This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent historian of the Latter Day Saints, the fur trade, and the trails of the American West. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan remained committed to interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence, leaving a legacy to inspire contemporary historians. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with the methodological shifts that coincided with his career: the mid-twentieth-century collision of interpretations within Latter Day Saint history and the development of a descriptive, scholarly approach to that history.

Morgan’s work signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Leonard Arrington, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, and Wallace Stegner, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.