Depression
Sliding Finances
Even before the town’s residents bid Andrew Jenson a cheerful farewell at the end of 1893, their economic outlook had become less rosy. Bluff’s dependence on livestock had made the town dependent on national markets. This attachment had brought the bonanza of the previous years, but when the national economy started sliding, so did stock prices in San Juan County and Colorado. Although the gold rush bounty and spiritual glow of 1893 delayed and obscured the fact, Bluff was following the nation into depression.
A year before, in late 1892, the outlook was as bright as ever. The San Juan Co-op had delivered another 40 percent dividend to its investors, and the Bluff Cattle Pool had yielded a 15 percent profit. In the early months of 1893, President Hammond began to negotiate with the Carlisles about buying large chunks of their land claims. But at the same time, Bluff’s stockmen saw troubling signs. The profits of earlier years had brought too many cattle and far too many sheep to their ranges. At the same time, the grass was thinned by what was beginning to look like a drought. Cattlemen lost more stock over the winter of 1892–93 than they ever had before, possibly as much as one quarter of their herds. The sheep survived better, but when the co-op’s directors returned from the Salt [299] Lake Temple dedication, they discovered that some of the herders they had hired from New Mexico had sold or gambled away a substantial number of their sheep to Navajos. Their spring wool clip sold for only eight cents a pound, half the price of a few years before. Their supposed disaster insurance, the mutton market, was low as well. The U.S. Congress did not help either. The Democrats, who regained control in the 1892 elections, passed the Wilson-Gorman Tariff in August of 1894, lowering wool tariffs.1
Forebodings turned to gloom as the pool and co-op boards met after Pioneer Day in the summer of 1893. Fletcher Hammond could barely get payment for the four hundred head he had sold for the pool in Omaha. He reported the banks of Denver were closed and confirmed that Bluff was not just struggling with its own troubles but with a “general panic in financial matters.”2 The co-op was eight thousand dollars in debt, owing to the loss of sheep, lax management, and too much profit seeking during the boom. The individuals in Bluff as well as its companies found themselves in debt at a time when credit had fled and past obligations pressed down with more weight than ever. On one occasion, for instance, Platte Lyman had to borrow change from his children to meet an interest payment.3 Few in town had cash to spare, the rates for day laborers plummeted, and [300] herders were taking as little as fifteen dollars per month.4
The decision to build a school and church at the same time in Bluff began to seem less than wise. Church headquarters was in the same, strapped situation, having a hard time paying its monthly expenses. The Presiding Bishop urged all the wards to put off improvements that were not absolutely necessary and to forward any cash they had on hand or any they could get by selling tithing in kind to Salt Lake City.5
Some looked to the county court to help ease their burdens by reducing taxes. Instead, Bluff tried to steal a march on Monticello. San Juan County had matured to the point where it needed a county courthouse, and the boom leading up to early 1893 encouraged the county court to discuss it. But the two main towns could not agree on its location. Bluff was the older town and the traditional county seat, but Monticello was more centrally located, and it seemed to have the momentum of future population headed its way. So Judge Joseph F. Barton and some Bluff members of the county court tried to settle the matter by decisive action. They passed a quick resolution, perhaps loaded by the absence of councilmen from Monticello, that named Bluff as the location for the courthouse. Then ten teams and wagons from Bluff went for lumber in Cortez, Colorado, instead of their usual source, the Butt brothers’ sawmill near Monticello. Word got to the Monticellans, who were just as disjointed with the hard times as were the people in Bluff, and they loudly protested the sly attempt to make Bluff the de facto county seat by conjuring a courthouse. Those in Monticello were joined in their objections [301] by other taxpayers who thought this was the worst time to build a courthouse. Finally, in mid-August Judge Barton and the court had to withdraw their plans, having succeeded only in antagonizing county residents instead of relieving them.6
Division
Under the heat of the drought and the pressures of depression, the unity of the Bluff Ward began to crack as well. In the crisis, “nearly every man wants to be the manager or ‘top sawyer,’” which only added to the confusion. Some almost came to blows. Judge Barton seized Lemuel Redd by the throat, accusing him of lying about whose turn it was to ship freight for the co-op. Hyrum Perkins got involved in a scuffle as well. To make matters worse, too many teams were traveling on Sunday, breaking another commandment. The stake president felt that in these trying times “the priesthood is set at naught and counsel trampled under foot.”7
Soon, however, the priesthood leaders were at each others’ figurative throats as well, though the cause was not entirely clear. It might have been the courthouse. Or under these circumstances it might have been as trivial as Bishop Nielson resenting the stake president for telling him he could not punish people who rang the meetinghouse bell without authorization because bishops had no civil authority. Or Jens might have had enough of the president’s constant quibbling about building the new [302] meetinghouse and school. Whatever the reason, the men had another falling out. With everything stewing in the ward, these disagreements took a full month to fully resolve, but after an extended series of meetings, conferences, and free discussions, the tensions were cut at the Thursday afternoon fast meeting on September 7. The bishop went first, confessing his sins and then asking forgiveness of the ward. Francis Hammond, Platte Lyman, the stake high councilors in town, the bishop’s counselors, then “all the elders and saints with very few exceptions” followed. This “glorious time” again cleared the air, and more importantly to those involved, made them “more acceptable before the Lord” and more likely to “obtain forgiveness from him.” Still, it did not help President Hammond collect the money Judge Barton owed him when he needed cash to get to general conference.8
