Ogden Utah in 1899.
On this day in 1919, the Motor Transport Convoy left tiny Echo and traveled on to Ogden, Utah.
They were welcomed in Morgan, Utah, a town I'm not familiar with, and received two keys there, one to the town and one to the state. At Morgan, they were addressed and welcomed specifically by a Mormon bishop and the Mormon Church Relief Society women, which is an organization that still exists.
This entry points out a bunch of interesting things, one of which is the inadequacy of the diary entries. A reader of American Road would find that a lot of interesting events occurred on this extremely long 1919 trip, but most are omitted by the officer who was the daily diarist. And of course they would be. He was only summarizing the progress of the day, and the problems they encountered, as a rule. Only when something really unusual comes up does it have a really good chance of being noted, such as when one of the enlisted men was married on a Sunday, although street dances and events involving the entire command are often listed.
This entry is only the second one mentioning a religious service organization, the first one being
July 24, when the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization, was mentioned.
The command, up until yesterday, did normally halt on Sundays, when this stopped in this case without explanation. Sunday is a day in the Army on which soldiers are normally given a day of rest which also acknowledges that in a Christian society, that's what most people also did. At the time we're looking at here, 1919, the 40 hour work week was not yet the law, so a lot of people worked six days a week, although in rural communities, and the country was much more rural in 1919 than it is now, that was often a type of market day for rural dwellers which amounted to sort of a day off. W
e would note that on the prior day the command didn't start moving until a little after noon, and almost certain the officers and men were dismissed until late after noon to attend church if they wished to.
In addition to what we've noted, church services are mentioned in the diary, up to this point, twice. Once when in the Midwest a protestant pastor gave a service for the command, and then the Episcopal church service that involved the enlisted man who married. And that takes us back to this entry.
The earlier entry concerning the protestant minister lets us know that at that point they command was passing through part of the Midwest where protestant churches were well represented, which they still are today. The appearance of the Knights of Columbus was in Marshalltown, Iowa, which is in central Iowa. Then, as now, Iowa had many heavily Catholic communities (my grandfather on my father's side came from one), and chances are Marshalltown was one.
This is unfortunately the point at which our data breaks down and, moreover, the point at which a really good map would be handy. We'll get to maps in a moment, but I can't find one for 1919.
I can several that are more or less current, but they're also highly deceptive. Probably the best of them is this one:
This map is likely the most accurate, maybe, as what it shows is religious affiliation today, in our own era, on the part of religiously active families. Another map can be easily found that demonstrates the same thing by claimed affiliation, and is largely the same, but this one shows something that's more subtle, but is still inaccurate.
For example, if you look at this you'll be left with the impression that Wyoming his heavily Catholic. If you made that assumption, you'd be wrong.
What the map actually demonstrates, but without explanation, is that Catholics are largest group of single denomination church goers, and the map that shows simple affiliation, would do the same. But in reality, Catholics are outnumbered everywhere in Wyoming by Protestants, who collectively make up the larger group in both groups, but who are split into a lot more denominations.*
What you'll also see, and what brings us to this point, is the "Mormon Corridor", which is the gray area on this map centered in Utah. That exists now, and it existed in 1919 as well.
Okay, before we go on to that, we better flesh out the story in 1919, which we only hinted at with Marshalltown Iowa. I'd love to have a map like the one above for 1919, but it might also be deceptive.
As we've noted here before, the United States was founded by Protestant people. This doesn't mean that everyone in the U.S. was Protestant from day one, particularly if we take into account areas that were settled by Spain and France. But even in the English colonies there were always a small number of Catholics and a smaller number of Jews. The Protestants, however, were not all of one faith even early on. The Church of England dominated in most places, but there were other Protestant churches, often ones very much at odds with the Church of England, right from the onset.
Catholics really began to arrive in numbers during the mid 19th Century when large scale immigration occurred from Ireland and Germany, and then later from Italy. Added to that were lands added to the American territorial domain that had been Spanish or French, which incorporated Catholic populations. None the less, in 1850, just after the Mexican War which had shocked the Army into treating its Catholic enlisted men more fairly, the Catholic population of the United States was just 5% of all Americans. By 1910, however, it was 17%.
It was also concentrated in communities that strongly reflected ethnic heritage, and would be right up through the 1940s. So, you could find heavily Catholic communities, often living in Catholic Ghettos, in large urban areas. Irish Catholics were also well represented in certain types of agriculture, sheep being first among them.
