Manti Temple

It's hard to believe but it was just barely over twenty years ago that my wife and I were married in the Manti Temple. March 25, 1985.

After the marriage ceremony, there was a moment in which the officiator gave advice to my wife and me. And what was that special advice given to build our marriage for time and all eternity?

Never go to bed mad at each other. Talk it over.

Time flies.

Wrong Flag, Wrong Country

Utah understands illegal immigration. After all, our Utah pioneers were illegal immigrants of Mexico in Alta California, escaping religious persecution from the United States.

Nowadays, Utah's 300,000 Hispanics are our fastest growing minority group.

But these photos of so many protestors in Los Angeles, Chicago and other American cities yielding Mexican flags will change the face of the debate. Our melting pot is much more welcoming of immigrants waving the American flag of freedom. Waving the Mexican flag in large American cities is no way to melt into America. Protestors should have carried American flags to show that they are an important part of America's economy.

Bad PR move.

My prediction. The country is going to have a stronger gut reaction on the side of immigration enforcement.

LDS Church Office Building

LDS Church Office Building
Originally uploaded by landoncliff.

I went to Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City, and took a few photos of the church office building. And what should my wandering eyes spot but a statue of Joseph Smith on one corner and Brigham Young on the other.

How appropriate. Here is the legacy of what Joseph Smith started.

Doctrine & Covenants 20:1. The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days, being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh, it being regularly organized and established agreeable to the laws of our country, by the will and commandments of God, in the fourth month, and on the sixth day of the month which is called April—2 Which commandments were given to Joseph Smith, Jun., who was called of God, and ordained an apostle of Jesus Christ, to be the first elder of this church;

Downtown Salt Lake City

I took this photo of downtown Salt Lake City from my neighborhood while walking my dog just before sunset.

Those are the Oquirh Mountains on the west side of Salt Lake City running to the north. And you can see the Great Salt Lake between the two, looking north west.

My dog liked the view too. She would stop, sit and observe for several minutes at a time. Sometimes she's so human.

Good Leadership Is Being A Good Flip-Flopper

A reader recently commented that it is the mark of an intelligent person to change their mind if they receive information that convinces them otherwise. I've always found it strange that some of my buddies have a sense of great leadership as firmness in the right, and flip-flopping as a sign of bad leadership. How did that become their mantra? That's poor leadership.

God blesses the flip-floppers who do better their second try. Our scriptures are filled with world-class flip-flopping heroes. The Lord's most noble leaders flip-flopped in behavior, given new knowledge.

Abraham was commanded to kill his son, and then on the mount received new revelation not to. Jacob fled from confrontation and danger his whole life until he decided to confront it, wrestling with God first.

What they didn't flip-flop on was being true to the voice within, as God gave them to know. You know, line upon line of truth; here a little, there a little. We receive truth in little squirts and at our own imperfect level. What we think is true one day may be incomplete.

Isaiah 28: 10 For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: 11 For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people.

I cannot imagine a scenario in which change is more difficult than to tell leaders of a religious group that they need to jump ship. And what mercy and understanding was shown to such leaders who devoted their whole lives to God but were stubborn in not adjusting their beliefs to new knowledge? “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said, “tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

The Kingdom of God is built of flip-floppers. If you doubt this, go read about the power of Alma in the Book of Mormon flip-flopping in his life.

I greatly admire Reagan even more for owning up to the Iran-Contra Affair, then changing his cabinet and course.

Becoming celestial is about constantly learning amidst change. Maybe that is why change is built into the process.

Think about this. Our eternal spirits have always been and will always be; however, being a spirit is fine for a time, then it isn't enough. We have to add on a body. We grow from dependent infant, to independence, back to a more dependent old ager. We lose our body and turn back to our spirit form, only to take it back later in its perfect ressurected form.

LDS Lesson Learned in an LSD World:
One thing we know is that in this life and the next, God expects change from every one of us.

Grey Winter Day in Spring

It was another snowy day in Spring today with low hanging snow clouds hiding the tops of the skyscrapers downtown.

Poor old Angel Moroni on his perch atop the Salt Lake Temple had his head in the clouds this afternoon as I drove past.

Another heavy snow warning is predicted this evening.

Snow, snow - I do fear
Come again another year

Speaking of snow, here's a quote from Brigham Young regarding snow and the coming Utah War of '57 that came up when I searched the term "snow" in GospeLink 2001. Federal troops were marching on Utah to depose duly-elected Governor Young and to get the territory to tow the line on the federal government's definition of marriage. This is just a few short years before the war of the states broke out in 1861.