As it turned out, the bishop would need more peace and strength than any of them. Soon after the purging fast meeting, he became seriously ill. Jens had lived with chronic inflammation in his nose and throat for years, probably from “catarrh,” or the drainage of sinus infections, but now the pain in his head became unbearable. He could not attend meetings, and on September 16, a number of the ward’s leaders gave him a priesthood blessing. But soon after, he was so much worse that his family sent for a doctor. Francis Hammond, Platte Lyman, and Kumen Jones administered to the bishop again. The doctor arrived from Cortez on the twentieth and immediately removed a polyp from the suffering man’s nose. Two days later, fluid started running out of his ears as the infection spread. Jens’s temperature rose and his strength declined even more. Visitors found him “very [303] weak” and “dangerously ill.” His fever broke the next day, but the doctor did not yet consider him out of danger. When the physician finally left on the twenty-fifth, his bill in those cash-strapped days was $175.00, what a cattle hand earned in seven months on the range. But the infection still rumbled around in Jens’s ears, nose, and throat. In October, it gathered strength again, and the bishop suffered a relapse. He was bedridden throughout the month, and at seventy-three, it was uncertain if he could muster the strength to survive. By November 1, though, he felt up to attending Francis Hammond’s birthday party, and by December, he was completely recovered. It was the closest he had come to moving onto Bluff’s cemetery hill.9
Deeper Down
While the bishop was ill, the schoolhouse was finished. He missed its jubilant first social at the end of October. They also held some Church meetings in the school as the rock meetinghouse was still being built. All were not entirely pleased with the new building: at first its main room seemed too tall, too dim, and too noisy. But a curtain dividing the primary and secondary students made a big improvement, and it was a triumph to have the building finished.10 The rest of the news Jens heard in his illness was bad. Wool prices were so low that the co-op had decided not to shear the sheep, and now they had scabies. Despite the hard times, the ward had to continue assessing its members for the continuing costs of their new church.11 [304]
For the first time since 1888 the co-op declared no dividend since it still owed four thousand dollars. And for the first time since the early days of Bluff, children worried if they would get anything for Christmas.12 The holiday season proceeded with less verve than usual. Church leaders were happy that the youth put on two plays, one about an ostracized Jewish maiden and the other a farce titled “The Mischievous Major.” These replaced some of the dances of which the young were too fond. But the leaders were disappointed when some of the young men got drunk at the Christmas Day Ball, one so badly that he had to be carried from the hall. The bishop was particularly disappointed that two of the culprits were his backsliding sons, Jens Peter and France. They confessed their sins later in church, but it still did not remove the fact that his sons were cowboys in more than their occupation.13
Jens had cause to be concerned about Freeman as well. Always energetic, the fourteen-year-old was devoting some of his energy toward bullying and mischief. Albert Lyman, his former friend, mourned the treatment he had received from Freeman and his gang: “There are no boys in this town to sling at me and curse me because I am a Mormon as they did in Scipio, but they treat me just as bad on other principles.”14 On a Saturday in late January, just after the opening hymn had been sung in the 2:00 pm session of stake [305] conference, Calistia Hammond burst in to the meeting announcing Freeman had been shot. The meetinghouse emptied as the congregation rushed to the boy. It turned out he had been loafing on a haystack while Frank Hyde was shooting at some birds, and two small shot grazed Freeman across the eyelid and forehead. There was no lasting damage, and the meeting resumed, though there is no record of what consequences came later at home.15
Caroline, however, gave Jens more reason to celebrate. Wayne Redd had come to Bluff with his father, the polygamist exile Pap Redd, in 1887. When Pap went to Mexico in 1891, Wayne stayed, partially because of this Nielson girl. They got married in the new Salt Lake Temple in late November 1893. “It was time, too,” according to a Bluff boy, “because he was twenty-three.”16 When the newlyweds returned to town just after the New Year, despite the hard times, Jens threw them a “sumptuous dinner” at his home. Wayne, rejoicing at his good fortune, threw everyone a party in the new schoolhouse.17
The drought and depression continued unquenched in 1894. The town was amused when a man with a phonograph came through, and they paid to hear it “sing songs, preach negro sermons, recite pieces, etc.”18 But the rest of the news was not as entertaining. The rain did not fall, the streams were nearly parched by mid-April, and the range dried out earlier than ever before. Some Navajos felt their flocks were only a year [306] away from ruin and speculated that “God is either dead or he has moved a long way off.”19 It was particularly difficult to try to prepare the ditch for such low water, and much of the watering of garden plots and orchards had to be done by hand if it was done at all. The generally depressed economy and the failure of the co-op to pay a dividend echoed in the meager tithing amounts the bishop could forward to Salt Lake City.20
Many cashed in their relics. Platte Lyman sold his four Native American mummies for one thousand dollars. Those who had laughed at him when he first started digging stopped laughing and started digging. Jens Peter Nielson and Robert Allan (“Rollicky Bob” to his friends) sold some of their collection for twelve hundred dollars. Jens Peter had less success on a relic-hunting expedition with Joseph Hammond in which they not only came home empty-handed but minus Jens’s pack mule as well, which Hammond had inadvertently shot.21 In essence, however, even though they lived on the land and made no secret of their activities, these hunters were ransacking the relics. While they added some pieces to museum collections, their amateur methods made it impossible to properly evaluate many of the items they found once they had wrested them from their earthen strata. Soon, some people in Utah and even San Juan County itself would be wondering if the state needed legislation to protect its antiquities.22 [307]
The adversity of the times seemed to bring some humility as well. “There is a silent reformation going on in the midst of the people,” felt President Hammond. Some members of the ward, mostly women, began holding a class to study the Doctrine and Covenants at President Hammond’s house. By the end of the year, there was some kind of Church meeting or class going on every night of the week.23 The baptized builders of the previous year made progress on the buildings and their faith in the gospel. Brothers Sitzer, Nix, Johnson, and Lumpkin were all ordained deacons in the Aaronic Priesthood in February, making for a quorum with members from ten to fifty years of age.24
But peace did not last long in these difficult days. The ward watched and fasted in pity and apprehension as John Allan Jr. was checked in and out of the asylum in Provo twice, claiming “he was troubled by evil spirits” due to family problems.25 Then John Adams, Margaret Nielson’s husband, assaulted Judge Barton over some business of the Bluff Pool. This caused “quite a feeling” in the ward, and Adams was later found guilty by Bluff’s justice of the peace and fined twenty-five dollars plus court costs.26 Pettier problems also came out as the Bluff citizens jostled against each other in their hardships from day to gritty day. The co-op ran a meat market, which was supplied with beef by its patrons when they needed to pay up their accounts. Beef was butchered one to three times a week. But to get the premium cuts, customers lined up early, meaning the “most [308] aggressive hog” got the best beef. The cows went in cooperatively but went out competitively, causing hard feelings among the losers in the carnivorous derby.27 The bishop took his own knock when a vengeful post he was pulling down whacked him, decorating his forehead with a nasty gash.28
