too far. He is equally critical of unreasonable positions and actions taken by Latter-day Saint leaders.

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In 1999, Davis Bitton referred to the work of Edward Leo Lyman as “fundamental” to understanding how Utah became a state. Professor Lyman’s voluminous work in this area is must reading. His groundbreaking Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood, published by University of Illinois Press in 1986, along with articles published in various journals remain important, but his new volume, Finally Statehood! Utah’s Struggles, 1849–1896, is his most significant contribution yet. Lyman provides the reader with a firehose of new information, insights, and analysis into the issues and controversies of Utah Territory’s seven statehood attempts.

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Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2019, xii + 470 pp. Cloth $34.95

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By Edward Leo Lyman

who would become discouraged and largely ineffective. Though unsuccessful in achieving statehood or stopping passage of all anti-polygamy legislation, the territorial delegate and high-ranking church official George Q. Cannon made many friends and built many bridges in Congress that eventually bore fruit in the late 1880s and 1890s. The later delegates—John T. Caine, Joseph Rawlings, and Frank J. Cannon— are also covered well. More groundbreaking, Lyman introduces us to many of the important characters in Washington who influenced federal policy toward Utah, some highly critical of the Mormons and Utah, but many others far friendlier than generally acknowledged.

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Finally Statehood! makes clear that Mormon leaders were sometimes willing to bend to further statehood ambitions, as evidenced by the election in 1864 of a non-Mormon (though friendly) territorial delegate. In the late 1880s, as the Edmunds-Tucker Act threatened to undermine and perhaps even destroy the Church of Jesus Christ, church leaders quietly encouraged monogamists within their ranks to assert they did not believe in polygamy to avoid being prevented from voting and exercising other civil rights.

Perhaps the book’s most important contribution is an extended discussion of how church leaders, with the encouragement and direction of prominent railroad owners, found a way to radically alter public opinion toward Mormons in the late 1880s. This involved relatively widespread “boodling” (an amusing nineteenth-century term for bribery). Central Pacific railroad barons Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford, with substantial financial

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contributions from the church, bribed prominent newspapers and wire services to report favorably on the Mormons. These reports countered negative articles written by the Salt Lake Tribune reporter and Associate Press correspondent William Nelson. The railroad owners’ aid was hardly charitable—they understood that church members represented an enormous future customer base. Church leaders had previously balked at bribing politicians and, perhaps, judges, but journalists seemed to be a different story. Lyman chronicles with ample documentation the church’s part in changing the tide of public opinion.

The juxtaposition of the church taking innovative action to ingratiate itself with the federal government and the national population, while at the same time polygamists (famously including George Q. Cannon and Francis M. Lyman) were serving prison terms, is striking.

Concurrent with the public relations campaign, church leaders also encouraged monogamous Mormons to take loyalty oaths, to hide belief in plural marriage, and to take action to preserve their political involvement and influence. They did this to maintain political power that was eroding from restrictions imposed on Latter-day Saints’ civil rights mostly because of their unusual marriage practice. Lyman argues that this led to a gradual weening of younger Mormons from their leaders, which facilitated far fuller political independence over the coming decade with the radical alterations of Utah’s political landscape.

Another of the book’s important contributions to the literature of Utah statehood is its inclusion as an appendix the full text of Republican leader James Clarkson’s 33-page letter to Wilford Woodruff written in July 1894, just after both houses of Congress approved the enabling act to make Utah a state on a bipartisan basis. Lyman, who scouted out this letter in a Midwestern archive in the 1980s, finds the long epistle to be one of the most important sources for understanding the attainment of statehood by Utah.

The book’s final chapters lay out how the ultimate attainment of statehood played out.

Lyman tells this important story as well as anyone. Through wrenching Supreme Court decisions in 1890 that upheld severe legislation and through even harsher laws being

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considered, LDS leaders came to realize that the political rights of church members and the institutional survival of the church would be seriously threatened if polygamy were not officially abandoned. Political changes in Utah in the early 1890s were also critical to statehood.

Lyman masterfully tells the story of the end of the People’s and Liberal Parties, the political intrigue that continued for several years, the careful balancing act LDS leaders had in wooing both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the internal disputes that they sometimes faced. Mormons who were becoming avid members of the national parties felt more like Americans than ones who had voted as a bloc as members of the People’s Party.

