My district in Grenoble, France held a street meeting. Once. We didn’t know it was illegal, but were kindly informed of that fact by a passing Jehovah’s Witness. We didn’t know what we were doing. We just had an elder stand up on a planter and start preaching, while the rest of us stood around pretending to be interested bystanders. I have a photo of one of our elders sitting in earnest conversation with a newspaper reporter who happened to come along.

Street meetings are mentioned frequently in reports from the 19th and early 20th centuries. I do not know when they went out of style (except for abortive attempts like ours). They were still being conducted after World War II when Joseph Fielding Smith responded to a missionary son’s mention of a Yakima, Washington street meeting in 1947: (more…)

LDS missionaries working on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England, found the Tippett family in 1859. It is unclear how many members of the family joined the Church, but 15-year-old Johanna and her mother Mary Ann were among the converted. It was a source of pride to Johanna throughout her long life that she had been one of the first sister missionaries, if only unofficially: Johanna and her mother purchased materials from the missionaries and spent many days walking the roads of their district, preaching the gospel and endeavoring to find neighbors who would read their tracts. (more…)

See here for John M. Bernhisel’s assembly of the original Utah Territorial Library. See the comments here for discussion on our plans for linking the titles in this catalog to their Google Books scans – Thanks to Edje for identifying the scans and for supplying missing cataloguing elements for this section.

Any surprises here? What pops out as being of interest? (more…)

An article in The Children’s Friend of June 1909 may not be the earliest expression of concern for those we now call “less actives,” but it is the earliest I recall seeing. It seems to me very current in its analysis of the reasons for inactivity, while the old-fashioned charm of its wording breaks through the tedium of pulpit lectures we have heard so often that I struggle not to tune them out.

“During the Civil War it was a dreadful thing to have the name of one’s friend appear in the list of the ‘missing’ after the battle. In our spiritual warfare, there is a record of splendid victories; but there is also a list, not often published, but which may be found by reference to the roll of the association, a list of the ‘missing.’ Their names are upon the roll, but their bodies, their minds, their talents — where are they?” (more…)

The Utah War of 1857-1858 was the nation’s most extensive and expensive military involvement during the period between the Mexican and Civil wars, an armed confrontation between the civil-religious leadership of Utah and the Buchanan administration over power and authority in the territory. Ultimately it pitted nearly one-third of the U.S. Army against Utah’s Nauvoo Legion, arguably the country’s largest, most experienced militia. The historiography and folklore of this conflict is loaded with myths and misunderstandings, not the least of them being the notion that the war ended 150 years ago today – on June 26, 1858 – when Brevet Brig. Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Utah Expedition marched into and through a Salt Lake City deserted and ready for the torch.

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My ward has ties to Latter-day Saints in Zimbabwe. They ask for our prayers for their safety during the current election, and also that they will find sufficient food for their families. Please remember them.

A wet spring had filled the reservoir at Hatchtown, Garfield County, Utah, to the top of its spillway: on Monday, May 25, 1914, its earthen dam held back about 14,000 acre feet of Sevier River water. All was well when caretaker A.W. Huntington made his routine morning inspection.

At 2:00 p.m. he discovered a muddy ooze below the dam and summoned help. For hours he sought the source of the leak. The ooze increased to a stream, and the ground above began to cave, first in small slabs, then large, until the dam gave way entirely at 8:00 p.m. Water burst through the five-story-high breach with the pressure of a fire hose, scouring farmland far beyond the river banks as the flood rushed northward. (more…)

Great Salt Lake City July 8, 1849.

Perhaps a few lines from a stranger in this strange land, and among a still more strange people will be judged sufficiently interesting to find a place in your columns.

The company of gold diggers which I have the honor to command, arrived here on the 3d inst., and judge our feelings when after some twelve hundred miles of travel through an uncultivated desert, and the last one hundred miles of the distance through and among lofty mountains and narrow and difficult ravines, we found ourselves suddenly and almost unexpectedly in a comparative paradise. (more…)

At the church-wide Primary conference held in June 1918, a children’s operetta was presented for the entertainment of the assembled officers. Called “The Assembling of Nations,” the play was popular enough that its producer “prepared the following description of the steps in the preparation of the cantata, so that all who desire may be able to repeat our success,” which description was published in the September 1918 issue of The Children’s Friend.

