In the opening essay of this edition of Utah Historical Quarterly, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich casts a critical eye on the memories handed down about the 1862 murder of Olivia Coombs in Beaver, Utah. Rather than dwell on the man who committed the crime, George Wood, Ulrich seeks to understand the episode through historical fragments and family stories. What emerges is a portrait of not only Olivia but also of her descendants, who struggled to remember and tell the unspeakable tale. Opening with Juanita Brooks's brief if incomplete reference to the murder in The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950), Ulrich masterfully interrogates snippets of tangled family lore and relationships, the connection between memory and storyteller, and the circumstances that motivate the retelling of stories such as the Coombs murder.
The second essay introduces readers to Mabel Frazer and a sexual misconduct case directed against her male colleague in the University of...
