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The Lost Expedition: Charles Nettleton Strevell and the Utah State Museum Association, 1933–1938

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/26428652.91.3.01

2642-8652

James M. Aton, Jerry D. Spangler,

American History and Culture

When the Natural History Museum of Utah's (NHMU) new Rio Tinto Center opened in 2011, it was hardly the first such museum in the state. At that time smaller museums existed at almost every state university and college, as well as at several state parks. There were also museums at private facilities, such as the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum on Capitol Hill and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint's Church History Museum, among others. Although the new NHMU is a university building, it differs from all the others because it essentially functions as the natural history museum for the state.The idea of an official state museum first germinated in the 1930s when a group of amateur “relic collectors” pushed to establish a state-run natural history museum. In 1934 smaller anthropological museums existed in makeshift setups at the University of Utah (1891–1963) and Brigham Young University (1892–2011).1 There was also the predecessor to today's Church History Museum, the LDS Church Museum on Temple Square (1918–1976); it focused mostly on LDS history in Utah but included some Native American artifacts. It had its roots in the Salt Lake City Museum and Menagerie opened by Brigham Young's son, John W. Young, and Guglielmo Giosue Rosetti Sangiovanni in 1869. It was the first museum of any kind in the Utah territory and was loosely church supported.2 Although the idea of a state natural history museum might have occurred to some people, this was the first formal attempt we know of to push forward the idea of a state museum that would feature prehistoric cultural artifacts.Boosters, collectors, and newspapers around the state encouraged this group, but it was the brainchild of Charles Nettleton Strevell, a wealthy Salt Lake City businessman and a prominent collector. The Illinois native almost realized his dream, but it unraveled at the last minute due to several factors, including opposition from the University of Utah itself. Most Utahns would now agree with Strevell's overall goal: a state natural history museum. His methods, as we shall see, were probably not the best for the time and place. Moreover, the ethical standards he and his associates embraced regarding human remains, artifacts, dinosaur bones, and Indigenous cultures were a bit behind his own time and certainly ours.For what he would call the Utah State Museum Association (USMA), Strevell's first step in 1933 was to gather support and members for the organization. He sought to recruit five thousand dues-paying members and wisely persuaded Utah's recently elected governor, Henry H. Blood (D), to serve as the USMA's honorary president.3 Besides trustees Charles S. Pulver, Dr. John Eugene “Gene” Broaddus, and Frank A. Beckwith, Strevell recruited wealthy and well-connected Utahns like Edmund J. Kearns, a mining fortune heir; Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former president of Utah State University; Pearl Douglass, the wife of Earl Douglass, the famous paleontologist who discovered and excavated what became Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah; and C. H. Skidmore, Utah State school superintendent.4Strevell and his fellow collectors incorporated as the Utah State Museum Association in April 1934. He served as president, and another prominent businessman and collector, Charles S. Pulver, acted as secretary.5 USMA's trustees numbered twenty-three men and four women.6 Although women composed 17 percent of the USMA board, this venture was typical of the times: it was conceived, directed, and carried out by white men. No one thought to include Native Utahns in the survey, and none of these men were professional archaeologists or paleontologists. Perhaps the USMA's amateurism partially foiled its efforts to build a museum. For a time, though, in the mid-1930s, all signs suggested the organization would succeed.The USMA took another crucial step after incorporating: they succeeded “in securing the passage of a statute by the state legislature banning all exploration and excavations for, as well as prohibiting the removal of, prehistoric relics from the state without a permit from the State Parks Commissioners.”7 This law attempted to stop the outflow of Native American artifacts and dinosaur bones from the state.8The next step was to conduct an ambitious field survey of the state's archaeological and paleontological treasures. The six-month USMA expedition, which took place between September 1934 and February 1935, secured significant funds from the New Deal's Utah Emergency Relief Administration (UERA). Its mission was to identify the state's archaeological and paleontological resources in eastern Utah, and it was the first survey of its kind in the state. To add