Alta Journal is pleased to present the first installment of a five-part serialization of “Trekking to Delta,” a historical essay by acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita. Each week, we’ll publish the next portion of this provocative reconsideration of the internment of Japanese Americans at Topaz within the larger contexts of geology, Indigenous history, the Cold War, and recent examinations of responsible storytelling.
In “Part One: Cosmic Rays,” Yamashita described how the first issue of a mimeographed magazine, published by a group of Japanese American writers and artists incarcerated at Topaz, reveals a connection to the area’s prehistoric origins. This week’s installment, “Part Two: People and Land,” brings its earlier inhabitants into the picture.
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta,” and sign up for email notifications when each new episode is available.
Along with shells, geodes, and trilobite fossils, Topazans found arrowheads. I find an app called Native Land that is a digitized global map of Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages. The site of the Topaz camp resides in the overlap of territories of the Goshute, Ute, and Paiute peoples. I understand that the state name Utah comes from the tribal name Ute. According to their website, the Ute today number 2,970, over half of whom live on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, covering 4.5 million acres and located 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. The Goshute people are of the desert region southwest of the Great Salt Lake, the Great Basin Desert. Historically highly adept at living off the scarce resources of the desert, today the Goshute nation numbers around 500 and is divided into two bands living on the Deep Creek Reservation, on the western border with Nevada near Ibapah, and the Skull Valley Reservation, in Tooele County.
As I read about the Goshute, it would seem that they were the people with the best expertise to live off the alkaline bottom of Lake Bonneville. Hunters and gatherers, they were the original caretakers of the desert landscape, having knowledge and use of 81 vegetable species, taking seeds for 47 of these as well as berries, roots, and greens. They fished and hunted small reptiles, rabbits, deer, and antelope and gathered insects and larvae. The Goshute, I imagine, knew very intimately the square mile of greasewood desert that became the temporary home of over 11,000 Japanese Americans, but by those years—September 11, 1942, to October 31, 1945—the Goshute had been removed from the land, as if invisible.
In TREK, Frank A. Beckwith writes about Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, the Franciscan missionary who in 1776 sought a route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Monterey, California, and whose diary and map preserve a story of the land and people he encountered. Beckwith maps Escalante’s trek through Millard County, Utah, noting the priest’s observations and the present-day changes in the landscape. Of interest is the name Escalante gave the Pahvant Valley: Valle Solado, “an extremely apt designation.” And Beckwith points out Escalante’s diary entry noting that the
aborigines were found living either in teepees or more substantial wickiups…indicating that the area of the Pahvant Valley, including Topaz, was occupied by nomads and semi-settled families. Any resident of Topaz who will diligently search around the outskirts of the center should find arrowheads, pottery shards and other artifacts of that pre-historic Indian occupation.
An avid student of Native language and petroglyphs under the tutelage of a local Paiute named Joseph J. Pickyavit, Beckwith wrote a book about their friendship, which he carefully typeset with illustrations and photographs, making only six copies. This work is a guide to interpreting petroglyphs and a record of Native thought and practice in Millard County. I’m surprised to discover Beckwith’s experimental and fragmented narrative, created, I believe, to express the truth in the mosaic of learning he’s experienced. I learn that trilobites were used as charms against bullets, that a glyph figure under a rainbow is always youthful, perhaps immortal, and that spiral glyphs can be interpreted as spiritual whirlwinds, perhaps ghosts. I’m amused by the name that Pickyavit gave Beckwith, Sevvi-toots, meaning “billy goat hair,” for Beckwith’s goatee, and by his teasing: “Beckwith, you are pretty smart for white man, but not smart enough for Indian.”
The Spanish were the earliest visitors to this land, but they were soon followed by others, most significantly the Mormons. After the death of Mormon leader Joseph Smith in 1844 and after fleeing from anti-Mormon hostility, Brigham Young and 148 followers crossed into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. The next year, as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded 525,000 square miles to the United States, an area including the future state of Utah. Thousands of Mormons followed westward, and by 1896, the year of Utah’s statehood, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints counted 250,000 members.
