5 Competition, 1887–1890

Besieged

“The Raid”

Congress, reflecting the moral outrage of its constituents and utilizing the coercive methods it had recently used during Reconstruction, increased its pressure on polygamy. This was exactly what Jens Nielson feared when he advised his daughter Mary to permit Kumen Jones to take a second wife. In 1882, the Edmunds Act amended the Morrill Act of 1862 to make it easier to punish those practicing plural marriage in United States territories. While convicted polygamists could still be fined five hundred dollars and imprisoned for five years, now the new crime of “unlawful cohabitation” was created. Adults found living together without a legal marriage could be fined three hundred dollars and imprisoned for six months. Cohabitation was much easier to prove than bigamy given the difficulty of finding marriage records and the common-law precedent barring spouses from testifying against each other. Furthermore, men and women living in polygamous marriages were declared ineligible to hold elected or appointed government office.¹ Some plural families started colonizing in northern Mexico and southern Canada to avoid ^[185] this law. The new restrictions also kept Jens Nielson from running for reelection as a county selectman in 1883, a job he had grown accustomed to holding in Cedar City and Bluff.

As 1887 dawned, more alarming news came from Washington, D.C. On February 18, President Grover Cleveland allowed the Edmunds-Tucker Act to become law without his signature. This congressional hammer threatened to break Mormonism on the anvil of what its members believed was God’s law. All Church property over fifty thousand dollars was confiscated, women’s suffrage was repealed, common-law strictures forbidding wives to testify against husbands were waived, public records of marriages were required, and territorial probate judges had to be appointed by the President of the United States instead of elected locally.²

In the wake of these acts, the First Presidency counseled the men of the Church to live with only one wife under the same roof. Bishop Nielson followed this counsel in Bluff, building a separate two-room log home for Elsie by the time she arrived again in 1885.³ But federal marshals actively pursued those they suspected of unlawful cohabitation. As more Church brethren were hauled into court, the shock waves rippled out to Bluff. The Saints there subscribed forty dollars to the legal defense fund for ^[186] fellow Church members defending themselves against these charges.⁴

As “the raid” on polygamy became more severe, the news reported to Bluff became more alarming. The President of the Church, John Taylor, operated out of hiding. When Francis Hammond tried to see him in Salt Lake City in mid-1885, the visitor had to call at the tithing office and leave a note. The next day he returned for the answer, which arranged a personal visit with President Taylor in a private residence more than two miles outside Salt Lake City.⁵ Many other Church authorities went into “exile” to avoid the marshals. The next year, the Saints in Bluff read with great suspense about the conviction of Elder Lorenzo Snow and the arrest of the First Counselor to President Taylor, George Q. Cannon, on a train in Nevada. Old friends from Iron County, such as Stake President Henry Lunt and Bishop Christopher Arthur took to the mountains. More alarming still, young Edward Dalton, the son of their visitor in 1881, was shot and killed by a federal marshal in Parowan who was trying to arrest him for unlawful cohabitation. To the Saints it was “cold-blooded murder,” and they were further outraged when the shooter was not convicted. “Thus is the law and order trampled upon.”⁶

Bluff’s residents had to worry about more than just distant news, however. Although they lived in a remote corner of the territory, they grew more suspicious of strangers. Cowboys “might be U.S. Marshals in disguise.” Two prospectors who rolled ^[187] into town with a cart and horse were just as suspect.⁷ Bluff’s ward members were instructed to report all strangers to their Church leaders and told “not to know too much about other people’s business.”⁸ But no real marshals appeared. Refugees “on the underground” from the marshals did appear with increasing frequency in Bluff. The First Presidency, from their own places of hiding, confirmed they felt Bluff “a most excellent hiding place” for these purposes, and these political fugitives were the most consistent source of population growth for the town in the late 1880s.⁹ Some of these “cohabs” on the “u.g.” came from a distance, such as Winslow Farr, who arrived with President Hammond from northern Utah in 1885. More local men, such as Hiram Taylor of Moab and Bishop Burnham of the town named after him in New Mexico, also came through from time to time. And the raid persuaded some old friends to visit Bluff in their difficulties. Herman Daggett Bayles, both the father of Bluff resident Hanson Bayles and the husband of Kirsten Nielson’s younger sister in Parowan, lived out his final year as an exile in Bluff. Platte Lyman was persuaded by the presence of marshals and a vigilant apostate across the street from him in Scipio to start spending some of his time running cattle in the more obscure parts of San Juan County again.¹⁰ The raid made those in Bluff feel even more distinct from their neighbors. On a visit to Colorado, Francis Hammond ^[188] found, “The sentiment out here is that if we would give up polygamy all would be peace with us and the world; we know quite differently from that.”¹¹ Such persecution was instead a sign of their peculiarity. “The raid is upon us because God desires to prove us,” President Hammond told the members of the Bluff Ward. In fact, he “was pleased that the devil was at work. It was a good sign to the saints.”¹² More “good signs” were on the way.

Removal

On April 7, 1886, the evening mail “brought the news that San Juan County is about to be turned into an Indian reservation.”¹³ This was not the first that San Juan colonists had heard about this possibility. As soon as the Weeminuche Utes went onto their reservation in the southwestern corner of Colorado in the 1870s, many found it unsatisfactory. Its long, rectangular shape made it both inconvenient for the Indians to travel to the agency and inviting for outside cowboys and miners to intrude upon. The Utes became increasingly uncertain of their future in Colorado, whose politicians desired to resolve the issue in a way that would benefit their enterprising constituents. Homesteads along the La Plata River granted in severalty to the Indians were rejected as a solution in the early 1880s, and the Coloradans continued to search for other answers. Some spoke of moving these southern Utes to the Uintah Reservation in Utah as they had ^[189] done with the northern Utes after the Meeker massacre in 1879, but the Utes in question quickly denied any desire to go there. Perhaps as early as 1882, some started discussing the creation of a new reservation in a land the Utes already knew, one with few white settlers on it: San Juan County, Utah Territory.¹⁴

These rumors were discouraging not just because they threatened the settlers in Bluff with eviction. The possibility of losing their land also dissuaded the settlers from making substantial improvements to the town. “No one felt like making permanent improvements while the specter of having to pick up and move on again stared them in the face.”¹⁵ Those who had the means to build more comfortable homes in Bluff could not take the risk. Furthermore, Bluff’s settlers could not file any claims on their lots because the federal government had never done an official survey. In the face of the rumors, they found themselves squatters in their own homes.¹⁶

In 1885, the rumors materialized. Senator Henry Moore Teller of Colorado filed a bill to remove the Southern Utes to an unspecified location. His colleague, Senator Thomas Bowen, followed up in early 1886 with Senate Bill 1916, which proposed removal to San Juan County. Ute leaders, including Ignacio, were sent to Washington, D.C., to testify in favor of the bill. By April, Bluff’s negotiations with the Indian ^[190] Winchester over disputed claims to Elk Mountain stalled since it appeared more probable that the government was going to turn all the county into a reservation.¹⁷ Amid the doubts, Bishop Nielson encouraged the members of his ward to plant their crops and trees “as though we intended to stay here.”¹⁸

Within days of receiving the alarming letter on April 7, William Halls spearheaded the drafting of a petition to Congress against the bill. Bishop Nielson, Charles Walton, and Lemuel Redd also prepared a list of the improvements colonists had made to the county so they could be reimbursed in case the bill passed. Those in Bluff soon found out the First Presidency of the Church was also opposed to the removal plan, urging Utah’s delegate to Congress, John Caine, to do all in his power to defeat the bill. As it turned out, the bill died in committee that year. But the issue was not dead. The Indians were unsettled by it, and Colorado newspapers continued to write strong editorials in favor of removal, urging their congressmen to try again.

Differences

Removal still hung over Bluff when a more immediate threat struck in the summer of 1887. It came out of a clear sky, since relations with the local Indians had continued to improve. When others accused Mormons of having an unfair advantage with the Indians, they were not entirely wrong, though Henry Mitchell continued to go too far when he accused Mormons of colluding with Indians to murder Gentiles like himself.^{19 [191]} The Durango press and the Carlisles claimed Mormons and Indians were banding together to keep stock off Elk Mountain, though even that exaggerated the matter.²⁰ But there was an undeniable difference in how the Indians treated Mormons and Gentiles, and it showed the continued success of Bluff’s diplomacy. Francis Hammond exaggerated somewhat himself when he claimed the Ute Winchester was “a terror to the cowboys but a fast friend of the Mormons,” though he was not far off in his assessment.²¹ Visiting authority John Morgan left Bluff with the impression that “the Indians themselves easily detect the difference between the ‘Mormon’ and the ‘American’ settlers, and always speak of the former as their friends, and trust implicitly in their honesty.” This was largely due to the fact, Morgan felt, that Mormons told the truth, did not get drunk, and did not interfere with Indian women, in contrast to some of the cowboys in the county.²²

Despite this distinction the Mormons achieved with the Indians, both sides still had problems with each other. Bluff residents maintained their very low opinion of some of the “dirty, lazy, lousy, begging, thieving Utes.”²³ But they also perceived the main complaint the Utes had against them: “Poor creatures, they have a hard time . . . since the white man has come with his immense herds of stock, the game which was formerly plenty is now very scarce, and the poor Indian is hard pushed to obtain a living.”²⁴ Utes ^[192] and Paiutes still resented the two- and four-legged incursions on their land, but visited Bluff regularly, especially in winter, sometimes to work and sometimes to beg for their livelihood. The Saints continued to admire the Navajos more than the Utes and Paiutes and worked more closely with them. But each side in this relationship also had grievances.²⁵ All were worried that so many cattle and sheep were devouring the range. The bishop often organized delegations to persuade Navajo herders to take their flocks south of the San Juan.²⁶ Those in Bluff came to admire the skill of the Navajo women who wove blankets that took up to a year to make and cost a hundred dollars to buy.²⁷ But some of the high dividends the co-op store paid came because “the poor Indian sells his wool too low and pays too high for his goods.”²⁸

