"Grit Enough to Stick with It": Stories from Blue Valley
Edited and introduced by KENT DAVIS and KRISTEN ROGERS
James W Nielsen was a storyteller. So was his brother Joseph. In the early 1960s James -wrote a history of his parents, Niels J. and Minnie Nielsen, which included an account of their life in Giles, a town in Blue Valley, Utah, around the end of the nineteenth century. At about the same time, he wrote letters to his sister, Pat Nielsen Davis, telling her about other people and events associated with the valley. Joseph, a younger brother, also wrote an account of life in Blue Valley. 1
The narratives give an intimate, firsthand look at an unusual community. Blue Valley, located on the Fremont River between Hanksville and Caineville on what is now State Highway 24, had received its name from the bluish-gray Mancos shale of the surrounding hills. Those hills are barren indeed, and the Fremont River is unruly even today, but a small group of families who were "called" by Mormon church authorities to settle in the valley did not flinch from the task. They came in full faith that they would be able to make a life and a community in the valley. In so doing, they believed, they would contribute to building the kingdom of God.
Niels J. Nielsen, born in Denmark on March 11, 1855, was a small man who when young had "fiery red hair and a quick temper and would fight at the drop of a hat." After converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) he immigrated to Fairview, Utah. But he did not have red hair for nothing, his descendants say, and he ended up in Denver for a -while because he could not live with the Mormon "good old boys" in Fairview. It was in Denver that he met Minnie Schiller Shaw, a divorcee who was supporting her mother and daughter, Maybell. 2 Minnie, "a beautiful woman in her day, trim built and proud as a peacock," had gone looking for a job at the Albany Hotel, where N.J. (as he was called) was managing the kitchen crew. He almost sent her away without looking at her, but when he did glance up he "saw the only woman he ever loved and was completely hooked." He promptly found work for her peeling vegetables. Although at the time Minnie had no desire to marry again, especially not to such a "homely clodhopper" as N. J., he convinced her, and they married in 1885. Within a year, Minnie converted to Mormonism and the family moved to Fairview, Utah, where their first five children were born; James and Joseph -were the two oldest. N. J. worked mainly at making adobes and -was so energetic that his local nickname was "Timothy Quickstep." 3
When Jim was ten years old, the family moved to Blue Valley. Here is how his account begins:
In the Spring of 1897, the Church called for volunteers to help settle Giles in Wayne County, Utah. 4 Father, along -with four or five other Fairview men -went down to have a look. It was quite a trip in those days. It took the five covered wagons a week to make the trip. Maybell and I went with Father; Patience was just a baby. We dropped Maybell off at Teasdale, Wayne County, with our families old friends, the Ostbergs, and Father and I went down on to Blue Valley.
I shall never forget the old Blue Valley dugway; -we had to let the wagons down part of the way by hand into a box canyon with sheer red sandstone cliffs on both sides with the dirty devil river with a quicksand bottom meandering crookedly through its entire land. 5 The valley averaged about a mile wide and drained all of Wayne County when it rained. There were about fifteen families in the valley, and they were sure isolated. The Fairview boys looked the valley over, talked with the settlers, saw the unsurmountable conditions, and pulled out the next morning for home.
Father felt duty bound to stay. He traded a new Bain wagon to John C. Ekker for forty acres of land with a partial water right. About twenty acres of good ground; the rest was drift sand. 6 He took over the farm of Henry Loris on shares for the summer. We planted several acres of corn and a nice garden. The corn that we planted had been frozen and the seed failed to germinate, so the crop for that summer was a total failure. We worked on our own place between times getting it ready so we could move Mother and the family down that Fall. There was a one room frame house on our place with 14 by 16 feet with a dirt floor and just sheeting lumber nailed onto the frame and roof with a fireplace in the East end.
The climate -was about the same as St. George, Utah, and the good land was very productive. Sugarcane, corn, melons, and all kinds of fruit grew prolifically, when -we could hold the water to irrigate it. Our dams in the river were always temporary ones; they -were built on a quicksand foundation and went out whenever -we got a hard rain. The ditches were built along the side walls, under the ledges, and everytime it rained they were filled with mud. We were continually cleaning ditches or putting in a new dam with cottonwood, willows, and rock and, as hope springs eternal in the human breast, the men refused to quit. I can still hear old Pappylance 7 say, after completing a goodlooking dam, "It will never go out in Gods almighty -world, no sir, it will never go out." But it always did and the half developed crops died and the people lived on faith and hope and greasewood greens. 8
Joseph Nielsen, Jim's brother, describes the building of dams in more detail:
It took all the men in the Valley 30 days to build a dam in the river high enough to get the water into the ditches, on [e]ither side of the river they -would put a layer of cottonwood trees in the river, then a layer of big flat rock, then another layer of trees and rock and on up. They had to make the dam about 25 ft. thick and 20 ft. high and the river was about 100 ft. across, and that spelled a lot of trees and rock and a lot of hard -work, the dam -would hold fine until a big flood came, the flood -would pour over the dam with such force it -would gouge out a big hole in the soft river bed below the dam, and the dam would tip over into the hole, and the big stones -would drop out into the hole, and the trees would float away, when this happened two or three times in the spring and early summer it got too late to put in a crop, and they would have to give it up for that year, and go to the coal camps or some place else and find work to provide for their families. The ditch on one side of the river was 7 miles long, and the one on the other side was 4 miles long, and they had to be shoveled out quite often as the water was always riley that went into them.
