FLASHBACK 1996: Louis Coray's quest for Utah's original legal document.
The Case of the Missing Constitution
By Ben Fulton
In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.
Title: The Case of the Missing Constitution
Author: Ben Fulton
Date: Jan. 11, 1996
He was a farmer from Mona, a small town in Utah's Juab County. Although largely self-educated, he also taught school. A slender, dark, gray-eyed many who kept his diet free of sweets and rarely ate meat. There was also something of the eccentric about him. Although he purchased a Ford automobile later in life, he left it in the garage in favor of his horse. He was also an avid reader, but had no patience for fiction. "He never read a novel in his life," says his only surviving offspring, 87-year-old Blanche Shepherd, who today resides in Salt Lake City.
Louis LaVille Coray, it seemed, reserved his taste for the stuff of reality, never wasting time with the fancy of literary imagination or the excess of elaboration. He had a good sense of humor, but not for jokes. Like a lot of early Utah settlers, perhaps, the long hours of manual labor Coray poured into his farm imbued him with a pragmatic approach to life. Don't tell me, show me. "Dad didn't tease, he was a very serious type," Shepherd says.
It was an attitude that would drive him along his path to recover one of the state's most important—possibly the most important—legal documents. It's an account that's rarely come to surface, even in this, Utah's centennial year. Nor was it shouted from newspaper headlines in Coray's day until his death in 1949. In fact, even those most schooled in state and Western American history run a blank to the fact that Utah's Constitution was ever lost.
"I don't know that story at all," says Dean May, professor of U.S. and Western American history at the University of Utah. "They [delegates to the constitutional convention] were very concerned about the quality of handwriting for the document, so I'm surprised it would have been misplaced."
"I've never heard about it," says Thomas G. Alexander, professor of Western American history at Brigham Young University and author of a book hailed as "the official centennial history," Utah, The Right Place.
More than a tale of simple tenacity, Coray's commitment to finding Utah's original, hand-written constitution ultimately tells us that history means far more to those who actually had a hand in its making. Coray was a delegate to Utah's Constitutional Convention, a body elected to hammer out state law overseeing the people of Utah, present and future. Many delegates no doubt had another fact hanging over their heads: six other constitutions submitted by Utah in hopes for statehood failed approval by the U.S. Congress. In a word, it was all about polygamy, a practice that, once discarded by the LDS Church, turned the magic key for Utah's eventual statehood.
More than a job of self-validation, then, Coray's hope to see the state constitution found was reinforced by the memory of 106 other delegates with whom he spent two grueling months in Salt Lake City's City and County Building debating over the fine points of a state judicial system and the terms of elected officials. Based on Coray's own hand-written account it's possible he might have thought that, without the original document for reference, Utah law could take on a meaning the delegates hadn't intended. A comma missing, or a comma inadvertently inserted during reproduction, and a sentence can give birth to a whole new interpretation. With a detailed, two thousand page record of the convention's proceedings readily available should the delegation's intent ever come into question, such a worry may seem spurious, but it seemed to animate Coray to an unusual degree.
"He was so adamant about finding that thing," Shepherd says. "He used to make mother so mad. He spent so much time looking for it that she thought it was silly. She looked at it as just a hobby."
Having moved from Juab County to Ogden years after his participation in the constitutional convention, Coray's "hobby" grabbed him unwittingly during a trip to Salt Lake City sometime in 1929, or the early 1930s. "I came to Salt Lake about 20 years ago," he writes in his letter, "and thought I would like to see the original copy, to determine how well it was being preserved. I knew how much the delegates thought of it..."
According to Coray's account, what followed was a bureaucratic game of tag that reads like Abbott and Costello laced with Kafka. When the constitution was first written out in a penmanship filled with elegant waves and spirals in 1895 it was entrusted to then secretary of state J.T. Hammond for safe-keeping. It only made sense that Coray approach then secretary of state M.H. Welling for a peek at the original. Welling, in essence, didn't know what Coray was talking about.
"Knowing what had been done to preserve it, you could have easily knocked me down with a feather," he records in his letter.
So began Coray's run through the maze. "He [Welling] called on Mr. Jones who was as dumb as Mr. Welling. Jones went into the basement and stirred up the state papers and records..."
Whatever was stirred up, it wasn't the constitution. Welling asks Coray to check their progress at a later date.
Coray returns. Welling, empty-handed, tells him to see H.E. Crockett, secretary of state before him.
"I called on Mr. Crockett and he was as dumb as Welling," Coray writes.
And Crockett refers him to Supreme Court clerk and librarian Leland M. Cummings.
