Stewart L. Udall: Steward of the Land

By Thomas G. Smith

As a three-term member of Congress and as the secretary of the interior in the Kennedy and Johnson cabinets (1961–1969), Stewart L. Udall (1920–2010) was a distinguished public servant and one of the great environmental leaders in US history. This book, the first biography of Udall, introduces his work to a new generation of Americans concerned with the environment. The author traces the influences on Udall’s career, the evolution of his views on conservation, and his setbacks as well as his triumphs.

In addition to his efforts to preserve wilderness areas and protect the planet, Udall advocated reforming the seniority system in Congress, limiting the production and testing of nuclear weapons, promoting coexistence with the Soviet Union, and helping oppressed peoples in emerging nations. A visionary leader, Udall was inspired by his pioneering Mormon forebears who helped settle the Arizona high plateau, where he first connected with the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780826357762

Thomas G. Smith

Thomas G. Smith is a professor emeritus of history at Nichols College, where he served as the Robert Stansky Distinguished Professor. He is the author of Green Republican: John Saylor and the Preservation of America’s Wilderness and Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins.

Book preview

STEWART L. UDALL

STEWART L. UDALL

Steward of the Land

Thomas G. Smith

© 2017 by Thomas G. Smith

All rights reserved. Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

22  21  20  19  18  17 1  2  3  4  5  6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Thomas G. (Thomas Gary), 1945– author.

Title: Stewart L. Udall : steward of the land / Thomas G. Smith.

Other titles: Steward of the land

Description: Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, [2017] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016057146 (print) | LCCN 2016057480 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780826357755 (hbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826357762 (E-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Udall, Stewart L. | Cabinet officers—United States—Biography. | Legislators—United States—Biography. | Conservationists—United States—Biography. | Reformers—United States—Biography. | United States—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC E840.8.U34 S55 2017 (print) | LCC E840.8.U34 (ebook) | DDC 328.73/092 [B] —dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057146

Cover photograph: Lady Bird Johnson and Stewart Udall Floating the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park, courtesy of LBJ Presidential Library

Designed by Catherine Leonardo

For Sandra, as always, and our eight grandchildren: Jack, Molly, Mick, and Maggie Sullivan and Sam, Henry, Ian, and Lily Smith.

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

Mormon Forebears

CHAPTER TWO

Son of the High Plateau

CHAPTER THREE

Mormon Mission

CHAPTER FOUR

Wartime Mission

CHAPTER FIVE

Tucson

CHAPTER SIX

Storm Warning for Reclamation

CHAPTER SEVEN

House Reformer

CHAPTER EIGHT

Secretary of the Interior

CHAPTER NINE

Kennedy, Conservation, and Khrushchev

CHAPTER TEN

Disgruntled New Frontiersman

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Ringside Seat at LBJ’s Round Table

CHAPTER TWELVE

Beauty and the Beast

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The CAP and the Grand Canyon Controversy

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Vietnam: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Parting Gifts, Parting Ways

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Consultant and Presidential Campaign Manager

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Advocate for American Atomic Victims

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Final Days in Santa Fe

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

Stewart Udall’s boyhood home in St. Johns, Arizona

Pencil sketch of Stewart Udall as a Mormon missionary

Pencil sketch of Stewart Udall as a World War II B-24 waist gunner

Stewart Udall as a basketball guard

Stewart and Lee Udall with five of their six children

Stewart and Lee Udall visit with Robert Frost

Cartoon showing Udall being unhorsed

Stewart Udall with his parents and siblings

Udall and President Kennedy address the press

Udall and JFK at a Washington Senators baseball game

Udall and JFK meet with writer Carl Sandburg

Cartoon depicting Udall’s public relations gaffes

President Kennedy presents congressional medal to poet Robert Frost

Udall arm in arm with Robert Frost

Udall pictured with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev

President Kennedy signs Point Reyes National Seashore legislation

Udall and Rachel Carson

President Johnson signs the Wilderness Act

Udall and Lady Bird Johnson greeted at Big Bend National Park

Udall and Lady Bird Johnson hiking at Big Bend National Park

Udall and Lady Bird Johnson rafting the Rio Grande

Udall with Arizona’s governor and congressional delegation

New Yorker cartoon teasing Udall

Udall toasting passage of the CAP legislation

Cartoon illustrating Udall’s concern for clean rivers

Acknowledgments

The seeds for this biography were sown in 1986 when Stewart Udall gave a talk at Nichols College, where I taught. When I broached the idea, he urged me to hold off while he remained alive. Meanwhile, over the next decade or so we talked and corresponded on a number of Udall-related projects, including Civil Rights on the Gridiron: The Kennedy Administration and the Desegregation of the Washington Redskins, Journal of Sport History (Summer 1987); The Canyonlands National Park Controversy, 1961–1964, Utah Historical Quarterly (Summer 1991); John Kennedy, Stewart Udall and New Frontier Conservation, Pacific Historical Review (August 1995); and Robert Frost, Stewart Udall, and the ‘Last Go Down,’ New England Quarterly (March 1997). I thank those journals for permission to use previously published material.