Bluff’s policy also came to include seeking “the better members of the different tribes,” and “when all the best ones were won over to our side this gave us the advantage when trouble arose.”²⁹ When Bluff’s residents or their cattle wronged their neighbors, the settlers tried to deal justly with them.³⁰ The bishop continued to send his delegations to work with close allies when problems arose, and once an agreement was reached, Bluff settlers were surprised to find that even renegade Utes and Paiutes kept their word.^{31 [193]}

Feelings were never better between the Mormons and their Native American neighbors than in early 1887. The previous year was unusually peaceful, the first year in which no livestock were raided. Church leaders finally felt comfortable enough to release Thales Haskell, chief Indian interpreter, so he could rejoin his family in Colorado.³² Relations with the Indians had become so good, in fact, that Bluff felt it was ready to more fully pursue its mission, which was “largely in the interest of the Indians, to try and civilize them and prepare them in due time to receive the gospel.”³³ Now that it seemed the Indians had been taught “to cease to shed the blood of any one, . . . [and] to cease their stealing,” it was time to teach them how “to cultivate the ground and to become like the white man.” All of this would be “preparatory to their receiving the Gospel.”³⁴ Four men were called as missionaries to the Indians to teach them how to improve their physical lives. They failed to persuade Utes and Paiutes north of the San Juan to farm, but as summer approached in 1887, the residents in Bluff continued to feel “quite satisfied with our Navajo neighbors” to the south.³⁵ Until June 1887, an important part of that satisfaction consisted in the fact that while at least thirty whites had been killed by ^[194] Indians in San Juan County since 1880, not one of them was Mormon.³⁶

Nightmare

On June 9, 1887, two Paiutes on horseback pounded into town. They immediately delivered a scrawled note:

Come quick someone Amasa is shot in the head in two places and Ma and I are alone For the sake of us do hurry. . . .

Send for Jo. A Navajo did the shooting Amasa had no gun The bullets are lodged near the surface and can be removed do come as many as can the bishop, Platte and as many as will and do have faith. . . .

Feenie Barton³⁷

Platte Lyman and Kumen Jones raced out first, and the bishop and others followed soon after. Sister Parthenia “Feenie” Barton had sent her desperate message from the trading post her husband, Amasa, and her family operated at Rincon, where Comb Wash flowed into the San Juan, about ten miles below Bluff. She was the daughter of William and Angeline Hyde, and the store at Rincon was one of the Hyde family’s many trading outfits along the river. Soon after she and Amasa Barton married, just after the floods of 1884, they resettled at this important crossing on the San Juan, where they raised livestock and ran the store. The bishop had tried to discourage Brother Barton from living in so isolated a place unless there were at least ten families down there, reminding him it was against counsel to live outside the settlements, but the newlyweds went ^[195] anyway.³⁸ They were joined by Parthenia’s mother and at times her two brothers, Ernest and Frank Hyde. The “Jo” in the note was Amasa’s brother, Joseph F. Barton, also a partner in the business. Amasa and Feenie had two little boys; the second had been born just three weeks before. The Barton brothers had been called in the February stake conference to open a ferry at “Moquise crossing of the Colorado River” by March, but apparently had not relocated yet.³⁹ Now came this desperate message.

When the men arrived at Rincon, they found that Sister Barton’s note was gruesomely accurate. Amasa had been shot in the head and was unconscious. Old Eye, the Indian who tried to throttle Barton with a rope while another shot, was killed when Barton’s struggles put Old Eye’s heart in the path of a bullet. Sister Barton and her mother tried to help but were threatened and thrown out at the point of the pistol. Some nearby Paiutes did nothing despite the supplications of the frantic women. The other Navajo then put his pistol to Brother Barton’s head and pulled the trigger. He checked on his fallen partner, then he returned and put another bullet in Amasa’s brain. He loaded Old Eye’s body into a boat with the help of a bystander Paiute and crossed the river. Six other Indians came over after the shooting and ransacked the store, but they left when Platte Lyman and Kumen Jones arrived. The threat did not seem to be over yet, as many ^[196] Navajos appeared on the cliffs across the river overlooking Rincon. From what the Bluff men could find out, the whole affair had been about three dollars worth of beads that the shooter had pawned at the trading post a few days before.⁴⁰ Most of the Bluff men stayed in Rincon overnight to help the distraught Sister Barton watch over her unconscious husband and protect them from any further attacks.

Meanwhile, rumors of what might happen flew to Bluff. The vague fears of extermination by Indians that had remotely haunted the settlers since the beginning leaped forward now. Peter Allan was the only man left in town, and he stood guard over all of the women and children, who gathered in Kirsten Nielson’s two-room log home that night.⁴¹ There they kept their tense vigil throughout the dark hours. Jody Wood “washed and dressed her children in their best clothes, the better to find them dead in.”⁴² No attack came.

When Bishop Nielson returned to Bluff, he assured the townspeople they had nothing to worry about; Church authorities had promised them protection from the ^[197] Indians.⁴³ More Bluff men came in from the range to watch over both Rincon and Bluff. After a few days, Tom Holliday, a large and trusted Navajo, came across the river and expressed his desires to have no more violence, but the more sullen attitudes of other Indians left the matter unsure.⁴⁴ Meanwhile, Amasa Barton lived his last few days under the influences of morphine and delirium.⁴⁵ He opened his eyes once or twice and seemed to recognize people in the room but died on June 16.⁴⁶ He was buried in the hill at Bluff the next day with the whole town present, eulogized as “one of the most substantial and reliable members of the mission.”⁴⁷ But he was also the first to die violently at the hands of the Indians, and his killing revived dreads that had never been entirely put to rest.

In the days after the funeral, the crisis apparently over, most of Bluff’s men again dispersed to the range or wherever else they were working. But one morning, close to one hundred Navajo warriors rode into town, their faces painted black. The townspeople barricaded themselves in their homes. Caroline Nielson, twelve at the time, peeked out of the curtains and saw the warriors, their horses, and their guns and felt she might be killed.⁴⁸ Mary Jones, clerking at the co-op store, quickly summoned her husband and her father. The two of them, along with John Allan Jr., were the only men near town at the time. Kumen Jones and the bishop hurried toward the war party, which hurled threats and ^[198] grievances against them. Jens, through his son-in-law, who had already served two missions to the Navajos, told the war party to put down their weapons and talk as friends; they wanted peace. A few of the older Indians did so at once, but most of the younger warriors were reluctant. Finally, the bishop told them that “fighting was not in our line,” but they could send for soldiers if that was what the war party wanted. Immediately Navajo hands went up in protest; they knew that if it came to this they would not win. Eventually they descended from their horses, put down their weapons, and sat down to talk. The bishop then reminded them why Bluff was there, and what its citizens had suffered in leaving their former homes. His earnestness and lack of fear, as well as the fact that he had a fat steer butchered and supplies brought over from the co-op, turned the war party’s purpose. The meal was followed by a peace pipe and “a general hand shaking, and the war was over.”⁴⁹

At no other point in his life did the bishop show so poignantly his “indomitable courage.”⁵⁰ To him it was a natural product of faith. Being true to priesthood authority meant not just obeying what Church leaders had asked but also believing what they had said. As ^[199] he had told those huddled in Bluff a few days before, they had been promised they would be protected from the Indians. Personally, Jens had been promised in a blessing that “thine enemies shall not harm thee. . . . Thy days shall be prolonged until thou shall desire to lay thy body down to rest.”⁵¹ He believed these promises, which allowed him to limp up to the overwhelming band of warriors and do whatever else this mission required of him without fear.⁵²

This showdown did not end all the troubles. President Hammond returned to Bluff from Colorado soon after and held another council with “quite a few of the Navajo Indians,” reemphasizing the peaceful purpose of Bluff’s mission and reminding them that one white was dead as well as one Navajo; therefore, there was no need for further violence.⁵³ But some Navajos continued to be “insolent” and “hostile” after the Barton murder, and so, on his return trip to Colorado, President Hammond stopped at Fort Lewis and, for perhaps the only time in Bluff’s history, requested troops be sent to protect them. A short time before, a cowboy and camp cook from the LC Cattle Company had been killed farther north, so two companies of infantry came to the county: one to Bluff, where they were was stationed on the Recapture, and another to Soldier’s Springs, near the Blue Mountains. As usual, this caused the Navajos to withdraw from their northern border. When Brigham ^[200] Young Jr. drove across the reservation a few days after the troops arrived, he found the Indians “feeling quite uneasy.”⁵⁴

But the Saints in Bluff also felt “depressed . . . and somewhat unsettled” by the recent events. These feelings again welled into vital questions about their town’s viability. Quite a few, mostly relative newcomers, moved away within a week of Amasa Barton’s funeral. President Hammond was more convinced than ever that the mountains to the north were “about the only points in the county where settlements can be sustained.”⁵⁵ The bishop wondered aloud in church, “There are but few men to stay and too much to do. What are we to do?”⁵⁶ So when Apostle Young arrived at the end of July, he once again found the town at the edge of extinction. Steadfast as always in his beliefs on Bluff, he preached once again that their mission to the Lamanites “was of great moment, [and] must not be abandoned.” He recognized that it was hard to attract new settlers since “people turn pale at hearing of this ditch and San Juan.” But Bluff was also the “nursing mother” and “foundation” for the other Mormon settlements in the stake; if it failed, the other towns would be weakened, and San Juan County could be dissolved by the legislature. Then, reminiscent of what Joseph F. Smith had told the settlers in 1884, he promised, “The people who stay here will be able to buy out those who leave here.” He closed by encouraging them to “make your foundations strong. The Lord will not permit these ^[201] Lamanites to hurt you.”⁵⁷ As the bishop said the next week, this unequivocal counsel was “just in accordance with his feelings.”⁵⁸ To help them continue, Thales Haskell was once again retained to serve on the San Juan.⁵⁹

But the bitterness brought by the murder persisted. The Navajos were not a threat while the troops remained, but Bluff settlers had to tame their own feelings toward the Indians. In late November, President Hammond had to caution the Saints against harboring a spirit of revenge; such feelings might lead to a general massacre. At the precise moment these words left President Hammond’s mouth, Frank Hyde shot at a stray cow in his field, startling the congregation and adding some unexpected excitement to the ominous prediction.⁶⁰ Frank Hyde, Amasa Barton’s brother-in-law, was one of those who most needed to hear his leader’s advice, since he and his brother Ernest continued to threaten Navajos who came to town. Even in January of the new year, the bishop and stake president had to talk with those who felt it was proper to whip an Indian caught stealing rather than try to reform him through persuasion. Some Navajos held grudges as well, refusing to let Bluff men cut cedar posts on the south side of the river.⁶¹ Finally, early in 1888, Bishop Nielson and President Hammond got the Hyde brothers to promise not to go after the five surviving Navajos who took part in the murder and robbery. After this, Navajos returned in large ^[202] numbers to trade in Bluff again.⁶² Once more a substantial physical threat had menaced Bluff’s survival, but the threat to their mission had been at least as great. And once again, it had been overcome enough so that Bluff’s settlers could persist where they were and justify their existence.

