Author: Mary Heers

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Cache Valley Sugar Beets and German POWs

Abandoned Sugar Beet Factory, Weston near Franklin, ID Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Abandoned Sugar Beet Factory, Weston near Franklin, ID
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
When I started teaching at Preston High School, one of the first books my English class read was The Diary of Anne Frank. I remember asking the class if they had any family stories of their own to share about those war years. A young woman raised her hand and said her grandparents had a painting on their wall that had been given to them by a German Prisoner of War. This POW had worked on their Cache Valley sugar beet farm in 1945. He’d signed the painting, and had written a few words of thanks on the back for the kind treatment he had received

I was astounded. German POW’s in Cache Valley? This led me to ask more questions.

I found out in 1945 there were close to 400 German POWs living in tents in a work camp at the Cache Valley Fairgrounds. Local farmers contracted with the US Government to hire the POWs to work in the fields for 80 cents a day.

Each morning the prisoners would get loaded into trucks and driven to a sugar beet field. The work day didn’t end until 8 pm when the prisoners returned to the Fairgrounds, damp and chilled, from the ride in the open bed trucks.

Sugar Beet Knives Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Sugar Beet Knives
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
In 1945, sugar beets were a profitable crop, but labor intensive. In the Spring, the beets needed to be thinned and weeded. This work was done by a short handled hoe. In the Fall, the beets needed to be pulled out of the ground. This was done by a special beet knife with a big fish hook on the end. Once pulled out of the ground, the top leaves were sliced off and the beets tossed into a pile bound for the sugar factory.

At the peak of sugar beet farming in and around Cache Valley, there were 5 sugar factories operating. But by 1945 the factories were down to two – one located in Lewiston, and the other in Whitney, near Preston.

Native Americans came from Arizona to work the beets and set up their colorful teepees in downtown Lewiston. High school students were let out of school for 2-3 weeks in the Fall to work during what were called “Harvest Vacations.”

A friend of mine in Preston told me about a young man who went off the college in the Fall of 1945, but came home after a week. His father handed him a sugar beet knife and told him if he wasn’t going to go to college, he was going to work in the fields.

Everyone I met who once worked in the sugar beet fields told me all the work of thinning and harvesting needed to be done while bent over, and the resulting back pain was terrible.

Of all the stories I heard, my favorite was one of a Logan beet farmer who took his 3-year-old daughter with him to check on the work being done by the POWs he had hired. One day, he looked up and saw one of the German POWs holding his little girl in his arms. The farmer took his little girl by the hand, but the POW didn’t let go. A guard came running over. But both men stopped when they saw the tears running down the POW’s face. Somewhere, many miles away, they realized this German POW had a little girl of his own that he may or may not ever see again.

Today, all the POWs have long gone, as well as the local sugar beet farms. But if you drive north on Highway 89, just before you get to Preston, you can see the remains of the Whitney sugar beet factory. These huge crumbling buildings stand as a reminder that sugar beets were once king in Cache Valley.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:

Images Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio:
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Mary Heers & Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Powell, Allan Kent, Splinters of a Nation: German Prisoners of War in Utah (UTAH CENTENNIAL SERIES), University of Utah Press, January 1, 1990, https://www.amazon.com/Splinters-Nation-German-Prisoners-CENTENNIAL/dp/0874803306/ref=sr_1_1

Radford, Alexandria, The Old Sugar Beet Factory, Medium, Oct 7, 2021, https://medium.com/mind-talk/the-old-sugar-beet-factory-2e4b26f906d6

Arrington, Leonard J, Beet Sugar in the West A History of the Utah Idaho Sugar Company 1891-1966 University of Washington, 1966, https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Leonard-J-Arrington/dp/029574037X

Arrington, Leonard J, The Sugar Industry in Utah, Utah History Encyclopedia-website, Utah Education Network – UEN, https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/s/SUGAR_INDUSTRY.shtml

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A Day at the Chariot Races

Chariot Racing in Utah Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Chariot Racing in Utah
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
A few weeks ago, I met someone who mentioned she used to be involved in chariot racing.

Chariot Racing Team Courtesy & Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
Chariot Racing Team
Courtesy & Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
“Chariots?” I asked. “Like in ancient Roman days?”

“Sort of.” she said. She explained how today’s chariot racing in the Intermountain West involves two horses pulling a small aluminum chariot with the driver standing in the cart.

She mentioned the Regional Championships were coming up at the Golden Spike Arena in Ogden that weekend. So on Saturday, I jumped in my car . I got to the Arena just after the first race.

As I was strolling up to the rail running along the side of the racetrack, the horses in the next race shot by me. I was a little stunned by the hammering of the hooves on the dry dirt, the jangling of the harnesses, the strange whirring of the bicycle wheels — let alone the screaming of the spectators.

