UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (ISSN 0 042-143X) Department of Community and Culture Division of State History EDITORIAL STAFF BOARD OF STATE HISTORY ALLAN KENT POWELL, Managing Editor CRAIG FULLER, Associate Editor MICHAEL W. HOMER, Salt Lake City, 2013, Chair MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY, Salt Lake City, 2013 ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS SCOTT R. CHRISTENSEN, Salt Lake City, 2013 YVETTE DONOSSO, Sandy, 2015 LEE ANN KREUTZER, Salt Lake City, 2012 MARIA GARCIAZ, Salt Lake City, 2015 STANFORD J. LAYTON, Salt Lake City, 2012 DEANNE G. MATHENY, Lindon, 2013 ROBERT E. PARSON, Benson, 2013 ROBERT S. MCPHERSON, Blanding, 2015 W. PAUL REEVE, Salt Lake City, 2011 MAX J. SMITH, Salt Lake City, 2013 JOHN SILLITO, Ogden, 2013 GREGORY C. THOMPSON, Salt Lake City, 2015 NANCY J. TANIGUCHI, Merced, California, 2011 PATTY TIMBIMBOO-MADSEN, Plymouth, 2015 GARY TOPPING, Salt Lake City, 2011 MICHAEL K. WINDER, West Valley City, 2013 RONALD G. WATT, West Valley City, 2013 COLLEEN WHITLEY, Salt Lake City, 2012 ADMINISTRATION

WILSON G. MARTIN, Acting Director and State Historic Preservation Officer KRISTEN ROGERS-IVERSEN, Acting Assistant Director Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, and reviews contributing to knowledge of Utah history. The Quarterly is published four times a year by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Phone (801) 533-3500 for membership and publications information. Members of the Society receive the Quarterly upon payment of the annual dues: The Utah State Historical Society was organized in 1897 by public-spirited Utahns to individual, $30; institution, $40; student and senior citizen (age sixty-five or older), collect, preserve, and publish Utah and related history. Today, under state sponsorship, $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100. the Society fulfills its obligations by publishing the Utah Historical Quarterly and other historical materials; collecting historic Utah artifacts; locating, documenting, and preserving historic and prehistoric buildings and sites; and maintaining a specialized Manuscripts submitted for publication should be double-spaced with endnotes. Authors are encouraged research library. Donations and gifts to the Society’s programs, museum, or its library to submit both a paper and electronic version of the manuscript. For additional information on require- are encouraged, for only through such means can it live up to its responsibility of ments, contact the managing editor. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are preserving the record of Utah’s past. not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society. This publication has been funded with the assistance of a matching grant-in-aid from the National Park Service, under provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended. Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah. This program receives financial assistance for identification and preservation of historic properties under POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The U. S. Department of the Interior prohibits unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, Lake City, Utah 84101. age, or handicap in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to: Office of Equal Opportunity, National Park Service, 1849 C Street, NW, Washington, D.C., 20240. UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

FALL 2011 • VOLUME 79 • NUMBER 4

298 IN THIS ISSUE 300 Another Look at Silver Reef By Gary Topping 317 Speed Merchants: The History of Professional Cycling in Salt Lake City, 1898-1914 By Ted Moore 338 Seeds of Change: Farm Organizations in Depression and Post-War Utah By Robert Parson, John W. Walters and Emily Gurr-Thompson 358 1943 Victory Theater Fire Ignites Salt Lake City Firestorm By Steve Lutz

375 BOOK REVIEWS

Stephen C. Taysom. Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries Reviewed by Richard Francaviglia David J. Whittaker, ed. Colonel Thomas L. Kane and the Mormons, 1846-1883 Reviewed by Richard W. Sadler Patrick Q. Mason. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South Reviewed by Brandon Johnson Edward Leo Lyman, ed. Candid Insights of a Mormon Apostle: The Diaries of Abraham H. Cannon, 1889-1895 Reviewed by Curt Bench Mary Jane Woodger and Joseph H. Groberg. From the Muddy River to the Ivory Tower: The Journey of George H. Brimhall Reviewed by Colleen Whitley

384 2011 INDEX

© COPYRIGHT 2011 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY IN THIS ISSUE

s historians explore new terrain and re-plow old ground in recounting and reinterpreting our past, they can take reassurance that their endeav- Aors are merited from the words of the nineteenth-century writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.” This issue completes the seventy-ninth volume of the Utah Historical Quarterly and we encourage readers to consider how well served our generation has been by the works of the earlier students of Utah history. At the same time, we might ask how much current studies and interpretations of the past reflect our times and how beneficial our work will be for those yet to come. The town of Silver Reef was an anomaly in Utah’s Dixie. Where Mormon pioneers endured hardship to build agricultural communities in the desert of southwestern Utah, miners pursued their Eldorado in the silver mines that bored into the sandstone twenty miles northeast of St. George. Our first article in this issue recounts the relationship between miners and farmers, Catholics and Mormons, in this corner of Utah. In this other look at Silver Reef we see the frontier mining town from a different perspective than that presented by previous writers. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the bicycle became an everyday part of Salt Lake City’s transportation and recreational scene. At the same

COVER: A group of youngsters gather on October 3, 1936, at Salt Lake Cityʼs Victory Theater as members of the Searʼs Victory Popeye Club. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY. IN THIS ISSUE (ABOVE): Silver Reef in the 1880s looking from the southeast to the northwest. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY. (ABOVE RIGHT): St. George Main Street in the 1880s. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

298 time professional bicycle racing became a popular spectator sport. Several bicycle tracks were con- structed including those in the Salt Palace, at Saltair, at Wandemere Park, and in Ogden’s Glenwood Park. The tracks and lucrative prize money drew local and colorful professional racers from across the country. Speed merchants like Salt Lake City’s John Lawson, the bearded Russian Theodore Devonevitch, and the African American Marshal “Major” Taylor, the highest paid cyclist in the world, all found Utahns enthusiastic about their bike racing talents. As Utah continues to move further and further away from its agricultural base, it is useful to look back on the state’s agricultural heritage and how an earlier genera- tion of farmers sought to maximize its economic security through cooperation, government support, and adoption of new methods and tools made available through the nation’s land-grant colleges. Following World War II, two competing organizations, the Utah Farm Bureau and the Utah Farmer’s Union, emerged as champions of Utah farmers. Where Utah farmers and their organization had given strong support to Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party’s New Deal during the 1930s, in the late 1940s the Farm Bureau took another course opening the door for the Farmers Union to establish its first local in Utah in Emery County in 1948 and spread quickly to other parts of the state. Political repercussions followed during J. Bracken Lee’s tenure as Governor of Utah (1949-56), the U.S. Senate and House elections of 1950, and unsubstantiated charges that the Utah Farmers Union was a Communist-dominated organization. Wednesday, May 19, 1943, proved to be a tragic day as the Victory Theater at 48 East 300 South in Salt Lake City caught fire. The city fire department responded immediately, and in the efforts to put out the fire, three firefighters were killed and several others sustained injuries. As the author of our last article in this issue reveals, “No other incident in the history of the Salt Lake City Fire Department caused as much upheaval and discontent as the Victory Theater fire. No other structural fire incident in Utah resulted in more firefighter deaths. No other fire- fighter fatality incident received more public interest or press attention or became such a hot political topic in Salt Lake City Hall.” As you will read, the Victory Theater fire and the loss of three firefighters caused changes to occur in the city’s building code and within the fire department. The four articles in this issue of the Quarterly demonstrate once again the diver- sity of peoples who make our history—firefighters and farmers, miners and freighters, politicians and bureaucrats, judges and bicycle racers, and, of course, all the rest of us with our collective and individual ties to Utah.

299 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Another Look at Silver Reef

BY GARY TOPPING

ilver Reef, Utah, has long captured the imagination of Utah historians, professional and amateur alike, and with good reason: the very exis- tence of a rich vein of silver in a stratum of sandstone is a geological Sanomaly, and the existence of a “raucous” Gentile mining town in the midst of the sober Mormon agricultural communities of Washington County created an economic, social and religious dynamic scarcely to be found elsewhere. Unfortunately, the historiography of Silver Reef has been largely (though not entirely) a negative one, as students have been tempted to make invidious comparisons, treating the town as a high-living den of iniquity in contrast with the pious and stable city of St. George. Also, scholars have been too eager to fashion from the Silver Reef story a theology of failure, in which it is implied that the ghost town ruins serve as a symbol of the bankrupt values on which the community was founded. This article will present evidence to show that the story is much more complicated than that historiographical morality play, that Silver Reef was not such a hellhole, St. George was not such a model of civilization, and that the interaction among those two and other Washington County communities was close and beneficial to all. The story of the Cotton Mission is a familiar episode in Utah history. In October 1861, Brigham Young, pursuing his ideal of Mormon self- sufficiency, sent a party of 309 families to establish the city of St. George and colonize the Virgin River basin. Although the colonists were instructed to grow fruit, grapes, tobacco, and other crops suitable to the area, the primary purpose of the colony was to grow cotton; the colonists were told, as historian Leonard Arrington put it, “that the Cotton Mission should be considered as Silver Reef Main Street in 1880.

Gary Topping is archivist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City.

300 SILVER REEF important to them as if they were called to preach the gospel among the nations.”1 It was an archetypal Mormon colonizing venture, in which an entire integrated community with a full range of occupational skills was transplanted to a hitherto unsettled region. The colonists embraced their call with a will, and before long had erected in the wilderness a classic Mormon village with the characteristic orderly streets and solid buildings. Later reinforcements swelled the population and spawned satellite commu- nities so that by the late 1870s, by Arrington’s estimate, the Cotton Mission included perhaps four thousand people.2 The first year’s crop, which yielded over 100,000 pounds of seed cotton, seemed to vindicate the venture. Unfortunately, production never attained that level again. In fact with the end of the Civil War, when cotton prices dropped steeply, in addition to other problems like the difficulty of harness- ing the treacherous Virgin River, Indian conflicts, insect pests, alkaline soil, and the expense of manufacturing and transporting the cotton, the project was pretty much doomed within a decade. Although sorghum and wine continued as profitable industries, the cotton factory in Washington limped along until 1898 processing wool as well as cotton and also functioning as a store. By the 1870s the Cotton Mission had largely lost its momentum: lacking capital and lacking markets, the economy descended into individualistic subsistence agriculture. As the collective sense of purpose evaporated and Dixie farmers sank into what threatened to be a perpetual agricultural poverty, the morale of the community began to decline, and people wondered if the Cotton Mission was finished.3 Although many, perhaps most, of the cotton missionaries faithfully and tenaciously stuck to their mission, others began to feel forgotten and trapped in a dead-end enterprise. Historian Juanita Brooks told the story of her grandmother, Mary Hafen, attending a meeting in the 1870s where some of Brigham Young’s wives asked the Washington County women to “retrench” from their “extravagances in dress and habits.” Looking around at the coarse homespun dresses of her neighbors and contrasting them with the speaker’s “silk dress with wide bands of velvet ribbon and lace edging,” Mrs. Hafen could not resist asking, “Which do you want us to retrench from, Sister Young, the bread or the molasses?”4 At that low moment, what many Washington County Mormons regarded as a miracle occurred. Although prospectors had become aware as early as the mid-1860s of silver deposits in sandstone strata some twenty miles

1 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 217. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1996), 94-95. The threat of failure was real, and the cotton missionaries knew it: although St. George and other communities survived, others, like Harrisburg, Grafton, Shunesburg, Duncan’s Retreat, and Hebron did not. 4 Juanita Brooks, Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1982), 112.

301 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY northeast of St. George, it was not until the mid-1870s that the richness of those deposits became known. When it did, in 1876 a silver rush occurred and a mining town, Silver Reef, sprang up with all the proverbial suddenness of western boom towns. Although the 1880 census counted slightly over one thousand Silver Reef inhabitants, one historian has estimated that the population may have peaked at as much as 1,500.5 Not all Silver Reef residents were miners, of course: among them were store and hotel keepers, restaurateurs, freighters and other service workers who supported the mining population. But none of them were farmers or ranchers, all of them needed to eat, and they had a ready supply of cash.6 The economic salvation of the Cotton Mission, it would appear, was at hand. It was a popular belief among Dixie Mormons that God had put the silver there for that very purpose. In the words of a poem penned by one of the historians of the Cotton Mission, God didst put it here for us, In our dark and direful day; Didst bring it forth when,—almost,— Hope from us was gone.7 While a skeptical modern scientist or historian is reluctant to accept a miraculous explanation for a geological phenomenon, in this case it is not perhaps a proposition one should challenge, for geologists are themselves uncertain how a rich vein of silver could occur in a stratum of sandstone— a virtually unique circumstance.8 At any rate, it was clear that Apostle Erastus Snow, the leader of the Cotton Mission, saw the mines as economic salvation, and reputedly thanked the Lord for them in a public prayer offered at the St. George Tabernacle.9 In Apostle Snow’s mind, however, the Mormons would profit from the mines only indirectly, by doing freighting and providing building material and foodstuffs in exchange for cash, rather than actually working in the mines. Silver Reef might have represented economic salvation, but it also represented moral temptations and an industrialized, capitalistic economy inimical to Mormon agrarianism. If the Mormons would sup with the

5 Alder and Brooks, History of Washington County, 86; Bart C. Anderson, “Silver Reef,” in Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 498. 6 Since about 1870 the Washington County Mormons had been supplying produce to the miners in Pioche, Nevada, so Silver Reef was not their first outside market. But Pioche was much farther away and the route was infested with robbers, so Silver Reef represented a much more convenient and safer one. William R. Palmer, “Early Day Trading With the Nevada Mining Camps,” Utah Historical Quarterly 26 (October 1958): 353-68. 7Marietta M. Mariger, Saga of Three Towns: Harrisburg, Leeds, Silver Reef (St. George: Washington County News, n.d.), 59. 8 Paul Dean Proctor and Morris A. Shirts, Silver, Sinners and Saints: A History of Old Silver Reef, Utah ([Provo, Utah:] Paulmar, Inc., 1991), Chapter 4, pp. 51-62 examines several theories about the origin of the silver. W. Paul Reeve, “Silver Reef and Southwestern Utah’s Shifting Frontier,” in Colleen Whitley, ed., From the Ground Up: The History of Mining in Utah (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006), 250-71 is the best history of mining in that district. 9 Alder and Brooks, A History of Washington County, 257.

302 SILVER REEF UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY devil, they would use a long spoon. But as Looking from the northwest to the things worked out, no spoon they could find southeast, a view of the Barbee was long enough, and the interaction Mill in the center and the Catholic between the two communities became more church and hospital on the far tangled than either had anticipated. right. What was Silver Reef like, this jack-in-the- beanstalk town that sprang up so suddenly in the midst of the Mormon community? Nels Anderson, author of the first published study of the Cotton Mission, portrayed it as just another roaring western boom town, as ramshackle in morals as in architecture, and contrasted it negatively with stable, civilized St. George. In 1880, he claims, Silver Reef “was at the height of its prosperity and gentile assertiveness.” Residents of the town “were of the bonanza-minded, carefree, reckless types portrayed by Bret Harte. . . . Silver Reef was worldly—a treeless, grassless, red-sand location. St. George was otherworldly—a community of fields, gardens, and flowers. Silver Reef was a shack town, its main street lined with saloons, gambling places, and other conveniences for miners. St. George was a moral family town, where the humble domestic virtues were glorified.”10 Even when one makes due allowance for Anderson’s Mormon revulsion at what he calls “saloons, gambling places, and other conveniences for miners,” photographs of the town at its height offer ample evidence to confirm his general image of the place as slapdash and transitory, particularly when set beside the solid stone dwellings and verdant gardens of St. George.11

10 Nels Anderson, Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 428-29. 11 Both Mariger and Proctor and Shirts, cited above, include photographs of Silver Reef, as does Stephen L. Carr, The Historic Guide to Utah Ghost Towns (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1972 [rev. ed., 2003]): 138-42. On page 141 Carr also helpfully reproduces a plat map of the town from 1879.

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Anderson’s view has prevailed in the popular mind, confirming as it does our conventional image of the western mining town as a hellhole of drinking, gambling, prostitution, and violence. Even careful professional historians have not entirely escaped the Anderson image, as one recent history of the area refers to Silver Reef as a “raucous mining camp.”12 Indeed, Silver Reef could undoubtedly hold its own in raucousness. With a population of mostly young, single males and the presence of such testosterone outlets as a race track, a quotient of almost one saloon per one hundred residents, and the inevitable house of ill repute, Silver Reef’s social life would not have been sedate. (Oddly, the sources nowhere mention prostitution, only a certain “notorious” dance hall, but one surely would have found the world’s oldest profession in the territory’s newest town.)13 Others, however, have seen another side of Silver Reef, and in fact by several standards of civilized development, Silver Reef was equal to, or even ahead of St. George. Don Maguire, for example, an itinerant trader who passed through the town twice in 1878-79, thought the balance leaned rather heavily the other way: Silver Reef, he said, was “so neat, so clean, so thrifty. . . that I was reluctant to leave it. I knew that its thoroughly civilized and American-like expression would contrast favorably with the Mormon towns of southern Utah, and that it would be like passing through a foreign land until we reached the Colorado River.”14 Viewed from a cosmopolitan perspective, in other words, St. George was the anomaly, not Silver Reef. Local historian Marietta Mariger, who interviewed many old-timers both from Silver Reef and the neighboring Mormon communities, supports Maguire, suggesting that while “it seemed a very rough place to those Mormon pioneers, . . .as mining camp history goes, it was not a wild camp, though there were some murders, duels, and even one lynching.” And despite the hurried construction of some Silver Reef buildings, others, like Harrison House, which she calls Silver Reef’s “Waldorf Astoria,” were impressive in their comfortable amenities. In addition to the guest rooms on the second floor, “the ground floor had kitchen and dining room, and amusement rooms, which contained at least three billiard tables, and an immense grand piano. . . . When this old building ceased to be used, its bedroom furniture was sold all over the county, I suppose. I still have one of its marble-topped dressers.” Private dwellings seem to have run the gamut, from the shacks emphasized by Anderson to what Mariger recalled as “the finest of them, as I remembered it, [which] followed the Harrisburg water ditch, and had fine shade trees, lawn, and flower gardens.”15 Even some of the St. George Mormons thought Silver Reef was a

12 Reeve, “Silver Reef,” 250. 13 Mark A. Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” Utah Historical Quarterly 3 (October 1930): 103, 108. 14 Gary Topping, ed., Gila Monsters and Red-Eyed Rattlesnakes: Don Maguire’s Arizona Trading Expeditions, 1876-1879 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 107. 15 Mariger, Saga of Three Towns, 97-98.

304 SILVER REEF surprisingly civilized place. Lawyer and druggist Joseph E. Johnson, who also founded the Silver Reef Echo, the town’s first newspaper, said, “As to the class of miners and business men at and about these mines, it has never been our lot to see brought together so many hundreds of mining population as free from pover- ty and dissoluteness. All seem able to pay their way, to have business and go after it with a will, and the camp as a whole seemed rather a community of gentlemen than a camp of rough miners. . . .”16 Still others, while acknowledging that life in Silver Reef had its rough edges, nevertheless saw it as an exciting place where colorful people enjoyed a vibrant social life. Mark Pendleton, who moved there as a boy from Parowan with his UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY family in 1878 and lived there for the Tim Quirk, an Irish Catholic Miner in next thirteen years, remembered it thus: Silver Reef, dressed for after-work To a boy from a quiet village, Silver Reef, socializing. with its brightly lighted saloons and stores and ceaseless activities, was a never-ending delight. Peddlers and freighters were constantly coming and going. Wagons loaded with ore and others loaded with cord-wood were ever on the move to the mills where the stamps pounded the ore to powder. Hundreds of miners were on the trails mornings and evenings on their way to or from the mines, carrying the regulation dinner pail. These men, Americans, Cornishmen, Irishmen, fine specimens of manhood, after ten hours of toil in the mines emerged from their cabins dressed in the best that money could buy and walked the streets with the air of kings. Chinatown with its queer inhabitants and strange tongue, its unusual merchandise and Oriental coloring, was a source of wonder. Saloon brawls, and gun plays that often resulted fatally, certainly took the monotony out of life.17 The coarseness of life in western mining towns, it seems, fell along a continuum, and surely Silver Reef would rate as one of the tamer ones. In comparison with St. George, of course, Silver Reef looked like a pretty wild place, but a fairer comparison, with Pioche, Nevada, yields a very different picture. The two towns were roughly the same size at their peak, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500, yet where Silver Reef had nine saloons, Pioche had no fewer than seventy-two; while Silver Reef had no out-and-out brothels (though the “notorious” dance hall apparently

16 Albert Bleak Stucki, “A Historical Study of Silver Reef: Southern Utah Mining Town” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1966), 35-36. 17 Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” pp. 100-101.

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The Barbee and Walker Silver Mining Company at Silver Reef. From left to right: blacksmith shop, mine hoisting works, five stamp mill, and assay office.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

fulfilled that function), Pioche had thirty-two.18 In the light of figures like those, Silver Reef does not seem radically different from St. George, while the mines of Pioche begin to look like primarily a support system for the booze and sex industries. Interaction among Mormons and Gentiles was intimate, and over time vindicated both Erastus Snow’s hope of economic prosperity and his fear of moral decline. As Mariger points out, the primary relation was economic, “for the two communities were forced to depend much on one another. Silver Reef sought laborers; the Mormons sought labor; Silver Reef needed what the farms produced; the Mormons needed what stores and shops furnished.” Economic relations expanded to social ties, as the two commu- nities joined together in “social mingling” during dances and holidays.19 The moral decline, from Snow’s perspective, came from the wine industry, which had flourished even before Silver Reef came into existence and had even been promoted by the St. George Tithing Office. Dixie wine, by some accounts, was infamous for its poor quality. To trader Don Maguire, it was “a villainous stuff, containing about as much of the juice of the yellowjacket and wasps as it does of the grape. . . . So rascally is the nature of this drink that people of Arizona and Nevada claim that a man who drinks a quart of it will get up in the night and steal his own clothes.”20 Mark Pendleton had a similar memory: The natives were immune, but woe to the ‘stranger within the gates.’ Often he was brought back to the Reef [from Leeds, which seems to have been the center of Dixie

18 Reeve, “Silver Reef,” 264; James W. Hulse, Lincoln County, Nevada: 1864-1909: History of a Mining Region (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1971), 28. The Pioche numbers seem high until one learns, as we shall see, that the Virginia City Enterprise, which had seen a few Nevada mining towns, rated Pioche as the roughest. On the other hand, Leonard Arrington and Richard Jensen, “Panaca: Mormon Outpost Among the Mining Camps,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 18 (Winter 1975): 213, estimates that in 1872 Pioche may have had a population of six thousand; if so, the numbers, while still high, seem more credible. The population of western mining towns was so transitory that unless a town happened to reach its peak in a census year, as Pioche did not, accurate population data is elusive. 19 Mariger, Saga of Three Towns, 99. 20 Topping, ed., Gila Monsters, 108-9.

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wine production] in a helpless condition, or Mine buildings at Silver Reef. returned hatless, spurring his horse and shouting. Recovering consciousness some twelve hours later with a terrible headache, he won- dered who he was, where he was, and what had happened and was not fully sober for several days.21 Quality seems not to have been much of an issue with its consumers, however, and the wine industry became big business; when the Silver Reef market vanished in the mid-1880s, the tithing office found itself stuck with an inventory of some six thousand gallons. More to the consternation of church leaders, Anderson tells us, was that “in some wards most of the brethren made wine for sale and most of the brethren had become wine- drinkers to some degree. To make matters more difficult, there began to emerge the attitude that wine-drinking was a private matter. Such an atti- tude could not have been found before the miners established themselves in Silver Reef.”22 One of the civilizing elements in Silver Reef was the Catholic church, which made its first appearance at the end of 1878.23 The central figure in that church, as indeed in the whole history of Catholicism in Utah, was Father Lawrence Scanlan, a priest from Ireland who later became the first bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake.24 Born in 1843, Scanlan trained for the

21 Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” 115. 22 Anderson, Desert Saints, 435-36. 23 Catholics comprised by far the largest religious group in Silver Reef; thus the emphasis on them here. Readers should know, though, that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists all maintained min- istries there, holding services in the Citizens’ Hall, where also a free public school was taught for non- Catholic children. Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” 101.

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Miners and towns people at Silver Reef.

priesthood at All Hallows College, Dublin, which had been founded in 1842 to pro- vide priests to follow the Irish diaspora. Ordained in 1868, he immediately came to California and soon was assigned to his first pastorate in the mining town of Pioche, Nevada. It was a

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY tough boot camp for a pioneer priest. Although mining camps were often rough places, Pioche had developed a reputation as one of the worst. The Virginia City [Nevada] Enterprise said of the place that it “is overrun with as desperate a class of scoundrels as probably ever afflicted any mining town on this coast, and the law is virtually a dead letter. . . . as matters now stand the name of Pioche has become a by-word of reproach and a synonym for murder and lawless- ness throughout the state.”25 Although the Irish miners at first welcomed Scanlan as one of their own, they turned against him when he began telling them to stay away from gambling dens and houses of ill repute. For a time he had trouble earning enough even to feed himself, but in the long run his firm moral stand impressed his parishioners and he once again became popular. Scanlan was assigned to Salt Lake City in 1873, where he took charge of the only Catholic church in Utah Territory. When the Silver Reef boom began in 1876, many of the miners were Irishmen who had moved over from Pioche, so when Scanlan visited them late in 1877, he found that it was pretty much his old parish transferred to Utah. (To some degree, the towns of Pioche and Silver Reef were one and the same: once the Pioche deposits began to play out and the ones at Silver Reef began to pay, some Pioche merchants simply dismantled their stores and reassembled them in Silver Reef.)26 As Scanlan was building churches for the railroad workers in

24 Robert J. Dwyer, “Pioneer Bishop: Lawrence Scanlan, 1843-1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 20 (April 1952): 135-58. 25 Hulse, Lincoln County, 25 26 W. Paul Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 117; Proctor and Shirts, Silver, Sinners and Saints, 47-49. I can name only one merchant, a Hyman Jacobs, who literally dismantled his Pioche store and reassembled it in Silver Reef, but perhaps others also literally “moved” in that way. Stucki, “A Historical Study,” 32.

