OCR Text |
Show threatened man on two levels: First, the untouched forest darkness harbored ferocious beasts, savage men, and demons of the imagination; second, and on a deeper level, wilderness was believed to be an area where civil and moral laws became inoperative and behavioral restraints broke down. Wilderness was an affront to the sensibilities of man. The story of the domestication of our continent is well known; the forest was cleared, crops planted, and the land transformed into an arrangement of farms, roads, and cities. The "pioneer tradition" which conquered the land had little sympathy for nature. The French historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited America in 1831 and rightly observed that "living in the wilds, [the pioneer] only prizes the works of man."15 Plow and axe would effectively control the natural world. When Brigham Young spoke of "beautiful houses," his concept of beauty was consistent with that of his fellow frontier travelers: He was looking for a beauty based on artificiality. The folk design aesthetic is built around the square, not the circle; it favors the smooth over the roughness of texture and glorifies the balanced over the irregular. The organic is stifled by the synthetic. In building up Zion, the Utah Mormons followed a well-worked- out American tradition of "turning nature into culture."16 The Mormon landscape is self-consciously controlled and fundamentally synthetic. While the settlers were forced by necessity in the first years to hovel in dugouts, the experience only intensified their antipathy to nature. If compelled to utilize native materials like adobe, stone, and logs in building permanent structures, their technology allowed them to mold these materials into the geometry of civilization. The various construction techniques employed in Utah demonstrate the settlers' willingness to devote considerable time and expense to differentiate the human from the natural landscape.17 Logs for dwellings were usually sawed or hewn square and were thus deprived of their identity as round trees. Often the logs were further disguised by the application of lumber siding or plaster (Fig. 50). The organic irregularities of stone were chiseled into a smooth regularity of pattern pleasing to the settler's eye. The process of quarrying the stone, hauling it to the building site, shaping it into blocks, and placing the mortar in evenly coursed lines transcends pioneer expediency (Fig. 49A-C). Clay was extracted from the ground, mixed with sand, and molded into the adobe bricks which became the most commonly used of all Mormon building materials. To help protect sun-dried " 'dobies" from the weather, walls were often plastered to present a smooth exterior finish. Plastering helped to preserve the fragile bricks, but it 41 |