By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
In 1865, New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley famously advised someone, “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” A half century later, Bernard DeVoto—the first Utahn to win a Pulitzer Prize—did the exact opposite.
DeVoto left his native state as a young man and moved east, but then earned his fame writing about the American West that still tugged at his heart. One of those western outposts he always loved was Huntsville, a small town in Northern Utah.
DeVoto was born in 1897 in Ogden City. Huntsville lies just to the east, nestled in the small but mountainous Ogden Valley.
Florian DeVoto—Bernard’s father—was a Catholic Notre Dame graduate who had moved west two decades earlier seeking fortune but never finding it. His mother Rhoda Dye was the Latter-day Saint descendant of a Mormon pioneer and hardworking Uintah farmer.
DeVoto’s biographer Wallace Stegner says Bernard was not born into either of his parents’ faiths but rather “into the area of conflict between them; and since any conflict between a good Mormon and a faithful Catholic may be expected to end in a draw, it was predictable that [Bernard] would adhere to neither.”
Given his unique origins, DeVoto often felt like a stranger in his own hometown. Ogden teacher/writer Scott L. Greenwell explains other reasons DeVoto likely felt ostracized:
“His peers took him for a sissy. The fact that his father insisted he attend the all-girls Sacred Heart Academy just a few blocks up the street on 25th didn’t make life any easier. And, when he reached [Ogden] high school, the adolescent torment continued. A former co-ed remembered him as ‘the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw’ (in part from a squashed nose, the result of a baseball accident). Still others referred to him as ‘Barnyard Revolto.’”
In 1920 DeVoto told a friend, “Do not forget that at best, I am a spore in Utah, not adapted to the environment, a maverick who may not run with the herd, unbranded, given an ill name. These people are not my people, their God is not mine.”
Perhaps to extract some revenge, early on in his writing career DeVoto penned a venomous article for H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury that offended pretty much everyone at home. He proclaimed, “Civilized life does not exist in Utah. It has never existed there. It never will exist there.”
During these difficult early years, DeVoto found refuge in only two places. One was in books. The other was hiking and camping in the foothills and Wasatch mountains east of Ogden.
Ogden Canyon—the scenic and twisting gateway to Huntsville and the valley where legendary mountain men like Peter Skene Ogden and Jim Bridger had roamed—was just a bike’s ride away. DeVoto could survey the small town and all of Ogden Valley during overnight hikes to the top of Mount Ogden.
DeVoto called this part of Ogden “a garden in the desert, with the peaks splendid above it—lines that sweep the eye irresistibly onward, distances and colors that carry the breath with them, the mountains in which the Gods of the Utes walked in the cool of the day.”
His mixed feelings about his hometown eventually pulled him far away from it. DeVoto studied for a year at the University of Utah, served in the military during World War I, and graduated in 1920 from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bernard eventually accepted a job teaching English at Northwestern University in Illinois where he met and married his wife Avis. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts so DeVoto could write and teach at Harvard.
In 1925, however, the young couple took a honeymoon trip to visit Ogden so Avis could meet Florian. After an introduction from the owner of Spargo’s bookstore where he’d worked as a young man, Bernard spoke to the Ogden Rotary club about his first novel.
DeVoto also brought Avis into his beloved Ogden Canyon and the Wasatch Mountains near Huntsville. They almost died there when a flash flood caused by the torrential rain of a summer squall swept past their rented cabin as they fled to higher ground.
Believing the flood resulted from years of livestock overgrazing the area, the couple began a lifelong quest to preserve the natural beauty of the West. DeVoto wrote articles, edited by Avis, criticizing the cattle, timber and dam-building interests they though were spoiling the untamed frontier.
The DeVotos had two sons—Gordon and Mark. In a 2021 interview with the University of Utah, Mark fondly recalled family driving trips out west.
The Ogden Standard Examiner reported on three of those trips in 1940, 1946, and 1950. DeVoto was always doing research while traveling.
