Utah Historical Quarterly Volume XLVI

UHQ 1978 - Volume 46 - no 4 - Book Reviews and Notices

The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857-1858. Edited by RAY R. CANNING and BEVERLY BEETON. Utah, the Mormons, and the West Series, no. 8. (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1977. Xvi 4-111 pp. $12.50.) I t is nearly a quarter-century since I first "discovered" the Elizabeth Cum­ming letters (if memory serves, through the courtesy of Ray Canning). In the years that followed, a half-dozen of them were published under my editorship. It now comes as a happy fulfillment to see all eighteen of the letters published in one volume. Elizabeth Cumming was the wife of Alfred Cumming, who had been ap­pointed in 1857 to replace Brigham Young as governor of the territory of Utah. Earlier federal officials, particu­larly Judge W. W. Drummond of the territorial supreme court, had castigated the Mormons for their disloyalty and treasonous conduct toward the national government. In the squabbles during the early and middle 1850s with the carpet­bag officials of the territory, Mormon complaints, both oral and written, did sound anti-federal government if not downright treasonous. The Mormons viewed themselves as defenders of the Constitution and therefore entitled to criticize officials who in the Mormon view were not loyal to the Constitution. All of this continued, and violent bicker­ing led President Buchanan to believe that Utah and the Mormons were in re­bellion against the government. The re­sult was the formation of a posse comitatus to escort the new governor to his post, to put down the supposed rebellion, and to secure control of an integral part of the territory of the United States of America. The whole business came to be called the Utah War or, officially, the Utah Expedition. The military escort turned out to be a significant part of the entire armed forces of the country. The Utah Expedi­tion, disparagingly referred to by the Mormons as Johnston's Army, was placed under the command of Col., later Brig. Gen., Albert Sidney John­ston. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnston left the territory, traveled to California, and finally made his way to Texas and the South where he offered his sword in defense of the Confederacy. His defection to the South and his sub­sequent death, of a superficial wound at Shiloh, left no mourners in Mormon Utah. Alfred Cumming was from a promi­nent family in Augusta, Georgia. He had had a rather significant career as sutler with Zachary Taylor's army in Mexico, mayor, and superintendent of Indian Affairs, before appointment as governor of Utah Territory. Elizabeth Wells Randall Cumming was from an equally distinguished Boston family. She was a great-granddaughter of Samuel Adams of Revolutionary fame. Although of gentle birth, she accompanied her hus­band over the rugged road to Utah, in­cluding the winter encampment in tents at Camp Scott near Fort Bridger. In spite of the bitter weather, she seems to have enjoyed the experience. I n the spring of 1858 she entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake, where she made her home for the next three years. 416 Utah Historical Quarterly Even though her letters cover only the first year of her experiences-traveling to Utah and life among the Mormons- yet, they are most interesting and re­vealing as a footnote to history. Unlike the vituperation spewed out by earlier Gentile observers of the Mormon scene, both male and female, her letters ex­hibit understanding, a sense of humor, and even enjoyment of her experiences. Her observations of Mormon social and religious customs, which she disliked, are still reported with sympathy and understanding as being matters of their own business. While at Camp Scott in December, she describes the well-known salt episode: the gift of 800 pounds of salt to the army, which was so sum­marily rejected. Her depiction of the "death like stillness" of the abandoned city, so recently deserted by the Mor­mons before the advancing army, is most descriptive and dramatic. The long march of the army through the city on June 26 and the straggling groups of Mormons returning home in succeeding weeks are both chronicled succinctly but with feeling and emotion. The last of the eighteen letters is dated September 24, 1858. Unfortun­ately, there are no letters from that time on. Nearly three years later Elizabeth returned to the national capital at the expiration of her husband's term of office. It would be most interesting to read what her observations would have been after a prolonged stay among the Mormons. The book is handsomely put together. Its mechanics are interesting. The dimensions are rather wider than verti­cal. The footnotes are really marginal notes placed parallel to the left side of the text of the letters. There is much ex­planatory material in the notes. Each of the three sections is prefaced by a page of introduction. An adequate bibli­ography, containing the major works, both primary and secondary, on the Utah War is included. The only major item missing is the diary of John Wolcott Phelps, a captain of artillery. Originals are in the New York Public Library, with copies in the Utah State Historical Society. The Utah War is a much told tale with many chroniclers, yet this hand­some little book is a contribution to the literature on Utah, the Mormons, and the West. A. RUSSELL MORTENSEN Escondido, California Holy Smoke: A Dissertation on the Utah War. By PAUL BAILEY. (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1978. 