Salt Lake City’s Eagle Emporium

© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In 1864, English immigrant William Jennings opened a mercantile business in the Eagle Emporium.  According to the Utah Heritage Foundation, the Emporium building, which still stands at 102 South Main Street in Salt Lake, is the city’s “only remaining commercial structure built prior to the completion of the transcontinental railroad.”

Jennings, who arrived in Salt Lake in 1852, began his business career as a butcher and tanner, before branching out into dry goods with the construction of the modest one-story Emporium.  In the space of a few years, the building had become a center of Mormon commercial might.  In 1868, when Brigham Young proposed the idea of the Zion’s Commercial Mercantile Institution, or ZCMI, as a counterbalance to the growing influence of non-Mormon merchants in Salt Lake, Jennings offered up his Eagle Emporium as the cooperative’s first home.

Over time the Emporium was remodeled, with two stories being added in the 1880s.  At the same time, William Jennings was climbing Utah’s political ladder, first winning a seat in the territorial legislature and then being elected mayor of Salt Lake City in 1882.  (He was later forced out of the mayor’s office due to enforcement of the Edmunds Act which prohibited polygamists from holding public office.)

In the 1890s, Utah National Bank moved into the old Emporium building and remodeled the structure yet again, this time covering its original red standstone face with a terra-cotta veneer.  Today, the ornate character of the building’s exterior bears little resemblance to the more modest store Jennings built in the 1860s, yet it reminds us how historic buildings over time almost develop lives of their own.

Sources:

See John S. McCormick, Salt Lake City: The Gathering Place (Woodland Hills, California: Windsor Publications, 1980), 44; John S. McCormick, The Historic Buildings of Downtown Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1982), 62; Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing, 1984), 68 and 102; and Thomas G. Alexander, Grace and Grandeur: A History of Salt Lake City (Carlsbad, California: Heritage Media, 2001).  Also see the Utah Heritage Foundation’s Main Street Tour Guide online at www.utahheritagefoundation.com/images/stories/docs/tours/ms.tour.pdf.

Park City Dynamite Outrage

© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

On the morning of May 3, 1894, a tremendous blast reverberated through the still sleeping town of Park City. The epicenter of the explosion (which bystanders compared to an earthquake) appeared to be the Main Street residence of John Bogan. When the dust cleared, neighbors surveyed the damage and found that the long flight of stairs that once graced the front of Bogan’s house has been partly destroyed and several of his windows had been, according to the Park City Mining Record, “shivered to atoms.” The explosion also blew out windows in neighboring homes and scattered debris up and down the street.

Suspicion immediately centered on a local miner named John Carroll, whose estranged wife was temporarily living in the Bogan house at the time of the blast. According to newspaper reports, Carroll had an abusive streak that drove his wife and children to take shelter with friends. When Carroll’s daughters returned home to give their father a second chance, he purportedly attacked them with a knife, forcing them once again to take to the streets and seek help from the community.

Most of the evidence against Carroll turned out to be circumstantial. No one actually saw him plant dynamite under the Bogans’ front stairs. He had, however, confronted his wife shortly before the detonation and went away, according to reports, cursing and swearing “like a pirate.” He allegedly had also been seen near the Ontario mine’s dynamite stores earlier in the day. But what seemed to convince the editors of the Mining Record that Carroll was guilty was the miner’s track record of using explosives to get his way. When his wife left him on a previous occasion, Carroll apparently went to where she was staying and exploded blasting caps on the roof. It was this and other evidence that finally led the Park City police to arrest Carroll and jail him.

Sources:

See the Park City Mining Record, May 5, 1894.

William Rishel’s Desert Bike Ride

© 2009 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In 1896, to promote his growing chain of national newspapers, publisher William Randolph Hearst cooked up a wild plan to sponsor a transcontinental bicycle relay.  Knowing his scheme would require local people to scout the best route, he recruited bike enthusiast William Rishel to investigate the Nevada-to-Wyoming leg of the coast-to-coast course.   On his way from Salt Lake to California, Rishel swung north of the Great Salt Lake, but quickly concluded that the northern route was too long to work for the relay.  Scrapping that course, he instead decided to follow, at least roughly, the old Hastings Cutoff, a desert shortcut that many overland pioneers, including the Donner Party, had followed to the West Coast.  This trail would cut miles off the relay and hopefully speed the bicyclists on their way east from California.

