The City of Corinne

This episode originally aired May 23, 2008.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm
© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago, the steamboat City of Corinne was launched into the wide channel of the Bear River near the settlement that shared its name.  Financed by a group of businessmen under the auspices of the Corinne Steam Navigation Company, the vessel ended up costing more than $40,000.  Its engines were built in Chicago and then were shipped around South America to California, where they were transferred to a Utah-bound train.  When it was finished, the boat was 150 feet long and stood three decks high.  At its stern was the broad paddlewheel that would propel it through the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake.

The City of Corinne was not the first steamboat to ply the lake’s waters.  In 1868, Patrick Edward Connor, formerly the commander of the California Volunteers stationed at Fort Douglas, launched the Kate Connor to haul railroad ties and telegraph poles across the lake.  But in the end, the Kate Connor was too small and underpowered to prove effective.  With new mines in Tooele County digging hundreds of tons of gold and silver out of the ground each month, but with no railroad connection nearby, a boat like the City of Corinne stood to make a killing in the shipping business going between Lake Point, near present-day Stansbury Park, and the railhead in Corinne.  On her first trip to the lake’s southern shore, the boat returned north with 45 tons of ore.

Fluctuating lake levels eventually made it difficult for the City of Corinne to continue anchoring in its home port of Corrine and it began a new life as an excursion boat docking at Lake Point.  When presidential candidate James A. Garfield rode the boat while on a visit to Utah, its new owner renamed it the General Garfield in his honor.  In 1904, the vessel burned to the water line and was buried under I-80.

Sources: 

See the Salt Lake Tribune, May 22, 1871.  Also see Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1947), 294-200; David E. Miller, “The Great Salt Lake,” Utah Historical Quarterly 27 (July 1959): 297-311; Brigham D. Madsen, Corinne: The Gentile Capital of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1980), 157-169; Peter G. Van Alfen, “Sail and Steam: Great Salt Lake’s Boats and Boatbuilders, 1847-1901,” Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (Summer 1995): 194-221; Ouida Blanthorn, comp., A History of Tooele County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1998), 156-158; and Frederick M. Huchel, A History of Box Elder County (Salt Lake City: Box Elder County Commission and Utah State Historical Society, 1999), 135-139.

Socialism in Utah

This episode originally aired December 29, 2006.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2006 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

Now that the elections of November are over, let’s take a moment to look back at a time when Utahns found what they thought was a viable alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties.  From 1901 to 1923, more than a hundred Utah socialists were elected to public office in places like Cedar City, Murray, Salt Lake, Lehi, and Salina.  Utah was just one of eighteen states to elect socialists to the legislature.  But it was in the little mining town of Eureka that socialists truly came to dominate the political scene.  Ninety-eight years ago this week, at a public swearing-in ceremony, members of the Socialist Party claimed the Eureka mayor’s office and a majority of the seats on the town council.  Socialists would remain key players in Eureka politics until the 1920s.  

The Eureka socialists were not wild-eyed radicals bent on social revolution as some of their opponents wanted to believe.  Instead, they tended to be careful reformers dedicated to clean, honest governing.  Not only did Eureka’s socialists begin paving the town’s streets once they took office, but they also built the community’s first sewer system, appointed its first dog catcher, and began regular street cleaning and garbage collection programs.  They also passed town ordinances that banned gambling and the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

Eventually, though, the political power of Utah’s Socialist Party began to wane.  The Eureka socialists were able to hold out after party members in other parts of the state started to lose ground, but eventually opposition from political opponents, the press, and conservative religious figures overcame even them.  Fights within the party also weakened the ability of members to mount successful political campaigns.  Yet, the Eureka socialists, and socialists from around the state, were able to leave behind a substantial legacy of reform that still benefits Utah’s citizens.

Sources:

See news reports about the Eureka socialists in the following editions of the Eureka Reporter: December 19, 1902; September 13, 1907; October 11, 1907; November 8, 1907; January 3, 1908; January 24, 1908; September 18, 1908; November 27, 1908; and September 30, 1921.  Also see John S. McCormick, “Hornets in the Hive: Socialists in Early Twentieth-Century Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Summer 1982): 225-240; John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, “Respectable Reformers: Utah Socialists in Power, 1900-1925,” in A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995); and John Sillito’s entry on the Socialist Party of Utah in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.

Land and Murder

This episode originally aired December 7, 2007.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2007 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

Utah has at times been a violent place, especially when distribution of lands has been at stake.  Land apportionment in the Utah Territory was a complicated matter and only the federal government, through the institution of a land office, had the right to grant title to territorial lands.  The fact that Utah didn’t get a federal land office until 1869 meant that before federal officials arrived on the scene, 22 years’ worth of competing land claims were able to accumulate and create sometimes intense friction in the little towns that dotted the territory.

In the case of John Howard, this policy turned out to have deadly consequences.  Howard was a relative latecomer to the settlement of Beaver County in south-central Utah.  The first white colonizers of the area were Mormons who arrived in 1856 and immediately began putting down roots.  For more than a decade, they were left to their own devices until a branch of the federal land office was established in town, an event that caused some residents to fear that outsiders would be given lands they had been clearing and farming for years.  When a small group of newcomers, including Howard, moved in and began building on lands already claimed by Mormon settlers, those fears were realized and tensions quickly boiled over until they led to murder.  As Howard was entering a friend’s cabin late one night he was gunned down by a hidden assailant.  His friends scattered and the gunman was able to get away.  A few days later, a local Mormon man was arrested and held for the killing, but according to historian Martha Bradley, in the end no one was charged with Howard’s murder.

