When the first company of Mormon settlers arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, it was immediately apparent that thier survival depended upon what resources they found in the mountains surrounding them. The Great Basin soil was baked hard by the sun and yielded to the plow with great difficulty. And as pioneer William Clayton noted, surveying the valley floor, "Timber is evidently lacking." But within a week of arrival, a small dam had been constructed to channel irrigation water to crops, parties had been dispatched to explore the nearby canyons for trees suitable for lumber, and names had been attached to several dozen features of the landscape including peaks, creeks, and canyons.

These place names, as well as the physcial traces and artifacts that persist in three Wasatch canyons—Mill Creek, Big Cottonwood, and Little Cottonwood—tantalize with what they suggest, but do not tell, about the history of settlement and development in the canyons. Charles Keller has extracted a wealth of information to create The Lady in the Ore Bucket, a faxcinating history of the lumber, mining, and hydropower industries built from the rich natural resources of the canyons. With more than six dozen photographs and maps, the book is alive with details concerning the personalities, politics, pacts, and peregrinations of local leaders from white settlement in 1847 through the early 1900s. It will delight any reader with an interest in the magnificent canyones that open onto the modern Wasatch Front.  

Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.

Landscape of Desire examines the plight of the western landscape. It discusses a wide range of issues, including mining, grazing, dams, recreation, wilderness, and land management. Since recreation has replaced extraction industries as the primary use of wilderness, especially in southern Utah, Gordon addresses its impactful qualities. He overviews the history of the conflict between preservation and development and places these issues in a cultural context. The text is presented in a narrative format, following the individuals of one field course Gordon lead that explored Muddy Creek and the Dirty Devil River from Interstate 70 to Lake Powell. Though each chapter focuses on the geologic formation the group is traveling through, the plants, animals, ecology, and human impacts are all tightly woven into the narrative. Not only does the land affect the members of the field course, but their attitudes and insights affect the land.

In Landscape of Desire Gordon achieves a vision of wholeness of this popular and contested region of Utah that centers around the implications of being human and also stewards of the wild.

Alison Thorne provides a small-town Utah perspective on the progressive social movements that in the mid to late twentieth century dramatically affected American society. A born activist, Thorne has fought for women's rights, educational reform in public schools and universities, the environment, peace, and the war on poverty. Her efforts have been all the more challenging because of the conservative social and cultural environment in which she has undertaken them. Yet, Thorne, who has deep personal and familial roots in the politically conservative and predominantly Mormon culture of Utah and much of the West, has worked well with people with varied political and social perspectives and agendas. She has been able to establish effective coalitions in contexts that seem inherently hostile. She demonstrated this through her election to the local school board and through her appointment by both Republican and Democratic governors, eventually as chair, to the statewide Governor's Committee on the Status of Women.

The nature of the Old and New West is fully reflected through dialects, beliefs, occupations, and actions in this collection of thirteen plays with complete stage directions. Set in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah from the mid-1800s to the present day and focusing on veterans, children, prostitutes, priests, the newborn, and newly dead, these one-acts written by playwrights who know the region give voice to those who created and continue to recreate the West. This collection of contemporary plays, written out of love and concern for the region, examines as never before the western myths rooted in the national psyche. The characters battle limits, deny fate, and seek new beginnings. The plays examine symptoms, pose questions, and seek answers about the past and present West.