Although a must-read for anyone serious about understanding how Utah became a state, Finally Statehood! is not without faults. The book sometimes jumps around temporally from one period to another and back again without warning. References are occasionally missing or a bit jumbled. Important conclusions are not always documented as well as one might hope. Lyman seems to believe that the important Supreme Court 1890 opinion that helped precipitate Wilford Woodruff’s issuance of the Manifesto was the decision in Davis v. Beason, a February 1890 decision in which the court unanimously found constitutional an Idaho law that prohibited people from voting who believed in polygamy based on their religion. Davis v.

Beason is certainly an important free-exercise decision which largely followed Reynolds v. United States. I believe, however, that more significant was the May 1890 Supreme Court decision of Late Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. United States, which found the Edmunds-Tucker Act constitutional with its disincorporation of the church, its forfeiture of most church property to the United States, its application of the proceeds from the sale or use of that property, its restrictions on civil rights, and various other important provisions.

There are a few surprising, though admittedly minor, mistakes in the book. An example is that Lyman asserts that George Q. Cannon was let off easy on unlawful cohabitation charges to which he pled guilty in September 1888 and that he received only a 75-day sentence, citing Abraham Cannon’s journal as evidence. In fact, as Abraham Cannon correctly recorded, Cannon pled

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Kenneth L. Cannon II —Independent historian, Salt Lake City, Utah

Cannon is a member of Signature Books’ editorial board but took no part in the publisher’s considering or accepting the book for publication, or editing or marketing the book.

Prehistoric Suns: Ancient Observations in the American Southwest

By Steve Mulligan Albuquerque: Fresco Books in association with the University of New Mexico Press, 2020, 156 pp. Cloth, $65.00

Many people in Utah seem to believe that the history of the state began in the nineteenth century. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, most forget the enduring legacy of those who inhabited this place long before the arrival of mountain-men, pioneers, and dot-commers.

Some of the most important reminders of Utah’s long history are Native American petroglyphs and pictographs found across the state. Left by an assortment of ancient peoples, including the Fremont and Ancient Puebloan cultures, “Rock Art” has captivated the interest of a wide variety of individuals including archeologists, historians, artists, and average travelers who have tried to decipher the meaning of these seemingly immutable and inscrutable works.

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For more than fifteen years Mulligan has tirelessly crisscrossed the western United States, and Utah in particular, recording the ways in which rock imagery acts as celestial calendars intricately recording, through light, equinoxes, solstices, and other astronomic phenomenon.

Prehistoric Suns is the culmination of this work that links, in stunning fashion, the fields of astroarchaeology and photography. As fellow Moab-photographer Tom Till noted, Mulligan has the ability to see “beyond the obvious beauties to other secreted, subtle realms.”3 This is exactly what he has accomplished in this book.

Many of the sites in the text are well known and have been recorded by other photographers.

What sets his work apart, however, is that it is not what a site looks like but what it does that interests Mulligan. He records carefully placed spirals capturing the light and shadow of a solstice or equinox. Sun-daggers cut across rock panels as a calendric act in which light seems to impregnate stone. In other photographs he documents other visual references to the sun, moon, and stars, a further indication of these ancient cultures’ profound understanding of the interaction between the heavens and earth.

It is a project, Mulligan admits, that has drawn

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Despite these, Edward Leo Lyman’s Statehood Finally! should be read by every person interested in understanding how Utah became a state. It represents the culmination (to date) of the work on the subject from the leading expert. It adds information and insights into important roles national leaders played, identifies a number of Utahns whose pieces of the story have been ignored or missed, provides the surprisingly large part the Central Pacific leaders played, provides a plausible explanation why Isaac Trumbo was not one of Utah’s first Senators, and confirms and documents (though alters) suspicions many of us have had for years about the church’s involvement in “boodling.”

