B’nai Israel

Temple B'nai Israel (Courtesy Utah State History)

The Story:

In 1864, when Jewish settlers in Utah celebrated the high holy day of Yom Kippur, they did so in a private home.  The territory’s Jewish community was still in its infancy, and grew slowly as westward-bound Jews made their way to the Great Basin.  Many of the early Jewish migrants to Utah were merchants intent on taking advantage of new opportunities in the American West.

By 1881, Jewish pioneers had established Congregation B’nai Israel and had bought a plot of land for a synagogue and school at the intersection of Third South and First West in Salt Lake City.  Two years later, due in no small part to the sacrifices of the congregation, the school and temple were finished.  When the congregation decided to move to a new synagogue on Fourth South a few years later, the commission for the new building went to Philip Meyer, the nephew of Frederick Auerbach, one of Salt Lake’s leading businessmen.  Meyer, who lived and studied in Germany, came to Utah at his uncle’s expense intent on building a structure that would please Utah’s Jewish community.  What he designed was a scaled-down version of Berlin’s Great Synagogue, a magnificent structure that unfortunately was destroyed by Allied bombers in World War II.

After the synagogue was built, Meyer returned to Germany (where he later died at the hands of the Nazis), and Congregation B’nai Israel struggled on.  The rise of a new congregation, this one made up of mostly Eastern European Jews, eventually challenged the dominance of the original group of worshippers, causing the Jewish community to split into factions.   Through it all, the B’nai Israel temple remained a potent reminder of the pioneering spirit of Utah’s first Jewish settlers.

Sources:

See Eileen Hallet Stone. A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 1-20; Jack Goodman, “Jews in Zion,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z, Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1981), 187-220; and Ralph M. Tannenbaum’s entry on the Jewish Community in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.

Text © 2007 Utah Humanities Council
Images courtesy of Utah State History

Armistice Day in Utah, 1918

Courtesy Utah State History

© 2007 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

On November 11, 1918, the signing of the armistice with Germany that effectively ended World War I became the spark that ignited a series of all-out, raucous celebrations across Utah.  It’s not hard to imagine why Utahns met the news of the war’s end with more than a touch of loud revelry.  The United States had only been involved in the war for a little more than a year and a half, but in that time more than 100,000 American soldiers had been killed or died of disease.  (More than 600 of those fallen soldiers had come from Utah.)  On the home front, Utahns sacrificed by going without meat on certain days, using meat and sugar substitutes, donating to the Red Cross, and buying war bonds.

When the war ended, people were understandably ecstatic.  In Sevier County, citizens poured into the streets, bells rang nonstop, cannons roared, and flags began appearing outside homes and around public places.  The people of Richfield arranged an ad hoc parade, complete with a giant effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm, the German leader, chained to the bed of a truck.  According to the local newspaper, a nighttime raid on a stockpile of dynamite in Salina provided a troop of merrymakers with enough ammunition to make people wonder if they were hearing “an allied bombardment of a German front line.”

Courtesy Utah State History

Festivities in Price and Manti were more subdued, but no less genuine.  Another effigy of the Kaiser was hung up in Manti and burned, and the entire town turned out for a community barbecue, while the mayor of Price declared an official holiday and citizens hauled giant logs down from the surrounding mountains to build a bonfire that eventually warmed more than two thousand revelers.  The war was over, and celebrations like these seemed to function like a collective sigh of relief.

Sources:

See news reports about how Utahns celebrated the end of World War One in the following Utah newspapers: Richfield Reaper (November 16, 1918); Manti Messenger (November 15, 1918); and [Carbon County] News-Advocate (November 14, 1918).

John Muir in Utah

© 2009 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In 1877, naturalist and future Sierra Club founder John Muir found himself in Salt Lake City, working as a correspondent for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin.  Not surprisingly, Muir was attracted to the city’s greenery and irrigation system.  Salt Lake was a “city of lilacs and tulips.”  “Nowhere have I seen them in greater perfection,” he effused.  “Scarce a home, however obscure, is without them.”  Of the city’s system for distributing water, Muir was less upbeat.  As City Creek entered town, he wrote, its water was drawn off to feed irrigation canals, which were “all pure and sparkling in the upper streets, but, as they are used to some extent as sewers, they soon manifest the consequence of contact with civilization, though the speed of their flow prevents their becoming offensive.”