This pattern of strong ethnic concentration existed, albeit to a much lesser degree, in the 20th Century as early as the first half of it. This in part reflected earlier settlement patterns. So in some regions of the South the predominant church was Presbyterian, reflecting an early Scots Irish immigration. Lutheran Churches were well represented anywhere Scandinavians or northern Germans has settled. The Baptist Church, then as now, absolutely dominated in the post Civil War South, reflecting a large scale shift form the Episcopal Church following that war. The Episcopal Church, however, was a very strong and large church and was the strongest church in the United States at that time, reflecting its early history and the fact that wealth often tended to concentrate in its membership. Conversions from other Christian religions into the Episcopal Church, at that time, was common for economic and social reasons (it's really easy, for example, to find Army officers who were other religions becoming Episcopalians as their careers advanced). The Episcopal Church today is a tiny shadow of its former self, not even getting a color in the map above, but it was a titan in 1919.
So what we've seen, but only barely, is that as this convoy traveled across the United States, it traveled across the ethnic and religious map of the United States. Almost everywhere it went at first it would have been traveling through cities and towns where Protestant churches predominated and there would have always been an Episcopal Church wherever they were, and often a Presbyterian one.
Most of any size, by that time, would have had a Catholic Church as well. Most of the areas they traveled through, moreover, were predominantly if not exclusively "white", although as frequent readers here know, racial categories are frankly suspect in many ways. Only in Illinois, where the command stopped in Chicago, which experienced race riots that year, and on the East Coast, and in Omaha Nebraska, would they have almost certainly have seen American blacks. And this in one of the years during which the Great Migration was in progress.
100% of the command involved in the convoy, being in the segregated Army, would have been white.
Drilling down a little further, however, some interesting things were now happening.
We've already noted Iowa. By that point of the trip the command would have been traveling through territory where a majority of the local residents were often Catholic, and predominantly of German ancestry. Entering Omaha, however, they would have returned to a situation somewhat like that of Chicago in which there was a real ethnic diversity and a large black population. After Omaha, the population was again white, but there would have been once again a fairly substantial, if not majority, Catholic population in many of the towns they were traveling through. AS they were now traveling the path of the Union Pacific, whoever, there would have been an Hispanic community now in any town of size, which were few.
Entering Wyoming they would have been entering a state which by today's standards is "white", but which featured considerably more ethnic diversity than might be supposed. Indeed, Wyoming by some measures would have been highly diverse by the standards of the first quarter of the 20th Century, during which racial categorizations included many more divisions than they do now. At the time, as we've explored before, the predominant "race" in the country was the "Anglo Saxon Race", which was a much more limited definition than "white". Racial discrimination was common against many more groups than blacks as well, with Irish, Italian, Greek, Hispanic, Chinese, Japanese, and so on, communities all being targeted, often highly openly, by various groups for discrimination.
And Wyoming was much more ethnically and ethnoreligiously diverse by 19th Standards than is commonly imagined. Indeed, the southern portion of the state that the Lincoln Highway traveled through, which had been trailblazed by the Union Pacific Railroad, was distinctly so.
In entering the state the convoy first stopped at Hilsdale, a small farming community then, and an even smaller farming community now, where the ethnic and ethnoreligious nature of the state was quite unlikely to be apparent. But that may very well have started to change a bit upon entering Cheyenne, the state capitol.
Like most Midwestern towns of any substance, a strong element of English and Protestant British Isles heritage was, and is, apparent. In the immediate downtown of the city, a very English Episcopal church had existed since 1888 and was modeled on the Stoke Poges church in England, sending a very distinct message. Interestingly, the Episcopal Church, which had a Cathedral in Wyoming, did not choose Cheyenne as the Bishop's seat, which we shall shortly see.
That English heritage was also shown in the very substantial downtown Methodist Church, which in those days was the Methodist Episcopal Church, reflecting that it had its origin as a movement within the Church of England. Their church dated to 1890.
Probably more surprising, however, is that the Catholic Diocese of Wyoming had located in the state's capitol, and it had a very substantial new Cathedral.
St. Mary's Catholic Cathedral in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The cornerstone of the Cathedral was laid in 1909, so the church was in existence in 1919 when the Motor Transport convoy traveled through town. That the state, with its small population, already have its own diocese is telling, and reflects, more than anything else, an early Irish immigration into the state, although by 1919 the state already had strong Catholic Slavic and Italian populations and the beginnings of a substantial Greek, and hence Greek Orthodox, population. Added to the Catholic population, moreover, was a substantial Hispanic population that lived all along the course of the Union Pacific and which was supplemented in the mid 20th Century by New Mexican migrants.