The land in the Valley -was very good, -when they could get the water they could raise good crops, but about half of the years they were not able to get the -water out of the river. 9
Throughout its history, the story of Giles would center around the getting—and not getting—of water. Niels J. Nielsen -was quickly given a pivotal role in that effort, and he -was able to increase the efficiency of community irrigation, at least when the river was cooperating. As Jim relates,
Half the old timers in Blue Valley could neither read or write. Father was a -wizard -with figures and was immediately appointed secretary of the irrigation company and his word -was law, and although he -was the smallest man in Blue Valley, he was respected and depended upon. Headgates -were installed in each farm and each man drew his portion of water in accordance -with the amount of shares of water stock he had. This stopped a lot of bickering and fighting over the 'water.
We got our place as near ready as we could and in the Fall of 1897 hired a man named Archie Young to go with us to Fairview and move Mother and the family down. Father sold his home in Fairview for one thousand dollars, which was quite a bit of money in those days. We bought a new wagon, three horses, and a plow; loaded our furniture and belongings in the two -wagons with Mother, Joe, Patience, and Grandma and made the treck back to Blue Valley full of hope and faith.
For Joe, who was making the trip for the first time, the journey -was a hair-raising adventure that ended in anticlimax; at the end of the road lay disappointment.
I think it took us three days to make the trip, and we all looked forward to seeing our new home, the further we -went the more rugged and rough the country got, deep canyons some of them with straight up ledges hundreds of feet high, and so narrow there was just room for the wagon road, and times it looked like we were coming to a dead end, but the box canyon would turn and on we'd go, finely we got out of the deep canyons, and came out into Canesville [Caineville, a town about sixteen miles west of Hanksville] Valley, there was a small town of very poor folks this town was twelve miles above Blue Valley, we went down over a long leval mesa, then we came to the big jump off, the place where we had to go down off the high mesa into Blue Valley, so steep and it looked more like a trail then it did like a road, we all got out of the -wagon and walked down the hill, all but Dad he stayed in and put on all the breaks he had and held back on the horses, the hill was so steep that one team could only pull an empty wagon up it, and if there was any load on the wagon they had to put on extra teams to pull them up, later on they built a little better dugway in a different place, but it was still very steep, this dugway was about 2 miles above...Giles..., after we got down the hill, the road went along a narrow place between the hill and a high river bank, and the road tipped toward the river bank, and we -wanted to get out and walk again it looked so bad, I cried and Mother screamed -we -were so scared.
The wagon road traversed the Waterpocket Fold through what is now Capitol Reef National Park. After it left the Fold, two or three miles before reaching the site of Caineville, the road went along the steep northwest slope of a blue clay reef. This -was the Blue Dugway. The downhill side sloped precipitously for several hundred feet, and there was no way for wagons to turn around or pass. Even a fraction of an inch of rain caused the clay to turn into slick gumbo. Naturally, the dugway acquired a terrifying reputation, made worse by the legend of a teamster who, descending the slope one overcast day, suddenly encountered the devil blocking the road. Fortunately, the story goes, the teamster thought to pull his Book of Mormon from the grub box and -wave it, causing the devil to disappear in a scream of rage and cloud of smoke. Sunday School and Primary teachers told and embellished the story with great relish—but it gave the children nightmares, and church leaders finally banned the story. 10
Joe Nielsen's story continues:
Then the valley got a little widder, and we passed a little ranch house, where Bro. Lance and his family lived in the summer. Then we passed Ren Turner's ranch house, both were log houses, then we crossed the river and that was real scarey to us nervous ones, we were getting all ruffeled up with the thrills and chills.
After we crossed the river we went up through a big brush patch for about a half a mile, then up pretty close to a big sandstone bluff, we drove up to a little one room shack, made of boards, and you could stand on one side of it and see out the other, through the cracks bet-ween the boards.
Dad drove the wagon up close to the door and stopped the team and said Well we're home. Mother did not believe him at first, but he finely convinced her that this was it, the place was about halfway between the big dugway and the town, it was almost a mile from any other house.
Mother shed bitter tears, she wondered why the church wanted to send them into such a forsaken place. Dad put his arm around her, and told her not to try to swollow the whole situation all at once, just take one thing and one hour at a time, and thrash out the problems as they come along. The idea of living outside mostly among the bugs snakes and lizards was pretty heart rending to Mother, but when she finely got her teeth into it, she was just as good a pioneer as any one could be.
