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Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 4
The Grass is Always Greener | Ronald O. Barney, One Side by Himself: The Life and Times of Lewis Barney, 1808-1894
One Side by Himself is well written and shows careful research and documentation. The author, a descendant of Lewis Barney, emphasizes that his subject was a run-of-the-mill Mormon; in fact, he says, “Lewis Barney was a ‘last wagon’ man” (p. xvii). But Barney was too independent to be a “last wagon” Mormon, he was an outrider. The author presents him as a self-reliant man, a very independent but loyal church member. The following details illustrate these traits. He was a member of the pioneer wagon train that reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. He then returned—in 1847—to his family in Iowa and proceeded to build up a good farm there. He accepted the Principle and married a second wife, a young widow in poor health. Barney thought that his farm was worth $1000, but he sold it for about $50 in 1852 because Brigham Young had called all the Saints in Iowa to go west. On the way west, he had a run-in with the wagon master and left the train in a huff; eighteen wagons from the train followed him to the Salt Lake Valley. Though he never had much money, Barney paid to have many of his ancestors identified and then took his first wife to Manti where they lived for nearly a year, doing temple ordinance work for those ancestors. To reaffirm his loyalty to the church, he was rebaptized at least twice over the years, but he maintained his independence by failing to appear on a list of Mormons who were rebaptized in a show of support for the United Order in Monroe, Utah. For Lewis, the Order was much harder to live than the Principle.
One of the purposes of this book is to describe how nineteenth-century Mormonism functioned at the family level, at least for the Barney family. The story, the author says, “comes from the voice of the under-represented, quiet majority of Mormonism” (p. xvii). He points out an obvious but important problem in writing a biography of a person like Barney: the common man leaves few tracks. Barney himself sought to overcome this problem. In his later years, he wrote two autobiographies, the first in 1878 in Monroe, Utah and the second, longer work (300 pages) in 1886 in Bowie Station, Arizona. Unfortunately all but 40 pages of this longer autobiography were lost. These two manuscripts, a few personal papers, and an autobiography written by Arthur Barney, Lewis’s son, form the framework of this book. The author has gone to great lengths to gather background material to evaluate Barney’s recollections and to fill in the blanks. He reports “that Barney is a remarkably reliable wit ness to the events he describes “(p. xix).
While Barney was a loyal Latter-day Saint and an influential church member, he was not an ecclesiastical leader. He did, however, become one of the first “teachers of the ward” in Monroe after Young initiated what is now the home teaching program (p. 240). He was also elected a director of the Monroe United Order, but he didn’t last long in that job. In an era when the Church was more democratic than at present, Barney was influential in the selection of local church leaders. He says “I used my influence” to have Moses Gifford chosen as bishop in Monroe (p. 220). Shortly afterwards, Barney felt that appointing Gifford as bishop had been a mistake. Gifford came to agree and resigned in a dispute over the United Order. He was replaced by James Thompson Lisonbee, a rigid man, who found that for him managing the Monroe United Order was an impossible task. Lisonbee was released as both bishop and president of the local United Order and called on a mission. Barney then, in 1878, nominated Dennison L. Harris as Lisonbee’s replacement. After a discussion, Erastus Snow, who presided at the meeting, called for a vote and Harris was elected and ordained as the new bishop. One could say, then, that Barney was active in local politics.
This book might have been titled The Peregrinations of Lewis Barney. It is difficult to count the number of times he moved. Does living away from home for a few months to work or to visit count as a move? What about returning to a previous abode? A reason able estimate is that Barney moved about 20 times after he ceased living with his father. Typically Barney would become restless by the time he had finished building a log cabin, generally about two years after he had ar rived in a new area. He lived in Illinois, Iowa, Utah (in communities across a broad band from Springville to Circleville), and—briefly—in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. This constant moving was hard on his wives. By the mid-1860s, Barney’s first wife, Betsey, apparently became tired of following him about and lived mainly with her sons. In 1889, after not seeing Betsey for over five years, Barney picked her up in Kanosh and took her to Manti, where for nearly a year they regularly attended the temple. In 1886, Elizabeth, his second wife, who had dutifully followed Barney all the way to Bowie Station in southeastern Arizona, refused to move yet again. Maybe she would not cross the Ari zona desert in summer. Whatever the reason, Barney, now in his late seventies, returned to Utah without her, traveling with his daughter, Martha, and her husband, Thomas Briscoe. Five years passed before he went to see Elizabeth, who was then living with her son, David, in Mancos, Colorado. Barney shows surprising fairness in the neglect of his wives.
The book does contain a few errors. On page 143, the author has the Spanish Fork River run eastward instead of westward; he makes a similar error by having the Price River flow westward from Wellington to Price (p. 271). He usually calls the LDS Church “The Church of Jesus Christ,” which he describes as “the original name of the Mormon Church” (p. 159). Yet “The Church of Christ” is the name printed on the title page of A Book of Commandments.[1] Finally, one minor typographical error: the index lists Benjamin Franklin Barney as Lewis’s son. He is really Charles Barney’s son, and Lewis’s half-brother.
I really enjoyed this book. Reading about a Mormon who never even became a bishop’s counselor and viewed himself as a loyal Mormon all of his life was both informative and refreshing. More serious historians should write books like this one.
One Side by Himself: The Life and Times of Lewis Barney, 1808-1894, by Ronald O. Barney (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001), 402 pp.
[1] The name may go back to as early as June 1829; see the reprint edition, A Book of Commandments for the Government of the Church of Christ Organized According to Law, on the 6th of April, 1830 (Independence, MO: Church of Christ – Temple Lot, I960), 26.