Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 by Leonard J. Arrington (review)

312 Western American Literature as if he told himself: People will want to know about this some day. And he was right. What he put down is dependable historical source material and, perhaps more rare, dependable impressions of a broad and perceptive mind. His style is straightforward, unpretentious, but with an effectiveness that seems to flow out of his own lively interest in what he saw around him. He transmits powerfully the sense of the Apache threat that hung over the scattered miners of southern New Mexico. Again and again he gives us brief sketches of the people he knew, and the reader is impressed with the variety and color of the characters on the frontier. He retells the campfire tales of a Mexican storyteller, Natividad Lujan, and captures the spirit of the teller at the same time that he preserves the folklore of the border region. Editor Myres ties together the original writings with interspersed sec­ tions dealing wtih necessary background. He also adds copious notes. I found myelf continuously flipping back to the notes, a testimony to some awkwardness of arrangement, but also to the value and interest of the notes. The book is gracefully designed by Carl Hertzog and beautifully illustrated by José Cisneros. B e n ja m in C a p p s, Grand Prairiee, Texas Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 18301900 . By Leonard J. Arrington. (Bison Books. Lincoln: University of Nebras­ ka Press, 1966. xi + 534 pages, illustrations, maps, index. $2.40.) For those of us who have asked our students to read Leonard Arring­ ton’s Great Basin Kingdom> it will be pleasant to know that a paperback edition is now available, and at a reasonable price. As one of their Bison Books reprints, the University of Nebraska Press has reissued Arrington’s excellent monograph in photo-offset form. Arrington’s book has held a well-deserved place as an unusually im­ portant study of Mormonism. While primarily an economic history, Great Basin Kingdom has the great virtue of having been written out of a full under­ standing of the theocracy that dominated Mormon economics and determined Mormon values. The volume thus accomplishes far more than economic analysis, valuable though that alone would be; it gives insights into many aspects of Mormon life. As an economic study, Great Basin Kingdom is the only book that gives us a reliable appraisal of the Mormons’ actual achievements during the days of the great communitarian experiments under Brigham Young. Arrington reveals a much higher percentage of failure than earlier narratives have sug­ Reviews 313 gested, and thereby he increases our respect for the average Mormon pioneer, for Arrington’s evidence makes clear that when Brigham Young’s ventures turned out badly, the losses were absorbed by the hard-working Mormon common people. With remarkable resiliency and self-denial, those simple, devout farmers accepted each new setback and thereby enabled the church to clear its debts. R o d m a n W. P a u l , California Institute of Technology The Company Town in the American West. By James B. Allen. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. xvii + 205 pages, $5.95.) The plaintive cry “I owe my soul to the company store” is familiar enough, but a history of that store and of the company-owned town that controlled it has long awaited full and adequate exploration. James Allen has taken the important first step in this direction with the publication of his doctoral thesis. In the process of locating nearly 200 company towns in eleven western states and carefully describing each in a forty-page section appended to his survey, the author has rescued the subject certainly from neglect and quite possibly from oblivion. The plan of the volume is ambitious. Allen faced a formidable task in gathering the necessary materials, and he is careful to point out the limita­ tions imposed upon his research. The disappearance of many company-owned towns, the inaccessibility of corporation documents, and the complicated nature of official company records have curtailed somewhat his effort to mine the potentially rich sources of the subject. Regrettably, his attempt to overcome this disadvantage has led...