Thursday, March 20, 2014

Forrest Kennington

Mormon settlers helped to make Wyoming a state

Published: Saturday, May 26, 1990
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A good portion of Wyoming's first tentative steps toward statehood - which was achieved July 10, 1890 - were taken by early Latter-day Saints who established colonies, constructed roads, dug irrigation canals and helped build railroads in what was then an untamed frontier.
The 39 Church members who were called in October 1853 to build a permanent settlement near Fort Bridger were no strangers to Wyoming. Mormon pioneers had traversed Wyoming's plains and hills ever since 1847, the year the first Latter-day Saints entered the Salt Lake Valley. Fort Bridger was then a trade and supply center for western bound pioneers, including Brigham Young and his fellow travelers.When the 1853 group of colonists from the Salt Lake Valley arrived at Fort Bridger, they found the place already occupied by some mountain men. The LDS colonists moved on about 12 miles southwest and established a colony that became known as Fort Supply. Brigham Young purchased Fort Bridger in 1855. When Col. Albert Sidney Johnston led a contingent of the U.S. Army against Utah, the saints abandoned Fort Supply and Fort Bridger.
LDS colonizers made significant contributions to Wyoming's growth in the 1880s when they settled the Salt River Valley - later named Star Valley - in western Wyoming. (Star Valley actually consists of two small valleys united by a narrow mountain pass. Two stakes and 14 wards are organized in the communities of Freedom, Etna, Thayne, Bedford, Grover, Afton, Osmond, Fairview, Smoot and Auburn.)
The area today is still predominantly LDS, and many of its older residents recall the history of the pastoral valley as if they had experienced it first hand. "I grew up hearing my father and my uncles tell stories about this valley," said Forest Kennington, a member of the Afton Wyoming Stake.
His grandparents, William Henry and Elizabeth Ann Lee Bracken Kennington, were among early settlers who endured Wyoming's harsh winters to help establish a community of saints in western Wyoming. To them came the sad distinction of being the first Mormon settlers who buried a child in Afton; he died in 1887.
"Star Valley wasn't an unknown quantity," said Kennington. "Trappers had been here for 50 or 60 years before the Mormon colonists came in. The Lander Trail, a cutoff of the Oregon Trail, passed through here.
"In 1877, Moses Thatcher and Bishop William Preston visited this valley. It was vacant except for a lot of Shoshone willow houses. In 1878, several apostles visited the valley, and Brigham Young Jr. dedicated it by prayer as a gathering place for the saints. The name was changed from Salt River Valley to Star Valley because Moses Thatcher said it was a star among valleys."
Kennington describes himself as a lifelong historian, and a collector of stories and artifacts. Many of his stories are preserved in a book he wrote, Salt River, the First Hundred Years. His affinity for Star Valley is summed up in the book's final lines:
"We are often asked if anything historically important happened here. To many, contention and conflict make the news and then the history from the news. It is to the everlasting credit of the people of this area, both red and white, that this western Wyoming and eastern Idaho could go through all phases of frontier development, exploration, fur trade, immigrant travel, displacement of the Indians, cattle drives and settlement without more confrontations. . . . The history of Star Valley is the story of a determined and resourceful people making a home for themselves in a harsh but beautiful valley."
The Big Horn Basin is another part of Wyoming in which Latter-day Saints made significant contributions. The colonization of this area differed from other Mormon colonization efforts in that it was Wyoming's governor who requested that the Latter-day Saints come to his state. Just 10 years after Wyoming achieved statehood, Gov. DeForrest Richards visited President Lorenzo Snow, asking that a colony of Mormons be sent into the Big Horn Basin to assist in colonizing northern Wyoming.
Today, the Big Horn Basin has three stakes and 21 wards in Burlington, Cody, Meeteetse, Otto, Powell, Byron, Cowley, Lovell, Basin, Greybull, Ten Sleep, Thermopolis and Worland.
President Snow appointed Abraham O. Woodruff of the Council of the Twelve to take charge of what became the Big Horn Basin Colonization Company. The colonists' primary task was to dig a 37-mile-long canal that would be large enough to carry water to irrigate 1,200-1,500 acres of land.
"It will take a united effort to perform this gigantic task, for we are few in number," Smoot told the colonists. "I urge you to keep the Word of Wisdom, pay your tithes and offerings. Do not profane the name of the Deity. Be honest with all men. Honor the Sabbath Day, and if you do these things, this will be a land of Zion unto you and your children and children's children throughout the generations that are to come. And that you may be united, I now, as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, call each and all of you upon a mission to help build up this country, and if you will do this, the Lord will bless you forever."
Wyoming today has 51,000 members in 16 stakes.

Albert William Macbeth

Shuttle Probe Zeros In On Who Knew What And When

February 27, 1986|By Michael Tackett, Chicago Tribune.
 -- Jan. 27, 1 p.m.: Boyd Brinton, Morton Thiokol Inc. director of shuttle engineering and its representative at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., places a phone call to Morton Thiokol officials in Utah asking whether the 18-degree overnight temperature at the Kennedy Space Center caused concerns about the solid rocket motor. Brinton passes along the information about the concern about cold to Morton Thiokol engineers William Macbeth, Arnold Thompson and Charles Saderholm.
-- 2:30 p.m.: At Morton Thiokol, a meeting is held in Ebeling`s office to discuss the effects of cold weather on the solid fuel boosters` O-ring seals, which have been a problem for years and which, it is feared by some engineers, do not perform well at low temperatures. Attending the meeting are Ebeling, Macbeth, staff scientist Roger Boisjoly, Ketner, and Thompson and engineers Jerry Burn and Gregory Gorman and Russell.

