“Anybody’s Gold Mine”, by Maurine Whipple

One in a series of introductions of pieces from A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020).

Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 1, 1949.

One of a series of Whipple magazine articles about interesting places and people on the edges of the Great Basin. In 1914, a man named Freddie Crystal arrived in Johnson Canyon north of Kanab, Utah with a newspaper clipping about Mexican petroglyphs. A legend held that Montezuma had sent much of his gold north to save it from the marauding Spaniards, and Crystal thought the petroglyphs indicated that it had been hidden nearby. Many Kanab citizens spent weeks living in tents in Johnson Canyon digging for the hidden treasure; but after two years, there was still no sign of it.

In spring 1949 Whipple was working as a caretaker on the isolated Von Hake ranch in Johnson Canyon. She interviewed Kanab citizens about the craze, and explored the area herself. She sold the story to The Saturday Evening Post, the leading general-interest magazines of the day, for $750. They sent photographer to take pictures of the dig site.

“The Timpanogos Hike”, by Maurine Whipple

One in a series of introductions of pieces from A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020).

This unpublished essay is based on Whipple’s participation in a 1943 midsummer moonlight hike of Mount Timpanogos at the head of Utah Valley. The annual hike, led from 1929 to 1961 by Charles (Chic) James Hart Sr., a PE teacher at Brigham Young University, drew hundreds of participants. She presents her own simple patriotism and sentimental response to nature as juxtaposed to a male companion she calls "the Cynic", who refuses to be impressed by any ceremonial, geologic, or natural wonders until the sublime moment of reaching the peak at sunrise.

The Giant Joshua reading guide

Here are a series of posts with background information and commentary about Maurine Whipple's The Giant Joshua, by Andrew Hall, Lynne Larson, and Sarah Reed, published at By Common Consent in 2020. 

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/10/bcc-late-summer-book-club-the-giant-joshua/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/17/the-giant-joshua-chapters-one-and-two/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/24/the-giant-joshua-chapters-three-and-four/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/31/the-giant-joshua-chapters-five-and-six-community-unity-and-native-americans/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/09/07/maurine-whipple-and-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-a-complicated-relationship-chapters-7-and-8/

 https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/09/14/the-giant-joshua-chapters-nine-and-ten/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/09/21/the-giant-joshua-chapters-11-12-polygamy-and-postmemory/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/10/06/the-giant-joshua-chapters-15-and-16-polygamy-raids-life-on-the-underground-and-the-real-life-stories-behind-the-novel/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/10/10/the-giant-joshua-chapter-17-the-great-smile-and-the-sequel/

Also, be sure to get A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson (By Common Consent Press, 2020), for Cleave the Wood, the sequel to The Giant Joshua, and other great stories, articles, and essays by Whipple.

Here is the first post:

Welcome to the BCC Late Summer Book Club!

For the next eight weeks we will be reading Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, which is widely considered to be Mormonism’s greatest novel. Maurine Whipple is an enigmatic figure—in 1938 at age 35 she was broke, divorced and depressed, a failed grade school teacher who wrote obsessively but who had never published a substantial work. In that year, however, she was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for new writers, and the coveted prize allowed her to take pen in hand, let her genius flower, and create her masterpiece. Over the next two years she worked feverishly on The Giant Joshua, the epic story of the 1861 settlers of St. George. 

The Giant Joshua celebrates a vision of disparate people coming together to form a community of mutual love and service, while also portraying the hardships of pioneer life. Terryl L. Givens has stated, “No one has succeeded better than Whipple at capturing the recurrent Mormon paradox: the independence and loneliness of an exiled people . . . making it perhaps the fullest cultural expression of the Mormon experience.”[1] Most of all, Maurine was exceptional in her ability to depict the complicated choices and emotions of women living in polygamous marriages and in a patriarchal society. 

When The Giant Joshua was published in 1941, it received a flood of positive reviews nationwide. The literary critic Bernard DeVoto wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature, “The Giant Joshua is excellent reading and it catches a previously neglected side of the Mormon story—the tenderness and sympathy which existed among a people dogged by persecution and hardships, forced to battle an inclement nature for every morsel of food they ate and to struggle for every moment of genuine happiness.”[2] The Book-of-the-Month Club review said the heroine was “one of the most appealing women in modern fiction.” 

