1 Arrival, 1820–1880

April 6, 1880

Most of them could not go on. Even if the people found strength to make themselves move, the animals were through. Their expedition to a new settlement on the San Juan River was supposed to take six weeks. Now, six months later, the last few miles were too far to go. It took almost all they had to reach this strip of bottomland, and the planting season was moving on without them. As more settlers straggled into the valley and surveyed the red bluffs that rose starkly around it, they began to understand that this might have to be the place for them. It was April 6, 1880, the fiftieth anniversary of the church that sent them on this grinding migration across the Colorado River into one of the remotest corners remaining in the West.

This was not the first difficult trek for many of them. And it was certainly not the first for one of the oldest among them. Jens Nielson’s sixty years had carried his sturdy frame from a sea-sprayed island of southern Denmark to this arid outpost in Utah. His convictions had traveled at least as far. ^[11]

Jens Nielson’s Journey

Conversion

As a young Dane, Jens Nielson’s greatest hope was to move up into respectable society. He was born April 26, 1820, on the island of Lolland, separated from Germany by a finger of the Baltic Sea. He did not know his father and expected no inheritance. So Jens hired out his labor until he could become an independent farmer.¹ At the age of thirty his physical and emotional efforts were rewarded. He married Elsie Rasmussen, who had labored through similar struggles herself, and Jens Nielson bought five acres of land later in the year. A son arrived shortly after. “I was looked on as a respectable neighbor,” Jens assessed later, “and many times invited to the higher class of society.”²

Two men preaching a disreputable foreign religion found the Nielsons’ neighborhood in the fall of 1852. Out of curiosity, Jens attended a nearby meeting, and his pastoral life was transformed. “As soon as I saw those men’s faces, I knew they were not the men as represented to be, and I told my friends so before I heard them speak. Before the meeting was out, I knew the testimony they bore was of God. We bought some few of their tracts and studied them for a few weeks and were perfectly satisfied the ^[12] work was of God.” Both Jens and Elsie began to believe the doctrines of Mormonism.

Still, they did not join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints immediately. If they had, it would have required tremendous spiritual and material sacrifices of them, and Jens had labored too long to cast away his good fortune so quickly. “Now the struggle commenced to give up all my possessions,” he wrote later.³ He wrestled with himself for over a year before he and his wife were baptized into their new faith on March 29, 1854, by Johan Sandberg.⁴

Emigration

Almost immediately the Nielsons were displaced by their conversion. Their social standing evaporated once they were baptized. “From that time on,” recalled Jens, “all of my former friends turned against me and spoke all kind of evil against me, and that falsely.” On one occasion he was even assaulted by an anti-Mormon pack that left him injured and outraged. “He presented his tattered clothes to the local magistrate in an appeal for justice, but was told there was ‘no law in Denmark to protect the Mormons.’”⁵ Converts throughout Denmark faced such treatment, in spite of the supposed religious liberty granted by the more liberal constitution of 1849. “That awful delusion, ^[13] Mormonism,” had converted over two thousand souls since its first missionary, Erastus Snow, had arrived in 1850, and the backlash was severe.⁶ Opposition was notably fierce on Lolland, where “it had become a common saying that all who joined the ‘Mormons’ should have their windows broken.”⁷ In the long term, these insults would not matter, since Latter-day Saints (the more official name for Mormons) were expected to gather to the body of the Church in “Zion,” the territory of Utah in the United States. “All my possessions had no power over me then,” Jens wrote. “My only desire was to sell out and come to Zion.” He found a buyer for his home and was about to remove with his family when again his plans were abruptly changed.

A regional Church leader, perhaps Lolland Conference President Johan Svenson, admonished Jens that he was not doing his duty. Before he left his homeland, he should warn others, just as he had been warned. This meant Jens should become a missionary. “That counsel came right in contact with my natural feelings, but the Spirit whispered to me I must obey, for obedience is better than sacrifice.” For more than a year he labored to save the souls of his countrymen, leaving Elsie to manage the challenging circumstances at home. He served well, presiding over a “branch,” a small congregation of the Church in the area of his labors. He baptized about fifteen people and considered his labors a success.^{8 [14]}

In the spring of 1856, Jens was honorably released from his mission. At once he liquidated his property, paid his debts and his tithing, and bid farewell to his homeland. Jens and Elsie, along with their five-year-old son Jens, whom they called Niels, and Bodil Mortensen, a nine-year-old girl another convert entrusted to their care, boarded the steamship Rhoda in Copenhagen and started west.⁹ They were part of a larger stream of Danish pilgrims who comprised 163 of the 764 Latter-day Saint passengers aboard the triple-masted U.S. vessel Thornton that left Liverpool, England, on May 4, 1856. Now the Nielsons found themselves part of a flood of Saints and could associate with hundreds in the same circumstances. Like most Mormon emigrant companies, the throng aboard the Thornton made the best of what was usually a transatlantic ordeal. Organized under returning European missionary James G. Willie, they were a model community, extremely well-regimented and behaved.¹⁰ When they arrived in New York on June 14, after forty-one days at sea, ship’s captain Charles Collins called them “the finest body of emigrants I have ever had the pleasure to convey across the Atlantic.”¹¹

The immigrants were welcomed in New York by Mormon Apostle John Taylor. ^[15] Three days later, they continued their en masse odyssey by locomotive and steamboat.¹² Aside from an unpleasant exchange with surly railroad men in Toledo, the journey went well. The Nielsons and their fellow Saints moved through a country agitated by escalating violence in Kansas and electrified by the beating of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate just weeks before. While the migrants made their way west, the infant Republican Party met in Philadelphia to nominate John C. Frémont as their first presidential candidate, on a platform which called on Congress “to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery.”¹³ The Nielsons may not have grasped much of this with their embryonic understanding of English, but what they did comprehend confirmed to them why they were fleeing to Zion. The company reached the end of the Rock Island Line at Iowa City, Iowa, on June 26.¹⁴ Their lurching, steam-powered introduction to the eastern United States had lasted twelve days.

