A Pioneer Cattle Venture of the Bennion Family

A Pioneer Cattle Venture of the Bennion Family

BY GLYNN BENNION

The author's father, Israel Bennion (left), at about the age he herded cattle for the family cattle enterprise.

I've been going over the almost-forgotten items my father, Israel Bennion, related to me about early day cattle enterprises of the Bennion family, and the total now seems pretty sketchy and perhaps meaningless.

One wonders why they allowed their livestock to so greatly increase at a time when there was little or no market for the increase. Cows were worth $10.00 a head and sheep $2.00. With untouched ranges stretching away without limit in every direction perhaps it was the natural thing to let their livestock increase also without limit.

Another thing, those early Utah herdsmen had all recently come from more humid climates where grass grew green all summer. They had no idea what the carrying capacity of desert ranges might be, nor gave any thought to the harm that might be done to such dry ranges when repeated cropping was permitted during the short season of green growth in the spring.

Grazing livestock take the most flavorful forage first, and when those forms are killed out they adjust their tastes to the kinds of lesser nutrition. This process under a regime of unlimited grazing goes on until in a tragically short time the vegetation left alive on ranges of six to twelve inches of annual rainfall bears little resemblance to the original forms.

So when I remember how my father and uncles and their fellow herdsmen used to rave about how wonderful the ranges were in early days, and how fat the horses and cattle and sheep got on them, I feel only a bitter sense of the irony of it all. Why did they have to wreck those ranges at a time when they gained so pitifully little from doing it?

Samuel and John Bennion were born in North Wales where their father was a tenant on a tiny hillside farm. When the boys were quite young they left home for the more attractive city of Liverpool. Samuel apprenticed himself to learn the flour trade and John became an apprentice iron worker. While thus engaged they heard the preaching of Elder John Taylor, were converted to Mormonism, and immigrated to America.

After the expulsion of the Mormons from Illinois, the brothers joined the Perrigrene Sessions wagon train and arrived in Salt Lake Valley October 5, 1847. For a homesite they chose a 20-acre tract about three miles southeast of the first settled area of Salt Lake City. Evidently they intended to do some farming and at the same time engage in such urban enterprises as their training had prepared them for. However, when President Brigham Young returned to the Valley in 1848, he asked the Bennions to move across the Jordan River and help colonize the southwestern portion of Salt Lake Valley.

This move put them too far away from the city to take part in urban industry, but it did place them in the heart of the best grazing land in the territory. Noticing this, some city-dwelling friends — notably John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and John M. Bernhisel, whose time was largely occupied by affairs of church and state — sent some of their surplus cattle over the Jordan for the Bennions to care for on a shares basis. Thus, by these fateful circumstances, the careers of two embryo industrialists were changed to that of rangemen.

I think the dominant personality in this change-over to a new and strange occupation was Esther Wainwright Bennion, first wife of John Bennion. She was an English girl, daughter of the household in Liverpool where John boarded while working as an apprentice. Esther was a person of unusual physical and mental strength and possessed of a driving determination to transform by austerity and hard work the grinding privations of the pioneer years into solvency and plenty.

It was decided by the family to make a dairy as well as a beef project of the cattle business. Corrals, sheds, and calf pens were constructed. At four o'clock in the morning, the small boys of the family were routed out of their beds, breakfasted, and sent to the calf pens. Their job was to let the calves out in relays to the cows in the milking corral, allow them to nurse a very short time, then wrestle them away from their mothers, and whale them back into the calf pens. Older boys and girls of the family then milked the cows and turned them out.

Then the small boys took over and drove the cows four or five miles westward for the day's grazing. The grass there was so tall that the boys couldn't see over it, and to keep from getting hopelessly lost, had to stick close to the cows until late afternoon, when the pain of tight udders made the cows think of their calves and turn toward home, with the boys following closely behind them.