Despite all the troubles, the Bluff Ward was still the strongest in the stake, “presided over in a very efficient manner by Bishop Jens Nielson and his very worthy counselors.”29 This competence was more of an achievement than it seemed, especially in hard times, as the bishop of the Mancos Ward could testify when he became unpopular. One sympathetic ward member felt this sniping at bishops was “a natural failing all over Zion; he is the target for all to shoot at.”30 Bluff could also take cold comfort from the Moab Ward, which was reduced to a branch because of much strong opposition to its bishop and because it was “so mixed with gentiles and Jack Mormons and apostates that it is not a desirable place to live in.”31 During the depression, Bishop Nielson continued to preach traditional Mormon values to his ward. He urged his people to cut back on their expenses and cooperate more during these hard times. But no preaching could stop the wind from blowing up the dry dirt and sand into “genuine San Juan blinders” throughout the summer or halt the sun from glaring off the rock walls around them or add life to the [309] dry range, which “was never known to be in a so poor a condition as it is at the present time.”32 Nor could the bishop force his followers to get along. The main advice they received in the July stake conference was to settle their difficulties with each other without dragging them before the high council. Christians should need none but the parties concerned to reconcile their differences.33
Bluff did have two things to look forward to despite the depression. On July 17, 1894, Grover Cleveland, in his second term as president, signed a bill that provided for Utah to be admitted as a state in the near future. The good feelings that had developed after the Manifesto and continued through the temple dedication and the Columbian Exposition had reached the nation’s capital. And as a more local source of pride, Bluff’s rock meetinghouse was almost finished. The project was still several hundred dollars in debt, as was the new schoolhouse, but at least it would be completed. When the choir tried it out in September, they liked its acoustics.34 The Bluff Ward would have a place to worship for decades, provided its members were still there to do the worshiping.
Indian Affairs
Upbringing
By the 1890s most of the children in Bluff had been born and raised there. They saw Indians [310] almost every day and got to know them fairly well. For some, this familiarity did not help. “Luella is wonderfully nervous frightened of Indians,” President Hammond reported regarding his daughter, “and in a state of terror all the time.”35 Previous killings reminded the settlers there was danger, but most of them had more personal interactions with the Native Americans around them. In addition to seeing them when they traded at the store, Bluff men and women often hired Indian men and women to work for them. Sometimes they would work for cash, but “some of them are quite willing to work for something to eat, especially this season of the year when they cannot hunt for game.”36 And as Bluff children worked alongside Indians, they got to know each other a little better. “I shoveled with Tom Navajo,” Albert Lyman wrote about a day at the ditch, “he learned me some of the language he spoke and I learned him some of my language.”37 But there was a mental hierarchy, and Bluff’s children inferred they were on the higher rung, as the same Brother Lyman realized indirectly while a young man. He was working for the Wetherills in Mancos, and he noticed “such pride and class . . . and such style as they maintained made me to feel that I was getting exactly the kind of reception that we gave to Indians when we had them in our service.”38
Bluff youth also knew Indians thought higher of Mormons than of “Americans”39 and that as second-generation missionaries they still had an [311] obligation to teach the Indians something. On one occasion one of Platte Lyman’s horses got away and an Indian found it and returned it. “We gave him some cloth afterwards to pay him for his kindness and to learn him to be honest.”40 On another occasion, Albert loaned his pocketknife to Manito’s wife to open a can of fruit. At sundown, Manito came back to return it. “I believe if anyone will trust an Indian and the Indian knows they are trusting him, he will not steal.”41 Sometimes, the lessons were harsh, such as the time Mike Moancoppy was snared in a double wolf trap when he kept removing wool from a chink in the wall of the co-op warehouse.42 But Bluff’s settlers also learned it was better to avoid some Indians if they could. When an Indian named Posey accidentally shot his wife, all of his and Aunt Jody’s efforts could not save her. He cremated her corpse west of town, and some Bluff boys had to go see. Posey, understandably upset at this intrusion, yelled at the terrified boys and chased them a long way toward town.43
On the whole, relations with the Indians were more stable than they had been just a few years before. There were few enough troubles in the early 1890s that Thales Haskell, the Indian interpreter, was once again released from his assignment in Bluff to rejoin his family in Manassa, Colorado. By this time, Christian Lyngaa Christensen, a Dane nicknamed “Lingo” for his ability to interpret, had been called to live in Bluff. “The Indians are very [312] much like other human beings,” he opined, “they are easy to be led, but slow to be driven; and if there were more interpreters and fewer soldiers it would soon work a reformation.”44 The worse the season, however, the more Indians could be counted on to leave their reservations and come into towns for help, he cautioned. The drought starting in 1892 hit the Indians as hard as it hit Bluff. This made the situation more precarious, but the settlers were used to it. “While it is not impossible to have some trouble with Indians on our borders,” Christensen noted, it was usually outsiders who caused it and Indians who got blamed for it.45
Still, the danger could be real. In 1893, Clark Field, a Gentile traveling alone, was shot in his sleep by a Navajo after Field tried to warn them away from his camp with his gun. His end would have remained unknown, but his grieving mother from Boston persisted in finding out his fate.46 As the drought grew worse, so did Indian begging and demands. Benow, a Ute, brought his band to Bluff in August 1893, but the settlers had little to spare. Some Indians began to steal crops as well as turn their ponies loose into fenced fields to feed. Bluff’s leaders worried that violence might break out if one of the “rash brethren” lost his temper.47 By September the Indians were “here almost every day begging, and we feel it is better to feed than fight them. The game is almost gone and they are very destitute.”48 [313]
Final Removal