In Iowa City the Nielsons met another obstacle. Even though they had the money ^[16] to travel with a full wagon and team, they had been counseled in Denmark to contribute as much as they could to the less fortunate. This meant they would have to forego a full outfit and travel by handcart, according to Brigham Young’s optimistic plan to gather more souls for less money. But poor communication between European mission leaders and Church immigration agents in Iowa left the agents surprised by the number of Saints arriving so late in the season. They had already outfitted three handcart companies that year, and there were not enough vehicles left for the Thornton group. So the pioneers had to wait three more precious weeks as carts were thrown together out of whatever wood became available, properly seasoned or not. About five hundred eager emigrants, 120 handcarts, and a few supply wagons finally set out on July 15, once again under the leadership of James G. Willie. As on the Thornton, long-established principles of organization pervaded the camp. The band was organized into hundreds, with a leader over each. Jens Nielson was assigned to be in charge of his tent, which housed twenty people. Each handcart held from four hundred to five hundred pounds, most of it provisions for the trip. Every adult was authorized to bring seventeen pounds of personal property, each child ten. But while the passage of the Willie Company across the Atlantic had been exemplary, no one would ever hope to emulate the Willie Company’s crossing of the plains.

At least seventy-five members of the company dropped out in Iowa.¹⁵ The rest arrived at the final outfitting post of Florence, Nebraska (at the eastern end of the territory, near today’s Omaha), on August 11. They refitted for a week, but also held a mass meeting to decide if they should try to cross the mountains so late in the year. Most ^[17] of the immigration agents and expedition leaders favored making the attempt. Those who thought the risks too great, particularly Levi Savage, were derided for a lack of faith. Jens knew little about the country ahead; it was utterly unlike Denmark. Therefore he had to rely on the judgment of those who did. The great majority of the assembly voted to leave.

The company pulled out of Florence on August 18. From there, misfortunes multiplied on the hapless travelers. Their slapdash carts broke down regularly. Many of their draft and beef cattle were driven off in a buffalo stampede. Fort Laramie had few supplies left for them when they arrived. Other way stations expected no more immigrants and were abandoned. Cold and snow came extraordinarily early. And all the delays translated into increasingly cruel arithmetic when applied to their dwindling rations: by the time they passed Devil’s Gate, the men were allotted ten and one half ounces of flour per day, down from a pound, and the women and children still less. Some began to beg the leaders to please pack down the flour into the cups to fit a bit more in. All along the Sweetwater River, the lives of consumed Saints flickered out when they sat down during the day or while they rested at night, “as smoothly as a lamp ceases to burn when the oil is gone.”¹⁶ The last flour was eaten on October 19, and the company would have been completely extinguished if not assisted somehow.

On the same afternoon the flour disappeared, hope arrived with messengers from Salt Lake City heralding more substantial relief soon. The first rescue wagons came two days after, with just enough food and warm clothing and promise to get the group moving again. But the worst lurked ahead. In spite of the meager relief, more of the travelers ^[18] gave out and were placed in the carts to be pulled by the rest. On October 23, the company tried the unforgiving ascent up Rocky Ridge. A keen wind sliced through them as they trudged through knee-deep snow up steep and broken slopes. Some were absolutely unable to budge their carts, weighed down by those who could no longer even try, and they, like oxen, were doubled up to move one cart forward a few yards, and then the other. When they staggered into camp, few pitched their tents but rather “sat shivering with cold around their small fires.”¹⁷ The pitiful stragglers were brought into the camp at Rock Creek by teams and wagons just before dawn.

When the burial detail surveyed the company in the morning, they found there were thirteen who had frozen during the night. Among the dead was Bodil Mortensen, clutching brush she would never throw into the fire. Also among the dead was little Niels Nielson; his numb parents could not protect their only child from exhaustion and unending cold. All the bodies, large and small, were stacked in the same square hole chiseled into the frozen ground. After a bit of a funeral the corpses were covered with willow boughs, then dirt, then shale to keep the wolves from them. Two of the gravediggers died that night and were buried nearby the next day, making fifteen total who never left the frigid camp at Rock Creek, still three hundred miles from Salt Lake City.

The company moved on, and its members continued to die daily. Jens was the only survivor of the five men who started the trip in his tent, and he had to enlist some of ^[19] the “largest and strongest women” to help set up the shelter at night.¹⁸ Then Jens faltered. Frostbite had deformed his feet, and now it was his turn to sit down in the snow and die. He urged Elsie to go on without him and save herself. She would not. Instead, she persuaded her husband to get into the cart. Somehow she got her small body, less than five feet tall, to pull her large husband far enough to recover his strength and will.¹⁹

Relief wagons kept arriving to feed the starving and carry the disabled, and after the emigrants crossed over South Pass the weather improved. But the danger was not past, as old and young continued to expire almost every day. Of the 404 members of the Willie Company who left Florence, 68 died, and many who survived suffered lingering effects from frostbite or other afflictions.²⁰ Jens kept his feet, but they had been frozen at odd angles, giving him a permanent limp. From at least Fort Bridger the Nielsons were able to abandon their cart and ride in a relief wagon.²¹ Finally, on November 9, the Willie Company emerged into Salt Lake City to the welcome of hundreds of people who had turned out to greet them. The bishops of the various wards in the valley made sure each of the families was comfortably accommodated, and the survivors began to recover and consider their new lives in Zion.

