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Sunday, July 28, 2024

This is the Place XII: Joseph Smith Finally Gets a Building

 Previously: The Hidden History of Music



Welcome readers to part twelve of my current series called "This is the Place.” In this post, I'll be covering Utah's Classy Lady (The Hotel Utah, later changed to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building). 

Of all the many meaningless jobs I perform to eke out a living (if you can call it that), the coveted role of Sprinkler Contractor is my all-time favorite. I mean, what's not to like about sweating profusely in 90 degree weather, arduously digging through Idaho river rock, cloddy dirt, hard clay, and sandy loam? 

OK so maybe it's not a coveted job after all (except for the fact that it keeps you in shape and provides a nice farmer's tan). 

I've been in the sprinkler business for 18 years, and as of late I've learned that there are a lot of parallels between underground sprinklers and history. Installing a new system on a virgin lawn is no sweat, a piece of cake really. Once the water stub out is ready and the volume is measured all you have to do is layout the piping, valves, and heads. We use a Ditchwitch to pull the poly pipe right through the ground, and once the job has been pulled, hand shoveling only has to be performed directly over the pipe, as the hydraulic shank on the pipe puller does a great job of softening the dirt. 

Installing a new sprinkler system is actually quite enjoyable to me, there is nothing stressful about it. I get plenty of sunshine and exercise, and even get to make a few bucks on the side. I get to layout the heads, pipes, manifolds, valves and wire exactly as I want them. It's kind of like writing history. Everything is put into a neat and predictable pattern, and because I won the bid for the job, I get to decide what patterns and layouts I want to use.

My first year in the sprinkler business consisted of only installing new systems. It was great fun, and I actually made some decent money. The year was 2006, but I was a new contractor with few connections and an unestablished name, and as many of us remember, the crash of 08 was just around the corner. I had to supplement income by working part-time in the summer and full-time during the winter at my dad's cabinet shop, and I had to add a new division to my fledgling business: sprinkler repair.

Sprinkler repair was a whole new ball game. It required sorting through some other contractor's (or do-it-yourselfer-homeowner's) old design. I literally had to try to get into the head of a guy that to me might as well have been a ghost. Even if the homeowner remembered who put in the system the chances of me getting ahold of him or him remembering what he did was slim to none. Once pipes are in the ground, it's anybody's guess as to which way they run.

Sometimes, on really gnarly repairs, it requires randomly digging for hours through extremely hard ground, aimlessly searching for where the problem is. When grass is not watered in Idaho, the combination of dead roots and rocky ground make digging next to impossible, always requiring a pick axe to soften things up. It can take hours to dig a small trench extending only a few feet. 

Even when there is leak in a pipe it can be tricky to find. Water follows the path of least resistance, and sometimes where the water comes up in the grass is several feet or even yards away from where the leak is. I remember a job in St. Anthony that had several leaks in an old pipe. The top of the lawn was so infused with rock that the water would stay under the grass and create a waterbed effect that stretched out hundreds of square feet in all directions. Finding the location of the leak took hours of digging up large swaths of grass, and after successfully patching the leak, I was drenched in mud and sweat. 

Succeeding at sprinkler repair requires perseverance and relentlessness. Once you start the job, you have to put your head down and dig with everything you’ve got. If you give up before the problem is fixed, you’ve wasted your customer’s time and won’t get paid.

Finding the problem may require digging trench after trench, only to refill each one and start again, repeating the process over and over, becoming exhausted and encumbered with mud, sweat, and frustration - until finally you find the fitting that’s causing the problem. 

And you think to yourself: “it was there all along, just laughing at me, taunting me, hiding just below my feet.” The ground is, after all, the perfect place to hide a troublesome anomaly. 

The historian, like the sprinkler repairman, should also be relentless. The pursuit of history should be an exhaustive effort to uncover absolute truth, leaving no stone unturned, and no available record unexamined. A historian should be a digger, incessantly and obsessively analyzing every word of every obscure book, every source document, and every "official" record.

The historian should also be dauntless, never fearing to search into the darkest abyss for even a sliver of truth, caring not what peers say or agree upon, and putting aside the comforts of a distinguished career. Unlike the sprinkler technician, the historian should not even labor for money, but only for the love of truth, becoming like a little child, questioning everything, and being open to all possibilities. 

Real history, like an old underground sprinkler system, is a jumbled mess, with pipes running every direction, failing fittings causing a myriad of leaks, old wires and solenoids not firing, pressure to the heads weakening, and the mother board on the control panel shorting out. An honest historian, using his proverbial shovel, should be willing to dig up the entire landscape to reveal every leak, digging trench after trench exposing every anomaly, tracing every wire to its short, measuring the water flow at every valve, and discovering which sprinkler heads are defective and need replaced. 

Let's face it, no rational thinking person wants to be a sprinkler repairman, spending hours in intense heat digging randomly through the hard ground searching for what might be the problem. Similarly, no historian wants to be labeled as "fringe", researching conspiracies or digging into old books that might cast an alternative view on what we've been told our history is. Most will stay within the carnal security of the mainstream, enjoying comfy careers and peer recognition while teaching at establishment institutions, substituting vain ambition for academic honesty. 

Very few historians want to dig into the ground to find the real truth, searching vigorously for what's hiding in obscurity and crying from the dust just under our feet, willing to get their hands dirty and put themselves at the risk of becoming unpopular. 

Finding the truth sometimes requires putting your hands directly into the muck and digging around profusely just to find a single clue, a process that has to repeated over and over again in order to form even a cursory picture of what happened in our past. It's a life-long journey, and we should all be our own historians, taking no one at their word, analyzing and evaluating every historical work we come across. 

I wanted to be history professor, but I dropped out of college twice (the second time in 2021), only a few credits away from obtaining a bachelors in history. I couldn't do it. I couldn't listen to the mainstream garbage combined with neo-liberalism and creeping wokism at a school that was once conservative. 

Over twenty years ago I had a professor at Rick's College that I'll never forget, his mind was not encumbered by the left/right paradigm, and he valued logical thinking over emotional talking points. The class was World Civilization, and we read Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984 in the same semester. We studied collectivism in all its forms: communism, socialism, and fascism. He opened my young mind, and I'll always be grateful for that. No other professor that came after compared, and I soon grew impatient with all the establishment pap I was digesting from all the others. 

