Bear River Mountain Reflection

On the return leg of one of my cross-country road-trips a few years ago, Mugs, my English Bulldog, and I made a brief stop high up on a bench that runs along the western slopes of the Bear River Mountains.

I had never been there but the tiny town three and a half miles below of Richmond in upper Cache Valley, Utah lies along what I call the Meridian of my DNA.

That’s because the scores of settlements my ancestors helped found over just the six decades beginning in 1847, stretching from southcentral Arizona to my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, all fall a degree or so along the 111th Meridian West.

By highway, it is US Route 89 as it zig zags its way from the banks of the Salt River to the banks of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, and all but the southern tip along the Rockies that comes closest to each of these ancestral settlements.

In retirement I try to take in a cross-section on road trips out west from my home in Durham, North Carolina.  The first of these ancestral settlements was founded more than a hundred years before I came along.

Back five generations, all of my ancestors had all become Mormons including four lines who were among the very first who crossed the Rockies and descended down into the Great Salt Lake Valley, then a part of Mexico.

By the Civil War, they had been joined by 12 other lines of great-great grandparents.

Many lines of ancestors on both sides of my family tree crossed paths on arrival before fanning out, some to the south and others to the north, to open up Cache Valley below where I stood that crystal clear winter morning.

This included a few who ventured another six miles north from where I stood to establish the first permanent settlement in what would soon be Idaho Territory.

I overlooked where my Bowman ancestors settled in 1860 after crossing over the Rockies in 1856 to Wight’s Fort where my great grandfather was born in 1859 in what is now West Jordan.

This is south of Big Cottonwood Creek and the area where different than Salt Lake, settlers were living out the land they worked and near today where I’ve watched my grandsons play in a basketball league. 

In Richmond they were given a plot along the Northside of the fort and, as customary, about 17 or so acres to the east to farm or use, and about that many acres up on the bench for grazing.

For a few years, it would be too dangerous to live or leave livestock outside the fort at night because of Shoshone Peoples native to that area and Grizzly Bears.

But Mormons also believed strongly in the commons and worked together there to quickly build a meeting house/school house and dig irrigation canals.

Unlike my great grandfather Hyrum Edward who was the first in six generations of horsemen continued today by my niece, my great-great grandfather, Hyrum Webster, was more of an entrepreneur.

He ran freight to the settlement and built a molasses factory below the bench where I stood before also building a sawmill there on Cherry Creek as well as manufacturing brick at one time.

He also had the first horse-powered and then steam grain threshers in the area to harvest grains from throughout the valley. 

In the beginning the family lived in a log home with a dirt floor and a dirt roof and my great grandfather and his siblings wore burlap wrappings for shoes in those early years, always working side by side in these enterprises. 

Today people build homes along the bench for spectacular views across the valley and Richmond below.

This is where my great grandfather once raised and bred horses and where higher up behind the bench toward Cherry Peak, my grandfather Ernest Melvin first herded cattle as a boy.

Today that area has become Utah’s 15th ski resort.

By the time my great-grandparents married in 1881 and started a family it was clear there would not be land available in Cache Valley for their children.  Nor were the small acreage plots there optimal for livestock growing.

Nor was even the 160 acres per settler that could be homesteaded further north in Idaho which was nearly ten times the amount allotted settlers in upper Cache Valley. 

In his report three years earlier to Congress, John Wesley Powell had recommended 2,560 acres per settler for livestock growing in semi-arid areas, based on defined watershed boundaries.

Judging by the ranch where I was born and spent my early years, which had been cobbled together from homesteads and contiguous land purchases, Powell was right.

I believe my newlywed great grandparents Bowman were ready to head north in 1881 but two things held them back.

Even though Margaret Rita’s mother had just passed, my great-great grandfather Kent lived nearby.

Hyrum Edward’s mother Hannah who went by Annie, was estranged from his father, and needed her first son’s support until she passed three years later.

