In 1886 Boise had a single national bank and Idaho’s growing mining and agricultural production offered conditions for another financial house. Alfred Eoff, a freelance economic agent operating across the American West since the 1860s, took advantage of this opportunity. Encouraged by Wells Fargo & Company treasurer Henry Wadsworth to seize the opportunity, Eoff established Boise City National Bank in 1886. Situated near Main Street and Capitol Boulevard, it was established as a competitor to the First National Bank of Idaho. Wadsworth acted as City National’s president while Eoff became its cashier, becoming part of Wells Fargo’s growing presence in the American West. Wadsworth’s recommendations proved sound. By 1890, City National Bank’s portfolio included over $620,000 in financial assets, with $65,000 held in securities alone. Idaho’s population boom increased City National’s business, requiring a larger building as the initial bank became too small to house its customers and resources, including cash, deeds, or precious metals. This led City National Bank’s board to construct a three-story building designed by local architect James King that could house both the bank and rentable commercial and office space. This new structure housed not only the bank but also the United States Marshals’ and Surveyor’s Offices as well as Idaho’s federal district court after its completion in 1892. Despite the 1890s economic downturn, City National’s portfolio continually increased, with total assets totaling $870,000 by 1900. Continued growth led to the addition of a fourth story commercial club in 1904 and renovations in 1913, all designed by John Tourtellotte & Company who also planned Idaho’s State Capitol. The commercial club catered to its patrons, who likely consisted of influential stockmen, farmers, and investors, offering amenities such as a dining district, billiards parlor, cardroom, lounge, writing room, and a library.  By 1905, Wadsworth retired and Frank R. Coffin became City National’s new president. Coffin, previously lured west from Indiana, first settled in California as a tinsmith and later became a gold miner in Idaho’s 1860 gold strike. He served as Idaho’s first state treasurer from 1891-93, treasurer of the Artesian Hot and Cold Power Company, one of the state's leading utility corporations, and president of the Boise Clearinghouse Association, a local financial institution. Serving as president until he died in 1920, Coffin further expanded City National’s reach until it became Idaho's second-largest national bank, with $1.6 million in total assets. By 1932, during the strain of the Great Depression, City National voluntarily closed, citing depleted reserves. It argued that closure was the best option for depositors, with the remaining $2.5 million in accounts distributed among its clients. After its closure, various owners occupied the bank building, including the Idaho Building and Loan Association and the J. R. Simplot Company, one of Idaho’s largest corporations. Today it is owned by Rocky Mountain Management, and houses many offices and commercial businesses.

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The Pleasant Grove Canning Company, established in 1919 in Orem, Utah, marked a significant milestone as the town’s inaugural major industry. The canning industry had been growing in the United States for about 50 years before the Pleasant Grove Canning Company was created. By the time it opened, the preservation of produce through canning had been perfected. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, there was little industry in Utah County, but the canning company took in produce from local farmers and farmers of the Provo Bench, canning, among other things, 75,000 cases of tomato paste. The company sold the tomato paste to the Campbell Soup Company.   The canning company underwent substantial changes in subsequent years as the industry in the state evolved.  In 1960, the Pleasant Grove Canning Company merged with Ogden’s Utah Canning Company and it became known as the Orem Plant of Utah Packers. Eventually, the decision was made to sell the company. In 1972, the company was sold to Booth Distributing Inc. and they used the building as a warehouse.  Over the ensuing decades, the building was sold multiple times to different owners. In 1992, the once-thriving structure had fallen into disrepair and deemed a hazard by the city of Orem. Consequently, in 1993, the building was demolished, leaving behind only memories and a historic marker commemorating the site of the former Orem landmark.

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The Utah Capitol’s ornate rotunda includes twelve murals that the Public Works of Art Project funded during the New Deal era. The pieces fill the dome and the spaces between the rotunda’s arches. Painted along the dome’s base, four illustrations display scenes from Utah’s pioneer settlement history, including: Father Escalante Discovers Utah Lake – 1776, Peter Skene Ogden at Ogden River – 1828, Fremont First Sees Great Salt Lake – 1843, and Brigham Young and Pioneers Entering the Valley. Prominent architect Richard K.A. Kletting, known for creating several Utah buildings, completed the Capitol in 1915 after winning a competition. Inspired by Greek and Roman architecture, Kletting designed the Capitol in the Corinthian style, seen through features such as its distinct exterior columns. With its large scale, Utah marble, and commanding city view, the building’s construction cost a grand $2,739,529.

