Review
Title: Faithful and Fearless: Major Howard Egan – Early Mormonism and the Pioneering of the American West
Author: William Hartley
Publisher: Howard Egan Biography LLC
Genre: Biography
Year Published: 2017
Number of Pages: 619
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-9986960-1-0
Reviewed by Andrew Hamilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
I will admit, I was very skeptical when I first picked up “Faithful and Fearless: Major Howard Egan, Early Mormonism and the Pioneering of the American West” and prepared to read. After all, Howard Egan is infamous. He murdered a man and legally got away with it after a member of the LDS First Presidency acted as his defense lawyer. Egan was known to be one of Brigham Young’s “B’hoys”[i]. The “B’hoys” were a group of men who, along with Egan, included such people as Porter Rockwell, Hosea Stout, Ephraim Hanks, John D. Lee and others who acted as “enforcers” when Brigham Young needed things done. Would it really be possible for a historian, even a historian of William G Hartley’s skill, to write an honest biography about Egan where he did not come out looking like a bad man? I was sure that no one could write such a book.
SO, I am happy to report that I really enjoyed “Faithful and Fearless.” I learned a lot while reading it. As I progressed through the chapters, I found that Egan had many qualities that surprised me. For example, Egan had quite the sense of humor. He was also involved in many important historical events and movements in the westward expansion of the United States that led to this book containing a number of very interesting stories. By the time I reached the last chapter, I was convinced that Hartley had done an excellent job handling Egan’s complex life.
I will say here that there were a few of the people in Egan’s life who I feel Hartley played “softball” with, but overall, I think that he was fair and did a fine job of relaying the story of Howard Egan’s life in a way that was fun, informative, and engaging to read.
I should note several things off the top. The author of this book, William Hartley, was a well-known and respected author of LDS history. He worked with Leonard Arrington in the LDS History Department in the 1970’s and was involved early on in the “New Mormon History” movement. As an LDS historian, his resume is long and impressive[ii]. He was an excellent choice to write a biography of Howard Egan. Sadly, Hartley passed away on April 10, 2018. Thus, “Faithful and Fearless” was his final contribution to LDS history and I am happy to report that it is an excellent swan song for this skilled historian and author.
One of the things that Hartley did in “Faithful and Fearless” that I really enjoyed as a reader was that he delivered a LOT of history along with the story of Egan’s life. As I alluded to above, Egan was involved in many of the important events of Mormon and Western history. This book could have turned into a simple regurgitation of known historical stories, but Hartley did not let that happen. Instead, he did a great job of telling the stories and histories of those episodes and events in a way that provided me with information I was not always familiar with and that gave me a feel for the experience of 19th century life and the many professions that Hoard Egan held over the course of his life.
Let me give you a sampling of some of the many activities and events that you will learn about when you read “Faithful and Fearless.” Early in the book Hartley provides details about the life of a 19th century sailor and then writes thoroughly about the rope making process back then (these were two of Egan’s many occupations). Chapter 8, titled “Dangerous Secret Assignment,” is about a special mission Egan received related to the Mormon Battalion. It was an unusual assignment (Egan was not in the Battalion but was sent to assist them) and the chapter gives details about the history of the Battalion that some readers might not be familiar with.
Chapter 15 details Egan’s involvement in the Gold Rush of ’49. Howard was also involved in early mail delivery efforts including the Pony Express and this book includes three chapters (56 pages) of history on that organization and on those important events. Then there is a chapter on Egan’s involvement with the Overland Stagecoach. The Gosiute Indian War is mentioned in the biography as is the Bear River Massacre (which is appropriately called a Massacre and not a “Battle” — see pp 401-420).
Really enjoyable are the various episodes of humor from Egan’s life. I was not expecting these. Based on the serious expression on his face in his only known photograph, and on the story of how he killed the man who fathered a child with his wife, I assumed that Egan was a serious and a humorless man. However, as Hartley relates, Egan not only had quite the sense of humor, he also had entertaining events occur in his life when he wasn’t even trying to be funny. I will not spoil the surprises, but there are a few stories that you should check out. Some of these stories relate to the fact that Egan was a bit of a prankster. Egan spent many a cold winter caring for his family and livestock. One winter a fox got into the henhouse. The fox was shot, froze solid, and then next, hilarity ensued (see pp. 416-418). In another winter event, Egan was once lost in a snowstorm. Conditions were so severe that he became “snow blind.” He tried bandaging his eyes, but it didn’t help. A Native American then came along with what we can say was a very creative solution (see page 339).
