A Cold
Morning
Walk By Lyman Hafen
By Lyman Hafen
On a frosty winter morning, I walked down the hill from my house on Santa Clara Heights and found myself swept onto a path of history and memory. I had just read the local paper, and my mind was hot with contention. The letters to the editor and the opinion columns had heated my blood to the boiling point. Much of it had to do with newcomers and old-timers—and all the resentment that comes with the give and take of growth and change. I walked briskly down the sycamore-lined Santa Clara Drive, the road that had once been Highway 91 and before that, the dirt path that led my ancestors into this village more than five generations ago.
I considered what it must have been like for those Swiss Latter-day Saint converts to leave the verdant land of their birth in the late 1850s, cross the Atlantic on a boat and the wide prairies in a wagon or handcart, and stop right here on this very road in the middle of a rock-strewn desert and start all over again. The Southern Paiutes had lived here for centuries, passing the winters along the babbling creek they called Tonaquint. The Latter-day Saint missionary Jacob Hamblin had arrived with a handful of other frontiersmen, including Samuel Knight, in the mid-1850s. They had come to terms with the native people along the creek they now called the Santa Clara and were grazing cattle in the hills and building rock houses along the foot of the Heights when this strange company of foreigners came rattling into town late in 1861. From the start it was a clash of cultures. My Swiss ancestors could neither speak nor understand English when they arrived in Santa Clara. It was a place about as different from their native land as could be imagined. They had left their wealth behind. The only means they brought with them were their stamina and their will to achieve. They possessed an
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