When For A Shining Moment Tourism Became Patriotic

Less than two months after the Civil War effectively came to an end in Durham, North Carolina, 150 years ago next April, a newspaper editor headed out west publishing later in 1865, that region’s first travel guidebook.

Long before that war began, every line of my ancestors back five generations, (except three who died along the way) some northerners, some southerners, along with two sets of newly arrived immigrants, (Scots and Brits) had settled in the western shadow of the Rockies, all but four a decade prior to that internal conflict.

Samuel Bowles was traveling by stagecoach with the Speaker of the House of Representatives and future Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, on a journey requested by President Abraham Lincoln the day he was assassinated.

Along the way they would pass some of the last two dozen wagon trains of Mormons still heading west.  The subsequent guidebook was entitled, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, The Mormons, and the Pacific States.

The Civil War was over but the route Bowles and Colfax traveled was anything but peaceful.

A general uprising by thousands of Plains Indians, Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho had been brewing for several years due to abuses by immigrants seeking fortune rather than a homeland, but warriors sometimes failed to make a distinction.

Nor did Cavalry units protecting the Overland Route, which burst into open warfare after the tragic massacre of peaceful Native Americans a few months earlier at Sand Creek, mostly women and children.

All along the stage route ranches, wagons, stagecoaches, telegraph wires and feed had been burned across Kansas and along the front of the Rocky Mountains midway through Colorado and Wyoming.

Narratives about the transformative exodus of 80,000 Mormons between 1847 and 1868 in pursuit of religious freedom are obviously heavy on sacrifice, perseverance, suffering, faith and grit.

But ironically, a new study by researchers at Brigham Young University looking into insurance rates provides some new perspective.

The mortality rate for Mormon pioneers, while a point higher than the U.S. population in 1850 was only slightly higher for male pioneers and slightly lower for female pioneers overall.

Showing that it may have been safer out on the trail away from cities, the mortality rate for babies on Mormon wagon trains was 9% compared to the U.S. population overall at 15%.  Of course, only white mortality was measured at the time.

Soon after Bowles published his travelogue, visitors began arriving to see Mormons, much as they do the Amish today, perhaps ironic to my Bowman ancestors who arrived in America as the latter and migrated west as the former.

The first true “tourist’s guide” to the West was published as a resource five months after the first transcontinental railroad was opened in 1869, less than a decade after my ancestors settled the first permanent settlement in Idaho and forty years before they would prove up on their last homestead.

Until then, tourism in America had been regional in nature.  In the early 1800s coastal planters seeking the climate and scenery of North Carolina’s mountains were primarily motivated by fear of disease.

Organized tourism took root first in New England by the 1840s just as my ancestors headed across the Great Plains.  It was viewed as healthful scenic relief from industrial cities and factories.

By the time a modest hotel clerk in Salt Lake City, a transplanted Virginian, first coined the term See America First, as the name for a three-day conference focused on tourism promotion, the first handful of community-destination marketing organizations had already been formed beginning a decade earlier with Detroit in 1896.

Attending were 200 business leaders, governors, heads of commercial associations, agents for railroad and trails/good roads groups, including representatives from Spokane, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Victoria, Duluth, Denver, Vancouver, Colorado Springs and several towns in the Midwest.

The meeting venue, now on the National Historic Register (the historic Oregon Short Track Building on Pierpont behind Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and the Hilton, kitty corner from the Salt Lake Convention Center), at least deserves a plaque.

While the movement fizzled, the slogan was soon picked up by the Great Northern Railway to promote Glacier National Park and then to promote all national parks and monuments as national assets.

We are reminded by Dr. Marguerite S. Shaffer in her book by the same title, that this was the conference where speakers formalized the notion that had been emerging since the Civil War, that the West was emblematic of the “true” America, the ideal of America as “nature’s nation” and tourism as a “ritual of citizenship.”

Watch for her new book, a co-edited collection of essays entitled Entangled Environments: New Perspectives on Rendering Nature in American Culture, due out this year.

Scenic preservation and “nature” tourism took hold before, during and after WWI.  From 1897-1915, most tourism was in the form of conventions and expositions because the idea of leisure travel would not emerge as mainstream until the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Good road coalitions argued for a system of highway routes true to the historic pioneer routes such as those my ancestors blazed to honor them as emblematic of what it means to be American.

Unfortunately, some cities didn’t get the memo when the proportion related to conventions and meetings began to rapidly decline by the 1930s, even battling until the early 1970s to prevent “visitor” from being added to the name of community marketing agencies.

