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Until 1927, the wild area of Utah near the Colorado River and below the mouth of the Escalante River was almost unknown archaeologically. The Claflin-Emerson Fund of Harvard’s Peabody Museum was created to provide support for an extended survey of southeastern Utah west of the Colorado River.

One such survey was conducted by author Noel Morss during the summer of 1928, resulting in an unexpected revelation: the Fremont (Dirty Devil) River drainage area being surveyed proved to be host to a prehistoric culture different from all other established Southwestern cultures. Excavations completed the following field season confirmed Morss’s findings. This distinct culture was defined by unique unpainted black or gray pottery, sole use of a primitive moccasin type, elaborate clay figurines, and abundant distinctive pictographs. Though too definite and well developed to be confined to a single drainage, Morss concluded that the Fremont were nonetheless a periphery culture and not an integral part of the mainstream of Southwestern development.

Originally published in 1931 and now featuring a new foreword by Duncan Metcalfe, The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah has become a classic in Southwestern archaeology, furthering a conversation about the early peoples of southern Utah that continues even today.

Salt Lake City’s oldest residential historic district is a neighborhood known as the Avenues. During the late nineteenth century this area was home to many of the most influential citizens of Salt Lake City. Built from 1860 until 1930, it contains a mix of middle and upper middle class homes of varying architectural styles. This architectural diversity makes the Avenues unique among Utah's historic districts. For the past thirty years, as citizens have rediscovered the value of living in historic properties near downtown and the University of Utah, preservation efforts have soared in the area.

In 1980, the Avenues was established as a historic district and the Utah Historical Society published The Avenues of Salt Lake City. That book’s authors, Karl T. Haglund and Philip F. Notarianni, gleaned much about the area’s history by using information found on the historic district applications. This newly revised edition of The Avenues of Salt Lake City by Cevan J. LeSieur updates the original with a greatly expanded section on the historic homes in the neighborhood, including more than 600 new photos, and additional material covering the history of the Avenues since 1980.

The book is designed so that readers can take it along as a guide when exploring the neighborhoods. All the pictures of Avenues homes are accompanied with architectural information and brief histories of the properties. This volume makes a valuable resource for those interested in the history of the Avenues and its diverse architecture, and for anyone interested in Utah history, Utah architecture, and historic preservation.
 

 Recognized as a Mormon classic twenty years after its release,The Backslider features longstanding Christian conflicts played out in a scenic, sparsely populated area of southern Utah. A young ranch-hand, Frank Windham, conceives of God as an implacable enemy of human appetite. He is a dedicated sinner until family tragedy catapults him into an arcane form of penitence preached among frontier Mormons. He is saved by an epiphany that has proved controversial among readers, either interpreting it as an extreme impiety or celebrating it as a moving and entirely plausible rendering of a biblical theme in a Western setting.

Frank comes into contact with a host of rural and urban characters. Of central importance is his Lutheran girlfriend, Marianne, whom Frank seduces, begrudgingly marries, and eventually loves. Frank’s extended family is just a generation removed from polygamy and still energized by old-time grudges and deprivations. Along the way Frank encounters a closeted secular humanist, a polygamist prophet, a psychiatrist, a Mason, government employees, college professors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs—all drawn with heightened realism reminiscent of Charles Dickens or the grotesque forms of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

The story engages readers as it alternates almost imperceptibly between Frank’s naïve consciousness and the more informed awareness of its narrator. It can be read as a love story, a satiric comedy, or a dark and sobering study of self-mutilation. Shifting from one to another, it builds suspense and elicits
complex emotions, among them a profound sense of compassion. More joyous than cynical, it sympathizes deeply with the plight of all of God’s backsliders.

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.

The volume features nearly fifty writers who have anchored their attention and imagination in Utah’s least-known national park. The bedrock elders of Colorado Plateau literature are here (Clarence Dutton, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey), as are generations of writers who love this land (including Ellen Meloy, Craig Childs, Charles Bowden, Renny Russell, Ann Zwinger, Gary Ferguson, and Rose Houk). Their pieces are a pleasure to read and each reveals a facet of Capitol Reef’s story, creating a gem of a volume. Editor Stephen Trimble guides and orients with commentary and context.

