CHAPTER 5
RANCHING COMMUNITIES
Next day I was through the Indian country into the Diamond Mountain cattle country. . . . It was like a little of cowboy Wyoming lapping down into Utah. —MATT WARNER
rVl.att Warner was right. When the young M o r m o n boy from Levan drifted into the eastern Uinta Mountains in 1878, he encountered a way of life very different from that which he had known. This was not a land of small irrigated farms and compact villages; it was an open range cattle culture. People lived on isolated homesteads. There were no towns, no churches, and there was very little authority of any kind. An ambitious lad with a long rope and a running iron could do well. Ever since the mountain men had taken to herding livestock in the early 1840s, the eastern Uintas had been cattle country. The old mountaineers had developed a sort of subsistence ranching lifestyle. Their cattle and horses provided meat, milk, leather, and transportation, and surplus animals were marketed to the U.S. Army or to emigrants. Herd sizes stayed small and manageable because livestock was only a part of