Some still obsess with conventions today when meetings of any type now represent only 7% of business and 4% of leisure visitor stays and 10% of travel overall about the same as attending performing arts, not insignificant but hardly worth the high risk of over building for.

Increasingly after WWII, cookie-cutter development, franchise architecture, formula businesses and facilities, desecration marketing such as billboards, facility envy and mainstream culture have combined to demean tourism appeal, destroy sense of place and enable blight across the country.

But as I was growing up in the 1950s, kids collected stickers about the destinations they visited and often displayed them on the rear corner window.

Many reflected the colorized photographs made famous beginning in 1901 by Fred Kiser who was during his lifetime, the premier scenic landscape photographer in his day.   He called them “artographs.”

Along with others commissioned from artists such as the postcards at this link by railroads, then road associations, and for a time by airlines, they were used to promote tourism destinations.

Little did I know in the 1970s as I backed my way into a life-long career in community-destination marketing in Spokane where businesses put on an exposition to celebrate nature that much of tourism across the nation had or was rapidly becoming anything but patriotic.

A City Creek Walk Through Time

My earlier than expected arrival last month in Salt Lake City gave me a couple of hours to explore my personal connection with the recently-opened, spectacular 23-acre City Creek Center in Downtown Salt Lake City, after parking in one of the 6,000 underground parking spaces.

It was nearly 166 years ago that two of my great-great-grandfathers and one of my great-great-great-grandfathers first rode down from a canyon in the Wasatch Range toward a small grove of Cottonwood trees along what would be called City Creek, the Center’s name-sake.

They traveled ahead of a vanguard company of 148 Mormons who were the first to arrive in that valley in late July 1847 following an 1,100 mile journey up and across the Continental Divide.

They pulled up a block or so south of where the new Center is located now and hurriedly constructed dwellings and planted crops in advance of winter, after first softening the earth by temporarily damming City Creek across its six mile journey from a canyon to the Jordan River.

That winter two of my ancestors, Charles and his 15-year-old son Andrew, also found time to build a “ship” as a way to earn funds.  Among that small number, they also encountered a thief who confessed to stealing some seed corn from them during his trial and was given “five lashes on the bare back.”

By 1849, this branch of my ancestors was assigned property in the original 13th Ward, directly across the street to the east of where City Creek Center is now, near where a spectacular Harmon’s has opened in conjunction with the massive development and my great-great-great-grandfather Charles had been appointed Deputy Marshall.

In those early years, Mormon leaders had decided all property would be public-held with stewardship assigned to various families.

There, my then-17-year-old great-great grandfather, A.P. Shumway, busily herded cattle along the creek and built adobes.  He and others also dug ditches to carry water from City Creek past each individual plot to be used for drinking and irrigation.

Today, this location is at the base of an office tower where coincidentally, my daughter and A.P.’s great-great-great-granddaughter works as assistant corporate counsel.

And as City Creek flows out of a canyon on its way to entombment beneath Downtown Salt Lake, it passes near where my grandsons attend an innovative school where learning through music is a balance to their passion for sports.

As I explored the spectacular City Creek Center last month, parts of which are both inside and outside, the temperature hovered in the low teens, held there by several days of inversion above Salt Lake Valley. Breathing air that cold for the first time since leaving Alaska in late 1980s brought back a flood of other memories.

The real City Creek remained the lifeblood of Salt Lake City throughout the remainder of the 1800s.  As the city’s population surpassed 92,000 in 1909, the creek was entombed.  This was the same year that my great-great-grandfather passed away near the town of Franklin in my native Idaho.

The nearly quarter of mile creek of that name that flows through City Creek Center today is a man-made facsimile, much like a similar water feature of approximately the same length dubbed Old Bull River that flows through the restored 16-acre Lucky Strike factory complex in a downtown district of similarly-sized Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

The real spring-fed City Creek famously resurfaced in a 1983 flood when suddenly swollen by a spring thaw it day-lighted once again and flowed during a brief reminder down the surface streets that traced the original path of its south fork.  Entombed once again, efforts to daylight City Creek once and for all continue.

A.P. Shumway left Salt Lake with his father later in 1849.  They were “called” by Mormon leaders to lead a party of 100 families south 135 miles to settle the pastoral San Pete Valley after a request by Ute tribal chiefs.  The valley is the geographic center of what would become Utah Territory a year later and a state in 1896.

However, I suspect, that for them, Salt Lake was already becoming too crowded.  Wagon trains of more than 1,000 people each had begun arriving, followed by ‘49ers who stopped for the winter on the way to the gold fields of California.