For the horses, it was an all out sprint for a quarter mile and it was over in 21 seconds.

In Roman times, the races lasted much longer. A typical race went 7 laps on a U-shaped racetrack with dangerously tight turns on both ends. Wealthy Roman Citizens owned the horses, but they usually sent a slave to drive the team. A crowd favorite was the daredevil slave charioteer Scorpius, who won 2,048 races before he died in a crash at the age of 26. Stories of chariot racing go all the way back to Homer’s Iliad where the Spartan king Menelaus was accused of cheating in a chariot race.

Rome’s racetrack was called the Circus Maximus and it could seat 250,000 spectators.

Back in Pioneer times in Utah, farmers liked to brag about how fast their horses could go, so challenges were made, and the issue usually settled by an informal race. The first official chariot race took place down the main street in Jackson Wyoming in 1950. For the following decades, chariot racing was very popular. Hundreds of teams would show up at the local races.

Going back to the Golden Spike racetrack, I walked up to where the races were starting. I asked if I could get close and climb up on the sidebars of the starting gate and they said ,”Sure.” From there I got an eyeball-to-eyeball view of the horses impatiently banging around in the starting chutes.

I think I was expecting a “Ready, Set, Go” and a starter pistol fired into the air. What I got was a mighty clang of metal on metal when the starter pulled a lever. The gates slammed open, the horses lunged forward, and dirt flew by me.

When the dust finally settled, the days winners were a team from Logan, who clocked in at 20.40 seconds – just 3 hundredths of a second off the world record.

On the way out I stopped to talk to three old timers still standing around chewing the fat.

“The sport is dying out,” one said.

“It’s getting expensive to keep a horse,” said the second.

The third summed it all up for me:
“Used to be you were really someone if you had a car. Now you’re really someone if you have a horse.”

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild about all the horses in Utah.

Credits:

Photos: Courtesy and Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Chariot Racing Team, Courtesy and Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman Utah Public Radio upr.org
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

https://www.facebook.com/reel/917556147927681 Courtesy Wendy Wilker

American Chariot Racing, https://www.goldenspikeeventcenter.com/event-details/acr-chariot-races-7

World Chariots, https://www.goldenspikeeventcenter.com/event-details/world-chariots-8

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Bug World Athletes

Dragonfly Courtesy Pixabay, DerWeg, Contributor
Dragonfly
Courtesy Pixabay, DerWeg, Contributor
As the Winter Olympics were getting into full swing , I was glued to the TV. I was dazzled by the super speed and skills of the athletes. Then I heard the Natural History Museum of Utah had just opened its traveling exhibit Bug World, which could teach me about the small super athletes of the insect world.

I turned off the TV and took a trip to Bug World.

When I walked in the door of the exhibit, I found myself face to face with an Orchid Mantis. This insect has the unique ability to blend into a patch of orchid flowers, so when another insect comes looking for nectar, the mantis snags it out of the air at dazzling speed. I watched this drama play out on the museum’s video screen. It looked very fast.

Just how fast? The exhibit invited everyone to find the answer using the nearby light board. I stepped up to the board and hit the start button. A light came on in one of the 12 dots on the board. When I tapped the lighted dot, it would go out and another dot would light up. I had 30 seconds to see how many dots I could put out. I got 12. That put me in the range of Slug. That stung. I took a deep breath and hit the start button again. This time I got 25, moving me up to Butterfly speed. So, I took off my jacket and handed my purse to my husband. I gave it all I had. I hit 33, almost getting me up to Spider speed. The mantis can do 50. They are the undisputed champions of attack speed.

I moved on to Japanese Bees. Bees are the champions of wing speed. They can hum along at 200 beats per second. The unique Japanese bees have figured out a way of use this wing speed to protect their hive. When a dangerous wasp enters their hive, they swarm around it, beating their wings fast enough to whip up the temperature to117 degrees centigrade. That’s enough to kill the wasp.

Once again, the museum invited people to test how hard it was to raise the temperature by sliding their hands over 6 lighted dots. Two small kids were already rubbing 4 of the dots and getting nowhere. I stepped up and started working on the last two dots. The temperature went up a little. “Harder!” cried the onlookers. All three of us were rubbing the lights like crazy. I started to sweat. Suddenly a light flashed. We’d hit 117 and killed the wasp. I now know just how hard the bees need to work to defend their hive.

Next up was the Dragonfly. The dragonfly can only flap its wings at 60 beats per second. But each wing operates independently, giving it the ability to fly with pinpoint accuracy. Combine this with its bulging eyes that can see in all directions, and you have the insect predator champion of deadly accuracy. The lion, pointed out the exhibit poster, will bring down its prey 20 times out of 100. The Dragonfly hits its moving target midair 95 out of 100 times.