A visual survey of the park in almost 100 photographs adds another layer to our understanding of this place. Historic photos, pictures from Trimble’s forty-five years of hiking the park, as well as images from master visual artists who have worked in Capitol Reef are included. No other book captures the essence of Capitol Reef like this one. 

Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts

“There was a certain magic about sending young men into the woods. It was not so much man against nature as it was man in league with nature against the economic troubles that were then stalking the land.”—from the book
 
In 1932, unemployment in Utah was about 34 percent. Nearly every state west of the Mississippi River was struggling not only with unemployment but also with drought, erosion, and overgrazing. To solve these serious difficulties, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched what would become arguably the most popular of his New Deal programs—the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). From 1933 to 1942, the CCC employed three million young men on land-improvement projects that are still used today.
     In this book, Kenneth Baldridge chronicles the work of the 10,000 men who served at Utah’s 116 CCC camps. With facts and anecdotes drawn from camp newspapers, government files, interviews, letters written by enrollees, and other sources, he situates the CCC within the political climate and details not only the projects but also the day-to-day aspects of camp life. For thirty dollars a month—of which twenty-five was sent home to their folks—these young recruits planted trees; built roads, bridges, dams, and trails; fought fires; battled pests and noxious weeds; and erected cabins, campgrounds, amphitheaters, and reservoirs, and more.
     Today the CCC is credited with creating greater public awareness and appreciation of the outdoors. It has also served as a model for the Student Conservation Corps and other youth programs. This volume documents the public good created by the CCC, provides an extensive bibliography, and is illustrated with numerous historic and modern photos.

In 1935, during the wind-swept years of the Dust Bowl, three people went missing on separate occasions in the rugged canyon country of southeastern Utah, a place “wild, desolate, mysterious.” A thirteen-year old girl, Lucy Garrett, was tricked into heading west with the man who had murdered her father under the pretense of reuniting with him. At the same time, a search was underway for Dan Thrapp, a young scientist on leave from the American Museum of Natural History. Others were scouring the same region for an artist, Everett Ruess, who had disappeared into “the perfect labyrinth.” 

Intrigued by this unusual string of coincidental disappearances, Scott Thybony set out to learn what happened. His investigations took him from Island in the Sky to Skeleton Mesa, from Texas to Tucson, and from the Green River to the Red. He traced the journey of Lucy Garrett from the murder of her father to her dramatic courtroom testimony. Using the pages of an old journal he followed the route of Dan Thrapp as he crossed an expanse of wildly rugged country with a pair of outlaws. Thrapp’s story of survival in an unforgiving land is a poignant counterpoint to the fate of the artist Everett Ruess, which the New York Times has called “one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern West.” Thybony draws on extensive research and a lifetime of exploration to create a riveting story of these three lives.

Although scholars have increasingly investigated the impact of religion and religious movements on nature, studies of the interactions between Mormons and the natural environment are few. This volume applies the perspectives of environmental history to Mormonism, providing both a scholarly introduction to Mormon environmental history and a spur for historians to consider the role of nature in the Mormon past.
     Since Joseph Smith’s revelations, Mormons have interacted with nature in significant ways—whether perceiving it as a place to find God, uncorrupted spaces in which to build communities to usher in the Second Coming, wildness needing domestication and control, or a world brimming with natural resources to ensure economic well-being. The essays in this volume—written by leading scholars in both environmental history and Mormon history—explore how nature has influenced Mormon beliefs and how these beliefs inform Mormons’ encounters with nature. Introducing overarching environmental ideas, contributors examine specific aspects of nature and Mormon theology to glean new insights into the Mormon experience.

In 1927, the Claflin-Emerson expedition of the Peabody Museum began a rapid and extensive archaeological reconnaissance of eastern Utah. The expedition was funded by William H. Claflin and Raymond Emerson, Bostonian businessmen with a deep devotion to the American Indian and a probing interest in the remote and mysterious regions of the American West.