There would have been a lot of excitement about the far reaches of the Upper Snake River Valley in Idaho.  A federal land office had just opened at Oxford just across the border in Idaho.

In the 1870s, contrary to the asessment of explorer John C. Fremont, it was discovered that the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho was ideal for settlement.

My newlywed great grandparents had watched the first settlers head north as far as the terminus of the Henry’s Fork.

Great swaths of waist high bluegrass had been found growing along the banks of that north fork of the Snake, punctuated further up the river by sagebrush, indicating the soil was excellent. 

But this part of the west was still very much wild.

While Yellowstone had been made a national park less than a decade earlier, only three years before my great grandparents married, Cavalry troopers were fighting running battles in pursuit of Chief Joseph and bands of Nez Perce as they fled across the nook.

Outlaw gangs, a third of whom were from Mormon stock, were rustling cattle and robbing banks up and down the valleys of Idaho, Wyoming and Utah just east and would for another decade or more.

But I think something else made my grandparents hesitate.

My great great great grandfather Bowman was one of the 3 or 4 percent of Mormon males asked to take more than one wife, similar to that practiced in the Old Testament.

He had married one of two plural wives when my great grandfather was eight years old.  My great-great grandmother did’t want anything to do with it and separated.

As most did, he apparently maintained the households in different towns.  In 1870, nearly 30% of the population of Richmond came from polygamous families which varied greatly by community.

However, even though monogamous, the practice is estimated to have touched the lives of a majority of Mormons in some way.  The practice was waning at the time my great grandparents married and was even more extremely rare in that second generation.

It was rarer still across the border in Idaho where, as the percentage of the population who were Mormons reached 17%, less than 1% there were engaged in polygamy.

But as my great grandparents contemplated the move to Idaho, the US Congress debated the Edmunds Act to disenfranchise Mormons and an anti-Mormon arm of the Republican Party in Idaho was taking control of the legislature.

Mormons were predominantly Democrats so the move had more to do with partisan politics and dominating the constitutional convention leading up to statehood in 1890.

Seeing that the strategy was working, an anti-Mormon wing of Democrats joined forces to throw their fellow Democrats under the bus by wording the constitution to effectively disenfranchise all Mormons.

They also deparately hoped to acheive statehood before Congress learned in the 1890 census that this reduced the population necessary to qualify for statehood.  It was an unsettling time in Idaho or to contemplate a move there.

After losing in the Supreme Court, in 1890 Mormon leaders issued a manifesto disavowing polygamy in practice or teachings, two years after my grandfather Bowman was born.

Two years later the right for Mormons to vote was restored in Idaho just as my great-great grandfather died.  But that clause wasn’t removed from the Idaho constitution until 1968 I believe.

Today, 24% of Idaho is Mormon by religion and probably more by culture.  Ironically, like the state, nearly all are Republican.

In 1907, my great grandfather rode up into the far reaches of the Henry’s Fork and purchased a 360 acre ranch where his sons, including my grandfather, could homestead adjacent land.

The family left the bench above Richmond that year with their belongings and equipment loaded into three iron-wheeled wagons each pulled by four teams of horses.

Following was my great grandparents horse drawn white-top buggy and a little side-spring black top buggy, along with 100 cattle my grandfather, brother and cousins drove on horseback during the 15 day, 200 mile trip.

Richmond was undergoing something of a growth spurt at the time before going into decline by 1920 only to rebound to about 2,500 by ther time I stood looking down from that bench along the Bear River Mountains.

Soon after settling along the Henry’s Fork, four and a half miles west of the newly established village of Ashton, these Bowman ancestors too had become Republicans.

They were drawn to progressivism and the western and rancher/farmer-friendly policies of President Teddy Roosevelt, including water reclamation.

My great grandmother died in 1918 during the Great Influenza Epidemic and was buried in the small cemetery (Ora) carved into our ranch.  My great grandfather passed away in 1936, twelve years before I would be born.

By then my grandparents had consolidated 1,100 acres of ranchland along with a similar amount of range that was operated by my parents after my dad returned from WWII.