According to Joseph, the house had one bedstead for the parents, and the children slept on the floor. He said that when the wind blew "the frail little house swayed back and forth, and the boards squeaked and popped...and the sand blew into the house in piles. I guess that's where we got grit enough to stick with it." But the house was only one of the disappointments of that first day, according to Jim.
We landed there at noon late in the Fall, unloaded the furniture in the well-ventilated lumber room and it started to rain. Mother had some nice things piled in the room. The rain came throgh the roof in streams. We had buckets, tubs and all the containers we could find trying to catch the water and keep it from destroying Mothers keepsakes, with very poor success. Mother sat down in the middle of the mess and started crying, never before or after did I ever see her so heartbroken and thoroughly disgusted; but they had burned their bridges behind them and there was nothing to do but tough it out.
I say tough it out advisedly, we did tough it out, living mostly on faith for five years. They were the miracle years. We were seventy miles from the nearest railroad over a desert of sand. The nearest flour mill was fifty miles away over a road that was almost impassable. There was no doctor within a hundred and fifty miles. It was not unusual for some of our own midwives to ride twenty miles on horseback to deliver a baby. 11
N. J. and his son Jim built a shed in front of the house out of green Cottonwood limbs. The family called it the bowery and spent most of their time there in the summers. Inside or outside, the family had to deal -with rodents, lizards, scorpions, insects, and snakes. Minnie was squeamish, but her mother, Johanna Beatta Heidersbach Schiller, went after the "friendly pests" with a vengeance. 12 According to Joe's account:
Dear old Grandma she was a wonder..., she thinned them out quite a bit in a short time, no one down there had any screen doors, and the flies and mesquetoes fed on us quite a bit, when we got to the table to eat some one had to waft the flies while the others ate, and in the evening the mesquetoes made their attact on us, we made smudges to combat them.
There were several families who chose to settle in Blue Valley and -who, for a time, had "grit enough to stick with it." Not surprisingly, then, the valley -was home to an interesting and sometimes challenging mix of people. Jim was not afraid to classify his diverse neighbors, and in a letter to his sister, Pat Nielsen Davis, he wrote, "Blue Valley people were pretty closely related and there were two different factions lived there." Some families were "more or less on the Lord's side." Others were "the bad influence."13 He went on to write brief profiles of some of the settlers.
Just before we moved there, the Bishop, Harry [or Henry] Giles (for whom the town was named) -was thrown from a horse and received a compound fracture of his right leg. They got a horse doctor from Grass Valley, sixty miles away, to come down. Gangrine had set in and they sawed his leg off with an ordinary cross cut saw. No sedative, no nothing. He rolled a newspaper into a cone and hollered through it while they did the job. He died the next day and was buried in the Blue Valley graveyard along with a number of others -whose stories have never been told.14
Bishop Giles when he -was alive had the ability to keep them in line and the Valley prospered. We moved down there just at that time
Bishop Giles had been dead about two years and his son-in-law, Levi White was the Bishop. Levi married the oldest Giles girl They were a proud family but so far as book learning was concerned they had none.
Levi White.. .was a quiet soft spoken man with very good principles. His wife Bertha Giles was the town Gossip and kept the Town and the poor Bishop in an uproar most of the time. She could stir up more trouble accidentally than all the rest of the town put together if they tried. Lean hear Tump busenbark cussing her now. Wren Turner accused Tump of shooting his dog and was sure mad about it. Tump said, "I know who told you it -was that G*** D*** Birth White and Tump proceeded to call her every thing a sheep herder -would call his dog. If there was any swear words Tump didn't know I never have heard them. Well it very near stareted a Feud as Bertha's brothers took it up and Tump threatened to kill the whole dam rotten family. That is just a sample of our neighborly difficulties.15
"Neighborly difficulties" were not necessarily the rule in Blue Valley, but the settlers did have a diversity of temperaments and habits. And each had his or her own way of adapting to a bare-subsistence life that, for many, -was based on faith and backbreaking work. For instance, John and Mary White, the "oldest couple" in Giles, had come directly from England. "They were hard working, honest people but they -were sure tight," Jim's narrative continues.
White brought a family of girls and three boys with him from England. The girls all married Bluevalley boys and they were excellent housekeepers and all believed in that First Commandment 'To multiply and replenish the earth.
Teddy Abbott received a little check every month from the Ould Country and he guarded it with his life. I worked for him for $15.00 a month and the family took it out in chips and Whetstones. I worked every daylight hour but we all rested on the Sabbath day. We had to haul our water in barrels from the Dirty Devil River and they were as tight with it as they were with Every thing else. On Saturday night we all bathed in a big no. 3 galvanized tub. One tubful had to do the whole family. Teddy and his wife bathed first then Nell, John and Nettie. By the time it became my turn it was pretty soapy as we all used home made soap. Teddy raised Bees and paid me off largely in honey which he watered down until it was about half and half.