How to Continue

Evolution

During these difficulties, more settlers passed through the San Juan sieve. Earlier in 1887, the older settlers once again offered to share some of their southern fields closer to the ditch to satisfy the newcomers who did not like their locations.⁶³ But once again, the ditch and the other hard facts of life in Bluff disheartened almost all of the recent arrivals. Meanwhile, President Hammond continued to promote the region both through the Deseret News and by writing directly to stake presidents, urging them to send settlers. “Your letters to the News are interesting,” commented President John Taylor and his counselor George Q. Cannon, “and give the public a very good idea of the country; it has been much misrepresented and therefore been dreaded.”⁶⁴

Even for the stalwarts, the ditch continued to be their annual dread, bringing each year a new list of necessary repairs and improvements to keep at least the hope of water coming to the town. The bishop often provided the inspiration, admonishing the ward ^[203] members from the pulpit to “take hold of the ditch as it is not a big job.”⁶⁵ The few remaining regulars such as Hyrum Perkins provided the prodigious annual labor: he “traveled on the trot and never tired,” according to a fellow digger.⁶⁶ And every year the results continued to be about the same: the daunting work somehow got done, the first stream of water flowed to town amid jubilation, then it surged, often too much, until late July, when nature’s spigot twisted shut, then the bishop rallied whoever was there (five town men and two Indians in 1889), and some crop was salvaged. Only about a hundred of the seven hundred available acres were harvested in a given year, though the number of available acres was beginning to drop into “Walton’s Slough” as the river began to gnaw away at the land south of town. The settlers usually raised enough corn and potatoes to feed themselves, but still depended on flour from Colorado. Fortunately, the price had dropped to only $3.25 per hundred pounds, from almost three times that back in 1880.⁶⁷

It was still incredible to people like President Hammond that such labor be expended, and he migrated to Mancos for most summers.⁶⁸ This absence might explain why he commented less on the ditch over the next few years, but it might have also had to do with the fact that if Bluff had to be held, as Brigham Young Jr. had said, then someone had to do it. Wilford Woodruff, the presiding authority of the Church after John ^[204] Taylor died on the underground in 1887, continued to insist that “it is of great importance to keep it up,” especially to keep political control of the county. Having people relocate to Colorado would not fulfill “the object of having them go to that region.”⁶⁹ The Church authorities promised more help in the form of more bodies, but if new people simply got discouraged and left the area, then the objective was not served either. The leaders in Bluff had to find some way to hold souls to this hard country.

Offensive

Bishop Nielson and his counselors met at President Hammond’s home on February 27, 1887, just after the regular meetings of their quarterly stake conference. What they discussed changed the mission. A few days earlier, they had failed to come up with a mutually acceptable division of the nearby range with Brooks, the foreman of the LC Cattle Company. That outfit was moving another thousand head of cattle closer to Bluff, to go with perhaps three thousand more head of “outside” cattle, plus forty thousand sheep.⁷⁰ And so, in their meeting, Church leaders agreed that they would call certain families from Bluff and Mancos to make new settlements on the North and South Montezuma creeks. The plans were announced in a special meeting the next day.⁷¹ Clearly this was an attempt to extend the San Juan Stake of Zion to better hold the resources and ranges in the county against the Gentiles. But the settlements would further ^[205] constrict the Utes who chose not to live on the reservation and the Paiutes, who still had no reservation on which to live. The Church leaders may have discussed other consequences of the move in their meeting. The new areas might be more dependable for farming, allowing the Saints to diversify what they produced and buy grain from each other rather than “from Babylon.”⁷² They seemed to be more desirable places to live than Bluff, solving most of the problem of dissatisfied settlers fleeing the county altogether. It had to be a difficult choice for the bishop, since it consigned those who remained at Bluff to their annual purgatory of ditch digging with meager numbers. But this was the compromise position between the bishop and the stake president: Bluff would not be abandoned, but it would be weakened for the good of the mission.

F. I. Jones was called in 1887 to preside over the North Montezuma settlement, and a number of Bluff residents, including Jens Peter Nielson, were called to help establish it that summer. They were specifically instructed. First, they should be careful what they wrote about the mission: far too many negative reports in newspapers had made people reluctant to come to the county in the past. Second, they had to find out exactly what the Carlisles claimed up there. They should stay together that first year and try to avoid difficulties with cowboys. “We expect Carlisle & Co. to make some objections to our locating on these streams,” President Hammond wrote. He also wrote a preemptive letter to the British brothers, informing them of the impending settlements. ^[206] Sure enough, Brother Jones soon reported he had been “warned off” the property by Harold Carlisle. Still, when President Hammond met with the Carlisles in Colorado, some cordiality remained despite the Carlisles seeming “a little sore over the matter.” But President Hammond also consulted an attorney on the issue, who advised him to keep possession of the area.⁷³

Meanwhile, the Mormons went to work on their new towns. One of the reasons so few men were in Bluff during the confrontation with the Navajos in June was that many of them were digging a ditch on the North Montezuma. F. I. Jones, the Charles Waltons (Sr. and Jr.), Parley Butt, and the Adams brothers were all up north. Originally their settlement was to be named “Hammond,” but when the object of that honor objected, Charles Walton proposed “Monticello,” after Jefferson’s “little mountain.”⁷⁴

It did not take long for the Carlisles’ stranglehold on the land and water to weaken. A former Carlisle cowboy named Fritz filed a quit-claim deed on behalf of the Mormon settlers. Then President Hammond met a woman in Colorado who claimed she owned half of the Carlisles’ North Montezuma ditch. A Mr. Carpenter owned the other half. It appeared that the Carlisle brothers, English citizens that they were, might not own title to any of their land personally. The first season at Monticello ended in triumph for its residents. The wheat crop did very well, and Edmund Carlisle failed to show up at a hearing to defend his water rights.⁷⁵ The Monticello pioneers folded back into Bluff for ^[207] the winter, but made bigger plans for 1888.

One day that next spring, the Waltons were almost completely surprised by the flock of people and the quantity of food that descended on them. They were packing up to be the first family to permanently settle in Monticello, and almost all of Bluff came to send them off. The young gave recitations, the old gave speeches, and everyone sang until a late hour.⁷⁶ Bluff would miss the actor/bugler/teacher/fiddler and his family. Farewells, with or without the party, would be repeated often in the years to come. What built Monticello directly diminished Bluff. But Bluff’s bishop now understood that his town could not do everything alone. This conclusion was apparent in his own family’s movements. Soon after the Waltons departed, Kumen and Mary Jones, as well as Jens Peter, went to Dodge Springs for the summer to run the “Nielson’s & Co.” dairy, where they used common range cows to produce at least fifty pounds of “very good” cheese a day.⁷⁷ Willard and Julia Butt split time between the dairy and South Montezuma (later named Verdure), where Willard and his brother Parley operated a sawmill. Joe, France, and Jens Peter were often out on the range with the herds, and Joe was running a store on the San Juan above the abandoned town of Montezuma.

As a whole, the county prospered. Monticello already superseded Bluff in some ways. Some of its new homes were shingled, and its farmers raised another good crop of wheat, oats, and vegetables, in spite of the cowboy who told Charles E. Walton Jr. that ^[208] “you’ll have to draw your gizzard up pretty small if you live on farming in this country.” Monticello hosted its first stake conference in its new meetinghouse (shingled, of course) in August 1888, but Bishop Nielson did not attend for some reason.⁷⁸

Not everything was perfect, though. Just after the town’s Fourth of July celebration, the Carlisles turned the water out of North Montezuma Creek and put an injunction on the claims of the Blue Mountain Irrigation Company, the organization of Monticello water owners. President Hammond had to again engage in personal diplomacy with the brothers to get at least some water sent back down, and the legal issues would take years to fully untangle. Furthermore, that first conference in the Monticello meetinghouse was disrupted by a cowboy riding through town firing his pistol, a sign of ugly incidents to come. And the eight families that braved the winter of 1888–89 in Monticello were snowed in for six weeks.⁷⁹

But on the whole, President Hammond’s bold venture onto new land with questionable water rights worked. Even some residents of Bluff bought fields in Monticello to farm in the summer. All of this was good for the mission: the Mormon presence in San Juan County was significantly increased. But it left Bluff a lonelier place. When Brigham Young Jr. stopped by Bluff after the Monticello Conference to count how many men were still settled there, he found fourteen.⁸⁰ Platte Lyman felt “there are but eight families here who are not interested in making a place somewhere ^[209] else.”⁸¹ Yet the bishop and his remaining few soon found some compensating advantages in staying where they were.

Flocks and Herds

By the fall of 1887, President Wilford Woodruff had heard regarding Bluff that “the families who are there are making means more rapidly than double the same number of families in any other settlement.”⁸² When the bishop wrapped up his year as the first president of the San Juan Co-op, his report confirmed the town’s prosperity. There was a bounteous crop of nearly five thousand lambs, and the store, small tannery, and shoe businesses also did well. This meant that the shareholders would gain a thumping 40 percent dividend on their initial investments. Francis Hammond was elected as the new president, while Jens Nielson was chosen as one of four directors to try to continue the bonanza.⁸³ This was why the co-op was organized, to help the Saints prosper through cooperation rather than competition. But the cooperation did not last uninterrupted for long.