World War I, then flaming toward its bloody end, was considered a suitable subject for the patriotic LDS children of Salt Lake City to present in poetry, song and dance. Father Time opens the action with this lament: (more…)

Lottie Owens was born in 1877 in Willard, Box Elder County, Utah. Her mother’s family were early Church members in Nauvoo; her father had emigrated to Utah as a convert from Wales.

Among the Owens family’s closest friends during Lottie’s childhood was another Welshman, Evan Stephens, the gifted teacher and composer who would one day transform the Salt Lake Stake’s choir from a good local chorus into the world-class, award-winning Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Lottie learned to sing under the guidance of Evan Stephens and absorbed his techniques for teaching ordinary Saints to sing with extraordinary beauty. (more…)

I’m easily annoyed. I know it, and I often try to fight it, to eliminate it for my own peace of mind or at least to hide it from others as a contribution to the general welfare. Sometimes a good eye roll, though, is such a relief!

I’m also at an age when I find college-aged people to be alternately annoying and wonderful. Sometimes I wonder how these great kids have managed to turn out so much better, so much kinder, so much more thoughtful than their parents, and other days I wonder why their parents let them live. Did I say I’m also prone to extremes? (more…)

See here for John M. Bernhisel’s assembly of the original Utah Territorial Library. See the comments to previously posted sections of the catalog for discussion on our plans for linking the titles in this catalog to their Google Books scans – and see here for one section of the catalog that has been almost entirely linked to images (thanks, Researcher, for your work on that section. Edje has made contributions to other sections – and anyone else who is interested in helping, a lot or just a little, is welcome to join the fun. Contact me at keepapitchinin dotAOLdotcom.)

(Some links here may not yet be functional, if they lead to sections that I have drafted for posting but not yet published.)

Catalogue of Books, Maps, &c. Belonging to the Utah Territorial Library, October, 1852.

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Kendall Blanchard. “Basketball and the Culture-Change Process: The Rimrock Navajo Case,” Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 5:4 (Nov. 1974), 8-13.

This is a truly odd little piece. To begin with, “Rimrock” is a pseudonym; I’m guessing that “Rimrock” is Fruitland or Kirtland in the northwest corner of the state, based on statements in the article that “Rimrock” is in close proximity to the Navajo Reservation, with 95% of its 1300 Anglo inhabitants being Mormon.

The author’s stated purpose is “the description of basketball and its role in the changing Rimrock Navajo community.” Blanchard’s “other” against whom he contrasts the Navajo community and which he sees as attempting to change that community is Mormon – not generic Anglo, not generic American, but specifically Mormon. His outsider’s estimate of the importance of basketball to the Mormon community strikes me as comically absurd. Is this really what cultural halls/basketball courts, and “Church Ball,” and the lazy ward’s Young Men’s program, look like to non-Mormons? (more…)

The Saints who gathered to Deseret, especially those who came from Europe and Asia, had the “pleasure” of experiencing all the major transportation forms of the 19th century: sailing vessel, rail travel, and animal-drawn wagon. Improvements in the system over time – the switch from sail to steam for the ocean crossing, the stationing of emigration agents to smooth the arrival in the U.S. and the transfer to the railroads, and the eventual completion of the transcontinental railroad – made travel safer and more comfortable, but never entirely eliminated the dangers.

In all the research I have done, I have found only one set of letters describing the three phases of travel from the pen of one writer. (more…)

A correspondent signing himself “Utah” wrote to the New York Times in March 1857 with a one-sided catalog of “treasonous events” by the Mormons against the United States. One of the recent actions “Utah” charged against the Mormons was this:

On the night of the 29th of December last [1856] the office of the Clerk of the United States Supreme Court, which was also the office of the United States Circuit Court, was broken open and robbed of all the records, books and papers of every kind, together with the libraries of Judge Stiles and T.S. Williams, containing some nine hundred volumes. These were all thrown into the vault of a privy in an adjoining yard, after which they were covered with straw, shingles and other combustibles, and the whole were burned and utterly destroyed. This was the first stab taken towards the breaking up of the United States Courts. The city authorities and Governor Young take not the least notice of the affair, while the citizens chuckle over it as a clever trick.