151 pp. $8.95.) Visitors to Wheatland, President James Buchanan's Pennsylvania coun­try mansion, will encounter mementos of Buchanan's interests in Great Britain, Japan, the Democratic party and local politics but nothing amidst the ante­bellum furniture to remind them of his attempt to resolve the "Mormon prob­lem" by intervening in Utah Territory during 1857-58 with one-third of the U.S. Army. Such also has been the focus of most recent analyses of Buchanan and his administration, as this reviewer lamented in 1977 ("The Gap in the Buchanan Revival: The Utah Expedi­tion of 1857-58," Utah Historical Quar­terly, Winter 1977). Now comes Paul Bailey, a veteran writer on nineteenth-century Mormon affairs, with the first full-length account of the Utah Expedition to appear in nearly twenty years. The result is a straightforward account of the cam­paign's origins, prosecution, and resolu­tion that will appeal more to the general reader than to the scholar. In a sense, almost all of the principal events are covered in Bailey's book: the Mormon trek to the Great Salt Lake in 1847; growing conflict between Mor- Book Reviews and Notices 417 mons and federally appointed territorial officials during the 1850s; the violent religious Reformation of 1856; Buch­anan's early conviction that a secession movement was afoot in Utah; his sur­prise decision to garrison the territory with a brigade of federal regulars; the Mormon military response with a non­violent scorched-earth campaign that forced Col. Albert Sidney Johnston's regulars into an isolated bivouac during the winter of 1857-58; the feverish efforts to resupply and reinforce John­ston with a second brigade; and the negotiated settlement of the standoff by Buchanan's peace commissioners and Brigham Young during July 1858. Strangely, though, Holy Smoke lacks any reference to the Mountain Meadow Massacre, the campaign's principal atrocity-an inexplicable omission in view of Bailey's own earlier book on the Nauvoo Legion. Perhaps even more disturbing is the book's lack of focus or interpretation coupled with a series of overstatements and inaccuracies. With respect to the former, Bailey announces in his first chapter, despite the passage of 120 years, that "Who was wrong and who was right in the American incident of the 'Utah War' is a matter best left to time and evidence. What is of concern is the marshaling of facts, the scrutiny of motives, and reconstructing a frame to this lively and entertaining segment of history." Lost in the process is another opportunity to examine the principal conspiracy theories that have for cen­turies lurked below the surface of the Utah Expedition's origins and clung to its historiography without resolution. Bailey himself hints at two of these theories-those that suggest that the campaign was designed to enrich Russell, Majors & Waddell or to divert attention from "bleeding" Kansas-by comment­ing without elaboration that the Utah Expedition "built freighting monopolies" (p. 10) and that "There were obscure political reasons for generating military hostility in the far west to forestall the divisive states' rights ferment which was gripping the nation" (p. 99). By leaving the motives of the Buchanan adminis­tration with hints, Bailey not only tan­talizes the reader but lends credence to conspiracy theories that cry for in-depth analysis rather than heavier usage. In somewhat the same vein, readers are apt to be intrigued by, but dis­satisfied with, Bailey's unsupported as­sertion (p. 10) that the Utah Expedi­tion somehow "wiped a president out of the White House, overturned a politi­cal dynasty . . . affected drastically the course of the Civil War to immediately follow, and rechanneled the very course of history pertaining to America's West." Such premises have major, national significance but are not to be found in developed form in Holy Smoke. Equally vexing are the several notice­able inaccuracies that occur in Bailey's book, several of which are repeated in the text of the dust jacket. On page 10, for example, Bailey states that Congress as well as Buchanan dispatched the army to Utah, although neither the House nor the Senate was consulted and, in fact, neither was even in session during the period March-November 1857. Elsewhere in the same sentence, he describes Johnston's brigade as "an army almost equal in size to that ragged Mormon populace," a