Journeys West: Jane and Julian Steward and Their Guides

8. Land of the Utes

8. Land of the Utes On their return to Utah Julian and Jane stopped briefly in Ogden to see their friends, the Howes. The next day they left Salt Lake City and drove due south, skirting the base of the Wasatch Mountains as they entered Utah Valley, passed Provo, and headed for the Kanosh Reservation where some Pahvant Utes lived. It was an easy day’s journey over paved roads and through the heart of Mormon country. They drove through a landscape of memories. Jane had attended college in Provo, briefly and unhappily, in the late 1920s. She had already studied for two years at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City—a public university that her father considered “too worldly”— when he enrolled her at Brigham Young University in Provo. He hoped that she would meet, and marry, a young Mormon man who had completed a mission for the church. There were many candidates at byu, a Mormon institution; but Jane found Provo “too provincial,” and she did not share her father’s vision for her life. The onset of the Great Depression gave her a good reason to withdraw from college and look for paying work in Salt Lake City.1 Julian had different memories of the area around Provo, the most recent, of skiing in Provo Canyon five years earlier. He and his first wife had gone there with one of their students, Kilton Stewart. Kilton ’s younger brother, Omer, had also been one of Julian’s students at the University of Utah. Omer began graduate study in anthropology a few years later at Berkeley, where he worked closely with Kroeber . During that very summer, in 1936, he was in Nevada working with Northern Paiutes on trait lists.2 220 part 3 Kilton and Omer had spent summers during childhood at a homestead ranch in Provo Canyon. The Stewart family still owned the property , but they were not living there when Julian visited. More than twenty feet of snow usually fell in the canyon each year, and that one proved no exception. The snow lay so deep that Julian and his companions entered the family’s house through a second-story window, skiing directly up to it.3 Now, in early September, as he drove past Mount Timpanogos, which loomed above Provo Canyon, he could see no sign of white, not even on the crest of the mountain. The last traces had vanished in the melting heat of summer, and the first snows had yet to fall. The mountain, one of Utah’s most famous landmarks, attracted many summer visitors, drawn there by glacier lakes and waterfalls and fields of wildflowers. Stands of the flowers, still in bloom, lingered on the upper slopes, but he and Jane bypassed Mount Timpanogos and a feast of color in the high country. The Wasatch Range, sentinel of the eastern edge of the Great Basin , held no warm memories, unlike the Sierra Nevada of the western edge. His three years in Utah were marred by what he recalled of an unhappy marriage that suddenly fell apart and threatened to destroy his career. Those years did not compare to the three he remembered from his student days in Deep Springs Valley, near the foot of the Sierra. Trying to make up for lost time, Steward gave complete attention to the work at hand. His illness and the surgery in July had cost him a full month. Unlike the previous summer, when he had interrupted fieldwork to take a pack trip into the High Sierra with his wife and friends, nothing distracted him now. Excursions and adventures in the wild belonged to the past. The contours of his life had changed in ways that affected fieldwork. He and Jane felt pressed for time because, strictly speaking, he was on assignment for the bia—and he had not yet begun that work. Jane 221 Land of the Utes planned to leave Utah in just three weeks, and the idea of remaining in the West for a month or two after she left held no appeal. He no longer had the freedom to spend as much time as he wished following his own interests in the field, in company with Jane, for as long as the meager funds permitted. He had traded independence, and an utter lack of security, for assignments, schedules, deadlines—as well as a regular paycheck and impending parenthood...