Beehive Archive

The episode originally aired on KCPW December 1, 2006.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2006 Utah Humanities Council

The Script (modified):

107 years ago this week, the Utah illusionist known as “Dante the Great” died in the tiny Australian town of Dubbo of a gunshot wound to the abdomen .  Born Oscar Eliason to Swedish immigrant parents, the magician began his career at the age of twenty with a performance at a Salt Lake LDS meetinghouse.  Soon he was touring Utah, expanding his travels to surrounding states and the rest of the country as word of his magic spread.  Like other magicians of the age, including the illustrious Harry Houdini, Eliason was especially interested in exposing what he believed were the fake supernatural tricks of spiritualist mediums.  At one popular performance in Salt Lake, he was able to duplicate and pick apart the supposedly mystical marvels of Anna Eva Fay, one of the nation’s most admired mediums.

As Eliason’s star rose in the United States, he also began receiving requests to appear on stages in Canada, Mexico, and even Cuba.  Later, in 1898, he decided to travel to New Zealand and Australia where he played to packed houses.  In Sydney, he actually broke the record for consecutive nights performed by one man.  But Eliason wasn’t satisfied with playing just the big cities Down Under.  He also decided to hit some of the small towns in Australia’s rough interior.  It was here, while on a kangaroo hunt, that he was accidentally shot by one of his friends.  Doctors initially thought Eliason’s wound was minor, but within days Dante the Great was dead.  Ironically, one of the feats that made him popular was “The Bullet Catch” where he would allow a ring of men to fire loaded guns at him at point blank range.  Audiences were amazed when the smoke cleared and Eliason was still standing, holding a handful of bullets.  Eliason was buried in Australia where magicians still make pilgrimages to his grave.

The Rest of the Story:

According to historian Will Bagley, some observers suspected that Eliason’s death was the result of foul play.   At the time of his Australian tour, the magician was making more than $5,000 a month, a hefty sum for the time.  But as Eliason found out later, not all of that money was making it into his pocket.  It seems his manager, M. B. Curtis, had been dipping into the illusionist’s ticket receipts to feather his own nest.  Eliason fired the manager, though he eventually paid Curtis $7,000 when the latter sued.

As appealing as this conspiracy theory may have been to some, it’s extremely unlikely Curtis was behind Eliason’s death.  The man who fired the fatal shot was one of Eliason’s friends—his pianist, George Jones.  Add to that the fact that the doctor who examined him pronounced the gunshot a flesh wound—hardly the likely result of a planned assassination.

Sources:

See news reports on Eliason’s career and death in the following editions of the Salt Lake Tribune: April 24, 1894; April 26, 1894; April 30, 1894; May 1, 1894; May 18, 1894; October 24, 1894; December 18, 1894; April 8, 1895; November 30, 1899; December 1, 1899; December 2, 1899; and December 29, 1899.  Also see Will Bagley’s pair of articles for the Salt Lake Tribune on Eliason.  They were printed respectively on September 24 and October 1, 2000.  (The articles may be accessed on the Utah History to Go website at www.historytogo.utah.gov.)

This episode originally aired on KCPW August 24, 2007.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2007 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

74 years ago, the followers of Marie Ogden arrived in San Juan County’s Dry Valley and began to create their version of God’s kingdom.  Ogden had dabbled in the occult and lectured on spiritual subjects around Boise, Idaho, before making the shocking announcement that she had established a direct link to heaven through her typewriter.  She claimed the typewriter, under God’s direct control, had commanded her to move to the wild lands of southeastern Utah and take a small band of eager disciples with her.  Followers who made the move to Dry Valley had to renounce all worldly goods, become semi-vegetarian, and swear allegiance to the supposedly divine word that came from Ogden’s typewriter.

At first Ogden and her followers were mainly treated as a curiosity by the San Juan County locals.  But then, in 1935, an Ogdenite by the name of Edith Peshak died of cancer at the religious settlement believers called the Home of Truth.  Ogden, however, claimed Peshak wasn’t dead at all and was only in a state of spiritual purification Peshak, Ogden declared, would eventually return to life.  People from the Home of Truth bathed the body in salt brine three times a day and even fed it.  When health officials investigated they found the body in a perfect state of preservation.

