Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 77, Number 2, 2009

106

108

IN THIS ISSUE

The Big Washout: The 1862 Flood in Santa Clara

By Todd M. Compton 126 Soldiering in a Corner, Living on the Fringe: Military Operations in Southeastern Utah, 1880-1890

By Robert S. McPherson

151 Friends at all Times: The Correspondence of Isaiah Moses Coombs and Dryden Rogers

By Sandra Dawn Brimhall 166 Did Prospectors See Rainbow Bridge Before 1909?

By James H. Knipmeyer 190

BOOK REVIEWS

Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen E. Leonard. Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy Reviewed by Melvin T. Smith

Shannon A. Novak. House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Reviewed by Richard E. Turley, Jr. Stan Hoig. The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade Reviewed by John D. Barton Jay H. Buckley. William Clark Indian Diplomat Reviewed by H. Bert Jenson 198 BOOK NOTICES

IN THIS ISSUE

One constant in history is nature.The forces, whims, and bounties of nature affect our lives in obvious and not so obvious ways. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes, tornadoes, severe snow storms, global warming, set limits on our actions, disrupt our plans and dreams, and demand our resources, our time, and our energy. The disruptions of nature are never opportune, yet since the earliest days of history our ancestors have sought to avoid, anticipate, and prepare for disasters.

Our first article for the Spring 2009 issue recounts the ferocious Santa Clara River flood of January 1862 that swept away much of the infant settlement of Santa Clara in southwestern Utah. The flood spared neither recent Mormon settlers nor the Paiute people who had lived along the river for centuries and required adaptations that neither group had anticipated. In recent years, modern residents living along the Santa Clara have also been severely challenged notably in January 2005, when flood waters rampaged down the river’s course toward its junction with the Virgin River, destroying scores of homes, disrupting hundreds of lives, and testing a new generation’s abilities to deal with an unexpected crisis, floods in a desert.

(RIGHT)

ON THE COVER: Rainbow Bridge. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY IN THIS ISSUE (ABOVE): Forbidding Canyon and Rainbow Bridge before Lake Powell. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

An Aerial Photograph of Rainbow Bridge. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

In the minds of many people the history of the American West is the story of three groups—Indians, cowboys, and soldiers. Our second article examines the experience of soldiers in a remote area of the West—southeastern Utah during the decade of the 1880s. Ten years after the end of the American Civil War, during which approximately three million American men served in the armies of the North and South, the United States Army numbered only 27,000 men. Charged with defending the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, maintaining peace in the Reconstruction South, protecting settlers and placating Indians in the West, the United States Army faced no small challenge in carrying out its responsibilities. This was certainly the case for the few hundred soldiers at Fort Lewis, Colorado, and Fort Douglas, Utah, who served among the Mormons, cattlemen, Paiutes, Utes, and Navajo of the Four Corners area.

Throughout history individuals, organizations, and even nations have struggled with the difficulty of maintaining respect and fostering good will in the face of fundamental differences in belief and action. The failure to do so has resulted in tensions, animosity, hostility, and even war. When Isaiah Moses Coombs left his pregnant wife in Illinois to join his fellow Mormons in Utah and, in time, take up the practice of polygamy, his friendship with Dryden Rogers, a physician and Baptist, was put to the test. Their friendship overcame their differences as their correspondence between 1855 and 1886, the subject of our third article reveal.

Rainbow Natural Bridge is truly one of the natural wonders of the world. The sandstone bridge, rising 290 feet above Bridge Creek and spanning 270 feet, has been a sacred site for native peoples for centuries, however, it was not until two expeditions, one led by Byron Cummings of the University of Utah and the other by William B. Douglass of the United States General Land Office, reached the remote bridge on August 14, 1909, that the bridge became known to the outside world. Our final article for this issue commemorates the centennial anniversary of that 1909 “discovery” in fine historical tradition by considering the question did prospectors along the Colorado River see the natural bridge before 1909? As with many historical questions, there is no clear or easy answer.

The Big Washout: The 1862 Flood in Santa Clara

BY TODD M. COMPTON

The great flood that swept much of Santa Clara away in January 1862, including its solid rock fort, was one of the epic moments in southern Utah history, complete with the adventure, hairraising escapes, humor, tragedy and heroism that epic requires.1

The story that emerges from both the earliest and retrospective sources shows the cohesiveness of the Santa Clara saints, who somehow survived as their homes, mills, orchards were swept away, and their solid fort fell stone by stone into a monstrously swollen river. The “old” settlers of Fort Clara had just been joined by some ninety immigrants from the unlikely country of Switzerland when the flood occurred. Working together, the two groups survived and then settled together in the new town of Santa Clara, about a half mile below the older settlement. The old community had been entirely washed out; the new one began immediately.

The fate of the Paiute Indian settlement and their farms located on the opposite side of the river is not recorded in the white historical record. However, the probable destruction of their village, coupled with other problems caused by Mormon settlement in southern Utah, must have had a devastating impact on their way of life.

Flood waters from the Santa Clara River cover the Jacob Hamblin home site in January 2005.

Todd Compton is the author of In Sacred Loneliness: the Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1997). He is currently writing a biography of Jacob Hamblin.

1 This article often uses the modern name for the town; however, before the flood it was generally known as Fort Clara. Likewise, the Santa Clara River was often called the Clara.

CHRISTOPHER REEVES, PORTRAITS OF LOSS, STORIES OF HOPE

While the 1862 flood was one of the worst floods in nineteenth-century Utah history, in some ways it was typical of the white pioneer experience in southern Utah, especially on the Virgin River.2 Violent floods in southern Utah often arrived unexpectedly in usually dry territory and often these floods swept away houses, farms, dams and canals that had been built by Mormon settlers with enormous, painstaking labor. As a result, they were often faced with the heartbreaking option of starting again from scratch or leaving. In some communities the pioneers faced this choice repeatedly.3

This paper examines some of the sources historians have used to date and tell the tale of the Santa Clara flood and reexamines the story of the flood itself.

The date of the Santa Clara flood—January 17 to 19, 1862—has been disputed by some local historians and writers. For example, Jacob Hamblin’s published autobiography dates the flood in mid-February, while Santa Clara residents have generally dated the flood on January 1, 1862.4 Local historian Nellie Gubler, using James G. Bleak’s “Annals of the Southern Utah Mission,” dates the Santa Clara flood from January 17 to 19, 1862. But Gubler also states that a number of the survivors of the flood dated the flood on New Year’s Day.5 Many Santa Clara residents accept this date. John Staheli’s autobiography dates the flood on January 1, 1862. “Just five days later [after the birth of Barbara Staheli on Christmas Day],” he wrote, “the big flood of 1862 came. The New Year’s morning, with my sisters Wilhelmina, Elizabeth, and Mary and my brother George, I stood at the high window and watched the flood racing past. The west wall of the fortress had already falled and there were great trees and boulders battering the place down.”6

In recent years, new documents have come to light that allow us to tell a much more precise story of the Santa Clara flood, especially a letter by Daniel Bonelli (captain of the Swiss saints who had arrived in Santa Clara in late November 1861) to Brigham Young written on January 19, 1862.7

2 A flood in 1889 may have been worse, see Andrew Karl Larson, I Was Called to Dixie: the Virgin River Basin: Unique Experience in Mormon Pioneering (St. George: The Dixie College Foundation, 1961), 367.

3 Ibid., 357-75.

4 James Little, ed., Jacob Hamblin, A Narrative of hisPersonal Experience, asa Frontiersman, Missionary to the Indians and Explorer (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1881), 75-76. A local historical marker erected in 1939 honoring the Swiss colony states: “The fort and many other buildings, dart and ditches were washed away by floods January 1, 1862.” The Fort Clara historical marker dates the flood on February 4, 1862, apparently relying on Richard Ira Elkins, Ira Hatch: Indian Missionary, 1835–1909 (Bountiful, Utah: n.p., 1984). However, this is not an actual autobiography; it is a modern biography which the author placed in the first person.

5 Nellie McArthur Gubler, “History of Santa Clara, Washington County, 1850-1950,” in Hazel Bradshaw, ed., Under Dixie Sun: A History of Washington County (St. George: Washington County Chapter D.U.P., 1950), 146-76, 164.

6 See John Staheli, “The Life of John and Barbara Staheli, Ms 7832, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Archives, hereinafter cited as LDS Church Archives. John Staheli was four and a half years old at the time of the flood.

7 Daniel Bonelli to Brigham Young, Brigham Young Collection, Box 28, fd. 17, microfilm reel 39, LDS Church Archives. This letter was brought to my attention by Waldo Perkins’ article, “From Switzerland to the Colorado River: Life Sketch of the Entrepreneurial Daniel Bonelli, the Forgotten Pioneer,” Utah Historical Quarterly 74(Winter 2006): 4-23.

This letter gives the correct date for the flood, January 17 to 19, 1862, and conclusively resolves the dating debate.

There is also a letter about the flood from Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith dated February 2, 1862.8 While this letter is valuable, it fails to precisely date the flood; it merely states that the rains started on Christmas day, 1861. It actually gives the impression that the flood and the evacuation of the fort occurred the day after Christmas in 1861, which is incorrect. Nevertheless, it is a valuable early holographic account of the flood.

Other early sources that mention the flood briefly are the Harmony Ward Record by John D. Lee, an article on the flood in the February 12, 1862 Deseret News, and two letters to the editor in the same edition of the News — one by Chapman Duncan from Virgin City on the Virgin River, dated January 19, and the other by Jesse W. Crosby from St. George, dated January 20.9

A purported January 19 letter to George A. Smith from Jacob Hamblin, published in the Deseret News with the Duncan and Crosby letters, is a curiosity. There is no letter from Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith dated January 19 in the George A. Smith collection at the LDS Church Archives. It appears that this letter was not really by Hamblin. It seems to take the beginning of the February 2 Hamblin to Smith letter, then inserts some of the January 19 Bonelli letter, rephrased. A few details in it come from sources other than Bonelli.

After these near-contemporary sources, there are many later reminiscences, autobiographies, and family histories. For example, James Bleak’s “Annals of the Southern Utah Mission” is a valuable source; though it includes some primary materials, much of it is written long after the 1862 flood.10

Jacob Hamblin, Thales Haskell and Augustus Hardy founded Santa Clara

8 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862, George A. Smith Collection, MS 1322, Box 6, fd 5, LDS Church Archives, available in Richard E. Turley, ed., Selected Collections from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2 vols. (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), v. 1, DVD 32.

9 Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks, eds., A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 18481876, 2 vols. (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1955), 2:4-7, “The Flood in Washington County,” and letters to the editor by Chapman Duncan and J. W. Crosby, Deseret News, February 12, 1862, pp. 4 and 8.

10 James G. Bleak, “Annals of the Southern Utah Mission, circa 1898-1907,” holograph, MS 318, LDS Church Archives, also in Turley, Selected Collections, vol. 1, DVD 19. James G. Bleak, a resident of St. George, never lived in Santa Clara.

George A. Smith.

on December 2, 1854, about a mile or so northwest of present-day Santa Clara. Three other missionaries Samuel Knight, Amos Thornton, and Ira Hatch arrived the following January and February.11 The Santa Clara settlement was located on the northeastern side of the Santa Clara river while Paiutes lived and farmed on the southwestern side. The community grew steadily, and by January 1856 a sturdy rock fort was built. The fort was about one hundred feet on each side with two feet thick walls, standing eight feet and six inches high, rising twelve feet where houses joined the wall.12 The fort’s north side faced a bluff overlooking the valley.

A company of saints from San Bernardino settled in Santa Clara after the Mormons abandoned San Bernardino in 1857-58. With these additional settlers, “a town site was laid off and those who built outside the Fort built on that town site.”13

By late November 1861, there were about twenty families living in Santa Clara.14 Aside from houses in the fort, there were about seven homes built outside the fort, a schoolhouse (perhaps the same as the “abobe meeting house” that a Gubler family history refers to) and Jacob Hamblin’s grist mill on the other side of the stream.15

At the time of the flood there were about twenty acres under cultivation as well as many orchards (especially peach orchards), some vineyards, and some cotton fields.16 Walter E. Dodge had a remarkable nursery that had received particular notice. When Brigham Young visited Santa Clara in May 1861, the settlers were expecting to harvest a thousand bushels of peaches

11 See Jacob Hamblin journal, December 1-2, 1854, holograph, MS 1951, LDS Church Archives; Thomas Brown to Brigham Young, December 22, 1854, in Juanita Brooks, ed., Journal of the Southern Indian Mission: Diary of Thomas D. Brown, Western Text Society, no. 4 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1973), 103-104. Other sources incorrectly have five missionaries arriving in Santa Clara in December 1854.

12 The dimensions are according to the Jacob Hamblin journal for January 1856, and Zadok Knapp Judd, “Reminiscence on the Settlement of the Santa Clara,” in James G. Bleak collection, Box 2, Fd 6, Utah State Historical Society. John R. Young incorrectly states that the fort was 200 feet square, Memoirs of John R.Young, by Himself (Salt Lake City: The Deseret News, 1920), 118.

13 Bleak, “Annals,” 79, cf. p. 62.

14 Mary Ann Hafen, Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer of 1860: a Woman’s Life on the Mormon Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 31. Bleak, “Annals,” 85, counts twenty families also. However, John Staheli remembered thirty families. See John Staheli, “The Life of John and Barbara Staheli,” LDS Church Archives, Ms. 7832, p. 5; “History of Brigham Young,” in History of the Church, 1839-circa 1882” CR 100 102, LDS Church Archives; and Turley, Selected Collections, vol. 1, DVD 4) at May 25, 1861, records that there were thirty-four men and thirty houses in Santa Clara in May 1861. The 1860 census for Santa Clara “Tonaquint” Washington County, pp. 151-54, lists twenty-five households.

15 Daniel Bonelli to Brigham Young, January 19, 1862; “Casper Gubler,” (n. a.), at http://www.lofthouse.com/history/GublerCa.html (accessed January 7, 2008); and Young, Memoirs, 119.

16 Zadok Knapp Judd,Autobiography, typescript at the Utah State Historical Society.

Thales Haskell. UTAH

SOCIETY

later that year, half of which would come from Jacob Hamblin’s orchard.17 Other settlers soon added to the growing settlement. Between eighty-five and ninety-three recently emigrated Swiss were called by Brigham Young to settle in Santa Clara to raise grapes, indigo, cotton, figs, and olives. They arrived at Fort Clara November 24-28, and at first camped around the adobe meeting house, putting up shelters around it.18 Some of the Swiss saints moved into the fort. The George and Sophia Staheli family, with a pregnant mother and seven children from twelve to two, moved into the second floor of the Ira Hatch home in the southwest corner of the fort.19

Settlement leaders decided that the Swiss saints should be permanently located on the “lower flat” on the “Big Bend” of the Santa Clara creek about a half mile or a mile southeast of the fort.20 This site would eventually become the hub of modern Santa Clara. Some of the older settlers of Santa Clara had been using this flat, but at the counsel of church leaders, apostles George A. Smith and Erastus Snow, they gave up their claims to the Swiss. The land was surveyed by Israel Ivins from St. George in early December, and Daniel Bonelli headed the effort to divide the land into equal plats for farming and vineyards.

On December 22 Bonelli dedicated the land; the Swiss saints sang, prayed and drew numbered lots from a hat to receive their inheritances.21 After this meeting, the Swiss began moving away from the fort and onto their lots. This location was not by any means the most attractive land possible for vineyards. Mary Ann Hafen remembered “dry, dead sunflowers” and “gray rabbitbrush” growing there. Ten-year-old Anthony Ivins, who helped his father Israel move a group of Swiss settlers to Santa Clara, remembered seeing nothing but sagebrush, and wondered how the Swiss settlers would survive.22

The Swiss saints dammed the Santa Clara near their site, and dug irrigation ditches to their lots, which they completed on Christmas day 1861.23

17 “History of Brigham Young” May 25, 1861, p. 216.

18 See Daniel Bonelli to Brigham Young, January 19, 1862; Waldo Perkins, “Christen and Samuel Wittwer,” typescript in possession of author; and Bleak, “Annals,” 99.

19 John Staheli, “The Life of John and Barbara Staheli,” 5. According to Mary Judd, the Stahelis lived in the Ira Hatch home. See Mary Judd autobiography, 27, Huntington Library, San Marino, California;Young, Memoirs, 119.

20 Hafen, Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer, 32. One source uses the following language: “below the point of the hill on the bend of the river where homes would be safer from the flood waters of the creek.” Selina G. Hafen and Eliza H. Gubler, cp., “Johannes (John) Gubler and Maria (Mary) Ursula Muller” at http://www.lofthouse.com/USA/Utah/washington/.gubler-johan.html, (accessed January 1, 2008). Bleak, “Annals,” 99, uses the language, “‘Big Bend’, or ‘Bottom’, below the Fort.” According to Bleak, “Annals,” 33, Fort Clara was “about half a mile above the present town of Santa Clara.” Zadok Knapp Judd, autobiography, remembers the Swiss settling “a few hundred yards below where we had settled.” See also John Stucki, “Autobiography,” typescript, Utah State Historical Society, 12, and, Joyce Wittwer Whittaker, comp. and ed., History of Santa Clara, Utah “A Blossom in the Desert” (Santa Clara: Santa Clara Historical Society, 2003), 281.

21 Bleak, “Annals,” 99-100; Hafen, Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer, 32.

22 Gubler, “History of Santa Clara,” 161. For a contrasting view, see John Stucki, Autobiography, 10-11.

23 Bleak, “Annals,” 123D.

Some of the Swiss lived in their wagon boxes, and others gathered willows to make temporary shelters from the wind. The Samuel and Magdalena Stucki family, including their daughter, Mary Ann, lived in such a shelter. Mary Ann remembered her mother complaining that this wickiup was a poor substitute for the cozy home they had left behind in Switzerland. Her complaints would undoubtedly multiply when the rain began to fall. Other Swiss began to build more permanent dugouts in the sides of the hill.24

On Christmas day, three significant events occurred. First, Barbara Staheli was born to George and Sophia Barbara Staheli in the upstairs room of the Hatch home in the fort. The Stahelis had moved into the fort to accommodate the childbirth, and since Sophia was ill for weeks after the birth, they stayed in the fort after Christmas. Second, the Swiss settlers finished their irrigation ditches and diversion dam. And third, it began to rain. 25 According to early sources, the rain lasted for some forty days, which would be about six weeks or until about February 8, 1862.26

The settlers of St. George had arrived in late November and early December. Bleak writes that it began to rain on them while they “where having a festive Christmas time.” The wagon covers and tents they were camping in turned out to be “but poor shelter” from a continuous fortyday “down-pour.”27 The same would have been true for the Swiss saints.

Further to the north, heavy rain and snow fell on the upper Santa Clara creek and in Pine Valley, which swelled the lower Santa Clara creek. Daniel Bonelli refers to “incessant” rain and snow storms in the mountains above Fort Clara.

Many of the early reminiscences remember the Santa Clara before the flood as a creek and under normal circumstances one could walk across it in places.28 In the weeks following Christmas 1861, the creek became a river in full flood, with banks widening continually and water level always rising.

The flood came “as a thief in the night,” in John Ray Young’s words, early in the morning of Friday, January 17.29 When the flood struck, the once-meek Santa Clara indeed presented a fearsome sight. John Young remembered a “wall of water” ten to fifteen feet high.30 Daniel Bonelli was equally impressed by the weirdness of cottonwood trees and huge logs

24

Hafen, Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer, 34.

25 For the rain starting on Christmas, see Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862; Robert Gardner, Jr., Autobiography, holograph, written in 1884, pp. 20-21, in the Robert Gardner collection, MS 1744, LDS Church Archives; Bleak, “Annals,” at December 25, 1861, 113, 123D.

26 Bleak, “Annals,” at December 25, 1861, 113, 123D; Cleland and Brooks, A Mormon Chronicle, 2:6-7. Mary Judd, autobiography, p. 26, remembered that the rain fell about three or four weeks after Christmas.

27 Bleak, “Annals,” 113.

28 Hafen, Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer, 33.

29 Young, Memoirs, 118 For the date of the flood see Daniel Bonelli to Brigham Young, January 19, 1862.

30 Young, Memoirs, 118.

careening down the Clara, rushing along “like arrows upon the turbid current.” This presented “a spectacle of dreadful magnificence.” In addition, the flood uprooted trees at Santa Clara “with astounding rapidity.”31 Jesse W. Crosby wrote on the 17th that the Virgin and the Santa Clara “became mighty rivers, and both man and beast fled from them terrified.” In fact, a number of horses, mules and cattle were drowned.32 Jacob Hamblin remembered the awesome sound of the flood, “the roar of the water awakened most of the inhabitance in and about Ft Clara.”33 Mary Judd wrote that the flood “looked like the sea as it came out of the kanion and spread over the bottoms from hill to hill.”34 Bonelli in his letter to Brigham Young wrote that the river “overflew nearly the whole of the bottoms, destroying orchards and field.”35

On the other side of the river, the angry current swept away Jacob Hamblin’s grist mill at about this time. When the flood struck on early Friday morning, the elderly miller Solomon Chamberlain and his grandchildren, who lived near the mill, were rudely awakened by a stream of water pouring into their dugout.

They managed to escape this deathtrap by climbing a nearby tree, where they spent a miserable and terrifying night. “Old Father Chamberlen grandson and daughter ware in a long tree surounded by the floods,” Hamblin wrote.36 They stayed in the tree until Friday afternoon when the floods abated, and then the Chamberlains retreated to “a high spot on the mill-race.”37 Soon after this, the tree in which they had taken refuge was swept away in the still-raging current. “Chamberlen had decended ^from his tree^ but a few minits when it ... was hauld into the distructiv element,” according to Hamblin.38 However, they were now safe at their high point on the mill-race, and John Young reports that three days later he and Ira Hatch were able to cross the river and bring Chamberlain and his grandchildren back to the main settlement with them.39

By about midday on Friday the flood water in the bottoms retreated to the river channel. Daniel Bonelli wrote, “During the forenoon the floods seemed to abate and returned to the deeper washing bed of the river.” Hamblin wrote that on that afternoon the river had receded to its banks, but the channel of the river was eight feet deeper than it had been, and now “the banks [were] sliding in with great rapidity undermining houses stacks

31 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, January 19, 1862, in Deseret News, “Floods in Southern Utah,” February 12, 1862, p. 8.

32 J. W. [Jesse Wentworth] Crosby, Letter to the Editor, dated January 20, 1862, in Deseret News, “Flood in Southern Utah” February 12, 1862, p. 8.

33 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862.

34 Mary Judd, Autobiography, 27.

35 Daniel Bonelli to Brigham Young, January 19, 1862.

36 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862. For this incident, see also the Bonelli letter and “The Flood in Washington County,” Deseret News February 12, 1862, p. 4. The fullest account of Chamberlain’s adventures is in Young, Memoirs, 119-20.

37 Ibid.

38 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862.

39 Young, Memoirs, 119-20.

of grain orchards and nurserys.”40 According to one local history, “The mad river was slashing into the bank, carving out pieces as big as a house.”41

The Santa Clara pioneers evidently felt that the fort and houses near to it were safe. Hamblin, in his autobiography, wrote, “Our fort, constructed of stone ... with walls twelve feet high and two feet thick, stood a considerable distance north of the original bed of the creek ... and we had considered it safe from the flood.” 42 On Saturday night, Jacob Hamblin’s third wife, twenty-year-old Priscilla, warned him that the situation was dangerous. “Priscilla, you are too concerned,” Hamblin responded, and went to bed.43

Later that night, the flood waters began making inroads beneath the southwest corner of the fort, where the Hatches and Stahelis were living.44 The Santa Clarans realized they might lose the fort, and quick evacuation was necessary. Someone knocked on Jacob Hamblin’s door: “Jake, are you going to lay there and be washed away?” was his brusque question. That got Hamblin out of bed.45

John Young described the waters hitting the west wall of the fort and dividing the flood water north and south. While the walls of the fort held for a time, the water on the north soon streamed into the entrance of the fort. A sheet of water four or five feet deep “swept through the gate like a mill race, flooding the inside of the fort to a man’s armpits.”46

The rescue mission to save people and remove the settlement’s possessions from the fort was quickly organized. The rescuers must have presented an eerie spectacle; while the chaos of the river roared, a black unseen monster, human forms moved about in near darkness, lit only by a few torches or makeshift lanterns.

Their first priority was to take women and children to higher ground. However, just outside the entrance to the fort a dangerous strong current was flowing that could easily sweep people away. To provide safe passage through the rushing water, the men tied a strong rope to a post inside the fort and to a tree higher up the hill.47

Thus, the women and children were evacuated, some clinging to the necks and riding on shoulders of men as they held onto the rope.48 Many

40 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862.

41 Gubler, “History of Santa Clara,” 163.

42 Little, Jacob Hamblin, 76.

43 Pearson Corbett, Jacob Hamblin: Peacemaker (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1952), 200. For Jacob Hamblin’s wives, see Todd M. Compton, “Civilizing the Ragged Edge: Jacob Hamblin’s Wives,” Journal of Mormon History 33 (Summer 2007): 155-80.

44 Jacob Hamblin does not give the date, but says that this occurred at night: “when the darkness of the night had set in the south^west^ corner of the Fort comenced falling.” Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862.

45 Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, 200.

46 Young, Memoirs, 119.

47 John Staheli, “The Life of John and Barbara Staheli,” 5, remembers it in the middle of the fort.

48 Young, Memoirs, 119, portrays the rope being used during all the evacuation. Jacob Hamblin, in his February 2 letter to George A. Smith, and his autobiography, Little, Jacob Hamblin, 77, seems to remember using the rope only for the rescue of Sophia Staheli.

of the refugees took shelter in a “stone corell” that Hamblin had built higher up the hill. Mary Judd later remembered, “A city of tentes and shanties around that stone fort.”49

Following the evacuation of the women and children, the men turned to saving what supplies they could. There were two hundred bushels of wheat stored in the northwest corner of the fort, and the men started to move the wheat, while John Young held a lantern and kept an eye on the flood. “We barly saved the grain that was stord in the Fort lard[er],” wrote Hamblin.50 When they had removed 175 bushels, Young gave a warning, and soon after this the northwest corner of the fort fell into the raging Santa Clara waters.

