Oral History Program Monsignor Jerome Stoffel Interviewed by Alfretta Soward 7 February 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Monsignor Jerome Stoffel Interviewed by Alfretta Soward 7 February 1971 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Stoffel, Monsignor Jerome, an oral history by Alfretta Soward, 7 February 1971, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Monsignor Jerome Stoffel. The interview was conducted on February 21, 1971, by Alfretta Soward, in Logan, Utah. Stoffel discusses the history of non-Mormon immigrants, referred to as minorities, to Utah. JS: I’m Monsignor Jerome Stoffel, pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, Logan, Utah. Also, director of the Newman Institution at Utah State University. AS: We are interviewing Father Stoffel about the minorities when they first came into Utah. Father Stoffel, when did the first minorities that were recorded come into Utah? JS: I was thinking about the ... we can talk about a lot of Catholics who came in, in the presettlement period. I don’t know... these would hardly be called minorities because oftentimes they were the majority while they were here. But we have, of course, in that period from the first discoveries of Utah as we know it, the first explorations by the Escalante expedition. We have then a period of 25-30 years, 540 years almost, of Spanish traders moving in and out of Utah, trading with the Indians. We have the trappers and the traders coming in, the establishment of forts. I think of Fort Winty and the Robidoux brothers. Quite a few of the trappers that came out of St. Louis were of French origin and many of them were Catholic. Many names occur at the time, men like Etienne Provost and Denis Julian. My memory isn’t going very well on the names of these, but there are a great many of them in the trapping days of the West. We have the government surveyors. I’ve not followed through on many of these, but undoubtedly some of these are Irish and Catholic, possibly. I think of Timothy O’Leary...O’Sullivan and his camera just occurred to me. The German and Irish 1 immigrants oftentimes were the laborers, and so in a government expedition, they might not be the prominent names but would be there. We have the wagon trains. We know of Catholics coming across on many of the wagon trains. One of the wagon trains, the one of 1844, one of the early ones to California – the Stevens party, it was called. Over half of them were of one family, relatives and so forth... the Martin Murphy family heading for California. But none of these stayed, and we have no one settling in Utah that we know of previous to the Mormon settlement of Utah. In fact Miles Goodyear, who was of some Protestant denomination I am not familiar with right now, settled in Ogden Valley, but this is the only one that could be called a settler that I would know of up to the coming of the Mormons and the settlements. Then also we have the men who are pushing through, following Fremont’s explorations of 1843 and 1845. And, I’ve thought that perhaps there were many minorities represented in Fremont’s expedition, but these, too, would not be settlers nor would the railroad survey parties that came through – Stansbury, Gunnison, some of these others. So perhaps the earliest that we could trace anybody living in Utah, settled down, would be only a quasi-settlement: the army of 1858, and what is sometimes called the Mormon War, brought many, many Catholics to Utah. These were principally Irish and German immigrants signed up with the army, and in 1859 there came a chaplain to take care of these men. We know his name – Father Bonaventure Keller. We know the names of some of the others. We see, for example, the Kelly’s. There was one Kelly out there that buried a Catholic that we know of. We know that Father Keller baptized possibly as many as 30. These are probably children of Catholic families, their father being a member of the army. 2 We have, of course, the teamsters. Many of the immigrants were familiar with handling teams, and so an Irish name or German name often occurs among these. We assume possibly that they were Catholic, no direct evidence on this. Actually not much work has been done on this. Then we come now with the beginning of the Civil War, the raising of the California Volunteers, and finally the Third California Volunteer and Colonel Patrick Conner coming in 1862 in the fall of the year and settling at Fort Conner, then what was then called Camp Douglas. We know that there were a good many Catholics among these. Maybe I should modify that. We don’t know that there were a good many Catholics, but we do know that there were a number of Catholics among them. The first priest after Father Bonaventure Keller that we know of came from Colorado in 1864. This question of priests is rather interesting. Apparently several priests came across in the days of the Gold Rush, but we have not, to my knowledge, ever really undertaken this study to know or to identify these men if they did come. The reason I say this is that even the move to Oregon, in which several Catholics participated along the trail, we do know of Catholic priests. Of course there’s Father DeSmet back in 1840 and 1841. In 1847, the same year that the first group of the Mormons was on the trail, we know also