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Ogden and the miners in Park City, he started The Wells Fargo Building at Silver construction of a church in Silver Reef on Reef. January 1, 1879. Once begun, the church went up as fast as the town itself, and Father Scanlan said his first Mass in the new St. John’s church on Easter Sunday—April 13, 1879. On September 1 of the same year, St. Mary’s School opened in the church basement with fifty-five students, staffed by several Sisters of the Holy Cross whom Father Scanlan had invited from Notre Dame, Indiana.27 Altogether nine Holy Cross sisters served in Silver Reef over the course of its brief history.28 At the same time, the education system in St. George was much more primitive: schools were staffed—when they existed at all—by volunteer teachers who often had little more education than their students.29 Perhaps Scanlan’s most remarkable accomplishment in Silver Reef, though, was construction of St. John’s Hospital across the street from the church. Mining is an infamously dangerous occupation, yet there was no facility within many miles where anything but the most minor injuries could be treated. During his pastorate in Pioche, Father Scanlan had erect- ed a hospital, so once he showed up in Silver Reef his former parishioners from Pioche suggested he do the same for the new community.30 Begun on April 1, 1879, and opened on August 1, the hospital was staffed by five Holy Cross sisters and a medical doctor, Dr. J. T. Affleck.31 Construction and

27 “Historical Record and Home Accounts—Book A, 1880-1890,” and “Account Book, 1871-1892,” Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, hereafter referred to as Diocesan Archives. 28 Bernice Maher Mooney, Salt of the Earth: The History of the Catholic Church in Utah, 1776-1987 (Salt Lake City: Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, 1987, 1992), 517. 29 Andrew Karl Larson, “I Was Called to Dixie”: The Virgin River Basin, Unique Experiences in Mormon Pioneering (St. George: The Author, 1961), 544-52 30 Rev. Denis Kiely, “The Story of the Catholic Church in Utah,” unpaginated MS prepared for deposit in the cornerstone of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, July 22, 1900, copy in Diocesan Archives. 31 It is a trivial matter, but this Dr. Affleck contributed a bit of local color as well as medical care. When making house calls in his buggy, he would tie his horse to a heavy piece of iron he carried with him, almost as a sailor would drop an anchor. [Juanita Brooks,] “Silver Reef,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (July 1961): 293-94.

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The Silver Reef Catholic Church.

maintenance of the hospital was an interesting partner- ship among the miners, mine and mill owners, and residents of the community, each of whom agreed to contribute one dollar per month. While patients had to pay doctor’s fees and buy prescriptions, their stay in the hospital was free. Indigent patients were charged nothing and were cared for out of the hospi- tal’s general fund.32 What ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF SALT LAKE CITY Father Scanlan and the citizens of Silver Reef had done, in effect, was to create the first hospitaliza- tion insurance plan in Utah history. At the same time, St. George had no doctor, no hospital, and treated illnesses by Thomsonian herbal methods or folk remedies.33 It was only after Silver Reef was abandoned in the mid-1880s that St. George acquired its first doctor—the selfsame Dr. Affleck, who moved over from Silver Reef.34 Although Mormons and Catholics apparently mingled amicably in their regular contacts in both the Mormon communities and Silver Reef, the most dramatic symbol of cooperation between the two faiths occurred on Sunday, May 25, 1879, when Father Scanlan took his entire congregation to St. George to celebrate Mass in the Mormon Tabernacle, with music

32 Father Lawrence Scanlan, “History of the foundation of St. John’s Hospital, Silver Reef,” in “Account Book, 1871-1892, 94-95. 33 Samuel Thomson was “a popular evangelist of anti-orthodox herbal medicine whose influence pre- ceded the Mormons into virtually every area they entered. Thomson’s remedies appear regularly in both Mormon diaries and sermons, and he allegedly once was described by the Prophet to be ‘as much inspired to bring forth his principle of practice according to the dignity and importance of it as he [Joseph Smith] was to introduce the gospel.’” Lester E. Bush, Jr., Health and Medicine among the Latter-day Saints (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1993), 92. 34 Larson, “I Was Called to Dixie,” 615-23; Alder and Brooks, History of Washington County, 103-107. W. Paul Reeve wisely counsels skepticism regarding the credentials of mining camp doctors: “Licensing and regulation were almost nonexistent, making it possible for anyone with an inclination to dabble in the healing arts to call himself a doctor and open for business.” Making Space, 150. There is evidence, though, that Dr. Affleck was a physician of some skill, though we know nothing about his training. Another physi- cian, a urologist named Dr. Joseph Walker, knew Affleck well and held him in high esteem. One one occa- sion, Affleck removed a diseased kidney from a woman in Washington, Utah, operating on her kitchen table. Afleck admitted to an element of luck in the procedure, but it was, after all, a success. Dr. Joseph Walker, “Portrait of a Country Doctor (Dr. J. T. Affleck),” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (July 1961): 293-94.

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Mrs. Grambʼs Boarding House at Silver Reef during the 1880s. provided by the tabernacle choir under the direction of John M. Macfarlane. Although he lived in St. George, Macfarlane was Deputy U.S. Mineral Surveyor at the time and spent his work week in Silver Reef, where he boarded at the same hotel as Father Scanlan and the two became acquainted. As their friendship developed, Macfarlane invited Father Scanlan to say Mass in the tabernacle—a gesture he UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY was able to make only after some difficulty with his stake president and by special permission of Apostle Erastus Snow.35 Why Macfarlane would extend such a unique offer and why Father Scanlan would accept it are both problematic questions: what did each man hope to gain? Macfarlane’s biographer has Scanlan lamenting that he had “neither a church nor a choir” in Silver Reef and thus he would have found an offer of both in St. George irresistible.36 But that was only partly true, for the Silver Reef church had been completed and used for Easter Mass on April 13. The church did have an organ, but perhaps not a choir.37 More plausibly, Father Scanlan probably saw the Mass as an opportunity to undermine the Mormon faith of the St. George spectators, for those early Utah Catholics had not yet given up their naïve image of Mormonism as a tottering house of cards that would collapse under the onslaught of solid theology.38

35 L. W. Macfarlane, Yours Sincerely, John M. Macfarlane (Salt Lake City: The Author, 1980), 153-59. 36 Ibid., 155. 37 Father Scanlan’s “Account Book, 1871-1892” in the Diocesan Archives indicates that he paid $75 for the organ. Apparently there was a piano as well, for Mariger, Saga of Three Towns, 99, reports that Mormon girls took piano lessons from the nuns at St. Mary’s school. 38 The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, an association of French laypersons which collected funds to support Catholic establishments in far-flung parts of the world, was an important source of finan- cial support during the 1870s and 1880s for the Catholic church in Utah. Each year Father Scanlan or his assistant, Father Denis Kiely, submitted a report to the Society describing the previous year’s accomplish- ments and justifying their requests for funding for the following year. Although those reports are obviously important historical sources, they are also significantly biased, for the Society wanted to see tangible accomplishments, and baptisms were about the only way spiritual progress could be made visible. There is no reason to doubt, however, that converting Mormons was a sincere goal of those early priests. But the fact that they went about their proselytizing in a much less confrontational way than the Presbyterians or

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And what was in it for Macfarlane, Erastus Snow, and the Mormons? Juanita Brooks, the dean of southwestern Utah historians, speculated that one motive was to show off the splendid new tabernacle, which had only been completed in 1875. Catholic historian Msgr. Jerome Stoffel adds to that speculation the darker point that Dixie Mormons at that time were in need of some good public relations toward Gentiles because bad memories of the Mountain Meadows Massacre only twenty-two years earlier—an event in which some of them had participated—were still strong, and in fact John D. Lee had been executed at the massacre site just two years pre- vious to the Macfarlane offer.39 The liturgy was a Mass in D by a composer named Peters. There is a Macfarlane family tradition that the choir practiced nightly for six weeks, probably, as Macfarlane’s biographer speculates, with repeated visits from Father Scanlan to help them understand the meaning of the Latin and its proper pronunciation. When the Mass began, at ten a.m. on May 25, Mormon observers in the Tabernacle far outnumbered the Silver Reef Catholics, so Father Scanlan took a few moments to explain the nature of the liturgy and of the vestments he was wearing. His homily—incredible to a modern Catholic—was reported to have lasted two hours, although Scanlan’s biographer notes that “he was inclined to preach with violence and at a length which would today be considered intolerable,” and perhaps the priest was not about to waste what he realized would be a unique opportunity to teach Catholic doctrines to a large assembly of Mormons. More believable, though, was a report by an unidentified French Catholic who was present that Scanlan’s oration was a speech given after Mass rather than a homily given during the liturgy.40 How successful were his efforts? All seem to have agreed that the music was exceptional and the event itself was of great significance. The afore- mentioned French Catholic reported that Scanlan “delivered the clearest, most informative speech I’ve ever heard. He proved the Truth of the Catholic Church in a perfect style, interesting manner and in a way that

Methodists, for example, actually seems to have endeared them to the Mormons instead of provoking the bitter controversies that largely characterized Mormon-Protestant relations. Nevertheless, in his 1876 report, Father Scanlan referred to Utah as “this far off and largely pagan land,” and reported that he had baptized “about a dozen” non-Catholic students in Catholic schools “and refused to comply with the desires of many others, through motives of prudence and objections raised by their parents.” John Bernard McGloin, S.J., “Two Early Reports Concerning Roman Catholicism in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 29 (October 1961): 337-38. Similarly, Father Kiely, reporting Father Scanlan’s Mass in the St. George Tabernacle, characterized it as an effort “of great help expanding the light of the ‘True Faith’ among peo- ple immersed in darkness.” Father Denis Kiely, Report to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, October 31, 1879, copy in Diocesan Archives. 39 Msgr. Jerome Stoffel to Rev. [Paul S.] Kuzy, CPPS, December 30, 1987, in Diocesan Archives. Stoffel reports Brooks’s opinion expressed in conversation with him. He incorrectly gives the tabernacle comple- tion date as 1871 instead of 1875—not an insignificant error, because the later date gives even more cogency to Brooks’s speculation: the building was newer than Msgr. Stoffel realized and local pride in it would have been bright. Father Kuzy was pastor of St. George Catholic church in St. George. 40 Macfarlane, Yours Sincerely, 156; Dwyer, “Pioneer Bishop,” 151; Kiely, “Report,” 2.

312 SILVER REEF couldn’t be contested. He gave the history of the Institution up to our time and created an impression on the Mormons of St. George that won’t soon fade.” Others were not so impressed. Although Apostle Erastus Snow, his biographer tells us, “was proud to call [Scanlan] friend and brother, . . he certainly believed Catholi- cism was a perversion of Christ’s doctrines,” and used the Mormon Sacrament meeting that very afternoon to lay out the antidote to Scanlan’s poison: “Pres E Snow spoke in a clear and lucid manner on the Divinity of Christ building his church on the Rock of Revelation,” wrote one who UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY attended the meeting, “[and] quoted the The St. George LDS Tabernacle, scriptures copiously to show the apostacy constructed in 1875. [sic] of the Catholic Church and the various sects of the day.”41 So what is the larger meaning of this anomalous event, a Catholic Mass in a Mormon tabernacle? At the time, it would have been hard to point to any real rapprochement between the two churches: although St. John’s parish continued to exist for another five years and Father Scanlan presumably continued to lack an adequate choir, the event was never repeated. In the longer perspective of history, the event has certainly played a larger role in Mormon folklore than in Catholic.42 In addition to the Dixie historians, who have missed no opportunity to narrate it in proud detail, the Southern Utah Heritage Choir re-enacted it in 2004 and invited the Catholic bishop. Everyone needs friends, but the Mormons, in their often cross-grained relationship to American culture throughout history, have understandably

41 Kiely, “Report,” 2; A. Karl Larson, Erastus Snow: The Life of a Missionary and Pioneer for the Early Mormon Church (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971), 578. The Mormon quotation was from the diary of Charles L. Walker. 42 I can find no mention of the event in Scanlan’s subsequent writing. He even failed to mention it in his annual appeal to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Father Francis J. Weber, “Father Lawrence Scanlan’s Report of Catholicism in Utah, 1880,” Utah Historical Quarterly 34 (Fall 1966): 283-89. Father Kiely’s “Story of the Catholic Church in Utah” does mention the event and says of Scanlan’s homily (or lecture, as it probably was), “Careful to give no offence and respect the belief of his hearers, nearly all of whom were Mormons—he won for himself the esteem and good will of all.”

313 UTAH HISTORICAL SOCIETY sought such opportunities to eradicate mis- The interior of the St. George LDS understandings and extend the olive branch. Tabernacle, where a Catholic By 1885, the silver of Silver Reef had Mass was celebrated by Father played out, and despite the fact that some of Lawrence Scanlan on May 25, the mines continued to operate into the 1879. twentieth century, its residents were mostly moving on to other digs, and Father Scanlan terminated the parish, school, and hospital.43 Although a parish was temporarily maintained in Frisco (in Beaver County northwest of Milford) for a couple of years, and a permanent one was established in Cedar City in 1936, Washington County did not have another parish until 1958, so the process of building good relations between Mormon and Catholic entered into a long hiatus. Economically, Silver Reef helped St. George in death as it had in life— building materials and furniture were scavenged to be used in other communities—but other economic effects are harder to measure, for despite the infusion of capital and markets Silver Reef had offered, Washington County continued to struggle well into the twentieth century. Perhaps we can find Silver Reef’s greatest significance in its brief example of economic symbiosis and a modicum of mutual cultural toleration with its Mormon neighbor. Silver Reef in the twenty-first century is a ghost town, with little more than the foundations of most buildings visible above the rubble of the rest of the structure. Similar ghost towns exist throughout the West and even elsewhere in Utah, but the wreckage of Silver Reef is uniquely conspicuous as wreckage because of its close proximity to the neighboring Mormon towns, most of which are in as good repair today as they were in Silver

43 According to interpretive material in the modern Silver Reef museum, the church was moved to Leeds, where it served for a time as a social hall, then apparently was dismantled. Other Silver Reef build- ings were either moved elsewhere or dismantled for building materials.

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Reef’s heyday. And the contrast is rendered even more vivid by the major metropolis St. George is becoming and the retirement homes that are spilling into the former city limits of Silver Reef and threatening to engulf the ghost town completely. Those contrasts have provoked perhaps more than the usual tongue clucking and head shaking about the glory that once was, how the mighty have fallen, and the failure of the once-thriving community. Former resident Mark Pendleton, on a return visit nearly thirty years after he had left: The changes that had come to the camp were most tragic. Where once had dwelt 1500 souls, only two buildings were intact and occupied. Ruins everywhere. The once well kept cemetery, with grass, Lombardy poplars, shrubs, flowers and white picket fence, was desolate save for a riotous growth of Trees of Heaven. Now almost as silent as a grave, fifty-odd years ago this lusty camp was a challenge to St. George for the county seat, and the Temple City, alarmed, appealed to the territorial legislature for aid.44 A recent history of Silver Reef offers the following caption below a photograph of the remains of the Wells Fargo building: “An abandoned mine car stands in front of an equally forlorn Wells Fargo building in Silver Reef.” (Actually, while the mine car appears a bit forlorn, the stone building, the best preserved edifice in town, is in excellent condition with the exception of the rotted doors and windows, and would compare favorably with most of the structures of similar vintage in St. George.) On the following page, a photograph through a doorway is interpreted thus: “The southern Utah desert, not a booming mining town, is all that can be seen through the sandstone arch of an abandoned building in Silver Reef in 1976.”45 “Ruins everywhere,” a “desolate” cemetery, “silent as a grave,” a “forlorn” building, and a dust-to-dust view from a ruined doorway—these metaphors of death and failure in the midst of permanence and prosperity could be multiplied many times in the literature of Silver Reef. Was Silver Reef a failure, and its death a reminder of the wages of sin? Perhaps even more than other ghost towns, Silver Reef asks us to confront an essential ambivalence we Americans feel toward our history. On the one hand, we embrace those ruins as symbols of an antiquity our brief history of barely five centuries does not possess. Ghost towns are our pyramids; they are our Parthenon. On the other hand, ghost towns are silent embarrassments to our secular religion of growth, success, and progress. Silver Reef in particular, in its close proximity to the enduring Mormon communities of Washington County, seems a poignant reminder that not all dreams come true, and that there are no guarantees of progress and permanence. If, as we have seen, though, Washington County history is not a dualistic

44 Pendleton, “Memories of Silver Reef,” 99. 45 Whitley, From the Ground Up, 299-300.

315 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY narrative of Sin versus Salvation, Success versus The Elk Horn Saloon and James Failure, perhaps Silver Reef can suggest a N. Lowder Store in Silver Reef— more nuanced way of looking at our history. 1890. It could be argued that an abandoned com- munity does not necessarily indicate a failed one. Surely humankind can as legitimately pursue temporary goals as permanent ones. A community based on an extractive industry is necessarily going to have a finite life; the only question is how long the resource to be extracted will hold out. An agricultural community, by contrast, barring some natural disaster, can reasonably expect permanence. Thus the ramshackle architecture of many—but not all—buildings in Silver Reef, some of them moved in pieces from Pioche, seems appropriate. Why build for the ages when the end is so obviously near? Viewed in this way, the ruins of Silver Reef could be seen as evidence of the practical wisdom of its creators, who knew the whole project would be transitory and built accordingly, even as the St. George Mormons built for permanence, as a witness to their faithfulness to their church calling. Viewed in this way, Silver Reef represents a goal achieved, a project completed, as its builders moved on to other enterprises.

316 Speed Merchants: The History of Professional Cycling in Salt Lake City, 1898-1914

By TED MOORE SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

y the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle had become one of America’s more important technological advances. The bicycle Bwas one of the primary reasons that municipalities began to pave their streets, it provided personal freedom for individuals to travel from place to place on their own timetable, and it was an important manu- factured product as the nation became more industrialized. The bicycle’s influence, as a means of transportation, was felt throughout the nation and especially in Salt Lake City. By 1900 almost half the city’s population owned a set of “wheels,” and it is fairly likely that almost every family owned at least one bicycle. Despite the fact that in 1900 a new bicycle cost between $50 and $150 dollars and the average annual wage hovered around $500 dollars, local dealers were selling over six thousand new bicycles annually.1 With bicycling mania continuing to increase, professional track cycling followed Two bicycle racers at Saltair pace and became one of the nation’s most about 1910.

Ted Moore received his Ph.D. in environmental/urban history from Michigan State University and is cur- rently an Assistant Professor of History at Salt Lake Community College.

1 “Cyclists Are Willing,” Salt Lake Herald, May 23, 1900, and “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 27, 1900.

317 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY popular sports. Perhaps surprisingly, Salt Lake City, a moderate-sized com- munity of 53,531 located in the middle of the “Great American Desert,” became the center of professional track cycling by 1900 (along with Newark, New Jersey), and remained so through 1912. The majority of America’s best professional riders were lured to Salt Lake City every sum- mer to race on one of the fastest, if not the fastest, tracks in the world. Additionally, local businesses doled out thousands of dollars in cash as prize money that also attracted some of the best riders from Europe and Australia. All of this occurred at a time when Salt Lakers and their city were in a transitional phase economically, socially, and culturally as leading citizens worked to better incorporate the state into the broader economy by trying to attract non-Utah investors. This little known history of bicycle racing in Utah deserves further attention for what it adds to the history of profes- sional cycling in the United States generally, and as it helps to illuminate the important role commercialized leisure played in the city’s economic and cultural integration into the broader national economy.2 By the 1890s sports and commercialized leisure were gaining in popularity throughout the country and bicycle racing became one of the most popular forms of recreation and entertainment. The attention and esteem lavished on professional cyclists rivaled that given to any of the early twenty-first century professional baseball, basketball, and football stars. The riders’ images and their feats of triumph were routinely splashed across the pages of newspapers nationwide. Cyclists, even those who were only nominally successful, could make more than four times the average working man’s annual salary, and some of the best cyclists made in excess of ten thousand dollars a year. The potential promise of a good living attracted scores of determined and talented men to try their luck at the sport.3 Bicycle races also attracted large numbers of gamblers. As a result, by the mid 1890s the sport’s reputation for integrity began to wane in the fans’ eyes. Rumors abounded of fixed races and this, coupled with hard evidence of collusion among riders and promoters, caused some spectators to lose interest in the sport. Despite these problems, however, cycling’s popularity remained high at least through World War I when it declined rather quickly. It then made a comeback during the Depression before the sport drifted into relative obscurity after World War II. For its part, Salt Lake City became the center of this international craze by 1900, when interest in the sport may have been at its highest.4

2 For a more thorough discussion on the economic and social dynamics in Utah and Salt Lake City see Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1900 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1958), and Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, CO.: Pruett Publishing Co., 1984). 3 Todd Balf, Major: A Black Athlete, A White Era, and the Fight to be the World’s Fastest Human Being (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008), 76; “Iver Coming Home,” Deseret News, March 22, 1901; and John Lund, “The Old Salt Palace,” Bicycling Magazine (August 1969): 11. 4 Balf, Major.

318 SPEED MERCHANTS UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Some key factors that helped to keep track The bicycle race track at the Salt cycling popular included: new racing formats Palace. or “disciplines,” the creation of a new gov- erning body that restructured the sport by giving the cyclists greater autonomy, redesigned tracks that were more sharply banked and allowed cyclists to race at greater speeds, and the use of a new technology— the motorcycle. Track cycling had several “disciplines” or events. By the early twentieth century “French-style” races were becoming the most popular. This format involved two riders racing head-to-head around the track for a specified distance. The rider’s strategy was to “sit-on” or follow the slipstream of his competitor, who did all the work setting the pace and blocking the wind, thereby conserving the second competitor’s energy. This would continue until the trailing rider decided to “jump” or try to go around the lead rider by using the accumulated momentum to “slingshot” himself into the lead, much like American stock car racers do on the NASCAR circuit. Sometimes the lead rider would go as slow as possible and even come to a dead stop while balancing his motionless bike in an effort to force his opponent to take the lead. If this failed the leader might try to surprise his opponent and bolt away, thus creating a large enough gap that his opponent would lose any sort of drafting advantage. The crowds loved the cat and mouse strategy and were especially keen to attend races in which the opposing riders were intense rivals.5 This new racing format helped to re-energize and re-legitimize the sport. In some of the older disciplines like the un-paced mile and the mile handicap, the riders did not always give an honest effort. For example, in the un-paced mile four riders were evenly spaced about 110 yards from each other around the track and the object was for each one to try to catch the rider in front of him, and, by doing so, eliminate that rider. This continued until only one racer was left. Occasionally, races like this were rigged, as rid- ers made deals to pace each other or block uncooperative racers in

5 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, 1899.

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exchange for a share of the purse. This new discipline required each rider to race to win or lose without the aid or collusion of other participants and this helped to restore the sport’s reputation.6 Other racing formats such as the twenty- four hour race and the six-day race also gained appeal as the nineteenth century came to a close. In the twenty-four hour event the winner was the rider who completed the most laps in a twenty-four hour period. The prizes for this contest usually ranged from 175 to 500 dollars for the victor. Finally, the most difficult test of a cyclist’s endurance was the six-day race. Like the twenty-four hour

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY event, this contest awarded the rider who John “The Terrible Swede” completed the most laps over the course of Lawson, a Utah bicycle racer. six continuous days. During these contests riders often became delirious from lack of sleep and would have to rest for a few hours before continuing. Promoters liked this format because spectators could purchase tickets to watch portions of the contest, which meant higher gate and concessions revenues as spectators came and went throughout the event. Due in part to concerns over the riders’ health and safety, however, the six-day races evolved into a two-man team event wherein two riders alternated between racing and sleeping.7 In Salt Lake City, track racing began at least as early as 1881. A young man named William Wood along with twenty-four others organized the first bicycle club in the city and they constructed a one-eighth-mile track at Calder’s Farm (present-day Nibley Park). A second track was soon built at Washington Square (present-day city/county building block), and it is on this track that Wood won the state cycling championship in 1885.8 It is also on this same track that professionals from California, Otto Ziegler, the first American Champion, and others raced in 1894. Ziegler and other cyclists often spent a few days racing in Salt Lake City to stay in shape and earn a few extra dollars as they traveled back and forth between the two coasts.9 These first tracks were flat, and consisted of compacted dirt that was rolled smooth, and were usually ringed with ropes around the perimeter in

6 Ibid. 7 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 18, 1899; “With Bike Riders At Saucer Track,” Deseret News, July 29, 1907; and Balf, Major: A Black Athlete. 8 “Champion Recalls Old Bicycle Races,” Deseret News, July 18, 1945. 9 “Glory Enough For Once, A World Record for Salt Lake City,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 24, 1894; “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, 1899; and “C.R. Coulter Dead,” Salt Lake Herald, February 19, 1901.

320 SPEED MERCHANTS an attempt to contain the throngs of spectators from interfering with the races and eventually Calder Park came to be the most popular place to watch these events until a new track was built at the Salt Palace.10 As commercialized recreation generally, and cycling specifically, became more profitable, two local men, Frederick Heath and J.R. Walker, decided that a racing oval would place the city in the national sporting spotlight. The two entrepreneurs owned a piece of land on south Main Street on the outskirts of Salt Lake City’s commercial district and they with some other Salt Lake City businessmen organized a joint-stock company for the pur- pose of constructing an exhibition hall and recreational area that would permanently showcase the state’s manufactured goods in a world’s fair/Coney Island type of exposition. Their vision was part of broader local efforts to boost the city and the state, and to better integrate its economy into that of the nation. The resort that Heath and Walker built in 1899 was known as the Salt Palace. The Salt Palace board members represented a mix of successful Mormon and “gentile,” or non-Mormon businessmen. Some of these men included W.A. Neldon, who was the founder and president of the Neldon- Judson Wholesale Drug Company and one-time president of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. J.W. Dittman and Jacob Moritz, both immigrants from Germany, were involved in the liquor trade—Dittman was a wholesaler and retailer of spirits and Moritz was the vice-president of the Salt Lake Brewing Company. S.W. Morrison owned a profitable lumber company. These men, along with the other board members were all heavily involved in boosting the city and successfully attracted eastern capital into the region.11 The Salt Palace management envisioned their venture as more than just an exhibition hall, but as a center for leisure and recreation. As such, part of the Salt Palace grounds contained an amusement park, and a velodrome. The main building was to be fashioned out of blocks of salt and the grounds quickly became a popular center for amusements and recreation. Richard Kletting, a well-known local architect, was hired to design the track’s façade, while “Captain” Thomas O. Angell was tasked with oversee- ing the design and construction of the track. Angell was a bicycle enthusiast and was the president of an influential local cycling club. He also had some experience supervising the construction of other tracks in the west. It is not clear where Angell got the inspiration, but the Saucer, as it came to be called, was a departure from other tracks and it would set the standard for other velodromes around the world.12

10 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, 1899. 11 C.W. Bouton, “Utah’s Salt Palace: Official Souvenir,” (Salt Lake City : Utah Litho. Co. Printers), Utah State Historical Society, PAM 6102, and “Fierce Flames Attack Salt Palace Property,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 29, 1910. 12 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 18,1899, and “Fierce Flames Attack Salt Palace Property,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 29,1910.