In Maurine’s own community, however, the novel was less enthusiastically received. Many in St. George were offended by her depiction of polygamy, and her own father called the novel vulgar. When the apostle John A. Widtsoe accused her of “straining for the lurid” in a review in The Improvement Era[3], he shamed Maurine and probably squelched sales throughout Mormon country. She had expected Joshua to be welcomed by her LDS neighbors and even by the ecclesiastical authorities, for she saw her characters as heroic in their accomplishments in spite of their human weaknesses, and not “vulgar” because of them. She was badly shaken by the negative response. Still, although her attachment to the institution vacillated over the years, she never left the Church and remained fiercely loyal to “her people.” She managed to publish a Utah travel book and a few notable magazine articles over the next two decades, but was never able to complete another novel—one of the great tragedies of Mormon cultural history.

However, there is now hope. BCC Press will soon publish A Craving for Beauty: The Lost Works of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson. The volume contains over 450 pages of literary work by Maurine in her prime, most of which has never been published, including over 200 pages from Cleave the Wood, her planned sequel to The Giant Joshua. The volume is full of excellent material, including stories that take on issues of faith and superstition, community and isolation, oppression and tolerance. Maurine was ahead of her time in her calls for gender and racial equality, a heritage with which we should become more familiar. Participating in the Giant Joshua book club will offer everyone a chance to prepare for this momentous occasion in Mormon literary history.

A post on two chapters of The Giant Joshua will appear on the blog every seven days over the next eight weeks. The authors will provide commentary on the content, the story of Maurine’s efforts at composing each chapter in 1938-1940, details on the real historical figures on whom she based her characters, and links to selections of her unpublished works. 

So please prepare yourselves by reading the dramatic opening two chapters and get ready to share your own comments on the blog or on Twitter (#GiantJoshua). These chapters introduce Clorinda (Clory) MacIntyre, who begins as an orphaned Mormon girl compelled to become the third wife of a man who has been like an adoptive father to her. Clory, her new husband, and two sister wives are part of an 1861 emigrant wagon train traveling from Salt Lake City to the arid lands of the Dixie Mission. It will introduce the real historical figures of Erastus Snow and John D.Lee[4], and culminate in the blessing of an ox, and a baby’s birth, while the party desperately scrambles to pull its wagons over a cliff. A triumphant entry into what will become St. George awaits them. 

Michael Austin has said that the creation of The Giant Joshua is “nothing less than a miracle”. It is a miracle you won’t want to miss.

---

[1] Terryl R. Givens. People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 289

[2] Bernard DeVoto, Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. 4, 1941.

[3] [John A. Widtsoe], “On the Book Rack,” Improvement Era, 44 (February 1941), p. 93. The story of Maurine’s relationship with Church leaders, including previously unknown documents which tell of a 1935 encounter between Maurine and Widtsoe which may have colored Widtsoe’s view of Maurine, will be told in an upcoming book club post.

[4] Maurine’s portrayal of John D. Lee and the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre was based on information she had received from her St. George friend and former teacher Juanita Brooks. Maurine and Juanita had a long and troubled relationship, they were two very different personalities drawn together by the desire to write and explore the past of their communities, traits which set them off as odd to the rest of the community. Maurine had little compunction about “borrowing” stories she read in journals and other materials gathered by Juanita, and although Juanita helped to edit the entire novel, she resented Maurine publishing some of the stories before she was able to complete the scholarship which would result in her masterpiece, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950). The fact that our greatest novelist and our greatest historian were close collaborators for many years is remarkable. The story of their partnership and fallings out will be told in an upcoming book club post.

“A Grain of Mustard Seed” Maurine Whipple and the Spanish Flu

One in a series of introductions of pieces from A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020).

"A Grain of Mustard Seed"

Whipple set this short story in Salt Lake City in Winter 1918, during the Spanish Influenza pandemic. It tells of a dying young woman and her husband’s priesthood blessing which brings her back to health. The story, written in 1943, is perhaps Whipple’s most positive towards LDS faith, featuring the young man’s thoughts upon returning from a 3-year mission, a fairly detailed but reverent description of their marriage in the SLC Temple (despite Whipple not having been endowed at that point), his fear of losing her, and the blessing, performed by the husband and his former missionary companions, stretching their arms through the window of the hospital they were not allowed to enter.

(Photos of a BYU lecture hall, Utah newspapers, and the Millennial Star during the 1918-1919 pandemic)

A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple

A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson, has been published in October 2020 by By Common Consent Press.

