By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As I was eating lunch alone in my law office one day, the ghosts of my long dead professional ancestors—Joseph Rawlins and William Dickson—appeared from nowhere. They admonished me for holing up and ignoring the fascinating history that lived and breathed just steps away in downtown Salt Lake City. (Read this first story, part 1 of this series, here.)
They then spirited me away from my sixteenth floor skyscraper perch and deposited me on the southeast corner of Second South and Main Streets. Rawlins told me that my journey began there, Dickson pushed me north, and I started to float through the intersection. Halfway across, I thought I heard a mournful and pitiful voice moan, “Death!”
Not certain I’d heard correctly—and doubting the credibility of my senses given the strangeness of the previous few minutes—I listened again when I landed on the opposite sidewalk. This time I heard, quite clearly, “Death lives on this corner!” The voice emanated from a face etched into a black and gold plaque attached to the outside wall of the old Walker Bank building.
As I examined the plaque, a voice from behind startled me by saying, “Ahh, that’s Andrew Burt…he likes to shout out like that on occasion.” I turned around and saw a tall but hunched over old man with a gray mustache and goatee wearing Civil War era garb. He introduced himself, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Matthew Henry Walker is my name. Rawlins and Dickson sent you over, right?”
“Do you know them?” I asked. “Oh yes, indeed good sir” Walker said, “they are my lawyers. My brothers and I operated a dry goods store and bank just across the street from here, and then our company built this fine tall building where you stand now. At one time, it was the tallest building between San Francisco and the Mississippi River!”
As Walker spoke, I watched the face on the Andrew Burt memorial contort and bellow once again, “Murder!” I asked Walker, “What happened here?” Walker reported, “I remember it all too well. I was working in our store on a hot Saturday afternoon in August of 1883 when I heard shouts and gun shots. I ran outside and saw two men fighting across the street while another staggered away into the local drug store.”
Walker continued, “I went over to help. Great Salt Lake City’s water master Charles B. Wilcken had been shot, but he was restraining a man named Joe Harvey. Wilcken told me that Harvey had threatened to shoot another man who owned a local restaurant just up the street. City marshal Andrew Burt had asked Wilcken to help him investigate and restore order.”
“Where was Burt when you arrived on the scene?” I asked. Walker replied, “I did not see him at first, but I heard moaning inside the drug store. I rushed in and found Burt on the floor just moments before he died. Originally from Scotland, he was a good law man with many years of experience. I grieved for our town and for his wives and children.” I asked, “Wives? Plural?” Walker said, “Yes, remember the polygamist times. He had three wives and almost 30 children.”
“That’s a very sad story,” I said. Walker responded, “It gets worse. When I went back outside and reported the death of Marshal Burt, the gathering crowd was enraged. Other law officers had arrived to take the suspect Harvey to the city jail a few blocks away, but the surging crowd intervened and grabbed him. They brought him to a nearby maintenance shed and lynched him without even giving the poor man a trial.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. Walker nodded in agreement, and then said, “After the lynching, the mob started to drag his dead body around in celebration. Only the strong intervention of Mayor William Jennings stopped the debacle. In the days that followed, newspapers and church leaders condemned both brutal murders.”
Later, I read about Mayor Jennings, a local merchant and businessman who owned and lived in the city’s famous Devereaux Mansion also near downtown. In 1864, Jennings constructed the Eagle Emporium Building further north on Main Street. It now houses a branch of Zions Bank, a financial institution started by Brigham Young in 1873. The classical white columned building is the oldest existing commercial building in downtown Salt Lake City. Jennings, said to be Utah’s first millionaire, later joined a cooperative mercantile also founded by Brigham Young.
Walker continued telling me the story about the unfortunate lynching, “I read how Mormon Church President John Taylor eulogized Burt and called the aftermath a ‘degrading scene.’ President Taylor even warned the crowd at the funeral, ‘Men ought not permit their frenzied passions to control them, and follow up the breaking of a law by their breaking another one.’”
I asked Walker, “Did you go to Andrew Burt’s funeral?” He smiled slightly and said, “No, that was held at the Tabernacle, and my brothers and I were not really welcome there.” Walker explained, “We first came here from England in 1952 as good church members but we almost starved, and so we worked hard and prospered selling dry goods after the Civil War.”
“You sound like upstanding citizens,” I said, “so what happened?” He explained, “We started a bank too with one safe in our store. Yet, Brigham Young later told the saints to boycott us because he thought we did not pay enough tithing to the Church. He even started the Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution…which you knew as ZCMI…to drive us out of business. Only our banking and mining work kept us afloat those years.”
I looked at Walker with new respect and said, “That cannot have been easy, to battle with the local power structure. You and your brothers were not establishment bankers, you were the town’s rebel bankers.” Walker laughed, “Indeed we were, in some ways. We even started a newspaper called The Mormon Tribune as a counterweight to the power of the church and the local theocracy. Like Rawlins and Dickson did, you now do work for that client, it’s now called The Salt Lake Tribune.”
“Then we do have something in common,” I said. Walker also mentioned that not everything his family did was rebellious, “Perhaps you have heard of my own daughter—Glenn Walker Wallace? She was known as ‘Utah’s First Lady of the Arts.’ She helped establish what you know today as Ballet West and the Utah Symphony.”
I asked, “What happened to your brothers?” Matthew sighed and said, “Well, that is a sad story too. Samuel Sharp Walker died of alcohol poisoning in 1887. David Fredrick Walker moved to California in 1884 and died in poverty in 1910. Joseph Robinson Walker passed away in 1901. I was left to run the family business with my son-in-law John M. Wallace.”
As Walker and I spoke, I heard thundering hooves getting closer and closer. Suddenly, Walker pulled me aside just as a sweat-covered equestrian team flew past us and continued north up Main Street. I asked Walker, “What was that?” Walker looked at the rider again and told me, “You have just witnessed the early afternoon ride of the Pony Express.”
“The Pony Express came through here?” I said with excitement. “Yes, there was a station just right up the street,” said Walker. “Now that is something I have to see with my own eyes,” I said. Thanking and taking my leave from Walker, I ran north up Main Street following the trail of the legendary ghost horse and rider.
(Next week…ponies, the press, and a surprise visit from a legendary American writer.)
*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.