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The architects of the new Salt Lake Palace Saucer designed the one-eighth mile oval track banking the curves at forty-three degrees which enabled cyclists to hold their speed around the entire track. The racing surface was wooden planks laid length-wise rather than cross-wise making the track faster. It only took a month to complete the track’s construction, yet its design was so new and radically different that its steep inclines intim- idated many of the local riders. Many of them believed that they would simply tip-over or slide off the track. The Saucer initially accommodated 3,500 spectators and was lit with electric lights for night-time racing (all the races were held in the evenings). Initial building costs for the new track were around four thousand dollars, and to help fund its construction and better assure its success, track owners sold five and ten dollar shares in the venture.13 While cycling would become the main attraction at the Salt Palace, it was not the only form of entertainment. The palace management capital- ized on the public’s desire for amusement and leisure by also building a midway-style carnival on the Salt Palace grounds. They promoted their establishment as a “Western Coney Island.” The amusement park included several rides and attractions such as the “Balloon Ascension,” “Parachute Jump,” “Slide For Life,” “Serial Wizard,” “Old Mill,” “Ocean Wave,” and “Hale’s Tour.” There was also a miniature railway and a “freak show” exhibit that was billed as “nature’s monstrosity.” Admission to the grounds was free, but to see the attractions, ride the rides, or witness the races cost money. A night of bicycle racing was only twenty-five cents for general seating and fifty cents for a reserved seat.14 Palace management also constructed an amphitheater and an indoor theater called the “Streets of Cairo.” The amphitheater staged light operas and plays while the “Streets of Cairo” held vaudeville-like performances on the nights that races were not held. To try to entice people off the streets to view the shows and exhibits Palace management had “middle-eastern- looking” men walk through the city’s streets and on the amusement grounds playing instruments. The Palace owners also had a small lake excavated on the grounds where people could go on boat rides. Ownership also held special promotional days and events such as a kids’ day that allowed all school-aged children to see the exhibits for free and “give-away” days when a twenty five dollar gold watch was awarded to “the most popular lady on the grounds.”15

13 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, and June 18, 1899; and “With The Wheelmen,” June 30, 1899. 14 “Big Crowd Attends the Bicycle Races,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 31, 1908, and June 1, 1908, (Salt Palace Advertisement). 15 “Big Amusement Enterprise,” Deseret News, April 13, 1900; “Salt Palace News,” Deseret News, June 8, 1900; “Salt Palace Attractions,” Deseret News, July 9, 1900; Olive W. Burt, ed, “Bicycle Racing and the Salt Palace: Two Letters,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Spring 1982): 167.

322 SPEED MERCHANTS

Additionally, management had some of the Midway performers entertain the crowds in between the cycling races hoping to lure the spectators into visiting the other attractions. Held’s band would routinely liven-up the spectators with several tunes in between races, and on at least one occasion a record- breaking crowd witnessed a “Professor” Austin ascend 5,100 feet in a balloon and then parachute back to earth.16 Cycling was the real draw at the Salt Palace, and when the Saucer opened to a packed house on July 4, 1899, it was evident to all in attendance that it was a special track. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Cycling fans quickly realized that it was one Frederick Heath. of the fastest tracks in the world, and by the end of the first month of racing many world records were broken by riders who the local press admitted, “could not hold their own on other tracks.” With speed records being shattered under the lights, the Saucer quickly became the place to be. The demand to see the races was so great that several hundred spectators routinely had to be turned away due to a lack of seating, which prompted track management, after only two months of racing, to expand the track’s seating capacity from 3,500 to 5,000. This decision proved quite prudent as virtually every race night for the next decade was at or near a capacity crowd.17 In mid-July of 1899, shortly after the Saucer began operations, two professional cyclists who had been in Seattle and were on their way to race in the east, stopped in Salt Lake City and decided to spend a couple of weeks racing on the new track. The two men were Frank Cotter, known as the “Western Whirlwind,” and John M. Chapman who hailed from Atlanta, Georgia. Chapman became a regular racer in Salt Lake City thereafter and was partially responsible for convincing other big-name professionals to come and race in the city during the spring and summer months.18 According to newspaper reports, however, Chapman, although acknowl- edged as the best rider in the city, for some reason was not well liked by most of the other competitors or spectators. For example, during one night of racing the crowd hissed at him so violently that the race directors considered barring him from the track for his own safety. They ultimately allowed him to compete at the last minute, however, and he ended up winning that night to the dismay of many on-lookers.19

16 “Record-Breaking Crowd At Races,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 13, 1908. 17 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 16, 1899, and “People Turned Away, Big Throng At Salt Palace Wheel Races,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 11, 1899. 18 Ibid. 19 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 17, 1899.

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In the fall of 1899, other riders of national acclaim also began stopping in the city to race. One such rider was Floyd A. McFarland, who was one of the fastest and most successful American cyclists of his time. McFarland first raced on the track on his way home to California that fall. McFarland grew up in San Jose, California, the hometown of the first official American champion, Otto Ziegler, and McFarland dreamt of becoming the fastest and most successful cyclist in the world. This desire drove him at times to be a ruthless and unscrupulous competitor both on and off the track. On one occasion he beat Ziegler by running him into a barrier and in a differ- ent race McFarland caused another rider to crash by leaning into the other racer’s path and throwing his elbow into the opponent’s tucked head. On another occasion, McFarland was suspended for a year for his part in fixing a race in Australia that had a winner’s purse of five thousand dollars.20 There were a few professional riders who ultimately decided to make Salt Lake City their permanent home and the most popular of these riders was an immigrant named John “The Terrible Swede” Lawson. Lawson pur- portedly got this sobriquet early in his racing career at a road race in Chicago. There, during the twenty-five mile event, he crashed and bent his front wheel. While he was attempting to bend it back into shape and with the other competitors almost ready to pass him, Lawson hopped on his bike and veered across the pack of racers, causing many of them to crash. Lawson then grabbed one of the other rider’s bikes and rode away with the other cyclists yelling “blessings” at him.21 His popularity was such that he was often invited to take the lead part in local plays and on numerous occasions he was also challenged to demonstrate his speed and power, such as when he was paid to race against a team of horses.22 Lawson’s popularity on the race track can be attributed in part to the large Swedish population in the city. He was a world champion and record holder in the six-day and the twenty-four hour disciplines. According to the 1910 census, a little over seventeen thousand residents in Utah were either native-born Swedes or first-generation Swedish-American. Swedes comprised a little over 4.5 percent of the state’s total population and 5.2 percent of Salt Lake County’s population. By the 1880s, there was also a sizeable neighborhood in North Salt Lake known as “Swede Town.” Iver and Gussie, his two younger brothers, also raced in Salt Lake City in the early twentieth century, and they too, were each nicknamed the “Terrible Swede.” Iver also became quite popular in Salt Lake City and, like his brother John, set down roots in the city, eventually starting a bicycle and motorcycle shop. Iver also became a highly successful cyclist in his own

20 “Phenomenal Wheel Ride,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 20, 1899; “Cycle Track Frosty,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 24, 1899; “Bicycle Track Blacklisted,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 1899; and Balf, Major, 64, 67, 245. 21 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, 1899. 22 Ibid., June 18, 1899.

324 SPEED MERCHANTS SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY right, winning several world titles and setting The Wandamere Resort bicycle 23 a number of world records. track, October 1913. The early financial success of the Saucer, coupled with several world records that had been broken at the Saucer, including the coveted record for the one-mile, prompted the owners of the Calder Park track to make improvements. They decided to re-surface their track by “scientifically” baking it in clay, and banking the entire track to thirty degrees in the hopes of again re-attracting racers and crowds. It also inspired other entrepreneurs to build additional velodromes along the Wasatch Front. The owners of the popular lakeside resort Saltair also considered building a track of their own as early as the end of the 1899 racing season, but post- poned building the track until 1908. Their plans capitalized on the public’s interest to swim, dance, and participate in other activities on the weekends as well as watch competitive bicycle races. The newly constructed racing track was banked at forty-seven degrees and was a tenth of a mile compared to the longer eighth of a mile track at the Salt Palace. It was

23 “Lawson and Emory,” Deseret News, June 18, 1900; “Bicycle Notes,” Deseret News June 19, 1900; Richard L. Jensen, “Swedish Immigrants and Life in Utah,” in Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996), 537-38 ; Richard D. Poll et. al, Utah’s History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989), 690-91.

325 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY partially roofed and accommodated seven thousand spectators. It included a tunnel from the entrance under the track to the seats, Captain Angell, the architect of the Saucer, also designed and oversaw construction of the Saltair track. It was completed in mid-June at the reported cost of forty- five thousand dollars.24 A group of Ogden businessmen decided in 1900 to secure funds to build a velodrome in Ogden. The Ogden velodrome was constructed at Glenwood Park. With this race track, there was talk of creating a circuit of races that would have been held between Provo, Salt Lake, Ogden, and Logan, although this never came to fruition.25 The sheer excitement of the sport coupled with its lucrative nature enticed many locals to begin racing. As the 1900 racing season approached, over one hundred amateurs were numbered among those training in the city. The newspapers reported large groups of cyclists riding on the cycle path in Liberty Park and on city roads in preparation for the upcoming season.26 The thrill of greater speeds and the opportunity for fame were not the only attractions to the amateur cyclists. The professionals could make much more money riding in Salt Lake City than they could in the east or even in Europe and the lure of big money induced many local amateurs to leave good paying jobs and pursue cycling full-time.27 Both professional and amateur cyclists, if they were successful at their trade, enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. While it is difficult to estimate how much individual cyclists did earn—in part because the professionals had corporate sponsors—the average winnings for a race were anywhere from $50 to $100 for first place, $25 to $75 for second, and $10 to $50 for a third-place finish. In 1900, one of the organizations responsible for governing professional races reported that the 167 registered professionals it oversaw had collectively won $59,477 a year earlier. This did not include their contract salaries for racing at specific venues, nor did it include the money they were paid to endorse cycling and other products.28 For many racers, cycling also opened doors to other opportunities. A study done in 1916 of 353 former professional cyclists from the U.S. and Europe revealed that over 50 percent had become factory owners, small business owners, or managers of bicycle and or automobile factories.29 As noted earlier, in the U.S. an average professional cyclist in 1900 could expect to earn at least two thousand dollars a year, which was about four times the average annual salary of most American workers; some world

24 “New Saucer Track Opens Today,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 17, 1908. 25 “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 3, 1899; “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 16,1899; “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 1900. 26 “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 15, 1900. 27 Ibid., March 11, 1900. 28 “Meeting of Wheelmen,” Deseret Evening News, February 7, 1900; J.A. Mangan, ed. Reformers, Sports, Modernizers: Middle-Class Revolutionaries (London: Frank Cass,, 2002), 115. 29 Mangan, Reformers, 124; “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 15, 1900.

326 SPEED MERCHANTS UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY champions such as Marshall “Major” Taylor Bicycle riders and support staff at could expect to receive as much as five thou- the Salt Palace Bicycle Race sand dollars just as an appearance fee. In 1899 Track. John Chapman claims to have won over 1,500 dollars racing for two months in the Northwest, and in 1901 Iver Lawson won over two thousand dollars racing for a couple of months in Australia. In an interview done in the late 1960s with a former local professional rider Fred Whittler, who had nominal success, claimed that he annually signed a three-month contract to race at the Saucer for between 1,800 and 2,000 dollars and that placing in the top three in races netted a sizable amount of bonus money.30 Amateurs, although not awarded cash for victories, often received valuable prizes. Amateur riders who were registered with the National Cycling Association, for example, won over twenty thousand dollars worth of prizes in 1899. A growing number of them sold their winnings for cash, which caused the N.C.A. to force many amateurs to race with the professionals. Salt Lake amateur champion Eddie Smith was forced to compete with the professional riders, following a number of complaints from other true amateurs in 1899.31 The large sums of prize money, as well as the chance for international fame, precipitated the spread of the reputation of the Saucer and Salt Lake City to cyclists in the East. Each summer between 1900 and 1912, Salt Lake City hosted most of the best professional riders in the nation. As the

30 Balf, Major,76; “Iver Coming Home,” Deseret News, March 22, 1901; and Lund, “The Old Salt Palace.” 31 “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 4 , 1900, and “Meeting of Wheelmen,” Deseret Evening News, February 7, 1900.

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1900 racing season approached, at least twenty professionals from across the country committed to race in the city for the summer and many more riders expressed an interest in coming west.32 With the three tracks, race promoters were concerned that the population base might not be able to support that much racing and that the three tracks would drive each other out of business. Harry Heagren, the manager of the Ogden track, brokered a deal with the Saucer management to permit racers in Salt Lake City to race once a week to compete on the Ogden track. Under this arrangement, cyclists could race at both tracks and ensure competitive and entertaining race cards for the spectators without the tracks competing in a costly bidding war to attract cycling talent. In 1908, local race promoters and the track managers boasted that over forty thousand dollars in prize money was awarded during the racing season. With two nights of racing at the Saucer, one in Ogden, and two at Saltair, races were held five nights a week among the three tracks and everyone believed that they would rake in record profits.33 The popularity of cycling remained high among Salt Lakers, despite the many other recreational venues and other commercialized spectator sports events: horse racing, professional wrestling, baseball, boxing exhibitions, and soon to be popular, motorcycle racing. Local amusement parks such as Lagoon also drew sizeable crowds, yet residents along the Wasatch Front continued to support cycling in large numbers.34 As the 1908 racing season approached, cables from champion riders around the country, lured by the large sums of prize money flooded the city’s telegraph offices. Some of the best international professionals, including the Australian champion, A.J. Clarke, and the German champion Henry Mayer, who won the Grand Prix of Paris in 1905 and finished second to Iver Lawson in the world championships that same year, signed contracts to race at Saltair.35 In addition to Clarke and Mayer, the Saltair track also boasted one of the more colorful cyclists, a Russian nationalist and winner of the African cycling championships Theodore Devonevitch. Devonevitch sported a long flowing beard that he claimed gave him good luck and this quickly earned him the nickname, “Whiskers.” Newspaper accounts suggest that the beard made him look like a man in his forties despite only being in his early twenties. Before making his way to Salt Lake City, Devonevitch claimed that he had fought, and was subsequently captured, by the British in the Boer War where he was serving as a messenger rider, riding his

32 “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 4, 1900; and “With The Wheelmen,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 15, 1900. 33 “Five Race Meets For Bicycle Riders,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 30, 1908. 34 See for example, “Big Cycle Road Race for Decoration Day,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 24, 1908; “Big Road Race Over The Lagoon Course,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 30, 1908; “Dark Horse Wins Lagoon Road Race,” Salt Lake Tribune, 31 May 1908; “Big Crowd Attends the Bicycle Races,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 31, 1908. 35 “Bicycle Season Open May 30,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 24, 1908.

328 SPEED MERCHANTS bicycle instead of a horse.36 Devonevitch initially tried to compete as an amateur, but many of the other riders filed protests, which forced him to race with the other profession- als. As a result, early on Devonevitch was described as being “a joke” by the fans because he often fin- ished last. On one occasion when he entered the track, someone yelled out to him “Hey, Rip Van Winkle.” Despite the ridicule, his smile and his flowing beard eventually endeared him to a portion of the fan base and as he improved Marshall “Major” Taylor, at the SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY his racing strategy and got into better shape Salt Palace Bicycle Race Track on he soon became a crowd favorite. On the July 21, 1910. night that he won his first race, “the people yelled themselves hoarse when the Russian took the lead, and when it was seen that he would win shout after shout rent the air.”37 Perhaps the most internationally famous cyclist to race in Salt Lake City was Marshal “Major” Taylor. Taylor, a world champion and one of only a few African American professionals in the sport, was the highest paid cyclist in the world and agreed to come to Salt Lake City in 1910 to cycle in three races for 1,500 dollars plus traveling and lodging expenses.38 Although past his racing prime, he, nevertheless, attracted large crowds, and was still good enough to challenge the world’s best. He arrived in Salt Lake City in July and spent a couple of weeks training and riding into shape. Ultimately he was beaten in all the races in which he rode, but they were all highly competitive and attracted some of the largest crowds in the Saucer’s history.39

36 “Revolutionist To Race As Amateur,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 12, 1908; “Salt Lake Riders Win All the Money,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 12, 1908. Just a note about the spelling of Devonevitch’s name. Newspaper accounts spell his last name alternately Devonevitch and Devonovitch. 37 “Clarke Breaks The Two-Mile Record,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 10, 1908. 38 “Crack Negro Bike Rider Arrives For Match,” Deseret News, July 14, 1910; and “Champion Cyclist Arrives in Zion,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 14, 1910; “Hardy Downing Breaks Record,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 2, 1910; “New Western Champion,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 5, 1910; “Clarke Jumps Onto Lead In Championship,” Deseret News, July 4,1910; “Clarke Hangs Up Two World’s Records,” Deseret News, July 3, 1910; “Major Taylor Will Go After Record,” Deseret News, August 5, 1910; “Major Taylor Drew Crowd At Saucer,” Deseret News, July 26, 1910. 39 “Major Taylor Will Go After Record,” Deseret News, August 5, 1910; “Major Taylor Drew Crowd At Saucer,” Deseret News, August 6, 1910; “Lawson Wins From Taylor,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 17, 1910.

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The motivation by the cyclists to win races was not exclusively monetary in nature. Both professionals and amateurs had separate leagues that went from the end of May through the beginning of September, and each cyclist was awarded points for placing in the top four in a race. The rider who amassed the most points by the end of the racing season was crowned the Western champion, earning the right to race the top point getter from the east for the title of U.S. champion.40 The West-East rivalry was played-up in the papers, in part to sell tickets, but the cyclists did have a highly competitive nature as well. A good illustration of this is the story of A.J. “Jackie” Clarke. Clarke rode his first bike race in Melbourne in 1903 and quickly rose through the ranks to become Australia’s champion by 1906. In that year, Clarke came to the U.S. where he competed in Salt Lake City and at several eastern venues. In 1908, he won over twenty-five races at the Saltair Hippodrome track and became the number one rival to the long-time American champion Frank Kramer. Kramer won his first of a record eighteen national titles in 1901, as he rode almost exclusively in the east and made his home in New Jersey. In 1909, Clarke had tied Kramer on points for the American Championship and the National Cycling Association required that the two men race the five “standard” distances to settle the matter. With each of the riders having won two races, the N.C.A. then changed the racing distance of the final match at the last minute, and Clarke refused to ride, forfeiting the race and the title. The rivalry between the two from then on became much more intense. Clarke’s manager, Floyd MacFarland, challenged Kramer to come and race in Salt Lake City to determine the true champion. MacFarland boasted that Clarke was the current record holder in several disciplines and distances and had recently won the New York and Berlin Six-Day races, while Kramer “continued to compete against inferior talent.”41 With Kramer and his manager doing their best to brush Clarke aside, MacFarland publicly challenged both the Kramer camp and the N.C.A: Without any competition, the National Cycling Association, which is one of the most grasping ‘hidebound’ trusts in the country, exploiting bicycle riders for the money there is in it, has handed Kramer the championship for 10 consecutive years. Kramer hasn’t a world’s record to his name and has been racing with a bunch of second class riders at Vallsburg [the track in Newark, New Jersey] under the management of Johnny Chapman. We demand the right to compete for the American title either here or in the east. Our American license from your association requires you to give us consideration. Manager Heagren offers $5,000 for series if sanction is granted.42 While these cross-country rivalries stirred even more public interest, cyclists’ need for speed, coupled with the public’s desire for more excitement,

40 “Hardy Downing Breaks Record,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 2,1910. 41 “Clarke After All World’s Records,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 7, 1910; and Lou Dzierzak, The Evolution of American Bicycle Racing, (Guilford CN: Globe Pequot Press, 2007), 15. 42 “Clarke Challenges Kramer to Race,” Deseret News, August 4, 1910; “Jackie Clarke Defies Kramer,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 4, 1910.

330 SPEED MERCHANTS SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY led to the dangerous discipline of motor- Cyclist demonstrating motor pacing. Early in the development of the pacing at the Salt Palace, July 16, sport, cyclists discovered the science of draft- 1906. ing. Namely that a person could ride faster, further, while using as much as 30 percent less energy, if there was someone or something that blocked the wind. Cyclists used this to their advantage in the “French Style” races, trying to force their opponents to take the lead, set the pace, and expend more energy until the final lap when the trailing racer would try to “slingshot” past his competitor to victory. In longer distance races, cyclists would often use teammates to set a steady pace as long as they could before launching themselves to go it alone for the final few laps. As records continued to fall and cyclists searched for more speed, they realized that what they needed was a pacing device that did not fatigue and could consistently go fast. Ultimately, the idea of slapping an engine on a bike and using this new machine to pace riders caught on. John Lawson was the first recorded cyclist in Salt Lake City to try motor-pacing on the Saucer. In September of 1899, Lawson created quite a stir when he announced that he would begin training and practicing behind a motorcycle (supposedly the first one west of the Mississippi). At that time, the machine could travel a mile in about a minute and thirty seconds, and Lawson was confident that he could break all records pacing behind it.43 Motor-pacing became its own discipline and eventually Hardy Downing

43 “Motor Tandem on Saucer,” Salt Lake Tribune, and “Cycling in the News,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 20, 1899.

331 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY was the master. In one successful record-breaking ride Downing stayed so close to the motorcycle that, “[he] seemed to be tied to the rear wheel of the pacing machine and he appeared more like a piece of machinery than a human being.”44 In motor-pacing the two men riding the motorcycle would often stuff newspapers or cardboard around their legs to create a vacuum, which would help pull the bike along. The rider still had to remain less than a foot behind the motor, or he would lose the full advan- tage of the draft. The motorcycles, therefore, were equipped with a roller that extended off the rear wheels so that if the bike got too close, the roller would just spin, thus reducing the odds of a crash.45 As one can imagine, this type of racing was very dangerous to riders, but was very popular with the crowds. One such motor-paced event held on June 10, 1908, threatened both the spectators and racers when a race almost turned fatal. One of the motorcyclists lost control of his machine, causing the other motorcyclist to swerve hard to avoid a collision when the driver fell off the motor-bike, sending the machine flying up the bank toward the crowd. Only a light- pole saved several dozen spectators from serious injury and possible death. With no one injured, the crowd, after having absorbed what had happened, erupted into a loud roar. It is also worth noting that at the next night of racing after this incident the Saucer experienced a record attendance.46 From motor- pacing, it did not take long for motorcycling to become its own form of entertainment, and Salt Lakers flocked to the motorcycle races too. The city became a popular venue that also attracted “motor- heads” from across the country. The first night that the Wandamere track (formerly Calder’s Park) opened in the summer of 1910, over ten thousand paid attendants watched the two and a half hour racing spectacle. A reporter from the Deseret News commented that, With all the dare-deviltry of the man who flirts with death a dozen riders tore around the three-lap track at rates of speed that made the throng catch its breath. A mile a minute was too slow for any of them and the pace was set from 45 seconds to 50 seconds for encircling the huge saucer three times. There were thrills, too, that in spite of the fear for the outcome, held the eyes of the spectators, and brought the blanch to the face.47 Those who raced motorbikes also belonged to a competitive circuit that awarded points. Many racers spent a few months each summer in Salt Lake City as part of a larger West Coast circuit that included Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. However, motorcycle racing failed to consistently draw as large crowds as cycling, and the newspapers usually devoted more space to cycling and relegated motorcycling news to the second page

44 “Hardy Downing Breaks Record,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 2, 1910. 45 Lund, “The Old Salt Palace,” 10-11; Burt, “Bicycle Racing,” 165. 46 “Awful Accident Barely Averted,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 10, 1908; “Record-Breaking Crowd At Races,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 13, 1908. 47 “Motordrome,” Deseret News, July 26,1910.

332 SPEED MERCHANTS of the sporting section.48 With the inclusion of motorcycles in cycling events, questions over associational jurisdic- tions soon arose. Motorcyclists were governed by the Fed- eration of American Motorcyclists, which had an agreement with the N.C.A. that any motor-paced events needed the approval of an F.A.M. official. On occasion the formalities SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY of seeking such approval were not followed The Hippodrome at the Saltair and the local F.A.M. official would lodge a Resort on the Great Salt Lake. formal complaint resulting in the motorcycle drivers being temporarily suspended. The two organizations worked to avoid a bidding war for talent, but occasionally conflicts did occur.49 Cyclists not only had to deal with potential jurisdictional controls from the F.A.M, they also had to contend with their own governing bodies. When the Saucer track opened in 1899, it did so under the umbrella of the League of American Wheelmen, which had governed most races in the U.S. until 1898. In October of that year, led by Floyd McFarland, the top riders voted to leave the L.A.W. and start their own league, one that they would control, called the National Cycling Association or N.C.A.50 The L.A.W. did not like professional cyclists in its organization because of the gambling element and the reality of fixed races. Their controls and restrictions on cyclists were quite autocratic at times as the L.A.W. attempted to force order and discipline on the cyclists in the name of efficiency. L.A.W. guidelines required cyclists to compete at specific venues or face suspension and race at a minimum speed and abide by a specific code of conduct.51 The L.A.W. also placed a cap on race purses that the N.C.A. lifted. Additionally, under L.A.W. regulations riders were forced to compete at certain locales and even race when sick or injured or face stiff penalties and

48 “Motordrome Card of Speed Thrills,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 4, 1910. 49 “Kelsey’s Decision Will Determine Sanctions,” Deseret News, July 29, 1910; “Fight Renewed Over Motor Paced Races,” Deseret News, July 29, 1910; “ Motordrome and Saucer Track Settle Strife,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 27, 1910. 50 Balf, Major, 117-18, 132. 51 Christopher Thompson, “The Tour in the Interwar Years: Political Ideology, Athletic Excess, and Industrial Modernity,” in ed. Hugh Daunce and Geoff Hare, The International Journal of the History of Sport 20 (2003): 79-102; and Mangan, Reformers, 2, 106.