Behind all this, the issue of Indian removal to San Juan County had never entirely died. Every once in a while there were rumbles from Congress about the treaty made with the Utes back in 1889, but nothing came of them. Francis Hammond again wrote to Senator Henry Teller of Colorado in early 1891, pressing him to either pass the bill or reopen the land for settlement, “for we are in great suspense.”49 But when the removal bill failed to pass the Senate again that year, President Hammond and Silas S. Smith sold their Zapato Ranch land in Colorado to the First Presidency. “I lose $1,000 and a good deal of time,” the stake president lamented, “but I could not handle it unless the government should buy us out for the Indians in San Juan County.”50 Left in suspense, the settlers in Bluff received varying signals from their religious leaders. Brigham Young Jr. urged “the people of Bluff to go to and build and improve and not wait for the settlement of the Indian question,” and “the Lord will sustain them.”51 But George Q. Cannon later felt it was unwise to build public buildings on unsurveyed lands that might be confiscated.52 While the school and church were being built, settlers waited for a resolution before they hazarded building better homes.53 “If the Ute removal question was settled,” felt “Lingo” Christensen, “San Juan County would soon fill up, and still add [314] wealth and population to blessed Utah.”54
In early 1894, Colorado people and papers were once again agitating to get a bill through Congress. President Hammond consulted with the bishop and other ward leaders and forwarded the customary request for compensation, though now the bill had risen to three hundred thousand dollars, to Utah’s delegate John Rawlins and Senator Teller of Colorado. Toward the end of February, however, Bluff’s leaders read a copy of a telegram sent by Delegate Rawlins to Utah’s governor, Caleb West, alleging that the Coloradans had sunk to new depths. The Utes were now being incited to come to Utah and drive out the settlers themselves. Immediately the bishop and his counselors met with Francis Hammond and Platte Lyman. This was an alarming prospect, but the danger would not really arrive until the grass grew tall enough to feed the Indians’ ponies.55
In March, reports came in from the range that twenty to thirty Utes under Red Jacket had killed up to forty Bluff sheep. In early April, Delegate Rawlins informed the settlers that the Senate committee reported favorably on the removal bill. By May, however, things were quiet enough that President Hammond advertised in the Deseret News that he considered removal “a dead issue; they will not come now.”56 But Red Jacket and a band of Utes did come into Bluff a week later, and the Ute leader was upset. He told the residents he wanted to live in their homes already, and they could find a place somewhere else. The Utes, he continued, would even let the Mormons settle on the [315] western part of their new reservation.57
A very unsettled summer followed. Impatient Utes continued to raid Bluff’s livestock. Navajos came into town in large numbers in mid-July “and acted very strange.”58 Some were stealing fruit, and by the end of the month the town’s “danger from them and the Utes was never greater.”59 One day, Mike Moancoppy struck at Bishop Nielson with a quirt, but Lemuel Redd stopped him with a kick to the midsection.60 Bluff’s leaders “counseled the people to be very careful in their treatment of the Indians, for they are mad.”61 The town leaders wrote to David Day, the Indian agent at the Southern Ute Reservation in Colorado, requesting that he hold his Utes there.62
Bluff’s agitations with the Indians declined as the heat of summer fell, but other problems failed to wane with the season. A diphtheria scare in August forced the bishop to suspend meetings for a week. As fall came, Bluff’s citizens were left to contemplate how they could hold their dry range against the huge anticipated number of sheep that would be brought for the winter. Just to be certain of their helpless situation, President Hammond confirmed at the territorial land office in Salt Lake City that since they lived [316] on unsurveyed land, “if a cowboy turns his stock onto our fields we have no legal redress.”63 But some events made even these problems look small. The whole town mourned the sudden and striking death of President Hammond’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Hannah, in November. She was seized by convulsions soon after a bath and “expired in a few moments exclaiming, ‘Let me go, let me go—kiss Pa and Ma good bye for me.’”64 Jens sent Freeman out with fresh horses to help bring the Hammonds in from Colorado, and with the other town leaders did everything he could to console the stunned parents.
When Jens attended stake conference in Monticello in late November, there were a lot of Utes around, more, in fact, than he had seen before. They were belligerent when questioned, insisting that they had more right than the whites to be there. Some even felt that if the settlers tried to stop them, the militia would come to help the Indians. Scores of Navajos also came north from their reservation, invited, rumors said, by the Utes. It was not surprising that the talks of the conference focused on “kindness, patience, and all other necessary virtues towards the Indians,” since “any hothead could start a fight in the county,” which, given their numbers, would go much better for the Indians than the colonists at first.65
Another rumor that spread through the conference was that the Indian presence was a deliberate plot by the Southern Ute Indian agent, David Day. The Indians near [317] Monticello repeatedly explained that Day had told them to come. According to his reconstructed calculations, one of two things could happen. The Indians might be allowed to stay, and this would give the necessary shove to ratify the removal treaty. Or, war might break out. Either way, the Indians would be out of Colorado. To the Utahns, this was “a nefarious scheme of some of the people of Durango, Colorado, who are conspiring with the present unscrupulous Indian agent, Mr. Day.” For the San Juan settlers, it was an alarming situation. They could probably control their own people, but who could tell what some cowboy might do? Jens’s son-in-law Willard Butt, the sheriff of the county, sent off a petition from county citizens and an alarming telegram to Governor Caleb West, requesting state militia to protect the settlers and stabilize the situation.66
As Jens returned to Bluff after the conference in Monticello, more Navajos streamed by, heading north into the county. Their sheep were stripping the range from Bluff’s already famished stock. If it came to violence, he and the other old men who were usually in town, Francis Hammond, William Adams, and Father John Allan, would not last long. As always, Jens had faith it would not come to that. But when he got home, he had other things to do. Cindy had apparently forgiven Frank Hyde for shooting Freeman earlier in the year, because the two were going to get married after “running together” for five years.67 They were not traveling to a temple to do it, which was surely a letdown for the devout bishop, but it was a festive occasion nonetheless. Jens gave the couple some words of advice on [318] marriage, being the veteran of three such relationships himself, then President Hammond performed the ceremony. A big party was thrown for Cindy four days later, as the newlyweds prepared to move to Monticello.68 This meant all of Kirsten’s children but one, the thirty-two-year-old holdout Jens Peter, were safely wed.
