The Lost Well of the Mormon Battalion Rediscovered

The Lost Well of the Mormon Battalion Rediscovered

BY CARMEN SMITH

THE LOST WELL MUST BE THE MOST PICTURESQUE site on the entire two-thousand-mile Mormon Battalion trail!" I exclaimed while reading the battalion diaries to my husband as we drove southward along the Rio Grande.

Diarists described a cistern-like well, variously estimated at from twenty to one hundred feet deep and from thirteen to thirty feet in diameter, hidden on the north side of a deep, narrow ravine under a mass of overhanging rock one hundred twenty feet high where the battalion's leader Col. Philip St. George Cooke, "sat for two hours until all the mules and other animals were watered, cursing the men almost all the time."

Its discovery was critical to the execution of Cooke's orders. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny, commander of the Army of the West, had ordered Cooke to California to assist him in the war with Mexico and en route to explore a wagon road south of the Gila River. Unfamiliar with the proposed route, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Paulino Weaver, and Antoine Leroux, the three most famous and best qualified guides sent by Kearny to Cooke, doubted that Cooke could successfully venture that route and had tried to persuade him to discard his wagons and follow the known route taken by Kearny down the Gila River. But Cooke was obdurate. He would take the unknown route; he would lead more than three hundred men with an assortment of mules, oxen, and sheep some three hundred miles into a desert country and gamble their lives on the precarious chance of finding water.

For several days all available guides, in a search typical of ensuing wide-ranging efforts to find water, had scouted westward. Meanwhile, the battalion remained on a riverbank some three hundred miles south of Santa Fe awaiting directions to their first campsite off the Rio Grande. Stephen C. Foster, interpreter for the officers of the Mormon Battalion, volunteered his services and on November 13, 1846, found a well-hidden waterhole fifteen miles distant. The initial route determined, Cooke promptly ordered a march, and the battalion ascended a gravelly slope toward a high mountain to the west and to the waterhole that would be caked the Lost Well.

My husband, Omer Smith, and I had been following the route of the Mormon Battalion from Fort Leavenworth westward, wanting to share as much as possible the experience of Omer's grandfather. Lot Smith, who at sixteen years of age was popularly credited with being the youngest member of the Mormon Battalion. Our guides were the battalion diaries and the invaluable Mormon Battalion Trail Guide prepared by Charles S. Peterson and staff under the auspices of the Utah State Historical Society. Our purpose was to create a biography of Lot Smith, combining our research with the many stories collected by Omer's father, who, as the posthumous youngest son of the Utah War hero of 1857, had yearned for knowledge of and acquaintance with the father he never saw.

We, too, had come down the Rio Grande. In the vicinity where the diaries recorded a turn westward from the river, we hoped to find the Lost Well campsite. Its location was not determined, only conjectured by the Trail Guide. Using the mileage traveled and the descriptions of terrain from the diaries, it indicated the vicinity of Hatch, New Mexico, as the probable point of departure, specified Nutt Mountain as the high mountain, and recommended its east side as the site of the Lost Well.

We looked at Nutt Mountain. Despite its being the only high mountain in the vicinity, the evidence of the estimated mileage in the diaries pointing to Nutt Mountain, and our high regard for the expert judgment in the Trail Guide, we could not envision the east side of Nutt Mountain as a possibility. It appeared to us to have too much the same character as the smooth south side to sustain the rugged canyon description of the Lost Well.

Still, if we rejected Nutt Mountain, where else could we look for the Lost Well? Knowing we were within a few miles of the site increased our compulsion to find it; at the same time we could see no locale that quite met the requirements. Frustrated because we could think of nothing else to do, we returned home to Central, Arizona.

Who can explain the magic that compels one to search for that elusive, hidden treasure known to exist but defying discovery? During the ensuing months Omer and I came under the spell of that magic, and the Lost Well began to exert a charm quite apart from a biography of Lot Smith. We knew the site lay within a limited range in southern New Mexico only one day's march from the Rio Grande, but not until the following fall could we indulge our obsession to search again. Omer invited his cousin Mike Steed and his wife. Fern, of Albuquerque to share the pleasure of the search. In preparation, we sent them topographical maps and copies of the Mormon Battalion diaries.

Omer and I reasoned that the logical first step would be to find the precise point where the Mormon Battalion left the Rio Grande to turn westward. Neither the Trail Guide nor the diaries enabled us to determine with any accuracy where the battalion left the Rio Grande. Then Omer thought of Cooke's journal which we had recently acquired. Although Cooke's November 13 entry gave the direction after leaving the river, k, too, was inconclusive on the exact point of departure. We were facing defeat.