At about this time a near disaster occurred, as the saints realized that most of George Staheli’s family was still inside the fort. (George Staheli had been attempting to “rake” wood out of the creek’s channel and did not realize that the fort was being evacuated.) Hamblin headed the rescue even as the back part of the fort was falling away “piece by piece.” Judd, Hamblin, and others waded through the water and were able to get to the family in time while George Staheli attempted to take his wife through the wild current north of the fort, but “the depth and swiftness of the water prevented him” from escaping the fort.51 Hamblin, a large, tall man came to the rescue. “I then took the sick woman on my back and by the help of Bro Young and the roap conveyed hur safe to the shore.” According to one account, Hamblin nearly lost his own life while trying to save the gravely ill Sophia Staheli. Just as he and Sophia were nearly safe, the pole at the fort on which the rope was tied “gave way and tore the rope loose.” Someone was able to seize Sophia even as Hamblin was being swept away in the rushing water. A quick thinking Indian threw a rope to Hamblin who seized it and the Santa Clara men dragged him to safety.52

In Hamblin’s autobiography, he tells the story somewhat differently. Midway through the most dangerous part of the rescue, Sophia Staheli’s “arms pressed so heavily on my throat that I was nearly strangled. It was a critical moment, for if I let go the rope we were sure to be lost, as the water was surging against me.” However, he was able to persevere, and reached safety “to the great joy of the husband and children.”53

The other Staheli children were rescued by other men, with great difficulty. Zadok Judd took a Staheli boy about five years old, possibly George Staheli who had been born in January 1854, and carried him clinging to his back as he waded through swift water. As Judd fought the

49 Mary Judd, Autobiography, 27.

50 Jacob Hamblin to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862.

51 Ibid.

52 Gubler, “History of Santa Clara,” 163. “Life Story of Barbara Staheli Graff Stucki,” WPA biography, Utah State Historical Society, and Juanita Brooks, On the Ragged Edge: The Life and Times of Dudley Leavitt (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1973), 103. This may be a doublet of Hamblin’s fall into the Santa Clara described below, in which Albert, an Indian, throws Hamblin the rope.

53 Little, Jacob Hamblin, 77.

waist-high current and tried to go forward, he stumbled and almost fell into the flood; but he just barely had enough strength to regain his footing while the boy held tight to him. They made it to safety.54

Just after the Stahelis were saved, the entire south wall of the fort dropped into the water.55

According to Mary Judd, Jacob Hamblin nearly lost his life while bringing his own wife to safety. “[B]r Jacob Hamblin came near going down to[o] trying to git out his wife,” Judd later wrote.56

John R. Young reports another close shave for Hamblin (or another version of the fall described above). After the rescue of the people in the fort and the wheat, Hamblin asked Young to hold the lantern while he moved some cordwood to higher ground. While he was engaged in this task, the section of earth on which he stood fell into the river. Young shouted for help, and Joseph Knight came running with the rope they had used to evacuate the fort. As Young tried to direct the light down the bank to where Hamblin was struggling to hold onto “snapping roots,” Knight made a noose and threw it down, lassoing Jacob with it.57 As Hamblin seized the rope, Knight and Young pulled him from certain death, for, as Young later wrote, “no man could have lived long in that torrent of mud and water.”58

By three a.m. Sunday morning, the fort had been entirely swept away, along with the schoolhouse, and seven houses close to the fort.59 There has been a local tradition that a wall of the fort still stood, and Jacob Hamblin used the rock from the wall of the fort to build his new home. However, in his February 2, 1862, letter to George A. Smith, Hamblin convincingly contradicts this: “by the next morning thare was not a single rock of the old fort to be seen but a chanel whare it once stood, [and] the schoolhouse and 7 other houses above the Fort had [also] disappeared and in their place roar now the wild torrents of the river.” Bonelli’s January 17, 1862, letter to Brigham Young also supports the idea that no part of the fort survived. The Santa Clara orchards, vineyards and Brother Dodge’s prize nursery were also entirely gone.

As the sun arose on Sunday morning, January 19th, the Santa Clara saints, camping out in the rain at Jacob Hamblin’s stone corral at the top of the bluff, must have witnessed a heartbreaking panorama of apocalyptic grandeur. Their fort, town, orchards, and vineyards were entirely gone. In

54 Zadok Knapp Judd, autobiography. According to “Life Story of Barbara Staheli Graff Stucki,” WPA biography, at USHS, “My brother George was carried away by the flood but was saved by a man called ‘Little Bishop.’” Judd was the bishop of Fort Clara ward at the time.

55 Elizabeth Staheli Walker, “History of Barbara Sophia Haberli Staheli,” in Nora Lund, Biographies Collection, 3, MS 8691, microfilm reel 3, LDS Church Archives.

56 Mary Judd, Autobiography, 27. This may be a doublet of the incident of Hamblin bringing Sophia Staheli to safety.

57 Juanita Leavitt Brooks, doubtless reflecting Leavitt/Hamblin traditions, wrote that Albert, Jacob’s adopted Indian boy, threw him the lasso that saved him. Brooks, On the Ragged Edge,103.

58 Young, Memoirs, 120-21, and Zadok Knapp Judd “Autobiography.”

59 Daniel Bonelli to Brigham Young, January 19, 1862.

their place was a river “one hundred and fifty yards wide the banks on the north side of the creek 25 feet high.”60

Many accounts of the flood emphasize how the old town of Santa Clara was washed away, and even old settlers, along with the Swiss newcomers, had to make a new beginning. The flood “changed the prospects and circumstances of all to a great extent, reducing the first settlers to almost the position of new beginners,” writes James Bleak.61 After the flood, the area even looked different, aside from the obvious lack of the fort and schoolhouse, homes, and orchards; the flood “gave a very different aspect to the country.”62 This transition from destruction to new beginnings possibly provides a reason for the persistent misdating of the flood to January 1. It may have simply felt right that the flood should occur when the old year was ending and the new year was beginning.63

In the days and weeks that followed the flood, the men and women of Santa Clara set to work to provide themselves and their families with dry clothing, hot meals, and temporary homes as the forty-day rain continued. The Mormon pioneers such as Priscilla Leavitt Hamblin believed in a gospel of work, and now it was time to practice it. “There was no time for self-pity,” Priscilla later said. “There was work to be done and much of it; shelters were made, and the mothers had to make them pleasant to live in.”64

Priscilla had just washed and ironed the clothes of the large Hamblin family on Friday and had put them on a rack on a side wall inside the fort to dry. In the rush of evacuation, her clothes were washed away. Later Priscilla said, “I only owned two aprons [at the time of the flood], I was wearing the old one, and my good one was buried in the red Santa Clara flood.”65

The Ira Hatch family, who lived in the southwest corner of the fort, also lost everything they had. John R. Young wrote, “Suddenly the southwest corner of the fort, Ira Hatch’s home, fell into the flood, sweeping away everything he owned. Other families suffered, but he, taken by surprise, lost all.”66 Other families evidently were able to salvage part of their possessions.

Some things that had washed down the Santa Clara were recovered. “A great many peaces of Heamlans grist mill did [go] down the clara, a distance of four miles for I helped to pick them up,” wrote St. George resident Robert Gardner.67 Zadok Judd recovered some of his peach trees, which were “brought back and reset and afterwards bore fruit.”68 The

60 Jacob Hamblin, letter to George A. Smith, February 2, 1862.

61 Bleak, “Annals,” 123D.

62 Ibid.

63 The transition from last day of old year to first day of new year is regarded in many cultures as a time reenacting the destruction of the world and new creation. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, Bollingen Series XLVI, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 49-92.

64 Quoted in Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, 202.

65 Ibid.

66 Young, Memoirs, 119:

67 Robert Gardner, Jr., Autobiography, 22-23.

people at Santa Clara spent much time and effort in the days after the flood trying to reclaim plants, machinery, and building materials that had disappeared into the violent waters of the Santa Clara.

Though the great rains and flood were a harsh welcome to the new Swiss arrivals at Santa Clara, they were actually somewhat fortunate. “On the ‘lower flat,’” Mary Ann Hafen wrote, “we were untouched by the flood.”69 However, their new dams and ditches were entirely washed away, and they started rebuilding these on February 17 and finished a month later, on March 16.70

Remarkably, no lives were lost during the “big washout” at Santa Clara, though Jacob Hamblin, Zadok Knapp Judd, Solomon Chamberlain and his children, and the Stahelis, all had brushes with death. Elsewhere, the Lee family at Fort Harmony was not so lucky, as John D. Lee lost two children to a cave-in just as they were preparing to finally evacuate Harmony Fort.71 The survival of the entire Santa Clara community in the face of a sudden, violent challenge from nature is a tribute to the cohesiveness of the little Mormon community, which had recently received a major, quite alien infusion of population—many of whom could not speak English.

Nevertheless, the Great Flood took its toll; a few people who were already ill obviously would not have been helped by the unavoidable exposure to cold, rain, and flood waters of the Santa Clara. There were a few deaths that were attributed to the flood. John Terry Young, the two-year-old son of John Ray and Albina Terry Young, died on February 22, 1862. John senior wrote, “During the damp and rainy weather that accompanied the flood, our little son, John T., took the croup, and after several days of terrible suffering, died. This was our first life sorrow, and the blow was a heavy one.”72 Sophia Barbara Staheli, the mother of the child born in Fort Clara on Christmas Day died of typhoid fever on June 3, 1862, leaving her baby motherless.73 Her son wrote, “Barbara was never well after the night of the flood.”74

Rachel Judd Hamblin, Jacob Hamblin’s second wife, died four years later, on February 18, 1865. Family traditions report that her health, already poor, was worse after the flood.75 Caroline Beck Knight, the wife of Samuel

68 Zadok Knapp Judd, Autobiography.

69 Hafen, Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer, 34. See also John Stucki, Autobiography, 14; Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, 203: “The momentum of the stream’s current was directed to the south side of the creek’s channel away from the townsite [of the new Swiss settlers].”

70 Bleak, “Annals,” 123D.

71 Lee, Harmony Ward Record, February 6, 1862, in Cleland and Brooks, A Mormon Chronicle, 2:7.

72 Young, Memoirs, 121.

73 John Staheli, “History of John and Barbara Staheli,” 6.

74 Frank Staheli, “Johann George Staheli,” in Whittaker, History of Santa Clara, 348-50.

75 Compton, “Civilizing the Ragged Edge,” 180-81; Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, 200. Corbett reports that Rachel, when saved from Fort Clara, had an eight-day-old baby, Araminda. However, on p. 460, he gives the date of birth for Araminda as “January 27, 1861.” If this is the correct date —and it is the date in Vera Leib Miller, compiler, The Jacob Vernon Hamblin Family (Seal Beach, CA: by the author, 1975), 54 — then Araminda was not eight days old, but almost a year old at the time of the flood.

Knight, had poor health before the flood, according to family traditions, and was eight months pregnant at the time of the flood. She bore her second child, Leonora, on February 8, 1862, while all the Santa Clara saints were undoubtedly living in crude shelters of some sort. The “forty-day rain” may have continued up through the date of the birth. Caroline died eight years later on February 13, 1870, at the age of thirty-nine. The flood may have worsened her sickly condition.76

There is today a persistent tradition that Brigham Young had advised the Santa Clara residents to move to higher ground before the flood. In Andrew Karl Larson’s account of the Big Flood in Santa Clara, he quotes the LDS church’s monumental daily scrapbook, the Journal History, which in this case draws from a contemporary source, “History of Brigham Young.” According to this account Brigham Young visited Santa Clara on May 26, 1861, and advised the saints there to move onto higher ground. This tradition suggests that old Santa Clara was destroyed partly as the result of the heedlessness and disobedience of the settlers there.77

However, upon closer examination of the Journal History, the statement in which Brigham Young advises the saints at Santa Clara to move to higher ground is written in pencil, while the main text is typed. The advice is thus a late addition to the Journal History, and when we examine the actual “History of Brigham Young,” the sentence on Brigham Young advising the move is not there.78

There was a quite early tradition that Young gave this advice, though it does not come from Santa Clara. In his January 20, 1862, letter to the Deseret News , St. George resident Jesse W. Crosby wrote, “This will learn us an important lesson, and all will now be willing to take President Young’s advice and get on high ground.” However, Crosby was not in Santa Clara when Brigham Young visited the community in May 1861. Crosby came south with the St. George group in late November or early December, 1861.79

James Bleak, another St. George resident stated that “President Brigham Young in his visit ... advised the people of Santa Clara to move to higher ground.”80 However, this statement appears in the 1859 section of Bleak’s work, and Brigham Young did not visit Dixie in 1859 but in 1861. The text in “Annals” continues and gives Brigham Young’s well-known prophecy of

76 Robert Briggs, a descendant of Caroline Knight, reports a family tradition that Caroline was sickly since the birth of her first child and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but he wonders if the 1862 flood, and the wet, cold living conditions that accompanied it, might have been the more logical cause of her ill health. Personal communication.

77 Larson, I Was Called to Dixie, 43.

78 See “Church Historian’s Office. History of the Church, 1839-circa 1882” CR100 102, in Turley, Selected Collections, vol. 1, DVD 4.

79 See Jeff Crosby, “Jesse Wentworth Crosby,” a biography of Crosby, at http://www.angelfire.com/ut/jcrosby/history/jesse/jesse.html, (accessed on January 7, 2008). Crosby is on the list of St. George settlers given by Bleak, “Annals,” 89. See also Bleak, “Annals,” 101. John Stucki also mentioned the prophecy by Young, Stucki Autobiography, 13.

80 Bleak, “Annals,” 75.

Flood waters destroy a home built along the Santa Clara River. January 2005.

St. George, which occurred in 1861. So Bleak was probably referring to Young’s 1861 visit to Santa Clara. And, as we have seen, there is no record of a warning from Young in the “History of Brigham Young” on May 25, 1861. Once Brigham Young declared Fort Clara to be “the best Fort in Utah.” It would be hard to imagine him praising it in such glowing terms if he felt it had been built in a dangerous place.81

Undoubtedly, the Santa Clara flood also impacted the Paiute Indian community, both near Fort Clara and up and down the Santa Clara river. The Paiutes were remarkable for their agricultural accomplishments. 82 When Mormon Indian missionaries first settled in the Santa Clara area, they did so at the invitation of the Paiutes, in order to help them improve their farming methods and help defend them against Ute incursions.83 One

81 Ibid., 34.

82

For Paiute agriculture, see Thomas Brown diary, June 8 and 13, 1854, in Brooks, Journal ofthe Southern Indian Mission, 49, 57; Isabel T. Kelly and Catherine S. Fowler, “Southern Paiute,” in William Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, 17 vols. (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1986), 11: 368-97, 317; Catherine S. Fowler and Don D. Fowler, “Notes on the History of the Southern Paiutes and Western Shoshonis,” UtahHistorical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1971): 95-113, 101; Richard W. Stoffle and Maria Nieves Zedeño, “Historical Memory and Ethnographic Perspectives on the Southern Paiute Homeland,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 23 (2001): 229-48; Robert A. Manners, Paiute Indians 1. Southern Paiute and Chemehuevi: An Ethnohistorical Report (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974), 37-43.

83 For the Paiute invitation, see John R. Alley, “Prelude to Dispossession: The Fur Trade’s Significance for the Northern Utes and Southern Paiutes,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Spring 1982): 104-23. For Mormon-Paiute relations generally see Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 17751995 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 48-94, and W. Paul Reeve, Making Spaceon the Western Frontier. Mormons, Miners, and SouthernPaiutes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

CHARLIE HARRISON, PORTRAITS OF LOSS< STORIES OF HOPE

wonders how the flood affected their farms and villages. However, the Paiutes were not writing history, and their fate during and after the great flood is not recorded in any substantial way. There are only a few references to Indians during this time period.

John Staheli recalled that when he and the others first settled at Santa Clara there were about three hundred Indians camped by the creek below the fort. For a time “they were troublesome” but Staheli and the other settlers were “fortunate... having Jacob Hamblin with us, since he was able to assist us in settling most of our troubles. However at times we had unpleasant encounters. Often Indians would come begging for bread and would not believe that we could not supply them, even when assured we had neither bread nor flour for ourselves.”84 The white settlers did indeed undergo great difficulties in the months and years after the flood. However, this reference suggests that the Paiutes may have been undergoing even greater difficulties.

Hamblin biographer Preston Corbett writes of the Swiss saints that they were alarmed when the Paiutes in the Indian village burned their wickiups throughout December, and Samuel Knight explained to them that Indians were dying, and the living were trying to ward off the ghosts of evil men who had recently died.85 This describes the Paiutes before the flood.

Sometimes Mormons mentioned Indian memories of a previous comparable flood. Chapman Duncan in Virgin City wrote, “The Indians say their fathers told them there was a similar flood in this country many years ago.”86

84 John Staheli, “The Life of John and Barbara Staheli,” 7. Staheli then lists a few incidents written from the viewpoint of white settlers being troubled by local Indians.

85 Corbett, Jacob Hamblin, 198. Burning the wickiup of a dead man to drive his spirit away was a common practice. For Paiute death customs, see Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier, 136-56.

86 Duncan, letter to the editor, January 19, 1862, in Deseret News, February 12, 1862, p. 8, in the section, “Flood in Southern Utah.”

James G. Bleak and his wife.

These few references tell us very little about how the Paiutes survived the flood. Common sense argues that the flood must have had a devastating effect on their agriculture. If the Santa Clara changed from a creek you could step across to a river 25 feet deep and 150 yards across, then the Paiutes’ traditional fields and gardens, which they depended on at certain times of the year, must have been swept away.

Another serious blow to the Paiutes and their gardens was the appearance of sizable groups of new settlers in Santa Clara and St. George at about the same time as the rains and great flood. The impact of these settlers on the usually very limited water supply of the Santa Clara creek and Virgin River would be immeasurable. Hamblin wrote that Mormons began seriously undermining the Paiute method of living at exactly this period, late 1861 and 1862.87

We might note that before 1862, Santa Clara was dominated by Hamblin and the Indian missionaries. The Swiss saints were sent to Santa Clara with an entirely different mission, economic in nature, and the ninety Swiss suddenly greatly outnumbered the old Santa Clara settlers. The great flood, combined with the major influx of new Mormon settlers with their need for irrigation water and land for cattle grazing, must have been a major catastrophe for the Paiutes.

Two statements by U.S. Indian officials perhaps help tell this story. On June 30, 1857, George Armstrong, an Indian agent, wrote, “‘Tot-sag-gabots,’ the principal chief of seven bands on the river, has under cultivation about sixty acres, and expects to raise a sufficiency for himself and band, and a surplus to trade to emigrants ... ‘Captain Jackson,’ another of the chiefs on this river, has about twelve acres in corn and squashes.”88 This records successful and extensive farming operations among the Santa Clara Paiutes.

87 Little, Jacob Hamblin, 87-88; see also Jacob Hamblin to Brigham Young, September 19, 1873, Brigham Young Collection, CR 1234, LDS Church Archives.

88 George Armstrong to Brigham Young, June 30, 1857, in Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1857 (Washington: William A. Harris, Printer, 1858), 309.

A Paiute Indian photographed along the Virgin River, 1873, by J.K. Hillers.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Paiute Indians in conference with the U.S. Indian Commissioner on the Virgin River, 1873. Photographed by J. K. Hillers.

Some twelve years later, Indian agent R. N. Fenton, after a visit to Tutsegabits and his people near St. George, wrote, “The Pi-Utes are a very destitute tribe … a few around the settlements engage in farming to a limited extent. They raise a small quantity of wheat, corn and melons, using sticks to plant and knives to harvest with; therefore, the crops raised amount to almost nothing.”89 While Fenton is reporting on Paiutes in Nevada as well as in Utah, if the Santa Clara Paiutes had been pursuing remarkably successful agricultural operations, he probably would have commented on it.

The great flood thus was probably a factor that contributed to the Paiutes’ decline in farming productivity and living conditions. The major influx of whites also was a major contributing factor, as were the diseases that the whites brought.90

The 1862 flood of the Santa Clara creek and Virgin River inevitably causes us to think of the January 2005 flood at the same places. Many of the same phenomena described in the 1862 flood occurred in 2005: the astounding widening of the usually quite small Santa Clara creek; the remarkable deepening and widening of the creek bed and the undermining the foundations of houses. Photographs of the flood show one detail that Priscilla Hamblin mentioned in 1862: the uncanny redness of the flood

89 R. N. Fenton to E. S. Parker, October 14, 1869, in Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Made to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1869 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1870), 203.

90 For the Tonequint (Santa Clara) Paiutes after 1862, see Edward Leo Lyman, “Caught In Between: Jacob Hamblin and the Southern Paiutes During the Black Hawk-Navajo Wars of the Late 1860s,” Utah Historical Quarterly 74.1 (Winter 2007): 22-43; Knack, Boundaries Between, 115-17. Many Paiutes literally starved to death. For a Mormon view of disease as a cause of decline of Indians at Santa Clara, see John Stucki, Autobiography, 11-12.

91 Dawn Love, “Utah Flooding Causes More than $150 Million in Damages,” Insurance Journal, March 7, 2005, at http://www.insurancejournal.com/magazines/west/2005/02/07/features/51706.htm (accessed September 24, 2008).

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

water. According to one report the total damages of the flood exceeded $150 million and fifty houses were lost or condemned.91

As in 1862, the remarkable cohesiveness of the Latter-day Saint community was highlighted in the 2005 flood, as residents of St. George, Santa Clara and other Utah communities organized and worked together to save homes that would have otherwise been destroyed.

The 1862 flood, though one of the worst floods in nineteenth-century Utah history, was in some ways typical of the Mormon pioneer experience in southern Utah and Nevada. The Santa Clara saints were fortunate in that they apparently were not subject to ruinous flooding periodically, as was the case in the Virgin River settlements.92 Nevertheless, the Santa Clara flood experience in 1862 is emblematic in some ways of the struggle with destructive floods in other southern Utah settlements. Joseph W. Young wrote in 1868, “The floods come now and then, and wash away these rich bottoms, carrying down with its foaming currents houses, corrals, vineyards, and all one has, and the toiling man feels almost disheartened.”93

It must have been especially disheartening, for “desert saints,” to see the more fertile bottomland swept away. W. Paul Reeve interprets these constant destructive floods as a winnowing agent in southern Utah history. Many settlers left, but those who stayed were firmly committed to their mission.94 Ann Woodbury wrote of the town Shuneburg, as late as 1891, “If they ever had any land to farm worth speaking of, the floods of the last few years have taken it away, leaving the people with but poor prospects for the future; they certainly deserve credit for their staying qualities.”95 Floods certainly tested the “staying qualities” of the saints in Santa Clara, and in most of southern Utah.

92 Bluff in San Juan county also endured some disastrous floods, particularly in spring 1884. Robert McPherson, A History of San Juan County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1995), 227. Outside of Utah, settlements in southern Nevada were also subjected to dangerous flooding, see Larson, I Was Called to Dixie, 367.

93 Quoted in Larson, I Was Called to Dixie, 367.

94 Reeve, “A Little Oasis in the Desert,” 233-34.

95 Quoted in Larson, I Was Called to Dixie, 365.

1862 SANTA CLARA FLOOD

Volunteer workers place sand bags in an effort to save a home from the flood waters of the Santa Clara in January 2005

ANNETTE TAYLOR, PORTRAITS OF LOSS, STORIES OF HOPE

Soldiering

in a Corner, Living on the Fringe:

Military Operations in Southeastern Utah, 1880-1890

By ROBERT S. MCPHERSON

John Wayne, speaking of the Monument Valley-Moab corridor, is said to have quipped, “This is where God put the West.”1 Central to that now clichéd image is the cowboy-Indian-cavalry, serving as a core to many of Wayne’s films that played across the sunny Utah landscape. Stagecoach, Fort Apache, The Searchers, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon all speak of the mythic West of cowboys and Indians in an unsettled frontier. Entertaining but simple, black and white, right over wrong—soldiering was a straightforward find, fix, and defeat the enemy with enough time for some comic relief and a little romance—all in an hour and a half.

Keep the high country desert of the Colorado Plateau, remove the actors and replace them with real cowboysIndians-cavalry of the 1880s, and

Men like these twenty-second Infantry soldiers served in southeastern Utah between 1880 and 1890.

1

This quote is cited in Bette L. Stanton, Where God Put the West: A Moab-Monument Valley Movie History (Moab: Canyonlands Natural History Association, 1994), 1.

Robert S. McPherson teaches at the College of Eastern Utah—San Juan Campus and serves on the Utah Board of State History. He wishes to express appreciation to Winston Hurst for his assistance and to the Utah Humanities Council for providing the Delmont R. Oswald Fellowship, both of which made possible the research for this article.

throw in a half dozen very different lifestyles with competing objectives, and one has a bewildering array of situations that were anything but simple to solve. What follows is a broad look at a narrow slice of time (1880s), focused on a region (Four Corners—primarily Utah and Colorado), and one facet of the triad—the soldier and his challenges during military operations concerning the Utes.

There was nothing simple about living on the fringe. Every aspect of military life in this environment exacted its toll. Each experience the soldier faced called for ingenuity, patience, and skill. “Fringe” and “corner” are ideal words to describe the geographic, historic, and cultural situation. Army doctor Bernard J. Byrne, stationed at Fort Lewis, Colorado, during the 1880s, recalled how people referred to the Four Corners area as the “Dark Corner” because of the ease with which miscreants could slip across state and territorial boundaries.2 In 1880, Colorado boasted of having been a state for four years; Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were still territories, each perceived with its own problems—Mormons and polygamy, Hispanic populations imbued with a foreign lifestyle, Navajo and Ute tribes on and off their reservations, and isolation enough to stymie many forms of progress. Trains, roads, and a growing surge of farmers, miners, and cattlemen gnawed away at the geographic seclusion, but the real isolation of the Four Corners area—cultural understanding and acceptance—took decades to move forward and is not a fait accompli yet.

A snapshot of events before 1880 provides the milieu in which the military operated for the next ten years. Think of this date as four years after the defeat of General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876; two years after the end of the Plains Indian wars; one year after the Utes killed Agent Nathan Meeker and ten civilians as well as eleven soldiers, including their leader, Major Thomas T. Thornburgh in northwestern Colorado in 1879; the year that the government initiated the process to move all of Colorado’s Northern Utes into Utah and removed the Southern Utes from much of their ancestral land, placing them in a relatively desolate stretch of terrain in southwestern Colorado.3

Ever since the 1860s, a conglomeration of Utes, Navajos, and Paiutes had coalesced in southeastern Utah, claiming these lands as ancestral and refusing to acknowledge any ultimate authority. Known in various records as “Pah Utes,” “Piutes,” “Utes,” “Renegades,” and “Outlaws,” these people were determined not to go to any reservation, although they had relatives and friends there who often joined them for hunting expeditions and social events.4 These amorphous groups (which for simplification here will be

2 Bernard James Byrne, A Frontier Surgeon, Life in Colorado in the Eighties (New York: Exposition Press, 1935, 1962), 153-54.

3 See, Virginia McConnell Simmons, The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000).

4 For an overview of this people’s history, see Robert S. McPherson, A History of San Juan County, In the Palm of Time (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1995).

called Utes) enjoyed a certain autonomy and were politically astute enough to use reservation boundaries, regional isolation, and neighboring groups to obtain what they wanted. Their biggest problem was the decreasing natural resources on which they depended for survival. The establishment of settlements in the midst or near their territory inflamed their attitude against those who encroached. Anglo towns and villages catering to mining, ranching, or agriculture spread throughout the area, with six towns sprouting up in southwestern Colorado, four in southeastern Utah, along with five major cattle companies operating in this area—all between 1878 and 1887.5 Little wonder the Utes in the region were angry about their shrinking land base.

