… because what’s a blog for if not to indulge a blogger’s randomness?

For some reason yesterday morning I recalled a brief conversation from about 30 years ago – 1985, I think, but it could have been a year either way. I was in the microforms area of the BYU library working on my family history. The microfilmed newspapers were in the same area as the microfilmed federal census, and a college-age young woman sitting at the next machine was cranking through the Deseret News. She was making little noises of frustration, and so, with my vast experience of two or three years of genealogical research, I asked if I could help.

“I can’t find it.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Well, I want to read the news reports about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.”

Yes, she was reading the Deseret News of 1857.

“I don’t think there will be anything in the paper,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Well, because it wasn’t something anybody talked about publicly at the time.”

“Maybe it just took more time for the news to come from southern Utah,” she said, and continued to read. I turned back to my own work.

I remember thinking it was naive, even silly, for her to expect to find a Salt Lake newspaper account of the massacre at the time. I had read Juanita Brooks’s Mountain Meadows Massacre, and perhaps had seen other brief accounts somewhere although I can’t now guess where. This was years before I had any idea of “doing” Mormon history myself – I had always been interested in Church history, but only as a layman. I was reading just-published history at the time – I had read Mormon Enigma by then, I think, and I read Brigham Young University: A House of Faith as soon as it came out, so I may have even been reading that when this random conversation took place.

But I know I had no experience whatsoever as a historian at that point, beyond family history. I knew what primary sources were with regard to genealogy, but I doubt I had ever heard of the Church Archives (this would have been just prior to the Mark Hofmann bombings – I may have heard of the Archives in the news coverage of that, but I’m sure I didn’t realize that “regular” people ever went there – that was something I didn’t know until about 1999).

The point is that I was a garden-variety Latter-day Saint with a layman’s interest in history but absolutely no expertise. Yet I had enough background to know that the Deseret News would not have published an account of the massacre in 1857 – or for a long time to follow – and I felt my neighbor was naive for expecting to find anything.

Today, all these years later, I think differently.

First, it had never occurred to me – and it wouldn’t occur to me for years to come – that I should or even could turn to contemporary records to check up on what I was reading in secondary published history. I mean, I did use those sources for genealogical research, yes, but it never entered my mind to do that for history beyond family history. This “naive” BYU student was light years ahead of me in that respect. I hope she kept up that practice even though this particular occasion did not give her what she hoped for. And I hope that there was no hint of superiority in my words or in my tone when I told her she wouldn’t find what she was looking for. She had the right instinct, and she followed up on the impulse to do the research. She was wiser, if less knowledgeable, than I was.

And second, this random memory confirms for me my general impression that it was, somehow, possible – if you lived in the Western US, if you had a general interest, if you were able and willing to spend pocket money at the bookstore – in the 1970s and ’80s, to be more or less generally aware of Church history, merely by reading what was widely available in print. I had no special access to anything, had no insider network for discussion or recommending titles, nor even any particular encouragement from family other than visits to Church history sites when we lived in Missouri, hadn’t read any of the Mormon journals outside the Church magazines (I don’t think I even knew that Dialogue existed at that point), and hadn’t had any special training of any kind – I just read published Church history, as I read science fiction and mystery novels and biographies, that I found at my local (independent, not Deseret Book) bookstore in Las Vegas, primarily.

This is not intended to shame others for not having picked up the same awareness I had. It’s just the reminiscence of a particular moment when I can measure my involvement with Church history. In 1985, that was solely as a general (if avid) reader – it hadn’t yet dawned on me that there was more to Mormon history than what was on the bookstore shelves.