2 Survival, 1880–1881

1880: Initiation

First Days

When they held a meeting that first evening, the settlers did not debate what to do; after starting so many communities, Mormons knew that. Jens Nielson had followed the standard plan in Panguitch, as had many of the others in settlements across the territory.¹ This meeting was held so they could get to work. Under the direction of acting leader Platte Lyman, five men were chosen to survey the land, and the rest were set to dig the irrigation ditches. The next morning, Wednesday, April 7, they started the chains and shovels moving.

By Saturday they had a problem. The surveyors found less land than they had anticipated, so they called another meeting. Rather than live on such small lots, the ^[51] colonizers decided to hold a lottery for the available land. A slip of paper was prepared for every family and unattached individual. Forty of the slips had the number of a lot on them; twenty-two were blank. Those who drew a number would stay on that parcel, those with blanks would move on. In the tense drawing, Jens Nielson most likely drew a number. Platte Lyman drew a blank. And then this group of settlers they were overseeing began to unravel.

The divisive issue intruded on their church meetings the next day. James Pace, who held a number, proposed sharing equally with those who did not but was voted down. Many others who held lots did not want to share them and made that blaringly clear with “illiberal feelings” toward those who were supposed to get out. On Monday they held another meeting and things got worse. Some who were supposed to move on had started settling on parcels of land anyway. At the end of the contentious gathering, those holding numbers again voted out those with blanks. But on Tuesday, the dispute almost miraculously dissipated. Some of the men again proposed throwing out the lottery results, seeing as how “it is out of the question for us to move any further at present.” This time, after much discussion and negotiation, the idea passed. Fifty-nine smaller lots would be distributed. Self-interest had almost destroyed in days the union they had forged through six months of shared hardship. Work on the ditch, which had been almost entirely suspended during the dispute, resumed that afternoon.²

Each individual or family of settlers received a town lot that measured just under ^[52] an acre plus a field lot of anywhere from eight to twenty acres based on its location and quality. These were small even to Mormons, who had smaller fields than other western settlers. For the most part, Mormons looked to their land more to sustain their families than to raise a large crop for market.³ If things continued as they were, most of the boys who were helping Jens clear, water, and plant their acres would have to look elsewhere for their own farms when they grew up.

With the land controversy dispatched, the colonizers set up their homes. For the Nielsons, like most of the families, this meant modifying the same domiciles they had used for the past six months: their wagon boxes were removed from the wheels and parked on their town lot. Others threw together crude brush wickiups. But there was no time yet for real homebuilding. All available labor had to go toward getting life into the town, which meant getting water into the ditch.

As the men threw themselves and their animals into scraping and digging a channel, it did not take long for the regular rhythms of life to reassert themselves. Alvin Morris Decker was born that first Monday night. And Roswell Stevens, at seventy-two easily the oldest member of the group, died on May 4. He had come out with three of his nephew’s sons, and long before, in 1847, had marched across the Southwest as a private in Company E of the Mormon Battalion. But the Hole-in-the-Rock trek finished him. ^[53] The others could not saw straight lumber for his coffin out of the twisted cottonwoods nearby, so they pried the planks from a wagon box.⁴

Their neighbors up the river at Montezuma, the Davis and Harriman families as well as a few other individuals who were deposited there by the scouting expedition in 1879, greeted the newcomers with mixed emotions. On the one hand, they were thrilled the expedition had arrived, since they desperately needed supplies. On the other, they were disappointed most were not coming to settle with them. A few of the pioneers had gone directly to Montezuma, and three more families headed there during the land squabble. But the best news that came down to Bluff from Montezuma was that Thales Haskell, the veteran Indian missionary, was there. During the spring he had come by to see if any of those left on the San Juan were still alive. When he found they were, he moved his own family in, and his experienced and stoic presence was immensely reassuring to the settlers.

On Sunday, April 25, amid wind, rain, and even some snow, the settlers gathered together again and gave their infant town a name. William Hutchings seized on the most obvious feature surrounding the place and proposed “Bluff City.”⁵ The name was unanimously approved. Whether the reddish bluffs suggested protective ramparts against outside dangers or looming walls imprisoning them was a matter of personal interpretation.^{6 [54]}

The next day was Jens Nielson’s sixtieth birthday, and he had a new job. The Utah Legislature had just created San Juan County with Silas Smith as county judge, Charles Walton as clerk, and a board of selectmen, or county commissioners, consisting of Platte D. Lyman, Zachariah B. Decker, and Jens Nielson. The officials in Bluff held the first meeting of the county court, “by appointment of the judge” (probably meaning that Smith sent word to go ahead without him), on Jens’s birthday. There they added another hallmark of civil society by appointing Lemuel H. Redd Jr. as the tax assessor and collector. The acting county court then adjourned for the time being.⁷

Later in the day, Jens was also left in charge of Bluff, or what was left of it. Silas Smith was still back in the settlements, now recovering from illness. After the meeting of the county court, Platte Lyman followed those who had headed back up the road toward the Hole in the Rock to fetch family and supplies from the older settlements.⁸ But other settlers had already left for good. A few families never planned on staying, but had linked up with the San Juan expedition to get them to Colorado or Arizona more quickly, they thought, than the usual routes. Other individuals had come to help their relatives relocate, and with that job done they returned to their homes. Still others, called to the mission or not, took a look at the country and kept right on going.⁹ In all, 61 people, almost one-quarter of the 234 who came, left the San Juan permanently before ^[55] June. Hopefully a successful first year’s crop would stop the hemorrhaging of population. Jens’s leadership did not last long on this occasion. Silas Smith arrived in May, and when Platte Lyman returned to Bluff on June 2, he marked the progress the residents had made: “The water is in the ditch and some seed has been sown which has come up and is looking well, but taken all together, I do not think the prospect very encouraging.”¹⁰

Who They Were

Bluff was planted just in time to be counted. The census taker came through town on June 19 and was on to Montezuma by June 21.¹¹ His numbers confirmed what the settlers already knew: they were astonishingly young. The enumerator found 193 people living in these two towns, all of them Mormons, and their average age was seventeen years and six months old.¹² Children swarmed all over the settlement, with exactly half of the population under sixteen, and more than two out of five under the age of ten. Among the thirty-six married couples, there were twenty-five infants less than two years old, and forty-nine less than five. Jens and Kirsten Nielson, at sixty and forty-six years old, were ^[56] the oldest couple still there. In fact, aside from Jens, only one other soul was over sixty, and overall fewer than one in seven were over thirty. There was one man in his fifties, nine settlers in their forties, and sixteen in their thirties. But most of the adults barely fit the age requirement: fifty-three of them were in their twenties, and three wives were younger than that.¹³

Most of them had been born in Utah. Naturally, almost all the settlers over thirty had been part of the exodus to Utah from other states or foreign countries in the 1840s and 1850s. But among those in their twenties, fewer than one in four had been born elsewhere, and hardly any of the youth and children. Overall, just over three-quarters of the settlers were Utah-born and had known no other way of living than the Mormon communities in which they were raised. One in six came from foreign lands, and more than three-quarters of these were from the British Isles.¹⁴ But the Nielsons could converse in Danish with Lars Christensen, Samuel Mackelprang, or J. P. Jensen. In fact, Samuel Mackelprang and the parents of Peter Mickelsen and his sister, Anna Mickelsen Decker, came from the same region of Denmark as the Nielsons.