The point I'm making here is that you, the reader, should never take my word for granted, or the word of anyone else. Do your own research, be your own historian, become a digger, learn to become analytical, learn to avoid logical fallacies, and take everything to the Lord for confirmation. He, after all, is the only source of truth in this world. And He has promised that there will come a day when He will "reveal... hidden things which no man knows." And always remember, compared to Him, none of us know anything.

And with that introduction, let's dive into the Hotel Utah, now known as the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. 

Utah's Classy Lady: The Hotel Utah (Built in 2 years; 1909-1911)



As the story goes, in April of 1909 a group of diverse businessmen met at the Deseret National Bank to discuss plans to construct a high end hotel on the northeast (remember the Masonic significance of northeast?) corner of Main and South Temple streets. All the major Utah religions were represented: Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and of course, the Mormons. Joseph F. Smith, Church president at the time, together with apostle Heber J. Grant spearheaded the deal, and formed a plan to tear down the "old" tithing house and build a $2 million luxurious hotel.

Leonard Arrington, in a book entitled The Hotel, lays out the financial arrangement as follows: the LDS Church, owner of the lot, would invest half a million, the other businessmen representing various religious groups would come up with another half million, and bonds would be issued to cover the remaining $1 million. The site, we are told, had been the location of the old adobe Church Mint, where Brigham Young minted coins with gold brought from California during the late 1840's. The mint was replaced in the 1850's by the three-story tithing house, which we are told was still around in 1909 when President Smith was planning to build the 10-story hotel.

Like many of the old world edifices we have researched in this blog series, the LDS Church was the majority shareholder of the Hotel Utah. Of the 10,000 shares valued at $100 per share, Joseph F. Smith, acting as Trustee-in-Trust for the Church, held 3,620 of them, while Heber J. Grant, through enterprises he personally owned, purchased 500 shares. Zion and Deseret banks jointly held 250 shares, ZCMI (a Church-owned cooperative) held 750 shares, The Deseret News held another 250 shares, and the Clayton Investment company, which I wrote about here, held another 250 shares.

The First Presidency, consisting of Joseph F. Smith, Anthon H. Lund, and John R. Winder, privately held 200 shares between them. And right away, with First Counselor Winder, we get our first clue that the Hotel Utah was indeed an old world building. In a documentary entitled Utah's White Palace: The Legacy of Hotel Utah, an old familiar pattern is revealed. John R. Winder, we are told, had managed the interior work of the Salt Lake Temple, and this prior experience in construction qualified him to chair the building commission for the Hotel Utah. We are told that Winder oversaw the construction of the hotel up until his death on March 21 of 1910, a year before the building was completed.

What is interesting about this pattern is that it is usually the architects that are said to die before (usually a year before) seeing the old world buildings completed, but here the pattern shifts to a man who, at 89 years old no less, was overseeing the construction of this huge project while simultaneously serving in the First Presidency of the LDS Church. Ask yourselves readers, what 89 year-old could handle the stress of serving in both capacities? According to the official story, this was a massive building project, touting the Hotel Utah as one of the largest and most luxurious hotels west of the Mississippi. 

This to me is a nod from the group controlling these narratives that men leading the LDS Church were the original founders of this building.

As the story goes, the architectural firm awarded the contract for designing the building was Parkinson and Bergstrom. This partnership was formed in 1905 and lasted until 1915. John Parkinson and his son Donald were said to have designed some of L.A.'s most iconic (old world) buildings, such as the Memorial Coliseum and L.A. City Hall. G. Edwin Bergstrom, who terminated the partnership with Parkinson in 1915, went on, we are told, to design the Pentagon, which was built in only two years, from 1941-1943. The Pentagon is in my opinion a gigantic old world star fort, which occupies over 30 acres of land, and is the world's second largest building, with floor space spanning more than 6.5 million square feet.

Tell me dear readers, how did we build the massive Pentagon complex, with limited resources during a major world war, and in only two years? 

There is a consensus among many Tartarian researchers that our modern society didn't do much building until after the 1950s. This would mean that even the Empire State Building might be Tartarian, and when you look into its narrative this makes a lot of sense, because the 102-story structure was said to be built in only one year, during the Great Depression no less, from 1930 to 1931. Have a look at the Empire State Building and ask yourself if that seems feasible, and oh ya, pay no attention to the dirigible refueling at the top. Nothin' to see here folks:



The excavation for the foundation of the Hotel Utah was said to be performed by the contractors Raleigh and Harmon in the summer of 1909 (most of the other buildings I've blogged about were said to have been excavated during the dead of winter). According to Leonard Arrington, the basement of the hotel was excavated using horse-drawn wagons. Surprisingly, there is a photo of the undertaking, shown below:


As you can see, there doesn't appear to much excavating going on at all. Why would they use men with shovels and pick axes and wagons to haul off material when steam shovels were also said to be in use at this time in history? This photo isn't the greatest quality, but if you can zoom in and look around you'll notice that all the wagons are empty, totally devoid of dirt. It looks like just a bunch of horses standing around with a few men leaning over a shovel. 

Now focus your eyes on the anomaly in the lower right-hand corner. It appears to be the entrance to some underground tunnel or opening. Also notice the circle of men in the upper left-hand corner, digging as if they are looking for something. To me, this photo looks much more like an archeological excavation rather than digging a building foundation, with wagons standing by to haul not dirt, but artifacts. From what we know about early 20th century photography, it would have been very easy to superimpose the buildings in the background over this archeological dig site.

Interestingly, one of the definitions for the word excavation is "the act of removing earth that is covering very old objects buried in the ground in order to discover things about the past." (Cambridge Dictionary)

In the "construction" photo below we see the steel framework of the Hotel Utah:


Typical of these types of old photos, we don't see any construction workers at all. All we see is a small group of well-dressed people in the bottom-left corner acting like they are in a totally different place. And as usual, we see the vanilla skies in the background. 

