In Memoriam: Beverly Beeton
Beverly Beeton
February 18, 1939 - August 27, 2020
Compiled by R. Bruce Parham, Secretary, Cook Inlet Historical Society, Anchorage, AK
The Cook Inlet Historical Society is mourning the passing of our longtime former Board member, Beverly “Bev” Beeton, who passed away on August 27, 2020 in Seattle, Washington, after suffering a stroke. She was 82 years old.
Beverly had been a member of the Cook Inlet Historical Society Board for over fifteen years, 1996-2010. She served twelve years on the Mayor’s Building Committee, which was formed by Mayor Rick Mystrom to advise and make recommendations to the mayor for the expansion and governance of the Anchorage Museum from initial planning to the opening of an 80,000 square-foot expansion in 2009. The major 2009 expansion of the Anchorage Museum with art, history and science galleries includes one with objects from the Smithsonian Institution. She was instrumental in raising private donations throughout the Anchorage community in support of the Museum. Beverly was also a member of the Anchorage Museum Association Board.
In 2008, Beverly arranged the donation of the Cornelia Templeton Jewett Hatcher Papers, 1867-1953, and a Sydney Laurence painting of the Hatcher Relay Station in the Talkeetna Mountains to the Anchorage Museum. Cornelia came to Alaska and married quartz gold prospector and miner Robert Lee Hatcher. Cornelia went on to lead Progressive Era reforms in Alaska for women and prohibition of liquor.
Beverly was born on February 18, 1939 to Thain Joseph and Florence Hatch Beeton in Brigham City, Box Elder County, Utah, but spent her early life in Deweyville. She grew up on the family ranch in rural Northern Utah, and rode and drove double teams of horses beginning when she was a small child. Beverly came from a long line of teamsters, who bought Camp Floyd wagons, horses, and oxen to haul farm produce to miners in Montana. Her ancestors were of English, German, Danish, and Irish descent. Most migrated to the United States as Mormon immigrants around the time of the American Civil War and settled in Utah.
Beverly graduated from Bear River High School, Tremonton, Utah, in 1957. She served as business manager of the school newspaper, The Searchlight, judged as one of the top nine papers of five hundred to seven hundred papers by the National Scholastic Press Association. She was married and divorced twice, with no children. At age nineteen, she married Robert Bruce Cottle, a jazz musician who joined the United States Air Force when he received his draft notice. She went to Weber State College (now Weber State University) in Ogden on a college scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in history and English in 1968. In her thirties, Beverly married Dieter Wolf, a German physicist.
In 1976, Beverly obtained a PhD in social and intellectual history from the University of Utah. She is best known to western U.S. historians for the first of her three books, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869-1896 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), which is based on her PhD dissertation. This book was the first volume to explore the history of woman suffrage in the American West, with coverage on the Rocky Mountain states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. In addition, she co-edited The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857-1858 (Salt Lake City, UT: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1977), the seventh volume in the Utah, the Mormons, and the West series. In 1995, she was a contributor to One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), the companion book to the PBS documentary of the same name. She published articles in the American Indian Quarterly, Hayes Historical Journal: A Journal of the Gilded Age, Journal of the West, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, The Paystreak: The Newsletter of the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Foundation, and Utah Historical Quarterly on women’s rights and temperance, woman suffrage, and Alaska and Utah history.
Beverly served as a university administrator at four universities in Utah, Illinois, and Alaska. She worked at the University of Utah from 1972 to 1978 as an historian and assistant to the vice president of academic affairs. In 1977, she was a consultant for Time-Life Books, New York, NY. In 1983, she moved to University Park, Illinois, to accept an appointment as Governor State University’s executive assistant to the president. In 1983, Beverly moved to Juneau to become the associate provost and vice president of academic affairs at the University of Alaska, Southeast. From 1986-1993, she was a commissioner for the Commission on Colleges of the Northwest Accreditation Association, evaluating universities for accreditation. In 1988, Beverly moved to Anchorage for what would be her final assignment as a university administrator and historian, as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Alaska Anchorage. In 1997, she left this post to pursue her longstanding academic interest in American history.