Early expedition surveys and excavations conducted by Noel Morss would lead to a definition of the Fremont culture; later research would augment existing data on the Fremont by adding entirely new traits, disclosing new variations in architecture and basketry, and providing new information on the distribution of previously known traits.

In The Fremont Culture: A Study in Culture Dynamics on the Northern Anasazi Frontier, archaeologist James H. Gunnerson provides the results of his 1950s survey and excavation in the Utah area. He presents a functional synthesis of the Fremont culture and discusses the dynamics of its growth and decline.

Gunnerson’s report also uses the original field notes, maps, plans, photographs, sketches, and unpublished preliminary reports of the Claflin-Emerson expedition. Together, the reports of Morss and Gunnerson offer the most important and complete overview of the expedition available. They are fitting tributes to the men of that expedition, scientists who recognized the importance of an ancient people who once wrested a meager living from the rugged canyon country of the Green and Colorado Rivers.

When Barney Clark received the Jarvik-7 artificial heart in 1983 and Cold Fusion came under fire in 1989, Chase Peterson, as the University of Utah president, was inevitably pulled into these campus events. While these episodes may be the best known in Peterson’s professional history, they are certainly not the only stories that make his autobiography worth reading.

The Guardian Poplar tells of a man who grew up in small-town Utah and carried his pioneer and Mormon heritage to a New England prep school and later to Harvard. He then returned to Utah as a doctor, but unexpectedly found himself back at Harvard as its dean of admissions, handling issues such as the Vietnam War and racial and gender reform. The book explains how Peterson’s home state recruited him back to become an administrator at the University of Utah and how he would eventually become the university president, taking on new issues and challenges. Peterson recounts these years by drawing on anecdotes that recall the people he served and the moments that brought his life meaning.

This autobiography is a compelling account of how Peterson has managed to balance family and career, handle the tensions that have arisen between his faith and his scientific training, and remain solid in the face of his newest challenge—cancer. The book’s engaging prose and honest reflections are sure to intrigue and inspire readers who know the man well, as well as those readers who simply want to know a man who can be described as dedicated, faithful, hardworking, and hopeful about the future.

“When I first met Chase Peterson as a Harvard freshman—along with our joint friend and brother David Evans—something deeply touched me. It was not only his sincere smile and open embrace but also a sense that here was a kind and courageous man comfortable in his own skin, secure in who he was yet eager to encounter new persons, new experiences, and new challenges. . . . He was from Utah but in New England, a Mormon in old Harvard, and a medical doctor in the deanship of admissions. Little did I know that his journey would enhance and enrich my own—owing to his critical allegiance to his family, his faith, his friends, and to his citizenship of country and world. His prophetic witness at Harvard in the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s, his promotion of black priesthood in the Mormon church, his support of antiapartheid protests in the ‘80s, and his steadfast defense of academic freedom in the Cold Fusion controversy in the early ‘90s all express his quiet and humble effort to be true to himself—a self grounded in, but
not limited by, a rich Mormon tradition.”—from the foreword by Cornel West

Its fires help to give the Interior West a peculiar character, fundamental to its natural and human histories. While a general aridity unites the region—defined here as Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado—its fires illuminate the ways that the region’s various parts show profoundly different landscapes, biotas, and human settlement experiences.

In this collection of essays, fire historian Stephen J. Pyne explains the relevance of the Interior West to the national fire scene. This region offered the first scientific inquiry into landscape fire in the United States, including a map of Utah burns published in 1878 as part of John Wesley Powell’s Arid Lands report. Then its significance faded, and for most of the 20th century, the Interior West was the hole in the national donut of fire management. Recently the region has returned to prominence due to fires along its front ranges; invasive species, both exotics like cheatgrass and unleashed natives like mountain pine beetle; and fatality fires, notably at South Canyon in 1994.

The Interior West has long been passed over in national fire narratives. Here it reclaims its rightful place.
 
Included in this volume:

• A summary of 19th- and 20th-century fire history in the Interior West
• How this important region inspired U.S. studies of landscape fire
• Why the region disappeared from national fire management discussions
• How the expansion of invasive species and loss of native species has affected the region’s fire ecology
• The national significance of fire in the Interior West

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.  