Photographers have recorded Native American rock glyphs across the American Southwest for nearly 150 years, and their work has played an important role in how it has been seen and understood. Yet photographers often look at these works of stone and pigment as primitive yet powerful works of art, devoid of utility. The act of photographing these sites, therefore, is a form of artistic appropriation in which, as Lucy Lippard has argued, the photographer acts as a surrogate for the “original artist.”1 While appreciating the inherent beauty of the work, other photographers see more than art for art’s sake. For decades the photographer Craig Law has documented panels in distant, difficult-to-reach climes in order to know more about these prehistoric cultures and the context in which they lived. His project may still seem like a pilgrimage, but with different intentions and outcomes. Hoping to produce an archive for future scholars, Law’s work successfully integrates “anthropological and artistic data.”2 The same may be said of the recent work of Utah-based photographer Steve Mulligan.

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guilty to two counts of unlawful cohabitation, resulting in what amounted to a full six-month sentence and a $400 fine (which was more than the statutory fine for one offense).

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him “into a world of intuitive observation and ancient insight.” (7)

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Remarkably the photographer always seems to be in the right place at the right time, which prompts one to marvel at his ability to cover so much time and space in pursuit of fleeting, yet profound moments. Yet Mulligan is quick to acknowledge that this is a collaborative effort and he received assistance from astroarcheologists, scholars, Native American guides, and friends with local knowledge of certain sites. The photography, however, is his contribution, the product of a photographer at the top of his craft. Through his use of film—a bit of photo-archeology in an increasingly digital age—Mulligan produced black and white images that magnify the book’s essential elements of light and stone. Using a large-format camera, moreover, he created images that are both informative and beautiful and would satisfy the needs of an archeologist and the desires of an art collector or curator.

Prehistoric Suns features two contextual essays

by Ken Zoll, director of the Verde Valley Archeology Center, and Natalie Cunningham, a writer and astrophysicist, as well as short essays by the photographer that provide insight into his experiences. In one, he described photographing the early morning light of a summer solstice on a petroglyph on Land Hill, near Santa Clara, Utah, noting the crammed scene behind his camera with a “drum circle, several flute players, and several dozen onlookers.” (72) More essays would have been a welcome addition to the text, providing, as they do, a greater understanding of how these sites continue to function as places of interest and worship.

If photography is fundamentally a product of light and time, then few books come as close to the essence of the medium. Prehistoric Suns is a spellbinding work of art and science, and readers will find themselves returning to it again and again and sharing the images with friends and family (as I did). Most importantly, it will bring home the fact that the history of this place is far more beautiful and complex, intelligent and sophisticated than most could fathom.

James R. Swensen —Brigham Young University

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Notes 1. Lucy Lippard, “Foreword,” in Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1988), x.

2. Lippard, xi.

3. Tom Till, “Foreword,” in Steve Mulligan, Terra Incognita (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

Standing on the Walls of Time: Ancient Art of Utah’s Cliffs and Canyons

By Kevin T. Jones; photographs by Layne Miller Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019, 144 pp. Paper, $19.95

Petroglyphs (pecked, carved, etched, or incised images on stone) and pictographs (painted images on stone) are among Utah’s most compelling wildland attractions, scattered across the cliffs and canyons of multiple counties in the state. Individual images may date to eleven thousand years ago. Large panels may be nine thousand years old. Utah rock imagery represents some of the nation’s most important and enduring prehistoric symbols, with direct connections to modern Native American tribes descended from Ancestral Puebloans, Utes, Paiutes, Navajos, Shoshones, and others.

Chronicling this wealth of original art has been the work of the Utah Rock Art Research Association and hundreds of volunteers. Related books include Polly Schaafsma’s The Rock Art of Utah, Jonathan Bailey’s Rock Art: A Vision of a Vanishing Cultural Landscape, Sally Cole’s Legacy on Stone: Rock Art of the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners Region, Winston Hurst and Joe Pachak’s Spirit Windows: Native American Rock Art of Southeastern Utah, and Steven Simms and François Gohier’s Traces of Fremont: Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah.

In Standing on the Walls of Time, Kevin Jones and photographer Layne Miller follow protocol by not revealing locations of rock art panels; superb photographs document diverse sites.

Where the book differs from other volumes is in Jones’s writing. Having been state archaeologist of Utah for seventeen years, Jones knows all of the time sequences and stylistic details to identify rock imagery panels by date and culture groups, but he chooses not to do so.