However, there had been obstacles on Utah’s path to statehood: the perception that Young ruled the territory as a personal theocracy and the church-sanctioned practice of polygamy. Thus, in 1857, President James Buchanan sent 2,500 soldiers to Utah to replace Young as governor and enforce U.S. sovereignty, and in 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act. In 1890, Wilford Woodruff, then church president, renounced polygamy on behalf of the church. This is a short recitation of a long and controversial history, but suffice it to say that it is a history of a people who understand persecution and ostracism and strongly believe in their religious rights and independence. Whatever I think about religion and its discontents, I have to keep to myself. After all, I’m the agnostic daughter of a Methodist minister, but I am a believer in social justice and the beloved community. And I recognize and honor strong and forthright folks who believe, create a moral compass of love and compassion, and follow it.
The Mormons were only one group of Americans moving into the American frontier. With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the great rush had begun. Thousands headed west in covered wagons. Then began the great fever to get there faster and to build the railroads. There were those who built them and those who profited. With the end of the Civil War, there began the migrations of the war-weary and the formerly enslaved, now free. I pause here to remember promises never kept, even though, out there, the frontier was supposedly vast open land: 40 acres and a mule.
Driving across Utah’s desolate, strange, awesome landscape, all this history literally swirls and rises with the dust in the dry heat, and it’s impossible not to wonder about the meaning of the frontier, the rabid rush to grab the West, the ideas and desires that accelerated exploration, surveying, and takeover. About the encounters of whites versus Native people, the removing, the killing. And the consequent violence of settlers versus settlers. Looking out on the great expanse of freedom that opens beyond the roads, I am painfully aware that I can only imagine a way of life irrevocably destroyed, that of the Goshute people.
I trek back to the story of Delta because by now, in this telling, the transcontinental railroad has been built, the Chinese, Irish, and Mormons exploited in the process, the 17.6-karat golden spike inserted where the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific met on Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. In the commemorative photograph, Frank A. Beckwith could claim, his father, Asahel Collins Beckwith, was among the celebrated faces—though not a Chinese worker in sight, but move on. It’s 1905, and in this year, the mapped location of Delta was a simple railroad switch called Melville on the route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Eventually, Melville was renamed Burtner, which in turn, in 1911, was renamed Delta, which two years later was incorporated by Millard County as a city.
In the history of settling the American frontier, I follow the story of water in Millard County: dam and irrigation plans to create arable 40-acre plots over a treeless desert of silt and greasewood. Much like the earlier Homestead Act, the Desert Land Act in 1877 and the Carey Act in 1894 granted federal desert lands for the purpose of reclamation for settlement and cultivation. Pooling resources, private companies organized to build irrigation systems to profit from the sale of water. One venture after another—the Melville Irrigation Company, the Oasis Land and Water Company, and the Delta Land and Water Company—constructed irrigation systems, drawing from the Sevier River, drying up the Sevier Lake, damming reservoirs upstream and downstream. The delta they reclaimed and acquired was then resold to settlers, and this project, despite setbacks of washout and drought, turned out to be one of the most successful Carey Act proposals.
At 50 cents an acre, settlers could purchase up to 160 acres plus water rights. Starting in 1911, land sales created a small boom, and for years, potential buyers and settlers came, setting up camp around the train depot as boxcars arrived to unload farm equipment, furniture, and livestock. On a February morning in 1913, at the outset of this boom, Frank Asahel and Mary Amelia Beckwith stepped off the train at Delta and encountered a miserable collection of tents and makeshift shacks, the scurry of hungry folks looking for a new chance. They say Frank A. Beckwith carried his Remington typewriter in his bare hands and trudged over to the Kelly Hotel, where he and his wife would live initially in the basement. What this booming outpost required was a bank, and Frank’s assignment was to serve as cashier for the Delta State Bank, funded with about $4,000. As the bank’s safe had not yet arrived, for several weeks, Frank slept with this money in his vest under his nightgown, a revolver at his side.
