Life in a Corner

Most students of American expansion in the Intermountain West know the story of the 1879–1880 Hole-in-the-Rock expedition, in which Mormon settlers traversed some of the world’s most rugged terrain to settle the valley of the San Juan River on the Navajo frontier. We less often hear the stories of the settlers after they reached their destinations and attempted to carve out a home along a harsh desert river. Life in a Corner fills this gap, telling how remote, tight-knit communities such as Bluff, Monticello, and Blanding established themselves, worked, and lived. The book is a fairly traditional post-Turnerian work in its approach. Familiar Old West frontier motifs such as gunfights, Indian conflicts, bootlegging, and boom-and-bust mining all make appearances here. Utilizing the oral histories, memoirs, and church records that are so rich in Mormondom, Robert S. McPherson hearkens back to Robert Wiebe in showing how these isolated communities attempted to “establish physical order as soon as possible” in rough desert landscapes (p. 15). Variations on this theme appear in individual chapters on law enforcement, ranching, mining, logging, predator eradication, midwifery, and more. Although organized topically rather than chronologically, this is a clear narrative of a hardy, devout people making their way and finding order in a hard country.

American west · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Boom · Bust · Desert (philosophy) · Ethnology · Frontier · Geography · Memoir · Narrative · Navajo · Order (exchange) · Political science · Settlement (finance) · Shadow (psychology) · Theme (computing) · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Geology · History · Law