Tag Archives: Utah history

“The Credit It Deserves”: Respecting Religious Organizations

March 26, 2009 Ardis E. Parshall 27 Comments

I wrote a Christmas column this past December about the Salvation Army in Utah. The Salvation Army has been a charity I’ve respected since my long-ago Las Vegas ward partnered with the Salvation Army to provide Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets — they furnished a minimum list of items to include, the Latter-day Saints assembled the boxes (usually with added food items), and the Salvation Army picked them up and delivered them to families. They were so well organized and so efficient that the Relief Society could have taken lessons from them — and you know there aren’t many organizations I would say that about.

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biographical, Utah history

Avalanche!

December 8, 2008 Ardis E. Parshall 4 Comments

The four men knew they were in danger. Heavy, wet snow falling on an icy crust of old snow was the perfect recipe for avalanche on Jan. 7, 1912. The men left the sawmill anyway, their wagon loaded with lumber, and drove cautiously down Blacksmith Fork Canyon southeast of Logan, Utah.

Four miles below, the road was blocked by a snowslide. As the men worked to free their stalled wagon, a field of snow broke loose and crashed down upon them. George William Ellis of Smithfield, 45, father of seven with an eighth child to be born the following March, was crushed against the heavy wagon and died almost instantly. Daniel Fletcher Norris of Paradise, 23, married less than a year, was buried by snow and died slowly of suffocation. John Edward Miles, Jr. of Paradise, 21, son of the sawmill’s owner, was carried down the ravine and flung into a creek, his shoulders pinned against a rock by snow which hardened like concrete around him.

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Utah history

National Guard, 1916 (Utah history)

December 5, 2008 Ardis E. Parshall 12 Comments

Hundreds of Utah families observed Thanksgiving 1916 with an empty chair at the table. Their sons and husbands in the National Guard were in Arizona, guarding the border against raiders attempting to draw the United States into deeper involvement in the Mexican Revolution.

The 140 men and officers of Battery A, Utah Field Artillery, had been in Arizona since late June, reporting to Nogales only nine days after President Woodrow Wilson had called for troops. Battery A claimed to be the first National Guard unit to arrive at the border, although Illinois disputed their claim. Utah’s men were fully uniformed, equipped, examined and mustered, in contrast with other early arrivals who had rushed to the border unprepared for service. Continue reading National Guard, 1916 (Utah history) →

Mormon history, Utah history

A Utah War Primer

November 19, 2008 Ardis E. Parshall 24 Comments

This is a modified version of one of several “introduction to the Utah War” talks I’ve given over the past couple of years. Bill MacKinnon is the one who uncovers new documents and offers professional analyses — I just try to bring everybody up to speed with the basic outline.

This “Utah War Primer” is only an overview of the Utah War. Rather than breaking new ground, it is my purpose to remind you of the basic story of the Utah War, so that you have the framework on which to hang the more original information you may have heard or read during the 2007-08 sesquicentennial observance of the Utah War. If I do it right, you won’t think you have learned a thing – merely recalled stories and facts that you have heard before but which may have become jumbled or faded in your memory.

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Utah history

Our Women Veterans (Utah history)

November 11, 2008 Ardis E. Parshall 7 Comments

American women first wore the uniforms of the United States military during World War II, when they were organized into the WACs (Women’s Army Corps), the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots), the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), the SPARs (a contraction of the Coast Guard motto Semper Paratus, “always ready”), and the Women Marines. National WAC director Oveta Culp Hobby spoke in Salt Lake in 1943, proclaiming that “This is a new age; it calls for new ways of expressing our love for our country; it makes different demands upon us.”

American women responded by joining the auxiliary corps and providing services that freed able-bodied men for combat duty. Within the first year, the WACs alone had filled enough positions to create four full combat divisions. One manual noted that some assignments were routine and others glamorous, “but whatever the job is, every WAC knows that a paper not properly routed today may mean insufficient supplies to our fighting men tomorrow.” Continue reading Our Women Veterans (Utah history) →

holiday, Utah history

An 1870 Ghost Story (Utah history)

October 20, 2008 Ardis E. Parshall 13 Comments

Charles William Carter was Salt Lake’s most experienced photographer in 1870, so it was business as usual when a young mother chose his Main Street studio to make a portrait of her little daughter. Carter posed the child, stepped behind his big camera, and exposed the glass plate from which the photograph would be printed. He told his customer the portrait would be ready the next day, and she left his studio with no idea that overnight her daughter’s picture would become the center of Salt Lake’s attention.

When Carter processed the photograph, he found the likeness of a little girl, as expected. But behind her, a little to her left, appeared the faint image of a man whom visitors to his studio recognized as a recently deceased military man, Captain W.R. Storey. Continue reading An 1870 Ghost Story (Utah history) →

Utah history

An Occurrence at St. Mark’s Cathedral (Utah history)

September 10, 2008 Ardis E. Parshall 9 Comments

St. Mark’s Cathedral is one of the loveliest old landmarks in Salt Lake City. Designed by Richard Upjohn (founder of the American Institute of Architects) and built of locally quarried red sandstone, it has served Utah’s Episcopal Church since its dedication in 1874, the first permanent Protestant building in Utah. The Right Rev. Daniel S. Tuttle, its first bishop, described it as “plain, but beautiful, and complete in its appointments.”

Plain it may have been in 1874; it has since been embellished with dazzling stained glass windows – some of them by Tiffany – and with the finest wood and metal work. Its organ is a jewel. Yet St. Marks retains the pioneer simplicity that earned its place on the National Register of Historic Sites. Continue reading An Occurrence at St. Mark’s Cathedral (Utah history) →

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