Craft Guild: The Multigenerational Legacy of the American West Center

Since its founding in 1964, the American West Center has seen its share of accomplishments and successes, but in the words of the former associate dean of the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library for Special Collections Greg Thompson, “no assessment of the American West Center’s legacy would be complete without recognition of the training it provided for hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students as public historians . . . .” History professor Greg Smoak knows this as well as anyone, not just in his capacity as the center’s director, but as someone who, over the last three decades, has himself personally and professionally benefitted from his association with the center. “The American West Center is truly a multigenerational community of scholars whose reach extends far beyond the University of Utah campus,” he wrote in the acknowledgments of “Western Lands, Western Voices.”

 Long and distinguished, the list of people who have worked with, for, and benefitted from the center includes community partners, established public and academic historians, as well as numerous graduate students, many of whom have gone on to achieve great distinction in their respective fields. But every legacy has to start somewhere and, what is more to the point, with someone. Although former Utah history professors A. R. Mortensen and C. Gregory Crampton founded the Western History Center (which would later become the AWC), the center’s real legacy began when tobacco heiress Doris Duke made sizable donations to seven universities to fund American Indian oral histories. At the University of Utah, the American West Center managed a seminal, multi-year endeavor now known as the Duke Oral History Project. 

According to Smoak, this project was transformative in several ways: It created a meaningful and sustained engagement with Native communities throughout the region; it helped the center become a trailblazer and leader in the field of oral history; and it led to the recruitment of Floyd A. O’Neil. “First as a graduate student, and then as assistant director and director, Floyd managed a series of successful projects that established the American West Center’s reputation in Utah and throughout the West”

Widely considered the lynchpin of the AWC, O’Neil’s contributions to the center are many. One of his most significant contributions, however, was his two-prong innovative approach to oral history, whereby he sought out and enlisted the direct involvement of tribal members to produce their own histories and used the university’s vast resources to facilitate this end. “Of course, Floyd did not do this alone,” writes Smoak in the introduction of ‘Western Lands.’“He had an eye for talent and a talent for mentorship.” One of the first scholars O’Neil recruited for the center in the late ‘60s was Richard Hart, who, like many of his successors, would go on to do great things after receiving training at the American West Center. 

Through his work with Floyd, S. Lyman Tyler and Gregory C. Crampton, Hart gained the training and expertise he needed to launch a career as a respected historical consultant for American and Canadian Indian tribes. He also directed the Institute of the American West and later the Institute of the North American West. “Dr. O’Neil, especially, provided me with broad training in historical research, using primary materials and going to important archives,” Hart said. “And I should add that Dr. O’Neil provided support and consultation for many years after my work at the American West Center.” 

Hart was one of the first people in a long line of people who would cut their teeth at the American West Center and then use that experience to realize their professional goals. Others would soon follow, including Kathryn MacKay, who started working at the AWC in early 1970s and would remain there for the next 14 years. “I was hired to edit oral history transcripts,” she said. “I went on field trips with Floyd and Greg [Smoak] to various Native communities to do oral histories.” Like Hart, MacKay would also work on curricular materials, and she edited John Wesley Powell's Ute stories into a book with illustrations by Ute healer, elder and historian Clifford Duncan (1933-2014). 

Born in the early decades of the 20th century, Duncan no doubt saw a lot of change over the course of his lifetime, but he wasn’t the only indigenous scholar that MacKay crossed paths with during her time at the center. She also worked with former museum director for the Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Tribal Judge, Tribal Councilman, and World War II Army veteran Fred Conetah (1924-1980) on his posthumously published book “A History of the Northern Ute People.”  “We made a good team,” MacKay recalled.  Building on her work at the center (she was one of the historians whose work became “Indian Self-Rule: First-Hand Accounts of Indian-White Relations from Roosevelt to Reagan,” and she also wrote most of “A History of Uintah-Ouray Ute Lands” with Floyd), in 1988 MacKay became a professor of history at Weber State University and she’s been there ever since.

Around this same time, and with a BA in history already under his belt, John Alley would finish his master’s degree (also from the U’s History Department), and then go on to complete a doctorate in history and ethnic studies in 1986 from UC Santa Barbara. He, too, owes much to his time at the center, which greatly informed his life’s trajectory, professional and otherwise. “The American West Center provided me with opportunities and experience that at least twice set the course of my scholarly and professional career,” he said. Alley’s involvement with the center began in 1974 while he was still an undergraduate student and continued through his master’s studies. “I was given the chance to work in a substantive way – researching in archives and the field, interviewing, writing and editing – on Native American tribal histories, archives and curricular materials.” 

Many things shape a person’s life, but Alley traces his interest in studying American Indian history to his experience at the center, where he wrote or co-wrote half a dozen published tribal histories for use in classrooms on or near reservations. The writing and the co-writing were crucial in terms of how those activities contributed to Alley’s overall development as an historian, but his time doing field research may have been even more so. In his words, “field research was especially important relative to public engagement since it included direct work with tribal representatives and oral history interviews with tribal elders.”