The intensity of the drive of these people to succeed in the new land may be pointed up by the following bit from my father's memories of his childhood: at just under the age of four he was brought from his mother's home (she was John Bennion's second wife) to the first wife's home tojoin the little boys who fought the calves at milking time. Anyone who has ever tried to take a hungry calf away from its mother can realize how banged up a small boy would be after being kicked, butted, dragged, and tromped on by a corral full of such calf maniacs, each one determined to stay with its mother until her udder was completely emptied.

Finally the great day arrived when my father was four years old. But there was no change in the drab program for the day — the noisy awakening at four o'clock; the breakfast of "pobbies," a tasteless mush or thick gravy made of flour boiled in skim milk (so named from the sticky, bubbly sound of its cooking) ; the bruising battle with the calves; the dreary, hungry, endless hours with the cows on the range; the long trail home and fight with the calves again; and the final ordeal with the detested pobbies. Then the boy quickly went outside, lest anyone see his tears, climbed the ladder to his attic bed, and noiselessly cried himself to sleep. No one had remembered his birthday.

Every product of the family's labor that could be sold in Salt Lake City or elsewhere was hauled there and disposed of. The members of the family lived on what wasn't salable. No Bennion tasted cream or butter during the austere years.

By 1855 the cow herd had grown so large — as had other herds in Salt Lake Valley — that the range was becoming noticeably overgrazed. Brigham Young accordingly called on a number of the herdsmen to move out to new ranges. Acting on this request, the Bennions drove their range cattle to the north end of Rush Valley, establishing a camp on the west side of Rush Lake. However, in 1860 they sold their cabin and corrals to Bill Hickman and moved 40 miles to the south end of Rush Valley.

In this new locality they built several small cabins and cellars, some corrals and sheds, and fenced in a sizable area with a rock wall for a vegetable garden. No effort was made to secure title to the land — it was considered only as a range camp.

This new range was highly regarded by the Bennions. In a short time they, and other stockmen, loaded it up with several thousand cattle, two large herds of sheep, and numerous horses. Sagebrush and cedars were almost nonexistent, and the grass was abundant and unusually nutritious. My maternal grandfather, Adam Sharp, who freighted in summer between St. Joseph on the Missouri and Salt Lake City, used to bring his 800 work oxen, thin and jaded from the round trip across the Plains, to Rush Valley in the fall and there turn them out on the range. By spring they were fat and strong, ready for work.

By 1875, however, this range was so badly depleted that cows were calving only every other year, and both cattle and sheep were being moved in the fall to winter in the lower valleys farther west. As Uncle Hyrum put it, "When we first came to the south end of Rush Valley in 1860 we thought it was the best range in Utah, because we could stay in one place all the year round. But by 1875 it was all et out, and we had to move our cattle to Castle Valley."

The roundup in the spring of 1875 covered an immense territory and involved a large number of riders. From Grantsville on the north, to Fish Springs on the west, to Deseret and Fillmore on the south, and to Gunnison and Nephi on the east, the range was combed for cattle branded with a "B." One of these riders was a black-bearded giant named Sam Gilson, who later achieved fame as the discoverer of an asphalt now called Gilsonite. My father, then nearly 15 years old, rode with this man during much of the roundup and noted with interest some of Gilson's eccentricities. The man scorned hardship and traveled without food or bedroll. At night he pulled his saddle blanket over his shoulders and slept on the ground. If the night was cold and the ground wet, he woke next morning with his hair usually frozen in the mud. When he got hungry he shot a good-looking calf, cut off a sizable part of its anatomy, threw it on a brush fire burned down to coals and ashes, scorched the meat briefly on one side and then the other, and ate it (ashes, etc.), with blood dripping down both sides of his magnificent beard. My father managed to survive this manner of living because it wasn't much different from what he was used to.

I never did learn the exact route chosen for the drive to Castle Valley, but the gathering herd most likely converged on Leamington and then moved along the Sevier River to Salina where it turned east up Salina Canyon and followed the Fremont trail into Castle Valley. In the shadow of Mt. Terrel, a summer camp was constructed and the occupation of the new range was effected.