Not long after, on December 6, Brigham Young Jr. came in from Durango and lodged with the Nielsons. He had spoken with Agent Day, who had seen nothing wrong with the current Ute situation. Of course he had ordered the Utes off the reservation, Day affirmed, since they could not leave without his permission. But the Utes had always wintered their stock in Utah, so this was nothing unusual. The cowboys could protest, but since the county had been withheld from settlement since 1888, they were the trespassers. Since white cattleman in Colorado had robbed the reservation of forage, people could hardly expect chiefs such as Ignacio and Mariano to simply stay there and let their stock starve. If there was any trouble, the agent continued, it would come because the cowboys started it. Day suggested that “Messrs. Hammond, Nielson, Jones, Lyman, and others who lived in the county . . . send him a written statement of the facts, and he would forward the same to Washington.” Elder Young had also consulted with Ignacio and other chiefs and agreed they had a right to be in Utah. Ignacio had been in Washington, D.C., again the previous winter. When he told various congressmen that he had always wintered in Utah, no objection was made. In fact, some unofficially encouraged him to return this year. Young urged the Bluff leaders to write the letters to Agent Day and the Secretary of the Interior of the United States, Hoke Smith, to express their view of the [319] situation.69
On December 11, notice came that a meeting was going to be held the next day in Monticello. Governor West would meet with Agent Day personally. The governor had not sent troops, but he had sent weapons and ammunition. He was furious at Day, not only for his “nefarious scheme” but for an “impudent and blackguard” telegram Day had sent him, insisting that it was the Indians who required protection from the cowboys.70 President Hammond raced up to Monticello for the meeting, and all the people in Bluff could do was wait.
The news that arrived in Bluff a few days later was the best possible for the settlers there: the Utes were returning to Colorado. President Hammond and Samuel Wood told the ward how it happened in church the next Sunday. Many of the Indians were determined to stay when they got to Monticello, some saying they would not leave for anyone, not even the United States. President Hammond attended the 10:00 am meeting with the governor and representatives from the towns, cattle companies, and mining interests. Agent Day had not yet arrived, but Governor West showed those who were there his trump: a telegram from Secretary of the Interior Smith ordering the Indians to move back to the reservation immediately. When Day arrived after lunch, there was little need for discussion. All agreed to help get the Indians back, and they sent a telegram to Denver requesting troops to assist them. [320]
At 3:00 pm the Indian leaders were brought into the meeting, along with “Lingo” Christensen, the interpreter. Governor West, Agent Day, and President Hammond, among others, told them their fate. Ignacio, Mariano, and Benow replied for the Indians. The consensus was that the Indians “could be cut up and eaten by us if we were hungry, but they would not go back.” At this impasse, the chiefs were told to think about it until the morning. During the evening, weapons were distributed among the settlers and a guard was set for the night.71
The next morning dawned much brighter. The chiefs said they would return if they were given hay for their horses and supplies for themselves. The appropriate amount of beef was promptly butchered, and the hay was quickly brought. In the evening the settlers held a picnic and a meeting. They commended Governor West for his decisive role in the crisis. Agent Day grumbled that it was all a great noise without real danger. The disappointed Utes returned to the reservation as soon as the harsh season permitted. There was still the question of what to do with Benow’s band of Utes, who had never been on the reservation, as well as the eighty or so Paiutes who roamed around San Juan. But the largest question of what to do with the 1,140 reservation Utes was closed.72
The next time C. L. Christensen came by Bluff, he probably explained his role in lubricating the settlement. He knew Ignacio felt he was right in the debate; after all, he had been in Washington and had even sat in Grover Cleveland’s chair. This had come out [321] clearly during the discussions of the first evening. Ignacio interrupted often, particularly battling President Hammond on every point. Christensen did what he could to reduce the tension by not translating some of the more angry phrases. Then he stayed up with the Indians all through the night. He reminded them that the whites were as numerous as the grains of sand, something he knew Ignacio had seen in the East. Early in the morning, when he told the weary Indians that black troops were coming to remove them, the chiefs capitulated.73 Lingo’s nocturnal diplomacy had helped avert an explosion. Colonel Williams, the Navajo agent, helped get his charges back on their reservation in the days to come, and when several returned to Bluff for the Christmas feast, they did not seem threatening in the least.74
Bluff’s citizens could afford to be amused by how the event fell out in the newspapers. The Deseret News editors mocked Colorado for their failed attempt in the “dumping business.” David Day aired his frustrations against Governor West and the San Juan settlers in the Colorado papers, and even chastised the Salt Lake Tribune.75 A few hundred reservation Utes lingered in the county through the winter, but the hopes of those [322] urging removal departed with these last Indians.76
Permanence
The winter in early 1895 turned severe, alternating between heavy rains, subzero temperatures, and snows of up to a foot. Every roof in town leaked. Francis Hammond had the option of shifting his bed into the stone and shingled section of his home, but everyone else had to deal with the dripping. They did not mind it too much, though. The kids got the rare chance to go sledding. But the adults had something to make their eyes bright also. They had been living in their log homes for over fourteen years. As always, “the women folks were the hardest hit” by such primitivism.77 The biggest hindrance to improving their homes had been the possibility of removal hanging over their heads. Now, finally, removal itself had been removed. As soon as Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith reopened the county to settlement, which he did before 1895 was out, the settlers could begin to build something better.78