Almost everyone was attached to a family somehow. The typical household in Bluff and Montezuma had four people in it with a fifth on the way. The average husband ^[57] was thirty-one, his wife was twenty-eight, and the couple was about to celebrate its eighth wedding anniversary.¹⁵ As was true in most Mormon towns, the typical husband had just one spouse. James Harvey Dunton set up the only multi-spouse household in the towns for his two wives and ten children. Jens Nielson and Platte Lyman had plural wives living elsewhere.¹⁶ Unlike most western towns, there were a few more females than males in Bluff and Montezuma, though this was due to the children, since there were slightly more adult men than women.¹⁷ The three single women who came without their parents stayed with brothers or sisters, as propriety demanded. Only three single men lived completely unattached; of the six other bachelors, four lived with relatives and two were brothers to other settlers, but lived alone.

As remote, fledgling outposts, Bluff and Montezuma were less than half the size of ^[58] the average community in either Utah or the West.¹⁸ They had significantly fewer foreign-born residents and polygamous households than the average Mormon community, and a few more females. But it was not unheard of for half of the population in a developing Mormon community to be under sixteen. What was missing was the middle: more mature families whose parents were in their thirties, forties, or fifties. The Nielsons were not typical settlers in Bluff and Montezuma. These colonies were dominated by young couples and their toddling children, so the average age was more than five years less than that of most Utah towns. With so many young families, these were vulnerable settlements; either their environments or their neighbors could overwhelm them. The earnestness of the settlers in setting up their new homes was often not far from anxiousness, or even desperation, since they knew they could not withstand many mistakes.

Where They Were

San Juan County was still “the terra incognita of the country,” as a member of the Hayden survey had dubbed it a few years earlier.¹⁹ Some of its settlers were astonished by their first glance: “This is the most God-forsaken and wild country I have ever seen, ^[59] read or heard about,” recorded one.²⁰ Other newcomers were a little more restrained: “It is the wildest, oldest looking country on earth, I think.”²¹ Parley Butt felt that “when God finished makin’ the world he had a lot of rocks left over an’ he threw them down here in a pile in Utah.”²² The untamed terrain entranced some and haunted others.

The bottomland around Bluff extended two miles east and west along the San Juan River, and it was one mile across from the cliffs on the north to those on the south. These rock slabs were adorned with “numerous fantastic and strange formations.” The most distinctive of these, the Navajo Twins, stood to the northeast as sandstone sentinels. Rocks also immediately hemmed in the east. The western boundary of the settlement was Cottonwood Wash. Miles beyond that, the sun set over the fantastic petrified writhing of Comb Ridge, named after the shape atop a rooster, but on a scale more suited for some mythic vermillion serpent.

On top of the sandstone wall across the river to the south, Navajos occupied lands stretching into Arizona. The northern wall and northeastern rocks submerged themselves under the shale of Tank Mesa and Bluff Bench, on top of which grew sage, grass, cedar, and pinyon pine that stretched forty miles to the Abajo, or Blue, Mountains and Elk Ridge. By there the elevation climbed from 4,320 feet at Bluff to 7,000 feet before the Blues ^[60] quickly rose to over 11,000 feet in altitude. The ponderosa pine forests on the flanks of these mountains were the closest source for good lumber. The mountains also pushed up the dry desert air, cooling and condensing it into precipitation, which was sent down to the south in a series of shallow, intermittent streams. Comb and Butler washes surrounded Comb Ridge; Cottonwood Wash ran just west of Bluff, while Recapture and Montezuma creeks came down to the east. All flowed, when they did, through their cottonwood-covered banks into the San Juan. This river came from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, wound south into New Mexico and northwest into Utah Territory. It swept gently by Montezuma and Bluff before plunging through contorted canyons, the “Goosenecks,” into the Colorado. The creeks and rivers had gradually deposited the blessing of “deep, rich alluvial soil” that caused the settlers to stop here.²³ How long they remained depended on how ingenious and industrious they were and how generous the rivers would be in irrigating that soil.²⁴ It also depended on how well their neighbors welcomed them.

Neighbors

The San Juan missionaries were quite conscious of where they were not. Within a few weeks of their arrival, they found a tree stump inscribed a couple of years before by Ferdinand Dickert, a government surveyor, that told them they were 328 miles ^[61] south and 128 miles east of Salt Lake City.²⁵ They knew from painful experience that they were 117 miles as the crow flies from Escalante, and that was certainly not how they traveled. They considered themselves in a hinter or nether region, largely isolated from people like themselves. And so, when they journeyed west, they traveled back to “Utah,” as if they were in some separate territory.²⁶

In a way they were. They were far from any other white town, and geography aimed them more toward the developing settlements of frontier Colorado than toward their homeland. Colorado had just become a state in 1876, and its southwestern corner was bustling with the activities of ranchers, miners, and some other Mormon colonizers. Durango, in fact, was being assembled at the same time Bluff was, but almost a hundred miles away. By 1880, various settlers were also returning to Moab, almost ninety miles to the north in Utah. To the southeast, Farmington, New Mexico, had been founded four years before the Bluff settlers arrived, but was still 150 miles away. All of these settlements were easier to access than Bluff’s parent communities, or at least would be as soon as anything resembling roads were made. The San Juan settlers were nowhere near the interstate of that age—the railroad. The closest railhead was in Alamosa, Colorado, 180 air miles away.²⁷ Bluff was an isolated outpost of white settlers, but the community still had plenty of neighbors. ^[62]

To the south were the Navajos.²⁸ According to archaeologists, the Navajos’ Athabascan ancestors wandered south from northwestern Canada around AD 1000 They arrived in New Mexico about the time the Anasazi left in AD 1300. But the “Dine” (“the people,” as the Navajos call themselves) assert their ancestors emerged from the last of a series of underworlds to this Fourth or “Glittering World” at a place in the La Plata Mountains of Colorado or somewhere near Navajo Dam in New Mexico. They inhabited an area bounded and protected by four mountains and four rivers, the San Juan being the northernmost riparian border.

The Navajos earned the enmity of their neighbors by perpetually raiding them. As they learned the uses of horses and herd animals from the Pueblo Indians and the Spanish, livestock became an important target. The Navajos also borrowed agriculture from those around them and began planting corn, beans, and squash in addition to pursuing the hunting and gathering lifestyle that they brought with them. But in the late 1800s, they felt the same pressures of encroaching white settlers as other western tribes. The American military leaders urged the Utes to attack, enslave, and reduce the Navajo Nation. Then the army took direct action.

In 1864, the same year William Tecumseh Sherman was burning through Georgia, Colonel Kit Carson waged a similar brand of demoralizing warfare on the Navajos, igniting their homes and fields, hatcheting their orchards, and driving off their flocks. As winter and starvation closed in, over eight thousand Navajos immediately or eventually marched three hundred miles, beyond their defensive borders, to the Bosque Redondo ^[63] Reservation in New Mexico. Even holdouts such as Manuelito and Ganado Mucho gave in when they saw the suffering of their followers. On the reservation, they found physical and spiritual half-lives, scarcely subsisting on short rations and enduring attempts to convert them to a different way of life. By 1868, after an inspection of the reservation by General Sherman, the government gave up the attempt. Not only were the captives allowed to return home, but the thousands of fugitives, including leaders such as Hashkeneini and Kaayelii in Utah, emerged from their places of refuge. But they did not forget the “Fearing Time” inflicted by the soldiers. Some refused to plant fruit trees when they returned, certain that invaders would raze them.

