For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders -- some call them the most successful rodeo family in history. Now Bill and Evelyn Wright, parents to 13 children and grandparents to many more, find themselves struggling to hang on to the majestic landscape where they've been running cattle for 150 years as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought, and rearranged by public-land...

"This manuscript reconstructs and interprets the life of "Sally," an Indian woman who was captured and enslaved in Utah in 1847. Her captors sold her to a settler who had just arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and she ended up in his father-in-law's house. Sally served as the longtime servant and cook in Brigham Young's household, living and working in the Lion House and Beehive House for over twenty years. Kerns has drawn on a broad range of ethnographic,...

Trespass is the story of one woman's struggle to gain footing in inhospitable territory. A wilderness activist and apostate Mormon, Amy Irvine sought respite in the desert outback of southern Utah's red-rock country after her father's suicide, only to find out just how much of an interloper she was among her own people. But more than simply an exploration of personal loss, Trespass is an elegy for a dying world, for the ruin of one of our most beloved...

In the summer of 1860 the author of these recollections, Mary Ann Stucki, then six years old, walked beside her parents' handcart from Florence (Omaha), Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, Utah. The family, converts to Mormonism, had left their comfortable home near Bern, Switzerland, to make the long journey to the Mormon Zion. Nearly eighty years later, Mary Ann Hafen published this account of her life, giving us an unparalleled, candid, inside view of...

At 18, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger, 32 years her senior, who already had three wives. Arranged plural marriages were part of her heritage in the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband's psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives. Her every move was dictated...

In 1857, over 100 men, women, and children in a wagon train from Arkansas were murdered in southern Utah by local settlers aided by Southern Paiute warriors. For 50 years, Mormon historian Juanita Brooks's The Mountain Meadows Massacre has been the standard work on the subject. Here, independent historian and Salt Lake Tribune columnist Bagley claims only to extend Brooks's work. But by using documents not available to Brooks and by following her...