Udall’s oldest son, US senator Tom Udall, chose not to respond to my request for an interview, but Stewart’s brother Burr and sister Elma, now both in their nineties and enviably sharp minded, were wonderfully cooperative. Both spoke long and lovingly about their brother, and by mail and e-mail Burr never seemed to lose patience answering my requests for more information. He also supplied a photo used in this book and provided information from other family members. I am also indebted to Ambassador Curtis Kammen for talking to me about his and Stewart Udall’s 1962 visit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Librarians and school officials across the country gave invaluable assistance. At Nichols College, Jim Douglas, Rosalba Onofrio, Matthew Haggard, and Cindy LaFortune provided research and technical help. During my several visits to Tucson, Roger Myers and the Special Collections staff at the University of Arizona were extremely helpful, as were archivists at Arizona State University in Tempe; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Western History Department at the Denver Public Library; the Dickinson College Library in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota; the National Park Service; and the JFK and LBJ Presidential Libraries. Ellen Greene at the Arizona State Archives in Phoenix and Andrea Vaughn at the St. Johns Public Library helped me access St. Johns and other Arizona newspapers and yearbooks. And at Eastern Arizona State College, registrar Russell Skinner and alumni officer David Udall provided information about Stewart Udall’s academic courses and school activities.

As many historians of recent American history realize, acquiring the rights to illustrations can be a time-consuming and expensive process. I am grateful to the archivists and rights holders who helped smooth the way, including J. Wendel Cox and his associates at the University of Arizona; D. Clark Manning; Allison Ingram at Condé Nast; Mark Madison of the US Fish and Wildlife Service; National Park Concessions; and Thomas Alex, Margaret Harmon, and Rachel Packelhofer of the National Park Service at Big Bend National Park.

I have been fortunate to teach at a small college with caring and cooperative colleagues. Outgoing academic dean and provost Alan Reinhardt, a fellow baseball fan, has been an avid supporter of my projects and a close friend for more than two decades. Incoming academic dean Mauri Pelto, who studies glaciers in the American and Canadian Cascades, has also encouraged my work in the field of environmental studies. Paul Lambert, Ed Warren, and the late James Conrad in the history department have long enabled my academic and classroom efforts with sound advice, as have officemates Don Leonard and, later, Art Duhaime. Colleagues Andrea Becker, Maureen Butler, and Chris Wojnar have buoyed my spirits with their positive outlooks and timely administrative and technical assistance. For financial support I am indebted to Robert Kuppenheimer, a Nichols College alum whose generosity helps fund faculty research and attendance at professional conferences. I have also benefited from a grant from the Lyndon B. Johnson Library.

Executive editor W. Clark Whitehorn at the University of New Mexico Press has encouraged and patiently guided this project from the beginning. Diane Bush has served as an exemplary copyeditor. I also have benefited from the many helpful suggestions from the anonymous manuscript reviewers.

Friends and family, including my sister, Janet, and a gaggle of in-laws in upstate New York, have provided comic and stress relief. Dennis Sexton, a classmate whom I first met in a rural one-room elementary school, has been a lifelong confidant; golfing, hunting, and fishing partner; best man at my wedding; and fellow conspirator in many boyhood and adulthood escapades. My children—Tom Jr., Shannon, Steven, and Matthew—their spouses, and my eight grandchildren have provided joyous, humorous, and regenerative leisure times, especially at family get-togethers at Ingalls Head, Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada. My wife, Sandra, my high school sweetheart, has been a constant source of love, laughter, patience, and wisdom. She has tried to save me from myself and from errors in this book. My errors within and apart from this book are, alas, my own.

Prologue

In June 1967, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall embarked on a Colorado River raft trip with his family to connect with the wild and to reassess his position on a controversy that the Sierra Club’s David Brower called the most important conservation battle of this century. For more than a week, Udall later wrote, we would float through the climactic canyons of the Colorado, run some of the most turbulent rapids on the continent, camp on sandbars and sleep under the stars. We would also sever all contact with the outside world.¹

Udall’s ride on the wild side also gave him an opportunity to inspect two canyon sites that were proposed for dams. Facing near-critical shortages, residents of Arizona, Udall’s home state, fervently supported federally constructed hydroelectric dams at Marble and Bridge Canyons that would bring more water to Phoenix and its parched central valley. Preservationists like Brower just as ardently opposed the Central Arizona Project because the proposed dams would back water into Grand Canyon National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park, thus violating the principle of national park sanctity.

