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Being Different: Stories of Utah Minorities
Being Different: Stories of Utah Minorities
Being Different: Stories of Utah Minorities
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Being Different: Stories of Utah Minorities

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Ethnic studies can be full of surprises, pathos, and nostalgia, in Utah as elsewhere. In this anthology, fourteen gifted historians consider such issues as the collision of white settlers and Shoshones in northern Utah and the initial trouble with Salt Lake City residents when all-black troops were garrisoned at Forts Douglas and Duchesne.

The Mormon immigration was primarily of Yankee and British stock. Less advertised is the fact that it also included a sizeable number of Scandinavians who lent a distinctive, Old World flavor to the Sanpete area and by Polynesians who adapted their unique culture to the harsh realities of Skull Valley.

Peoples of other religions and nationalities followed with similarly colorful, energetic cultural contributions: the Italians and Greeks of Carbon and Emery Counties and the first Mexicans in and around Salt Lake City. There were short-lived colonizing efforts by Jewish settlers in central Utah and Japanese in Wasatch County.

In writing about and memorializing significant events surrounding immigrants’ lives and the day-to-day perseverance of pioneers of all nationalities, the fourteen contributors to this anthology offer fascinating details and unforgettable stories.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 15, 2001
ISBN9781560853411
Being Different: Stories of Utah Minorities

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    Being Different - Stanford J. Layton

    BEING DIFFERENT

    Stories of Utah’s Minorities

    Favorite Readings from the

    Utah Historical Quarterly

    Edited by

    Stanford J. Layton

    Signature Books

    Salt Lake City

    Cover design by Ron Stucki

    2001 Signature Books. All rights reserved.

    Signature Books is a registered trademark of

    Signature Books Publishing, LLC.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Being different : stories of Utah’s minorities / edited by Stanford Layton.

    p. cm.

    Articles originally published in the

    Utah historical quarterly between 1965 and 1995.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 1-56085-150-3 (pbk.)

    1. Minorities—Utah—History—Anecdotes.

    2. Minorities—Utah—Social conditions—Anecdotes.

    3. Minorities—Utah—Biography—Anecdotes.

    4. Utah—Ethnic relations—Anecdotes.

    5. Utah—Race relations—Anecdotes.

    6. Utah—Biography—Anecdotes. I. Layton, Stanford J.,

    II. Utah historical quarterly.

    F835.A1 B45 2001

    305.8’009792—dc21

    2001049377

    Contents

    BEING DIFFERENT

    Editor’s Introduction

    1. Utah’s Ethnic Minorities

    2. The Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Tribe

    —Deeply Attached to Their Native Homeland

    3. No Place to Pitch Their Teepees

    4. Justice in the Black Hawk War

    5. Improbable Ambassadors

    7. Clarion, Utah, Jewish Colony in Zion

    8. Japanese Americans and Keetley Farms

    9. Life and Labor among the Immigrants of Bingham Canyon, Utah

    10. Utah’s Ellis Island

    11. The Evolution of Culture and Tradition

    in Utah’s Mexican-American Community

    12. Folklore of Utah’s Little Scandinavia

    13. Serbian-Austrian Christmas at Highland Boy

    14. The Memory Box

    Contributors

    Editor’s Introduction

    Well before the New Social History became fashionable in academic circles, Utah Historical Quarterly had a deserved reputation for featuring immigrant peoples, making it a leading journal in this subject area. Numerous articles on ethnic and cultural groups graced the pages of the Quarterly as early as the 1960s. By the 1970s such fare was common. Veteran historians Helen Z. Papanikolas and Richard O. Ulibarri, both members of the Utah Board of State History, and a bevy of younger scholars such as Philip Notarianni, Joseph Stipanovich, and Michael J. Clark were bringing their energies, insights, and leadership to the challenge of discovering and illuminating this rich side of Utah’s heritage.

    In fact, the Quarterly did not have room to accommodate all the ethnic history suddenly being written in Utah. In 1976 the Utah State Historical Society, with a generous grant from the Utah American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, published a 500-page book, The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Papanikolas, containing fourteen chapters on ethnic and cultural groups. Even with that, the surface had barely been scratched. For the next quarter century— right to the present—the Quarterly has continued to benefit from top-notch submissions in this exciting area.