Muir was especially dazzled by the Great Salt Lake and Oquirrh Mountains west of the city.  “When the north wind blows,” the naturalist noted, bathing in the lake “is a glorious baptism, for then it is all wildly awake with waves, looking like a prairie in snowy crystal foam.”  Of a hike through the Oquirrhs he wrote effusively: “I found many delightful seclusions—moist nooks at the foot of cliffs, and lilies in every one of them, not growing close together like daisies, but well apart, with plenty of room for their bells to swing free and ring … Descending the mountain, I followed the windings of the main central glen on the north, gathering specimens of the cones and sprays of the evergreens, and most of the other new plants I had met; but the lilies formed the crowning glory of my bouquet—the grandest I had carried in many a day.  I reached the hotel on the lake about dusk with all my fresh riches, and my first mountain ramble in Utah was accomplished.”

Sources:

See John Muir, “The City of the Saints,” “Bathing in Salt Lake,” and “Mormon Lilies,” in Steep Trails (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994); and Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 227-232.

Book About Utah Valley Wins Another Prize

Jared Farmer, author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, can now add another honor to his growing list of prizes: an American Association for State and Local History Award of Merit. 

You can see a description of Farmer’s book, posted on the Beehive Archive blog after Farmer was honored with the Francis Parkman Prize, here.

Salt Lake’s Odd Fellows Hall is on the Move!

Salt Lake City’s Odd Fellows Hall, with its all-seeing eye perched above the main door,  traditionally has not attracted much public attention, at least when compared to some of the city’s more high-profile historic buildings (such as the Utah State Capitol).  That trend, however, has changed, if only temporarily.  (See news stories here and here.)

Beginning in April, workers from Layton Construction began rotating the hall to get it ready for a move across the street  Photos and time-lapse videos of the move can be seen here and here.

The biggest move is still to come.  Next week, on Tuesday, June 23rd, the building will begin its slow roll across Market Street at 8:00 am.   Three days later, on Friday, the bullding will be rotated again and then moved into its final location.

Manuelito

© 2009 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

Born near the Bear Ears in extreme southeastern Utah, the man known to whites as Manuelito and to the Navajo or Diné as Man of Dark Plants Emerging and Holy Boy became one of the last Diné chiefs to resist white territorial incursions onto his people’s traditional lands. Navajos clashed with US Army troops in the Four Corners region as early as the 1850s, but it wasn’t until General James Carleton arrived in Navajo country in 1862 that the Diné found themselves engulfed in full-scale warfare with the US government.

Carleton and other whites wanted Diné lands for their minerals, and hatched a plan to remove the Navajos to the Bosque Redondo in northwestern New Mexico. The job of removal went to legendary Indian fighter Kit Carson, whose scorched earth policy in Navajoland eventually led more than 8,000 Diné to take the punishing Long Walk to the bosque. A few leaders like Manuelito, however, refused to be removed from their homeland and continued to resist Carleton’s soldiers. Hoping to quash the resistance, the general threatened to kill the Navajo headman and have his family enslaved. Soon men from Manuelito’s band began filtering into army posts to surrender, though their chief continued the struggle. Only when Utes fighting for Carleton dispersed Manuelito’s few remaining stalwarts, and the holdouts were close to starvation, did the Man of Dark Plants Emerging finally surrender at Fort Wingate. The year was 1866.

Sources:

See Nancy Maryboy and David Begay. “The Navajos,” in The History of Utah’s Indian Tribes, ed. Forrest Cuch (Salt Lake City: Utah Division of Indian Affairs and Utah State Division of History, 2000); Robert S. McPherson, Navajo Land, Navajo Culture: The Utah Experience in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 11-14; Dee Brown, Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970), 14-36.

Holy Trinity Church

© 2006 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In 1905, Utah’s first Eastern Orthodox church—Holy Trinity—was dedicated. The church, which fronted 4th South, became the center of spiritual life for many eastern and southern Europeans who lived in Salt Lake City and around the Intermountain West. But it was Utah’s Greek community that was the driving force behind the construction and consecration of the church.

Most of Utah’s early Greek settlers were men who felt the duty to provide for their families, leaving poverty-stricken Greece in the hopes of finding temporary jobs in America. Labor agents for railroads and western mining companies preyed on these desperate men, luring them away to the Intermountain West from ports like New York and San Francisco almost as soon as they arrived. Typically, the agent would first charge the new immigrant an excessively steep fee to place him in a job, and then collect a one-dollar kickback from each month’s salary. One particularly repugnant labor agent, Leonidas Skliris, nicknamed the “Tsar of the Greeks,” lived in an opulent apartment in the Hotel Utah and publicly flaunted his diamond jewelry, bought with money he collected from poor immigrant workers.