The steelwork was said to have been performed by the Jones Company, led by front man "Dick" Jones. Apparently, they built the steel frames for the Hotel Utah and the Kearns building at the same time. According to a 1910 edition of the Deseret Evening News, in addition to the buildings mentioned above, the Jones Company was given the contract on "a number of other buildings which will keep the company busy in Salt Lake for at least two years."

That is a lot of steel work to accomplish in a time frame of only two years. I wonder if modern steel companies can knock out ten-story steel frames as fast as their 1910 progenitors? 

Dick Jones was said to have been the son of an old sea captain from San Francisco, and is described in the Desert Evening News article as a kind and benevolent "commander", often working side by side with his men and cheering them on. He was said to have been "a big figure in the building circles of the California metropolis" (a reference to San Francisco). According to the article, Jones was involved in the rebuilding of San Francisco after the great fire and earthquake of 1906, including the re-building of the St. Francis hotel. Supposedly, he also built the "new" Flood building in 1904.

The Flood Building:


The St. Francis Hotel:


As it turns out, Jones came late to the party, because the St. Francis Hotel had been rebuilt multiple times before he ever got his hands on it. In my opinion, the Jones Company link to San Francisco is a nod from the group controlling these narratives that all of these buildings were built by the previous civilization (more details on this later).

The construction history of San Francisco is full of anomalies and impossibilities. It was said to have been built up very quickly by gold miners after the winter of 1848, when the population increased from 1,000 to 25,000. Over the decades between 1850 and 1906 there were several fires that destroyed many stone and brick buildings (because you know, stone and brick are “flammable”) but these were of course rebuilt in record time. For the complete story, and with very compelling evidence for the Old World, I recommend Jon Levi's book below. Click here for the Amazon link.


John gathered some interesting information the St. Francis Hotel:
The St. Francis Hotel was constructed in 1850 in less than a year. The building operated for less than a year when it was destroyed in a fire in 1850. It was rebuilt in one year in 1904, right before the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt after the earthquake, we are told, using the exact same materials. (p. 220)

Scroll back up and take another look at the St. Francis Hotel, do you really think it was possible to build that behemoth structure in less than one year in 1850? And does it make any sense that it would burn down and not be rebuilt until 1904, again in one year? And then rebuilt again, in one year, after the 1906 earthquake, out of its own rubble? 

The Flood Building was also built in only one year, from 1903 to 1904. According to the narrative it survived the great earthquake of 1906. The Deseret Evening News article, which I will quote at length later on in this post, vaguely suggests that Jones built the original steel frame for it. (More on Jones and San Francisco later). 

As with Dick Jones, and many other contractors said to have built (or rebuilt) these old world structures, there is an aura of mysticism and heroism enshrouded into the stories of these men, painting them as benevolent and paternal workers of the impossible, almost as if we have created our own cultural mythology.

We have a tendency to deify historical figures of the past, especially in LDS culture. Although there is nothing wrong with honoring our ancestors and the pioneers who settled the West, perhaps our view of them should be a little more balanced.

For instance, how many Latter-Day Saints acknowledge that the early Saints failed at building the Nauvoo temple in the time frame that the Lord set and were "moved out of their place?" Because of their slothfulness in building the temple, putting it off in order to construct high-end homes and a Masonic lodge, the church (congregation) was rejected by the Lord with their dead. The Lord told them that if they failed in this appointment it would bring cursings, wrath, indignation, and judgments upon their heads. Yet, despite this being written plainly into the LDS version of the Doctrine and Covenants, we celebrate our Mormon pioneers as if they were uber-righteous-super-heroes who built Salt Lake valley up from nothing.

Ironically, Heber C. Kimball admitted in an 1852 General Conference talk that the Latter-Day Saints were nothing but "squatters," occupying empty houses apparently abandoned throughout the Utah territory.

What? Abandoned houses?

Why were there abandoned homes in Utah during this early time period? The Brighamites had only been there for five years. 

Here is what Heber declared in the Tabernacle (most likely the already-existing large Tabernacle that was said to have been built twenty years later):
In the city of Manti, half of the houses are vacant; there are houses enough empty there to accommodate fifty or a hundred families. In Iron County also there are similar advantages...

We shall thus travel back and forth, and live about as much in one place as in another; for the future we shall keep on the move, going to and fro, and shall never be easy; we never want to be, nor that you should, until the kingdom of God prevails over this earth. We will fill up these mountains, take up the land, and, as they used to say in the States, "become squatters," and we will will become thicker on the mountains than the crickets ever were. (Journal of Discourses; Volume 1, pp. 295-96)

Tell me dear readers, whose houses were they occupying? Are we to believe that Utah pioneers traveled to Manti, 124 miles south of Salt Lake City, built houses, and then abandoned them within five years? Kimball declared that "similar advantages" were to be had in Iron County, which is even farther south, over 200 miles away from Salt Lake City.

This makes entirely no sense at all, unless of course there were abandoned buildings and homes left over from a previous civilization that were ripe for the taking.

It's also interesting that Kimball used the word squatter, which literally means "a person who unlawfully occupies an uninhabited building or unused land." Kimball speaks as if this term was bandied about commonly in those days by all Americans, as if it was common to find abandoned homes throughout the country. 

I have to thank Jon Levi for the above reference in the Journal of Discourses. A friend sent it to him and he presented it in this recent video, skip to around 13 minutes for his report on the reference:


Getting back to the Hotel Utah, a structure I definitely believe existed when Brigham and crew rolled into Salt Lake Valley, I found this newspaper photo of the structure "under construction" very interesting:


The man standing just to the left of the crane hook is supposedly "Dick" Jones himself. Notice the other men having that same Charlie Chapman look that we see in scores of other "construction" photos of old buildings. Also notice the date, February 5 of 1910, only 8 months from when ground was supposedly broken for the hotel (According to Arrington, construction began on June 1 of 1909), and the work had already progressed far beyond steel work, yet that's what we're told Jones was doing. 

Again, this doesn't make any sense at all. Also notice that the shape of the building itself looks nothing like the Hotel Utah that we see today. Compared to the photo below the image in the article looks like it is only one wing of the hotel, and a much shorter wing at that:


Again, we have to ask, who builds this way? Who builds an entire finished structure and then adds to the top of it?