    Upon a moment’s reflection one can easily see why our history reflects such diversity. A prominent feature of our state heritage has been a certain conformity of cultural views, inherent within the religious gathering of the second half of the nineteenth century, but a diversity of national and ethnic backgrounds stemming from that gathering. Scandinavians, Polynesians, Germans, and Britons who converted to Mormonism and relocated to Zion brought with them their distinctive languages, customs, idioms, and traditions. The melt- ing pot functioned somewhat more effectively here than elsewhere, but this image was also still as mythical as real.

    Others, including Jews, Chinese, and African Americans, came to Utah in those pioneer times, the latter two joining the Utes, White Mesa Utes, Gosiutes, Paiutes, Northwestern Shoshones, and Navajos as the non-assimilables, to use Richard Ulibarri’s insightful term. Then as the twentieth century dawned and labor opportunities beckoned, other immigrants came to the Beehive State, and the mix was further enriched. In-migration was nothing new here, but for the first time such nationalities as Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), Austrians, Mexicans, and Japanese moved here in significant numbers. With the variety of religions they brought, along with unique customs and generally strong ties to their homelands, these new immigrants were definitely pioneers of a different sort.

    The essays that follow embrace most of these ethnic groups, though they are not necessarily intended to be inclusive. Rather, they were selected as personal favorites. Each holds an attraction—a definable charm—that has summoned me back again and again through the years. If some of the older articles seem a bit dated in terminology and historiographical context, perhaps the modern reader will overlook this. History is constantly being rewritten as new sources are discovered and new frames of reference take shape. But great story elements are never out of date. The remarkable range of human experience, the aspirations and failures, the unpredictable twists and turns, and, yes, those occasional acts of generosity and nobility that tug at the heart—these are timeless elements of which we never tire. And they are here in abundance, awaiting discovery by those who missed them the first time around or rediscovery by those whose memory of them may have faded.

    We begin with Ulibarri’s survey of ethnic minorities in Utah. Recognized as path-breaking when first published in 1972, it has lost none of its luster through the years. Perceptive and sensitive, it addresses forthrightly the challenges faced by people of color in finding acceptance within a predominately Euro-American culture. Today’s readers will find a good deal to ponder here by contemplating how much has changed during the last generation, how much has not, and where our society seems to be heading.

    Three essays on Utah’s native people follow. Lost amid today’s debates regarding nuclear waste repositories in Skull Valley is the simple historical fact that the Skull Valley Gosiutes have held and continue to hold an abiding love of their homeland—an area that migrants and overland travelers found hostile and forbidding. This attachment and geographical remoteness, along with the relatively small size of the band, account in large measure for its successful resistance to relocation, first in the nineteenth century and then again in the twentieth. In contrast, the fertile grass-covered ranges of the Northwestern Shoshone in Cache Valley were immediately coveted by white settlers, and love of the homeland was no match for soldiers’ rifles and the newcomers’ numbers. Nor was central and southern Utah untouched by Indian-white warfare. Out of the wake of death and destruction caused by the Black Hawk War in the late 1860s came one of the territory’s most interesting murder trials. Thomas Jose, defendant, was accused of killing a Paiute named Simeon. The outcome—a reflection of many factors, including timing and some cleverly presented forensic evidence—reveals a dimension to Indian- white relations that is not commonly seen in the historical record. All three of these situations offer special opportunities for historians, and in each instance a gifted historian has answered the call.

    Though most of the new immigrants came to Utah as individuals or single families in search of labor opportunities, some came in organized groups for other reasons. One such was the 24th U.S. Infantry Regiment, transferred to Fort Douglas in 1896. Arriving in the face of hostile editorial opinion from the Salt Lake Tribune and a good bit of uneasiness within the local white community, these buffalo soldiers proved to be remarkably successful ambassadors for the African American community and the military generally. Given the unblushing racial prejudice within white American society of that era, this was a particularly significant historical development for Utah and is still worthy of reflection by thoughtful readers today.

