Juanita and Me

By Gary Topping–

Looking back over my career as a historian, I am struck by how much of it has involved the work of the great Utah and Mormon historian, Juanita Brooks.  I seem to be unable to separate myself professionally from her, nor would I ever wish to.

Late in the 1970s, when it became apparent that I was going to become, as my wife puts it, a “naturalized Utahn” and thus have to begin learning the history of my adopted state, one of the first books I read was Brooks’s Mountain Meadows Massacre, the narrative of a grimly fascinating (but thank goodness atypical) episode.  I learned, too, of how she and her husband had suffered at the hands of their fellow Washington County Mormons who regarded the book as a betrayal of that collective dark secret of which no one was to speak.  They could hardly justify excommunicating or even disfellowshipping them, so they simply shunned them: neither Brooks was ever again asked to speak, teach a class, or even offer a prayer in church services.

From there I moved on to her biography of John D. Lee and became aware of her definitive editing of the multivolume diaries of Lee and of Hosea Stout, the best pioneer diaries of southern and northern Utah respectively.

By then I had taken up my first professional post in history as Curator of Manuscripts at the Utah State Historical Society.  The first project that confronted me there was processing of Juanita’s vast collection of papers which had just been brought in by the then Director, Melvin T. Smith.  It was my great good fortune to be able to sit in my office for months reading through her thousands of letters and manuscripts.  During that time I developed a profound respect for not only her intelligence, but also her humility, her energy and dogged commitment to her task, as well as her rural villager’s common good sense. I have never lost that respect.

In time I drew deeply on my intimate familiarity with her books in drafting the major section on her work in my Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History.  To be sure, I was sharply critical in that book of what I came to see as some of her philosophical shortcomings, but I was reassured in those criticisms by my recollection that she had said that nothing but the truth was good enough for the church of which she was a member, and felt that if she had lived to see what I had written, she would have patted me on the back.  (I was not so fortunate in the reactions of a couple of her disciples who thought I had committed lese majeste, but even they eventually came around.)

With that background, one can imagine my elation when I recently came into possession of a long-lost Juanita Brooks manuscript, in fact her very first historical essay, a brief history of her hometown, Bunkerville, Nevada, written almost a century ago.  It has come to me through the kind offices of her grandson, Lynn Pulsipher, and Holly George, editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, where it will appear with my editorial apparatus early in 2024.

The manuscript is remarkable, in the first place, for its maturity.  Juanita Brooks seems to have come into the world fully equipped with the tools of the historian’s craft.  Also, it is the first extensive study of the workings of the United Order of Enoch, the Mormon communal experiment in the 1870s.  And she presents life under the Order not as oppressive regimentation, but rather a joyful experience in which everyone had their way to contribute to a larger and meaningful purpose.  Finally, it is startling in its conclusion, that Bunkerville had become such an inbred community of so few families that they were at risk of mental retardation if they could not attract some new blood!  I know of nowhere else in the literature of Mormon colonization where anyone suggested that risk in small, isolated communities.

But I’ve saved the best for last.  One time in the early 1980s my friend and supervisor Jay Haymond and I made an overnight trip to St. George, Utah for a purpose which I cannot recall.  Out of the blue, he asked me if I would like to meet Juanita Brooks.  Jay had previously taught at what was then Dixie College in St. George and had gotten to know the Brookses well through occasional evening get-togethers at their home of liberal-minded Mormons.  At the time of our visit, Juanita was living next door to her son Karl and his wife.  She needed increasingly close care as the dementia that turned her later years into a fog was gradually taking hold.

As she invited us into her living room, I could not have been more nervous, and at the same time more elated, if this had been a papal audience.  We spent a good part of the afternoon with her.  I do not remember what we talked about, but I do remember that her mental acuity came and went.  I do remember giving her my business card and feeling so honored when the last installment of her papers came to the Historical Society and my card was still there.  Juanita Brooks took even me seriously!

When it became time for us to leave, she showed us out.  Before we could go, she came up close to me and pointed to a niche beside the door.  “That’s where I used to keep my gun,” she said.  Then, looking closely into my face with fire in her eyes, she added, “And it wasn’t to protect me from the Gentiles”!

Later I learned that she never actually had a gun and would use that story to impress wide-eyed rubes like me.

And you know what?  It worked!

*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian