This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent Western historian of the fur trade, historic trails, and the Latter Day Saint movement. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan committed his life to tracking down sources and interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with methodological shifts in the historical profession, the mid-twentieth-century collision of interpretations within Latter Day Saint history, and the development of a descriptive, scholarly approach to that history.
Morgan’s body of work and commitment to serious scholarship signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Leonard Arrington, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.
Saunders deserves praise for forcefully contextualizing and writing a balanced and nuanced account of a rich and complex life and career. His book will be of interest to students as well as general readers with an interest in Mormon and/or Western history.
Mormon Studies Review
Saunders successfully demonstrates how the antiquarian and ethical approaches to telling stories about Utah, Mormon, and Western histories gradually transitioned to relating those histories through the lenses of historicism and documentary evidence, a transition initiated and facilitated by an unassuming yet immensely talented, nonacademic deaf man with an art degree. We are all enriched by Dale Morgan’s remarkable influence upon the whole amazing panorama of the history of Utah and the West, the Mormon relation to both, and the priceless collection of records he left to the state.
Utah Historical Quarterly
Saunders is extraordinarily thoughtful about his somewhat prickly and brilliant subject; there is much in these pages about Morgan’s emotional life and turbulent relationships. It is to his credit that the book also succeeds as an introduction to the shifting nature of professional history in the twentieth-century United States. The book earns its title and subtitle alike.
Montana: The Magazine of Western History
Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition is a seminal work of impressively meticulous scholarship and is especially, unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library American Biography collections.
Midwest Book Review
Richard Saunders charts the life and career of Dale Morgan in this deeply researched biography. Saunders places Morgan’s career in the context of the evolution of Mormon and western American history as well as changes in the publishing world. Although Morgan’s papers illuminate his scholarly work more than his personal life, Saunders manages to vividly illuminate chapters in his personal life—especially his childhood, adolescence, and final years.
Brian Q. Cannon, Brigham Young University
About the Author
Richard L. Saunders is a librarian at Southern Utah University. He is the author of Eloquence from a Silent World: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Published Writings of Dale L. Morgan, and editor of Morgan’s writing in Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849–1869, and Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works, 1939–1970.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Daniel Walker Howe
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: “A Thousand Utterly Trivial Things”
Part I: Mormon, Historian
1. “Under the Shadow of Her Love”: Family and a Salt Lake City Childhood, 1914–1929
2. “A Sense of Being Socially Maimed”: Salt Lake City’s West High School, 1929–1933
3. “The Strange Mixture of Emotion and Intellect”: The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1933–1938
4. Digression: Telling the Past in Latter-day Saint Utah, 1930s Style
5. “One of Those Minds Which Dwell in a Typewriter”: The Historical Records Survey, Ogden, Utah, 1938–1940
6. “This May Not Last, but It’s Fine While It Does”: The Utah Writers’ Project, Salt Lake City, 1940–1942
7. “Not So Dull as It Sounds”: Office of Price Administration, Washington, DC, 1942–1947
8. “It Is Best to Make the Most of My Opportunities”: The Guggenheim Fellowship Travel and Salt Lake City, 1947–1949
Part II: An Uncomfortable Interlude
9. Digression: Books and History in the Postwar Context
10. “I Am in for a Long Pull”: Job Seeker in Washington, DC, and Salt Lake City, 1950–1952
11. “Sundry Kinds of Hackwork”: Writing in Washington, DC, 1950–1952
12. “Half an Easterner and Three-Quarters a Westerner”: Writing Jedediah Smith and Salt Lake City, 1952–1953
Part III: Western American Historian
13. “It Is Something to Be On My Way Again”: Bancroft Library and the Navajo Project, Berkeley, California, 1954–1962
14. “Too Many Things Have Been Going On at the Same Time”: Writing, 1954–1963
15. “Too Many Obligations Out Here”: Turning Points and Departures
16. “Struggling to Get My Disordered Life Back Under Control”: Bancroft Library, Berkeley 1964–1965
17. “I Seem to Work All the Time”: Shifting Priorities, Berkeley, 1966–1968
18. “There Are All Sorts of Problems That Will Have to Be Worked Out”: New Directions, Berkeley, California, 1969–1970
19. “As Liable to Happen to Me as to Anyone Else”: Lafayette, California, and Accokeek, Maryland, 1970–1971
Epilogue. “If History Is Going to Stay Viable”: A Historian’s Life and Contexts
A Dale L. Morgan Bibliography
Works Cited
Index