ridiculous asser­tion in view of the probability that the Nauvoo Legion alone outnumbered the troops of the Utah Expedition if not those of the entire U.S. Army. Similarly, we find twice (pp. 74 and 76) the com­ment that Brevet Brig. Gen. William S. Harney was "dismissed" from command of the Expedition, an observation that overlooks Harney's reassignment to Kan­sas at the express request of Gov. Robert Walker as well as his subsequent promo­tion by Buchanan upon the death of Gen. Persifor F. Smith, an officer whose given name Bailey misspells. On balance, Holy Smoke is a worth­while book for the general reader, but 418 Utah Historical Quarterly the scholar or specialist may well view it, as does this reviewer, as a volume that fails to capitalize fully on a pub­lisher's willingness to offer another entry on the Utah Expedition. The last such offering was the Yale University Press publication in 1960 of Norman Furniss's The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, the standard work in the field. Significantly, it is a book that is neither cited nor listed in the bibliography of Paul Bailey's Holy Smoke. It may be decades before this subject is again addressed at length in print, and it is against "this back­ground, in part, that Bailey's study should be assessed. WILLIAM P. MACKINNON Birmingham, Michigan A Clash of Interests: Interior Department and Mountain West, 1863-96. By THOMAS G. ALEXANDER. (Provo, Ut.: Brigham Young University Press, 1977. Xii 4- 256 pp. $11.95.) If ever you have wanted to know what learned professors mean when they speak of a "scholarly monograph," this study of the activities of the U.S. Department of the Interior in three territories of the Mountain West (Idaho, Utah, and Arizona) from the time of the Civil War through the second Cleveland administration will serve admirably as an example. The quantity and variety of sources that Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young University history professor and associate director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, has employed in rendering this account is, to say the least, impressive. Although it began as a doctoral disser­tation (Berkeley, 1965), it has obviously been updated to take advantage of a number of specialized works which have appeared in the last decade. There is no question whatsoever about the author's familiarity with his subject. As the title indicates, Alexander sees the administration of a number of federal programs as foundering because of an essential "clash of interests" be­tween the Washington establishment (most notably powerful members of Congress from the Midwest and eastern philanthropists) and the people who actually lived in the territories. In the case of the business of the General Land Office, the nation's policymakers were obsessed with the threat of land monop­oly and seemed to assume the avari­cious nature of the settlers. When it came to Indian Affairs, the motives that guided legislation such as the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 were often benevolent, but the invariable as­sumptions of cultural superiority and the congressional habit of inadequate fund­ing resulted in wretched conditions on reservations in the Intermountain area. Throughout, the federal government operated on the basis of a system of "pupilage," denying that the residents of the three territories under considera­tion, whether white or red, had the capacity or the competence to manage their own affairs. The unwillingness of the national government to tolerate local customs and beliefs when they were at variance with its own is most graphically portrayed in the author's examination of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, designed to eradicate polygamy in Utah, and in the establishment with federal funding of the Industrial Christian Home Associa­tion of Utah, an institution intended to provide safe haven for refugees from the horrors of plural marriage. There is, then, a great deal in this book to which scholars will need to pay attention. How much it will appeal to the general reader is another matter; the literary quality is uneven, and some sug­gestion of that dreaded phenomenon called "dissertation style" still lingers. Partly because of the subject matter, this is not an easy volume to read, and only a savant will want to immerse himself in the details of the problem of land Book Reviews and Notices 419 surveying in the region. Although there are no illustrations, the publication is handsomely put together (if occasionally marred by typographical errors) and the appendices, tables, and maps in the back are both interesting and helpful. This reviewer has no major quarrels with Professor Alexander's interpreta­tions. His sympathies clearly lie with the territories rather than with their masters in Washington, and the roughest criti­cism is reserved not so much for federal agents in the field as for tight-fisted conservatives in Congress who often made it