Within the Interior Department, the dam-building Bureau of Reclamation supported the project while the National Park Service opposed it. A recommendation by Udall favoring at least one of the dams would be hailed by Arizonans and heighten his chances for a possible run for the governorship or the US Senate. A recommendation against the dams would please preservationists and cement his reputation as perhaps America’s greatest interior secretary. It also would likely destroy his political future in Arizona. While other officials would have input into the administration’s final recommendation to Congress, Udall, as head of the agency tasked with construction, was the point guard. Pressed on all sides, he decided to give the canyons a chance to speak for themselves.²

Udall came from a tradition of developing natural resources, especially rivers. His pioneering Mormon ancestors had dammed streams in the arid Southwest to bloom the desert and sustain their frontier communities. As a member of Congress, he followed in that utilitarian resource-use tradition. After his appointment as interior secretary, however, he began to evolve toward a perspective emphasizing the protection of the environment and the preservation of open space, wilderness, and free-flowing rivers. That viewpoint was put to the test with the proposal to build dams on the Colorado River at Marble and Bridge Canyons.

Udall served as interior secretary from 1961 to 1969, and only Harold Ickes, who held the post under Franklin Roosevelt, rivals him in significance. As department head, Udall, like Ickes, helped bring more scenic and historical landscapes into the national park system. Additionally, he became a national spokesperson and symbol for the emerging environmental movement, insisting that humans were not masters of the earth but rather fellow travelers and stewards. He inspired Americans, especially young people, to serve Earth in much the same way that John Kennedy asked them to serve their country. He was the first secretary to articulate the interdependence between people and their natural world, wrote former National Park Service director George Hartzog. He was in the forefront of those visionaries whose leadership ushered in the environmental era, and was perhaps the greatest leader the Department has ever seen. Udall himself was guided by visionaries, including his pioneering, earth-sculpting Mormon forebears who helped settle the Arizona high plateau, where he first connected with the natural world.³

CHAPTER ONE

Mormon Forebears

The name Udall derives from the medieval word f-e-u-d-a-l meaning connected to the land.

—ELMA UDALL, Interview with Julie Ferdon, February 21–22, 2004

Stewart Lee Udall took pride in his Mormon ancestors, even though two of them had been criminals. His paternal grandfather, David K. Udall, whom he admired, was a polygamist and convicted perjurer. His maternal great-grandfather, John Doyle Lee, who distressed him, was a mass murderer.

The Udalls trace their roots to England. Stewart’s paternal great-grandfather, David Udall, father of David K., was born in Goudhurst, County Kent, in 1829, and his great-grandmother, Eliza King, hailed from that same county. Besides reading, writing, and numbers, David’s parents taught him to be forthright, hardworking, and sober. His decision to abstain from strong spirits, he later wrote, spared him many of the heartaches and misfortunes that befell the giddy multitude. At age seventeen, he moved fifty miles away to Putney, near London, where he kept himself sober, honest, industrious; stayed apart from the giddy multitude; and did not deprive any young woman of her virtue.¹

His four-year experience in Putney was transformative. He worked as a farmhand and delivery boy and found love and religion. In 1848, at age nineteen, he met Eliza King, age twenty-three, and was smitten. I had never seen a young woman I liked so much, he confided to his journal. She was tall, and she possessed dark brown hair which was silken and wavy, full dark eyes, beautiful complexion and red cheeks. After a two-year courtship, they married in 1850. They also became converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).²

Joseph Smith founded the LDS—or Mormon Church, as it is commonly termed—in upstate New York in 1830. Though much maligned, the new faith took hold in the United States, and by the late 1830s had spread to England. Over the following decade, approximately thirty thousand English men and women converted to the faith. As with Puritans two centuries earlier, thousands of English Saints, seeking refuge and new opportunities, migrated to North America. David and Eliza joined the mass migration in mid-January 1851, and, fortunately, David chronicled their life journey in his journal.³

After an eight-week, stomach-churning voyage across the Atlantic to New Orleans, the Udalls took a steamship six hundred miles up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where David found work in a brickyard. At mid-century, St. Louis was a raucous city filled with merchants, bankers, wagon masters, trail guides, saloon keepers, con men, prostitutes, and gamblers—all seeking to capitalize on the wants and needs of westbound emigrants. The abundance of temptations in the Gateway to the West, David complained, caused many Mormon brethren to lose their faith. Cholera also plagued the city. It is a sickly, wicked, hell of a place, he observed. Despite their unsavory surroundings, the Udalls spent nearly a year in St. Louis preparing for the 1,300-mile trek across the continent to the Salt Lake Valley and awaiting the birth of their first child, David King Udall, who was born September 7, 1851.⁴

In a covered wagon hauled by yoked oxen, they rattled out of St. Louis the following spring with a small party of pioneers, and after four grueling months, they reached Salt Lake City on September 5, 1852. The Salt Lake Valley belonged to Mexico when Brigham Young, successor to the murdered Joseph Smith, led the Mormon exodus there in July 1847. The following year, the United States acquired Utah and the future states of Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war with Mexico. In 1850 Congress organized Utah as a territory, and President Millard Fillmore appointed Young as governor. Young also served as the president of the LDS Church, a position he would hold from 1847 until his death thirty years later.⁵

Church leaders, known as the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, ordained David Udall as a priest and asked him to help settle a community of Saints in Nephi, located eighty-five miles south of Salt Lake City. I feel at home here. I like this place very much, he jotted in his journal.⁶