Under the co-op arrangement, shareholders could submit bids to herd the collective sheep. The bishop had a particular interest in the well-being of this flock, since an increasing fraction of it was the ward’s tithing herd, paid to him as the sheep multiplied. He and his sons also hoped they could profit from doing the herding. To ^[210] pursue these ends, they put in a bid that was accepted by the co-op board for the next two years. The Nielsons posted a fifteen thousand dollar bond for security, which was standard procedure for anyone undertaking a corporate or public trust. But everything changed after a heated meeting on Saturday, January 28, 1888. Francis Hammond, the new president of the co-op, reversed the board’s decision. Hanson Bayles had pointed out to him that the bishop and his sons were already bonded for more than they were worth. Joe had taken out bonds for his position as county selectman, and the family might also have been in debt for some of their business ventures. Technically Hammond was correct on this point, and he felt it was part of his duty as president to reject the bid. But the bishop was furious, since this also appeared to be a lack of trust among men and Saints who had worked so closely together. Jens was still upset at church the next day. President Hammond approached him on the stand and offered his hand, but Jens refused to take it. Hammond was stunned; nothing like this had ever happened to him before. For his part, the bishop had never been so upset at a priesthood leader. The ward could not help but notice the split. On Monday, the two men tried to restore unity by talking “at length” over the issue, as they knew they must, but agreement still escaped them. Francis Hammond, looking at the letter of the law, was not conscious of having done any harm. In the spirit of the matter, Jens still felt the wound and proposed submitting the affair to the ward’s teachers for resolution.^{84 [211]}

Sister Mary Ann Bayles, Hanson’s wife, had given birth to a baby girl the same Sunday the bishop refused to shake the stake president’s hand. The delivery did not go well, and Sister Bayles was very ill. President Hammond and William Adams visited her and had just finished giving a priesthood blessing, when they were summoned to Charles Walton’s home. Brother Walton was in charge of the teachers quorum of the ward, and he requested President Hammond to come answer charges filed against him by the bishop, his two oldest sons, and Parley and Willard Butt regarding the bid for herding. After some discussion, the group decided the matter most properly belonged to the co-op’s board of directors, so the teachers were dismissed and a special session of the board was called. After only minutes of this meeting, an urgent summons came to again administer to Sister Bayles since she seemed to be nearing death’s door. Some men went to do this, then they returned and resumed the meeting. It was again interrupted by another call to administer, followed swiftly by the message that Sister Bayles had died. The meeting adjourned, and as the men left they found Brigham Young Jr. had arrived just in time to be with Sister Bayles at the end. All discussion about things such as flocks and herding was suspended for the evening as the ward mourned the death of this twenty-six-year-old sister. The next day the weather was as unsettled as the ward. The bishop and the stake president shared the stand in the packed meetinghouse as they commemorated the late Sister Bayles. There was both snow and mud on the ground as the house emptied to march up to the cemetery. Lemuel Redd dedicated the grave, and a choir sang “White Robes Are Waiting for Thee.” ^[212]

Brigham Young Jr. was in business with his brothers-in-law, Alma and Joshua Stevens, who had made some improvements up Butler Wash and on Elk Mountain. So Elder Young decided to take a trip with his partners to look things over, and Jens Nielson accompanied them. They were gone for three days, until Monday, February 6, so Bishop Nielson did not have to confront President Hammond on the stand again on Sunday. It also gave him a chance to talk the matter over with Elder Young and get some distance from it.

The night they returned, the co-op board met again to review the issue. Not only did the Nielsons’ bid lack the proper bonds, but so did all the others, so all were nullified. Then, “after a long labor with each other it was agreed to mutually ask each others’ forgiveness and shake hands and try and do better in the future.” Jens confessed he wished he had not brought the matter up in the first place. After midnight the meeting broke up, as the issue, which had been a public spectacle, was laid to rest—almost. There was one last thing to say, and Jens said it. The next Sunday, the bishop stood before the ward and asked forgiveness for refusing to shake President Hammond’s hand two weeks before. The requested favor was swiftly granted, and good feelings were officially restored. The bishop, who normally helped resolve these clashes of interests and personalities, was reminded how swiftly they could destroy his ward and himself if he were not faithful and careful.

Jens and the rest of the co-op board had plenty to deal with for the rest of the year. They continually tried to improve their original Navajo and Mexican stock by ^[213] crossbreeding them with French merino rams.⁸⁵ Herding continued to be a problem. They arranged as well as they could after the bid fiasco, but the summer herding was not done well. Many sheep were lost, and many others developed scab. Rain was scarce in the late summer and fall, and they knew in the winter they would have to successfully hold their range against perhaps a hundred thousand outside sheep, many of which came in from Colorado for a winter range that charged lower taxes. Indian trade dropped at the store because the supervisor, Joseph F. Barton, “was not qualified to win the Indians’ good feelings.”⁸⁶ Perhaps he was not yet over the murder of his brother. And the widow Barton, along with her mother and brothers, wanted to withdraw their substantial four thousand dollar investment from the company, more than a quarter of the total stock. The corporation could ill afford to let this amount go, since they still owed four thousand dollars to the Durango banks from their large sheep purchase more than a year before. The co-op board hoped to pay this off with the profits from the fall wool clip, but when wool sold for only twelve cents a pound, they could not cover the whole amount and had to pay the 10 percent interest on the balance. At the end of 1888, with all these difficulties, the co-op paid no dividend. Early in 1889, many stockholders talked about dissolving the San Juan Co-op altogether.⁸⁷

Meanwhile, the cattle owners of Bluff continued to try to unite. Across the ^[214] western United States, range wars blazed between sheepherders and cattlemen. Bluff experienced few such difficulties, largely because the same person usually owned both types of stock. If conflicts did break out, the Church provided both the incentive and the forum to work them out. In May 1888, for example, the bishop appointed Hyrum Perkins to smooth some friction between the two interests.⁸⁸ Most of the Bluff cattlemen summered their herds somewhere near Elk Mountain. Their winter ranges extended from Lake Pagharit, close to the Colorado River, down to the washes surrounding Bluff. But some of this range had been preempted by a herd of two thousand Texas longhorns that grazed around the abandoned outpost at Rincon in the fall of 1887.

The competition from the Texas outfit, as well as the Carlisles and the LC cattle companies, finally drove Bluff’s stockmen to cooperate. Just before they left to take their herd onto Elk Mountain for the summer in 1888, most reached an agreement and hired herders for a “Bluff Pool” of cattle. But they were also pressured by the poor cattle market in 1888. Complaints of monopolies controlling the eastern markets echoed through Bluff as well as the rest of the country.⁸⁹ By pooling and selling together, the Bluff cattle raisers hoped to cut herding costs and improve their negotiating power, though each member would continue to control his own brand and calves. But the pool was not watertight yet. Disagreements kept some from joining and caused contention among those already in. “Through selfishness we cannot unite,” lamented President ^[215] Hammond, who later shipped some of his stock east with the LC Company.⁹⁰ Poor prices and the parched range made most stockmen nervous about the upcoming winter. In a year in which “cattleman in the West were all overdrawing their bank accounts,” when Durango bankers offered to help the pool buy out the troublesome Texas herd, the pool declined.⁹¹ Jens Nielson, though, was well off enough that he could buy some new stock toward the end of the year.⁹²

Business turned up the next year. The San Juan Co-op took a hard line with its debtors and started to charge them the same 10 percent interest the company had to pay the Durango banks.⁹³ They made a better contract with Durango businessmen for their wool, and they brought back Indian trade to the store by hiring Thales Haskell as the salesman. By August the co-op was out of debt.⁹⁴ The cattle multiplied and fattened as well, even though the range was still dry. Just after Thanksgiving in 1889, the quarterly stake conference was held at Bluff. President Hammond announced that all the wards had been blessed financially during the past year, but Bluff especially had prospered. When the San Juan Co-op declared its dividend at the end of the year, it was 40 percent again, a return that would be repeated for the next three years. As the town approached its tenth anniversary in 1890, all were satisfied with the co-op, and the cattle ^[216] pool held together.⁹⁵ In spite of its annually undermanned ditch digging and its permanent “dry camp” status, Bluff was prospering financially.⁹⁶ If Leonard Arrington’s assertion that “the building of the Kingdom was partly a process of turning disasters into windfalls” is true, then Bluff was a prime example during these years.⁹⁷

Bluff Life

Cowboys

Prosperity brought its own problems. The cowboy lifestyle was not very conducive to building a community. The men were gone for weeks at a time several seasons of the year, and this was hard on their families. One Bluff girl recalled the often-repeated farewells. After kissing their father goodbye, “we’d stand there and wave as ^[217] long as we could see him. Oh that was sad. . . . We sure hated to see Dad go.”⁹⁸ In the absence of the men, the prayers of many Bluff women continued to be, “Bless the Indians that they may have no power over us.”⁹⁹ The cattlemen had to ride hundreds of miles to round up and move the herds to their summer and winter ranges, go after strays, brand calves, and drive the cattle to market. Sheep had their own demands. They had to be herded perpetually, bred properly, sheared once or twice a year, and dipped just as often to fight scabies. They also had to be driven to their winter and summer ranges and marked or docked for identification.¹⁰⁰

Life on the range was not particularly pleasant: saddle sores and bowed legs were just the beginning. Camps were often unsanitary.¹⁰¹ “Every trip had its peculiar thrills and interesting features, but they all included riding, riding, choking, starving, driving cattle, branding calves, drinking water alive with wigglers and pollywogs and meeting with drenching rain or stinging hail.”¹⁰² The cowboys ate a lot of bread, beef, and beans in their camps and were lucky if they had bottled rice or stewed peaches for variety. These staples, along with the jerked beef on the trail, sometimes “bred nausea and thirst ^[218] and cramp.”¹⁰³ The long rides with only cows for company became monotonous: “I sang, preached, recited, lectured and yelled to pass the time,” one cowboy remembered of a long ride back to Bluff.¹⁰⁴ Stationary life in camp often was not much better, as Joe Nielson lamented to his family one summer, “There is nothing to write about. I believe it will be more lonesome for me this summer than last. I hope some of you will write often. Tell the boys to write.”¹⁰⁵ Still, nothing made the men appreciate Bluff more than a trip to “the Lake” or some other forlorn place. “Bluff seemed like a green garden compared to the country I had just come from,” wrote one homesick cowpuncher.¹⁰⁶

There were also the occupational hazards of the job. Bluff’s men were very fortunate in these early years not to have any serious accidents or deaths on the trail. No one had yet lost fingers in a suddenly constricted lariat like the Carlisles’ foreman Latigo Gordon. But the risks were always there of this or some worse accident, and the stock was often in danger as well, sometimes from Indians, sometimes from storms or droughts, and sometimes just from themselves. An unknown cause started the Hydes’ sheep stampeding in 1889, for instance, and they did not stop until about two hundred had plunged over a one-hundred-foot cliff.¹⁰⁷

The cowboy life hid spiritual dangers as well. Men out on the range could not ^[219] attend Church meetings. They might start neglecting their prayers. Sermons were frequently given on the subject of not cursing or beating the poor, dumb cattle, but out on the range with the wayward cusses the temptation could easily become too great. Bishop Nielson also warned the youth against branding stray cattle as their own.¹⁰⁸ Especially when working for gentile companies or with outside cowboys, there was the strong temptation to mix in with their profane ways. Platte Lyman not only disliked the hard country and life of the cattleman, but found it sad how even Mormon boys would sometimes mock anyone who tried to uphold his virtues on the range.¹⁰⁹ The drinking, smoking, and tobacco chewing prevalent among gentile cowboys were also too readily adopted by Bluff cowboys.

