3 minute read
At the Crossroads
By Lyman Hafen
One of my favorite lines from western history comes from Virginia Reed, a twelve-year-old survivor of the Donner Party. After her rescue from that ordeal by hunger in 1847, she wrote to her cousin in Illinois: “Never take no cutoffs, and hurry along as fast as you can.” It’s good advice in most cases but sometimes difficult to follow.
This little corner of Utah is brimming with some of the classic stories of western history. The unique geology and geography of the area have a great deal to do with the stories that have naturally grown out of it. We sit in the vortex of a colossal collision of three major geologic provinces. We hover on the southern lip of the Great Basin where it bumps up against the Colorado Plateau to the east and spills off into the Mojave Desert to the south and west. It is a natural crossroads—a point where paths have always diverged, where difficult decisions have been made, and where compelling stories have been born.
We’re also near the place where three corners of three storied states connect on a remote Joshua-studded flat down along the vast stretch of the Beaver Dam Slope. I remember riding for cattle on that slope as a boy and my dad pointing out into the distance at the actual spot where Utah, Arizona, and Nevada touch at one precise point on the continent. The thought of it made my mind run wild.
My great-great grandfather Lyman L. Woods was an early Latterday Saint convert born in Chautauqua County, New York. As an orphaned boy, he followed his fellow church members from Kirtland, Ohio, to Missouri to Nauvoo on the Mississippi River in Illinois. By the time he was fifteen, he drove a team and wagon across the Mormon Trail to Salt Lake City. He married and eventually moved to southern Utah and finally settled in a remote mountain glen just across the line in Nevada. They called it Clover Valley. The home he built there in 1870 still stands. It’s where I spent summers as a boy, punching cows on Clover Mountain.
I remember Dad taking me on a horseback detour one hot summer day near Clover Valley. We dropped down into a small canyon lined with white limestone. He told me we were in the headwaters of the Beaver Dam Wash and that we were almost exactly on the Utah-Nevada state line. It’s strange the things you remember from childhood, but I distinctly recall wondering why there was no line. Dad was supposedly looking for a stray cow, but he had something else in mind. We never found the cow, but Dad led me up the canyon a stretch and stepped off his horse. I stepped off mine. We tied up and started walking along the sandy wash bed. Dad rustled through the oak brush for quite a while, looking for something on the east wall of the canyon.
Finally, he found what he was looking for. Above us, etched into the soft white limestone, were the initials HWM and the year 1849. We sat there in the shade of the ledge and dad told me the story of the forty-niners. I don’t know how much he told me that day, but in the years since, he’s told it to me in detail many times. He has a file on the forty-niners a foot thick, and over the years, he’s taken dozens of people to that place where a man named Henry W. Bigler cut his initials in the limestone.
I learned a lot about human nature from those stories. The image that stands out most is the party’s leader, Jefferson Hunt, sitting on his horse at the crossroads near what is now the town of Enterprise, thirty-five miles north of St. George. Hunt was a veteran of the Mormon Battalion and knew the route along the Old Spanish Trail well. In Salt Lake City, he had contracted with a disparate and desperate group of fortune seekers trying to make their way to the gold fields of California late in the fall. He agreed to lead the more than one hundred wagons on the southern route along the Spanish Trail to Los Angeles, avoiding the killer snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
By the time they reached the Iron Mountains west of Cedar City, the wagon train had split into various factions, each with its own opinions and ideas on how to proceed. Many wanted to cut off to the west to get to the gold sooner. Jefferson Hunt warned them against it and said he would continue south, even if only one wagon followed.
In my mind, I see the man sitting on his horse at the crossroads watching as a few of the company faithfully passed by to the south, remaining on the trail he recommended, while most of the others looked him in the eye in defiance of his wisdom, experience, and good judgment and cut off to the west. Many of those who cut off, including Henry W. Bigler, eventually saw the error of their ways and found their way back to Jefferson’s trail. Others did not, and some of them are among those for whom Death Valley is named.
Over the years, I’ve been back a couple of times to see the inscription Henry Bigler made more than 170 years ago. Each time I looked up at those initials on the wall, I realized I was a stretch farther down the path of my life, and I took stock of the choices I’d made along my own road. I hope I’ve been wise enough to follow those who know the way.