But somewhere back in those unmerciful mountains, Jens reaffirmed the choice he ^[20] had made before being baptized. “I remember my prayers as distinctly today as I did then,” he told his son Uriah forty-five years later. If God “would let me live to come to Salt Lake City,” then “all my days should be spent in usefulness under the direction of his Holy Priesthood.” So far priesthood direction had delayed his departure from Denmark until this disastrous season and cost him most of his money, his only son, and almost his life. Yet emerging from the ordeal he was still faithful. His feelings matched the “Reformation” in Utah that year, as the Saints sought to purge their souls of any remaining impurities. Most pioneers were rebaptized when they reached the Salt Lake Valley as a way of rededicating themselves to the faith in their new home. Whether Jens Nielson was physically baptized again or not, he emerged from his travails reborn.

Colonization

Once Latter-day Saints gathered to Zion, they were expected to build it up under the direction of Church authorities. Sometime in the next two years, the Nielsons were assigned to settle in Parowan. Established six years before, in the wake of Parley P. Pratt’s explorations, it was the oldest Mormon community in southern Utah. It was originally part of the “Iron Mission” to manufacture that metal out of the ore in the mountains nearby. It also became the center from which other southern settlements radiated, as the Nielsons later found out firsthand when they were sent to settle new land. But for the time being, Jens and Elsie occupied themselves in rebuilding their lives. They were alarmed, as the whole territory was, at the reports of a United States army advancing toward Utah in the summer of 1857. From August on, Jens probably drilled with the ^[21] territorial militia, unless his twisted feet excused him from this service.²²

Through all this, the Nielsons hoped to have more children but were disappointed again during their first year in Utah. Still, they believed they would be blessed this way if they lived the whole gospel, all of the commandments of their faith, as well as they could. But part of that “whole gospel” might disrupt the family before it helped: by late 1857, Jens felt he should marry a second wife. Plural marriage, more often called polygamy, had been openly avowed by the Church since 1852. While not everyone had the spiritual or economic means to live up to the principle, it increasingly became an ideal. In the fervent Reformation spirit of 1856–57, leaders exhorted eligible members to do their duty in this area as in others. Declarations such as this one from Heber C. Kimball seemed aimed directly at the Nielsons’ difficulties: “I have noticed that a man who has but one wife, and is inclined to that doctrine, soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality looks fresh, young, and sprightly. Why is this? Because God loves that man, and because he honours His work and word.”²³

For most Mormons polygamy was not a salacious concept but a spiritual one, and the Nielsons had as much difficulty embracing it as most members did. Jens may have heard about the doctrine in Denmark, or he may have been counseled to take a second ^[22] wife by Church leaders in Utah who felt he met the standards to do it.²⁴ Even if he was not individually invited, every major decision Jens had made since he was baptized three years before, no matter how cataclysmic to himself or his family, had been based on trying to live up to the requirements of his faith. There could be no exceptions. Whatever problems he and Elsie encountered could be resolved only by obedience.²⁵

Before a man asked a second wife to marry him, he often had to ask his first. Almost everything had changed for Elsie since 1850, the year she married Jens. They had sold their farm, lost their son, and now he was asking to alter their union. But Jens would not continue without her consent. He prophesied that if she accepted this principle, she would be blessed with children once again.²⁶ Elsie agreed, and on October 4, 1857, Jens married Kirsten Jensen in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. Jens was thirty-seven years old, Elsie twenty-seven, and Kirsten twenty-three.^{27 [23]}

Kirsten and what was left of her family had arrived in Utah not long before. But she already knew Jens Nielson: he had baptized her while he was a missionary in Denmark. Kirsten’s parents and two brothers crossed the Atlantic with the Nielsons on the Thornton in 1856 but left Kirsten, a brother, and a sister in Denmark since the family did not have enough cash to travel together. Kirsten’s parents and brothers stayed in the Midwest to earn money for the remnants’ passage rather than go to Utah immediately. But the joyful reunion the family expected in the United States never happened. Instead, after Kirsten and the others crossed to America and trekked to Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1857, they were informed that their mother and one of their brothers had died from cholera in St. Louis. Another brother died as they crossed the plains with their father as members of the Christiansen handcart company that summer.²⁸ Less than a month after her afflicted family pulled into Salt Lake City, Kirsten, after quiet struggles of her own, became the second wife of Jens Nielson.^{29 [24]}

Jens’s promise to Elsie came true. In October of the next year, she gave birth to a daughter, Mary. Kirsten had a boy named Jens, but he died the day he was born. The next six years in Parowan, however, brought many more children. Elsie had another daughter, Julia, and Kirsten had two boys, Hans Joseph and Jens Peter, as well as a girl, Margaret. Now Jens had achieved something he had never dreamed of in Denmark: he was a respected member of the community and the head of not one, but two, households.³⁰

Once more his faith did not let him stay still. Due to scarce water and a declining wheat crop, Church authorities in Parowan sent out explorers to find new land.³¹ Jens was called to start a new settlement.³² In March 1864, fifty-four families from Parowan and Beaver cut a winding road up frosty canyons to a place they eventually called Panguitch, about twenty-five air miles east of Parowan on the upper Sevier River. Jens Nielson was ^[25] appointed the presiding elder, then bishop, responsible for the venture.³³ When the settlers arrived, they quickly set to work digging irrigation ditches, planting crops, and constructing their homes from the plentiful timber in the area. But with only one team of animals for every three families and the short growing season that exists at an altitude of 6,666 feet, not much crop was raised. The following winter was severe, and when their flour gave out, the families were reduced to grinding wheat in a little coffee mill or gnawing on boiled kernels to survive. Seven men were sent to Parowan for supplies and were able to proceed over the deep snows in some places only by arranging a relay of quilts to walk on. But the colony survived to celebrate its anniversary the next March. As one girl recalled the feast, “We had pies made of bulberries and service berries and the bishop made forty gallons of beer.”³⁴ The settlers soon completed the small log structure that was a schoolhouse, church, dance hall, or assembly room, depending on the occasion. Sunday meetings found the Nielsons in the front row, with Elsie’s two little girls in matching dresses.³⁵

