Salt Lake City: The gathering place : an illustrated history - Hardcover

McCormick, John S.

9780897810180: Salt Lake City: The gathering place : an illustrated history

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089781018X ISBN 13: 9780897810180

Publisher: Windsor Publications, 1980

Notions of homogeneity to the contrary, Salt Lake City has had a history of on-going religious, political, and ethnic conflict. When Mormon settlers arrived, they vied with indigenous people for economic, as well as cultural, hegemony. Over the ensuing years,through the Walker War, the Tintic War, the Blackhawk War, and other skirmishes, and through disease and disruption of the lifestyle and social fabric, Utah's native population declined from 20,000 in the late 1840s to a little over 2,000 at the turn of the century. Mormons also wanted independence from the United States to which the latter responded by sending an army, in the face of which Mormons completely abandoned their capital city. They left it a ghost town until a negotiated peace allowed them to return. During the Civil War, federal troops again established a presence in Salt Lake City, this time in the foothills with cannons trained on the city below. The status of black slaves was determined early on by an ordinance that required them to "labor faithfully all reasonable hours, and do such service with fidelity as may be required by his or her master or mistress." As elsewhere in the United States, blacks were an invisible part of the demographic landscape. Nor was the valley utopian for many of the foreign immigrants who crowded into several ethnic neighborhoods on the west side of town, who found work in the mines and railroad yards. So, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the community that had once been a religious sanctuary and that had striven for communal enterprise became an example of good old-fashioned self-interest and frontier squabbling. People no longer even agreed on whether to fund municipal garbage collection or sewer installation. Labor unions mushroomed and radicals proliferated. Alongside respectable businesses, well-attended brothels appeared. During the Great Depression, marches, rallies, and demonstrations attracted thousands.

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