The center directly impacted Alley as a burgeoning historian, but it also indirectly impacted him owing to its reputation as a leading regional studies center, “My AWC experience also no doubt influenced the Department of History at the University of California Santa Barbara in admitting me as a doctoral candidate,” he said. Alley would periodically do consulting work for the center while working on his doctorate. “Once I was at the ABD stage, I was again able to parlay my American West Center experience into professional development. The introduction I had to writing and publishing tribal histories at the center gave me a foot in the door to the publishing industry.” Alley’s first job at a small university press would eventually lead to a thirty-year career in scholarly publishing at university presses, where he “drew on his AWC training to work as an independent historical researcher and writer, in effect a practitioner of public, or applied, history.”

While the majority of people to benefit from the center were already historians or on their way to becoming one, Laura Bayer says that her story is not typical of graduate students in history who came to the AWC as part of their professional development. Known (fondly, she thinks) as “that Damn English Major,” in 1975, when she was finishing a MA in English, Bayer took a three-week, part-time editing job at the center. What is typical, however, is how this brief stint at the center turned into a long-term position, during which Bayer “had the privilege of working not only with a distinguished generation of AWC scholars that included Greg Thompson, Tom King, John Alley, Kathryn MacKay and others, but also with the tribes of Utah and Nevada, the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico, and the Hoopa Valley Reservation in California on a variety of tribal history and curriculum projects.” Bayer’s time at the center would last about seven years. Forty years later, she appreciates reflecting on how the experience shaped the person she became.

The fact that the center has played – and continues to play – a significant role in determining the direction of people’s lives is not lost on Tim Glenn, who was recently appointed as the inaugural museum director for the new Museum of Utah. “The American West Center truly opened doors for me as a public historian and as a professional in general,” he said. “Had I not had the opportunity to work at the AWC as a research assistant from the fall of 2009 to the summer of 2011, I may not have even gone to graduate school at all.” 

During the three years he was there, Glenn worked on two projects that would prove vital on his journey to become a museum director. The first was a research project on the history of cattle grazing in the Uinta Wasatch Cache National Forest, which was funded by the United States Forest Service and ultimately delivered to the USFS. The second project, whose purpose was to research historic hunting, fishing, and grazing within the western United States, was contracted by the Shoshone Bannock tribes at Fort Hall. Glenn says that “each project offered invaluable experience to collaborate with other researchers, academics, government entities, and colleagues [and he] especially enjoyed popping [his] head in for a bit of wisdom and good-natured ribbing from Floyd O'Neal.”

Although the AWC is perhaps best known for its American Indian Oral History Project and its collaborations with tribal members and leaders, and has, in effect, attracted many young scholars precisely for that reason, according to Smoak, “the center has also been part of a broader initiative to document the stories of the United States Military veterans in World War II, and the Korean, Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq Wars.” John Worsencroft took part in this work from 2008-2011 as a graduate assistant, and then served as the center’s assistant director from 2010-2011. Whereas several of his predecessors would go on to work outside of academia after leaving the center, Worsencroft went the traditional academic route, which culminated in a tenure-track job as an assistant professor of history at Louisiana Tech University.

Still, Worsencroft says that he “continued to keep one foot firmly in the public history world, and that because of [his] experience at the AWC, [he] was awarded a fellowship during [his] PhD training, which allowed [him] to work for a year at an urban history museum.” Other opportunities included his first postdoc at the Waggonner Center at Louisiana Tech, as well as writing curriculum for audiences ranging from K-12 to senior officers in the US military. “Each of these opportunities were made possible because of the start [he] got at the AWC.” 

Another U and AWC alum who worked on the center's Vietnam War Oral History Project is Lisa Barr. After finishing her BA in history in 2014, she started volunteering at the AWC, where she transcribed oral histories and interviewed veterans for the project while she learned more about the center’s work.  “This introduction to the AWC made me want to work at the center and earn an MA in history with a focus in public history. I felt incredibly supported during my time as a grad student thanks to Greg Smoak, Leighton Quarles, and Floyd O'Neil. It is a place where you can see history truly at work!” Barr also gained invaluable experience working as a research associate for the center. One of the projects she worked was for the National Park Service at Pipe Spring National Monument, where she researched it’s structures' inscriptions and wrote short biographies about the people who made them. 

Equally important, however, is how this work at the center connected Barr to other local history organizations throughout the state, such as the Utah Historical Society, where she currently works as a Historical Collections Curator. “Overall,” she said, “the center and its leadership provided a blueprint to help me navigate the public history field and how we can best serve our public.”

No one can say for sure how many people’s lives the American West Center has changed for the better since its founding over 59 years ago. What we can say for sure is that the craft guild embodied by the American West Center has offered, and will continue to offer students and scholars of history alike the guidance, training, and support they need to make history.

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MEDIA CONTACTS
Jana Cunningham, University of Utah College of Humanities
jana.cunningham@utah.edu | 801-213-0866

Published April 11, 2023