"They say that their army is legal, and I say that such a statement is as false as hell, and that they are as rotten as an old pumpkin that has been frozen seven times and then melted in a harvest sun. Come on with your thousands of illegally-ordered troops, and I will promise you, in the name of Israel's God, that you shall melt away as the snow before a July sun."
(President Brigham Young, remarks in the Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, Sunday Morning, September 13, 1857.)

Why Me? Shouldn't It Be Him?

"We will not always have a smooth, ready answer to the question, 'Why me? Why now? Why this?'—for as Moroni observed, "Ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith.” – Elder Neal A. Maxwell

There lay a pronghorn right in full view, unharmed and uncaring. It relaxed in front of the LDS church chapel at the gate of Dugway Proving Grounds in Skull Valley, Utah.

I had been shot by accident just a few hours earlier but fortunately not wounded. Yet here lay a big game animal with decent tasting meat free from any bullet. Where is the fairness in that? It was free from any adverse consequences of either hunters or crazy target practice shooters farther north up the highway.

Go figure. I mean why me and how come this pronghorn gets off so easy?

Well, at least I shot the beast with my camera.

LDS Lessons Learned in an LSD World:
The process of life and free agency means that some days you're a bug, some days you're a windshield.

6400 Dead Sheep in Dugway in '68

Psalms 49:14 Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them;

Hmmm, just found this bit of information on the history of dead animals outside of Dugway. In all fairness, I saw only a few deceased cattle, which is nothing compared to thousands of dead sheep there in the '68.

In March 1968, 6,400 sheep were found dead after grazing in south Skull Valley, an area just outside Dugway's boundaries. When examined, the sheep were found to have been poisoned by a deadly nerve agent called VX. The incident, coinciding with the birth of the environmental movement and anti-Vietnam protests, created an uproar in Utah and internationally.

One side note. There's no sheep there now.

LDS lessons learned in an LSD World:

• Dead animals are a bad sign but dead people are a worse one.

Samuel Clemens Opines About Skull Valley

It seems that Mr. Samuel Longhorne Clemens opined about the harshness of Skull Valley. Local broadcast journalist Ken Verdoia continues his interview with historian Dennis Defa over the history of the Goshute Indians in the harsh environment of Skull Valley.

Verdoia: By the early 1860s when a young writer by the name of Samuel Clemens transits the [Skull Valley] area, he comments that he has seen the most miserable form of human existence. You reference it in your chapter. His view of the Goshute people from, I would assume, the Overland Stage route, is one of a horrific existence on a horrific landscape. Is that one of the consequences of this conflict between Goshute and increasing white settlement?

Defa: It is. It's a direct result. To go across the desert in a stage, and especially someone like Samuel Clemens who comes from Missouri, where it is so green and it is so lush that for many of these people, as you read their journals, their descriptions would, would make one think that they had arrived on the backside of the moon, they just could not appreciate, nor could they understand, that kind of a landscape. It provided them with no references in terms of what their experiences had been. It was an area to get through as fast as possible.

LDS lesson learned in an LSD World:

• Samuel Clemens was smart
  

Skull Valley's Goshutes: Most Adapted to Desert Living

Here's an interesting interview of historian Dennis Defa, who has had a life long fascination with Skull Valley and its Goshute Indians. From what I can see, there aren't many living in the valley today. The Goshutes, a very small community of the Shoshone tribe, had long ago adjusted themselves to living in Death Valley and later Utah's Skull Valley. Mr. Defa observes about these 100 or so Native Americans:

"The [Skull Valley] Goshute represent, I think, the best example of what's been called the desert culture in modern terms than any of the other groups in the Great Basin. There were never many of them, but there have always been people out there. And for white Americans or the casual observer, it's a desert. It's a harsh desert. It's not even a pleasant desert like the deserts in Arizona, the Sonora Deserts. But yet the Goshutes have always viewed it as their home. They have an intimate understanding of everything that desert provides."

"...Water is the common denominator out there. Without water you don't survive. With water you can survive fairly well. As whites moved into the West Desert, they had to have the same thing. They had to have water. They had to have grass for their livestock. And as they moved into those more favorable areas, Indians were forced out. By depriving them of the water and the resources that went along with the water, the Indians suffered horrifically. They lost food sources. They lost places of shelter. They lost access to pinion pines for pine nuts and they came in direct competition with the white settlers. Horses didn't mean anything to the Goshute, these are not buffalo hunting Indians. Horses were direct competition. They ate the grass that provided the seeds for the Goshute. When the Pony Express and the Overland Stage went through, water is the common denominator. And when you're using animals like horses, you have to have water and you have to have feed. Those were the same places that the Goshute used to gather."