    Three other organized movements to Utah were the Polynesian colony at Iosepa, the Jewish colony at Clarion, and the Japanese colony at Keetley. The Polynesians immigrated as Mormons and developed their farming community under LDS church leadership; not surprisingly it was the longest lived and in many ways the most successful such undertaking, lasting from 1889 to 1917. The Clarion Jews, on the other hand, came on their own, though with considerable encouragement from Utah government officials, and laid out their farms in 1910. In retrospect their efforts seem doomed from the start, and their project was abandoned within six years. The Japanese migrated under duress, hurriedly leaving northern California in advance of forced relocation after Pearl Harbor in late 1941. Making the most of a painful and difficult situation, they farmed as best they could in a high mountain valley of Wasatch County and helped to mitigate negative attitudes within the nearby towns. Despair, disappointment, and broken dreams aplenty were in store for each of these groups, but a few triumphs of enterprise and triumphs of spirit were to be theirs as well.

    An interesting dimension to Utah history is to be seen in the Work Projects Administration images of the laboring man swinging a pick on the railroad or in a mine, especially since the man was likely to be an emigrant from the Balkans, Italy, Asia, or Mexico. Bringing his native language, customs, cuisine, religion, and points of view, he and his family enriched Utah’s culture in many ways. A few of these men would lay down their tools to take up business, opening stores and restaurants or peddling goods from wagons. Some had hopes of returning to their native lands and buying farms or businesses there. All had visions of a better future. An excellent survey of the various immigrant laborers—their aspirations, everyday lifestyles, and labor troubles—is offered here with a look at Bingham Canyon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is followed by an analysis of one specific group as we spotlight the Italians of Carbon County and view their struggles to gain acceptance while they maintained their cultural values.

    An anomaly of Utah historiography is that one of our fastest growing ethnic groups—Latinos—and one of our largest—Scandinavians—have had the least written about them. But the Quarterly has featured a couple of valuable essays on these groups, and I was quick to select them for this volume. The first appeared in the early 1980s when the term of preference was Chicano and borrows from the discipline of sociology to illuminate such challenges as generation gaps and a collective identity crisis. Continuing with the same methodology, it pinpoints the emergence of ethnic pride within the Latino community. The second essay borrows from a sister discipline—this time folklore—to present the story of the Scandinavians of Sanpete County. But it does more. By introducing us to the folk tales, legends, myths, and jokes from Little Scandinavia, it helps us better understand our own foibles, strengths, and values.

    The anthology concludes with two essays separated in their initial publication by nearly twenty years yet much alike in style and message. One describes a Serbian-Austrian Christmas at Highland Boy in 1932, the other reflects on growing up in a German household in Salt Lake City during the 1940s. The way these two authors portray the distinctive aromas of Old World cuisine, the excitement of holiday festivities, and the joys of sharing good times with families and friends is nearly as real as if they were experienced in person. Worrisome as the 1930s and 1940s were, the immigrant family held to its optimistic view of the future and valued the past. The ethnic pride visible in all of the preceding essays receive an exclamation point with these final two.

    Of the mix of people in Utah today, only a few are lucky enough to be just one or two generations removed from immigrants and able to develop an appreciation of ethnic pride firsthand. Fortunately for the rest of us there is history. And what better place to begin than here, wherein such talented and thoughtful writers have focused on immigration and ethnicity in a way that puts a face to it, introducing us to unforgettable personalities and stories. If you are like me, these essays are of a type that will prompt you to think back on them again and again.

    1. Utah’s Ethnic Minorities

    A Survey

    Richard O. Ulibarri

    One of the pet theories of American history is that of the melting pot. It has been propounded with such fervor that only recently has it been shown to contain inconsistencies. In fact, the melting pot applies only to immigrants from Europe, while a significant number of people have never been assimilated: blacks, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asians. The other so-called minority peoples are so only in the sense that they are small in number. In the main, they have been part of the melting process. The true ethnic minorities are those who, because of racial or cultural difference, have been treated as a group apart, who are held in lower esteem, and who are deferred from opportunities open to the dominant group. These are the people described in this essay.

    The primary reason minority people do not mix is the majority’s view of them as different. All, for instance, have easily recognizable physical features such as skin color, texture of hair, stature, and facial features which set them apart. Another difference commonly shared is their non-European origin.