This high country about Mt. Terrel and Fish Lake was suitable for summer range only, so it was deemed the better part of wisdom to locate a winter range at a lower altitude. Accordingly, a site for a winter camp was selected on Ferron Creek far to the northeast of the summer range. From this point the cattle were allowed to drift in winter southeastward as far as Green River.

My father considered this a mistake because it involved trailing the cattle back and forth each year at right angles across the innumerable, very deep, narrow, and practically impassable sandstone canyons infesting the area between the Wasatch Mountains and the Green-Colorado river system.

Neither of the two first generation Bennions took any part in the handling of their cattle or sheep on the range, and so did not come to Castle Valley with the cow herd in 1875. Several of the older males of the second generation came with the herd, but these soon went home, leaving my father and a boy of 16 named Tom Simpers to care for the 2,000 cattle. On leaving for his new home in Vernal, my oldest uncle, Samuel R. Bennion, gave my father a pistol and instructed him to practice diligently with it, because, said he, "This is a land of outlaws and if you ever need to use a gun you've got to shoot first and straight."

The life of the cowboys in summer was little short of idyllic. Thousands of ducks and geese covered the surface of Fish Lake or waddled about on its shores feeding on berries, insects, and seeds. Fat deer and grouse were everywhere. Noisy little streams were alive with native trout. Certainly, in contrast to the deserts the boys were used to, this summer range was the Land of Beulah.

In late fall they smoked fish and jerked venison for winter use, made a trip to Salina for a year's supplies (consisting principally of flour, clothing, rope, and ammunition), and then commenced gathering the cattle off the summer range.

The airline distance from the boys' summer camp to their winter camp on Ferron Creek was probably not more than 40 miles, but the zigzag ground trails between the crossings of those God-awful sandstone canyons must have been twice that distance.

Cattle soon become wild as deer when their only contact with humans is the semiannual roundup for branding and weaning calves. A little bunch of spooky cows will dive into impenetrable timber or scramble out of sight up a rocky draw, and it may take a day of horsekilling riding to get them back to the trail herd.

A rider passing over the rolling surface of some parts of the Castle Valley range might suddenly and without warning find himself on the edge of a yawning chasm whose vertical sandstone walls dropped dizzily down to a dry, boulder-strewn wash hundreds of feet below. At one such place my father dismounted to gratify a boyish wish to spit a quarter of a mile. A clatter of rocks behind brought him around in time to see a charging bull almost upon him. Nearby was a four-foot vertical slab of rock which he grabbed with one hand and, while he danced around the rock to avoid the slashing horns, with the other hand he bounced pistol bullets off the bull's thick skull. Luckily for me the last slug hit squarely instead of slantwise and the bull dropped dead.

The boys were not long getting acquainted with the human inhabitants of the area. I remember only a few of the names of the outfits: Miller, Swasey, Nethery — there were others. In nearly every case the owners lived elsewhere, and their sons were the caretakers of the livestock.

In summer the cowboys were apt to be camped in high country at considerable distances from each other, but in winter they lived in more substantial quarters not so far apart. During this season the cattle were pretty much left to themselves, and the cowboys devoted the time to molding bullets, mending riding gear, breaking horses, and just plain having fun. Often they would all gather at one camp and stay there for a week at a time — then move on to another spread and another extended visit.

This was probably the first time in my father's life that there had been an opportunity for camaraderie. Heretofore, practically every waking moment of his life had been devoted to the work and responsibility of an adult. He was small for his age, and although wiry and of great endurance, was no athlete. Now he was accepted in this goodnatured cowboy fraternity. His age relegated him to the status of "the kid," but I doubt if he was ever subjected to any kind of hazing, goodnatured or otherwise.

Of all the residents of Castle Valley, the Swasey boys rated tops with my father. These boys were of a black-haired, blue-eyed strain of Irish; good-natured, happy-go-lucky, superb athletes, expert horsemen; full of all the lore of braiding quirts, bridle reins, horsehair ropes; mending saddles and bridles and fixing anything from a hurt human to a broken-down wagon.

During the three years of his stay in Castle Valley, my father was visited by no member of his family. In summer mail might be carried to or received from Salina, but from late fall until summer there could be no travel over the Wasatch because of snow.