333 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY fines. Under the N.C.A. these regulations were abolished and riders were free to race where and when they chose and perhaps more significantly, the prize cap was also removed. McFarland successfully convinced thirty-seven of the top prize-winners to join and he also secured agreements with tracks in the west and the south for the new organization. The removal of the race purse cap and the greater freedom and control that the riders enjoyed helped restore some legitimacy to the sport, as riders no longer felt as compelled to fix races or perform on demand.52 The tracks in Salt Lake City abandoned their affiliation with the L.A.W. in 1899 and switched first to the California Association of Cycling Clubs, and then to the N.C.A. Even under the C.A.C.C., however, local riders continued to face some of the same autocratic demands and enforcement that they had endured under the L.A.W. For example, on one occasion a local C.A.C.C. official ordered some sick and injured cyclists to race. The two cyclists tried to persuade the official to allow a couple of other riders to take their places, but to no avail. Their attempts to “fake it” were easily detected by the spectators and they finished the race amidst a throng of hisses and boos from the crowd.53 There were some who believed that cyclists, through research and technology, would eventually be able to race without fatiguing. Wilbur Atwater at Wesleyan University in Connecticut attempted in his efficiency studies to transform cyclists into machines. He conducted scientific experiments having cyclists ride for many hours on a contraption that determined the caloric value of food in the hopes of finding the perfect diet for a cyclist. He, like many others, believed that with the right diet and aerodynamic setup of a bicycle and rider, cyclists could race without ever tiring.54 Despite the best scientific knowledge, cyclists remained human. Competitive cycling continued to be a dangerous sport, which fostered a degree of camaraderie. Some of the more successful riders created a fund to aid fellow cyclists who were seriously injured in races. Cyclists who suffered severe injuries often lost the means to earn an income and perhaps became debilitated for life. To lighten the financial strain on riders and their families, McFarland, Clarke, Major Taylor, and a few others routinely participated in charity races to raise money for their fellow cyclists.55 In an interview conducted in the late 1960s, Art Gardiner, who was a teen-age concessionaire at the Salt Palace in the early 1900s, noted: “Those bike riders were the most colorful group of athletes I ever knew. They’d risk their necks night after night, and there were feuds and fist fights among them, but they were quick to come to the aid of a buddy who was down

52 Ibid. It needs to be noted, though, that fixed races still continued, and that ultimately, the riders lost most of their control over the N.C.A. 53 “Cycle News,” Salt Lake Tribune, 24 Sept. 1899. 54 Balf, Major, 94-95. 55 “Benefit Race Meet At Salt Palace Tonight,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 28, 1910.

334 SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

on his luck and they never failed to put on a Construction of the Saltair 56 great show.” Bicycle Track, June 15, 1908. The last “great” year of track cycling in the city was 1912. That year Floyd McFarland, who earlier had become track manager, took the best riders and left to ride on a permanent basis on eastern tracks. Despite this, the Saucer was still able to attract some of the better, although aging professionals for the 1913 racing season. That same year, the Salt Palace changed its name to the Majestic and in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I in Europe the track exclusively hosted amateur racers. The war and the growing use of the automobile took their toll on the sport of bicycle racing, especially in Salt Lake City. With the decline of bicycle racing, and the Salt Palace building burning down in 1910, the Saucer was torn down and the space was used for a dancehall, later as an arena for boxing and wrestling exhibitions, and in the 1930s, on the north end of the block, Maurice Warshaw built Grand Central store, which became a chain of supermarkets in Utah. Today, the area is a new and used automobile dealership. As city and country roads slowly improved, more cyclists took to road cycling, which contributed to waning local interest in the once popular sport of track racing.57 Professional track cycling in Salt Lake City in the early 1900s was an

56 Lund, “The Old Salt Palace,” 11. 57 “Salt Lake Bike Riders Off For East Tuesday,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 8 1912; “More Riders Come For Saucer Track,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 18, 1913; “Large Crowd Attends Saucer Track Opening,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 31,1914; According to one of the interviews in Lund, “The Old Salt Palace,” one account claims that the track burned down, but newspaper articles suggest that it was simply torn down and replaced by the exposition hall, while another makes the claim that a dancehall, arena, and then super- market were built on the site, see “Building One Time Rocked With Sports’ Fans Cheers,” Deseret News, July 23, 1959.

335 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

(TOP) The Saltair Bicycle Track. (BELOW) A stage with seating on the infield of the bicycle track inside the Saltair Hippodrome, January 16, 1910.

336 SPEED MERCHANTS important contributor to and indicator of the emerging culture of commercialized outdoor leisure that was developing in the city. The commercialized leisure was part of a broader effort by municipal leaders to market Salt Lake City and the Salt Palace Saucer to the rest of the nation and professional cycling as an important venue thereby boosting the city’s reputation generally. Cyclists like John and Iver Lawson, who made Salt Lake City their home, and A.J. Clarke, who ended up marrying a local girl, became some of the noted “speed merchants” as they helped to spread the reputation of the Saucer and the city as they traveled to venues around the world. Competitive track racing also played a role in integrating the city and state into the national economy.58

58 See for example, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture In Fin-De-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: University. of California Press, 1998); Thompson, “The Tour in the Interwar Years,” 79-102, and Mangan, Reformers.

337 Seeds of Change: Farm Organizations in Depression and Post-War Utah

By ROBERT PARSON, JOHN W. WALTERS AND EMILY GURR-THOMPSONTHOMPSON

arm organizations have made distinct contributions to the national political process, at least since the founding of the populist inspired FFarmers Alliance and National Grange during the post-Civil War period. Although farm organizations routinely proclaimed their impartiality, both national parties solicited their support. During the depths of the 1930s depression the Utah Farm Bureau Federation united with a majority of Utahns to cast its lot with reform- minded Democrats. Utah joined in the 1932 Democratic sweep by supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt for president; and by electing Democrats in both of the state’s congressional districts, a Democratic governor, and a majority of Farm Bureau Headquarters in Democrats to the state legislature. Voters even Vernal, circa 1930. Unless other- favored first-time candidate, Elbert D. wise noted, all photographs and Thomas, over veteran Republican Senator, illustrations are from Special Reed Smoot.1 Collections and Archives, As Roosevelt prepared to launch the New Merrill/Cazier Library, Utah State Deal in 1933, Thomas emerged as one of his University.

Robert Parson is Utah State University Archivist; John Walters is documents librarian; and Emily Gurr- Thompson was a graduate student assistant at the Merrill/Cazier Library, Utah State University.

1 An apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon or LDS), the resilient Smoot became a Republican Party stalwart, who served five terms in the U.S. Senate. See F. Ross Peterson, in Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot, Apostle in Politics (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1990), xv. See also Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1-11.

338 SEEDS OF CHANGE ardent supporters.2 Until the close of World War II, the Farm Bureau, along with a majority of rural Utahns, also embraced Thomas’s faith in expanded government and regulated economic activity.3 The first farm bureau in Utah had been organized in 1915, shortly after Congress created the Cooperative Extension Service through the 1914 Smith-Lever Act. This act, designed to bring the latest agricultural research directly to the farmer, provided for cooperative funding agreements between the states and federal government, and established formal relations between the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Utah Agricultural College, the State’s land-grant college. The USDA, through the States Relations (Extension) Service, supported the employ- ment of extension agents at the college, to be placed within each of the state’s counties. Agents would provide instruction on farming practices, based on research emanating from the college. Local farm bureaus acted as an organizing arm for the College Extension Service, where the agents often worked formally with local leaders to build a constituency of farmers, and encourage participation in Extension Service programs.4 This model worked particularly well in Utah. Until late during the nineteenth-century, the LDS church had encouraged cooperation and promoted self-sufficiency. The church greatly influenced how agriculture developed on Utah’s small irrigated farms, predisposing Mormon farmers to the type of cooperative organization that the Farm Bureau proposed. The Farm Bureau and the Extension Service were practically indistin- guishable during their infancy, an arrangement that benefitted both organizations. It enabled Extension personnel to reach a much wider audience, while allowing the Farm Bureau the opportunity to profit from increased membership. In 1916, the various county farm bureaus met in Salt Lake City and formed a state organization. Three years later, the Utah Farm Bureau Federation joined with other state organizations to become a member of the American Farm Bureau Federation.5 The Farm Bureau’s rise to become the nation’s largest farm organization within the span of a few years was directly tied to its relationship with the Extension Service. Concurrent with its national affiliation, the Utah Farm Bureau entered into commercial agreements with farmers, while it lobbied for legislation

2 Among other accomplishments, Thomas sponsored legislation which created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Department of Education and Public Welfare, and the National Science Foundation. See Paul Jennens, “Elbert D. Thomas” in Utah History Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 557-58 For more inclusive detail see Frank Herman Jonas Collection, Ms. 641, Box 80, folders 8 and 19; Box 81, folders 14-17; and Box 83, folder 7, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Hereafter referred to as Jonas Collection. 3 In 1932, Thomas carried all rural counties with the exception of Millard, Garfield, Piute and San Juan. Most importantly, he carried the major agricultural counties of Cache, Box Elder, Utah and Weber. See Secretary of State, Election Papers 1932-1936 (microfilm), Utah Reel 561, no. 12, Special Collections and Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. Hereafter SCA. 4 W. Preston Thomas, Agricultural Cooperation in Utah, Bulletin 392 (Logan: Utah State Agricultural College, Agricultural Experiment Station, 1956), 8-10. 5 Ibid.

339 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Utah Extension officials meeting in 1948.

favorable to its rural membership. The Farm Bureau had been actively campaigning for farm relief throughout the 1920s. In 1923, it was instrumental in securing passage of the Agricultural Co-operative Marketing Act, Utah’s counterpart to Congress’s Capper-Volstead Act.6 Together, these legislative initiatives allowed farmers to market their products collectively. The Co-operative Marketing Act also enabled farmers to form associa- tions that could collectively bargain with powerful corporations. Under the auspices of the Farm Bureau, its members in Cache County, for instance, organized the Sugar Beet Growers Association, and the Canning Crops Growers Association, to successfully negotiate a higher price for their produce with the Amalgamated Sugar Company and the California Packing Company.7 Such leverage naturally ran counter to corporate interests, which denounced cooperative principles as having no legitimacy in a free enterprise system. “When all other schemes to undermine the movement fail,” bemoaned Utah Farm Bureau Secretary Tracy Welling, “when the opposition can no longer appeal to prejudice, it argues…that the principle is unsound and…all cooperation will finally result in disaster.”8 Other Farm Bureau efforts to leverage the farm economy during the 1920s agricultural depression met with similar opposition from conservative business interests. When President Coolidge vetoed Congress’s attempt to raise domestic farm prices through the 1927 McNary-Haugen Bill, offering the farmer nothing more substantial than his condolences, Utah Farm Bureau Secretary M.S. Winder dismissed the President’s overture of sympathy. “Farmers don’t want sympathy!” he exclaimed. “All they ask is an intelligent understanding of the problems of agriculture and a square deal…”9 The Utah Farm Bureau, along with its parent affiliate, enthusiastically

6 Laws of Utah, (Kaysville: Island Printing Co., 1923), 10. 7 V. Allen Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go: A History of the Utah Farm Bureau Federation (Salt Lake City: The Federation, 1975), 20-23. 8 Ibid., 48. 9 Ibid., 37.

340 SEEDS OF CHANGE supported New Deal measures. Farm Bureau officials in Utah urged their county affiliates to support the New Deal’s 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), an “allotment plan for controlling surpluses by paying farmers to keep a percentage of their acres out of production.”10 Whenever, Utah Farm Bureau President, Ward Holbrook, reflected upon the penury of the farm sector, he confessed to feel- ing “very much as Lincoln… when he first beheld the auction block of human slavery.”11 Even after the Supreme Court ruled the AAA unconsti- tutional in 1936, the Farm Bureau continued to champion farm subsidies through a system “based on soil conservation,” and urged that the newly creat- ed Soil Conservation Service be used to This chart outlines the relation- implement this plan through an association ship of legislative, executive, 12 with the Extension Service. The national and administrative bodies for organization also participated in drafting a promoting and enhancing new Agricultural Adjustment Act in1938, one agriculture in Utah. which the courts ultimately found acceptable, and which continues to shape the nation’s farm policy to the present day.13 New Deal farm programs allowed the Farm Bureau to exploit its relationship with the Extension Service. As administration of the AAA, along with other New Deal farm programs, “depended almost completely on the Extension Service’s county agents…,” the Farm Bureau continued its relationship by using agents to help bolster its membership.14 Between 1933 and 1940, national membership swelled from 163,000 to more than 500,000.15 The Utah Farm Bureau experienced a similar expansion, as its membership more than tripled during the same time period.16

10 Lowell K. Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 17. 11 Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go, 47. 12 Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 18-19. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 17-18. 16 Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go, 43, 52.

341 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

It was only after New Deal agencies, such as the Soil Conservation Service and the Farm Security Administration, began asserting their independence from the Extension Service that the state and national organization withdrew its support for New Deal programs.17 The Farm Bureau became less devoted to Democratic policies after 1940, and turned increasingly acrimonious to these following World War II.18 Much of this reversal followed the election of Allan B. Kline as President of the national organization in 1947. Characterized as an “evangelist of free enterprise,” the dutiful Iowan re-inserted the sanctity of free-enterprise and free-market capitalism back into the national farm economy debate.19 As the relationship between the Farm Bureau and Democrats chilled following the war, the relationship between its chief rival, the National Farmers Union, and Democrats warmed. The Farm Bureau and Farmers Union diverged particularly over President Truman’s new farm plan, unveiled in 1949 by Secretary of Agriculture, Charles Brannan. In most respects, Brannan’s proposal to maintain and invigorate the national farm economy simply endeavored to continue the system of price supports and subsidies begun under Roosevelt, which the Farm Bureau had helped to effectuate. It included a combination of purchase agreements, production payments, direct-purchase of agricultural commodities, and government loans. Significantly, however, Brannan also proposed appropriating even larg- er sums to provide cash payments to farmers whose income fell below that of comparable professions.20 Republicans generally, and the Farm Bureau in particular, denounced this as a measure certain to render the farmer forever dependent on the largesse of Congress. Utah Farm Bureau Secretary, Frank G. Shelley, observed that such “a program would simply mean government handouts to farmers and the end of free-enterprise in agriculture.”21 Conversely, Farmers Union President, James Patton, asserted “the right of farm families…to be able to earn incomes equivalent to those earned by people in other walks of life.” Patton argued that “it is high time that we junk the idea that farm prosperity is based on price alone.…Parity means equality in all things—in incomes, in schools, in roads, in markets, in parks and playgrounds, in recreation.”22 The Farmers Union organized in 1902, and confined most of its early activity to the cotton-country of east Texas and adjoining states. Following

17 Christiana McFadyen Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 166-67. 18 Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 17. The deliberative, and often rancorous, back and forth between President Truman’s Secretary of Agriculture, Charles Brannan and National Farm Bureau President, Allan B. Kline revealed the growing ideological divide between the Farm Bureau and the USDA, as it did between conservatives and the Truman Administration, generally. See UFBF [Utah Farm Bureau Federation] News (Salt Lake City, Utah), February 1950, 1. 19 Ibid. 20 Virgil W. Dean, “Why Not the Brannan Plan?” Agricultural History 70 (Spring 1996): 271-72. 21 UFBF News, March 1950. 22 John A. Crampton, The National Farmers Union: Ideology of a Pressure Group (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1956), 20.

342 SEEDS OF CHANGE

World War I, the Farmers Union spread to Attendees at a farm bureau the upper South, Midwest, and Northeast, outdoor function. where a loose confederation of state organi- zations enjoyed great autonomy. The parent organization consolidated power only after the 1940 election of James Patton as its President.23 Patton helped mold the Farmers Union into a substantial, though fragile, national coalition, after having headed the state organization in Colorado during the 1930s. As part of the Colorado Union he had launched a mutual insurance company, which merged with the national organization in 1937. The availability of insurance attracted many new members, and because the company “was chartered…on a fraternal basis, Patton could use its salesmen to organize Farmers Union locals.”24 The Farmers Union established its first Utah local at Emery County in May 1948, where forty families affiliated, and immediately enrolled in the Farmers Union insurance program. In August, Patton visited the fledgling association, and by September, organizers had launched additional locals at Millard, Duchesne and Uintah counties.25 The sudden emergence of the Farmers Union in Utah, attributable in part to its insurance program, spurred the Farm Bureau into launching its own company in 1949.26 The competition between the two insurance companies would eventually extend to encompass additional commercial

23 Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 224. 24 Ibid. 25 Utah Farmer, May 25, 1948, 24; September 10, 1948, 21; and September 25, 1948, 22. 26 Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go, 62.

343 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY enterprises that supplied farmers with seed, feed, fertilizer, gasoline and automotive products. The rivalry for preeminence in the farm supply and insurance businesses further aggravated a growing ideological divide between the two organizations. The Farmers Union had long resented the cozy association between the Farm Bureau and the Extension Service. Even though in 1921 the USDA and Farm Bureau had agreed to circumscribe the activities of county extension agents by limiting them only to educational outreaches stipulated under the terms of the Smith-Lever Act, a 1948 USDA investigation revealed a number of states in which the affiliation between Farm Bureau and Extension led to inappropriate activities.27 Extension and Farm Bureau leaders in Utah had immediately established their own accords following the 1921 agreement, as Salt Lake County Agent, Vere L. Martineau, reported his faithful observance of these restrictions. Agents no longer participate “in commercial activities…,” Martineau declared, “nor in any projects…of a political nature.”28 While the USDA did not mention Utah specifically in its 1948 report, solidarity between the Farm Bureau and Extension Service was evident. The Extension Service lauded the Farm Bureau for its support and urged extension agents to reciprocate by giving “assistance to…the Farm Bureau in the counties where [it] was the predominant farm organization.”29 Of particular importance to the Extension Service was the Bureau’s intercession following Governor J. Bracken Lee’s election in 1948. Arguably one of the nation’s most conservative state executives, Lee’s election created a dilemma for the Farm Bureau. Following the war, it had abandoned its support of progressive policies, and joined ranks with conservatives who, like Lee, associated Democrats with high taxes and bloated budgets. Lee eagerly cut taxes and slashed budgets, and was never reluctant to sound the alarm of encroaching government. Lee believed, as did his supporters, that the most effective way to curb the expanse and expense of government was to “cut taxes,” and deliberately decrease state revenues so legislators would have “less money to spend.”30 When it came to curtailing the state’s budget, no agency escaped the governor’s sharp pencil, or his sometimes even

27 “Extension – Farm Bureau Relationships,” USDA, May 1948. Contained in the Walter K. Granger Collection, Ms. 5; II, Congressional Work; D, Studies; Box 2, Folder 11, Special Collections, Gerald R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah. See also Block, The Separation of the Farm Bureau and the Extension Service, 14. 28 These accords are discussed in Utah Extension News (Logan, Utah) 3 (December 1922), 2. Quote is from the Annual Report of the Salt Lake County Agent, 1922, 2, Series 19.2/1-1. SCA. 29 Meeting of the Utah County Agents Association held January 10, 1950, Series 19.1/2-1:33. SCA 30 Dennis L. Lythgoe, Let ‘em Holler: A Political Biography of J. Bracken Lee, (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1982), 73. Article XIII, section 9 of the State Constitution prohibited so-called deficit spending, and mandated that state expenditure conform to state revenues. Therefore, cuts to the state’s rev- enue would necessarily also require curtailment of state government and services, ostensibly reducing the size of government. See Constitution of the State of Utah as amended (Salt Lake City: Office of the Secretary of State, 1949), 20. For a discussion of Article XIII, see Jean Bickmore White, The Utah State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1998), 157.

344 SEEDS OF CHANGE sharper tongue. “Let ‘em holler!” Lee retorted, as many did when he trimmed budgets by as much as 40 percent.31 Lee assured newly appointed Utah State Agricultural College President, Louis L. Madsen, that he would have his support if he asked “only for the real necessities.”32 Unseasoned to the usually combative process of preparing the state’s budget, the artless young president obliged and declared that the college shared the governor’s “spirit of econo- my.” Madsen nevertheless advised Lee that his bare-bone budget would necessitate a cut “in ser- vices,” and while he accept- ed these as “emergency measures,” he expect- A summary of activities and ed the governor to restore the “deficien- objectives of the Summit County 33 cies…as soon as economically feasible.” The Farm Bureau. skeptical governor rewarded Madsen’s pledge of economy by reducing funds to the College’s Extension Service by an additional 33 percent.34 The Farm Bureau had generally approved of the Republican Party’s slogan to vote “Republican straight for good government in ’48.”35 Notwithstanding this newly formed alliance with conservatives, the Farm Bureau commenced lobbying the state legislature to restore the Extension Service budget, arguing that cuts to its programs for the control of soil erosion, bovine tuberculosis, and Bang’s disease, would impose a hardship on farmers, and create a significant health risk.36 While the Farm Bureau successfully persuaded the legislature, Lee

31 Lythgoe, Let ‘em Holler, 54-55. The statement comes from the title of Lythgoe’s book. 32 Papers of Louis L. Madsen, series 3.2/8-1, box 46, folder 2, SCA. 33 Ibid. 34 Lythgoe, Let ‘em Holler, 125. The amount of the budget reduction is found in the “Annual Report of the Extension Director, 1953,” Series 19.17/1. SCA. 35 Utah Farmer, October 10, 1948, 13. 36 Lythgoe, Let ‘em Holler, 56.

345 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

The Bountiful Co-op Gas Station. remained unconvinced, and promptly vetoed the revised appropriations bill. The Farm Bureau persisted and after “considerable jockeying back and forth between the governor, both houses of the legislature and the joint appropriations committee…,” secured additional funds, although still nearly 14 per cent below what President Madsen had requested.37 The Utah Farm Bureau took particular umbrage when Utah Congressman Walter K. Granger introduced his so-called Divorce Bill in 1950. This bill, which Granger reportedly submitted on behalf of Farmers Union organizers in Utah, would have separated state farm bureaus from the Extension Service, and thus deprived farm bureaus of their important partner.38 Utah Farm Bureau President, John H. Schenk, reiterated his unwavering compliance with the 1921 guidelines when he appeared at the 1950 congressional hearings on Granger’s divorce bill. He intimated that passage of Granger’s bill would have little effect on Utah. Although Schenk speculated that it may prohibit Utah Extension workers from enjoying the customary slice of cake and glass of lemonade with local community members at the conclusion of an Extension program, he otherwise labored to find any deleterious consequences for the state.39

37 Annual Report of the Extension Director, 1953. Series 19.17/1, SCA. 38 H.R. 3222, 81st Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record, Vol. 11290, and Digest of Public General Bills With Index No. 4, 80th Congress; 1st Session (Washington, D.C., 1949), 298. William J. Block, “The Separation of the Farm Bureau and the Extension Service: Political Issue in a Federal System,” Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, vol. 47 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960): 132. In 1950, during the 2nd Session of the 81st Congress, Granger introduced a substitute bill (H.R. 8676), which he thought might convince some opponents to support the measure. It did not. See UFBF News, July 1950.

346 SEEDS OF CHANGE

Beyond inhibiting the social activities of county agents, Granger’s bill, according to the commonly held view expressed by Schenk, assured “complete federal control” of the Extension Service.40 Witnesses called to oppose Granger’s bill repeatedly denounced it as an encroachment of the federal government, one witness even describing it “as un-American as the tenets of Lenin.…”41 In the political climate of the early 1950s, such comparisons to the Soviet Union, however absurd, were enough to cause cowering legislators to recoil from even the most salutary of proposed initiatives. Much as would befall the Brannan Plan two years later, the divorce bill died in committee, with all Republicans and eight Democrats voting to table its reporting.42 Granger’s purported attempt to restrain the nation’s largest and most influential farm organization had grave consequences for Utah Democrats in the 1950 elections. The Farm Bureau singled Granger out as the “Number One enemy of a free, independent American agriculture.”43 Its contempt for Granger extended effortlessly to include fellow Democrat, Senator Elbert Thomas, especially after he imprudently acknowledged to a crowd of farmers in Cache County that he usually deferred to Granger on agricultural matters.44 While political advertisements in Utah frequently lampooned Democratic candidates Elbert Thomas, Reva Beck Bosone, and Walter Granger as communist sympathizers, the Republican National Committee targeted Thomas specifically for defeat in the election of 1950.45 Hoping to “create doubt and fear in the mind of the voter…,” it enlisted the services of veteran political propagandist, Walter Quigley, to pen a thin but devastat-

39 See, UFBF News, June 1950. 40 Ibid. 41 Block, The Separation of the Farm Bureau and the Extension Service, 168. 42 Ibid., 169. 43 UFBF News, November 1950. 44 Ibid., October 1950. 45 Political advertisements are discussed in Janet Burton Seegmiller, “Walter K. Granger: A Friend to Labor, Industry, and the Unfortunate and Aged,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Fall 1999), 343. Liberal, tolerant, and intellectual, Thomas presented a near perfect target for red-baiters. In 1906, he received an AB degree from the University of Utah, where he met and married his wife, Edna Harker. One year following his graduation, the couple served for five years in the LDS Church’s recently estab- lished Japanese Mission. They were important early figures in facilitating the spread of Mormonism throughout Asia. Elbert, particularly, immersed himself in Japanese culture and custom, learning to speak the language, fluently. Following their mission, the Thomases continued to travel extensively throughout Asia before returning to Salt Lake City, where Elbert resumed teaching courses in Latin and Greek at the university. In 1922, he received a two-year fellowship to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a doctoral dissertation, “Chinese Political Thought.” After completing his studies, Thomas returned to the University of Utah. According to one biographer, Thomas’s scholarship consis- tently expressed a “concern for social improvement.” Progressive Democrats, like Thomas, “championed world order, humanitarian causes, and labor…,” and believed in the government’s capacity to improve people’s lives. See Patricia F. Cowley and Parker M. Nielson, Thunder Over Zion: The Life of Chief Judge Willis W. Ritter (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), 165. See also Jennens, Elbert Thomas, and Justin H. Libby, “Senators King and Thomas and the Coming War with Japan,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (Fall 1974): 376-80. In depth information on Thomas’s life and career is found in the Jonas Collection, Boxes 78-88.

347 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY GERALD R. SHERRATT LIBRARY, SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY

Representative Walter Granger ing invective remarkable for its disregard for 46 examining a stand of crested the truth. The United States Senate News, wheatgrass near Cedar City. Utah Edition, succeeded in consistently mis- representing Thomas’s positions on all issues of public policy. Furthermore, Quigley ornamented this “yellow rag” with cartoons depicting Thomas as a puppet of organized labor, a crony of socialists, and a spokesman for the American Communist Party. The newspaper circulated to every Utah voter with an address or phone number. More than two hundred thousand copies were mailed out, only days before the election.47 The effective smear campaign enabled Wallace F. Bennett to handily defeat Thomas. Thomas may have been conditioned to endure the slings and arrows of his political opponents, but not those of his church, to which he had devoted his life. Only days before the 1950 election, the LDS church-owned newspaper, Deseret News, prominently displayed a picture of American Farm Bureau President, Allan B. Kline, and President of the LDS Church Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, David O. McKay, which conveyed the “unmistakable message that the Mormon Church approved of Kline, the Farm Bureau, and Republicans.”48 Furthermore, the LDS Church Law Observance and Enforcement Committee circulated a letter just prior to the election that urged members to “vote on the basis of principle… and

46 The United States Senate News, Utah Edition, is found in the Jonas Collection, box 107, folder 23. Quigley had a long track record of “political dynamiting,” having worked for both national parties, and producing over 150 propaganda pieces. See Frank H. Jonas, “Political Dynamiting,” Proceedings, Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, vol. 33 (1955-56): 142-46. See also Frank H. Jonas, “The Art of Political Dynamiting,” Western Political Quarterly 10 (June 1957): 374-91. Jonas’s extensive research on Quigley can be found in the Jonas Collection, boxes 105-110. 47 Jonas, “Political Dynamiting,” 135-47. 48 Cowley and Nielson, Thunder Over Zion, 166. Photograph was published in the Deseret News, November 3, 1950.

