Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, Fall 2001, Number 4
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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.