And Cummings refers Coray to, of all people, Utah's first governor Heber M. Wells.
Like an Olympic relay, Wells passes Coray on to Utah's first secretary of state, J.T. Hammond. Unable to tell him where the document lies, Hammond nevertheless describes to Coray full details of how the constitution was maintained under his term of service, the years of 1896 to 1905.
"The first thing he did was to make a strong box and carried the key in his pocket, and when the judges of the Supreme Court wished to see if there was any difference between it and the type-written copies, either in syllabization, capitalization, or punctuation, or anything else that could make the least difference between the two manuscripts. He did not trust it to a messenger but carried it to them and watched it with an eagle eye to see that no alterations were made."
The constitution, Hammond told Coray, was left to the care of his successor, secretary of state C.S. Tingey. Unfortunately, Tingey was dead.
But his successor, David Mattson, wasn't. Mattson, it seemed, was secretary of state at the time state records and papers were moved from the City and County Building into the newly constructed State Capitol. If anyone knew the whereabouts of the document, surely it had to be him. Trouble was, Mattson was apparently a tough man to get an appointment with.
"...so I asked the Tribune to interview Mattson and see if he knew anything about it, but the Tribune was a little slow about it..."
If you want the job done right, better do it yourself. So Coray wrote an article for the Tribune's Forum section, "stating what I had done, with the conclusion that Utah had no constitution and that it was forever gone."
That, in turn, initiated a whole new round of action from Welling, who sent his whole office hunting. After two weeks of searching it still wasn't found. Then Welling's secretary, Frank Lees, asked permission to go over the capitol building one more time. "...he went to the bottom and came up, and found it concealed in a niche in the foundation above one of the papers. It had been lost for 20 years."
Jean Bickmore White, professor emeritus of political science at Weber State University and author of The Utah Constitution: A Reference Guide, can believe every word of the story. "Documents have to get old before people realize that they're important," she says. "The current state archivist would have nightmares about the way things were bandied about. I can imagine that for years it was treated pretty casually."
Neither is Alexander shocked with disbelief. "I'm not surprised," he laughs. "I could imagine it happening with almost any document. I suspect it was on display for a while, then put away and someone forgot where it was."
But the delegation went to some length to make sure the first state constitution was laid out in the most exquisite long-hand possible. The scribe, incidentally named Joseph Smith, was good but slow. So the delegation hired another man with similar penmanship to help with the task. Apparently, his job was less than adequate. He was sacked. With that knowledge in the background, only U. Professor Dean May expresses the most puzzlement over the document being misplaced. "There was certainly much 'to do' over the constitution at the time," he says.
By the time the document was found, the mood between Coray, the bothersome old constitutional delegate in his late 60s, and Welling was not good. The search over, Coray pressed Welling as to what would be done with the constitution. It would be locked tight in a safe, Welling replied.
Flabbergasted, Coray shot back with angry sarcasm, "Yes, you might put it under one of the corner stones of the Capitol and forget it?"
Welling said, "It [the constitution] was nonsense, a matter of sentiment, and did not amount to any more than the Declaration of Independence, and there was nothing to that aside of the signature of John Hancock."
Disgusted, Coray told Welling his words were the "first time I had heard that sort of sentiment expressed."
White falls somewhere between the two men in regards to the original document's importance. "Once the document was accepted by Congress and publicized, what's the loss? Once it was validated by the United States government that pretty much sealed it," she says. "But it's nice to have. It looks pretty sloppy if you lose your state constitution. Once you find out it's lost you tend to get kind of indignant."
A great deal more flexible than the U.S. Constitution, Utah's document has been amended some 84 times since becoming law. To make Utah courts more efficient there were wholesale changes made in the state's judicial system in 1985. Articles of corporation, which regulate business and industry, have also seen vast changes.
In today's electronic age, White points out, countless people accept as authentic documents transferred by computer. And they do so without ever seeing the original.
Utah's constitution, though, is a record of perhaps the first time the people of the state came together for the single cause of statehood. In a speech delivered recently at the Utah State Historical Society, Alexander notes that by 1890, 45 percent of Utah's population was non-Mormon. Compare that with a state population that was 98 percent Mormon in 1870. Between 1870 and the constitutional convention, or 1895, several things had occurred to cool contentions between Mormons and non-Mormons.
