Dale Morgan was a historian whose work underpinned “New Mormon History,” bringing academic methodology to the study of Latter-day Saints. He championed evidence-based research and mentored figures like Juanita Brooks and Fawn Brodie. Many of his own Latter-day Saint history projects went unfinished, but Morgan completed notable works such as a study on the fur trade and the mapping of the Trans Mississippi West. In this interview, Richard Saunders discusses the life and legacy of Dale L. Morgan.
Sign up to be notified when we publish new content, like articles about D. Michael Quinn, Jim Bridger, and Martha Hughes Cannon.
Who was Dale Morgan?
Morgan was a mid-century historian of Western America and the Latter Day Saints. He started but never completed a history called The Mormons in the 1940s. Morgan was the one Leonard Arrington came to for criticism and support early in his career, and he was the one who made Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and Juanita Brooks’ Mountain Meadows Massacre relevant works of actual history.
Unintentionally he was the central figure tying together “Mormondom’s Lost Generation” writers, historians and novelists who moved Latter-day Saints into the American mainstream during the 1930s and 1940s, before the academically driven “New Mormon History” became a thing.
What was Richard Saunders’ relationship with Dale Morgan?
I read Morgan’s fur-trade work in graduate school in the mid 1980s. When working for the Utah State Historical Society in 1988 I discovered he was from Utah and that Dale’s brother Jim lived down the street and around the corner from us.
In 1991, I went to work for the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. One day, three boxes of Dale’s personal and family photos, on loan from the Bancroft Library, landed on my desk with a request to see what I could do with them. I met more of Dale’s family in the process of identifying them. A while later the library acquired 80 reels of Morgan’s microfilmed papers, which had just become available to researchers. Peterson’s biography of Juanita Brooks had just come out a year or two earlier, but I noticed that no one was writing about Morgan.
Together those three points prompted me to launch a biography. It just took thirty years (and a few other book projects) to get it done.
What was the Utah Historical Records Survey and why was it important for Dale Morgan?
The Historical Records Survey (HRS) was a federal culture program during the second New Deal (1935-1940), a white-collar work-relief program of the sort the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was for unemployed young men. Though planned by Hoover in the 1920s, National Archives had just opened. The HRS was an effort to identify and describe local government records (cities, counties, and states) the way National Archives was doing for federal records. That meant the contexts of local history was a big part of what the organization did.
Dale Morgan was hired as Utah’s project editor just after a mandate was issued to write up a multi-page county history for each of the county records inventories published. Morgan was a good editor, but in fact-checking the drafts, he discovered that much of the written history at the local and state levels were more folklore and assumption than documentable reality.
He realized at that point that very few historians, including professionals, had ever actually looked into primary documents. They tended to accept uncritically what had been written earlier.
Other people were recognizing the same thing at about the same time; Morgan was not the origin of the push for documentation. He was, however, one figure that people respected because he was not satisfied with an explanation if there were other sources reporting different perspectives. He became so well known for his grasp of source material that virtually all of the first generation of “modern” Western American and Latter Day Saint scholars came hat in hand for his input.
What were Dale Morgan’s accomplishments in the field of Western American history?
The one great work he completed was The West of William H. Ashley (Old West Publishing, 1964), a documentary study of the fur trade of the central Rockies in the 1820s.
He also completed Carl Wheat’s magisterial Mapping the Transmississippi West, 5v. in 6 (Institute for Historical Cartography, 1957-1963), and did two small but masterful works on the 1849 overland trail to California in The Overland Journal of James Avery Pritchard (Old West Publishing, 1959) and of the Panama route California As I Saw It (Talisman Press, 1963).
Probably half or more of the book’s cited sources were supplied by Dale Morgan.
Most of his Latter Day Saint work was never finished, and, in fact, hardly qualifies as begun. I gathered his published and extant draft material in Dale Morgan and the Mormons, 2v. (Arthur H. Clark Co., 2012-2013). The various introductions tell the stories as completely as I could. At Everett Cooley’s prompting and in Chad Flake’s hands, Morgan’s bibliographical catalogue of Mormonism was completed in 1978, A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930 (University of Utah Press).
Morgan’s real contribution to history was as a mentor, sign post, and sounding board. That is harder to trace because he trained no graduate students and had no advanced degree at a time when history was professionalizing. Plus, it was becoming much harder for non-academics to find a voice.
Who were some of the significant people in Dale Morgan’s circle and why were they significant?
I’ve mentioned Juanita Brooks and Fawn Brodie, but there were also Nels Anderson, who wrote Desert Saints (1942), and HRS director Maurice Howe. Howe was a history buff similarly committed to documentable history, and it was he that Morgan credited with introducing him to the past. Morgan critiqued drafts of Anderson’s book but Anderson (who had a sociology degree from the University of Chicago), worked in federal service until coming to academia in the 1960s, and then only in Canada, so he is almost unremembered.
Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto were close friends and correspondents. Stegner, who had a PhD from Iowa and remains well known, taught writing at Stanford. DeVoto was a major voice in the American conservation movement and wrote Across the Wide Missouri (1947) to notable acclaim. Morgan supplied long factual critiques for drafts or galleys from both writers. To give an idea of how well both men regarded their younger and untrained colleague, Stegner once wrote Morgan, “Benny DeVoto and I are determined, sooner or later, to pool our resources and send you at least one page of errata on one of your books.”
Arrington approached history from a very different perspective than Morgan.
Novelist Virginia Sorenson respected Morgan highly, as did Jonreed Lauritzen and (with more than a bit of ire) Maurine Whipple. Others like Charles Kelly, Rod Korns, Stan Ivins, or Wilford Poulson are hardly known today, but each of them were significant in dragging Latter-day Saints, kicking and screaming, to relying on documentation over memory. Neither Kelly nor Korns were Latter-day Saints, but their approach was influential partly because they were associated with Morgan.
Poulson was the first collector of Latter-day Saint books for BYU. Stan Ivins, Anthony W. Ivins’ son, was a committed researcher who published virtually nothing but who contributed to the view of documentation as the basis for historical interpretation.
How did Dale Morgan influence No Man Knows My History and Mountain Meadows Massacre?
Fawn Brodie won the Knopf prize for biography in 1942, which launched her Joseph Smith biography project. She approached Morgan while both were living in Washington DC and he immediately became a major source for her notes. He read and critiqued the manuscript twice before publication and helped her turn her approach and writing from polemic into a serious work of history. No matter what one may think about the book or author personally, No Man remains the most significant Latter-day Saint book of the twentieth century.
Morgan almost single-handedly made Juanita Brooks’ Mountain Meadows Massacre. Brooks decided she wanted to write about the massacre in 1937, and told Morgan so by 1941, but she imagined the story as an article in Harper’s like her earlier “The Water’s In.” Morgan convinced her that it had to be a real book, had to be told factually, and had to be documented.
In fact, Mountain Meadows Massacre is the only one of her works with substantive footnotes, and none of the citations to federal sources or contemporary newspapers came from her own research. Probably half or more of the book’s cited sources were supplied by Dale Morgan, not her.
Morgan also insisted the publisher of Mountain Meadows Massacre had to be reputable enough to withstand pressure from the church. He was the one that suggested and approached Stanford through Wally Stegner. As he lay dying from cancer twenty years later, Brooks wrote him “I myself owe so much to your guidance, though I can hardly claim to be an historian. You were right when you said my area is folklore.”
Anyone interested in an in-depth look at the Morgan-Brooks relationship and the time in which they wrote, might be interested in my 2019 Brooks Lecture.
Why did Dale Morgan disagree with Leonard Arrington’s work?
Leonard Arrington approached history from a very different perspective than Dale Morgan. On one hand, his generation of scholars benefitted from the HRS pioneering approach to historical source material. On the other hand, Arrington had training that helped him critique the historian’s function. Morgan liked Arrington personally but felt his detached, nonjudgmental approach wasn’t the purpose of history.
In 1965, in critiquing Arrington’s landmark essay “The Secularization of Mormon History and Culture” Morgan wrote the economic historian that
I for one cannot agree that the ‘true historian’ should exhibit ‘suspended judgment.’ On the contrary, I think it is the ultimate responsibility of the historian, after he has dug as deeply into the facts as possible, and when he is supposed to know more about his subject than the average reader can hope to know, that he should stand up and render judgement [sic]. It may keep a historian out of trouble to abstain from judgment, but it is not the primary business of a historian to keep himself out of trouble. He should be sufficiently humble, recognizing that the whole record is rarely recoverable about anything. But his attitude finally should be: ‘Insofar as the facts are known to me, this is what I make of them.’
Dale Morgan
Morgan was not committed to objectivity for its own sake, but he wanted to see what was left in the record before drawing conclusions about what happened. Morgan felt that other sets of facts told a different and much less inspirational story of Mormonism. He felt that most Latter-day Saint-affiliated scholars started with their conclusion and selected or shaped evidence to fit that conclusion.
What was the “Mormon book” Morgan worked on but never competed?
It was planned as a three-volume work on the Mormons from the First Vision through the modern day. The history of the book is a very complicated story that is covered in my books. The short version is that Dale Morgan could not make history pay consistently enough to live on. Eventually that caught up with him, the book contract was canceled, and he became an uncredentialed librarian in a research library to pay the bills and allow him to write history.
A few early chapters of “the Mormon book” were drafted but never completed. A review draft was published by John Phillip Walker in Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism (Signature, 1986). I published the author’s later version with his subsequent editing in the second volume of Dale Morgan on the Mormons (Arthur H. Clark Co., 2012).
