Joyous Journey | The Joyous Journey of LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen: An Autobiography

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Among historians of the West LeRoy Hafen is well known for his prodigious shelf of books—The Overland Mail, History of Colorado, Broken Hand, Fort Laramie, Western America, and two score more of documentary and reference volumes for which his was author, editor, coordinator, or all three. Since few historians operate with that much efficacy, one of the interests in The Joyous Journey is the clues provided on how this efficiency was generated. 

The work ethic in which Hafen grew up clearly helped, but not more than his like-minded and collaborative wife. Ann is a presence throughout this book, though the structure and content relate more specifically to LeRoy’s life and career. From the beginning he was ambitious, diligent, and industrious. He and Ann indulged in travel and other relaxations but never much interrupting their self-assigned research and writing. With his thesis and dissertation on the Handcart Migration and the Overland Mail, LeRoy staked out the mid-nineteenth-century and the Rockies and their immediate eastern and western slopes as his field. He reached back into the epoch of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, which fitted in well with his penchant for topics in travel and transportation history. In this compact and exciting time and place he was never at a loss for subject matter. 

Nor was he ever lacking a publisher. The Colorado Magazine, which he edited from 1924 to 1954, was the natural and eager vehicle for many of his shorter pieces, and his first several books were quickly placed. Early in the forties, the Arthur H. Clark Company signed him on to round out the Southwest Historical Series, which he did with dispatch. Clark then contracted for a fifteen-volume series on the Far West and the Rockies, and after that for a series on the Mountain Men. 

In 1924, having earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley, Hafen became State Historian of Colorado, a post he held for the next thirty years. On the side he taught part time in Denver University. As State Historian his administrative and ingratiating duties were mild, and the main thrust of his assignment was to carry on with research and publishing. Offhand it appeared that the secret of his success was this insulation from the hurly-burly of teaching. 

At sixty, Hafen retired as State Historian and promptly was called across the mountains to Provo and a professorship in Brigham Young University. He quickly adjusted to full-time teaching. He found the faculty and student contacts stimulating. And whereas many professionals consider work on this firing line more arduous than cloistered research, in Hafen’s opinion “it was less exhausting than a day of constant research and writing” (p. 275). Today at eighty he is rolling right along. In his thirties, forties, and fifties he published at the rate of a book every year and a half. In his sixties and seventies he stepped the rate up to a book and a half per year, which meant shortening the gestation period from eighteen months to eight. 

This autobiography also gives testimony on Mormon life. Hafen’s father was a polygamist. In the 1890’s, when pressures against that institution came to climax, he dispersed a wife or two across the territorial line into Arizona and another across the state line to Bunkerville, Nevada, where LeRoy was born and spent his youth. Polygamy begets patriarchy, or so we usually assume. In this instance, although his father visited a couple of times a year and is warmly remembered for the boxes of apples he brought from St. George, he was always a rather re mote figure. What LeRoy grew up in was essentially a matriarchy; perhaps the Mormon symbol of the beehive should have tipped us off. 

The scene was rural and farm work the steady routine, though not in the pat tern of a single-family farm. Instead, Mormon cohesiveness and irrigation produced a farm-village. There also was an extended family scattered through the Mormon Dixie. Riding off to school in St. George or Cedar City, LeRoy had relatives with whom he could spend each night. Although Mormonism as such is seldom mentioned, it is an underlying fact. At one stage in Colorado, there came a time when Hafen thought he might be expendable as an outlander and as a Mormon. In 1954 he and Ann found a special warmth in coming home to a Mormon community, Provo, and a particular rapport with the students there. Needless to say, all that is Mormon about the Hafen experience, achievement, and career is part of the substance of the history of the West.

The Joyous Journey of LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen: An Autobiography. Glendale, California and Denver, Colorado, The Arthur H. Clark Company and Fred A. Rosenstock, 1973. 335 pp. $11.50.