The allure of the cowboy was too much for Bluff boys to resist. At their age and place they could not help but admire the lariats, wide hats, fine boots, pearl or ivory handled revolvers, the “short rifle under the fender,” and especially the attitude: they “did not give a damn for nothing.”¹¹⁰ Some Bluff men tried to protect their boys against this influence. When Platte Lyman found Texas outfit cowboys in the same area where he needed to work for a few days, he sent his son, Albert, on a fifty-mile ride back to Bluff alone rather than be around those men. The Nielson boys seemed to have more contact, being older and working sometimes for the outside cattle companies, though at times Church authorities ^[220] counseled against such employment.¹¹¹ Bluff’s young men had been taught well against the vices of the cowboys, but even young Albert Lyman, who had once scrawled, “I would much sooner make shoes than be a wretched cowboy,” admitted an unconscious admiration for them and later on bought himself a six shooter because he liked the look of it.¹¹² For other Bluff boys the admiration was much more determined. Francis Hammond pled “for mercy and charity to be shown towards our wild boys.” “Gain them by love,” he urged.¹¹³ There was something of a reformation in early 1889. Boys and young men such as Jens Peter Nielson “expressed their desires to do better in the future than they had in the past” and declared their testimonies of the gospel more often in meetings.¹¹⁴ Still, as Martha Hammond contemplated matches for the Hammond girls, she was unimpressed: “You know the boys that are here in Bluff as well as I do are not a fit companion for the girls.”¹¹⁵

If the Bluff cowboys were not fit, outside cowboys were even less so. Bluff’s dances were a magnet for range-weary men. Their attendance was acceptable as long as there were not too many of them and they behaved themselves. Those who played instruments were particularly welcome now that Samuel Cox and Charles Walton had taken their fiddles elsewhere. The cowboys had to respect the authority of the floor ^[221] manager, dance only when their numbers were called, remove their spurs, and not smuggle in alcohol and firearms. When they first started showing up in early 1887, “they behaved like gentlemen,” and a few even stayed around to attend Church meetings the next day.¹¹⁶

But real trouble broke out at the dance that closed the quarterly stake conference in March 1888. Bluff boys invited some cowboys to attend. The word spread, and the cowboys came in such large numbers that some were refused admission to the dance. This did not go over well, and the bishop and stake president tried to make some explanations to them. But those who were “disposed to cause trouble” tried to force their way in. In the fracas, some of the cowboys and some of the Bluff boys went for their guns and serious trouble seemed imminent. But since there was no liquor and enough chivalry was “possessed by a good percent of the otherwise rough cowboy element,” both sides compromised and violence was averted. The disgruntled cowboys who could not get in “only shot off their mouths,” even muttering some threats against the Church leaders, until the end of the dance, when they rode out of town at a gallop shooting off their guns in the streets of Bluff. There was “a great panic for a few moments,” but everything was calm by 1:00 am. A few of the cowboys were ashamed the next day, but others were still contemplating action against Bishop Nielson and President Hammond until Kumen Jones gave them a dressing down in camp a few days later. “May the Lord give us wisdom . . . to keep ourselves from contamination with the wicked,” hoped ^[222] President Hammond.¹¹⁷ “Keep your daughters from the society of the cow boys,” was a common theme in church.¹¹⁸

Part of the situation improved soon after. Cowboys kept attending dances, but behaved better. Most of the concern in dances was directed toward Bluff’s youth. Girls dressed too extravagantly, in the opinion of their Church leaders, and boys and girls alike would not give up their closed-position round dances, such as the waltz. Church authorities preferred the called quadrilles, similar to square dances, in which the partners were not so close. An epistle from the Apostles in 1877 recommended that no more than one or two waltzes be permitted in an evening.¹¹⁹ The bishop tried to set the example. When a dance was ready to start, he asked the musicians if they were ready and willing, then called on someone to open with prayer before turning over direction of the dance to the floor manager for the evening. Despite his twisted feet, he danced some respectable figures, such as the quadrilles, speed the plows, and Scottish reels, but he never danced the waltzes. He called for the closing prayer before it got too late.¹²⁰ But there were still problems. On one occasion a young man successfully bribed Joe Nielson and Kumen ^[223] Jones, the floor managers, to add another waltz. “The priesthood must be firm,” lamented their stake president.¹²¹

Once again, though events in Bluff were sometimes alarming, the town looked good by comparison. Monticello, closer to the Carlisles’ base, had more frequent ruckuses and Bishop F. I. Jones had to deal with more threats. On one occasion he may have missed being dragged up and down the town’s streets when he decided at the last minute not to attend a dance. Mons Peterson, the storekeeper, imported liquor “for medicine,” which, once stolen by cowboys, fueled them in a furious spate of riding and shooting around town. Latigo Gordon and Tom Roach were two cowboys who married Mormon girls. At least in Monticello, Church authorities kept a tenuous grasp on the reins of authority. In Moab the cowboy element was in charge. Killings were frequent, and even the schoolteacher was beaten out of town by a cowboy.¹²²

Domestic Concerns

Dances were not the only occasions that caused Bluff’s leaders to consider the town’s safety. Leaders always worried and sometimes spoke about the danger of leaving the women and children exposed to insults and violence from Indians and “wicked whites.” “Our families are worth more than the cattle on a thousand hills,” President Hammond admonished.¹²³ Often there were only two or three men in town, and ^[224] occasionally the bishop was the only one left. Jens was still one of the few men who could stay in town most of the time, thanks to his older boys, who could care for the livestock and look after the dairy. Joe was thirty by 1890, and his family had grown to four children by then. He had taken over for his father in civic responsibilities, serving as a county selectman from 1885 through 1889. As such, and as someone who traveled often from Verdure to Bluff and Colorado, he helped to extend and improve county roads north to the border with Emery County and east to Colorado. Jens himself contracted with the county court in 1888 to build a section of road on the north side of Devil Canyon, leading toward Monticello, and his sons undoubtedly did a lot of the work.¹²⁴ Joe continued to be his open, cheerful self, and he was so hospitable that his wife, Ida, never knew whom he was going to bring home for dinner.

Jens Peter, at twenty-eight, was not married, but was a giant of a man at six and a half feet and over 250 pounds, capable of loading four fifty-pound sacks of flour at a time.¹²⁵ Kumen Jones felt he “did more hard work than any one man.”¹²⁶ His altitude became a unit of measure, as children claimed the water in their swimming hole in Cow Canyon came up to Jens Nielson’s neck.¹²⁷ But he always had something childlike about him and was full of mirth and jokes. France was twenty-two, a little less shy than he once was, and rode the range for the pool. The unmarried boys worked for the family’s ^[225] prosperity “without compensation.”¹²⁸ Jens’s sons-in-law also helped in the family businesses. Kumen Jones, Willard Butt, and, after Margaret married him in 1888, John Ernest Adams added to the manpower that allowed the bishop to remain with his ward in Bluff. Julia’s husband, Willard, was also appointed the constable for the Bluff Precinct in late 1888, and his title was later revised to that of sheriff. Soon after his appointment, law enforcement in the county was upgraded when the county court approved the expenses for four pairs of handcuffs and two pairs of shackles.¹²⁹ Julia was often the hostess to travelers and to arrested criminals passing through Verdure and won a reputation as being hospitable to everyone, regardless of the time of day or the misdeeds of those she was hosting.¹³⁰

The prolonged absence of the men meant that much of the time Bluff’s society was dominated by women and children. The women not only nurtured their faith in divine protection but also developed a “sturdy self-assertiveness.”¹³¹ It was a difficult life their church asked them to live. As one outsider noticed later, if the men “worked hard on the range and in the fields, the women toiled twice as hard at home.”¹³² They ground away at the tasks that occupied most of a woman’s time throughout the West. A great ^[226] deal of Monday was devoted to washing, assaulting the soiled clothes with the washboard, tub, boiling water, and homemade soap.¹³³ Regular meals, bread, cheese, candles, and clothes were other items most were expected to produce, and many also had to care for vegetable gardens and domestic livestock. Spring cleaning was particularly difficult, with the yards of stained factory cloth added to all the other items that needed to be purged. A woman living in another frontier settlement in Arizona summed up the labor this way:

I will just write my morning chores. Get up, turn out my chickens, draw a pail of water, water hot beds, make a fire, put potatoes to cook, then brush and sweep half inch of dust off floor and everything, feed three litters of chickens, then mix biscuits, get breakfast, milk besides work in the house, and this morning had to go half mile after calves. This is the way of life on the farm.¹³⁴

