The Kingdom, the Power, and the Water

Among the truly outstanding books written in this century about the American frontier—and the shelf of such books is rather small—is Great Basin Kingdom by Leonard J. Arrington, published in 1958. When it appeared, it had only a few rivals either in scholarship or ideas. There was Henry Nash Smith’s work on the West as symbol and myth, Bernard DeVoto’s vigorous account of explorers and imperialists, Paul Morgan’s saga of the Rio Grande valley, Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell, and Walter Prescott Webb’s sweeping survey of Europeans on the global frontier. All of those books appeared in the 1950s within a few years of each other. All were well researched and brilliantly written, in many cases by accomplished novelists whose talents in creating plot and character recruited a wide audience for frontier and western history. Arrington’s study of the Mormon frontier was different from the others in that it was the work of an economic and social historian who was interested in how institutions took shape in one small part of the West and how they differed from those in other parts of the region and in the East. Like the other historians, he gave his story a compelling plot and filled it with arresting, complex characters; but for him the chief interest was how a vague, half-articulated set of ideas had migrated to Utah and taken shape there as a thriving, distinctive economic order. Better than any of his contemporaries, moreover, and better than most of his successors, he understood how powerful the drives of capitalism had been in developing the West, how thoroughly those drives had entered into the region’s overall sense of purpose, and how fiercely the battle had been waged, at least in Utah, to prevent that from happening. As romance, his story may not have been able to compete with DeVoto’s lusty adventurers or Morgan’s brown-robed padres preaching among the Indians, but in its implications it may have been the most important story of all. Arrington’s thesis was that nineteenth-century Mormon Utah was at once an intensely materialistic society, intent on achieving wealth, and a determinedly anti-capitalistic one.