that the new bishop for Oregon Territory (Blanchet) was also on the trail moving north. I don’t think he came into Utah unless he dipped into it up near Bear Lake. Back to 1864, to the Civil War days, Father John Raverdy came in here from Colorado on his way to the Montana gold fields. He was... he said mass, he stopped at Fort Douglas in the fall of the year, said mass there, blessed the graves of the Catholics who had died in the Bear River Massacre of the previous year and some of the other 3 soldiers that had died at the time the Third California Volunteers had been in here. But there seems to have been no settlement of any kind of Catholics, although again, this has not been explored. There might have been some teamster residents in Salt Lake City by that time, with the protection of the army. There might have been also people who had chosen to move from other places. One of the reasons that Catholics are not identified with the early history of Utah, or for that matter any other religious minority group, but particularly Catholic, is that many of these who were on the move were looking for land. And this was particularly true of the Catholic minority groups. They were low on the economic ladder, and they were looking for a place to settle. The very idea behind the Mormon settlement of the Great Basin was to take up the land. So there was really no attraction for Catholics into this area. We find, of course, a great number of Catholics moving up into the Northwest, and undoubtedly some of these drove down to Salt Lake, perhaps for supplies on occasion, brought supplies themselves. Minority groups, when did they come? Well, the real move of minority groups seems to be during the Civil War days. There seems to be no particular identifiable reason why one group would have come more than another until after the railroad, when of course, the opportunities multiplied for the services that a community develops. Most of the services up to then had been taken care of pretty much by the Mormons themselves although there were Gentile merchants – Gentile merchants who were of enough size by 1866 to be able to protest to Brigham Young for his pressure upon them, many of them wanting to leave the territory or at least expressing a desire to leave the territory. Some of them probably in fear because of two murders that took 4 place in that year. There was a certain amount of hysteria. The merchants of 1867-68 who were affected by Brigham Young’s decision to establish the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution show us that there were a considerable number of non-Mormons living in and about Salt Lake. Who were these non-Mormons? Well, as I say, some teamsters; we have the cattle drives that are moving through this country, the horses gathered and moved to the various markets. We have the telegraph operators and maintenance men. We have, as I’ve said before, the government surveyors settling down for a while, while they surveyed an area, merchants always and of course such professional men as lawyers, doctors. When did they come? Well, it’s kind of a small in-and-out immigration. I guess the best way to describe it is that there is no real reason to stay in Utah for most of these people. They did not have their roots in the soil, so both Protestants and Catholics, and I believe it is true also of the Jews, that they came and went. We can actually identify very few people who stayed for a long period of time even in the days after 1866 when the first parish was established in Salt Lake City. But with the coming of the railroad, of course, the mines opened up and then communities developed. And some of these communities were not Gentile minorities, but actually Gentile majorities. I think of Park City, for example. By 1883-84, it is thumbing its nose at Salt Lake, 29 miles away – sort of Jack the giant killer – but feeling quite secure because it was a Gentile town. I don’t know, is that about what you... AS: Father Stoffel, when did the first Catholics or minority groups make a permanent settlement, really stay in Utah? JS: Again, there was not too much reason to stay in Utah. Very few of them really 5 established permanent businesses. However, by the time the railroad had come to Utah, there were a considerable number of merchants. I suppose these would be, I mean, we could say blacksmiths’ shops, groceries, meat markets, general stores, gunsmiths, and among these was a Gentile population. At the moment, I recall one Catholic name, a fellow by the name of McGrath had a grocery store in Salt Lake. Men like Guthrie and Walker, the banking firm of – I’ve forgotten that one now– his name was Dahler, and I always recall it that way. But some of these moved up to Corinne because for a while it was thought that with Brigham Young policies, and of course the real scarcity of money in Utah, the business would flow to the Gentiles. The railroad contracts, for example, many of them were not fulfilled with actual cash, as you know, but by stock, rolling stock, which became the Utah Central in the case that I recall. And so for a while there were dreams of Corinne being “the Gentile capital of Utah.” Some of the people moved up there, but even this was no such a permanent settlement. However mining – developed or encouraged by General Connor – now after the