Comments on: Brigham Young’s Swimmin’ Hole

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:46:21 +0000

Bookslinger, I have 2760 identified descendants in my database, but I don’t know how many are living, nor have an educated guess as to how many are in the branches I haven’t been able to trace forward yet.

By: Bookslinger

Bookslinger — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:20:26 +0000

Ardis, don’t go researching this, but off the top of your head, how many currently living descendents does BY have?

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:56:16 +0000

I *luv* those illustrations, Hunter. The swimming pool would be just out of range of either picture, but they’re wonderful aids to visualizing several familiar stories. Can’t you see the mountain lion cautiously exploring the backyard, sniffing at the haystack as he slunk by? Thanks!

By: Hunter

Hunter — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:22:32 +0000

FWIW, I ran across a book at Google Books that contains a couple of interesting (somewhat contemporaneous) paintings of the general vicinity that this post talks about ("Painters of the Wasatch Mountains," 2006). While neither painting depicts the swimming hole, and while both paintings post-date Brigham's death, some of BY's children were still living in the immediate area, so the images may be of some illustrative relevance to the original post. The first image is on the bottom of page 37 and depicts "Brigham's Backyard," looking south at the back lots of the Beehive and Lion Houses (here). A second image is on the bottom of page 36 and depicts a view of South Temple looking to the northeast where the swimming hole would have been (here).

By: Brandon

Brandon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:40:48 +0000

True enough, Ardis, regarding the difficulty of finding traces in the historical record of something so ephemeral.

It’s the detective work of history that makes the discipline so much fun. Let me know if you run across something.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:09:24 +0000

Wish I knew, Brandon. Structures like this that were private, not built of permanent materials, and underground, are not apt to be noticed in formal records when they decay or are deliberately removed. I can’t hunt for it because there’s no logical place for it to have been recorded. Maybe someday I’ll run across a casual mention in a newspaper to something new being built on the site “where the former plunge bath of Pres. Young was filled in last fall” or something like that. It’s a lot of fun to connect the dots between casual, ambiguous references like that!

By: Brandon

Brandon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:15:13 +0000

Like the post.

The private swimming hole would have been a nice alternative to other public bathing sites around Salt Lake, including the very popular warm springs near what is now the boundary between Salt Lake and Davis counties. Later in the nineteenth century one could also witness the rise of several bathing resorts dotting the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Ardis-how long did the swimming hole exist? When did it disaappear?

By: Bill MacKinnon

Bill MacKinnon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:38:56 +0000

Chad Too, further to your point, B.Y. did leave precise instructions re the dimensions of his own coffin, including an instruction about shoulder room that brings your thought to mind.

By: Bill MacKinnon

Bill MacKinnon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:35:41 +0000

When it came to building things, Brigham Young, former carpenter/cabinet maker that he was, was very hands-on and quite precise, as with the design of the piers and buttresses of the new Tabernacle and even the proper construction and siting of wilderness sentry shelters and observation posts used by the Nauvoo Legion during the Utah War. His instructions to Apostle John Taylor on how to build a hand cart in 1856 are a classic. Given this proclivity to,er, manage closely the fabrication of such artifacts, are there no presidential instructions re building “the pool”?
Ardis’s description of the fastidiousness with which bathing/swimming took place in “the pool” are in sharp contrast with war correspondent A.G. Browne’s description for the readers of Horace Greeley’s “New York Tribune” of how James Buchanan’s two peace commissioners — Lazarus W. Powell, former governor of Kentucky, and Ben McCullock, U.S. marshal for the eastern district of Texas and former Texas Ranger — swam the Platte River in the buff en route to Salt Lake City during May 1858. Wonder if “the pool” was in commission that early. Powell made no mention of it, but he did take a dip in the Great Salt Lake and attributed its powers and Utah’s climate to the ensuing cure of his rheumatism.

By: Bruce Crow

Bruce Crow — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:32:29 +0000

The other day my wife went smimming wearing a full length dress, a swim suit was not conveniently available, and the alternative was simply not going to happen. She found the experience surprizingly comfortable and had no problem keeping afloat and uh…modest. Afterwards she suggested that perhaps we are too quick to dismiss the swimming fashions of the past as impractical.