348 SEEDS OF CHANGE to seek the counsel of their Bishop if they wished further advice as to the candidates.” Accompanying the letter was a list of preferred candidates that conspicuously omitted Thomas’s name.49 LDS church leaders received President Truman’s Fair Deal policies as unfavorably as they had Roosevelt’s New Deal. Yet, despite their opposition, the New Deal, along with other approaches at reordering society, remained popular among church members.50 During much of its early history the church had endorsed unconventional approaches. Until early in the twenti- eth century, the co-op store was at the ubiquitous center of most Mormon communities. Church leaders also encouraged some communities to adopt church founder Joseph Smith Jr.’s United Order, a societal arrangement founded on social justice and economic principles heretical to free market capitalism.51 Not until statehood during the 1890s, did the church relinquish its former emphasis on these alternative social and economic models. While the church’s leadership became increasingly conservative as the twentieth-century progressed, the ideal of cooperation remained deeply entrenched within Utah’s farming communities. Some church members perceived the 1930s economic depression as an opportunity to renew this cooperative spirit and campaigned to reinstitute the United Order. Dean R. Brimhall, head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for Utah, observed how “pressure groups” within the church had frequently beseeched LDS church leaders to reprise the United Order. Brimhall maintained that the state legislature’s appropriation of forty thousand dollars to “establish a self-help cooperative board [was] in response to such pressure.”52 Utah became the first state to legislatively sanction the growing national self-help movement, which encouraged mutual aid and cooperation between consumers and producers. As Brimhall rightly asserted, Utah’s legislation grew directly from the earlier efforts of Benjamin B. Stringham, who in 1931 formed the Natural Development Association (NDA). Inspired by historic Mormon alternatives to capitalism, the NDA promoted a barter system, and issued scrip as a means of exchange. It proscribed the use of

49 See, Frank H. Jonas, “The Mormon Church and Political Dynamiting in the 1950 Election in Utah,” Proceedings, Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 40 part 1 (1963): 94-110. 50 In 1936, when the LDS Church’s First Presidency ventured to sway church members from their Democratic allegiance by accusing Franklin Roosevelt of “promoting unconstitutional laws and advocat- ing Communism,” public out-cry over the Deseret News editorial was deafening. See D. Michael Quinn, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 81. See also Brian Q. Cannon, “Mormons and the New Deal: The 1936 Presidential Election in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Winter 1999): 13-16. 51 The Law of Consecration and Stewardship, or the United Order, was established as part of historic Mormonism through a revelation that Joseph Smith claimed to have received. See Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Section 82, 15-19. For a social and economic analysis of the United Order see Gordon Eric Wagner, “Consecration and Stewardship a Socially Efficient System of Justice,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1977). 52 Papers of Dean R. Brimhall, Mss. 114, Box 29, folder 1, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

349 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY money, adopting Stringham’s belief that where “there is no money…there will be no enticing, inducing and deceiving…”53 Despite Stringham’s aversion to money, he had a talent for generating it. The NDA’s business volume skyrocketed from a mere fifty-seven dollars in January 1932 to more than seventy-two thousand dollars by October. By 1933, the organization could boast of having nineteen trading partners in six states, and a member- ship of thirty thousand.54 The LDS Church First Presidency responded to the movement’s meteoric rise by strongly condemning it as “revolutionary and socialistic in character…” They admonished “members…not to identify themselves with it…”55 The NDA’s success, however, soon overwhelmed its ability to keep adequate records, as inflation rendered the repeated issue of scrip practically worthless. Whether caused by poor business practices or church censure, the NDA ceased to exist by July 1934.56 Still, the NDA’s popularity throughout depression-era Utah pointed to an acute need for a more stable organization that could better articulate cooperative principles, and act as a clearinghouse for community projects. In an effort, perhaps, to circumvent the inevitable opposition that the LDS church would bring to bear, Stringham lobbied for state legislation to create the Self-Help Cooperative Board.57 Established in 1935, the Self-Help Cooperative Board began immediately to use its forty thousand dollar state appropriation, plus matching federal funds, to make no-interest loans to qualified organizations consisting of “unemployed and low income people.”58 Projects included farm and garden cooperatives, canneries, lumber mills, and coal mines. The board hoped to foster self sufficiency among project participants where produce “grown on the farms and gardens and canned at the canneries could be exchanged for lumber from the saw mills and coal from the mines.”59 Unlike the NDA, however, the Board realized little success. Over half of the thirty-seven funded cooperatives disbanded during the first year. Hoping to sustain those projects that remained solvent, the Board created the Utah Cooperative Association (UCA) in 1936 to centralize the exchange and distribution of commodities between the remaining co- operatives, and to act as their purchasing and selling agent. The UCA affili-

53 Benjamin B. Stringham, Natural Government (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1931), 92. 54 Farrell B. Darley, “Self Help and Consumer Co-operative Developments in Utah” (Master’s Thesis, Utah State Agricultural College, 1939), 7. 55 Randal M. Rathjen, “Evolution and Development of the Mormon Welfare Farms,” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1969), 17. See also Richard O. Cowan, The Church in the Twentieth Century, (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1985), 136. 56 Darley, Self Help and Consumer Co-operative Developments in Utah, 7. 57 Summit County Representative and President of the Utah Federation of Labor, Paul Peterson, shep- herded the legislation through to its passage on March 25, 1935. Ibid. See also Joseph A. Geddes, “I Remember the Utah Self Help Cooperative Board,” Papers of Joseph A. Geddes, Ms. 75, box 3, folder 4, SCA. Hereafter Geddes. 58 Darley, Self Help, 11. 59 Ibid., 14.

350 SEEDS OF CHANGE ated with the Con- sumer’s Co-operative Association, a regional distribution center based in Kansas City, Missouri, to make wholesale purchases, as well as to broaden the market for local products.60 This was the second attempt by the Con- sumer’s Co-operative Association to establish itself in Utah. In 1931, it had partnered with The West Millard Co-op Gas the Farm Bureau to establish a network of Station. automotive service stations. The Great Depression, however, simply overwhelmed the service station venture. In 1936, the Consumer’s Co-operative Association reacquired the service sta- tions from the Farm Bureau and sold them to the UCA.61 Until the end of World War II, the relationship between the Farm Bureau and the UCA remained cordial. The UCA continued to provide Farm Bureau members with discounts on oil and gas after they assumed ownership of the Bureau’s service stations. In fact, farmers seemed to have no preference whether they obtained their supplies through a cooperative affiliated with the UCA, or one affiliated with the Farm Bureau. Nevertheless, competition between the UCA service stations and the Utah Poultry and Farmers Cooperative, the Farm Bureau’s flagship coopera- tive, which by 1948 had grown to become the state’s largest wholesale cooperative, rendered both enterprises less profitable.62 After reviewing these competing interests, the USDA recommended joining the two organizations and in 1953 dispatched cooperative expert, Joseph G. Knapp, to effect the merger.63 Post-war politics, however, had led to hostile relations between the UCA and the Farm Bureau, which were further exacerbated by the UCA’s relationship with the bureau’s rival, the National Farmers Union.

60 Ibid., 70. 61 Ibid. 62 Founded initially as the Central Utah Poultry Exchange in 1923, the Utah Poultry and Farmers Co- operative now operates as the Intermountain Farmers Association. In 1969, Farm Bureau discontinued the Utah Agricultural Marketing Association, which had served to centralize its cooperative enterprises since 1923, and established the Farm Bureau Service Company as an incorporated business model. See Olsen, As Farmers Forward Go, 99-100. 63 J. Warren Mather, Coordination of Cooperative Supply Purchasing Activities in Utah, USDA Farm Credit Administration special report, no. 161 (July 1946), 51-52. Papers of the Utah Cooperative Association, Ms. 129, box 3, folder 3, SCA. See also Notes Covering Ben Lomond Hotel Conference of Utah Farm Cooperative Leaders, August 31, 1953, Geddes, box 3, folder 1, SCA.

351 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

In 1950, UCA acquired the Kelly Seed Company from Paul Kelly, who had led the 1948 effort to organize the first Farmers Union local in Emery County. In October 1950, UCA discontinued its contract to cooperatively supply oil, gas, and automotive products to Farm Bureau members. In 1952, the UCA officially affiliated with the Farmers Union, when the latter agreed to invest more than one-hundred thousand dollars with the association.64 The Utah Poultry and Farmers Co-operative and the UCA were both amenable to the merger then being orchestrated by the USDA, but UCA ties to the Farmers Union proved too much for the conservative Farm Bureau to accommodate. The Bureau simply could not tolerate “the entanglement that would grow out of UCA affiliation with [Farmer’s Union],” insisted President John Schenk.65 Secretary Frank Shelley ruefully recorded how the Farmers Union “has come into Utah and advocates policies and ideologies which we cannot agree with. We could never bring ourselves to agree that earnings from a business we support should go to advance such programs.”66 Ideological differences became intractable after the Farm Bureau published its contention that the Farmers Union was a “Communist- dominated” organization. The Utah Farm Bureau Board of Directors met in October 1950, and endorsed a “firm stand on the principles and issues as presented by the American Farm Bureau Federation….Vigorous opposi- tion will be taken towards those who have opposed these principles,” the Farm Board stated. “This action applies to candidates for National, State and County Offices.” The board pointed out how “Senator Thomas and Representative Granger had been in opposition to Farm Bureau in every instance where their department of Congress was involved.…” The board singled out Granger for exhibiting “his evident animosity toward farm organizations (except the Communist dominated Farmers Union).”67 In November 1950, the National Farmers Union responded by filing a libel suit in the United States District Court for Utah, claiming that the Farm Bureau had “in a document accompanying a letter addressed to various…members…published of and concerning…that the Farmers Union was Communist dominated and a Communist organization.” The Farmers Union sought judgment for the “false and defamatory publication,” which it claimed had “injured… their reputation and… their business.…”68 District Court Judge Willis W. Ritter presided. Prior to his judgeship,

64 See UFBF News, June 1950, and July 1952. The UCA remained a vibrant partner within the state’s rural communities until absorbed in 1976 by CENEX, a mid-western conglomerate once affiliated with the National Farmers Union. See Geddes, “I Remember the Utah Self Help Cooperative Board.” 65 “Notes Covering Ben Lomond Hotel Conference of Utah Farm Cooperative Leaders,” August 31, 1953. 66 Ibid. 67 National Farmers Union Service Corporation v. Utah State Farm Bureau Federation, defendants. United States District Court of Utah, Central Division, Civil no. 1923, September 17, 1951. Narrative statement of a portion of the transcript of testimony, 2-3.

352 SEEDS OF CHANGE

Ritter had championed the New Deal and cam- paigned for Utah Democrats. He, along with Warwick (Rick) C. Lamoreaux, had effectu- ated Senator Thomas’s nomination in 1932.69 Ritter also worked for Thomas’s reelection in 1938, and again in 1944. Upon the retire- ment of Judge Tillman Johnson in 1949, Thomas rewarded Ritter by nominating him The Uintah Farmers Co-op in 70 for this vacated judgeship. Vernal. Between September 1949 and June 1950, Ritter endured several long, contentious Senate confirmation hearings, which scrutinized his politics, national loyalty, and personal conduct. Utah’s junior Senator Arthur V. Watkins led the charge against him, producing wit- nesses who challenged Ritter’s Americanism and devotion to the Constitution.71 One can only imagine Ritter’s delight as he looked down from his judge’s bench to find defendants representative of his political enemies, who now were captives in his court. He could have had no more favorable a forum from which to even old scores, such as the “communist” and “fellow traveler” charges leveled against him at his confirmation hearings, as well as those that destroyed his friend, Elbert Thomas, during the 1950 campaign.72 Adding further intrigue to the proceedings, Rick Lamoreaux appeared as the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Ritter’s amicable relations with Lamoreaux, his enduring friendship with Thomas, and his activism on behalf of the Democratic Party must certainly have been known to the defense team. These veteran litigators, A.H. Nebeker and C.N. Ottosen, reportedly advised their client to settle out of court, and although the Utah Farm Bureau was willing to acquiesce, “its parent organization was not.” The national organization “encouraged its Utah affiliate to seek total

68 National Farmers Union Service Corporation v. Utah State Farm Bureau Federation, defendants. United States District Court of Utah, Central Division, Civil no. 1923, Transcript of the Record, Complaint, November 27, 1950, 22-23. Hereafter referred to as Farmers Union v. Farm Bureau (record). 69 Cowley and Nielson, Thunder Over Zion, 41-46. 70 Ibid., 109. 71 Ibid., 140-60. 72 Ibid., 169. See also Jonas, Political Dynamiting, 146.

353 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY victory,” hoping to prove in a legal forum that its ideological rival and commercial competitor did indeed advocate communism.73 The trial revealed the spuriousness of the communist allegations directed against the Farmers Union. Robert McManus, a journalist who testified on behalf of the defense, and who frequently served as consultant to the American Farm Bureau, admitted that he had been the source of the Utah Farm Bureau’s offending phrase.74 Characterized by one writer as the “master of guilt by association,” McManus’s acknowledgment clearly reinforced the Farmers Union’s suspicion that the American Farm Bureau and the Republican Party had been the real perpetrators of attack.75 The jury awarded the Farmers Union a $25,000 judgment, nearly $250,000 by today’s standards. Although it remained the dominant farm organization in Utah, the Farm Bureau diminished in stature as a result of its defamatory campaign against the Farmers Union, which was too much for many Utah farmers to bear.76 By following the lead of its national affiliate the Utah Farm Bureau discovered that it can be costly to practice the politics of paranoia. The casualties from such practices were, of course, littered widely across the 1950s political landscape. The outcome of this political carnage in Utah, however, appears to have been a general moderation back to the political center. For the next two decades, the state legislature remained almost evenly divided between the two national parties, as Utah voters supported moderate policies of elected officials who sought consensus, and concentrated on developing the state’s resources, encouraging economic growth, and supporting the state’s young population by providing opportunity through education. Furthermore, as funds for reclamation projects, roads, and defense facilities poured into the state, Utah’s congres- sional delegates, regardless of party affiliation, worked harmoniously to maintain this flow of federal dollars and to assure the continued prosperity of farm and factory. By 1971, the federal government was contributing nearly 35 percent of the state’s general revenue, more than ten times the amount it contributed in 1951.77 Remnants of the brash conservatism that characterized the immediate post-war period still persisted. Governor J. Bracken Lee’s unrepentant support of Senator Joseph McCarthy during his censure by the U.S. Senate in 1954, coupled with his inflammatory criticism of President Eisenhower for failing to reverse the Democratic policies of his predecessors, likely cost

73 Bruce E. Field, Harvest of Dissent: The National Farmers Union and the Early Cold War, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 132. 74 Farmers Union v. Farm Bureau (record), minute entry, May 18, 1951, 28. The phrase “communist dom- inated organization” was used by U. S. Senator, Styles Bridges (R-NH), a past secretary with the New Hampshire Farm Bureau, in a two hour harangue delivered on the floor of the Senate. See Field, Harvest of Dissent, 90. 75 Field, Harvest of Dissent, 70-72, 134. 76 Crampton, The National Farmers Union: Ideology of a Pressure Group, 161. 77 Statistical Abstract of Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1973), 140-41.

354 SEEDS OF CHANGE him a third term as governor in 1956.78 Not even Eisen- hower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, Jr., a devoted anti-statist, dared try to reverse entrenched national farm policies and wean American farmers from the federal teat. Benson command- ed enormous respect in Utah, where he served concurrently as an apostle in the LDS church. In 1954, he issued The Bunkerʼs Feed Center Co-op, an executive order that officially separated the Orem, Utah. Extension Service from state farm bureaus, essentially implementing Representative Granger’s failed 1950 divorce bill with a single stroke-of-the-pen.79 Neither locally nor nationally did the Farm Bureau contest Benson’s display of federal authority, although both had accused his predecessor, Charles Brannan, of orchestrating a federal coup d’etat when he had supported Granger’s legislation.80 Upon concluding his service to the Eisenhower Administration, an unbridled Benson affiliated with other ultra-conservatives, including retired FBI agent, author, and embattled Salt Lake City Police Chief, W. Cleon Skousen, who proclaimed in print what Benson had pronounced from the pulpit: that the communist conspiracy was real, that it posed grave dangers, and that it must be extirpated. Although neither acknowledged actual membership in the organization, both Benson and Skousen openly endorsed, supported, and defended the John Birch Society, a right-wing, anti-communist, fringe organization founded in 1958.81 Except to a resolute, but shrinking, coterie of like-minded conservatives, Benson’s political pronouncements generally played poorly throughout

78 Lythgoe, Let ‘em Holler, 163-66, 203-207. 79 Block, The Separation of the Farm Bureau and the Extension Service, 214-17. 80 UFBF News, June 1950. Walter K. Granger retired from politics, after having run unsuccessfully against Senator Watkins in 1952, and subsequently having failed to regain his congressional seat in 1954. See Seegmiller,” Walter K. Granger,” 344-46. 81 In 1963, Utah State University professors analyzed a speech given by Benson at the Logan LDS Tabernacle. They concluded that “about one-third of the speech came from the John Birch Blue Book without any reference to the source.” Published in 1959, the Blue Book consisted of a long speech given by John Birch Society founder, Robert Welch. See Papers of Clyde Stewart, Record Group 17.11:45, Box 1, folder 5, SCA. For additional insight see D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy, Extensions of Power, (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), 66-115. The society’s methods and beliefs during the 1960s are discussed in Max P. Peterson, ”The Ideology of the John Birch Society,” (Master’s Thesis, Utah State University, 1966). In 1963, the LDS church renounced the John Birch Society, particularly the effort by

355 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Utah. Furthermore, Utah farmers had grown Members of the Utah Farmers weary of J. Bracken Lee’s obstinate penny- Union board a bus for a trip to pinching. Washington, D.C. As governor, he had twice defied the State Legislature, and again locked-horns with the Farm Bureau, when he vetoed bills to rebate taxes for gasoline used in tractors and other off-highway farm vehicles.82 The governor’s actions so incensed the Farm Bureau that it even offered a tacit endorsement to one of Lee’s Democratic challengers during the 1952 Utah Democratic primary election.83 Lee had also gutted the Utah Water and Power Board’s construction fund, which farmers relied upon for improving irrigation systems, and for building storage reservoirs.84 The fund would not be fully restored until George D. Clyde replaced Lee as governor in 1956. While the Farm Bureau enthusiastically supported Clyde’s actions, he disappointed conservatives like J. Bracken Lee who opposed any measure that he construed as an entitlement. The “price of freedom is the same to you as it is to everyone

some of the society’s members and supporters to align the church with its views. See Salt Lake Tribune, March 21, 1963, cited in Peterson,” The Ideology of the John Birch Society,” 121. Utah’s congressional del- egation also repudiated the society. Skousen’s career as Salt Lake City Police Chief is discussed in Dennis L. Lythgoe, “Political Feud in Salt Lake City: J. Bracken Lee and the Firing of W. Cleon Skousen,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42 (Fall 1974): 316-43. 82 UFBF News, May 1954. See also Frank H. Jonas, “The 1956 Election in Utah,” Western Political Quarterly 10 (March 1957): 157. 83 UFBF News, August 1952. 84 State of Utah, Second Biennial Report of the Utah Water and Power Board to the Governor of Utah, for the period of July 1, 1948 to June 30, 1950, 1. See successive reports for information on subse- quent appropriations.

356 SEEDS OF CHANGE else,” Lee disdainfully informed his farm constituency, “a little hardship when times are adverse.”85 The number of farms in Utah declined precipitously from 16,500 in 1965 to 12,000 a decade later.86 Furthermore, legislative reapportionment, which the federal judiciary mandated in 1963, effectively eliminated the political advantage that rural counties had enjoyed.87 Political power shifted decidedly to the more populous counties along the Wasatch Front. Federal legislation enacted during the 1970s to address environmental concerns, limit grazing, and provide greater access to public lands, further contributed to a sense of powerlessness in Utah’s hinterland. The widening gulf between progressives, who favored this new federal authority, and conservatives, who did not, created tensions throughout the interior West, and propelled the Utah Farm Bureau back to the forefront of state politics. Perhaps it is inevitable that politics periodically erupt in populist furor. Utah’s brief period of political equanimity abruptly ended during the 1970s. The calculated actions and reactions from the ideological extremes on both sides of the political center rekindled the embers of intolerance that had ravaged the political landscape during the post-war period. In 1953, at the apex of their bickering, UCA Board member, Joseph A. Geddes, had encouraged greater cooperation between his organization and the Farm Bureau. Citing historical examples ranging from the Puritans through the Mormon pioneers, Geddes implored both parties to “become more tolerant,” to declare how “differences in ideology overemphasized are a menace to cooperation. Only increased tolerance…,” he implored, “can enable us to live in peace and work in peace.”88 It was as important then as it is now to heed Geddes’s call for a civil political discourse.

85 Lythgoe, Let ‘em Holler, 59. 86 Utah Agricultural Statistics, (Salt Lake City: Utah Department of Agriculture, 1980), 8. 87 Until 1954, the Utah Constitution granted each county at least one House seat. Senate districts like- wise remained unchanged from the original 1895 Constitution, which organized Utah into twelve dis- tricts consisting of eighteen senators. This situation obviously empowered rural counties, and made the state legislature disproportionately favorable towards agriculture. The UFBF had long been committed to maintaining this imbalance, and even after the legislature passed a reapportionment bill in 1954 to have the Senate apportioned by population, lobbied successfully to maintain the imbalance in the House. See UFBF News, May 1954. Not until 1964 did the courts strike down the constitutional requirement for each coun- ty to have one representative. See White, The Utah State Constitution: A Reference Guide, 122. 88 Notes Covering Ben Lomond Hotel Conference of Utah Farm Cooperative Leaders, August 31, 1953.

357 SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1943 Victory Theater Fire Ignites Salt Lake City Firestorm

By STEVE LUTZ

isasters of all sorts change people, communities, and nations. In recent memory, the date of 9/11/2001 has changed America Dforever, but smaller disasters have had their own long- and short-term effects. This is the story of one of them. The 1943 Victory Theater fire in Salt Lake City killed three firefighters and set off a chain reaction that changed the lives of many people. The fire vastly changed the Salt Lake City Fire Department and significantly affected the city government and the attitudes of citizens towards it. No other incident in the history of the Salt Lake City Fire Department caused as much upheaval and discontent as the Victory Theater fire. No other structural fire incident in Utah resulted in more firefighter deaths. No other firefighter fatality incident received more public interest or press attention or became such a hot political topic in Salt Lake City Hall.1 The sheer number of news articles on the Victory Theater fire, the publicity generated, and its aftermath indicate the disaster was among the most sig- nificant events in Salt Lake City history. Salt Lake Cityʼs 300 South Utah’s capital city has been spared the type between State and Main Streets of conflagrations that have ravaged huge after the Victory Theater Fire on swathes of other major cities with narrow May 19, 1943.

Steve Lutz is the Assistant Director of the Utah Fire & Rescue Academy at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

1 James Berry, Captain, SLC Fire Department, retired, conversation with author, June 2006

358 VICTORY THEATER FIRE streets such as Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Reasons may include Brigham Young’s design of wide streets that also act as effective firebreaks. A good water system, relatively new buildings, fire and building codes that have evolved over time and a proficient fire department are also likely to have been important factors in preventing or limiting large Salt Lake City fires.2 But none of those factors stopped the disaster on the day the Victory Theater burned. Located at 48 East 300 South, the Victory Theater was originally known as the Colonial Theater. It then became the Pantages, changed to the Casino, then Loew’s State Theater before being finally called the Victory Theater in 1924. The famed theater was the venue for stage shows and plays for several years before equipment was installed to show silent films. Twenty-five years to the day, before fire fighter Harry Christenson was laid to rest,after dying in the tragic theater fire, the theater showed the first “talking picture show” in Utah, which starred Al Jolson in “The Singing Fool.”3 The Victory, built in 1908, was typical for its time when effective building or safety codes were lacking in Salt Lake City. The theater was constructed of ordinary masonry walls and wooden floors. It included upper and lower balconies, a stage with a brick proscenium, and a small basement below the stage. The theater’s auditorium was 130 feet deep by 80 feet wide. To accommodate the showing of motion picture films, a projection booth with a concrete floor containing a great deal of heavy projection and sound equipment was later added to the lower balcony. This extra weight became a major problem during the fire.4 At the north end of the auditorium a thirty-foot deep lower balcony extended over the ground level seating area. A steel I-beam and steel posts supported the front of the balcony but the rear of the balcony and the heavy projection room were only supported by wooden joists set into pockets in the north brick wall that separated the theater from the other occupancies. The main floor seating was supported by a wooden structure resting directly on the ground with a tiny crawl space containing wiring and ductwork. Patrons entered through a large two-story atrium on the north that opened onto the south side of Third South. The auditorium itself sat behind other businesses that directly fronted Third South. These included

2 Salt Lake City has experienced some disastrous fires in both economic and human terms. A huge downtown fire and explosion in 1883 destroyed most of the block just south of Temple Square housing half a dozen businesses and precipitated the establishment of a paid fire department, replacing the volun- teer force that had served the city for thirty years. The 1980 Avalon Apartments fire claimed the lives of twelve Vietnamese refugees making it the worst fatality fire in state history and spurring the strengthening of fire codes in the city again. 3 “The Singing Fool Still Scoring at Victory Theatre,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 8, 1928. Press cover- age of fires at the time of the Victory fire, always referred to “firemen”. After women began joining fire departments after World War II, the term firemen was gradually replaced by firefighters, a gender neutral term now widely accepted. 4 “Stevens Clears S.L. Fire Officials,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 17, 1943, 1.

