Will Bagley on the value of history (Season 1, Ep. 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:06)
Hi, this is Brad Westwood. You're listening to Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast where writers, historians, and contributors to Utah's history, including critics, curators, archivists, rare book dealers, and more, share their discoveries about Utah's history.
The past is never truly the past, it's all around us. It informs us, it speaks to our shared and to our separate identities. What's in store for the future? You can answer this question better when you first examine the past. This is what this podcast strives to do for the many diverse and geographically varied communities across Utah.
My speaker today is Western historian, Will Bagley.

**Will Bagley** (0:47)
Hello Will. Hello Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (0:49)
So good to have you here.

**Will Bagley** (0:51)
We were remembering our personal history, which goes back decades.

**Brad Westwood** (0:57)
It's while I was at BYU and you were working on Mormon Battalion history and I think a number of other books simultaneously.

**Will Bagley** (1:03)
Mountain Meadows Massacre and Sam Brannon and all kinds of wonderful subjects.

**Brad Westwood** (1:10)
Well, as I think about this podcast and its earliest beginnings in my mind, I thought of who could help me frame up the kind of essential idea of what is history and what part it plays in today's world. So as we begin this podcast, I ask you the question, what is history?

**Will Bagley** (1:32)
History is time. It's about our heritage as human beings and the stories we remember. It's important to know that history should be called our story, not just his or her story, but it's our story. And it's our collective memory of the past. And for my money, it should be told as it's told by ancient people, Paleolithic people, which was his stories.
We are a storytelling creature.

**Brad Westwood** (2:17)
The old idea of around the campfire, bringing people together with these mutual stories of the past.

**Will Bagley** (2:24)
And they create identity. They make us know who we are and where we came from.

**Brad Westwood** (2:31)
Such a big deal in Utah. I mean, identity is not only geographical, but there are so many communities in Utah, so many ways and means of looking at the past.

**Will Bagley** (2:42)
And they all have fantastic traditions and stories because almost nobody got to Utah without making massive sacrifices and showing considerable courage.
And then we have Utah's first peoples. Thank you. Those who were brave enough to leave the old world Asia behind, cross a land bridge in pursuit of the big animals that they learned to hunt and live on, and come into this unpopulated, unexplored Eden.

**Brad Westwood** (3:27)
It's not, I appreciate you doing, saying this, because so often, particularly in the Academy, they divide history up in, you know, prehistory and history. I really see Utah's history as really 13,000 years of human activity.

**Will Bagley** (3:43)
And then there's prehistoric, which means before, well, or before people. We have an amazing geological past, an amazing zoological past.
We can see the bones of that history.

**Brad Westwood** (3:59)
Well, in any way you cut it, Utah has this in a grand panoramic way, between paleology, paleontology, geology, history. I mean, you can come and go anywhere you want and run into some part of the past.

**Will Bagley** (4:15)
And fantastic stories, amazing characters, truly strange situations, which is what you really need if you want to write honest, interesting history that has some reflection of the complexity of human life.

**Brad Westwood** (4:39)
Well, you've written, I think over, you've either written or edited over 20 books.
You can be seen in the Tribune, 200 or more articles and pieces related to Utah's history. You've seen so much, you've framed up so much history for so much of the public. Who are the people that you think of most are the influential historians that have told this story you're talking about?

**Will Bagley** (5:04)
They're the people who I owe so much to and who made me a historian. And among that number are Floyd O'Neill, David L. Bigler, Juanita Brooks. I never met Brooks, but her heritage and her legacy had a dramatic impact on how I see the state of Utah and its past. So we've got any number of colorful, controversial and courageous characters.
We can start, I think, in many ways with Juanita Brooks, who to use her phrase was born on the ragged edge of the Mormon frontier in Bunkerville, Nevada in 1898 and lived almost, well, into the ninth decade of the 20th century, and inspired a number of other people. Her mentor was Dale Morgan, and Morgan is another of these heroic epic characters.