Colonizing Landscapes

I presented at the Mormon History Association last week in Park City, which was my first in-person conference since October of 2019. It was great to remember how fulfilling non-virtual human interaction is, and it was exciting to see really powerful work on Mormonism’s complicated history related to race. My talk explored how landscape paintings by Mormon artists worked to promote colonialism, using the rhetoric of “improving” or “reclaiming” land and water resources to justify displacement of Native people.

I focused on a little-known painting, Harvest Time, Ephraim, that C. C. A. Christensen completed late in his career in 1904. At first glance, it seems like an unassuming pastoral landscape like scores of others painted in Utah around the turn of the century. Yet it highlights the source of Mormon agricultural success that most other works took for granted: irrigation.

Mormonism has a fascinating relationship with irrigation. Even though they were settling a semi-arid region, nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints were committed to building an agrarian society. They largely succeeded—by intervening in the region’s natural hydrology to redirect water resources on a massive scale. I had no idea, growing up in Salem where we had a water turn from the Strawberry Water Users Association, that the water I was turning down rows in our garden had been diverted from the Colorado River watershed through a massive tunnel across the Wasatch.

Irrigation wasn’t just the basis of Utah’s agricultural economy—it also became a powerful symbol of Mormons as quintessential pioneers, making the American desert “blossom as the rose.” Especially as they sought to rehabilitate their image after the nineteenth-century struggle over polygamy, early twentieth-century Latter-day Saints constantly promoted their innovations in irrigation as evidence of their essential Americanness. Farming scenes like Christensen’s weren’t just pretty pictures; they were great PR (or propaganda, depending on how you look at it) for Mormonism.

Maybe less obviously, they were also propaganda for white displacement of Native people. This rhetoric is easier to see in images that actually depict Native people, like Christensen’s imagined view of Temple Hill in Manti at the arrival of the first Latter-day Saint settlers. He juxtaposed that scene with an image of the Manti Temple forty years later, highlighting its pristinely manicured formal gardens (which were never quite completed as Christensen depicted them). The message was obvious to contemporaneous Mormon viewers: where other people had never managed to rise above the wilderness in which they lived, the Latter-day Saints had “reclaimed” the landscape as a verdant, orderly garden.

If you’re interested in learning more about Mormon settlers’ interactions with Native people, Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount is an excellent place to start. The super-abbreviated version is that Latter-day Saints initially worked to convert and assimilate the Northern Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Diné, and other Native nations whose lands they were settling. By the end of the nineteenth-century, they had largely given up that effort and instead relied on the United States government to remove and confine Native people on remote reservations. Mormons of the era worked hard to justify settlement, using texts and images to hide the brutal reality of intercultural violence (I explore this in much more detail in Mormon Visual Culture and the American West).

I tried to make two really important points in my MHA talk. The first is that images of Native absence are just as much a part of this promotional agenda as images that record Native presence. Christensen’s Harvest Time, Ephraim is as much about Mormon claims of cultural superiority as his paired paintings of Manti’s Temple Hill. Harvest Time, Ephraim—really all the pastoral landscapes produced in Utah around the turn of the century—celebrate Mormon farmers as helping the land blossom into its divine potential through irrigated agriculture, justifying the physical and cultural violence attending “Indian Removal” by erasing Native presence in images of the very landscapes from which Native bodies had been violently displaced.

The other important point is that although we tend to think of the establishment of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in the 1860s-70s as the end of colonization in Utah, settlers were still taking Native lands and water resources well into the twentieth century. In fact, the year after Christensen painted Harvest Time, Ephraim, Theodore Roosevelt signed the proclamation opening vast tracts of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation to white settlement. One of the strongest arguments for this new stage of “Indian removal” was that Mormon settlers could employ irrigation to “improve” the region in ways that Northern Utes and other Native peoples had allegedly failed to. Most of my research has been on the nineteenth century, but I’m working on an essay exploring the twentieth-century intersections of race, colonization, and water in Utah art and visual culture.