Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier by Juanita Brooks (review)

Reviews 167 Yet as Chenetier has warned, he is out to map, not settle. And if the decon­ structionism threatens to wag the dog, at least it jolts us to recognize the potential free play of Brautigan’s style and reminds as well how new criticisms seem to emerge in tandem with new senses of language and structure in literature. So even my minor quarrels with Chenetier’s book suggest its value and accomplishment. Meet you at the stream. Good fishing. TIM HUNT, Nova University Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier. By Juanita Brooks, with an introduction by Charles S. Peterson. (Salt Lake City, U T : Howe Brothers, 1982. 52 + 342 pages; maps, illustrations, $19.95.) The publication of Juanita Brooks’memoir after forty years in manuscript is timely: these unassuming but by no means artless recollections of her girlhood and growing up speak to us in the clear tones and fresh colors of unclouded early memory and add her own story to the chronicle of the Brooks and Leavitt families she has already told elsewhere. An overview of Juanita’s career by Charles S. Peterson as introduction and two letters by Dale L. Mor­ gan as appendices provide a fitting frame for the thirty-seven chapters and epi­ logue of the memoir itself. The introduction not only informs but illuminates, and the letters are prescient and historic. Both letters were written in 1944 after Morgan had seen eight or nine chapters of the reminiscences in rough draft: one is addressed to Juanita urging her, as narrator-participant, not to hesitate to give her book an autobiographical structure because “all these marvelous stories you have will fall naturally into place” ; the other is addressed to Bernard DeVoto calling his attention to Juanita’s “rich and heart-warming and lively and colorful book,” a story “that no one can read without a renewed sense of the worth of human living, and it is at the same time a book to be read with delight.” Juanita’s historical writing was a “career by happenstance,” she tells us, the result of an impulse in 1934 to send Harper’s an article called “A Close-up of Polygamy,” which to her surprise they accepted. Gathering and preserving Mormon diaries and journals during WPA days deepened her interest in the history of “the southern Mormon frontier” and led to what became a lifelong preoccupation. The way there, those significant years that served as prologue to this career, is the substance of this memoir, which concludes, appropriately, in 1941 with her appointment as Field Fellow for the Henry E. Huntington Library. There are dignity and delight in equal measure in Juanita’s remembrance of things past. The transparent surfaces of Juanita’s unhurried prose play, as in Willa Cather, over unsuspected depths. The work is essentially a gather­ ing of stories, self-contained episodes in her life, chronologically ordered and unified by a sense of movement, from innocence to knowledge, a knowledge 168 Western American Literature of the larger world beyond Bunkerville, Nevada, and southern Utah’s Dixie country. “The Outsider,” coming midway in the memoir, is a pivotal chapter, dividing Part One, the “Wide, Wonderful World” of childhood, from Part Two, “That Untravell’d World” Juanita glimpses as the result of a telling encounter with a stranger who comes to town and who is not, she discovers, one “sitting in darkness” but instead one who fires her imagination with possibilities, a shock of recognition crucial to her literary awakening. Throughout her story we catch glimpses of the curiosity that led to Juanita’s historical researches: the chagrin she felt at the chance she missed to record the dying w'ords of a survivor of the Mountain Meadows massacre ; her quickening pulse as.she realized the worth of the John Pulsipher journals in her husband’s family ; her lucky rescue of the Myron Abbot journal about to be used to start fires in the owner’s kitchen stove. Plucky, curious, adventurous and even wilful as a girl, courageous and resourceful as a young woman widowed within a year of her marriage to Ernest Pulsipher and left, with a child, to earn her...