National Council on Public History

“Mormon Couch,” Pipe Spring National Monument

Pipe Spring National Monument is located in northern Arizona, just south of Kanab, Utah and is owned and operated by the National Park Service. In 1863 James Whitmore, a member of the Church, began keeping his cattle and sheep in Pipe Spring and lived part-time in a dugout he built as he developed the ranch. At that same time, conflict with local tribes had escalated and the Union Army was in the process of rounding up Navajo people and settling them at Fort Sumner. The remaining Navajo were forced to raid nearby Mormon ranches for food, and were most likely responsible for the 1866 killing of Whitmore and his brother in-law, although the local militia executed Paiutes found butchering one of Whitmore’s cows. Similar raids occurred around St. George and Cedar City for approximately two more years. In 1870, Brigham Young assigned Anson P. Winsor to start a new cattle herd for the Church at Pipe Spring and establish a militia post that was eventually called “Winsor Castle.” [i]

Winsor Castle eventually served as a hideaway for plural wives after Congress passed the Edmunds Act in 1882. The subsequent 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act put even greater pressure on Mormons to end plural marriage. Because federal agents needed wives to serve as witnesses against their husbands, many church leaders sent their families into hiding. If the federal agents could not find wives, it was nearly impossible to prove unlawful cohabitation. At least eleven plural wives and an unknown number of children took refuge at Pipe Spring during the raiding period from 1884 and 1893.[ii]

Early historical interpretations of Pipe Spring National Monument derived from a unique partnership between the Latter-Day Saints and the Federal Government. In 1920, National Park Service Director Stephen Mather was interested in Pipe Spring for its historical value and strategic location as a stopping point between Zion National Park and the north rim of the Grand Canyon.[iii] Shortly after Pipe Spring became a National Monument by proclamation of President Harding in 1923, the National Park Service appointed Leonard Heaton as the site manager. Heaton was a member of the LDS Church, whose family was well-established in the region.[iv] NPS researcher Kathleen L. McKoy noted in the “Administrative History” that she suspected that because Heaton oversaw the monument, it was used “to illustrate distinctive Mormon systems, as conceived of and directed by the Church leadership” and “as long as the Park Service let this story be told . . . then harmony was maintained.”[v] From the outset, the Latter-Day Saints played a critical role in shaping the historical interpretation of the site and used it to convey Mormon settlement as a heroic encounter rather than cowardly retreat that involved the hiding of women and children. This was in part achieved by ending the interpretation at 1880, just before the implementation of the Edmunds Act.

An early interpretive and historic furnishings plan completed in 1941 contained the scope of historical significance from 1830 to 1880. In 1959 the furnishings plan was revised to 1879 to 1882 as the result of the problem of finding pieces that were “crude” enough to accurately portray early pioneer life.[vi] The decision to set the cut-off date prior to the period of the raids suggests that neither the NPS nor the LDS Church was ready to delve into a discussion of Winsor Castle as a hideout for polygamous families.   An interpretive shift occurred in the 1980s “away from the broader history of Mormon migration to Utah and the West and move more toward telling the story of Church’s Southern Utah Mission (also called Dixie Mission or Cotton Mission) and ranching life on the Arizona Strip.”[vii] In 2007, rangers openly discussed polygamy and rather than explain its demise as a revelation, it was the Utah leaders’ desire for statehood that led to the abandonment of the practice. The central historical interpretive themes presented in ranger-led tours of Pipe Spring National Monument in 2007 and 2011 included the site as a tithing ranch, location of the first telegraph station in Arizona, and hideout for polygamous families.[viii] In 2007 through 2011 the material culture of Winsor Castle illustrated how women and children who were in hiding were accommodated. On display is a “Mormon couch” that was purported to be the first convertible of its time in order to provide bedding for the transient numbers of residents. The Pipe Spring National Monument website uses this artifact to describe a variety of situations that would necessitate additional overnight accommodations. Hired girls came to Pipe Spring to work off their Perpetual Immigration Fund debts, passersby traveling the wagon road between St. George and Kanab, and lastly “polygamists also used these rooms when hiding from federal marshals in the late 1880s.” This artifact is particularly intriguing to me because other than the title it has been assigned (“Mormon couch”) it seems like it could be interpreted as a convenience for any site that had frequent visitors and temporary boarders. At the same time, it conveys something that is unique to the history of Mormons in the American West.