The Navajos’ reservation in 1868 was only a quarter of what their traditional lands had been, but by 1880 they were expanding their fields and flocks beyond the official boundary of the reservation north to the San Juan.²⁹ “The people” had returned to their promised land and were enlarging their borders at a time when most Indian lands were being constricted.³⁰ Some Navajos, such as Kaayelii, often lived north of the San Juan. Others crossed tentatively to trade with the Utes and Paiutes, put in some crops, or graze their sheep. The colonists in Bluff were aware of the recent aggressiveness of the Navajos, which was partially responsible for their mission. But that knowledge also led the settlers to wonder about how they would be welcomed as they glanced anxiously toward the southern cliffs from time to time. The Navajos, given their recent history, were also in ^[64] suspense as they peered over the rim into the busy new towns.

Utes and Paiutes roamed the lands on the north of the San Juan River. Some of them probably heard the explosions as the pioneers blasted their road to Bluff. These Indians’ Numic-speaking progenitors had migrated from southern California and arrived in the Great Basin perhaps as early as ad 1150. As the migrants spread across the Colorado Plateau, they subdivided into numerous groups with related languages. The Utes, ranging farther to the east, split from the Paiutes by about AD 1600, as they were occupying the Four Corners region.

The Utes in San Juan County were the westernmost of the three Southern Ute bands, and according to the United States government, they were not supposed to be there. These Weeminuche Utes had a complex relationship with their neighbors, and some helped the government terrorize the Navajos in the 1860s. Nevertheless, their turn for confinement came immediately after. In 1868 a large Southern Ute reservation was created, comprising almost the western third of Colorado, but by 1880 it was reduced to a 15-mile-wide by 110-mile-long strip of land in the southwestern corner of the state. Reservation agents tried to persuade the Utes to embrace agriculture, but many of their charges, seeing no need to change their ways, continued to roam over their traditional homelands. They pursued game and gathered food as the seasons dictated into the Blue and La Sal mountains and visited the Northern Utes on the Uinta Reservation once in a while. Sometimes they fished, and sometimes they planted corn, beans, squash, and melons in small plots. They traveled in flexible bands, usually of twenty to one hundred people, following whoever in their number commanded their respect at the time. And so ^[65] Utes who rode with leaders such as Red Jacket, Mariano, and Narraguinip were renegades from the reservation according to the United States, but in their own reckoning they were simply living as they always had. As long as the game held out and the U.S. government did not take too much of an interest in them, they could continue to do so. Although the Utes knew the government tended to take more interest in an area occupied by white settlers, the new town might offer compensating advantages.³¹

The San Juan Paiutes were the only branch of their people to extend east of the Colorado River. The government had not yet created a reservation for any Paiutes, so they were under no obligation to leave San Juan County, though they were often considered renegades by the few whites in the area. Adopting less of the horse and plains culture than the Utes, the Paiutes roamed in small, fluid family groups hunting, gathering, and occasionally farming for their existence. Both the Utes and Navajos looked down on the Paiutes but also found them useful. The Utes sometimes intermarried with the San Juan Paiutes to the point that in some bands they were almost indistinguishable and were referred to solely by one name or the other. Navajos also married Paiutes, hired them for certain tasks, and used them as a screen against the Utes during times of intense raiding. Some young Navajos had teamed with Paiutes to launch raids of their own into southern Mormon settlements in recent years. The new towns on the San Juan were, to some extent, the settlements’ counterstrike, a sort of peace offensive.

So Bluff and Montezuma were founded on the seam of these three tribes that had variously killed and cooperated with each other. The easternmost Paiutes met the ^[66] westernmost Utes and the most northern Navajos in San Juan County.³² Animosity between the Navajos and Utes lingered, though it was sometimes softened by trade and marriage. The Paiutes were often in the middle geographically and politically, mediating between the other tribes. Now the Mormons hoped to do some of the same, and the fact that they were potential trading partners made them more welcome to these earlier residents of the county.³³ But there were no guarantees any of them would get along. The Bluff settlers had heard that the two miners they had met while traveling to the San Juan were killed soon after by upset Indians in Monument Valley. Although each tribe blamed the others, the murders did little to reassure the young families moving in that their new neighborhood was entirely safe. The colonizers were occupying an area that all of their neighbors found desirable at times, and all of the groups, Mormon and Native American alike, felt some degree of entitlement to the land or the resources along the San Juan.

Other newcomers made this mix more volatile. Cowboys began riding into southeastern Utah just as the Mormons took interest in it. Individual cattlemen such as Tom Ray, “Spud” Hudson, and Preston Nutter crowded cows into the northern part of the county when they found they could corral fifteen to twenty dollars per head if they bought cattle in Utah and sold it in Colorado. And since San Juan County, the area in between, was unorganized before 1880, they could graze their cattle tax-free. Such profits soon ^[67] began to glint in the eyes of more substantial investors.³⁴ The San Juan region also attracted those attempting to avoid another kind of government attention. Outlaws found easy refuge in the area, whether working for one of the cattle outfits or holing up in one of the countless crannies of such a broken country.

A small but steady parade of miners also marched across the county, hoping to recreate the bonanzas of Colorado on this side of the border. A few others came west from Colorado hoping to homestead. None of these newcomers had any obligations toward the Indians, and the actions of any one of them could easily inflame the whole area. By 1881, United States Army troops stood ready at Fort Lewis, Colorado, southwest of Durango, to protect white settlers. Soldiers were the last people the Indians wanted in the area, and the Mormons, while grateful for the protection if necessary, were not in favor of any increased federal presence either.

The Bluff colonizers had injected themselves into a remote corner of the West, but one that was quickly getting crowded, at least by the standards of that isolated place. They had to live peacefully with their Native American neighbors for their mission and themselves to survive. But they also settled in a strategic spot from which they could command that corner of the territory against the Gentiles who were starting to come in. Vested with full religious and political authority, they continued to build the towns they hoped would fulfill both parts of their mission. ^[68]

Pillars of the Community

In early June, Silas Smith came downstream from his camp at Montezuma to further organize the settlement. On June 6, a Sunday, acting as president of the San Juan Mission, he organized the Church in Bluff. The next day, as provisional judge of the county, he presided over the second session of the county court. Church and state were never far from each other in Mormon towns because their purposes reinforced each other. Communities were constructed not just to make a living, but also to “make saints.” Building up “the waste places of Zion” occurred as much on an individual’s moral landscape as on the town’s lots and fields. Conversely, “‘making the desert bloom’ . . . was a form of religious worship.”³⁵ And so religion, politics, and the economy were always intertwined, though nominally separate. The settlers had already distributed land, set up irrigation, and resolved their early disputes under Church authority. As they strengthened the pillars of their community, their ecclesiastical leader, Jens Nielson, would also come to embody the strong relationship between spiritual and material government.