359 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Speicher’s Economy Shoes, Hughes Women’s Clothes Store, Reeds Riteway Store, Edwards Women’s Clothes, the St. George Hotel and the Ratskeller Restaurant. There was a narrow alley on the east side between the theater and the Keith O’Brien Company and on the west the theater abutted the Paris Millinery Company. There was a short alley in the rear where fire exits with metal stairs led from the auditorium.5 At the time of the fire, the theater had been closed for two weeks for remodeling.6 On the morning of May 19, 1943, Bert Berch, the first work- er on the remodeling crew, showed up just before 8:00 a.m., unlocked the front doors and made his way through the darkened theater to the stage where he unlocked the stage exits so that the rest of the crew could enter. He climbed up to the fly loft, the area into which the curtain and stage backdrops were hoisted, and began his work. Berch was the first to notice the smell of burning rubber. Although he did not see any smoke or fire from the cockloft, he made his way down to the auditorium floor where he saw several seats burning about sixteen rows from the front of the auditorium. He pulled the alarm box near the stage, grabbed a fire hose line from one of the wet standpipes and tried to extin- guish the fire in the seats. The Salt Lake City Fire Department headquarters station received the alarm at 8:24 a.m.7 The first alarm fire companies to arrive at the theater were Engine 1, Ladder 1, known as Big Dan, Engine 2, and a rescue car. Acting Battalion Chief Don White quickly saw the flames in the seating area and directed workmen to play a stream from a second standpipe line onto the area.8 When the fire was not extinguished immediately, White assumed that something was feeding the flames from below. The first-in crew of Engine 1, under the supervision of Lt. Melvin Hatch, laid both fire hose and air lines to supply the breathing air masks worn by the firefighters into the structure to knock down the fire in the seating area. Ed Phillips and Theron Johnson used the masks as they played a hose stream onto the seating area with Lt. Hatch.9

5 George Short, Benjamin Roberts and Owen Reichman, “Report to the Salt Lake City Commission on The Victory Theater Fire” Salt Lake City Corporation, August 11, 1943, reprinted in Deseret News, August 12-17, 1943. The authors of the report were the members of the Citizens Investigation Committee appointed by the City Commission. 6 “Victory Theatre Slates Reopening,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 11, 1942. It had only been six months since a small fire in a neighboring shop caused another shutdown due to smoke damage. 7 A description of the city alarm system is contained in Annual Report Of the Salt Lake City Fire Department, 1941, 29. Parts of the original system are preserved for demonstrations at the Utah Museum of Fire Service History in Tooele County. 8 A battalion chief in Salt Lake City at that time had command over all firefighting resources in the city during typical operations. The Chief and Assistant Chief were primarily administrative leaders and rarely responded to emergencies. An organizational chart can be found in the Annual Report Of the Salt Lake City Fire Department, 1941, 4. 9 Breathing apparatus of that period consisted of a hand-cranked air pump with long hoses attached to facemasks. There were never enough of these apparatus to equip all crews and since firefighters were teth- ered by the one-hundred foot long hose, they were really only usable by firefighters staying in one place within reach of the hose. Someone needed to constantly crank the machine and this tied up crewmembers that needed to relieve each other on the hand pump.

360 VICTORY THEATER FIRE

White sent Lt. Limb and the Ladder 1 crew to the St. George Hotel to check for fire extension and life safety hazards. Seeing no problem in the hotel, they climbed to the roof of the theater and made an attempt to manually open the ventilators, only to discover that they were nailed shut. Although Limb had ordered a hose line be taken to the roof and forcible entry of the vents, nobody carried out these orders.10 Firefighters on Engine 2 hooked up the engine to the hydrant west of the the- ater and then ran hoses SALT LAKE CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT down the alley to the exit on the southeast LaVere Hanson, Salt Lake City corner. Then Lt. Abelhausen from Engine 2 Fire Chief, at the time of the had his crew relieve Berch’s workers who Victory Theater Fire. were still using their small standpipe hose near that exit. While the Engine 2 crew cooled the seating area with their hose, Abelhausen went with Berch to the basement to try to access the area under the auditorium floor where the fire may have started. From an opening in the air conditioning system, they could see fire but by the time they got a hose line downstairs the conditions in the basement had worsened so that they could not mount an attack. Abelhausen hatched another plan to cut a hole in the auditorium floor and insert a cellar nozzle, a rotating nozzle on a pipe capable of being lowered through a hole into the basement. His crew, however, never accomplished that objective because of deteriorating conditions of smoke and heat developing overhead in the auditorium as he saw a dense layer of smoke mushrooming down from the balcony onto the main floor area and could hear fire roaring, but saw no flames. He then directed hose streams up towards the ceiling and balcony areas to cool down the superheated gasses to keep them from igniting. Battalion Chief White soon noticed fire beneath the auditorium floor as well as a great deal of smoke, which had developed in the balcony area and

10 Short, Roberts, and Reichman“Report to the Salt Lake City Commission on The Victory Theater Fire.”

361 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY was rapidly mushrooming across the ceiling some seventy feet above the auditorium floor. This large amount of smoke indicated that there was more fire elsewhere that could not be seen from the main floor. At 8:35 a.m. White called for a general alarm, summoning the city’s entire fire forces. Assistant Chief Lloyd Egan received the call on the radio in his car and quickly responded, arriving within a few minutes. Quickly assessing the situation, he assumed command and ordered ventilation by opening doors and windows so that firefighters inside could see and breathe. Water sup- plies were established from nearby hydrants and more hose lines were also deployed. Egan’s efforts were hampered because several of the arriving companies were undermanned and had no officer in charge or the officers were directly engaged in firefighting operations. No one on the scene could see that fire had spread upwards beneath the seating area towards the foyer and then had traveled up through the hollow decorative columns into the floor of the balcony. Due to rapidly worsening conditions, no crews were sent to the balcony where they might have discovered the fire exten- sion. Lt. Hatch’s crew continued fighting the fire spreading through the seating area where later-arriving crews, some of which advanced farther into the building, joined them. Ed Phillips asked to be relieved. Giving his mask to Harry Christenson, he went outside to help on the pumps. The Engine 4 crew laid lines from the rear to the northwest exit but did not enter the building, staying instead in the doorway and applying a stream of water on the flames inside. Other crews were sent to the roofs of the neighboring buildings where they were the first to observe fire and smoke pouring from the roof and the inoperable ventilator openings on the theater. By now the fire had spread into the heavy timbers of the cockloft, used to support the heavy curtains and backdrops. Egan ordered crews to force open the ventilators and the upper exit doors on the fire escapes in order to allow heat and flammable gasses to escape. Fire crews from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, led by chief mechanic “Big Dan” Cunningham, and a crew from the Utah Ordnance Plant, led by former City Fire Chief Walter Knight, arrived at the scene to assist in the fire fighting effort. Two fire fighting crews from Salt Lake County arrived to cover emergency calls in the rest of the city. As radiant heat ignited the edge of the roof on the Paris Company building next door, crews quickly attacked that extension of the fire. From their high vantage points, these crews observed the worsening conditions of the theater but could do nothing from their positions except to protect the Keith O’Brien and Paris Company buildings. Chief LaVere Hanson arrived in the lobby at 8:50 a.m., checked in with Egan and then made a walk quickly around the exterior of the entire structure, a journey of 1,100 feet, to see what was being done and to do a complete assessment of conditions. Just eight minutes later, he arrived back at the lobby as the rear of the balcony collapsed onto the crews

362 VICTORY THEATER FIRE working near the foyer. In the aftermath of the structural collapse, Hatch, Christenson and Johnson were pinned under the rub- ble and died of burns, crush injuries and smoke inhala- tion. Lt. William Limb seri- ously injured his back when he fell from a ladder. Capt. A.R Ward fought his way part of the way out of the collapsed area through ten feet of burning timbers, suffering burns and smoke inhalation in the process. Chief Egan desperately pulled Ward from the build- ing and both were taken to the Police Emergency Hospital which was just two blocks away at 105

South State Street. Egan UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY told reporters that there was no warning of Ab Jenkins, Salt Lake City Mayor, the collapse, “Usually there is some creaking at the time of the Victory Theater or some signal that a roof or balcony is about Fire. to collapse, but this time there was nothing. It just collapsed and came straight down.”11 Lt. Evan Hansen, firemen George Kilpatrick, F.E. McKinnon, Glen Crowther and Elmer Hansen sustained various non-life threatening injuries. Fireman Luther Stroud was hit in the head by a falling pipe as he attempted to reach his trapped comrades.12 Stroud’s apparently lifeless body was dragged from the wreckage and carried to the street, covered with a sheet and taken to the morgue at the Salt Lake County General Hospital on State Street and Twenty-first South. According to his grandson, Roger Stroud, when his grandmother arrived to identify the body she found her dear departed husband, Luther, sitting up on the gurney wondering just where he was and why he was there. He recovered and lived to be ninety-three years old.13 He never resumed

11 “No Warning,” Deseret News, May 19, 1943. 12 Short, Robert, and Reichman, “Report to the Salt Lake City Commission on The Victory Theater Fire.” 13 Roger Stroud, a retired Salt Lake City Fire Department veteran, conversation with author September 6, 2010.

363 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY firefighting duties; instead he was assigned to the alarm division at head- quarters. The tragedy was not without its humorous elements. The Deseret News reported that, “As the flames roared a third of a block into the sky, a bald headed gentleman appeared on the roof of one of the nearby buildings threatened by the fire. He had a small bucketful of water that he calmly poured down the side of the building. The bricks were hot so the water evaporated immediately.” Confident with his own efforts, he reappeared with his bucket and a bunch of rags, which he soaked and placed on top of the wall, thereby maintaining a three-foot cold pack on top of the wall. His building didn’t catch fire.”14 The newspaper didn’t reveal the gentleman’s identity or why he thought his actions would be effective against the raging fire. The day after the fire the Keith O’Brien Company ran quarter page ads in the Salt Lake Tribune: “A Tribute to the Firemen of Salt Lake City. Unselfish, fearless, daring, without thought for themselves, the firemen battled the flames in the fire catastrophe…”15 Two days after the fire, fifty-year-old firefighter Harry Christensen was honored at his funeral and his casket was carried on the bed of a fire engine to the cemetery. Two more fire fighters’ funerals followed. The Firemen’s Relief Association successfully raised $1,202.45 for each victim’s family. But even as funerals were still being arranged, someone claiming to represent the Firemen’s Relief Association solicited money, supposedly for the fallen men’s families. Police searched in vain for the perpetrator of the fraud who was never found.16 To understand the full effects of the Victory Theater fire on the city’s fire department and the larger community, it may be useful to understand a number of factors that added difficulties for firefighters who were already engaged in a stressful occupation. The national war effort had created a situation in which truck parts, tires and gasoline, and other equipment were rationed and in short supply. Several city fire stations were fifty-years old or older, having been built during the horse drawn apparatus era of the nine- teenth century, and by 1943 these fire stations were in danger of collapsing. Eleven city firefighters left to serve in the military in 1943 and the pool from which to hire qualified replacements was small. Adequate training was lacking for new recruits and recently promoted officers were short on experience.17 Wartime added extra duties for firefighters including organizing and training civil defense units and collecting scrap metal from throughout the city while remaining ready to respond to an emergency call at a moment’s notice. The department schedule resulted in an eighty-

14 “Sidelights on Fire,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 20, 1943. 15 Advertisement, Salt Lake Tribune, May 20, 1943. 16 “Benefit Checks Ready for Firemen’s Kin” Salt Lake Telegram, June 12, 1943. 17 “City Upholds Ouster,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1943.

364 VICTORY THEATER FIRE four-hour workweek and salaries were considerably less than those paid by war-related industries. For unknown reasons, a number of experienced and dedicat- ed firemen simply quit.18 Morale among the fire- men had been declining for some time. One reason was that the city’s Civil Service Commission, which handled all hiring and promotions for city departments, was perceived by the fire and police departments to be hostile because of the delays in hiring or promoting public safety personnel. The UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY city commission could and did overrule the Before it became the Victory civil service commission on a few occasions Theater, the building at 48 East but rarely pushed them to act. Although 300 South was Pantageʼs Mayor Ab Jenkins fought with the civil Vaudeville Theater. service and the city commissions to raise fire and police pay, he found little support for the proposal.19 Increasingly there seemed to have been a gap between fire department leaders and firefighters over poor communications and a perception of favoritism.20 This problem had been present for years and had caused the former fire chief, Walter Knight, to be replaced in 1940. In 1942 the city had the highest dollar fire loss in its history with $828,026.73 in damage, while in 1943 property losses dropped to $355,984, however, the human cost was much higher. Four firemen were killed in two downtown incidents. The city’s annual report simply states, “The Fire Department lost four efficient members.” The Annual Fire Department Report put it another way, “To the memory of their efficiency, courage and comradeship, we pay humble respect.”21 When Harry Christensen, Melvin Hatch and Theron Johnson died in the line of duty at the Victory Theatre, discontent finally boiled over. Within days, the city commission demanded investigations into the Victory Theater fire and the workings of the fire department.

18 “Ouster Defended,” Deseret News, November 12, 1943. 19 “Jenkins Renews Pay Fight for Firemen and Policemen,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 2. 1943. 20 “Theater Blaze Brings ‘Politics’ Cry,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 28, 1943. 21 Annual Report of the Salt Lake City Fire Department, 1941, p.1.

365 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Chief Hanson formed the investigation committee to find the cause of the fire and the factors precipitating the collapse of the balcony. This committee consisted of a police detective, W.E. Eggleston, S.R. Waugh from the National Board of Fire Underwriters and James Carver, a Salt Lake City fire investigator. Despite their efforts and that of Salt Lake City’s Fire Prevention Bureau, no definitive cause of the fire was identified. Rumors swirled in the city concerning possible arson or sabotage but nothing materialized from these speculations. Circumstantial evidence pointed at accidental under-floor electrical short or a plumbing torch as the fire’s origins. The balcony’s collapse was clear. It was never designed to hold the weight of the projection room and its equipment. Further, the hollow columns provided a perfect pathway for the fire to spread from under the auditorium floor up into the floor of the balcony. The fire burned there undetected in the concealed space while the attack crews concentrated on the lower fire and the fire showing above the balcony until the wooden floor joists burned through, collapsing the balcony. Without a complete understanding of the unique construction features, firefighters and officers had no way of knowing the extreme hazard they faced. If the recently formed city fire prevention bureau knew of the problems with the columns and extra weight on the balcony, there is no record of that information or of it being relayed to fire combat personnel.22 Curiously, there was no suggestion in the newspapers that theater owners were in any way responsible for operating a building that contributed to the disaster nor were there any comments from the owners or theater operators at all. The tragedy of this fire and a series of other events gathered energy into a storm that broke against the beleaguered leadership of the fire department. James Giles, a print shop owner and the father-in-law of dead firefighter Theron Johnson, decided to launch his own inquiry.23 After talking to some of the firefighters who were at the scene, Giles filed a complaint alleging that Ed Phillips, a sixteen-year veteran of the department, had warned Lt. Hatch that the balcony was in danger of collapsing but Phillips claimed that he was ignored and sent outside to help on the pumps. Giles further charged that the fire department had known for years that the building was defective and presented unusual dangers in the event of a fire. Giles went on to allege that the department was run by a clique of “hard-drinking” officers who were not responsive to other members of the department, adding that a battalion chief’s car was frequently parked at a nearby bar. The allegations included provocative words such as “incompetence” and “recklessness” in regard to command at the fire. These charges prompted

22 “Expert Approves Fire Handling,” Deseret News, August 17, 1943. 23 “Theater Blaze Brings ‘Politics’ Cry,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 28, 1943, 13.

366 VICTORY THEATER FIRE the city commission to launch an inquiry while Mayor Ab Jenkins was absent.24 Mayor Jenkins, whose responsibilities included oversight of the Police and Fire Depart- ments, strongly objected to this process, which he felt usurped his powers and duties. He offered his own plan to bring in fire experts from other states. The city commission rejected his proposal and instead appointed a committee of local prominent citizens to conduct the probe. None of those appointed had any fire expertise. This prompt- ed more objections from the mayor and the fire department. While the Salt Lake Telegram questioned the wisdom of an investigation by non- UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY experts, the criticism seemed to have no Collapsed fire ladder from “Big effect on proceedings. The committee Dan” truck at the Hotel changed membership as the probe progressed Newhouse, June 19, 1943. but never included fire experts.25 Less than a month after the Victory Theater fire, another tragedy struck the city’s fire department. Fireman Paul Hamilton died when the department’s pride and joy, the one-hundred foot American Lafrance ladder truck affectionately known as “Big Dan,” collapsed at a fire on the seventh floor of the “fireproof” Hotel Newhouse on the corner of Fourth South and Main Street.26 This new tragedy added to an already toxic atmosphere that seemed to permeate Salt Lake City

24 The Salt Lake City Commission in place at the time consisted of the mayor and four commissioners. Mayor Ab Jenkins acted as the commissioner over Public Safety while the others oversaw the other administrative divisions, Public Works, Parks, Health etc. See Salt Lake City Commission Minutes, June 15, 1943, Salt Lake City Recorder’s Office, 25 “Do a Thoroughgoing Job,” and “Fire Death Probe Gets New Member,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 16, 1943. 26 “Newhouse Hotel, Two Rooms Destroyed, Fireman Killed,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 12, 1943. The location is now a parking lot.

367 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY politics that often pitted flamboyant Mayor Ab Jenkins against the four other city commissioners on a variety of issues. The political drama that unfolded at the Salt Lake City and County Building was worthy of the stages at any of the city’s theatrical palaces. Mayor Jenkins was used to getting things done his way. He was a successful building contractor and a phenomenally successful race car owner and driver who had built a superstar image by driving his “Mormon Meteor” Duesenburg race car that set more records on the Bonneville Salt Flats than anyone else in racing history. His endurance, unflagging optimism, and kindness to competitors, both on the racecourse and off earned a reputation that catapulted him into the mayor’s office. Jenkins gave no speeches, kissed no proverbial babies, and expended nothing for advertising, yet he won handily. He approached the job of mayor as he approached racing on the Salt Flats—not against people but against the existing record. When he lost his reelection bid in November following the fire, he told a Time Magazine reporter, "I'm not used to running a race against someone else."27 In response to the appointment of the citizens’ committee, the fire chief and the mayor requested that Jay Stevens, a widely respected authority on the fire service from the National Board of Fire Underwriters in San Francisco, conduct an independent investigation into the fire and the response of the department. Stevens traveled from the west coast several times to conduct eighty-five interviews, examine the fire scene, and to review the fire department’s procedures.28 He went so far as to set a bonfire in the ruins of the theater and pulled the nearby box alarm to determine response time as the details of the original response time had not been recorded and were in dispute. The false alarm was a common practice by fire investigators. The exercise resulted in the assistant fire chief arriving in two minutes with a ladder company a few seconds later. This test of the system was, to say the least, disconcerting for arriving crews who had also been on response to the earlier fatal fire.29 This was not the first time that Stevens had a role in Salt Lake City affairs. As far back as 1925, when he was the California State Fire Marshal, he testified in a hearing concerning a dispute between the Salt Lake City firemen’s union, Local 81 of the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF), and Chief William Bywater. “The men have no respect for the authority of their superiors,” Stevens told the hearing officer.30 That inquiry led to mass resignations, the retirement of Chief Bywater, and a strike when the resignations were withdrawn and, in an attempt to destroy the union, the city commission refused to reinstate the men.31 The conflict engendered

27 “Salt Lake City: Ab Loses,” Time Magazine, November 15, 1943 28 “City Upholds Ouster,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1943. 29 “Test Decides Victory Theater Time Factor,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 28, 1945. 30 “Salt Lake Firemen’s Strike of 1925 Part 1,” Backdraft, July 2002. 31 “Salt Lake Firemen’s Strike of 1925 Part 2,” Backdraft, November 2002.

368 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY ill feelings between some firefighters and J.W. Salt Lake Cityʼs Fire Engine Stevens. Assistant Fire Chief Walter Knight Number 1, Ladder 1, known as succeeded Bywater and served until more “Big Dan,” was one of the first department unrest in 1940 led to his resigna- units to arrive at the Victory tion and the appointment of LaVere Hanson Theater. as chief. This transition also occurred with substantial input from Stevens.32 He blasted the civil service commission and Chief Knight, urging Mayor Jenkins to replace him and hire a chief from Beverly Hills, California, to fix the problems in the department.33 The parallel investigations continued throughout July and into August until final reports came to very different conclusions. The citizens’ committee investigation lambasted the chief on numerous fronts while the Stevens report exonerated him.34 Throughout the summer, Chief Hanson pleaded with the city commission to hire more firemen and two more battalion chiefs to fill the two existing positions. He argued that the positions were needed to provide better command and control at big fires. The commission responded by appointing three new battalion chiefs. The chief himself did not fare so well. Following the investigation by the citizens’ panel and a closed door report to the commission, Hanson was demoted on August 12 despite his passionate plea and refutation of charges against him and one of his Assistant Chiefs, Lloyd Egan.35 Curiously, the committee had not interviewed Hanson or Egan.

32 “Stevens Urges Outside Fire Expert for S.L.,” Salt Lake Telegram, May 17, 1940. 33 “Keyser Says Mayor Should Ask Discharge,” Deseret News, May 1, 1940. 34 “New Fire Probe Sought,” Deseret News, August 18, 1943. 35 “Hanson, Egan Deny Fire Probe Charges,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 13, 1943.

369 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

The citizens’ committee report drew heavily on what it saw as digressions from standard operating procedures in the fire department’s drill manual based on its interviews of various witnesses. Most of the testimony to the committee was information volunteered behind closed doors by various department members, much of which centered on issues having nothing to do with the fire, but instead expressed mistrust of department leadership. There were no transcriptions made of the committee’s proceed- ings, so there is no record of the questions asked or the context or details of the responses. A testament to the wide interest in the proceeding was that the final report of the committee was made public and the entire text was printed in the Deseret News over a period of five days. Mayor Ab Jenkins was quoted in the papers and in the minutes of the commission on the day of the demo- tion, “I have heard of individuals being railroaded and today I saw it.”36 The conclusions of the investigation committee were also strongly disputed by Jay Stevens, who found, following his own investigation, that the tragic fire was handled properly by the officers who could not have known of the collapse potential. He went on to refute a number of the other charges against Hanson and Egan and accused the commission of a “cowardly action,” by not allowing the chiefs to defend themselves. Nevertheless, the decision stood.37 Hanson believed that his ouster was a political blow by the city commis- sion against the mayor. Hanson told the Deseret News, “Mayor Jenkins is doing a fine job and he has contributed more of his own time and money to promoting the welfare of Salt Lake than any other official I know of. In my opinion the whole affair is being thrown at the mayor. The controversy does not worry me, but I am very concerned about him.”38 Despite this brave statement, Hanson was personally devastated by the blame placed on him and what he felt was an unfair process driven by city commission politics. Mayor Jenkins, Hanson’s supervisor, was strong willed and often clashed with his colleagues on the commission.39 Both Jenkins and Stevens clearly felt that politics was at work. Jenkins told the Salt Lake Telegram, “I will continue to clear or convict those firemen and get to the bottom of this thing. Meanwhile it might be well to organize a gossipers league and take in the current crop of rumormongers as charter members.”40 After delivering his report to the commission, Stevens commented that the city was “The whisperingest town I have ever been in, you can hear anything you want about anybody in Salt Lake City. The time has come to investigate the investigators…to determine what interest may have been served by them.”41

36 “SL Fire Chief Ousted Following Probe,” Deseret News, August 12, 1943. 37 “City Upholds Ouster,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1943. 38 “Ousted Head Fears for Mayor,” Deseret News, August 12, 1943. 39 “Jenkins Charges Fire Shakeup Political Move,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 14, 1943. 40 Ibid. 41 “City Upholds Ouster,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1943.

370 VICTORY THEATER FIRE

The complainant, James Giles, was the campaign manager for commis- sioner John Matheson, who was the target of numerous jabs by the mayor. Giles insistence that Hanson be punished, probably influenced the move to discipline Hanson and Egan, although Matheson publicly favored making Hanson’s demotion temporary. Internal fire department strife, even before the fire, also contributed significantly to the outcome. An addendum to the citizen’s committee report expressed concern about a “clique of officers” who drank excessively and would not consider input of those outside of the clique.42 Responding to public outcry against the conclusion and results of the investigation, the city commissioners insisted that they were reacting more to the low morale and internal fire department problems than to the specific actions during the Victory Theatre fire. Nevertheless, Mayor Jenkins felt that the chief had been wronged and attempted to promote him to Chief of the Prevention and Arson divisions. The city commission rejected the move, further angering Jenkins. Hanson, in turn, told reporters that he “Feared for the Mayor.”43 Hanson returned to duty as a captain but within a week went on medical leave for a heart condition and then took a medical retirement, ending a career that began in 1926. Ultimately, even the outspoken Stevens came to agree with the removal of Chief Hanson, stating, “He did a good job on the Victory fire but so far as his other actions as fire chief were concerned, fell down. Hanson betrayed the confidence of Mayor Jenkins. The first year he was fire chief he was fine. Then prosperity apparently went to his head and he couldn’t take it.”44 Assistant Chief Joseph Knowles Piercey, known universally as “J.K.,” was appointed by the city commission to replace Hanson as chief. He immediately set out to rebuild the battered and divided fire department. His orders from the city commissioners included “cleaning up the department.” Piercey joined the department in 1919 at the age of eighteen and worked his way up the ranks.45 The public turmoil overshadowed the private sadness and grief felt by the families and colleagues of the dead. The city commission authorized a total of $16,269.71 and burial expenses be paid to the families of Johnson, Hatch, and Christensen. A firefighter’s life in 1943 was thus determined to be worth $5,423.23.46 Twenty-six-year-old Theron Johnson, born and raised in Huntington, Utah, had been with the department less than a year. He was previously a

42 “Jenkins Demands Quick Action on Fire Death Report,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 12, 1943. 43 “SL City Commission Stands Pat on Motion Ousting Chief Hanson,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1943. 44 “Ouster Defended,” Deseret News, November 12, 1943. Although Stevens held no position with Salt Lake City, his decades of expert consultation with the city on fire matters seem to have given him great credibility in the press and a special relationship with successive city commissions, who periodically sought his expertise. He appears in news reports of fire related activities in the city over many years. 45 “Piercey Heads Department,” and “Important Shoes to Fill,” Deseret News, August 12, 1943. 46 Salt Lake City Commission Minutes, June 16, 1943, Salt Lake City Recorders Office.