Oscar White was the oldest boy and was an old batchelor. He filled a mission for the church while we were there. When he came back there was such an improvement that we hardly knew him. His hands were as white and soft as a woman's. When he partook of the Sacrament, he would nearly drain the glass. I shall never forget what a righteous man I thought he must be after drinking all that Sacrament water. We all drank out of the same glass in those days
The boys generally married the local girls within a radious of ten or fifteen miles. A number of the people living there had never saw a Train or been in a City larger than Loa. Once in a while a lady school teacher would come there and they rarely got away. I remember several City girls who became anchored in Bluevalley. The morals of those people were exceptionally good. The girls were modest to a fault. I never heard any off color stories told at our parties. When we left Bluevalley and came to Sunnyside [in Carbon County] I -was sure surprised at the difference. 16
According to Jim, the Nielsen family had its own ways of surviving life in Blue Valley.
We never was without food in our home, sometimes only bread and molasses and Brigham tea17 with a cottontail rabbit once in a while. Mother would go to the flour bin for a mixing of bread and -would say, "Pa, I doubt if there is another mixing of flour there." But there was always another mixing. This would go on for weeks at a time.18 Nothing went to waste. Bacon rinds were preserved and guarded to grease the drippers. One day the cat got the last bacon rind and I can remember mother calling all of us to come and help as the damn cat had the greaser. We never caught the cat. After that she sprinkled flour in the dripper to keep the bread from sticking.
Father and Mother had a baking powder can in our cupboard where they deposited their tithing and one-tenth of any money of what -we got hold of was deposited in that can. They were strict tithing payers. We could go -without shoes, clothes or any necessity but that baking powder can belonged to the Lord and -was never touched and the blessings predicated upon keeping that commandment were fulfilled many times over during those lean years.
St. Vitas Dance was very prevalent among the little children of our community and they believed they were possessed of the devil as they would do and say many things while under the influence of these attacks. Maybe the devil did have something to do with it and they were more susceptable under their weakened condition. But as I assess it today in my opinion, it was a lack of proper nourishment.19 We had the same food as everyone else, but our family was never afflicted and we saw much suffering along with our neighbors and several unexplainable deaths.
Two of our finest young women caught little colds and were found dead in their beds the next morning for no explainable reason.20 Then Small Pox hit our town. Henry Giles contacted [it] -while in Emery County after supplies. When he got home the whole family was stricken and helpless within a week. A town meeting -was called, everyone was scared pink, as Small Pox -was a killer in those days. The Giles family had to have help as they -were all down, and lived across the river from the town.
Father volunteered to go and take care of them, which he did, cooked, washed and seen them through. Mother and I -would go down to the river bank and visit with father by calling across the river. Archie Young, the town health officer, got so scared they stopped us from doing that. Father never got the Small Pox and it spread no further. The people were frightened they had the Giles family set fire to their home and burn everything they had. The people then pitched in and built them a one-room house on the town side. We had a large one-room meeting house with a potbellied stove in the center of the room in which we held church, school and all public meetings. All the grades -went to school in that one room from kindergarden to grown men and women. They had an awful time keeping teachers as the big boys would run them out of town if they tried to correct them. The same thing happened to the girl teachers who came there. The young ladies of our town would clean up on them and send them home crying. We were without school more than half the time. The meeting house had a dirt roof with a log sticking out on the corners. When we got tired of school one of the boys would climb onto the roof, stuff the chimney full of trash and smoke us all out, and ended school for that day.21
What dances we had in those days! The town was full of musicians. All of the Hunt family played the fiddle also our old friend, Henry Lords, as that was about the only entertainment we had, we danced two or three times a week. 23 The men always had plenty to drink as they made wine out of the grapes and white eye out of the green skimmings of the molasses. That -white eye was potent stuff, it would make a canary tackle an eagle. The dances invaribly ended up in a big fight with a lot of busted noses and sore heads. They always fought out their fueds at the dances. We had a number of good square dance callers and I can still hear Old Tom Businbark stomping the floor as he kept time to "Hell in the Cottonwoods." He would generally have an epileptic fit before the dance was over and have to be carried home.
Father was a peacemaker, and lived his religion and those wild tough men respected him and for some reason feared him just a little. Maybe it was because he had the Lord on his side and knew what he was talking about. Father was a builder and in all their poverty they decided to build a new church. They put him in charge of construction, he drew the plans and made a beautiful drawing of how the church would look when finished. Each family in the valley contributed all they could in labor and commodities.
Father examined the soil and picked out a spot about a mile from where the meeting house was built to make the adobies. Many of the men helped mix the mud. Father molded all the adobies, in fact, he put in his entire time until the building was completed. Doing all the mason work and a large part of the carpenter work. The settlers paid him for his time in the things they had; molasses, honey, pigs, corn, and a horse or two. How they ever done it I will never be able to explain. They hauled the lumber from the Boulder Mountain, fifty miles away, and bought tongue and grove flooring in Richfield at seventy-five dollars per thousand feet and hauled it to Blue Valley through what is called Wayne Wonderland now, we called it Capital Wash24 and in its natural state you can find nothing more rugged in Utah.