I visited and played around the headstones of my great grandparents in that cemetery while growing up, stopping often to gaze at the Tetons rising across the Henry’s Fork.

My great grandfather’s HB brands, a variation for horses and cattle, were also a constant reminder as was that buggy which I found abandoned in a grove while herding cattle. 

I haven’t been back since 1976 when my grandmother died, nor have I been a practicing Mormon since before that time.  But transcending religion, it is a culture that literally runs through my veins.

Until the day I die, it will lead me to research the lives of my ancestors and the places and times in which they lived.  More than flesh, bones and DNA, each has contributed to who I am.

Six Million Businesses and Shrinking

There are only 6 million active businesses in America.  Another 20 million are in name only according to Gallup.

They report that “Of the 6 million, 3.8 million have four or fewer employees,” otherwise known as micro businesses.

According to another study, most micro businesses never want to grow to more than 10 employees, which would place them among the one million businesses today with between 5 to 9 employees.

That means there are “only 2 million small, medium and large businesses in the United States,” including about 1,000 companies in the “big business” category with 10,000 or more employees.

For sources of “dark money” and undue, often opaque influence among lawmakers look to the larger employers, something shown in an investigative piece just re-published in Pacific Standard.

For job creation, however, look to those first two groups, especially micro businesses.

So how do we foster more of these concerns that generate the vast majority of new jobs?

Buy local, obviously.

Some experts point to enforcing regulations evenly along with simplifying some.  Most, however, point to making credit more available.

The rub is that over the last 15 years, small business loan volume is down 14% and loans made to micro businesses are down a third.

What happened?  One indication is that since 2008 alone, one in four “local banks” have simply vanished.

When I graduated from high school in 1966, more than 7 out of every 10 banks were small, single-office local banks, totally more than 10,000 nationwide.

Branch banking had become the norm by the time I moved to Durham, NC in 1989.

Today, there are half as many commercial banks overall as there were when I graduated from college in 1972 and fewer than 1,000 single-office or truly local banks in the entire country.

Even so, small banks and credit unions make most of the loans to small businesses, including micro businesses.  There are just fewer and fewer of them.

Contrary to lobbyists, the decline of small, local banks isn’t due to regulatory reform after the great recession.  Click here to download an excellent review of the reasons.


Far more compelling is that this problem began with policy changes more than a decade earlier.

In 1995, small banks and credit unions held 27% of bank market share compared to the 17% held by giant banks.

Today, giant banks control 59% of bank market share, more than five times as much as small banks and credit unions, and just four mega banks control most of that.

Now, the four largest banks alone control 42% of all banking, yet they make a very small share of loans to job creating local businesses.  Nor do they play nice with one another.

These four mega-banks alone control nearly four times the amount of banking as all of the remaining small banks and credit unions put together.

In the four years leading up to the great recession about 300 commercial banks disappeared each year but we were creating nearly half as many.

The vanish-rate continues, but we’re creating only 6 new banks a year on average according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the source delving into much of these data.

Good policies and lending by small - usually stand-alone local banks -fueled the growth of America’s middle class in the 1960s and 1970s before anti-government rhetoric and deregulation began to hollow it out.

It is likely no coincidence that today this powerful segment of households is rapidly shrinking or that the deaths of businesses now outnumbers the births of new businesses.

As a moderate Independent, fiscally and socially, I find analysis intriguing that shows that nine out of the last ten recessions occurred under Republican presidents while Democratic presidents created nearly twice as many jobs per year.

Of course, this illustrates how intricate and complex economic development is but that the underlying principles always come back to main street as well as the political courage to resist powerful special interests.


It is also ironic that conservative states such as North Carolina where I live regulate cities and local governments from practicing the most basic tenant of economic development – buying local.

This Ongoing War 150 Years Later

In North Carolina, it’s no surprise to learn that “since 1960, one third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion.”  Nor, according to scientists, that “46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year – equivalent to 36 football fields every minute.”