The military called upon to douse the heat from rising tension was as much in the hinterlands as the settlers. The post Civil War army in the United States was the product of an immediate reduction in force following the cessation of hostilities, with subsequent decreases. The boundaries of the continental United States were established, the South could not rise again, and relations with foreign powers were generally amicable. Consequently, the government reduced the 37,000 man army of 1869 and reduced it again in 1874 to 27,000 men. Even with these fewer numbers spread over a vast geographic area, the army’s tasks remained fixed. The first two—coastal defense on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and maintaining peace in the Reconstruction South—pulled the military to centers of large population. The third, keeping the overland trails open, placating Indians, and protecting settlers, was broad-ranging in scope and complexity and more difficult to logistically support.

The army in the West filtered its tasks through two large entities— Division of the Missouri, headquartered in Saint Louis and Division of the Pacific in San Francisco. Geographically, this put the Four Corners area at the extreme end of both jurisdictions. Departments subdivided the divisions. The Department of the Missouri ranged over Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico; the Department of the Platte held responsibility for Iowa, Nebraska, Utah as well as parts of Montana and the Dakotas; the Department of California, one of two in the Pacific Division, controlled California, Nevada, and Arizona.6 This meant for operational integrity that three departments each held responsibility for some part of the Four Corners territory, and for all of them, this area was at their extreme limits. Southeastern Utah was about as far away from the geographic center of the three commands as one could get.

To perform its many tasks across the continental United States, the army formed ten regiments of cavalry but shrank the infantry from forty-five to

5 Daniel K. Muhlestein, “The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Companies in San Juan, 1880-1900”, unpublished manuscript, n.d., Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2-5.

6 Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars, The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1973), 14-15.

Fort Lewis, Colorado served as the hub of infantry and cavalry units maintaining control of Indian and white relations in southeastern Utah.

twenty-five regiments. These numbers rose and fell depending on the funding cycles of Congress, but compared to Civil War manning, the military was a sideshow to the much larger schemes of the Gilded Age. Each cavalry regiment had twelve companies or troops and each infantry regiment ten companies. Each was commanded by a colonel and assisted by a lieutenant colonel, while within the cavalry regiment there were three majors, each of whom commanded a battalion; the infantry regiment had one major.7 The reasoning behind this was to give the cavalry more maneuverability with added control. Captains commanded companies, each with the assistance of a first and second lieutenant. The two platoons within each company served as individual maneuver elements, while four man squads fought as teams working in support of the platoon, but not as a stand-alone tactical elements.8 On the larger scale, companies were the primary deployable units that could be detached and sent on independent missions and it was the company, not the battalion or regiment, which demanded the loyalty of the soldier.

In 1881, the enlisted strength of 120 cavalry companies on paper averaged fifty-eight men, with the infantry companies at forty-one.9 It was difficult for commanders to muster three quarters of their soldiers because of desertion, health problems, and extra duties. Part of the issue stemmed from the recruiting process. Half of the soldiers serving in the West came from foreign countries with Ireland leading at 20 percent, and Germany at 12 percent between 1865 and 1874.10 Many of the enlisted men came from impoverished circumstances, had little or no education, and some did not speak much English. Accordingly, the monthly pay for these soldiers was

7 Ibid., 16-18.

8 Douglas C. McChristian, The U.S. Army in the West, 1870-1880, Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 33-34.

9 Utley,Frontier Regulars, 17

10 Ibid., 24.

SOLDIERING IN A CORNER

Slow but steady, the 1873 Springfield carbine with its shorter barrel, was standard issue for cavalry units. Dismounted firing was the preferred method, providing greater accuracy.

low with a private earning thirteen dollars and a line sergeant twenty-two dollars. It is little wonder that the general desertion rate per year for many units was high. At Fort Lewis, “Troop F of the Sixth Cavalry reported thirteen deserters from March 25 through June 24, 1887. From April into mid-May 1882, thirty soldiers stationed at Fort Lewis deserted their companies—nearly one per day!”11 Officers, while receiving higher pay, had their problems too. Promotions were based on seniority, not necessarily on performance, and were slow in coming within such a small force. For example, in 1877 a new second lieutenant might take from twenty-four to twenty-six years to move through the ranks to become a major. That same lieutenant could take from thirty-three to thirty-seven years to obtain the rank of colonel.12 This graying of the officer corps meant not only slow promotion, but little upward mobility, few changes, and older men serving in maneuver elements that required the energy and reserves of youth.

The weapons and tactics used in the Civil War gave way to evolving technology that changed the battlefield. By 1873, the 1873 Springfield rifle and carbine replaced earlier models. This single shot .45/.55 caliber breechloaded rifle fired a metallic rim-fire cartridge, remaining in service for the next twenty years. Its maximum effective range was accurate to five or six

11 Duane A. Smith, A Time for Peace: Fort Lewis, Colorado, 1878-1891 (Boulder: University of Press of Colorado, 2006), 78.

12 Ibid., p. 20.

hundred yards and with a rate of fire, depending on the skill of the soldier, at twelve or more shots per minute. The weapon was durable, accurate, and simple to operate. Shorter barrel carbines were easier to control on horseback so became standard issue to cavalry units.13 Repeating rifles, available by this time, were not issued due to their shorter range and requiring more ammunition. Fire discipline and the conservation of ammunition became major concerns, even for men armed with breechloaders. The basic load for most units was fifty rounds per rifleman. If firing twelve rounds per minute, a soldier in heavy contact could be out of ammunition in four minutes. Soldiers also carried the 1872 Colt caliber .45 army revolver with a six cylinder capacity. The “Peacemaker’s” range was effective for close quarters fighting but was relatively slow to reload under fire.14 In the case of both rifles and pistols, there was initially little ammunition for marksmanship training, however, by the 1880s, the men “took great pride in their skill and in the marksman and sharpshooter badges and certificates awarded to soldiers qualifying for them.”15

In addition to equipment, tactical doctrine also received a facelift. In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel Emory Upton published his influential Cavalry Tactics: United States Army, Assimilated to the Tactics of Infantry and Artillery. For the next twenty years, his view of the battlefield determined how engagements would be fought and troops deployed at home and abroad.16 His basic tenet was that the cavalry was merely mounted infantry who dismounted to fire their weapons. General William Tecumseh Sherman, Commanding General of the Army, favored the development of the cavalry and was highly supportive of this new approach. Improved firearms demanded a change from the shoulder-to-shoulder-by-ranks assault popular ten years earlier. The dispersal of forces became mandatory with a five-foot separation between soldiers and a fifteen-yard space between squads. Rather than massing fires through sheer volume, leaders placed more emphasis on selecting a specific target, aiming then firing.

The four-man squad or “set of fours” became the fundamental tactical unit for independent employment with the platoon. The squad’s horses were a determining factor. Three of the four soldiers dismounted, with the remaining rider taking the horses back from the firing line, preferably to a covered and concealed position away from direct fire and the loud noise of massed weapons. There was even a strap and snap ring on each horse’s bridle to keep the animals close together and controlled. Skirmishing could be done either mounted or on foot, the latter being preferred for accurate shooting. An individual could seek cover as long as this did not affect the

13 McChristian, The U. S. Army in the West, 112-16.

14 Ibid., 117-20.

15 Don Rickey, Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, The Enlisted Soldier Fighting in the Indian Wars, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 104.

16 Richard Allan Fox, Jr., Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle, The Little Big Horn Reexamined (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 40-46.

squad’s volume of fire. Odd numbered skirmishers in each squad fired a round on command and then reloaded as even numbered skirmishers reloaded and fired on command, then everyone fired at will until told to cease. One or more squads could be held in reserve to the rear for exploitation of a battlefield opportunity or to plug a gap in the line. The two platoons that comprised a company could take individual assignments during a fight.

Command and control on the battlefield were of primary concern. The most obvious form was by an officer in front. Maneuvering units focused on the direction and speed of the leader of that element and the men followed. Close to that leader was the guidon, denoting the location of an element and the general vicinity of its command during the ebb and flow of battle. A trumpet controlled soldiers’ activities from the beginning of the day to the end. Boots and saddles, assembly, charge, retreat, etc. all rang out over the battlefield, directing the lowest and highest ranked soldier as to what his leader wanted. For long distance communication, the telegraph became an integral part of railroad operations and so Fort Lewis ran a line from Durango to the post. For elements in the field, messengers carrying reports sufficed until 1887, when the heliograph facilitated communication. With an average distance of thirty to forty miles on good days and a rate of speed of ten words per minute, the military employed the heliograph from Colorado to Utah. A tall ridge behind Fort Lewis provided a station that sent messages to Point Lookout, twenty-three miles away, and thence to Blue Mountain, another fifty miles.17 For a short time, southeastern Utah had its heliographic place in the sun.

In order to keep the military’s horses fit, wagon trains or pack mules were necessary to carry enough fodder for the animals and supplies for the men. Unlike Indian ponies that could maintain their strength by eating prairie grass, soldiers’ mounts required grain; extended campaigns took a heavy toll on horse flesh. Troop I, Ninth Cavalry comprised of the famed “buffalo soldiers” (African Americans) temporarily stationed at Fort Lewis in 1881 and again in 1883, reported that the unit traveled 2,776 miles during that first year of operations throughout the Four Corners area, including southeastern Utah.18 One can imagine the stress this placed on the cavalry’s remuda. A surprising point to consider, however, arises from combined arms operations between infantry and cavalry. Colonel William B. Hazen, Commander of the Sixth Infantry, noted: “After the fourth day’s march of a mixed command, the horse does not march faster than the foot soldier, and after the seventh day, the foot soldier begins to outmarch the horse, and from that time on, the foot soldier has to end his march earlier each day to enable the cavalry to reach the camp the same day at all.”19

17 Smith, A Time for Peace, 55.

18 Ibid., 102.

19 Utley, Frontier Regulars, 50.

Deployment of artillery pieces with caissons to carry ammunition followed set procedures that prescribed distances and battle drills for different sized units.

When this issue is combined with differing rates of speed of moving elements to an objective, the problem of timing had to be considered. The accepted planning estimate for horses at a walk was three miles an hour and at a trot six. The length of a day’s march varied according to terrain, time of year, and availability of wood and water. An average for many marchesof inf antry and cavalry indicates a usual distance of about twenty miles. Cavalry could move faster and farther than foot troops for a few successive days, but over a period of weeks, hardened infantry could outdistance horsemen on grain-fed army mounts.

In the 1880s, most supplies on tactical operations eventually ended up in horse-or mule-drawn wagons. Each infantry company required at least one six-mule wagon and each cavalry troop needed three, because of the grain to feed the horses. A wagon pulled by mules could travel up to twenty miles per day. If artillery pieces or Gatling guns became part of the mix, an even greater number of wagons and animals were necessary. Depending on the length of the operation and number of people participating, these trains were often slow, large, and cumbersome. Mule-pack trains were an option to speed the logistical tail, but the animals could be temperamental and the amount carried on the animal’s back much less than what fit in a wagon. The military often contracted with civilians to handle specially trained mules accustomed to a pack frame. Like the horses, pack mules required grain because they could not subsist solely on grass; they could eat all they carried in twenty days.

The railroad alleviated much of the logistical burden between major military installations. The transcontinental railroad opened the West to large scale movement of men and materiel for both military necessity and

economic development. Trunk lines and spurs arose, with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad branching its way through Colorado, and by 1881 into the railhead established in Durango for the San Juan mine fields. With the Meeker massacre fresh in the minds of Coloradoans, the movement of the Southern Utes onto the Los Pinos Reservation, and the general unrest in the area, the military decided to shift a previously established (October 1878) cantonment at Pagosa Springs nearer to the rail line and the reservation. What had been called Fort Lewis, after Lieutenant Colonel William N. Lewis killed by Cheyennes in 1878, now became Cantonment Pagosa Spring, a subpost under the new Fort Lewis near Durango.20

On July 9, 1880, Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan directed through Special Order 78 that companies A, B, C, D, and E, Thirteenth Infantry under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. A. Crofton from Fort Stanton, District of New Mexico, establish the new post in southwestern Colorado.21 By October, construction was well underway and the command settled in for a relatively uneventful winter. But for the next ten

20

21 Notes on file, “Fort Lewis—Calendar of Letters Received, 1880,” Special Collections, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado. [Unless otherwise specified, information cited with an “FLC” designation came from the Fort Lewis Library Collection.]

Robert W. Frazer, Forts of the West, Military Forts and Presidios and Posts Commonly Called Forts West of the Mississippi River to 1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 38.

Large wagons, like this one at Fort Douglas, were the backbone of logistical support for troops in the field. There never seemed to be enough to meet the various needs of active units.

SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

years, Fort Lewis played a prominent role in maintaining peace in the Four Corners region.22 Different cavalry and infantry elements rotated in and out of the post on various assignments, with an average number of soldiers stationed there probably around 300 and a high for special circumstances of 600 to 700.23 Spring, however, caused a spike in manpower due to friction, as the grass grew, Indian ponies strengthened, and both cattlemen and Indians contested for the same resources, giving rise to friction.

The first in a series of annual incidents surfaced on the border between Colorado and Utah. Colonel Crofton received on May 2, 1881, concrete glimmerings of what evolved into a long-standing feud between Colorado cowboys and Utah Indians. D. D. Williams, a rancher living near the Dolores River, penned the opening complaint. Southern Utes had stolen three horses, torn down his fences, allowed livestock to destroy his crops “beyond redemption,” killed or mutilated thirty-five of his cattle without taking any meat, threatened him to the point of abandoning his home, and treated his neighbors in the same fashion. John Thurman, who lived near the Utah line, reportedly had his home burned, while Indians stripped another neighbor named Reese of six horses then sent him packing on foot. Williams feared war was imminent with the “one hundred and fifty bucks with their squaws and families” who were heavily armed. “Within the last 24 hours [other] bands of Narraguinip and Mariano and a band of Piutes—about 150 lodges—had been crossing the Dolores River at the Big Bend,” heading north to the Uncompahgre.24 Agent Henry Page previously described the Southern Utes as having twenty-five hundred horses that are “always with them” with “all adult males” being armed “with firearms of the best quality usually of the Winchester pattern . . . [with] a liberal supply of fixed ammunition.” They were a formidable force.25

A week later Williams reported to Crofton that he had returned with the remains of his neighbor Richard May, buried Thurman at his cabin, but could not find the body of a third man Smith alleged to have been killed by the Utes during the same fight. What ensued resulted in the cowboys pursuing the Indians into Utah to regain stolen livestock and exact revenge, getting caught on June 15 and 16 in a firefight that left nine of them buried in the La Sals outside of Moab, and nursing an ache for revenge.26

22 Three major studies look at the role of Fort Lewis. In chronological order there are Robert W. Delaney, Blue Coats, Red Skins, and Black Gowns, 100 Years of Fort Lewis ( Durango: Durango Herald, 1977); Duane A. Smith, Sacred Trust, The Birth and Development of Fort Lewis College (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991); and Smith, A Time for Peace

23 These figures are estimates. Delaney gives an average of 200 with a high of 600 soldiers for special occasions (p. 18). Smith, on the other hand, cites figures of 344 in 1887 and 439 soldiers in 1888 (p. 93). Given the operational tempo and the fact that entire units were shipped in for the spring and summer months due to Indian activity, an average (for winter and summer figures) of 300 seems reasonable.

24 D. D. Williams to Col. R.E.A. Crofton, May 2, 1881, Headquarters Letters Calendar 1881, FLC.

25 Henry Page to Crofton, October 24, 1880, Calendar of Letters Received, 1880, FLC.

26 See Rusty Salmon and Robert S. McPherson, “Cowboys, Indians, and Conflict: The Pinhook Draw—Little Castle Valley Fight, 1881,” Utah Historical Quarterly 69 (Winter 2001): 4-28.

The military learned its own lessons from what became known as the Pinhook Draw fight: it took too long to mobilize forces coming from three different posts in southern New Mexico—Forts Bayard, Cummings, and Seldon. What this meant in terms of travel time between when they left their duty station, arrived in Colorado, and then rode to the battlefield was that the 190-man force averaged twenty-two miles a day for over fivehundred miles.27 By the time Captain Henry Carroll arrived with four troops of Ninth Cavalry, the Indians were long gone in various directions. The cowboys, who had been recruited locally, sensed where to find the Utes, and had a vested interest in supporting the operation. Poorly equipped, untrained as individuals and as a group, unfamiliar with much of the terrain, and underestimating their opponents, the Colorado cowboys still engaged the enemy. The cavalry did not.

One of the few recorded incidents of racial animosity with African American soldiers temporarily stationed at Fort Lewis occurred during this incident. The whipped cowboys met Captain Carroll’s command in the vicinity of Blue Mountain. According to Jordan Bean, one of the cowboys, the officer told the civilians they were under arrest for attacking the Indians. William Dawson, leader of the group, drew his rifle, as did every other man, and “told Carroll he just didn’t have ‘niggers’ enough to arrest his men.”28 Sense prevailed, Carroll insisting he did not want a fight, but only some men to lead him to where the skirmish occurred. He welcomed two volunteers; the civilians and military parted company the next day.

This incident illustrates a second lesson learned—that the cowboys could be just as aggressive as the Utes, with no love lost with any of the groups within the triangle. Indeed, as the course of events unfolded over subsequent years, the military assumed a role of protecting the Indians from the settlers as much as it did the settlers from the Indians. Newspapers and correspondence testify that some citizens felt they were being discriminated against to the benefit of the Utes. A final lesson was the difficulty of identifying exactly who the enemy was. Peaceful bands of Utes living on the reservation made forays onto public lands to hunt, which was totally in keeping with treaty rights; some Indians involved in the fight melted into these friendly groups. Family and band relations demanded a certain level of loyalty, while other Indians felt no such allegiance. The Ute/Paiute/Navajo “renegades” flowed amongst their own tribal elements easily.

An army adage counsels, “Inexperienced leaders talk of tactics, experienced ones discuss logistics.” Field operations in Utah prove the point. As the Ninth Cavalry remained on maneuvers during that summer of 1881, Second Lieutenant Charles A. Howard, stationed at Fort Lewis 110 miles

27

“Operational Returns,” Ninth Cavalry, 1881-1887, Microfiche M774, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

28 Jordan Bean, “Jordan Bean’s Story and the Castle Valley Indian Fight,” Colorado Magazine 20 (1943): 23.

The Utesʼ mobility with horses and knowledge of the land gave a decided advantage over cavalry units unfamiliar with the terrain. Unlike the grain-fed cavalry stock, Indian ponies required only what the land provided.

away, fretted over what it would take to keep the troops supplied. He started with 133 mules, eight of which either died or were unfit for service, leaving him 125. In order for the cavalry to have sufficient grain and rations, the lieutenant estimated a minimum need of twelve—six-mule teams. Given the distance and amount of supplies necessary, he would not have enough animals for a rotating shift, thus requiring most of the same animals to remain in constant motion.29

Captain Carroll’s battalion was on the receiving end. His travels in search of an elusive foe took him from Fort Lewis to the north slope of Blue Mountain, to the La Sal Mountains, across the Dolores River then west to the Colorado River.30 He respectfully urged “the necessity of full forage for our stock to put them in condition for field service. Ten days hard service, now, would, I believe, leave half of our horses on the trail. Many men of the command are about barefooted and need clothing generally.”31 Part of the battalion’s problem was that many of the soldiers’ “accoutrements” were stored in Santa Fe and impossible to retrieve. Carroll also believed that the paymaster would never venture to Utah to pay his men, so he offered to come part way to Dolores to obtain the funds. At the same time he anticipated twenty-five new recruits and fifteen other men who had been left at

29 Charles A. Howard to Chief Quartermaster, District of New Mexico, July 2, 1881, Calendar of Letters Received, FLC.

30 Assistant Adjutant General, District of New Mexico to Adjutant General, Fort Lewis, July 8, 1881, Letters Received, AGO, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

31 Henry Carroll to Headquarters, Ninth Cavalry, July 15, 1881, Calendar of Letters Received, FLC.

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SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fort Lewis to join him. As with most extended field operations logistical needs only increased.

The activities in the spring, summer, and fall of 1881 were not an anomaly. The next year forces of various sizes spent time at Riverview (today’s Aneth), Soldier Spring (near future Monticello), the mouth of Recapture Wash, and McElmo Canyon. In each instance, the soldiers selected the site for a specific purpose. Take Riverview, for instance. A cantankerous settler named Henry L. Mitchell originally from Missouri thence Colorado to Utah was in constant conflict with the Navajos and Utes in his area.32 The military sent a “detachment of infantry of not less than 25 men to the Lower San Juan River to remain for a month to six weeks to give temporary protection and endeavor to restore confidence to the settlers. Also to send an intelligent officer to investigate the trouble arising in that locality and report same to the District Commander.”33 Given Mitchell’s penchant for requesting assistance, fostering controversy, and sniffing out an opportunity to sell goods from his trading post shelves to troops stationed nearby, it is not surprising that he had the military at his settlement for five years in a row, until he moved away in 1885.

The spring, summer, and fall of 1883 simmered with tension. The military and Indian agents received complaints from almost every white community or settlement within a one hundred mile radius of the Four Corners. The people of Colorado demanded soldiers be stationed at Navajo Springs and on the Dolores River to protect the growing population. Settlers in McElmo Canyon and on the Lower San Juan River grumbled about Ute travelers begging at the door; tearing down fences; destroying crops; running off, mutilating, or killing livestock; and threatening those who did not comply. Navajos joined the fracas, though not quite as militant, pushing livestock across the San Juan River, appropriating vegetables and fruits, and generally adding to the chaos. In one instance, a group of Indians killed Peter Tracy at his home near Mitchell’s ranch, requiring a military detachment to investigate the ruckus over some vegetables that resulted in his death.34

The Utes hit the large cattle companies the hardest. Why there was so much friction can be found in a newspaper article published in 1887, giving a few facts and figures that provide a telling picture of what was happening to the land over the years. W. J. Forham, an entrepreneur in Salt Lake City, noted in San Juan County alone there were 11,000 sheep and 32,000 cattle belonging to white stockmen on the range all year long, and

32 See Robert S. McPherson, “Navajos, Mormons, and Henry L. Mitchell,” Utah Historical Quarterly 55 (Winter 1987): 50-65.

33 Assistant Adjutant General, District of New Mexico, to Commanding Officer, Fort Lewis, June 12, 1882, Calendar of Letters Received, FLC.

34 For more information about this incident and others in southeastern Utah during this period, see Robert S. McPherson, The Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860-1900, Expansion Through Adversity (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1988, 2001), 46.

another 100,000 cattle that came in from Colorado for winter grazing. 35 As a people dependent on hunting and gathering, the Utes ground their teeth as they watched livestock destroy their livelihood—plants not eaten were trampled and game not shot scared away. Something had to give, and it did, in 1884.

Thompson Springs, north of Moab, on the Denver and Rio Grande Line. Railroads moved troops and supplies to initial start points, such as this, for the trek from southwestern Colorado or into southeastern Utah.

As usual, the action started in the spring. According to citizen reports from Mancos, Navajos and Utes threatened their livestock, herders, and the mail carrier who traveled from there to Bluff. He would no longer ride the route without armed escort. A telegram from the District of New Mexico’s commanding officer in Santa Fe notified Fort Lewis that the people in Mancos were capable of protecting themselves. Southern Ute Agent Warren Patten assured the local commander that the Southern Utes were moving on to the reservation to avoid any type of conflict. Cattlemen at Navajo Springs made a similar request for assistance, but the military told them that they could not protect them since they were trespassing on Ute lands. Besides, five to eight feet of snow still blocked many of the trails over the mountains.36

In warmer climes along the San Juan River, however, there were no barriers for conflict. Only a cursory review of events is given here since they have been covered in detail elsewhere. The mosaic of military operations of 1884 does provide a clear picture of the intensity, pace, and type of problems encountered by both small and larger units in the field. First shots fired in southeastern Utah were on April 15, when men at Mitchell’s ranch killed one and wounded two Navajos in a trading post confrontation.37

35 W. J. Forham, Deseret News, October 12, 1887, cited in “San Juan Stake History,” unpublished manuscript, Historical Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

36 Petition from Mancos to Commanding Officer, Fort Lewis, March 18, 1884; Commanding Officer, District of New Mexico to Commanding Officer, Fort Lewis, March 18, 1884, AGO; Warren Patten to Commanding Officer, Fort Lewis, March 24, 1884, Outgoing Correspondence, 1883-1885, Fort Lewis. [Hereafter cited as OC]

37 McPherson, “Navajos, Mormons, and Henry L. Mitchell,” 47-48.

Utes and Navajos took this outrage as an opportunity to exact revenge on Mitchell, steal his livestock, and raid other establishments along the river. The trader saw it as an opportunity to claim the loss of fifty horses, recruit twenty-three Colorado cowboys to stay at his establishment, and have a military force stationed there as well.

Six days after the confrontation, Lieutenant J. F. Kreps arrived with a detachment; one week later Captain Hiram Ketchum from Fort Lewis descended on Mitchell’s ranch with one company and a month’s rations as did Captain Allan Smith from Fort Wingate with three week’s rations. Once at the scene, all agreed there was no need for this size force and that much of what happened was caused by Mitchell and greatly exaggerated.

By mid May, Sergeant Christian Soffke, a corporal, and ten privates from B Company, 22d Infantry received instructions to camp at Mitchell’s, create a defensive position from which to “make a stubborn fight,” if necessary, and prevent Indians from having access to his position.38

June gave respite from the hostilities; in July tempers flared. What is now known as the fight at Soldier Crossing began on July 3, when Utah and Colorado cowboys faced off against a Ute/Paiute faction at Verdure near the base of Blue Mountain.39 The cowboys took a drubbing, returned to Colorado to raise a force, then joined with the military to track down and punish the recalcitrant Indians and to retrieve lost stock. The results were three weeks of hard riding, the death of a civilian packer and a cowboy, a nearly catastrophic loss of logistical support, frayed nerves between the military and civilian leadership, and a group of elated Utes who had once again bested the cowboys. Over this twenty-day period, Captain Henry P. Perrine’s F Troop, Sixth Cavalry logged 368 miles of travel and Lieutenant B. K. West’s B Troop, Sixth Cavalry, in support, traveled 418 miles, providing an average of 18 and 21 miles per day respectively.40 Difficulties in employing military tactics, traveling, and conducting operations in the unfamiliar terrain of canyon country characterized the entire deployment. While the larger element, comprised of two companies, faced their problems in the White Canyon area west of Blue Mountain, Sergeant Soffke and his detachment had their own. Five Utes with apparent involvement in the opening fracas with the cowboys appeared at Mitchell’s Ranch. The good sergeant arrested them, thinking that the larger command under Perrine was in the vicinity and on its way to his location. In reality, the captain was headed in a different direction en route to his own debacle. When the Ute leader Red Jacket arrived with forty warriors, demanding the release of the Ute prisoners, Soffke held out as long as he could. Once he learned of Perrine’s location and direction, he had no choice but to

38 Lieutenant Theodore Mosher to Christian Soffke, May 18, 1884, OC.

39 See Robert S. McPherson and Winston Hurst, “The Fight at Soldier Crossing, 1884: Military Considerations in Canyon Country,” Utah Historical Quarterly 70 (Summer 2002): 258-281.