At the Sunday meeting, Jens was once again called to watch over the souls of the settlement. As chaplain of the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition, he already had responsibilities of this nature, but now they were made more formal. Jens was appointed as the presiding priest in the Bluff Branch, and James Bean Decker became the Sunday School superintendent.³⁶ The Sunday School got off to a rousing start that same day. Since they had no building, class was held under a massive cottonwood, eventually dubbed “The Swing Tree,” in Samuel Rowley’s field south of town near the river. During the meeting, young Sarah Williams recalled, “a bunch of Indians came riding up ^[69] and I wondered what would become of us, but Bishop Nielson and Bro. Jones were so calm I found there was no reason to be afraid.”³⁷ On that same eventful Sunday, Cindy Nielson was baptized by Charles Walton in the San Juan River, thus becoming the first person to receive this ordinance in the new community.³⁸

The next day at the county court, Jens continued to act as a county commissioner. Under Judge Smith, they set a tax of six mills (.6 cents) on every dollar of assessed property value.³⁹ Lemuel H. Redd, the assessor and collector, swiftly went out as the first governmental ambassador to the previously unmolested cattlemen in the county and, despite some resistance, started to assess and collect. Most of the money he brought in went to two causes: roads and schools. George Sevy was appointed supervisor of roads. The settlers needed to improve the road back to Utah and build better roads to Colorado and Moab. But there was so much to do that summer that they mostly just improved routes as they traveled them. Kumen Jones was appointed school superintendent, and classes started late that fall. France and Cindy Nielson were two of the pupils instructed in Bluff by Ida Lyman, who was paid an old cow named “Blue” for her efforts.⁴⁰ Additional offices, such as pound keeper and coroner, were added when necessary. While the county court eventually permitted alcohol to be sold, they set the fee ^[70] prohibitively high: one-year liquor licenses were $200 each, “paid in advance.”⁴¹ Better no organized drinking at all in their county, but if it did happen, at least it would pay for some roads and schools.

The government continued to develop over the summer. The county held its first regular elections in early August, and Jens was chosen as a commissioner again, as he would be in the next two elections as well.⁴² The new county court set up some law enforcement, with Sunday School superintendent Decker as constable and Platte D. Lyman as prosecuting attorney.⁴³ Charles E. Walton was appointed postmaster before the year was out, but the appointment was discontinued in the absence of any predictable post. Mail, for the time being, came by surprise, with any traveler who happened to pick it up in Utah or Colorado. Nor was it encouraging that James Lewis, the man elected as county judge, saw “nothing that pleased him” in the area and headed home to Kanab right after the election, never to return.⁴⁴

For any of this organization to do any good, the colonizers in Bluff had to make a living, and they had to do it together. The ideal of the standard Mormon settlement was to become a cooperatively independent agricultural village. Jens and his flock not only had to raise crops, but to get along with each other and work together to make their town ^[71] independent of outside influences. Part of the motivation for this was practical: past experience and persecution showed it was better to enrich each other than outsiders with their trade. Part was philosophical: in the old Jeffersonian tradition, agrarian habits made more virtuous citizens. But part was spiritual: a city of God could not be polluted with outside influences, and its citizens must be united. The scriptural warning, “If ye are not one, ye are not mine” applied to their economic enterprises as much as to their religious relations.⁴⁵

The Nielsons and the other settlers of Bluff had all tried to practice unity in their previous settlements. All of them had been part of cooperative industries, herds, or stores. Almost all had participated in united orders in the mid-1870s, such as the one the Nielsons lived under in Cedar City, in which private property was subordinated to Church authority in varying degrees.⁴⁶ The settlers had seen the theoretical advantages and practical flaws of such attempts. These ventures allowed industries to form in capital-starved lands and also aimed to bind the Saints more tightly together. But it seemed almost impossible to hold these concerns together against centrifugal self-interest. Unlike the colonizers sent to the Little Colorado in Arizona in 1876, those going to Bluff were not supposed to set up a united order at the settlement’s inception.⁴⁷ The impulse toward organizing ^[72] new united orders dwindled with the passing of the general depression of the 1870s and the death of Brigham Young in 1877. So Jens and the others were not going to cooperate to that extent. But all of them had lived in Utah long enough to be permeated with the communal ideals of independence, home manufactures, and cooperation. Although some of the particular communal experiments, such as the united orders, had waxed and waned, the principles themselves still reigned.⁴⁸ The practical and spiritual advantages of economic cooperation were, in the words of John Taylor, “obvious to all those who desire to serve the Lord.”⁴⁹ But that last qualification was an important one: nature, neighbors, or circumstance might destroy them from without, but they were as likely to destroy themselves from within.

Nature began to say something in June. Soon after the first water came into the ditch it went right out. There was so little fall from the head of the ditch to the town that it was hard to keep the stream flowing. Jens marshaled his workforce again, and the men flung themselves into the task of building a dam at the head to raise the water level in the ditch. Suddenly high waters washed the dam downstream, and the same fate awaited the two other dams they tried to build soon after. So they extended the ditch another half-mile upstream to increase its overall decline, and the same troubles bedeviled them there. But late June surges brought enough water to their fields to allow the tired diggers and those working on the dam to spend their labors elsewhere for the moment.^{50 [73]}

These problems caused many to suspect that they would not be able to raise enough crops to feed themselves, and there were many products they could not yet produce themselves. Like it or not, they would have to trade for these things somewhere else. And so once their seed was in the ground, many men exported the only commodities they had: their labor, wagons, and teams, to the nearest source of employment in Colorado. This was a compromise with the ideal of independence, but without the compromise there would be no community, ideal or not. And it was not an unusual one: Cedar City had regularly sold its surpluses to mining camps in Nevada and western Utah.⁵¹ So the older Nielson boys, Joe and Jens Jr., took teams and went with the others. For many of the younger men like them, it was the first time they would live outside of a mostly Mormon place for very long, and there was concern among themselves and their parents about how they would behave.

Those who went to Colorado soon reported that they did well for themselves. Many traveled all the way to Alamosa to work on an extension of the railroad. Platte Lyman made from five to thirteen dollars per day, a windfall wage, cutting and hauling railroad ties. He also did some scouting along with Silas Smith for more promising settlement sites in Colorado and New Mexico.⁵² President Smith, the man who was largely responsible for the fact that settlers were trying to survive on the San Juan, became convinced that Manassa, Colorado, was a more desirable place to live.

Events in Bluff, meanwhile, did little to recommend that anyone should stay there. ^[74] Jens Nielson was once again responsible for the town as the presiding religious and civil authority. With the luxury of two older sons to send to Colorado, he was one of a handful of men who could stay all summer to look out for the welfare of the families there. The intentions of Bluff’s neighbors were still unclear. Each day saw “fervent prayers morning and evening, that the Indians would be peaceably disposed towards the defenseless town.”⁵³ But Jens also had more immediate problems to address. As the heat rose late in July the level of the San Juan fell, and the water abandoned the irrigation ditch. Since there were only about ten men left to try to lower the ditch or raise the water, most crops dried up, and more discouraged settlers gave up and left.⁵⁴ The leader of the Bluff Branch was rapidly losing any members over whom to preside.

