Utah Books

This book is NOT about Mormons in Salt Lake City. The focus is on the growth of the physical city and its commerce, not its faith. In a way, I miss the Mormon aspect of its history very much. I hope that Turner does a collection, maybe several collections, of Early Mormon History in Utah and the other places founded and formed with strong Mormon influence.

This book was put together by Jeff Burbank. He is a journalist, editor, and teaches at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The book's 197 pictures are placed in four sections.

The first in the early 1880s and is entitled "From Mormon Enclave to American City (1880-1905). I found it fascinating to see the very old buildings of our time (those that are still standing) when they were very new and just being built. The Mormon influence is not totally excised from the collection because the ceremony laying the capstone on the Salt Lake Temple is shown with crowds filling temple square (page 12) as are the celebrations of statehood in the Tabernacle and a commemoration of the aging pioneers.

The next section runs from 1906-1919 and is called "New Buildings, New Streets, New Faces". We see buildings going up, streetcar tracks being laid, and strung wires hanging from poles to provide electricity to the growing city. We also get pictures of visiting dignitaries including President Taft in this section. We do see some very interesting approaches to marketing and racing machines.

The third section covers 1920 through 1939 and is called "The Depression Stalls Public Improvements". This section provides more focus on entertainment including the local minor league baseball team, a visit by the Marx Brothers (page 173), and a social place called "The Lagoon".

The last section is called "Suburban Growth and Presidential Visits" and covers from 1940-1968. The presidents are Truman and Kennedy. We see the downtown decaying a bit and the times becoming more "modern".

Again, I think the collection tries a bit too hard to avoid the Mormon influence on the City and ends up being a tad sterile. But if you want to see the buildings and non-Mormon life in Salt Lake City, this is the ticket for you. I do hope Turner does some collections of Historic Photos of Mormon Life in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Idaho. It would be fascinating. Especially if they include key historical figures.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

This was such a good story. I grew up in a mining town in Southeastern Utah and I found the story very delightful and full of many truths. I am hoping that there will be more to come as is indicated on the front cover. I identified with so many of the things that went on in the book. I know that anyone over the age of fifty would love to read this book as it tells about a simpler time when values were more clearly defined.

This book has been in my family for many years. It is the story of Mormon pioneers who were called to settle the Southeast portion of Utah and serve as a buffer between the Navajo Indians and other settlers. They find themselves building a road through country that is impassable, even today. The title comes from a slot in the cliffs above the Colorado River where they blasted and built up a road to the bottom of the canyon, only to find that the hardest parts still lay ahead. An epic historical tale, made all the greater because it is true. Mr. Miller painstakingly researched all the original diaries and histories he could find. He very carefully points out areas of the unknown and discrepancies in different histories.

This is considered the best work on the 1870s Mormon Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition. The extent of the author's research is evident by the extensive notes and appendices that make up almost the entire back half of the book, and by all the authors and scholars who cite and praise this book as the final word on the subject.
The Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition was a two-mile-long caravan of horse-drawn Mormon wagons and livestock that travelled across the West in the 1870s, on the way to establish a new settlement in the untamed, southeast corner of Utah. The Mormons at that time thought that if white, Mormon families settled in this sparsely populated area, they might have a "civilizing" effect on the local Indians, who had been stealing their cattle. The group was decently prepared in most respects, but they failed to realize that the land they would be in would have little grass to feed the cattle they brought--causing many of their animals to starve to death--and they based their route on the reports of three overly optimistic scouts. The scouts' report of the area said the route would be difficult but possible--which was true--but until the group found itself high on the edge of a cliff, two thousand feet above the Colorado River, none of them realized just HOW difficult.
Heavy snow made the road behind them impossible to use, so instead of turning around, fifty of the group's men worked hard dynamiting what had been a narrow, one hundred-foot-deep, two thousand-foot-high crack in the cliff into a dangerous, almost vertical wagon road. Others managed to ford the Colorado River and develop a road out of Glen Canyon on the river's other side, and others found, cut, and hauled trees to use in building a ferry for all the wagons to cross the river. The route down the Hole-in-the-Rock was so steep that sloping wooden platforms had to be attached to cliff walls at points, and when the group finally descended down the insane route, after six weeks of blasting, picking, removing rock, and building, teams of men had to lower the wagons down with ropes tied to the wagons' rear axles.
Eighty-three wagons, over two hundred people, and over a thousand cows and horses went down, and though there were minor injuries to people and animals--especially to the animals--no humans or animals lost their lives in the descent. The people crossed the river on the new ferry--two wagons at a time--and when they had gone as far as their bodies, animals, and supplies would allow, they just unpacked and stopped-founding what would become the towns of Bluff and Montezuma Creek, Utah.
The expedition was an amazing one, and this book does a good job at expressing the extreme degree of hardship this hardy group experienced. The book is also fairly readable, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Glen Canyon, Lake Powell (since it currently covers the bottom half of the Hole-in-the-Rock trail), southern Utah, Mormon history, Indian and white relations, or the Old West.
Buy enough, and you could build a little fort.

