Historical Photographs of Utah’s Native Americans

Over the years, the Utah State Historical Society has collected hundreds of historic al photographs, some of which portray Utah indigenous peoples.  Click here, here, here, and here for some of my favorites. All photos are from the Peoples of Utah Photograph Collection, donated to USHS by Helen Zeese Papanikolas.

We Shall Remain: The Spark That Ignited the Black Hawk War

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

The Story:

In 1865, on the same day Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were negotiating an end to the American Civil War, a group of Mormons and Ute Indians were also meeting in the tiny Utah town of Manti in the hopes of finding a peaceful way to settle their differences.  According to historical reports, several bands of Utes who spent the winter months in Sanpete Valley had killed and eaten at least fifteen head of cattle owned by local Mormon settlers.  The winter of 1864-1865 had been particularly harsh, and the Utes had taken the white settlers’ livestock in order to stave off the very real threat of starvation.  Some Utes also blamed the Mormons for the diseases that had ravaged them over the winter. 

Opinions at the Manti meeting over how to handle the rising tensions were mixed.  Sow-ok-soo-bet, one of the Ute leaders present at the meeting, cautioned peace as did Toquana, the son of the head Northern Ute chief Sowiette.  But John Lowry, an employee of the United States Indian Office, would not be pacified.  Lowry lunged at Jake Arapeen, one of the more outspoken Utes, and, grabbing him by his hair, hauled him from his horse.  Enraged, Arapeen and his comrade Antonga (otherwise known as Black Hawk) rode out of town, while Lowry headed home to get a gun. 

In the months after the Manti fight, Black Hawk led a mixed band of Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos in a series of raids across central Utah.  Before long, the conflict began to take on the appearance of a civil war, with people on both sides committing unspeakable atrocities.  Things only began to quiet down in 1867 when Black Hawk surrendered, though Indian raids continued until federal troops finally stepped in to enforce the peace.

Sources:

See John Alton Peterson, Utah’s Black Hawk War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), esp. 16-17.  Also see John A. Peterson’s entry on the Black Hawk War in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.

We Shall Remain: Kanosh and Mormonism

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

The Story:

In 1856, Kanosh, an influential leader among central Utah’s Pahvant Utes, delivered a speech before Utah’s territorial legislature.  According to Mormon apostle Wilford Woodruff, who wrote about the event in his journal, the Pahvant headman affirmed the rightness of the Latter-day Saint cause and defended the abandonment of traditional Ute lifeways in favor of white men’s ways.  “I want to plant and raise wheat and learn to plough and do as the white people do,” Woodruff recorded the Pahvant chief as saying.

In the minds of many nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints, the speech before the legislature and similar incidents likely made Kanosh a “model Indian.”  He adopted a lifestyle of sedentary farming and wage work, and according to multiple sources, he had allowed himself to be baptized and ordained a Mormon elder.  LDS Church members who had moved into Pahvant country referred to him as “Friend of the Whiteman,” perhaps because he seemed so often to back white settlers’ claims to Pahvant land. 

To conclude from these details, however, that Kanosh was a puppet of the LDS Church, doesn’t take into account the complexity of human thought and behavior.  Kanosh was fully engaged in the maneuverings for power and resources that were sparked by the arrival of the Mormons in the Great Basin and he made conscious choices he believed would benefit himself and his people over the long run.  As one historian has explained it, instead of resorting to conflict, Kanosh used negotiation to ensure the survival of his people.  It’s debatable, of course, as to how successful that strategy actually was.

Sources: 

See Susan Staker, ed., Waiting for World’s End: The Diaries of Wilford Woodruff (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993), 169-170; Clifford Duncan, ”The Northern Utes” in Forrest S. Cuch, ed., A History of Utah’s American Indians (Salt Lake City: Utah State Division of Affairs and the Utah State Historical Society, 2000), 192-193; Virginia McConnell Simmons, The Ute Indians on Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 92-108; Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775-1995 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 60-61 and 77-78; and Hyrum S. Lewis, “Kanosh and Ute Identity in Territorial Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 71 (Fall 2003): 332-347.  Also see Paul Padilla’s entry on Kanosh in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.