The first physical symbol of their newfound permanence, the stone church, had been finished in February. At the 10:00 am dedicatory service held on February 23, the choir sang “Lord We Come Before Thee Now,” and Platte Lyman offered the invocation. Jens Nielson, as head of the construction committee, gave a brief history of how their new church had been built over the previous two years at a cost of nearly four thousand dollars. It was quite a change, he reflected, from [323] their log meetinghouse. In place of the old, rough-hewn furniture, the new podium, secretary’s desk, sacrament table, and benches were well-made and smoothed to a satin finish. Instead of looking up at leaking factory cloth sagging from the ceiling, the Saints could gaze out of stained glass windows. The steeple had a bell, and after the schoolhouse bell was hung a year and a half later, the two could sound simultaneously for special occasions.79 Next on the program, Lemuel Redd described how the Bluff Ward members “responded admirably in this matter” of paying for the building, even during their difficult financial times. There was, in fact, a small surplus in the treasury.80 Brigham Young Jr. offered the dedicatory prayer on the building, so long in coming. It was to be used only for strictly religious meetings. To close the quarterly conference meeting held after the dedication, Francis Hammond noted that the Bluff Ward paid more tithing in 1894 than they had the year before. His words, echoing up toward the spire, signaled “that the Saints were on the improve.”81
Disunion
Politics
Political winds blew through Bluff with increasing force in the mid-1890s. Back when the only choice was Mormon versus Gentile, voting was easy. But the time had come for voters in Bluff to decide if they were Republicans or Democrats, and [324] voters in San Juan County, Mormon and Gentile alike, fought for control of the county as the population on the northern end increased. When Grover Cleveland restored full civil rights to all Mormon males in early 1893, the bishop and other Bluff polygamists could once again take active part in the elections. But Bishop Nielson regarded the parties with the same suspicion he had for all outside influences. As seen from the First Presidency down, party politics could easily become a wedge to divide the Mormon bloc and turn brother against brother. Therefore, he kept his distance from these new partisan divisions, only helping to heal breaches as they occurred.82 “We are required to take sides with the political parties of the day and mix up with those who are not of our faith,” he warned. “But it will require all of our faith to keep us from partaking of their evil ways.”83
Bluff’s other leaders also tried not to let political divisions run too deep. Francis Hammond energetically worked to organize the Democrats in 1893. Late in the year, however, he resigned from his party posts on the advice of the Church’s First Presidency, so that priesthood leaders could “be free to counsel without bias the saints in political [325] matters.”84 His informal survey at Bluff’s polls that year showed eight Republicans and eight Democrats, though a few more Democrats stayed home.85
Early in 1894, Bluff was divided when President Hammond circulated a petition for Joseph F. Barton to be removed as county judge, a position still appointed by the president through the U.S. Attorney General under the provisions of the Edmunds-Tucker Act. His reasons might have been political, since Barton was appointed by a Democratic administration, but now, perhaps, showed himself to be more of a Republican. In any event, Platte Lyman, the most prominent Republican in the county, came to Judge Barton’s defense. Harsh charges were leveled, wounding both sides. A council including the bishopric and Apostles Brigham Young Jr. and John Henry Smith decided Hammond should ask Barton’s forgiveness in the matter. The stake president was reluctant to do so, but finally both sides apologized in Church meetings on April 15, and Hammond rescinded his petition.86
In the 1894 elections, the Democrats again felt betrayed. The citizens of Bluff had agreed before the election to run a nonpartisan convention to nominate candidates to begin the process of drafting a state constitution. They also had agreed to shake free of any sort of People’s Party and run under the national party labels. Instead of holding to this, however, the Republicans ran under a Citizens’ ticket, perhaps hoping to draw more gentile votes to put their party over the top. There was also a Democrat ticket, but the [326] “Citizen” ploy worked well, winning most of the races.87
Everyone in the county could be proud, or at least amused, by how Francis Hammond represented them at the state’s constitutional convention in early 1895. He could not help but speak often and became noted as “the funny member from San Juan” and “the most popular member of [the] convention.”88 He was one of the 107 delegates who worked for sixty-six days under John Henry Smith on the document, which reinstated women’s suffrage. In the end they all signed it and looked ahead to popular ratification in November. But the partisans in them also anticipated capturing control of the first state government in those elections, as well as winning the first full delegation to the U.S. Congress.
Politics in San Juan County were hot leading up to the elections in 1895. Republican Platte Lyman and Democrat A. P. Sorenson stumped around the county for the office of state legislator. Both were Mormons, but there were more differences between the two than their personalities or their parties. Sorenson lived in Monticello, which, on the strength of its surging population, was ready to seize control of the county government after fifteen years of Bluff control. Judge Barton’s failed courthouse coup in 1893 may have accelerated the process. In early 1894, the Pittsburgh Cattle Company, operating in the La Sal Mountains on the north end of the county, petitioned the territorial legislature to detach the top twenty-five-mile strip of the county and annex it to Grand County to the north. It was simply too hard to travel clear across the county to the seat in [327] Bluff to transact business. Platte Lyman was dispatched to lobby the legislature against such a loss, and it helped that Francis Hammond’s old friend from Huntsville, David McKay, was chairman of the committee that considered the bill. Even though the cattle company’s attempt had failed, it highlighted the existing inequity.89 Within a few months, Monticello citizens presented a petition to move the county seat from Bluff to their town, and it became an initiative that would be decided on the 1895 ballot.
