Episode 125: Our Favorite Time Periods in History; a chat

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:00)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:02)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:04)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the everlasting hills, straight out of Zion, this isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:31)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:36)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:45)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.
Listeners and watchers. It's YouTube time again.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:09)
Look at us. We're on video.
We're not disembodied ghosts.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:14)
Brother Brigham presides at this meeting. He's asked that Sister Park conduct.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:19)
You'll notice that I have nothing on my shirt, because I'm an independent woman. So, Bryan, we are going to talk about history. We're going to battle it over who's favorite period in history is the most important.
The most interesting. We're going to get into that, but we have been recording a bunch of episodes, so if this is the first time you're joining us, we actually do this mostly as an audible audio-only podcast.
So welcome, and join us and subscribe and like, and make sure you follow us on all the platforms and give us a donation. I'm going to get that out of the way right now. We are doing a contest at Sunstone this year with our staff to see who can get the most recurring donors. I want us to win. So go to sunstone.org, become a recurring donor, put this podcast in the subject line, and help us win our goal.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:18)
So on the podcast right now, we're in the middle of early Utah. And while some of us, spoiler alert, think that's the best period, some of you are thinking, boy, I wish we could just cheat a little bit and talk about later periods.
This is for you, my people.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:33)
Yeah, so the reason why this comes up is we like going in chronological order. That's important. But Bryan keeps trying to bring us to the fundamentalist period, and I'm like, whoa, dude, hold your horses.
You want to talk about these folks. No one is going to know who John Y. Barlow is yet.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:52)
And that's a shame. That's a real shame, I have to say.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:55)
I'm surprised you're not wearing his shirt today. That's a shame.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:58)
I wore him last time. I can't use him too much.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:01)
Every time Bryan makes these custom shirts and we talk about them on the podcast, now you can see them here. And every time he wears his John Y. Barlow one, literally nobody says a thing except in one place in the world, and that's in Short Creek. And then everybody walks out of the gas station.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:16)
Hey, why is my grandpa on your shirt?

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:18)
They'll walk into grocery store and be like, ha, it's funny.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:22)
It plays well there.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:23)
It plays well. You do have a market there. Yeah, so Bryan's always wanting to jump to that, but we're in my favorite period now, the Utah period. We're really getting into the messy 1850s and 1860s. There's a lot of cool stuff going on there. So we're going to talk about why we like those periods in history and why it's important to build on it and why we jump around sometimes.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:43)
So I can hear people already out there thinking, wait, I'm going to need some concrete reasons why early Utah is the best.
Talk to those people. What's your reasoning?

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:54)
Intrigue, sex, drugs, money. Like, where should we start? It's got all the elements of good story.
As a storyteller, I'm doing several projects right now in film that involve this time period, so it's been really fun. The latest was I got to work on a series called American Primeval, and I did some work for them helping build the Nauvoo Legion in Utah during the Utah War.
And it was really, really fun, because this is a time period where it's the Wild West, and so you have all the stuff that comes with it.
And I tell all my filmmaker friends, and I've said this on this podcast before, that you've got all the components for, that you have in any Wild West trope in Mormon Utah, right? You have all the tropes that you see in an 1880s Western, and yet instead in Utah, the bishops are the sheriffs, right? They're the ones that are running the town. It's run by this ecclesiastical court, but it's still the Wild West. So you have these bishops, and you have these religious men doing heinous things that you see in Wild West having sheriffs do, right? Or lawyers do. They were dirty. You have guys like Hosea Stout, who's poisoning people, who's still running around doing Danite things in the Wild West. You have Brigham's henchmen, Bill Hickman and Porter Rockwell, killing everyone in a mobster style way. It's like Game of Thrones Mormon style.