We Shall Remain: The Strawberry Valley Project

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

The Story:

In 1905, the federal government authorized the Strawberry Valley Project.  Designed to divert water from the upper Strawberry River into the Spanish Fork River through a tunnel beneath the Wasatch Divide, the project was meant to benefit the farms of southern Utah County.  The extra water from the project would be a big win for white farmers, but the plan promised to be a major defeat for the Ute Indians of the Uintah Basin.  They stood to lose not just the use of a good part of the water that flowed across the western edge of their reservation, but also a lot of their best land.

Since 1865, when the treaty was signed that required all Utes to give up their traditional tribal lands and move to a new reservation in the Uintah Basin, white ranchers and farmers consistently broke the pact by grazing their livestock on reservation land and by building illegal canals to siphon off Ute water for their own farms.   They argued that the Utes were not using the land and water, so why couldn’t they?  Within a matter of years, state and federal lawmakers had successfully shifted the Utes’ water and land rights to the white settlers.

Around 1900, another plan to grab more Ute resources was hatched, this time by a state senator from Spanish Fork named Henry Gardner.  Gardner was passing through the Strawberry Valley when he came up with the idea to build a reservoir and funnel its water to Utah County.  It took only five years for the Secretary of the Interior to authorize the Strawberry Valley Project, and by 1906, the U.S.  Bureau of Reclamation was digging a tunnel through the mountains.  Two years later, construction began on the dam that eventually created Strawberry Reservoir. 

The negative impact of the Strawberry Valley Project on the Utes of the Uintah Basin was great.  Not only were they never consulted about the land and water grab, but their title to the Strawberry Valley was permanently extinguished and given to non-Indians.  Not surprisingly, the project also opened up the Uintah Reservation to further incursions from white settlers and mining companies in the years that followed. 

Sources:

See Kathryn L. MacKay, “The Strawberry Valley Reclamation Project and the Opening of the Uintah Indian Reservation,” in John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, ed., A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995); and Howard A. Christy, “Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah, 1847-52,” Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978): 216-235.  Also see Virginia McConnell Simmons, The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 226-227, and David Rich Lewis’s entry on the Northern Utes in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.  Data on the Strawberry Valley Project can also be found on the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation website (www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/straw.html).

We Shall Remain: Learn More about Utah’s Native Americans

Beginning in April, PBS will be broadasting We Shall Remain, a five-part television series that highlights Native American history.

For those of you interested in Utah’s Native American story, KUED 7 will pair each national episode with a short documentary about one of Utah’s American Indian tribes: the Ute, the Paiute, the Northwestern Shoshone, the Goshute, and the Navajo.  You can find a schedule of the linked programs here.  View the trailers for the national episodes here.

To dovetail with the airing of We Shall Remain, the Beehive Archive blog will be featuring stories from Utah’s Native American past over the next few weeks.  New stories on American Indians in Utah will air on KCPW and Utah Public Radio.  For information on how to listen to Beehive Archive around the state, click here.

Cyrus Dallin and the Angel Moroni

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

The Story:

In 1891, the plaster model for the statue of the Angel Moroni that sits atop the tallest spire of the Salt Lake LDS Temple was completed.  Born in Springville to Mormon pioneer parents, the angel’s sculptor, Cyrus Dallin, had strong ties to Utah.  But he never identified with Mormonism, perhaps because the LDS church apparently excommunicated his father for supporting non-Mormon political candidates.  Members of the Dallin family later converted to Presbyterianism and young Cyrus attended a Presbyterian school.

Dallin won his first art competition, part of a local fair, at a young age.  Recognizing his talent, a couple of local men paid for his train fare to Boston where he studied with the famous sculptor Truman Bartlett.  After opening his own studio a few years later, Dallin saved up enough money to travel to the art capital of the world—Paris—where he continued his art instruction under two master sculptors.  Over time, Dallin developed into a first-rate artist, winning a number of important commissions.  Perhaps his most famous, titled Appeal to the Great Spirit, sits in front of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  Other Dallin pieces can be found in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, and around Utah.  A copy of his sculpture Massasoit stands outside Utah’s state capitol building, and the Springville Museum of Art, which Dallin helped found, owns several of his pieces.  The statue of Brigham Young at the intersection of Main Street and South Temple in Salt Lake is also a Dallin.  But, because of its visibility and symbolic importance to members of the LDS church worldwide, Dallin’s most popular work is arguably the Moroni statue.

As he grew older, Dallin traveled back and forth between his home in Arlington, Massachusetts, and Utah.  On his final trip West he was quoted as saying that more than the awards and medals he’d won for his work, his greatest honor was that he had been born in Utah.  But he remained fiercely opposed to the faith claims of Mormonism, saying that the LDS religion created too many intermediaries between himself and God.  When he finally died in 1943 at the age of 82, a Unitarian minister presided at his funeral.