The political and religious aspects of the election became superheated in the final weeks. In the October general conference of the Church, Joseph F. Smith made comments in the priesthood meeting that were endorsed by George Q. Cannon and that made it sound as if the Church wanted the Republicans to win. Democrats quickly reconvened their state convention, including their own General Authorities, such as B. H. Roberts and Moses Thatcher, to declare politics should be free from Church dictation. Elder Smith later softened his comments in the Deseret News, but the exchange still caused great commotion, even in the far corner of San Juan County. The persistent depression did nothing to improve the feelings of Bluff’s residents toward each other either. Fifteen-year-old amateur cobbler Albert Lyman tried unsuccessfully to dun his neighbors for accounts receivable and “felt so disgusted, I went off by myself and swore a bit.”90 Still, relations among the Saints at Bluff remained good enough that nearly the whole ward united in regaling President Hammond until midnight on his seventy-third birthday a few [328] days before the election.91
When the results from the contests came in, there was something for everyone in the county. The Utah Constitution passed comfortably, though many Gentiles were impelled to vote against it by the Church’s recent insertion into politics. The document passed in San Juan County by a margin of 82 to 12, an even larger majority than the 80 percent of the vote it had won in the whole state. But the county’s ninety-four voters were less than one quarter of one percent of the entire electorate in the state.92 The Republicans won a majority of the state legislature, causing resentment among the Democrats for the slanted comments of Smith and Cannon. But the northern part of San Juan County also won, approving the transfer of the county seat and electing all the county officers but Commissioner France Nielson and Assessor and Collector Hans Bayles from the northern end of the county. Lyman, though a Republican, lost the state congressman race to the northern Democrat, Sorenson. Bluff had lost command, though the Mormons had not: they held all county positions but one. Still, shifting control of the county to the north was a victory Gentiles were poised to exploit.93
The Church straightened its own house after statehood by announcing what came to be called the “Political Manifesto” in April 1896: no Church officer should accept a political office without consulting Church leaders. Moses Thatcher, the lone holdout from sustaining this measure, was eventually dropped from the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. [329]
Utah became as excited as the rest of the country over the major elections in 1896. There were no organized Populists in San Juan County, but the Democrats in the cash-poor region held to the national party standard of free silver and supported its champion, William Jennings Bryan. The plank was so popular in this western area that the Republicans of the county also supported the free coinage of silver, removing an issue that caused intense campaigning in other areas of the country. But there was plenty of local controversy. Many Gentiles in the northern section of the county were nominated as candidates for office by the Democrats. This meant that if a Mormon voted that party’s ticket, he would be helping to elect Gentiles to control the county. V. P. Martin, for example, was running for the state legislature against Platte Lyman. A few years ago, Martin would have run on the Liberal Party ticket, and the Mormons would have rallied against him in the People’s Party. But now national party politics had weaned many Bluff voters away from such considerations and made it thinkable for them to support someone who did not belong to their faith or champion its causes. Monticello, the largest and most divided town in the county, was where these crosswinds were the strongest.
There was even some mudslinging leading up to election day. Francis Hammond, not running for any particular office, but still a prominent Democrat, was accused of being drunk and speaking ill of Platte Lyman because he was a Republican. In the election, the state and the county turned Democrat. Bluff voted 34-6 for Platte Lyman for the state legislature, but its votes were easily overwhelmed by the county’s northern Gentiles. Monticello went 60-30 for Martin, who also won every vote in La Sal, McElmo, and Indian Creek to triumph 109-64 countywide. Two out of the three county commissioners [330] were northern Gentiles, with Cindy Nielson’s new husband, Frank Hyde, the lone Mormon. One man from Bluff had won the election as county sheriff, but he resigned in 1897, and Latigo Gordon, who had just opened the Blue Goose Saloon in Monticello, took over the job.94 Not only had power shifted north, but now it was firmly in the hands of Gentiles, thanks to their successful use of the national parties. Many people in Bluff strongly resented these developments. Platte Lyman’s son groused, “Pa ran for the legislature, and we got the word tonight that he is beat. The man that got it was an outsider and elected by Mormons. I am disgusted with some people.”95
With the county seat more centrally located and more gentile influence in county government, law enforcement became steadily more regular and secular. Misdemeanors were still taken before the local justice of the peace.96 But felonies went north, though not as far as before when they had to travel to Provo.97 Instead of that, trials were held quarterly in Monticello when the Utah Seventh District Judge came to town on his circuit. Residents of Bluff were frequently summoned to Monticello for jury duty. In one of the first cases before the newly traveling court in June 1896, Jens, Jens Peter, and Joe Nielson, as well as Kumen Jones and John Ernest Adams were all drawn for the same panel of jurors.98 Bluff residents, however, often felt they were getting the short end of [331] the legal stick. Some crimes were impossible to prosecute, such as when someone poisoned the nosebags of the Nielson brothers’ six-horse team that was hauling wool during a contentious time on the range.99 Before regular court proceedings in the county, Bluff’s Mormons usually did not prosecute many crimes against their property. Now they took more cases of cattle rustling to court, but often felt cheated when the accused were let off for lack of evidence. It was unchristian to haul a Church brother before the law, so generally the cases involving Mormons were suits against Gentiles.100 France and Joe Nielson filed suit a few times over the next decade and always either lost or settled out of court before trial.101 The most frustrating case, especially galling given the hard times of the 1890s, came after Joe and Jens Peter took a contract to cut and haul five hundred cords of wood for the Gold Queen Mining Company. After the brothers had stacked a prodigious pile, the company did not pay, and Joe took them to court. The defendants hired a Nebraska lawyer who won the case for them, netting Joe and Jens “experience instead of cash.” The pile of wood remained as an overgrown monument for at least twenty years.102 [332]
Departure