    Japanese and Chinese Americans came here from Asia. Blacks were brought against their will as slaves from Africa. Native Americans, of course, were already here. Chicanos shared a European background on the side of their Spanish forebears, but they also shared distinctive American Indian cultural backgrounds. As a result of different backgrounds, they have cultural traits unlike the rest of the country. Often these traits have been taken as an affront by the majority. Of critical importance is the fact that Indians, blacks, and Chicanos are conquered people, thus having suffered deculturalization and cultural isolation. Asians, on the other hand, while not suffering this fate, did suffer severe discrimination.

    Another common trait is that none of these groups shared in the American frontier experience except on the wrong end of the action. That is, they did not participate in a manner which brought them the benefits of that experience. Specifically in Utah we see that Indians suffered the loss of their lands to early Anglo settlers at precisely the same time the land of the Mexican fathers of the present-day Chicanos was taken over by the U.S. government. Blacks who came during the settling of the Utah frontier came as slaves or servants, and Asians came to stay only after the original settlements had been made, participating on the periphery as basic laborers. Incidentally, it should be stated that this experience was not unique but simply furthered a pattern developed elsewhere on the frontier of America’s sweep westward.

    The minority peoples in Utah are truly in the minority, for while their number increased about 63 percent from 1960 to 1970, they still comprised only slightly more than 6 percent of the total population. This contrasts with national figures which showed minority groups at approximately 15 percent. Chicanos formed the largest minority group in Utah, numbering more than 40,000 persons or at least 3.5 percent of the population. Others comprised significantly smaller percentages: Indians from various tribes, 1.1 percent; Asians, 0.9 percent; and blacks, 0.6 percent. Chicanos, then, comprised a larger group than the other three minorities put together.¹

    Most—with the exception of American Indians—are concentrated along the Wasatch Front in the larger urban populations of Salt Lake City and Ogden. Blacks and Chicanos live in communities which are close to the state’s military installations where they most readily find employment.

    The very small number of Chinese is concentrated in the densely populated areas where many are engaged in small businesses such as laundry and dry cleaning establishments and restaurants. Most of the Japanese Americans also live relatively close to the major population centers. Many of them, however, are engaged in farming activities, particularly in truck farms. Others own small business establishments, and the younger generations, now graduating from colleges, are entering the professions.

    Most Indians still reside on reservations; in San Juan County alone are found approximately half of Utah’s total Indian population. However, in the decade of the 1960s, an important shift was noted as Indians moved to urban areas. During that period the total Indian population in metropolitan Utah more than doubled, giving evidence of significant migration.

    Blacks: Servitude and Service

    The black population is extremely small. There were only slightly more than 6,500 residing in Utah in 1970, and nearly all of them were located in the urban communities of Salt Lake City and Ogden near military installations and the fast dying railroad centers. Nevertheless, blacks have made a significant imprint on the area. The first arrived with the earliest fur trappers who entered the region. Sadly, most of them remain nameless. However, James P. Beckwourth, a member of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company from 1823 to 1826, was one of the area’s noted Mountain Men.²

    The names of three black men who entered the Salt Lake Valley with the vanguard of Mormon pioneers appear on the Brigham Young Monument at the intersection of Main and South Temple streets in Salt Lake City and on the This Is the Place Monument at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. These three slaves achieved an immortality along with other Utah pioneers. Their names were Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby.³ While they were the first black slaves into the area, they were not the only ones for there were many others accompanying Mormon parties on their journeys westward. A great number emigrated from the southern states. The Mississippi Company of Mormons in 1848 included fifty-seven white members and thirty-four blacks.⁴

    Blacks came both as free men and as slaves, in the latter case often as the most valuable property a family had. John Brown listed in his autobiography an inventory of the gifts made to the church including real estate valued at $775.00, a long list of livestock, farm equipment, tools, household articles, and one African Servant Girl valued at $1,000.00. The girl constituted one-third of the entire gift.

    By the ambiguity of the Compromise of 1850, Utah was the only western slave territory. According to the U.S. Census that year, Utah had twenty-four free blacks and twenty-six slaves. The next census listed thirty free blacks and twenty-nine slaves.

    The Utah Territorial Legislature passed an act in 1851 to protect the institution. It provided clearly defined obligations for master and servant, similar to the practice in the South. While slave trade was never legal, dealing in human bondage did take place in Utah until the Civil War. Many of the black people at that time, slave and free, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and remained in the territory throughout their lives. Some Utah blacks today can trace their origins to these early pioneers.