Scroll back up to the steel frame photograph that I shared earlier in this post and compare it to the Deseret Evening News photo. You'll notice a glaringly obvious size and shape discrepancy. The steel frame actually looks like the shape of the hotel, the other does not.

These anomalies are easy to find in almost every narrative of old buildings similar to the Hotel Utah. It is impossible for all those involved in writing scripts (whether they are using AI or real people to write them) covering up true history to be completely consistent in their stories. This is the weakness of those who endeavor to cover the earth with lies, they leave breadcrumb clues everywhere they go.

The problem however is that people refuse to question narratives that are just "too big to fail." Small lies are easy to scrutinize, but big lies involving the covering up of true history are much easier to get away with. Adolf Hitler, a master propagandist, actually said the following, and just think about this in reference to this massive cover up of old buildings:

In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. (Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. X, quoted in D. Christian Markham, There are Save Two Churches Only, p. 158, emphasis added)

In the research of old world buildings, there are "traces" of the big lie that can be picked up in every narrative. After you've looked into so many building narratives it becomes like clockwork, finding anomaly after anomaly, distortion after distortion, and flat out lie after lie. 

But who is going to believe it?

Who is going to say, "oh that's interesting, maybe I'll look into it"? No, the first reaction is to think that such a lie is too massive to pull off, and that the pilgrims, the pioneers, the Indians, the mountain men... someone would have said something. Someone would've have said, "Holy shit, there is a massive abandoned building there!"

And as soon as this thought crosses the mind, the theory is put to rest, and the researchers who look into it are labeled as conspiracy quacks.

Yet, which of you was there a century (or two) ago when these buildings were said to have been built? Who actually witnessed it? Anyone now living? No, so we are left to study the records of those who went before us. But how do we know they weren't tampered with, destroyed, or outright fabricated? How can we trust whoever controlled the records to show us the truth? How do we know that they had our best interests at heart and were only concerned with reporting facts? 

Honestly, we don't. If we weren't there ourselves to witness a thing, there is no way of knowing for sure what actually transpired. This, unfortunately, is the state of the world we now reside in, a world covered in gross lies and falsehoods, a world that groans under darkness.

And what has been revealed about human nature is that the natural disposition of almost all men is to abuse power and gratify their vain ambition. The abuse of power and gratifying of ambition are more easily accomplished when the truth is hidden from the masses. This should tell us something about the world we reside in: truth, or things as they really are, were, and will be, is the absolute nemesis of the powers that be. It is the first casualty in the war for our minds, and as you've probably heard many times before, the victors always get to re-write history.

I know many of you believe that a false script for Joseph Smith's supposed practice of polygamy has been written by the LDS Church, manufactured out of whole cloth with zero contemporary evidence. There are some good folks doing some great work on this subject right now, bringing the truth to light and clearing Joseph's, Hyrum's, and Emma's good names. The polygamy narrative is a great example of an organization changing the historical narrative to bolster authority and power that they never received from God. It's a perfect example of the victors (in this case those who took over the organization after the succession crises) re-writing history. 

If you apply this same logic to old world buildings, you find the same pattern repeated. A pattern that I believe repeats in different cycles of creation, or "doing that which has been done on other worlds." I believe that we have been placed in a world that is mostly saturated with lies as a test to see how much we love the truth. Are we content to digest what the victors feed us, or do we long for something more? Can we feel that something is wrong with our narratives, and our we willing to follow the Spirit of Truth into whatever abyss it leads us to?

Sometimes the lies are so obvious that it's actually funny. The image below found in the Deseret Evening News supposedly taken during the winter of 1910 is a ridiculously fake insult to intelligence:


The first giveaway is the vanilla sky and the 3 large smudges in the top-right corner, the second is that the men standing on the car appear to be drawn in with ink. According to the article, the Jones Company is using their crane to hoist up a Hupmobile 150 feet in the air. The article states that the "photograph is an actual reproduction, showing the steel work under construction of the mammoth Hotel Utah..." But hold on a minute, I only see one piece of steel and a few wooden poles, and this is February of 1910, the same month that the Deseret Evening News article I shared earlier showed a photo of a finished wing of the hotel. 

What the hell is going on here? 

In my opinion, nothing at all. No construction whatsoever, because it was already there. Just take a moment and scroll through this gallery of photos of the Hotel Utah and ask yourselves if the cartoonish-like stooges portrayed in the headliner photos above seem capable of this kind of elaborate work:












According to Leonard Arrington, the completed building had consumed the following resources:
As many as 550 men had worked on the building each day. Construction had required 3,700 tons of steel, 3.5 million bricks, 25,000 barrels of cement, 10,000 yards of concrete, and 400,000 square feet of partition tile, with twenty miles of piping to link the network of plumbing and heating. The use of "white" granite and the porcelained pure-white terra-cotta had given the structure one of the most brilliant facades in the nation. (The Hotel, p. 18)

My, my, that's quite a tall order... and in only two years no less... very impressive. 

The Hotel does indeed have a beautiful facade, the terra-cotta glazed brick looking so fresh and clean, it begs the question: where did all those bricks come from, where were they cooked, and how did they manufacture them so quickly?

A Massive Clue From San Francisco

As the story goes, terra-cotta facade finishes were a very popular form of masonry work for building exteriors during the early 19th century, but was completely phased out during the 1920s and 30s. According to a catalogue published in 1888 by the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Co., architectural terra-cotta has been around since the dawn of man and was even used on the Tower of Babel. It is one of the oldest and most durable building materials in the world. It was used by the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians and Assyrians to preserve public records, and is virtually indestructible.

On page 15 of the catalogue mentioned above, there are several examples given of how terra-cotta is more durable than stone, but the following paragraph sums it all up:
For timber will rot, stone, even granite, will disintegrate, iron will oxidize, these and all other materials will succumb to the action of fire, but properly-made and thoroughly-burnt terra-cotta will pass through centuries, and be the last to yield to those influences to which all natural productions must give way--the only material known which is not only absolutely fire-proof, but also, in all architectural employments, practically time-proof and indestructible.