I've read a number of books on the rivers of the west. None are as clear, concise and fun as this. It's like the greatest hits of the Green River running. It will certainly act as an excellent starting point for your future dsicoveries on the Green.

The book contains in more or less chronological order the history of adventurers who ran the Green River from Green River, Wyoming down to the confluence with the Colorado. It's replete with stories of John Wesley Powell, William Manly, William Ashley, the Kolb Brothers, Julius Stone, etc. The book also describes the technological advances in boating from Ashley's willow and buffalo skin bull boats through Powell's heavy, oaken row boats, to fold boats, to the ascendency of rubber rafts as a result of army surplus after WWII.

Think of this as an index to the history of the river - and when (not if) something interests you there are lots and lots of footnotes and a thorough bibliography to point you in the right direction.

This is THE book to have on a week long river trip to tickle loose all those stories you know.

I know that indians ofen got hitched when they were 10. I am 10 so it it a little wired even ........ thinking about it . I have some indian in me ... my great great grandpa was a mountain man he bought my Astec great great grandma .

... The author/editor has compiled a very scholarly work on the Hopi and the place of the kachina in their life and spirituality. Each contributor has done extensive research in his/her field of expertise. If there is a negative side to the book, I would say it is TOO SCHOLARLY for the average reader. It is not a book which one should consider for pure enjoyment and 'light' reading. It reads much more like a graduate text book ... for which many of these articles were intended. If you are looking for indepth material, this is the book for you. If you like to relax and curl up with an 'enjoyable read' ... you won't find it here.

I obtained a copy of this from Vernita Beesley-Meikle, who has the only remaining copies for sale and found it a good read. There are tons of references to the early establishment of the psalmistry and organization of the Mormon Choir.

There is a lot of history in the tri-canyon area and (unfortunately) a lot of interesting details had to be left out to keep it to reasonable length but Keller did a good job of organizing the fascinating, sometimes vague or conflicting records of the past into an accessible account. Finding out why some of the areas are named what they are is especially interesting - especially having been to most of them and wondering about it myself.

The only (and very minor) gripe is that if I wanted to find out about just one area, I had to remember all of the many other in the book that I'd read about it, find them, and put all of the pieces together: A slightly more comprehensive index would help in that. Although it has a lot of pictures, more would be nice to help visualize what some of the familar areas looked like a century (or more) ago...

Glen Canyon of the Colorado River, in southern Utah and northern Arizona, was a tranquil place with currents friendly enough for even the most boyish of Boy Scouts and the oldest of old ladies. Edward Abbey considered it the heart of the canyon lands. The residents of White Canyon, Utah--a town since submerged by Lake Powell-considered it home. The Bureau of Reclamation just considered it a good place to build a dam.
That dam, Glen Canyon Dam, was built in the early-1960s, to create a reservoir in which to store the water of the Colorado River for the states that needed it, to use the river's water to turn turbines and generate lucrative electricity, to control the Colorado River's seasonal flooding, to bring visiting boaters and their money in from all around the world, and to stop water-borne silt and sediment from clogging Lake Mead, an even larger reservoir downstream. The 710-foot-tall Glen Canyon Dam blocked the path of the Colorado River, the trapped river backed up behind the dam, and everywhere the water could go, it did. It covered multiple rivers, created bays, filled Glen Canyon and side canyons and coves, drowned beavers and snakes and trees, and turned buttes and spires into islands. It changed an almost two hundred-mile-long stretch of the Colorado River into Lake Powell, into a deep, manmade lake with about 1,960 miles of ragged, convoluted shoreline-a shoreline longer than America's West Coast.
That's what this book's about.
A lot of books have been written about Glen Canyon, but very few have focused so exclusively on Lake Powell--on its ecology, its invasive species, on the effects it's had on the environment, and on the good and the bad effects its had on the West in general. This book is full--FULL!--of facts, and it's very valuable to anyone writing on or interested in this subject. The book often lapses into complex (although often helpful) scientific data and charts, and its text is occasionally almost impenetrable, but it's worth owning if for no other reason 9and there are other reasons) than its extensive chapter on tamarisks, an invasive plant imported from northern Africa and elsewhere.
(To know Lake Powell is to know tamarisks. They're everyhere.)
Buy this book, read this book, and keep it around as a reference. It's great.