The building was, as I remember, about seventy by forty feet with nice comfortable bench seats and a good cedar shingled roof and it was paid for when it was completed. Don't tell me you can't get blood out of a turnip. As poor as we were, father contributed over seven hundred dollars in labor and money, and wages in those days were about one-tenth of what they are now. The building was completed in 1900 or 1901 and stood in tact for over sixty years. It was the last building left standing in Blue Valley. Our family visited the valley the year before joe died. 25 The foundation of the building was still in good shape and the old door frames and -window lintels were still scattered around. We found the old horse drawn tithing yard hay bailer with hay still in it. It could have been repaired in a few hours and used again.
Well things went from bad to worse, we had so many crop failures as we could not keep the water in our canals. Maybell came down from Teasedale, where she had been working and as she was a new girl in the valley she was very popular with the young men. She could have had her pick as she was a neat dresser and had some nice clothes and for a Nielsen was really good looking. What a celebration we had when she and Henry Hunt were married. 26 Everyone in the Valley was there and we really put on a splurge, never saw so many pies in my life. Everything we had was sweetened -with molasses. We would dump our fruit into a batch of molasses and when it was finished, put it in homemade barrels. So we had fruit preserves by the barrel. Sometimes when it was not cooked enough it would ferment and the foam would run out of the barrel and all over the floor. You could eat two slices of bread covered good with that preserves and get higher than a kite. Well, we all survived the wedding and lived on pie for two weeks after. They got some nice wedding presents and had more than most people to start housekeeping.
Father built an adobie room up to the square across from the frame building [missing word27] and covered it -with cottonseed logs, willows and dirt. He then put up a bower between the two houses and lived most of the summertime in the bowery. We lined the frame house with adobies and plastered it, we dried our fruit, corn squash, mushmellons and other vegetables on top of the flat roofed adobie house.
One day we were plowing out in the field when a little storm came up, we heard mother running toward us screaming for help, we rushed to the house and found Grandma lying on the ground beside the ladder. She had attempted to get the drying fruit off the roof before the rain hurt it, the ladder slipped and Grandma came tumbling down. Pa and I carried her in the house and put her in bed but she never stood on her feet again. She quit cold which is a German trait. She had never seen a sick day and worked like a beaver all her life, she recovered but had made up her mind that she was going to die. She ate hearty but would not get out of bed, she got the dropsy and laid there until she smothered and had to sit up in a chair. Father built a special chair for her. Mother waited on her and lifted her around until she died.28 Mothers health was never good and Grandma almost killed her before she passed away.
Although the family grew a good crop in 1902, the irrigation system failed in 1903. The children carried river water to the garden in buckets, but the food supplies dwindled.
Things finally got so tough that we had to do something. Father and I loaded up a wagon full of molasses and dried corn, leaving mother and the family in Blue Valley we came to Castle Valley to peddle our load. We spent several days peddling in Emery and Farren and finally disposed of the molasses at forty cents a gallon.
We then started for Sunnyside, Utah, as we heard there was plenty of work there. We -were two days driving from Farren to Sunnyside and arrived there in the Fall of 1903. They were building coke ovens at that time and there were fifteen hundred men employed there. 29 Every nationality on the globe -was represented, but there were mostly Italians and Greeks with a goodly mixture of the Austrians and Japs.
There was probably about twenty five buildings in Sunnyside. People lived in dugouts and tents, drank the water from the grassy brook stream, and built their outhouses on its banks. Grassy Creek had cut a deep gorge through Sunnyside and people burrowed into its banks like rats, did their cooking over fires or fireplaces and built huge bake ovens outside where they would bake a two week supply of bread at one time. What a change it was. We had always lived in a Mormon community where all that were not Mormons were gentiles and outsiders. Here in Sunnyside -we were the outsiders as there was only a handful of Mormons in the community.
Father and I had no trouble getting jobs, he was a good drop mason and could draw top wages. I understood horses and started driving team hauling rock on a stone boat off the side of the mountain for the masons to cut and hew to build the ovens. We were making more money in a day than we made peddling our molasses after working all summer to raise it. Father sold our team and wagon for a good fair price and sent the money to mother. Our financial troubles were over for a while. We worked good all Fall and winter, batching it except for one meal a day which we ate at the boarding house.
Pa paid his tithing regularly and insisted that I do the same. He took an active part in the church and they sure needed all the help they could get. Grandma died in Blue Valley while Pa and I were in Sunnyside and mother had to take care of all the funeral arrangements -with the help of the neighbors they got the job done. Henry Hunt and Maybell moved them [the rest of the family] out [to Sunnyside] and Henry got a job at once so they pitched a tent and stayed.
