Alta Journal is pleased to present the fourth 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.
Last week, “Part Three: The Teachers” highlighted instructors who influenced the lives of Japanese American students at Topaz during World War II and one who inspired her rebellious charges during the 1980s. In this week’s installment, Yamashita describes how the popular misconception of the desert as being “empty” led to its use by the military as a proving ground and missile arsenal.
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta,” and sign up for email notifications when each new episode is available.
In 1971, the U.S. Air Force began developing the MX, or missile experimental, a solid-fueled four-stage rocket 70 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter, with a range of over 6,000 miles and a larger-than-before warhead (of course). The guidance system, it was said, could send 10 warheads each on their own trajectory, delivered within about 300 feet of targets. The air force anticipated that the MX’s lethal first-strike accuracy would force the Soviets to deploy their missiles at American MX silos. Duh. Their solution was so-called multiple protective shelters constructed along a “racetrack” with a missile constantly moving around to hide in any one of the shelters—you guessed it—to confuse the Soviets. In 1981, the air force wanted $37 billion to produce 200 missiles, now called Peacekeepers, to be deployed on these tracks going in and out of 4,600 shelters. Hide-and-seek missiles. Absolutely MAD. And where in America would you build such a project? Well, logically, in the Great Basin in the Utah and Nevada desert, which was once again seen as empty.
Maybe someone remembers when Sue Beckwith Dutson appeared on The Phil Donahue Show. That’s right, another Beckwith, another of Frank’s grandkids. Sue was interviewed as the publisher of the Millard County Chronicle Progress, formed by the 1985 merger of the Millard County Chronicle and the Millard County Progress, and was leading the local opposition to the construction of the MX. She voiced the concerns of Deltans, organized from every constituency—farmers, ranchers, mining people, environmentalists, housewives, professionals. Military generals, politicians, mainstream press—all descended on Delta to find out why these folks didn’t want progress, didn’t want to defend America from the Soviets, didn’t want the economic opportunities of strategic military installations. Years later, Sue spoke frankly in a multipart PBS documentary:
They always were patronizing, yes definitely. Yes, they talked to us like children. Because we live out here, we prefer this kind of a lifestyle, that means we’re not too bright, which is not true at all.
She caught them in their nonsense:
They’d get into these heavy debates about how the Russians could put monitoring devices on sheep collars and the sheep would get too close to the fence and the Russians would all know what we were doing. It was just craziness.
But Sue, in the tradition of grandfather Frank, declared for the Great Basin, “one of the few frontiers left in some sort of natural state. And so fragile.” For two years, she “ate, slept and breathed the protest,” but thought,
I still have to do what I believe, or why am I here?… If they came in and wanted to do it again, I’d fight them again.… We do not need more missiles, and we are not going to take something as valuable as this desert and make it a dead zone.
When grandfather Frank A. Beckwith bought the Millard County Chronicle in 1919, perhaps he thought of it as an opportunity to put into print his treks and discoveries in the Utah landscape, but he also recognized the responsibility of the paper to record the happenings of local people, their daily lives and concerns, the cost of feed, weather forecasts for crops, mining discoveries, local elections, recipes, county fairs, sports, celebrations, weddings, births, and obituaries. The paper was a source of information and community, never an editorial platform.
During the war years when the Topaz camp operated, Frank A.’s son, Frank Sylvanus Beckwith, discovered that Topaz resident Harry Yasuda was a skilled Linotype operator and offered him a job at the paper. Frank A. wrote an editorial announcing Yasuda’s hire, arguing that the Millard County Chronicle was prosperous enough to hire a Topaz resident, relieving the government of its financial responsibility to Yasuda and, in so doing, contributing to the war effort. While Frank A. may have thought this editorial would spur other businesses to similar patriotic action, his declaration backfired for Yasuda, who was then charged rent by the War Relocation Authority for his family’s barrack housing.
Frank S. considered Topaz part of Millard County and thought to bring communities together by showing that life’s everyday events happened for everyone. In that spirit, he included in the paper news items from the camp: babies born, harvested crops, sports, dances, Nisei soldiers leaving for the war. Through the newspaper, the Beckwiths formed ties and friendships with camp staff, teachers, doctors, clergy, artists, various fossil and rock clubs, and the writers of TREK. The family came to understand the unjust and sad hardship of those in the camp, but the newspaper remained mostly apolitical. Perhaps the first time the paper came forward with a political agenda was when Sue Beckwith Dutson threw her energies into questioning the MX project in Delta.
In her Donahue interview, Sue mentioned the Tooele Ordnance Depot, a storage site for war reserve and training munitions, and the Dugway Proving Ground, where biological and chemical weapons were tested. Both military locations were built in the same year as the installation of Topaz, 1942. Also built around that time was the Wendover Air Force Base, the secret training site for the crews of the B-17, B-24, and B-29 planes, including the Enola Gay and Bockscar. The Tooele Ordnance Depot and the Dugway Proving Ground, located only two counties to the north of Topaz, are still operational today for storage, testing, and training. In the center of the Delta City Park, down the street from the Topaz Museum, there is a curious platform of equipment that measures radiation, originally installed to alert residents to changes that might signal residue from Nevada nuclear testing. Focused on the story of my family’s wartime imprisonment, I’d forgotten the broader churning industry of war, the continuing specter of the Cold War, the connecting map across the Lake Bonneville desert.
In 1945, after the writers of TREK closed shop and as Topaz residents made plans or were forced to leave camp, the crews of the Enola Gay and Bockscar took off to deploy Little Boy and Fat Man over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Sue understood so well, that legacy had returned to Delta with the MX project.
In 1981, the Mormon Church made a surprise declaration, effectively precluding the future of the MX in Utah:
Our fathers came to the Western area to establish a base from which to carry the gospel of peace to the peoples of the earth.… It is ironic, and a denial of the very essence of that gospel, that in this same general area there should be constructed a mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization.
In the anteroom of the Millard County Chronicle Progress offices, Frank A. Beckwith’s collection of artifacts is encased in glass cabinets. Above the cabinets is a photograph of Sue Beckwith Dutson with Ronald Reagan. And somewhere, there’s a postcard from Utah’s longtime U.S. senator Orrin Hatch, who called Sue his “MX princess.” I wonder at her youth and fortitude in those days. Sue and her cohort weren’t like the Marxist revolutionaries I had studied, but they were equally fierce and committed. She represented the stubborn independence of Deltans; their skepticism toward government, authority, and so-called experts; their understanding that progress might come with the loss of freedom. Sue died in 2014. Her obituary states that she was the first female president of the Utah Press Association and a board member of the National Newspaper Association, that she married Ray L. Dutson, and that she was the mother of three of her own kids as well as 30 foster children.
In the late 1980s, several years after the MX controversy had cooled and the Delta High School students had begun to uncover the story of Topaz, Jane Beckwith signed up for the Japan Exchange and Teaching program in Hiroshima, where she taught English to Japanese students. By this time, Mary McMillan had retired and returned to the United States. The two teachers, though connected across time, place, and history, would never meet.•
Next week: “Coda”
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.