40 Lieutenant B. K. West, “Record of Events,” July 31, 1884, AGO.

surrender his captives.

Soldier encampments during field operations sought water for men and horses, good grazing areas, natural terrain features for protection from the elements, and accessability by roads for resupply.

Following Perrine’s defeat, the Utes fled to the vicinity of Navajo Mountain while he remained in the field to prevent further incidents, establishing his camp near Noland’s trading post at the Four Corners. Here there was “an abundance of fine grazing” where other places had been heavily cropped by flocks of sheep. The road network facilitated resupply from Fort Lewis, a key point since there was continual correspondence about “returning,” or “releasing,” scarce wagons for transport.

Captain J. B. Irvine of the 22d Infantry at the same time established a camp at Soldier Spring, 110 miles distant from Fort Lewis. He also had logistical concerns but of a different nature. Among other problems he noted, “men crippled by wearing shoddy narrow-toed shoes,” someone had failed to put kegs in the resupply wagons and so the men had insufficient containers for water, and “no medical officer is with command which is a mistake.”41 In spite of the issues, life went on—Irvine and Perrine requested clothing for the men and horseshoes and forage for their mounts, handled military discipline for deserters, conducted rifle practice, and created rough maps of the area. On August 12, new orders directed Perrine to break camp and move to Paiute Springs, located one mile west of the Colorado-Utah line and about five miles north of today’s Highway 666. Among other tasks he had while assigned there was to build “barracks” for Troop F, Sixth Cavalry and other units who would replace his. By October 16, with the

41 J. B. Irvine, Field Report, July 24, 1884, AGO.

UJ. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

weather turning cold, he requested permission to move his men into the new facility.42

Spring 1885, while quieter in Utah, was not without its issues. Underlying much of the conflict was the question of food. The Utes were starving. In June a group of fifty “quiet and peaceable” men, women, and children camped at Mitchell’s Ranch before going to Blue Mountain to hunt. This was earlier than usual and there was little doubt that they would help themselves to the “immense [cattle] herds as they say they will and always do [have] nothing else to eat.”43 The Ute agent noted that he issued only one pound of beef and three-and-a-half pounds of flour each week for every man, woman, and child.44 A few months later, Colonel Peter T. Swaine, Commander of the 22d Infantry, Fort Lewis, did his own math and calculated there were 983 Southern Utes on the reservation, who for the past year received a per capita daily allowance of less than a half pound of beef and about a quarter of a pound of flour.45 Little wonder that the Indians left their reservation in search of food.

There was just such a party comprised of six men, four women, and a child camped at Beaver Creek near the Dolores River on June 19. They had temporarily stopped as they traveled to their hunting grounds, when, a large group of cowboys “at last carried out their threats to shoot Utes on sight.”46 Raising the sides of the two tepees, they fired inside killing three men, two women, and a child. The others escaped, some sustaining wounds. The reaction was instant; the Utes set fire to a rancher’s home in Montezuma Valley then killed him and wounded his wife as they fled the burning building. Not one of their five children was injured. One of the three infantry companies (thirty men) already deployed in Mancos Valley went immediately to the scene where they joined two troops (sixty men) of cavalry. With the distinct possibility that the Indians who committed the outrage had already fled to the reservation, Major David Perry of the Sixth Cavalry proceeded to Blue Mountain to “protect cattle interests” so that “the spark of war may not have an opportunity to kindle the hearts of the young bucks,” while at the same time giving “confidence to citizens.”47

The plan worked. Swaine, with surprised relief, felt he had prevented the Indians from wiping out all of the scattered settlers and rampaging on the “warpath.” As for the cowboys who openly boasted they would kill any Indians encountered and who welcomed “a disastrous and bloody war,” the colonel believed they had “little regard for the fate of the innocent settler” or the “lives of inoffensive Indians whom they so cowardly assassinate.”48

42

J. B. Perrine to Commander, Sixth Cavalry, October 16, 1884, AGO.

43

Colonel P. T. Swaine to Adjutant General, Fort Leavenworth, June 18, 1885, FLC.

44

Colonel P. T. Swaine to Adjutant General, Fort Leavenworth, June 19, 1885, FLC.

45

Colonel P. T. Swaine to Adjutant General, District of New Mexico, August 10, 1883, OC.

46

Colonel P. T. Swaine to Adjutant General, District of New Mexico, June 22, 1885, FLC.

47

Ibid., 85; Colonel P. T. Swaine to Major David Perry, June 22, 1885, FLC.

48

Colonel P. T. Swaine to Adjutant General, District of New Mexico, June 25, 1885, FLC.

With so many men already in the field providing protection and taking preventive measures, Swaine had to balance his operational arm with the possibility of a Ute uprising that could besiege both the agency and the fort. He also feared that those traveling about could become so splintered by different tasks that they could be “whipped by detail.” Still, elements received missions to remain on the Mancos and go to the Big Bend of the Dolores River, reconnoiter in the area of Blue Mountain, provide escort duty to Navajo Springs, investigate general rumors, man an outpost at Mitchell’s Ranch, and maintain a general presence. All of this was not good enough. Coloradoans sent reports to state authorities, saying that the regular troops were not providing sufficient protection, the situation becoming so bad that some settlers had abandoned their homes to live in the brush for safety. They insisted the state militia be mustered for duty since the regular soldiers were more interested in protecting Indians than whites.49

From the field came word that “the situation was never more quiet.”50 Even Mancos Jim, who had been one of the “Paiute” leaders in the Soldier Crossing fight the year before and who lived around Blue Mountain, said he wanted to avoid conflict, would stay away from the cowboys, and just wished to hunt. Mancos Jim’s desire was not delivered from a position of weakness, rather as Swaine reported: “If we went to war with [these Paiutes/Utes], it is believed from the nature of the country they could successfully defy a much larger force of cavalry than we have here.”51 The previous year underscores his point. Troops remained in the vicinity of Blue Mountain at least through mid-September.

Nagging problems of transportation and resupply continued. There never seemed to be enough wagons for hauling wood and water, freight from the railroad in Durango, infantry soldiers when possible, rations and equipment for troops in the field, and all of the day-to-day chores.

Whiskey was another issue. When the government created Fort Lewis there remained a 160-acre parcel of land that had already been homesteaded and now belonged to a civilian, Edward Rebstock. He opened a saloon, selling to all comers but specializing in soldiers. He even loaded a wagon full of liquor and followed the troops to the field as they protected settlers against Indians. When the officers complained, he upped the ante by providing his saloon with “dance girls.” Swaine requested special permission to allow his own post trader, a man he trusted who had previously sold alcohol until the army denied the privilege in 1885, to market whiskey to “thwart the evil designs of outside parties.”52 His request was denied.

By August 1885, the Indian problems were quieting but the people of

49

Ibid., July 2, 1885, FLC.

50 Ibid., July 5, 1885, FLC.

51 Hiram Ketchum to Colonel P. T. Swaine, August 7, 1885; Colonel P. T. Swaine to Assistant Adjutant General, District of New Mexico, August 7, 1885, FLC.

52 Colonel P. T. Swaine to Adjutant General, District of New Mexico, August 11, 1885, FLC.

southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah were not. Taking it upon themselves to advise the military on departmental changes, groups of citizens circulated petitions, sending them to influential stewards back East. G. G. Symes, a member of the House of Representatives, was the first to write a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, requesting that southeastern Utah be removed from control of the Department of the Platte and added to the Department of the Missouri. La Plata, Dolores, and San Juan counties, sharing a common history and problems, banded together through a petition in support of making this happen, since “the troops at Fort Lewis are able to afford us only partial protection.” Recognizing that little help came from the Salt Lake City area and hoping that the Secretary of the Interior would “not suffer us to be ruined by the delay of too much official etiquette,” the three counties united for a solution.53 All desired a firm hand with the Indians, who should not be coaxed with more “annuities and gratuities;” troops needed to be stationed somewhere along the San Juan River.

Starting on September 25, Lieutenant Colonel N. W. Osborne and First Lieutenant R. R. Stevens of the 6th Infantry boarded the Denver and Rio Grande in Salt Lake City and traveled to Blake (now Green River), then by horse to Moab, Blue Mountain, Bluff, and Montezuma Creek, Utah; from

53 G. G. Symes to Secretary of the Interior, August 8, 1885; Petition to Secretary of the Interior, August 26, 1885, AGO.

These African-American soldiers of the 24th Infantry belonged to one of several segregated units that proved highly effective in performing frontier duties in the 1880s and 1890s.

J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY., THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

This 1886 escort wagon, converted here for personnel, was small and maneuverable, qualities needed to traverse the curves and grades on roads in southeastern Utah. Heavier, larger wagons were occasionally left behind after their cargo was shifted to smaller wagons.

there they went to Mancos, Fort Lewis, Silverton, and Montrose, Colorado, before returning to Fort Douglas. The entire trip took twenty-eight days. Their findings were objective but with a few surprises. Based on many interviews throughout the white settlements, Osborne felt that the “Mormons are disposed to speak well of the Utes” while the Navajos were more involved in petty theft; the Utes had “a more predatory inclination of a more damaging character” when it came to outfits ranging cattle; people who farmed or ranched and did not share with the Indians received most of the trouble; non-Mormon cattlemen felt the Mormons were encouraging the Utes to work against them, but “such stories may be received with a grain of allowance;” many of the Colorado settlers wanted the “extinction of the Southern Ute Agency,” removing the Indians to “anyplace whatever;” and the land the Indians held was desirable for expanding white cattle ranches.54

The two officers also analyzed the terrain and climate to determine where a post should be built to meet various needs spread over a large geographical area. The answer: the southern side of Blue Mountain, centrally located to meet problems in the mountains and along the river. Such a spot provided access to “Indian strongholds and trails west and southwest.” A constant source of water needed to be considered along with logistical routes open to wagon traffic that would not be snow-bound in the winter. Presence of the railroad—both in Colorado and Utah—was another key factor. Even though there was no insurmountable issue, the officers felt that “Southeastern Utah can be as effectively controlled in a military sense by 54 N. W. Osborne to Headquarters, Department of the Platte, October 26, 1885, AGO. 55 Ibid.

the Department of the Platte [with troops from Salt Lake City] as by the Department of the Missouri [Fort Lewis].”55 The spring and summer of 1886 witnessed a further attempt to work through questions of jurisdiction while providing security. Two separate elements from different locations took to the field, generating detailed reports of soldiering in canyon country. As early as April, plans were afoot to send detachments either in or near southeastern Utah. Company D, Sixth Infantry (Department of the Platte) from Fort Douglas received orders to take the Denver and Rio Grande Railway to Thompson, Utah, then move to the North Fork of Montezuma Creek (today’s Monticello), establish a base, and protect the lives and property of settlers in the region. Troop D, Fifth Cavalry from Fort Riley, Kansas (Department of the Missouri), received the mission of patrolling Dolores and La Plata counties in southwestern Colorado. As part of the response to the petition sent the previous year, this element was to monitor Indian activity in Colorado and coordinate its efforts with the troops from Fort Douglas.56 Company D left Salt Lake City on June 1, arriving in Thompson the next day. To support this field operation, the company had “two hundred rounds of ammunition per man; thirty days rations; two six mule teams and wagons complete; three four mule teams with escort wagons complete, four saddle mules with equipment complete; and the necessary camp equipage.”57 There was so much “equipage” that two-wagon loads remained at Thompson for future delivery. The command reached the Grand (Colorado) River to find it overflowing its banks. The laborious task of unloading the wagons, putting the supplies in a skiff to cross a creek in flood, then half-loading the wagons for a move to the main river to transfer onto the ferry, taxed the soldiers. On the third trip across, the commanding officer, Captain Murdock, drowned when a rope on the ferry broke; Second Lieutenant C. G. Morton took charge. Even though an estimated 2,000 pounds of rations and commissary stores sank to the river bottom, the soldiers still left behind a broken wagon, tents, grain, and ammunition in Moab for later retrieval. Ten miles down the road, the company cached another 250 pounds of grain. Large stones, steep ascents and descents, and the “narrow sidling curves of the road,” made it necessary to “rope the wagons” over the rough parts.58 The travelers emplaced a second 250 pound cache of grain, and the next day yet another. On June 12, the rear wheel of a wagon broke, so men packed two mules with the critical supplies, while the rest of the load and the wagon as well as part of the cargo from a weakened escort wagon were left behind with a corporal and four privates. After all of the caching, the command still had each mule

56 Assistant Adjutant General Samuel Breck to Commanding Officer, Fort Douglas, May 10, 1886; Acting Assistant Adjutant General J. C. Kelson to Commanding General, Division of the Missouri, April 9, May 8, 1886; Special Orders No. 56, Headquarters Department of the Missouri, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, June 3, 1886, AGO.

57 Special Orders No. 49, Headquarters Department of the Platte, May 10, 1886, AGO.

58 C. G. Morton to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, June 16, 1886, AGO.

carrying 350 pounds of grain. Even then, the steep roads with short curves necessitated taking half the load out of the larger wagons and ferrying the remainder to the top of a large hill (known today as Peter’s Hill) with the escort wagons. The last five miles to the North Fork of Montezuma Creek was also done in relays.59

Once in position, the command began its two fold mission, part of which was to map the territory west of Blue Mountain to the Colorado River. From this project came a detailed sketch with verbal description of the land and its people. An analysis of the terrain; the necessity of troops and unit size; location of camps; points of communication, shipment, and supply; and lines of supply (distances and road conditions) were all considered. When joined with the cartography, a descriptive rendering of San Juan County in 1886 appears.60 The second task was to evaluate potential Indian problems. Mancos Jim, an active participant in most if not all of the brush-ups with the cowboys, was in the area, “armed to the teeth,” and “very impudent when spoken to.” Daily signal fires on the Blue and La Sal Mountains indicated a Ute presence, but most of the white ranchers agreed the Indians were hunting and not looking for trouble. There was, however, a group of six to twelve “renegade whites” in the vicinity, stealing horses and forcing a shoot-out with a combined Mormon-cowboy posse. One cattleman, Bill Ball, died in the exchange.61

Troop D, under the command of Captain E. D. Thomas, and with the support of the command at Fort Lewis, had an easier time. Finding all quiet in Colorado, he marched his men from Lost Canyon Creek on the Dolores River, to Blue Mountain, with a detachment dropping to the south through Navajo Springs to the San Juan River, then to Bluff before heading north to rendezvous. Company D and Troop D coordinated efforts in case of a disturbance, agreed that the Indians knew of their presence and intended to be peaceful, and continued active patrolling along the San Juan River. Indeed, once the local Utes and Paiutes learned that the government’s intent to move them was no longer under consideration, they went to the trading posts and started exchanging rifle ammunition that they had been accumulating, for other needed supplies. Equally important for the military, the cowboys were quiet. “There will be no trouble this summer unless a fight is started by the whites. This is the usual manner in which trouble begins, and the cattlemen have been warned both by Captain Thomas and myself [Morton] against such proceedings in the future.”62 Hot July weather continued, but besides the loss of three mules from eating

59 Ibid.

60 C. G. Morton’s Report to Adjutant General, Sixth Infantry, April 30, 1887, AGO.

61 Ibid.; Albert R. Lyman, Indians and Outlaws, Settling of the San Juan Frontier (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1962, 1980), 75-78.

62 Brigadier General J. H. Carter, Assistant Adjutant General, Division of the Missouri, July 7, 1886; E. D. Thomas to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Missouri, July 13, 18, 1886; C. G. Morton to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, July 15, 1886, AGO.

jimson weed, there was not much to report.

By early fall, D Company and D Troop had departed, the cattlemen had completed their roundup, and the Utes kept hunting. This was also the winding down of military operations whose mission it was to determine the feasibility of establishing a more permanent presence. Such a force was deemed unnecessary. Companies from Fort Lewis continued to provide security for settlers and cattlemen to prevent a low grade fever of discontent from erupting into something larger. However, McElmo Canyon, a major thoroughfare for Indian and white travelers moving from the San Juan River to Sleeping Ute Mountain, and a prime agricultural spot, turned into one such area of conflict. Mariano and Red Jacket camped near its mouth and intimidated the settlers living in its confines by demanding food, tearing down fences, visiting ranches when the men were away, grazing livestock on white ranges, stealing tools and horses, and killing cattle. Captain J. B. Irvine, Twenty-second Infantry, spent Christmas week sorting out the matter. Either Southern Ute Agent Christian T. Stollsteimer got them back on the reservation or a party of soldiers would have to be stationed there to keep the peace. Apparently the agent succeeded and Irvine returned to his post later in January. Stollsteimer did suggest, however, that for the next spring and summer, troops again be stationed at McElmo.63

At the same time, there was a reverse situation on the Ute reservation. Cattlemen were grazing their herds at Navajo Springs. Ignacio, the Ute leader, demanded they be removed. Colonel Swaine insisted that they “do so without the use of a military force to eject them.” 64 While Swaine appears willing to have used troops if the cattlemen did not comply with the agent’s request, his commander was not as anxious. With Ignacio wanting to camp at Navajo Springs, the unrest in McElmo Canyon, and the encroachment of livestock on Ute lands, Swaine’s commander suggested the establishment of a subagency in that general vicinity. This allowed for monitoring problems, decreased the use of troops, and provided a presence.65 While the creation of this entity was ten years away, the seed had been planted and the Navajo Springs Agency (later moved a short distance to today’s Towaoc) eventually established government control in this troubled corner.

Another means of maintaining a presence when not responding to an actual threat was the “practice march.” Captain Javan Irwin, Sixth Infantry, participated in such an exercise in September 1888, providing lessons in training for his soldiers, a message to the Indians hunting around Sleeping Ute Mountain, and a good example of size, organization, tactics, and

63 J. B. Irvine to Commanding Officer, Fort Lewis, December 26, 1886, Record Group 75, Consolidated Ute Agency, Denver Federal Record Center.

64 Christian T. Stollsteimer to Adjutant General, Fort Lewis, January 11, 1887; Colonel P. T. Swaine to J. B. Irvine, January 16, 1887, FLC

65 Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Missouri to Colonel P. T. Swaine, January 22, 1887, FLC.

logistical concerns for units of this time and place. Captain Adam Kramer, battalion commander led Troops E and F, Sixth Cavalry, on this combined arms drill. He and three lieutenants with a surgeon worked with sixty-nine enlisted men three civilian packers and teamsters, one wagon pulled by six mules, seventy-six horses, fourteen pack mules, and two saddle mules, all of which were provisioned for a month. The maneuver element purchased fresh forage at $1.50 per 100 pounds of hay and fresh beef at ten cents a pound locally.66

The Sixth Infantry, Companies A, B, C, D, E, and L, left on their march with the cavalry. “While the average length of daily marches complied with the orders, it was impracticable from want of camping ground, water, and thorough advance knowledge, to comply exactly with the requirements of not less than ten miles per day.” 67 The march simulated combat conditions with advance and rear guards as well as flankers. Upon reaching the campsite for that day, the command posted pickets (men emplaced to provide early warning) and vedettes (mounted sentinels in advance of an outpost). Other activities included a night “call to arms and to horses,” as well as day convoy defense, “rapid concentration of the trains, deployment of cavalry and infantry as skirmishers, preparation of a field hospital,” day and night signaling, and a march in the presence of a hostile force.68 The only factor that marred the perfection of the exercise was that the men

66 Post Commander, Fort Lewis to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Missouri, September 18, 1888, FLC.

67 Ibid., September 17, 1888, FLC.

68 Ibid.

Lieutenant A.C. Allen sitting in front of his tent during the Ute Campaign (1878-1879).

J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

received their pay before leaving, there were many saloons on the route of march, and “the command was followed by whiskey peddlers,” resulting in cases of drunkenness. “However, the precautions adopted to restrict sales were successful.”69

The last few years of active soldiering from Fort Lewis centered upon keeping the Utes on their reservation and trying to allay the fears of settlers intimidated by the Indians who were constantly hunting off their lands. The continued demand for food at the cabin door, friction over access, request for troops, escort duty of dignitaries, practice marches, and days on the rifle range filled the soldier’s time. The era of larger troop deployments and possible pitched battles were over. In 1890, the Public Land Office declared the settling of the frontier closed while the army reassigned many of the troops stationed at Fort Lewis to a post in Montana.70 With responsibilities elsewhere, the army moved to close its facility, with any further assignments shifting to Fort Wingate, Arizona, 160 miles away. On May 28, 1891, the Secretary of War signed the document closing Fort Lewis as an active army post, and on September 11, a civilian custodian, a Mr. Lacombe, took charge of the grounds for sixty dollars a month.71 Less than a year later, the post became the Fort Lewis Indian School and assumed a different role in settling the West.

What can be said of this turbulent period of history, where southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah became inextricably joined through cowboys, Indians, and cavalry? Most obvious is the fact that the military was at the right place and time to prevent an escalation of friction. It took an active and relatively impartial role in keeping things quiet. With cowboys, Utes, Navajos, Indian agents, farmers, and townspeople, there was plenty of need for diplomacy and understanding. Another point to consider is how well it did given the circumstances. With the exception of the fight at Soldier Crossing, the soldiers held their own against the Utes and gained their respect. In a number of instances, when the Indians learned that the cavalry would be called in, they insisted it was unnecessary and peacefully went their way. The cowboys gave a similar message. Managing to travel long distances, remaining in the field for monthly stints, and solving the problems of resupply, were all in a day’s work. What came from these efforts besides a quieted frontier were maps and reports that describe southeastern Utah, improved road access to many parts of the land, an impartial view of events and personalities, and an attempt to understand issues underlying local conflict. The military’s task was anything but simple or black and white. For the most part, they sided with right over wrong and did the best they could when soldiering in the corner, living on the fringe.

69 Ibid.

70 Helen M. Searcy, “The Military.” in Sarah Platt Decker Chapter, The Pioneers of San Juan Country (Durango: Daughters of Colorado Pioneers, 1942) I: 70.

71 Assistant Adjutant General to Chief Quartermaster, Department of the Platte, September 11, 1891, FLC.

Friends at all Times: The Correspondence of Isaiah Moses Coombs and Dryden Rogers

By SANDRA DAWN BRIMHALL

The life-long friendship as revealed in the correspondence between Isaiah Moses Coombs and Dryden Rogers was unusual, and sometimes sorely tested, because the two men were fundamentally different in many ways. Coombs, who spent most of his adult life in Utah, was a school teacher and a Mormon; Rogers, who resided in Illinois and Kansas, was a physician and a Baptist.

Their letters, which spanned the years 1855-1886, show how they were able to build upon the things they had in common and rise above the prejudices of their time and locale. They also provide an intimate portrait of the communities and period in which the two men lived.

Coombs was born March 21, 1834, in Columbia, Monroe County, Illinois. His parents, Mark Anthony Coombs and Maria Morgan, were both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Coombs received a common school education and began teaching school at the age of seventeen.1

Almost half a continent away, Rogers was born on January 14, 1827, in Belchertown, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. His parents, Dr. John Rogers and Esther Atwell, moved to Illinois shortly after his birth. When he was a young man, Rogers attended medical lectures in St. Louis and graduated in March 1848 from the Missouri

1 Kate B. Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 20 vol. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 195877), 1: 330-408. Coombs’s father was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Isaac Morley at Independence Landing, Missouri in 1831. See Alice Coombs Mills, “Mark Anthony Coombs: His Roots and Branches,” (privately published, 1970s, copy in author’s possession.), 12.

Sandra Dawn Brimhall is a journalist living in West Jordan and the great-granddaughter of Isaiah Moses Coombs.

Isaiah Moses Coombs.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Medical College.2

Coombs and Rogers first became acquainted in 1852 when Coombs accepted a teaching position in the small town of Waterloo, Illinois. Waterloo was an agricultural community located a few miles south of Columbia.

According to Coombs’s autobiography, “During the winter of ’52 Dryden and I and a number of others organized a Lyceum for our mutual improvement. Our meetings were public and well attended.”3

Coombs made many friends in Waterloo and became a well-respected citizen. A year or two after his arrival, two pivotal events occurred in his life. First, he decided to commit to his parents’ faith and was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 13, 1854. Second, he was married to Sarah Turk, a Methodist, on November 30, 1854.4

Mormonism was a hiss and a byword in Illinois during the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1844, the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, and his brother, Hyrum, were martyred in Carthage, Illinois. Two years later, the majority of Mormons were expulsed from the state.

Coombs also experienced his share of prejudice and persecution as a Mormon. When word spread of his baptism, many of his patrons began to withdraw their children from his school and to clamor for his dismissal. His membership in the unpopular church also alienated him from friends, relatives, and eventually his wife. Rogers was one of the few close associates who remained loyal to him during this time.5

Unable to make a living and isolated from the community, Coombs sought counsel from church leader Erastus Snow. Snow recommended that he either serve a mission in England or move to Utah. Coombs chose the latter and informed his wife of his decision. When she refused to accompany him, he decided to go without her, even though she was expecting their first child.6

2 Letter from Dr. Stephen von Hitritz, descendant of Dryden Rogers, to Sandra Dawn Brimhall, January 10, 2007.

3 Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 1: 331. Dryden’s father and sister, Dr. John Rogers and Cornelia Rogers, were among the attendees.

4 Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 1:337.

5 Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 1:338. One example of Rogers’s continued regard for Coombs is found in Coombs’s diary. Although Coombs left Illinois in 1855, he returned to the East in 1856-1857, at Brigham Young’s request, to serve a mission in Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas. When he visited Waterloo, he received a cordial welcome from the Rogers family. Coombs wrote that, one evening, Rogers invited him and “a few friends to spend the evening in social talk and singing. Throughout the evening, he paid marked attention to me, thus showing he thought none the less of me on account of my religious principles.” See Coombs diary, December 18, 1856, MS 1198, LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah.