Lee Greene Richards led the mural project, while Henry Rasmussen, Ranch S. Kimball, and Gordon Cope assisted him, with Waldo Midgely creating the murals’ borders. Richards grew up in Salt Lake City in an artistic family. He studied under J.T. Harwood in Salt Lake City, and at Paris’s Académie Julian and École des Beaux-Arts. While visiting England on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Richards developed a passion for portraiture, although he also became a popular muralist who captured Utah’s settler history in the rotunda murals. The Capitol rotunda’s murals opened in 1935 with ceremonies headed by former Utah Governor, Henry H. Blood.

The muralists conducted lengthy research to ensure that their chosen depictions were significant and accurately portrayed. While researching Peter Skene Ogden at Ogden River –1828, for example, Richards ensured that he depicted period-accurate weapons. In the murals including Brigham Young, however, Richards decided to artistically represent the Salt Lake City founder with his more recognizable beard, despite pioneer depictions from this period showing that Young was clean-shaven.

Father Escalante Discovers Salt Lake – 1776, depicts the Spanish expedition of Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante accompanied by a small group and one of three Ute people who guided them. Flanked by the area’s foliage, the background exhibits the scenic waters of the Great Salt Lake. In Peter Skene Ogden at Ogden River – 1828, Ogden and his company are in the vividly colored Ogden Valley using weapons like the Hawken rifle, the preferred weapon of choice along the western frontier. Fremont First Sees Great Salt Lake –1843, features John. C. Fremont and his party overlooking the lake’s expanse, positioned in an adventurous pose overlooking the scene. Brigham Young and Pioneers Entering the Valley, focuses on Brigham young and his distinctive beard standing proudly as he reaches the Salt Lake Valley, joined by pioneers, cattle, and covered wagons.

Examining these murals reveals the aims of the New Deal-era art projects in not only employing artists but also in creating a western American artistic identity. Indeed, the Public Works of Art Project-funded murals did not typically illustrate the Great Depression’s despair. Conversely, muralists like Richards chose to focus on themes of a settling, pioneering past. In choosing to depict scenes of Utah’s pioneer settlement, then, this optimistic vision guided Richards and his co-painters. 

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Jenne Magafan painted A Typical Western Town from 1939-1941 under the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a New Deal project that aimed to employ artists and craft an American arts culture. Magafan installed the painting in the Helper, Utah, Main Post Office, where visitors can still see it today.  

In 1941, New Deal-era artist Jenne Magafan of Colorado completed her mural, A Typical Western Town, in the Helper, Utah, Main Post Office. The post office building opened in 1938 and was placed by researchers on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. With its initial installment, A Typical Western Town was the first post office mural that Utah received with funding from the Section of Fine Arts.

Magafan won the chance to install the oil-on-canvas mural through the Forty-Eight State competition as a part of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. A well-known painter of the New Deal era who studied in a variety of institutions like the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Magafan practiced art with the mentorship of artists including Frank Mechau. The Section of Fine arts also commissioned Magafan for Post Office murals in Anson, Texas, and Glenwood Springs, Colorado. After completing the Helper mural, Magafan and her twin sister and fellow artist, Ethel, hung the painting over the postmaster’s office door.  

Magafan reflects the later nineteenth-century commotion of Helper’s industrial history in her mural riddled with motion. Helper, located in central Utah, was uniquely named after the additional locomotives that trains needed to ascend Soldier Summit, located between Helper and Salt Lake City, Utah. Helper once bustled as an activity center for many surrounding coal mining towns. Indeed, the history of coal mining in Carbon County is significant as it was crucial to the state’s economic development. Helper especially transformed into an economic hub after the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad’s completed its Castle Valley branch in 1883. Geologists discovered rich coal deposits in nearby Sunnyside along the path to Soldier Summit by Price Canyon, further cementing Carbon County as the coal mining center of Utah.

The five feet by twelve feet mural depicts a usual western town, likely during the bustling heights of Carbon County’s coal industry during the later nineteenth-century. In the central foreground, two men on horseback come to a stop as a curious dog barks at them. To the right, a “Blacksmith” sign stands above the shop’s worker, who appears to be repairing a wagon wheel. The left side includes a group of people conversing and a woman as she approaches a post office and grocery store. A saloon is placed next to the office. The background includes a wide blue sky. The focus is dedicated to the bustling and optimistic happenings of the town. Unlike other typical TSFA murals, A Typical Western Town does not feature specific natural landscapes. Rather, the lively, populated town that the work exhibits could reflect the thriving industrial history of Helper. 