Elsie bore a third daughter, Agnes, in the spring of 1865, but the infant died the ^[26] following December. During her short life, new trouble came to the settlement. Relations between Indians and Mormons boiled over in Sanpete Valley to the north, and various Indian bands began to loosely organize under the Ute Black Hawk to raid Mormon settlements. They hit perimeter outposts such as Panguitch particularly hard, and the settlers fought a number of skirmishes against the Indians. Those embattled residents stayed close to their fort and organized a strict militia to guard themselves and their livestock. When George A. Smith reviewed the troops in March 1866 he found forty men, twenty-two guns, and a few revolvers, with about half the guns “scarcely fit for service.”³⁶ Even under these precautions, Panguitch was too vulnerable, and it became one of the many exposed settlements Church leaders decided to abandon during the conflict. Late in the spring of 1866, the colonists cleared out, leaving their third crop in the fields.

With Kirsten ready to give birth at any moment, the Nielsons moved twenty-six miles down the Sevier to Circleville, another settlement started in 1864. There she delivered another son, John, shortly after they arrived. But the Indian pressure on Circleville was at least as heavy as it had been in Panguitch, and it, too, was abandoned later in the year. Before that happened, though, a brutal act occurred. Circleville, like Panguitch, had been raided by Indians late in 1865. But unlike Panguitch, settlers were killed in these attacks. When difficulties and rumors continued the next spring, the residents of Circleville decided to take preemptive action. They confined all the members of the nearby Piede group of Paiute Indians in their meetinghouse while they awaited ^[27] instructions from authorities in Parowan. When some of the Indian men slipped out of their ropes and attacked their captors, the alarmed settlers killed all sixteen of them. Then they proceeded to execute at least ten captive women and children to keep them from telling about the murders. Only four small children were allowed to survive.³⁷ The Nielsons, recently arrived, had little influence. Jens protested strongly against confining the Indians to the church and pleaded against the massacre, but in the end he retreated declaring, “I wash my hands clean of this.”³⁸ When Circleville was abandoned, the Nielsons returned to Parowan.

Within two years, the young family moved to Cedar City, about eighteen miles south. Compared to where the Nielsons had lived recently, Cedar was a mature community, having been established a few months after Parowan in 1851. Originally it was the center for the county’s attempts to produce iron, but those efforts had been abandoned by the time the Nielsons arrived in 1866 or 1867. Jens most likely knew a number of Cedar residents already through church and commercial connections. He quickly became a prominent figure in his new community. In 1869 he was called to the high council of the Parowan Stake.³⁹ By then Jens had also been elected to the city council, and he would serve as a councilman for ten years. In 1873 he appeared before the Utah Second District Court judge and became a citizen of the United States. ^[28]

Jens prospered enough in Cedar that by 1874, either by invitation, inclination, or inspiration, he married again.⁴⁰ Ane Katrine Jorgensen was also born on the island of Lolland in Denmark.⁴¹ Her mother died before the baby turned two, and her father died by the time she was ten. She was placed with a foster family named Beabaum, probably the same family that raised Elsie. While Elsie was a farm worker, “Trena” found work as a domestic servant in Copenhagen. She was employed in the homes of some of the city’s wealthier citizens and became an excellent cook. Mr. Beabaum migrated to Parowan and later paid for Katrine to come to Utah, possibly to look for her brother. She visited Elsie in Cedar City and stayed on for six months as a boarder before Jens asked her to be his third wife. After taking the long trip to Salt Lake City accompanied by Kirsten’s oldest daughter, Jens, now fifty-four, and Katrine, who was twenty-nine, were married on February 23, 1874, in the Endowment House. By this time the Nielsons lived in a large, rectangular home in Cedar City. Elsie and her two daughters resided on one end, while Kirsten and her children lived in the other. When Jens married Katrine, he added two more rooms for her, making the house into an “L” shape, with Elsie and her children occupying the junction and the households of Kirsten and Katrine on the ends. Jens ^[29] rotated through the sections, living a week at a time with each family.⁴²

The Nielsons needed all the space they could get. Although Kirsten’s baby from Circleville, Johnny, died not long after his first birthday, she had three more healthy children in Cedar City: Francis, a boy, and two girls, Lucinda and Caroline. One last boy, Hyrum, was stillborn in 1876.⁴³ Katrine had three children, Annetta, Uriah, and Freeman from 1875 to 1879, making for a total of eleven children, six daughters and five sons, in Jens’s large family. The father’s other responsibilities continued to grow as well. In 1877 he was called as the first counselor to Bishop Christopher Arthur in the Cedar Ward, and on November 27, he dedicated the cornerstone for the new meetinghouse.⁴⁴ The Nielsons, just like their neighbors, contributed to the construction of the St. George Temple and rejoiced at its completion in 1877.⁴⁵

Their life, however, was not entirely idyllic. Cedar City’s “United Order of Enoch,” an attempt organized by Brigham Young to bring the Saints’ economic affairs into close cooperation, fell apart within three years of its organization in 1874, leaving ^[30] fractured feelings and finances behind.⁴⁶ Then there was a great division in the stake when some supported Jesse N. Smith and others William Dame as their stake president.⁴⁷ This controversy hit Parowan the hardest, but still sent ripples through Cedar’s society. The Cedar Saints did manage to preserve some cooperation, continuing to operate a store and beginning to herd their sheep and cattle in cooperative companies. The older Nielson boys often found themselves alone on the range watching stock.