Note: This is extracted from an article I am working on that explores how the Church of Latter-day Saints uses and has used historical sites to portray an ideal of the Church and LDS members as civilized Americans by adopting strategies to overcome the stigma of its past practice of plural marriage. The two case studies include Pipe Spring National Monument in Arizona and the Beehive House in Salt Lake City.

~ Melissa Bingmann

[i] Robert W. Olsen, Jr. “Pipe Spring, Arizona, and Thereabouts,” Journal of Arizona History 6, no. 1, 1965 and Nicky Leach, Pipe Spring National Monument: an ancient oasis on a storied frontier (Springdale, UT: Zion Natural History Association, 1999). Kathleen McCoy, Pipe Spring National Monument National Register of Historic Places Nomination, August 2000, 38-39

[ii] McKoy, National Register of Historic Places Nomination, August 2000, 41-42

[iii]Kathleen McCoy, “The Creation of Pipe Spring National Monument,” Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History of Pipe Spring National Monument, Cultural Resources Selections No. 15 (Denver, CO: Intermountain Regional Office) : Part II, http://www.nps.gov/pisp/historyculture/upload/PISP_adhi.pdf (accessed June 11, 2011)

[iv] McKoy attributes the early emphasis on Mormon settlers to the Heaton family’s “genuine desire to see the site preserved as a memorial to the early Mormon settlers,” noting that the family was “staunchly faithful to the Church” and “played an important role in the area’s history.” “The Creation of Pipe Spring National Monument,” Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History of Pipe Spring National Monument, Cultural Resources Selections No. 15 (Denver, CO: Intermountain Regional Office) : Part II, http://www.nps.gov/pisp/historyculture/upload/PISP_adhi.pdf (accessed June 11, 2011)

[v]McKoy, Cultures at a Crossroads: an Administrative History of Pipe Spring National Monument Part VII “Calm Before the Cold War,” section on “Interpretation,” and footnote 1491. McKoy stated that “Many Park Service officials viewed the Mormon aspect of the history as secondary. On the other hand, Latter-day Saints saw a much more people and place-specific story. For them, Pipe Spring’s significance was its role in Mormon history, and the purpose of interpretation was to commemorate the sacrifices and successes of the Mormon people in particular in the broader history of western settlement. The site was also useful to illustrate distinctive Mormon systems, as conceived of and directed by the Church leadership: the cooperative, polygamy, the colonizing, evangelizing, and civilizing mission of settlers.” I argue that there was not a desire to discuss polygamy based on the decision to set the cut-off date.

[vi]McKoy, Cultures at a Crossroads: an Administrative History of Pipe Spring National Monument Part V “The Great Depression,” Part VII “Calm Before the Cold War,” and Part IX “Mission 66”

[vii] McKoy, “Part XII: The Herr Administration”

[viii] These are the main points I gleaned from a ranger-led tour in July 2007. The NPS Long-Range Interpretive Plan for Pipe Spring National Monument developed in March 2000 articulated five broad themes. The two that are most relevant to the historical interpretation include “The history of Pipe Spring is a saga of relationships among different ethnic, political, and religious cultures,” and “Pipe Spring provides an opportunity to understand the expression of religious freedom in 19^th century America.” Elements of the former include the fort as “physical evidence of the tensions between the Mormon settlers, the Navajo and Paiute tribes, and potential Federal threats” and its role “as a refuge in the conflict between the Mormons and the U.S. Government over the practice of polygamy, in the context of Mormon relations with the Federal Government and the path to Utah’s statehood.” Elements of the latter include Pipe Spring as “an example of Mormon plans for colonization and the development of a church-based state within a state” and “the practice of polygamy was important to early Mormon religion, and Pipe Spring came to play a role in protecting polygamist families from Federal authorities,” pp. 6-7.

Discussion