The process of making terra-cotta (a Latin word that literally means "cooked earth") takes about six weeks from start to finish. Aged clay is mixed with "sand or pulverized fired clay" and fired at extremely high temperatures (around 2800 degrees Fahrenheit). After being fired in a kiln the material has to cool for at least a month. If a glaze was applied, as in the case of the Hotel Utah, a clay wash "or aqueous solution of metal salts was brushed or sprayed on the air-dried block before firing." 

Each design on the facade of the Hotel had to be hand carved out of clay before being fired in the kiln. This was a painstaking and tedious process, we are told, and had be performed by a highly skilled artist. Just look at the detail on these perfectly homogenous lions:



As the story goes, the contractor who was awarded the terra-cotta work on the Hotel Utah was Gladding McBean, a company located in Lincoln, California that started out making clay sewer pipe in 1875. Supposedly, the brick for the Hotel came from clay deposits close to the plant in Lincoln, and every piece of the facade was fired in Gladding McBean's kilns and shipped to Utah on train cars. This company is still around today, and the video below offers some interesting details on the process of making terra-cotta. Even today in our modern world, the clay still has to be hand-carved by an artist:


The architectural art of terra-cotta has a strange history in the United States, as we are told that it wasn't used as a building material until 1853, when James Renwich, Esq., a New York architect, suddenly became interested in it. For the next fifty years, buildings with terra-cotta finishes went up all over the country, but during the 1920s the industry turned from building facades to clay wares and "restoration" projects. The entire industry of architectural terra-cotta seemed to vanish overnight. 

An interesting question to ask here is why was the strongest building material known to man only used for such a short time in the United States?

Gladding McBean's factory was located on the path of the transcontinental railroad in between San Francisco and Salt Lake City. They would've had to ship 3.5 million bricks to Salt Lake during a small window of a few months to supply the masonry company (said to have been James Black Masonry) with enough material to finish the job by June of 1911. 

Was this logistically possible? How many bricks could fit on a single train car, how many train cars could a locomotive haul on a single trip? How many men did it take Gladding McBean to sculpt and glaze the intricate clay designs, fire them in the kilns, prepare them for shipping, and load them onto train cars? 

The distance between Salt Lake and Lincoln, Californian is 631 miles, the average train speed in 1910 was between 25-40 miles per hour, which means that each train load would take about 25 hours each way. Also consider that each load of bricks would have to be hand loaded onto wagons at the train station in Salt Lake and delivered to the job site using horses. 

According to some estimates, each train car could hold about 10,000 bricks, and a single locomotive could haul around 20-40 cars depending on how mountainous the terrain was. This means that it would've taken around 20-25 trips to deliver all the bricks to Utah, or at least a few months just to deliver the product. Although this seems feasible, we don't know the capacity of Gladding McBean's kilns, like how many bricks could be fired at one time, or how many artists they had working to produce perfectly sculpted designs simultaneously. If they could only produce and fire say 20,000 bricks at a time, then they would’ve had to wait six weeks in between each wave of bricks, which would put our time line at more like 3 years just to produce the material (this is assuming that Gladding McBean had no other jobs going at the same time).  

Now, we don't know the history of the actual logistics, because we are not given it. The official record says that Gladding McBean was the contractor for the terra-cotta and that is the only information we are given. We don't know what other companies or businessmen were involved in the supply chain to get these bricks to Salt Lake in a timely fashion. We are just expected to believe that it happened in our given timeline. 

Now, we can guess at logistics all day long and get nowhere, because the clues that tell us this building comes from a previous civilization are to be found elsewhere; I believe they are encoded into the link between Salt Lake and San Francisco. Remember, Salt Lake and San Francisco have a lot in common, because, as we are told, they were the two fastest-growing cities in the West, sharing a direct railroad line that was also built in record time during the 1860s.

(Did you know that there is also a "Hotel Utah" in San Francisco? Read about its history here.)

Since 1949, San Francisco was said to have burned down many times with subsequent rebuilding. But in 1906 the mother of all earthquakes struck the city, we are told, and damaged gas lines ignited a myriad of fires that burned down 90% of the city's buildings. These, we are told, were rebuilt in less than two years. I found an old book describing the heroic efforts to rebuild the city involving over 25,000 men. The book was published in the fall of 1906, just six months after the earthquake shook the city. 

I am going to share an excerpt from the book, and I'll let you decide if what is described was feasible. Just think about this logically and logistically. Remember, just to clean up the rubble of 911 at ground zero took a few years, and that was one building, but homeless and destitute workers in San Francisco, using horse-drawn wagons, cleaned up rubble (with picks and crowbars) and rebuilt thousands of stone buildings in just a matter of months. Read the following paragraphs carefully, the narrative reads like a fairy tale:

The vacant lots were cleared and graded, and the foundations of laid buildings in which merchants who had grown old in the city of the past were to make a fresh start in the city to be. Old buildings were raised and stores built underneath [What? How was it possible to raise a building?]...

The removal of debris in the burned districts was at first badly handicapped by the lack of facilities. But one a a time donkey [does this mean literal donkeys?] engines began to puff in the streets; standing walls began to disappear, and tangled steel and iron came to be straightened out. Bunkers were built and spur tacks laid. As early as July [the earthquake struck in April] a hundred cars of debris were moved daily. An army of men from the camps was soon at work among the ruins, clearing bricks (which had a value in rebuilding, if unbroken) and piling them up in neat stacks; loading wagons en route to the bunkers; tearing down with pick and crowbar the stump of walls; breaking up with heavy sledges fallen and useless cast-iron columns...

