Vol 1 905p Vol 2 961p.

This extraordinarily comprehensive, well-documented, biographical dictionary of some 1,500 photographers (and workers engaged in photographically related pursuits) active in western North America before 1865 is enriched by some 250 illustrations. Far from being simply a reference tool, the book provides a rich trove of fascinating narratives that cover both the professional and personal lives of a colorful cast of characters.

This book explores the roots of the Miller/Lewis family. From colonial America, the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the expultions and forced migrations of the early Mormon saints, to the settlement and development of the state of Utah, we learn who we are by seeing who we were. We also learn what great potential we have, for we have been blessed with a heritage rich in sacrifice, hard work and vision.

Lt. William Pratt ( -1678), was the son of Rev. William Pratt and Elizabeth. He married Elizabeth Clark in 1636 and they had eight children. He was the first settler in America in this line. He went to Newton (now Cambridge) Mass. in 1633 and then to Hartford, Conn. Where he helped develop the town as one of the original proprietors, or settlers of Hartord, Conn.

John Esplin was born in Scotland in 1828. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1849 and immigrated to Utah. In 1853 he married Margaret Ann Webster, who had come from England, and they were sent to colonize southern Utah. They eventually became part of the Orderville experiment. They had 13 children and information on many of their descendants is included in this volume. Most of their descendants now live in Utah and the southwest and are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The three volumes of My Own Pioneers together tell a remarkable story of the desperate pioneer struggles of four generations of the author’s family. Although the memorable historical journey begins seven generations ago, these three volumes of stories focus on four important pioneer generation. They are the culmination of fifteen years of painstaking research as the author carefully reconstructs her family’s pioneer struggles from before 1830 to 1918 using information from family records, journals, memoirs, histories and letters, supplemented by accounts from their pioneer companions, and by Church and other official records. Volume I tells about the author’s once prosperous pioneer families survived the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, then eventually relocated to join the newly founded Mormon Church. The stories tell how the pressure of mobs and mob wars eventually forced these families to abandon everything as they were driven from place to place, until they found themselves exiled on the western-most border of the United States—at the Missouri River—looking toward the wild and hostile West as their only refuge. Stories describe how dozens of family members were among the Mormon refugees who died by the hundreds at the Missouri River, of illness, starvation and exposure. Yet family members had managed to journey among Indians on the frontier to preach, and had sailed through nearly catastrophic ocean storms to preach in England. And despite much sorrow and hardship, this volume relates how five family members left their loved ones behind at the sickly Missouri River in order to march down the Old Santa Fe Trail in the U.S. Army’s Mormon Battalion to prove their loyalty to the government by helping to fight a war with Mexico.

Catharine Jane Cottam Romney (1855-1918) was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to Thomas and Caroline Smith Cottam. At a young age, she moved with her family to St. George where she grew into young womanhood. In 1873, at the age of eighteen, Catherine married Miles P. Romney as the third of his five plural wives. In 1881 Miles was called to help settle St. Johns, Arizona. Following the anti-polygamy prosecutions in 1884, Miles Romney and his fourth wife, Annie moved to Mexico. Catharine and her family followed in 1887. Miles died in 1904, leaving four widows. In 1912, Catharine was forced to flee Mexico, with other Mormon colonists, from the devestation of the Mexican Revolution. She spent her remaining years in the United States. Catharine died in 1918. She was the mother of ten children. Her children and grandchildren settled in Arizona, California and Utah and were prominent in the LDS Church as well as politics and education.

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands. Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning. This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.