Brother Frank was born in Sunnyside on May 9th , 1904. He was the caboose, Mothers health had always been very poor and when John Henry and my sister Mary -were born in Blue Valley she nearly died both times as we only had mid-wives and if anything went wrong they were at sea. How often we had all knelt around mothers bed holding hands and praying for God to spare her when it seemed like all the blood in her body had drained out. Pa never seemed to worry much and -would go on about his -work. We thought he was pretty cold blooded but he knew what he was doing better than any of us. He prayed, did all he could then left it up to the Lord and seemed to be sure that she -would be all right and she was.
When Frank was born in Sunnyside, we had a good doctor, the first she had ever had when one of her children -was born. Father bought a very large tent and pitched it on a hill across from the coke ovens in the lower end of Sunnyside, we also built a dugout in the side of the mountain where we all slept as it was cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We had two tiers of bunks in the dugout with an alley bet-ween. Mother and father took in boarders and -we did all the cooking and eating in the large tent which was boarded up to the square. They had five or six boarders who paid them $22.50 a month for board. They bought most of their supplies from peddlers who came up from Castle valley with butter, eggs, meat and all kinds of vegetables.
The folks were making money, but mother did not like the mining camp so they moved to Huntington in Emery County where they bought a home from Antoine Nielsen, (no relation), the house consisted of two log rooms with an acre and a half of ground in the Southwest corner of Huntington. Father did well from the start, and always had more work than he could do, but he felt that his mission in Wayne County had never been finished, so they stored up supplies, bought a new wagon, team and harness, sold their home to me and moved back to Blue Valley to finish their assignment.
They moved back in 1906 and with enough means to start the grind all over again. They bought the old Knewl Knight home in Clifton three miles below our old home. The place had a fine large orchard, grape vineyard and large alfalfa fields. They bought chickens, pigs and a cow or two and were really fixed fine. Henry and Maybell were still in Huntington.
My wife and I had bought Father and Mothers home there and were settled down. Father and mother were anxious to have us move back to Blue Valley. Henry and Maybell and my wife and I sold out our belongings and moved back to Blue Valley. That was our big mistake. Two years later we had a flood that took everything before it. Bishop Elliot [Joseph H. Ellett] and I stood on the banks of the Dirty Devil River at Hanksville and watched the farms and houses go down the river. I shall never forget Bishop Joseph Elliot saying, "Jim, if we ever get out of here and tell people what we have seen today, they will never believe us. "We saw whole orchards with ripened fruit on the trees floating down the river along with houses, barns, pits, chickens and cattle and most everything we had. Father and mother were washed out completely, their whole farm was nothing but a river bed.
Joseph gives the date of the big flood as 1909. He says that the river was in flood for most of two months and that it took out large amounts of farm land, widening the river until it cut a wide swath through the valley. Overgrazing had caused flooding of this nature to become more and more common in southern Utah, a circumstance that was documented during the 1930s in a WPA project on grazing. The interviews and notes gathered by WPA writers consistently discuss the depletion of groundcover and the resulting floods that left wide gullies across the land. 30
After the flood in Blue Valley,
the Stake President and some of the others came down there [from Loa]...and they looked the Valley over, and then they went up to the dam site, and there they found that the river was much wider and deeper then it ever had been before. I remember all those good people were standing up on a high bluff looking down on the dam site where they had labored so hard, standing there with the Stake President waiting for his verdict, almost holding their breath waiting to see what he was going to say, finely the President turned from looking down into the canyon, and spoke to the people, and he said this is a hard thing for me to say, but this thing has been tried out by you and others who have come and gone for the last 20 or 25 years, and you seem to be just about where you started, very little headway has been made, and my impression is that you had better give it up, some of the people cried and some of them shouted for joy...
Father asked the Stake president if he was released from his mission in the Valley, and the President commended him for sticking on to the bitter end, and said Yes you are released from your mission, now you are free to go where ever you choose.
The Nielsen family promptly moved to the Provo Bench, or Orem. 31 Eventually, the rest of the valley's inhabitants also moved out, but not before some tried one last time to make a go of it. According to a local history, in 1913 the Stelson, Cook, and Throckmorton families joined the diehards still in the valley, which included Hunts, Gileses, Pierces, and Chris Jorgensen. Together they decided to build a spillway through "solid rock" to bring water to their fields. Although they completed the spillway, they were "so broken in spirit, as well as financially, that they never finished the levee....They stayed on as long as they could live on blighted hopes, and then one by one they moved away." 32
As one of those who had worked to wrest a living from Blue Valley, Jim Nielsen must have recognized how the geography of the place worked against the settlers. Maybe he also recognized a connection between overgrazing and flooding. But in trying to find a reason for the community's failure, he turned not to these factors but to the paradigm of faith—the same paradigm that had led his family to the valley in the first place. A faith-steeped explanation for the flooding could justify the priesthood leaders who had called the settlers to Blue Valley and -who had promised the settlers that if they kept God's commandments they would prosper.33 A faithful explanation could also justify his own family's prodigious and sacrificial efforts to obey this call. Perhaps it -was natural, then, for him to blame the failure of the community on those he called the "bad influence." "I will tell you about those who brought on the disaster," he wrote his sister. "I heard Sister [Lydia] Giles tell the people in front of the old meeting house one Sunday what would happen if they did not repent and quit making -whiskey and wine."
