Juanita Brooks - Emma Lee

Juanita Brooks

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LOGAN, UTAH

Copyright. 1978, 1984
Utah State University Press
Logan UT 84322-7800
All rights reserved

ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-121-4
ISBN-10: 0-87421-121-2

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Brooks, Juanita, 1898-1989

Emma Lee.

Includes index.

1. Lee, Emma, 1836-1897. 2. MormonsUtahBiography.

3. PioneersUtahBiography. 4. UtahBiography.

1. Title

BX8695.L39B76 1984 289.3320924 [B] 84-22057

ISBN 0-87421-121-2 (pbk.)

BY CHARLES S. PETERSON

Juanita Brooks was approaching the end of a long and illustrious writing career when she published Emma Lee in 1975. Born Juanita Leavitt in 1898 to a pioneering polygamous family at Bunkerville in southern Nevada, she grew up in a Mormon community that was isolated by desert miles as well as by the customs of one of the most distinctive subcultures America has produced. She came to know the lore of her home country as its traditions and geography unfolded through her youthful experiences. Touched now and again by the outside world, she yearned for its broadening influences, but she stayed on to write brilliantly about Mormon Countrys Dixie.

Lying mainly in southwestern Utah, but extending into southern Nevada and into the strip of Arizona that lies north of the Grand Canyon, Dixies early years had been activated by special attention from Brigham Young and given tragic notoriety in the national consciousness by the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. However, the year 1877 had marked the beginning of a quieter, more stable period. That year, change was signaled in an irony of converging events. The dedication of the Mormon Temple at St. George climaxed Brigham Youngs determined effort to build the country, and his death vastly diminished the churchs special interest in the regionS growth, while the execution of John D. Lee, one of the participants at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, at long last quieted national outrage and eased, but did not erase, the local societys sense of guilt and tragedy. For half a century thereafter the country changed but little.

Indeed, if ever the people of Mormon Country had a truly separate existence it was in the Dixie of Juanita Brookss youth. It lay beyond the railroad, highways had not yet come, color country was yet to be discovered. National Parks, movie crews, tourisms hype, sunbelt retirement, and an extension of the garish culture of the Las Vegas Strip were still in the future. With their Mormon sense of community, their isolated but interrelated towns, and their lore of faith and folly, Dixies people were as near a self-contained society as could be found in the burgeoning West of the turn-of-the-century decades. Life was limited, opportunities few, and parochialism intense. Self-identity was closely tied to the desert environment. From long experience, people knew the deserts limits and its attributes. Practices and institutions were tailored to its potentials, and in important respects, people belonged to it and shared its character. Even their failed dreams, their secrets, and their moods grew in large measure from their experience in and with the country during the two generations that followed Brigham Youngs death.

In this context, the young Juanita grew. From the town of Bunkerville, she absorbed the lore of home. She attended grade school and, by a fortunate turn, was one of the twelve students who made up the first graduating class of Bunkervilles high school. By another fortuitous turn, she also had a year of normal school training there when, as part of a belated effort to upgrade schools, the state of Nevada brought in Mina Connell from Columbia University to teach a one-year course, graduates of which were to receive a temporary teaching certificate. With dreams of education at Columbia implanted in her heart, Juanita Brooks taught a year at neighboring Mesquite and a year at Bunkerville and attended a summer session at the University of Utah. Then followed her short and tragic marriage to Ernest Pulsipher, which ended when he died of cancer in 1921.

Stunned by sorrow and raising an infant son, the young widow found a certain solace in transcribing the pioneer journals of the Pulsipher family, an activity foreshadowing the course of her later life. But to meet immediate needs, she turned to education, first at Dixie College in St. George and then at Brigham Young University, where her interests focused increasingly upon creative writing. On her return to southern Utah, she took a position in 1926 at Dixie College, where she taught English for several years before another first influenced her educational life. This time the college offered its first sabbatical leave. Teachers with longer tenure were offered the leave but for reasons of disinterest or family responsibilities turned it down until at last it was offered to her. With no hesitation she accepted. She attended Columbia University, where she received a masters degree in 1929 thus realizing the dream Miss Connell had implanted.

Back in southern Utah, she was appointed dean of women at Dixie College and entered into a life in the community that in 1934 led to her marriage to Will Brooks, county sheriff, who became her chief supporter as she moved into a career as a historian. A federally sponsored project to collect and transcribe the pioneer journals of Mormon Countrys Dixie during the depression was her first major step towards history. Later she also wrote articles for Harpers, the Readers Digest, and the Utah Historical Quarterly. In 1942 a biography of her grandfather Dudley Leavitt became her first book-length publication.

Juanita Brookss development as a historian during the late 1930s and 1940s was greatly stimulated by a flowering interest in Utah and western topics among a remarkable group of Utah writers, many of whom like herself addressed the past from unlikely freelance backgrounds including literature, journalism, folklore, and sociology. Among the earliest of these to touch her life was Nels Anderson, who became the first writer of what may be called the Dixie School of Mormon History when his Desert Saints, which approaches the Mormon experience from the standpoint of southern Utah, was published in 1942. Also influential were her uncle LeRoy Hafen and his wife Ann Woodbury, who were already attracting national acclaim for their work in Colorado, mountain man, and Mormon history. Then too the success of Giant Joshua, written by her St. George friend Maureen Whipple in the mid1940s, suggested that Dixie held some interest for publishers. Exerting a somewhat different influence were Utah folklorists Austin and Alta Fife, Hector Lee, and Wayland Hand, who encouraged Brooks to believe that her own roots in the folkways of the region gave her a legitimate claim to the attention of the reading public. During this same period, she formed close and fruitful friendships with historian Dale Morgan and writer Wallace Stegner. She collaborated closely with them in defining the UtahMormon topics to which all three turned and helped them identify source materials. Both men read her manuscripts and helped her work out the mix of historical, literary, and folk method by which she addressed the past as well as helped her find publishers and otherwise promoted her career. Less directly involved but still significant were Bernard DeVoto and Fawn Brodie. Encouraged by all these, Brooks was drawn increasingly to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a study to which she devoted most of the 1940s.