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Andrew Standing Soldier, a Sioux artist of the Oglala Lakota Nation, completed the Arrival Celebration and The Round-Up when he was twenty-two, installing the murals in Blackfoot, Idaho’s Main Post Office. Gilbert Stanley Underwood constructed the Blackfoot MPO in 1936 in the Art Deco style, seen specifically through details such as the foliage motif that decorates the building’s exterior columns. When researchers placed the building onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, it was the sole federally-constructed post office in Idaho built in the Art Deco style. The building continues to operate as a post office today.

Andrew Standing Soldier was born in 1917 on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. He was taught to draw by his father, Martin Standing Soldier. During the 1930s, he studied art under the Swedish muralist Olle Nordmark, a Pine Ridge artist-in-residence who was known for his mural work in New York. Nordmark went on to supervise Standing Soldier during the creation of the MPO murals. With his individualistic, western-focused style and well-drawn horses, Standing Soldier painted the post office murals through a government commission after he submitted sketches of his ideas.

Standing Soldier painted the five-panel Arrival Celebration and Round-Up with a realistic and Regionalist style under the Treasury Section of Fine Arts (TSFA), as a part of a six-mural project in Idaho funded by New Deal-era projects. The works cover all of the post office’s walls excluding the front wall and contains scenes based on life sketches depicting the everyday life of the Shoshone-Bannock peoples who live on the Fort Hall, Idaho, reservation. Their ancestral lands make up present day Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and parts of Canada.

The Arrival Celebration and The Round-Up depict the western life of the Shoshone-Bannock peoples as they go about their day. In the background, he painted the distinct scenery of the vast Eastern Snake River Plain and the feeding ground that it provided for cattle. Along the mural’s wide expanse, the artist included scenes such as families travelling with horse-drawn wagons, people conversing on horseback, preparing covered wagons, cutting wood, and making meals with cattle roaming in the background. Standing Soldier also filled the scene with depictions of the traditional tipi dwellings of the tribes. The Round-Up portion of the mural shows a group of people as they work to rope and brand cattle.

His murals reflect the aims of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts in employing artists as well as establishing a western identity in art that everyday people could see for free in their day-to-day lives as they ran errands at the post office. Indeed, most New Deal-funded murals did not portray the Great Depression’s troubles, but rather displayed regional scenes of optimistic imagery and scenes of conviviality like the group cooking scene portrayed in Standing Soldier’s work.

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Louise Emerson Ronnebeck’s The Harvest is a Regionalist-style mural found in James A. Wetmore’s 1918-designed Wayne N. Aspinall Federal Building United States Courthouse in Grand Junction, Colorado. Completed in 1940 under the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, the mural hangs in the building’s post office today.

Art programs like the The Treasury Section of Fine Arts (TSFA) allowed for greater opportunities for women artists to work. In the typical process of creating TSFA murals, Ronnebeck, a prominent artist during the New Deal era, won the opportunity to paint The Harvest through an anonymous contest after she submitted a sample sketch. In 1940, when leading architect Louis A. Simon expanded the Wayne N. Aspinall Federal Building, Ronnebeck installed The Harvest to adorn the postmaster’s office door pediment with its distinct V-shaped bottom. 

Ronnebeck’s work prominently represents the history of the Ute people’s forced removal from Colorado throughout the nineteenth century. Before the 1860s, Ute people had lived in southwest Colorado for centuries and had established seasonal hunting grounds in the area. They also faced minimal encroachment from European and American settlers prior to the 1860s, until mineral interest drew more into the area. The United States government desired to increase land possession in the region. As such, they forced all seven Ute bands into a single reservation. Still, settlers intruded into reservation boundaries seeking minerals, further increasing hostility between the groups. Events like the Meeker Incident, in which a Ute group killed Agent Nathan Meeker, ten men, and took five others hostage, represented the hostility’s heights. The event culminated in an us-or-them sentiment. Settlers refused to leave, and by 1881, efforts to force the last Ute bands away from Colorado succeeded, with Southern Utes remaining within a sparse boundary. 

As six million acres once inhabited by the Utes became available for settlement, the Mesa County region attracted settlers who established local industries like orcharding, depicted through The Harvest’s Regionalist-style. Indeed, peaches make up more than seventy-five percent of Colorado’s fruit production today. Festivals such as 1909’s Peach Day display the fruit’s significant settler history in the area, dating back to the development of irrigation systems in the Grand Valley during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Numerous peach orchard establishments led to the Mesa area’s status as a highly concentrated peach district.