credibility to the expedition, Strevell and Pulver tapped two trustees to help head the adventure: Broaddus, a well-known photographer and Utah national parks advocate, and Beckwith, a newspaper editor and noted amateur archaeologist from Delta, Utah. They hired only one academically trained archaeologist, Grant G. Cannon, and he had but one season of field experience. Cannon was, however, the scion of one of the most prominent families in the state. Thus, the expedition almost entirely lacked academic professionals in the field of archaeology and paleontology. Its members relied, instead, on local collectors to guide them to the appropriate prehistoric and paleontological sites. Out of practicality, professionals at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, as well as University of Utah archaeologists such as Dr. Julian H. Steward, had made the same devil's bargain.In today's world, most citizens probably recoil at the thought of private individuals digging up archaeological and paleontological treasures for their own economic benefit or amusement. But this was not always the case. In nineteenth-century America, there were no laws whatsoever to prevent private individuals from excavating resources on public lands. The first attempt to provide some modicum of official protection was the Antiquities Act of 1906, which recognized a broad public interest in the preservation of resources on federal lands. The intent of the act was lofty: a fine and jail time for “any person who shall appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the government of the United States.”9 In reality, the Antiquities Act was notoriously vague and provided little if any protection to cultural resources on federal lands not designated as monuments. And even if the government tried to make that argument, there were no means to enforce it. It wasn't until 1974 that the first federal law enforcement agent was hired to protect resources on western lands, and he was hired to protect wild horses and burros.10To be certain, there were attempts over the years to establish standards to authorize who was qualified and who was not to conduct archaeological and paleontological excavations. But these provisions, more policy than law, were largely unenforceable, and land managers watched helplessly as vandalism became increasingly prevalent over subsequent decades.11 As the looting and vandalism continued unabated, Congress in 1979 passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA, amended in 1988) that codified the protection of such resources—and provided severe criminal penalties for those who violate the law.Interestingly, the protection of fossils on federal lands never rose to the same level of federal concern as archaeological resources. The Antiquities Act was used to create fossil-centered national monuments across the West, such as Dinosaur and Cleveland-Lloyd in Utah, to protect certain localities, but otherwise federal land managers weren't certain what to do about fossils on the public domain. For decades, they even authorized individuals to privately collect fossilized wood. This ambiguity was finally corrected in 2009 with passage of the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (PRPA), which established a “scientific principles and expertise” standard for paleontological investigations on public lands.12The idea behind an institution to keep Utah relics in the state was not new. In the late nineteenth century, Utahns had watched with dismay as successive waves of federal-government-sponsored and eastern-museum-funded expeditions flooded into the state, carting away its prehistoric cultural and paleontological resources. Utahns from all walks of life resented that the state was being colonized by these wealthier and more powerful institutions. This process began as early as 1859, with the United States government's Macomb expedition. Then in the 1870s, federal scientists like John Wesley Powell, Ferdinand V. Hayden, and Lieutenant George M. Wheeler came to Utah to survey, and their missions grew to include archaeology. Later, eastern institutions like Harvard's Peabody Museum, New York City's American Museum of Natural History, and the Carnegie Museum also dispatched scientists. These expeditions all acquired vast holdings and carted them back east.13By the early 1930s, many Utahns, like Strevell, had seen enough. And it was not only amateurs sounding the alarm. Professional archaeologists at the University of Utah like Julian Steward said the same thing. Steward even tried to negotiate a split in archaeological booty between state museums and eastern museums such as the Peabody.14 It was past time, they believed, to provide Utah's relics with a home in the state's capital. As Strevell wrote in an op-ed in the Salt Lake Telegram, “Utah is a vast storehouse of diversified, unclassified, and widely scattered geologic and historic treasures that ought to be assembled under one roof.”15 He expressed the anger and frustration of many of his fellow Utahns when he said to