371 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY baker. He joined the fire department at the same time as his brother-in-law Grant Walker. Walker fought the Victory Theater fire and undoubtedly was deeply affected by the disaster. Walker later became chief of the fire depart- ment in the 1960s, and after retiring from the city’s fire department, became the Utah State Fire Marshal in the 1970s. As state fire marshal he fought hard for the adoption of statewide uniform fire and building codes. Johnson’s father, like his son, died at age twenty-six, while working for the Utah State Road Commission. Theron Johnson left a widow, Shirley, a son, Dahl, a brother, a sister, and his mother. Harry Christenson was a World War I veteran and a seasoned firefighter with nineteen years of firefighting experience. He was born in South Dakota on January 24, 1893, into a large family with two brothers and five sisters. He left two sons, a daughter and his widow Zoa. Born in Payson, Utah, on January 29, 1903, Lieutenant Mel Hatch was a seventeen year veteran firefighter who had enthusiastically taken on the responsibility for all civilian and fire department rescue squads in Salt Lake City. His death left a daughter, a son, and a widow to mourn with his par- ents and three brothers. The city commission posthumously promoted Mel Hatch to the rank of Captain.47 Hatch’s widow, Maud, strongly disputed the citizens’ report conclusions. She told the city commissioners in a letter: Through constant effort and diligent application of his experience, he (Hatch) won promotion to lieutenant and had been qualified as a captain and would have been made such, had his life not been taken by the fire. He did not get his promotion through a clique. This is not only untrue but it is extremely unfair. These men work and study for advancement. I know, for it was my job to know as the wife of a fireman who lived for his job. The stigma of ‘negligence’ is equally unfair, for it infers that my husband was also negligent. Had there been any physical indications of the collapse I know he would have seen them. She went on to pass on her husband’s praise of Egan as his role model and Hanson as “the most naturally inclined fireman ever affiliated by the Salt Lake Department.48 Salt Lake City was not alone in experiencing a theater disaster. A year before the Victory fire, the Strand Theater in Brockton, Massachusetts, collapsed during a fire killing thirteen firefighters and injuring twenty more. The deadliest single building fire in United States history was Chicago’s Iroquois Theater fire on December 30, 1903. An arc lamp shorted, igniting a curtain. Flames and smoke spread quickly and in just twenty minutes, 602 of the 2,400 audience members and performance troupe in the building were dead. These and scores of smaller amusement venue disasters spawned a host of fire and building code improvements across the country including adoption of new codes in Salt Lake City just a

47 “Hatch Posthumously Promoted to Captain, Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 1943. 48 “Widow’s Letter Blasts Report on Fire Deaths,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 11, 1943.

372 VICTORY THEATER FIRE few months before the Victory burned.49 Stevens speculated that if provisions of those later codes had been in effect when the Victory was built and later modified, the structure would have been less likely to burn or collapse.50 Even if the theater had not burned, other issues on the city’s fire department may have festered until city offi- cials were forced to take action. Whether or not Mayor Jenkins would have dealt with internal problems himself or waited for the city commissioners to act as they ultimately did, remains a question that will never be answered. Another question that raises speculation is whether Jenkins would have been reelected if the Victory Theatre contro- A tribute published in the Salt versy had not exacerbated the hostility Lake Tribune to Salt Lake Cityʼs between him and the city commission. Since Firemen. The Keith OʼBrien 1912 Salt Lake City had not reelected a mayor Department Store, located to the to consecutive terms, it would appear that an east of the Victory Theater, was anti-incumbent mood affected voters for a spared serious damage because long time, and certainly public bickering con- of the firefighterʼs efforts. tributed to the public’s lack of confidence in the Jenkins administration.51 After his defeat Jenkins continued to resent his fellow commissioners and in 1945 campaigned against his political foes, com- missioners John Matheson and Fred Tedesco, on behalf of rival candidates.52 The Salt Lake City Fire Department and the community were well served by Fire Chief J.K. Piercey. He took command when the department and its members needed to heal and found his main job to create a safer and more open environment for firefighters while rebuilding a relationship

49 “A Tragedy Remembered,” NFPA Journal (National Fire Protection Association) (July/August, 1995);”City Drafting New Fire Prevent Code,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 2, 1942. 50 “Expert Approves Fire Handling,” Deseret News, August 17, 1943. 51 “Salt Lake City: Ab Loses,” Time Magazine, November 15, 1943. 52 “Jenkins Opposes Tedesco and Matheson,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 28, 1945.

373 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY with the city commission. He immediately initiated a new daily training program to increase coordination and cooperation.53 The commission approved his initial budget requests for more equipment, firemen, officers, and modern fire stations. It took patience, time, money and persistence to bring the entire fire department up to his desired standard. Piercey instituted a new employee evaluation process and he reorganized the department so that three battalion chiefs were on duty at all times to provide supervision in three newly delineated districts in Salt Lake City. This insured that battalion chiefs could maintain a reasonable span of control at emergencies. Department morale improved and so did relations with the commission.54 Piercey served as chief for sixteen years modernizing and improving the fire department: new equipment, training, organization, staffing, and facilities while using his quiet firmness to achieve progress. His tenure as chief, the longest in Salt Lake City history, was unusual in its length and a tribute to his ability to weather the storms that can rock any organization. Following his retirement in 1959, he continued to use his political savvy to win election to the city commission where he oversaw the Water Department and then the Public Safety Division. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack on April 17, 1961, at age sixty, ending his forty-two years of service during a long, eventful chapter in Salt Lake City history.55 Perhaps the editorial in the Deseret News printed the day after his death provides the answer to why Piercey succeeded where Knight, Hanson and Jenkins failed: “[He] was a rugged, plain-spoken man with no great flair for the niceties of public relations. But he had the confidence of his men and of all others who worked closely with him. In the long run, that proved to be the best public relations of all.”56 The Victory Theater fire was a disaster in many ways; a personal tragedy for family and friends of the victims; a professional disaster for LaVere Hanson and Lloyd Egan; a public relations nightmare for Ab Jenkins and overall, a tragic loss to the fire department and the community. But from its ashes the fire department rose to become a better organization and the city and its citizens gained a greater awareness of their city’s problems regarding unsafe buildings, limited fire department resources and internal fire department stress and strife. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that it takes horrific events like the Victory Theater fire to precipitate change and for the public to recognize the vital work that fire fighters render to the community. In retrospect, the blame for the deaths of Lt. Mel Hatch, Harry Christenson, and Theron Johnson cannot be laid exclusively upon any one individual. At the very least, we can learn from the circumstances of those deaths and from other disasters of the past and to prevent tragedy in the future. May we not forget their sacrifice.

53 “Jenkins Charges Fire Shakeup Political Move,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 14, 1943. 54 1943 Annual Report of the Salt Lake City Fire Department, January 1944. 55 “Funeral Honors J.K. Piercey,” Deseret News, April 18, 1961. 56 “Important Shoes to Fill,” Deseret News, April 18, 1961.

374 BOOK REVIEWS

Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries. By Stephen C. Taysom. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xiv + 259 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

SHAKERS AND MORMONS are but two of the many religious groups that sprang up on the American frontier about two centuries ago. Over time, the Shakers have dwindled to just a handful of practitioners, while the Latter-day Saints multiplied and became a world-wide religion headquartered in Utah. Although Shakers and Mormons are Christians, they had rather different belief systems. Their regard for the physical or material world is a prime example: Shakers essentially abhorred it, as evi- dent in their practice of celibacy. By contrast, the Mormons lustily embraced physicality, practicing polygamy in the nineteenth century while energetically building cities and transforming portions of the interior West into a garden. The nineteenth century was indeed a defining time for both Shakers and Mormons, and it is the time period that religious studies scholar Stephen Taysom addresses in this book. Interestingly, Taysom does not focus on any discourse between the Mormons and Shakers, though that might make a fascinating book in itself. In Taysom’s words, the ultimate goal of both religions was “to behave in ways that imitated God,” but their methods differed (100). To the outside world, Shakers appeared meek while Mormons often appeared confronta- tional. However, both religions clearly established—as do all religions— boundaries between their own faiths and the faiths and activities of others. In doing so, they exerted strong—and sometimes seemingly draconian— control over their own followers. Taysom shows that these religious groups developed physical boundaries for two major reasons, namely, to distinguish themselves from others and to control behavior within. These boundaries operated at several scales, from larger external spaces (geographical) to smaller scale (personal space, including the bodies of individual worshippers). To tell the story of how this worked, Taysom employed the methodologies of several disciplines, including social and religious history, theological studies, and cognitive anthropology. This review addresses the Mormon side of Taysom’s study. Plumbing the primary source literature, albeit somewhat selectively, Taysom offers an insightful look at the early Mormon experience in relation to boundaries set by designs such as the City of Zion, which was propounded in detail by Joseph Smith in the early 1830s. After the murder of Joseph Smith and the long trek away from their beloved Nauvoo, the Mormons reached Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young. According to Taysom, “by the time that the Mormons arrived in the Great Basin, they had already given up

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their original ideas about the religious basis of physical boundaries” (53). He claims that by 1847 the Saints had discarded the ideal City of Zion plan and adopted a different set of boundaries in the interior West. This involved a new role for temples and increasing emphasis on sacred garments that further distinguished Mormons from others. Although Taysom’s interpretations of Mormon history are intriguing, some may claim that he oversimplifies it. For example, he claims that the Saints found isolation, peace, and prosperity following their arrival in Utah. This is true, but only to a point. Although the Mormons settling what would hopefully become Deseret certainly faced less overt hostility than the mayhem they had experienced in the Middle West, they faced many other challenges. These include the sobering geopolitical reality that the area claimed by the Mormons: 1) had, to their dismay, become part of the country they had just fled; 2) witnessed a flood of California bound gold rushers; and 3) was increasingly besieged by federal authorities who chal- lenged Mormon institutions. Given these conditions, some readers may find it difficult to fully accept Taysom’s claim that the supposed peace and prosperity found by the Mormons had actually become so disorienting to Brigham Young by the mid 1850s that he deliberately “inflicted the crisis” of the Mormon Reformation on his own people to rectify it. In Taysom’s view, the tensions palpable by the mid 1850s were not generated by contact with outsiders nor exacerbated by the physical environment, but rather generated by the Mormon leaders themselves who, in effect, had become addicted to (and craved) conflict. As Taysom puts it, “too much tranquility” prompted the Mormon leadership to create “harsh rhetoric” (170). To Taysom, the practice of polygamy was simply another Mormon strategy aimed at ramping up tensions between Mormons and outsiders, including federal authorities. This is an interesting premise, but it overlooks the fact that the Mormons at that time believed that polygamy represented the ancient times and beliefs that they were commanded to recapture. Although abhorrent to many, polygamy was an integral part of Abrahamic religious and cultural traditions, and it remains so today in Islam. In conclusion, Taysom’s account of Mormon decision-makers’ motives may be challenged by some readers and welcomed by others. The former will claim that he overlooks the Mormon leadership’s vision and passion in building up the western Zion as a distinctive place (where, as Brigham Young put it, the angels would be pleased to visit). These critics could confidently claim that Young raised the bar in 1850s Utah Territory, leaning hard on followers to behave in a more saintly manner and to create more sustainable settlements in preparation for the Second Coming. Other readers, however, will find that Taysom’s critical interpretation offers new and exciting ways of explaining Mormon decision-making during the

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mid-to-late nineteenth century. As Taysom astutely notes, the Mormons behaved in a cyclical pattern, episodically challenging authority at times and then backing off at others. Employing this strategy of resistance and capitulation, they achieved success rather than annihilation. Regardless of their views about the early Mormons, all serious students of Utah and LDS history will find Taysom’s book worthwhile, if sometimes controversial, reading. RICHARD FRANCAVIGLIA Salem, Oregon

Colonel Thomas L. Kane and the Mormons, 1846-1883. Edited by David J. Whittaker. (Provo: BYU Studies, 2010. 240 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

THIS VOLUME EDITED BY David J. Whittaker grew out of activities at Brigham Young University during the 2008-2009 school years. Staff at the Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, prepared a public exhibition of manuscripts focusing on Thomas L. Kane and his relationship with the Mormons. During the exhibition, the library sponsored a lecture series by scholars on various aspects of Kane’s relationship with the Mormons. The seven essays in this printed volume came from the lecture series. The essays and their authors include: “Thomas L. Kane and Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” by Matthew Grow; “He is Our Friend: Thomas L. Kane and the Mormons in Exodus, 1846-1850,” by Richard E. Bennett; “Thomas L. Kane and the Mormon Problem in National Politics,” by Thomas G. Alexander; “Full of Courage: Thomas L. Kane, the Utah War, and BYU’s Kane Collection as Lodestone,” by William P. MacKinnon; “Tom and Bessie Kane and the Mormons,” by Edward A. Geary; “Touring Polygamous Utah with Elizabeth W. Kane, Winter 1872- 1873,” by Lowell C. (Ben) Bennion and Thomas R. Carter; and “My Dear Friend: The Friendship and Correspondence of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane,” by David J. Whittaker. The volume concludes with “Thomas L. Kane: A Guide to the Sources” which is a helpful look at man- uscript sources at BYU and published documents concerning Thomas L. Kane and a review of Matthew J. Grow’s “Liberty to the Downtrodden”; Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) by Charles S. Peterson. This volume, which is published jointly by BYU Studies and the University of Utah Press, is the fifth in the “Biographies in Latter-day Saint History” series. The seven essays range in length from twenty-one to thirty-eight pages in length, and the slim volume is illustrated by eighty- seven figures and photographs. Grow’s essay reviews Kane’s extensive

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immersion in nineteenth-century culture and particularly the reform aspects of ante-bellum American culture. Grow writes, “Kane perceived the Utah War as a ‘Holy War’ waged on the Mormons by an Evangelical nation, a belief that shaped his sense of mission in protecting the Latter-day Saints’ religious liberty from the intrusions of federal officials and the U.S. Army” (26). In Grow’s judgment, “Kane’s life remains significant because he repre- sents two nineteenth-century cultural types: the romantic hero and the honorable gentleman” (27). In his essay, Bennett suggests that Kane’s early involvement with the Mormons profoundly changed his life, as “Kane admitted his association with the Mormons had soured him from pursuing politics and encouraged him to pursue other humanitarian causes” (53). Of interest in Alexander’s essay on Kane and the Mormon Problem in national and territorial politics is footnote 81 concerning Alexander’s 1966 essay on Judge James McKean. Alexander notes, “I should point out I do not now agree with many of the conclusions I arrived at in defense of McKean. Rather, I now believe that he was an anti-Mormon bigot and that many of his actions were clearly illegal and aimed at undermining Mormonism” (87). Bennion and Carter’s essay is a new and valuable look at Utah society and architecture in the decade of the 1870s as viewed particularly through the lens of plural marriage and the eyes of Elizabeth Kane. This volume adds much to our knowledge of Thomas and Elizabeth Kane and nine- teenth-century Utah history. RICHARD W. SADLER Weber State University

The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. By Patrick Q. Mason. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi + 252 pp. Cloth, $29.95.) BY LOOKING AT Latter-day Saint (LDS) history from a fresh regional vantage point—in this case, the American South—Patrick Mason has made a valuable contribution to the field of Mormon studies. The Mormon Menace is a fine illustration of just how successful contemporary scholarship on Mormon history has been in moving beyond older conceptual models focused primarily on Utah and the West. The South and its people, declares Mason, were both a significant domain for LDS proselytization and a foil against which Utah Mormons could construct and reinforce their collective identity. Readers concerned with Mormonism’s past will want to read this book in order to explore these points at length.

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Mason's book, however, does not ignore Utah and the West completely. Rather, it illuminates Utah's complicated symbiotic relationship with the South, a point Mason especially emphasizes in his first two chapters. Using the story of Mormon elder Joseph Standing's death at the hands of an infu- riated Georgia mob (which he relates in Chapter 2), and the equally har- rowing tale of the Cane Creek massacre, where two Mormon missionaries and two of their converts were gunned down on a Tennessee farm (the subject of Chapter 3) as representative instances of violence against Mormons in the South, Mason shows just how much anti-Mormon leaders in the region relied on like-minded elements in Utah for their rhetorical ammunition. "The national anti-Mormon movement," including associated groups in the South, writes Mason, "fed upon the reports they received from their faction in Utah" (53). Not surprisingly, the Mormon practice of polygamy gave rise to much of the antagonism between the LDS faithful and their southern Protestant opponents, a point Mason develops in Chapters 4 and 5. Though it flourished in the Latter-day Saints' western heartland, the alien practice of plural marriage was the single worst stumbling block to the growth of Mormonism in the southern states. But this knowledge will not "feel" new to readers who possess more than a passing familiarity with Mormon history. Still, it is striking to note just how truly incensed and resentful southerners were over polygamy. Fears of "home wrecking" Mormon missionaries, intent on seducing southern women and spiriting them off to enlarge their supposed harems in the West, tapped into southern white males' fears about "white womanhood" and their shared responsibility as its culturally designated protectors. The result of this unshakable dread of the Mormon elder was the construction of the "Mormon" as a cultural corollary to the "black beast rapist," the sexual predator that allegedly lurked, barely suppressed, inside every African American man in the South. The book's final few chapters—with the exception of Chapter 8, which sheds light on how anti-Mormonism in the South contributed to the perpetuation of Latter-day Saint collective identity in the Mormons' western home—are less relevant for readers primarily interested in Utah history, chiefly because they move away from discussing Utah's place in the calculus that informed and was informed by southern anti-Mormonism. They are, however, still worth perusing. Chapter 6 details southerners' doctrinal quarrels with Mormonism, while Chapter 7 tries to provide a general accounting of some three hundred occurrences of southern anti-Mormon violence. Chapter 9, Mason's final one, tries to broaden his argument about persecution and religious identity by bringing southern Jews and Catholics into the mix, and by showing how their willingness to bend more readily to southern cultural norms and attitudes distinguished them from Mormons.

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The Mormon Menace is a good book, well-researched and thoughtfully written. Readers of Utah and western history will find the book's earliest chapters, with their narrower focus on the polarized relationship between Utah and the American South, most interesting. It is safe to say, though, that a glance at the rest of the volume won't hurt anyone. BRANDON JOHNSON Bristow, Virginia

Candid Insights of a Mormon Apostle: The Diaries of Abraham H. Cannon, 1889-1895. Edited by Edward Leo Lyman. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2010. liii + 794 pp. Cloth, $125.00.)

ABRAHAM H. CANNON was a prominent son of George Q. Cannon, an extremely influential LDS church and Utah leader in the late nineteenth century and, like his father, Abraham became an apostle and a polygamist. Tragically, he died at age thirty-seven, but, fortunately, during his seven years as an apostle, he kept a detailed and intensely interesting diary in which he recorded a wealth of information that will be enjoyed by readers of varying interests. The Cannon diaries are ably edited by Edward Leo Lyman and published by Signature Books as the twelfth volume in the “Significant Mormon Diaries Series.” While they do predominantly contain a trove of information and insights into contemporary LDS activities, doctrines and practices, and church governance, they also include those on politics, business and finance, mining, publishing, and much more. Lyman states that never before had he “encountered anything comparable to the insights chronicled in Abraham H. Cannon’s diaries….” and that “the Cannon document was the ‘most valuable single source’” he had access to during his work on his 1986 book, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (xi-xii). As an apostle, Cannon met regularly with the church’s first presidency and his fellow apostles. He was privy to their discussions and even disagree- ments over a variety of church matters of doctrine and practice and the concerns they sometimes had over them. He faithfully recorded the details of their meetings and discussions in his diary, which, today makes for fasci- nating and intriguing reading. A few of the many possible examples must suffice, including two which reflect my own interest in books. In January 1890, Cannon writes that he met with President Wilford Woodruff “concerning Dan Jones’ book ‘Forty Years among the Indians,’ which we are printing.” Woodruff had been informed that “the author was censuring in his book the authorities of the church in Arizona and Pres. W. did not approve of this.” Cannon notes that he duly “erased from the Ms.” the

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objectionable passages as he revised the book and that “Bro. Jones” concurred with such actions. That same month, Cannon records that the heirs of Parley P. Pratt claimed the church owed them $13,500 “for the use which the Church has had of [Pratt’s] books, ‘The Voice of Warning’ and ‘The Key to Theology.’” He notes that the church did not recognize or acknowledge the claim but chose to give the family $6,750 as a “donation” only and adds that from then on the family would own the copyright to the books (49-52). Readers searching for those rare gems of information and insight that only a well-placed insider in the LDS church hierarchy could provide will not be disappointed. Apostle Cannon provides an abundance of such material which includes discussions on such subjects as “Negroes” and priesthood, the Adam-God doctrine, plural marriage (much on the Manifesto), temple ordinances and practices, the Word of Wisdom, the nature of the Holy Ghost and Godhead, and many more. Lyman feels the most valuable contribution of the Cannon diaries is “the insight they provided into the evolutionary process of Church leaders as they struggled to accommodate the political realities of the time” (xii). One telling diary entry shows that in evolution sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same. Cannon quotes from a letter from fellow apostle, John W. Young (Brigham’s son), who says he “does not see how it is possible for Latter-day Saints to be anything else but Democrats, and yet he acknowledges the immense monetary power and other influence of the Republicans” (220). In addition to informative footnotes and a handy index, editor Lyman has included in this handsome volume a helpful listing of Cannon family members and their relationships and a “cast” of “prominent characters” to identify many of the individuals written about by Cannon. My main regret about the book is shared by Lyman who wishes he could include all the material in the Cannon diaries, but is constrained by the limits of a mandated one-volume abridgement. This edition includes nearly double the material of a previously published abridgement of the diaries. Unfortunately, we do not know what we may be missing, but hope and trust that Lyman, a respected historian of many years, has struck the right balance. CURT BENCH Salt Lake City

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From the Muddy River to the Ivory Tower: The Journey of George H. Brimhall. By Mary Jane Woodger and Joseph H. Groberg (Provo: BYU Studies, 2010. xxxvi + 245 pp. Cloth, $18.95.)

THIS BIOGRAPHY of George Henry Brimhall, second president of Brigham Young University, is of interest to students of both Utah and LDS history, those concerned with academics in the state, and anyone who has every attended BYU, but it’s value is not limited to so narrow a group. Several features of this book increase its worth and broaden its appeal to a much larger audience. Sixty-three photographs, from formal pictures of BYU faculty to one of Brimhall driving his 1922 Dodge, add interest to his life and to the period in which he lived. That period comes into even sharper focus with more than a dozen boxes containing succinct summaries of events like the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 and biographies of individuals across a broad spectrum: Alma Richards, first Utahn to win an Olympic medal, psychologist William James, and LDS Apostle and United States Senator Reed Smoot. Each box includes sources for its specific topic. Notes are detailed, although there is no separate bibliography. A chronology of Brimhall’s life helps a reader put events into perspective. Appendices list three generations of his family and present a sampling of Brimhall’s “sermonettes,” brief talks he delivered to students and faculty each Monday evening for the eighteen years of his presidency. Those talks, often includ- ing his own poetry, certainly reflect the style and attitudes of that period. A biography of a person like Brimhall, especially when authored by a descendant, can be just an homage, but these authors have not fallen into that trap. While the book discusses Brimhall’s achievements, which are many and significant, it does not shrink from the controversies nor the negatives. Certainly Brimhall himself focused on the positive. Each chapter is headed by an epigraph or poem sampled from his writing, such as “I’m glad I’ve loved fair science;/ I’m glad I’ve loved good art// I’m glad I’ve loved religion/ And held it in my heart...” (191). That positive attitude extended to personally counseling students, many of whom remembered him with great kindness and affection. Still, the authors discuss objectively the problems Brimhall, BYU, and the LDS Church faced when he began to move Brigham Young Academy from a general school teaching high school students along with a teacher- training college to a full-fledged university. Brimhall followed national education trends, read books and went to conventions and other campuses to learn what he might do to raise BYU to the level of other institutions of higher education. He added parenting classes, an innovation at the time and worked with Joseph Kingsbury of the University of Utah to change state

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law to allow private schools to receive state approval. He brought in scholars like John Dewey to address the faculty and students. He also hired faculty members with advanced degrees from noted insti- tutions, but those scholars also “brought in the ideas of modern biblical criticism and scientific inquiry that often were in tension, if not at complete odds, with fundamental Latter-day Saint beliefs” (165). As students began to report that they had learned there was no Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood was just a heavy rain in a small area, both Brimhall and LDS authorities became concerned enough to dismiss several of those scholars he had worked so hard to bring in, causing trauma for all involved. Nor do they gloss over his eventual suicide after an extended illness that affected both mind and body. The net result is an easily readable biography of a life-long student who impacted education not just at BYU but throughout the state and the region. COLLEEN WHITLEY Salt Lake City

383 2011 INDEX

A Floyd A. McFarland, 324; Otto Ziegler, Abelhausen, Lt., Salt Lake City firefighter, 324; A. J. Clarke, Australian Champion, leader of fire engine crew, 361 328, 329, 330; Henry Mayer, 328; Akin, Joseph C., killed pursuing Tse-ne-gat Theodore “Whiskers” Devonevitch, and Polk, 234 African champion, 328-29; Frank Kramer, Allen, Clarence, Range Valley Cattle American record holder, 330; racing for- Company foreman and cook, 24, 27 mats French, 319, distance, 320, motor- Allen, Corrine Tuckerman, wife of Clarence pacing, 331-32; racing, 273-75; racing Allen, files land entry, 24 prizes, 326-27; Salt Lake City ordinance Anasazi and Fremont cultures, agricultural for riding of, 276, 277, 279-80, 282; Saltair activities of, 215; artifacts associated with, racer, 317, Salt Palace race track, 319; Salt 215-16 Palace Saucer, 331 Andersen, H. Verlan, BYU legal advisor for (Bi)cyclists, women, 270-71; clothing worn Young American Freedom Club, 175 by, 272; 272 Ashley Falls, description of, 14-15; river expe- Bishop, Francis Marion, Captain and cartog- ditions through: William Ashley (1825), rapher, 42; 1871 Powell Expedition William Manly (1848), (Nathaniel) Galloway- member, 42-43 Julius Stone Expedition (1909), Amos Bluff citizens and Ute Indians, 248 Burg (1937), Buzz Holmstrom (1937), Boats, launching, at Green River, Wyoming, Norm Nevills (1940), 16, 7, 12, Norm 16; on the Green River: Comet, Sunbeam Nevills and Joseph DesLoge (1947), 13; and Teddy R., 9 Todd-Page party (1926), 17; Don Harris Book Cliffs, trail on, 23 (1940), 17; Cal Giddings (1950s), 17 Bountiful Co-op Gas Station, 346 Brennigar’s Ferry, on the Green River, 9 B Brooks, Phil, and a big wheel, 269 Barboglio, Joseph, Italian immigrant, Helper Buckboard Hotel, at Halfway Hollow on the Mayor and bank president, 39 Green River, 7 Beaman, E.O., 1871 Powell River Expedition Buckskin Charlie, Southern Ute, Muache photographer, 43, 44, 46, 48 negotiator, 53-55; and wife, Emma Naylor Beehive Rock, mouth of Kingfisher Canyon Buck, 52 on the Green River, 8 Bunker’s Feed Center Co-op, 355 Bentley, Joseph T., BYU comptroller, involve- Butt, Uriah, Bluff teenager, recalls Indian ment with student spy ring, 180-82, 183; fight, 234-35 supports BYU president, Ernest L. BYU Army and Air Force ROTC, flag cere- Wilkinson, 166-67, 173 mony, 187 Benow, Southern Ute, 64-65 BYU dress code, 179 Benow, Johnny, son of Southern Ute Chief BYU faculty, student spy ring targets: Stewart Benow, opposed moving to Ignatio L. Grow, Ray C. Hillam, Melvin P. Mabey, Reservation, 68 Louis C. Midgley, Jesse R. Reeder, J. Benson, Ezra Taft, LDS Church apostle and Kenneth Davies, Richard B. Wirthlin, U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, separates Briant S. Jacobs, 168, David Kirk Hart, Extension Service from state farm bureaus, Russell Horiuchi, Gordon 355 Wagner, John T. Bernhard, 171 Bicycle, clubs: California Association of BYU students: Ronald Hankin, David M. (Bi)cycling Clubs (C.A. C. C.), 334, Sisson, Colleen D. Stone reveal student spy League of American Wheelman (L.A. W.), ring, 178-79 333-34; Social Wheel Club, 268-69, 272, BYU vice presidents, student spy ring and 275; Meredith and Guthrie Bicycle Store, cover-up report, 184-86 202, 203; messenger boys on, 273, 274; professional racers in Salt Lake City: Frank C “Western Whirlwind” Cotter, John Caine, Margaret Nightingale, promotes M. Chapman, George Chapman, 323; mammoth U. S. flag for statehood

