Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [35]
The women visited W.W. Wells, the governor of Utah, on July 11, and saw the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western Historical Collection, photo by H.S. Poley, P378.
Detail of this photograph on this page.
Mormons, who considered themselves on a mission from God, founded Salt Lake City in 1847 to establish a religious utopia in the wilderness, a model city where they could practice, without persecution, their vision of a close-knit communitarian society. However, with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the development of mining and smelting, their geographic isolation ended. By 1890, the flood of immigrants created diversity with more than fifty percent of the population non-Mormon. Helga and Clara entered a deeply divided city, where Mormons and non-Mormons usually lived in separate residential neighborhoods, attended separate schools, joined separate fraternal and commercial organizations, and battled over social and cultural issues.8
By 1896, the changing city resembled other western cities undergoing rapid urbanization. Similar attitudes toward the “necessity” of prostitution that existed in Spokane allowed prostitution to be tolerated in Salt Lake City, which housed a thriving “red-light” district in the heart of downtown. Legal businesses, such as cigar and liquor stores, lined Commercial Street with “female boarders” in the upstairs of the houses. An urban working-class ghetto emerged west of the railroad tracks. With the extraction of copper, lead, silver, and gold in Utah, five smelting companies caused significant pollution to drift into Salt Lake City through a smoke belt between Murray and the city. But the city had cleaned up another pollution problem in 1890 when a major sanitation effort led to the installation of five miles of sewer pipe in the downtown area, eliminating the fetid sources of earlier epidemics.
Now well-dressed women passed to and from the shops along Temple Street. Through an elaborate canal system, the Mormons transformed the parched land until the city teemed with beautiful flower gardens, backyard orchards, and parks. A well-planned city that some called the Paris of Utah, Salt Lake City presented spacious avenues with beautiful hotels, markets, libraries, and even a museum.
While in Utah, they managed to arrange a visit to the office of Governor Wells and he added his signature to their document from Mayor Belt. He clearly treated the women with respect and welcome as they reported to the Deseret News that Utah had a “very excellent chief executive.”9 The Deseret News reporter described Helga and Clara as intelligent women who “converse freely and fluently,” were clad in fairly good apparel, and were taking notes on the way because they expected to write a book at the completion of their journey. Recognizing their stunning achievement so far, the reporter noted that “the only other woman known to have attempted a similar feat left from San Francisco with two men and dogs; when she arrived at Salt Lake City she quickly boarded a train to return home.”10
In Salt Lake City they donned the bicycle skirts that the original contract stipulated they model. For some, perhaps even the sponsor of the wager, the emancipation of women from conventional and deforming fashions became linked with women’s growing freedom in society. “Until woman is allowed to have ankles, there is no hope for her brains,” claimed one advocate for the reform dress.11 By 1896,