Tar Heels have witnessed the link between depleted soils and deforestation in the decades before the Civil War when more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

By 1850, 31% of native North Carolinians then living in the United States resided in some other state.

Backwardness regarding slavery and race relations as well as resistance to public education and infrastructure played a big role in the out migration as did poor land use practices by plantations.

It’s well documented by unapologetic historians such as the late Dr. William S. Powell.

I’ve been reading or rereading two others recently, one written the year I was born (1948) entitled From Slavery to Freedom and another just released entitled, The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas.

Both shed new light.

The latter shows the population breakdown by race and freedom-status broken down by county just prior to the Civil War, as well as the vote by county for or against succession.

You can see a divide back then running down between what is now Durham and Wake/Raleigh with 5 points more slave-holders in Wake.

Wake/Raleigh also had twice the number of slaves as Durham/Orange and nearly three times the number of free Blacks out of 30,463 statewide.

There were a little more than 125,000 households in North Carolina in 1860 and 28.2% owned slaves.

Yet in 1861, Durham/Orange voted by more than 3 to 1 against succession from the Union while Wake/Raleigh voted for it by a few hundred votes.

As the rhetoric heated, the state as a whole was almost evenly split on the issue with a slight nod against.  People’s minds back then were more focused on the wealthy paying more in taxes here.

Within weeks though, secessionists won out both because of a general sentiment of “you can’t tell us what to do” and being surrounded by states that had or were succeeding.

The North won the Civil War that resulted, which effectively ended with a surrender in Durham.  Thanks to resistance by Southern Generals Lee and Johnston there wasn’t the subsequent guerilla war Southern leaders wanted.

But that didn’t mean war was over.

Another war erupted almost immediately between Democrats who were controlled by white supremacists and Republicans.

Just as a small percentage of the population had monopolized power in North Carolina and kept it backward, then pushed it into a war to defend slavery as a way of life for a few, a similarly small percentage held power in this follow up war.

Political rhetoric is powerful as we still see today.  It can close minds more easily than open them, something given comprehensive coverage a few days ago in an On the Media radio show entitled Lies, Lies, Lies.  

Republicans lost this follow up war and soon became all but extinct across the South because the party had became divided into an increasingly conflict-weary faction seeking social justice leading to a takeover by its Wall Street wing.

Just as Democrats had become divided into factions over slavery leading up to the Civil War, resulting in President Lincoln’s election, factionalized Republicans lost the follow up-struggle.

Following the South’s defeat and preservation of the Union in the Civil War, reunited Democrats fell sway to the rhetoric of a small fraction of white supremacists who this time sought not only to reinstate limitations on civil liberties, but to virtually annihilate the Republican Party in the South, which they did.

As a result, civil rights in the reunified country were put on hold for another hundred years and even today, seem lodged between ongoing institutionalized bias on one hand and a futile obsession with effacing racist symbols on the other.

The two political parties have switched roles today.

It began gradually in the decades leading up to the 1930s on issues of social and environmental justice, then became increasingly apparent after WWII and symbolized by the 1960s.

As someone who was raised a staunch Republican which I remained until nearly 25, I have been particularly interested in the history of the Republican and Democratic parties.

My Republican roots go back to the party’s founding.  But many of those ancestors would no longer be welcome there.  People who sense I lean Progressive probably don’t realize that it is the Republican Party that has shifted.

Understanding how the parties have evolved helps me understand how I briefly moved to the left in my mid-20s before finding my comfort zone as an Independent except wherever forced to briefly sign up so I could vote in primaries.

Today it is Republican ideology that seems to view everything as a threat to way of life, dominated by a few who seem to want to annihilate not only Democrats but anyone who dares to be moderate.

We see it in the refusal to negotiate or reach bipartisan agreement, even when Democrats sign on to Republican-generated innovations such as carbon credits or healthcare overhaul using exchanges that emulate the requirement for car insurance.