Water in Skull Valley

HORSESHOE SPRING
A reader commented about a spring of water close to the colony of Iosepa. Although the valley only recieves an inch and a half of water a year, there is an underground spring of Horseshoe Spring several miles north of Iosepa. The spring feeds a few small ponds, with water temperature staying 72 degrees during the winter.

The Hawaiians raised carp in those ponds.

It's a strange place. The desert goes straight into the blue and green pond, with no trees or shrubs. So summers must be really harsh here. A local guy told me that the trench that feeds the spring water into the ponds largely dries up during the summer months.

In the past few decades, the spring was made into a national protection area in order to block the transportation of used plutonium for storage in the Indian reservation.

DEAD CATTLE WARNING
There was an occasional bloated cattle carcass about 100 yards off the road. Such death just outside Dugway's biological and nerve gas testing area was rather nerve racking. I realize that a reason the cattle are dead by the side of the road is because they were hit on the road by vehicles during the night. But you can see from the photo I took, there aren't any signs of being hit by a car -- no blood, broken bones, bruises, indentations or other signs of trauma.

This cattle and others I saw looked in good shape, considering they were dead. Whatever killed them, killed them quickly.

Was I trodding around in a land hiding nerve gas or atomic radiation? But radiation poisoning should emaciate cattle. Bovine hair should be falling off in clumps. Having not seen a bald cow, I was comforted with that thought. But after looking at that tumescent carcass, a feeling of unease returned.

LDS lessons learned in an LSD World:

1. Despite the hot spring, Skull Valley is still very dry
2. Be wary of the federal government, especially when it works in secrecy
   
3. Dead cows in a biological testing ground tell me it's time to drive home immediately
   

Shot in the Stomach

I had the wildest thing happen to me today. I was shot but I have no wound.

After writing so much last week on the colony of Iosepa, I went out this afternoon to get another impression of Skull Valley. This Sunday afternoon there were hunters and people target practicing all over the valley. Lots of gun fire, which certainly made me nervous. I should have left the area then and there but I'm afraid I didn’t.

I went up to the top of Lone Mountain (pictured above from a photo I took on the way up), away from the gun fire and began talking with a driver of another car. He was on the inside of his car and I was on the outside talking in. Faster than I could react, I heard a zip followed by a "kersplat" on my stomach. There wasn't much pain. Even better, I didn't see a hole through my yellow jacket and there was no red blood oozing out. No mushrooming holes or even straight little holes, only a small scratch on the side of my stomach. Frankly, how my skin was scratched with no hole or scratch on my clothes remains a mystery to me.

I glanced for Dick Cheney, thinking he must be in the area, . He wasn't, which was a good thing. It meant I would not have to apologize on national television for the inconvenience of putting the VP through so much anguish over shooting me. My luck was improving with every tick of the clock.

I drove down to the direction that the projectile came from -- a cove at the base of the mountain, where I found a Dad and his young kids innocently target practicing.

"Are you shooting pellets?", I asked.

"Nope", replied the Dad. "I have a .357 and my kids have been shooting with .22s."

That was definitely not the answer I wanted. It meant that I had been hit by an actual bullet -- not a pellet or a BB that I had conveniently convinced myself of on the short drive down the hillside.

Since there was no direct line from the bottom cove to the top of the mountain, the best I can figure is that the bullet must have ricocheted off the cliff of the mountain or a rock before it hit me. That's why the bullet didn't go through me -- that and my lucky angel looking over my shoulder.

LDS lessons learned today in an LSD World?

1. Don't play with guns, and never fire them in a direction where there might be people. They might fire back.
   
2. Skull Valley, Utah is a hostile place in more ways than its harsh climate. Its filled with crazy Quick Draw Utah McGraws on Sunday afternoons; oh, and their little Baba Looeys have guns too.
   
3. One can't even get lost in the middle of nowhere without fear of being shot.
   
4. And remember. Guns don't kill people. Bullets do.
   

Location of Iosepa, Skull Valley, UT

Just found this map of Skull Valley, where the old colony of Iosepa can be found (the red rectangle). The ground has been deemed most appropriate by the federal government to use for bombing ranges, nuclear processing and chemical demolition.