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Florence Lister has said that archaeology gives us only 20 percent of ancient cultures and cannot recreate songs, dances, ceremonies, and other cultural practices. Jones concurs. “The most important ways people identify themselves, those items of their behavior that distinguish them from others, are not generally expressed in the concrete objects that may be accessible to archaeologists,” he writes. “We cannot dig up beliefs. We cannot dig up stories. What are we left with? We sometimes find clothing. We do find tools and can learn about prehistoric economies, but what a shallow understanding that leaves us.” (24) Standing on the Walls of Time takes a relevant, new approach. “I am saying that rather than try to decipher the ancient artist’s meaning, we can try to find the meaning the art has for us,” Jones writes. (25) Thus, both the essays of Kevin Jones and the photographs of Layne Miller allow the reader to make up his or her own mind and to become deeply engrossed in the world-class rock art imagery prevalent in Utah’s canyon country.

For the enthusiast, all of Utah’s great styles are represented here: Barrier Canyon, Glen Canyon

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Rock art, on site and in situ, and thousands of years old, is one of Utah’s great gifts to the world. Jones and Miller understand that. The University of Utah Press has produced a beautiful, timely, and affordable volume that makes a strong case for rock art appreciation and protection. Recommended for libraries and public land gift shop venues, Standing on the Walls of Time is a book that all Utahns should be proud of and all visitors should purchase.

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This is a refreshing approach. Jones wants the book’s photographs to reach readers on an emotional, not an intellectual, level. His essays, interspersed with Miller’s extraordinary close-up and landscape photos, draw you into different millennia. The book succeeds because it encourages readers to interpret rock art for themselves rather than learn about it through the mediated words of archaeologists. The book’s photographs show these works as both playful and profound.

Linear, Archaic, Fremont, San Juan Anthropomorphic, Ute, Navajo, and Paiute. Cowboy and sheepherder glyphs are missing, but that’s a different cultural overlay. For Utah’s prehistoric and historic Native inhabitants, this book is a blessing with a plea for preservation. Panels have been protected in Nine Mile Canyon and in Range Creek, but politicians shrank the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, leaving irreplaceable panels at risk.

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Jones, who campaigned for rock art to become a state symbol under Utah Code 63G-1–601, writes that “academic researchers . . . work to identify patterns in the iconography to learn about past cultures and their geographic and temporal positions as expressed on stone . . . [but] this book represents a departure from nearly all of these approaches.” (3) Instead, Jones challenges readers to enjoy rock imagery not as some form of primitive communication “or mere folk art” but to recognize its “deserved status as fine art of great value and historic significance.” (3)

Andrew Gulliford —Fort Lewis College

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Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics Edited by Matthew L. Harris Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. viii + 247 pp.

Paper, $27.95

While the broad brushstrokes of Ezra Taft Benson’s life (1899–1994) are generally known among Mormon watchers, only in recent years have historians taken him up as a subject of serious study. To a large degree this is symptomatic of the field of Mormon history, which has focused most of its considerable energies on the nineteenth century. Michael Quinn, Greg Prince, and Gary Bergera were among the first historians to critically analyze Benson as a prominent, and controversial, apostle and then president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Thunder from the Right goes a step beyond these previous historians’ work, viewing Benson not just in his Latter-day Saint setting but in the broader context of the rise of conservatism in twentieth-century American politics and culture. This volume thus sheds important light on Benson that speaks to his significance beyond Mormon history, narrowly construed.

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Matthew Harris has emerged as the foremost historian of Ezra Taft Benson’s political life and legacy. Many of the themes that are featured in this edited collection are further developed in Harris’s 2020 monograph, Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right (University of Utah Press). Even with the publication of this latter book, however, Thunder from the Right remains a distinctive contribution in its own right, with substantial and original offerings from several outstanding historians. The footnotes alone make the book a valuable resource, pointing to a wealth of primary sources and secondary scholarship. Each of the volume’s contributors is to be commended for their fine scholarship, and Harris is to be congratulated not only for bringing together such a strong cast, but also conceptualizing the book’s organization so that each chapter offers genuine depth while contributing to the volume’s overall breadth.