I never heard my father speak of any sale of beef cattle from Castle Valley while he was there, and I believe there were none. He did saythat he and Simpers branded about 700 calves each year. This seems a rather poor calf crop from upwards of 2,000 cows and may indicate that part of the cattle counted in Castle Valley were calves and yearlings.

In 1877, two years after the family's cow herd had been moved to Castle Valley, John Bennion died. He was then only 57 years old. His untimely death was caused by an attack of "inflammation of the bowels," a malady now called appendicitis.

The death of John Bennion signaled the end of the family business co-operation and the gradual division of livestock and range and farm lands among the numerous second generation Bennions. Late in 1878 John R. and Samuel R., oldest sons, respectively, of Samuel and John Bennion, came to Castle Valley to make a decision on what to do with the family cattle.

This late autumn roundup of the "B" herd in 1878 only produced 1,700 head, 300 less than were brought to Castle Valley three years before. My father always asserted that a thousand head more could have been found if the hunt had been prolonged. Further search however was impossible because winter was upon them. In summer the "B" cattle mixed on top of the Wasatch Mountains with cattle from the western side and likely some followed their new acquaintances that way. The canyon country of eastern Utah furnished the safest hideout in the nation for wanted men from everywhere, and these criminals could easily pick up cows west of the Green and Colorado rivers and dispose of them to Colorado cattlemen who at that time ranged over most of the Utah east of the rivers.

Evidently concluding that there was no profit in the cow business and that the family would be better off in other pursuits the older Bennions sold the gathered cows, plus the right to all the strays that could be found, to young Tom Simpers for $17,000. Simpers was a protege of Uncle Samuel R. before coming with the cattle to Castle Valley. Evidently the transaction was not a cash deal, but certainly Simpers paid out satisfactorily and became a prosperous and respected stockman of southeastern Utah. My father returned to Rush Valley where his mother resided.

Thus an end came to the disastrous adventure in Castle Valley. The two boys in charge of the cow herd must have lost close to 1,000 head of cattle each year they were there. Who was to blame?

One of the most useful talents a successful man can acquire is the ability to make himself look good and make someone else look bad. My father was a gentle, deeply religious man, totally lacking in the strong assertiveness necessary to success in recrimination and angry debate. He could easily be made to carry the blame for failure. Simpers was bigger, a year or two older, and much more mature than my father. The boys generally got along well together, but my father did complain to me that Tom was sometimes short-tempered and bossy. It is entirely possible that his patron, Uncle Samuel R., had earlier commissioned him boss of the outfit.

Samuel R. Bennion was a strong and able man. In his book incompetence and failure were the unpardonable sins. At the time of the closing out of the Castle Valley adventure he was rapidly making himself a dominant figure in the colonization and development of the Ashley Valley in northeastern Utah. Besides extensive sheep interests there, he became president of the bank in Vernal, owner of a large department store, and president of the Uintah Stake. It may be that his waning interest in Castle Valley can be attributed in some degree to his brilliant success in Uintah. If my father suffered his oldest brother's wrath because of the Castle Valley losses, he never said so to me, and always spoke of Samuel R. in terms of admiration and respect.

In my own mind the blame for the disaster must rest squarely on the older Bennions for leaving too much property to be cared for by too few and inexperienced hands and in a place and situation altogether different from any they were acquainted with. Why didn't the older Bennions make frequent checkups and supervisory visits to Castle Valley during the three years? In the wide, prairie-like valleys of Rush, Skull, and Dugway where the Bennion herd had been built up, a few seasoned cowmen might have been expected to properly care for a large herd of cattle in the days before the range was too badly impaired. But Castle Valley was something quite different. In that place the Bennions were intruders. Other outfits were there first. And that gashed, reefed, upside-down nightmare of sandstone — where one's range of vision might be less than 200 yards — called for the riding and wisdom of at least 30 or 40 experienced cowmen to handle 2,000 wild cattle at roundup. It is no wonder that boys, forced into manhood, were unequal to the situation.

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