In Nephi David and Eliza raised crops and expanded their family. Three children, one of whom died in infancy, were born in short order. David also took up the practice of plural marriage, or polygamy. In 1852 the LDS Church publicly defended the patriarchal plural-marriage arrangement that had been practiced for at least a decade. By that year, Young had forty-four wives and thirty-two children. David never had more than two wives simultaneously.⁷

In establishing the community of Nephi, Mormons had to battle drought, stubborn soil, grasshoppers, and hostile neighbors. Native Americans (mainly Ute peoples) considered them intruders and periodically lashed out by stealing livestock and occasionally committing acts of violence. In turn, Mormons retaliated. After Indians killed four settlers in nearby Williams Springs in October 1853, the Saints struck back by killing eight Indians, or Lamanites. I did not kill any of them, Udall stated.⁸

Mormon settlers also took up arms against other alleged threats to their community. One of those came from the US government in the summer and fall of 1857. In the so-called Utah War, President James Buchanan ordered federal troops to Utah Territory to assert US authority and to replace Young as governor. Fearful of being destroyed, Mormons armed themselves. Rather than engage federal troops directly, their militia used guerrilla and scorched-earth tactics—stampeding livestock, destroying supply trains, torching grasslands—to disrupt the federal advance into the Salt Lake Valley. Fortunately, no lives were lost and after protracted negotiations, Young stepped down as governor, the federal government established its authority, and the war ended uneventfully in July 1858. David Udall’s role in the conflict is unknown. A characteristically understated journal entry of October 10, 1857, reads, I was called to go out and meet our enemies. ⁹

A month earlier another Mormon, John Doyle Lee, felt called to defend Zion from alleged enemies. Lee’s background is murky. He claimed to be descended from the prominent Lee family of colonial Virginia, but DNA evidence belies that connection. Born to Ralph Lee and Elizabeth Doyle in Illinois Territory in 1811, he lost his parents at an early age and was raised by an aunt. He converted to Mormonism in the late 1830s and joined LDS settlements in Missouri and Illinois before making the trek to Salt Lake City with wife Agatha Ann Woolsey and four other wives in 1848. A zealot and dutiful deputy, he became Brigham Young’s adopted son. In Utah he was a successful farmer, rancher, evangelist, and colonizer. In the 1850s he helped settle the new Mormon communities of Parowan and Fort Harmony in southern Utah. And in 1872, shortly before his capture for murder, he established a ferry across the Colorado River in northern Arizona, a site that still carries his name.¹⁰

Lee committed his crime in 1857, when he led an attack by a group of Cedar City Mormons against an Arkansas emigrant wagon train bound for California. In the Mountain Meadows Massacre on September 12, he and his militia slaughtered between 120 and 140 men, women, and children. When news of the bloodbath surfaced, the local Mormons placed all the blame on Paiute Indians. Young questioned Lee but accepted his version that Paiutes solely perpetrated the atrocity. Indeed, the LDS Church held this position until 1990.

The reason for the attack, the degree—if any—of Indian involvement, and Young’s role are still under debate. Clearly, Young had created an atmosphere of wartime hysteria, placed the territory under martial law, and aroused the Mormon population against outsiders. He also failed to undertake a thorough investigation of the massacre. Church leaders chose to look away for nearly 150 years. The weight of the evidence suggests that Lee and his militiamen acted alone.¹¹

The federal government chose not to look away, but the Civil War stalled its investigation. Based on the testimony of a lapsed Mormon participant in the carnage, the government eventually brought Lee to trial in the mid-1870s. He claimed to be a scapegoat, but an all-Mormon jury of his Utah peers found him guilty and sentenced him to death. In a bizarre move, the court ordered that he be executed at the scene of the crime. From his prison near Beaver, Utah, he was carted under armed guard to the Mountain Meadows site, some seventy miles away. There, on the morning of March 25, 1877, a firing squad shot him as he sat on the lid of his coffin. No other perpetrators of the crime were brought to justice. Anguished by the crime, in 1990 Stewart Udall, Lee’s great-grandson, helped organize a service of contrition and atonement at the massacre site for the families of the slain and slayers. In June 2011 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.¹²

The crimes of David King Udall were mild compared to the heinous one by Lee. He spent his youth and early adulthood in Nephi and Kanab, both Utah towns his pioneering father had helped to settle. In Nephi he met Eliza Luella Stewart. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Ella, as he called her, was the daughter of Levi and Margery Stewart. Brigham Young asked Levi, a successful Salt Lake City business entrepreneur, to relocate to Kanab to serve as its first bishop.