    Like other western territories, Utah had important military defense installations that black men played a significant role in establishing and maintaining. In September 1884 war and the threat of war existed between the Ute tribes and the Mormon population. As a result the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent to the Uintah Reservation an agent who recommended the establishment of a fort for the discipline and control of the Indians. In August 1886 a site was selected at the junction of the Duchesne and Uinta rivers. Chosen to command Fort Duchesne was Major F. W. Benteen, who had saved what was left of General George Custer’s army ten years earlier. Benteen’s Ninth Cavalry troops from Fort Steele and Fort Sidney, Nebraska, were black. Much disliked by the Indians, they received from them the name Buffalo Soldiers because of their woolly beards. Their task was to defend the frontier of eastern Utah, western Colorado, and southwestern Wyoming.⁸ A monument at the fort reads: August 21, 1886, two companies of colored infantry commanded by Major F. W. Benteen and four companies of infantry under Captain Duncan arrived at this site to control the activities of Indians. There were three bands of Utes—Uncompahgres, Whiterivers and Uintahs. The troops hauled logs from nearby canyons, built living quarters, commissary, storehouses and hospital, thereby establishing Fort Duchesne. Abandoned in 1912, now headquarters for the Uintah Reservation.⁹ The famed Buffalo Soldiers served for nearly twelve years.¹⁰

    Another military unit of black soldiers, the Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment, was stationed at old Fort Douglas and participated with distinction in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. These were the men who swept up San Juan Hill past the faltering Seventy-first New York Regiment and, along with the Black Cavalry, helped save the day for Theodore Roosevelt. Following the battle they served as nurses in the yellow fever hospital at Siboney.¹¹

    The black population grew slowly in Utah.¹² While the entire population at the turn of the century reached 270,000, there were only 678 black residents, including approximately 200 at Fort Duchesne. In the half century from 1850 to 1900, blacks resided in Salt Lake, Tooele, Uintah, and Weber counties where they found employment with mines, railroads, and military establishments.

    The period from 1900 to 1920 saw increased growth. Despite the removal of some 200 soldiers and their dependents from Uintah County, the black population doubled. Varied economic opportunities were available for them in Salt Lake City, in the coal mines in Carbon and Emery counties, and with the railroad in Weber County. However, population growth fell sharply in the period between 1920 and 1940. Employment—especially during the Depression—was extremely scarce, and black people left the state in search of jobs elsewhere. The decline in mining in Utah’s two coal counties presented particularly difficult economic conditions, and by 1940, 90 percent of the state’s blacks lived in Salt Lake and Weber counties.

    Beginning with the early 1940s, the black population increased more rapidly than in previous years. Much of this resulted from employment opportunities with Department of Defense installations established during World War II—Hill Air Force Base and the Naval Supply Depot in Davis County, the Utah General Depot in Weber County, and the Tooele Ordnance Depot and Dugway Proving Grounds in Tooele County.

    As elsewhere, these new residents faced discrimination and prejudice. The historical record shows that even lynchings occurred, as in the cases of Sam J. Harvey who was hanged in Salt Lake City in 1885, and Robert Marshall who was strung up twice in one day in Price on June 18, 1925, by some 1,800 men, women, and children.¹³ During the 1920s and 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan was active and, as elsewhere, blacks were the chief target. While blatant bigotry subsided, blacks today still suffer a degree of segregation. Statistics show that the core areas in Salt Lake City and Ogden, zones peripheral to the business district where at least 80 percent of the total black population resides, are difficult to escape.¹⁴ About seven census tracts in the central part of Salt Lake contain about 80 percent of the city’s blacks, and in the central city area of Ogden, five census tracts show about 98 percent of the black population.¹⁵

    Although they have played a substantial role in the historical development of the state, it is obvious that blacks still have a long way to go in achieving equality in such areas as employment, educational opportunities, and adequate housing.

    Native Americans: First and Last Citizens

    Another minority that played an influential role in the state’s development but which has farther to go to achieve equality of opportunity to successfully compete in today’s modern society is the American Indian in various

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