Dale Morgan

Lowell Dale Morgan (December 18, 1914 – March 30, 1971), generally cited as Dale Morgan or Dale L. Morgan, was an American historian, accomplished researcher, biographer, editor, and critic. He specialized in material on Utah history, Mormon history, the American fur trade, and overland trails. His work is known both for its comprehensive research and accuracy and for the fluid imagery of his prose.

Morgan was forced by post-lingual deafness as an early teen to communicate by letters throughout his professional life. This effort created a written network for scholars interested in Western American themes. Vast stores of correspondence indicate his willingness to help another writer or scholar, to provide information on sources and materials, or offer advice on projects. Many emerging scholars, particularly those out of the academic mainstream, considered him a mentor. As a result, Morgan stood in the center of a scholarly group of literary figures of the 1930s through 1960s involved in history and biography of the American West. These individuals included Juanita Brooks, Fawn Brodie, Bernard DeVoto, Charles Kelly, J. Roderic Korns, A. Russell Mortensen, William Mulder, and Harold Schindler.

Early life Morgan was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1914 and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the city. He was the oldest of the four children of James Lowell Morgan and Emily Holmes. His father, James Morgan died of appendicitis when Dale Morgan was only five years old. To raise her children, Emily Morgan returned to college to upgrade her normal certificate to a college degree and worked until her retirement as an elementary school teacher.

A promising and intelligent youth, Morgan contracted meningitis in August 1929. The disease left him with a total loss of hearing. Emily Morgan kept him home from school for an entire year, hoping that some hearing would return. Deafness cut off his ability to relate to people around him. The once popular, social, and athletic boy became socially introverted, devoting much of his time to reading and study. Morgan recalled that he had not yet reconciled himself to his deafness by the time he returned to school. In 1951, in a letter to Marguerite Sinclair Reusser, he wrote that a minor family crisis in March 1931 led to a hysterical outburst. During this emotional time, Morgan finally confided in his mother the difficulties and fears he had faced over the loss of his hearing. "I began to face the future instead of wasting myself in bitter regret over a past that was beyond my reach. That was the beginning of my adjustment to the fact that my hearing was gone and would probably never return." At this time, he began a lifelong pattern of writing, producing thousands of careful transcriptions, personal letters, and books in his field.

Morgan learned and became quite competent in lip reading, but was never comfortable with the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the method. His friends noted that he could speak quite clearly but typically chose not to do so unless among people he knew well. Deafness gave him no way to regulate his voice and his conversation was locked in a high-pitched monotone. Instead he typically turned to communicating in writing, carrying on personal conversations with the use of note cards, the backs of letters, scratch paper, and other handy paper. Archivist and historiographer Gary Topping noted that "...because Morgan’s deafness shifted his communication with the external world entirely to the written world, his world became a literary world, and the long hours of practice with the written world turned him into a virtuosos of English prose in the same way that musical practice produces virtuosity." He was profoundly affected by the soft positivism of 1930s social psychology and took a stance for historicism. Having rejected any religious motive as impossible, Morgan insisted that his work in western history and Mormonism present a completely-objective, exclusively-naturalistic viewpoint on religious matters, and he encouraged other Utah and western historians to follow his example. In 1943, writing to S. A. Burgess, a historian of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ), Morgan said that his "viewpoint about Mormon history is that of the sociologist, the psychologist, the political, economic, and social historian." Historian of the Latter Day Saint movement Jan Shipps credits Morgan, along with three other notable historians (Bernard DeVoto, Fawn McKay Brodie, and Juanita Brooks), with establishing a basis for the new historiography of Mormonism through significant Mormon-related works in the 1940s and 1950s.

Morgan's intellectual experience in the federal WPA programs had both advantages and disadvantages for him as a historian. The independent nature of the programs encouraged his critical judgment and work ethic, forced him to work with a variety of people, and exposed him to a wide training ground on source development and research. However, it did not lead him to consider the larger meaning of the facts that he gathered or to understand the philosophy and theory of history, as taught in an academic setting. In fact, during the trials of his career, he became quite antagonistic to academic requirements. In response to a negative academic review of a work by his friend DeVoto, he wrote that "the term ‘history’ had better be redefined to mean, ’a species of writing produced by or enroute to a Ph.D.’ I have had enough troubles trying to break a path alongside this main-traveled road to know something of the snobberies at work here, and the ways in which the academic world and even the world of learning are geared to these attitudes."

According to Topping, this lack of perspective and understanding led Morgan to believe "that historical facts contain their own meaning, and that the historian’s intellect ought to be active only in internal and external criticism, establishing the authenticity and credibility of sources, yet passive when it came to establishing the larger significance …" As a result, Morgan "fell short of the interpretive potential of (his) sources...asserting that the facts would somehow convey their own meaning without any help from him...." However the same focus on fact, coupled to a spectacular memory for detail, allowed him to produce work of breathtaking detail and scope within the field. His strength and greatest contribution was as a documentary, rather than synthetic, historian.

Symposium on Morgan In August 1985, Sunstone offered a segment on Dale Morgan and Mormon History as part of their annual symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah. Historian William Mulder, a friend of Morgan, presented the segment.

Selected publications The State of Deseret (1940) Utah: A Guide to the State (1941) The Humboldt: Highroad of the West (1943) The Great Salt Lake (1947) Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953) Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail (1963) The West of William H. Ashley (1964)

With other writers and editors West from Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of the Immigrant Trails across Utah, 1846–1850 original diaries and journals edited and with introductions by J. Roderic Korns and Dale L. Morgan; originally published 1951. Revised and updated by Will Bagley and Harold Schindler. Publisher: Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1994. . Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs ed. Richard L. Saunders. Publisher: Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2007. The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson, with Eleanor T. Harris, (1967)