In his history, Jim looks back at a community that -was not able to survive. "Not a single living soul has lived in the valley since and the majority of the valley is still river bottom."
The Greasewoods grow so high that they have obliterated all signs of human habitation, but if you have time and will search long enough, you will find an old graveyard high and dry. The old foundations of many houses and the remains of a beautiful church building that -was built by a bunch of the most determined pioneers that ever lived in Utah. They were handlisted tough men and today would be poor Latter Day Saints.
Most of them did not keep the Word of Wisdom, they made and drank their own whiskey and wine and -when times were tough lived on greasewood greens and faith. The Word of Wisdom was not a commandment in those days, but the people were advised to keep it. 34 Maybe because they did not, the Lord permitted the valley to be destroyed and its people scattered. There is very little life in the valley today—our family stopped there a day and night. We saw no birds, or wildlife, not even an animal track on the soft blue hills.
NOTES
Kent Davis, a retired captain in the U.S.Air Force, is the grandson of Pat Nielsen Davis, daughter of N.J. and Minnie Nielsen Kristen Rogers is associate editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly.
1 In the manuscript excerpts that follow, paragraphs have been divided and obvious typographical mistakes have been corrected; otherwise, original spelling and punctuation have been retained James W Nielsen was born August 20, 1887, in Fairview; he died in 1976 Joseph August Nielsen was born in Fairview September 26,1893, and died in 1962.NielsJ.and Minnie had eight children, two of whom died very young The couple also raised Minnie's daughter by a previous marriage The youngest child in the family Isaac Franklin (born May 9, 1904, in Sunnyside, Utah), also wrote a lively account of life in Blue Valley; see Isaac F.Nielsen, "I Can't Forget that River: A Reminiscence of Mormon Fortitude," self-published pamphlet in possession of Kent Davis
2 Minnie was born April 10, 1862,in St Joseph, Missouri She was twice-divorced when she met Niels Nielsen.
3 JamesW Nielsen,"A History of NielsJ Nielsen and Minnie Schiller," typscript, c 1965,in possession of Kent Davis.
4 Mormons had first settled in BlueValley in 1883
5 The Dirty Devil River was named by the party ofJohn Wesley Powell in 1869 However, Powell did
not know where the river's headwaters were or that the river had two main forks Today, the north fork is called Muddy Creek and the south fork is the Fremont River Where the two riversjoin near Hanksville, it becomes the Dirty Devil Therefore, Giles was located on what isnow called the Fremont River
6 He later acquired two "very small horses"and an old wagon as payment for building a house for one of the settlers "The old harness and wagon were tied together with bailing wire, and we spent a lot of time fixing them,"his sonJoseph recalled;Joseph Nielsen,typescript manuscript in possession of author
7 Perhaps Orson H Lance
8 JamesW Nielsen, "A History." Unless otherwise noted, subsequent narrative byJim comes from this source. Greasewood is of the genus Sarcobatus, awoody shrub with small leathery leaves,common to saline desert soils;Michael Treshow et al., Guide to the Woody Plants of Utah (Boulder, CO: Pruett Press, 1964.), 95
9 Joseph August Nielsen, "Family History of NielsJoseph Nielsen and Minnie Schiller Nielsen," typscript, n.d., copy in possession of Kent Davis All narratives by Joe come from this source The settlers raised fruits, vegetables,melons, corn, cane, and alfalfa They also raised bees and made salt from "salt rock" by pounding it into a powder and boiling it until it had dissolved and the water evaporated See Anne Snow,comp., Rainbow Views:A History of Wayne County (Springville:DUP ofWayne Co., 1953),294-95