Soon, however, followers of Ogden began leaving the community, perhaps because their leader’s predictions about a resurrected Edith Peshak never panned out.  When it was discovered that Ogden ordered a follower to burn Peshak’s body on the sly, what little credibility she had left evaporated and she drifted from public notice.  Years later, the contents of Ogden’s office, presumably including her typewriter, were sold at auction.

Content for this episode of the Beehive Archive was provided by the Utah State Historical Society and the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission.

The Rest of the Story:

According to writer Wallace Stegner, it was Tommy Robertson, a follower of Marie Ogden, who did the actual burning of Peshak’s body.  In Stegner’s words, Ogden had ordered Robertson to wrap Peshak’s corpse “in two sheets and a thin mattress” and then carry the mummy on his back to a dry wash “about a quarter mile southwest of the Peshak cabin.”  When he got to the wash, Robertson built a four-foot-high pyre, laid the body on it, doused it in oil, and set it ablaze.

Stegner reports that Ogden watched the entire cremation from a distance.  When the body was finally consumed she supposedly revealed to Robertson that he should gather up the scattered bones around the pyre and bury them.  What Ogden didn’t know, however, was that Thompson hadn’t hidden all of the evidence: he later claimed to have dug a couple of vertebrae out of the corpse before following Ogden down into the wash.

Sources:

See the April 1995 collection of the History Blazer, a joint project of the Utah State Historical Society and the Utah State Centennial Commission.  The History Blazer can be found on the Utah History Suite CD available from the Utah State Historical Society.  Also see Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 331-343.

This episode originally aired on KCPW March 9, 2007.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm
© 2007 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

One hundred and seven years ago this week, the village of Koosharem found itself in the throes of a major smallpox outbreak that had state health officials concerned.  According to the Salt Lake Herald, authorities at first thought the disease might have been the chicken pox.  But as it became clear that the outbreak was much more serious, debate over what needed to be done intensified, and a quarantine was eventually declared.  People were told they now had to stay at home, and outsiders were prohibited from entering the town. 

According to the Herald, the citizens of Koosharem didn’t like being told to stay put.  The paper reported that townspeople continued to mingle at dances, church meetings, and funerals.  A few weeks into the outbreak more than twenty citizens had come down with the pox, frightening people in surrounding towns.  One man, an Arthur Montague from Greenwich, wrote to health officials, claiming the disease was being spread to neighboring towns by travelers and peddlers.  If something wasn’t done quickly, fumed Montague, all of the surrounding countryside would be crawling with smallpox. 

When the outbreak began, there was no local board of health to manage it and there weren’t any doctors in town to provide immediate care, though a few physicians later made the trip to Koosharem to help tend to the sick.  The fact that the tiny town lay on the disputed border between Piute and Sevier Counties also didn’t help matters.

So was the smallpox epidemic really as bad as people made it out to be?  The leading citizens of the Koosharem claimed their neighbors and the papers had blown things out of proportion.  For the Koosharemites, it was a clear case of unwarranted mass hysteria.  Every case of smallpox, they declared, had been quarantined, schools had been closed, and public meetings had been banned.  If that’s true, then their efforts helped the epidemic burn itself out.  By the end of April, the pox had left Koosharem behind.  According to authorities, a total of 45 people had come down with the disease.

The Rest of the Story:

The 1900 Koosharem smallpox outbreak appears to have been a part of a larger statewide epidemic, and similar eruptions of smallpox in other Utah towns coincided with the occurrences in Koosharem.  In addition to outbreaks in Fillmore, Springville, Payson, Spanish Fork, and Cedar Fort, there were also cases of the disease in San Juan and Carbon counties that year.  According to historian Martha Bradley, an occurrence of smallpox in Greenville (Beaver County) “caused neighbors to take precautions against contact with those outside their families.”  A year later, a smallpox epidemic struck Iron County, causing the Cedar City council to hire guards to patrol places under quarantine.