Overall, by 1879, Jens Nielson could be content. He had followed the high standards and forded the difficult challenges of his faith. He had been carried to a strange new land and had sacrificed much, but like Joseph of the Old Testament, whose story he loved dearly, he had been recompensed many times over.⁴⁸ He had a large family whose eleven children spanned an entire generation. The oldest, the very energetic Mary, had wed ^[31] one Kumen Jones, a wiry cattleman from Cedar, just before Christmas in 1878.⁴⁹ The youngest, Freeman, was born a few months after Mary’s wedding, in August 1879. By his family, church, and community, Jens Nielson was recognized as a “strong character, strengthened or developed more or less by his association with the Mormon Church.”⁵⁰ Once again, Jens could say, as he had regarding his early years in Denmark, “The Lord blessed me on my right hand and on my left.” He could be excused if, at the age of fifty-nine, after establishing one home in Denmark and five in Utah, he anticipated a tranquil retirement, disrupted only by his growing children and an increasing gaggle of grandchildren. But he may also have suspected from his previous experience that other fates awaited.

To the San Juan

The Call

The Mormon Church was the greatest colonizing institution in the American West.⁵¹ From the arrival of the first pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, the Church ^[32] created more than five hundred communities in successive waves of colonization. Most of this was done under the imperatives of gathering and supporting over a hundred thousand immigrants and their posterity with the scarce and scattered resources of the region. But this physical necessity was coupled with “their own particular version of Manifest Destiny”: the extension of Mormon control throughout the Rocky Mountain region, eventually overspilling U.S. borders into Canada and Mexico.⁵² Even after the establishment of the Cotton Mission around St. George in southern Utah during the 1860s, population pressures continued, becoming especially acute toward the end of Brigham Young’s life in the late 1870s. Settlement continued within Utah Territory in marginal areas. One hundred new settlements jumped over the boundaries of Utah from 1876 to 1879, located in places such as the San Luis Valley in Colorado, the Upper Snake and Goose Creek valleys in Idaho, and the Little Colorado and Salt River valleys in Arizona. In some of these areas, agricultural lands and pastures were reclaimed from the desert through laborious irrigation projects. It was important not only to cultivate new colonies for the present, but also to secure land for future growth, particularly in places that might be settled by non-Mormon “Gentiles.”⁵³ One of these areas was the four corners region. In the late 1870s it was still largely unsettled, but immigrants were approaching swiftly, and ^[33] better they be Mormon than not, “that the Saints may have room to dwell.”⁵⁴

As usual, more colonization meant increased constriction of Native Americans. In spite of Mormons’ good intentions toward them and Brigham Young’s policy of feeding rather than fighting them, more for the Mormons meant less for the Indians.⁵⁵ The livestock of the new settlers was difficult to resist for cultures accustomed to raiding their neighbors. Even with the end of the Black Hawk War in the late 1860s, and the continued best efforts of Indian missionaries such as Jacob Hamblin and Thales Haskell in the 1870s, difficulties persisted between Mormons and Native Americans on the southern frontier.⁵⁶

Given these factors, Brigham Young almost certainly considered sending a mission into southeastern Utah or the nearby corners of Arizona or New Mexico, and perhaps discussed it at a conference in St. George in 1877.⁵⁷ But the great colonizer died in August of that year. While this may have delayed the endeavor, Young’s successor, ^[34] John Taylor, along with Erastus Snow, the Apostle who oversaw southern settlements, did not let the matter rest long. Specific preparations to occupy the area began during a stake conference in Parowan days after Christmas in 1878. One name read just before the close of the conference altered Jens Nielson’s golden years immensely.⁵⁸

The name was that of his oldest son, Hans Joseph Nielson. Joe was nineteen years old and unmarried. Like his father, he was tall, sturdy, broad-faced, square-jawed, and incurably outgoing. And like the others on the long list of names read by Elder Snow at the conference, this public announcement was the first he knew about his call to relocate to the Four Corners region. Furthermore, Joe was also chosen to be a member of the exploring party that would reconnoiter that area early the next year. Jens was particularly attached to this son who was his firstborn after he had to bury Niels in the frozen ground near Rock Creek.⁵⁹

The mission call caused turmoil in the stake as soon as the names were read. A week after the conference, a special meeting was held in the social hall in Cedar City. Bishop Christopher Arthur and the stake president, now Henry Lunt, assured those assembled that there had been “no prejudice” in the selection of names. Their colonizing mission was just as important as a foreign mission and would require the same amount of guidance from the Holy Spirit. Bishop Arthur assured them there was no compulsion, but advised all who were going to do so “with a cheerful heart.” He invited those who were called and their parents to express themselves on the matter. Jens, among others, arose and ^[35] announced “his willingness to assist all that laid in his power for his son to go and fill the mission.” Joe also expressed his willingness “to go and do the best he could.”⁶⁰

But something else was working in Jens aside from his desire to help his son. During the meeting, Bishop Arthur also invited volunteers to submit their names for this mission. Over the next weeks, Jens contemplated doing just that. Of course he was concerned about Joe, but there may have been other factors that influenced him during these early months of 1879. He probably agreed with the major purposes of the proposed outpost. He had lived near the southeastern border of Mormon settlement for more than twenty years and could see the need for better relations with the Indians. Furthermore, if gentile cattle ranchers, or even worse, outlaws, dominated the southeastern corner of the territory, as it looked as if they were starting to do, then they would not only use up resources that Mormons needed for the future, but also antagonize the Indians there.⁶¹ Despite their run-ins, Mormons felt a spiritual obligation toward Native Americans, possible descendants of the Book of Mormon’s “Lamanites.” Better relations had to be established with them before the Mormons could convert them. In other words, the proposed settlement would be started for both offensive and defensive reasons: to pacify Indians in the hope of eventually converting them and to defend Zion by preempting this large section of land from outsiders.