The Hawaiian City of Joseph in Utah

DESOLATION
Looking at Skull Valley, I see some harsh ground for Utah. It's just southeast of the Bonneville Salt Flats and next to the top secret Dugway Proving Grounds -- a part of Utah that is sparsely populated to say the least. The little water in the area seems to be frozen in the mountains or under ground. Wikipedia describes the valley this way, “Considered an unsuccessful attempt at colonization, Iosepa was an extremely inhospitable location for any group of people.”

But the Hawaiians wanted to be next to the Salt Lake Temple, so I guess Skull Valley, 75 miles out, was reasonably close. I suspect there were other reasons. After all, at the time there was a temple in St. George, a much warmer area but which already had a colony. There was another in Logan and one in Manti, Utah.

I suspect that it wasn’t being close to just any temple but rather the Hawaiian saints wanted to be by Elder Smith, Elder Cannon and other senior authorities at the Church office in SLC.

A BAD NAME TOO
The colony was named after the Apostle Joseph F. Smith, who served his mission in the Hawaiian islands. They supposedly gave it the Hawaiian name for Joseph -- Iosepa.

Iosepa?? What’s that? The Hawaiian language doesn't have an "s" in its alphabet. "Iokepa" would be the appropriate transliteration of Joseph's name into a Hawaiian pronunciation. "IoSepa" sounds like a bunch of haoles (white guys) slurring the name back to English, sort of a second generation transliteration. e.g. Joseph > Iokepa > Iosepa > And even this distortion is further distorted by being given an Anglo pronunciation, Yo-seh-pa. Matthew Kester of BYU-Hawaii states that Hawaiians were more literate than their Caucasian counterparts at the time. They certainly knew how to read and write their language. Their church leaders also preached in Hawaiian. In other words, the Hawaiians of "Iosepa" knew how to write their language in 1889 just like we know that Lisa is not spelled "3-I-S-A." It's a real indication that the feedback mechanisms to civic leadership were not fully working.

The fact that the Hawaiian saints let the spelling stand meant that they understood the ignorance of the surrounding culture and their civic leaders but went along out of respect for authority. I can't come up with another conclusion than that. For the record, Iokepah is pronounced EE-OO-KE-PAH. The wrong name and pronounciation is but another tangible evidence of Utah haoles trying to make sense and to nurture what they didn't understand. The results of everyone’s efforts are the graves on the ghost town of Iosepa in the desolate Skull Valley.

HAWAIIANS FAILED BECAUSE NOT INDUSTRIOUS?

There are some here that think their brown brothers failed because they simply could not work as hard as the other colonists throughout Utah. One web site author writes,

“The Kanakas were not used to the hard labor necessary to create a colony which was to survive on its own. Although they managed to get by most of time, much of their food was imported from Salt Lake City.”

Historian Arrington seems to anticipate this stereotype and responds:

“Even more serious from the standpoint of the production record of the colony, however, were the frequent outbreaks of milder forms of illness among the natives. Accustomed to island conditions, the constitutions of the Hawaiians, despite a fierce faith, did not adjust readily to the rigors of the burning heat of the summer sun and the driving winds and zero temperatures of the Skull Valley winters. The high rate of mortality is indicated by the large number of markers in the village cemetery…It is probable that the disastrous depression of the 1890's, with its long period of declining farm prices, was responsible for most of the financial problems of the colony and the need for Church help. Other Church colonies required similar assistance. Certainly, the Hawaiian Saints did not lack the qualities of industry and frugality.” (Improvement Era, 1954, May, 1954)

People tend to work pretty hard when the natural alternative is death. President Smith saw this first hand. He particularly saw how his beloved Hawaiian saints were faithful in tribulation, even to death. It may have been seeing that level of tribulation first hand at the Hawaiian colony that had now President Smith receptive to build the first temple outside of Utah -- in Laie, Oahu.

Iosepa lasted as a community until 1917 at which time the residents returned to Hawaii where an LDS Temple was under construction. The LDS Church paid the travel expenses for those who could not afford to pay themselves.

Utah's plumeria tree died that year, despite all the efforts of all its gardners. As for me, to this day I never understood why my beloved plumeria in my yard did not make it.

The Ghost Town can be seen on southbound 196 off of I-80.
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Other resources:

Check the audio recording from the Savvy Traveler's experiences at this ghost town in May.