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This was the life Jens’s wives lived. Elsie continued to quietly burn daylight making life more comfortable for all around her. Her more limited abilities in the English language made her radius smaller than that of her husband and Kirsten, but within that arc she was well esteemed. She was particularly well loved by Katrine’s children, one of whom felt that “Aunt Elsie” was the “best, kindest woman on earth,” treating him “like his own mother would have.”¹³⁵ She spent a lot of time on a little, green chair with rawhide straps across the seat in front of the fireplace. But she was always busy, always ^[227] industrious, like most Bluff women, her fingers were always working on some project. “She was one woman that could do anything she wanted done.”¹³⁶ Kirsten also continued to carry out her demanding domestic role. She had been trained as a seamstress in Denmark and used these skills to good effect in Bluff, making her family’s clothes out of cloth from Durango or the mail-order catalogues. She also traded for tanned buckskin from the Indians and made scores of gloves and other articles.¹³⁷ Like many Bluff women, Elsie and Kirsten often hired Indian women to help with the burdensome chores, particularly the washing. Jens’s wives also participated in the quilting and sewing and rag bees to socialize through these long tasks. Elsie and Kirsten continued to get along like sisters, helping each other when it was possible. As one of Kirsten’s daughters recalled, “I have never seen a polygamous family who had less friction than our family had.”¹³⁸ Jens ate breakfast and supper with Elsie and dinner, the big mid-day meal, with Kirsten.¹³⁹

While “just living was so time consuming,” Bluff’s women had to continue to live knowing that their lives would be easier elsewhere.¹⁴⁰ Frequently they and their children had to care for the farms during their husbands’ and fathers’ long absences. And they ^[228] were approaching ten years of living in log cabins, some still with dirt floors. They might be driven out of even these if the government decided to do it, and some secretly hoped it would happen. Martha Hammond confided to her husband, “It is amusing to me to hear the sisters talk. They all hope and pray that this place will go in to Indian Reservation. I tell them I hope it won’t go as it would be such a disappointment to the men. But if I am not mistaken I think that the sisters are only telling what the men would like.”¹⁴¹ Reflecting on the situation, Kumen Jones mused he was glad he was not born a woman.¹⁴²

On top of all this, Bluff’s women also fulfilled the obligations of their church and civic organizations. When Jane Walton left with her husband to settle in Monticello in 1888, Kirsten Nielson was called by her husband to be the president of the Relief Society in the Bluff Ward. As such, she held weekly meetings, looked after the women in the ward, engaged in projects to help the Saints and Indians, such as making carpets and quilts, and looked after the small sheep herd owned by the group. Her home was often where visiting Church authorities stayed. And like all women in the town, she visited the sick and afflicted with small tokens of her good wishes, such as bullberry jam or loaves of bread.¹⁴³ Elsie was a champion of the older teachings of self-sufficiency: she faithfully kept her beehives and tended her mulberry bushes. Both women spoke in the quarterly Relief Society conferences that were held just after the stake conferences. Whether they ^[229] were referring to their spiritual or language limitations, each said “she felt her weakness in trying to say anything” to the group or instruct the Saints. But both grew more confident with time and always expressed strong testimonies “in all Revelations and principles of the gospel” as well as in their mission.¹⁴⁴ Both were also diligent students of the Bible. The Church and the community added more work to do but also eased the physical and mental burdens these women always carried, and Jens was present to help more than most men of the town.

Jens could also spend more time with his younger children, though they were no longer so young. The boys were old enough to start riding the range in the summer, and all the children went to school in the fall and winter, taught by Charles Walton, J. L. Young, and A. P. Sorenson in these years. The day sessions were supplemented by special spelling schools, debates, and presentations held in the evening. They also had their round of Primary and youth association meetings, programs, and activities. Even though the county collected taxes to support public education, the bishop was at least partly responsible for the quality of the schools.¹⁴⁵

But Jens’s oldest daughter, Mary, needed particular attention. She continued to help care for the sick in town while harboring her own inner grief. She had consented for Kumen to take a second wife in 1882, but her father’s promise of a child of her own remained unfulfilled. She visited the temple in St. George sometime in these years and ^[230] received a special anointing in which she was once again assured she would bear a child. She conceived after returning to Bluff, but her hopes were dashed when she miscarried. In 1889 she was expecting again and with guarded hopes guessed the baby would be a girl. On November 6, the long-awaited infant was delivered, and it was a boy. “Why I was expecting a girl baby,” Mary told her father. Jens replied, “Did you ever hear of a literal child of promise being a girl?”¹⁴⁶

Jens could be proud of the work his children were doing to build the Church and fulfill their mission. Mary was first counselor in the ward’s Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association. Julia was the president of the stake Primary organization for children. Margaret was president of the ward’s young ladies association and also assisted Julia with the stake Primary. Joe worked in the ward’s Sunday School, France worked with the deacons, and Uriah had just been ordained a deacon. The older boys spent much of their lives on the range and were subject to the temptations out there. They made some mistakes but also showed contrition for their errors. Jens must have been proud to hear all of his older boys, Joe, Jens Peter, and Francis, tell their testimonies of the gospel in the same meeting during the drive to reform the young men in early 1889.¹⁴⁷

Jens had plenty of work to do himself. When he was not busy looking after the members of the ward, going to meetings, urging ward members yet again to keep their livestock out of the corn fields, caring for the tithing yard, raising his family, dandling ^[231] grandchildren (six of them by 1890), contracting for work on county roads, or inspiriting whoever happened to be home to repair the ditch, the bishop looked after his gardens and fields. As he approached his seventieth birthday, he may have started to feel, like Francis Hammond, that while his capacity to do manual labor was diminishing, he could “direct as well as ever.”¹⁴⁸ He probably put in tomatoes, cabbage, beans, beets, onions, carrots, cucumbers, and perhaps another crop or two in the vegetable gardens around the house, and grew corn, potatoes, and maybe some sorghum out in the fields. There were occupational hazards at home as well as on the range. Jens was laid up for a few days in early 1887 when he ran a sunflower snag into his foot. The flu got him for a couple of weeks in 1890. At times like these, papers such as the Deseret News, which was “found in nearly every household, and . . . read with interest” were particularly welcome.¹⁴⁹ Jens also loved good horses, taking great care in breeding them and great pleasure in riding them.¹⁵⁰ And there were frustrations as well: since Bluff still had so many tall weeds, finding domestic stock could be infuriating. Platte Lyman once searched for two days up Recapture Creek for a cow who was all the time roaming in the stinkweeds at Bluff.¹⁵¹

Occasionally the bishop traveled, which was much easier once the Denver and Rio Grande ran through Thompson’s Springs, north of Moab. In late March 1888, he took a ^[232] trip to general conference in Salt Lake City, with the added pleasure of accompanying his daughter Margaret to her wedding in the Logan Temple. After a weeklong wagon trip through Monticello and Moab to Thompson’s, they bought conference-rate, round-trip tickets for $13.95 apiece. The train left at 10:40 pm and delivered them to Salt Lake City at 8:00 the next morning. Kirsten’s brother, John Lollin, lived in Salt Lake City. While he had lapsed from the Church, making part of his living operating a saloon, he stayed in the family, failing to disown his sisters, as he had once threatened to do, for entering polygamous marriages. The Nielsons probably stayed with him, as they did on other trips, at his home on the first or second block of South Main Street. They may have also seen the great Shakespearean actor and brother of Lincoln’s assassin, Edwin Booth, play at the Salt Lake Theater during his engagement there at that time.¹⁵² They certainly noticed the amenities available in some city homes: “heating by steam from the basement to all the rooms above, lighted by gas, and hot and cold water in the rooms.”¹⁵³

After the wedding on April 4, the Nielsons attended conference. Many of the General Authorities were either in hiding or exile from federal authorities, but Jens heard those who remained, including Lorenzo Snow, John Henry Smith, and Heber J. Grant, speak on the principles of the gospel, mission experiences, and relations with Gentiles. Jens, Mary, and the newlyweds returned to Thompson’s on April 13 and were back in Bluff by April 21. The next day in church, the bishop, along with other ward members ^[233] who attended, gave the first reports of what was said in conference to the Bluff Saints.¹⁵⁴

Church authorities continued to visit them in Bluff as well. Apostle John Henry Smith came twice in 1889 and left a strong impression, bearing “one of the most powerful testimonies I ever heard come out of the mouth of man,” in the opinion of Francis Hammond.¹⁵⁵ In his first visit, he helped organize a high council for the San Juan Stake, a group of twelve men called to assist the stake presidency. In the second visit, Elder Smith dedicated the Moab meetinghouse. With the addition of the Moab Ward, President Hammond now had a loop of seven hundred miles to cover in his buggy, which he faithfully endeavored to do every quarter, true to his namesake, the long-traveled Methodist circuit rider Francis Asbury.

Jens and Kirsten also attended the October 1889 general conference. They crowded into the full sessions in the “Big Tabernacle” on Saturday. Wilford Woodruff was still in hiding, but they heard from other authorities. Many discussed the difficult situation of the Church, particularly in Salt Lake City, where the non-Mormon Liberal Party threatened to beat the orthodox People’s Party at the polls and seize control of the city as they had previously done in Ogden. While in Salt Lake, the Nielsons loaded up on items they could not conveniently buy in Bluff. Sometime after the conference, they visited with Church authorities about their son. Joe had been called in March to be the first missionary from Bluff. He was excused from the call, however, due to “the unsettled ^[234] affairs of the people at Bluff,” largely related to the proposed Indian removal.¹⁵⁶

Continuing Problems

Removal, Part II

Sometime in late 1886 or 1887, an amendment to a bill in the U.S. Congress authorized a three-man commission to negotiate with the Utes in southwest Colorado for the surrender of their reservation lands. When the commissioners arrived at the reservation in mid-1887, however, their negotiations proceeded poorly. Ignacio, Mariano, Buckskin Charlie, and some of the other leading Utes who had favored removal when Senator Thomas Bowen introduced his bill back in 1886 were now suspicious. Would the new land be any better? There was no large river running through the middle of the proposed new reservation. The land in Utah was not as good for farming. What was to prevent stockmen in Utah from causing the same sort of trouble as those in Colorado? How long would it be before the government chose to remove them from this land, too? What would happen to the other Indians in the area?¹⁵⁷ The commissioners returned the next summer to tour San Juan County with the Utes, try to satisfy their questions, and again forge a treaty.