In 1873 Ella and her father visited the Udalls. When she left them, David K. later wrote, the fair, slender girl with clear blue eyes took my heart away with her. For the next two years the couple corresponded. In 1875, at the ages of nineteen and twenty-four, respectively, Ella and David were married in Salt Lake City. The couple had been married only six weeks when the church directed David to serve as a missionary in England. Dutifully, he accepted the mission, but the long separation from Ella was excruciating. Our faith is a very trying one at times, he wrote, but the greater the trial, the greater the reward. Six decades later, Stewart Udall also heeded the call to serve as a missionary, but he did not find the experience as rewarding as his grandfather did.¹³

While David was away, Ella lived in Kanab, where she worked in the telegraph office and taught school. While apart, the young couple exchanged tender letters and had difficulty disguising their longing for each other. I must change the subject for we know how utterly impossible it is for these desires to be realized, she wrote. Dear, the time when we will enjoy each other’s society, is looked for with a pleasure undescribable by my pen, he responded.¹⁴

After twenty-seven months without each other’s society, David and Ella reunited in Nephi. They tried farming, but when that hardscrabble venture proved disappointing, they moved to Kanab. There, they celebrated the birth of their daughter Pearl. But once again, the church disrupted their lives when LDS president John Taylor sent David to Arizona in 1880 to serve as bishop of a pioneer community called St. Johns.¹⁵

The couple believed that they were going into another world, strange and far away. Located in Apache County, near the Little Colorado River in east-central Arizona, St. Johns was a garden spot amid desolation. Cradled on a lofty 5,600-foot plateau, it offered prairie grassland, pine and cedar forests, and water. A few non-Mormon ranchers and several Mexican Catholic families called it home, and the White Mountain Apache people lived some seventy miles to the southwest under the supervision of federal forces at Fort Apache.¹⁶

Mormons first scouted the area for colonization in the late 1870s. They bought water rights and land for a townsite from ranchers Solomon and Morris Barth for 750 head of cattle and then proceeded to lay out the town and sell lots. Local Mexicans, who had established the nearby community of San Juan, considered the Mormons intruders and threatened to defend their community from encroachment by any means necessary—but the Saints just overwhelmed them.¹⁷

Fifty pioneer families—with names like Udall, Tenney, Crosby, Overson, Christofferson, Kempe, and Romney—set to building the town. In seven years they erected a meetinghouse, school, irrigation system, assembly hall, sawmill, gristmill, blacksmith shop, cooperative store, and newspaper. Occasionally, non-Mormons, or Gentiles, ridiculed their faith and provoked quarrels. But the Saints persisted. David K. credited their success to hard work, a cooperative community spirit, and the faith our parents had in their calling to ‘make the desert blossom like a rose.’ Men dealt with community issues while women offered encouragement and adapted themselves uncomplainingly to life in rude shanties or in Mexican houses whose dirt roofs often leaked ‘mud’ when rains were violent. Women, including Ella Udall, also adapted themselves, sometimes reluctantly, to the concept of plural marriage.¹⁸

Both Ella and David were reared in plural-marriage households, so the practice was hardly alien. David’s mission in England reinforced his belief in polygamy: In accepting Joseph Smith as a prophet of God, logically I accepted the revelation given to him in the Doctrine and Covenants . . . on the plurality of wives. Ella once wrote, Marrying a second wife does not imply any diminution of love, provision or care for the first. It was similar, she said, to a parent loving more than one child. But she was less open minded when the concept hit home.¹⁹

In the fall of 1881, while serving as the superintendent of the cooperative store, David employed Ida Hunt, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of John Hunt, bishop of the nearby community of Snowflake. Ida roomed with the Udalls and served as bookkeeper and clerk at the store. She was young, attractive, and talented. She spoke Spanish, played the guitar, and possessed a pleasing singing voice. David described her as a charming girl with a wealth of auburn hair and the gift of song. That winter he asked Ida if she would consider marrying him—a wrenching prospect to Ella. How could it be otherwise for she was to divide my love with another woman, intoned David. I was sorely tried myself. It hurt me in an inexplicable way to cause Ella heartache. But deep religious conviction, he continued, carried the plan forward.²⁰

Ida did not want to cause Ella unhappiness and sought her approval before consenting to the union: I believe in this matter, it is not only your right, but your imperative duty to state plainly any objections you may have in your feelings and I beg you will not hesitate to do so. Sick in her pregnancy and sick at heart, Ella delayed her response. But after six weeks she gave her halting approval. The subject in question has caused me a great amount of pain and sorrow, more perhaps than you could imagine, she wrote. Yet I feel as I have from the beginning, that if it is the Lord’s will I am perfectly willing to try to endure it and trust it will be overruled for the best good of all. My feelings are such that I can write but briefly on the subject.²¹

Meanwhile, Ida had quit her job with the cooperative store and moved to Snowflake to live with her parents and await David’s visit to see if she would accept his proposal of marriage. But David was having second thoughts. On his return from a trip, he came to a literal and figurative fork in the road: One road led to Snowflake where Ida was awaiting me; the other road led to St. Johns—to my home, my wife and baby. For a little time my mind was undecided and my soul tormented. He dismounted, dropped to his knees, and asked for God’s guidance. Eventually, a calm assurance came over me and I knew it was my duty and privilege to enter into plural marriage. I whipped up my horse and rode to Snowflake as fast as the darkness would permit.²²