a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, “We are being milked of our richest ancient artifacts almost every day and we have no choice but to like it. . . . And where did they go? Almost always right out of state—and we have to like it.”16Strevell went on to explain to the Tribune reporter that his substantial collection would form the foundation of a state museum. Once a museum was established, he said, many private collectors around the state promised their collections, as well. Strevell worried about the disposition of his extensive collection, part of a long line of collectors going back to at least the Renaissance who fretted in a similar vein.17Even though Strevell's own collection resembled more a “cabinet of curiosities” in the mode of an aristocratic collector, he had in mind a regional natural history museum. It would be modeled in a smaller way on the great natural history museums like the British Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, even though those institutions had their roots in the work of wealthy collectors like Strevell.18 He knew the state of the 1930s museum world through his subscription to the Museum News.Who was Charles Strevell and how did he immigrate to Utah and achieve such prominence in business and relic collecting? And who were the main participants of the USMA expedition from September 1934 to February 1935? Strevell was born Charles Nettleton in 1858 in Pontiac, Illinois. His father Zeleus died two months before Charles was born, and his mother Elizabeth promptly married Jason W. Strevell. Jason adopted Charles and Elizabeth's other two children. Charles's adoptive father was an attorney, a hardware store owner, and an Illinois state senator.19In Illinois, Charles picked up the collecting bug from his mother, who had a collection of semiprecious stones. He later wrote that he gathered his first “treasure” during a family vacation in Minnesota: a piece of carnelian, a semiprecious gemstone.20 This fired his imagination and launched him on a lifetime quest. He later branched out to collect dinosaur fossils and Native American artifacts. By the time Strevell died in 1947, he had amassed a collection of thousands of relics, estimated then to be worth over $100,000.21Strevell's collecting passion received a great jolt in 1879 when his stepfather moved the family west to Miles City, Montana. In part, they immigrated because Charles's health required a drier climate.22 Also, Jason saw an opportunity to open a hardware store with a relative, George Miles. The Miles City area, of course, was rich in dinosaur bones and Native American artifacts. When not scouring the hills for bones and artifacts, Charles apprenticed to his father at the family hardware store.In 1890, at age thirty-eight, the young collector moved from Montana to Ogden along with his wife Elizabeth. Like his father, Charles opened a hardware store, and a few years later he relocated his business from Ogden to Salt Lake City and consolidated with George Scott to form the Scott-Strevell Hardware Company. When Scott retired in 1903, Strevell brought in James H. Patterson to establish the Strevell-Patterson Hardware Company.In Ogden, Strevell met the prominent collector Don Maguire and excavated (by present standards, looted) burial mounds near Willard Bay in northern Utah. Maguire had been commissioned by the state that year to secure from southeastern Utah a collection of prehistoric artifacts for Utah's exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a task he enthusiastically carried out in every corner of the state. In some instances, such as the Paragonah Mounds north of Cedar City, his excavations amounted to little more than plowing the prehistoric mounds to see what turned up.23 In southeastern Utah, Maguire may have helped Bluff pioneer Platt D. Lyman excavate material in Cottonwood Wash near Bluff. At the minimum, Maguire certainly acquired Ancestral Puebloan artifacts from Lyman. Strevell, Maguire's friend and kindred spirit, saw the entire collection before it shipped to Illinois.24 It must have given him ideas about keeping such collections in state.Strevell was a wealthy man. He also invested in coal mines near Helper and became president of the Independent Coal and Coke Company. He sat on the board of the Walker Bank in Salt Lake, he served in the Utah State Constitutional Convention in 1895, and he was also an honor delegate to the Mountain Congress for a League of Nations.25 By the time Strevell retired from business in 1931 at age seventy-three, he had achieved much and received many honors. Strevell's wealth afforded him the time and means to extend his considerable collection. He often displayed it in the basement of the luxurious Bransford Apartments on South Temple. He lived there and was a neighbor and friend to Utah's most famous cattle baron, Preston Nutter. The cattleman also built up a cabinet of curiosities from around the world, including Crimean swords and Navajo rugs.26Strevell was not an untrained crackpot. He used his high school education as a springboard to further learning. He read voraciously about his two passions: paleontology and archaeology. He also published a scientific treatise on the Utah dinosaur group, then called Dinosauropodes. He corresponded with such notable paleontologists as Dr. Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Dr. Charles W. Gilmore of the Smithsonian, Dr. Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History (whom the USMA team would meet at Dinosaur National Monument in 1934), Dr. Richard Swan Lull of Yale's Peabody Museum, and local University of Utah paleontologist Dr. Frederick J. Pack.27And through the Museum News, Strevell stayed abreast of the New Deal's expanded museum-building program during the 1930s. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and its successor, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), constructed more than one hundred museums across the country. He even placed an overly optimistic notice in the bulletin indicating that the approval of the Utah State Museum was imminent.28In sum, Strevell spent his retirement pouring all his energy, money, and influence into his passion: a state natural history museum to educate the Utah public about its archaeological and paleontological resources. He shrewdly used his many business, political, and social connections to get the museum ball rolling. But funding a big public project like a state museum is always tough, and the Depression made his task that much more difficult.Strevell's USMA partner and friend, Charles Sumner Pulver, was also a Midwesterner. Born in Villisca, Iowa, in 1866, Pulver moved to Miles City, Montana, in 1885 or 1886. Perhaps he met Strevell there when he was working for the local newspaper, the Cattleman's Journal; he became its editor at age twenty-one. We do not know if Pulver already had the collecting bug when he arrived in Miles City or if Strevell introduced him to it. Nonetheless, Pulver followed Strevell to Ogden in 1892 to work on the two-year-old Ogden Standard Examiner. Within five years he had ascended to its editorship.A few years later, Pulver joined his friend in Salt Lake City and founded a steel furniture and fixtures manufacturing business. He also invested in gold mining properties in the Tonopah and Goldfield areas in Nevada. Pulver even ran unsuccessfully in 1910 for the Utah State House of Representatives as an American Party Candidate (an anti-Mormon party).29 He was sixty-eight when he supervised the 1934–1935 USMA survey. As we shall see, he foundered as an expedition leader.Frank Asahel Beckwith joined the USMA as another high-profile Utahn. In 1934, Beckwith was already well known in the state and the region for collecting prehistoric artifacts and paleontological fossils. He was considered by the public to be an archaeologist, even if he had no such training. Beckwith had published articles about his finds in newspapers, natural history journals, and even national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. When the 1934–1935 USMA expedition commenced, the Salt Lake Tribune called him a “well-known archaeologist . . . in charge” of the expedition's survey. Another article from Moab's Times-Independent newspaper referred to him as the head of the survey and as one who had gained a national reputation for his archaeology work.30Age fifty-eight by the time of the expedition, Beckwith, like Pulver, was not a young man. He was born in Evanston, Wyoming, in 1875 to one of the richest men in the state, Asahel Collins Beckwith, the owner of a fifteen-thousand-acre ranch, the largest herd in the state, a racetrack, a coal mine, and other businesses. Young Frank grew up in comfort, but he chafed under a father who ruled with an iron fist. Frank loved learning and was intellectually curious, something he inherited from his mother, Mary E. Stewart, a former schoolteacher. Rather than enter university after completing high school in 1892, Beckwith reluctantly joined the family banking business at his father's insistence. After his mother died in 1894 and his father two years later, Frank and his brother Fred mismanaged their father's holdings, and the businesses soon went bankrupt.31Between 1898 and 1919, after marriage to Mary Simister and jobs in banking in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, Beckwith and his family returned to Delta where he purchased the Millard County Chronicle. By then he was a middle-aged man. Besides reporting on county commission meetings, weddings, and funerals, he could now write about his passion, the prehistoric people of Utah.32Living in Delta in west-central Utah also gave Beckwith proximity to the history and culture of a local Native American band, the Kanosh Paiutes. Over the years he worked closely with tribal member Joseph J. Pickyavit to interpret rock art, a special passion for Beckwith. He collected many artifacts from the area and accepted others from locals. And like Strevell, he also collected fossils. One fossil trilobite he dug up near Delta and sent to the Smithsonian