Books, Bluster, and Bounty

Local Politics in the Intermountain West and Carnegie Library Building Grants, 1898–1920By Susan H. Swetnam

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2012 University Press of Colorado
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-842-8

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….viiiIntroduction………………………………………………………………………….11: The Culture of the Intermountain West, 1890—1920………………………………….142: The Challenging Process of Applying for a Carnegie Library Building Grant…………………403: Boom Towns: Carnegie Libraries and Boosterism………………………………………….664: Small Mormon Towns: Carnegie Libraries to Protect Youth…………………………………885: Carnegie Libraries in Religiously Diverse Utah Communities………………………………1126: Women’s Role in Bringing Carnegie Libraries to Settled Communities……………………….1377: Oligarchies and Carnegie Libraries in Transitional Towns………………………………..1668: Carnegie Libraries in the Service of Personal Power…………………………………….1879: Contested Libraries…………………………………………………………………20910: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..225Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….230Index………………………………………………………………………………..245

Chapter One

The Culture of the Intermountain West, 1890–1920

“New Country”

Residents of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, rode a crest of excited optimism in 1907, certain that prosperity was finally about to arrive in their community. For twenty years Steamboat Springs had made its living as a modest commercial center serving a far-flung ranching and mining district in northwestern Colorado. The town did boast a hot springs, but its isolation from major population centers limited potential as a health resort. Now news had come that the Moffat Railroad was building a standard gauge line through the Rockies. It was just a matter of time, boosters claimed, until Steamboat Springs became “the main town between Denver and Salt Lake City.” Flush with anticipated prosperity, businessmen initiated projects designed to draw tourists and encourage in-migration. Most of these ventures were unambiguously commercial as a new hotel was capitalized and the hot springs were modernized. But one item on this booster wish list was not quite like the others. Steamboat Springs also dreamed of a Carnegie library, an institution that would demonstrate the place to be “refined” as well as “coming.”

The early steps of Steamboat’s Carnegie library building grant application progressed smoothly. Citizens were fortunate to have an ally in a friend of Carnegie’s who had vacationed there. The community soon obtained a promise of $5,000. Though this number was smaller than the sum the commercial club members spearheading the application had desired, their boosterish spirit remained undimmed, and this figure was inflated in the public press to “a strong probability for … a $10,000 library” within “a year.”

But Steamboat’s fortunes fell apart, and with them the town’s enthusiasm for a Carnegie library. Mountainous terrain proved more difficult to negotiate than Moffat Road builders had anticipated and the most expedient path was discovered to cross a tract already tied up with reservoir survey claims. Lawsuits, logistical difficulties, and bad weather stalled building. By the time track construction reached Steamboat (a year later than anticipated), the railroad was heavily in debt, its founder dead, and its future right-of-way challenged. The track stopped just beyond Steamboat, never to become a through-line. The anticipated influx of new settlers and their money never came. When the 1910 census was counted, the town’s population was closer to 1,000 than to the 2,500 which library applicants had claimed to Carnegie, and citizens struggled with taxes incurred in the cause of promoting pre-empted prosperity. For the first time in four years, in 1910 the Steamboat Pilot’s last issue in December did not include a chronicle of the year’s progress and a prediction of a glowing future. Steamboat Springs’ boom was over before it began, and with it the town’s Carnegie library campaign. City leaders quietly abandoned the application, and no one seems to have noticed, much less clamored for its renewal. Steamboat Springs never built a Carnegie library and did not construct a purpose-built library until 1967.

While Steamboat Springs’ Carnegie library story is distinguished by particularly bad luck, many other Intermountain West communities faced similar challenges at the time of their applications due to unpredictable economic and social change. Between 1898 and 1919, the period when Andrew Carnegie offered funds for the construction of public libraries, the Intermountain West was a zone self-consciously in transition—a place which variously anticipated, dreamed of, or dreaded change, but which could not ignore that change was occurring. In a substantial number of the region’s towns, many people remembered community beginnings. Of the seventy-eight Intermountain West communities which applied for Carnegie public library building grants, a third were established after 1890 and a half dozen after 1900. Citizens voiced a sense of inhabiting land where no civilization had previously existed. They also emphasized their sense of rapid municipal transformation. “The town is … passing from the village class to the city class,” an editorial in the Eastern Oregonian proclaimed of Pendleton during that community’s Carnegie library application and an inquiry letter to Carnegie from Nampa, Idaho, spoke of that town’s “remarkable transformation” in the previous few years. Even in the pockets of the region that had been settled for decades diversity increased: Eastern Europeans arrived to work in mines and new industries; Russians immigrated to labor in beet fields; an influx of non-Mormons infiltrated Mormon country; and Anglo-Europeans colonized towns long dominated by Hispanic influences.

The narratives of individual communities’ Carnegie library histories, this book will argue, are integrally tied to just such circumstances, mirroring both larger trends in regional social history and specific local variations. As a foundation, this chapter offers a brief overview of the specific economic and cultural circumstances that led residents to call the region “new country” at the time of Carnegie’s offer.

