Joseph Fish: Mormon Pioneer | John H. Krenkel, ed., The Life and Times of Joseph Fish, Mormon Pioneer

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A review of this book is naturally divided into two phases: Joseph Fish as an observer and recorder of his times, and John H. Krenkel as editor of Mr. Fish’s voluminous writings. Since the latter has not maintained the distinctions between himself and the journalist, judgment of his part of the enterprise would appear to be limited to his technique, preface, and footnotes. His job was difficult, as any scholar who is familiar with the Fish manuscripts can attest. 

Joseph Fish was born in Illinois in 1840 and his life ran the gamut of the Mormon experience to 1926, the year of his death. He was a keen observer, sensitive to his environment, and the events of his boyhood provided a reliable feedback in later years which enabled him to write exceptional descriptions of Nauvoo and the long trek west. As one of “the movingest people,” he recorded life from various places in Utah, Arizona, and Chihuahua over a period of seven decades. 

Apparently he started writing during the last half of the 1850s, be ginning in flashback with his ancestry, birth, and early years. Thorough in all things, he acquired the habit of consulting the best available references for events which he had not personally observed and he wove this detail smoothly into his own entries. In this book the blend-point between recollection and daily entry cannot always be detected, the result being an unusual mixture of diary and memoria. 

It was about 1885 that Joseph Fish completed the first volume of his record and he immediately went to work on a second. But instead of continuing from the last entry, he rewrote his entire first book, amplifying some passages and omitting others. The second version was also written longhand. By 1901 he had begun to type and to compose other manuscripts in this manner. Once more Fish rewrote his journal, augmenting the typed version with many incidents not found in the two handwritten editions. And again he deleted material contained in the early books. Although Krenkel does not tell us so, it is this third version which comprises his edition. 

Thus Joseph Fish wrote three variations of his record, each a melange of recollections, daily entries, augmented passages, edited items, and extraneous data indirectly obtained. While subsequent editing of any entry ordinarily impairs the value of a journal, Fish’s exceptional honesty and ability tend to minimize this failing in his manuscript. He wrote mostly about others and was motivated more to be inclusive than to make himself appear to better advantage. 

Walter Prescott Webb has said, “The function of history . . . is to de scribe and make understandable the forces which have shaped the destiny of man and brought him to the present time equipped as he now is with his ideas and institutions.” By this definition Joseph Fish recorded the Mormon departure from the mainstream of American society and the painful process of re-entry. He saw the multi-faceted aspects of the mundane and recorded them along with the abstractions of the complex and the unusual. He wrote about nearly everything that made up the world in which he lived, but primarily he wrote about other people and their attitudes toward the pragmatisms of everyday life — politics, religion, morals, and social practice. Basically, the texture of his writings is derived from the essence of human experience. 

Many of Fish’s observations regarding his contemporaries will interest today’s historians. Whether he comments on the generous hospitality of John D. Lee (p. 65) or the relations between Ammon Tenney and John W. Young (pp. 218 and 222), we know his words are the considered opinions of a perceptive individual, well worth consideration by scholars. He maintains his objectivity when he comments on the Spanish mission at Zuni (pp. 210-11), Judge Jacob Boreman (pp. 152-53), the excitable nature of William H. Dame (pp. 69 and 115), the tribulations of Thompsonian doctors (pp. 76-77), or the numerous machinations of the Liberals. What other Mormon of his day would have had the courage to record the words of U.S. Marshal William Nelson regarding Brigham Young in the Lee case (pp. 59-60 and 165-66), to repeat the opinion of his father-in-law Jesse N. Smith that the Woodruff Manifesto was a political decision (p. 423), or to record the resentment of the local Saints on being advised in 1892 to vote the Republican ticket, writing that some people thought the apostles had no business to meddle in politics (pp. 361-62)? 

John H. Krenkel is to be congratulated for making this Fish manuscript easily available to students of Western history. Unfortunately, Krenkel the editor falls short of Fish the recorder. After an adequate preface, the editor inexplicably uses inferior secondary sources in his footnotes — some of which are in error — when primary sources are readily available in university libraries. For instance, Krenkel uses the Granger edition of Arizona Place Names instead of the more accurate 1935 paperback by Will C. Barnes. An example is footnote 17 on page 198. Had he referred to the Barnes edition, page 282, Krenkel would have found a better, although not error-free, reference. But had he consulted the journal of James S. Brown under the date of December 3, 1875, he would have used the primary reference. Another example is footnote 3 on page 347. Barnes, page 453, is much better, but again, Krenkel should have used the primary source — L. John Nuttall’s letter of September 24, 1878 (printed in the Deseret News, Vol. 27, p. 591), in which the writer recorded the layout of the Tuba City townsite on September 17, 1878. Footnotes 3 on page 84 and 2 on page 208 are Mr. Krenkel’s own errors. 

The Utah Guide is another reference which must be used with care. Citing it (footnote 3 on page 182), Krenkel states that Orderville was settled in 1864. Actually, the Berry brothers settled in Long Valley in 1864. Berryville became known as Glendale when elements of the Muddy Mission moved there in 1871. Orderville was not established until 1874 when some of the people moved three miles up the valley from Mt. Carmel as a result of a dispute motivated by the advent of the United Order. 

Mr. Krenkel will find better references than the ones he quotes in foot notes 4 and 5 on page 183 in the journals of Andrew S. Gibbons (Brigham Young University) and Thales H. Haskell (Utah Historical Quarterly, Vol. 13). The first mention of Buckskin Mountain is found in the Gibbons entry of December 18, 1858, and Haskell repeats the callout on October 21, 1859. The Paiute waterhole which came to be known as Jacob’s Pools was shown to Jacob Hamblin by his Indian guide Naraguts in November 1858. Another small party under Hamblin arrived at this spring on October 24, 1859. Two days later Thales Haskell and Taylor Crosby named the spring after his party leader. (UHQ, 12, p. 75) 

It would appear that since Silas L. Fish has copies of the three versions written by his father, Mr. Krenkel would have served scholarship better had he compared each edition with the others, preserved detail not repeated elsewhere, eliminated all repetition, and used the diarist’s own words, imperfect though they might be in the first and second books. Brackets and omission marks should have been used to designate editorial insertions and deletions. Mr. Krenkel utilized only the third version of Fish’s writings, and this reviewer knows that passages important to his own needs have been eliminated. 

The Life and Times of Joseph Fish, Mormon Pioneer, edited by John H. Krenkel. Published by the Interstate Printers & Publishers, Inc., Danville, Illinois, 1970. 518 pp, index, photo, three maps.