Jens might also have worried about something else. Federal officials began to ^[36] step up their prosecution of polygamists after the passage of the Poland Act in 1874. Brigham Young was embroiled in legal difficulties surrounding the divorce suit of his last wife, Ann Eliza Webb, for several years before his death. Then, scarcely a week after the Parowan Conference issued the first calls to settle the San Juan region, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the conviction of the late Brigham Young’s private secretary, George Reynolds, for polygamy. And Congress seemed to be brewing up more trouble for those who lived in “L”-shaped houses with more than one wife.

Sometime in the next month or two, Jens approached a Church leader, perhaps Erastus Snow himself, and asked to be called to this mission. He was volunteering to go but also hoped for the validation of an official priesthood call.⁶² It came in the next conference of the Parowan Stake, held in Cedar City on March 23, 1879.⁶³

Some of the Nielsons began to prepare for their removal. Not all of them would go. Katrine, who may have had some troubles with her health already, was expecting Freeman to be delivered just before the expedition would leave. It was better for her to stay in the house at Cedar and manage the fields and flocks. For the time being, Elsie and ^[37] Julia would stay as well to help. Elsie’s oldest daughter, Mary, would accompany her husband, Kumen Jones, who had also been called. Kirsten and her six children would go, and they began to accumulate supplies and expectations for the journey to their new home.

On April 14, 1879, Joe Nielson and Kumen Jones left Paragonah with the twenty-four other men, two women, and eight children who made up the scouting party. Church authorities had not designated a specific spot for the colony, so this party’s goal was to explore the region and find a suitable place to settle. Its members might have contemplated what they were leaving. Many besides themselves had worked very hard to make their towns what they were. Cedar City had almost 750 settlers now, with almost 2,000 acres of fields enclosed against the nearly 12,000 sheep and 3,000 cattle. It had built up its industries, with gristmills and sawmills, a tannery, a furniture shop, and two mercantile stores. In all it had become comfortable: “a beautiful little village with its orchards and shade trees, the envy of many passers-by.”⁶⁴ Plunging into the wilderness forfeited all of that.

All of those who were called to settle in that wilderness wrestled with their feelings. Kumen Jones had a dream shortly after he and Mary were wed in St. George, days before the December 1878 Parowan conference. In it, “he was helping erect buildings from rock. There were Indians watching and nearby was a muddy stream. The next morning he asked his mother to interpret the dream, whereupon, she [having already heard rumors] began to cry, ‘Oh Kumen, you will be called to pioneer into the San Juan ^[38] River country.’”⁶⁵ James Davis was distressed by his call, but tried to rally his spirits: “Feel very low and sad about it. So did Mary and the children, but by the help of God I am determined to obey counsel. We are still feeling gloomy over the mission.”⁶⁶ He sold his farm in Cedar and took his whole family out with the scouting party. Twenty-two-year-old Lemuel H. Redd Jr. in New Harmony had been married for less than a year and was determined to succeed in business when his call came. His father-in-law, who was his partner in the business, was also supposed to go, but decided he would not. “Lem,” as the young man with intense eyes was known, told his own father he could not afford to accept the mission call. But his father directly replied that he could not afford not to go, and young Brother Redd found the motivation to accept.⁶⁷ The Woods, who lived across the street from the Nielsons in Cedar City, were called in 1882 to strengthen the mission. “We spent the evening talking about our call to San Juan,” Jody Wood recalled. “Some thought they would just as soon stay in Cedar. But when a call comes from the President of our Church, we go.”⁶⁸ But as was usually the case, not everyone did. Some pleaded difficult circumstances and were released from their call. Some just stayed put.⁶⁹

The scouting party returned in September, having traversed a circle of almost a ^[39] thousand miles. The explorers curved south, then turned up through the Navajo Reservation at Moenkopi in Arizona, and left the Davis and Harriman families in a promising spot near where Montezuma Creek flowed into the San Juan River, in southeastern Utah. They came home by the northern arc, across the Colorado and Green rivers, then up the Sevier. They reported two or three sites that could sustain settlements, but also had mixed experiences with the Indians and the water in the area.⁷⁰

The scouting party’s report was acceptable, but not encouraging. And the roundabout routes they took to the proposed settlement were too long for the main body to return on if the settlers hoped to reach their new home before winter. There had to be, they believed, a more direct way that would bisect the circle of the scouting party’s path and take the settlers straight to the San Juan. Just in time, scouts from Escalante, a town eighty-five miles east of Cedar City, reported such a “back door,” a probable passage across the Colorado River that would open a shortcut to the San Juan. All the while preparations continued, and people decided if they were going. The Nielsons had an easier time of it since they did not have to sell their house and fields. Still, they had to take what they would need for their migration and what they wanted for their new home. But Jens had no doubts. During his last sacrament meeting in the Cedar City Ward, he once again emphasized that he “felt it the voice of the Lord to him to go, and he was going by the help of the Almighty.”^{71 [40]}