The European Settlement of the Intermountain West

Before Lewis and Clark’s expedition in 1804–6, the Intermountain West was a land of mystery to Euro-Americans, isolated between rugged mountain chains reaching to 14,000 feet. Spanish explorers and missionaries had operated in New Mexico in the sixteenth century, French fur traders had traveled in Canada, and British and American ships had explored the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The interior west, however, was so little-known that the Corps of Discovery set out expecting to find the mythical great “river of the west,” a conduit to the Pacific Ocean just one day’s portage west of the Missouri River. Most of the region wasn’t even technically in American hands at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Northwestern Montana, Idaho, Eastern Washington, and Oregon belonged to Oregon Territory, jointly controlled with the British. The Spanish controlled Nevada, Utah, Arizona, western Wyoming and Colorado, and most of New Mexico. Venturing into contested territory, Lewis and Clark became the first men to map the northern Rockies, floating rivers and recording wonders that no whites had ever before seen. And yet, monumental as their expedition was, it only passed through a tiny fraction of the region.

Further exploration followed on the Corps’ heels. Mountain men (several of whom had traveled with Lewis and Clark) pushed into new country in the northern and central Rockies. Zebulon Pike led an expedition into Spanish territory in 1806. Jedediah Smith wandered through present-day Colorado, Oregon, and California in the 1820s. In the 1840s, after Oregon and some former Mexican territories became US possessions, the newly established federal Corps of Topographical Engineers systematized exploration. John C. Fremont’s expeditions crossed Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and California. Howard Stansbury explored the Great Basin. Expedition surveyors mapped the 17th, 19th, 38th, 35th, and 32nd parallels. After the Civil War, geologist Ferdinand Hayden and scientific adventurer John Wesley Powell surveyed particularly remote sections of the interior west, including the Grand Canyon and northwestern Wyoming.

Though artists including Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt celebrated the interior West’s landscape, chronicling its expansive light, sweeping panoramas of basin and range, and huge sky, it was not a region particularly inviting to agriculture. The region’s geography offered numerous barriers to internal travel including precipitous basin-and-range-style ranges, and river canyons hundreds or thousands of feet deep. It also held numerous zones uninviting to cultivation including immense ossified lava fields, alkaline deserts, and wind-swept plateaus. Even most of the relatively level ground lay over 3,000 feet in elevation. Compared to the land immediately east of the Continental Divide and west of the Cascade/Sierra crest, the interior west was distinctively arid and subject to more extreme temperature swings. Several Eastern Oregon counties lying within the Intermountain West, for example, received less than 10 inches of rain in 1910, compared to 40 inches in the Willamette Valley. Rainfall in Delta and Grand Junction, Colorado, was calculated in 1910 as about 8 inches, compared to the 14–18 inches for foothills east of the Colorado Rockies. Even in dust-dry Wyoming, the southwestern, Intermountain West, part of the state recorded significantly less rain in 1910 than counties east of the divide. States whose boundaries were wholly within the region were particularly arid. Nevada counties received between 5–10 inches of rain a year and the towns in southern Idaho’s Snake River Plain averaged around 11 inches. Clear skies fostered especially hot and especially cold weather. In many sections (including parts of Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, and Idaho in the north) summer temperatures regularly neared or surpassed 100 degrees, while winters routinely threw thermometers far below zero. Furthermore, frost could also strike in any month in the region’s northern reaches, or even in its southern high country, including Arizona’s mountains.

Home-seekers on the Oregon and California trails thus tended to hurry as quickly as they could through the region. With their gaze fixed ahead to the temperate, fertile ground of the Pacific slope, they registered their disgust at the unpromising nature of the interior West. “The country all the way down the Snake River [in Idaho] is one of the most desolate dreary waste in the world,” wrote one Oregon Trail traveler. Sixty years later even the boosterish mayor of Rock Springs, Wyoming admitted the region’s deficiencies in terms of obvious incentives to settlement. “If there is a place that merits recognition from those interested in the upbuilding of humanity,” he wrote to Andrew Carnegie in 1907, “certainly it is here. Nature has not been kind except to give us a wonderful coal basin, lying in the heart of the Great American Desert, sans water, sans vegetation of any kind.”

By the 1850s the Intermountain West saw only scattered settlement. Although communities grew up around former forts, including Tucson and Boise, and around Indian missions, including Walla Walla, those who ranched and farmed lacked the means to transport their goods to larger markets. Only in Utah, where Latter-day Saints fleeing persecution collectively migrated under Brigham Young’s leadership in 1847, did a significant network of interlocking settlements develop.

