The area we know as Utah was part of Mexico when explorers like Jedediah Smith saw it in the 1820s. It was Mexican territory in the heyday of the trappers and mountain men, and still Mexican territory when Brigham Young entered Utah in 1847. Utah became American territory only in February 1848 when Mexico ceded the region at the conclusion of the Mexican War.

Mexican ownership of Utah, though, was little more than a paper ownership. There was no Mexican governmental presence here; Utah’s native tribes paid no allegiance to Mexico City. Although Father Escalante’s expedition had entered Utah Valley in 1776, and while there had been some Spanish mining in southern Utah and considerable traffic on the part of the Spanish Trail that passed through Utah, there was little permanent Mexican presence in Utah anytime during the 19th century.

Continue reading Alejandro Bacca: Salt Lake City’s Landscape Gardener →

Ah, summer! The season of water parks and carnivals and circuses.

It was the same in 1885, when John Robinson brought his “strictly moral” circus to Utah. Robinson’s was one of the premier circuses in America. At age 78 and near the end of his half-century as a circus performer and entrepreneur, Robinson was one of the wealthiest in the business. This was no shabby carnival whose advertisements were grander than its acts – this was the best there was, and Salt Lake City was on his route that year.

Anticipation of his arrival on the morning of July 17 was so great that one family stationed their little boy on the main road with instructions to run home and notify the rest of the family as soon as there was any sign of the circus. The little boy saw dust in the distance, and a speck of blue, and ran home as fast as his bare feet could carry him. “They’re coming! Hurry, you’ll miss them!” The entire family ran to the road in time to see a lone man walking along under the shade of a blue umbrella.

Continue reading John Robinson’s “Strictly Moral Circus” Comes to Town →

If we lived in late 19th century Utah, this last week of May would find us wrapping up business in most of our social, religious, and civic organizations. Not only would school be closing, but so too would be the regular meetings of most young men’s clubs, women’s sewing circles, dramatic societies, debating clubs, literary associations, and, if you were LDS, Relief Societies and Young Men’s and Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Associations. There was too much work to do in the summer and fall for many people to engage in social organizations; winter, with its long, dark evenings, was the season for those activities.

Organized in 1854 and disbanded in 1856, the Polysophical Society formed by the notable siblings Lorenzo and Eliza R. Snow may have been the first such Utah social club. Members gathered to give speeches, display musical talents, and discuss current events. The Young Men’s Literary Association featured poetry and literature recitations, as well as debates, dancing, and the collection of a library, from 1864 through at least 1867. The women’s Blue Tea Society formed in 1875 and the Ladies’ Literary Club organized in 1877 were, like the Young Men’s Literary Association, exclusively non-Mormon cultural societies. The LDS Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association dated to 1869, while the corresponding Young Men’s association was organized in 1875.

Continue reading The Fillmore Athenaeum →

Ah, the stories that have been told and believed about the Mormons of 19th century Utah! Many will swear today that the most outrageous fantasies were historical fact, so it’s refreshing to hear from someone who fell for the bloody tales and later had the grace to admit he was wrong.

When Utah’s Methodists met in conference in Provo in July, 1879, they welcomed a new worker to their ranks. Marshall Bennett Hyde, 31, was an experienced preacher, a native of Indiana who came to Utah from a pastoral assignment in Missouri. He was assigned to officiate in the newly established church in Ogden.

Hyde hadn’t been there very long before he was visited by two Mormons who lived in a settlement a short distance from Ogden. A man had come from Missouri to visit his Mormon sister and had died while at her home. Because he was a Methodist, the sister wished to give him a Methodist funeral, and Hyde’s two callers had been dispatched to request his assistance. (I have not been able to identify the deceased man or the town where he died; sometimes history stubbornly refuses to disclose all the details we would like.)

Continue reading Pistol Packin’ Parsons →

403 U.S. 9
91 S.Ct. 1775
29 L.Ed.2d 279
State of UTAH, Plaintiff,
v.
UNITED STATES.
No. 31, Orig.
Argued April 26, 1971, on Exceptions to Report of Special Master.
Decided June 7, 1971.

This suit was brought to settle an argument between the State of Utah and the United States of America over which of them owned the bed of the Great Salt Lake and controlled the lake shore. The whole case hinged on whether the Great Salt Lake was navigable at the date of Statehood. If it was, Utah owned it; if it was not, the United States got it.

