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Show The Hogles. By GERALD M . MCDONOUGH. (Salt Lake City: McMurrin-Henriksen Books, 1988. XX + 539 pp. $22.50.) When most people in Utah hear the name Hogle, the first thing they think of is the Salt Lake City zoo that bears that name. Few know much more about the influential name associated with the zoo. Gerald M. McDonough's publication of the The Hogles provides the opportunity for readers to know more. The book is a history of this prominent Utah family from their immigrant roots in Ireland to the death of James A. Hogle in 1955. The story begins with Patrick Gil-more who left Ireland in 1839 and finally settled in Illinois in 1854. Though Patrick seemed content in Illinois, his son, James, was not. He became infected with gold fever and set out for Pikes Peak in 1859 at the age of twenty-one. James, like thousands of other gold miners, found that striking it rich in the hills was not as easy as he thought. However, he learned quickly that gold miners, rich or poor, need a place to drink and spin yarns. As a result, James began a long career as a saloon owner. By 1865 James Gilmore had become known as James Hogle, the reasons for which we do not know completely. The saloon business brought James to Salt Lake City in 1871. His establishment soon became the most popular in town. He used his profits wisely and carefully invested in local real estate and numerous mining ventures. By the turn of the century he had amassed a fortune. The Hogle family estate was built further by James's son, James A. Hogle. The success and prominence of James A. is attributable to more than the determination and shrewdness he gained from his father. His mother, Ida Elizabeth Hogle, saw to it that he received a first-rate education, graduating from Yale and Columbia universities. With this training he became a mining consultant and stockbroker. James A. Hogle and Company eventually had branch offices in many parts of the West. James A. married Mary Copely, one of the most fascinating women in early twentieth-century Utah history. It was Mary and James A. who donated their Emigration Canyon farm to Salt Lake City for the establishment of a city zoo. The book provides a delightful jump into Utah and western American history through the lives of four generations of Hogles. The description of the education of James A. at St. Paul's in New Hampshire in the 1890s is excellent. Also fascinating is the story of the Mary Hogle Foundation and its battle with the medical establishment and the Federal Trade Commission. Though I enjoyed the book very much and recommend it to others, there were a few minor instances of historical error. For a few examples, 390 Utah Historical Quarterly McDonough attributes the Panic of 1857 to the passage of the Tariff of 1857, states that the Civil War started in 1860 and, claims the Emancipation Proclamation came at the end of the war. All are inaccurate. I also was disappointed in the lack of footnotes; however, McDonough states that the book was meant "for the general reader rather than the historian" and therefore intentionally left the footnotes out. These concerns are relatively minor. The book is well written and for the most part well researched and informative. Anyone interested in reading about the rise of a prominent Utah family and its impact on the state will enjoy reading The Hogles - I did. MICHAEL E. CHRISTENSEN Salt Lake City Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830- 1900. By EDWIN BROWN FIRMAGE and RICHARD COLLIN MANGRUM. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Ilhnois Press, 1988. xvii + 430 pp. $27.50.) With their book law professors Edwin Brown Firmage (University of Utah) and Richard Collin Mangrum (Creighton University) have attempted to fill a rather large hole in published LDS history. They have provided a single volume with an exhaustive and near complete discussion of all the judicial conflicts involving the LDS church. While the book is not for the casual reader, it is an important reference work that should be in the library of any serious historian of the Mormon movement. The authors should sound familiar. Professor Firmage has been on the UU law faculty since 1966 and regularly appears on national television as a constitutional law expert. He is the grandson of Hugh B. Brown and recently edited Brown's memoirs, published last year by Signature Books. His article "The Judicial Campaign against Polygamy and the Enduring Legal Questions" in BYU Studies in 1987 is an interesting reflection on the substantive content of this book. Professor Mangrum has been on the Creighton law faculty since 1979. His articles have previously appeared in Mormon quarterlies. Both authors are extensively published in law reviews. Their book is divided into three parts. The first is headed "Early Mormon Legal Experience" and discusses legal harassments of Joseph Smith, Jr., and his followers through the Nauvoo period. It also traces the beginnings of the ecclesiastical court system, the later stages of which are discussed in the final section. The second section deals with federal attacks on the LDS community in Utah Territory, concluding with the chapter "The War against Mormon Society." One of the current gaps in Mormon letters is an informed study of the use of the federal judiciary, actually abuse in many instances, to force Mormon assimilation into mainstream American society. It was a period when accepted constitutional guarantees were often dispensed with to meet the passionate public denouncement of Mormon life. Here the authors provide a basic discussion of the main congressional anti-Mormon acts and many of the over one hundred reported appellate decisions that came out of the struggle, mostly in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Each of the dozen U.S. Supreme Court opinions on plural marriage that followed Reynolds v. United States in 1879 are ex- Book Reviews 391 amined. Criminal lawyers will be surprised at the lax evidentiary standards and denial of due process that were approved by the appellate courts in these cases. The absence of a single legal bibliography and the publisher's failure to use proper legal citations is a disappointment, but the book still gives enough information to locate any of the opinions in a good law library. The authors' approach in this section is that of legal scholars, which they are. They examine the arguments, the inconsistencies, and