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.

Edward Geary’s collection of writings on the High Plateau country of central and southern Utah, a combination guidebook, travel narrative, personal essays, and natural, social, and literary history, encompasses each of those forms with a sweep as broad as the landscape it describes.

It traces the progress of travelers to the region, including the historic Dominguez-Escalante party in 1776, and trappers and explorers such as Jedediah Smith, John C. Freemont, and Kit Carson. Scandinavian and English descendants of the early Mormon pioneers, sent to settle Manti and surrounding areas by Brigham Young in 1849, populate many of the pages and dominate the agrarian villages described by the author. The book also describes the multiethnic society of French Basque, Greeks, Slavs, Italians, Chinese, Welsh, and Finnish laborers and coal miners that developed in the region.

Geary writes of all these people with affection and a deep sense of place, of belonging to a distinctive landscape and its history. It is a book that will bring a rush of understanding to those who have lived in the High Plateaus and greater depth of appreciation to visitors.

Desolation Canyon is one of the West's wild treasures. Visitors come to study, explore, run the river, and hike a canyon that is deeper at its deepest than the Grand Canyon, better preserved than most of the Colorado River system, and full of eye-catching geology-castellated ridges, dramatic walls, slickrock formations, and lovely beaches. Rafting the river, one may see wild horses, blue herons, bighorn sheep, and possibly a black bear. Signs of previous people include the newsworthy, well-preserved Fremont Indian ruins along Range Creek and rock art panels of Nine Mile Canyon, both Desolation Canyon tributaries. Historic Utes also pecked rock art, including images of graceful horses and lively locomotives, in the upper canyon. Remote and difficult to access, Desolation has a surprisingly lively history. Cattle and sheep herding, moonshine, prospecting, and hideaways brought a surprising number of settlers--ranchers, outlaws, and recluses--to the canyon.

The 220 letters selected for this book offer a fresh and intimate encounter with Juanita Brooks, one of the most influential historians of Utah and the Mormons. Born and raised in the small and remote agricultural village of Bunkerville, Nevada, Brooks lived most most of her life in St. George, Utah, and rose to prominence following the 1950 publication of her landmark book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Her unwavering commitment to honest scholarship continues to inspire younger generations laboring to produce excellent objective history.
 
The letters in this volume, written from 1941 to 1978, trace Brooks’s development from fledgling historian to recognized authority. Serving almost as an autobiography of her interactions with her contemporaries, this selection provides a new perspective on Brooks’s personality and growth as a scholar. Richly detailed, chatty, and covering a wide array of subjects, the letters afford an important glimpse into Brooks’s struggles, concerns, and interests.

Copublished with the Tanner Trust Fund, J. Willard Marriott Library.

Robert Smithson’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson built a masterpiece from local materials, one that spirals counterclockwise into the lake and appears or is submerged with fluctuations in the lake’s locally red, saline water.

The Spiral Jetty Encyclo draws on Smithson’s writings for encyclopedic entries that bring to light the context of the earthwork and Smithson’s many points of reference in creating it. Visitors and armchair travelers, too, will discover how much significance Smithson placed on regional considerations, his immersion in natural history, his passion for travel, and his ability to use diverse mediums to create a cohesive and lasting work of art. Containing some 220 images, most of them in color, with some historical black and whites, The  Spiral Jetty Encyclo lets readers explore the construction, connections, and significance of Smithson’s 1,500-foot-long curl into Great Salt Lake, created, in Smithson’s words, of “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.” 

Winner of 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book.
Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.

Set in Salt Lake City at the height of the Great Depression, Linda Sillitoe’s last novel opens with three little girls, eleven-year-old triplets, skipping in front of their house at 1300 South, across from Liberty Park. They giggle lightly as they chant: 

Prin-cess Al-ice in Liberty Park
Munch-es ba-nan-as ’til way after dark.