In the meantime, life in San Juan County continued as it had. Utes and Paiutes kept clashing with settlers on the lands they traditionally wandered, particularly in the ^[235] narrow McElmo Canyon.¹⁵⁸ The Mormons in Bluff increased their efforts to teach the Utes “to raise their own living” rather than live “by the chase and begging.” Twenty to thirty Indians joined Thales Haskell in Allan Canyon. They grubbed the land, dug a ditch, fenced the fields, and put in some wheat, corn, and potatoes. But on the whole, Haskell did not think the experiment was going too well since the Indians were not much help. Bluff held a large celebration for the Utes in early June. Benow and Red Jacket led a “grand dance,” and the town gave the Indian two cows and a lot of flour, sugar, and coffee. The few Navajos who were present seemed jealous of this increased attention to the Utes.¹⁵⁹

But during a social party on November 28, Jens and most of the other people in town found that their situation on the San Juan had become precarious again. Francis Hammond showed them a letter from the Southern Ute Commissioners that confirmed they had made another treaty with Ute leaders. The thousand Utes affected would receive almost all of San Juan County, five thousand dollars a year for ten years, and twenty thousand dollars in sheep. The negotiating chiefs also received five hundred dollars apiece. An Indian agency would be established in San Juan County, and the Indians could also hunt on the unoccupied areas of the La Sal Mountains. The commissioners now wanted to know what sorts of compensation the settlers expected for their improvements. Bishop Nielson and Hans Bayles were appointed to help President ^[236] Hammond appraise the place.¹⁶⁰

Over the next two weeks, they looked over what they had built. Between Bluff, Monticello, and outposts at Verdure, Dodge Springs, Indian Valley and Rincon, there were just over two hundred Mormons in about thirty families. They had constructed over sixty log cabins and a handful of rock homes, President Hammond’s still being the only one in Bluff. There were two schoolhouses, a store building, and a shoe shop. Twelve hundred acres of fields had been fenced, as had almost all of the town lots. There were seventeen miles of ditch. They had spent twenty-seven thousand dollars on roads, from Bluff and Monticello to Colorado, and from Bluff to the Colorado River and to Moab. Only seven thousand dollars of this amount had been paid for by the territorial legislature. There were a lot of corrals, a few good orchards, and a lot of lucerne hay fields that yielded three crops a year. The bishop and Brother Bayles added in the double cabin headquarters of the Carlisles and whatever other improvements the cattle companies had installed. The bishop looked over what his people had wrought in a little more than eight years and valued the lot at seventy-five thousand dollars.¹⁶¹

While he was doing this, President Hammond went to Colorado, where he attended a celebration held at the Ignacio Agency and a large party of the commissioners at the Stratton Hotel in Durango. He found the people and papers of Colorado jubilant at reclaiming the two million dollars worth of land on the reservation about to be reopened ^[237] for their use. There was enough farmland for two thousand farmers to settle on 160 acres each, to say nothing of the rangeland. On both occasions President Hammond expressed his opinion that this was a “blessing to all concerned”: the Indians were removing to a land “better adapted to their wants than the one they are leaving.” Furthermore, he could speak with authority when he said the large, broken land in San Juan County was “such as the average white man will not covet.” If the Mormons could get a fair valuation for their improvements, they could move to a better place, making it a good deal for everyone.¹⁶²

He may have been surprised when he returned to Bluff to find that the settlers there did not agree with him. “The people are much exercised over the prospect of our removal from this county.” They hoped that if the removal order came, the government would allow them to remain to live among and work with the Indians, but they realized this was not likely. Wilford Woodruff and the other authorities of the Church also assumed there was not much left to do but plan for removal. Utah Territory was on the short end of the political stick, with only a delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives against Colorado’s full delegation to the House and the Senate. On several occasions Church authorities counseled the Saints to get the best deal they could out of the government but not to give up their mission. They should rather continue to live close to and work with the Indians from places in Colorado and New Mexico.¹⁶³ This was a difficult prospect, because by this time most ranges were already full, and “the stock the ^[238] people own are their wealth.” “The Lord only knows where they would go if this place was to go to the Indians,” one settler lamented.¹⁶⁴ As Bluff stockmen moved their flocks and herds south to their winter ranges for perhaps the final time, President Woodruff hoped for blessings on “all the Saints who are thus deprived of their hard earned homes, and make your present inconvenience light to you.”¹⁶⁵ Meanwhile, the Ute commissioners headed toward Washington, to deliver their work to Senator Bowen, who would translate its provisions into another removal bill. Eager Indians headed directly for San Juan County assuming the deal was already done.¹⁶⁶

These new arrivals increased the burdens on those in Bluff. Not only were there more Utes in the county, but 1888 had been a hard year for crops and herds. The Indians had already grown more “insolent” in the fall, and things got worse in winter. Some Utes were always in town and increased their begging, sometimes helping themselves to what they wanted in the settlers’ homes. They detained travelers and in some instances even covered them with their rifles from a distance. The Navajos were also upset at the strengthening of their traditional rivals, and they also increased their demands on the settlers and their stock.¹⁶⁷

In early 1889 Bluff did its best to plan for an uncertain future. Church authorities counseled settlers to put in crops as usual, but hold off from making more substantial ^[239] improvements until their future was better known.¹⁶⁸ Kumen Jones and the Allan brothers explored the lower Mancos River as a potential new home but returned with a negative report.¹⁶⁹ The townspeople vigorously rejected Commissioner T. S. Child’s allegation to Congress that the Bluff canal was an unusable failure that had been swept into the river.¹⁷⁰ The co-op’s members, whose unity was already cracking the year before, held a meeting until midnight and finally voted to sell their sheep and “wind up the affairs of the company” on April 18.¹⁷¹

Maybe they heard rumors in the interim, but they did not dissolve the San Juan Co-op. By late May those in Bluff heard the news that Bowen’s bill, though it passed the Senate, had been defeated in the House. Removal would not happen that year. Utah’s delegate John Caine deserved some of the credit for lobbying hard against a bill that passed the Senate in a form that did not give the San Juan residents fair compensation.¹⁷² But more powerful forces had coalesced to defeat the bill. Cattle companies such as the Carlisles and the Pittsburgh outfit on the La Sals were mostly opposed to losing their ranges. The Pittsburgh Cattle Company found an effective ally in its home state: the Indian Rights Association was headquartered in Philadelphia.¹⁷³ This group was opposed ^[240] to the reservation system altogether and had been instrumental in passing the Dawes Act in 1887, which allotted homesteads to individual Indians instead of reserving large parcels for tribes. They saw the Bowen bill as a backward step in their drive to assimilate Indians to American culture and agriculture. The association had potent connections and lobbyists. They sent two inspectors to the San Juan, who returned reporting the improvements in the county were worth double the seventy-five thousand dollars the bishop had assessed. This amount gave other members of Congress, particularly empathetic westerners, more pause. Finally, those in the government of Utah Territory used whatever influence they had against the bill, feeling the area had too many Indians in its borders already.¹⁷⁴ If Martha Hammond’s earlier appraisal was right, when news arrived of the bill’s defeat, the stockmen cheered while their wives quietly mourned through their pallid smiles.

Bluff’s troubles on this issue were far from over, because many of the Utes were understandably furious. In August, Amelia Hammond reported them singing, dancing, and shooting every night. “Brother Jones said he never knew them to act so saucy before.” The Utes stole watermelons, dug up potatoes, and frightened the women and children in general, especially when they arrived at sundown and lurked into the night.¹⁷⁵ The settlers were “really in danger because of the restless condition of the Indians, they ^[241] regarding the white people as trespassers.”¹⁷⁶ With only six men in town, once again the bishop’s faith was all he had close at hand to withstand perhaps 250 Indians.¹⁷⁷ Furthermore, the Coloradans were not going to be stopped short of victory; the bill was sure to be reintroduced. When Utah’s governor asked President Hammond for another assessment of the county’s improvements, the bill went up. The canals themselves were now worth a hundred thousand dollars, and everything in the county was worth two hundred thousand dollars. According 
to this second assessment, the government should either pay the settlers this windfall or reopen the county to white settlement and build some reservoirs as part of the bargain.¹⁷⁸

The threat was still imminent enough that President Hammond did two more dramatic things. First, he arranged to buy a new home for the soon-to-be displaced saints of Bluff. He visited Manassa, Colorado, and was impressed with the town, now with over a thousand residents, a large co-op store, and a flourmill. In the same valley, he set his sights on a twenty-one-thousand-acre ranch on the Zapato River. It was impressive enough that he, in consultation with Silas S. Smith, put seven thousand dollars down and arranged financing for the twenty-three-thousand-dollar balance over the next five years. “Altogether it is the finest country for saints to make ready homes in I have ever [seen] in these mountains.”¹⁷⁹ But he also went to Washington, D.C., in December. Delegate Caine felt it would be beneficial to have a ^[242] representative from San Juan County in the capital, and Hammond was the logical choice. “The sentiment is strong on the part of the saints here,” he recorded before he left, “to be let alone in their homes, but if forced to move make a strong effort to obtain full compensation for our claims.”¹⁸⁰ Jens Nielson, Platte Lyman, and John Allan were appointed to draft a strong protest to Congress and also revise their list of claims in case the protest did not work. Instead of finishing the job, though, they later wrote President Hammond telling him they would leave the business to him.¹⁸¹

The people in Bluff received periodic updates on President Hammond’s activities in the East, mostly through letters written to Lemuel Redd. Although Washington was “a very wicked and corrupt city,” it had many impressive buildings, museums, and theaters. He shook the hand of President Benjamin Harrison, though as a Republican, “his form and looks did not strike me very favorably.” Hammond toured Mount Vernon, and when he got back they could see the magnolia leaves and coffee beans he had bought from an “old negro,” who assured him they came from trees planted by George Washington himself. They eagerly read President Hammond’s accounts of New York and Philadelphia, in which he told tales of buildings that were fourteen stories high and of a contraption that talked and sang and made him “roar with laughter, it was so natural.”¹⁸² In the latter city he conferred with the Indian Rights Association before returning to the cloakrooms and corridors of the nation’s capitol. Senator Dawes, head of the Indian ^[243] Affairs Committee, “seemed every inch a gentile,” but arranged a subcommittee hearing on removal. In his conversations, testimony, and lobbying, Hammond held to his position that the settlers wanted either two hundred thousand dollars or an opportunity to perfect their own claims on the county. In spite of his efforts, the bill that was reported out of the House committee and looked likely to emerge from the Senate committee appropriated only fifty thousand dollars for the residents of the county. From Bluff, these residents reported back to President Hammond that the Colorado newspapers continued to incite the issue and the Indians, who were extremely impatient with the long delays.