Jens also had plenty to concern him in his own home, or the wagon boxes in which his family still lived. Kirsten had been stricken with an illness that left her in bed most of the time, unable on most days to raise her arms to her head.⁵⁵ The family still had no dairy cows and had to get along without milk.⁵⁶ With his two oldest sons gone, Jens had to rely on the help of sixteen-year-old Margaret and eleven-year-old Francis to care for Kirsten and the two younger children, as well as look after the family’s stock, gardens, and fields. Despite his crooked feet, Jens liked to work hard. “He limped heavily wherever he went, yet he went nonetheless on that account; he went early and late. He ^[75] liked to rise in the gray dawn and get impressions from crossing the fields before the sun came out.”⁵⁷ Because he stayed at it all summer, and perhaps due to his experience and the location of his fields, the canny old Dane was the only Bluff farmer to bring in a crop of wheat that fall.⁵⁸

The rest of the farms did not fare as well. The town’s products included some vegetables, corn, and sorghum cane, but due to the difficulties with the ditch and the long absence of most men, Bluff was not able to raise a general crop.⁵⁹ Those who suspected that the place might not support them were confirmed in that belief. If more men had stayed in Bluff, they might have been able to save the crops, but that was too risky. Their labor in Colorado undoubtedly bought the supplies that would allow the colony to survive. When Jens Peter and Joe returned from Colorado, they brought important provisions for the family. Flour was very expensive, at nine dollars per hundred pounds, but they were able to bring enough. Their wagons were also loaded with clothes, hay for the horses, and even some dried fruit and sugar. These, with what their family had grown, would hopefully see them through the winter.

Fortunately, some help came as the summer waned. Silas Smith was able to disburse some of the five thousand dollars the legislature appropriated for building the road into the San ^[76] Juan, but not as much of it as the settlers would have liked.⁶⁰ By early September, William Hyde, a forty-eight-year-old merchant, arrived from Salt Lake City. He had been asked to come by President John Taylor, and he set up a trading post in Montezuma. When he looked the land over, though, he was not too eager about it: despite “a rich sandy soil that will grow almost anything,” the problem was “it will take a good deal of labor to get the water out of the river.” Altogether, Hyde judged, “I do not think I want any of it; it is too hard a country and too hard to get at.” But the trader in him was enticed by some items shown to him by a Navajo, “some of the finest blankets I ever saw.”⁶¹

Two Apostles, Erastus Snow and Brigham Young Jr., along with Marion Lyman, also arrived in early September to survey the settlement. They held a number of meetings, still in the open air, and gave advice and encouragement to the settlers. They were very impressed with the soil and the climate, which were “all that could be desired.” They congratulated the Saints on their road- and community-building efforts so far. Even though the Indians appeared to be friendly during the first summer, the Apostles advised the settlers to stay with the tradition of building their homes around a hollow square to form a fort. “Let no man think of scattering or locating families upon farms or claims isolated from their brethren, or of abandoning the posts to which they have been appointed, or to go at the beck and call of unauthorized individuals in search of other locations not yet appointed or consecrated for the gathering of saints.” Working in Colorado was allowed, as long as it was done under the direction of the presiding ^[77] authorities of the mission. They also cautioned against land speculation. Everyone who improved their lot was entitled to compensation for that, but land itself should be apportioned by Church authorities, with ownership given to those actually present. This counsel highlighted the change in the town since spring. At the start, settlers had argued over the privilege of occupying the land; now the future of their vacant lots had to be determined.

The Apostles confirmed what the colonists had learned the previous summer: “Your chief difficulty will be how to arrange your water sects, flood gates, wing dams or other contrivances for controlling the waters of this fluctuating stream, but experience gained by a few failures will enable you to accomplish it. Let none be discouraged or abandon the enterprise.” They called back all the absent members of the mission and urged them to direct their primary efforts toward the water problem the upcoming winter. The Apostles envisioned “flourishing towns and villages” along the San Juan and believed that after some initial success, there would be five hundred Saints there instead of fifty. If the settlers followed their instructions, the Apostles blessed them with “peace and prosperity, fellowship and love.”⁶² If any of the settlers hoped the Apostles would release them from such a difficult mission they were disappointed. Still, their efforts of the first summer received marginally passing marks from the Church authorities, and the vision and blessing of the Apostles were inspiring to the isolated Saints.

Bishop of the Bluff Ward

Neither man might have realized it at the time, but Erastus Snow was doubly ^[78] responsible for Jens Nielson being in Bluff. He was the one who had pioneered the Danish Mission thirty years earlier that had brought the Nielsons out from among their neighbors. And as the “Apostle of the South,” Snow spearheaded the settlement on the San Juan and called many of the people to populate it. Now he was about to make sure Jens Nielson would stay here for a long time.

The Apostles finished the religious organization of the settlement. Silas Smith and his sons were set to move to Manassa, Colorado, which was still considered part of the San Juan Mission, soon after the conference. Platte Lyman, as first counselor, would be in charge of Bluff and Montezuma in the absence of President Smith. The Bluff Branch was made into a ward, and to nobody’s surprise, Jens Nielson was ordained bishop. George Sevy was appointed first counselor, and Bishop Nielson’s son-in-law, Kumen Jones, was made his second counselor.⁶³ Zachariah Decker Jr. was to preside over the Montezuma Branch.

As shepherd of the Bluff Ward, Bishop Nielson would have a lot to do. The duties of a bishop in the late 1800s were both spiritual and temporal. Presiding Bishop of the Church Edward Hunter had pointed out in 1861 that there were even more difficulties in being a country bishop than a city bishop. In the country, a bishop became the authority in many areas. In addition to being theologian and statesman, he was a “pastor, constable, judge, arbitrator, foreman, and mayor.”⁶⁴ While Bishop Nielson’s ward was smaller than average, its mission and situation made its concerns larger, as the ^[79] land, ditch, and Indian questions had already made manifest.⁶⁵

A good illustration of the required mix of spirituality and practical sense was the principle of tithing. As a spiritual requirement, Saints were commanded to give the Church 10 percent of their increase. This was received and managed by the bishop. But in cash-poor Utah, cash tithing amounted to only about 20 percent of the total in 1880.⁶⁶ A small amount of the rest came in labor, but the great majority was in kind. This meant that loads of hay, corn, and potatoes, as well as cows, horses, and pigs were regularly being dropped off to the bishop. He had to have a storehouse and yard in which to keep them, but he also had to be able to manage them well so they did not rot, deteriorate, die, or get stolen. Furthermore, he had to meet with each member for an end end-of-year tithing settlement where the bishop and the Church member computed how much that member had raised or earned and how much he had tithed. Finally, the bishop was responsible for allocating tithing resources to local purposes, the poor, or Indians, or converting the items to cash to be forwarded to Church headquarters. This required a wide range of abilities. Bishop Nielson seemed to possess the range required. His age and experience helped. As Albert Lyman appraised him later, “It is the fine balance of the temporal and spiritual that makes the well-balanced man. For quality of balance, Jens Nielson was one among thousands. He was old enough to be the father of these other ^[80] men, and they accepted him as such.”⁶⁷

Bishop Nielson was also responsible for carrying into effect “the program of the church.” In 1880 this meant an array of meetings and organizations. Every Sunday the Saints continued to assemble for Sunday School in the morning, and Superintendent Decker led them in songs such as “Children Haste to Sunday School, Nor Tarry on the Way.”⁶⁸ Although they could not get the Juvenile Instructor magazine regularly in Bluff, classes were still conducted, complete with recitations, catechisms, and examinations.⁶⁹ They also held a sacrament service in the afternoon, with Bishop Nielson announcing in his musical intonation, “Men you vill come to order; ve vill commence our meeting.” The bishop also closed the meeting in his Danish-laced English, endorsing what the speakers said and adding his own comments, sometimes forgetting himself in his eagerness and slipping entirely into the mother tongue. During his thirty years in the Church, he had built up great enthusiasm for it, and this vigor was the defining characteristic of his talks, “the fervor of his words more winning than his fluency.”⁷⁰ On the first Thursday of each month, Saints were expected to fast and contribute to the poor the equivalent of what they would have eaten. In the early afternoon a fast meeting was held, in which farmers and their wives were expected to come in from their fields and give testimony of the truth of the gospel as they had witnessed it in their lives. From the start, these essential ^[81] Church meetings went well. The first Sunday after Platte Lyman returned from Colorado, he felt that “there is a good spirit in this ward.” Later, he remarked that the Sunday meetings “are generally well attended and always interesting.”⁷¹

