1. 1. The invocations of Brooks as heroic are legion and cannot all be listed here. The ones I quote are William Mulder, review of Juanita Brooks by Levi S. Peterson, Western American Literature 24 (Summer 1989): 159-60
2. Levi S. Peterson, "The Saving Virtues, the Pardonable Sins," Juanita Brooks Lecture, Dixie State University, St. George, Utah, April 28, 1989, and "In Memoriam: Juanita Brooks," Sunstone (October 1989): 7
3. Laura L. Bush, "Truth Telling about a Temporal and a Spiritual Life," in Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth-century Mormon Women's Autographical Acts (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004), 81
4. and Charles Kelly to Dale L. Morgan, January 4, 1970, reel 14, frame 272, Dale L. Morgan Papers, MSS 71/161 c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Morgan Papers, UCB).
5. 2. Myth in the sense of origin story, not falsehood. A myth is not necessarily fiction—yet like any modern myth, the pioneer myth is packed with all sorts of inspirational or instructive expectations. Though myths are often passed along undisturbed or welcome antiquarianism (study of the past as artifact—recounting and correcting dates, times, participants, geography, and other details), myths are usually ethical productions intended to inspire the rising generation of the time. See Eric A. Eliason, “Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression,” in Useable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expression in North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 175-211.