Utah Place Names by John W. Van Cott

Abstract

154 WesternAmerican Literature something different. He is more interesting for his reflections on civilization and the record of human change than for his perceptions of nature. This book is not without conventional beauties: descriptions ofwind, larch, snow, and the occasional absorption into nature. But we are definitely occupied with human growth and pursuit. Nature here is tinted with the language of civilization: the moon is a “great aluminum coin”;the snow falls “tumbling like planes crashing.” These notes might be compared to Eliot’s Wasteland or Malcolm Lowry’s OctoberFerry to Gabriola for their sense of flight from a fallen world and their discovery of a temporary heavenly afterlife in nature. On the other side of the hill the town of Libby may “fester and boil”; in the Yaak valley the wood which warms us produces smoke which changes the air. Bass is the voice of the fallen world in retreat, aware that all is not well. “We’re all dirty, but we’re all sweet.” In this remote valley it is with a sense of exposure that we watch the snow melt, opening the road to the world. Rick Bass has created a worthwhile human record and has a message for a late age: “Love the winter. Don’t betray it. Be loyal.” CAROL S. LONG Willamette University UtahPlaceNames. Byjohn W.Van Cott. (Salt Lake City: University ofUtah Press, 1991. 434 pages, $14.95.) If language, as Emerson said, is fossil poetry, then place names are crystals of history, telling tales of adaptation, conquest, dominion; no knowledge of a landscape is truly complete without some reckoning of the names bywhich it is and has been called. John Van Cott’s compendium is the first full-length account of Utah’s toponyms, which range from the prosaic—Forest Dale, for instance—to the wonderfully evocative. Among the second variety are the Aquarius Plateau, named by explorer Frederick Dellenbaugh for its once abundant small lakes; Bacchus, named not for the Greek god ofwine and reverie but the president of an explosives plant; Fruitland, known to early Anglo settlers as Rabbit Gulch but renamed by developers to lure unsuspecting investors; and Paul Bunyan’sPotty, a cliffside depression in Canyonlands National Park that would seem to fill the legendary bill. (Readers might remark as well on the abundant toponym “Molly’s Nipple”and its several variants across the state; whoever Molly was, she evidently got around.) Utah PlaceNames lacks the date of first mention of a given toponym in the literature, and in this it is a poor cousin to Will Croft Barnes’s Arizona Place Reviews 155 Names and other standard works for individual states. Mr. Van Cott, however, has provided an extensive list of references, and he rightly calls for other students of Utah history and literature to seek out old-timers and elicit their accounts of when and how the land became dotted with the names it now bears—certainly a fruitful project for a high-school English class, on the lines of Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire collections for southern Appalachia. Even with its minor limitations, Mr. Van Cott’s book is a worthy addition to western Americana. GREGORY McNAMEE Tucson, Arizona Kid Curry: The Life and Times ofHarvey Logan and the Wild Bunch. By F. Bruce Lamb. (Boulder:Johnson Books, 1991. 384 pages, $19.95/$11.95.) F. Bruce Lamb comes naturally to the story of Kid Curry and the Wild Bunch. On a trip from their Sand Gulch, Colorado ranch to an uncle’s spread in Montana when Bruce was forty, his father revealed their family’s relationship with the outlaw group, including their especially close friendship with frequent houseguest Harvey Logan. Better known as Kid Curry, Logan had even dictated details of his personal history one winter while hiding out at the Lamb ranch, with death closing in—though the manuscript was lost in transit and so failed to get his account of events out. Even years later, the long shadow of the Pinkertons kept Lamb’s father from setting the public record straight, but a sense of the family’s obligation to tell the true tale was thus passed from one generation to another. Many years...