Rishel arranged to have himself and his friend, Charlie Emise, dropped off at Terrace, a railroad town in central Box Elder County, and with a few sandwiches, a questionable map from an old prospector, and four canteens between them, the two men set out on a southwesterly course toward Grantsville.  At first, the going was easy over encrusted salt, but soon Rishel and Emise found themselves bogged down in the desert’s infamous mud flats.  Then their water ran out.  But by alternating between carrying and riding their bikes, the two men finally found the tiny spring in the Lakeside Mountains that had been marked on the prospector’s map.  Evening fell as they rested at the spring, encouraging them on to their destination with its cooler air.  Add to that a view of the lights of the old Saltair Pavilion.  At about midnight, aching and thirsty, Rishel and Emise finally pedaled their way down Grantsville’s Main Street.  A few weeks later, heavy rains forced a reluctant Rishel to scrap the course he had just crossed and reroute Hearst’s relay around the Great Salt Lake’s northern end.

Sources:

See Charles Kelly, Salt Desert Trails (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1996), 157-160; Virginia Rishel, Wheels to Adventure: Bill Rishel’s Western Routes (Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1983), 11-24.  Also see the April 1996 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.

Overland Trail Stories: The Old Spanish Trail

© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

Utah’s always been a cultural and social crossroads.  Before a single European explorer, trapper, or trader set foot in the Great Basin or on the Colorado Plateau, indigenous trading and war parties could be found ranging far and wide across the region’s deserts and mountains.  Then, Spanish traders arrived in the southwest and began pushing north from New Mexico, flouting a policy set down by the colonial government in Santa Fe that prohibited commerce with the Utes.  Fears about the possibility of California falling into the hands of the Russians or British, who threatened to move down the Pacific Coast from Alaska and Oregon, however, helped reverse Spanish policy and soon New Mexico’s governors were sending explorers north to find a path from Santa Fe to California. 

The first of the pathfinders was Juan Rivera, whose small party of Spaniards in 1765 followed the La Plata and Dolores Rivers through present-day Colorado, before crossing into what is now Utah near Monticello.  They then traveled northward into Spanish Valley around modern-day Moab and finally looped to the west and dropped back into New Mexico.  A subsequent party of explorers under Francisco Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante made it as far north as Utah Lake in present-day Utah County before turning back to Santa Fe.

It wasn’t until decades later that Mexican and American trappers and traders operating out of New Mexico began to give formal shape to the Old Spanish Trail, using the early expeditionary routes as a framework.  Setting out from Abuquiu, just north of Santa Fe, trader Antonio Armijo set out across the Four Corners region, crossed the Colorado River, and pushed past modern-day Kanab, before dropping down the Virgin River and trooping across the Mojave Desert into San Bernardino.  The next year, two Americans, William Wolfskill and George Yount, created a northern branch of the trail when they followed the path blazed by the Rivera party into today’s Grand County, turned northwest toward what’s now Green River, and after fording the Green, passed near present-day Castle Dale before turning into Salina Canyon.  Coming out of the canyon, they trudged up the Sevier River, crossed the Markagunt Plateau near Parowan, and then cut across the Mojave into California.

Sources:

See Richard D. Poll, ed,, Utah’s History (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1989), 35-51; Peter H. DeLafosse, ed., Trailing the Pioneers: A Guide to Utah’s Emigrant Trails, 1829-1869 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press and Utah Crossroads, Oregon-California Trails Association, 1994), 9-32; Ted. J. Warner, ed., The Dominguez-Escalante Journal (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995); and Thomas G. Alexander, Utah: The Right Place 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 52-57 and 66-67.

The Salvation Army’s General Booth Visits Salt Lake

© 2007 Utah Humanities Council

The Script:

In December 1894, General William Booth arrived in Salt Lake City by train.  Booth, an Englishman who was born into a poverty-stricken family in Nottingham, converted to evangelical Christianity while still a teenager, an experience that led him to seek out the most downtrodden of English society.  Out of this ministry emerged the Salvation Army, a mostly urban religious organization that focused on the moral redemption of prostitutes, alcoholics, and other so-called social outcasts.  

By all accounts, the people of Salt Lake City received Booth warmly.  Posters announcing his visit had been put up all around town in the days leading up to his arrival.  Nearly a dozen of the city’s Protestant ministers were on hand to greet the old general as he stepped off the train, then they whisked him away to the First Methodist Church for a private reception with local religious and civic leaders.  But it was Booth’s evening address in the LDS Tabernacle that was the centerpiece of his visit.  According to newspaper reports, the place was nearly packed.  According to the Salt Lake Tribune, when the general took the stand to rail against poverty and expound on the horrors of slum living, his voice seemed to “reach the sympathies of every hearer.” 