The documentary evidence was a little vague, because it mostly dated to the 1870s and 1880s, not 1896. This suit was argued 75 years after Statehood — it’s not like there were a lot of people around who were old enough to have clear memories of 1896, and who were also still so clear-minded in 1971 that they made credible witnesses.

The State of Utah found one, though.

Continue reading A Living Witness: State of Utah v. United States →

This is a paper I gave at a Utah State History meeting in 2005(?), and for obvious reasons it comes to mind again. Go wash your hands.

Paiutes called it “Tosaw’kawduhd,” from which we get our name for the nearby Tushar Mountains. It was familiar to travelers on the Spanish Trail. One member of the 1849 Southern Exploring Company was so taken with its beauty that he instantly “composed a hymn about a sweet southern vale” and sang it to his companions. Two years later, Brigham Young pronounced it “a beautiful vale filled with cedars and firs.”

“It” is Marysvale, in Piute County, 200 miles south of Salt Lake City, on the Sevier River, south of Richfield and north of Panguitch. A few cabins were built in this jewel of a valley on the eve of the Blackhawk War; the first permanent settlers arrived in 1868 to exploit the discovery of gold in Marysvale’s Bullion Canyon. These first arrivals included men like DeWitt Clinton Tate, originally of Georgia, later of the California gold fields; and Jared Taylor, born in New York and a Mormon pioneer of 1848. They were joined by 2,000 other miners, who worked on successful strikes like the “Bully Boy” and the “Webster,” as well as unnumbered worthless holes.

As the gold boom ended, most of the miners left; those who remained established homes for their families down in the valley, along the river. They were joined by such families as that of William Taylor Dennis, a doctor from Nashville, Tennessee; undocumentable local stories report that his household included a black woman they called “Mammy,” a former slave who accompanied them west and who is buried with them in the tiny Dennis family cemetery. Josiah Francis Gibbs – rancher, geologist, newspaper editor, historian – worked in Marysvale off and on beginning in 1874, then made it his permanent home in 1900.

Continue reading “La Grippe”: A Utah Community Responds to the Flu Epidemic of 1918-19 →

This piece was published in the Salt Lake Tribune and posted at Keepa nearly ten years ago. There is nothing particularly Mormon about it, except for its setting in Salt Lake City. I offer it again as a nod to Black History Month.

Salt Lake City used to have a lot more parades than we do now, some spontaneous and others regularly scheduled to commemorate past events. Throughout the 1890s and into the early years of the 20th century, September 22nd was hailed as a day of thanksgiving and celebration, marked by a parade with pretty girls dressed in white and proud men marching boldly. It was “Emancipation Day,” the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 proclamation setting forth a timetable for freeing four million enslaved African-Americans.
Continue reading Emancipation Day (Utah history) — reprise →

This is still one of my favorite columns from the days (2007, in this case) when I used to write for the Salt Lake Tribune:

Some 1,700 students and community members waited in the Union Ballroom of the University of Utah on Jan. 31, 1961. Eight o’clock came and went with no word from their featured speaker. He had not been on the scheduled plane from Denver – had he stayed home in Atlanta to care for his wife and the son who had been born only hours earlier? Still, the audience waited.

When he finally arrived, with a police escort to speed his way across the valley, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. apologized to the standing-room-only audience and explained that he had missed his Denver plane connection.

He had come to speak on the future of integration – “civil rights” was not yet a current term in Utah – and to encourage Utahns to participate in the movement. “We are standing on the threshold of the greatest period of racial development,” he said. “The most important force behind the struggle … is the non-violent resistence movement. It’s our most potent weapon.”

Continue reading Martin Luther King in Deseret (Reprise) →

I blew it. I was supposed to post an invitation to attend a launch event at the University of Utah library that took place earlier this week. The announcement came in far enough in advance that I held it until closer to the event, then missed the date.

But despite missing the launch (a film screening and panel discussion), I can still promote the archive sponsored by the Marriott Library at the University of Utah:

Downwinders of Utah Archive

UPDATE: Amy T. sent these links to recordings of the recent Downwinders Archive event:

Launch Event
Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Some of you will remember a 2012 Keepa post on the service of Norlan G. and Sheron R. Walker, service missionaries who for years and years and years volunteered at the Church History Library to document a presence in fallout zones for those (or their survivors) who needed that documentation to make claims for injuries suffered as downwinders: Service in the Nuclear Age. Elder Walker, still performing that work at age 81, passed away on Christmas Day, 2013. Like the Walkers, the University of Utah seeks to serve those whose lives were so severely affected by those nuclear tests and the deception surrounding them.