But there were other elements in the program of the Church, most of recent invention, which also needed to be carried out. Back in the 1850s and 1860s, the Church gave parents little institutional support in raising their children aside from Sunday School, which was not always held, and sacrament and fast meetings, which children rarely attended. As complaints came to Salt Lake City in the 1860s and 1870s of the bad behavior of “unchurched youth,” Church leaders devised new programs to support parents in the difficult job of proper breeding. “Retrenchment” associations to root the youth in basic gospel principles commenced, then faltered in the early 1870s. The youth program was retrenched itself into the Young Women’s and Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations, with weekly meetings in which the youth studied “history, literature, debate, and elocution” as well as doctrine.⁷² Often they had readings and recitations and performed musical numbers or dramas. The YWMIA and YMMIA also held one meeting together each month, nicknamed the “conjoint.” Bluff started a YMMIA in late 1880, with Charles E. Walton as its president, but did not yet start the young women’s ^[82] organization. By October, however, a branch of the Relief Society, the Church’s women’s organization, was up and running under President Jane McKechnie Walton.⁷³ According to Church instructions in the late 1870s, young men were also expected to be ordained deacons in the Aaronic Priesthood, help keep the church clean, and, as mice guarding the cheese, keep order during meetings.⁷⁴ Bishops were expected to hold weekly Aaronic Priesthood meetings with the boys, though these often adjourned from April through August. A Primary organization for children had been started by the Church in 1878, and even though the Bluff Ward was not lacking children, the bishop did not yet organize this group.

Still, the organizations that did exist made for an endless round of meetings through the week and a difficult schedule for a struggling farming community to keep up. But led by their bishop, the ward members did their best to meet the institutional expectations the Church had for them. As a result, the ward became the focus of activities in the community. It seems that one organization or another was always holding some sort of party, performance, or dance. YMMIA president Charles Walton distinguished himself as a protean actor in these productions: “comedian, tragedian, whatever else was demanded.” He still fiddled at the dances, and his bugle also called the Saints to holidays, meetings, and other special occasions. Samuel “Ginger” Cox (so designated for the color of his beard) could fiddle along with Walton and sing. The Perkins brothers, Hyrum and Ben, crooned old Welsh ballads, sometimes with Kumen Jones, such as “Pull for the Shore,” “Nora Darling,” and “Will You Love Me When I’m ^[83] Old?”⁷⁵

In between all these meetings and activities, families added their houses to the fort. Using a pattern in place since at least 1846 when the Saints were stationed in Winter Quarters, they arranged their homes close together in the shape of a square, with about twenty-four rods, or almost four hundred feet, per side. A picket wall filled the spaces between the homes. Since their arrival, they had lived out of their wagon boxes “for about another six months before our first log cabins were ready to occupy,” as Kumen Jones remembered.⁷⁶ To build these cabins, they used the only wood they had, ram’s horn cottonwood logs, saddle-notched at the corners. The plentiful gaps were chinked and daubed with wood chips and mud, but the result was less than perfect. “My home is made of cotton wood logs crooked as can possibly be used,” a fourteen-year-old Bluff boy candidly observed.⁷⁷ The Bluff women and children, who spent far more time in these homes than the men, must have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, many felt like Kumen Jones, who exclaimed, “But oh, what a luxury to get out of the blazing sun under a cool dirt roof, even if the floor was dirt, too.”⁷⁸ But many of the homes had doorways without doors, and windows without glass that first year. Women sprinkled the floors to persuade the dust to settle, and when it rained the permissive roofs did it for them. Residents quickly learned that most San Juan storms came swiftly and furiously. Whatever combination of willow boughs, dirt, sand, and weeds they tried, these roofs ^[84] “never turned away the rain, which dropped dismally long after the sky cleared.”⁷⁹ And when the wind blew, nothing could keep the sand out, either. It found its way into everyone’s clothing, bedding, and food. For Kirsten Nielson, especially as she was recuperating from her illness, it was a great relief to move out of her wagon. But the rude log cabin she moved herself and her children into was not much compared with the brick home she had occupied in Cedar. Still, she and everyone else kept house as well as they could in such homes, all easily within view of each other in the fort block.

Finally in the fall, they put together the largest building in the fort: the schoolhouse. The rectangular building was assembled out of the same sort of cottonwood logs they used on their homes, with coal-oil lamps mounted on the wall and most likely a fireplace on one end. It was not only a schoolhouse but, like the one Jens helped build in Panguitch, also held church meetings, dramas, programs, dances, and every other type of public gathering that happened in Bluff.⁸⁰

As they put the finishing touches on the meeting hall and gathered there, the survivors in Bluff were pleased, if not entirely satisfied, with their efforts so far. In six months they had turned a thread of river bottom into their home, complete with government, church, and school. They had established a village similar in form, though smaller and cruder in many ways, to those they had left. They had sacrificed the world not just in the general way all Mormons were supposed to do, but also in the form of the ^[85] very specific comforts in the older settlements. They labored together on their ditch and celebrated together during holidays and public events. They set themselves up as an example to the Indians and Gentiles in a previously unorganized county. And while they were still on shaky economic ground, they had the consolation of knowing they were being true to their faith, that they were different not only from the Indians and the Gentiles, but from those Saints who had pulled out of the mission.⁸¹ Yet all was not well. In spite of the advice of the Apostles, some continued to become discouraged and abandon the enterprise. William Hutchings, the man who gave the town its name, packed up his family and left in late September, “disgusted with this country.”⁸²

Winter

Platte Lyman accompanied the Hutchingses out in September on his way to Oak City to retrieve his family, and Bishop Nielson left in November to visit the portion of his family residing in Cedar City. The trip was a difficult one for Jens, for more reasons than the rough ride back. He left his children in Bluff with an ailing mother, a rude house, and probably enough food to survive the winter, though not comfortably. The Indians had started raiding Bluff’s livestock as the weather got colder, and the bishop could not ^[86] be certain they would allow the settlement to survive, nor could he be certain that his little ward in Bluff would not get smaller before he got back. Plus he had responsibilities as a county selectman. But two of his wives and four of his children were still in Cedar City, and he had not seen them in almost a year. As Katrine wrote to her husband, the children “would like to know why their father doesn’t stay with us all the time.”⁸³ And so he went. The trip back over the Hole-in-the-Rock road, while by no means easy, was at least faster than the first time he had traveled it.⁸⁴ Jens covered the distance between Bluff and Escalante in about two weeks on this trip, as opposed to five months the first time.⁸⁵

When Jens arrived at the familiar home in Cedar perhaps a week later, he was greeted by Elsie and Julia, who was now eighteen years old, as well as Katrine and her three young children: Annetta, five; Uriah, three; and Freeman, a couple of months past his first birthday. Katrine, a notably good cook, most likely pulled out all the stops. On his first Sunday back, Jens occupied the entire sacrament meeting giving a “very encouraging” report about the settlement on the San Juan and urging all those who had been called “to respond cheerfully.”⁸⁶ Jens renewed old acquaintances in Cedar and looked after his ^[87] household there in relative comfort until the next spring.