impossible for the Bureau of Indian Affairs or General Land Office surveyors to operate effectively, and for Interior Department officials such as L. Q. C. Lamar and William Andrew Jackson Sparks who attempted to dis­charge their duties with no real under­standing of conditions in the West. The author concludes with a suggestion that decentralization-more local autonomy -may still have its uses. In an age that has seen its own manifestations of top-heavy federal bureaucracy and what Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called "maximum feasible misunderstanding," it is easy to appreciate that view, but there may be more to the picture than that. One wonders, for example, if Alexander fully comprehends the under­lying impact of changing technology: sometimes things happen just because they are possible, not because human in­telligence plans it that way. f n the early part of the period he has studied, there was a fair amount of de­centralization and local autonomy be­cause it was quite difficult for effective control to be exercised from the East. In the years from 1875 to 1885, with the transcontinental railroad an established fact and telegraph lines being strung, stronger centralized control was possible, but it preceded the knowledge of western conditions or needs required in the na­tion's capital for wise policymaking. By the late 1880s, the process of educating members of Congress and Washington-based bureaucrats had progressed, and in that period we may even be witness­ing the first steps toward the more posi­tive conception of the proper role of government that we identify with the Progressive Era and the twentieth cen­tury in general. Be that as it may, Clash of Interests raises a number of questions that con­tinue to be germane in our own time. For that reason, as well as for the pieces in the puzzle of the Mountain West in the late 1800s that it fills in, it is an important contribution to the historical literature of the period. F. ALAN COOMBS University of Utah The Urban West at the End of the Frontier. By LAWRENCE H. LARSEN. (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978. Xiv + 173 pp. $12.50.) Professor Larsen has here undertaken an ambitious and most promising labor. He has aimed at nothing less than a comprehensive view of life in all urban centers west of the Mississippi as de­fined by the census of 1880. The most obvious model for such a study is Carl F. Bridenbaugh's classic, Cities in the Wilderness. But whereas Bridenbaugh was content to study only five major seventeenth-century towns, Larsen in­cludes in his work the twenty-four towns scattered from Houston to Los Angeles which reported populations of 8,000 or more in the 1880 census. The census not only defined the cities to be studied but was the major source of data, particu­larly the massive Report of the Social Statistics of Cities, compiled by George Waring, Jr., and printed as part of the Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 in vols. 18 and 19 (Washington, D.C, 1886). This major work is supplemented with materials from the manuscript census, .local and regional histories, and monographs on specialized topics such 420 Utah Historical Quarterly as urban transportation. Larsen ap­parently visited archives from only a few of the towns studied, relying almost entirely on printed sources. The author approached his task with two major questions in mind. To what extent did the condition of these cities in 1880 confirm or deny Frederick Jack­son Turner's proposal that "to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics"? In what mea­sure did these towns evidence the stereo­typical image of western towns as aggre­gations of saloons, bawdy houses, and gun-toting marshals? Western towns, he concludes, wrere for the most part, dull and derivative. Without heed to local circumstances or native precedent, Anglo-Americans marched into the wil­derness and built cities that were as much as possible replicas of those they had left in the East. There is little evidence of innovation or reform-mindedness in the urban monuments built by western pioneers. Symbolic of the lot were identical grids printed by the Illinois Central Railroad for communities along its route, containing a blank for the name of whatever future towns might spring up. Moreover, western urban en­vironments suffered at least as much as eastern towns from extravagent promo­tional schemes and unmitigated acquisi­tiveness on the part of their citizens, as illustrated in the colorful career of William Gilpin who touted at various times the matchless future glories of urban centers he styled "Centropolis" (Kansas City), "Cosmopolis" (Denver) and "Linn City" (Portland). Not only did these towns fail to demonstrate qualities Larsen feels the Turnerian frontiersman would have effected in his built environment, they were devoid of all the more colorful accoutrements of the pulp book West. Policemen wore blue worsted and brass buttons, not Stetsons