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The first Catholic priests to visit Utah came with the 1776 Escalante expedition. Unless others passed through anonymously on their way west, the next did not visit until 1863, when John Baptist Ravardy called on soldiers at Camp Douglas. The first to spend time here was the Rev. Edward Kelly, whose remarkable 1866 mission laid a permanent foundation for Catholic worship and education in Utah.

Kelly was dispatched by Sacramento’s Bishop Eugene O’Connell in May. Tradition reports that he first celebrated Mass at the Mormon Tabernacle late in June, but new research reveals that for five weeks before that date he had been holding services at Independence Hall twice each Sunday, and lecturing there on weekday evenings. (more…)

An earlier post discussed the efforts of John M. Bernhisel to assemble a library for the Territory of Utah in the winter of 1850-51. Readers expressed an interest in knowing which books were available to the Saints through that library. Here follows the first section of the catalog, 1852: works on theology, and ecclesiastical history and law. The headings to other sections appear at the end of this list; as those sections are posted, I’ll add links so that you can move around the entire catalog.

The original catalog uses columnar format for publication place and date, which I cannot reproduce here, and lists items alphabetically by title keyword, not by author or first word in title. I have rearranged the material into a standard bibliographic format and rearranged the entries to be alphabetic within that format. Sorry, purists, but I thought this would work better for discussion purposes.

Any surprises here? Which sections would you like to see posted next? (more…)

Much of the attention of the Relief Society Conference of October, 1945, was devoted to efforts to assist surviving members of the Church in the former war zones of Europe. Contact had been reestablished with some of the European branches, and reports of their experiences and especially of their needs were read to the sisters assembled in Salt Lake City:

“One of the most touching incidents to come to us from Europe is the story of Sister Zippro, the Netherlands Relief Society president. She was willing to face alone the dangers of an invading army in order that members of the Church might receive assistance from the Relief Society. … Her bravery and devotion to the ideals of Relief Society under such trying and perilous circumstances are worthy of our highest praise,” reported the conference. (more…)

Olive Woolley Burt, “Murder Ballads of Mormondom,” Western Folklore 18:2 (April 1959), 141-156.

Olive Woolley Burt (1894-1981) used to be a very well-known name in Mormon, Utah, western, and American letters. She was a reporter or columnist both for the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News, studied at the University of Chicago and at Columbia, published fiction and non-fiction, for children and adults (from 1902, when she was just 8 years old, to 1979, when she was 85, she published something professionally every year except 1904), and contributed to church publications, like the Relief Society Magazine. Her book American Murder Ballads and Their Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) is the basis for this article.
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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “A Pail of Cream,” the Journal of American History 89:1 (Jun., 2002), 43-47.

This delightful personal essay covers a lot of ground in five pages: the author’s early attraction to writing, her first professional efforts, Exponent II, the “pink issue” of Dialogue, graduate school and her choice of studies, her support of, by, for, and from other women, A Midwife’s Tale, feminism in and from history, and helping other women “see the many uses of history as well as the many ways of being a woman in times past.”

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Salt Lake City used to have a lot more parades than we do now, some spontaneous and others regularly scheduled to commemorate past events. Throughout the 1890s and into the early years of the 20th century, September 22nd was hailed as a day of thanksgiving and celebration, marked by a parade with pretty girls dressed in white and proud men marching boldly. It was “Emancipation Day,” the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 proclamation setting forth a timetable for freeing four million enslaved African-Americans.
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“Who’d ever think that Utah would stir the world so much? Who’d ever think the Mormons’d be widely known as such? I hardly dare to scribble, or such a subject touch, for all are talking of Utah.”

Mormons were fully aware of their prominence in the national press, as these lines from a popular folk song attest; they also knew that the more outlandish the report, the more the public was apt to believe it. Historians find ample proof of such public gullibility in Brigham Young’s incoming correspondence. (more…)

She used to joke that most dawns came from the east, but she came from the west. Hazel Dawn – born Henrietta Hazel Tout – came from Ogden, Utah, and she never let the world forget that.

Hazel came from a musical Mormon family. Her sister Nannie was an infant phenomenon in the 1890s, singing before enthusiastic Utah crowds. When their father, Edwin, was called as a missionary to Wales, the entire family went along and provided the singing for street meetings. (more…)

John Heeren, Donald B. Lindsey, Marylee Mason, “The Mormon Concept of Mother in Heaven: A Sociological Account of Its Origins and Development,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 23:4 (Dec. 1984), 396-411.