10 See Dwight L.King, "The Blue Dugway," Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (Winter 1981),66-67.
11 According to Joseph Nielsen, the nearest doctor was seventy-five miles away, and it took around forty-eight hours to fetch a doctor with a team and light wagon Since the sick person was either "dead or better by the time the Doctor got there,"the settlers rarely sent for one
12 Grandmother Schiller was born June 16, 1827, in Silesia, Prussia Her granddaughter Pat said she never spoke English but conversed 'with the family in German
13 James W Nielsen to Pat Nielsen Davis,undated letters, copies in possession of Kent Davis All references toJames Nielsen's letters are from this source.Anne Snow, comp., Rainbow Views: A History of Wayne County (Springville:DUP ofWayne Co., 1953),293,lists the early settlers as Henry Giles,Elijah Mayhew, ArchieYoung,LorenzoTurner,Edward C.Abbot,James P Knight,William Shirts,N.J Nielsen,John Ekker, Jonathon Hunt,John Busenbark, Heber J.Wilson, Francis C. Mikelsen, Daniel Cook, LeviWhite,John C. White,Joseph Ellett,and Orson H Lance
14 Henry Giles was appointed bishop in 1885 and died in 1892 The ward and town were named for him in 1895; see Miriam B Murphy, A History of Wayne County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society andWayne County Commission, 1999), 134,and Snow, comp., Rainbow Views, 296
15 JamesW Nielsen to Pat Nielsen Davis
16 A few of the other Giles residents mentioned in the letters include Henry Giles,a"good man" who was named after his father, Bishop Giles "He headed the tribe,and ifyou had an argument or trouble with one, you had the whole family to whip. Right or wrong, they sure hung together.""Lydia [Giles] left Blue Valley and went to work in one of the Mining camps She got in trouble, came home and had her baby and later married John Bacon." "John [Giles] was a very profane man and one day when he was really going good, he was struck dumb and although he regained his speech to some extent, he never could talk fluently again.""Ann [Giles] married a sheepman who run his sheep in the Henry Mountains His name was ChrisJorgensen He was stone deaf and aheck of a nice fellow.""[Frank Mayhew] and I'were real pals when we were kids and stood by each other thru thick and thin We traveled together for protection as the Giles boys would gang up on us if we were alone." "Luella [Mayhew] married a Nielsen boy on the Reservation She died when she had her first baby.""Bill Shirts was the blacksmith in BlueValley and a pretty good one His wife, Sarah, was a very sweet woman and was President of the Primary She baked our bread and I shall never forget how good it tasted Pa furnished the flour and she baked our bread for half and it was sure worth it."
17 Genus Ephedra, a low-growing shrub with jointed stems and scale-like leaves common to southern Utah;Treshow et at, Guide to the Woody Plants of Utah, 98. Ephedra is a strong stimulant and has decongestant properties;it is also called Mormon tea
18 During this time, family tradition has it that N J and Minnie had taken in the orphaned Lafe, Leonard, Moroni, and Mary Ann Hunt, and the family worried that there would not be enough food That there was always another "mixing" of flour in the bin they regarded asa miracle
19 St Vitus' dance, or Sydenham's chorea, is a nervous system disorder causing spasms of the face and limb muscles; it results from allergic reaction to streptococcal infection Another type of chorea, Huntington's, is an inherited disorder of the nervous system. See the World Book Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center Encyclopedia.
In one of the letters to his sister,James gives more credit to the devil than to nutrition:
"An epidemic of St Vitus dance hit the valley and half the families were affected People became possessed of the devil and we sure had some great experiences with him The Elders would make him depart from one place and he would tell them thru the person possessed that he was going to another place and possess them You could feel his influence so strong that it made your hair stand on end Not all the people in BlueValley were wicked, but there were some pretty tough old Mormons lived there."
Minnie Nielsen believed the valley was a hangout for the Book of Mormon's Gadianton Robbers For another account of Mormon belief in devils and Gadianton Robbers, seeW Paul Reeve,"Cattle, Cotton, and Conflict: The Possession and Dispossession of Hebron, Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Spring 1999), 171-73
20 The girls wereJennie and NellTurner "Fred Giles was engaged toJennieTurner and they had set the date It was quite a blow to him and he never married He died alone in a Hut on the Dirty Devil";James W Nielsen to Pat N Davis
21 According toJoseph, education was second to farm work for the children, who might start herding cows at age sixandbe able to do an adult's work by age fourteen Joseph only went to school in the middle of winter, and only part of the time even then, since often he could not cross the"high and tretcherous"river to the school
22 Besides playing fiddle, Henry Lords ran asawmill in the Henry Mountains
23 At one dance "Jont Hunt andJim Bergess had a fight and Hunt bit offJim Bergess's nose and swallowed it";James Nielsen to PatNielsen Davis
24 This would be Capitol Gorge, now part of Capitol Reef National Park.
25 Joe died in 1962
26 Henry had been born in 1874 in Hebron, Utah
27 Because the manuscript was typed on a ditto master, this word may have been scraped off
28 July 3, 1903
29 Mostly in jobs related to coal mining
30 See "History of Grazing," notes and manuscript, WPA work project, MSS B-100, Utah State Historical Society
31 Later, N.J and Minnie Nielsen lived in CedarView (in the Uinta Basin), Gunlock, and Manti It was in Manti where, after more than fifty years of marriage, Minnie died on November 26, 1939 N J died two days later.Jim subsequently lived in CedarView,Sunnyside,and Castle Dale.He died in 1976.
32 Snow, comp., Rainbow Views, 296-97
33 James Nielsen to Pat Nielsen Davis
34 The Word of Wisdom is a Mormon health code advising against tobacco and "strong drinks"; it was even as revelation in 1833 See Doctrine and Covenants, section 89
