Introduction

On a chilly late-summer morning in 1853, Captain and explorer John Williams Gunnison, a topographical engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ordered his company to circumvent the newly ‘discovered’ Black Canyon in what would become Colorado Territory, and begin the long trek westward towards present-day Utah in what was then known as Manti, Utah Territory. By October 26, the cohort was well upstream of Sevier Lake and was suddenly attacked by what they initially perceived as a band of Pahvantis, or Ute Indians. Gunnison and all but four of his men were killed, a massacre memorialized in Millard County, not far from Hinckley, Utah, where in 1927 a bronze marker was erected to commemorate this expedition and massacre, and that would later, in 1976, be added to the National Register of Historic Places. Gunnison, a graduate of West Point Military Academy, was a skilled and experienced explorer, leading men and participating in such official surveys as one in the Florida panhandle in 1838, and another in the Great Lakes region from 1841-1849.  Both Black Canyon and Sevier Lake would see him memorialized as well with place namesakes, such as the Gunnison River, which runs through the Black Canyon in Colorado, and the Gunnison Bend Reservoir, nearby Sevier Lake.

But there is another story of Gunnison and his men’s massacre that persists even today, like the place names and bronze markers that are his epithet.  In letters to his wife in the weeks and months before the event and in his own words a few years earlier in the eponymous The Mormons, Or, Latter-Day Saints, In the Valley of the Great Salt Lake: A History of Their Rise and Progress, Peculiar Doctrines and Present Condition, and Prospects Derived from Personal Observation During a Residence Among Them (1852), Gunnison let it be known that he felt threatened by this religious sect. The aggressive ways its founder and the governor of the Utah Territory, Brigham Young. approached Indian affairs was startling to Gunnison. But especially cruel and deranged were Young’s deployments of Mormon adherents that had donned Indian clothing, painted their faces like Ute’s, and attacked encroaching settlers, Indians, and others, key aspects of Young’s defense of the religious community in Utah Territory and a defense that acted as a red herring for authorities, as Young disclaimed knowledge of the near-genocidal tactics that he employed. This essay, in the context of this richer history of Gunnison and his doomed Army Corps, examines the nature of historicity as stylized and presented by the U.S. federal government, and expressed through the National Parks Service, and offers some observances that park historians may use to help with incorporating more rich and full narratives, such as, for example, religious and political histories, of the people, places, and things that public historian’s study and ultimately present as work product to an ever more informed public.

Argument

Now a national park, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is at least 1.2b years old, the product of upheavals in the earth when the present-day continents were not yet formed, and which were caused by landmasses in what is now Colorado and Montana being squeezed by an extinct island chain uplifting and exposing the ancient mineral-rich rock that forms the canyon’s sheer, 2,700-foot studded cliffs.  Leaving only a narrow gap of 40 feet at the bottom at some points, geologic processes including volcanism and mountain water run-off were instrumental in carving the canyon and reformed its incredible landscape over hundreds of millions of years into the spectacle we see today. While not exactly ‘discovered’ by Gunnison it was mapped by him and his Corps for the first time instead, and sometime after the massacre the river that formed the canyon acquired his namesake.  The National Park Service, on its website and at a small visitor center onsite, describe Gunnison, his family, and his expedition to the Black Canyon and the massacre in Utah Territory, with an oblique reference to the controversary surrounding the massacre and its ties to The Church of Latter-day Saints and its Mormon adherents. 

Upon learning of the massacre, Gunnison’s wife was distraught, immediately firing off letters to the federal government and Governor Young, questioning the circumstances of her husband’s death and implicating the fledgling and defensive Mormon church. A federal court agreed, and the incident blew up in the nation’s press.  Even the White House became concerned with the amount of violence flaring up between Indians and Mormons in the Territory of Utah.  One source claimed that Young and his Mormon followers were not amenable to a mapping of the territory for fear of an influx of citizens into an otherwise organized religious community of like-minded Mormon adherents. Primary sources, including letters, courtroom transcripts, newspapers, and U.S. government documents, press the claims of Mrs. Gunnison.  “I have always held myself that the Mormons were the directors of my husband’s murder,” wrote Gunnison’s widow in a petition to a federal judge.  Ultimately, Young responded to official inquiries, loudly decrying the Ute people. “It was a time of war,” wrote Young “It cannot be expected of the Indian, in their present low and ignorant condition, with all their traditions and ferocious natures, to understand and act in accordance with the provisions of law which they never had the least knowledge of, nor any opportunity for obtaining such information.”

Before his death, Gunnison wrote of Mormon’s that “they call up historical facts, and exhibit before us similar fanaticism in all ages of the church, in which whole countries and communities have been overwhelmed for a time, and which passing away, are the wonder of after ages; and we come to the melancholy conclusion that nothing is too absurd when it assumes the name of religion, to have its thousands of votaries." As well, and possibly as a result, Gunnison’s expeditions to the western territories were complicated by the presence of The Church of Latter-day Saints.  Indeed, over time and around the world, religious sentiment has had enormous impacts on historical events that repercuss today. 

A mock trial of six Paiute Indians was erected, with several exonerated, and the facts of the massacre and the telling of Garrison’s heroic exploratory adventures to map the territory were nearly silenced altogether.  Resurrected by locals in the early 20th century, and later the National Park Service in 1976, the memory of Garrison and his remarkable ‘discovery’ of the Black Canyon are honored today, and narrowly contextualized for visitors.