Further evidence is research showing that the root of Republican opposition to addressing climate change is the knee-jerk stereotyping of anyone concerned about the environment as a “watermelon,” green on the outside, red (as in Commie for you Millennials) on the outside.

The one thing that remains constant is that just as a tiny minority held North Carolina back after the U.S. was founded and the Civil War was fought to preserve the way of life lived by only 28% of Tar Heels, policies here are still driven by a small percentage in power.

The only thing certain is that the pendulum will swing yet again, but not the problem.

The parties may reverse roles yet again one day and apologists, as always, will try to smooth everything over like propagandists did between 1866 and 1966 by transforming the issue of slavery into “states’ rights.”

Democracy truly exists only when a majority of people vote, not just when the vote is a majority of those showing up.   Maybe similar to governing boards, popular elections should be valid only when there is a quorum?

As a moderate Independent who more and more has a little “time on him” as they say in my native Idaho, I am more and more aware of the dangers of failing to admit to myths when in pursuit of greatness as a nation or perpetuating a way of life.

I know far too many reasonable Republicans and far too many crazy Democrats to believe the rhetoric when one or the other party gives in to zero sum thinking.

But as President George Washington lamented in 1795, the problem may be in the nature of political parties, meant as a means to help people make decisions but then used as a reason not to think:

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Lament indeed!

An Action Plan for Green Infrastructure

Once again, the U.S. Forest Service and its stakeholders such as the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council have clarified something a few otherwise forward-thinking communities still don’t get.

A community’s urban forest includes “all trees in the city, on public and private property,” including homeowners’ yards as well as school and corporate campuses, 3.8 billion trees overall in America.

The ten year action plan issued several weeks ago includes progress made over the previous ten years as well as overarching principles, metrics, goals, strategies and steps to guide urban forestry efforts through 2026. It also includes strategies at the local level.

Management of an urban forest begins with a plan predicated on a comprehensive community wide inventory and assessment.  Many communities, such as the one in North Carolina where I have lived for more than a quarter century, have neither.

But across the South now, 649 communities have management plans, an increase of 43% in the past decade compared to 70% nationwide.

Still, less than half of Americans (47%) live in communities that have programs to plant, protect and maintain their urban forests. More than 40% feel much more needs to be done.

The report is “must reading” for people who care about their communities and should be required for anyone holding or running for elected office.

The report provides supporting metrics useful for public information and that will lessen the tendency of some to either dismiss trees merely as just “nice to have” or those who ironically knee jerk about anything environmental as a threat to their way of life.

One cannot read this report without gleaning that a community’s trees and vegetation are indeed important infrastructure.

In Pursuit of Dialogue

By necessity I became a pioneer in what is now called “reputation management” during the last half of my now long concluded nearly four decade career in community destination marketing.

This involved standing up for the communities I represented during that span.  In the words of an IBM exec in Durham who came to my defense, I was just insisting on what was “justly due” that community.

With the backing of a grassroots group of residents we called Image Watchers, we turned the community’s reputation around over a span of about nine years.

A turn-around is marked by when a negative positive-to-negative ratio climbs into positive territory.

As you might expect, reaching this milestone was not without a cost to my personal reputation, which to the consternation of friends and supporters, I never defended with the same passion.

There may have been more if you consider the spectrum of sycophants but there were only a handful of detractors that were publicly vitriolic judging by their thinly disguised verbatim comments on community-wide surveys of my performance.

One even passive-aggressively returned a business reply envelope with a hand-written epitaph and taped to a brick hoping to run up the cost to my organization.

You can see the handiwork of one of these detractors who was then a public official if you Google my name.  Though not the one quoted in the story, this official planted the story along with misrepresentations he knew to be false.

Even though it was explained that my severance upon retirement was not a severance but a payout of income that had been earned month by month over two decades but deferred, I suspect the temptation to juice up the story headline and lead in without revealing the source was too much.

During the last decade of my career, I added satisfaction with my leadership to periodic surveys of several hundred civic and business leaders to help my governing board discern if the complaints these individuals were making to them were generalizable.

