Those of us who struggle, at times, to win cooperation from the Powers That Be in the Church History Library can remember that things could be, and have been, much harder. Here’s a fragment of a letter I ran across this morning that makes that point.
Isaac Russell, the well-known Mormon journalist about whom historian Ken Cannon has spoken and written so much, had a younger brother, Francis J. Russell, who also had a flair for writing. Francis wrote a letter to Isaac after Francis’s 1923 return from the Hawaiian Mission, with a great story about the Danish-born Assistant Church Historian, Andrew Jenson:
In January my mission president, Eugene J. Neff, told me to write a history of the mission. He wanted it to be 300 pages in length and wanted it completed in two months.
After arriving home, I called at the church historian’s office to see the material they had – and they had plenty of it, three large quarto volumes of typewritten manuscript, well collected and assembled, I thot. On learning my purpose he (Bro. Andrew Jenson), became quite concerned, and all but refused me access to the church archives.
“You fellows come in here,” he said, “and steal our ‘Tunder.’ I haf spent $15,000 of my own money collecting historical data for the church and you can see that we naturally resent every Tom, Dick and Harry coming in here to make money from our labors. I made the trip to Honolulu in 1895 to get that material, and if you want to pay my fare there, I shall feel more like helping you.”
At least nobody at CHL’s reference desk has ever charged me cruise fare for access to the old minutes.
Thank goodness Jensen thought enough of the need to get the historical data that he was willing to spend his own money to get it. He is responsible for a huge swath of our history. I guess I can understand some of his personal attachment to the gathered material, but it is interesting that apparently the church would not underwrite all of his efforts at gathering and preserving information.
About 40 years ago I took a day vacation from my work and went to the Church Historian’s Office to see if I could read Amasa Lyman’s diary, because I had an ancestor who had lived in San Bernardino. I was interviewed by Bill Slaughter, who denied my request. But he suggested I should read Andrew Jensen’s history of the town, so I spent the rest of the day doing that.
It was compiled from letters and diaries of people who lived there, and told an epic story. Someone said that they had been chased out of their homes everywhere they’d lived. It wasn’t going to happen again, because they now had no enemies. There was a Mayday festival described in extreme detail, down to transcripts of the speeches. I remember somebody was sent with $500 in gold coin to sail in a steamboat to San Francisco to buy some machinery. He didn’t buy it, but there was a storm an hour out and he feared that the money might be lost. As he was making his way to the purser, he dropped the money and it rolled into the sea and was lost. A few years later the Mormons were driven from San Bernardino by a mob led by Quartus Sparks, an apostate Mormon from the Ship Brooklyn. I didn’t learn anything that day about my ancestor Ellis Eames, but through these little stories I learned a lot about the world in which he lived. Andrew Jensen was a great historian. He had a nose for history. With this post we discover that he was even more like you, Ardis, than I ever suspected.
Wow. How easily we forget. If we ever knew to begin with.