was named after him, Beckwithia typa. He said it was his highest honor. Finally, in 1933–1934, a year before the USMA expedition, Arches National Monument used Civil Works Administration money to hire him to study and name its landforms.33Beckwith was a self-taught polymath who sometimes knew his stuff but sometimes came up with wild interpretations, especially when it came to the meanings of rock art. He was hardly alone in this—then and now. Besides his interest in Native American prehistory, dinosaurs, and fossils, Beckwith was an accomplished photographer, a job he shared for a time with the fourth USMA trustee on the expedition, Eugene Broaddus.Like Strevell and Pulver, Broaddus was a Midwesterner. Born in Plano, Illinois, in 1882, he moved to Salt Lake City in 1900 where he trained at Columbia Optical Company, eventually earning a doctorate in optometry. Optometry led him into photography. Early in the new century, he spent much time photographing and promoting Utah's scenic treasures: Zion, Bryce, and Wayne Wonderland, which later became Capitol Reef National Monument in 1937. In 1950, near the end of his life, he claimed that he had traveled more than 250,000 miles in the Intermountain West and spent over $35,000 of his own money touting the scenic landscape.34 Broaddus ran for the Utah House of Representatives in 1936, as a “Bourbon” (or conservative) Democrat.35 Like Pulver, he lost his bid for public office.The final and youngest USMA expedition member was Grant Groesbeck Cannon. The twenty-three-year-old Cannon was a recent student in the University of Utah's new anthropology program, directed by Julian Steward, who had married Cannon's younger sister Jane.36 Steward would later become one of the most important anthropologists in the history of the discipline. But Cannon's own field experience was limited to the winter of 1933–1934 when he assisted archaeologist Ben Wetherill, excavating in Parunuweap Canyon in Zion National Park. Cannon excavated, directed the crew, kept notes, made sketches, and did lab work. He loved his work there.37Although Cannon had less field experience than Beckwith, his training under Steward made him an asset for the expedition. Moreover, he was a Cannon, one of the most prominent families in Utah. His grandfather, George Q. Cannon, was Brigham Young's right-hand man, and Grant's father, Joseph Jenne Cannon, was a prominent businessman and editor of the Deseret News. Grant's inclusion on the trip roster made sense in every way, especially with the Cannons’ political power in the state. We do not know, however, how he and Beckwith shared responsibilities or if Cannon easily deferred to the older and more experienced amateur archaeologist. It must be noted, however, that even though Beckwith lacked professional training, he had worked side-by-side with Steward excavating near Kanosh in 1930. So Beckwith had at least observed, if not absorbed, the latest techniques and nomenclature.38This was the kind of work and career Cannon envisioned for himself at the time. He admired his brother-in-law and wanted to follow in Steward's footsteps. He was also a skilled writer and a bit of a dreamer and an idealist. He had entered a relatively new academic field whose principles and methodologies were just being established. Cannon saw the science and the socialist-leaning ideology of anthropology as an attractive alternative to the conservative theology and politics of Mormonism.39By the time the Utah State Museum Association was incorporated in April 1934, Strevell and his trustees had learned of the federal money available through FERA, a program that Congress established two years before. By August of the same year, the Utah Emergency Relief Administration (UERA) was in place with Robert H. Hinckley as director.Utah immediately applied for grants from FERA. Most of the money went to schools, town halls, and other infrastructure projects. Over 240 UERA/WPA projects were built in Utah alone. FERA money funded over a hundred museums across the country. In 1933 and 1934, when they applied for UERA money, Strevell and Pulver were optimistic because FERA funding had risen. They asked for and were granted a whopping $7,304.40 In truth, UERA was handing out so much money that oversight and close review were not always possible, so the agency might have overlooked the USMA's amateurism. Nonetheless, the signs appeared so positive that the Salt Lake Tribune reported that the museum was now “assured,” a message the paper probably heard from Strevell and Pulver.41Strevell also commissioned the noted Salt Lake City architect Slack Winburn to design a two-story museum building.42 It would encompass about 82,000 square feet and cost $275,000. Strevell envisioned it sitting just south of the capitol building at the top of State Street. The museum would charge an unspecified entry fee but also would allow students to enter free of charge on certain days. Winburn based the design on a recently discovered Mayan ruin in Umatilla, Yucatan. Strevell chose the Mayan design