Since it’s the “Elephant in the Room,” or in this case, “The Elephant in the book,” I want to address Hartley’s handling of Egan’s murder of James Monroe and its aftermath. Hartley discusses Howard’s murder of Monroe and its aftermath in two chapters about halfway through the book. Chapter 17 is titled “The ‘Mountain Justice’ Killing of James Monroe” and Chapter 18 is “A Jury Trial and Acquittal.” As soon as I started reading the first page of “Faithful and Fearless,” I got worried that my fears about how Hartley was going to handle the incident were being confirmed. This was because in the very first paragraph of the book’s introduction Hartley describes Egan as the “avenger of his wife’s seducer” (xvii). Then, a few chapters in, when detailing life in Nauvoo, Hartley writes about when Howard and Tamson met Monroe. In his description of Monroe, he writes of him that later, “in Utah in 1850, he took advantage of Tamson while Howard was absent in California” (p. 53). The description of Egan as “an avenger” and the depiction of Tamson as a helpless victim who was “seduced” and “taken advantage of” seemed like a bad sign to me that Hartley’s handling of the murder was going to be biased in Egan’s and the family’s direction.
Writing about how a person’s ancestor committed a well-known murder cannot be an easy task. Most, if not all, of the members of the family are going to want their ancestor to come out looking good. Those readers who are suspicious of the subject’s intentions are going to want the person to look as guilty as they are already convinced in their minds that he is. Howard Egan was guilty of the crime and the results of his trial are well known. I knew that Hartley could not change this, but I was anxious to see how he made sense of the whole incident.
As Hartley describes the relationship between Monroe and Tamson, I do feel that he tried to make Monroe out to be “the bad guy.” In my mind the descriptors that Hartley chose placed all of the responsibility for the consensual relationship between Monroe and Tamson on Monroe. Hartley’s descriptions of Monroe include the previously mentioned “seducer” who “took advantage of (Tamson).” In chapter 17 there is a whole subsection called “Paramour James Monroe” (see p. 253-254) and two pages later he calls Monroe “the wrong-doer” (p. 256). Tamson, on the other hand, is assigned no responsibility by Hartley for her decision to have intimate relations with Monroe, despite Hartley’s admission that Tamson told Howard that her relationship with Monroe was “consensual, not forced” (p. 252).
While Hartley’s portrayal of the relationship between Tamson and Monroe disappointed me, I thought that he did a good job with the rest of the way that he handled the murder. It’s easy to judge the past by our morals or by what we want the morals of the individuals involved to have been. I feel that Hartley did a fine job in contextualizing the behaviors, attitudes and morals in play when Egan killed Monroe.
Hartley spends several pages going into detail explaining the violence in the antebellum United States, cultural ideas from the time about “family honor,” when homicide was considered “justifiable,” attitudes in the Utah territory about “blood atonement,” etc. Hartley also writes in detail on George A. Smith’s “Mountain Common Law” defense and judge Zerubbabel Snow’s charge to the jury. He concludes the section by covering the repercussions to Egan after the trial ended. After the trial all of Egan’s wives except Tamson left him and they had no more children for another ten years. In later years Egan told family members that, after he killed Monroe, it “felt as if his heart was taken out of him” (p. 273). It was also interesting to learn that Egan raised the son born to Tamson from the affair as his own and showed him as much love as he did his own children. It was a very informative section of the book and Hartley’s handling of the events, attitudes, and outcomes related to the murder helped me understand Egan and this event in a way I never thought possible.
I want to say again that I really enjoyed this book and I think that Hartley did a great job. I realize that he was writing for the family and that this caused him to write some things differently than if he was writing this book for a general audience. Still, he did mention in the introduction: “I agreed the Egan history should be thorough, honest, accurate, and that it must be a history my academic colleagues could respect” (p. xvii).
