Dream Mines and Religious Identity in Twentieth-Century Utah I Ns Ights from the Norman C
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Dream Mines and Religious Identity in Twentieth-Century Utah I ns Ights from the norman C. PIerCe PaPers ian barber N unprocessed Western Americana collection in the Princeton A University Library elucidates a religious worldview that trailed the growing assimilation of the formerly polygamous, Utah-based commonwealth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter lds; more popularly, the Mormons) into mainstream, twentieth-century American society.1 In 1976, David N. Pierce of acknowledgments: This research was supported by a grant from the Friends of the Princeton University Library (2007–2008). I am grateful for the administra- tive support of Linda Oliveira and the assistance and interest of Alfred L. Bush, as well as the professional library staff of Special Collections, Firestone Library. I ac- knowledge the further support of the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University (especially the ever-helpful Anita Kline), and funding assistance from the Humanities Division, University of Otago. In Utah I thank John M. Murphy, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young Univer- sity, for interest and for directing me toward the Woodward family collection. At the lds Church History Library in Salt Lake City, I am grateful for the assistance of William W. Slaughter, Alan Morrell, and Brittany Chapman in locating relevant sources. The revised manuscript has benefited from the observations of the Chroni- cle’s editorial board and editor Gretchen Oberfranc, who is thanked for ongoing sup- port, interest, and encouragement. 1 Gustive O. Larson, the “americanization” of Utah for statehood (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1971); Mark P. Leone, roots of modern mormonism (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Klaus J. Hansen, mormonism and the american experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, a Kingdom transformed: themes in the Development of mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984); Thomas G. Alexander, mormon- ism in transition: a history of the Latter-day saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Armand L. Mauss, the angel and the Beehive: the mormon struggle with assimilation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Kathleen Flake, the Politics of american religious Identity: the seating of senator reed smooth, mormon apostle (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 433 the Class of 1967 and his siblings donated the personal papers and effects of their late father, Norman C. Pierce (1905–1976), an “in- sistent Mormon millennialist,” to the Firestone Library.2 The pa- pers include typescript drafts of Pierce’s publications, religious ex- periences, and various meetings; short notes; assorted contemporary publications; mining documents; photographs; and correspondence. Many of these materials relate to the history of Utah visionary John H. Koyle (1864–1949) and his revelations concerning a sacred mine in the mountains south of Salt Lake City. This essay draws on these and other documents to investigate the historical appeal of Koyle’s prophecies to “core area Mormons” and the development of his fol- lowing into a subaltern variation of an increasingly assimilated lds cultural identity.3 This investigation of Koyle’s following is part of a larger histori- cal anthropology research project that evaluates the changing place of sacred narratives about American history, ethnicity, and materi- ality in the making of the Mormon people and in the further emer- 2 Alfred L. Bush, “Princeton University,” in mormon americana: a guide to sources and Collections in the United states, ed. David J. Whittaker (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1995), 285. Family records submitted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (lds) and at least one website list various years of birth for Pierce (1904, 1905, 1906, 1915; see Norman C. Pierce, Utah entries in Search Records, Family Search, lds website www.familysearch.org/eng/Search/ frameset_search, accessed February 2009). The year 1905 preferred here is consis- tent with Pierce’s Social Security record (also at Family Search website, accessed February 2005) and with lds mission records (confirmed in an e-mail response from Jenny St. Clair, Reference Librarian, lds Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah [hereafter chl], March 18, 2009). 3 Here, “Mormon culture” is interpreted as the shared material and symbolic expressions of a distinctive, Utah-centered social group that is fundamentally reli- gious in nature. In this view, cultural identity is also religious identity insofar as lds society may be differentiated. On the emergence of a more mainstream Mormon religious identity in the twentieth century, and consequent tensions between the cultural poles of assimilation and peculiarity, see Mauss, the angel and the Beehive, and Cardell K. Jacobson, John P. Hoffmann, and Tim B. Heaton, eds., revisiting thomas f. o’Dea’s “the mormons”: Contemporary Perspectives (Salt Lake City: Univer- sity of Utah Press, 2008). In this essay the “Mormon core area” (after Alexander, mormonism in transition, 189) refers to the geographical heart of the early Mormon commonwealth centered on Salt Lake City, Utah. In this area, lds influences un- derpinned dominant patterns of social organization and economic behavior through much of the nineteenth century and, in central to southern parts, well into the twen- tieth century. 434 IDAHO UTAH N 0 10 20 30 40 50 miles 0 20 40 60 80 kilometres Ogden Great Salt WYOMING Lake Salt Lake City Utah Provo Lake Leland Relief Mine r Salem e v i Syndicate Mine R n e COLORADO NEVADA e r G River Colorado uan R n J ive Sa r ARIZONA Map of Utah, showing locations discussed in the text. Prepared by Les O’Neill, De- partment of Anthropology, Gender and Sociology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. gence of a global lds movement. The idea of the (re)construction of religious identity is fundamental both to the larger study and to the present essay, including the question of what it may mean to be Mormon for different lds communities separated by space, time, or social position. 435 cultural change and religious identity in early utah The nineteenth-century polygamous Mormon commonwealth is in- terpreted by many scholars as a nascent, theocratic Kingdom of God that was at odds with principles of federal republican government as much as with Victorian morality.4 Plural marriage was abandoned by the church at the end of the nineteenth century after the federal gov- ernment disenfranchised polygamists and confiscated church proper- ties. The further cultural transformation of the separatist kingdom into a relatively respectable twentieth-century religious denomination affected ecclesiastical organization and the cooperativelds economy as well. It also discouraged the periodic charismatic spirituality of the earlier lds religious tradition.5 Much of the scholarship on the Mormon transformation focuses on the implications for the official church. An official lds cultural identity incorporates the beliefs, historical narratives, rituals, sym- bols, and group behaviors that comply with the organization and di- rection of the priesthood hierarchy at any particular point in time. The last qualification recognizes that all cultural expressions are dy- namic to some extent. In the lds case, the organizational success of the Mormon transformation depended upon compliance to authority (“obedience to the priesthood” or “following the brethren” in popu- lar terminology), which facilitated changes in ritual behavior and be- lief between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus the con- temporary global church now characterizes so-called fundamentalist plural marriage, whether practiced in secret by church members or openly in alternative, self-defined Mormon religious organizations, 4 Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for empire: the Political Kingdom of god and the Council of fifty in mormon history (1967; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974); Hansen, mormonism and the american experience; D. Michael Quinn, the mormon hier- archy: extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1997); David L. Bigler, forgotten Kingdom: the mormon theocracy in the american West 1847–1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998). 5 Hansen, mormonism and the american experience; Shepherd and Shepherd, a King- dom transformed; Alexander, mormonism in transition; B. Carmon Hardy, solemn Cove- nant: the mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 436 as behavior that automatically separates the practitioners from an of- ficiallds identity.6 If official lds cultural identification is not static, neither is it en- tirely monolithic or seamless. Differences within the global church have been documented at both hierarchical and local community lev- els, where a range of theological beliefs and even behaviors can be identified. Unauthorized, local religious expressions are sometimes tolerated to a limited extent in the absence of a formally centralized, systematic lds theology, or they may persist underground.7 Two so- ciologists who have studied the Mormon transformation define such unofficial expressions as “common religion” or “the shadow of offi- cial religion.” In this interpretation, the unofficial religion “is the per- sonalized, practical side of religion as interpreted and implemented