A Cold Morning Walk

A Cold

Morning

By Lyman Hafen Walk

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

Santa Clara, Utah: John George & Susetta Bosshard Hafen Family. John Hafen is on the front row, second from the left; Lenora Knight Hafen is on the back row, second from the left.

ingrained sense of thrift. They were cheerful; they loved music and buoyed their spirits by singing the songs of their homeland.

On the other hand, the original Santa Clara colonizers were a random and independent lot. They were Americans accustomed to a frontier life on the great open range. For a time, the Swiss immigrants had to work for the original settlers in order to get on their feet. The newcomers began to methodically plant small patches of ground into gardens, fields, and orchards while the old-timers continued to focus mostly on grazing their cattle over the surrounding hills. There was little time, and there were even fewer resources to build fences. Soon the old-timers’ cattle were tearing up the newcomers’ fields and orchards. Resentment, bitter feelings, accusations, and prejudice prevailed.

In his wisdom, local church leader Erastus Snow called Edward Bunker, then a resident of Toquerville twenty-five miles to the east, to move to Santa Clara and preside as bishop of the ward. The neutral leader persuaded the stock owners to remove their animals from the fields and came up with a plan to build fences. This was a few decades before the poet Robert Frost was born, but even then it was known that good fences make good neighbors.

Disaster was averted. Within ten years, the Swiss settlers and the old-timers of Santa Clara had turned the place into the envy of the territory. The children of those Swiss immigrants grew up speaking English and some of them married children of the old-timers, including my great-grandfather John Hafen, who married Samuel Knight’s daughter Lenora.

All of this passed through my thoughts as I walked down Santa Clara Drive that bright, cold winter morning. I knew where my walk was taking me. I would soon pass the house where my great-great grandfather had lived and a little further on, the place where the Knight’s had lived. Then I’d walk on up past the Jacob Hamblin home, down the trail around the point of the hill, across the blue clay beds, and back up the rise onto the Heights to the cemetery where all of them were buried. There, I knew I would wander through the gravestones reading the names and the dates, trying to connect the stories with those little plots of ground where they ultimately came to rest, where they now lie completely unconcerned with the daily anxieties and the petty grievances of mortal life. I would look at the names on those graves and realize that each one of them has reached the place where all that really matters is how you treated your neighbor.

I walked through the frosty morning resolved on a course of action for the new year. I would watch fewer yakking heads on TV and engage more with real live human beings. I would read less vitriol on the opinion pages and spend more time looking for the good and the positive all around me. I would do what I could to help move my community and my country in the direction I believed was right, but I would do it civilly and with respect for those who had a different point of view. And I would go on walks like this one as often as I could.

I continued down the street and soon reached the house my great-great grandfather built. A man and woman were just stepping out the front door. They smiled, and I waved at them. It wasn’t until a moment later I realized they were speaking Spanish.

Santa Clara, Utah: Samuel & Laura Melvina Leavitt Knight Family. Lenora Knight is on the front row, far left.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 15 grandchildren.