The National Parks Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States federal government that oversees “423 individual units covering more than 85 million acres in all 50 states,” and has as its mission statement to “preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations,” implicating history as a key factor in the production and dissemination of information about the nation’s historical parks, sites, and other notable places.  In 2011, the Organization of American Historians was invited to survey the sprawling federal government agency to assess the efficacy and breadth of historical professional contribution to the NPS’s efforts.  They made several recommendations to an agency that had, to them, clearly ossified into silos and relegated new historical methods and analysis to the back burner, favoring interpretation instead, which was usually based on tired, Eurocentric narratives of ‘big men’ and other white administrators and trained experts that had shepherded history at the NPS for most of the agency’s history. In the authors’ first finding they note that “the intellectually artificial, yet bureaucratically real, divide between history and interpretation constrains NPS historians, compromises history practice in the agency, and hobbles effective history interpretation. The NPS should find and take every opportunity to reintegrate professional history practice and interpretation.” In effect, the OAH recommended that NPS immediately staff and fund the lead historical sciences office and devise a plan to bridge the divide between interpreters and a new generation of historians.  The purpose of this was to include and incorporate more and varied voices to the historical narrative, much like the inclusion of a full history of Gunnison contributes to the history of place for the NPS’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

As the authors of “Imperiled Promise” observed during two years of site-based study of the NPS, the histories of many of the 423 sites that NPS manages reveal issues, both funding and administrative, that prevent support for a more fulsome and varied narrative that highlights the cultural uniqueness of these places.  Suggested are inputs from the social sciences such as oral history and other political, religious, and economic histories that through permeations, including revisionism and changes in historicity over several generations, have been downplayed or ignored altogether.  Professional historians at the NPS have a duty to the American public to avoid the trap of defaulting to traditional narratives, and present a full-throated ‘new’ history that incorporates the significance of regular peoples’ contributions to history, place names over time that help visitors imagine a more broad spatial universe that is more encompassing, and oral and written histories by women, black people, immigrants, Indians, and other marginalized peoples in the maintenance and presentation of these historic national parks.  One notices this slip into traditional narratives, half-baked histories, and low funding levels in the NPS, facilitated by low expectations of administrators and other government servants and which burdens visitors with unmodern experiences.  Some years after the OAH study of the NPS, the authors were called to The George Wright Society to reflect on their experiences.  Marla Miller reflected on her dismay early in the study “to find this 1988 initiative, entitled ‘Shaping the History of the NPS History Program,’ posing almost identical questions. This turned up long after the scope of work calling for our survey was drafted, and long after our own questionnaire had been so painstakingly crafted,” leaving unanswered key questions from the agency about its veracity and attention to the recommendations from the historians, and leaving visitors to the parks victim to “specialized silos” within the NPS that restrict information about history, including “rich, ongoing debates, experiments, and developments in museums, the academy, and schools outside NPS.”

For example, historian and ecologist David Glassberg at the University of Massachusetts argued in his 2014 essay “Place, Memory, and Climate Change” that while climate change is very real and caused by humans, American historians should nevertheless pivot in the headwinds of calls for wholesale changes in energy consumption and production, to an approach that favors narratives of the ”adaptability” of landscapes and human beings, to turn away “assumptions about inevitability,” and instead return to the practice of telling “parables” of place to reinforce Americans’ connection to land and remember their ancestors’ “resilience” in the face of unsurmountable changes in local climate.  “Parables of resilience have the most value for public historians, since properly told they neither romanticize the past nor imply that it is too late to avoid a pre-determined dystopian future,” he notes, dismissing a clear and present danger to human survival in the dawning Anthropocene, and age in which, like no other, human beings are impacting climate and weather patterns in decidedly debilitating and possibly civilization-ending ways.  Like Young, Glassberg would have the public robbed of the wider conversation he himself covers in detail, in articulating that island and other low-lying landmasses around the world often contain the world’s poorest and unsophisticated nationals and face imminent danger, and that it deserves requisite action right now. 

Other examples of such a wider conversation abound, even in new local histories, such as the contrast between a mid-19th century interpretative film produced by the Whitman Museum and an updated counterpart produced in the 20th century.  The contrast is self-evident as Dr. Larry Cebula of Eastern Washington University provides context for the Whitman expedition and its homage in Walla Walla, Washington, explaining that religious fervor and a sense of superiority influenced the white settlers, including the eponymous Whitman family, as they pioneered into treacherous lands and mortally offended the local Indian population.  Earlier, in the mid-20th century, museum curators commissioned a film that was completely different in tone, exhorting a stomach-turning narrative that glad handled the mythos of the religious crusade that compelled the Whitman’s pioneering westward, and chastised the local Indian population as ignorant and uncivilized. These examples can be taken to the extreme, as when Ojibwe writer, critic, and scholar called for the outright return of NPS lands to Indians, serving as indicators that more voices want to participate in the historical conversation and are, in fact, enabled and heard today in the broader community of historical professionals.

Conclusion

As historians and other professionals in the NPS, people can and must do a better job of bringing a fulsome historical truth to the public, disavowing both the old trappings of denial of ‘the other’ including Eurocentrism and new notions including global capitalism, rejecting the allure of stylized history that, as one aspect of our national shared narrative, shapes political divides today.  This behavior of inflicting political and other biases, including religious biases, on historiography amounts to nothing more than the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations,’ a phrase used by conservative speechwriter Michael Gerson.  In the place of low expectations, historians could agitate more vociferously for the inclusion of suppressed voices – those of the marginalized, the poor, and other disaffected peoples that influenced historical events.  All to highlight a more human story, a story that compels everyone to do better by one another, by demanding action on and attention to the narratives and stories by and about as many influencers of historical narratives as possible at the NPS and beyond.  People who, all living the experience of, and uniquely engaged in, an American history of their own that will itself hopefully help to inform future generations in new and dynamic ways.