384 2011 INDEX

celebration, 252 Dellenbaugh, Frederick S., 1871 Powell Calder, Alice, seamstress, U. S. flag for Utah expedition member, 10, 14, 16, 43, 44-45 statehood celebration, 260 Derrick, Margaret Glade, seamstress, Utah Caldwell, Cam, BYU student body officer, statehood celebration U. S. flag, 253, 259, and BYU president Ernest L. Wilkinson, 260 184 Desolation Canyon, 20, 33, 43, 49 Cannon, John Q., Captain Utah National Dinwoody Block, decorated for statehood, Guard, inspects Indian camps, 68-70, 69 255 Carter Creek, 12-13 Dixie wine, 306-307 Cathedral of the Madeleine (Catholic), 148 Dutchie, Edward, Ute, recalls hostile Utes Cherry Meadows, 27, 40 manhunt, 236 Chicken Jack, Ute, killed by white posse, 235 Christensen, Christian Lingo, Indian transla- E tor, 65-66 Edward, Lizzie Thomas, vocalist, 113 Christenson, Harry, Salt Lake City fire fighter, Edwards, William, Mountain Meadows biography, 373, killed at Victory Theater affidavit, 92-94 fire, 363 Egan, Lloyd, assistant fire chief, commands fire Clawson, Hyrum B., Utah statehood day fighting at Victory Theater, 362, demoted, celebration committee member, 252 370 Clawson, Spencer, son of Hyrum B., and Elgar, Edward, acoustic recording session of ZCMI buyer, 260 Tabernacle Choir, 116 Colorado River Storage Project, 18 Ensign, Horace, 115 Cooperative Extension Service and College Ernest L. Wilkinson (student) center, 171; Extension Service, established by memorial lounge, 177 Congress, 339 Escalante Valley (Potato Valley), description of, Cotton Mission, 300-301 205 Cowboys, employed by Preston Nutter, 35 Coyner, John McCutcheon, Presbyterian F educator, 131, 137-38 Federation of American Motorcyclists Creel, Lorenzo D., special Indian agent, 237- (F.A.M.), 332-33 38 Ferron, Augustus “Gus,” Deputy U. S. Crick, Thomas, files on Range Creek land, Surveyor, 23-24, 37 34-35 Ferry, Edward P., Park City mine owner, 126; Cutler, John C., Utah governor, demands organizes Park City Congregational Colorado Ute removal, 227-28 Church, 130 Cycling club, 270 Ferry Hall, Westminster College, 122, and Converse Hall, 141; interior of, 139 D Ferry, Jeanette, wife of William Ferry, 125; Darioli (Daroli) House, at Range Creek, 22 Athenaeum Club member, 134-35; Darioli, John, Italian immigrant, land entry biographical sketch of, 125; organizes problems, 37-39 Ladies Anti-Polygamy Society, 131-32; Day, David F., Colorado Ute agent, Indian promotes Christian education in Utah, removal, 59, 60, 67, 68 131; Women’s Industrial Home officer, 134 Daynes-Beebe Music Store and Company, Ferry, William Montague, Colonel, 102, 103; involved with Mormon biographical sketch of, 123-24, 126, 125; Tabernacle Choir recording, 114, 119, 121 financial contributor to Westminster Daynes, Joseph J., Jr., co-founder Daynes- College, 139-41; helps establish Park City’s Beebe Music Store, arranges Mormon Congregational Church, 130; Park City Tabernacle Choir’s first recording, 102, house, 127 103, 105, 106, 117-18; 104 Firefighting equipment, at Liberty Theater, Daynes, Joseph J., Sr., Mormon Tabernacle 367 organist, 102 Firemen’s Relief Association, aids families of

385 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Victor Theater fire, 364 near, 16 Flaming Gorge, 4, 9; description of, 10-11, 12 H Flaming Gorge Dam, construction of, 18, 17; Hamilton, Paul, Salt Lake City firefighter, Jacqueline Kennedy dedicates, 18; killed fighting Hotel Newhouse fire, 367 President John F. Kenney power generator Hammond, Francis A., LDS church stake ceremony at, 19 president, opposed to moving Southern Flavell, George, early Green River runner, 15 Utes,59-60 Four Corners, map of, 229 Hancock, George R. and Kate Ferry, home Fremont, John Charles, and Green River, 4-5 of, 135 Fremont Indians, clay figurine made by, 217; Hankin, Ronald Ira, student spy, 168, 174, fauna hunted by, 217; flora grown by, 216; 175, 178, 179, 181 ruins of, 28-29; traded with Anasazi Hanson, LaVere, Salt Lake City Fire Chief, Indians, 217-18 361; commands Victory Theater fire fight- ing effort, 362-63; demoted as fire chief, G 370, requests support from city commis- Gates of Lodore, 13, 27 sion, 369 Gerber, Irvin, purchases and sells Range Hatch-Eggert Film Expedition (1955), on the Creek land, 39-40 Green River, 6 Gibbs, George W., Utah National Guard Hatch, Melvin, biography of, 373; killed at Captain, 68, 70 Victory Theater fire, 363; Lt. of fire engine Giddings, Cal, Green River kayaker, 17, 19 crew number 1, 360 Giles, James, father-in-law of firefighter Hausman, Alexander, Columbia Photograph Theron Johnson, campaigns for city Recording Company engineer, 106, 107- commissioner John Matheson, 371, con- 108, 112-13 ducts inquiry of Salt Lake City fire depart- Havane, son-in-law of Ute Indian Polk, killed ment, 366-67; during escape, 235 Gillett (Guillet), (Peter or Herman), Indian Heagren, Harry, Ogden’s bicycle race track trader, 58 manager, 328 Glass, Joseph S., Bishop, 144, 145; financial Heath, Frederick, Salt Palace co-developer, administration of, 158-59 323 Glenwood Park, Ogden, bicycle race track at, Henroid, Gus, Range Creek Ranch hand, 26, 326 28 Grand Theatre, 231 Hewett, O. B., physician, supporter of bicycle Granger, Walter K., Utah Congressman, 348; tax, 278-79 politically opposed by Utah Farm Bureau, Hill, Amos, Green River hermit, 11; living on 346-48, 352 Skull Creek, 14 Grayson (Blanding), settled by Albert R. Hillam, Ray C., BYU faculty member, 172, Lyman, 226-27, 227 184; charges levied against, 171-74; Green River (Seeds-kee-dee Agie—Prairie Fulbright scholar, 176; Political Science Hen River), at Ashley Falls, 7; at Department chair, 185 Brenninger’s Ferry, 9; at Carter Creek, 12- Hunter Congressional Bill, divides Southern 13; at Flaming Gorge, 4, at Horseshoe Ute reservation, 70-71 Canyon, 11; at Red Canyon, 6; boat run- I ners on, Don Harris river runner, 17; Cid Ricketts Sumner description of, 6; com- Ignacio, Weenuche (Weeminuche) Indian mercial boats on, Comet, Sunbeam, Teddy R, chief, 53-54, 58, 62, 55 8-9; John C. Fremont’s description of, 4; Indian Rights Association (IRA), 56-57 ranches on: Taylor, Kraus, Logan, Homes, Indians, Fremont, ruins at Range Creek, 20, 6-7, Lowe and Brennigar, 7; Smith, 8; 7 28-29; Ute family, 29, 29 Green River Suck, legend of the, 10, 13 J Green River, Wyoming, boating launching

386 2011 INDEX

Jackson, Sheldon, Utah Presbyterian minister, Ma Polk, mother of Tse-ne-gat, attends son’s 137, 138 trial, 244 Jenkins, Ab, Salt Lake City Mayor, 363, Mariano, Weenuche Indian Chief, meets with defeated for second term, 373-74; Utah Territorial Governor Caleb West, Police and Fire Departments head, 368 64-65; negotiator, 53-55 Johnson, Theron, Salt Lake City firefighter, McAdams, Bernice and Mary, seamstresses, assigned to Engine Number1, 360; biogra- mammoth forty-five star U. S. flag, 260 phy of, 372; killed at Victory Theater fire, McClellan, John J., Mormon Tabernacle 363 organist, 110, performs on first Mormon Joseph Smith Memorial Building (BYU), 167 Tabernacle Choir recording, 105, 109, 117 J. W. Guthrie (Bicycle) Company, 264 McKay, David O., LDS Church President, meets with Ernest L. Wilkinson, 166, 178; K with BYU students, 185 Kane, Francis F., Indian Rights Association McNiece, Robert, Dr., Presbyterian minister, investigator, 57-58 establishes Sheldon Jackson College Kessler, Alfred, and Murray (brothers), part- (Westminster College), 138 ners in Range Valley Cattle Company, 30 Memorial Lounge, Wilkinson Center, 177 Kessler, Frederick, description of mammoth Michigan Bunch, Park City mining coterie: U. S. flag, 260 William Ferry, David C. McLaughlin, J. W. Kolb, Ellsworth and Emery (brothers), visits Mason, Frederick A. Nims, 122-23, 128 Holmes ranch on Green River, 7, 12 Miles, W.A., and family settle in Nine Mile Canyon, 42 L Milton, L. H. “Bud,” Preston Nutter range Lamont, Daniel S., U. S. Secretary of War, creek ranch foreman, 31 issued design for forty-fifth star U. S. flag, Minnie Maud Creek and Canyon, origins of 255-56 name, 49-51 Lavell Edwards Football Stadium, 99 Mitty, John J., Catholic Bishop Salt Lake Lawson, Iver and Gussie, brothers of John Diocese, and Bishop Robert J. Dwyer, Lawson, professional bicycle racers, 324 144; biographical sketch of, 146; financial Lawson, John “The Terrible Swede”, bicycle reports to Cardinal Hayes, 147-50, 152-53; racer, 320, 324, uses motor-pacing, 331 first Holy Rosary Parish Holy Lawton, H. W., Lt. Col., investigates Southern Communion class, 105; letter to Cardinal Ute troubles, 62-65 Hayes, 152-53; Salt Lake Diocese statistical LDS (Mormon) church, opposed to New and financial report, 154-63; with Deal and Fair Deal agricultural programs, Apostolic delegate, Giovanni Cicognani 348-50 and Salt Lake Bishop James E. Kearney, Lee, J. Bracken, Utah Governor, relations with 157 Utah Farm Bureau, 344-46 Monticello, Utah, log church and school, 59; Lighthouse Rock, in Desolation Canyon, 50; Southern Ute negotiations location, 64-66 river runners land mark, 44-45 Morgan, Thomas J., Indian Commissioner, Linwood, Utah, established in 1890s, 8, 10 opposes Southern Ute removal, 56 Log Cabin (Cliff), landmark on the Green Mormon Tabernacle, interior, 1896, 109 River, 43, 47 Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Columbia Long, George, Preston Nutter employee and Phonograph record, 119; in Tabernacle homestead claimant, 34-35 (1896), 120; performs at Chicago’s World Lyman, Albert R., testified against Ute Tse- Fair (1893), 100 ne-gat, 248 Morrell, Edwin, BYU department head, defends Ray Hillam, 172, 173, meets BYU M vice-presidents about student spy ring, 176 Main Street (Salt Lake City), during Utah’s Motorbike racing, at Wandamere track, 332 statehood celebration, 256, 277 Mancos Jim, Ute intermediary, 236 N

387 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

National Cycling Association (NCA), 327, and Minnie Powell and niece of John 330, 332-33 Wesley National Farmers Union (NFA), establishes Powell, 49-50, 51 local organization in Emery County, 343, Powell, Wilhelmina (Minnie) Paul rival to American Farm Bureau, 342 Bengelstraeter, wife of William Bramwell Nebeker, Aquila, U. S. Marshall, hunts Polk (Bram) and Tse-ne-gat, 232, 233 Powell, Walter “Clem,” John Wesley Powell’s Nevills, Norman D., commercial river nephew, member of Powell Expedition, outfitter, 15-16 46 Niles, John, Range Creek land entry man, land dispute, 34-38 R Nine Mile Canyon, map of, 45; naming Range Creek (Valley), land entry men: legends of, 42 Thomas Crick, John Niles, George Long, Nine Mile Creek, description of, 46-47 24-35; map of 21 Ranch in, 22-23, 41; North Creek Shelter site, artifacts found at, trail map to, 32, 46-47 217; clay figurine found at, 217; descrip- Range Valley Cattle Company, claims water tion of, 206-207, 208-209, 212-15; excava- appropriations to: North Springs, Willow tion of, 213; granaries at, 216; hearth Springs, Indian Springs, Twin Springs, found at, 216; rock art at, 204, 207; South Springs, 21; incorporators: August significance of, 220-22 Ferron, Benjamin Van Dusen, Charles Van Nutter, Preston, Utah cattle baron, Range Dusen, James Dart, Edwin Dart, Reuben Creek legal land issues, 15, 30-31, 34, 36, Dart, George Tracy, John Scott, 23-25 land 40; 31 holdings of, 21-22; legal problems of, 36- Nutter Ranch, Range Creek operations, 38; origins of, 23-24; ranch hands, 25 33-35, 35 Red Canyon, 6, description of, 12-14 Redd, Hardy, Mormon rancher, attitude O toward Utes, 239 Olsen, Henning and Lloyd (son), Range Rex, Jeff, North Creek Shelter site owner, Creek land owner, 39; Lloyd’s suicide, 39 209 Opal club, University of Utah student social, Reynolds, A. K., river runner, floats Red literary and bicycle club, 269 Canyon, 15 Rock Creek, 46-47, 51 P Root, Dave, Southern Ute leader, 69 Painter, Charles C., Indian Rights Association Russell, Stephen Hayes, BYU student, student investigator, of Southern Utes, 57 spy ring, 182; meets with Larry Wimmer Paleoarchaic period, artifacts found: bone and church leadership, 181; membership bead, 211, projectile points, 212; tools, in: John Birch Society, 167, in Young 210, 211-12 Americans for Freedom Club, 168; Park City miners, 129 organizes student spies: Everett Eugene Philips, Ed, Salt Lake City firefighter, assigned Bryce, Lyle H. Burnett, Michael L. Call, to Engine Number 1, 360 Curt E. Conklin, Ronald Ira Hankin, Piercey, Joseph Knowles (J. K.), Salt Lake City Edward (Ted) G. Jacob, Lloyd L. Miller, fire chief, career of, 371, 374 Mark A. Skousen, Lisle H. Updike, James Pilling, Clarence and Bert (brothers), Range H. Widenmann, 168; university Creek land owners, discovers Pilling educator, 187 figurines, 39 Polk (Billy Hatch), Southern Ute leader, S resists arrest, 230 Safety (bi)cycle, “poor man’s carriage,” 264, Powell, John Wesley, 1871 expedition of, 267-68 through Flaming Gorge and the Green Saint George, LDS Tabernacle in, 313, River Suck, 7, 10, 49-50 interior, 314; Main Street in, 299 Powell, (Minnie) Maud, daughter of Bram Saint Mary of the Wasatch, 151

388 2011 INDEX

Saltair, hippodrome (race track), 325-26, con- Solomon, George, Linwood, Utah, founder 8 struction of, 335, 336, designed by Southern Paiutes, occupy North Creek Thomas O. Angell, 326, 333 Shelter site, 218 Salt Lake City Collegiate Institute, Southern Ute Commission, 53, 56 Presbyterian school, 137-38 Southern Utes: Bruno Seguro, Jack Ute, Salt Lake City Fire Department, conditions Havane, Joe Hammond, Jack Rabbit of, during 1940s, 364-65; tribute to, 363 Soldier, John Noland, 239 Salt Lake City fire fighters, injured fighting Southern Utes, Dry Valley camp, 67 Victory Theater fire: Lt. William Lamb, Spencer’s (Arthur), trading post, near Mexican Capt. A. R. Ward, Lt. Evan Hansen, George Hat, 243 Kilpatrick, F. E. McKinnon, Glen Starley, John, Temple Square gardener, super- Crowther, Elmer Hansen, Luther Stroud, vises hanging of mammoth forty-five star 363 U. S. flag, 262-63 Salt Lake City, paving of streets, 276-77 Starley, John C., son of John, burns mammoth Salt Lake (Mormon) Tabernacle, 253 forty-five star U. S. flag, 262-63 Salt Palace, activities at, 322, developed by Stephens, Evan, Mormon Tabernacle Choir Frederick Heath and J. R. Walker, 321 director, prepares choir for first phono- Salt Palace Saucer, bicycle racers at, 327; graph recording, 104-105, 112, 114; 107 Richard Kletting, architect, and Thomas Stevens, Jay, investigator, National Board of O. Angell, contractor of, 321-22 Fire Underwriters, investigates Victory Sandgren, Clyde D., BYU counsel, involve- Theater fire and Salt Lake City Fire ment with student spy ring 171, 172, 175, Department, 368-69, 370 181 Sumner’s Amphitheater, named for Jack San Juan Co-operative, 240 Sumner, 48 Scanlan, Lawrence, Catholic bishop: appoint- ment to Utah, 307-08; celebrates Mass in T St. George Tabernacle, 310-13; directs Tavaputs Plateau: West, 22, 29, 39-40, cattle construction of St. John’s Hospital and St. on, 30, 33; East, 29 Mary’s School in Silver Reef, 309 Taylor, Marshall “Major,” African American, Scott, Hugh, U. S. Army chief of staff, negoti- races at Salt Palace Saucer, 329, world ates Ute surrender, 238, 240, 245 champion bicycle racer, 329; Scott, John, Range Valley Cattle Company Tse-ne-gat inigatt (Silver Earrings a.k.a. partner with George Tracy, 25 Everett Hatch), son of Ute leader, Polk, Scott’s Bottom, U. S. G. S. camp site on the confrontation with Albert R. Lyman, 226; Green River, 2-3 robs and kills New Mexican sheep Seamount, Bill, Nutter ranch hand, plants fish herder, 228-30, 234; trial of, 242, 243-44; in Range Creek, 31, 32 224 Sharp, John, Utah chapter head National Thomas, Elbert D., Utah Democratic Senator, Cycling Association, 280 Utah Farm Bureau opposes, 347-48, 351 Sheeprock Navajo Indian scouts, 241 Tilton, Mr., cattle company operator and Silver Reef, 298; Barbee and Walker Mining partner of Alfred and Murray Kessler, 30 Company in, 306; compared to Pioche, Tracy, George, Range Valley Cattle Company Nevada, 305-06; Catholic Church in, 310; partner with John Scott, 25 Elk Horn Saloon and James N. Lowder Turtle Wash, Joseph Wing land claim in, 37-38 Store in, 305; Main Street in, 300, 303; Don Maguire’s description of, 304; U Marietta Mariger’s description of, 304; Uinta Mountains, 6, 8 Mark Pendleton’s description of, 305, 315; Uintah Farmers Co-op (Vernal), 353 Mrs. Grambs boarding house in, 311; Nels United States Geological Survey, at Ashley Anderson’s description of, 303 Falls, 3, 11, 11 Smith, J. Montgomery, Southern Ute U. S. flag, at Utah capital, 261; chart of large, commissioner, 55 263; designs for forty-five star, 251, 253-

389 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

55, 258; hung on Salt Lake LDS temple, 250, 262; mounted on Salt Lake W Tabernacle ceiling, 254; size of mammoth, Wall, Peter, owner of Buckboard Hotel, 7 257-58 Wandamere bicycle race track, 325 U. S. posse, camp at Bluff, 237 Weenuche Indians, Southern Utes, 53, 58 Utah Consumers Co-operative Association Wells Fargo building, in Silver Reef, 309 (UCA), established by Utah legislature, West, Caleb W., Utah Territorial Governor, 350-51; relations with Utah Farm Bureau, conference with Southern Utes, 62-63, 66; 351-52 63 Utah Farm Bureau, insurance agent, 343-44; West Millard Co-op Gas Station, 351 joined American Farm Bureau Federation, West Tavaputs Plateau, cattle grazing on, 30 339, legal problems with National Farmers Westminster College, 98 Union Service, 353-54; members at Wheelmen Protective Association, field can- outdoor activity, 343; officials of, 340; didates for Salt Lake City municipal organizational chart of, 341; opposed offices, 281 Congressman Walter K. Granger’s and White, Don, Salt Lake City Fire Department Senator Elbert D. Thomas’s re-elections, acting battalion chief, 360, 361-62 347-48; opposed J. Bracken Lee’s guberna- Wilcox, Ray “Budge,” Range Creek Ranch torial candidacy, 356; opposed to U. S. owner, 40 Department of Agriculture’s price and Wilcox, Waldo, Range Creek rancher, 20; 40- subsidy programs, 342; received support 41 from LDS church, 348-49; supported pas- Wing, Joseph E., in Range Creek land dis- sage of Utah’s Agricultural Co-operative putes, 36-37, 38-39; Range Creek cattle Marketing Act, 340; supported U. S. Soil owner, 21, 25-26, 31; 26 33 Conservation Service, 341; Vernal office, Wilkinson, Ernest L., BYU president, 164, 338 169; address: “The changing nature of Utah State Historical Society, and William American government from a Edwards affidavit, 92-94 Constitutional Republic to Welfare State” Ute encampment, at Bluff, 231 166, 170; and student spy ring, 177, Ute Indians, Allen Canyon group of, negoti- 181-82; meetings with LDS Church ates for land, 228; family in Uinta Basin President David O. McKay and other (1874), 29; confrontation (1909), with KT church leaders, 176, 178, 180 Cattle Company, 226-27 Wimmer, Larry T., BYU faculty member, Ute peace negotiators: Robert Martin, inter- arranges meetings with church hierarchy, preter; Leonard Creel, Indian agent; 176, 181; meeting with Stephen Russell, General Hugh L. Scott; Polk, Ute; Lt. Col. 181 Robert e. Michie; Posey, Ute; James E. Wirthlin, Richard B., BYU faculty member, Jenkins, Ute Mountain Ute superinten- student spy ring target, 175, 176 dent; Jim Allen, Ute interpreter, 247 Wood, William, and others, bicycle club organizers and constructed Calder Park V race track, 320 Van Dusen, Benjamin, Range Valley Cattle Wolves, removal from West Tavaputs Plateau, Company partner, 24-25, 36 32 Van Dusen, Charles, brother of Benjamin, Women’s Industrial Home (Industrial land claimant, 35-36 Christian Home), 133; leadership contro- Vandygriff, James C., BYU student spy ring, versy over, 133-34 171-72 Woodside, Utah, trail head to Range Creek, Victory Theater fire, description of, 359; fire 23, trail map, 32 investigation committee of: W. E. Eggleston, S. R. Waugh, James Carver, critical of Salt Lake City Fire Department Y fighting of ,370; 366, 358, 359 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA),

390 2011 INDEX

bicycle club of, 271 Young, Brigham, Jr., meets Southern Utes, 63 Young, Zina D. Huntington and other seam- stresses, 251 Z ZCMI, decorated for Utah statehood, 257

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042-143X) is published quarterly by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101-1182. The managing editor is Allan Kent Powell with offices at the same address as the publisher. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the Society or its magazine. The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 2,710 copies printed; 5 dealer and counter sales, 2,274 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 2,279 total paid circulation; 58 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; 2,337 total distribution; 373 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; total, 2,710. The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 2,562 copies printed; 7 dealer and counter sales; 2,240 mail subscriptions; 0 other classes mailed; 2,269 total paid circulation; 62 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution; 2,331 inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing; 231 total 2,562.

391 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS

THOMAS G. ALEXANDER JAMES B. ALLEN LEONARD J. ARRINGTON (1917-1999) MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER DAVID L. BIGLER FAWN M. BRODIE (1915-1981) JUANITA BROOKS (1898-1989) OLIVE W. BURT (1894-1981) EUGENE E. CAMPBELL (1915-1986) EVERETT L. COOLEY (1917-2006) C. GREGORY CRAMPTON (1911-1995) S. GEORGE ELLSWORTH (1916-1997) AUSTIN E. FIFE (1909-1986) PETER L. GOSS LEROY R. HAFEN (1893-1985) B. CARMON HARDY JOEL JANETSKI JESSE D. JENNINGS (1909-1997) A. KARL LARSON (1899-1983) GUSTIVE O. LARSON (1897-1983) WILLIAM P. MACKINNON BRIGHAM D. MADSEN CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN DEAN L. MAY (1938-2003) DAVID E. MILLER (1909-1978) DALE L. MORGAN (1914-1971) WILLIAM MULDER (1915-2008) FLOYD A. O’NEIL HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS (1917-2004) CHARLES S. PETERSON RICHARD W. SADLER GARY L. SHUMWAY MELVIN T. SMITH WALLACE E. STEGNER (1909-1993) WILLIAM A. WILSON

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392 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (ISSN 0 042-143X) Department of Community and Culture Division of State History EDITORIAL STAFF BOARD OF STATE HISTORY ALLAN KENT POWELL, Managing Editor CRAIG FULLER, Associate Editor MICHAEL W. HOMER, Salt Lake City, 2013, Chair MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY, Salt Lake City, 2013 ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS SCOTT R. CHRISTENSEN, Salt Lake City, 2013 YVETTE DONOSSO, Sandy, 2015 LEE ANN KREUTZER, Salt Lake City, 2012 MARIA GARCIAZ, Salt Lake City, 2015 STANFORD J. LAYTON, Salt Lake City, 2012 DEANNE G. MATHENY, Lindon, 2013 ROBERT E. PARSON, Benson, 2013 ROBERT S. MCPHERSON, Blanding, 2015 W. PAUL REEVE, Salt Lake City, 2011 MAX J. SMITH, Salt Lake City, 2013 JOHN SILLITO, Ogden, 2013 GREGORY C. THOMPSON, Salt Lake City, 2015 NANCY J. TANIGUCHI, Merced, California, 2011 PATTY TIMBIMBOO-MADSEN, Plymouth, 2015 GARY TOPPING, Salt Lake City, 2011 MICHAEL K. WINDER, West Valley City, 2013 RONALD G. WATT, West Valley City, 2013 COLLEEN WHITLEY, Salt Lake City, 2012 ADMINISTRATION

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