6 Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 1:338-39. Coombs’s reception from his wife, Sarah, was less friendly. She had given birth to their son, John William Coombs, on October 11, 1855. Coombs never saw his son because the child died on July 18, 1856. The couple met several times during Coombs’s mission, but they were never reunited as man and wife. When Coombs returned to Utah, he married Fanny McLean on July 28, 1858, in Spanish Fork. A few years later, on June 28, 1875, he also married Charlotte Augusta Hardy. See Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 1:321-408. Coombs recorded his sister, Mary, informed him that

COOMBS AND ROGERS

On April 24, 1855, Coombs began his journey west. He wrote in his diary, “I left home today. Parted with wife, father, sisters, brothers and all my relations perhaps never more to see them in this life. I arrived in St. Louis at about twelve o’clock in good health and was ordained an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”7

The two men began corresponding shortly after Coombs departed Illinois. Coombs preserved many of Rogers’ letters and made copies of some of his own. The letters demonstrate that like one of their contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Coombs and Rogers did not “treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage.”8 They openly expressed their opinions on various subjects and confided their innermost feelings. Apparently no topic, including religion and politics, was taboo.

On September 15, 1855, Coombs received a letter from Rogers, which asked pointed questions about Mormonism:“I suppose that by this time you are duly installed in the City of the faithful. . . . Is Polygamy openly practiced and countenanced among the Saints? Does each male have his acre of ground set off for him at the public expense? Is the Bible or any part of it the rule of faith as practiced in the Valley? Do the Mormons believe that any are saved outside of their church? Does the “sealing” of a second or third wife to the Saint, impair his obligations to the first? Are divorces in vogue in Salt Lake City?”9

Rogers assured Coombs his questions were sincere and that he was trying to keep an open mind, noting, “Rumor with her thousand lying tongues may prejudice, but it cannot entirely convince.”10

Coombs replied to Rogers’s letter on November 29, 1855, answering some of his inquiries. Regarding the allocation of land, he wrote: “When this city was laid off, it was laid off in blocks comprising 10 acres. Each of these blocks was laid off in 1&1⁄4 acre lots. As this is only a Territory, the land is not yet in market and that which is not already taken up belongs as much to one as another person. Of course then if any person settles upon any of these lots it belongs to him until it comes into market & then he can keep it by paying the government price for it. This you know is the law respecting all territorial lands. Thus you see it is not set off to him at the public expense.”

Sarah had obtained a divorce after learning of his marriage to Fanny. See Coombs diary, November 10, 1860, MS 1198, LDS Church Archives. Sarah later married George L. Reiss, a Waterloo resident, on August 13, 1861. See Coombs diary, June 24, 1864. According to the 1880 Federal Census, Sarah and George eventually moved to Red Bud, Illinois. They were the parents of six children. By the time of the 1920 Federal Census, George had passed away and Sarah was still living in Red Bud with her oldest son, George. There is no evidence in Coombs’s letters or journals that he ever had any personal contact with Sarah after he returned to Utah, although Rogers provided him with periodic updates on her activities until he left Illinois and moved to Topeka, Kansas in September 1872.

7 Coombs diary, April 24, 1855.

8 Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Random House, 1992), 206.

9 Dryden Rogers to Isaiah Moses Coombs, September 15, 1855, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 2.

10 Ibid.

As to whether or not the Bible was the Mormons’ rule of faith and if it was possible for a non-Mormon to be saved, Coombs said, “We believe the Bible to be a divinely inspired record of God’s ancient peoples . . . . We believe that a great portion of that sacred volume is applicable to us . . . . Again, we believe the Bible just as it reads with the exception of some few passages that have been wrongly translated . . . . those who believe and were baptized in his name [Christ] were saved, those who did not were damned. This is the exclusiveness of the Bible & this is the exclusiveness of the Mormons.”

Coombs boldly admitted the practice of polygamy, maintaining, that “there is no doctrine believed in & practiced by us that cannot be proven by the Bible. If you will take the Bible & prove to me that polygamy has ever been discountenanced or proscribed by God or any of his servants I am ready to bid goodbye to Mormonism and return to my native home.”

He asserted that the sealing of a second or third wife to a man did not impair his obligation to the first because “a man is under as much obligation to one wife as to another, for all are alike sealed to him for time and all eternity & if he does not treat them as he ought they will leave him.” Coombs acknowledged that some marriages were less than ideal when he tersely wrote that divorces were indeed in vogue in the valley.11

In another letter, Coombs opened his heart to Rogers about his own matrimonial difficulties and his pain in leaving his wife behind in Illinois. “Ah! Dryden that was a trying time. I thought my soul would rend asunder when I took my loved wife to my bosom in a last embrace and breathed scarce audibly the chilling word, ‘Farewell,’ I almost faltered in my purpose but the Spirit whispered ‘He that loveth his wife more than me is not worthy of me.’ I tore myself away from her & all my kindred and bade farewell to home . . . do I regret this? No, but I rejoice that I have been enabled to make this small sacrifice for the cause in which I am engaged.”12

On a different occasion, he lamented the loss of other loved ones and friends as a result of his conversion to Mormonism and wondered if his friendship with Rogers would also wither and die. “In years that are past, Dryden, I have enjoyed your friendship and confidences, in years to come your friendship may be put to the test and your confidence shaken but remember the injunction of the Savior, ‘Judge not,’ for the secrets of the heart you cannot know. In the visions of my mind, I often read my future destiny and I see friend after friend depart from my side to become an enemy. Dryden, will you be one of that number? I feel that you will not.”13

Rogers also had his trials. On September 25, 1858, he wrote Coombs a letter about the death of one of his children and his father’s lingering

11

Isaiah Moses Coombs to Dryden Rogers, November 29, 1855, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3 folder 6.

12 Coombs to Rogers, August 1856, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 6.

13 Coombs to Rogers, undated, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 5.

illness. “Since you were last here, death has visited us and taken to a better and happier sphere than this, our lovely Minnie. I trust your faith will not deny the efficacy of the atonement on her behalf, if peradventure you deny it to her Gentile parents. Father also has been brought to the very door of death and raised again and now he is able to perform the duties of life and his professions, with but half of his accustomed vigor.”

In another part of the letter, he discussed an upcoming election, which was a topic of special interest to both men. “Politics is the engrossing theme here. The question is Buchanan Democrats, Douglas Democrats or Republicans? In this country Douglas will triumph gloriously from present appearances. He was here on the 11th of this month, and of course everybody and their friends turned out to hear the Little Giant. His speech as far as listened to by me was not of the first order by any means. His opponent, Abraham Lincoln, I never saw.”

Rogers then brought up a controversial subject for Coombs and other Mormons—President James Buchanan’s decision to send 2,500 troops to Utah. The troops were assigned to suppress the alleged Mormon rebellion against federal authority and to install a new governor, appointed by Buchanan, to replace Brigham Young. Buchanan’s action, known as the “Utah War,” (1857-1858) was popular among Utah non-Mormons and also was enthusiastically supported in the East. Rogers wrote, “You know that I am not partial towards the present administration, but I must tell you that you impute wrong purposes and motives to them . . . . I must believe that Buchanan never thirsted for Mormon blood, or that he never sent Col. Johnston to Utah, for both facts come to me in the same tangible shape. I have heard grievances on one side and complaints on the other. You will naturally view me with suspicion because I will not take the word of a Mormon as good against the united testimony of our distinguished Gentile Statesmen. If I was a Mormon I certainly would. I esteem it an unfortunate event that the Mormons ever resisted the United States

COOMBS AND ROGERS

Dr. Dryden Rogers and his grandchildren.

authority, but a sign of returning reason that Brigham backed down from his lofty threats which every intelligent reader knew was negatory. I find new revelation very expedient in times of emergency, especially in presence of United States troops . . . .”14

Coombs assured Rogers that his faith would not consign Minnie to Hell. “Of course you meant not that question in earnest. I repudiate all such faith as that and would have no fellowship with anyone who would cherish such a doctrine. Infants come into this world pure and if they fall asleep in their infancy they are still pure and all is well with them whether or not their immediate predecessors be righteous or unrighteous.”15

The Civil War had a great impact on the content and frequency of Coombs’s and Rogers’ correspondence. As the conflict between the North and the South began to escalate, Coombs described to Rogers the Mormons’ reactions to the impending war. “As a people, we are making preparations to store up wheat in abundance against the famine and distress we are assuming on this nation . . . . The South rebels as he [Joseph Smith] said it would and in the very place, too. He foretold the arming of the negroes against their masters. He said that the nation would be split into fragments, state would be arrayed against state, city against city and man against his neighbor until he that would not take up his sword would have to flee to Zion for safety; that famine would tread upon the heels of war and that pestilence and earthquakes would complete the destruction of those who reject God and his prophet . . . . We will share in our prosperity with you and like Bunyan’s good evangelist, point you the way that leads to the Celestial City. My friend may you escape the judgments that are on the earth. For your kindness to me may you never know want, may the destroyer be kept from your habitation and may we meet again in peace.”16

In 1864, Coombs wrote: “Ever since the breaking out of the war I have been anxious to hear from you but have refrained from writing under the impression that you might possibly be absent with the army in the enemies’ country. I did not forget that you were as emphatically a man of peace as ever was a follower of William Penn, but I knew that the government was drafting men for the war & that any man was liable to be pressed into service whether his organs of combativeness was developed or not. This may be all right but I consider it unwarrantable stretching of the powers granted by the Constitution of our country. Of course every patriot will hold himself in readiness to go at the call of his country and maintain the honor of her flag whether it be against a foreign foe or as a domestic traitor, but in my opinion it should be a voluntary service. If I were going to lead an army into the field I should prefer one thousand willing patriotic

14

Rogers to Coombs, September 25, 1858, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 2. According to Stephen von Hitritz, Rogers’s descendant, Dryden Rogers and his wife, Elizabeth, were the parents of four children.

15 Coombs to Rogers, May 1, 1864, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 6.

16 Coombs to Rogers, undated, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2 folder 5.

men in whose bosoms burned a pure and sacred love for the cause of right to ten thousand drafted, or paid hirelings.”17

Rogers replied that he had indeed been drafted “into the service of Father Abraham but sent an Irishman which cost me $650.”18

In a subsequent letter he wrote, “I guess my Irishman fights. ’Tis their nature especially when mixed with tanglefoot.” 19 Rogers digressed from the subject of war when he asked Coombs if he had married again and, if so, how many wives and children he now had. 20 Coombs, who had married Fanny McLean on June 28, 1858, without obtaining a divorce from Sarah, testily replied that he had but one wife, like Rogers. “You see now that it was not for wives that I became a Mormon. I acknowledge polygamy as an institution of heaven revealed for the salvation of the human family to arrest the tide of corruption that was fast hurrying our race from the earth, but for several reasons have not seen fit to take others and there are plenty of willing women to choose from but I stick to the unit. You have been told that no man can be a good Mormon unless he has a plurality of wives. That is not true. My standing here in the church is good and it would be no better if I had a dozen helpmetes. Marriage here, as among other people, is an individual concern . . . . Women are as much respected and are as well treated as they are in any other part of the United States and what is more they are as virtuous and good to say the least.”21

What Coombs didn’t tell Rogers was that he had asked at least two young women to become his plural wives. The first proposal was made to Sara Alexander on January 5, 1860. Alexander was an actress and dancer, who performed at the Salt Lake Theatre.22 The second offer was made to Fanny’s sister, Lexy, on June 10, 1860.23 Both proposals were ultimately refused.

In June of 1865, Rogers wrote Coombs about a family mishap that occurred while Rogers was out all night on a medical call. When he returned home, he found his house, “a mass of coals, burnt timbers, calcined rocks and a blackened chimney. Children bare-headed and footed,

17 Coombs to Rogers, May 1, 1864, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 6.

18 Rogers to Coombs, December 18, 1864, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 3.

19 Rogers to Coombs, March 20, 1865, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 3.

20 Ibid.

21

Coombs to Rogers, May 31, 1865, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 6.

22 Coombs to Sara Alexander, January 5, 1860, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 2; Susa Young Gates, “Actress –By Command of Brigham Young,” Susa Young Gates Collection, MS B95, box 14, folder 2; box 17, folder 9, Utah State Historical Society.

23 Coombs diary,June 10, 1860.

COOMBS AND ROGERS

Fanny McLean Coombs.

trees and fence destroyed and plenty of Job’s comforters to pity me with their tongues.”

He reported that in seven weeks, he had removed the rubbish, rebuilt and moved his family into a new home. He observed, “You must not suppose that my house was insured for such was not the case . . . . Don’t suppose because I devote so much space to my loss that I regard it for ‘tis not so. I never once compare it to the loss of a member of my family. I have tried both, so I know how to sympathize with those that are afflicted. When property is destroyed it only urges the necessity of industry and economy without which mortals are unhappy.”24

Throughout the years, the two men occasionally exchanged harsh words as a result of their differing views on religion. Part of the friction was caused by Coombs’s repeated efforts to convert Rogers to his faith, and Rogers’ resistance to such missionary zeal.

On June 11, 1867, Rogers wrote a letter which strongly condemned polygamy, compared Brigham Young to Mahomet [Muhammad] and questioned the Mormon prophet’s motives in attempting to enforce the Word of Wisdom: “You ask if men can thus control their appetites and passions are not worthy of more than one wife. The Mahomet answers yes. The Pope answers that he can control himself and consequently needs none. Civilization and Christianity unite in characterizing it as revolting, dehumanizing, in this, that if man is entitled to 100 wives, a woman is certainly entitled to 100 husbands. Does not your women also curb their passion? Are they less pious than the men, are they less devoted? . . . .”

“You tell me that Brigham Young is great. The devout Muslim replies Allah is great and Mahomet was his prophet. Do you see the point? It is an insult to you to compare Mahomet with Young. It would be an insult to a Muslim man for me to compare Mahomet with Young. Do you see the point? Do I make it plain enough for you to comprehend my feelings? . . .”

“Now as regards the matter of which you asked my opinion. President Young advised the disuse of tobacco, tea and coffee, and the people actually abstained from their use. I do not wish to wound your feelings in the least, but honesty compels me, if I reply at all, to speak what I believe. I do not believe that any considerable number of Mormons, say 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 of the communicants of your church had abandoned the use of those luxuries, provided they are as easily obtained there as here. . . . Now for the motive in giving such council. . . . Does the building of the temple demand sacrifice? Are these articles exotic and not to be obtained without crippling the resources of the people? If either of these exist the council was appropriate, if not, then fix a name for it yourself. . . . I say such blind fidelity betrays a sad want of intellect.”25

Coombs took umbrage at Rogers’ comments and penned an angry

24 Rogers to Coombs, June 6, 1865, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 3.

25 Rogers to Coombs, June 11, 1867, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 3.

response, which he sent by return mail.

“Accept my assurance that your plain, blunt, unreasoning assertions concerning polygamy and Brigham Young have failed to hurt my feelings. I accord most cheerfully to you what I claim for myself – the privilege of thinking, talking and writing on subjects as you please. I claim to be your friend, and being such shall not allow myself to get offended at trifles . . . . You have revealed your feelings on the subject of Mormonism in your last letter very plainly – there can be no misunderstanding. I humbly beg your pardon for forcing the subject so often upon your consideration in my correspondence . . . . I am very sorry to be obliged to change my opinion of you and to place your name on my long list of religious bigots; men who tie themselves down to an iron bedstead and say thus far will I grow and no farther and all who are longer or shorter than this are fools and idiots . . . . you will excuse me for being plain and pointed for this once. I but follow your example and by doing so we will henceforth know each other on these points perfectly and as we differ so widely, as friends we may avoid it in the future.”26

Whenever they quarreled, Rogers would offer Coombs an olive branch, assuring him of his continued friendship. “When I condemn some parts of your theology, do not think that it includes you. Such was not ever at any time my meaning. The ‘tartness’ was general not personal, and I think you can bear me witness that I have repeatedly objected to our writing on the subject, as I did not wish to offend a real friend.”27

In the majority of their letters, the two men focused on their mutual interests, rather than their differences, discussing family life, education, current events, crop prices and the economy. Rogers periodically provided Coombs with updates concerning Waterloo and their common acquaintances: “Emery Slate met quite a loss a fortnight ago. Lost a valuable mule for which he paid cash $250; worked her all day, put her in the stable, fed her, and before going to bed, turned her into his 2 acres horse lot. Next morning, gone, hunted 10 days and came home, found her 60 yards from door a slight depression in the ground had proved a sink hole caved in with her 12 feet deep and 8 feet off and when found, (by blowflies) was barely visible i.e. her head was. To look at it now it seems it would require the strength of 100 men to drag her in the hold. It was known there was a small hole there, but as boys had tried to enter & had not been able, it had been filled with brush and straw and was filling up as all sinks generally does.”28

He also described an event that caused a scandal in Waterloo. “I saw a loving couple promenading, one I knew as Dr. H. P. Roden, and I was credibly informed that the other was his wife, daughter of Scipio M. Baird, aged about 14 years. I was informed that they eloped, went to St. Louis and were married, returned and reported progress. The inquisitive father wished

26

Coombs to Rogers, July 1867, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2 folder 6.

27 Rogers to Coombs, July 22, 1870, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 4.

28 Rogers to Coombs, April 30, 1869, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 3.

to know who were the witnesses, being informed, swore one was a lunatic, the other a fool, and that they should be married right. Sent for a license and a clergyman and reenacted the farce.”29

Coombs and Rogers occasionally discussed the anti-polygamy legislation enacted by the federal government against the Mormons. One of these laws was the Cullom Bill, which was sponsored by Rep. Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois. In 1862, Congress had passed the Anti-Bigamy Morrill Act which had made polygamous marriages a crime within the United States territories. The Cullom Bill of 1870 sought to strengthen the previous Anti-Bigamy law and to revamp the territorial government in Utah. The bill, when it passed the House but was defeated in the Senate, caused great excitement in Utah.30

In his diary, on January 21, 1870, Coombs wrote: “Have finished a long letter to Dryden Rogers. . . .In it I have written at length on the Cullom Bill. Told him this people would never submit to such oppressive and unjust laws. The nation may drive us or destroy us but we will not tamely submit our necks to the yoke.”31

Rogers wrote Coombs, “The Cullom bill mentioned by you makes no noise or stir here. No one cares much about it. The general maintains that it is useless, as the question will soon solve itself by letting alone. Universal experience teaches that pressure consolidates. Polygamy being a human invention is no exception to the rule.”32

One controversial topic where Coombs and Rogers saw eye to eye, was the ineptitude of some of the federal judges who had been sent to Utah to deal with Mormons and polygamy. Rogers wrote, “I see by the papers that there is occasionally a farce called a trial for Bigamy or kindred crimes in Utah. It is looked on as a farce all over the world & the best thing to do would be to kick a judge or two out of the Territory . . . . possess your soul in patience & keep still and you will not be molested. But drilling militia will not frighten anyone. Neither will polygamy always continue.”33

After Brigham Young was indicted for murder in the fall of 1871, on trumped up evidence, Rogers was appalled. “I see by the papers that your great leader Brigham Young is a prisoner, furnishing his own jail, boarding himself a refused bailer charged with murder. Oh, what a judge! Is there not a lunatic asylum in the Territory? If not, send him back to his.”34

On July 30, 1870, Coombs sent word that he and his wife, Fanny, were

29

Rogers to Coombs, October 17, 1870, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 4.

30 Andrew Jensen, Encyclopedic History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing Company, 1941), p. 48.

31 Coombs diary, January 21, 1870.

32 Rogers to Coombs, February 18, 1870, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 4.

33 Rogers to Coombs, December 12, 1871, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 4.

34 Rogers to Coombs, January 4, 1872, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 5. According to LDS Church leader, George A. Smith, Young had originally been arrested for “lascivious cohabitation” and was allowed bail at $5,000. Young went to St. George to spend the winter and a month

expecting another child: “We are well excepting my wife who is expecting to be confined again shortly. We expect to have another son and to call his name Dryden Rogers. What say you? Would you like to have a namesake among the Mormons?”35

In the same letter, he described a cooperative movement that had been launched by Brigham Young as a stepping stone for the “Order of Enoch,” or the order of Heaven. Mormon “cooperatives” were jointstock corporations, which were sponsored by the church, to achieve both spiritual and material goals. Coombs wrote: “The day is not far distant when poverty will be unknown among us, when all will share the blessings of life alike, i.e., all who are industrious and deserving. . . . The cooperative system we have introduced here is bound in a very few years to enter into every branch of business, and make us all rich. I expect to see the day when my interest in stores & factories will bring me in all my clothing; when my interest in the dairy will supply my family with butter, cheese & meat, and when my shares in a cooperative farm will bread me. . . .The system is a good one & with us it will work. Men without the cementing influence of the gospel and priesthood have tried it and have failed but it will win this time.”36

A few weeks later, Coombs wrote to Rogers about a recent territorial

after he arrived, he was indicted for murder. Young returned to Salt Lake City, where he learned that the only witness against him was William A. Hickman, an apostate. Hickman claimed to have committed several murders and named Young as an accomplice for one of those murders. Judge James B. McKean, committed Young to jail in his own house. See Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 26, 1872, microfilm in LDS Church Archives.

35 Coombs to Rogers, July 30, 1870, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2 folder 7.

36 Coombs to Rogers, July 30, 1870, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 7. Isaiah and Fanny were the parents of fourteen children. Isaiah also had six more children by his plural wife, Charlotte Augusta Hardy. For some unknown reason, Isaiah named the son he had proposed to call Dryden, Arthur Francis Coombs. Arthur was born on September 17, 1870. Isaiah and Fanny later had another son they named Dryden Rogers Coombs, who was born on May 14, 1875. Dryden Coombs, who became a well-known Utah educator, served as principal of both Riverside Elementary School and Jordan Junior High School. See Alice Coombs Mills, “Mark Anthony Coombs: His Roots and Branches,” (privately published, 1970s) 139, copy in author’s possession.

Isaiah Moses and Fanny McLean Coombs and some children.

election: . . . . “It would make you stare could you but take a peak at our polls today. Order and peace reigns there supreme. No drinking of spirits (the judge and clerk have a bucket of water sitting under the table from which they quench their thirst ever and anon.) There is no swearing, there is no electioneering, no challenging. . . . All this you would be prepared to see perhaps among saints but what would make you stare is the ladies who throng in there to deposit their votes along with their husbands, brothers and sons. . . . How I envy yon aged veteran who has just walked up and deposited of his seven votes assisted by his half dozen wives. . . . No case has come under my observation of a man coercing his wife to vote and I do not think an instance of it could be found in our territory and yet the women all vote for the Mormon officers . . . .”

“In the northern part of the territory where the gentiles do mostly congregate, I presume they are not having such quiet lines. We have only one bonafide gentile town in Utah, Corrine. They are very smart folks that live there, especially on election day. Two years ago, there were only 60 voters in that place and they polled no less than 1800 votes. They did that on the principle of voting early and voting often, they got in only 30 votes to the head. But then that was done to defeat the Mormons and introduce civilization into Utah.”37

Rogers and his family left Waterloo in October 1872 and moved to Topeka, Kansas. In describing his new home, he told Coombs, “This is a rather pretty place on both banks of the Kansas river, but principally on the South. It is the Capitol of the State. Contains 9,000 or 10,000 inhabitants. Churches are numerous and well attended. The morals, generally speaking, are good, especially among the residents. Floating population here as in every other place is generally rough. Rent is exorbitant, living high, pride costing more than necessity. I do not know what my success will be. The profession is overdone here, and I may not succeed at all. I have to run that risk. My children are all going to school.”38

In a later letter, he reflected on the peaceful interaction that existed between the members of different religions in his new locale and asked if Mormons were equally tolerant. “Here all denominations are called orthodox, and several very heterodox seem to thrive. Here Spiritualists pitch their tabernacle. Here Unitarian and Universalist, Deist & Atheist sit side by side. It is so in the valleys? Is opinions, or not opinions, creeds, litanies tolerated or are your people an exclusive association? True, the law makes all equal, i.e., before the law. But I mean socially and in a business point of view. Could I with my present views and practices succeed in a Mormon City where I would necessarily come in conflict with those of a faith different than mine?”39

37 Coombs to Rogers, August 7, 1870, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 7.

38 Rogers to Coombs, October 21, 1872, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3.

39 Rogers to Coombs, May 24, 1874, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 5.

The two men also demonstrated a keen interest in world, as well as national, politics. After the Russo-Turkish War in 1877-1878, the Congress of Berlin was called by the signers of the Treaty of Paris of 1856 to reconsider the terms which Russia had forced on the Ottoman Empire.40

Rogers wrote to Coombs in the summer of 1878 and expressed his opinion about the events that had taken place in Europe. “The first chapter in the history of European diplomacy is closed. How many sons are covered up, how much rottenness concealed, volcanic fires smothered, only to break out again with redoubled fury. The end is not yet. Russia needs an outlet that is not frozen over six months during the year and Europe should have had sense enough to awarded it, if permanent peace was the aim. Alexander may not fight again for it, but Nicholas will if he ascends to the throne of the Czars.”41

Coombs viewed the European troubles as the wages of sin and the judgment of an angry God. He was more ambivalent regarding the rise of communism, perhaps because of his own experience with the cooperative movement in Utah. “As to the communist, they are a dangerous clan, no difference whether they are foreigners or natives. They are dangerous because they are desperate and they have been rendered desperate by a long series of wrongs and deprivations at the hands of those very ‘better classes.’ . . . . If those ‘better classes’had within them the feelings of humanity and were to organize society with a view to provide labor for all and to do good to all, there would be no communists in this or any other country. I am not apologetic for lawlessness, on the contrary, I would bring all law breakers to justice were it in my power, but I am bold to declare that I hold the ‘better classes’ responsible in a measure, for much of the evils that afflict society in general. Our mother earth produces enough for all her children, and if some roll in wealth and luxury while others starve there is something wrong and men who have it in their power to right that wrong are responsible for it. May God bless the friends of mankind, right the wrongs of all his children and bring in the long looked for reign of peace.”42

Rogers disagreed with Coombs’s assertion that wars, pestilence and natural disasters came from God. To support his argument, he presented his theory on the Biblical story of Noah’s ark and the great flood. “It seems strange to me at least that you should think a flood or deluge, a judgment of God, when on the other hand floods are such blessings. One river overflows its banks and does harm, another like the overflow of the Nile, is a great blessing. . . .Let me tell you how it looks to me. In those primitive times men built their houses and barns together near rivers, for water was an object, when rain fell all congregated in the building, water raised floated the building and Noah being wealthy has the best building of

40 Ian Drury, The Russo-Turkish War 1877 (Oxford: UK, 1994).

41 Rogers to Coombs, July 28, 1878, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 7.

42 Coombs to Rogers, June 17, 1878, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 2, folder 7.

anyone in that part of the country and it floated, and saved him and family as they lived together and their inferences while all the rest was destroyed.”