With this promise from Hartley in mind there were a few choices that he made as an author that I found odd.
I understand the desire to include as much information about the subject as possible in their biography, especially when that biography is written for the family. But with as long as “Faithful and Fearless” is (over 600 pages), I thought it was strange that in various places Hartley made it longer by choosing to speculate about how Egan and his family MAY have been involved in events. This was especially odd when it related to events that Howard and his wife or wives were not directly involved in.
Here are a few examples. Hartley ends the second chapter by writing “Most sailors have a ‘home port.’ Perhaps Howard’s was Montreal. Whether it was or not, Howard probably returned home whenever he could” (p. 25). When writing about life in Nauvoo and the foundation of the Relief Society he states, “Membership rolls do not show Tamson’s name. Possibly, being so young a wife and mother, she felt a bit out of place and didn’t join” (p. 45). On pages 83-85 Hartley describes the practice of sealing in Nauvoo and Howard and Tamson’s entry into plural marriage. After mentioning that they learned of polygamy in Nauvoo Hartley writes, “No doubt Howard and Tamson experienced a soul-distressing process before embracing the practice.” Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, I don’t know and apparently neither did Hartley.
When describing the rescue of the Martin and Willey Handcart companies in 1856 he writes, “It is not known what, if anything, the Egans donated to the rescue effort or if they took in any of the survivors” (p. 307). If Hartley did not know if they were involved and could not find any evidence either way then why mention it? In chapter 28, Hartley details events near the end of Egan’s life and describes his return to Salt Lake City after many years of living on a ranch. While detailing this return to Salt Lake City, he states, “Perhaps Howard resumed some kind of activity in the Seventeenth Quorum of Seventies, in which he had been one of the seven presidents a quarter-century earlier” (p. 443). Again, I understand the desire to provide the reader and the family with as much information as possible, I understand the desire that modern Mormons have to link their ancestors to important events in Restoration history, but to me such speculation about whether or not Hartley MAY have contributed to this or that cause or MAY have been aware of or involved in some event when there is no evidence to support that idea goes against Hartley’s goal to be scholarly in handling Egan’s life.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, when it came to discussing some of the more questionable people in Egan’s life, there were a few places that I felt that Hartley just tapped at the ball instead of trying to hit it home. For example, one of Egan’s wives for several years was Nancy Redden. Nancy’s brother was Return Jackson Redden. Hartley documents how Return Redden and Howard Egan were close associates and interacted frequently for several years. “Faithful and Fearless” IS a biography of Egan and not Redden, but they were associated enough that Hartley gave a description of Redden to help contextualize his interactions with Egan. When describing Redden, Hartley writes: “Redden, like Howard, was a tough, and fearless man who served as a private detective and a bodyguard for Joseph Smith” (p. 85). Redden WAS tough and fearless, but that description is incomplete. It would have been more accurate for Hartley to include in his description of Redden that he was a member of the notorious “Hodges gang” in Nauvoo and that, as a member of that gang, he was involved in a number of robberies and crimes and that he was indicted in one murder and likely guilty of committing another[iii].
As I wrote at the beginning of this review, Howard Egan was among a group of men referred to as “Brigham’s B’hoys”[iv]. Hartley acknowledges this in several places. On the very first page of the preface of the book (p. xvii) Hartley notes: “Major Egan belonged to a small circle of fearless and dependable men, including Porter Rockwell, Hosea Stout, and Lot Smith, upon whom leaders counted to fill difficult assignments.” Later, when describing Egan’s role in the “Utah War,” Hartley writes, “[Thomas L. Kane] ‘traveled under protection of a few frontiersmen hand-picked by Brigham Young from among his reliable b’hoys’” (p. 322). Next, he quoted Bill MacKinnon as writing, “Howard Egan [was] a prominent member of Brigham Young’s inner circle of rough operatives dubbed the ‘b’hoys” (331). Near the end of the book Hartley writes:
“The book Rugged Men of the West, … focuses on [Porter] Rockwell, Ephraim Hanks, Lot Smith, Jacob Hamblin, and Major Howard Egan…In Brigham’s Boys…Marlene Bateman Sullivan gives short biographies of sixteen men on whom Brigham Young relied to help “tame the West” … Young often referred to these trusted can-do friends as his reliable ‘b’hoys.’ Howard was one of them.” (p. 471)
In a footnote, Hartley lists the 16 men whose lives are detailed in Sullivan’s book (pp.567-568 fn 6). What Hartley fails to mention about Rockwell, Stout, and Lot Smith, about the “B’hoys,” about the men in “Rugged Men of the West,” and in Sullivan’s book, is that many of them were involved in acts of murder and violence. He doesn’t mention that these “difficult assignments” that they were assigned to by Brigham Young because they were his “can-do friends” were quite possibly missions to act as his enforcers doling out vengeance and punishment to those whom Brother Brigham felt had either betrayed him or had betrayed Mormonism.