“Among the various faiths within the Judeo-Christian tradition, belief in a female deity is rather uncommon. One important exception to this image of an exclusively male-occupied pantheon is found in the Mormon belief in a Heavenly Mother.” The three authors discuss the historical manifestation of the Mormon belief in a Mother in Heaven, and also “the contending interests” connected with teaching or distancing the church from the idea.
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For half a millennium, ending with World War I, the Ottoman Empire dominated eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East. Turks controlled Palestine when Orson Hyde dedicated that land in 1841 for the return of the Jews, and when George A. Smith, Eliza R. Snow, and other prominent Latter-day Saints held the first LDS worship service on Mt. Olivet in 1873.

Aside from these brief pilgrimages, LDS presence there began in 1884 when Jacob Spori was called to open the Turkish Mission. He was followed by a handful of other missionaries. The Church grew slowly, mostly among the already-Christian German and Armenian populations. By the early twentieth century, there were half a dozen small LDS branches scattered through modern-day Turkey and Syria. (more…)

Another installment of high class comedy from those cut-ups at the original Keepapitchinin office:

Sum men iz foolz
For want ov sense,
And sum iz foolz
For want ov pence;

But the gratest fool –
Beyond recall –
Iz he hoo thinks
He noze it all.

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Josiah Francis Gibbs was already a third-generation Mormon when he was born in Nauvoo in 1845. He lived all the experiences we think of as prototypical for Mormons of that age — he crossed the Plains on foot, worked as a carpenter on such landmarks as the Salt Lake Tabernacle and Salt Lake Theater, helped settle and build up one community after another, served a mission to England, took part in his local ward activites, married polygamously, raised two families … and then for reasons too complex to outline here, but which will be explained in my biography of Gibbs, he forfeited everything that meant anything — his families and his membership in the Church — and became a bitter apostate and publisher of virulent anti-Mormon books. When his day had passed and those who had supported him had no further use for him, he was dropped by his old flatterers and faded away, a writer of cranky letters-to-the-editor until his 1932 death. (more…)

Joseph Bennett (1831-1911) was an influential English music critic, long-time reporter for the Daily Telegraph, editor of two music journals, author of several books, specialist in church music. In the 19th century, of course, such a critic did not sit in a studio and listen to recordings — of necessity he traveled widely to listen to choirs in national cathedrals and to try out organs in country churches. His 1884 travels brought him to the United States, and Christmas that year found him in Salt Lake City.

What would one of the world’s most sophisticated music critics think of the nascent Tabernacle Choir, its home-made organ, Mormon congregations, or the acoustics of an oddly-shaped auditorium in the desert? (more…)

The fall of 1850 brought a hopeful beginning for the people of Utah. Congress created the new Territory of Utah on September 9; one of its next acts was to appoint John M. Bernhisel as Utah’s agent to assemble a territorial library, furnishing him $5,000 for the project.

We could not have had a better agent. Bernhisel, Utah’s non-voting delegate to Congress, accepted the assignment with a sense of mission. “I was fully persuaded,” he wrote, “that the library would not only exert a powerful influence on the present and rising generation, but perhaps on millions yet unborn.” (more…)

Margaret K. Brady, “Transformations of Power: Mormon Women’s Visionary Narratives,” The Journal of American Folklore 100:398 (Oct.-Dec. 1987), 461-468.

Brady writes, “[F]or most women living within patriarchal religious systems, … feminine reproductive goals and values are inextricably entangled with the goals of their chosen religion.” She examines personal narratives of LDS women gathered over a 30-year period, all having to do with dreams, visions, or other premonitory experiences concerning an as-yet unborn child to develop “insights into the ways in which the women themselves conceive of their own power.” (more…)

Mormonism has provoked a great deal of legislation and legal commentary over the years: laws to abolish plural marriage, administrative policies to curtail Mormon immigration, test oaths to eliminate Mormon suffrage. While most of that occurred during the bad old pre-Manifesto days, echoes of those early days forced the courts to consider and accommodate Mormonism for years after those courts had seemingly forced us to adapt to their ways.

Here is one such echo, from 1910: (more…)