Wooden buildings of from one to four stories clustered around the frames and shells of the former great office buildings (already under repairs) and here and there appeared the growing skeletons of new steel, stone, and brick structures--the work of the new city. The foundations of new and greater skyscrapers appeared. Many brick buildings reared their splendid walls high above the ruins around. Building operations involving an expenditure of over twenty-five millions, were under way. The streets were crowded with wagons hauling great loads of lumber. Orders for whole trainloads of steel were placed with the manufactories. Carloads of cement were used daily. Six months after the fire, six thousand buildings, which covered half the burned area, had been erected. A new city was rising from the ruins, gradually, with much labor. (A History of the Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco; an Account of the Disaster of April 18, 1906 and its Immediate Results, pp. 184-192, emphasis added)

The Hotel Utah took two years to build, but men living in camps built 6,000 buildings in six months? This is by far the most ridiculous narrative I have ever read. If this doesn't convince you that our history is a complete fraud and fabrication, I'm not sure what else I can say. This story is 100% impossible. This could never happen in the real world. Here are the supposed before and after pictures of the San Francisco earthquake:

1906:


1909:


Now for the connection to Utah. 

In the Deseret Evening News article I shared earlier, published in February of 1910, a story was ran on Dick Jones, the owner of the Jones Company that erected the steel frame of the Hotel Utah, supposedly. Jones was from San Francisco, and the article relates that his company had been busy rebuilding structures in San Francisco lost in the earthquake and fire as follows:

Since the great earthquake and fire in San Francisco the Jones Company has cut a big figure in the building circles of the California metropolis. The great St. Francis hotel, the Flood Building, many of the new structures which have replaced the old in the business district, bear the imprints of the hand and brain of "Dick" Jones and the men behind him. His monuments rear their heads all along Market street, the main business artery. Across the bay at Oakland, in Alameda, Berkeley, San Rafael, Sausalito, in Portland, Or., and in Seattle, the Jones company has left its mark. And it is leaving its mark in Salt Lake, its mark stretched indelibly by the globe-trotting ironworkers who swear by "Dick" Jones because he can always be depended upon to answer the call of one of his "floaters" in distress.

This man named "Dick" seemed to have been able to build massive structures simultaneously all over California. Keep in mind the time line here; Jones rebuilt several large buildings in San Francisco between the years 1906 and 1908, and then had time to erect the Hotel Utah, the Kearns building, and several other unnamed buildings in Salt Lake as claimed by the article. How was this possible for one company to pull off in a matter of 4 years? Just one of the massive steel building frames Jones was said to erect could have taken at least two years. But this man and his crew of "globetrotting ironworkers" can knock out a dozen or more buildings in four years?

Given the ridiculous narrative of the rebuilding of San Francisco in 1906, I'm not sure that Dick Jones even existed. Perhaps he is just an anomaly to explain away all the buildings that our civilization still does not have the technology to build. 

Furthermore, the narrative of rebuilding San Francisco after the 1906 disaster offers a few more clues in some of the names that appear in the story. For instance, one of the city planners said to be most instrumental in coordinating rebuilding efforts was named Daniel Burnham. This name is most interesting. Daniel, the name of the biblical prophet who witnessed his three friends being thrown into a fiery furnace and miraculously spared. Just think about that, three men thrown into a furnace and not burned. And the last name is even more obvious, Burnham. The word burn hiding in plain sight. In my opinion, a nod to the fire narrative to explain away the strange construction histories of thousands of old world buildings.

In the same narrative, we find that one of the buildings spared from the fire was the James C. Flood Mansion. Here is yet another clue. Flood, as in mud-flood, a building was spared with the name flood. What are the storytellers trying to tell us?

How is it that homeless workers living in camps can clean up rubble with hand tools and rebuild 6,000 buildings in six months but it takes our modern society (with supposedly advanced technology) six years to build the One World Trade Center that replaced the twin towers?

Dear readers, none of this narrative makes sense. I'm not claiming to know what happened, and in fact, the more I research the more I discover I don't know. At this point all I do know is something is seriously wrong with our history. And as always, I encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. 

Advanced Tech and a Name Change

The top of the Hotel Utah is adorned with an interesting structure:



Here is an image from google earth. This is about as close as they will let you get to this beehive looking structure, also take notice of all the elaborate terra-cotta detail:


There is no mention of why the beehive top was added to the building, except that it honored the heritage of the Deseret State. But why would builders go through the trouble of adding this expensive decoration? What true purpose did it serve?

My question is this: if this building was truly a product of the previous civilization, was the beehive some kind of advanced tech? Did it resonate with other buildings in Salt Lake that may have been free energy stations (such as the Capitol Building)?

(Click here for a photo gallery of the Hotel Utah showing 43 images. There is an interesting "construction" photo showing various stages of progress, as well as a close-up of the beehive with the Capitol Building in the background. These photos are AVI files and not Jpegs so I can't share them here.)   

As far as the name change, that came, we are told, after extensive remodeling in 1987, when Gordon B. Hinckley looked around one day and noticed that there were a total of zero buildings dedicated to Joseph Smith in Salt Lake City. Brigham Young had monuments aplenty dedicated to him, but poor ol' Joseph had none. So in 1993, the Hotel Utah was renamed the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, you know, to make things fair. It is now closed and under construction for "seismic upgrades", but who knows what they are really doing to it? Who knows what tech or old world evidences they are destroying or covering up?

Finally, a friend pointed out something interesting to me in the new modern English version of the Book of Mormon called the Covenant of Christ. In the Isaiah chapters that Nephi quoted in his record, there is a clearer rendition of Isaiah describing desolate lands full of abandoned houses and buildings.

Isaiah makes two references to these abandoned homes. In this first one, I believe he is referring to a future time in America:
Woe unto you that build house to house until everything is crowded and yet you live isolated in that place. The Lord of Hosts said directly in my ear: Truly many families will become desolate, and fine mansions abandoned. (Covenant of Christ, 2 Nephi 8:XII, p. 65, emphasis added)

In this second reference, Isaiah seems to be talking about ancient Jerusalem, the Lord is describing to him what will happen to the very people he is called to preach to. They will inevitably reject Isaiah's message because of their hardened and fallen state, and when the prophet asked the Lord how long the Jews will remain this way, this was His reply:

Until their cities have been destroyed and left desolate, and their houses abandoned, and the land deserted, until the Lord has driven everyone far away, and there are many abandoned places throughout the land. (Covenant of Christ, 2 Nephi 9:II, p.67)

The scriptures are describing both a past and future time of cities being abandoned and left desolate. My question is are we looking at a pattern here? Did such a pattern repeat two or three hundred years ago and did the Utah Brighamites stumble onto those building remains? Why else would they describe hundreds of abandoned houses over 200 miles away from Salt Lake City in 1852?