Once in jail or convicted, Mormon polygamists could not run for office. Almost by default, non-Mormons gained control of vital elected posts, and in the late 1890s the Salt Lake City Council was virtually Mormon-free. Then the LDS Church let go of the practice of polygamy, making it difficult for Utahns of other faiths to turn their Mormon neighbors in to federal law enforcement officials. As Alexander notes, "Out of all state constitutional conventions, Utah's delegation had the largest number of ex-convicts."
Long at odds with each other, the Mormon People's Party and the anti-Mormon Liberal Party had disbanded. Both Mormons and non-Mormons flowed into the Republican and Democratic parties. By the time the delegates assembled in March of 1895 to get down to business, arguments centered more around party ideology than religion.
"It was not nearly as divided a territory as in the 1860s, '70s or '80s," says White. "People were saying, 'We've got to live together.'"
As evidence of the new state spirit, White cites the election of the Rev. George P. Miller as a constitutional delegate for the people of Sevier County. "I still can't account for a Methodist minister being elected a delegate for Sevier County, which was heavily Mormon."
Sketchy as Coray's account is, though, only the fragments of his motives are revealed. There is his six-and-a-half page letter, a handful of newspaper articles and the memory of his daughter, whose memory is fading. "I was 17 years old at the time, and it [her father's search for the constitution] wasn't even interesting to me. But he was so adamant about finding that thing."
Given Coray's consternation over what he records as Welling's swipe at the Declaration of Independence it's possible to deduce that Coray simply carried deep respect for the ideals of freedom and democracy, especially when formally committed to paper. Indeed, with the Utah constitution finally found, his job was only half accomplished. He then had to convince the governor and Legislature that it was worth preserving for future generations.
"When the constitution was discovered, I met Anthony Ivins [another delegate at the convention] on the street. He congratulated me and said I had performed a distinct service to the state and advised me to continue until something was accomplished," Coray wrote in his account.
Specifically, Coray wanted the document put in a marble case, covered with glass, and placed in the Capitol where the public could view it. That would take money, though, and Gov. George H. Dern had little time for such an appropriation when the Legislature had called a special session to deal with the matter of taxes and whiskey.
Coray would have to wait until years later, when Henry H. Blood was governor, for the Legislature to pass a bill for the preservation of the constitution. In a special ceremony Oct. 14, 1940, as war raged across Europe, Coray finally placed the original copy in a marble cabinet at the capitol. Besides himself, six other surviving members of the constitutional convention attended. Music was provided by an artillery band, a soprano soloist and a vocal quartet.
Having moved down from Ogden several years previously, Coray and his wife took an apartment at 963 E. South Temple. Working a job as a night watchman at Pierpont Ave., he attended the Salt Lake temple as often as three times a day, according to his daughter. "The Mormon Church was his life, but he never had a high church position," she says.
And while Shepherd says her father never scolded his children if they failed to attend church, his religious leanings no doubt added to his fiery prohibitionist stance during conventional debate on alcohol. "...any man or any set of men who will stand up here and defend the whiskey business, I consider their just reward will be to live to see their children and their grandchildren gamblers, drunkards, illegitimate, and prostitutes," Coray said during proceedings.
"He [Coray] had no problem at all speaking his mind," White says. "He was one of the more colorful delegates when he opened his mouth."
With his wife dead in 1944, Coray passed on five years later, as quietly as his search for the constitution was carried out. Newspapers ran obituaries with condolences to family members, along with mention of his work to see Utah's original legal document made safe and secure. "He was tireless and persistent, but his efforts were crowned with success," the Salt Lake Tribune wrote.
"He was a very retiring man, a very unsophisticated person. He was so natural," Shepherd remembers. "He was not after publicity of any kind. He was a very modest man."
Ironically, his search for the document may have led to rumors still alive today that Utah's constitution is still unaccounted for.
"We get people all the time coming in who say it's lost or that it's been damaged, but it's very well taken care of and beautifully maintained," says Jeff Johnson, director at the Utah State Archives.
White figures that soon after Coray laid the constitution in its marble case at the 1940 ceremony it was probably put in a place for safekeeping soon after.
Today, with the rank of secretary of state replaced by the Lt. Governor, the document rests in a vault in the office of Olene Walker. Years ago it was flown to an East Coast company so that harmful acid could be removed from its paper. Since light is damaging to most old documents, it's kept in the dark most of the time.
The copy on display at the State Capitol is a reproduction; certainly not the sort of set-up Coray had in mind when he wrote the final, triumphant words of his letter: "...it was placed on the north side of the corridor ... where we hope it will remain for 50,000 years." Still, with the constitution found and WWII over by the time of his death, Coray must have had a certain peace of mind. After all, at least a few things were in their proper order before he left.
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