Wyoming had a Catholic population very early on in various forms, including New Mexican migrants who helped the Army expand Ft. Laramie, French Canadian fur trappers, Irish and German soldiers and convert Indians, the latter category being something that was very real but frequently forgotten about.** When the railroad came in the population very much increased in the form of Irish and New Mexican rail workers. Coal development came almost immediately thereafter, and that very much increased the population in the form of Slavic coal miners. Sheep ranching the added to the mix with a large influx of Irish sheepmen. At the point in time we're looking at, 1919, sheep ranching, coal mining and railroad work were all major industrial factors in the state. This reflected itself in a vibrant Catholic Church in the state, although as noted, Catholic were and are an overall minority.
Much the same as noted above was reflected with the convoy crawled over Sherman Hill and on to Laramie.
Laramie, like Cheyenne, is one of the oldest towns in Wyoming, with the Gem City of the Plains having come into existence due to the railroad. That gave the town the same ethnic mix as Cheyenne with it being a bit modified by the early placement of the University of Wyoming there. Somehow or another, and perhaps because of an English fascination with ranching that came along in the late 19th Century, it was strongly attractive to English ex-patriots at one time. It's likely for this reason that it was, up until fairly recently, the seat of Wyoming's Episcopal Bishop.***
From Laramie, the convoy went through Bosler,
Rock River, and on to Medicine Bow. The diarist didn't mention Bosler at all, no doubt because it is and was a very small town. Most of what was likely in Bosler then is still there, which isn't much, but it's in much worse condition. It's basically a crossroads into the Iron Mountain Range and probably a service stop on the Union Pacific. Indeed, even now I'll occasionally see service cars parked on the tracks there.
Rock River, is a very small town as well, so I was surprised to read about the Red Cross Canteen that greeted the convoy there and served lunch. Based on the photographs we posted,
Rock River was really in its heyday at the time.
That day has really passed and so I can't give you any observations about the town now, other than that it remains there as a ranching town, I suspect, today. I'm always amazed that it hangs on, neither growing or declining. A Baptist Church has been built there within the last few years, but I'd be skeptical if there was a preexisting one.
Indeed, I can't find any evidence of an earlier church in Rock River at all, which doesn't mean that there wasn't one there. But Rock River may stand for something else in this journey, which is the sort of loose religious views that characterize Wyoming, which has long been one of the states where individuals are among the least likely to claim a religious affiliation. There's much made of "None's" in the news now, but in much of wide open Wyoming, once you pass into ranch country, that's been sort of vaguely common for a long time. It's not that people don't have any religious beliefs, but rather that they're unformed and no particularly allegiance is tightly claimed by many people. Indeed, a scene based on this was included in Owen Wister's
The Virginian, which was published in 1902.
If so, this is a good place to mention the novel, as Rock River is down the road, quite some ways, from the next town, Medicine Bow, where the novel starts off.
If Rock River isn't the beginning of the wilder Wyoming (maybe Bosler is for that matter), Medicine Bow certainly is. By that point the travelers were solidly into real ranching country and had been for many miles. In 1919, they were also into sheep country Medicine Bow was likely more of a happening place in 1919 than it is now, but it was a ranch town then and it remains one now, although then the Union Pacific stopped there and hence the hotel got its start, a start that was about to be boosted by the improvements that were soon coming to the Lincoln Highway.
Once again, the diarist didn't bother to mention the next town the convoy went through, Hanna. Hanna was a coal mining town at the time, and was right up through the 1980s. It's a mere shadow of its former self now, even though it was a going concern back in the 1980s.
Memorial in Hanna Wyoming to its World War One veterans.
Hanna was based on coal, even though sheep ranching was a major industry in the area. It's World War One memorial shows that in a few exotic names showing up on it, men who went overseas and were probably returning to the continent they were from in order to fight in that continent's giant war.
It was a site of prior sad 20th Century loss in and of itself, having suffered two horrific early 20th Century mine disasters.
The next place mentioned was Ft. Steele, which was nothing but a railhead at that time. It was also a giant sheep shipping location, confirming the extent to which the convoy had left farm country, and cattle country, and was in sheep country.
Perhaps it was oddly familiar to the men to camp in what had been a military post, albeit an abandoned one. The only current residents were associated with the Union Pacific.