and Levis. They were more likely to carry nightsticks and handcuffs than Colt revolvers. Western towns were dull replicas of eastern towns and hence depressingly like one another. The Urban West at the End of the Frontier raises two interesting questions. Other things being equal, is it better in studies of this nature to say much about little or little about much? Larsen has opted for the latter and ultimately offers an overview too superficial to satisfy this reader. Those interested in the history of Salt Lake City, for example, will find little not already available to them in printed form. All too often passages of the text end up being listings of how this or that of the twenty-four towns fared in its sanitation program or electrifica­tion project. The fifteen tables provide information permitting ready compari­son with other towns in the study on such important indices of urban devel­opment as child mortality rates, occupa­tional structure, or proportion of foreign-born. The text does not, however, draw this data into a conceptual framework that greatly advances our understand­ing of the western town. Perhaps a more detailed study of fewer towns would have revealed differences in the various towns' responses to environmental and histori­cal circumstances that simply are not visible in data of the level Professor Larsen has used. The second question is raised by the firmness with which the author con­cludes on the evidence presented that "The Turner thesis did not work in the city." Can we expect that those social data that emerge in the census report could answer definitively such broad cultural and even social-psychological questions as how independent were westerners as a people? Or how innova­tive were they in their responses to condi­tions of life on the frontier? Centering, as he has done, on the Turner thesis, Larsen owes the reader an explicit state­ment of what he understands the Turner thesis to imply for western urban dwellers. What would he have expected these cities to be like had the Turner thesis "worked" in the city? Clearly, these were a provincial people. Like Book Reviews and Notices 421 provincial people everywhere they no doubt were rendered profoundly ambiv­alent by their wish to be independent of the values of the East but their in­ability to claim success in their under­takings except as measured in terms im­posed by the mother society. This very ambivalence, as John Clive and Ber­nard Bailyn pointed out in a stimulating essay on America and Scotland as eighteenth-century provincial societies {William and Mary Quarterly, 1954), can lead to extraordinary creative en­deavor. But to what extent can such creativity, whether stemming from pro­vincial ambivalence or other aspects of frontier life, be discerned in transit systems, town plans, or main street archi­tecture? Professor Larsen's evidence, it would seem to this author, is too limited in nature and scope to lead us with con­fidence to the conclusions he has drawn. DEAN L. MAY University of Utah Beckoning the Bold: Story of tlie Dawning of Idaho. By RAFE GIBBS. (MOSCOW: The University Press of Idaho, 1976. Viii 4- 267 pp. Paper, $6.95.) Idaho's Gold Road. By H. LEIGH GITTINS. 1976. 165 pp. Paper, $8.95.) Idaho has lagged behind other states in establishing a university press.-per­haps to its credit, considering the finan­cial pitfalls. Now it has ventured forth with a fledgling organization and a few books, including the tvvo reviewed here, that vary widely in quality of printing and design. Beckoning the Bold, in stan­dard paperback format, was printed in easy-to-read boldface type by a Portland commercial firm. In addition to two separate photo sections that comple­ment the text, the book is also illustrated by a vibrant pen-and-ink sketch at the beginning of each chapter. Idaho's Gold Road, in contrast, was printed by the University of Idaho Duplicating Ser­vices in smaller type and double columns that occasionally end in horrendous widows and imbalanced white space. The photo illustrations are poorer in quality, and the pen-and-ink sketches lack the charm and draftsmanship of Alfred Dunn's superior work. The two books also vary in quality of content. Beckoning the Bold is a popular history of early Idaho by an accom­plished writer who tells a fast-moving and entertaining story. Drawn largely from standard secondary works such as Beal's and Wells's History of Idaho, the narrative begins with Lewis and Clark, moves through all the colorful epochs of Moscow: The University Press of Idaho, the nineteenth-century Idaho frontier, and closes with a few comments on Idaho's relationship to modern America. Serious students will look in vain for analysis and synthesis, but casual readers -and scholars, too, for that matter- will find the book rich in color and human interest. It is an excellent com­panion piece to Ross Peterson's Idaho: A Bicentennial History, and it should be recommended reading for young and old who want a lively