The general, however, did issue a rebuke to the Tabernacle crowd, claiming they were “the most restless” he had ever addressed.  Years later, his opinion toward Salt Lake had mellowed and he remembered that nowhere was he received “with greater respect than in Salt Lake City by the Mormons.”

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

Sources:

See news reports about Booth in the following editions of the Salt Lake Tribune: December 13 and 14, 1894. Also see the January 1996 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.

Overland Trail Stories: The Bartleson Party

© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

In 1841, a small group of emigrants set out from Sapling Grove, Missouri, to begin a new life in the Far West.  Scholars still disagree about how many were actually in the party, but we know the original company, headed by John Bartleson, numbered between 60 and 70 members, and included a new mother by the name of Nancy Kelsey.  Kelsey (only 18 years old at the time) and her infant daughter Ann were the first white females to cross the Great Basin.

The emigrant trail up the Platte River to the Far West was still relatively new in 1841, and the Bartleson party had no firsthand knowledge of the way.  Luckily, shortly after leaving Missouri they fell in with a group of Jesuit missionaries guided by mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.  The Bartleson party traveled with the missionaries as far as present-day Soda Springs, Idaho.  There Fitzpatrick, the Jesuits, and around half of the original company from Missouri chose to continue on to the Oregon Country via Fort Hall on the Snake River, while the other half of the Bartleson party decided to head southwest toward California.  This second group was completely on its own.  With no guide, the emigrants had only stories of the route and sketchy advice to aid them.

Following the Bear River down its course to the Great Salt Lake, the party skirted the lake’s northern shores, and eventually curved southward across the blazing desert toward Pilot Peak north of modern-day Wendover.  Here they abandoned some of their wagons; the rest they abandoned some days later, opting to pack their food and belongings on horses and mules across another stretch of desert to the Humboldt River.  Once on the Humboldt, the road was easier.  Following the river southwest across what is now Nevada, the emigrants finally reached the Sierra Nevada Range.  Crossing the mountains at Sonora Pass the company finally straggled into the California lowlands, after 6 months on the trail from Missouri. 

According to historians, the Bartleson party achieved a number of firsts.  Not only were they the first pioneers to cross northern Utah in wagons, but they were also the first emigrant company to cross the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevadas.  They were also the first planned overland party to emigrate to California.

Sources:

See  David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998), 32-33; Richard D, Poll, ed,, Utah’s History (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1989), 71-72; Peter H. DeLafosse, ed., Trailing the Pioneers: A Guide to Utah’s Emigrant Trails, 1829-1869 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press and Utah Crossroads, Oregon-California Trails Association, 1994), 33-53; Charles Kelly, Salt Desert Trails (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1996). 12-18; 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), 73-76; and Thomas G. Alexander, Utah: The Right Place, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 70.

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Book about Utah Valley Wins Prestigious Parkman Prize

Jared Farmer, author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, has just been honored with the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians.

Utah Valley has been the subject of several studies by local historians, but it has never been the focus of a volume that goes beyond the valley’s geographical confines to uncover how stories about local peoples and landscapes connect with larger American trends.  On Zion’s Mount has done this, and has done it successfully.

At its core, On Zion’s Mount is about historical forgetting.  The book begins with the Timpanogos band of Utes who lived on the shores of present-day Utah Lake, once a bountiful source of fish that effectively supported the band.  When Mormon settlers appeared in the valley in 1849, things changed.  First, the white settlers competed with the Timpanogos for the valley’s natural resources, including the lake’s fish.  Then the settlers made war on the Timpanogos, and eventually forced the Utes into exile on a reservation in eastern Utah. 

With the Utes’ compulsory move east, the new inhabitants of Utah Valley–the Mormon settlers and their descendents–chose to forget the historical existence of the Timpanogos Utes and their shared use of the once flourishing lake.  The region’s white population now turned their attention to the mountain that loomed over the valley, referring to it, ironically, as “Mount Timpanogos,” and began investing it with pseudo-Indian legends. 

Farmer’s book is a model of how local history can be written with national context in mind.  In its pages, local historians will find concrete ideas for better contextualizing their own work and making it more relevant to wider audiences.  Moreover, Farmer’s blending of extensive research in archival collections and a close reading of relevant local histories should be an inspiration to local historians who wish to produce and publish accurate work.