Civil War retired from the army – General Connor had been the advocate of mining and the mines began to open up. The railroad coming to Utah opened up the opportunities for transportation of the ore, and so the hard rock mining took on a considerable dimension in late ‘68 before the railroad was completed, and then of course anticipating the railroad. And then in ‘69, from then on, the mines began to get deeper, and there were no longer shallow holes in the ground but the beginning of shafts and deep mines ... With this, of course, came the cheap labor of the immigrant kind. So we find the Irish and the Cornishmen moving in. We have the introduction in considerable dimension of people gaining wages, beginning to set up houses, some stability of population. Some 6 of the towns that developed at this time could really be called Gentile towns – Stockton over in Tooele Valley tended to have a considerable population. Down or over in Park City and up in Alta, by the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the mines of Sevier, way down in the southern part of the state, and Frisco. Then the great collapse of the mine in Frisco, the miners moved up to establish Eureka and the Tintic district. This became a considerable mining area, and these became communities, sometimes quite strongly against Mormonism itself, mostly on a political basis. There was sometimes dramatic rivalry between Mormonism and Gentile community. AS: Well, did they make any contributions in the way of social contributions to the settlement of Utah? JS: As I said, with some of these, for example, the merchants that went to Corinne – Corinne had a short and rather testy history – some of these merchants later moved to Ogden, and some moved back to Salt Lake and became some of the big merchants of the later decades. A certain amount of money, Gentile money, developed. Many of the workmen that came here, as I said, were really at the lower end of the economic scale but then began to rise. Certain men who made a killing on a particular “glory hole” saw the advantage of a particular mining claim, and some of these men then became wealthy and the affluence began to show up in terms of, if you want such a thing, as South Temple Street, which would eventually be built into one of the grand streets of the West. The army undoubtedly contributed something of a dimension of... I’m just trying to limit it, I suppose, to economics. Buildings were built, but in proportion to what the Mormons built – this was their community, of course, that is, they were the settlers, they were upon the land. But I was thinking of Independence Hall, built in 1864, fall of 1863, 7 previous to the war, but not too much. St. Mark’s Hospital, the first hospital non-Mormon was established by the Episcopal Church in 1867. It was a small, very small building. AS: Well, Father Stoffel, we are running out of time... So in order to round this up, do you think you could tell us anything about the contributions that can be seen today by these first settlers coming into the West that were minorities? Do you think they’ve had an influence in the shaping of politics or the economics or the social way of Utah life? JS: Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Politics-wise, the great controversy of the Liberal party developed in Corinne there brought a “Mormon versus Gentile” approach to politics. But this was not really... yes, this was one influence. Then of course, and I would suspect another influence was the schools. Many envisioned doing something to convert Mormonism, and they saw an opportunity in building schools. Now, I hasten to add that schools were not built just for this purpose. For example, many of the Catholic schools welcomed Mormon students as a matter of survival, in some cases. But the idea of schools, the miners, for example, as men have often done – those who are low on the economic scale – will pledge themselves that their children will not be on that same scale. So many of those, well, we could have built maybe a dozen schools for every one that was built. We did contribute that way as Catholics, and the Protestants in various ways. So that by the time of statehood in 1896, there was – I suppose... proportionately – the greatest amount of resources put into Utah schools. I know in terms of Catholics, we were building schools in Ogden and Salt Lake, attempting schools down in Silver Reef and Park City and Eureka, and one time we tried Ophir, Mercur – no, not Mercur, Ophir. There was then an attempt... to take care of miners up in Bingham Canyon. There was 8 a plan at one time for Alta. We have laid the roots of the great school, a school that became great and famous – St. Mary’s Academy – which became St. Mary of the Wasatch in later years. There’s this... there was the building of churches, clubs, but it was a peripheral thing. It was the minority taking care of itself. It was the minority attending first to its own problems. And, of course, in the usual crises that developed over the matter of polygamy, there were many abortive efforts to establish non-Mormon or Gentile debating societies or other structured communities for the betterment of mankind. AS: I want to thank you, Father Stoffel, for your time and your effort, and you’re taking a few minutes to tell us something about it. 9