Madsen, Brigham D.

Brigham Dwaine Madsen was born in Magna, Utah, on October 21, 1914, to Brigham Andrew and Lydia Cushing Madsen. In 1919, the family, which now included sisters Ann and Phyllis, moved to Pocatello, Idaho, where Dwaine, as he was then called, attended public schools, graduating from Pocatello High School in 1932. He remained in Pocatello and attended the University of Idaho, Southern Branch, from which he graduated with a Junior College Certificate in 1934. Shortly after receiving this certificate, Madsen served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) to the East Central States, which included Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. He was appointed district president over the East North Carolina District in 1935.

In 1936 Madsen returned from his mission and entered the University of Utah, where he majored in history and minored in sociology. Harold Dalgliesh became a mentor, as did Andrew Love Neff, a former student of Herbert Eugene Bolton. While at the university he registered for a philosophy class taught by Waldemar Read, whom he remembered as "a wise and provocative liberal teacher" who "helped reduce some of the stuffed-shirt and superior inclinations" garnered from his missionary experience. In the spring of 1937, Madsen met Betty McAllister in a class in educational studies. By winter they had become engaged. In 1938, Madsen graduated from the University of Utah with a teacher's certificate. He returned to southeastern Idaho, where he accepted a position as both teacher and principal of the combined grade and high school in Pingree. In addition to teaching English, World History, Business Methods, Public Speaking, Algebra, and Geometry, Madsen coached the school basketball team and worked weekends in his father's construction business in Idaho Falls.

Madsen married Betty McAllister in Salt Lake City, Utah, in August of 1939. On the day following the ceremony the young couple boarded a train for Berkeley, where Madsen began work on an M.A. in history, studying primarily with Lawrence Kinnaird, another Bolton student. His early training in history was further enriched by his studies on the history of the American frontier under Frederick Logan Paxon, a student of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose frontier thesis established the American West as a significant field of study for historians. Madsen completed his master's thesis, "The Early History of the Upper Snake River Valley," in 1940 and began working toward his Ph.D. His major field was colonial America, minor fields included United States and English history. For his work outside the discipline of history, Madsen chose to study geography under Carl Sauer. In 1941 Kinnaird, the chair of Madsen's supervisory committee, left Berkeley to become the cultural attache in Chile. Herbert Bolton came out of retirement to take over his classes, giving Madsen the opportunity to work with the innovator who introduced the concept of Greater America to the field of American history. Madsen's graduate training furnished him with a broader perspective on the history of the American West than was usual at the time. Bolton's emphasis on the contribution of Spain and Latin America to the history of the American continent provided a much-needed counterbalance to the New England bias in the historiography of America.

In 1943 Madsen began what he later called "the greatest adventure of my generation, military service in World War II," reporting to the induction center at the Presidio of Monterey in September. After basic training he was transferred to Fort Benning where he served as tactical officer for a student training regiment. In November of 1945 Madsen boarded the U.S.S. West Point for Le Havre, France, taking charge of a group of soldiers bound for the replacement center in Bamberg, Germany. The following month he reported to Third Army headquarters in Bad Tolz. He worked in the Adjutant General Section for a brief period before transferring to Military Government, where he was assigned as Chief of the Historical Division for Patton's Third Army. He was separated from the service at Fort Sheridan on July 30, 1946.

The following month found the Madsens back at Berkeley, where Betty cared for daughter Karen, born in 1943, and son David, born earlier in 1946. In addition to resuming his studies, Brigham did odd jobs as a carpenter and served as a teaching assistant for the social history of the United States, a survey course taught by John D. Hicks. In 1947 Madsen passed his oral qualifying exams while teaching four sections of U. S. History at the University of California at Davis. The following year he completed his dissertation, "The Bannock Indians in Northwest History, 1805-1900," and accepted a teaching position at Brigham Young University (BYU).