He admonished Coombs to have more compassion for the differences of others. “Practice charity my friend. If others worship God in a different method from you, do not condemn, there is too much of that done in the world. Leave that to God when He judges the world, he will do right. If he gives you more light than he does me, do not think more honesty goes with it.”43

On another occasion, Rogers again asked Coombs for forgiveness for the times that he had been uncharitable. “I can think of no more appropriate way of beginning the year than writing to you, and we will see if we can spare each others feelings, and let theology rest during the current year. . . . I will ask your forgiveness for all harsh, uncharitable, and unfriendly language of the past, and try to be more guarded in the future.”44

A born philosopher, Rogers told Coombs he was willing to suspend judgment on Mormonism, and other religions, and allow historians to evaluate them in future years. “The enormities committed in the name and ostensibly by the command of God are as old as history. The people of one age speak for God and the next condemn. The history of religion is a history of the need of it, if not the absence of it, and if you never detect anything but good in your system, and among your brethren, and if historians are equally fortunate, you will indeed be entitled to the Kingdom of Heaven.”45

Rogers last known letter to Coombs was written on April, 13, 1885, after he received word that Coombs’s wife, Fanny, had died, following childbirth, on March 17, 1885. “Your letter received in which you convey the sad news of your great loss. I would send you words of comfort, but in affliction like yours, it seems impossible. No one can appreciate the loss until they are called to endure it. . . .It seems to me as if I had known Mrs. Coombs for years. When I looked at her picture, I am satisfied that your estimate of her virtues is not exaggerated. . . .Our time will soon come and it matters little how soon. The only question should be are we ready. My grandfather used to say that the Lord would not have to call him but once.

43 Rogers to Coombs, March 18, 1879, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 8.

44 Rogers to Coombs, January 1, 1882, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3.

45 Rogers to Coombs, October 15, 1881, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 9.

Home of Isaiah Moses and Fanny McLean Coombs in Payson.

He was always ready. . . .I hope your children will inherit their Mother’s faith and imitate her virtues.”46

Coombs, who never recovered from the shock of Fanny’s death, passed away a year later, in Payson, on May 20, 1886.47

Rogers outlived Coombs by almost twenty years. He died on March 27, 1902, in Topeka, Kansas. Despite Coombs’s great efforts to convert him to Mormonism, he remained a firm believer in the Baptist faith and was considered one of the pillars of his community.48

Coombs’s prediction, years earlier, that his friendship with Rogers would endure proved true. Throughout their lives, both men placed humanity above dogma. They were committed to the principles of loyalty, tolerance and forgiveness and, thus, were able to bridge a gulf that is sometimes too wide for society as a whole.

46 Rogers to Coombs, April 13, 1885, Isaiah Moses Coombs Collection, MS 1198, box 3, folder 10.

47 Kate B. Carter, ed., Our Pioneer Heritage, 323.

48 Waterloo Republican, April 3, 1902.

Did Prospectors See Rainbow Bridge Before 1909?

By JAMES H. KNIPMEYER

August 14, 2009, will mark the one-hundred-year anniversary of the official discovery of Rainbow Natural Bridge in far southeastern Utah. This was accomplished in 1909 by the combined parties of Professor Byron Cummings of the University of Utah and William B. Douglass of the U. S. Government Land Office. Writing later,

James Knipmeyer is a retired high school teacher from Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Rainbow Bridge and Navajo Mountain, overlooking Forbidding Canyon.

Professor Cummings said, “Had others been there before us; who can say? If so they left no sign.”1

This sentiment was echoed by a member of the Cummings party, Donald Beauregard, who, shortly after the discovery stated, “No sign of any previous visit by white man was visible….”2 An employee of the Douglass group concurred: “[At the mouth of] the canyon [Forbidding Canyon at the Colorado River]… below the arch, we saw remnants of a campsite with signs of a fire. On the canyon wall near the fire bed, someone had written something in charcoal from the fire…. [But] there wasn’t any sign of them having been at the arch.”3

For at least eighty years, however, the possibility has been raised that the great stone span had been seen by other Anglos as far back as the late 1800s. This point may have first been broached in published form by Harold S. Colton and Frank C. Baxter in their 1932 book, Days Spent in the Painted Desert and San Francisco Mountains, where they stated: “The [Rainbow] bridge … very probably was visited by the early beaver trappers who approached it from the Colorado River.”4

Beaver trappers most likely did not explore the Aztec Creek-Forbidding Canyon drainage in which Rainbow Bridge is situated because the stream’s riparian habitat was not suitable for fur-bearing animals. Nevertheless, the possibility of a pre-1909 visitation was presented to a broad reading audience by historian C. Gregory Crampton in his 1964 book Standing Up Country, wherein he states quite emphatically, “Unquestionably, Rainbow Bridge had been visited before 1909 by prospectors who were working their way up from the Colorado.”5

Prospectors were much more likely early visitors than beaver trappers. The discovery of placer gold deposits in the high gravel bars of the Colorado River had brought hundreds of men into Glen Canyon after 1883. However, they did not limit their prospecting to just the main canyon, but worked up the tributaries such as Aztec Creek as well. “Every stream, it is reasonable to assume, particularly those with boulder-strewn beds was prospected from its mouth. Those heading in the laccolithic mountains, including Navajo Mountain, were prospected high up their slopes to find the source of the placer gold in the main canyon.”6 There are at least four separate claims that have been made that Anglo prospectors

1 Byron Cummings, “Sa Nonnezoshie” Byron Cummings Collection, MS 0200, Box 5, folder 32, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Arizona.

2 Donald Beauregard, “Nonnezhozhi, The Father of All Natural Bridges,” Deseret Evening News , October 2, 1909.

3 Dan Perkins, interview by Grant M. Reeder, November 16, 1966. Excerpts in author’s possession.

4 Harold S. Colton and Frank C. Baxter, Days Spent in the Painted Desert and San Francisco Mountains (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1932), 68.

5 C. Gregory Crampton, Standing Up Country: The Canyonlands of Utah and Arizona (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 154.

6 C. Gregory Crampton, Historical Sites in Glen Canyon, Mouth of San Juan River to Lee’s Ferry , Anthropological Paper No. 46 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, June 1960), 98.

did, in fact, see Rainbow Bridge before 1909. This article will review all four claimant stories, and will examine the probability and validity of each, as well as provide background material on the history of mineral prospecting in the Rainbow Bridge-Navajo Mountain region.

Prospecting in the angle of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers that bracket Navajo Mountain on the west and to the north actually begins with one of the best known “lost” mines in the entire West. The story of the Merrick-Mitchell silver mine, or as it is often called by a Navajo name, the Pish-la-ki, has its inception in the latter part of the 1870s. The almost mythical status of this lode has inspired many different versions, but based on first-hand and contemporary accounts the story seems to go like this.

In 1878 a prospector by the name of Charles Merrick, while passing through the Navajo country between Fort Wingate, New Mexico, and Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River in northern Arizona, discovered “three crude smelters” where the Indians, he believed, had been working metallic silver from silver ore.7 In late December 1879, Merrick, accompanied by Hernan C. Mitchell, returned to try to find the mine and secure additional specimens of ore. Mitchell was the son of Henry L. Mitchell who had a ranch on the San Juan River just below the mouth of McElmo Creek in present-day San Juan County, Utah. When the two failed to return within a specified time, a party of men set out in search of them.

The search party found that during January 1880, the two prospectors had been killed by Indians in what was at that time known as Monumental Valley, though the name has since been somewhat shortened to just Monument Valley. Local Navajos accused a small band of mixed Paiute/Utes, while they, in turn, blamed the Navajos. Traces of silver ore found with the prospectors’ equipment led members of the search party to believe that Merrick and Mitchell had located a source of silver and were on their way back to the San Juan and southwestern Colorado settlements.8 Indeed, a second group of men who returned the next month in February to secure the remains of the two bodies, reported that though “they were killed in Monumental Valley, Arizona… they [the Indians] admitted following Mitchell and his partner for four days to get a chance to ambush them and kill them.”9

Cass Hite, a member of this second group, would in later years become synonymous with gold prospecting in the Glen Canyon region of southern Utah. However, in the fall of 1881, he outfitted with four other men to

7 Contemporary accounts offer different spellings of Merrick’s name including Myrick and Merritt. Merritt is most likely correct, though “Merrick” is the name that has come down to us today. Later, samples of this ore had supposedly assayed at 90 percent silver. David E. Miller, Hole-in-the-Rock (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1975), 91.

8

“Killed by Indians,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), March 16, 1880.

9 J. Y. Carpenter to Secretary of the Interior, February 28, 1880, Record Group 75, Letters Received New Mexico Superintendency, 1858-1907, Office of Indian Affairs, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D. C.

hunt for the rumored silver mine of Merrick and Mitchell in Navajo country. They believed the silver mine to be located in one of the canyons between Monumental [Monument] Valley and Navajo Mountain.10 One of the four, M. S. Foote, left his name carved into the sandstone wall of the Long Canyon branch of the Tsegi Canyon, along with the date December 16, 1881. The extent of their search is indicated by a second inscription left by Foote in upper Forbidding Canyon, southwest of Navajo Mountain, dated twelve days later on December 28.

While no silver mine was located, gold samples were found in some of the igneous dikes of Monumental Valley. In the spring of 1882, a much larger party, again including Cass Hite, started on a return trip from Durango, Colorado. Evidently the gold findings did not amount to much, as the expedition soon turned its attention once more to the “Myrick mine… supposed to have been located south-east of the Navajo Mountain.”11 They prospected every canyon from today’s Chinle Wash west to Navajo Mountain. When part of the expedition returned to Durango, several members remained behind to continue the search in “a small tract of country which they had not yet entered.”12 Names and dates carved and drawn on canyon walls by several members of the remaining searchers indicate that this area is near Navajo Mountain.

Cash Cade and Notley C. Young carved and wrote their names in

10 “New Mineral Excitement,” The Durango Record (Colorado), January 20, 1882.

11 “Another Song Sung by Navajo Explorers,” Rocky Mountain News, April 14, 1882.

12 “Nothing of Note Comes from Navajo Mountain,” Rocky Mountain News, April 3, 1882.

Discovery party and horses on the slick rocks west of Navajo Mountain on their way to Rainbow Bridge. Photo by Neil M. Judd, August 13, 1909.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

charcoal at Inscription House, a prehistoric Anasazi cliff dwelling ruin in Neetsin Canyon, a branch of Navajo Canyon. They continued their search, along with fellow prospector Lorenzo Reed, in Toenleshushe, the next tributary canyon to the north. Back up on the plateau, a few miles north toward Navajo Mountain at Tse Ya Toe Spring, George M. Miller also carved and wrote his name in charcoal on the alcove wall. He also incised his name on the sandstone wall of Cottonwood Wash, just east of Navajo Mountain. Finally, George Emmerson carved his name on a ledge of rock on the southern slope of the mountain itself and again in the upper part of Forbidding Canyon to the southwest. In each instance where a date was included with a name, it was always 1882. One of George Emmerson’s inscriptions recorded the month and day as April 1.

This group finally returned to southwestern Colorado about the middle of April, having seen nothing of the fabled Merrick-Mitchell mine. However, they did discover a large ledge of mineral-bearing ore, and so by mid-May yet another party of hopeful prospectors departed Durango “to take possession of the great copper mine which was located by Cass Hite on his last exploring tour a few weeks ago.”13 Three contiguous copper claims were located near the head of what they named, and is still called, Copper Canyon. However, for Hite at least, the quest for the Pish-la-ki silver mine was still on the agenda.

For some three months during the winter of 1882-83, Hite spent much time with the Navajo headman of the region, Hoskaninni and his son, Hoskaninni Begay. Depending on which story Hite told in later years, Hoskaninni either agreed to sell him the silver mine “for two thousand pesos,” but backed out when other members of the tribe angrily disagreed, or simply led Hite “around for five or six weeks” until the prospector finally gave up in disgust.14

Either way, Hite now turned his back on the San Juan country and the Merrick-Mitchell silver mine. By September of 1883, he was on the Colorado River prospecting for placer gold in the gravel bars of Glen Canyon. There he remained, around Trachyte Creek and what became the mining camp of Hite and at his “ranch” and mining claim at Ticaboo Creek, until his death in 1914.

William F. Williams begins a remarkable seven-page statement given on May 22, 1929, in Winslow, Arizona, with the words, “I saw Rainbow Bridge in 1884 in company with my father, J. Patterson Williams.” As this is the earliest dated claim of Anglos visiting Rainbow Bridge prior to its official discovery in 1909, it is important that an abbreviated form of his statement be given:

13

“A Prospecting Party Goes to Monumental Valley,” Rocky Mountain News, May 23, 1882.

14 For two different accounts see Pearl Baker, Trail on the Water (Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing Company,1969), 63; and James W. Black, Statement of James W. Black, July 10, 1930, Gladwell Richardson Collection, Arizona Historical Society, Northern Division, hereinafter AHSND MS. 48, Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona.

…. Hosteen Hoskinnini went with us, as he said he could show us where the silver prospect was that had been worked by Merrick and Mitchell. But as it turned out Hoskinnini didn’t know anything much about it at all…. I really think Hoskinnini, who had never actually seen this place himself, believed he could take us there because he had talked to the Indians who killed Merrick and Mitchell in Monument Valley.

…. It must have been in November that year when we started from Sierra Capitan for Navajo Mountain….

We crossed the upper end of Piute Canyon, staying a couple of days or so with the Piute Indians at the farms there….We went first to a place called later Owl Bridge, a natural arch on the north side of Navajo Mountain. We prospected around there for awhile, with Hoskinnini trying to obtain more information about this canyon Merrick and Mitchell had been in. We went up on top of the mountain….

After working the mountain for awhile we went down from the top over a bench to Willow Springs and then from the west side into what is now called Cliff Canyon, and Bridge Canyon. These canyons were then known as Broken Leg Canyon and Underthe-Arm Canyon….

Broken Leg Canyon got its name because of a party of white prospectors jumped sometime earlier in the year over between Willow Springs and the rim of Navajo Canyon and one of them escaped. But he broke his leg over in that canyon. All the other prospectors were killed….

I do not know why Bridge Canyon was known as Under-the-Arm Canyon, except that was the Navajo name for it….

This place [now] called Redbud Pass…. We had absolutely no difficulty getting through there in the winter of 1884. One place was very narrow, but we definitely did not have to unload our pack stock and carry our supplies through. We did not even dismount to get through. The Indians were using it all the time.

It was in December (1884) when we came out….

After leaving Rainbow Bridge, Williams describes a convoluted and completely implausible path to “Ute Ford,” just below the junction of the San Juan and Colorado Rivers, traversing downstream on the southeast side of the Colorado to the Crossing of the Fathers, and then back upstream to Cummings Mesa before descending into Navajo Canyon. His statement continues:

Yes, there were names cut on the base of the free end of the arch of Rainbow Bridge when we saw it, also some names written in charcoal on the cliff walls farther down towards the river.

The names I can recall definitely were those of Billy Ross, a man named Montgomery, Jim Black, George Emmerson, Ed Randolph and another man named Wydel. We did not cut our names on the base of the bridge….

… we [then] went into Billy Ross Canyon, a side canyon of West Canyon. Navajo Canyon was then called West Canyon….

Hearing of likely prospects farther up the canyon we went on through to Inscription House ruins as they were later to be called….

Sometime after the first of the year, 1885, Hoskinnini pulled out and went back north to the mesa where he lived (Hoskinnini Mesa)…. Father got hold of Long Back [a local Navajo] and he went with us…. Found a likely copper prospect….

We visited Square Butte, went out there from the canyon…. Camped two nights near White Craig natural bridge….

Father decided we should be going on home, so we pulled up and left…, coming on down the break in the mesa between White Horse Mesa and Red Mesa by Tsahotsoni, or Hole-in-the-rock [today’s White Mesa Arch].

Camped one night with George McAdams at Red Lake [present-day Tonalea, Arizona].

In 1885 Father still believed silver or gold could be found around Navajo Mountain. Ben [Bill Williams’ brother] and I went with him and we set up a small trading camp near Willow Springs. Father stayed there awhile, but got discouraged and left Ben and me there to sell out what we had packed in….

The first time I saw Rainbow Bridge it was about the 20th of November 1884. The next year Ben and I were there with my father around the 15th of February….15

Though Williams’ statement was given in 1929, knowledge of it did not become generally known to the public until 1955 when writer Weldon F. Heald published an article, “Who Discovered Rainbow Bridge?” in the Sierra Club Bulletin that included the entire Williams statement and other background information.16

William F. “Bill” Williams was born in September 1870, in Marysville, California. His father Jonathan P. “J. P.” Williams, was also born in California and, according to his granddaughter, “from boyhood his main interest in life was hunting gold.” In 1880, J.P. Williams relocated to New Mexico to work for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad. While Williams was there a friend, Jack “Kit” Carson, told the elder Williams about a fabulous mine in the Navajo Mountain country of northern Arizona. In 1882 Williams moved his family to Blue Canyon on the Navajo Indian Reservation, roughly halfway between the railroad town of Winslow and Navajo Mountain, so he could be nearer the “lost gold mine.” Williams ran a trading post at Blue Canyon and searched for gold and silver in his spare time with his primary objective to locate the “silver prospect that had been worked by Merrick and Mitchell.”17

Williams made at least one prospecting trip north to the Navajo Mountain area in the summer of 1882. In a statement made in early August of that year to U. S. Indian Agent Galen Eastman at Fort Defiance, Arizona, he said that he and a companion, William A. Ross, “have been prospecting and mining for the last few months in the country lying northwest in Arizona and southeastern Utah.” 18 In the upper part of Forbidding Canyon, southwest of Navajo Mountain, is carved the name “J. P. Williams 6/2 82.”

Williams’ claim that he, his father, and older brother Ben saw Rainbow Bridge in November 1884, and again in February 1885, has come under some scrutiny since the publication of Heald’s 1955 Sierra Club Bulletin

15 W. F. Williams, Statement of W. F. Williams, May 22, 1929, Gladwell Richardson manuscript collection, 1930-1980, MS 48, AHSND.

16 Weldon F. Heald, “Who Discovered Rainbow Bridge?” Sierra Club Bulletin, 40:8 (October 1955): 2428. Mrs. Bernetta “Billie” Williams Yost, daughter of William F. Williams and a resident of Flagstaff, Arizona, had in her possession the 1929 statement which she shared with Heald. In subsequent years Mrs. Yost authored two books, portions of which covered the Rainbow Bridge sightings in 1884-85.

17 Billie Williams Yost, Bread Upon the Sands (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1958), and Diamonds in the Desert (Flagstaff, Arizona: Silver Spruce Publishing Co., 1987).

18 Jonathan P. Williams, “Statement, August 4, 1882” Record Group 75, Letters Received, 1882-1886, No. 14834, Office of Indian Affairs, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D. C.

article. In 1969, Otis H. Chidester raised several questions about the 1884-85 visits in an article he authored on the 1909 discovery of Rainbow Bridge.19

Rainbow Bridge, August 14, 1909

Front Row: Left to Right, Mikeʼs Boy, John Wetherill, Dr. Byron Cummings, W.B. Douglass, and Malcolm B. Cummings. Back Row: F. English, Dan Perkins, Jack Keenan, Gene Rogerson, Neil M. Judd, and Donald Beauregard.

William F. Williams’ statement was not made until twenty years after the 1909 “discovery” by the Cummings-Douglass expedition. Why did he wait so long? According to his daughter, the 1929 statement was made at the request of writer Gladwell “Toney” Richardson, who was gathering information and stories as background material for articles he wrote for various Western magazines and publications. Thus, Williams was not only recalling events which took place almost forty-five years earlier, he was also only fourteen years old at the time.

It also bothered Chidester that Williams was not seemingly impressed with Rainbow Bridge. Here is the largest natural rock span in the entire United States, the Capitol Building in Washington, D. C., could just fit beneath its stone arch, and Williams, according to his daughter, “… didn’t think anything much of it.”20 Chidester postulated that perhaps the three Williamses actually saw another natural arch or bridge in the area. In his 1929 statement, Bill Williams does mention “three natural bridges, “one of them… a huge land bridge,” in nearby Navajo Canyon. 21

19 Otis H. Chidester, “The Discovery of Rainbow Bridge,” The Smoke Signal No. 20 (Fall 1969):216-20. 20 Heald, “Who Discovered Rainbow Bridge,” 26.

21 Williams, Statement, 5.

Finally, Chidester talked about Redbud Pass, the steep, narrow declivity connecting Cliff Canyon with Bridge Canyon. He correctly pointed out that traveler and explorer Charles L. Bernheimer of New York City and the Richardson family of nearby Rainbow Lodge, both in the early 1920s, had to make use of blasting powder and dynamite to make the pass negotiable for horses and pack animals. Williams, however, stated categorically that “We had absolutely no trouble getting through there…. We did not even dismount….”22

Most of the Williams statement is a fairly straight-forward account of a prospecting trip. Their route from “Sierra Capitan” (today’s Agathla Peak) in Monument Valley to Navajo Mountain is geographically correct and completely plausible, as is their return trip from the Navajo Canyon area homeward to Blue Canyon. It is the Rainbow Bridge portion which does not jibe with the others. Furthermore, the scant two paragraphs of the seven-page document have been seemingly inserted after the fact. Their placement does not fit in the chronological sequence of events nor relate geographically.23 After the 1884-85 prospecting trip to Navajo Mountain, Bill Williams worked at his father’s Blue Canyon Trading Post for seven years before going to the Keams Canyon Trading Post for five years. After marrying and living in Winslow, Arizona, Williams, with his family, ran the Red Lake Trading Post, some forty-five miles to the northwest of Winslow, from 1914 until 1928. Williams spent the remainder of his life back in Winslow, where he was interviewed by Gladwell Richardson in 1929. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1940.

Bill’s father, J. P. Williams, finally gave up hope of finding gold or silver in the Navajo Mountain area. In 1889 he sold the Blue Canyon Trading Post and moved his family to Winslow. For several years in the 1890s, he was involved with various gold mining operations on the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. In 1899 he was reportedly killed by Yaqui Indians in Mexico while still hunting for his elusive big strike.

Bill’s older brother, James Benjamin, or Ben as he was always known, stayed on at Blue Canyon in 1889 to help run the trading post for the new owners. He started his own trading post at Cow Springs, Arizona, about

22 Williams, “Statement,” 3. Later writers have also questioned the Williams account. In 1992, geographer Stephen C. Jett wrote a lengthy article concerning the 1909 Rainbow Bridge discovery and, while briefly describing the Williams claim, brought up no points or questions concerning its validity. See Stephen C. Jett, “The Great Race to Discover Rainbow Natural Bridge in 1909,” Kiva, 58:1 (1992): 43-45. In 1999 Hank Hassell raised two objections about the Williams statement. Like Chidester, Hassell had trouble reconciling the ease of the Williams crossing of Redbud Pass with the difficulty all parties since that time encountered. In addition were the several names that Williams indicated he and his father found carved on the free-standing end of the bridge. Cummings and members of his party, as well as those of the Douglass group, found no such names or any other signs that other whites had been to Rainbow Bridge prior to 1909. Stories that the names were removed before the 1909 discovery have little or no credence as any such abrasive erasures would have left noticeable marks on the soft sandstone of the bridge. Hank Hassell, Rainbow Bridge: An Illustrated History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999), 62-64.

23 It may be that the Rainbow Bridge part of the Williams account was added by Gladwell Richardson a prolific writer of western novels and magazine articles who obtained the Williams statement in 1929.

1895 and was listed in the 1900 U. S. Federal Census for Arizona as an “Indian trader.” In 1914 he ran his brother’s Red Lake Trading Post, but when Bill moved there permanently in 1915, Ben “took off immediately.”24 He died about 1944.

As a final note to the Williams family involvement with Rainbow Bridge, there is one last point to consider. A visitor to Navajo Mountain and Rainbow Bridge in 1927 reported that “… the Navajos have told of a party of three white men visiting the bridge ‘years and years ago’….”25 Could this have possibly been J. P., Bill, and Ben Williams in February of 1885?

In May 1939, the Saturday Evening Post magazine carried a lengthy article, complete with color photographs by Utah historian and writer Charles Kelly. The feature concerned the 1938 Colorado River trip through Glen Canyon by Ohio industrialist Julius F. Stone and Kelly. Floating from Hite, Utah, to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, the boating expedition visited many of the historic sites and scenic features of the region along the way. One of these was Rainbow Natural Bridge, and included in this section of the article is the following significant statement: “….the same old prospector… declares it [Rainbow Bridge] was first seen by Jim Black, in 1894, while exploring the flat mesa above.”26

Thus came into published print the next claimant of a prospector seeing

24 Yost, Diamonds in the Desert, 145.

25 Rupert L. Larsen, “Rainbow Natural Bridge Visited by Nash Travelers,” The Nash News, June 1927, 12.

26 Charles Kelly, “At Eighty-three He is an Explorer,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1939, 83.

The Colorado River and Glen Canyon at the Mouth of Aztec Creek.

Rainbow Bridge years before the 1909 Cummings-Douglass expedition. The “old prospector,” Dan Leroy by name, was a hermit-type recluse living in the wilds of the remote Salmon River in Idaho. There he was encountered by river-running enthusiast Dr. Russell G. Frazier of Bingham Canyon, in 1937. Leroy had been telling Frazier about his experiences as a prospector on the Colorado River in 1894 when he mentioned Jim Black and Rainbow Bridge. Frazier was subsequently a member of the 1938 Stone river trip.

Black remains a rather mysterious figure and, interestingly enough, what is known about him comes to us mainly from Gladwell “Toney” Richardson. On July 10 and 11, and again on September 27, 1930, in Flagstaff, Black gave “statements” to Richardson detailing his prospecting adventures in the Navajo Mountain region during the decade of the 1890s. Presumably, as he had done the previous year with William F. Williams, Richardson interviewed Black to collect information and stories as background material for his writing. Unlike with Williams, Richardson did succeed in getting a story published about Black, though it centered on his dramatic rescue of a Paiute Indian girl and subsequent discovery of rich gold diggings. Rainbow Bridge is not mentioned at all.27

In the 1930 U. S. Federal Census for Arizona, there is only one James Black shown as a resident of Flagstaff. He is listed as having been born in 1856 in Mississippi, single, and a laborer. What is presumably the same James Black in the 1910 census lists him as living in Yuma, Arizona, and his

27

1973): 30-36.