Maurine Whipple (1903-1992) was the author of the great Mormon novel The Giant Joshua (1941). She wrote many other remarkable short fiction pieces and magazine articles over the years, only a few of which have been published. This volume collects her published stories and her best previously unpublished work, including magazine stories about some fascinating people and places in extreme corners of the intermountain west, reporting from within Short Creek during the 1953 polygamy raid, a war-era lecture questioning war, racism, and patriarchy, several excellent short stories, and five chapters of Cleave the Wood, the unfinished sequel to The Giant Joshua.

Meet the Mormons (Look Magazine, March 10, 1942)

 Maurine Whipple, "Meet the Mormons". Look Magazine, March 10, 1942. Photographs by Earl Thiesen

Confessions of a She-Devil (Unpublished autobiographical essay, 1937)

 

"Confessions of a She-Devil" is an autobiography which Maurine apparently wrote for use at the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference at Boulder, Colorado, 1937. Veda Hale went over and confirmed much of the material with Maurine late in her life. There are fictionalized elements, however. There are two copies, a 34 page holograph and a 18 page typeset (included here). The originals are in the BYU Harold B. Lee Special Collections and copies in the Dixie State University Library Special Collections. The holograph and the typeset are virtually identical, except in one paragraph in the holograph describing a disagreement with Grant Redford in Cedar City, Utah.

The Need To-day of a Strong Faith in God (1920, by Maurine Whipple when she was 16)

“The Need To-day of a Strong Faith in God” (Prize Essay), by Maurine Whipple.  Dixie Owl, January 1, 1920, p. 7-13. 

Maurine was a 16-year old sophomore at Dixie Normal College when she wrote this essay, which appeared in the school newspaper. 

Utah Wonderland: Navajo Blessing (c. 1945-1949)

Whipple tried several times to write an article titled “Utah Wonderlands” or “Through the Utah Wonderlands” in the 1945–1949 period. It centered around the people and places in some of the great natural wonders of Utah’s far south, including the Monument Valley, that she encountered through Stewart Campbell’s Utah Wonderland Tours company. This is a short piece from one of her drafts of the article, describing a Navajo blessing ritual.

In this sketch, Whipple, who often let her witty commentary dominate her travel nar- ratives, writes with a reserved voice, reporting the ceremony with little commentary but with telling details: the singer’s long nails, the fright of the young patient, the sounds of the chant. The healer that she refers to as “Old Fat” was probably Hosteen Tso, a well- known medicine man in Monument Valley.1 She was introduced to the medicine man by Harry Goulding, who with his wife Leone (usually called “Mike”), owned and oper- ated Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley. The couple was known for their work convincing Hollywood directors to come to Monument Valley to film their Westerns. Whipple had described the Gouldings and Old Fat in This Is the Place: Utah, p. 95–113. The two photos attached here are from that book. 

The Time Will Come (1941)

Whipple’s sense of estrangement from her community is strongly portrayed in this story of a mother who reluctantly allows her only son to enlist. Elements of both feminism and pacifism are readily apparent, as is Whipple’s sensitivity for the Pueblo culture—an aspect which broadens the story’s theme and expands its setting from a 1940’s southwestern town to the red canyons of its distant past.

The character of the unnamed protagonist was based on Maurine’s neighbor, Elsie Hafen, whose son, Keith, had recently enlisted (and would later die) in the service of his country. Moved by Hafen’s voiceless heartache over her son’s departure, and the suffering of all Gold Star mothers, Whipple writes defiantly in the story about the “Elder Statesmen” of the town, “beating drums and flying flags” for the “young swashbuckling columns” in the village’s farewell parade, while, in contrast, the grieving mother sees the “waste” that lies ahead, as her boy goes off to war.

In Spring 1941 Whipple sent a draft of the story to her literary agent, Max Lieber. He replied that “the piece is out of step with the country’s [patriotic] mood.” She wrote four drafts of the story in the 1940s, experimenting with different narrators. In 1991, Veda Hale and Whipple collaborated on a revision of the story. The 1991 version is Whipple’s last piece of creative writing.

