Still lean and distinguished at 6 feet 4 inches, Brigham Madsen looks a bit older at 84, but the gleam is still in his eye, and he still talks about Western history with an infectious enthusiasm, punctuated by his own patented chuckle. Slowed a bit due to a heart condition, he believes "Against the Grain" is his last book.
"I can no longer travel to do the research," he says, "so I'm keeping myself busy writing introductions to books and book reviews."Maybe 15 books of narrative history will be a sufficient capstone to a wonderfully diversified professional career. The rest of the historical community will think so, anyway.
Madsen has enjoyed a lifetime of "adventure doing different things." People just kept offering him jobs, he says, and he just kept taking them, wondering if he could meet each challenge.
The result was a rich experience teaching at three universities, working as a carpenter and serving as president of his own building firm, working for the Peace Corps, serving as historian for the Shoshoni-Bannock Indian tribes and serving in a variety of academic administrative positions.
Inadvertently, his building experience helped him direct the construction of a dozen buildings on the University of Utah campus while he served as administrative vice president. Every one came in under budget because Madsen insisted the architects meet the estimates of the engineers.
But teaching has always been Madsen's first love, and his experience as an LDS missionary in Tennessee and North Carolina helped him to realize it.
Besides a determination to cover history in class "right up to the present day," something few history professors do, and his emphasis on anecdotes to make history come alive, he brought an expansive, humane, caring personality to his students.
Asked why he was able to do that when some academics lean toward arrogance, Madsen says, "Maybe it was because I was a carpenter all my life. I slogged around in the mud and built in the heat and the cold. So I can get upset at some of the professors who kind of look down their noses at people who work with their hands. The carpenters and construction people I worked with were all highly intelligent people."
Although those who know Madsen appreciate his even temper and his generous manner, he has not been incapable of anger. "When I was a builder, I could be pretty hot tempered. Building houses, you know, not knowing whether you're going to make a living or go bankrupt, and everyone is after you -- sometimes you blow up. So I could do that, but I decided I couldn't do that in a university."
Not only that, but 33 years ago, he suffered a heart attack that severely damaged a quarter of his heart. "The blood vessels that feed the right ventricle to my heart were destroyed, and as my doctor said, 'If your heart were an eight-cylinder engine, you'd have to learn to get along on six. You can't afford to lose your temper.' "
Madsen has followed that admonition closely. He also had a mother with "a wonderful sense of humor. She could see something funny in everything. I inherited a little of that from her, and it has helped me in my teaching."
Six years of teaching at BYU and heavy reading in LDS Church history caused him to feel less ardent about his religious beliefs, but his "Mormonness," as he prefers to call it, "is imbedded in my bones. I couldn't escape it. I am a Mormon. How can I escape my first name -- Brigham? When I worked in Washington, for example, and I introduced myself as 'Brigham from Utah,' well, they knew I was a Mormon."
Even though he taught full time for a relatively short time -- 18 years at three universities -- he was determined to retire when he reached the age of 70.
"I've seen too many faculty members hang on and keep teaching when they didn't know what was going on in their disciplines any more," he says. "I determined I wasn't going to do that."
During a highly productive retirement, Madsen researched and wrote Western history with lasting significance. A natural story-teller, he considers the writing of narrative history to be comparatively easy.
"Getting the first paragraph is terrible," he says, "but once I get it, then I enjoy the writing and can't stay away from it."
Madsen considers good organization crucial. "If you have good organization, the book will almost write itself. If it's well-organized, the narrative just flows. I get upset with historians who look down their noses at narrative history. If it's well-done, you don't have to write two chapters explaining what you just said. The narrative gives you the interpretation."
A proponent of writing interesting history, Madsen doesn't understand historians who think including interesting anecdotes is not scholarly. "It has to be germane to the subject, you know, but if it IS, good heavens, why leave it out? Furthermore, a simple story can better explain the point than complex details."
Although he denies his memory is superior, he wrote his memoir almost entirely from his own memory.
When he took his oral exam to finish his Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley, his major professor, Carl Sauer, asked him marvelously detailed questions that Madsen still remembers word-for-word.
"He asked me to draw the line from Vera Cruz across Mexico and delineate the wild Indian tribes to the north of that line and the civilized tribes below that line. I had memorized it, so I drew the line. He was astounded.
"Then he asked me some common-sense questions, one in particular I had never thought of. He asked me why there was a desert quality to the Baja peninsula? I said, 'Well, could it be that the prevailing winds to the South carry moisture across the cape and the prevailing Westerlies to the North, and there is a period of calm between the Westerlies? Maybe that's the reason.' He said, 'Not only MAYBE, that IS the reason.' "
Madsen was pleased, but even more so when he left the room while his professors decided on his fate, and he overheard Sauer say, "He not only has a good memory, but he uses his head." That, says Madsen, remains "the greatest compliment I've ever received."