On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their weapons, the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years.
In House of Mourning, Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss. Who were the victims at Mountain Meadows? How had they settled and raised their families in the American South, and why were they moving west once again? What were they hoping to find or make for themselves at the end of the trail? By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies.
The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America. House of Mourning is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events.
Winner of the Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award.
An illustrated collection of historical articles originally published in the Salt Lake Tribune from 1993 to 1996, In
Another Time provides both an entertaining introduction to Utah and a distinguished and popular historian's summary views of the state's peculiar history.
Another Time will entertain and inform newcomers seeking an introductory understanding of what has made Utah different, old hands wanting to know more about the rich complexity of the state's past, and anyone who enjoys well-told historical tales.
This classic biography is now in its fourth USU Press printing. It is unparalleled in providing a thorough and accurate account of John D. Lee's involvement in the tragic 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Caroline Crosby's life took a wandering course between her 1834 marriage to Jonathan Crosby and conversion to the infant Mormon Church and her departure for her final home, Utah, on New Year's Day, 1858. In the intervening years, she lived in many places but never long enough to set firm roots. Her adherence to a frontier religion on the move kept her moving, even after the church began to settle down in Utah. Despite the impermanence of her situation—perhaps even because of it—Caroline Crosby left a remarkably rich record of her life and travels, thereby telling us not only much about herself and her family but also about times and places of which her documentary record provides a virtually unparalleled view. A notable aspect of her memoirs and journals is what they convey of the character of their author, who, despite the many challenges of transience and poverty she faced, appears to have remained curious, dedicated, observant, and optimistic.
From Caroline's home in Canada, she and Jonathan Crosby first went to the headquarters of Joseph Smith's new church in Kirtland, Ohio. She recounts, in a memoir, the early struggles of his followers there. As the church moved west, the Crosbys did as well, but, as became characteristic, they did not move immediately with the main body to the center of the religion. For a while they settled in Indiana, finally reaching the new Mormon center of Nauvoo in 1842. Fleeing Nauvoo with the last of the Mormons in 1846, they spent two years in Iowa and set out for Utah in 1848, the account of which is the first of Caroline Crosby's vivid trail journals. The Crosbys were able to rest in Salt Lake City for less than two years before Brigham Young sent them on a church mission to the Society and Austral Islands in the South Pacific. She recorded, in detail, their overland travel to San Francisco and then by sea to French Polynesia and their service on the islands. In late 1852 the Crosbys returned to California, beginning what is probably the most historically significant time recorded in her writings, her diaries of life. First, in immediately post-Gold-Rush San Francisco and, second, in the new Mormon village of San Bernardino in southern California. There is no comparable record by a woman of 1850s life in these growing communities. The Crosbys responded in 1857 to Brigham Young's call for church members to gather in Utah and again abandoned a new home—the nicest one they had built and one of the finest houses in San Bernardino—again displaying their unquestioning loyalty to the Mormon church.
The wagon trail between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles is one of the most important and least-known elements of nineteenth-century Western migration. Known as the Southern Route, it included the western half of the Old Spanish Trail and was favored because it could be used for travel and freighting year-round. It was, however, likely the most difficult route that pioneers traveled with any consistency, following not rivers but leading from one--sometimes dubious--desert watering place to the next and offering few havens for the sick, weary, or unfortunate. Historian Edward Leo Lyman has provided the first history of the complete Southern Route and of the people who developed and used it. Based on extensive research in primary sources--including many early travelers’ accounts--and on Lyman’s own investigation of the route and its branches, the book discusses the exploration and development of the Old Spanish Trail, its horse thieves and traders, including Jed Smith and Kit Carson, along with government explorere John C. Frémont. Developing the old pack mule trail as a wagon road between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, miners heading for the California gold fields first used the route extensively. Mormon missionaries and the colonizers of San Bernardino and other communities also traveled that way, as did a wide array of mail carriers, soldiers and world travelers. Later, a steady stream of Anglo-American emigrants seeking new homes or fortunes in California shared the road with a surprising number of freight wagon operators. The trail passed through the territories of numerous Native American peoples, and contacts with them--both friendly and hostile--played a significant role in the experiences of travelers and in the fates of Native American cultures in this region. Lyman’s discussions of Mormon-Indian relations and of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre offer fresh and important analyses of these vital aspects of the westward movement.
Wend Your Way: A Guide to Sites Along the Mormon Trail tells the story of this great movement through Iowa. Tracing the trail from east to west through 12 counties the guide includes:
• Mormon Trail history for each countyVolume 1, Life Writings of Frontier Women series, edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher
Mary Richard's journals and letters record a young woman's rare, but richly detailed view of life in the temporary Mormon pioneer communities in Iowa.
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