story that does not stray too far from the facts. Idaho's Gold Road is an example of both the promise and the problems of local history. The author, a native Idaho cattleman and schoolteacher as well as history buff, is an enthusiastic chronicler of men and events along the main artery of commerce between Utah and Mon­tana- essentially Interstate 15 today, although it began as a toll road in the 1860s. Primarily a regional history with a focus on one of the road's chief pro­moters, Henry Orville Harkness, the book has chapters on cattle, commerce, irrigation, social life, floods, crime, and other subjects. Some of these peripheral chapters are relevant and helpful; others are distracting digressions. The book should have been extensively copy edited, ft will be of interest to history buffs in eastern Idaho, but outsiders 422 Utah Historical Quarterly may not grasp the significance of such revelations as: "Would you believe it? The first annual Bannock County Fair was actually held in McCammon in 1912" (p. 135). Factual errors and analytical flaws also mar the work. It is not helpful, for ex­ample, to dismiss the Oneida County seat fight with a shrug of the shoulders ("Politics are funny") or to perpetuate Hollywood myths ("Saloons were cer­tainly much more popular than churches in frontier days." p. 125). Even more serious is the author's tendency to in­vent narrative, to put words in the mouths of his heroes, to "explain" their thinking (see chapter nine for numerous examples). The result may be a more dramatic story, but it is not good his­tory. RONALD H. LIMBAUGH University of the Pacific Jews on the Frontier. By I. HAROLD SHARFMAN. (Chicago: Henry Reg-nery Company, 1977. Xx + 337 pp. $10.95.) Rabbi Sharfman's thesis that the American frontier submerged different immigrant backgrounds, including that of Jews, is a valid one, but he promises in his foreword more than he delivers in his text. True, many of Jewish back­ground discarded their religious customs, married out of their religion, and were buried in city cemeteries. In this con­text Rabbi Sharfman has done a good historical investigation. He has ferreted out those Jews who are not recognized as such by their contemporaries and/or historians. But the author has gone too far in the opposite direction-making it sound as if Jews were the primary American frontiersmen when that was obviously not the case. And the reten­tion of Jewish practices is given only passing mention. By the title and numerous references in the text, the author would have us believe he is researching Jews of the entire American West. Yet, his study reaches only to Texas with but brief notice given to the forty-niners. Part of the reason is that Sharfman started early, with the first settlers in the United States and so deals with the 1600s and 1700s. Still, with the 1800s and the gold rush to California, many Jews settled in the West, and Sharfman again stops short of his promise. Nevertheless, this volume is a useful one, for it contains biographies of many Jews whose lives would not otherwise be recorded, even as footnotes to history. Main Street: Tfie Face of Urban America. By CAROLE RIFKIND. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Xiii + 267 pp. $20.00.) A minor irony of America's urbaniza­tion during the last fifty years is that Main Street, which Sinclair Lewis de­picted so derisively in fiction as the zenith of narrow-minded boorishness, has become the focus for an exercise in Book Reviews and Notices 423 nostalgie de jamais vu. Main Street, once the domain of the the American "boob," has now become "the historical root of urban America." Regardless of whether it is satirized or mythicized. Main Street was the main street of Hogeland, Montana; Somerset, Pennsylvania; and Salt Lake City. With the current growth of suburban areas into what was once farmland, one can appreciate Gertrude Stein's description of Oakland, California as: "there's no there there." One aspect of Salt Lake City that elicited favorable comments from visitors was the broad, well-paved, and well-flushed streets, which even the most stub­born anti-Mormons attributed to the foresight of Brigham Young. The street conditions elsewhere in the country dur­ing the nineteenth century are aptly exemplified by a sign that "residents of Santa Ana, California, posted . . . at the corner of Fourth and Main: 'The street is not passable, nor is it jackassable. All who must travel it must turn out and gravel it.' " Big Falling Snow: A Tewa-Hopi In­dian's Life and Times and the His­tory and Traditions of His People. By ALBERT YAVA. Edited by HAROLD COURLANDER. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1978. Xiv + 178 pp. $10.00.) Albert Yava's life spans the period of white intrusion into traditional Hopi and Tewa ways and the adjustment to the conflict between old and new. He was educated both in government schools and in the Hopi kiva ceremonies, and he provides a unique view of the Hopi-Tewa culture. Although he is within the culture, he "steps back" to look objectively at it. Unlike Don Talayesva's book, Sun Chief, these rec­ollections are not a personality study. Yava looks at Hopis and Tewas collec­tively to give a chronicle of their history and the traditions embedded within it. The Golden Dream: Suburbia in the Seventies. By STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Viii4-213pp. $10.00.) Billed as a "chatty, anecdotal . . . na­tural history of suburbia today," this book contains chapters on the suburbs of several major cities, including Salt Lake City. If the facts about other cities are as garbled as those about Salt Lake, this book is teeming with inaccuracies. The enlightened person will be interested to read that Brigham Young's statue is located in Temple Square, that "South Fifth Street West is five blocks west of State Street," and that all. nineteen-year-old males are required to go on prose­lytizing missions for the LDS church. Birmingham also finds it hard to under­stand why the shores of the Great Salt Lake have not been converted to miles of suburbs. The book shows a desire to deride rather than analyze the phe­nomenon of suburbia. The Western Territories in the Civil War. Edited by LEROY H. FISCHER. (Manhattan, Kan.: Journal of the West, Inc., 1977. 120 pp. $6.00.) A thoroughly documented, scholarly account of the Civil War period in twelve western territories. Each chapter deals with a territory or pair of terri­tories and its political and economic status, its participation in the war effort, and its general milieu during that period. Mexican Americans in a Dallas Barrio. By SHIRLEY ACHOR. (Tucson: Uni­versity of Arizona Press, 1978. Xii 4 202 pp. Cloth, $12.50; paper, $6.95.) This cultural, sociological study of a Dallas Mexican-American neighborhood provides a contrasting viewpoint to earlier studies of Mexican Americans in rural areas and agrarian villages. 424 Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America. By BARRY HOLSTUN LOPEZ. (Kansas City, Kan.: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1977. Xx + 186 pp. $8.95.) Barry Holstun Lopez has collected a number of stories on Coyote, the "hero-trickster" figure of various North Ameri­can Indian tribes, among them the Shoshone, Southern Ute, and Navajo. Western readers, expecting some neat moral tagged on the end, as in Aesop's Fables, often have difficulty with such Indian narratives. Others, with cultural evolutionary tendencies, find that they "bear the same relationship to good Eu­ropean fairy tales as the invertebrates do to the vertebrate kingdom in the animal world." Those who pick up this work with such attitudes and expectations will- like the wandering anthropologist in one Coyote story-find themselves left with nothing but a pile of Coyote droppings. In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879-80. By ROBERT G. ATHEARN. (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978. Xii + 338 pp. $14.00.) Robert G. Athearn tells the story of the Black migration from areas of the South to Kansas and other midwestem and western states soon after Recon­struction. Working almost entirely from primary sources-letters of some Black migrants, government investigative re­ports, and Black newspapers-he de­scribes and explains the "Exoduster" movement and sets it in perspective as a phenomenon in frontier history. The book begins with details of the Utah Historical Quarterly Blacks on the move. Athearn then fills in the background of why they were moving; relates how other people- Black and white, northern and southern -felt about the movement; examines political considerations; and, finally, evaluates the episode and provides an explanation as to why it failed. Adaptive Use: Development Economics, Process and Profiles. By MELVIN A. GAMSON, et al. (Washington, D . C : Urban Land Institute, 1978. X + 246 pp. $26.00.) The book presents an instructive over­view of the concept and process of adap­tive use in renovating older buildings for profitable current use while preserving their historical value. The first part in­cludes detailed suggestions for the pro­cess of initiating, planning, and im­plementing adaptive reuse projects. The second part is a series of case histories including a report on Trolley Square in Salt Lake City, as well as fourteen other case histories from across the United States. The third section catalogs short profiles of other projects, classified by the original use of the building. The City of tfie Angels and the City of the Saints; or, A Trip to Los Angeles and San Bernardino in 1856. By ED­WARD O. C. ORD. Edited by NEAL HARLOW. (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1978. Xx + 56 pp. $7.50.) This account of Ord's journey to Los Angeles and San Bernardino on assign­ment for the U.S. Army is printed from a newly discovered manuscript. It is sup­plemented with excerpts from Ord's personal diary and the official report Ord gave his superior officers.