This is the Place (UT)

While in Salt Lake late June, I took a spin up to the This is the Place monument, where Brigham Young declared on July 24^th, 1847 that he and his Mormon pioneer brethren would forge a new beginning in this here place.  My own great-great grandfather, Elisha Wilcox, was one of the pioneers who came through the pass two and a half years later to gander at more or less the same view I had.  With him was a newborn infant, Hyrum, my great-grandfather, born in October on the banks of the Green River en route to Salt Lake.

The Wilcox pioneers likely camped here.

 



I’ve taken a particular interest in gr-grandpa Hyrum.  He was one of the 19-year-old boys clinging to a steam engine in the famous photograph of the two steam trains meeting nose to nose after the golden spike was driven in May 1869 to complete the transcontinental railroad near Promontory, Utah.  Hyrum would later become the sheriff of Carbon County, a famed hotbed of coal miner strikes and union organizing.  When matters got out of hand, with some striking miners threatening violence against the “scabs” who continued to work, Hyrum made the front page of the New York Times when he called on the governor to send in the National Guard.

Later, when the legendary Mother Jones came to the Carbon County town of Helper to support the miners’ cause, Hyrum wanted her quarantined, allegedly to control the spread of smallpox.  But 120 armed Italian miners came to her defense and a stand-off ensued that might have turned tragic had Sheriff Wilcox not engineered a more diplomatic outcome.  The outcome included the peaceful arrest and brief detention of all 120 miners.  The newspapers back then offer few other details.  Doggone, if only someone had recorded a video of these events with their smartphone.  Hyrum would have been the one with the broad, curled mustache and a clean hat.

I wonder about the kind of man he was.  He believed in law and order.  He was humane.  I learned he was a Democrat, the only Democrat to win elective office in Carbon County in the year William McKinley was reelected president.  And before becoming sheriff, he was a local constable, so it’s not improbable that he served on a posse that went after Butch Cassidy after the coal company’s payroll was robbed in Helper in 1897.  He worked guard duty for a time at the Castle Gate mine just outside Helper and seemed to enjoy being in the thick of it, whatever “it” was.

To further my research, I visited the state archives in Salt Lake and stumbled on a few old documents, including the governor’s November 1903 proclamation dispatching the National Guard and a May 1904 letter to the governor signed by Hyrum explaining the events that occurred following the stand-off with those pesky miners bent on protecting Mother Jones.  I’ll post more of the story as the research continues.