Farmer is a native of Utah Valley.  As such, he shares the love other local historians have for their native places.  But he does not let his respect for Utah Valley turn history into hagiography.  Instead, he leavens his love for the region with a critical approach.  This makes the book all the more enlightening and interesting.

See the announcement of the prize on the Harvard University Press publicity blog.

Overland Trail Stories: T. H. Jefferson’s Map

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

The Story:

In 1849, a map of the California Trail was published by a man named T.  H. Jefferson, who, it turns out, is almost untraceable in the historical record.  Scholars have been able to pin down the fact that Jefferson emigrated to California in 1846, probably in the group just ahead of the Donner Party, but beyond that we know very little about the man.  Jefferson’s use of nautical terms on his map led historian George Stewart to suggest that he may have served a stint as a sailor.  Other researchers have even advanced the idea that the mysterious mapmaker was none other than Thomas Hemings Jefferson, the son of Sally Hemings and President Thomas Jefferson.

The murkiness of Jefferson’s true identity, however, doesn’t take away from the historical significance of his map.  The map’s careful illustration of the California Trail, especially the part of the trail that crossed the barren desert west of the Great Salt Lake, as well as Jefferson’s marking of campsites along the trail, makes it a unique (and valuable) document.   Add to that his careful notes about the waterless stretch of the desert that delayed the Donner Party in 1846, and you have an indispensible chart that emigrants could have used to navigate the very difficult terrain of the Hastings Cutoff.  “To accomplish the long drive” across the desert, Jefferson instructed, “grass and water must be carried … and the journey performed night and day making short and regular camps.  Not more than five waggons [sic] should go in company and the cattle should be continually guarded.”  Today, only three copies of the map’s original 1849 print run are known to exist. 

Sources:

See J. Roderic Korns and Dale L. Morgan, eds., West From Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of Immigrant Trails Across Utah, 1846-1850, revised and updated by Will Bagley and Harold Schindler (Logan, Utah: Utah State university Press, 1994), 187-195; and Charles Kelly, Salt Desert Trails (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1996), 95.  Also see Will Bagley’s article on Jefferson in the Salt Lake Tribune, dated May 6, 2001.  (The article may be accessed on the Utah History to Go website at www.historytogo.utah.gov.)

Overland Trail Stories: Twenty Wells

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

The Story:

In 1846, a series of overland parties found relief at a site on the south end of the Great Salt Lake near present-day Grantsville known as Twenty Wells.  The place got its name from a series of holes in the ground that were filled, according to overland emigrant and early historian Jessy Quinn Thornton, by water from underground springs.  The holes, which to some looked like man-made wells, were so deep that a party of emigrants intent on sounding their depths came up empty-handed despite using seventy-foot lines.

The first group of California-bound overlanders to rest at Twenty Wells appears to have been the Harlan and Young wagon company, which apparently included the first Mormons to see the Salt Lake Valley nearly a year before Brigham Young and his vanguard party of Latter-day Saints drove into the Great Basin.  The Harlan-Young Party had only recently buried one of their company—John Hargrave—in the vicinity of today’s Lake Point Junction, when they pulled into Tooele Valley and found the cool, clear water of Twenty Wells.  After a few days in the area, they picked themselves up and pushed across the Great Salt Lake Desert, finally arriving  at the Humboldt River in present-day Nevada in an exhausted state.  Upon descending the Humboldt and reaching the Sierra Nevada Mountains, they saw that snow was already covering the passes.  Fortunately, they squeaked through to California by the skin of their teeth.

Nearly a month after the Harlan-Young company camped at Twenty Wells, the ill-fated Donner Party stopped at the same spot to recruit their animals and drink from the natural springs.  Their story, of course, is much more familiar–and tragic–than that of the Harlan-Young emigrants.  Like the earlier party, the Donner company also had a hard time crossing the blazing desert west of the Great Salt Lake.  But they were also torn apart by internal strife and difficulties along the Humboldt.  When they reached the Sierra Nevadas, the snows had become heavier, effectively cutting them off from the California lowlands and leading some of them to turn to cannibalism in order to survive.

Sources: 

See Charles Kelly, “The Hastings Cutoff,” Utah Historical Quarterly 3 (July 1930): 67-82; Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1947), 148-175; George R. Stewart, The California Trail (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 142-184; George R. Stewart, Ordeal By Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 40-50; Charles Kelly, Salt Desert Trails (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1996), 49-114; 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), 80-81; and Ouida Blanthorn, comp., A History of Tooele County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1998), 45-61.  Also see David Bigler’s entry on the Harlan-Young Party in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.