In the initial years of Greek immigration to Utah, few women came with their husbands and fathers. In fact, in 1910, fewer than ten Greek women lived in the state. Over time, though, Greek men began staying longer in America, and started bringing family members to their ethnic neighborhood on Salt Lake’s west side. Holy Trinity soon became a place for family worship where children were baptized, young men and women were married, and whole families were given the sacraments. Eventually, the community outgrew the old church and a new one had to be built. The new church—also named Holy Trinity—still stands on the corner of 3rd West and 3rd South.

Sources:

See Helen Papanikolas, Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1970); Thomas G. Alexander, Utah: The Right Place 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 239-240; and Constantine J. Skedros, 100 Years of Faith and Fervor: A History of the Greek Orthodox Church Community of Greater Salt Lake City, Utah 1905-2005 (Salt Lake City, UT: The Greek Orthodox Church of Greater Salt Lake, 2005). Also see Papanikolas’s entry on Greek immigrants to Utah in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.

Utah’s Latest Listings on the National Register of Historic Places

The Crockett House (Logan), the Forest Dale Historic District (Salt Lake City) , and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Factory (West Jordan) are Utah’s newest additions to the National Register of Historic Places.  For more information on these historic properties, visit the Utah State History website.

The National Register of Historic Places is the federal list of properties that are historically or architecturally significant.

What’s in the Spring 2009 Utah Historical Quarterly?

For readers interested in Utah military history, check out Bob McPherson’s “Soldiering in a Corner, Living on the Fringe: Military Operations in Southeastern Utah, 1880-1890″ in the latest issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly.   Bob has been writing for many years on the history of southeastern Utah and its native peoples.  His book, The Journey of Navajo Oshley (USU Press, 2000), is a must-read for those interested in understanding the everyday lives of Utah’s Navajos.

Other articles in the recent UHQ issue:

• “The Big Washout: The 1862 Flood in Santa Clara,” By Todd M. Compton
• “Friends at all Times: The Correspondence of Isaiah Moses Coombs and Dryden Rogers,” By Sandra Dawn Brimhall
• “Did Prospectors See Rainbow Bridge Before 1909?” By James H. Knipmeyer

Book reviews in the recent issue of UHQ:

• Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen E. Leonard. Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, Reviewed by Melvin T. Smith
• Shannon A. Novak. House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Reviewed by Richard E. Turley, Jr.
• Stan Hoig. The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade, Reviewed by John D. Barton
• Jay H. Buckley. William Clark Indian Diplomat, Reviewed by H. Bert Jenson

Happy reading!

How Antelope Island Got Its Name

© 2009 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In the fall of 1845, the famous American explorer John Charles Fremont crossed over the Rocky Mountains into what’s now eastern Utah bound for the Great Salt Lake.  Two years earlier, he and a small party of men had probed the lake’s brackish waters in a rubber boat, camping on the island that bears his name.  Now he was headed back, intending to discover more about the body of water he called “the Inland Sea.”

Upon reaching the lake the second time, Fremont set about investigating the region’s ecosystem.  He marveled at what he called the “incrustations of fine white salt” that practically covered the lake’s southern beaches and the insect larvae that called the salty beach mud home.

Perhaps the most interesting story to come from Fremont’s 1845 visit to the Great Salt Lake, however, comes from the explorer’s trip to the long, almost peninsular island near the lake’s southeastern margins.  Area Native Americans had told him he could easily ride his horse across the sandbar that linked the island to the shore.  Taking them at their word, Fremont took his guide Kit Carson and a few men and rode “across the shallows to the island,” recording later that the water never reached “above the saddle-girths” and that the “floor of the lake was a sheet of salt resembling softening ice, into which the horses’ feet sunk to the fetlocks.”  When they finally reached the island, the party found grass and water, as well as a considerable herd of antelope, a few of which Fremont and his men killed for food.  When they at last left the island and returned across the sandbar, they were accosted by a local Indian man who claimed all the antelope on the island were his and that they would have to pay for the animals they had shot.  Fremont, not wanting to anger the man, gave him some cloth, tobacco and a knife to make up for the dead antelope—and to the island he gave the name of the beasts that roamed it.  It became Antelope Island. 

Sources:

John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California (Buffalo: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1852), 198-208; John C. Fremont, Memoirs of My Life (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, and Company 1887; reprint, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 430-432; Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 140-145 and 149-150; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 153-170 and 257-261.