In May 1882 Ida, David, Ella, and Pearl left Snowflake by covered wagon for St. George, Utah, where David and Ida were sealed in marriage for life and eternity. May the deep unchangeable love which I feel for my husband today increase with every coming year, Ida confided to her journal. When he bade me goodnight the sacred name of ‘wife’ was whispered for the first time in my ear, causing my heart to flutter with a strange and new happiness. David was more businesslike, describing his second wedding as one to increase, not to begin my family circle.²³

Only two months before their wedding, the US Congress had passed the Edmunds Act, strengthening an antipolygamy law enacted two decades earlier. For those found guilty of polygamy or cohabitation, the new law called for fines and/or imprisonment and disqualification from voting, office holding, and jury service. Raids forced polygamists like Udall to go underground. To avoid arrest, David provided safekeeping for Ida variously in Snowflake, Nephi, Beaver, Salt Lake City, Round Valley, and Hunt. Living like a fugitive under assumed names, Ida was terrified of being caught and forced to testify against David. Northern Arizona, she wrote, had become the land of deputies.²⁴

The deputies caught up with Udall in 1884 and indicted him for polygamy and perjury. When Ida could not be found to testify against him for polygamy, the court proceeded with the perjury charge. David had signed a deposition attesting to the fact that a friend, Miles Park Romney, had lived on a 160-acre homestead claim for six months, which qualified him to take title. As it turned out, Romney had not lived on the claim continuously for six months, as the law required, so he and Udall were charged with perjury. Romney fled to Mexico, but Udall was brought to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to three years in a federal house of correction in Detroit, Michigan. His conviction, he wrote long afterward, was as cruel and cold-blooded, as vindictive and venomous a decision as any judge could make. Meanwhile, Ella and Ida waited patiently, hoping for his early release.²⁵

They did not have to wait long. David’s conviction for perjury was so patently spurious that several individuals, including the US attorney for Arizona, worked for his early release. After serving three and a half months, he was pardoned by President Grover Cleveland in mid-December 1885. In gratitude, two years later, he and Ida named their second child Grover Cleveland Udall.²⁶

David’s release meant reunion with Ella but not Ida, due to the overhanging polygamy charge. It is hard for me to think that a man cannot own his families openly and aboveboard without being in danger of the ‘Pen’, David wrote to Ida in 1886. However, we must accept conditions as they are. Ida was frustrated, lonely, and neglected, but she lived in a patriarchal culture that expected plural wives to tough it out. So she vented to her journal and her firstborn infant, Pauline.²⁷

The Arizona court, in early December 1886, dismissed the polygamy charge against David. After the LDS Church abandoned the doctrine of plural marriage in 1890 as a prelude to statehood six years later, antipolygamy raids subsided but not sufficiently enough to end Ida’s exile. Over the next decade she continued to shift among various Arizona communities but had enough time with David to bear five more children, all sons.

Following his release from prison, Udall advanced in the church hierarchy. In 1887 he was named president of St. Johns Stake, a church administrative unit comprising seven towns or wards totaling 1,400 people. Two years later, he helped establish St. Johns Academy. After serving as stake president for thirty-five years, he was selected as the first president of the Arizona Temple at Mesa in 1927, where he served for seven years.

Udall was less successful in secular matters. A Republican, in spite of the pardon from Democratic president Cleveland, he was elected to the Arizona Territorial Legislature in 1899 but served only one term. For most of his career, he struggled financially, finding it nearly impossible to maintain two families in separate residences with an income from farming. Father was never more happy than when he was helping the earth produce food for men and beasts, and was turning a barren desert into beauty, wrote his daughter Pearl. But farming alone could not sustain two families, especially when David’s unpaid church duties demanded his attention.²⁸

Fortunately, he found ways to supplement the family income. He won several contracts with the federal government to deliver mail from St. Johns to Holbrook, a railroad town some sixty miles distant. Wives and daughters also helped out. For a time, Ella managed the Apache Hotel in Holbrook. And in 1902 Ida and her sons took a homestead on the Little Colorado River, about midway between Holbrook and St. Johns. Called Hunt, it operated as a combination farm, way station, and post office. Besides raising livestock, crops, and grain, the enterprise delivered mail and passengers by buckboard and provided room and board for overnight travelers. Daughters also helped make ends meet, donating portions of their teaching salaries to the family treasury, working weekend jobs, and purchasing a house lot for David in St. Johns. With the help of his children, who supplied money for materials and labor, he built a spacious two-story home on that lot in 1912.²⁹

In 1906 Ida suffered the first of three strokes that would incapacitate her. At David’s request, their daughter Pauline bought her a home in St. Johns called the Air Castle because wind whistled through its uninsulated two stories. In 1912 Ida transferred ownership of the Air Castle to David and spent her remaining years there with Ella and their children. Ida died in 1915 at age fifty-seven.

