Old Utah Trails by William B. Smart (review)

158 Western American Literature compromising his own reliability. The History of the Sierra Club is a first-rate book, a model of archival research, critical imagination, objective analysis, and judicious appraisal. It belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the course of environmentalism both yesterday and today. ANN RONALD University of Nevada, Reno Old Utah Trails. By William B. Smart. No. 5 in the Utah Geographic Series. (Salt Lake Citv. Utah: Utah Geographic Series, Inc., 1988. 133 pages, $28.95/$17.95.) This is my second reviewing assignment for the Utah Geographic Series. (The first was Utah Wildlands, No. 3, by Stewart Aitchison). I must say that I’m sorry not to have gotten to review the entire series. I find the books very well done. The author of this fifth volume, a former editor for the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, bases his chapters on Father Escalante, Jedediah Smith, The Old Spanish Trail, The Hasting Cutoff, The Mormon Trail, The Forty-Niners, The Pony Express, and The Hole-in-the- Rock Expedition. Although none of these subjects can be treated in depth, the scope of each chapter is really quite amazing. In addition to the adventures of the trailblazers, there are also inter­ esting comments about what has happened to the trails since their opening. The chapter on the Mormon Trail, for instance, warns that condominiums and vandals have all but obliterated the section of trail leading into Salt Lake City. And the chapter on the Pony Express congratulates David Bagley of remote Callao, Utah for assembling at his own expenses a “small desert-andPony -Express museum” (117). Indeed, this is an active history, committed to preserving the heritage of the trails. One passage, for example, describes how Lynn Lyman, essentially working alone, saved a section of the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail from the bull­ dozers of an oil company. Hearing of the impending road building, Mr. Lyman “scouted out an alternate route, and persuaded the company to use it instead” (131). The excellent graphics in the volume make a similar point. One set of photos depicts Mormon youth, dressed in clothes such as their forebears wore, pulling handcarts through the Wasatch canyons as part of the annual celebra­ tion of Pioneer Days. Other photos show a rider and horse during the annual reenactment of the Pony Express. Such juxtaposing of past and present makes the trails come alive. Readers should hardly be able to resist setting out to see the rough country through which the trails pass and perhaps also to walk a section and to experience Reviews 159 something of what it must have been like for Escalante or Jedediah Smith. Even though the book will not serve as a complete guide to the trails, it has enough maps and close descriptions to get would-be explorers excited, oriented, and out the door. In almost every way, the book is very handsomely produced. The writing is not only readable, but lively. The maps, however, would be better if they had more topographic detail. And some of the photos would be more illum­ inating if they were wide-angle shots of the country the trailblazers crossed. The close-ups of plants and the sweeping skyscapes, beautiful as they are, don’t really carry the subject forward. As absorbing reading, and also as an attractive piece for a coffee table, Old Utah Trails is a good bet. RUSSELL BURROWS Utah State University Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian. By Levi S. Peterson. Woodblock prints by Royden Card. Foreword by Charles S. Peterson. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. xi + 505 pages, $19.95.) The “Woman” in the title of this definitive biography of Juanita Brooks serves, of course, as a badge of honor, a conscious corrective of the slights and difficulties she encountered, as a woman, in pursuing her historical research. But “Juanita Brooks: Mormon Historian,” without the feminist cachet, would be an even greater compliment, signifying acceptance at parity within the profession, an acceptance Peterson’s account fully justifies. His narrative, told with a practiced novelist’s skill, is an informed “life and times” of a tenacious western woman who was at once representative...