CANDLES OF THE LORD: AN ORIGINAL PAGEANT (1963-1975)

 CANDLES OF THE LORD: AN ORIGINAL PAGEANT (1963-1975)

     In the early 1960s Maurine Whipple's creative energies were at a low ebb. The "Grand Idea" of Mormonism's cooperative genius seemed to have dissipated itself, leaving her without the zeal to mobilize her energies. She had transferred them temporarily to Charley Shadel's cure for alcoholism; but after nine years of ferocious toil, the project had been shelved indefinitely. Her younger brother George, one of the failures of the Shadel "cure," was in the last stages of the alcoholism that would soon claim his life. Worried about him, plagued by frequent infections and arthritis in a hip and knee, Maurine was sufficiently curt and crusty with others that rumors circulated that she, too, had begun drinking.

     At this difficult period of her life, the "Grand Idea" revived in the form of a universal Easter pageant that would celebrate the resurrection as the crown of all human endeavor. With renewed energy, she filled her little home with stacks of books and articles on the final days of Jesus' life.  She reread Latter-day Saint scriptures, the Bible, and current biblical research.  She renewed her interest in the Indian myths of rejuvenation, and the land started to speak to her in new ways.  She roamed the countryside by car and on foot, looking for a suitable locale for staging the pageant taking shape in her mind.  One possibility was a natural amphitheater in an arch indentation in a red mountain between St. George and the exit off the main highway to Hurricane. But her favorite locale was in Snow Canyon, east of the present campground.  It offered ample staging area for dramatic effects, a breathtaking backdrop of orange and rust sandstone, footpaths leading "off-stage" into areas that could be screened for wings, and a slope so gentle leading up to the "stage" that seating for large audiences would not be a problem. Recalling those days of creative ferment, she said she found a new focus, that her whole life seemed shaped into a pattern of suffering and tempering that had prepared her to write this pageant.

Jane Thompson Bleak history, by Mabel Jarvis. A model for Clory McIntyre

Jane Thompson Bleak, Aged Pioneer Woman Recounts Past Events, by Mabel Jarvis 

Life history of Jane Thompson Bleak, wife of James G. Bleak. Written by Mabel Jarvis, a St. George journalist and author. Undated. It cuts off after 4 pages. Found in the Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks Papers,  Utah Department of Heritage & Arts. 

Note the many similarities between these stories and those found about Clory in The Giant Joshua. Jane T. Bleak was still alive when Whipple started doing resear

ch for the book, and her name is listed in the book acknowledgements. 

John A. Widtsoe's February 1941 review of The Giant Joshua

[John A. Widtsoe], “On the Book Rack,” Improvement Era, 44 (February 1941), p. 93. 

Grandmother: Cornelia Agatha Lenzi McAllister

[Editor's Note: The relationship between Cornelia Agatha Lenzi McAllister (1844–1920), Maurine’s maternal grandmother, and Clorinda Agatha Lenzi MacIntyre, the petite and irrepressibly spritely heroine of The Giant Joshua, is clear. Maurine was seventeen when this grandmother died, and for years afterwards she fondly recalled her visits with Cornelia and their close friendship.

To the young Maurine, Grandmother McAllister was a romantic and enigmatic figure. Elegant in her black silk dress, and isolated in her deafness, she radiated dignity to her impressionable granddaughter, who wrote this sketch for a high school or college English assignment on ancestors between 1921 and 1926.

Cornelia’s husband, John D. T. McAllister, was a polygamist whose personality provided the fictional portrait of Abijah MacIntyre in The Giant Joshua. As his third plural wife, Cornelia bore McAllister six children, and like Abijah MacIntyre in the novel, McAllister became the second president of the St. George Temple in 1884. The fictional Abijah left Clory behind and took another, younger, plural wife north with him when he was called to preside over the Logan Temple. McAllister, likewise, in reality left Cornelia to become president of the Manti Temple in 1893, taking with him only his youngest plural wife and providing literary fodder for his granddaughter in the years to come.

But if Cornelia was indeed the model for Clorinda MacIntyre, Whipple spared “Clory” many of the trials which her grandmother endured. By having Clory die as a comparatively young woman, the fictional heroine missed the dependent old age of Grandmother Cornelia, and more dramatically, Clory was not deaf, as was Cornelia for all the years that Maurine knew her, the result of a childhood illness.

Still, the strong, enduring, female character is there. Grandma Cornelia was obviously well remembered and in her own way played a significant role in Whipple’s masterpiece.1]

Every life must have a purpose—some main idea or main motive by and for which it exists. For instance, one man might from his earliest conscious thought, dedicate his life to music and make human life richer by that contribution; another might choose business, another writing, and so on. The more I read biography, the more I am convinced that every really worthwhile life has a definite plan, whether the person is aware of it or not, and that when this supreme aim is accomplished, and the pattern has been completely traced, the life is finished, no matter how many more years the person might live.