Whatever mail got through brought mixed news from Bluff. Kirsten’s health continued to improve through the winter, and the family had enough provisions. But a skunk got into the honey, meaning they had to eat their regular doses of corn mush unsweetened. Christmas was more bitter. No one in town had very much, but they had dances to celebrate the season, and on Christmas Eve the hopeful children hung up their stockings. Kirsten tried to explain to Caroline and Cindy, who were six and eight, that Santa Claus would not be able to find them clear out in Bluff. But the girls kept their faith, and after the others turned in they tacked their stockings to their bedposts. When they woke up eagerly in the morning, they found those stockings as forlorn as they had left them the night before. Kirsten was just as heartbroken as the girls, and she promised Santa would always find them in the future.⁸⁷ In the meantime, Indian raiders found the town’s livestock regularly during the new year. There was also quite a bit of excitement in January, when Mr. Critchlow, a construction engineer, passed through Bluff with a team of six men. They were scouting a railroad route from Colorado to St. George. The dream lasted until the first day of spring, when Critchlow and crew returned, “having satisfied themselves that there is no chance for a railroad from here west.”⁸⁸

As Jens was preparing to return in early April, he read a report about Bluff, courtesy of the Deseret News. Platte Lyman had written Erastus Snow at the end of February, and the Apostle forwarded the report to the newspaper. Bishop Nielson had to be encouraged by ^[88] what he read. More families had come in and more homes were built, which were filling the perimeter of the fort. The weather had been fine. Work went forward on the ditch, and prospects looked good for a crop. But most importantly, “all is peace with the Indians on both sides of the river, although we have seen very little of them of late.” But Jens might have been alarmed when he read the next line: “We are herding our horses all the time, however, as a precautionary measure.”⁸⁹

In the early spring Jens prepared to return to Bluff. In his last sacrament meeting in the Cedar Ward, he urged those who hesitated to depart for the San Juan to be true to their calling. Then he asked for the faith and prayers of all the Saints in Cedar “in behalf of himself and his little flock.”⁹⁰ On April 12, he said goodbye to Trena and their three young children. Elsie and Julia came with him to relocate in Bluff. Elsie brought mulberry shoots to plant so she could continue to feed the silkworms the Relief Society encouraged Mormon women to raise in the 1860s.⁹¹ She may have also brought some of her beehives so they could produce their own honey for the people—and skunks—in Bluff.⁹²

Erastus Snow did his own advertising in the Deseret News. “Ho! for San Juan,” read a headline on April 13, the day after Jens left Cedar City. Any Saints “with means and muscle” should meet Bishop Nielson in Escalante by April 16 so he could accompany ^[89] them to their settlement. The resources of the region “will abundantly reward persevering industry and labor.”⁹³ Nephi and Annie Bailey and their family went with Bishop Nielson from Cedar, and three more families joined them on the way.⁹⁴ Someone among them, possibly the bishop, brought a wagonload of grape cuttings and young apple trees.

On his way back, Jens found that the Hole-in-the-Rock road, carved with so much toil the year before, was already obsolete. An easier route had been scouted and built by George Sevy and men from Escalante, and Charles Hall had moved his ferry upstream. The bishop’s party rejoined the old road on the other side of the river, four or five miles beyond Lake Pagharit. The Hole in the Rock, Cottonwood Hill, and Grey Mesa were no longer obstacles travelers needed to worry about, but most of the road on the east side of the Colorado was still in use. According to the railroad man Critchlow, the new road was a little longer and “very little if any better” than the old.⁹⁵

1881: Failure

Back to Bluff

On Monday, May 9, well before Jens got to Bluff, he was surprised to see Joe coming up the road to meet him. His son had things to tell him: to start with, he was shot at a few days before. As they headed home, Joe had plenty of time to fill his father in on the details, though these may have unsettled the new recruits traveling with them. It ^[90] seems Platte Lyman’s letter in the Deseret News was overly optimistic about the Indians. They raided Bluff’s livestock regularly during the winter, finding in Bluff, it seems, a new source of subsistence during the lean cold season.⁹⁶ That was why the settlers herded and guarded the horses all the time. Joe was on watch at the Bluff Bench northeast of town on May 5 when a band of Indians cutting out horses shot at him. Joe rode quickly back to the settlement and burst into the fast meeting then in progress. The meeting swiftly adjourned as eight or nine of the men got on their horses and headed out to cut off the thieves, and a few more followed soon after. Joe was one of them, and they caught up with about ninety Indians, thirty of them men, near Boiling Springs in Butler Wash. Among the 150 or so horses the Indians had, the Bluff posse found eleven that belonged to their herd, two of them stolen last year. When the men expressed the intent to take their horses back, some of the Indians pulled their guns, and so did the Bluff gang; they were a trigger pull away from war. But then one of the Indians mentioned something about “Mormons,” and the others quieted down and put away their guns. The Mormons led away their horses and returned to town, their mission barely intact. They put a heavy guard on their horse herd that night, and the next morning a group returned early to the Indian camp. The Indians were generally friendly, but some were quickly upset when two more horses were reclaimed. As the Bluff men looked over the herd, they noticed close to forty branded horses. The Indians also had a lot of cash, “to which they assigned very little value.” They must have raided a ranch somewhere, but despite seeing this, the villagers went home, and the ^[91] Indians rode on.⁹⁷

After the headlines, Joe may have also reported to Jens the other news. William Hyde, who still had not reconciled himself to the idea of digging a ditch, had found a solution for their water problems. He put in a water wheel at Montezuma. It cost him four hundred dollars, but it was sixteen feet in diameter and could hoist more than twenty-three thousand gallons an hour out of the river, giving brothers Hyde and Haskell more water than they could use. Brothers Davis, Cox, and Harriman installed wheels there also.⁹⁸ But all was not well in Montezuma, despite the miraculous water wheels. There was a lot of contention among the few families there, and they were no longer holding regular church meetings. To make matters worse, the Harrimans lost their two-year-old daughter to illness, despite the best efforts of Sister Haskell, the most skillful nurse in the settlement.⁹⁹

Unfortunately, Bluff did not have the same solid rock banks as Montezuma, so the ^[92] wonder of water wheels was not an option for them. Instead, they formed a ditch committee in mid-January and all the available men dug, scraped, and hacked away at it through February and March. On April 2 the river rose seventeen inches, filling the ditch with water and the town with joy. But this quickly fled as swells of water broke through the banks in several places. By April 11, the river fell, taking all of the water back out again, and by April 23, they had played so much of this cat and mouse with the ditch that a crew had had to be kept on the job ever since, to make perpetual repairs to it.¹⁰⁰

Aside from the unenviable labor on the ditch, Jens also missed the most festive occasion of the past few months. On April 6, the townspeople celebrated the first anniversary of their arrival. They held an all-day celebration just like they used to have on big occasions in Cedar City and other previous homes. A marshal and chaplain for the day were chosen. There was a meeting with speeches and songs in the morning, then a children’s party in the afternoon, followed by a dance for adults in the evening.¹⁰¹ Although he missed the party, Bishop Nielson returned with reinforcements for the second campaign.

