By David Gerard
I promised Jon Taylor I would review his book.
That’s not the only reason I’m writing this review, though. It’s a good book.
But I’m not going to lie. It’s not the easiest book to get through. It is what it is — a scholarly book on a narrow historical topic.
So it’s not “The Da Vinci Code,” and it’s not “Undaunted Courage,” a popular book a few years ago about the travels of Lewis and Clark.
Like I say, it is what it is. It’s a book about the preservation of historical structures and the historical identity of Independence, Mo.
A lot of people in the Muskogee area are going to say that they don’t have a lot of interest in Independence and its identity crisis and preservation history.
I grew up 50 miles north of Independence, so I have some knowledge of and personal experiences with the places and history that Jon wrote about.
But that’s not the main reason I like Jon’s book. The bigger reason is that on every page, I found that what Independence had gone through and experienced, Muskogee had experienced or was experiencing similar things.
And then I like Jon, too.
I met Jon when my family and I moved to Muskogee in 1985. We were going to the same church. Jon was a teenager. His family lived in Fort Gibson, and his parents still live there. His dad served on the Fort Gibson school board a couple of terms or more. They are, as some people like to say, “good people.”
And Jon was a neat young man. He’s developed, as everyone knew he would, into an intelligent, interesting person. He’s a history professor at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, and he’s a Harry S. Truman scholar — hence his book “A President, a Church, and Trails West.”
The president is Truman, the church is the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and the trails are the early 19th-century pioneer routes that led out of Independence to the American West.
Independence’s problem wasn’t that it didn’t have an interesting history. It had too much, which led to various groups competing for resources and space to foster and advance their missions or favored historical events or personages. At times that competition led to the detriment of the others, especially the historical district to commemorate the life of the town’s favorite son, Truman, and his times.