Ella and David lived into their mid-eighties, dying ten months apart in 1937 and 1938, respectively. In all, David fathered sixteen children. Ida bore six—one girl and five boys. Ella gave birth to nine children, four of whom died at birth or in infancy. According to Pearl, Aunt Ida and Aunt Ella generally lived in separate residences, but their children cared deeply for one another, visited often, and cooperated on business ventures. Ella and Ida, she wrote, were truly mothers to all of us. David died at age eighty-six while working on his memoirs with his daughter Pearl Udall Nelson. In the preface to American Pioneer Mormon, he counseled his children that they too will have your frontiers to explore, your divides to cross, your own deserts to subdue. Most important of all, you will have home and state problems to solve that will challenge the pioneer blood that runs in your veins. Levi Stewart Udall was one of his many children who met that challenge.³⁰

Born in 1891, Levi was David and Ella’s youngest child. He was raised and schooled in St. Johns. Like his father, he was a devout Mormon who enjoyed working the soil. As a young man, he worked on his father’s farms, helped with the mail-delivery service, and performed assorted odd jobs. St. Johns furnished only two years of high school, so he completed his education at the Mormon-affiliated Gila Academy in Thatcher. There he met Louise Lee, granddaughter of the infamous John D. Lee. Louise, age twenty-one, and Levi, age twenty-three, were married in Salt Lake City in 1914 and moved to St. Johns, where they lived with David and Ella in their spacious new home. But Levi and Louise wanted a place of their own and persuaded David to sell them the Air Castle, former home of Aunt Ida.

In St. Johns, during the 1910s and early ’20s, Levi worked as a clerk, first for the county board of supervisors and then for the superior court. During those years he also prepared for the bar exam by studying law through a LaSalle correspondence course. In 1922 he was admitted to the Arizona State Bar. That same year he succeeded his father as president of St. Johns Stake and held that position until 1945. After serving two terms as a county attorney, he was elected to the Arizona Superior Court in 1930, where he remained until 1946, when he was elected a judge of the Arizona Supreme Court. He remained on the court—twice serving as chief justice—until he died in 1960, shortly after receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Arizona.

In his thirteen years on the state supreme court he authored 401 opinions, the most noted of which granted Arizona’s Native Americans the right to vote. In a democracy, he wrote in July 1948, suffrage is the most basic civil right and [its] exercise is the chief means whereby other rights may be safe. To deny the right to vote where one is legally entitled to does violence to the principles of freedom and equality. He also decried the shabby treatment of Native Americans in Arizona. Americans came to the aid of impoverished Europeans but shunned the needy First Peoples of Arizona. That should cause every one of us to hang his head in shame, he asserted. He and Louise bequeathed to their children respect for the Mormon tradition of community spirit, respect for the land, a commitment to aid the disadvantaged, and a dedication to public service.³¹

Levi and Louise raised a large family—three girls and three boys. After two girls, their first son was born on the last day of January 1920. They named him Stewart Lee Udall. He would spend his formative years in St. Johns, a community and boyhood he would later regard as idyllic.

CHAPTER TWO

Son of the High Plateau

When people live in open country their gaze runs to the horizon.

—STEWART UDALL, Human Values and Hometown Snapshots, 1982

Stewart Udall treasured his upbringing in St. Johns and its surrounding high plateau. The landscape was stark and stingy, but he grew to love it and in his later years wrote about it in mystical terms. When people live in open country, he recalled, their gaze runs to the horizon. . . . There is something uplifting about awaking each day to the sight of symmetrical mesas and beautiful far off mountains. The high plateau region, he continued, was a great outdoor cathedral whose clean lines and sweeping vistas soothed the human spirit and created a sense of harmony between people and the natural world.¹

The high plateau, sometimes called the Colorado Plateau or the Colorado Plateau Province, is a distinct physiographic entity enfolding southeastern Utah, northern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and the western edge of Colorado. Comprising eighty million acres, it is mostly arid; over five thousand feet in altitude; rich in coal, uranium, and other natural resources; and ethnically diverse, with Anglos, Latinos, and Native peoples. Remote, rugged and dry, at once forlorn and glorious, this is a separate place: a place with its own distinctive landscape, history, and future, Charles Wilkinson writes. The quiet of the deep canyons and the long still vistas, he continues, slow us down, take us far back, and hold us there.²

When Stewart was born in January 1920, Arizona had been a state for only eight years, and its population of 334,000 only slightly exceeded that of Kansas City, Missouri. Its capital city of Phoenix, as writer L. Boyd Finch points out, is farther from St. Johns than the Apache, Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni Indian Reservations. St. Johns boasted 1,300 people, and Udall later gloried in its self-sufficiency and small-town values. Modern civilization rode a slow horse to St. Johns, he once wrote. In the 1920s there were a few automobiles, sporadic electrical service, two weekly newspapers, and a few telephones; but the town had no railroad, movie theater, bank, or hospital, and its lone physician was unreliable because he was often drunk. Like his older sisters, Inez and Elma, Stewart was born at home in the Air Castle with the aid of a midwife. After the family moved into a new home in 1922, a midwife helped to deliver his siblings Morris King (1922), Eloise (1924), and David Burr (1929).³