Princess Alice is an elephant the children of Utah purchased by donating nickels and dimes to a circus. The girls don’t know this, but her handler takes the mammoth princess out on late-night strolls around the park when the moon is out. What they do know is that the elephant sometimes escapes and goes on a rampage, crashing through front-yard fences and collecting collars of clothesline laundry around her neck, a persistent train of barking dogs following behind. The girls’ father is a police officer who is investigating a boy’s disappearance. As the case unfolds, the perception of the park, with its eighty acres of trees and grass, will change from the epitome of freedom to a place to be avoided, even as Princess Alice moves to a secure confinement at a new zoo at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. The story is loosely based on the exploits of a real live elephant that lived in Liberty Park a decade before Sillitoe’s childhood in the neighborhood.  

The first book-length treatment of Utah’s distinctive food heritage, this volume contains work by more than sixty subject-matter experts, including scholars, community members, event organizers, journalists, bloggers, photographers, and food producers. It features recipes and photographs of food and beverages. Utah’s food history is traced from precontact Native American times through the arrival of multinational Mormon pioneers, miners, farmers, and other immigrants to today’s moment of “foodie” creativity, craft beers, and “fast-casual” restaurant-chain development. Contributors also explore the historical and cultural background for scores of food-related tools, techniques, dishes, traditions, festivals, and distinctive ingredients from the state’s religious, regional, and ethnic communities as well as Utah-based companies. In a state much influenced by Latter-day Saint history and culture, iconic items like Jell-O salads, funeral potatoes, fry sauce, and the distinctive “Utah scone” have emerged as self-conscious signals of an ecumenical Utah identity. Scholarly but lively and accessible, this book will appeal to both the general reader and the academic folklorist. 
 

Willis William Ritter, United States District Judge for the District of Utah from 1949 until his death on March 4, 1978, was the one judge whose name was familiar among those who had little or no idea of the difference between judicial jurisdictions. Many knew him by the broad gestures with which he challenged bureaucracies and the federal government itself. He was, legally speaking, a friend to the underdog. Yet at his death scarcely a friend was left and he had become the object of ridicule, outrage, pity, and contempt.

Ritter was clearly ahead of his time, for his opinions on criminal justice, police interrogation, and the rights to counsel have now become accepted standards in jurisprudence. They are, indeed, so universally accepted that few if any viewers of televised police court dramas would even question them. In his personal life he was a man flawed on a grand scale and he lived a life fraught with contradictions. This is his compelling story, compellingly recounted.

Fremont is a culture (ca. 300–1300 A.D.) first defined by archaeologist Noel Morss in 1928 based on characteristics unique to the area. Initially thought to be a simple socio-political system, recent reassessments of the Fremont assume a more complex society. This volume places Fremont rock art studies in this contemporary context. Author Steven Simms offers an innovative model of Fremont society, politics, and worldview using the principles of analogy and current archaeological evidence. Simms takes readers on a trip back in time by describing what a typical Fremont hamlet or residential area might have looked like a thousand years ago, including the inhabitants' daily activities. François Gohier's captivating photographs of Fremont art and artifacts offer an engaging complement to Simms's text, aiding us in our understanding of the lives of these ancient people.

Winner of the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Winner of the Society for American Archaeology Book Award for Public Audience. 

In February 2000, while excavating his property in St. George, Utah, Sheldon Johnson turned over a piece of ground and discovered a fully preserved dinosaur footprint. That track was the first of many fossils to be uncovered. Five years later, the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm was established to preserve one of the richest and oldest dinosaur-age fossil sites in Utah.

Tracks in Deep Time presents, for the first time, an engaging, thoroughly readable account of the history, geology, and paleontology of this important site. Two hundred million years ago, Lake Dixie covered the site. Within its waters and along its shores, a diverse ecosystem of dinosaurs, early crocodylians, fishes, plants, and other organisms thrived, leaving behind thousands of footprints and other fossils preserved in layers of rock. Unusual fossils found here include the world’s largest collection of tracks left by swimming dinosaurs and one of only six traces known to have been made by a sitting, meat-eating dinosaur. With approachable text and lavish, full-color photographs and illustrations, Jerald Harris and Andrew Milner describe how geologists and paleontologists have painstakingly reconstructed a vivid “snapshot” of life from the Early Jurassic epoch.