The Harvest depicts a couple in the foreground harvesting a peach crop. On the couple’s sides, Ronnebeck represents episodes of western settler and Native history. On the left, settlers move into the area with their horses. On the right, Ute people leave as settlers force them out into the painting’s background featuring Grand Junction’s mesas. As such, The Harvest is characteristic of New Deal-era TSFA murals. Most of them did not choose to focus on the Great Depression or generalized art focusing on universal features. Instead, paintings like The Harvest chose to focus on thriving local industries and impactful regional histories.

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Polly Duncan’s Cattle Round-Up, added to the Winnemucca Main Post Office as a part of its 1940 renovation project, provides a model example of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project and its goals. Constructed in 1921 by James A. Wetmore, the Neo-Classical Winnemucca Main Post Office was the original home of Cattle Round-Up and was the first federally constructed post office in the northern Nevada town. Today, Cattle Round-Up can be viewed in the city’s new post office building located on Hanson Street.      Polly Duncan, a Denver-based artist, completed the mural in 1942 under the Federal Works Agency Section of Fine Arts. Duncan worked in the 1930s under the mentorship of established Coloradan muralist Frank Mechau, who highlighted the beauty of natural western landscapes in his works. Accompanied by a collective of other young artists, she lived in a cottage located in Redstone, Colorado. She assisted Mechau on his own artistic endeavors during the winter of 1936.  Only one of three WPA murals in Nevada, the oil-on-canvas work depicts several cowboys in the foreground as they herd Hereford cows into a shed. In the background, the rest of the herd can be seen against the backdrop of the Nevada landscape with its expansive fields, reflecting the area’s significant local history in cattle ranching.  Emigrants first brought the cattle into the area during the 1840s on the Applegate and California trails, where groups founded cattle ranches in the 1850s. The vastness of the Humboldt River Valley landscape, with plenty of space for grazing, made the area a desirable location to raise cattle, and by the 1870s, the industry was thriving with the help of the Central Pacific Railroad’s shipping capabilities. The Hereford cattle depicted in Duncan’s mural were a particularly popular choice of livestock in 1890s Winnemucca for their faster maturation, which in turn enabled greater profits.    The mural is a common example of the type of artwork produced under the Section of Fine Arts-Federal Works Agency and represented the federal government’s goal to provide aid to local communities through employing artists to depict optimistic American images. Indeed, the New Deal-era murals did not typically portray the Great Depression’s difficulties or create generalized images of a geographic American identity. Rather, they often represented local communities. As such, the mural reflects the goals of building American cultural identity in the Intermountain West and democratizing American art as everyday people were able to interact with the image on their regular visits to the post office. 

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Nestled in the Black Canyon, the Hoover Dam helps control the Colorado River’s flooding cycle that once devastated nearby communities. Construction started in 1931 and finished in 1935. 21,000 individuals worked on the monumental project and just under 100 individuals died from the dangerous working conditions. In order to authorize building the dam, the states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada had to decide how to divide water rights along the Colorado River between themselves and Mexico. Ultimately, the Hoover Dam is not just an engineering marvel of American ingenuity but also a display of states working in union to overcome a shared problem.  Before the Public Works Administration could begin construction, they needed labor. Would-be construction laborers flocked to Las Vegas for the chance to work on the construction of the dam. The project took place during the Great Depression and, although it was authorized under Herbert Hoover’s presidency, was a symbol of the public works projects that President Franklin Roosevelt used to put Americans back to work. The project was not without risks and conflict. In August of 1931, the workers at the Hoover Dam went on strike. Their complaint was against unsafe working conditions. Individuals toiled in tunnels that could reach up to 140 degrees, which was made worse by Las Vegas’s heat. In July, the average high of the day hovered at about 106 degrees. There were also casualties from the unsafe conditions, such as workers falling from heights of up to 800 feet. Construction also kicked up dust and produced carbon monoxide. Both are dangerous, with carbon monoxide being potentially deadly. Despite these dangers, sufficient labor remained. There were enough workers that Boulder City was created in order to provide closer living quarters to the worksite.  The spectacle of the enormous structure has drawn tourists since before it was even finished. Tourists began visiting the dam before its completion, leading the team to construct an observation deck in order to keep visitors away from the dangerous worksite. Today, around 7 million individuals visit the dam itself while around 10 million individuals visit the lake created by the dam, named Lake Mead. At the time it was the largest dam in the world, and while others have eclipsed it in size, in the United States it remains the tallest dam, and Lake Mead the largest lake created by a dam.

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