Sources:

See Rell G. Francis, Cyrus E. Dallin: Let Justice Be Done (Springville, Utah: Rell G. Francis, 1976).  Also see Francis’s entry on Dallin in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE, as well as websites belonging to the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum (www.dallin.org) and the Springville Museum of Art (www.shs.nebo.edu/Museum/dallin.html).

Photos of Plum Alley, Salt Lake’s Chinatown

A few days ago I posted a story on Plum Alley, Salt Lake’s bygone Chinese enclave, and wanted to follow it up with more information.  For those of you who like historical photographs, check out the photos of Plum Alley in the online digital collections of Utah State History.  You can find the photos here.  Enjoy.

The site of Plum Alley is part of Salt Lake City’s historic downtown walking tour.  A printed tour guide can be found here.  You can see what the site looks like today by clicking here.

The Passing of Jean Bickmore White

Thanks to Ardis at the Keepapitchinin’ blog for tipping off the Beehive Archive to the passing of Jean Bickmore White. 

White was a member of the political science faculty at Weber State University and had a deep interest in Utah’s political history.  As her obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune states, her interest in the subject “continued throughout her academic career, and after her retirement, she published numerous papers, articles and an award-winning book.” 

If you haven’t read White’s essay “Women’s Place Is in the Constitution:  The Struggle for Equal Rights in Utah in 1895″ in Carol Cornwall Madsen’s Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Women’s Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896 (USU Press, 1997), you should.

Plum Alley: Salt Lake’s Once Vibrant Chinatown

This episode’s audio file may be found at http://www.utahhumanities.org/BeehiveArchive.htm.
© 2009 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

Today, if you find yourself in downtown Salt Lake City walking along Second South past the Regent Street Parking Terrace, you’ll notice a modest brown plaque that marks all that remains of Plum Alley, the narrow lane that used to be the nucleus of the city’s bustling Chinatown. The alley, which ran between First and Second South and bisected the block between State and Main streets, was a thickly settled cluster of buildings—primarily restaurants, grocery stores and other shops—perched along what was once a plain dirt track.

White observers tended to see Utah’s Chinatowns, like the one anchored by Plum Alley, primarily as centers of widespread vice and illegality, and attacked the presence of gambling and opium dens in the neighborhood as evidence of a retrograde Chinese civilization. Ironically, however, people from all walks of life, including white middle-class men and women, frequented the alley’s opium and gambling joints. Even a U.S. Marshal, Elias Parsons, landed in court on charges of renting a Plum Alley building to a group of Chinese men for the purposes of establishing an opium den.’

Plum Alley, though, was much more than the terrifying vice district white reformers fretted about. It was an important center of Chinese culture. Two of the most important fixtures of Plum Alley were the joss house and the Bing Kong Tong. The Plum Alley joss house was an informal place of worship located above a store at the intersection of Commercial and Plum. Inside, visitors could make food offerings to Chinese gods. The Bing Kong Tong, on the other hand, functioned primarily to help members find jobs and legal services, as well as to sponsor social activities. Between the joss house, the tong, and the street’s emporiums, Plum Alley was a richly textured community that deserves to be remembered.

Sources:

See the Salt Lake Tribune, January 10, 1886, April 4, 1886, March 8, 1893; Don Conley, “The Pioneer Chinese of Utah,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z, Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1981), 251-277; Dan Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns: The Development and Decline of Extinct Ethnic Enclaves,” Utah Historical Quarterly 64 (Winter 1996): 70-95.

Call For Papers: 57th Annual Utah State History Conference

Are you interested in presenting the research you’ve been doing on Utah history?  Consider presenting a paper at the Utah State History Conference.  Details are below.

Call For Papers

Proposals should include a one-page description of the topic and its significance, any audio visual needs, mailing addresses and telephone numbers of participants, and a one- or two-paragraph biography of each participant.  Proposals for individual papers or sessions should be submitted before June 4, 2009.  Proposals can be mailed to Kent Powell at Utah State Historical Society, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, 84101-1182, or emailed to kpowell@utah.gov.
For further information please call (801) 533-3520.

You can find the preliminary schedule for the conference here:
http://history.utah.gov/historical_society/annual_meeting/index.html