We ought to be curious about our past. We should want to know who came before us, what technology they possessed, what kind of economy they had, how they approached healing and disease, what kind of food they ate, and what kind of religion they practiced. We can't get away from history, we are only here because of thousands of choices made by those who came before us. Whoever they were, we owe them a great debt for our lives.

King Limhi was very curious about the 24 Jaredites plates that 43 of his men discovered when they went in search of the land of Zarahemla. Instead of finding Zarahemla, they "stumbled upon the ruins of various types of buildings that were once inhabited by many people, as numerous as the Israelites".

The king told Ammon:

I want these records to be translated into our language so we can learn more about the people who were destroyed, potentially the same people whose bones were found with these records. It would be valuable to understand what caused their destruction. (Covenant of Christ, Mosiah 5:XII, p. 129-130)

The Book of Mormon teaches us that a healthy curiosity about our past is a good thing, especially when those who came before us were swept off the land by God's wrath. Moroni and Mormon gave us several warnings about nations being swept off this promised for breaking the commandments of God. Moroni specifically used the phrase whatsoever nation when describing the everlasting decree of God on this land. Although we assume he is describing the Jaredites, the Nephites, and us the Gentiles, he never said that there weren't more. He simply stated that any nation that possesses this land would have to abide by the same decrees, whoever they were.

There is a period of 1200 years in between the destruction of the Nephites and the time the European Gentiles began to inhabit this nation. Were the Lamanites really alone here the entire time, or did some other group take control of the land? And was this group the people who built all the amazing buildings I've been blogging about? Were they subsequently destroyed for rejecting the God of this land, Jesus Christ? 

We, the Gentiles, have only been here for four hundred years and are already ripening for destruction. Is it not unreasonable to speculate that other groups could have been here and swept off in similar time frames, leaving buildings, bones, and other clues behind them.

The Book of Mormon uses the imagery of dreams to describe how our lives pass away. Studying history is also like stepping into a dream, a dream with no beginning or no end, like watching the end of a play or movie and trying to figure out the plot. Dreams only give us glimpses of reality, few and far between the abstract nonsense that our subconscious minds feed into the nightly player. When I look at construction photos of the past, they look and feel like an abstract dream. When I read about impossible building narratives, I feel that familiar nagging feeling of something trying to tell you to wake up, that something just isn't right. 

Like dreams, true history only comes in glimpses. Those who rule and allow power to corrupt will never be willing to tell the truth. That's why we must become our own historians, we must become diggers, searching the realm for clues about the past. God has given us scripture, true records of the past (as long as they haven't been corrupted), and this is where we start. If He reveals something new, then we get a little closer to the truth. In the meantime, we can study perhaps the only physical link between us and a lost civilization: unexplainable buildings. 

Join me next time when explore the narrative of the original Church Administration Building and its Corinthian columns made of granite, standing just east of the Hotel Utah on Temple Square. 

Postscript: Awesome New Podcast

Jeremy Hoop has started a new podcast dedicated to defending Joseph Smith against polygamy and other accusations. He and some others are working on a massive project to make historical documents more accessible to those who are sincerely questioning the polygamy narrative. 

Joseph Smith's polygamy is not "settled history," and Jeremy aims to prove it. Special thanks to him, Michelle Stone, Whitney Horning, Mark Curtis, Justin Griffin, and a host of others who are working hard to clear Joseph's good name. 



11 comments:

  1. Mind-blowing/expanding. Thanks for your good work.

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  2. Your work is very persuasive, but it fails to answer one question: How could Mormons arrive in the valley and take occupation of all these abandoned buildings, many of which being very grand and opulent, and no one say anything about that? How could this possibly be complete scrubbed from all history? There's always someone who will say the emperor has no clothes, especially since there were plenty of people disaffected from Brigham at that time.

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    1. Just curious. Do you keep a daily journal mentioning all the buildings going up where you live? Does anybody you know? In 150 years, if all anybody knows about the building projects in your area comes from only your journal, or others (who are over the top busy just making a living and keeping it pasted together daily) what information will they have? Who will have your journals, if you are actually keeping them?

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    2. If I had sacrificed my life to trek across the country and when I arrive at a land and it is filled with gorgeous buildings, it would 100% be written in my journal.

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  3. Well researched! I just get hung up on the fact that hundreds of thousands of old personal journals exist in America (and in other countries) and none directly speak of preexisting buildings. None. That holds the most weight so perhaps you ought to do a post addressing that major issue.

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  4. My friend sent me these series of posts and I have to say the research is compelling yet misses the major factor that we have zero evidence of people writing about this in letters to their families back in their countries of origin. Or even recording them in their own personal diaries. Zero. There were numerous explorers that passed through the Utah territory. Native Americans apparently had no interest in inhabiting such luxurious edifices…come now - these are too great of factors to willingly ignore. And the comments in multiple posts consistently show a body of people who willingly overlook these major factors. It’s not surprising they overlook the obvious because this is a Denverite blog with Denverite followers who are consistently willing to turn a blind eye to major inconsistencies in their movement that come from the top down (cognitive dissonance/ LDS 2.0) for what they hope is the Davidic Servant they can follow. Sigh.

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  5. If the people who came with Brigham were put under some kind of death oath not to speak or write in journals about what they found, (which is entirely possible given the other oaths authored by Young) there won't be any journal records. If Brigham's bottomless purse included money for payouts to purchase journals and written materials - likewise. They bought up all copies of Lucy Mack Smith's history, rewrote and republished it, why? What was so threatening about it? So there is actual precedent that money was paid by the church to obtain historical accounts. There are several possible scenarios where the pioneers could have been warned by leaders that the Lord had specifically prepared this place for them and were put under a cult "covenant" to keep it quiet. We just don't know. I appreciate the fact that this blog digs deep and examines glaring inconsistencies in the historical narratives, and at the very least makes us think about obvious anomalies. When the truth of the matter finally emerges into the light and all the gaps and missing details are finally revealed, I believe that this research will be vindicated.
    ...."for that which had not been told to them shall they see, and that which they had not heard shall they consider". The Lord's "Strange Act" may include bringing to light a few missing journals...