The Epic

In late October, wagons creaked out of many of the southern Utah settlements, rolling toward Escalante. The Lymans moved south from Oak City with six wagons and 180 head of cattle. The Paces and Goddards and Redds pulled out of New Harmony, and the Hutchingses and Lillywhites from Beaver. But the largest contingent came from the Parowan Stake. On Wednesday, October 22, 1879, the Nielsons’ three wagons, with about twenty others, left Cedar City. The expedition picked up more families in Paragonah, though not Silas S. Smith, a cousin of the martyred prophet Joseph Smith, who was called to lead the expedition but was not ready to leave. The company then turned up Little Creek Canyon and followed the same road Jens blazed fifteen years earlier when he led the way to Panguitch. At the head of Little Creek Canyon, the Nielson party caught up with the large group from Parowan, which had many clans of Deckers, the Butt brothers, the Rowleys (whose father, Samuel, also survived the Thornton and Willie handcart experiences when he was a lad), and the Nielsons’ half nephew-in-law, Hanson Bayles.⁷² There the mass moved over to the Upper Bear Valley and camped for three nights, where “Jens Nielson, Danishman, recognized as leading elder, proceeded to organize his flock and lay down some simple regulations for the conduct of his charges, the people of the San Juan mission.”⁷³ Jens made rules similar to those of most Mormon migrations: “The Sabbath was observed at all times, and under all ^[41] conditions. Every evening, hymns were sung and prayers were said. Occasionally dances were held,” as Kumen Jones remembered.⁷⁴

The group pushed down the Bear River Valley, then up the Sevier to Panguitch, which had been resettled in 1871. In fact, the leader of this second settlement, George Washington Sevy, later joined the expedition. By early November the host arrived in Escalante, then pushed ahead through the Potato Valley to the end of anything resembling a road at Forty-mile Spring. Here, about a month after they left the older settlements, they made camp to wait for the groups behind and to scout the terrain ahead.

The Nielsons were well outfitted for this trip. They had three wagons for their eight family members and supplies. Like most pioneers, they had furnished at least some of their wagons as rolling apartments as well as freight haulers. Three beds and a stove were set up in them, so none of the family had to sleep on the ground. As for food, in addition to wheat, corn, bacon, potatoes, and molasses, they had some extras. Elsie sent along five gallons of honey from the hives she faithfully kept, and Kirsten made at least that much ground cherry preserves to take with them.⁷⁵

Beyond the usual rigors of wagon travel, Kirsten had to feed the family along the way. Baking bread on the coals of a campfire was routine. For supper each night, she filled her big, black pot with corn cereal sweetened with molasses. Her job was sometimes made more difficult by her own family. One day, Margaret and Caroline were riding in the back of a wagon, with Kirsten riding up front with Joe. The girls smelled ^[42] freshly baked bread, which was supposed to last all day. Abetted by their father, they ate one piece, then another, until they found they had devoured everything. Their mother’s crestfallen face and the extra work they had to do to replace the lost loaves discouraged them from repeating the performance.⁷⁶

Yet on the whole the children were assets. Most of the families on the trip were younger, with two or three small children. But the Nielsons had six, most of them adults by frontier labor standards. Joe, close to twenty, was skilled with animals and could also help gather and herd stock, as well as build the road ahead. Jens Peter, at seventeen, had similar skills and was already a giant, nearing the six and a half feet in stature he would have as a man. Francis, or “France,” as he was called, was notably shy for a generally affable family, but at eleven he was old enough to drive one of the wagons, and he could also go out to gather firewood and scout pasture for the animals. The three girls, Margaret, 15, Lucinda, or “Cindy,” 7, and Caroline, 5, sometimes scouted with France, and helped their mother with her many tasks.⁷⁷

The Nielsons’ livestock were indispensable. There were two oxen to pull one wagon, two mules to pull another, and four head of cattle to pull the third. The family also had some dairy cows and an unspecified number of beef cattle among the thousand or so loose head that were strung ahead or behind the company as the feed warranted. Fueling these beasts became difficult: finding enough grass and water was one of the major challenges of the expedition, and it only got worse as they moved farther ^[43] from Escalante and deeper into winter.

At Forty-mile Spring the strung-out companies gathered. Jens sent Kumen Jones and three others to find a route to the Colorado River and beyond. These scouts were not encouraged by prospectors they encountered who informed them that “if every rag, or other property owned by the people of the territory was sold for cash, it would not pay for the making of a burro trail across the river.”⁷⁸ Silas S. Smith, the president of the expedition, arrived amid these dim prospects on November 24. He sent out a larger exploring party to find a passable route. “After about one week’s tramping,” almost everyone in this group also felt it was impossible to pass through what Platte Lyman called “the worst country I ever saw.”⁷⁹ On their way back to camp, the disappointed explorers informed the men who were pushing the road out from Forty-mile Spring that their work was in vain; a bird could not cross that country, let alone teams and wagons.⁸⁰

By the time the exploring party returned, the full camp of almost 250 settlers in more than 80 wagons had finally assembled at Forty-mile Spring. The group had many mouths and muzzles to feed. Heavy snow was falling on the Escalante Mountains behind them, making a retreat more perilous. As the scouts filed into President Smith’s tent to give their reports, they had more than themselves to consider: most had brought families. Caroline was the youngest Nielson at five and a half years old, but more than a fifth of the group was younger than she was. The trail forward seemed too treacherous and the road ^[44] back too desolate.

After the scouts gave mostly negative reports to the assembled leaders of the expedition, Jens Nielson made a motion that was both spiritual and strategic. First, he prophesied that if they decided to go on, a road could be made to their new home and crops raised there the next season.⁸¹ Then he proposed that the party “unanimously . . . sustain Brother Smith in whatever course he thought best for us to pursue.” Silas Smith, a quiet but steady man and an experienced pioneer, determined to proceed, even if it took over three months to build the road, since he considered it impossible to withdraw through the heavy snow behind them.⁸² The next day, a general meeting was held, and many members spoke their support for President Smith’s resolution. Jens Nielson declared that they should “go on whether we can or not.” Then, in a fervent attempt to produce a fairly new and intricate English word through a Danish-trained throat, he affirmed that if they had enough “stickety tootie” they would succeed.⁸³

With new resolve, the expedition advanced over the rugged country to the Fifty-mile Spring. Some camped there, but the Nielsons most likely accompanied the Cedar City contingent to the camp near the Hole in the Rock, a narrow slit in the sandstone overlooking the Colorado River. The site had a breathtaking view: the river was three-quarters of a mile away, two thousand feet down. Little Caroline peeked through the ^[45] crevice one day and eagerly summoned her mother to look at the small white kittens she saw in the distance. Kirsten had to tell her they were not kittens, but her father’s white mules far down the gorge.⁸⁴

The party’s food supplies dwindled, despite what they imported from Escalante. Flour ran out, and they had to parch their wheat or grind it in small coffee mills. George Hobbs reported that his “first meal of chopped wheat would shame a dose of salts in its purging propensities.”⁸⁵ Despite these hardships, the travelers continued to enjoy themselves when possible by singing and dancing. While the area around the Hole in the Rock had no natural amphitheater such as Dance Hall Rock back near the Forty-mile camp, a number of nights found the Saints doing the best they could with the fiddle and harmonica under the stars.

