Foreword
The American West has always been a contested land, a field of battle and conquest. Through most of the twentieth-century, writers and historians have glorified the American triumph in “winning” the West, portraying its settlers as victors of civilization who subdued and ordered the land and its peoples, wresting abundance and wealth from its hitherto barren mountains and valleys. But in recent years, new western historians, such as Donald Worster, Patricia Limerick and Richard White, have emphasized not the heroic but the rapacious character of western settlers of European descent, seeing them principally as despoilers of the land and its peoples.
Strangely, this discourse has virtually ignored what some have called the hole in the vast donut of the American West—the Mormon presence. Why would this be? How could astute and sophisticated scholars lavish years of toil examining mining camps, ranching, prostitution, company towns, struggles over water, range wars, women homesteaders, outlaw gangs and corporate greed, and somehow ignore in all this the presence of the Mormons, who, right from the beginning, turn up almost everywhere, interacting with the whole varied procession of other westering folk?
Morris Shirts provides an implicit answer to that puzzle in this long-awaited study of the Iron Mission, completed after his death by his daughter-in-law Kathryn. A Trial Furnace is a full and compelling account of the enormous effort Mormons put into developing an iron industry in the Great Basin in the early 1850s. It is a story that chronicles the beginnings of Mormon settlement in the Far West, the development of the “called” mission concept, and the techniques of its mobilization and application. The effort was headed initially by the much-loved Apostle George A. Smith—the wry, rotund and sometimes irreverent J. Golden Kimball of his time. The mission was the model for subsequent “called” settlements, the nucleus from which the Mormon domain emerged. It is an epic story that on every page gives the reader fresh insights into how the peopling of the Mormon West was accomplished and how in that process the Mormons were being “made saints”—undergoing a cultural metamorphosis that began to set them apart from the rest of the West.
Consider, for example, that epic moment when the missionaries fired up their small blast furnace, erected on Coal Creek in present-day Cedar City, after months of bickering, disappointments and backbreaking toil. Rhoda Matheson Wood and Belle Armstrong’s colorful account reports that on the eve of the pour, the whole town surrounded the furnace, said prayers invoking God’s blessing, and listened to brief sermons. Then, at dawn, an iron worker “took a long rod and knocked out the clay plug, to let a stream of fiery metal pour out. . . . Shouts of ‘Hosannah!’ broke from tired, sleepy throats.” Henry Lunt wrote more prosaically, “Tap[p]ed the furnace about Six oclock a.m. The Metal run out and we all gave three hearty cheers. When the Mettle was cold, on examination it was not found to be so good as might be wished.”
It is not the invocation of divine blessing that is unusual in this account. It was common, in fact, for nineteenth-century industrialists to inaugurate their enterprises with such ceremonies. What is unusual is the community gathering, the all-night vigil, the shouting of hosanna when the metal poured forth. The workers were not so much employees of a company as members of a close-knit family and the iron-making effort was pursued not to enrich an Andrew Carnegie but to provide metal vital to the founding of a commonwealth they saw as theirs.
But there was an even more important goal. Lunt’s concern about the quality of iron reveals but one of a number of thorny problems the iron missionaries had tried to lay down. The enterprise had gone slowly and with much fractiousness. Even as the furnace was being tapped, an apostolic delegation was on its way from Salt Lake City to try to set things aright. When they arrived, as they reported to the Deseret News, “we found a Scotch party, a Welch party, an English party, and an American party, and we turned iron masters and undertook to put all these parties through the furnace, and run out a party of Saints for building up the Kingdom of God.” The message was clear. As important as the material accomplishment of producing iron might be, it was secondary to the spiritual accomplishment of “making saints,” of creating a harmonious, cooperative community.
The story of the Iron Mission, as the authors tell it, is poignant. We see pettiness, shortsightedness and backbiting along with stoic, even heroic, dedication. The goal of fostering a successful iron industry eluded these true pioneers, yet theirs is a human story, where real “flesh-and-blood people” tried to stretch their limited human capacities to span the reach of their lofty vision. And despite hurts, resentments and grumbling, they persisted, their doggedness leading them willy-nilly to accomplish their primary goal, the making not of iron, but of Saints.
It is that communal ethic, the willingness to forego material rewards and individual satisfactions for the community good, that sets these folks apart, making them an anomaly in the West. Like Israelis in the Middle East, the Mormons seem to their neighbors to be cut from a different cloth, a source of bafflement and bewilderment, and hence ignored, shunned or at times even despised. Morris and Kathryn Shirts have brought together their story with a care and richness of detail that gives it life and meaning. Theirs is a solid and enduring accomplishment, an appropriate marker for the 150th anniversary of the commencement of the Iron Mission.
—Dean May
University of Utah