Maurice Kildare (Gladwell Richardson), “Mormon Jim Black’s Missing Gold,” True Treasure, 7:10 (October

The Colorado River with Navajo Mountain in the background.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

occupation as miner. Early Escalante, Utah, resident Jess Barker said that Black “came from Colorado.”28 William H. Switzer later also stated that Black was from Durango, Colorado.29 This, however, probably does not mean that he was born there, but that he came from there to Arizona. Black in his 1930 statements said that he came to the Flagstaff area in August 1880 from Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River. There he had been hired as a drover by John W. Young to help in driving a herd of horses from southern Utah to near the San Francisco Peaks. By 1883 he was working as a cowhand for Young’s Mormon church-owned A 1 cattle outfit in Fort Valley, several miles northwest of Flagstaff. Charles H. Spencer, involved in mining schemes on the upper Paria River, at Lee’s Ferry, and at Warm Creek in Glen Canyon, remembered Jim Black as “An A 1 cowpuncher who did a lot of prospecting at times and made the remark that the scenery where the San Juan and Colorado [Rivers] meet would make a good tourist attraction.”30

Following is an abridgement of Black’s statements. However, it is first imperative to note that his dates are from one to three years too early. This should not be too surprising since Black was giving his statements thirty-five years after the events took place. (This discrepancy is based on his 1889 date for the beginning of the San Juan gold rush, which in actuality started in the latter part of 1892, and the chronological sequence of his dates thereafter.) For both accuracy and ease of reading the corrected year dates are placed within brackets.

Sometime in 1889 [1892] J. P. Williams, who had a small ranch and trading post at Blue Canyon, discovered gold on the San Juan river. This was west of Bluff….

I had just come out of the Navajo Mountain country to Flagstaff when this excitement broke. It was called the “San Juan excitement.” Hugh Campbell [and I] got John Woody, John Towler and Bob Ferguson to… go to the San Juan country with us. We outfitted in June of 1890 [1892], and with nine packed mules we set out for the north through the Indian country.

On reaching the San Juan we made camp near the Williams diggings…. It was principally on a sand bar in the river that was then called “Williams Bar.”

After prospecting both sides of the San Juan in the vicinity of the Williams diggings we could find nothing more than flour gold….

Late in November that year [1892]… we decided to call it quits for prospecting… I decided to winter in Bluff City, Utah.

In Bluff City that winter I heard about the big arch in stone that is today called Rainbow Natural Bridge…. I heard stories about it from a number of Mormons who had been told about it by Ute Indians.

The next spring [1893]… I went back to the Williams diggings, holding up there about a week. Old man J. P. Williams told me that he had been to the natural bridge in

28

Jess Barker to Otis R. Marston, November 19, 1955, Otis R. Marston Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

29 William H. Switzer statement, Gladwell Richardson Collection, AHSND. Contained in a letter from Bonnie J. Greer, of the society to Stan Jones, May 30, 1984. Copy in author’s possession.

30 Muriel Spencer Pope to Otis Marston, May 31, 1957, Otis R. Marston Collection, The Huntington Library.

1884 and that it was no great shakes. [Williams’ two sons] Billy and Ben were more interested in the bridge though, and they described the country around it and how I could get in there….

At the Williams diggings I teamed up with Bob Sommers and we prospected down the San Juan again, and then north along the east side of the Colorado river. We went as far as Dandy Crossing [Hite, Utah] on the upper Colorado river, and came across Cass Hite….

Cass Hite told me more about the natural bridge, and that he had been to it back in the 1880s while seeking the “lost” Merrick-Mitchell mine.

Having to go out to Bluff City for supplies, I did so and came across Al Brown and George McDowell…. They wanted to throw in with me….

Sometime in January [1894], probably around the 20th, we decided to quit… the San Juan and moved through the flat country towards Navajo mountain….

We gradually worked up it onto the top from the eastern most point. We moved from there to Lookout Ridge and it was from this place that we could look down into what is now called Bridge canyon….

Brown, McDowell and I climbed off the mountain into what was then known as Broken Leg Canyon. We then followed through into Under-the-Arm Canyon to the natural bridge.

You [Richardson] ask about names on the bridge. I cannot recall them all, only a few. There must have been more than thirty all together. They were cut in the base of the free end of the bridge, and on the surface of the rock wall of the creek, and back on the cliff behind the bridge.

I distinctly remember the Williams’ names, or initials, because I had already run across them elsewhere in canyons and around Navajo mountain, and Bill and Ben told me about cutting their names on the bridge….

The best I can recollect after seeing the inscriptions a number of times later on, the following were on the bridge base or close by: Ed. Randolph, W. A. Ross, Geo. Emmerson, M. N. Wydel, Joe Ashblock, Montgomery, Craig, C. W. Wright, S. Jones, W. E. Mitchell, A. G. Turner, G. E. Choistila, W. Brockway, M. C.Young, J. E. H., and Cade.

I remember most of these names only because those men were known to me…. Billy Ross…. Carter Wright, Silas Jones, Al Turner, Bill Cade, and Bill Brockway.

The W. E. Mitchell inscription was the oldest…. With Mitchell’s name was an 1861 date….

Our time was limited by our food supply, so we came out on what is known as the East Trail, a real good trail that had been used by the Indians for years and years.

That canyon, Under-the-Arm, or Bridge Canyon, interested me so the next year, 1893 [1895], I got Benton Gibson to go back in with me. We went down Oak Canyon, crossed over and took the East Trail past Glass Mountain into the natural bridge.

Wanting to prospect that side of the Colorado river canyon we came out of Underthe-Arm… and swung back around Glass mountain.

Between where what is called now Forbidding Canyon, and… Oak canyon, the Colorado river makes a bend. We entered there, in a kind of basin with good grass and water. Here we prospected for two months before pulling out to Escalante, Utah. We swam our horses over and took up the Escalante river to the small Mormon town.

During the winter of 1894-95 [1895-96], in order to get another grub stake I agreed to winter two hundred head of horses for some people at Escalante. Gibson joined me in this undertaking and we swam the horses across the river and put them into the basin in the river bend. They did well in there while we prospected out from the basin. The basin was afterwards called “Jim Black’s Basin.”

In prospecting away from it we even made a trail over the canyon wall into Aztec near the mouth where there are some cliff ruins. Cleaning out one large room, we

camped in it and did our cooking. While in Aztec that winter we both went to the natural bridge several times.31

The first person to publish anything in any sort of detail about the Black statements was Stephen Jett in his 1992 Kiva article. However, as he did with the Williams statement, Jett only presented the facts put forth by Black and did not raise any questions or concerns as to their reliability or validity. On the other hand, Hank Hassell, in his 1999 book, does bring up several points that troubled him.

The first was the use of Redbud Pass, which Black said was crossed between Broken Leg and Under-the-Arm canyons to reach Rainbow Natural Bridge. The problem with Redbud Pass was discussed in the Williams statement. Another point also covered previously with the Williams statement was Black’s finding of “more than thirty names” at the bridge, while the 1909 Cummings-Douglass party found none.

However, two new points in connection with names are raised by Hassell. One involved Black’s remembering “the Williams’ names, or initials… and [that] Bill and Ben [Williams] told me about cutting their names on the bridge….” Hassell correctly points out that in Bill Williams’ statement he categorically says, “We did not cut our names on the base of the bridge.” The other point was the Williams claim of seeing Jim Black’s name cut on Rainbow Bridge in 1884-85. Black, however, in his statements, indicates that he did not visit the bridge until 1892 (1894).32

Hassell also questions Black’s statement that he talked with Cass Hite about Rainbow Bridge, and that Hite told him that “he had been to it back in the 1880s.” If this was true, why would Hite, following the 1909 discovery and responding to an inquiry from Byron Cummings, state, “No, I did not see the bridge you sent me the picture….” Hassell also takes issue with Black’s “East Trail” and his describing it as “a real good trail that had been used by the Indians for years and years.”33 Hassell notes that there was no trail there in 1909 less than twenty years later.Finally, Hassell brings up Black’s statement that he had heard about Rainbow Bridge from the Mormon residents of the little town of Bluff, Utah, on the San Juan River. However, no one else who left any written records and who was in contact with these same townspeople during this time was ever told about the bridge.34

As with the Williams statement, those of James W. Black are, for the most part, accounts of his various prospecting trips in the San Juan-Navajo Mountain region. Unlike Williams’, however, Black’s statement is longer and covers several years rather than just a few months. After adjusting the year dates, much of his information can be backed up and corroborated

31 James W. Black, “Statement.”

32 Hassell, Rainbow Bridge, 63-64.

33 Ibid., 62.

34 Ibid.

with contemporary records and testimonies of people who knew him.

Black’s statement that he had “just come out of the Navajo mountain country when this [San Juan] excitement broke,” is verified by a brief item that appeared in Flagstaff’s The Coconino Sun on June 30, 1892. “James W. Black returned this week from the country northeast of here… in search of the ‘Lost Spanish Mine’ [the Merrick-Mitchell, or Pish-la-ki]. But after searching for the lost mine two weeks through the rocky canyons… [he was] forced to abandon [his] search….”35

Black’s naming of Hugh Campbell, John Woody, and John Towler as partners in his 1892 trip “north through the Indian country” is backed by a mining claim dated December 29 of that year. Filed in Monticello, Utah, San Juan County seat, the document is for a claim “situated about fifty miles southwest of Bluff City, and one-half mile east of Sierra Capitan Peak.” Campbell, Woody, and Towler, along with Black, are all listed as “locators.”36

However, based on the June 30 Coconino Sun article a June outfitting date would be too early for the San Juan trip. But after thirty-eight years perhaps Black was remembering outfitting for his June Navajo Mountain venture instead. So, too, does the date of the mining claim seem to refute Black’s contention that it was “late in November” when they decided to call it quits for prospecting.

Once at Rainbow Bridge, and as pointed out by Hank Hassell, Black recalled seeing many names there. Besides those of the Williamses, he listed sixteen others. A few were the same as those reported by Bill Williams, but there were several additional names. Some of these Black gave only initials but later provided full first names. W. E. Mitchell, G. E. Choistila, William Brockway, M. C.Young, J. E. H., and Bill Cade were all names that Gladwell Richardson had seen and copied down at Inscription House ruin in Navajo Canyon in 1928.

It seems very likely that most, if not all, of these names that Black “recollected” were actually supplied by Richardson. That this possibility is a near certainty is borne out by the use of the initials “W. E.” with Mitchell and “M. C.” with Young. The 1861 Mitchell inscription was left by William C. Mitchell, a member of the 1861 Mormon party led by Jacob Hamblin to recover the body of the recently slain George A. Smith, Jr.37 In Mitchell’s inscription the “C” has a small, horizontal bar through it, a fairly common way of printing a capital letter C in the 1800s. It is apparent to see why Richardson may have misread it for a capital letter E. Black’s, or Richardson’s, M. C. Young was actually left in 1882 by Notley

35

The Coconino Sun (Flagstaff, Arizona), “Items,” June 30, 1892.

36 San Juan County, Utah, “Mining Claims, Miscellaneous Book A” p. 61, County Recorder’s Office, Monticello.

37 Albert E. Ward, Inscription House: Two Research Reports (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona Society of Science and Art, 1975), 11.

C. Young, who was a member of a prospecting expedition searching for the lost Merrick-Mitchell silver mine. 38 His capital letter “N” at Inscription House has a curved flourish at the beginning which makes it look very much like an M.

Another name listed by Black was that of C. W. Wright, whom he later names as Carter. While there is no Carter W. Wright in the mining records of the Glen Canyon region, there is a George M. Wright, a prospector, who in the early 1890s, left his name and the date at several locations throughout Glen Canyon, including at the mouth of Forbidding Canyon. In each instance he left only the initials of his first and middle names, G. M., and in each case his way of carving these initials looks much like C. W.

Then there is the name A. G., or Al Turner. Alonzo G. Turner was also a Glen Canyon prospector during the latter part of the 1890s and early 1900s. He, too, left his first two initials, his surname Turner, and the date at several places along the Colorado River. However, he was always known as “Lon,” never “Al.” Again, it seems very likely that these names, recollected by Black, were actually supplied by Gladwell Richardson.

On Black’s second trip to Rainbow Bridge, he recalled that he and his partner traveled down Oak Canyon, then crossed over and took the trail past Glass Mountain, coming out of Under-the-Arm Canyon (present-day Bridge Canyon) and then swung back around Glass Mountain to Oak Canyon. Either Black was confused thirty-five years later, or his Oak Canyon is some other Oak Canyon. The so-called Glass Mountain, or Mountains, are a series of sandstone domes on the east side of Nasja

38

“Gone to the Navajo Mountain,” The Durango Record, January 20, 1882, and The Rocky Mountain News, April 14, 1882.

The lower drainage of Forbidding Canyon with the mouth of Aztec Creek and the Colorado River at the lower right.

UTAH

Canyon and were so named by famous Western author Zane Grey when he went in to Rainbow Bridge in 1913. They are several miles to the east of Oak Canyon, and coming in by Black’s “East Trail,” they would have been encountered well before Oak Canyon. Leaving Rainbow Bridge, of course, just the opposite would be true. They are several miles to the east of Oak Canyon, not between Bridge Canyon and Oak.

“Jim Black’s Basin,” according to James Black’s own description, was probably a short distance up Oak Canyon from the Colorado River. Oak Canyon prior to Lake Powell made a large sweeping turn from its mouth back toward the west, almost encircling a tall rock mass. Before looping back south once again, this bend nearly cut its way back to the Colorado, a thin blade of sandstone wall just a score of yards in width separating the two streams. The comparatively low area fanning out to the southeast from this meander of Oak Canyon was most likely the basin described by Black.

Black says that they prospected the area for two months before leaving. Possibly substantiating this claim years later, Charles Kelly, whose river parties in 1938 and 1942 both camped at the mouth of Oak Canyon, said there was a Black inscription “a mile or two up Oak Canyon.”39 This would have been within the so-called “Jim Black’s Basin.”

The following year, again with the same partner, Black returned to the basin. This time they prospected out away from the basin, making a trail over the canyon wall from Oak into Bridge Canyon, the lower part of present-day Forbidding Canyon. Here they made camp in the “cliff ruin” near the mouth of Bridge Canyon. They were unable to travel directly along the bank of the Colorado River from the mouth of Oak Canyon to that of nearby Forbidding Canyon. In this relatively short stretch, the Colorado makes a bend from south to west, sweeping hard against the bordering canyon wall leaving no room for passage on foot. Black adds that during this winter they both went to Rainbow Bridge several times.

Black’s 1930 statements corroborated this in several ways. First, there is, in fact, an old trail identified as “prehistoric” by members of the Lake Powell Research Project in the mid-1970s.40 Before the filling of Lake Powell the old trail ascended by way of some pecked steps from the floor of Oak Canyon, across the intervening sandstone ridge for a few hundred yards, and then down to near the mouth of Forbidding Canyon. This very well may have been the trail that Black said they “made.” In actuality, they probably simply improved upon the old Anasazi trail.

Secondly, there are four man-made walls that were found just inside the mouth of Forbidding Canyon. Archeologists suggest that while they may

39

40 N. B.

44-46.

L. D. Potter,

No. 45

Charles Kelly to Otis R. “Dock” Marston, May 14, 1952. Otis R. Marston Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Pattison and

Prehistoric and Historic Steps and Trails of Glen Canyon-Lake Powell, Lake Powell Research Project Bulletin

(Los Angeles: National Science Foundation, September 1977),

very well have been prehistoric in origin, they were probably modified by later visitors. When a few members of the CummingsDouglass party followed down the canyon to its junction with the Colorado River, they, too, saw the ruins. Neil Judd, a member of the Cummings-Douglass party, wrote, “Just within the mouth of Bridge Canyon [Forbidding Canyon], under the overhanging north wall, is a dilapidated cliff-dwelling, re-occupied by later gold seekers. Abandoned miner’s tools and camp equipment littered the cave in 1909.”41

A companion of Judd’s, Donald Beauregard, added, “We found three names scratched with charcoal above the ruins….” One of the names was “Jas. Black Feb [unreadable].” 42 Just when this was first recorded has, unfortunately, been obscured by a later inscription.

It was undoubtedly these ruins that led Black, in his notarized statement of September 27, to say that “Bridge Canyon at that time had no name. We named it Aztec Canyon.”43

To avoid any confusion, a word must be said here concerning place names. The Glen Canyon tributary extending to the south, and whose three principal eastern tributaries, drain the west side of Navajo Mountain, is labeled as Forbidding Canyon on the U. S. Geological Survey map of the area. The stream draining the canyon is shown as Aztec Creek. Explorer and traveler Charles L. Bernheimer of New York City named Forbidding Canyon in 1922. The name Aztec Creek seems to have first been used by a U. S. G. S. river survey in 1921, though Aztec Rapid, identified as the

41 Neil M. Judd, “The Discovery of Rainbow Bridge,” National Parks Bulletin, November 1927, 10.

42 Beauregard, Deseret Evening News, October 2, 1909.

43 James W. Black, “Statement.” In the 1800s it was commonly, though incorrectly, supposed that the various prehistoric ruins throughout the American Southwest were the work of the Aztec civilization found by the early Spanish explorers in Mexico.

This photograph taken in Winslow, Arizona, about 1890 shows Jonathan Patterson Williams, seated, and William F. Williams standing in the back on the left of the photo.

J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

turbulent water at the mouth of the stream and canyon, was already in use by the late 1890s.

The eastern branch of Forbidding Canyon that contains the natural rock span of Rainbow Bridge is shown on the modern U. S. G. S. map as Rainbow Bridge Canyon. This full appellation first appeared on the Geological Survey’s 15 minute quadrangle map in 1953. But before 1953 it was known simply as Bridge Canyon on the 1923 Geological Survey river map sheet F. However, beginning with the 1909 Cummings-Douglass expedition, the name Bridge Canyon applied not only to the eastern fork, but also to the final two or three miles of what is now Forbidding Canyon to its confluence with Glen Canyon. Therefore, when Black stated that Bridge Canyon at that time had no name, he was referring to present-day Forbidding Canyon.

A final point to consider concerning the reliability of the 1930 Black statements is his contention that after their first prospecting venture in the Jim Black Basin area, he and his partner “pulled out to Escalante, Utah,” swam their horses across the Colorado River, and followed up the Escalante River to the small Mormon town. The following winter they then returned to the basin once again with a herd of horses to pasture there for some of the people at Escalante. A person cannot simply cross the Colorado River from Oak Canyon and “take up the Escalante River,” the mouths of those two Colorado tributaries being some seventeen river-miles apart from one another. Because of the meandering course of the Colorado, the often times sheer cliffs, and the blocking gorges of deep tributary canyons, it was impossible to travel by horseback from one to the other along the river bank.

However, Black and his fellow prospector could have easily forded the Colorado River from the rock delta at the mouth of Oak Canyon, angling not more than a quarter of a mile to the nearly opposite delta of what is shown on today’s U. S. G. S. map as Navajo Valley, the old Glen Canyon river-runners’ Twilight Canyon. This drainage did provide a difficult but passable route up and onto the Escalante Desert around the end of the Kaiparowits Plateau, and an open way to the northwest to the town of Escalante. These latter miles paralleled the Escalante River, but did not, as Black implied, follow that stream itself.

Besides his 1894 prospecting trip to Navajo Mountain, Black, as part of his July 11 statement, said that “a couple of years later,” meaning from 1897, he again went back into the Navajo Mountain country. This seems to be borne out by geologist Herbert E. Gregory in 1913. In his field notes while at the summit of Navajo Mountain, he wrote, “Mark on tip top stake… Jas Black Jan. (?) 1903.”44 This was echoed by writer Elmer E. Davis in 1926 when he said, “Carved into a piece of wood, a portion of a tree

44 Herbert E. Gregory, “Navajo-Moki, Book VIII,” entry for June 18, 1913. U. S. Geological Survey Library, Denver, Colorado.

limb, is Jas Black Jan 1903.”45

Here ends Black’s own statements about his prospecting ventures in the San JuanNavajo Mountain region. What little is known about his life afterwards comes to us from the ubiquitous Gladwell Richardson. In 1910 and 1911, Black worked for Charles H. Spencer in his mining projects at Lee’s Ferry and Warm Creek Canyon. Black finally left Flagstaff in 1931 and relocated in Phoenix, where he died at the age of eighty-three.46

Unlike the statements of W. F. Williams and James W. Black, whose claims found print, albeit briefly, the third claim of prospectors seeing Rainbow Bridge before 1909 has never been published in any form. This claim is contained in an interview conducted by Utah writer and newspaperwoman Pearl Baker in 1959. A typescript copy of that part of the interview is a single page in the massive collection of Colorado River historian Otis R. “Dock” Marston at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The interviewee was former Glen Canyon prospector Louis M. Chaffin, who, while not making the claim for himself, stated that two of his prospecting companions did see Rainbow Bridge, probably in 1898.

Louis Chaffin was born in 1874 in Beaver, Utah. According to his own

45

46

Elmer E. Davis, “The Rainbow Natural Bridge,” Progressive Arizona, July 1926.

Kildare, True Treasure, 36.

This photograph of the construction of the Charles H. Spencer steamboat at the mouth of Warm Creek and the Colorado River taken in 1911 shows James W. Black sitting, second from the left.

testimony in the so-called “River Bed Case” between the United States and the State of Utah (1929-30), Chaffin began prospecting on the Colorado River in 1892. He was on the river “pretty continuously” from 1893 until 1908 and then “off and on occasionally” up until 1912. During these years Chaffin lived in the town of Loa, Wayne County, Utah. In the 1930s he moved to Payson, Utah, where he died in 1962.

Chaffin in his interview concerning the sighting of Rainbow Bridge stated:

One Sunday while we were working the Klondike bar, Lige Maxwell, Bije Blackburn and I went up on top to get a beef and Billy Hay and George Little, catching a nice wind, sailed up to the mouth of a canyon [Forbidding Canyon] that headed up in Navajo Mountain, to prospect for gold. This canyon was about six or seven miles [sic] above the Klondike. They had a shovel, pick, and gold pan and a lunch with them. Billy had poor feet, had fallen arches, and he walked up the canyon to Rainbow Bridge, but got sore footed and disgusted because they didn’t find a bit of gold, so he came back down. He got into the boat and came on back to camp.

George Little laid out over night at the bridge, prospected around some more, and came on back the next day (Monday). He tied a couple of cottonwood logs together with a space between them, sat on a crosspiece with his feet in the river between the logs, and using the shovel for an oar, floated on down to the Klondike. It was late in the evening when he got to the bar, and he hollered and hollered when he saw he couldn’t pull that raft in and land it. The fellows went out in a boat and got him.

Billy and George described the Bridge and wanted us to go up and see it. Billy said there were big flat places on the ends to write our names, but didn’t say there were any other names there, or that he or Little wrote theirs.

I wanted to go up and see the Bridge, but we never did get a wind at the right time, and I didn’t get around to it.47

Some of the facts presented in Chaffin’s interview can be readily verified by mining records. Klondike Bar was one of the more extensive gold mining locations along the Colorado River in Glen Canyon. The bar extended along the right or west bank of the river from Mile 65 to Mile 66.5. This is downstream only about five and a half miles below the mouth of Forbidding Canyon, actually less than the “six or seven miles” estimated by Chaffin.

Louis M. Chaffin, Seth Longee [or Laugee], and William B. Hay made the first mining claim on the bar on December 22, 1897. They named their discovery the Clondike [sic] Placer Mining Claim, evidently commemorating the gold rush in Canada’s Yukon Territory, which was taking place at the same time. 48 The trio sold out their interests in the claim by the middle of February in 1899. This, then, would warrant a date of sometime in 1898 for the visit to Rainbow Bridge.

William B. “Billy” Hay was born in 1865 in Cork County, Ireland, and immigrated to the United States in 1886. He spent many years in the Glen Canyon country, and was interested in mining activities around the Henry Mountains and along the Colorado River. In 1895, Hay, Louis Chaffin, and two others located a gold placer on what came to be known as Moqui Bar,

47 Louis M. Chaffin, interview by Pearl Baker, March 13, 1959, Otis R. Marston Collection.

48 Mining Claim Location Notices, Book 1,p. 80, County Recorder’s Office, Kanab, Utah.

located on the east bank of the river across from and just below the mouth of Hansen Creek.49 On the cliff wall bordering Smith Bar at the mouth of Hansen Creek were many old names and dates, including that of “Billy Hay.”

During the summer of 1900, Hay worked on the Stanton gold mining dredge in Glen Canyon. In the 1910 U. S. Federal Census for Utah, he is listed as single, a prospector/ miner, and was boarding with the Franz Weber family in the little community of Giles in Wayne County. Hay died in 1942 and is buried in the Hanksville cemetery.

Not much is known about George M. Little beyond the brief information contained in the 1900 census. He is listed as being born in 1858 in Ohio. In 1900 he was living in Teasdale, Utah, and was married with one son. His occupation was given as day laborer.

Little’s name is not among the locators of the Klondike Bar claim, and he, Maxwell, and Blackburn were evidently hired on as laborers as the 1900 census indicates rather than being any type of co-owners. All three were residents and neighbors in western Wayne County; Little’s hometown of Teasdale is only a few miles from Louis Chaffin’s hometown at Loa.

As with Williams and Black’s claim, the claim of Hay and Little seeing Rainbow Bridge in the late 1890s is questionable since it was given so long after the fact, over sixty years later. It would seem that either Chaffin or Hay would have mentioned the visit some time before Hay’s death in 1942 or during Chaffin’s interview in 1959. Both spent the remainder of their lives in southern Utah and both were undoubtedly familiar with the 1909 discovery expedition of Cummings and Douglass. Yet the story in the interview by Pearl Baker remains the sole reference to the possible 1898 sighting of Rainbow Bridge.

The most enigmatic claim of a prospector seeing Rainbow Bridge prior to Cummings and Douglass is also the latest to come to light. Unfortunately, no details of the sighting are given, and it is not even known who actually made the claim or exactly when. The only two things known

49 Crampton, Historical Sites in Glen Canyon, Mouth of Hansen Creek to Mouth of San Juan River , Anthropological Paper No. 61 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, December 1962), 74.

Photograph of William B. “Billy” Hay in later years taken in Hanksville.

J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

with any certainty are the name F. H. Owens and a decade date of “the nineties,” meaning the 1890s.

In 2000, archeologist Andrew L. Christenson of Prescott, Arizona, purchased a “Discard” copy of Charles L. Bernheimer’s book Rainbow Bridge at a Phoenix Public Library sale. 50 In it he found on page five, opposite a photograph of Rainbow Bridge, part of the text underlined in pencil: “… in 1909, while guiding Professor Byron Cummings and Surveyor William B. Douglas [sic], he [John Wetherill] discovered the Bridge.” The underline extended off into the right-side margin of the page with an arrow pointing to a penciled notation, “My Grandfather, F. H. Owens, Discovered It In The Nineties.”

It is impossible to say who printed this historically tantalizing statement and when. The Bernheimer book is the 1929 edition, and a small stamp near the bottom of the title page indicates that it was acquired by the city library on “Feb 5 1936.” The identity of F. H. Owens has now been made with a reasonable amount of certainty.