Idly, Omer read the entry for the next day and realized suddenly that Cooke gave the compass reading and careful directions from the Lost Well to the next day's While Ox Camp, a known site. By tracing the route backward from While Ox Camp, Omer could locate Lost Well Camp. He calculated mileage and directions, took a back azimuth from Cooke's compass reading, and estimated the distance traveled in the two days from the Rio Grande; then he put a red dot on the topographical map some six miles north of Nutt Mountain. He could hardly wait until morning to telephone the Sierra County assessor for the name of the landowner to ask permission to explore his ranch. We also telephoned the Steeds in Albuquerque, and on a fine day in December we were off with our son Rock who would take photographs.

We rendezvoused near Nutt Mountain and drove northward on State Highway 27 between Nutt Mountain on the east and Cooke's Peak on the west over a grass-covered plain. In the half distance antelope raised their heads to stare, undecided between caution and curiosity, running both toward and away from us. In the far distance mirages cut and separated the pale blue mountain ranges ringing the horizon.

After traveling northward from Nutt Mountain for ten miles, we turned off the paved road onto Mike Hall's SS Ranch and drove eastward toward the ranch headquarters through more beautiful cattle range. Hall told us of a very rough canyon a few miles farther east. Having seen only a level plain, we were encouraged. When he told us there was no water in the canyon our hopes shriveled fast, for cattlemen know their waterholes almost as well as they know their children. Nevertheless, we asked for directions, and he sat on his heel to trace a map on the ground.

In our pickup trucks we followed meandering tire tracks through more smooth, wide plain. Farther eastward the rude track kept to the crest of a chaparral-covered, flat-topped ridge, and, when the ridge ended, dropped down a steep incline into a shallow wash.

We could see no immediate evidence of a rough canyon. But when the wash we started walking down began to deepen, our excitement began to heighten. We came to a series of solid rock portals in close succession, higher than our heads. In the sand beyond each portal we saw the paw and hoof prints of animals that had jumped over successively lower stone thresholds no wider than a doorway. We jumped in the same manner.

Those portals opened on a sight that set us all talking at once. We entered a small, round, sand-filled basin enclosed with perpendicular rock walls towering over our heads. Remembering the rancher's remark, we did not hope to find water, and wondered if we might not be standing in the Lost Well itself, except it was not on the north side. We stepped out of that enclosure into another basin of similar size and shape, and wondered again. Could those diarists possibly have been mistaken in their directions?

While we debated, Mike ranged more widely through the rugged canyon and after less than half an hour, called to us to come. We emerged from the enclosure to confront another of those tall, narrow stone portals, its threshold a nearly perpendicular slide of almost eight feet, water-carved in dense volcanic rock. We negotiated the slide and found ourselves in a wild canyon walled with towering bluffs and filled with huge, heaped up masses of convoluted rock.

We worked our way over twisted rock toward Mike who was standing at the base of the north wall, dwarfed by the bluff rising behind him. At his side we could see a narrow opening through high rock walls. When we stood at the opening of that defile, we looked into an enclosure approximately thirteen feet wide, almost under a high cliff, containing a cistern-like hole full of water—the Lost Well of the Mormon Battalion.

After we recovered from stunned surprise, we eagerly sought the pleasure of further discovery. Directly above was the outcropping where Colonel Cooke had sat and cursed the men. His perch had given him an eagle's eye view of the canyon while his sharp commands resounded in these bold humps and hollows and then echoed down this steep-walled canyon. Under his stern eye each man had brought a mule up to the threshold of this secluded well, let it drink from water hand-dipped from the well and poured into the depression below it, and then backed the animal out far enough to turn around to lead him back up the hillside and along the narrow trail skirting the cliffs edge.

Cooke's cursing became understandable. The tricky trail and the restricted access at the well presented real problems. He had to keep the line of men and animals moving, threading the narrow, rough trail; at the same time he had to prevent bunching that would clog the trail. Furthermore, he was in a race with approaching darkness. Already, the canyon was cast in deep shade by the low winter sun, and to dare this rough route in the dark would be to risk scrapes and bruises if not broken bones.

Having seen the well, Omer was eager to find the wagon campground. We climbed out of the canyon on the north side and followed a dim trail. We skirted the edge of the cliff, looking down into the canyon for the source of strange bird calls, and saw the unfamiliar topside of birds in flight. As we reached the summit, we saw to the west the silt-filled level spot where the wagons had stopped.