More Disappointment

Prospects for the second year, though tempered by the hard experience of the first, looked promising. In addition to the four new families that came in with the bishop, five more had already arrived. And June brought still another family: John Allan settled in ^[93] Montezuma. Allan was a Scot with a “magnificent beard,” and, at age 57, he was nearly the contemporary of Bishop Nielson. He brought both of his wives, Agnes and Jane, and five of his children. Bishop Nielson decided soon after his return that the ward could not get along anymore without a Primary organization to teach its children. At least a dozen had been born since the previous summer, and about the same number came in with the new families. Sister Paulina Pace was put in charge of making the program work with this rambunctious swarm.¹⁰²

By the end of the month, Jens found out how narrowly his own son and the whole town had avoided disaster. The Indians who shot at Joe and almost opened fire on the town’s posse had killed three cowboys at Paiute Springs before they arrived at Bluff and ten more men a few weeks later in a battle at Pinhook Draw, on the northwestern slopes of the La Sals.¹⁰³ If violence had erupted near Bluff, it would have cost not only lives, but the livelihood of the mission.

That summer repeated the pattern of the year before. After planting crops in June, Joe and Jens Peter, along with many other men from Bluff, freighted for the railroad in Colorado. Once again they made good money with their teams and wagons and reminded themselves why they were not Gentiles. Amargo, New Mexico, was “the wickedest and most lawless town” there ever was, according to Platte Lyman. The ^[94] freighters stayed in Colorado into the fall, and some remained until December before buying supplies and heading home.¹⁰⁴ With President Lyman among them, Jens Nielson was again the leading authority in Bluff all summer.

As such, Bishop Nielson supervised the season’s struggle with the ditch. The remaining men installed a headgate to try to tame the heavy floods that washed out the top of the ditch. But the river won, washing out the gate and sending it “on a voyage to the Gulf of California.” Hans Bayles and others tried desperately to lasso it, but their ropes caught nothing but water. This year’s failure was more discouraging than the last. This time they had organized, started early, and devoted months of labor to the effort, but the river defeated them and their crops again. They were still a “dry camp” without a reliable source of irrigation and dependent on wages and supplies from the Gentiles in Colorado.¹⁰⁵

In early fall, two cowboys came into town looking to trade horses. A short time after, some of the town’s horses were missing. Bishop Nielson determined that three men should trail the cowboys toward the Utah settlements, where the thieves’ trail pointed. Lem Redd, Hyrum Perkins, and Joseph Lyman were chosen. Days later, Perkins came back with a desperate report. They had recovered their property, but “Jody” Lyman had been shot while ferrying the animals back over the Colorado, and a bone in his leg was shattered. Lemuel Redd was bringing him in as best he could, but Jody was in agony, and they could not move very fast. The bishop, Jody’s elderly mother, and some others ^[95] quickly left Bluff to bring him in. By the time they arrived, Jody had improved, thanks to a prickly-pear poultice made by Baililii, a passing Navajo. They brought the wounded man home, and his brother Platte probed his wound daily to remove bone fragments. The men who shot him were never captured, though one of them was reported down the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry with the provisions of the other. Bluff’s settlers found they were not immune to the depredations of others in this wild country. And the decisions of the bishop, even in nonreligious matters, could carry grave consequences. Jody Lyman spent the next two months in bed, and then his brothers carted him back to Oak City.¹⁰⁶

Joe Nielson also had his life changed in the fall. Somehow between the freighting and digging, he and the schoolteacher, Ida Evelyn Lyman, got to know each other well enough to decide to get married. They set out on the long trip to the nearest temple, in St. George, where they were married on November 30, 1881. The newlyweds stayed the rest of the winter back in the older settlements, probably spending some of the time with Katrine in Cedar City.

But Jens did not go back that winter.¹⁰⁷ There was too much to do in Bluff after the second year of failed crops, and his concerns were shared in the top levels of Church leadership. By November, Church President John Taylor was worried about the mission. Hearing that it could continue only if the men worked among the Gentiles, President ^[96] Taylor remarked that the mission was not so urgent that the people should be required to stay if it were not a good place to live.¹⁰⁸ To acquire more information and evaluate the situation, he sent a representative to the colony. Many of Bluff’s residents had known Edward Dalton in Parowan; Jens had served with him for at least eight years on the Parowan Stake High Council. The sixty-four-year-old Dalton arrived in early December and found the Saints in Bluff once again in disharmony.

Another Ditch

It was the ditch again. The four-mile-long channel they had labored to excavate for two years was useless. There was too little fall to it, too much sand in it, and the headgate was still traveling south somewhere. There was only one solution, no matter how unappealing: they needed to make a new ditch, with its head a couple of miles higher up the river. This alone was daunting to those who had exhausted themselves so often on the first ditch. But there were two additional problems.

The first was technical. In making the first ditch, the Saints had used all the bottomland dirt along a hundred-rod stretch, more than a quarter mile of riverside. Over that length, they were right up against the smooth rock swept by the river. How could they dig if there was no dirt? Unwilling to give up the mission, Bishop Nielson and others determined to manufacture an artificial bank. They would construct log cubes, similar to the walls of a cabin, with one end open. One of these “cribs” would be placed in the river and filled with rocks and brush to anchor it against the current. Then another would be splashed next to it and so on, crib by crib creating a jetty that would hold the water close to ^[97] the bank. But with less than twenty men in town when the idea was conceived, it required a disheartening amount of work; they would require roughly one hundred cribs. Nevertheless, those available set to it in late November, and Orren Kelsey, who had arrived earlier in the year with his large family, distinguished himself in constructing cribs.¹⁰⁹

The second problem was financial, and by arousing settlers’ feelings against each other it threatened the community as much as the failure to bring water. Residents had earned ownership in the first ditch based on how much labor and money they contributed to it. Over two years, many had toiled their way to considerable equity in the project. But now that it was abandoned was their stock worthless as well? Some of those who had worked the most understandably felt it was not; they should be given credits in the new ditch to match their labor on the old. Others were vehemently opposed. The old ditch was a useless item, and any credit carried over to the new ditch would only diminish the amount of work the shareholders would desire to do. Edward Dalton arrived in the middle of this controversy.

The first impression the would-be mediator made was not a good one. Brother Dalton presented a letter from President Taylor, advising the Saints in Bluff to fort up and take small pieces of land, “all of which we had done more than a year ago.”¹¹⁰ It seemed that the leadership of the Church, while not unsympathetic, was underinformed. Dalton toured the old ditch and was immediately impressed by the amount of work it would take to construct the new one. He heard arguments on both sides of the credit question. And ^[98] then he proceeded to solve the dispute in the regular Mormon way—with a meeting.

On Saturday morning, December 10, ward members gathered in the schoolhouse. There was much animated discussion, as both sides aired themselves. Then the visiting authority, present on behalf of the President of the Church, spoke in favor of throwing out all the old credits. After this they held a vote, unanimously affirming the resolution: they would get credit only for work done on the new ditch since November. His job done, Brother Dalton departed. To recommit to each other and the crushing burden before them, some were rebaptized in the afternoon.¹¹¹ They continued their work on the ditch, starting three months earlier than the year before. The division and hard feelings had, for the time being, been defeated by the more important priorities of unity and obedience to Church authority.¹¹²

The great problem was solved just in time to allow the Nielsons and their neighbors to enjoy the festive Christmas season in Bluff. Work on the ditch was suspended for the last week of the year to haul wood, look after the stock, kill some beef, and do plenty of dancing. Santa Claus did find the Nielsons this time, at least in the form of older brother Jens Peter, who made sure he brought some dolls back from Colorado for the girls. ^[99]