There is one more thing that Hartley did that seemed to me to be an odd choice for a scholar of his level. When writing about Joseph Smith’s son, Joseph Smith III, Hartley writes, “In 1869, apostle George A. Smith wrote a letter to Joseph Smith III, president of the Reorganized Church, a Mormon off-shoot group…” (p. 84, emphasis mine). Both the LDS and the RLDS (now Community of Christ) churches came out of the movement started by Joseph Smith. At the time that George Albert Smith wrote his letter, he and his fellow Mormons did think of the RLDS members as an “offshoot” group. But in our time the two churches have amicable relations and work on scholarly projects such as the Joseph Smith Papers together. To call the Community of Christ an “off-shoot group” in our modern context is not scholarly and could even be considered by members of that church as a derogatory statement.
Hartley did his homework for this book, a lifetime’s worth you might say. His efforts are not only demonstrated by the fact that “Faithful and Fearless” is an informative, well written, and engaging book, but also in that it has 82 pages of endnotes and a 27-page bibliography. Hartley studied a wide range of original and secondary sources in the writing of this book. As he was researching, he consulted the work of many great fellow historians including Thomas Alexander, Devery Anderson, Gary Bergera, Ronald Barney, David Bigler, Jill Mulvey Derr, Rebecca Cornwall, Leonard Arrington, John Dinger, LeRoy and Ann Hafen, Maurine Ward, Will Bagley, and William Mackinnon.
“Faithful and Fearless” was written for the Egan family, but I hope that it finds a general audience as well. It was enjoyable to read, and I learned a lot more from it than I thought I would. When I picked up the book I was expecting that I would either have my biases about a murderer confirmed or that I would be able to dismiss Hartley’s efforts offhand as being shallow and unconvincing. I was wrong. What I discovered as I read “Faithful and Fearless” was that, in its pages, Hartley took the life of Howard Egan, a person who in my mind was a stereotypical, one-dimensional, storybook villain right down to the scruffy beard, dark suit and black hat, and showed him to be a complex and multifaceted individual. He detailed well how Egan was a man who struggled his entire life to provide for his family in a rough and evolving environment and that he was constantly challenged with finding ways to balance his responsibilities to his livelihood, his family, and the constant and heavy demands placed on him by Brigham Young and the LDS church.
I realized while reading the book that Egan’s choices, especially the choice to kill the man who fathered a child with his wife, often brought him sorrow and that he struggled over how to make sense of the challenges he faced and the decisions that he felt that he was forced to make. Howard Egan was not one dimensional, he was a fascinating and a complicated man and in “Faithful and Fearless” William Hartley does an outstanding job in bringing Egan’s difficult, knotty, and unusual story to life.
[i] Also spelled “Be’hoys.” See “The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power,” D Michael Quinn, Signature books, pp. 242, 244, 246, 256. Also, “On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844-1889,” ed. by Juanita Brooks, entry for March 8, 1858 p. 653.
[ii] According to his obituary Hartley “authored fifteen books, more than 120 articles, and co-edited three volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers” http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/deseretnews/obituary.aspx?n=william-g-hartley&pid=188725097&fhid=19566
[iii] See “Lost Apostles: Forgotten Members of Mormonism’s Original Quorum of Twelve,” William Shepard and H Michael Marquardt, Signature Books, 2014, pp. 252-260.
[iv] For the etymology of “B’hoy” see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27hoy_and_g%27hal