Throughout his later career as a Western historian, he tried to return to this first project but could never find sufficient time to do so. I suspect he would have tried to work on the Mormon history during his second Guggenheim Fellowship (which was awarded for a one-volume fur trade history), but he died before beginning that project.
What was the New Mormon History?
The term was coined by ethnic historian Moses Rischin in 1969. He saw the flowering of academic interest in the Latter Day Saints as a meaningful departure from the old nineteenth century polemics. Rischin identified Thomas F. O’Dea’s The Mormons (1957) as the departure point. Rischin’s piece was only a one-page essay, but it had a huge impact on the field.
Morgan was inadvertently the initial published representation of that broad change.
I think his view is useful, but misses the much more significant departure that had happened two decades earlier with Nels Anderson, Dale Morgan, and their circle of non-academic writers. This earlier generation had been the one for whom the search for contemporary documentation became a mission. Academic historians benefitted from not only their professional training, but particularly from that earlier spadework.
At the same time, the collision between Mormondom’s utilitarian narrative (history that does something, like encourage allegiance) and historicism (history which approached the past at its own level and from contemporary sources) had already happened, and in large measure the church was somewhat retreating, which is a whole other story.
I think it significant that the Joseph Smith Papers Project is grounded on Morgan’s approach to the past, while gliding demurely around the older, inspirational type of narrative championed by people like Joseph Fielding Smith.
How did Dale Morgan’s work relate to the New Mormon History and the field of Latter Day Saint studies today?
I think a good argument could be made that Morgan was inadvertently the initial published representation of that broad change. His 1940 work The State of Deseret seems to be the first study on the Latter-day Saints that reflects modern standards for documentation and scholarly approach. There are earlier works by academics, but they tend to reflect scholarship of their times, being highly interpretive and less well documented, mostly rehashing published matter. Notice Morgan’s monograph appears 17 years prior to O’Dea’s book and nearly two decades before Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom.
He was certainly a pioneer, but like any trailblazer he had faults and blind spots that others would later address and refine. That’s one challenge of being a pioneer in anything.
What led to the academic monopoly on scholarly history?
Ian Tyrell points out that beginning in the 1950s academic historians basically began writing for each other and essentially stopped writing for interested non-academic readers. That resulted partly from the credentialism that followed the Second World War, along with the rise of mass education at the college level. There is a whole chapter on that subject in the biography, because Morgan and people like him were the losers, and Arrington and other like him the winners in the new setting.
That’s not to say no one read history, but it began being published for different reasons. Eventually journalists and popular historians filled the void that writers like Samuel Eliot Morrison and Charles Beard once occupied (David McCullough and Barbara Tuchman come to mind).
Writing for the “trade publishers” requires quite a different approach than does scholarly history, and historians lost relevance to society at large as they write only to each other in the scholarly conversation.
What are some of Richard Saunders’s favorite quotes by Dale Morgan?
That one to Leonard Arrington about a historian keeping out of trouble is certainly one of them. Here are a few more:
I do not feel that I have ever lost anything by lending whatever helping hand I could.
DLM to Bernard DeVoto, 1942 Oct. 26.
I guess there is no substitute, ever, for going to the ultimate sources when you are doing a job in history.
DLM to Barbara Kell, 1952 Sept. 4.
No one can ever write a book for someone else, and criticism has validity only as it strikes some answering chord in the one criticized.
DLM to Juanita Brooks, 1952 Nov. 7.
A good document is immortal, for one thing; histories get out of date, but original source documents never do.
DLM to Carl I. Wheat, 1959 Aug. 17.
I find that the more I find out, the more I need to find out.
DLM to Robert Allen, 1942 May.
There is no absolute or final definition of truth. It has emotional values for some people, intellectual values for others.
People try to square their emotional truths with the intellect, while their intellectual truths they try to invest with emotional meanings.
DLM to Brooks, 1945 Jan.
Did you enjoy this article?
Subscribe to receive an email each time we publish new content!
About the interview participant
Dr. Richard L. Saunders served as the Dean of Library Services at Southern Utah University from 2014-2018. Saunders is considered an expert on library management and information science, historical and cultural studies on Mormonism, printing technology, the American West, national parks, and the US civil rights period.
Further Reading
- Is D. Michael Quinn a Reliable Scholar?
- Who Was Marcus Whitman?
- Who Was the Real Billy the Kid?
- What’s Next For Book of Mormon Studies?
- Who Were the Three Nephites?
Dale L. Morgan Resources
- Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition (University of Utah Press)
- “Dear Dale, Dear Juanita: Two Friends and the Contest for Truth, Fact, and Perspective in Mormon History” (Juanita Brooks Lecture Series [PDF])
- Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works, Part 2, 1949–1970 (University of Oklahoma Press)
- Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails (Utah State University Press)
One reply on “Who Was Dale L. Morgan?”
“Together those three points prompted me to launch a biography. It just took thirty years (and a few other book projects) to get it done.” But you got it done!
Thank you, Richard and Chad, for a great interview.