Every time I turned around I learned something interesting. But this Bugworld traveling exhibit was also interactive and fun.

It’s going to be in Salt Lake at the Natural History Museum until September.
I heartily recommend it.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah

Credits:

Photos: Courtesy Pixabay, DerWeg, Contributor, https://pixabay.com/photos/dragon-fly-insect-leaf-lotus-8105990/
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman Utah Public Radio upr.org
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

Natural History Museum of Utah, University of Utah, http://nhmu.utah.edu
301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, UT 84108

Bug World Exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah through September 7, 2026, https://nhmu.utah.edu/exhibitions/bug-world

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A Trip to the Utah Museum of Natural History

Mounted cast of a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) in the old building of the "Utah Museum of Natural History" Courtesy Wikimedia, Brett Neilson, Photographer, Licensed under the Creative Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Creative_Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
Mounted cast of a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) in the old building of the “Utah Museum of Natural History”
Courtesy Wikimedia, Brett Neilson, Photographer
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
When I opened the door to the special exhibit on the Ice Age at Salt Lake’s Natural History Museum, I found myself face to face with the long, looping tusks of a wooly mammoth. Once I caught my breath, I could see the mammoth’s head was painted on a piece of wood, but the tusks were 3 dimensional and towered above me – about 10 feet in the air and stretching out to about 9 feet. This magnificent mammal, now extinct, was well adapted to living on an icy planet. Its hair grew as long as 35 inches and its skin was slightly over 3 inches thick. By comparison, the museum pointed out, the modern Asian elephant has little or no hair and its skin is less than an inch thick.

The special ice age exhibit has left Salt Lake, but a visit to the Museum of Natural History is always a treat. Its skeleton of a mammoth clearly conveys a feeling for its massive size. Also looking huge is their skeleton of a giant sloth, standing 8 feet high and sporting a hand claw over 12 inches long. Back when Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States, some explorers found a similar claw in a cave in Virginia and sent it to him.. Jefferson quickly sent off an urgent message to Lewis and Clark on their trek west to keep an eye out for this fiercesome beast. As it turns out, the giant sloth was extinct and had just been a vegetarian who lived mostly in the trees. The giant sloth used the claw to pull tree branches closer so he could eat the leaves.

If you walk down the museum ramp leading away from the giant sloth, you leave the Ice Age and go deeper back in time to the Age of Dinosaurs. You pass by a prehistoric crocodile and a giant birdlike creature standing on large, three toed claw feet. This bird would run down its prey at speeds as high as 30 mph. Soon you arrive at a section of glass flooring, exposing a massive jumble of bones underfoot. You have arrived at the exhibit on Utah’s unique Cleveland-Lloyd quarry. In the early 1900’s, some cowboys and sheepherders noticed some large bones sticking out of a hillside about 30 miles away from the current town of Price. The scientific community was alerted, and digging at the site began. To this day, over 10,000 bones have been unearthed, and the majority identified as belonging to predator dinosaurs. But we still don’t know how or why this massive bone yard was created.

Four paleontologists have stepped forward and offered their best guess as to why so many dinosaur bones are here. One by one these four men appear on video screens along the museum path. The first one says this was once a watering hole. The dinosaurs came to drink, but the watering hole dried up. The dinosaurs died of thirst.

Oh no, said the second. There was actually too much water. The mud surrounding the watering hole became so deep the dinosaurs got stuck in the mud.

The third agreed that the dinosaurs came to the site to drink. But somehow the water had become contaminated. The dinosaurs drank and died of poison.

The fourth simply said the dinosaurs had died somewhere else, and the bones had been washed down to this site.

It’s still a mystery waiting to be solved.

In the meantime, the work of discovery goes on. Fossils are being found, and the promising ones are wrapped in plaster casts and sent to the lab. You can look in the lab windows as you exit the museum. A crew of staff and volunteers in white lab coats are picking up small hammers, picks and dentist drills. Slowly, carefully, they are cutting back the layers of time.

The answer to the question about the origin of Utah’s dinosaur bone yard seems to still lie just around the corner.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy Wikimedia and US Bureau of Land Management
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman Utah Public Radio upr.org
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

Natural History Museum of Utah, University of Utah, http://nhmu.utah.edu
301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, UT 84108

Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), US Department of the Interior, https://www.blm.gov/visit/cleveland-lloyd-dinosaur-quarry

Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, Jurassic National Monument, US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), US Department of the Interior, https://www.blm.gov/programs/national-conservation-lands/utah/jurassic-national-monument/photos

Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry: Paleontological Resource Management, https://yout-ube.com/watch?v=YotsxDLDMSE

Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry: The Interpretive Center, US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), US Department of the Interior, https://yout-ube.com/watch?v=YotsxDLDMSE