http://books.google.com/books?id=-nBtoxSZAMoC&pg=PA301&lpg=PA301&dq=Bill+Macbeth+thiokol&source=bl&ots=n0G6_-F0Mq&sig=f68TI7PKMrh5bAFK_-WVLcXu5pQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AwwrU5jmKI2AoQTqyoGgCQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Bill%20Macbeth%20thiokol&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?id=A3REsJuW2yEC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=Bill+Macbeth+thiokol&source=bl&ots=G9MJaEIgYk&sig=mUOSrde7YbmJGnSTzeHzuREPFuk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AwwrU5jmKI2AoQTqyoGgCQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Bill%20Macbeth%20thiokol&f=false 
http://graduateinstitute.ch/files/live/sites/iheid/files/sites/mia/users/Rachelle_Cloutier/public/Hashemi%20Decision%20Making%20and%20Leadership%20in%20Crisis%20Situations/Case%20-%20Challenger%20A.pdf

http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/Role%20Morality.pdf
As Thiokol's Bill Macbeth put it, "...when you get that kind of an impasse, that's the time management has to then make a decision.  They've heard all of the evidence.  There was no new evidence coming in, no new data being brought up, no new thinking, no new twists being put on it from our previous position, and we were just rehashing.  And so Mr. Mason then said, "Well, it's time to make a management decision, We're just spinning our wheels."

http://www.irgc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boin-and-Van-Eeten-PMR-2013.pdf
 Before the fateful flight of Challenger, a few Thiokol engineers suspected that the
predicted cold January weather (abnormally cold for Florida) could pose a problem to
the O-rings. They were unable, however, to provide a compelling rationale for their
intuition. In their rush to produce one on the eve of the launch, the Thiokol engineers
committed the ultimate sin of presenting aflawedrationale to the NASA engineers. The
NASA people – who had always been considered the more conservative group – were
‘appalled’ with the line of argumentation coming from Utah. The Thiokol engineers
realized their mistakes and ended up voting for launching even though their worries
remained. This is how a Thiokol engineer and a NASA engineer described what
happened (Vaughan, 1996: 302, 307):
I don’t believe they did a real convincing job of presenting their data […] The Thiokol guys even had a
chart in there that says temperature of the O-ring is not the only parameter controlling blow-by. In other
words, they’re not coming in with a real firm statement. They’re saying there’s other factors. They did
have a lot of conflicting data in there. (Marshall’s Ben Powers who agreed with the Thiokol
recommendation)
I recognized that it was not a strong technical position [to recommend against launching], but yes, I
basically supported that position. I had become very concerned during the presentation, however, when
one of the [Thiokol] people seemed to indicate […] that he had forgotten or didn’t know about one of
the recent warm temperature firings that also had a problem […] And so it began, to my way of
thinking, to really weaken our conclusions and recommendations. And I was already wishy-washy. And
that one [chart] really hit me home when I began to think, gosh, you haven’t really thought this out as
thoroughly as you should have. (Thiokol’s Bill Macbeth)

The analysis suggests that NASA’s safety structure trumped sense-making capacities.
NASA culture had no room for arguments that violate basic engineering logic. It could
not handle ‘feelings’ or ‘doubts’ that were not supported by hard data. This was the
entrenched norm that everybody in NASA knew and abided by – this was the way it
had been done during the Apollo years.
In hindsight, it is easy to argue – as the Rogers commission did – that the doubts of
respected engineers should suffice to snuff out the problem, to experiment and test,
until safety can be proven. During the Apollo years, however, NASA had learned that
this does not work with engineers: they will tinker, test and experiment forever (for
they know that they can never prove the safety of an experimental space craft). The
system in place had served NASA well: no astronauts had been lost in space until the
Challenger explosion.

http://people.morrisville.edu/~galuskwj/naked_launch.pdf
Other participants, familiar with Hardy, and with the cut and thrust
of these sorts of debates, felt that there was nothing unusual about
Marshall's response. As Thiokol's Bill Macbeth said:
No, it certainly wasn't out of charactcr for George Hardy. George
Hardy and Larry Mulloy had difference in language, but basically
the same comment coming back, Ithey] were indicating to us that
they didn't agree with our technical assessment because we had
slanted it and had not been open to all the available information . . .
I felt that what they were telling us is that they had remembered
some of the other behavior and presentations that we had made and
they didn't feel that we had really considered it carefully, that we
had slanted our presentation. And I felt embarrassed and
uncomfortable by that coming from a customer. I felt that as a
technical manager I should have been smart enough to think of that,
and I hadn't.

http://books.google.com/books?id=-nBtoxSZAMoC&pg=PA496&lpg=PA496&dq=william+Macbeth+thiokol&source=bl&ots=n0G6_-F1Mu&sig=QRe6Cc0WEZoeX7cfzN3QFXlG-dM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=awwrU_aWO4bioAS3jYHwAw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=william%20Macbeth%20&f=false












http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1appa.htm

Interviews of January 27, 1986 Teleconference (8:15 PM EST) Participants
.
Ben Powers
John Schell
William Macbeth
Jerry E Mason
Frank Adams
Keith Coates
Brian Russell
Robert Lund
Larry Wear
George Hardy
Jack Kapp
Joseph Kilminster
James Smith
Jud Lovingood
Ron Ebeling
Roger Boisjoly
Boyd Brinton
Jack Buchanan
Calvin Wiggins
Arnold Thompson
Robert Schwinghamer
Allan McDonald
Larry Sayer
Jerry Peoples
William Reihl
Carver Kennedy
Joel Maw
James Kingsbury
Wayne Littles
Cecil Houston
Kyle Speas
John Q Miller
Lawrence Mulloy
Jerry Burn
John McCarty
Stanley Reinartz
Don Ketner