Richard E. Turley Jr. & Lael Littke, Wagons West: Brigham Young and the First Pioneers, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 152 p. Illustrations. Hardcover: $18.99; Kindle: $11.99. ISBN 978-1-62972-250-4.

Keepa’ninnies will recognize Richard E. Turley as the longtime Assistant Church Historian (transferred this year to be the Managing Director of the Church’s Public Affairs Department), responsible for the high quality of many Church history projects; co-author Lael Littke has had an even longer career as a fiction author, especially in young adult fiction. We’ve seen her here at Keepa with “A Different Kind of Christmas”, “Be Jubilant My Feet”, and “Mama Lives in the Kitchen”, from the old Church magazines. I imagine that Rick Turley was chiefly responsible for the research and accuracy of the history, while Lael Littke contributed a storyteller’s skill in turning raw materials into a coherent, colorful, readable narrative.

Their partnership has produced a good thing.

Wagons West is the Pioneer story from Nauvoo through the arrival of the Vanguard Company in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Its opening chapters tell the broad story of the people, and as the book continues it focuses more and more tightly on the story of that single, first company – rather than the typical book “about the pioneers” with anecdotes culled from many companies over many years, Wagons West is a connected history of the first company, with the necessary backstory to tell who these people were and why they were out on the trail.

You may think you know that story – but I can almost certainly guarantee you will learn more from this slender book, and that “more” will be conveyed through a narrative of people and colorful incident rather than the typical, often dry editorial voice. You’ll see in your mind’s eye a vigilante gang attacking a band of Mormon harvesters in the final days of Nauvoo; you’ll see Patty Sessions going beyond mere duty at Winter Quarters to take care of a woman of whom she disapproved as that woman neared childbirth; you’ll see an encounter with a band of Sioux Indians – you’ll see events as they happen, rather than merely be told these things happened.

Wagons West shows you the Pioneers as living, breathing human beings, sometimes struggling, sometimes succeeding. Rather than depicting Brigham Young as marching West knowing exactly where he was going and how he was going to get there, this narrative shows him consulting other travelers on the trail, taking their experience into account but not always adopting their views as his own, making decisions about where the Saints would settle in relation to Indian presence, and laying out, in advance, a plan for the early days in the Valley so far as scouting and plowing and building was concerned. As real people, his followers grumbled and wasted their ammunition on game they didn’t eat, as well as choosing to follow Brigham Young rather than other contenders to leadership, and kindly setting up a blacksmith’s forge to repair the carriage of a man traveling in a company of Missourians.

This book could, I think, be easily read by children from about age 10 and up, or read to younger children by a parent who could answer questions about unfamiliar technology or natural history. It is not aimed solely at children, however: I read it with a great deal of pleasure, never once feeling like I was reading a kids’ book, and time after time saying to myself, “I didn’t know that” or “So that’s why they did it that way.” As someone who writes history, I was fascinated to examine how the authors converted historical documents into narrative, sometimes with the language of the documents displayed as dialog and always selecting details with an eye to color and movement, without ever, to my mind, crossing the line between history and historical fiction. This is history, and any adult who doesn’t think he’s too cool for anything not published by an academic press will be able to read this as history. (The dimensions of the book, a couple of inches wider than trade books, and the heavy illustration count – I don’t think there is a single two-page spread without at least one illustration – might, however, suggest a juvenile audience, and some too-cool-for-school adults might hesitate to read it in public.)

Those illustrations are an asset to the book. There are portraits of people I don’t remember having seen before. Trail landmarks are shown, in old photographs without modern intrusions. Old technology – blacksmith’s tools, a cannon like the one carried by the Pioneers, a plow – are pictured, helping the reader form a better mental image. Even short bits of documents make interesting illustrations – the authors or designer have picked out bits of documents in the even hand of Thomas Bullock, or others with handwriting legible enough for readers who have only a slight familiarity with cursive writing.

A very few of the illustrations do not appear to advantage, which is the only real fault I find with the book: Some of the illustrations are familiar to readers as intensely colored paintings, with too much detail to be quite comprehensible when converted to black and white (all illustrations throughout the book are black and white). In a few cases, images are printed more as gray and white, making them too muddy to be attractive or fully functional. Still, the images were well selected for content – and while Deseret Book could improve the quality of the printing, the company should be praised for publishing this book with hard covers.

There is a short, very relevant “for further reading” list, featuring books from Leonard Arrington and Glen Leonard to John Turner.

Wagons West is a book that most Keepa’ninnies will enjoy. It’s history, and story, and heritage. It’s the kind of history that I try to tell on Keepa, where people’s actions and words are the evidence of the faith that impels them, and that point doesn’t have to be made with sentimental editorializing about how noble the people were. If I gave stars, this book would get the full rating.

And it has been released just in time for Christmas.