We looked back at the course the teams of 1846 had traversed. The little mules had had to struggle to get the wagons out of the canyon and up over this rocky summit; they would have been panting from the exertion when the teamsters stopped the wagons, unhitched the tugs, pulled off the warm leather harness, and unbuckled the collars, sweat stained after the fifteen-mile upslope pull. They must have snorted gratefully to be relieved of the harness.

The crisp autumn air would have been redolent of their steaming sweat as they shook themselves and nosed the ground for a place to roll in the soft silt. I caught myself looking around for some evidence of their having been there.

The imagined sounds, smells, and sights still held me, but Omer wanted to find the campsite of the soldiers in the streambed. We reentered the canyon and wandered a short distance downstream from the well, stepping over the two-holed gossip rock of some unknown Indian group harbored at one time in this wild canyon. We came to a heap of sand, apparently dug out from under a rocky outcropping by wild animals craving the disappearing water. Could this be the spot where the battalion boys knelt in the sand over a hundred years ago to fill their canteens and camp kettles for the evening meal?

The side hills above us where the battalion had scrounged for anything combustible were barren of even small bushes; we wondered that they had found wood enough to boil their soup.

In their campground, here in this small canyon, those tired and cold soldiers had gone about their evening chores in the frosty November night air, their calls and conversations floating through a pall of pungent wood smoke from little campfires scattered about in the canyon.

At one of those campfires Lot Smith, a lanky youth with redblonde hair and freckles — the young man who would become Omer's grandfather—had gathered with his hungry messmates around an iron kettle filled with boiling water thickened with a bit of flour and a meager amount of inferior beef.

For Lot Smith's grandsons the time to start homeward was approaching. Leaving the soldiers' campsite, we walked upstream for one last look at the Lost Well. We felt reluctant to leave that unbelievable water-filled grotto tucked between folds of rock drapery in a strange canyon. In this small canyon, first suddenly by volcano and then leisurely by water, nature had molded and then carved an awesome site.

When we arrived back at the ranch house, knowing that cattlemen keep account of the rainfall as carefully as money in the bank, we asked when the last rain had fallen. September 24 was the reply. That meant that during almost three dry months, September 24 to December 19, the Lost Well had maintained an abundant supply of water.

So well hidden was the waterhole that Hall had had no idea of its existence until we told him of it.

And we understood why, after Stephen C. Foster found the cistern that day in November 1846, the Mormons with conscious poetry and unknowing prophecy named the romantic site the Lost Well. Although numerous Mormon Battalion diaries reported its existence, Foster's waterhole was to be the Lost Well for more than one hundred years, again known only to the wild animals marking the trails that long ago had given Foster's trained eye the clue to its existence.

AFTERWORD

After we found the Lost Well, finding the point of departure from the Rio Grande was much easier and was further confirmed by finding the landmark butte exactly two miles upstream as described by one of the battalion diarists. William Coray states in his journal that the battalion "marched due west to a high mountain." Nutt Mountain comes nearer to qualifying as a high mountain than any other geographical feature in the vicinity of the turnoff. Yet perhaps because most of the battalion were unfamiliar with mountains of any size, they called a distant, elevated ridge topped by a long line of mesas a "high mountain." When they later encountered what westerners would term mountains, some of the diarists expressed the uncomfortable feeling that the high mountains might topple over on them.

Regarding the point of departure from the Rio Grande, a further, later search revealed that Cooke in his report to Kearny, February 5, 1847, wrote that he had turned short to the right, leaving the Rio Grande at a point called San Diego. Yet a map accompanying Cooke's published journal places the town of San Diego on the Rio Grande east of Hatch, New Mexico. The editor of Cooke's journal states in a footnote that "the battalion left the Rio Grande about fifteen miles northwest of the present town of Rincon, Dona Ana County, New Mexico." Rincon, meaning corner or turn, logically should indicate the river's turn eastward in the vicinity of Hatch, New Mexico. If Rincon were located at the turn of the river, the editor's statement would be correct. But the town is placed on later maps east of Hatch on the approximate site of San Diego as shown on the older map accompanying Cooke's journal. The question arises whether a mapmaker's error misplaced both Rincon and San Diego east of present Hatch. On the basis of information in Cooke's report and journal San Diego might be more properly located about fifteen miles upstream from Hatch at or near the present settlement of Derry, and Rincon at the bend of the river.

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