Talana Smith Hooper was born in The Gila Valley in the southeastern part of Arizona and has lived there most of her life in the small community of Central, home of The Gila Valley Temple. Her roots run deep in Central with her grandchildren being the seventh generation to live in the community.
Talana was educated in the Thatcher Public Schools and graduated as Valedictorian. She attended Eastern Arizona College where she met her future husband and served as President of the LDS Women’s Sorority. She then attended Arizona State University with a major in Humanities emphasizing music, art, and theatre. She married Stephen Hooper in the Arizona Temple in 1973. After her husband spent a year teaching in Fredonia, Arizona, they returned to live in Central. Her life has been filled with the joys of raising their six children and serving in various callings in the auxiliaries of the Church, both ward and stake. She has loved the opportunities to help strengthen the testimonies of those whom she served, as well as her own. Her parents endowed her with a love of family history, and she has compiled numerous histories. She was called to be editor of Central’s centennial book which was published in 1982. Besides family history, she enjoys oil painting, quilting, yardwork, family gatherings, and being an ordinance worker in The Gila Valley Temple. She has almost completed a series of oil paintings portraying each of her twenty-eight grandchildren as ancestors in diverse family history stories.
Lot Smith: Mormon Pioneer and American Frontiersman is the comprehensive biography of Utah’s 1857 war hero and one of Arizona’s early settlement leaders. With over fifty years of combined research, mother and daughter co-authors Carmen R. Smith and Talana S. Hooper take on many of the myths and legends surrounding this lesser-known but significant historical figure within Mormonism.
Lot Smith recounts the Mormon frontiersman’s adventures in the Mormon Battalion, the hazardous rescue of the Willie and Martin handcart companies, the Utah War, and the Mormon colonization of the Arizona Territory. True stories of tense relations with the Navajo and Hopi tribes, Mormon flight into Mexico during the US government’s anti-polygamy crusades, narrow escapes from bandits and law enforcers, and even Western-style shoot-outs place Lot Smith: Mormon Pioneer and American Frontiersman into both Western Americana literature and Mormon biographical history.
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