The book opens with Matthew Harris’s outstanding introduction, providing a rich yet concise biographical sketch of Benson. Harris emphasizes that Benson can only be understood if we recognize that in his mind religion and politics were truly inseparable. His “conservative constitutionalism” (2) focused on values of self-sufficiency, hard work, faith, American exceptionalism, free markets, limited government, and individual liberty under the law. Benson’s conservative political ideology is more fully fleshed out in excellent essays by Brian Cannon, Robert Goldberg, and Matthew Bowman. Cannon shows how Benson’s neoliberal agricultural policies were rooted in his deep-seated commitment to family farms and a somewhat nostalgic yeoman ideal. Whereas Cannon emphasizes Benson’s agricultural roots, Goldberg places him within the changing landscape of twentieth-century American conservatism, revealing Benson to be both a catalyst for and product of the movement’s evolution and internal diversity.

In an essay deeply attuned to subtle nuances and change over time, Bowman demonstrates how Benson believed that threats to political and economic freedom would lead to an erosion of private and public morality. Freedom was fragile, always under attack by godless communists and other threatening forces, and so Americans—and Latter-day Saints in

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particular—needed to be vigilant in their efforts to protect liberty.

Gary Bergera and Newell Bringhurst reveal Benson to be a political animal at heart. Bergera’s essay focuses narrowly but insightfully on the ways in which Benson rhetorically deployed, and manipulated, the story of his 1959 meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. What could have been a cynical assessment of Benson’s “confabulations” (61) becomes a more useful reflection on history, myth, and memory.

Bringhurst zeroes in on Benson’s repeated flirtations with running for the U.S. presidency in the 1960s. Benson emerges here as coy and cagy—a political operator who was unable to pull himself away from the allure of Washington politics for nearly a decade after he returned to full-time church service.

In retrospect, Benson’s views on race and gender have not aged well. These two topics are the subjects of penetrating but fair essays by Matthew Harris and Andrea Radke-Moss, respectively. Harris traces Benson’s dire view of the civil rights movement, influenced substantially by the conspiratorial views of J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Welch. Benson’s outspoken disdain for the movement made him an outlier even within the generally conservative church leadership, and eventually earned him the censure of Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, and Spencer W. Kimball. Radke-Moss, the lone female contributor to the volume, examines Benson’s domestic ideology from the 1950s through the 1980s. She argues that his teachings in the 1980s—for instance, about women in the workplace—were not only conservative but reactionary. Importantly, Radke-Moss recognizes the significance of Benson’s wife, Flora, in enabling and actively promoting the notions of soft patriarchy and anti-feminism that have been important shapers of modern Latter-day Saint discourse about gender, marriage, the family, and women’s roles in church and society.

The volume concludes with an essay by J. B. Haws that offers the best critical assessment that I have read of Benson’s years as church president. He reveals a complex legacy, with church growth and globalization and an increased emphasis on the Book of Mormon on the one hand, but increased polarization (on both the left and right) and controversies over

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Mark Hofmann’s forgeries and Benson’s own debilitated status on the other. While Benson no longer spoke in explicitly political terms, the church’s new emphasis on “moral issues” was a form of politics in an era characterized by the rise of the Religious Right.

Patrick Q. Mason —Utah State University

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Those interested in a faith-promoting profile of a prophet should look elsewhere. But for

readers interested in Ezra Taft Benson’s significance as a historical figure at the intersection of twentieth-century religion and politics, Thunder from the Right is an original and richly rewarding contribution.

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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 co-editors are Holly George and Jedediah S. Rogers, 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: 1,365 copies printed; 1,006 mail subscriptions; 55 other classes mailed; 1,061 total paid circulation; 51 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 253; total, 1,365.

The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,315 copies printed; 956 mail subscriptions; 54 other classes mailed; 0 dealer and counter sales; 1,010 total paid circulation; 51 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution, 1,061; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 254; total, 1,315.

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CONTRIBUTORS

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THOMAS G. ANDREWS is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. His first book, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (2008), won six awards, including the Bancroft Prize. His most recent book, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (2015), is an environmental history of the Colorado headwaters region of Rocky Mountain National Park. He is now working on a multi-book project on human-animal relationships in U.S. history.

MARTHA BRADLEY EVANS is the Senior Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Undergraduate Studies and a professor in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah who teaches history and theory classes. She is author of Kidnapped from that Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists (1993), The Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (2000), and Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority and Equal Rights (2005), among numerous others.