Andrew’s father Charles was described by his in-laws as someone of “hardy stock” who “loved wild country.” Even with so few settlers having arrived in Utah in the late 1840s, various aspects of human behavior were manifest.

Cattle will not paw away snow to eat like horses will which is why ranches such as the one where I spent my early years used large horse-drawn sleds to distribute bales of hay during winter snow.

In the winter of 1849, some of the 100 families elected to remain by camp fires deeming it the will of God if their cattle died due to an unusually heavy snowfall while my ancestors went out each day to shovel clearings in the grass so their cattle would not starve.

The Shumways also formed another settlement further north and were caught up in hostilities with Native Americans known as the Walker War with my great-great-grandfather, then 21, fighting at Salt Creek before settlers were ordered to temporarily evacuate.  He assigned blame for the war to those who failed to obey instructions from church leaders to live peacefully and respectfully along side Native Americans.

My great-great-great-grandfather Shumway then bought a farm about four miles from where another of my great-great-grandfathers, Charles Harper, had settled in Holladay.  In 1856, my great-great grandfather Shumway returned east to visit family in Massachusetts after an absence of 18 years and passing through several slave-holding states.

I can imagine that talk of abolition and secession made him wonder if the Union, into which Utah had been annexed after the war with Mexico, would survive its new division into Republicans and Democrats who were subdividing during the Presidential election during his visit into Southern and Northern factions.

In December of that year he sailed aboard the paddlewheel steamship Arabia to Liverpool, England before being called back to Utah within months through New York aboard the packet ship Underwriter when federal troops under Colonel and soon-to-be Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston were ordered into Utah to depose Mormon officials in a bloodless coup known as the Utah War.

Soon, A.P. married Amanda Graham, the granddaughter of a Revolutionary War veteran from North Carolina who had settled in Alabama.

Both Shumways resumed colonizing, settling Cache Valley where my grandparents were born and later Arizona.  I wondered if I inherited any of their toughness as I hiked up an incredibly steep San Francisco-type hill at the end of my walk last month to rendezvous with family.

Looking back at City Creek Center,  I remembered that shortly after I graduated from Brigham Young University in the 1970s, the Mormon Church had invested $40 million to help revitalize Downtown Salt Lake an effort which included two malls.

Now its for-profit real estate arm has invested approximately $1.5 billion in City Creek Center to replace them with a new combination of retail, residential and office, none of it from tithing and part of a $5 billion revitalization.

I wondered what my three ancestors in that 1847 vanguard company would think now and how compelled I feel to leave information like this for my descendants.

The Serendipity of Acquaintance in our Lives

A week ago last Friday, I had an interesting conversation on the last leg of a cross-country flight to visit my daughter and grandsons. My seatmate for that stretch had worked on the documentary Blackfish with director Gabriela Cowperwaite.

The film was being shown the next day at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.  When he learned that I live in Durham, North Carolina, he asked if I had ever been to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival held there each April, which of course, I had.

As the flight crew interrupted to announce preparations for landing, my attention turned to the snow-covered peaks of the Wasatch Mountains that frame Salt Lake City from the east and I began thinking about how serendipity such meetings and conversations can be.

It brought to mind a time nearly 40 years ago when I headed up the newly-created community-destination marketing organization for Spokane, Washington, and became acquainted with two very accomplished inventors, Ray Hanson and Luke Williams.

Hanson, who passed away a few years ago, was another Idaho native who, while studying engineering at the University of Idaho, had invented an automated self-leveling attachment to enable efficient harvesting of wheat on the steep hillsides of the Palouse region.

This was just one of over a hundred patents for products he manufactured in Spokane and sold in 50 countries around the world.  At the time we met, Hanson was even more famous for having invented equipment that laid down entire highways and dig huge canals with the motto of “a mile a day.”

Little did either of us realize that the next move in my career would be Anchorage as we discussed the invention he used to help construct the just-completed Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.

Ray also planted the bug that led me later in life to learn to ride heavy motorcycles and take flying lessons.  He had owned a WWII era P-51 Mustang fighter and introduced me to a friend and former airline pilot in Spokane who at the time rehabilitated WWI era Boeing-Stearman biplanes, which became a part of Spokane’s eclectic appeal.

I first met Ray while snow-skiing a new area, one of several in a 50 mile radius of Spokane, that with his support had been re-built in the 1970s and rechristened 49 Degrees North.  In part, he may have even been an inspiration for a Ski The 51st State promotion the organization I led produced.

Luke Williams, after graduating from the same high school where I would later spend my sophomore and junior years, had returned from World War II to found a neon sign business with his brother.