Sources:

See news reports about John Howard’s assassination in the following editions of the Salt Lake Tribune: October 9, 1873; October 14, 1873; and October 29, 1873.  Also see Martha Sonntag Bradley, A History of Beaver County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Beaver County Commission, 1999), 55-56.

The Strange Death of James Farrell

 This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

 

The Script:

 

A little more than 112 years ago, an Irish immigrant named James Farrell was found dead in his home at the corner of Ninth West and Third South in Salt Lake.  A brickmaker by trade, Farrell was a relative newcomer to Utah, having moved to Salt Lake from Omaha only six or seven years before.  Before that, he had lived in Chicago where he became a US citizen in 1884.  He lived alone, but he appears to have made friends with some of the children in his neighborhood.  It was one of those children that found his lifeless body and called for a doctor.

 

Workers and immigrants from the 19th century—people like James Farrell—are notoriously hard to track in historical sources, in part because they tended to leave relatively few personal records behind for historians to use.  Farrell, however, is unique.  He owned his house and the property it stood on.  More amazing still, he left $1,500 in a bank account and a $120 insurance policy when he died, astronomical sums when one considers that in 1896 the average hourly wage in the manufacturing sector was less than 20 cents.  The result of Farrell’s good fortune when he was alive led to a knock-down, drag-out conflict over who would be the administrator of his estate.  The insurance company petitioned to have its representative named as executor, a request that was met with a counterpetition by a woman named Ann Cummings who claimed to be the dead man’s cousin.  Alleging that Cummings was nothing more than an impostor, the insurance company finally won out, but not before the Farrell estate case dragged out over several months.  In the end, James Farrell, a modest immigrant brickmaker, had posthumously captured the Salt Lake headlines with his paradoxical fortune.

 

Sources:

 

See news reports about Farrell in the following 1896 editions of the Salt Lake Tribune:  February 10, February 12, February 18, March 22, and April 29.  Also see the February 15, 1896, edition of the Deseret News.

The Stansbury Expedition

The episode originally aired May 9, 2008,
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

One hundred and fifty-nine years ago, officials of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers sent Captain Howard Stansbury on a expedition to the Great Basin with a long list of orders.   At the top of the Army’s list was a complete survey of the Great Salt Lake, the Jordan River, and Utah Lake.  The Captain left this part of his mission in the capable hands of his second-in-command, Lieutenant John Gunnison.  But the survey was only one small piece of what Stansbury’s superiors hoped he would accomplish.  They also ordered the captain to assess the Great Salt Lake’s navigability, study the Mormons and local Indian tribes, locate a site for a military post in the region, and find a wagon road between Fort Hall on the Oregon Trail and the Great Salt Lake Valley, daunting tasks for a mere mortal.

Perhaps Stansbury’s greatest accomplishment was his circumnavigation of the Great Salt Lake by land.  Taking five men and sixteen mules, the captain set out around the lake, occasionally passing, as he put it “thousands of acres” of land covered with wild ducks and geese.  The lake, with its barren rocky islands, intrigued the men of the party.  It had a rough hewn beauty about it, but Stansbury also was quick to compare it and its desolate setting to the “stillness of the grave.”  “I was surprised to find,” wrote the captain, “although so near a body of the saltiest water, none of that feeling of invigorating freshness which is always experienced when in the vicinity of the ocean.”  “The bleak and naked shores,” Stansbury continued, “without a single tree to relieve the eye, presented a scene so different from what I pictured in my imagination of the beauties of this far-famed spot, that my disappointment was extreme.”  After four weeks of skirting the lake’s shores, Stansbury finally returned to Salt Lake City, claiming to have led the first party of white men around the lake’s entire perimeter.

Sources:

For local newspaper traces of the Stansbury Expedition see the August 10 and August 31, 1850, editions of the Deseret News.  Also see David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998), 53-54; and Michael S. Durham, Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772-1869 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 231-233.

The Indian Scare That Never Was

The episode originally aired May 2, 2008.
This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

A little less than 133 years ago, fears of an armed uprising by Shoshoni Indians swept through the small northern Utah city of Corinne.  The area on the lower Bear River surrounding the town had been a traditional winter camping spot for the Shoshoni, so when members of the tribe on Idaho’s Fort Hall reservation faced the very real possibility of starving due to dwindling government resources, they set out for the Bear hoping to meet up with some of the Shoshonis still in Utah and to find food among the Mormons.  They were soon joined by hundreds of other Shoshonis and Bannocks from Idaho and Wyoming who had moved to northern Utah seeking conversion at the hands of Mormon missionaries.  Apparently, the Latter-day Saint notion that American Indians were part of the chosen Israelite nation appealed to the Native Americans.

The idea of a Mormon-Shoshoni alliance, along with the mounting flood of Indians into a camp near their town, set the residents of Corinne on edge.  As historian Brigham Madsen has pointed out, Corinne was the informal Gentile or non-Mormon capital of early Utah, and there was no love lost between the townspeople and the surrounding Mormons.  The Corinnethians (as the citizens of Corinne sometimes were called) feared the Mormons were inciting the Shoshonis to envelop their settlement and massacre them.  Fears eventually led some men to break into a shipment of Army weapons to protect themselves, while other citizens wired the governor for troops.  Soon federal soldiers were dispatched and made their way to the supposedly besieged city.  Within a matter of days, everything had quieted down around Corinne.  The Army never found any credible evidence that the Shoshonis camped on the Bear planned to attack the town.

Sources:

See the following editions of the Salt Lake Tribune for 1875: August 11; August 12; August 13; August 14; August 15; August 17; August 18; and August 21.  Also see Brigham D. Madsen, Corinne: The Gentile Capital of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1980), 259-293.