Then a series of mineral strikes explosively initiated town-building. Miners on their way to California discovered gold on Nevada’s Carson River in 1851 and populated the Comstock district in 1859. Precious metals were discovered in northern Idaho’s Clearwater/Salmon region in 1861, then in Idaho City, and then in the Coeur d’Alene district. Miners rushed to Utah’s Bingham Canyon in 1863, introducing a gentile (non-Mormon) presence to Utah territory. Utah’s mining expanded with new strikes in the 1870s in Park City, in the Tintic region, in Little Cottonwood Canyon, in Silver Reef/American Fork, and in the Beaver and Cedar City vicinities. Silver and copper drew miners to Butte, Montana, in 1875 and 1880. In western Colorado, the future Carnegie library towns of Durango and Silverton began as silver mining camps.

Adjacent settlements grew to support these enterprises. Corinne boomed as a freighting center connecting Utah and the Montana mines. Farmers and ranchers settled in valleys where they could raise crops and meat for miners, including Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and Idaho’s Boise, Payette, and Weiser valleys. New towns (including the future Carnegie library communities of Lewiston, Idaho; Spokane, Washington; Reno, Nevada; and Prescott, Arizona) functioned as market centers for such areas.

But several problems limited full-scale development in the Intermountain West. Crucially, no rail network existed before the Civil War to supply settlers and carry the region’s products to distant market. Then, in 1862, Congress approved the Pacific Railroad Act chartering the Central Pacific to build east from Sacramento while the new Union Pacific built west from Omaha. Land grants for railroad right-of-way were authorized, and the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. By the 1880s numerous feeder lines had snaked into previously isolated parts of the interior West. The Oregon Short Line was built through Idaho and eastern Oregon; the Northern Pacific through Montana, northern Idaho, and eastern Washington; the Denver and Rio Grande through western Colorado and eastern Utah; and the Atlantic and Pacific and the Southern Pacific through Arizona and New Mexico.

A string of settlements grew up alongside the tracks. Some had their genesis as railroad service communities, including the railroad shop centers (and future Carnegie library towns) of Pocatello, Ogden, and Missoula, Montana. All three of the future Carnegie library towns in southwestern Wyoming began as company towns. Rock Springs was established to supply coal to the Union Pacific, Green River to supply water, and Evanston to act as a switching point. In other cases, new agricultural towns were platted by development companies beside new rail lines and promoted for their “inevitable” growth given this connection to the outside world. Typical of such communities was the future Carnegie library town of Caldwell, Idaho, platted in 1883 when the Idaho and Oregon Land Improvement Company offered bare ground along the Oregon Short Line Railroad. Within four months the new settlement contained a hotel, a millinery shop, two blacksmiths, three doctors, a newspaper, a post office, several general mercantile operations, several lawyers, and numerous saloons.

American Indian presence constituted another impediment to European-American settlement in parts of the interior West—but only temporarily, for any rumor of hostility, even the most unfounded, was seized as an excuse for Indians’ removal from desirable districts. In the 1860s and 1870s settlers who saw agricultural potential in eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Valley and in northwestern Idaho pressured the government to remove the Nez Perce. An excuse for removal came when young Indian men clashed with settlers. Fearing reprisal, the band fled, then garnered a reputation for “viciousness” by defending itself when attacked by militia and federal cavalry. The Nez Perce journeyed hundreds of miles in their attempt to seek refuge in Canada, only to be caught by federal agents and relegated to a reservation. 13 The future Carnegie library community of Enterprise, Oregon was platted in 1887 on land taken from the tribe.

The Utes of western Colorado received especially bad treatment since they were removed not once but twice. The first displacement came after a few tribal members attacked an Indian agency and kidnapped a white family in 1879. The second came just three years later, after would-be settlers pointed out that the new reservation included potentially prime land for farming at the confluence of the Gunnison and Grand Rivers. “The Utes Must Go!” demanded newspaper headlines, and commissioners confiscated 150,000 acres around the confluence and opened them to settlement in 1882. Some eager settlers even staked claims while the land still technically belonged to the Indians. The Carnegie library town of Grand Junction became the market center for this new district.

The federal government similarly removed Apaches from ancestral grounds in Arizona after the United States assumed control of the territory from Mexico in 1848/1853, allowing the development of the future Carnegie library communities of Tucson and Yuma. Last of all in the region to be removed were the Modocs of Northeastern California, Southern Oregon, and Western Nevada, whom the government sent to reservations in 1873. Among the communities settled in the territory the Modocs had roamed was Alturas, California, which obtained a Carnegie library grant a few decades later.

Perhaps the most needed thing for widespread settlement in the Intermountain West, however, was irrigation water. While the Homestead Act of 1862 did lead to widespread development elsewhere in the United States, its requirements proved unworkable in the arid interior, offering in the words of historian Richard White, “not a ticket to independence but to starvation.” Small-scale irrigation projects thrived in limited districts along reliable rivers and streams, especially in Mormon Utah and southeastern Idaho, where settlers united by religion organized themselves to plow common ditches and to self-police water distribution. In large portions of the region, however, distance from water sources and lack of a coherent social structure made such projects impossible.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Books, Bluster, and Bountyby Susan H. Swetnam Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of Utah State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.