After
Ft. Fred Steele came Rawlins, another Union Pacific town with a strong sheep industry as well. Like the other substantial UP towns we've mentioned, Rawlins had an ethnic and ethnoreligious nature that was similar to them. A substantial Catholic Church had been built in 1916 as a result.
Just a couple of blocks away was a much older church, however, the
1882 France Memorial Presbyterian Church. Presbyterianism at the time was very strongly associated with the Scots and Scots Irish, and often indicated that people of that background were in the community. I don't know if it does in this case, but I suspect it does. Indeed, the Presbyterian Church in Casper was founded about the same time, and at the recommendation to the founding Presbyterian minister that he relocate himself there from another Wyoming town he intended to found a church in, as "Casper was a Scotch city".
It wasn't, but that there were enough Scottish people in those towns, or Scots Irish, or people of Scotch descent, so that somebody could say it, and a substantial church be built, says something.
Both of those churches represent changes in the fortunes of those denominations over time. . . maybe. The France Memorial Church is now a Baptist Church, a denomination whose fortunes have risen in the Protestant world over time, although it is still most strongly represented in the American South.
Casper's First Presbyterian Church, founded in 1913, changed its name only a couple of years after it celebrated its centennial.
From Rawlins they went on to a stay in the Red Desert and the next day traveled on to Point of Rocks, Rock Spring and Green River. All of those towns where mining (and ranching) towns.
Rock Springs indeed contained an ethnic makeup formed from every European nation where mining occurred, with the Welsh, Poles, other Slavs, Italians and Greeks all prominently represented there. As it was also a railroad town, like Green River, which is very nearby, it also had a strong Irish community.
The ethnic character of Rock Springs was so strong, in fact, that the Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne had provided the town with two churches, one for the Irish population and the other for the Slavic one. That latter church reflected that in its name, Sts. Cyril and Methodius. It's first pastor was a speaker of Slavic languages, which is in part no doubt why a separate parish was established.
And the Greek Orthodox Church, which is not well represented in Wyoming overall, also built a church nearby.
And then they crossed an ethnoreligious divide.
The Mormon Corridor, from Wikipedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1059487
There's no solid line or fence or anything of the type, but after Rock Springs and Green River the convoy entered into a new ethnoreligious region of the country which they would remain in for the next several days, which is referred to as "The Mormon Corridor".
Now, as we've set out as we've moved along, the command had moved through and between a lot of different religious and ethnic communities in their long trail across the United States. And in 1919, those differences tended to be sharper than they are now. Indeed, in areas that where Catholics were present but a minority, even in Wyoming, they were often subject to prejudices. In much of the Midwest and even part of the West, such as Colorado, the Klu Klux Klan was on the rise, and at that time it borrowed from some Protestant religious themes and it was sharply anti Catholic and anti Jewish, as well as being anti foreigner and anti black. So if you stayed anyone area, which they of course did not, you'd surely have noticed this, unless you were too acclimated it all to do so, after a fairly short time.
And as we've also noted, self segregation was a real feature of the era, with ethnic communities very sharply segregating themselves into ethnic communities.
And here you would have started to see that.
Americans of an historical mindset are generally familiar with the Mormon Church, which I understand doesn't really like to be called that, in a very general and often inaccurate way. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is the name by which it calls itself, is one of several churches that all have their origin in their founder, Joseph Smith. Most Americans outside of the West sort of generally suppose that Mormons are sort of like really strict Baptists, or something, other than that they may have tolerated polygamy at some time.****
In actuality the LDS are a very distinct and unique religious community and were, at one time, even fairly distinctly represented by the inclusions of some unique ethnic qualities in that that there were an unusual number of Mormons of Danish extraction. We're not going to try to make this a history of the LDS, but what we will note is that the history of the existence of the Mormon Corridor stems from their migration on the Oregon Trail starting in 1847 and lasting until 1869. The story is complicated but its roots lay in the fact that there was very strong animosity between Mormons and about everyone else in that time period and they understood to relocate themselves under the leadership of Brigham Young.
As noted, the story is complicated and it in fact involves a split in the Mormons themselves over doctrinal issues, with one branch, the "reformed branch" choosing more conventional Christian tenants and the larger branch choosing to accept some very controversial ones, which included polygamy. It was polygamy more than anything else that caused enormous tension between them and their neighbors and it was in fact illegal everywhere in the United States. As ti was however a tenant of the Mormon faith they persisted in it and relocated to the Salt Lake Valley, starting as we noted in in 1847.
