Dreams, Myths, and Reality: Utah and the American West (The Critchlow Lectures at Weber State University)

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Description

During the settlement of the West, during the Civil War and Gold Rush periods, the average Anglo household consisted of two or three bachelor farmers or miners. The nuclear Ingalls circle of relatives from Little House of the Prairie used to be less typical than Bonanza’s Cartwright circle of relatives with three boys, a father, and a male cook.

There were exceptions. The Willamette Valley in Oregon used to be settled by traditional families who carved out a middle-class existence on small farms. In Utah Territory, less fertile soil and more fertile polygamous fathers produced families who struggled against poverty and isolation.

The first Americans out West gravitated to existing pockets of Spanish culture in New Mexico and along the California coast—such a lot in order that in 1860 the U.S. census takers could not locate a single town in Idaho or Montana. They found only twenty-three settlements in present-day Nevada. These areas were still the domain of frontiersmen, soon to get replaced by prospectors and dirt farmers.

In this anthology, probably the most most prominent historians of the American West imagine Utah’s place within the context of broad settlement patterns. Along with the displacement of war and the lure of precious metals, immigration used to be influenced by a persistent idyllic dream of a new beginning in religion, social structures, and multi-culturalism.

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