The Giant Joshua, Chapter 1 alternate opening

Undated early draft of the opening of The Giant Joshua. Maurine Whipple Papers, Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Special Collections. Handwritten. MSS 1546, box 1.  

It is the last Sunday of October 1861. Sacrament meeting is being held in the Old Council House in Salt Lake City. President Brigham Young presides. Abijah McIntyre, a handsome, dark bearded man in his early forties, is seated with the other dignitaries upon the rostrum. (He is a member of the Seventies, an organization in charge of missionaries, and next to the apostles in importance). The congregation is seated upon wooden benches and Abijah’s family occupies the first bench directly beneath the rostrum. His wife, Bathsheba, a big-bosomed, imposing, stern-looking woman is seated beside her six sons, ranging from 16-year-old Freeborn, the eldest, down to the toddler, Isaiah. On her right is 17-year old Clorinda, brought up in the family as a daughter. Abijah had dandled her upon his knee in Philadelphia where he converted her father and brother converted to Mormonism. Clorinda’s father was a prosperous craftsman of fine jewelry, but when his wife refused to join the Church, he had left his business and assets to her and with his two children had walked across the plains in Abijah’s “Company of Ten.” But on this journey he had succumbed to the “green sickness”. And later, during the Starving Time, her brother had died from eating poisonous roots in Salt Lake City. Thus Abijah and Bathsheba were really the only parents Clorinda had really ever known. Clorinda is seated next to her best friend, Palmyra Wight and Pal’s husband David.

The congregation has just finished signing the opening hymn, Oh Zion, Dear Zion, and one (?) seated by the choir conductor with a rustle of standard Sunday-go-to-meeting finery. President Young suggests that Abijah McIntyre give the opening prayer, and Abijah does so at great length, spurred on by his own eloquence. Clorinda whispers to Pal that “Pa forgot to bless the corn on my big toe,” and both girls dissolve into a paroxysm of giggles. Both Freeborn and David have difficulty maintaining their own proper piety. Whereupon Abijah interrupts his prayer long enough to fix all four with a baleful eye. And Brother Brigham having repeatedly compared a windy prayer to a “braying jackass”, clears his throat significantly.  Abijah hurriedly ends his suggestions to the almighty, “Name of Jesus, amen,” and sits down.

Panguitch, Big Fish (1969)

Panguitch, Big Fish

Western Gateways: Magazine of the Golden Circle, March 1969.

[Editor's Note: This is Maurine's last published magazine piece, written for a small-circulation travel magazine, based in Flagstaff, Arizona. The article includes pictures she took herself. This piece is not included in A Craving For Beauty: The Lost Works of Maurine Whipple.]

So you don’t know a rod from a reel A fly from a night-crawler? Join the club.

            Having spent my life elbow-deep in fish, boiled, broiled, baked, canned, frozen, and spoiled, I naturally shrink from a can of salmon. Yet my world teems with mad people who oftener than not don’t even eat fish, but are extolled from “The Complete Angler” to today’s Sunday supplements for their dedication to early-rising, mosquitoes, sunburn, and something at the end of a line: What is it?

            One day last August I determined to find out. When my Ford balked, it was only the equal determination of two non-fishing fellow-sleuths (rock-hounds Brad and Betty Eutsler) who saved the day for posterity. But we were as nervous as three astronauts at countdown.

            Speculated Betty: “To catch a fish, wouldn't you have to think like a fish?”

            Brad’s eyes lit up. “And therefore hunt the biggest, deepest, coldest water?”

            “Panguitch Lake!” I shouted. For in the vicinity of St. George, Utah, only one fishin’-hole is rated among the ten best trout lakes in the United States by National Observer. 

            Panguitch Lake (“Pang-witch”, a Ute-Indian word meaning “Big Fish”[1]) is mounted like a jewel at the red-rock heart of south-central Utah. . We had a choice of two routes: take highway 91 east of St. George 9 miles to off-ramp State 17, 9 miles to Hurricane, and north 3 miles to LaVerkin Junction with State 15 which winds for 56 miles through Zion National Park to Mount Carmel Junction on U. S. Highway 89.