The migration is often imagined to have settled all the Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley, or alternatively in Utah, but that's also untrue. The concentration of the migration was the Salt Lake Valley, but fairly early on Mormons also settled a wide swath of country that is depicted in the map set out above. This then causes a demographic feature in Wyoming where, while they are minority faith, they are hte majority in some communities. The convoy was traveling through those communities starting with Lyman, which was noted but only barely so in the diary. The next Mormon community they traveled through in Wyoming was Evanston, after which they traveled on to Echo, leaving the state. They'd remain in it the Corridor for the next several days.
But how much did they notice the different ethnoreligious nature of where they were? Perhaps not all that much really. They moved every day. By this point in time the Mormon had long ago abandoned polygamy, although it was also the case that as late as he early 20th Century some of it was tolerated in the Mormon community, so if they were inclined to notice that, which we can doubt that they would have been, they wouldn't have noticed that.
And other things which some folks notice today, they also would probably have not have. The food certainly would have been standard American fare for the era. People often note that Mormons abstain from alcohol, coffee, tea and smoking. Prohibition was on, however, and indeed Prohibition had received real support from the Mormon Church in Wyoming when it was adopted. It had also, however, received widespread support from the Catholic Church in Wyoming, which had no tenants against drinking.
And interestingly enough, Mormon restrictions on smoking, drinking, and the consumption of tea and coffee were less pronounced at the time than they are now. They were frowned on, but they were not frowned on in a really strict sense at that time. While its only a guess, my guess is that these practices were less observed on the fringe of the Mormon Corridor than in its heart, for obvious reasons. Be that as it may, it's certainly always been possible, or at least was in this era, to buy coffee in Salt Lake and it was probably not all that hard to buy tobacco either.***** An observant person would have likely have noticed that there weren't very many people smoking or drinking coffee, however. Nobody should have been drinking alcohol anywhere as it was illegal in the places we've recently been talking about, such as Wyoming, and wartime Prohibition remained on in the U.S. for unclear reasons.
One thing that soldiers might have noticed, and which they would notice today, is that Mormons are as a rule very clean cut and modestly dressed, although all of society was much more modestly dressed then as opposed to now. Travelers to locations like Utah State University today are often struck by the lack of tattoos and how clean cut everyone is. That did have some impression upon people at the time as well as even the very eccentric Unitarian Californian Everett Ruess remarked on it, principally in regard to young Mormon women, before he disappeared forever in the Utah desert. But, as noted, a higher standard of personal appearance existed a century ago in general, as opposed to now.
But would they have really noticed any of this?
Well, probably some. We'll see.
And I'd guess that you would. I've traveled as a soldier to Oklahoma and to South Korea. I'm a student of such things, but things were different in both of those places in ways that were hard not to notice.
But on the other hand, driving through for just a day, and in 1919, many of these things might not have been all that noticeable.
They'd definitely note the desert. . . that was coming right up.
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*Those doctrinal differences in the Protestant community would have been more sharply observed by various Protestant denominations at the time, but it should also be mentioned, as it will be below, that there were and are a fair number of Wyomingites who are simply "unchurched". This is often noted as a new trend in much of the United States, but it is not in Wyoming.
**As a total side, and very little recalled, Catholic conversions by Indians were substantially high enough that some well known Indians became Catholic at some point of their lives. Red Cloud, the famous Sioux chief who won the only Plains Indian War against the United States, was a devout Catholic after settling on the Reservation, as was his wife. Sitting Bull, surprisingly, was also a Catholic, although the state of his devotion is something I'm not aware of.
Other Christian denominations also had a substantial number of Indian converts. Both the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church had missions on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming at this point in time. There was some Mormon representation as well. Protestantism as an institution was strongly represented in the actual administration of the Reservation at the time in a way that would likely be regarded as improper now.
***The administrative offices of the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming have been moved to Casper.
****I'm not going to get into churches that look back to Joseph Smith and retain polygamy, which is a controversial subject that would be a huge diversion. Suffice it to say, the number of people who adhere to some sort of church that looks to Joseph Smith and which retain polygamy is small and is very likely signficantly outnumbered by the Community of Christ, which at one time called itself the Reformed Church of Jesus Chirst of Latter Day Saints, which not only does not contain polygamy but which has many conventional Christian beliefs while retaining some LDS beliefs.
*****And indeed by this time, Salt Lake had a large Irish and Greek community.
