Making Space on the Western Frontier:: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes

by W. Paul Reeve

When Mormon ranchers and Anglo-American miners moved into centuries-old Southern Paiute space during the last half of the nineteenth century, a clash of cultures quickly ensued. W. Paul Reeve explores the dynamic nature of that clash as each group attempted to create sacred space on the southern rim of the Great Basin according to three very different world views. With a promising discovery of silver at stake, the United States Congress intervened in an effort to shore up Nevada’s mining frontier, while simultaneously addressing both the "Mormon Question" and the "Indian Problem." Even though federal officials redrew the Utah/Nevada/Arizona borders and created a reservation for the Southern Paiutes, the three groups continued to fashion their own space, independent of the new boundaries that attempted to keep them apart. When the dust on the southern rim of the Great Basin finally settled, a hierarchy of power emerged that disentangled the three groups according to prevailing standards of Americanism. As Reeve sees it, the frontier proved a bewildering mixing ground of peoples, places, and values that forced Mormons, miners, and Southern Paiutes to sort out their own identity and find new meaning in the mess.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion

231 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

W. Paul Reeve is Chair of the History Department and Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history, and the history of the U.S. West. His book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, (Oxford, 2015) received the Mormon History Association’s Best Book Award, the John Whitmer Historical Association’s Smith-Pettit Best Book Award, and the Utah State Historical Society’s Francis Armstrong Madsen Best History Book Award. In 2023, Deseret Book published his Let's Talk about Race and Priesthood, with a foreword by Darius Gray. He is the recipient of the Utah Council for the Social Studies’ University Teacher of the Year award. He is Project Manager and General Editor of a digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to identify all known Black Latter-day Saints baptized between 1830 and 1930. The database is live at http://centuryofblackmormons.org

Reviews

[Christopher Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

In addition to making some insightful points about competition for land and resources in early Utah, this book also has the virtue of being short and very readable.

[Brant · Rating 3 out of 5]

While certainly not central to the book's thesis, for me the highlight of Prof. Reeve's book is the attention he spent detailing the Mormons, Southern Paiutes, and Miners' sense of geopolitical space on the frontier. I found it interesting that, as part of the Nevada constitution, the United States Congress could move the Nevada/Utah border eastward one degree as often as they wished. When rich silver mines where discovered in western ranges of then Utah Territory, Congress, with the self-interested prodding of the Nevada Governor, moved the Nevada border eastward to include the mines.

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was great to see these groups set against and with one another. What are their differences? What are their similarities? Very fair between the three groups. No paternalism that I picked up on. Also put these groups into contexts of larger movements in the country at the time.