the application of the various legal rules applied to Mormon defendants. Any discussion of external pressures or the more colorful historical characters involved in these cases is left for another work. For instance, Franklin S. Richards, a key figure as church counsel from 1879 until his death in 1934, comes in for only two references in the book. This is unfortunate, but given the very broad scope of the book that kind of social history is probably not possible. Part three is an extremely interesting discussion of the far-reaching ecclesiastical court system that developed in the Great Basin. It is a further development of Professor Mangrum's excellent article "Furthering the Cause of Zion: An Overview of the Ecclesiastical Court System in Early Utah" in the 1983 Journal of Mormon History. It draws from unusually broad access to church court records in the LDS Archives. The section discusses the resolution of divorces in plural families, commercial disputes, land and water rights, torts, and a variety of other conflicts. Researchers will appreciate the fact that the book provides extensive endnotes and the authors' thorough bibliography. This book is obviously the product of years of research. This book can be demanding at times and presumes a fair amount of basic knowledge on the part of the reader. It is, however, an important work and likely will become a standard reference book for historians concerned with how the American majority responded to nineteenth-century Mormons as well as how pioneer Mormons governed themselves. KEN DRIGGS University of Wisconsin Law School Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 1492-1509. By S. LYMAN TYLER. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. x + 258 pp. $25.00.) S. Lyman Tyler's Two Worlds is a fascinating account of the first sustained contact between Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. It is an oft-told story of Indian hospitality and Spanish greed, focusing upon the early voyages of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish occupation of Espanola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic). What gives Two Worlds its reason for being, however, is the way the story is told - through the words of the early European observers themselves. Those words reveal that the conquest of the New World remained tragically imprisoned within the shackles of Old World preoccupations and beliefs. Tyler's primary purpose is to "view the Indian through the eyes of contemporary observers, so that the Indian appears as he was seen at particular times and in particular places." Secondly, he wants "to enable the reader to visualize the Spaniard as he was portrayed by contemporaries in the Caribbean islands, so that the reader can understand the observer and can place his description of the Indian in the proper perspective" (p. 3). To do so, 392 Utah Historical Quarterly Tyler presents extended excerpts from three major texts: Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas's abstract of Christopher Columbus's journal, which has been lost; Las Casas's own monumental Historia de las Indias; and Antonio de Herrera y Tordesilla's General History of the Continent and Islands of America, Commonly Call'd the West Indies, etc., to 1531. The book's strength is the immediacy of those texts. We see Columbus's sense of wonder about the new lands quickly overwhelmed by his need to justify the expense of the expeditions. We see how easily the Spanish crown's desire to protect the Indians was subverted by the gold fever of Spanish colonists. Above all, we see the vulnerability of Native American society in the face of European weapons and the Iberian ideology of conquest. Wooden spears were no match for fighting dogs or armored horsemen steeled by the campaigns of the Reconquista. Unfortunately, however, Tyler does not provide the scholarly apparatus that would have made Two Worlds a critical edition of the texts themselves. First, the excerpts are not placed in the context of what was left out. Unless the reader is familiar with the complete versions, he or she has no idea how representative the excerpts are. Secondly, the book is underannotated, containing very little information about the geography of the Caribbean or the ethnology of the Native Americans living there. More detailed footnotes and more extended introductions would have made the texts far more illuminating than they are now. More disturbing is the virtual absence of any critical commentary about the accuracy of the observers themselves. Two Worlds relies heavily upon the perceptions of Las Casas, who was, without question, a sincere defender of the Indians. Nevertheless, scholarly controversy still rages about the Dominican crusader's portrait of Arawak society, his estimates of Indian population, and his bitter condemnation of his Spanish contemporaries. Yet Tyler discusses this controversy in a woefully inadequate fashion. As a result, Two Worlds must be read with care. When used with other, more informed sources, the book does, indeed, offer a "window on both the Spanish and Indian worlds." When consulted alone, however, it merely perpetuates the Black Legend of unbridled Spanish cruelty and greed. THOMAS E. SHERIDAN Arizona State Museum Tucson A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians. By JOAN MARK. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. xx -h 428 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $16.95.) As Joan Mark notes, Alice Fletcher belonged, along with Frank Gushing, F. W. Putnam, and others, to that early generation of "lost anthropologists" who dominated the last two decades of the nineteenth century (xiii). Mark's biography of Fletcher, A Stranger in Her Native Land, is an attempt at feminist biography that examines an individual woman within the context of gender oppression and the resultant struggles that shaped her life. Fletcher's life, according to Mark, was characterized by two themes: her lifelong battle against male authority and power in her professional and personal life and her feeling of being a Book Reviews 393 stranger in America - a person without roots to the land. Combining her interest in women's rights with the fate of the "vanishing Redman," Fletcher launched her career in ethnography under the tutelage of Frederick W. Putnam of the Peabody Museum. As an ethnographer Fletcher wanted to record American Indian culture before it disappeared, as she believed it inevitably would. She avidly supported the Friends of the Indian movement, which sought the eradication of Indian culture and the destruction of the tribal estate. To her mind, contemporary Indians should ignore their past and seek total immersion in the melting pot. From Fletcher's perspective, only professional white anthropologists could study the Indian past, since they alone were capable of understanding it (p. 267). Fletcher's desire to record a culture that she regarded as fossilized led her to fieldwork with the Sioux, Nez Perce, and, especially, the Omahas. Assisted by Francis La Flesche (the son of an important Omaha tribal leader who became her translator and adopted son), she produced an ethnographic study of the Omahas while, at the same time, carrying out allotment as an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Fletcher's ability to observe and faithfully record, with just the right touch of condescending affection, the culture of the Omahas as she oversaw the obliteration of their traditional way of life provides an enlightening case study of intellectual schizophrenia. Perhaps Fletcher's very "rootlessness" and lack of strong attachment to her own past allowed her to dismiss the Omahas' culture as unimportant to them. Some of her opinions changed under the influence of La Flesche, but he broke with Fletcher over her ethno-centrism and his own growing opposition to assimilation. Fletcher's feelings of animosity toward traditional Omaha culture were typical of white reformers of her time. Yet, much of her treatment of Indians may be explained by her struggle against male oppression, which can be traced all the way back to her abusive stepfather. Fearing and resenting males in positions of power, she employed coquettishness as a means of winning sympathy and fair treatment from them (p. 13). At the same time, she regarded Indians as backward children and did not object to adopting a patronizing and even tyrannical attitude toward her Indian associates. Did Fletcher employ against Indians those tactics of dominance that had been used against her, or was she simply venting her resentment of and frustration with men on less threatening targets, her Indian subjects? Neither conclusion would be comfortable, and it is no criticism of Mark that she leaves such decisions to her readers. Joan Mark's biography of Alice Fletcher is well written and copiously documented. A Stranger in Her Native Land is a revealing portrait of Victorian womanhood and of the unfortunate consequences of both the sexism and ethnocentrism that dominated that era. JoDYE LYNN DICKSON SCHILZ Mankato State University Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest. By DAVID J. WEBER. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. xii + 179 pp. $27.50.) Historians of the Anglo frontier have often ignored the study of the Spanish Borderlands, but as United States-Latin American relations have 394 Utah Historical Quarterly become more controversial in recent times, Borderlands studies have acquired a renewed importance among scholars and the general public alike. Borderlands studies began with Herbert Eugene Bolton and continued through the efforts of scholars such as Lawrence Kinnaird, Donald E. Worcester, John Francis Bannon, and others. In Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest one of today's leading specialists, David J. Weber, explores southwestern myths and realities to demonstrate how their interaction produces the image of the Borderlands in the American mind. Weber begins by noting that non-specialists have largely misunderstood the Hispanic Southwest. Traditional Borderlands history begins with Cor-onado and ends at 1821. As Donald E. Worcester has written, however, the study of Chicano history is an extension of the field that Bolton established. Worcester insists that Borderlands studies include the demographic expansion of Iberian civilization - including the arrival of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans in the United States. While Weber and Worcester recognize the continuity of the Hispanic frontier, they observe that the Borderlands was also a process by which the Hispanic frontier expanded and coalesced. Many authors such as Ellwyn Stoddard have come to include ecology, culture, ethnohistory, and political issues within the scope of Borderlands studies. In one of his nine essays in this collection, "Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands," Weber makes the excellent point that disciples of Frederick Jackson Turner have largely ignored ethnic minorities, preferring instead to see the Anglo-American frontier experience as uniquely white. On the Anglo frontier Turner noted that Europeans had to become In-dianized before they could become Americans. Indians themselves, however, were excluded from the evolutionary process. By comparison, in the Spanish Borderlands, as Weber and other Boltonians point out, Spaniards not only learned Indian culture but also included Indians in Spanish institutions. Silvio Zavala and Oakah Jones have also noted that democratic government spread rapidly on the northern frontier of New Spain, far from the central power in Mexico City. The relative unimportance given the Borderlands in Anglo-American historical tradition is, as Weber sees it, the fruit of provincialism. He notes that writers of American frontier history have looked at the West as a realm of Anglo expansion only and have dismissed the Borderlands as mere local history. As Weber points out, a student of standard frontier history would "gain the impression that Anglo-Americans were playing the only game in town" (p. 94). Weber decries the failure of historians to deal in biographical studies of Spanish frontiersmen, fur traders, soldiers, and other heroic figures. The inherent danger in such provincialism is that students are left with impressions of the Borderlands and, indeed, all of Latin America, that impede and even warp their perception of its role in American history and culture. It is this deficiency Weber masterfully seeks to overcome. Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest is a milestone in the historiography of Borderlands studies. Weber's writing is enjoyable and concise and his work is thoroughly footnoted. The author and his publisher have put together an attractive volume that will serve scholars of Borderlands studies for years to come. THOMAS F. SCHILZ Mankato State University |