Perhaps the most interesting result of the statewide smallpox epidemic of 1900 was the political fight it helped spark between proponents, led by the State Board of Health (which met officially for the first time in 1898), and opponents of vaccination.  As scholar Richard Neitzel Holzapfel points out, the state health board issued a proclamation in January 1900 making smallpox vaccination mandatory among school children “in smallpox infested districts.”  There was some question, however, among local political leaders about the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine, causing some communities to flout the state directive and resist mandatory vaccination.  Eventually, anti-vaccinationists took the issue to the Utah Supreme Court, but were rebuffed; the court sided with the health board.  Undaunted, opponents of vaccination turned to the legislature, which, in January 1901, passed the “McMillan Bill” which outlawed compulsory vaccination.  When Governor Heber Wells refused to sign the bill, the legislature overrode his veto and made the bill law.  Only later federal laws forced Utah to toe the line and engage in mandatory vaccination.

Sources:

See news reports about the Koosharem smallpox outbreak in the following editions of the Salt Lake Herald: February 24, 1900; March 9, 1900; March 11, 1900; March 12, 1900; March 17, 1900; March 22, 1900; March 23, 1900; and April 25, 1900.  See also Martha Sonntag Bradley, A History of Beaver County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Beaver County Commission, 1999), 206; and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, A History of Utah County (Salt Lake City: Utah County Commission and Utah State Historical Society, 1999), 121-125.

This episode originally aired on KCPW
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm
© 2006 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

A hundred and twenty-nine years ago this week a cremation was scheduled to take place in Salt Lake City.  The body to be burned was Charles F. Winslow’s, a doctor from Boston, Massachusetts, who died of heart failure on July 7th, 1877.

When Winslow’s friends read his will the day he died, they discovered he wanted his body to be burned and his ashes placed in his late wife’s coffin, so they had a special furnace built just for the occasion and announced that the doctor’s remains would be burned the next Thursday.  But his children interfered, and threatened to sue, forcing the ceremony to be put on hold until things could be ironed out and a new date—July 31st—could be set.

Winslow’s cremation ended up being a first-rate spectacle.  Police were on hand to cordon off the furnace and keep out the mob of curious onlookers that showed up to watch.  Some people even jumped the barricade to get a closer look.  Here’s how the Salt Lake Tribune described what happened shortly after the doctor’s body was finally fed into the blazing crematory:

For the first twenty-five minutes the body could not be seen on account of the density of the smoke and flames which surrounded it, but a crackling noise was quite distinct.  By the expiration of the first half hour only the roar of the fire was heard, and the bones of the lower extremities became visible, the flesh having entirely disappeared. 

The fire was stoked again and a little more than two hours later Winslow’s body was gone, reduced to a few pounds of fine white ash.

The irony of Winslow’s burning—only the second formal cremation in modern American history—was that it happened in a conservative state where today some people question the dominant religion’s stance on cremation.  Yet, this important episode in the development of the national cremation movement was hardly noticed by the church.  No denunciations in the Deseret News, no statements from the First Presidency—just a quiet acceptance of a new way of departing this world.

The Rest of the Story:

It wasn’t until seven years after the Winslow cremation that the Mormon-owned Deseret News actually started encouraging church members to reject cremation, and then only for health—rather than religious—reasons.  In 1894, the News again weighed in on the cremation question, and again it focused on issues of sanitation and public health rather than religion.  As late as 1900, the News was still talking about cremation, quoting A. S. Bower, President of the Utah State Medical Society, as saying that he would “turn all cemeteries into parks; all graves into rosebeds; all dead bodies would be burned, and their ashes deposited in a columbarium or left with friends.  And thus only may we rest in peace freed from the obnoxious decay that must follow all earth burials.”

Sources:

See news reports about the Winslow cremation in the following editions of the Salt Lake Tribune:  July 12, 1877; July 13, 1877; July 31, 1877; August 1, 1877; and August 2, 1877.  Two retrospective news stories were also done on the Winslow cremation and can be found in the May 15, 1895, and August 6, 1899, editions of the Tribune.  Also see Stephen Prothero, Purified By Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Welcome to the Beehive Archive blog.  Here, you’ll not only be able to read original scripts from Beehive Archive episodes that have aired on KCPW and Utah Public Radio, but you’ll also be able to discover historical details that couldn’t be included on the radio program.

Beehive Archive is a two-minute radio program, funded by the Utah Humanities Council in partnership with the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University.  You can hear Beehive Archive weekly on KCPW radio (88.3 FM and 105.3 FM) Friday mornings between 8:30 and 8:45 am and Utah Public Radio (91.5 and 89.5 in Cache Valley and at other frequencies around the state) Friday mornings at 9:30 am and evenings at 7:30 pm.