In 1951, the Williams brothers invented the electronic time and temperature signs which rapidly became ubiquitous outside bank branches.  Luke believed signs such as that needed to serve a public purpose as much as capitalism.

The invention helped evolve their company into the huge American Sign and Indicator Corporation in Spokane but by the time I met Luke in the mid-1970s the company had moved on to developing stadium scoreboards, again marrying public service to signage.

He took an interest in my career in community-destination marketing because the organization was intended to leverage the success of Expo ‘74 into long-term visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

As part of the World’s Fair, Luke had been instrumental in persuading the state to construct an opera house and adjacent convention center and then then after the Fair to give it to the community for a dollar.

Luke definitely planted a vision for me that while tourism development has commercial aims, it should significantly also leverage historic preservation, the arts and unique sense of place.

Shortly after I left Spokane for Anchorage, Williams’s sold American Sign which was was relocated to another state and later dissembled. In 2004 Luke passed away.

As the wheels touched down on my flight, it occurred to me as it often does now in retirement, just how we gain from even brief encounters with the people we meet during our lives.

And by the way, the day before my return, I read that CNN Films and Magnolia Pictures had partnered to secure distribution of Blackfish.  The documentary will be in theaters by summer and air on CNN sometime during the year.

The film covers the same 40-year span, one in which Orcas have been captured and trained for commercial tourism purposes.  As the CNN release notes, “ultimately, it is a story about the life and death consequences of a spectacle that has thrilled millions.”

It also illustrates a type of tourism that is very different than the place-based tourism endorsed by the two inventors I came to know at the beginning of my career.

Channeling P.J. De Smet

Descended from four sets of Mormon great-great-great-great grandfathers who were among the first to enter the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 through a gap along the Wasatch, my grandsons are not the first to attend one of many Catholic parochial schools there.

My mother, their great-grandmother, was sent there from Idaho to attend a Catholic high school in an unsuccessful attempt to cool her relationship in Idaho with my father as he prepared to enter the US Army and head to Europe in the closing months of WWII.

Ironically, as they made preparations for a vanguard journey the following year, those Mormon pioneer ancestors of ours gathered around a Catholic priest when he passed through the 1846 staging area they had established along both sides of the Missouri River in the land of Native Americans such as the Omaha and the Oto near Council Bluffs along the border of Iowa with Nebraska.

This Catholic priest was Belgian-born Pierre-Jean De Smet, or “P.J” as he signed his correspondence, and he had paused on a return leg of one of his many journeys throughout the upper Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest that began in 1842, four years after he had established a mission for Native Americans at Council Bluffs.

Before he would die in St. Louis nearly thirty years after his encounter with my ancestors, De Smet would travel over 180,000 miles by horseback and on foot during repeated trips across the northern Rockies, often at the invitation of various tribes of Native Americans who called Catholic explorer/missionaries as “Black Robes.”  In between expeditions, he would travel back to Europe eight different times both to recoup and to raise funds.

He had volunteered to come to America in 1821 just as the fifth president of the United States, James Monroe, was sworn to a second term and the US purchase of Florida from Spain was finalized.  He was ordained a priest in 1827.

Beginning in 1831 four successive delegations of Rocky Mountain tribes of Native Americans, including Salish Flatheads and Coeur d’Alenes traveled to St. Louis to request Jesuit missionaries. Finally, an 1839 encounter with Father Des Smet brought success.

One cannot travel the edge of the upper Great Plains or the Rocky Mountain portions of Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Washington without being reminded repeatedly of the influence of De Smet beginning with his traverse along the fault line of my youth into the very Yellowstone-Teton nook of my origins.

There, along the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, in the corner of what is Idaho between Wyoming and Montana today, Father P.J. De Smet, of the Society of Jesuits, first joined up with the Flatheads to continue his journey over the Bitterroots to their homeland.

A trip last summer with my daughter and two grandsons to our annual lake-side rendezvous with family along the eastern Washington-northern Idaho, took us past the oldest building in Idaho.

Cataldo Mission, as it was known when I was growing up in Idaho, was designated a state historic site and park in 1975, during my early years in community-destination marketing on behalf of nearby Spokane.

Coincidentally, this was during a short period when Spokane took Coeur d’Alene under its wing until that community could form a marketing organization.

The distinctive building (shown in the photo in this blog) was erected in 1850 on a rise above the Coeur d’Alene River along what is now I 90, twenty-six miles from the town and lake bearing the same name.

The Mission of the Sacred Heart, as it was known, was established a year after De Smet had first met with the Coeur d' Alenes and established the Mission of St. Joseph along the river 35 miles south which he had given the same name.  However, the first location proved flood prone.

