Community dancing - involving everyone, young and old - used to bring people together and rejuvenate tired souls in ways that a night spent sprawled in front of a video never can. This was true for most ethnic groups, including Mormons.
In early 20th century Grouse Creek, LDS bishop David Toyn decreed that there should be a dance every week so that the community could joyfully reconnect. This was true in towns up and down Utah. In those days, everyone danced with everyone else, dances the settlers brought with them from Europe or other parts of the United States, like the Schottische, Varsouvienne, Danish Slide Off and Virginia Reel.
Like a square dance caller, Toyn called the dance figures. Sometimes he even had to provide the music, whistling and beating a tin can. One resident recalled a white-bearded Toyn sitting on a side bench calling the figures: "He'd call and sing and hit the tambourine on his knee and then his head and swing it and they really did dance."
Toyn made sure the dancing stayed proper. You mustn't do anything too "wild" or new. For a long time, the waltz was scandalous, and if you tried it the dance manager might throw you out or even close down the dance.
Not every town had such careful control. James Nielsen wrote about his isolated town on the Fremont River, "What dances we had in those days! . . . As that was the only entertainment we had, we danced two or three times a week. The men always had plenty to drink as they made whiskey out of the grapes and white eye out of the [fermented] green skimmings of the molasses. That white eye was potent stuff; it would make a canary tackle an eagle. The dances invariably ended up in a big fight with a lot of busted noses and sore heads. They always fought out their feuds at the dances.
"We had a number of good square dance callers and I can still hear Old Tom Businbark stomping the floor as he kept time to 'Hell in the Cottonwoods.' He would generally have an epileptic fit before the dance was over and have to be carried home."
Before town citizens got around to building a community center, they'd hold dances in homes, moving the furniture into the yard. When they danced in a church, they'd push the benches to the side and park their babies and picnic baskets beneath the benches or on the stage behind the musicians.
They might dance until 10 p.m. or later, then eat a picnic supper (boards on sawhorses might serve as tables holding sandwiches, pies and cakes). Then they would dance again until the wee hours.
Sometimes, for fundraisers, the women made picnic baskets to be auctioned. Men would bid on the baskets - either for the sake of some excellent home cooking or for the chance of eating supper with a girl he particularly liked.
Life was hard for people living by the sweat of their brow. But, says Lorna Merkeley, whose parents played fiddle and piano at dances in the Uinta Basin, as a child she would watch how toil-worn, exhausted people would tie up their horses - then literally run into the church to dance for hours.
"After a hard day's work cutting sod or plowing," she said, "they would lift their feet lightly when they heard the fiddle."
The cheerful music, the perky movement, the communal joy of dancing: I can't help but think that the world would be a happier place if we still regularly danced, all together.
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* KRISTEN ROGERS-IVERSEN would rather be dancing. She can be reached at kristenri@yahoo.com.
Sources:
Grouse Creek oral histories (manuscripts at the Utah History Research Center); James W. Nielsen, A History of Niels J. Nielsen and Minnie Schiller; The Old Time Dances, manuscript by Revo Young; interview with Lorna Merkeley.