In the 1900 U. S. Federal Census for Arizona there is only one Owens with the initials F. H. and that is Franklin H. Owens. In that year he was living in the small town of Woodruff, Arizona, on the upper Little Colorado River. At that time he was nineteen years old and listed as “At school.” By 1910 he was married and living in Holbrook, Arizona, and was a “clerk/general merc.” In both 1920 and 1930, the last federal census record open for public scrutiny, Franklin was a resident of Phoenix. His only son with two grandsons, were also residing in Phoenix in 1930.

Franklin Owens was born in 1881 in Woodruff. His parents were Mormon emigrants from Utah, who, sometime in the 1870s settled along the Little Colorado River in northern Arizona. Presumably, the elder Owens and his teenage son made at least one foray northward to the Colorado-San Juan River country, probably during the prospecting excitement of the 1890s. Or perhaps the younger Owens accompanied some other group. If he did, in fact, see Rainbow Bridge, it would have logically been on such an expedition, and, due to his age, more than likely in the late 1890s.

Two other facts have come to light over the years that could be used as possible circumstantial evidence for early sightings of Rainbow Bridge. The first was by writers Harvey Leake and Gary Topping in 1987. They pointed out that the “somewhat inaccurate” 1892 U. S. Geological Survey topographic reconnaissance sheet of Marsh Pass, Arizona, shows a trail in the general vicinity of today’s Cliff Canyon. They suggested that it was possible that members of the survey party, during their 1883-84 fieldwork, utilized thetrail.51

50 Charles L. Bernheimer, Rainbow Bridge: Circling Navajo Mountain and Explorations in the “Badlands” of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929).

51 Harvey Leake and Gary Topping, “The Bernheimer Explorations in Forbidding Canyon,” Utah Historical Quarterly 55 (Spring 1987):161, footnote 38.

In 1992, writer Stephen C. Jett observed that the 1892 Henry Mountains, Utah, U.S.G.S. reconnaissance sheet, which borders the Marsh Pass sheet, was surveyed in 1884, and shows a canyon reaching the Colorado River from the south. Not only was this canyon in the correct location for present-day Forbidding Canyon, it also had an eastern tributary branch corresponding to Rainbow Bridge Canyon. Jett advanced the possibility that “perhaps this is based on information obtained from prospectors.”52

However, as to any of the four prospector claimants actually seeing Rainbow Bridge in the 1880s and 1890s, the following must be kept in mind. All four claims were made many years after the fact. All were made following the discovery by the 1909 Cummings-Douglass expedition. No inscriptions of names or dates prior to the Cummings-Douglass expedition have been found in Rainbow Bridge Canyon itself. There are no contemporary accounts such as newspaper stories or dated journals that describe or mention Rainbow Bridge. Finally, though it would have been surprising, indeed, for nineteenth century prospectors to have carried any sort of camera with them, the fact remains that there are no known dated photographs of Rainbow Bridge before 1909.

Is it possible that Rainbow Bridge was seen by prospectors previous to 1909? Certainly. Is it probable? Yes. But is there any incontrovertible proof? No. Unless and until some kind of concrete evidence is found, we must for historical accuracy abide by Cass Hite’s 1910 pronouncement to Byron Cummings: “The bridge found near Navajo Mountain is located in about the only spot in that region that I did not explore or prospect. No, I did not see the bridge that you sent me the picture of, and I don’t think any white man ever saw it until your party did.”53

52 Jett, “The Great Race to Discover Rainbow Natural Bridge,” 45.

53 Byron Cummings, “The Great Natural Bridges of Utah,” Bulletin of the University of Utah, 3:3 Part 1 (November 1910): 17-18.

The William B. Douglass Party in Paiute Canyon, 1909, after their visit to Rainbow Bridge.

BOOK REVIEWS

Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy. By Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen E. Leonard. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi + 430 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

PLANS FOR THIS BOOK began late in 2001, and reached printed form in the summer of 2008. While originally projected as a definitive study of both the crime and the punishment, the “embarrassment of materials” discovered by the authors led to their decision for a second book. This volume focuses on the crime. Their extensive research is reflected in the 126 pages of endnotes, most with multiple citations, and four useful appendices containing brief biographies of people involved.

The authors chose to use their own sources and not to interact with and respond to previous books on the massacre. In their attempt to place what happened in the context of American history, they refer to the event as an American Tragedy. Mormons were generally unhappy with the government officials appointed to the Territory of Utah. The authors summarize the first decade in Utah briefly: “Two rival kingdoms were struggling against each other. One was religious and local. The other was civil and national. The issue was not just law and order, but whose law and order. Resolving the issue would embroil Utah and the federal government in a conflict that would come to be called the Utah War—and create an atmosphere for a massacre” (32).

News that General “squaw killer” Harney was commanding the troops en route to Utah caused the Mormons real concern. Governor Young preached: “avoid all excitement.” Still he instructed General Daniel H. Wells to alert all regional militia commanders to make preparations for what seemed an impending conflict. President Young preached on August 16: “I will not hold the Indians still…but I will say to them, go and do as you please” (98). That message was sent to southern Utah also. Apostle George A. Smith had gone South early in August to advise Church leaders of the dangers facing the Saints with the coming of the army. These authors do not believe Smith “hyped” the Saints’ fears. Indian Superintendent Young appointed Jacob Hamblin as Southern Utah Indian Mission President. He and about a dozen of the Indian chiefs joined Smith’s party on its return to Salt Lake City. They encountered the wagon train heading south at Corn Creek. Smith and the Indian chiefs met with Young on September 1, 1857. The authors suggest that none of those Indians were involved in the massacre.

With a general “context” established, the authors shift their focus from the federal government and church leadership in the north to the wagon train and the leadership and Saints in the south. They explain the dynamics of wagon trains, with people moving in and out. Most emigrants expected to buy supplies in Utah, but the Fancher-Baker people found that Mormons had been told to hoard supplies, and trade only if they could obtain more and better weapons. Conflict

arose over the feed on public lands—considered free graze by the emigrants, but preempted pasture by the Mormons. The authors believe the livestock poisoning was caused by “Texas Fever—Anthrax” left in the soil from herds of cattle previously trailed through the area to the California gold field markets. Other conflicts occurred because of personalities and disagreements with both settlers and Indians, reaching fever pitch by the time the Fancher-Baker party arrived in the southern Utah settlements.

The authors state explicitly that nothing in the conduct of the emigrants could in any way justify what happened at Mountain Meadows. They also add that the Mormons involved the Paiute Indians in the tragedy. They believe the decision to “attack” was a local one, and cite experts on violence to explain the “group dynamics” at work there. “Violence is not only what we do to the Other…. Violence is the very construction of the Other” (127). Such violent group action depends on participants who “allow the dictates of ‘authorities’ to trump their own moral instincts,” or who “submit to conformity, and fear to go against the crowd,” or who agree to the “dehumanization of the victims” (128-29).

The “dynamics” playing out among those southern Utah Mormon Saints included rumors of misbehavior by some members of the wagon train even before Parowan and Cedar City. The authors see Colonel William Dame as a weak leader who felt that “words are like the wind.” But for Major Isaac Haight, also Stake President in Cedar City, those confrontations with some members of the wagon train triggered a need for serious action against them. The plan proposed was to have the local Indians ambush the train in the narrow Mogatsu Canyon south of Mountain Meadows itself. Haight initiated his plan by sending runners out to contact militia leaders and the local Indians. However, he faced strong disagreement at the Sunday morning meeting. That opposition resulted in their sending James Haslam as an express rider to obtain the “will” of Brigham Young in the matter. He would return too late!

Couriers were charged with keeping the leaders informed of what was happening. Major John D. Lee was assigned the job of “managing the Indians.” The initial attack Monday morning, September 7, resulted in the deaths of some Indians as well as members of the Fancher-Baker party. The ambush plans aborted because of the location and the valiant defense of the besieged party. With these delays two other problems showed up. The wagon train had sent William Aden with John Gresley to try to get help, either from the Mormons, or from one of the three wagon trains traveling behind the Fancher-Baker party. Militiaman William Stewart killed Aden, but Gresley escaped. For the Mormons this was a new crisis. The emigrants would know Mormons were involved if Gresley made it back to the train, although they likely suspected that Mormons were involved in the Indian attacks as well. If that information got to California, Mormons believed it would trigger a second front against them.

Major Haight felt destruction of the wagon train was imperative. However, he

was not willing to make the decision alone, so contacted Colonel Dame and “bullied” him into giving the order for the massacre. Their plan involved sending the militia to Mountain Meadows, a white flag of truce, Lee’s disarming of the wagon train members, and separating them into groups of young children and the wounded, women and older children, and the men, each accompanied by an armed Mormon militiaman, and the Indians hidden in ambush. The slaughter was over in about one hour.

While the “what happened, and how” is clearly shown in this book, the authors’ answers of the “why” are incomplete at best. A “group dynamics” to explain that violence seems weak since the men involved on the “killing field” had to travel some forty miles or more to get to the Meadows, where the killing itself was precise, almost ritual-like. Those local leaders were also hearing other “voices.” Young’s Indian policy had been sent to them. In Blood of the Prophets, Will Bagley explains what Young’s “not holding the Indians by the hand” meant for western travel, as well as the impact of the oath taken in the temple to “avenge the blood of the prophets.” R. Kent Fielding in The Unsolicited Chronicler, and his article “The Lamanite Redemption” explains the challenges Mormon leaders had in understanding just what role the Indians were to play in “setting up the Kingdom of God.” He recounts how the quartering of troops among the Mormons after the Gunnison Massacre (1853) made Governor Young determined not to permit that again. Patriarch Elisha Groves gave Colonel Dame a “blessing” stating Dame would “lead the Lamanites in defense of Zion.” David Bigler’s Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 offers unusually keen insights into the mentality of the Mormon people during those years, including their “Millennial expectations” and their deference to “priesthood authority.” D. Michael Quinn in Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power calls attention to the “military component” built into Mormon Theology.

Juanita Brooks asks the question: “what happened to the missing pages in Jacob Hamblin’s Journal which reported his exchange with the Fancher-Baker party at Corn Creek.” She also raises the issue of the “Proclamation” of August 5, 1857. Were the southern Utah leaders under “official martial law at the time”? In her two excellent volumes The Massacre at Mountain Meadows and John Doyle Lee, Juanita sees George A. Smith as something of a firebrand stirring up the people in preparation for the impending war.

While this book’s authors are skeptical of John D. Lee’s Confessions…, he was a firsthand source. Lee believed the Saints in southern Utah “all” believed in Blood Atonement. He also stated that Joseph Smith (in Missouri, 1838) talked of the “rules of war,” with one rule being entitlement to the “spoils of war” (like the Fancher-Baker wagon train’s properties?).

The authors have done an excellent job of relating details about the wagon train, the people involved, the pre-massacre activities, and the September 11, 1857, massacre at Mountain Meadows. But their “historical context” paradigm lacks

completeness as they overlook the dynamics and the theology of the Mormon Kingdom, of the preaching and teaching of church leaders during that period, and the full “mental makeup” of those who ordered the massacre and who did the deed. This book is not the final word.

MELVIN T. SMITH St. George

House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

By Shannon A. Novak. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008. xvii + 226 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

UNTIL RECENTLY, most books on the Mountain Meadows Massacre have treated the victims of the crime as faceless beings. In the words of forensic anthropologist Shannon A. Novak, “they tell us a great deal about the killers and rather little about those who were killed.” Her book House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre “aims to redress the balance” (6). Approximately 120 people perished during the September 1857 massacre, most of them women and children. In August 1999 Novak was asked to analyze the recently unearthed bones of twenty-eight victims, most of whom were men. She combined the results of her research with findings from historical records in an effort to provide a more complete portrayal of the victims and of the massacre itself.

After a preface and introduction that explain her approach and provide background for what follows, Novak uses chapter 1, titled “Streams,” to describe the major emigrant families, their histories, and the regions from which they hailed. In chapter 2, “Confluence,” she correctly refutes the popular belief that the emigrant company was a unified group when it left Arkansas. She explains that kinship groups, as well as “satellite families and solitary men,” instead merged over time as they headed west (38).

In chapter 3, “Nourishment,” Novak assesses “skeletal indicators of dietary deficiency and excess” (59). Drawing on her study of Ozark society, census and property data, and skeletal evidence, she describes the likely diets and behaviors of the victims.

In chapter 4, “Constitution,” Novak examines what the bones say about the physical condition of the victims. Particularly welcome is her analysis of the charge made by some of the massacre’s perpetrators that many of the victims were afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases. She writes, “Though the skeletal evidence from the mass grave at Mountain Meadows cannot decisively refute the claims . . . , it casts doubt on the image of an emigrant party that was ‘rotten with pox’” (108). Such stories were meant to vilify the victims, salve the consciences of

the perpetrators, and “deny the innocence even of the surviving children” (109).

Chapter 5, “Domains,” explores gender roles among the victims. The bones Novak studied provide “some insight into sex differences in both activity and injury patterns” (132). Here Novak urges caution toward her conclusions about the women, given the comparatively small number of women’s bones found in the grave. As she notes earlier, “what we have to draw on is not a perfect sample” (59).

Chapter 6, “Epitaph,” examines the massacre itself and what the bones reveal about it. Novak includes photographs of the victims’ bones, and the pictures of skulls with bullet holes and other skeletal fragments tell a grisly story, reminding the reader of the horrific nature of the crime. Yet, as Novak writes in the book’s preface, “the bones cannot settle the matter of what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or who is to blame” (xiv–xv).

Modern historians have exploded the myth that the massacre was carried out entirely by Indians. The scholarly consensus today is that white men masterminded the massacre and were the principal aggressors in carrying out the crime. At times, however, Novak seems to imply that Indians had no role in the killings, a conclusion that goes against the testimony of Paiute headman Jimmie Pete and other sources. For example, she writes that “the skeletal findings do not support historical accounts of ‘scalping’ or other claims of specifically ‘Indian’ atrocities” such as the use of knives or arrows to kill victims (159). That same skeletal evidence, however, does not support the use of knives by white perpetrators either, even though good historical evidence suggests such use. In short, the absence of such weapon marks on the bones is not dispositive.

In an endnote, Novak herself cautions, “There may be a number of reasons for the absence of blade or arrow wounds. First, these weapons may not have been used in the massacre, or they were simply not used to attack any of the individuals in the mass grave. Second, knives and arrows may have been used, but they did not penetrate to the bone. . . . Finally, carnivore activity and other postmortem factors may have resulted in the loss of skeletal elements that manifest such wounds” (184 n. 11).

Novak also writes that “the most common injury observed in the skeletal sample was a single gunshot wound to the head” (161) and that “Southern Paiutes are especially unlikely to have wielded firearms on such a large scale” (173). Yet, as she also points out, “all the gunshot wounds were identified in males,” with one possible exception (162). Traditional histories of the massacre recount that the adult male victims were killed by white men; therefore, as Novak says, “in many respects the pattern of skeletal trauma corroborates the basic historical accounts. . . . Most of the victims in the mass grave were young adult males who had been shot. Most of the women and children had been bludgeoned to death” (159).

As so often happens with overreliance on secondary sources, Novak sometimes perpetuates errors made by other writers. For example, on pages 30 and 128 she misidentifies massacre victim Pleasant Tackitt as a preacher. Several writers have

confused the young Tackitt with the more famous Methodist minister of the same name who did not die until 1886, well after the massacre.

But elsewhere she corrects errors made by previous writers. For example, she notes, “[Will] Bagley . . . mistakenly has Nancy Mitchell married to Lorenzo Dunlap” (181 n. 1). In fact, Nancy Dunlap Mitchell was Lorenzo’s sister; he actually married Nancy Wharton. In another corrective Novak writes, “There seems to be no support for [Sally] Denton’s . . . suggestion that the ‘Camerons of Carroll County’ were ‘perhaps the wealthiest family’ on the wagon train” (182 n. 6).

Overall, House of Mourning is a useful contribution to the literature on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Novak is at her best when her conclusions follow directly from her scientific analysis of the bones, especially when she exercises caution, recognizing the limitations of her sample.

RICHARD E. TURLEY JR. Salt Lake City

Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade. By Stan Hoig. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. xi + 337 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR, Stan Hoig, has added an excellent new study on the Chouteau family’s impact, not only on St. Louis and the fur trade, but on the West.

The Chouteaus introduced goods and paraphernalia of the outside world amongst the powerful Osage Tribe as well as Kansa, Otos, and other regional tribes, and in so doing became “valuable intermediaries between the Indians and the government, forerunning the national advance, and assisting America’s western migration” (235). The two generations of Chouteaus played a significant role not only in fur trade but in the mercurial shifting political scene starting with the founding of St. Louis and that region’s moving from French to Spanish to French to American ownership. Utilizing a delicate balance of keen business acumen, political connections, common sense, and pragmatic application of strength, judgment, and accommodation they led the fur trade of the region and influenced western expansion from Oklahoma to Montana for over half a century. They were friends with and advisors to French, Spanish and American governmental and military leaders, as well as most of the significant tribal heads within hundreds of miles of St. Louis.

The saga of the Chouteau family revolves around two generations. The elders, Auguste and Pierre, were instrumental “in founding the city of St. Louis; in the development of the important fur trade along the Mississippi and lower Missouri rivers; and in providing critical aid to the young, still tentative United States in establishing its claim to the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and winning the friendship of Indian tribes of the region.” The next generation, “Pierre’s eight sons

The

… left their mark on the American West through adventures in the fur trade and their close relationship with Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi”(ix).

Their business and political expertise impacted the next generation of fur traders who had their beginnings in St. Louis: William Ashley, Ceran St. Vrain, both the Bent and Robidoux brothers, Ramsey Crooks, Sylvester Pratte. It was impossible to separate fur trade from politics in the years between 1763 and the French and Indian War and the Mexican American War of 1848. Throughout the era the Chouteaus played a critical role, and with uncanny ability always landed on the right side of power struggles in America’s holding and utilizing its Louisiana Purchase, and expanding towards Oregon, California, and New Mexico.

As the beaver trade faded in the late 1830s, “Cabet and his cadre of Chouteau fur-trader siblings did much to help open and explore an untamed half continent for the new nation that was so ambitiously bursting westward” (233). The Chouteaus led the next chapter of fur trade on the plains — the buffalo robe trade. As they plied their business they directly impacted Santa Fe traders, the Mormons, the Forty-niners, the army, the Pony Express, railroaders, ranchers, homesteaders, city builders, and all the rest.

“Despite their flaws, the value of the Chouteaus to the West must be recognized…. With little formal schooling, they read, studied, and educated themselves in the arts of social behavior and trade. They maintained detailed books …and instituted strict business procedures…they established valuable social relations with Native people and helped advance the trappings of American society beyond the Mississippi” (224).

Hoig has written more than twenty books on the American West from his 1961 Sand Creek Massacre, to this new study on the Chouteaus. The Chouteaus is heartily recommended to all enthusiasts of Western History.

JOHN D. BARTON

William Clark Indian Diplomat By Jay H. Buckley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. xx + 306 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

WILLIAM CLARK IS BEST KNOWN for his role in the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition. Meriwether Lewis died two years after that trek—in 1808, but William Clark settled in Missouri and lived on for more than three decades, serving as Indian agent, territorial governor, and later, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis. Post-expedition America (1806-1840) was a time when the country looked inside itself for definition, a time when starry-eyed Argonauts peered out through the misty landscape of dreams that many times cloaked fear, reality, and propriety. They looked to settlement in the West, where opportunities

Utah State University Uintah Regional Campus

based in land ownership were facilitated by dispersal of cheap federal lands. It was an era filled with vision and enthusiasm on the part of white Americans and fraught with nightmares for Native Americans, whose land fell to white settlement. While Anglo-Americans poured over the Appalachians and into the then West, previous denizens of French and Spanish stock also struggled to hold onto land claims held by their families for almost a hundred years. The West was a mishmash of socio-political workings that at times ran silent and deep and other times hot and red on the very land itself. This was a time when Aaron Burr fomented treason in an attempt to make of the West a new, independent nation; an era in which America reasserted its will before the world by fighting Great Britain in the War of 1812; a time of growth, of the advent of steamships on her inner rivers and commerce reaching beyond the Rocky Mountains. This was a time when the antebellum South pressed to have slavery in northern territories and Black Hawk and his people, among other native tribes, fought to hold onto ancestral lands. To study the life of William Clark is to revisit all this and more.

Jay H. Buckley’s William Clark Indian Diplomat is just such a study, an illuminating, sweeping, well paced history that is both straightforward and emotive, causing the reader to feel empowered and righteous one moment and carried away in pathos and introspection the next. It is well documented, laced with seventeen salient pictures, eight maps, and twenty-eight pages of notes. Buckley creates in the reader a vision as complex and compelling as his protagonist was real.

In his long career, Clark signed more treaties between Indian tribes and the United States than any other American. He was involved in nearly 20 percent of all Indian treaties ever negotiated by the United States. Clark personally negotiated thirty-seven treaties that were ratified by Congress, a full one-tenth of the total 370 ratified treaties signed between Indian nations and the United States of America, an astounding statistic. While Clark exhibited deep feelings toward Indians and strove to defend tribal rights and lands and to ease Indian suffering, in the end, demands of office rolled over the top of his good intentions. His public career inadvertently reduced Indian land base and devastated much of Native American culture. From the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 to Clark’s death in 1838, the United States acquired 420 million acres from native tribes, and Clark was accountable for about 100 million of those acres, and responsible for dispossessing more Indians than any other American. Ultimately, he adhered to the notion that if losing land and sovereignty was what it cost native peoples to assimilate, it was a cheap price to pay for survival. It was a conflicted logic built into a complex individual.

Jay Buckley, professor of history at Brigham Young University, has presented a comprehensive history of William Clark, revealing his influence and abilities in Indian-white relations in the trans-Mississippi West, and as a sentimental but yet pragmatic agent of expansion. Buckley intuitively uses words as a shuttle on a great loom of time and ties together a tapestry linking not only Clark, but many

salient, even visceral underpinnings to this most fascinating era of United States history. Whether one has studied this regional history before or is experiencing it more or less for the first time, this work will not only bring to life William Clark, but will bring perspective to the comprehensive nature of post-expedition America and the trans-Mississippian West. Buckley’s William Clark Indian Diplomat is destined to become a forerunner in this genre.

H. BERT JENSON Utah State University

BOOK NOTICES

Historic Photos of Salt Lake City. By Jeff Burbank. (Nashville, TN, and Paducah, KT: Turner Publishing Company, 2008. x + 205 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

Jeff Burbank, English instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has drawn from the Library of Congress, J. Willard Marriott Library, and the Utah State Historical Society dozens of historic black and white photographs of Salt Lake City including Sugar House. The book is divided into four chapters: “From Mormon Enclave to American City (1880-1905)”; “New Buildings, New Streets, New Faces (1906-1919)”; “The Depression Stalls Public Improvements (1920-1939)”; and “Suburban Growth and Presidential Visits (1940-1968).” The author has written a short two page essay for each section.

Ogden By John Sillito and Sarah Langsdon. (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. 126 pp. Paper, $19.99.)

In this collaborative work by John Sillito, curator, and Sarah Langsdon, associate curator of special collections at Weber State University, the authors have selected 225 photographs accompanied by informative captions to illustrate Ogden’s diverse history. With the photographs included in nine separate chapters–the last being a collection of about twenty postcards depicting scenes from Ogden’s past–the vibrance of the city is reflected in photographs of street scenes, public buildings and private residences, commercial activities, transportation facilities, and views from nearby Ogden Canyon. Individual and group photographs include everyone from World War I soldiers and World War II German prisoners of war, baseball stars who had their beginnings in Ogden, famous writers and artists, commercial and civic leaders, to residents of Ogden’s infamous 25th Street.

Early San Juan County. By LaVerne Tate. (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

126 pp. Paper, $19.99.)

Since it was organized in 1982, the San Juan County Historical Society has collected thousands of historical photographs. San Juan County native, La Verne Tate, has compiled this volume on early San Juan County from the extensive collection. San Juan County was first settled by Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers who reached the site of Bluff in April 1880. Chapter one includes photographs of the early fort and cabins at Bluff; a later chapter looks at the substantial rock homes built in Bluff during the ensuing decades. Other chapters illustrate farming and ranching, freighting and timber harvesting, the gold rush on the San Juan River during the 1890s, the extraction of oil during the first decade of the twentieth century, Native American weavers and silversmiths, trading posts, and early merchandising endeavors. Community life is depicted in photographs of churches, schools, and recreation.

Green River and the Gunnison Valley. By Jo Anne Chandler and Annalee Thayn. (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. 126 pp. Paper, $21.99.)

The crossing of the Green River at this location was an important landmark on the Old Spanish Trail. Captain John W. Gunnison crossed here in 1853 while conducting a reconnaissance survey for construction of a transcontinental railroad. In 1869 John Wesley Powell floated past the site during his epic voyage down the Green and Colorado Rivers. In 1883 the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad constructed a bridge across the river in completing the railroad between Denver and Salt Lake City. Jo Anne Chandler and Annalee Thayn of the Green River Archives have collected a treasure chest of historic photographs from Green River and the surrounding area. Their book uses a thematic framework to present this fine collection. The seven chapters are devoted to individuals who came from all points of the compass to Green River, scenery and recreation, cowboys and farmers, transportation, homes and businesses, education and religion, and the John Wesley Powell River History Museum, which was constructed in 1990 and now houses the Green River Archives.

UTAH STATE

HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS

THOMAS G. ALEXANDER JAMES B. ALLEN

LEONARD J. ARRINGTON (1917-1999) MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER FAWN M. BRODIE (1915-1981) JUANITA BROOKS (1898-1989) OLIVE W. BURT (1894-1981) EUGENE E. CAMPBELL (1915-1986) C. GREGORY CRAMPTON (1911-1995)

EVERETT L. COOLEY (1917-2006) S. GEORGE ELLSWORTH (1916-1997) AUSTIN E. FIFE (1909-1986) PETER L. GOSS LEROY R. HAFEN (1893-1985) B. CARMON HARDY JOEL JANETSKI

JESSE D. JENNINGS (1909-1997) A. KARL LARSON (1899-1983) GUSTIVE O. LARSON (1897-1983)

BRIGHAM D. MADSEN

CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN DEAN L. MAY (1938-2003)

DAVID E. MILLER (1909-1978) DALE L. MORGAN (1914-1971) WILLIAM MULDER (1915-2008) FLOYD A. O’NEIL

HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS (1917-2004) CHARLES S. PETERSON RICHARD W. SADLER GARY L. SHUMWAY MELVIN T. SMITH WALLACE E. STEGNER (1909-1993) WILLIAM A. WILSON

HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS

DAVID BIGLER

JAY M. HAYMOND FLORENCE S. JACOBSEN STANFORD J. LAYTON WILLIAM P. MACKINNON JOHN S. MCCORMICK MIRIAM B. MURPHY LAMAR PETERSEN RICHARD C. ROBERTS MELVIN T. SMITH LINDA THATCHER GARY TOPPING