They weren’t, but one or two board members always worried about the effect those efforts to undermine me might have, so I was annually tasked with meeting with each of them to learn more about their concerns.

But I had already met with each of these complainants numerous times, including one time four-on-one and would continue to do so until I retired, but to little avail.

It didn’t help that I could provide data-driven responses.  It seemed they could never really articulate what bothered them, especially those who didn’t have an issue but sought to curry favor with someone who did, essentially the definition of a sycophant.

But I sensed it had to do with a misunderstanding of roles complicated by misperceptions of power and influence, seasoned with a little envy.

In other words, politics.

Only two or three of these individuals were ever constant.  When a couple would drop out, replacements who were unfamiliar with the facts or previous discussions were recruited, perpetuating yet another round of meetings in pursuit of yielding understanding.

No one likes to have enemies, but meeting with people who disagreed with me and/or the organizational strategic direction we were executing was something I had made a practice during my entire career.

The habit took root when I ventured to meet with a powerful official who had set out to get me fired from my first community destination marketing organization in Spokane.

It was second nature when a clique attempted to do the same in Anchorage.

So it wasn’t a matter of if - but when - a handful in Durham began to take shots at me, for I had learned that truly being a change agent inevitably invites discord and carries risk.’

It is temping to either pander to these interests or to write them off instead with the 18th century French saying “on ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des oeufs” or “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

My goal in meeting with people who were openly contrary or covertly hostile to either me or our mission was always to gather understanding, but often the questions I was able to answer also begrudgingly garnered respect.

It helps to keep in mind when going into meetings such as these that there is a difference between someone being uninformed and ignorant.

You have hope for the former but be prepared to face the latter or at the very least understand that changes of heart and mind take time, often occurring after you are gone.

In the words of Seth Godin, "Ignorant’ used to be a fairly vague epithet, one that we often misused to describe someone who disagreed with us.

Today, because it represents a choice, the intentional act of not-knowing, I think it carries a lot more weight.”

In his short but inspiring book entitled Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Parker J. Palmer wrote of such seemingly inscrutable encounters:

“A movement can be saved…only by openly engaging those who disagree.”

Through much of my career, I made it a practice to meet with at least one person every week who disagreed with me while learning to listen carefully and only intervene when asked a question.

That, for me at least, was really hard work as was learning not to tell myself a story based on microaggressions.

Unfortunately, those habits I learned through necessity and experience are now increasingly rare.

For instance, NPR journalist Alan Greenblatt reported that “Indeed, over the past 50 years, the percentage of people who said they would disapprove if their children married someone from the other party has spiked from 5 percent to 40 percent.”

But just meeting with someone with whom you disagree does not guarantee dialogue even if they are brave enough to be vulnerable and explain why and how they disagree with you.

In an essay published a few months ago entitled “Ten Reasons to Stay Away from Your Political Opposite,” the co-authors of You’re Not As Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong) defined genuine dialogue:

“Perhaps it would be a step forward simply to recognize that genuine dialogue must entail the bilateral, free and un-manipulated engagement of at least two persons, two unique perspectives and ultimately two distinct agendas.”

They continue by writing, “The moment a space becomes, in actuality, a site for unilateral, instrumental and manipulated engagement, it arguably ceases to be “dialogue.”

It is an easy trap to fall into when the answers you get are, “just because,” or “I just don’t agree.”  Over time, I learned that in these encounters I had to dial back my passion and determination.

In the essay, the authors also happen to quote from a book I had been assigned to read back in 1971 while earning a degree in history at BYU entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire an expert in the philosophy of education:

“Dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s ‘depositing’ ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the discussants.”

It is unfortunate that this book might not now be permitted at BYU.  Freire felt that education could not be neutral.  It either functions to bring about conformity or functions to develop critical thinking which can lead to transformation.

Transformation was inherently my job during my entire career.  But in the words of a 13th century Monk and later adapted by President Abraham Lincoln:

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.