A Rich and Diverse Heritage

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THE PEOPLE OF THE SALT LAKE VALLEY: RKH AND DIVERSE HERITAGE John S. McCormick Utah State Historical Society The first Utahns were American Indians, who have lived in what is now Utah for about 12,000 years. When people of European ancestry began coming here in the mid-18th century, they found in the region five main groups and numerous sub-groups. Fairly fixed, but not rigid, boundaries existed between them. The Shoshones lived and hunted in northern Utah. The Goshutes lived in the arid area south and west of the Great Salt Lake and survived through ingenious use of available resources, including more than 100 varieties of plants, plus small animals, crickets, and other insects. Navajos inhabited Utah's southeastern corner, where they raised sheep. Southern Paiutes lived in the southwestern section of the state, and Utes occupied the eastern two-thirds. With the exception of the Navajos, all these groups were culturally related and spoke Shoshonean languages. In the 19th century, no Indians lived in the Salt Lake Valley (though perhaps 2500 years previously some had). The valley was a neutral zone separating the various Indian groups from one another. Today about 20,000 Native Americans make their homes in Utah, about two-thirds of them on reservations. The rest live in cities and towns throughout the state, with most of them, about 4000 in all, in Salt Lake City. Permanent settlement of the Salt Lake Valley by people of European background began in July 1847 with the arrival of an advance party of several hundred Mor­mons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had come, as they said, to build the King­dom of God on earth. Salt Lake City grew steadily, if not spectacularly, after that founding. It had a population in 1850 of about 6000, in 1860 of 8000, in 1870 of 12,000, and in 1880 of 20,000. A massive influx of population pushed the city's population to 53,000 in 1900. Throughout this period, the city had a large foreign-born population. In 1870, for example, 65% of Salt Lake families consisted of foreign-bom parents and their children. In 1880,37% of the city's residents were foreign-bom. In that same year, by way of comparison, 40% of New York City's population were immigrants. Most of Salt Lake's immigrants were from the British Isles and Scandinavia, and most were converts to the Mormon church. During the 19th century, perhaps as many as 100,000 Mormon converts from other countries came to Salt Lake City. Some of them remained, but most of them settled in other parts of the state. Of that 100,000, more than 50,000 were from the British Isles and another 30,000 were from Scandinavia Most of the others were from Canada and Western Europe, mainly Germany and Switzerland. Of those from the British Isles, the vast majority were from England, with some from Wales and Scotland and a handful from Ireland. Most of the Scan­dinavian immigrants came from Denmark and southern Sweden. Most of these people came not as individuals, but as members of family groups. Though they were from all walks of life, they fell mainly into three occupational categories: farmers, artisans and craftsmen, and unskilled laborers. The Mormon leadership did, however, fre­quently encourage the immigration of people with certain skills deemed necessary to build the Kingdom. Thus, in 1849, British missionaries were instructed to search out "blowers, moulders and all kinds of furnace operators to immediately immigrate to the valley without delay," and in 1852 church leaders specifically asked for iron workers, potters, woolen workers, comb makers, millers, and coal miners. Most of them came as part of an organized migration to Zion. Rather than travelling on their own, they came under church sponsorship and supervision. Church leaders chartered ships and organized immigrants into Traditional music and dance provide cultural support and continuity for those who choose to make their home in a new country. This photo of the "Glad Boys " band was taken in Sweden before Roland Gustavson (on the left) andHalvar Wallin (on the right) decided to move to the United States. Today Gustavson and Wallin often combine their talents to provide music for local Swedish celebrations, (photo courtesy ofHalvar Wallin) page3 self-governing and self-helping communities while they were in transit. Once in the United States, church agents met them and arranged for the overland journey to Utah, providing-in the days before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869-teams and wagons, instructions for overland travel, and an experienced guide. Of course, not all European immigrants to Utah were Mormons. There were others, particularly after 1870 as more and more non-Mormon groups carried on educa­tional and evangelical missions. Another factor attracting non-Mormon immigrants was the booming economy of the state, especially its mines and railroads. By 1885, one-third of Salt Lake's population was non-Mormon, and there were a number of non-Mormon churches: Baptist, Congregational, Episcopalian (two), Methodist, Presby­terian, and Roman Catholic. Of the original advance party of Mormons who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, three were black slaves. But black Americans had been a part of Utah's earlier his­tory, too. In the 1820s, they had hunted and trapped for beaver throughout the region, and a black man had been a member of Captain John C. Fremont's two expeditions to Utah in the early and mid-1840s. By 1850,50 blacks were living in the Salt Lake Valley, about half of them slaves and half of them free. In subsequent years Utah's black community grew slowly. The 1900 census showed 678 living in the state, most of them in Salt Lake and Uin­tah counties. At first they were employed mainly as domestic servants, but the railroads brought new job opportunities in the late 19th century and until 1940 were the major employers of blacks, most of whom worked as porters and waiters. World War II created new jobs and brought a further influx of black people into the state. Today about 10,000 live in Utah, mostly in the Salt Lake and Ogden areas. From the first, blacks met the same kind of prejudice and discrimination in Utah that they did elsewhere in the United States. Partly in response, they, like other minority groups, developed a rich social and cultural life, with their own clubs, community centers, fraternal organiza­tions, newspapers, and churches. Churches were espe­cially important. The first black church in Utah was Salt Lake's Trinity African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1890. The Calvary Baptist Church was estab­lished soon afterward Toward the end of the 19th century, new immigrant groups began to arrive in Salt Lake City. Mainly from eastern and southern Europe and Asia, they were part of a large stream of 20 million people who reached the shores of the United States between 1880 and the begin­ning of World War I. They included Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Slavs, Serbs, Turks, Slovenes, and others. After 1900, Spanish-speaking people and peoples from the Middle East-Lebanese, Armenians, Persians, Syrians, and others-began to join them. These new immigrants to Utah were different from previous groups. Not only had they come from different parts of the world, but most of them were not members of the Mormon church and had little interest in joining it. The vast majority were young, single men. (Of the nearly 4000 Greeks that the 1910 census counted in Utah, fewer than one dozen were women.) Also, they had often come to Utah by chance, not by design. Utah was where they happened to get a job, or where they had a friend or rela­tive, or where they decided to get off a freight train after a long and exhausting ride. Most of these new immigrants intended to stay in this country only temporarily. They had left their homelands because of economic distress, and they planned to work only until they could save enough money to return and re-establish themselves. Strangers in a strange land, these newcomers met with prejudice and discrimination in Utah, as they did elsewhere in the United States. The feeling was widespread throughout the nation that only the Anglo-Saxon race had the qualities necessary for American society to prosper and that the future of the country depended on its retaining a relatively homogeneous population. To help counteract this prejudice, newly arrived immigrants tended to gather together in small colonies, so that segregated ethnic neighborhoods became a feature of Salt Lake City, as in other American cities in the late 19th century. In contrast, earlier immigrants to Utah did not form such neighborhoods. That would have been con­trary to the idea of building the Kingdom, whose fellowship was supposed to override ethnic distinctions.