In the autumn of 1949, the Madsen's third child, Linda, was born. Brigham supplemented his BYU salary by building rental units and then selling them in partnership with his father and two brothers in the Madsen Brothers Construction Company. While at BYU, the Madsens participated in an informal faculty gathering which came to be known as the Saturday Night Chowder & Marching Club. Although the group was strictly a meeting of friends, Madsen recalled that the group "usually ended the evenings in relating to each other the latest and most interesting happenings at BYU and in discussion of Mormon Church politics and theology." During these BYU years Madsen also met informally with a small group of educated LDS men, primarily associated with the University of Utah, who met monthly to hear speakers on topics related to Mormonism. This group came to be known as the Swearing Elders. The fellowship and intellectual stimulation provided by these two groups became increasingly important to Madsen, who was experiencing some discomfort at the changes which came to BYU after Ernest L. Wilkinson took over as president in 1951. He resigned from BYU in 1954. Son Steven was born the following year. For the next seven years Madsen devoted his time to the family construction business. He was later to remember the years he spent in the building trade as "years of intellectual famine," but despite his busy building schedule, he taught Professor Gregory Crampton's survey course at the University of Utah in 1955 and prepared his dissertation for publication. It was published in 1958 by Caxton Printers, a small, family publishing business that was beginning to receive national recognition. The Bannock of Idaho was illustrated by Madsen's old friend and fellow Chowder Club member, Maynard Dixon Stewart. Generally well-received, the book came under criticism for some ethnographic interpretations based upon outmoded secondary source material. With characteristic lack of scholarly ego, Madsen conceded the expertise of his severest critic, Sven Liljeblad, and enlisted his aid in improving the accuracy of future projects. This first history of the Shoshonean peoples of the Intermountain West remains a seminal work.

In 1961, Madsen read Catherine Drinker Bowen's John Adams and the American Revolution . It was, Madsen said, "a work so well written and with such feeling that I underwent a real emotional experience. My seven years as a builder disappeared in a flash as I was moved back to academia and my love for history and for teaching." Fortuitously, Madsen's friend and fellow Kinnaird student, Everett L. Cooley, was leaving Utah State University (USU) to become the Director of the Utah State Historical Society and Madsen was offered Cooley's vacated associate professorship in history. The following summer he received the assignment of teaching a class in the American Institutions segment of the Peace Corps training program. Having made plans to complete the building of his own home that summer, he looked upon the prospect of teaching civics to "forty would-be chicken farmers in Iran" with some dismay. However, the idealistic and adventurous spirit of the Corps infected Madsen and he became an enthusiastic supporter of the program. This, coupled with his zest for teaching, made the experience so successful that two of his students wrote letters of appreciation to the Director of Training in Washington, D. C. As a result, Madsen was asked to serve as a training officer in Washington D. C. the following summer, an experience that was to lead to his participation in the Civil Rights March on Washington of 1963. In June of the following year Madsen took a two-year leave of absence from USU and went to work for the Peace Corps full time as Assistant Director of Training. In 1964 Madsen was appointed first Director of Training for the newly-formed Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program. Serving less than a year with VISTA, Madsen returned to Utah to accept a position as Dean of Continuing Education and Professor of History at the University of Utah.

Madsen began his term at the University of Utah with a building project. In an effort to instill some esprit de corps into the Division of Continuing Education (DCE), he oversaw an extensive remodeling program, which so energized the staff that he was soon the recipient of an abundance of ideas for improving the division. Madsen saw DCE as an instrument for integrating the university with the surrounding community, and attempted to initiate programs that would make higher education more attractive and accessible to individuals who would not ordinarily consider a university education an option. He oversaw programs directed toward women, minorities, members of the business and skilled trade communities, and students at the local trade school. A proposal for a credit-exchange program with Utah Technical College brought Madsen to the attention of President James C. Fletcher, and after only nine months as Dean of Continuing Education, he became Deputy Academic Vice President. Shortly thereafter Madsen was appointed as Administrative Vice President with a mandate to supervise the newly-funded campus building plan. His construction expertise was instrumental in getting several building projects completed on time and within budget. Among the buildings constructed under Madsen's guidance were the Art and Architecture building, the Special Events Center (Jon M. Huntsman Center), the Medical Student Housing Towers, and the married student housing complex now known as the East Village.