Beverly was a tireless historian for Alaska, even after she moved to Seattle in 2010. She lectured extensively on the role of women in Alaska, prohibition, prostitution, and the 1918 influenza pandemic. On March 4, 2013, Beverly gave a presentation, “Members and Accomplishments of the First Territorial Legislature, Including Woman’s Suffrage--1913,” to the Alaska Legislative Centennial Commission public event in Juneau (On March 21, 1913, Governor Walter E. Clark signed the first act passed by the First Territorial Legislature, the bill granting women the right to vote in Alaska). On November 30, 2018, she was in Anchorage (on the 14th floor of the Hotel Captain Cook), and experienced “a hell of a buckling.” She had been invited to help give a presentation to the Alaska Bar Association on the “Bone Dry” prohibition in Alaska, 1918-1934. More recently, she worked with the Alaska State Museum in Juneau to create suffrage-related exhibits to travel to museums, libraries, and archives around Alaska. She assisted the City of Wasilla Museum with their exhibit on Robert and Cornelia Hatcher. Beverly gave two talks for the Cook Inlet Historical Society, “Hatcher Mines and Alaska Before Statehood” (2009) and “Alaska Women Got the Vote in 1913: ‘But They Weren’t Unsexed & Didn’t Neglect Wifely Duties’“ (2019). She also gave presentations to the Alaska Center for the Book, Alaska Historical Society, Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Foundation, Alaska Public Lands Information Center, Alaska State Museum, Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame, Anchorage Museum, League of Women Voters of Anchorage, League of Women Voters of Tanana Valley, and Museums Alaska, among others.
Beverly was a member of the National Advisory Board, Women of the West Museum, in Boulder, CO. She was also a member of the Western History Association, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Pacific Northwest Historians Guild, Alaska Historical Commission, and Commonwealth North.
At the time of her death, she was finalizing a book on the social history of Alaska during the Progressive Era. The timing of her death was almost exactly one hundred years after thirty-six states ratified the 19th Amendment (August 18, 1920) and its adoption (August 26, 1920) was certified.
Beverly was preceded in death by her parents, and one brother, Rodney Joseph Beeton. She is survived by her Beeton and Hatch nieces, nephews, and cousins, of Seattle, Washington, and Box Elder County, Utah. No service or burial will be held; she donated her body to medical research at the University of Washington.
Bibliography
Books
“A Feminist among the Mormons: Charlotte Ives Cobb Godbe Kirby.” In Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896, ed. Carol Cornwall Madsen, 137-149. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997.
The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857-1858, co-editor, Ray R. Canning. Salt Lake City, UT: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1977.
“How the West was Won for Woman Suffrage.” In One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, 99-116. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995.
“Woman Suffrage in Utah.” In Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896, ed. Carol Cornwall Madsen, 116-136. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997.
Women Vote in the West: The Western Suffrage Movement, 1869-1896. New York: Garland Publishing, 1986.
Articles
“A Feminist Among the Mormons: Charlotte Ives Cobb Godbe Kirby.” Utah Historical Quarterly 59, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 22-51.
Beeton, Beverly, and G. Thomas Edwards. "Susan B. Anthony’s Woman Suffrage Crusade in the American West.” Journal of the West 21, no. 2 (1982): 5-15.
“The Hayes Administration and the Woman Question.” Hayes Historical Journal: A Journal of the Gilded Age 2, no. 1 (Spring 1978); 52-56.
“I am an American Woman”: Charlotte Ives Cobb Godbe Kirby.” Journal of the West, 27, no. 2 (April 1988): 13-19.
“James Harvey Simpson in the Great Basin.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 28, no. 1 (January 1978): 28-43.
“Robert Lee Hatcher (1867-1950.” The Paystreak: The Newsletter of the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Foundation 11, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 17-23.
“Teach Them to Till the Soil: An Experiment with Indian Farms, 1850-1862.” American Indian Quarterly, 3, no. 4 (Winter 1977-1978): 299-320.
“Woman Suffrage in Territorial Utah.” Utah Historical Quarterly, 46, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 100-120.
Book Reviews
“The American Search for Woman.” Journal of American History 63, no. 4 (March 1977): 1051-53.
“Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundation of Female Emancipation.” American Historical Review 86, no. 5 (1981): 1154.
“Frontiersmen before Leatherstockings.” Markham Review 7 (Fall 1977): 1-5.
“Frontierswomen: The Iowa Experience.” American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (1982): 1172-73.
“A Lady’s Experiences in the Wild West in 1883.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 29, no. 2 (1979): 71-72.
“The Letters of Jessie Benton Fremont.” Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (1994): 1466-67.
"Letters of Long Ago. Utah, the Mormons, and the West Series, no. 2." Utah Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 296-98.
“The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier.” Utah Historical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 102-03.
“A Timeless Affair: The Life of Anita McCormick Blaine.” Journal of American History 67, no. 2 (1980): 442-44.
“Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 33, no. 4 (1983): 67.
“Women in the West.” Journal of the West 21, no. 2 (April 1982): 3-88.
Websites
“Cornelia Hatcher (1867-unknown).” Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame. www.alaskawomenshalloffame.org.
“Lena Morrow Lewis (1862-1950).” Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame. www.alaskawomenshalloffame.org.
“Robert Lee Hatcher (1867-1950).” Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Foundation. www.alaskamininghalloffame.org.
“Votes for Women, Woman Suffrage in Alaska: A Resource List,” July 2020, with R. Bruce Parham. Alaska Historical Society. www.alaskahistoricalsociety.org.