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.

The Box Elder Tabernacle Fire

© 2008 Utah Humanities Council

The Story:

On February 9, 1896, LDS worshippers were just assembling for a morning meeting in the Box Elder Stake Tabernacle when the cry of “fire!” rent the air.  Someone had smelled smoke, causing a few intrepid worshippers to check the basement where they found the tabernacle’s furnace and wooden ducting engulfed in flames.  Soon the inferno spread to the timbers and up into the sanctuary.  Congregants scattered.  According to the local paper, the Box Elder Bugler, it took only a half hour for the tabernacle to turn into “a mass of furious, crackling flames.”  By 2:30 in the afternoon, the building was nothing more than a smoking, blackened hulk.  The fire had even stripped the plaster from the walls, and floating embers from the blaze had touched off other fires around town.

Naturally, Box Elder Mormons grieved for their lost spiritual center.  Only a little over five years had passed since LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff had dedicated the building; now it was gone.  The damage was valued at $12,000, but because the church carried no insurance on the building, it seemed like there would be no way to rebuild.  But area Latter-day Saints weren’t demoralized.  Within a matter of weeks, the membership of the Box Elder Stake had decided to restore the tabernacle despite a less-than-ideal financial situation: not only was the nation still in the throes of the panic of 1893, but the local experiment in cooperative manufactures known as the Brigham City Mercantile and Manufacturing Association had failed years earlier leaving the city in a depressed economic state.  Church general authorities couldn’t help much as they too were still feeling the effects of the 1893 downturn. But they did send a letter to local church officials encouraging members to donate to the Box Elder cause.  By March of the following year, work on the tabernacle had wrapped up and the restored building was dedicated by George Q. Cannon.

Sources:

See the Brigham City Bugler, 15 February 1896, and 27 March 1897; and Frederick M. Huchel, A History Box Elder County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Box Elder County Commission, 1999), 123-145.

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.