Utah's Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area offers breathtaking natural resources, powerful historical drama and intriguing cultural traditions. This rich legacy is built on old-world values of cooperation, industry, ingenuity and true grit--as well as a miracle or two. From frontier justice and lost treasure to the lasting contributions of a Presbyterian minister and a Jewish settlement, talented regional historians, educators and storytellers bring to life these legends, lore and true tales from the heart of Mormon country.
Utah's Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area offers breathtaking natural resources, powerful historical drama and intriguing cultural traditions. This rich legacy is built on old-world values of cooperation, industry, ingenuity and true grit--as well as a miracle or two. From frontier justice and lost treasure to the lasting contributions of a Presbyterian minister and a Jewish settlement, talented regional historians, educators and storytellers bring to life these legends, lore and true tales from the heart of Mormon country.
From the rugged beauty and refined splendor of this vast state emerges a remarkable volume of personal recollections, narrative histories and astonishing stories. Explore the fortitude and cultural diversity behind the development of Utah through "Big Bill" Haywood, vilified by the New York Times as "the most feared figure in America." Experience compelling accounts of women bruised on the front lines of suffrage battles, enthralling stories of Chinese "paper sons and daughters" and heroic endeavors of Northern Ute firefighters. Celebrate downtown's "Wall Street of the West," the off-road cyclist known as the "Bedouin of the Desert" and Utah's love affair with sweets. Culled from her popular Salt Lake Tribune "Living History" column, award-winning author Eileen Hallet Stone uncovers captivating tales of ordinary people and their extraordinary contributions that shaped Utah history.
2020 Reading the West Book Awards, Longlist for Fiction 2020 Association for Morman Letters Finalist, Fiction The Desert Between Us is a sweeping, multi-layered novel based on the U.S. government’s decision to open more routes to California during the Gold Rush. To help navigate this waterless, largely unexplored territory, the War Department imported seventy-five camels from the Middle East to help traverse the brutal terrain that was murderous on other livestock. Geoffrey Scott, one of the roadbuilders, decides to venture north to discover new opportunities in the opening of the American West when he—and the camels—are no longer needed. Geoffrey arrives in St. Thomas, Nevada, a polygamous settlement caught up in territorial fights over boundaries and new taxation. There, he falls in love with Sophia Hughes, a hatmaker obsessed with beauty and the third wife of a polygamist. Geoffrey believes Sophia wants to be free of polygamy and go away with him to a better life, but Sophia’s motivations are not so easily understood. She had become committed to Mormon beliefs in England and had moved to Utah Territory to assuage her spiritual needs. The death of Sophia’s child and her illicit relationship with Geoffrey generate a complex nexus where her new love for Geoffrey competes with societal expectations and a rugged West seeking domesticity. When faced with the opportunity to move away from her polygamist husband and her tumultuous life in St. Thomas, Sophia becomes tormented by a life-changing decision she must face alone.
This collection of fifty outlaw tales includes well-knowns such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Frank and Jesse James, Belle Starr (and her dad), and Pancho Villa, along with a fair smattering of women, organized crime bosses, smugglers, and of course the usual suspects: highwaymen, bank and train robbers, cattle rustlers, snake-oil salesmen, and horse thieves. Men like Henry Brown and Burt Alvord worked on both sides of the law either at different times of their lives or simultaneously. Clever shyster Soapy Smith and murderer Martin Couk survived by their wits, while the outlaw careers of the dimwitted DeAutremont brothers and bigmouthed Diamondfield Jack were severely limited by their intellect, or lack thereof. Nearly everyone in these pages was motivated by greed, revenge, or a lethal mixture of the two. The most bloodthirsty of the bunch, such as the heartless (and, some might argue, soulless) Annie Cook and trigger-happy Augustine Chacón, surely had evil written into their very DNA.
Legends, Lore and True Tales of Utah explores an eclectic past Ordinary history books often fail to address the obscure or the unexplained, leaving questions buried in annals of yesteryear. Where were Utah's mythical monsters, including Bigfoot, spotted? How did 'Schoolmarm's Bloomers' become a state symbol? What created the Lagoon Amusement Park's 'dark side'? Why did 'Frankenstein' prowl through the Cache town of Clarkston? Does Sardine Canyon hide the state's fishiest story? Exactly what was the 'Lakemobile' that rolled through the Great Salt Lake? When and why did BYU temporarily ban football? How is it that the first college basketball team to ever play in the state was all women, and they beat the men? Retired journalist Lynn Arave presents this unique collection, including over a hundred photographs, of the Beehive State's offbeat history.
While Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church’s history—for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson’s Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler’s regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance. The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism’s equivalent of the biblical admonition to “render unto Caesar,” a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons’ courage and travails during the war. Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century—and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.
Massacres, mayhem, and mischief fill the pages of Outlaw Tales of Utah, 2nd Edition. Ride with horse thieves and cattle rustlers, stagecoach, and train robbers. Duck the bullets of murderers, plot strategies with con artists, hiss at lawmen turned outlaws. A refreshing new perspective on some of the most infamous reprobates of the Midwest.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. “Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