One trip was to help him write “a history of western expansion.” Another was to fulfill his duties as a member of the National Parks Service advisory board.
Inevitably, the local reporters got DeVoto to talk about his favorite hometown memories. He reminisced about fishing trips on the South Fork of the Ogden River and said he was “flabbergasted” that Trappist monks had established a monastery near Huntsville.
During these trips back to the west, DeVoto often ventured into somewhat hostile territory. His criticisms of his home state and his strong conservationist leanings made him more than one enemy in Utah.
The Standard-Examiner reported in 1925 that the Chamber of Commerce was drawing up a protest to send to DeVoto. In 1926, the newspaper published an account of local sheriff officials burning DeVoto’s article “along with some other litter about the office.”
The same year, The Desert News published a poem mocking DeVoto’s comments. Letters to the editor called them “absurd,” and said dismissively, “little boys have to show off!”
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover even criticized DeVoto and Harpers magazine in 1949. Hoover accused them of publishing “half-truths, inaccuracies, distortions, and misstatements” about FBI investigations during the Joe McCarthy era.
One of DeVoto’s strongest supporters, however, wrote for the local papers too, and he also had deep ties to the Ogden Valley. Jarvis Thurston was born in Huntsville in 1914 and earned degrees from the University of Utah and the University of Iowa.
Thurston worked at the University of Louisville and then went on to a long career teaching English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1943, he married Mona Van Duyn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1991.
In the 1940s, Thurston served as literary editor for Standard-Examiner, a platform he sometimes used to defend DeVoto. Thurston expressed regret that DeVoto had alienated so many Utahns, but noted that Bernard also did the West a great service by acting as its realistic and often affectionate interpreter.
As proof of the affection, Thurston cited DeVoto’s 1933 essay admiring his hard-working maternal grandfather from Uintah: “The earth was poisoned, and [he] made it sweet. It was a dead land, and he gave it life. Permanently. Forever. Following the God of the Mormons, he came from Hertford [England] to the Great American Desert and made it fertile. That is achievement.”
Thurston also defended DeVoto as “Ogden’s one claim to literary fame.” A few years later, Stegner—a great Utah writer from Salt Lake City—seconded Thurston’s assessment.
In The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, Stegner describes DeVoto with a captivating list of words: “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running, scared all his life, often wrong, often spectacularly, right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.”
Bernard died unexpectedly in November 1955 at just age 58. He lived a productive life, publishing 21 books and writing well over 800 articles, essays, short stories and book reviews.
DeVoto won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1948 for the book Across the Wide Missouri, about the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1930s. He also earned a national book award in 1953 for The Course of Empire, tracing North American exploration from Balboa to Lewis and Clark.
In a December 1955 tribute to DeVoto, the Standard-Examiner said: “Among other things, his affection for this area is witnessed by the statement he made to relatives and friends that one of his ambitions was to own a home in the Huntsville area to which he could come during the summers and rest or work at his writing as he chose.”
Just imagine DeVoto sitting on his Huntsville front porch on a warm Ogden Valley summer evening with one of his beloved martinis in hand. Thurston and Stegner would be close by, discussing their latest books or articles.
A Trappist monk from the Huntsville monastery might have stopped by too, bringing DeVoto a book he’d asked to borrow from the monks’ impressive and extensive abbey library. Ansel Adams could have been there taking photos of the spectacular Ogden Valley landscapes.
Or perhaps Sister Madeleva Wolff, the acclaimed Holy Cross sister/poet whom DeVoto befriended in an Ogden bookstore would visit to share verses with Robert Frost, DeVoto’s sometimes-friend-sometimes-foe from New England.
And almost certainly, Avis DeVoto’s good friend Julia Child would be there from time to time too, testing new recipes in the DeVoto kitchen and asking the likes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alfred Knopf to sample them.
It never happened, of course, but what a fascinating Huntsville home that would have been.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