In 1971 Madsen was asked to take over as director of the University's Marriott Library. He agreed to accept this position for two years. During his tenure he supervised some badly-needed modernization in operations, including the installation of a security system and the establishment of an automated circulation system. While director, Madsen continued to teach one history class per quarter. In 1971 and 1972 he oversaw the publication of collections of essays produced by his students entitled The Now Generation and The Violent Year, respectively. In 1973, Madsen also agreed to serve on the editorial board of the Tanner Trust Fund publications series on Utah, the Mormons and the West. This series was designed to highlight the manuscript holdings of the Marriott Library's Special Collections division and to publish little-known works of high literary, as well as historical, value. At that time the editors were preparing the second book of the series, a republication of Agnes Just Reid's Letters of Long Ago . Everett Cooley, general editor of the series, asked Madsen to put the letters, penned by Reid as a reconstruction of her mother's life, into solid historical context. The Just homestead was located northeast of the Fort Hall Indian reservation, which had figured prominently in Madsen's graduate work on the Northern Shoshone.

Madsen's return to full-time teaching in 1973 inaugurated a period of intense study and research that culminated in the publication of three books almost simultaneously in 1979 and 1980. For several years Madsen and his wife, Betty, had been researching the Montana Trail. This research was the basis for a freighting article published in The Magazine of Western History shortly before Madsen began work on the Reid manuscript. Publication of the book based on this research was delayed by Madsen's work on Letters of Long Ago . When North to Montana! finally appeared in 1980 as one of a trio of books by Madsen, Lawrence Kinnaird remarked that "the Madsen family must have developed a sort of history factory." In addition to the ongoing trail research, Madsen had taken on a major research project for the law firm representing the Shoshone-Bannock tribe of southeastern Idaho in a suit against the United States government. The two books based on this research, The Lemhi, and The Northern Shoshone, established Madsen's reputation as an authority on this cultural group.

Following his retirement from the University of Utah in 1984, Madsen published several books and articles related to the history of the Intermountain region. Two books published in 1985 generated vigorous public debate. In The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre, Madsen employed his considerable research tenacity and penchant for detail in systematically exposing the violence and brutality of the event then popularly referred to as the "battle" of Bear River. His equally controversial B. H. Roberts: Studies of the Book of Mormon, raised the question of whether or not the LDS Church's premier historian had come to believe that the Book of Mormon was a work of fiction. Both books called into question cherished cultural beliefs about the nature of the past and brought to light the presence of an often elusive boundary between history and mythology. Public interest in these works remains strong. Both have been recently reissued in paperback editions.

From the guide to the Brigham D. Madsen papers, 1934-2000, (J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

Brigham Dwaine Madsen (b.1914), was raised in Pocatello, Idaho. In 1935 he served a Mormon mission to the Cumberland Mountains. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in history. Travels abroad to Germany during World War II saw him act as chief historian for Patton's Third Army, where he observed the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg, among other significant experiences.

After the war, he accepted a faculty position at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His curiosity about Mormon history soon brought him head to head with the limits of academic freedom there at that time, ultimately resulting in his resignation and forcing him to work in construction for seven years until a Utah State University position opened. Madsen turned his attention to Native American history. In pursuing the truth about an 1862 military campaign against the Northwestern Shoshoni, he discovered that the engagement was not a battle but a brutal slaughter. His dogged persistence in this area resulted in the establishment of the Bear River Massacre National Historic Landmark. There was similar controversy in his writings on other Western topics, including Mormon history.

Dr. Madsen also served as chair of the University of Utah History Department, director of libraries, deputy academic vice president, and administrative vice president. He was honored for his efforts with a Distinguished Service Award from the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters and two awards from the University of Utah: Honorary Doctor of Humanities and Distinguished Teacher of the Year.

He is the author of eight books: Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Western Historian, The Bannock of Idaho, Corinne: The Gentile Capital of Utah, Exploring the Great Salt Lake: The Stansbury Expedition of 1848-50, Glory Hunter: A Biography of Patrick Edward Connor, The Lemhi: Sacajawea's People, The Northern Shoshoni, and The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre . He is the co-author of: North to Montana! Jehus, Bullwhackers, and Mule Skinners on the Montana Trail . He is the editor of three works: A Forty-Niner in Utah with the Stansbury Exploration of Great Salt Lake: Letters and Journal of John Hudson, 1848-1850, The Now Generation: Student Essays on Social Change in the Sixties, and Studies of the Book of Mormon . He has also authored several monograph-length studies and contributed to such books as The Feminine Frontier: Wyoming Women, 1850-1900 .

From the guide to the Brigham Madsen audio-visual collection, 1986-1994, (J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)