They also used the time in camp to follow Mormon pioneer precedent and organize more formally for the trip ahead. Silas Smith was sustained as the head of the company and Platte D. Lyman as his assistant. The camp was split into groups of ten families with captains over each. Jens Nielson was made captain of the first ten, as well as chaplain for the entire group. President Smith, a former member of the Utah legislature, hurried to the capital town of Fillmore to lobby for money and road-building supplies from the territorial congress.

The work on the road to the river began. Benjamin and Hyrum Perkins, stout coal miners from Wales, drilled and blasted a wagon road down the first part of the Hole, a ^[46] sheer stone drop of forty-five feet. To do this, men were often suspended by ropes to drill holes and set powder. Once this first section was hewn from the rock, they proceeded to construct “Uncle Ben’s Dugway” down a fifty-foot drop lower in the canyon. To get down this “slantindicular” surface, the men drilled holes in the stone face and inserted oak staves.⁸⁶ These were covered with perpendicular poles, brush, rocks, dirt, and gravel to widen the path enough for a wagon. While the “Cedar boys” toiled on these upper parts of the road, other groups labored in the lower canyon and across the river. Debris blasted loose from the top was used to make fills farther down. Cornelius Decker remained impressed by these efforts many years later. “I don’t think I ever saw a lot of men work with more zeal and will to do something than that crowd. We were all young men and the way we did make the dirt and rock fly was a marvel.”⁸⁷

By late January, the tired migrants were ready for the great adventure: to take the wagons down to the river. The upper part of the road averaged a steep eight feet of drop for every rod (sixteen and a half feet) of distance. But some places, particularly the first stretch of road, plunged down at a precipitous forty-five degree angle. The back wheels of each wagon were rough-locked with chains and moored by as many as twenty men anchoring ropes behind it. The first wagons skidded down on January 26. Many animals were unwilling, and there were a number of narrow escapes and nasty scrapes, but no wagons tipped over, and no creature was killed. After the breathless descent, the ^[47] exhilarated and exhausted drivers pulled onto Charles Hall’s large ferryboat and crossed the river. Road crews had already cut a dugway up the opposite bank. This ascent was easy only in comparison to what they had already endured. Seven teams had to pull each wagon up Cottonwood Hill, and the only two tipovers of the trek happened on this treacherous road.⁸⁸

Beyond the Hole in the Rock

From the top of Cottonwood Hill, the expedition was still two months away from its destination, longer by itself than the six weeks originally planned for the entire trek. Supplies from Escalante and Parowan kept the party from starvation. But for those two months they picked, blasted, and dug their way up and across mesas, down chutes and canyons, and somehow past every obstacle that presented itself. Not all the travails were against the landscape: two healthy babies were born on the way. The pioneers dev eloped stronger ties as they endured and celebrated together. “All the hurt feelings and disgruntled tempers were washing away in fun under the stars,” Eliza Redd remembered.⁸⁹ And Joe Nielson started paying particular attention to Ida Lyman, one of the three single women on the trip.

As their wagon wheels sifted through the deep sand down Comb Wash, Jens Peter asked his mother how this trip compared to her handcart journey back in 1857. “I don’t remember everything about the handcart company, but we could get along,” Kirsten ^[48] replied. “We can’t even get along in this sand.”⁹⁰ In the end, the members of the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition worked a collective total of 3,200 days on the road from Escalante to the San Juan, an average of forty-one days of labor for every male over fifteen years old.⁹¹ No pioneers died, but many animals did. Hanson Bayles started the trip with twenty-one head of cattle and arrived at the San Juan River with six. The Nielsons’ milk cows dried up, and the family lost one ox and two of its cattle. This left Jens with no choice but to yoke an ox and a mule together to power one of their wagons. All of the emigrants would have agreed with the speculation of Platte Lyman’s brother, Marion, in a letter that might have reached them about this time: “This is a very trying winter in all parts of the territory. I presume none are having a more serious time than you and your company.”⁹²

The final pull up San Juan Hill was almost infernal. The teams had to be multiplied once again to drag the wagons up the road. The beasts had given what they had over the past weeks, but to clear this last, large obstacle they had to be beaten into giving more. Even with seven teams to a wagon many of the animals faltered and fell, smearing hair and blood from their forelegs onto the rocks. At the top of the hill, Jens Nielson’s second ox sank to the ground and died. Those creatures who survived that final drag were beyond exhaustion. Some wagons took days to cover the few miles between that awful hill and the spot next to the river where they all huddled together and decided ^[49] their journey was over.

So there they were. As exuberant celebrations took place among Mormons throughout the territory, and many in debt were released from bondage on April 6, the Day of Jubilee, this group began to recover its strength and go about the business of colonizing. Not all of them liked their prospects. Upon seeing the place, Margaret Nielson looked up at her father and asked dubiously, “Is this where we are going to stay?” “Why yes,” Jens replied. “Where did you want to go?”^{93 [50]}