Iosepa, the place, inspires new BYU-Hawaii archivist. BYU-Hawaii

Iosepa, a Hawaiian Plumeria in the Utah Desert

Ah, the Plumeria Tree, a tree right from the heart of paradise. My grandmother used to pick its white and yellow flowers in her Hawaiian backyard to make leis for me when I visited after a long absence. They grew almost like weeds there. I wanted such a symbol of Eden in my front yard on the Mainland. Despite putting porous rock underneath it and watering sparingly, the tree, alien to Southern California, just didn’t grow much the first couple of years. It wanted to grow, I could tell, but the forces of nature conspired against it and one winter day it finally died, a victim of my ignorance.

The Hawaiian colony of Iosepa in Utah is like that Plumeria tree of mine – a breath of paradise in a hostile land, having well intentioned gardeners, but with a superficial knowledge of its nature. That partial knowledge is no better symbolized than in Iosepa’s very name. But I am getting ahead of myself. First of all, what is the colony of Iosepa and what’s it doing here? This is how Utah’s government describes the history of this colony.

Iosepa, (pronounced Yo-SEH-pa) the Hawaiian word for Joseph, was founded in August 1889 under the direction of then Mormon apostle Joseph F. Smith. The town's colonizers were devout converts to the Mormon faith who came to Utah in order to build Zion and worship in the soon to be completed Salt Lake Temple. Certainly these tropical Polynesians were out of their element in the bone-dry desert of Utah and battled to adapt to the new climate, new language, and new foods, but in time they prospered and even made Skull Valley appear hospitable…More important to the pious colonists, however, were their 77-mile treks to Salt Lake City. They made the pilgrimage as often as possible to worship in the temple, which remained their primary motivation for staying in Utah…The Polynesian settlers were not accustomed to the harsh Utah climate; they baked in the dry desert summers and shivered in the cold white winters. Such challenges took their toll, and at times it seemed that the cemetery grew faster than the town.

The deadness of the ghost town indicates that all is not what it seemed in Iosepa. It was a showcase of faith that hid away secrets. The first was its bogus prosperity. There were also unmentionables such as the West’s prejudice against a brown skinned people that was cut out. And there were gross misperceptions. The surrounding community couldn’t even get the Hawaiian name right.

Information about Iosepa typically reads like propaganda. For example, Utah historian J. Cecil Alter wrote in 1911:

"Iosepa is perhaps the most successful individual colonization proposition that has been attempted by the Mormon people in the United States…There are 1,120 acres practically all in use and half as much more is being brought under the magic wand of the Hawaiian irrigator."

It may have looked successful, prosperous and self-sufficient but it wasn’t. According to historian Leonard Arrington, “The extent of Church aid, of course, was not known”. The colony was losing money but the LDS church quietly put in more to support the Hawaiians.

There are mysteries here. Why were they assigned such a hostile place to colonize? And for a small colony of saints ranging from 50 to 230, how come there are so many graves from just 25 years of settlement? Moreover, Hawaiians were a highly literate people as were the Caucasian church leaders who oversaw the colony. So how come the graveyard has so many unknown adults? A group of faithful Hawaiian saints moved from the islands to Salt Lake City to be close to and help build the SL temple. Church history is silent from here to the point in which a colony is appointed for them in Skull Valley a few years later. The question I had is if they wanted to be as close as possible to the temple of God, why were they moved from SLC to 75 miles away in the middle of some of the harshest country in Utah?

PREJUDICE & MISUNDERSTANDING
One historian says that Salt Lake City residents had problems "socializing" with the Hawaiians in the decade or so that they lived there. “Socializing”, eh? Yeah, we know what that means.

This misunderstanding did not just apply to the Hawaiians. A New Zealand record of a Maori saint, Hirini Whaanga Christy, who was not connected with the Hawaiian colony, described the situation.

“In 1894 he and other relatives went to Utah, where his grandparents worked in the Salt Lake Temple recording and affirming iwi genealogies. After arriving in Salt Lake City, the whanau was mistakenly thought to be a polygamous family. Since polygamy was no longer practiced, this proved to be an embarrassment to those who were unaware of the extended family of the Maori. They were moved to Kanab, southern Utah, where misplaced trust and misguided speculation saw them lose most of their funds.”

I cannot help but wonder if the outbreak of leprosy in the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1860 and 70s made Utahans suspicious of most Hawaiians for disease.So, when you are a church leader and see part of your flock not wanted by the general population, what do you do? I suppose you preach against it but in Utah there was also an option to have groups form their own independent communities. The church, with the leadership of Joseph F. Smith who had close ties to Hawaiians from his mission in Hawaii, called them to colonize a part of Utah.