in part because he had seen a similar design for a museum building in Los Angeles. He also believed it would appeal to Latter-day Saints, many of whom believed that Mayans had descended from the people in the Book of Mormon.43Once UERA grant money came through, Strevell and Pulver quickly organized the expedition and planned its itinerary. Plus, they initiated a media campaign to draw interest in the survey and its goal, a state natural history museum. Besides engaging newspapers like the Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, Salt Lake Telegram, Moab Times-Independent, Vernal Express, and Millard County Chronicle, they presented to organizations such as the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce and the Vernal Lion's Club.44 Strevell also placed a notice in a national publication, the Museum Bulletin.The group did not plan to excavate sites but rather to conduct a “reconnaissance” as opposed to a more formal survey. They hoped professional scientists would follow up on their work.45 It is not clear if they really knew how to conduct a reconnaissance that could lead to a state museum. It appears as if Strevell and Pulver believed that a fancy photo book of already well-known sites would convince legislators and other movers and shakers to fund a museum. Ultimately, that is what they produced, and of course it failed.Much like representatives of eastern institutions did, Strevell and Pulver contacted local collectors who knew the areas they wanted to explore. These men would not only guide the expedition to sites in their locales, but they would also provide needed labor. With $7,304, USMA had plenty of money to pay for labor, transportation, housing, and food. They identified men to hire based on county relief rolls, as well as the men's knowledge of cultural and paleontological resources in their respective areas.46 It is not known if they worried about the ethics of hiring people who had engaged in looting or even if they considered the 1906 Antiquities Act. It is important to note, however, that the USMA expedition did not collect artifacts and other items.It is possible through photographs, a few newspaper dispatches from team members, text by Cannon, and a two-page summary of the expedition's itinerary to chart generally where they were and when. But there are only scraps of information about their day-to-day activities, who did what, how they interacted with one another, and how they reacted to what they found. If any of the main team members—Pulver, Beckwith, Broaddus, and Cannon—kept a journal during the trip, it has not survived. Apparently, Broaddus wrote a report that was lost. Cannon's notes next to each photograph are the best guide.47The expedition departed Salt Lake City on September 3, 1934, to great fanfare. Pulver even brought along his twelve-year-old grandson, Garth Garner, to share in the euphoria of the moment.48 Except for a later horse-pack trip to the Circle Cliffs area south of Torrey, Utah, they traveled in two vehicles, a Dodge sedan and a truck. They first headed east to Vernal and the Uinta Basin. Their itinerary included the famous dinosaur quarry at Dinosaur National Monument near Jensen, Utah. They also were heading to the well-known rock art sites at the McConkie Ranch in Ashley–Dry Fork, west of Vernal. Virtually every site that they visited had been previously discovered.49We have far more information about the weeks the group spent around Vernal because Beckwith, a newspaperman, published accounts in the Vernal Express. But he left the expedition shortly after they moved south to Nine Mile Canyon in late September or early October. No other team member took it upon himself to make up the slack, even though Pulver, Broaddus, and Cannon were all accomplished writers. Pulver's long career in journalism should have taught him the value of public relations. This absence of news articles about the rest of the trip from late September through February could not have helped their cause.Spirits and expectations were high when the group motored into the Uinta Basin on US Highway 40 on September 4. After presenting to the Vernal Lions Club to drum up interest in their expedition, they headed seventeen miles east to Dinosaur National Monument. Although President Woodrow Wilson had designated it a national monument in 1915 using the 1906 Antiquities Act, the site had little funding after Douglass's death in 1931. Two years later, acting superintendent Dr. A. C. Boyle was able to wrestle some funding from the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and later FERA and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to keep the work going.50 Boyle warmly greeted the USMA team and showed them what his crew of young men were doing to enhance excavation.While the USMA team toured, recorded, and photographed the dinosaur quarry, they fortuitously ran into an expedition from New York, the American Museum–Sinclair Expedition (AMSE). It was led by “Mr. Bones,” Barnum Brown, the curator of fossil reptiles at the American