There is more to this story: that Frank A. Beckwith came from a well-to-do family in Evanston, Wyoming; that he and Mary Amelia had three children; that the family moved to Oakley, Idaho, for two years; and that, in 1919, they returned to Delta permanently when Frank acquired the local newspaper, the Millard County Chronicle, and changed careers from banker to newspaper publisher. In time, the Beckwith family all became involved in the business of the paper—gathering and recording local news—and Frank launched into his many extended interests in philosophy, literature, science, geology, archaeology, anthropology, and photography. With Delta as his base, Frank explored the natural and human geography of his home on the Utah terrain. He turned out to be a kind of local Benjamin Franklin, inventing and patenting innovations like gun safeties and thermostats, collecting and recording thousands of geological fossils and Indigenous artifacts, researching local lore to learn historic truth, and writing and publishing articles and essays.
If you were to draw a graph over time of the fortunes of Delta, you would see it as a wave rising and falling, from boom to bust, up and down. With the help of the Carey Act land grants and irrigation systems, farmers found a productive economy in sugar beets, and in 1915, the Southern Utah Sugar Company established a factory in Delta. But within a decade, owing to drought, waterlogging, and poor prices, sugar production declined, and the plant was closed and dismantled. Sugar was replaced by alfalfa seed and hay production, but this industry, too, struggled through the years of the Depression.
On March 18, 1942, Executive Order 9102 established the War Relocation Authority, authorized to handle the internment of Japanese Americans excluded from the West Coast by Executive Order 9066. Where to put 120,000 people? The WRA considered 300 sites before settling on 10 locations—Delta was one of them.
Nels L. Petersen, son of Mormon Danes and born in nearby Deseret, was a widower living in Salt Lake City and working for George S. Ingraham. Ingraham was a wealthy bondholder for large parcels of land and water rights taken over from farmers and ranchers during the Depression. For Ingraham, Petersen and his son Homer operated or helped sell some 115 of these repossessed properties. Apparently, the WRA sent out scouts to a site near McCornick, 10 minutes southeast of Delta, but found this land unsuitable because it lacked water for irrigation. Petersen knew that if they had traveled in the other direction, 20 minutes northwest to Abraham, they’d have found land with plenty of water. Here was a business opportunity and a possible economic boost to the county.
Immediately, Petersen got on a train; headed for the San Francisco WRA offices, housed in the Hotel Whitcomb; and made his case. Soon after, Robert Cozzens, assistant director of the WRA, stepped off the train at Delta. Thus, World War II saw the building and administration of Topaz over an area of 19,000 acres, a living city of one square mile supported by extensive farmland. In the fall of 1942, every few days for a period of two months, 500 Japanese Americans arrived at the Delta depot, with the Topaz internment camp reaching a peak population of 8,300; 1942 Delta population: 1,500. The federal government called it a war relocation camp, and it provided work and business opportunities for the region. But as the war ended, the camp was dismantled and people dispersed.
In the immediate postwar period, the mining of fluorspar, hauled by railroad car, stimulated a new boom. Fluorspar was used as a flux to remove impurities when processing iron and aluminum. Decreased demand and overseas competition eventually closed these mines. Then in 1959, beryllium was discovered in the tuff, or porous rock formed from volcanic ash, near Spor Mountain, 46 miles northwest of Delta. Beryllium is a high-strength lightweight metal used in the medical, aerospace, and military industries. It’s a key ingredient in heat shields for space vehicles. (An aside: without it, NASA astronaut Daniel Tani, descendant of Topazans, would have burnt to cinders on a Space Shuttle Endeavour flight in 2001.) It turns out that the Brush Wellman mine and processing plant in Delta provides much of the world’s production of the metal. You figure that one day, they’ll carve out that last bit of beryllium, but until then...•
Next week: “The Teachers”
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta,” and sign up here to be notified by email when each new installment is available.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of eight books, including I Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a professor emerita of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.