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  6. Alright - I'll accept that proposition that Brigham kept them under strict oaths.

    Now for a few questions:

    Were there hundreds, if not thousands of pioneers who came to Utah who were not Mormon nor under Mormon oaths (the answer is yes because I have an ancestor who never joined the church but came with the settlers).

    What about Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante? In 1776, these two Spanish Franciscan friars became the first Europeans to enter Utah Valley while searching for a route from Santa Fe to California. So if we trust this research we are to believe they saw all these buildings and went, "Nah...there's got to be a better place than this." They walked past the Provo Insane Asylum, Saltair, the Tabernacle, Joseph Smith Memorial building, Cathedral of the Madeleine, the state capital, Salt Lake City and County Building, etc. and were so absolutely unimpressed they could not be bothered to jot a word or two about it?

    They were guided by Timpanogots and Tabeguache Ute Indians, and named the Great Salt Lake "Laguna de los Timpanogos" in their journal. The journal, kept by Father Escalante, is considered to have been instrumental in OPENING Utah to Europeans. In all their exploring we are to believe they missed the buildings or their journals were altered so that all these European Settlers would come and be unfazed by it all? AND are we to believe that ALL the native Americans had no interest in living out in the elements and rather preferred to struggle in the snow and rain and be nomadic in tents? Why didn't the Native Ute, Navajo, San Juan Southern Paiute, Shoshone, Paiute, and Goshute have records of any pre-existing buildings? You don't think word would get out among all the tribes and they would all battle for the land and buildings?

    What about European trappers and fur traders who explored some areas of Utah in the early 19th century from Canada and the United States. The city of Provo, Utah, was named for one Étienne Provost, who visited the area in 1825. The city of Ogden, Utah, was named after Peter Skene Ogden, a Canadian explorer who traded furs in the Weber Valley. None of them were Mormon and none of them recorded buildings in their journals. And they all moved on...I don't know about you. But if I came to a place where there were exquisite places to live with no one in them, I would settle there immediately and I would write to all my friends and family to come too. People that came to San Francisco - thousands of empty dwellings and you don't think there would be thousands of letters written to their ancestors back home to come to the land of milk and honey?

    In 1824, Jim Bridger became the first known English-speaking person to sight the Great Salt Lake. Because of the high salinity of its waters, he thought he had found the Pacific Ocean; he subsequently learned this body of water was a giant salt lake. After the discovery of the lake, hundreds of American and Canadian traders and trappers established trading posts in the region. In the 1830s, thousands of migrants traveling from the Eastern United States to the American West began to make stops in the region of the Great Salt Lake, then known as Lake Youta. Yet, no record from Jimmy either. Seems everyone was in on the covenant of silence.

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    1. This is just one area of many areas the author is proposing that people decided to remain dead silent about or that in every case where a diary was written or a letter was sent home, it was destroyed, altered, hidden. He has proposed: San Francisco, New York Foundling Hospital, Hoover Dam, transcontinental railroad, Basilica of St. Josaphat, St. Botolph's Church, Ancient York Lodge, etc. etc. etc. You mean to tell me that In 1909, G.E. Kinkaid, a former Marine from Idaho could stumble upon THE most important archeological find in American history which caused an to be article published in the Arizona Gazette on Monday April 15, 1909, announcing the discovery. But hundreds upon thousands of other people coming upon "structure discoveries" were snuffed out, deleted, silenced in journals, letters home, or newspaper leaks?

      I took the time to write this response because I am all for a good conspiracy theory. If you grew up a member of the church you are already trained to believe just about anything wild and crazy or absurd and outlandish. Sometimes we have to overcome our desire for something to excite us for what are just God's simple truths. These posts are thorough yet only display an obsession with something that is and will remain unknown. The father and the son are two beings that beg to be known and we are promised our pursuit will not go unfruitful. It would seem that would be a far superior way to point your heart and your readers hearts.

      People write about what they know. You know a lot about a lot and are careful and troubled by many things but only one thing is needful - choose the good part which will not be taken away from you. (Luke 10:41-42)

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  7. I appreciate all the comments. One of the most difficult things about this research is that journals and accounts of mountain men and Native Americans don't mention anything about existing buildings. For some that is evidence enough to prove me wrong. If you're comfortable with that paradigm, that's your business, and I won't try to persuade you. All I am doing here is questioning the narrative, with its many inconsistencies and anomalies. I'm not claiming to know what really happened or what true history is. Honestly, I have no idea. I wasn't there and so I have to rely on written and oral accounts from the past, and I do believe that any written account from the past, whether it be a personal journal or other document, could have been tampered with. I also believe that characters, like say Jim Bridger, could have been totally made up by Artificial Intelligence or those who have rewritten history. My question to all of you is how do you know that any event that happened in our past is recorded accurately? You weren't there to see it so, like me, you also have to rely on someone else's interpretation of history. Furthermore, a people can easily forget their history within a single generation, especially if they do not have a written language. Most Native Americans do not have a written language, and rely on oral traditions, and anyone who has played the telephone game, knows how quickly those stories can change. If there was some kind of reset a few hundred years ago, old buildings and ruins would have been a normal occurrence, and everyone would have considered that normal and not remarked about it in their journals.

    As for Dominguez and Escalante, those were Jesuit explorers, and why should we trust their accounts? Which of you was here in 1776 when they were exploring Utah? Which of you personally saw what they found and explored? None of you, unless you are time travelers, and so like me, you also have no idea what happened. You are relying on others to tell you the stories of the past. As to Dan's final comment about me not focusing on the right things, you're probably right. A relationship with God is more important than the work I'm doing. And you certainly do not need to know the history of old buildings to have a relationship with the Savior. It's true, this is a personal interest of mine and I'm very fascinated by it. But I also believe that someday God will reveal our true history, and I think we will all be surprised how different it will be from any narrative we have been exposed to.

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Ancient Temples: The Saint George Temple and the Dragon

  Previously: A House for the Presidency Welcome readers. Thanks for joining me for Part I of my new series: Ancient Temples , where we'...