Less than a decade later the military used De Smet’s route to forge a wagon road past the mission and across the Bitterroots known as the Mullan Road after the officer who engineered the route, one that was later followed by I 90.

Father De Smet formed several missions on that first journey west of the Rockies and worked in a resupply trip to Vancouver, B.C. before heading back to St. Louis and his encounter in route with my Mormon ancestors as they prepared to head west.

Cataldo is the name of another “Black Robe” who, following some years later along the paths worn by De Smet, would establish a mission among the Upper Spokane Indians and would establish the first church in the nearby city of the same name about the same time one was first established in Salt Lake City.

Cataldo also initiated the humble beginnings of Gonzaga University in Spokane where I would attend law school at night beginning in 1973.

I guess you could say that my grandsons are following a 166-year family tradition of learning from Catholics.

Apathy Is An Enabler of Desecration

If they aren’t nose-down catching up on their smartphones and iPads, some of my former colleagues in community/destination marketing (DMOs), who are fortunate enough to attend the second of two major educational events held each summer, will see two things on the way in from the airport when they gather in Salt Lake City at the end of the month for USTA’s Educational Seminar for Tourism Organizations (ESTO).

First will be a spectacular view of a stretch of the Wasatch Range, a 162-mile mountain range that runs from the Utah-Idaho border down the spine of Utah perpendicular to the short stretch from the Salt Lake Airport to the conference hotel.

The second thing they will notice, especially if during their visit they have reason to be on the north-south I-15 through that city, is how incredibly scarred the view of those mountains and the skyline are by more than 200 huge back-to-back outdoor billboards crammed in the short distance from south of Ogden through the Salt Lake Valley to Provo where I attended and graduated from college.

I thought to myself as I traveled this route earlier this month on my now-concluded 6,300 mile cross-country venture that outdoor billboards have turned what was once one of the spectacular areas of the Intermountain West into one of the most severely blighted.

Fortunately, Salt Lake City leaders banned the digital versions of billboards last spring. I love the Utah-Life Elevated slogan and art work on welcome signs but to deliver on the one depicted in this blog, travelers will indeed need to be elevated above the billboards to appreciate it.

Many DMO execs attending the conference are so numb to true sense-of-place they probably won’t even notice. Those who do may at first just be grateful their destinations have been spared the blight and then it may dawn on a few that they and their primary constituents are responsible.

Yes, one of the great ironies about the million or so outdoor billboards wallpapering many parts of this country and blighting the landscape for residents and travelers alike is that far too many destination marketing executives have hypocritically desecrated the view shed in other places with billboard messages heralding how unspoiled and special their communities are.

But that isn’t the real irony. Five of the two dozen or more industries fueled most by visitor-centric economic and cultural development are the primary reasons this obsolete form of advertising is still on life-support even though far more effective, useful and less obtrusive and expensive alternatives exist.

Lodging, restaurants, retail stores, entertainment venues and gas stations, in that order, collectively make up 70% of outdoor billboard users according to an analysis in 2003 with hotels and restaurants alone driving 40% of the use.

And these are the very businesses that rely so heavily on the unique sense of place worthiness of their communities where they do business, something undermined and threatened by the blight of outdoor billboards. Whatever they believe they gain through the advertising is lost many times over by the desecration it creates.

Communities and states seeking to draw travel-related spending to their economies are at the mercy of the ignorance and apathy of both those businesses most likely to benefit and the DMO execs entrusted to protect, defend and promote them as visitor destinations.

Unfortunately, many destination marketing execs are trapped in a “circle-the-wagons” mentality (often firing inward by the way) instead of showing true leadership in their communities. They fail to realize that typically fewer than 1 in 10 consumers use the monstrosities while seven times that many are offended by them.

“At the end of the day,” stated a branding expert recently, “it is the brands themselves who end up shouldering responsibility as well as the brunt of citizen frustration…their very presence as outdoor advertising has made them scapegoats.” These brands, typically franchises, are also slowing the transition of those honorable outdoor billboard companies to less obtrusive forms.

It may stiffen the backbones of many DMO execs that as marketers they can take courage from the fact that pioneers of the “Mad Men” era such as advertising and marketing giants such as David Ogilvy and Howard Gossage long ago discouraged use of outdoor billboards and cited their detrimental effects.

I know that the job of a DMO is anything but easy and there are some execs who truly “get it”, but maybe it will take a new and more courageous generation of destination marketing leaders to finally stand up in unison against the harm being done by outdoor billboards to their cities and states.