A former vice chair of the Utah Board of State History, Bradley Evans is a Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society.

MATTHEW C. GODFREY is a general editor and the managing historian of the Joseph

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Smith Papers, a documentary editing project.

He is past president of Historical Research Associates, a historical and archeological consulting firm headquartered in Missoula, Montana. He is the author of Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907–1921 (2007), which was a co-winner of the Mormon History Association’s Smith-Petit Award for Best First Book, and coeditor of The Earth Shall Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays in Mormon Environmental History (2019). He has also served as the lead historian on several published volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers.

MARK E. DEGIOVANNI MILLER is Professor of History at Southern Utah University. His research and teaching specialties include United States History, American West, Borderlands, Indigenous Culture and History, World Civilization, and Latin America. He has published articles and books on modern American Indian History, most recently Forgotten Tribes (2006) and Claiming Tribal Identity (2013). Miller has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other publications on issues of tribal recognition.

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2 0 2 0 AWA R D W I N N E R S

William P. MacKinnon Award Wendy Rex-Atzet, Coordinator

Utah

History

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Sponsored by William P. MacKinnon Juanita Brooks Best Book in Utah History

Sponsored by the BYU Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Nick Yengich Memorial Editors’ Choice Award John Sillito, “Drawing the Sword of War against War: B. H. Roberts, World War I, and the Quest for Peace” UHQ (Spring 2019)

Best Utah history article or chapter in a publication other than UHQ

Finalist for Best Book in Utah History

Sponsored by Michael W. Homer

Kenneth W. Baldridge, The Civilian Conservation Corps in Utah, 1933–1942: Remembering Nine Years of Achievement (University of Utah, 2019)

Helen Papanikolas Student Paper Award

Dale L. Morgan Award Best scholarly article in UHQ Richard Saunders, “Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (or Villains) of Mormon and Utah History” UHQ (Summer 2019)

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LeRoy S. Axland History Article Award

Sponsored by the Smith-Pettit Foundation

Sponsored by the Smith-Pettit Foundation

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Sponsored by Ron Yengich

Jeff Nichols, “Before the Boom: Mormons, Livestock, and Stewardship, 1847–1870,” in The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History (University of Utah Press, 2019)

Sondra G. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (University of Utah Press, 2019)

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Michael McLane, “Taking the Waters: Lost Leisure on Salt Lake City’s Beck Street” UHQ (Winter 2019)

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Lisa Duskin Goede, Bear River Heritage Area Coordinator, for efforts to understand, document, and support heritage and cultural organizations, traditions, and individuals of northern Utah and southeastern Idaho.

Best general-interest article in UHQ

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Park City Museum, for efforts to preserve, protect, promote, document, and maintain the historical and physical integrity of the Glenwood Cemetery in Park City, Utah.

Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award

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Better Days 2020—Rebekah Clark, Tiffany Greene, Katherine Kitterman, Neylan McBaine, Naomi Watkins—for bringing Utah women’s history into the forefront with research, books, videos, events, educational tools, and K-12 curriculum.

Sponsored by Allan and Thalia Smart and Zeese Papanikolas

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Outstanding Achievement Awards

Emily Larson, University of Utah, “The Power of Paint: Working Women in Utah’s Art World, c1935–1955” Andrea Maxfield, University of Utah, “Latter-day Saint Female Dynasties of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” Sponsored by Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher

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U TA H I N F O C U S

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A group of children harvesting in a field, September 1917. Although a lower percentage of children in the Intermountain West worked for wages—4 percent—than in the rest of the country other than the Pacific states, child farm labor was underreported and subject to almost no regulation in the early twentieth century.

Considered by many to be healthful work, farm labor began as early as age 6 in the fields—the kind of work seen here. While some were employed full time, many children performed

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family work without wages. Laws establishing the type of work, conditions, hours, and wages—among them compulsory education and prohibitions from working in hazardous occupations and during the night—curtailed the number of children in the work place. Shipler Commercial Photographers Collection, no. 18332.

Source: Martha S. Bradley, “Protect the Children: Child Labor in Utah, 1880–1920,” Utah Historical Quarterly 59 (Winter 1991): 52–71.

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