When President Hammond returned to Salt Lake City in April 1890, he was convinced removal could not be stopped. “Colorado State is too powerful for us to oppose,” but he also believed the representatives and senators from that state would help the San Juan settlers get more money for their claims to help pass the bill. As it turned out, however, the same combination of forces that defeated removal the first time succeeded in doing it again in 1890. Once more, however, the government refused to open the land to white settlers, and the issue remained alive for future Coloradans to agitate and future Congresses to consider.¹⁸³ For the time being, at least, the ranch on the Zapato River would not be occupied by those leaving Bluff, though President Hammond and Silas Smith continued to try to acquire more land for the future.^{184 [244]}

The Raid, Part II

The people in Bluff had other pressures to worry about during these times. The raid against polygamy continued, and intensified leading up to 1890. Grover Cleveland, the Democratic president, “was as good as he dared to be” to Utah, even favoring statehood. But when he lost to “the cold-blooded Presbyterian” Harrison in 1888, the Mormons in Utah looked for “an increase of the persecuting spirit that we have contended with for the past four years.”¹⁸⁵ Church leadership discouraged the open preaching of plural marriage. Refugees continued to come. Platte Lyman spent significant time in San Juan County, moved his second wife, Annie, to live there, and prepared to bring his other wife, Adelia, and children back to Bluff as well. In late 1890, he was called to serve as a counselor in the stake presidency to Francis Hammond, to replace William Adams, whose health was not good. Lemuel H. Redd’s father, “Pap” Redd, was tired of being a fugitive, “never feeling safe to spend one night under his own roof.”¹⁸⁶ So in 1887, he brought some of his family, his cattle, and his horses to Bluff “for the purpose of bettering his financial affairs as well as to escape the persecution of the law.”¹⁸⁷ Although Pap was sixteen years Bishop Nielson’s junior, the two men enjoyed each other’s company, sharing good humor and keen judgment of people as well as livestock and horses. When Pap returned to Bluff with one of his wives in 1889, he wrote back to a daughter that Jens ^[245] was “the same old comic boy he was when you saw him.”¹⁸⁸ The raid also caused Ben Perkins to return to San Juan County with the wooden hat rack he had made during his five months in the state penitentiary.¹⁸⁹ After moving around the stake, he settled the younger of his two wives, Sarah, in Bluff, and lived most of the time with his first wife, and Sarah’s older sister, Mary Ann, in Monticello. Jens was of great help to detached families such as this one: “The dear old bishop was such a comfort to me,” recalled Sarah, “he came so often to know our wants.”¹⁹⁰

Those in Bluff heard of how tight things were around the perimeter of the county. Brigham Young Jr. came through from time to time with reports of how narrowly he had escaped rigid antipolygamy enforcement in New Mexico, where he had a home and family.¹⁹¹ Bishop Christopher Arthur of Cedar City, as well as Bishop Stewart of Moab, finally turned themselves in by 1889 rather than subject their families to further harassment.¹⁹² The newspapers informed Bluff’s residents that the government had confiscated over a million dollars in Church property and that Idaho Territory had started to disfranchise polygamists under the Edmunds-Tucker Act.¹⁹³ Women, who had voted in Utah Territory since 1870, also lost the vote. The Supreme Court ratified these actions in ^[246] 1890, and Congress was considering the Cullom Bill, which would take the vote away from all Mormons. The “political world is hot towards us,” as President Hammond saw it.¹⁹⁴

The federal marshal for San Juan County was Joe Bush, and he was generally very competent in tracking down train robbers, horse thieves, and the like, often with the assistance of sheriffs and deputies from Bluff such as Willard Butt, Hyrum Perkins, and Hans Bayles. But the townspeople continued to be skittish of any mention of marshals coming to town. When a Mr. Wolcott showed up in June 1888 claiming to be investigating the year-old shooting of Amasa Barton, many agreed that “he is here more to see and learn how many are here that he could have arrested for cohab.”¹⁹⁵ The bishop counseled with his ward members on when and where to hide. Sometimes suspect men would hole up in other ward members’ houses for a few days.¹⁹⁶ Sometimes the wives of polygamists, such as Lucy Redd or Ida May Jones, went on the underground somewhere else in the stake for a few months.¹⁹⁷ In August 1889, Nephi Bailey rode into town, Revere-like, a few minutes before midnight, to warn that the marshals were coming. He hustled all the prosecutable men with their blankets out of town to sleep. In the morning they found the federal officers were only after train robbers.¹⁹⁸ Pap Redd, used to intense interest from law enforcement officials, was amused by this. “The people here are quite excited just now ^[247] about marshals. One of them sent a letter unexpected which makes some think everything isn’t right in Rome. I haven’t got very bad excited yet as I have been used to such scares.”¹⁹⁹ In the end he was right. Marshal Bush endeared himself to the San Juan Mormons by showing little interest in catching cohabs. It was a good thing, too, because when it came to other kinds of criminals, he usually got his man.²⁰⁰

Although removal and the raid were largely beyond their control, San Juan Mormons kept control of county government. Their numbers were not overwhelming, especially after the restrictions of the antipolygamy acts, but in the 1880s the Mormons in Bluff voted solidly for the pro-Mormon People’s Party to elect local officials, territorial legislators, and the territory’s delegate to Congress.²⁰¹ Joseph Barton was usually chosen as county judge. This voting solidarity, as well as the Mormons’ more solid communities, allowed them to hold all of the county offices, though the gentile cattle companies paid most of the taxes.²⁰² A time or two, enough Gentiles showed interest in voting to make those in Bluff nervous, but never in sufficient numbers for the gentile Liberal Party to win a county position.²⁰³ Election day in August 1889 brought out ten to twelve voters in Bluff and only twenty in the whole county. Concerns that the Liberal Party would win in Salt Lake City were so high that, ^[248] despite their own feeble numbers, Jens Nielson and other Bluff officials talked about sending men to Salt Lake to vote in next February’s elections.²⁰⁴ In the end, the Liberals took Salt Lake, “a dark day for the Saints.” But in San Juan County, the People’s Party had little trouble holding power due to the transient nature of the cattlemen. In 1890 there were thirty registered voters, none of them Liberals. Emissaries were sent from Bluff to Monticello and onto the range to fetch voters to give all the support they could to John T. Caine as territorial delegate to Congress over C. C. Goodwin, publisher of that scourge, the Salt Lake Tribune. Twenty-four of the thirty voted; Caine stayed in Congress, and Mormons stayed firmly in control of the schools, roads, and tax rolls of San Juan County.²⁰⁵

Anniversaries

On April 6, 1890, Jens Nielson and those who were still in Bluff could look back on ten years by their muddy, unpredictable stream. The town still was not much. C. L. Christensen, an Indian missionary, came looking for it later in the year. He traveled up the “roughest road [he had] ever seen” from Rincon. “When I got there near the old cottonwood church I asked when we would be to Bluff City; I looked for 400 inhabitants or more. Some one answered this was it. A sure surprise!”²⁰⁶ The Bluff settlers did not have the steam-heated, gas-lit, well-plumbed homes of the more prosperous Utah settlements. But they had survived, which was saying something. Their stock prospered, ^[249] and they were becoming wealthy. Still, it was a precarious prosperity that could be toppled at any time by the weather, the raid, Indian removal, or the Indians themselves. But the settlers were sticking to their mission. They had the good will of some Indians, they still clutched political control of the county, and they prevented gentile cattle from overrunning the ranges.

On the worst days, when it was mercilessly hot, the water was out of the ditch, and the wind blew the dirt and grit relentlessly into their irritated eyes and defenseless homes, they could still congratulate themselves for being different. They were not like the Carlisles or the Coloradans or the Liberals in Salt Lake, and they could fire their salvoes from a distance that the city under the Liberals was “the paradise of thieves, burglars, foot pads, and all classes of the vile and ungodly.”²⁰⁷ And they were also different from the Mormons in Cedar City or even Mancos. They could rail against Saints in Salt Lake and Ogden selling out their inheritances to Gentiles under a spirit of speculation; they were holding theirs.²⁰⁸ What was easier to see at a distance was harder, though not impossible, to see at home. As President Hammond was in Alamosa negotiating the purchase of the Zapato Ranch, he noticed, “The world seems on wheels traveling to and fro seeking wealth and pleasure—all in commotion and a state of unrest.”²⁰⁹ Bluff residents rode all over the county in pursuit of their herds, and they still wrestled with keeping enough men in town to protect their families despite their leaders’ ^[250] repeated admonitions. But they had been promised blessings if they stayed, and though their homes did not show it, and they were threatened on many sides, they felt they were blessed. If they had stayed in Cedar City or Parowan, each of which had almost a thousand people by 1890, they would have been more comfortable. But they stuck it out by the San Juan despite such enticements.

In the early afternoon on April 25, the bishop walked toward the schoolhouse, summoned on some pretext or another. The cheers that greeted him from the murky, lamp-lit interior could not have been a complete surprise given that his seventieth birthday was the next day, a Sunday, and not another soul was to be seen on the streets of Bluff. All of them, about fifty adults plus their children, were packed into the schoolhouse, awaiting their bishop. The Nielson women outdid themselves with “a most bountifully prepared feast.” President Hammond was asked by the family to make a short speech on their behalf, at the close of which Joe presented his father with a new suit, and the stake president gave him a silver-headed cane. Then came the singing and dancing by all, and more dancing for the adults in the evening. “A real nice time was had.” A few cowboys came, by invitation, and behaved themselves. The weather was fine.^{210 [251]}