Levi Udall sold his World War I Liberty Bonds and borrowed money to build a new $5,000 home adjacent to the Air Castle. The ranch-style home was free from drafts but had no central cooling or heating system. Meat was hung out to desiccate, or it was frozen during the frigid winters when temperatures often dipped below zero. Dairy products were kept in a pantry on the cooler north side of the house; when they spoiled they were fed to the pig. The home was heated by a large woodstove in the kitchen, another in the dining room, and a fireplace in the living room. Fuel consisted of cedar for the stoves and pine for the fireplace. Kerosene lamps provided lighting. Early on the family used an outdoor privy. They had piped water but no water heater. Water for bathing had to be heated in mighty tubs on the woodstove. Their bathroom featured a bathtub but no shower. People thought we were rich, recalled Burr Udall, because we had a bathtub. Like most residents, the Udalls had a garden, an orchard, and farm animals—a cow, a pig, and chickens. Levi also bought a large farm outside of town, where he raised hay and alfalfa.⁴

Each morning before school the Udall children performed chores—milking the cow, slopping the pig, feeding the chickens, and chopping and hauling wood. Stewart has hauled load after load of wood in for us, his mother wrote when he was age ten. We surely burn a lot it is so very cold. Winter temperatures could be biting, but snowfall was rare and did not linger more than a day or two. But even when temperatures were mild, the stove had to be fed each morning for cooking. "I don’t remember that fire ever going out, Burr stated. When Stewart and his brothers were old enough they helped with the plowing, planting, irrigating, harvesting, and hay mowing and baling. The girls helped tend the animals and aided their mother with cooking, cleaning, and canning fruits and vegetables. Frosts often killed the fruit crop, so the girls spent countless hours on the porch canning peaches and apples trucked in from Farmington, New Mexico. Butchering animals generally was left to Conrad Ove" Overson, a town jack-of-all-trades, who, for his service, asked for the head and blood of the animal to make cheese.⁵

Writing late in life while crusading for a simpler, more environmentally friendly lifestyle, Stewart romanticized life in St. Johns. For the most part St. Johns was a self-sufficient farm village, he wrote. Cousin Calvin Udall, with some exaggeration, portrayed it as more like 1830 than 1930. Every family had one or more milk cows, a kerosene lamp, a Coleman lamp, pigs, a pasture, chickens, an orchard, an outhouse, and lots of Mason jars. The only cash farm products were cattle, alfalfa, and baled hay that were sold in Gallup, New Mexico, some ninety miles away. In St. Johns, people made their own clothes, relied on horses and mules for power, grew their own food, made wise use of their resources, helped their neighbors, and bonded with the land. One of the great things about St. Johns, Stewart wrote, was that everyone worked in some way with the earth. Everyone grew something. . . . Whether the harvests were sparse or bumper, I am convinced this preoccupation was a source of contentment to everyone. For Udall, "the simple, regular association with the world of nature gave a tone and tranquility and rhythm to life that had resonance in the lives of St. Johns people.⁶

Stewart’s sense of earth stewardship derived in part from his upbringing in St. Johns. The landscape was expansive but miserly. According to Burr, it "is fierce land up there. It is not good growing land. And so to conserve it was more a town commitment than a personal commitment. It was also in the Mormon tradition to conserve natural resources. Manure from the stable was gathered and spread onto garden plots before spring plowing, according to Stewart. And all kitchen leftovers became a nutritious swill which was fed to the pigs, whose offal in turn fertilized the family garden. In those days, he continued, the only unusable household ‘wastes’ I can remember were in tin cans which were gathered in a gunnysack and taken to the town dump once or twice a year. Our lives made us natural conservationists.⁷

During his formative years on the wind-whipped high plateau, he developed a feel for the land and scenic beauty, the conservation of resources, and the reclamation of the arid landscape through irrigation. It would be an overstatement, however, to contend that Udall’s environmental perspective was fully shaped during his upbringing in St. Johns. In truth, it evolved over time. And it was also influenced by his Mormon religion. The Udalls had a plaque in their home that read: The Earth is the Lord’s. The idea of earth stewardship, that humans were only brief tenants on the land, he maintained, was deeply imbedded Mormon theology, Mormon teaching, and it really permeated their lives on a personal level. At the same time, Mormons—and Udall himself during his first four decades—also wanted to dam streams for irrigation and to make the desert bloom.⁸

St. Johns, Stewart recalled, was a stubborn area for growing crops, but it was ideal for growing children. Village handymen boosted the self-esteem of youngsters by teaching them practical skills like mowing hay, shoeing a horse, or building a fence or stone wall. I have owed a debt all of my years to Conrad Overson, Stewart once wrote, who taught me how to dress a hog, mend a roof, and practice the craft of stone masonry. Uncle Rex Lee took him fishing and camping in the White Mountains. And Stewart partnered with