Politics were not all Bluff argued about in these years. There were always pesky troubles to be extinguished. When a woman stole Albert Lyman’s irrigation water three times in a week, he broke her ditch and hid her shovel for a day.103 Such frustrations could break out in any village in the state. But beyond the everyday, the Bluff ditch continued to devour labor in 1895. Those sweating out in the sun could not help but think about how well irrigation was going in Monticello that year. Since the San Juan had once again departed for its southern shore, the Bluff Saints had to build dams to funnel water back their way. By July, after a freshet washed the dams away and the crops started burning up, some at the job started talking of selling out and moving someplace else. “It makes me tired to hear such talk,” wrote Albert Lyman, “as the town is too notorious small now.” But he was not an unqualified booster, either: “I have got the blues and do not intend to make this my abiding place for life.”104
Neither did his father. Platte Lyman had been back in Bluff full time for four years. He was an important part of the town, laboring diligently with his stock, in his fields, and among the Saints. But the depression hit his interests especially hard, and he was struggling mightily to emerge from debt. He might have been preaching to himself as much as anyone when, on a visit to Fruitland (formerly Burnham), New Mexico, in June, he preached “on the subject of remaining where we are called to reside—and not to [333] go roaming around the country seeking good places.”105
It might have been the new difficulties with the ditch that caused Lyman to reconsider. In the afternoon meeting on July 7, he ruminated on the fact that many fine places had been settled after Bluff. Some of them had more fruit trees in one orchard than existed in all of Bluff. He could not understand why people were held in this place, where it was so hard to make their living. The bishop was up right after. With the situation in the town so precarious, the Saints could not afford to hear such thoughts, logical though they were. Bishop Nielson was perfectly satisfied with his call to Bluff, he said. He emphasized again that this was where he was willing to live and this was where he was willing to die. Francis Hammond tried to soften the confrontation by switching to another topic to close the meeting, but the old positions, held by both men since 1884, had resurfaced.106 Many people meditated on what Brother Lyman said as the river continued to undermine their efforts on the ditch in the next week. On Sunday a number of them expressed their dissatisfaction with the place. Resentment continued to fester for another week as the ditch absorbed their energy.107
To open the afternoon meetings on July 21, William Adams reported his recent visits to Parowan and St. George. He described the prosperity of those two towns, which also had some difficulties getting started, then contrasted their welfare with the fifteen years of trouble on the Bluff ditch. Clearly he was not settled on the wisdom of staying. [334] But then Platte Lyman spoke again. He had obviously thought about the matter considerably over the past two weeks, as had everyone. He might have realized that what he was saying was of the same nature as his reasoned comments of 1883 and 1884. Once again the prospect of being somewhere else was very appealing, but he did not want to leave under the same circumstances as before. So on this day he apologized for his remarks. While he did not concede that what he had previously said was false, he felt his statements had been “calculated to unsettle the people.” He asked the congregation’s forgiveness for doing such a thing.108
President Hammond spoke next. He also understood what he had to say here, which was difficult since he agreed with his counselor on the insufferability of trying to hold Bluff. But they were held there by Church leaders, and those who were still there obviously respected that authority and would not move without it. “Union is what we need” to master the river this year, he said. But the basic question of Bluff still hung over them: they had to solve the water question or abandon the settlement. In a way, he said, they had been granted an artificial extension of life through their Indian trade and livestock. But they would have to ultimately answer the question sometime.109
Bishop Nielson rose last. In response to the questions raised, he defended his course as bishop. Church leaders had called them here, and until Church leaders released them he had to do what he could to make the settlement survive. When he sat down, the issue had been dealt with but not settled. “This subject is a source of constant irritation to [335] the saints here,” observed President Hammond.110
Declining Stocks
The livestock and co-op which had allowed them to sustain their lives in Bluff also started to dwindle. Much of it had to do with the long depression of the 1890s, the worst the country had ever experienced. Some signs looked hopeful in 1895, but the market retrenched again in 1896. The Bluff Cattle Pool had always been a rather loose herding and negotiating association, and under the pressures of the drought and depression that also reduced competition from other cattle companies, more members chose to fend for themselves. Fletcher B. Hammond, who had often been the foreman of the pool in its earlier years, sold his cattle to the Nielsons, Kumen Jones, and Lem Redd for a total of $2,300. Francis Hammond soon pulled his cattle out of the pool as well, and both Hammonds transferred more of their resources into sheep. A few others withdrew from the pool in the late 1890s, leaving the Nielsons, Perkinses, and Redds at its heart.111 Francis Nielson became the foreman of the association.112
The co-op staggered along. It paid a 4 percent dividend at the end of 1894, which was an encouraging increase from the year before. But it was paltry compared to the 40 percents of earlier years. The dividend rose to 5 percent in 1895, still comparatively slim. Some stockholders wanted to withdraw their capital stock to help them through the hard [336] times, but if enough of that were done, it would lead to the breakup of the business. When times turned harder in 1896, the directors jostled among themselves about their future course as they headed toward another dividendless year. As with the cattle, adverse conditions persuaded many of the co-op’s investors that they could do better themselves. In October, the co-op decided to divide the sheep among the shareholders and remove them from the co-op stock. This meant the total stock of the corporation would be cut from thirty thousand to ten thousand dollars, and it would be left primarily as a mercantile business. The division was done by 1897. The bishop now had to arrange to take care of his own herds as well as the tithing and Relief Society flocks. Many shareowners, however, preferred owning the paper co-op stock to managing the actual animals. So a reconsolidation of the sheep happened in the following months, as some Bluff men either bought them outright or herded them on consignment.113 When asked by Lem Redd and Hans Bayles if they ought to contract for over eight thousand of these sheep in spite of the uncertain economy, the bishop advised them to do it. The two men borrowed money in Durango to carry out the plan. Some in Colorado questioned the move, wondering if the bishop’s self-interest in the matter had not colored his judgment. But Redd and Bayles believed the bishop when he promised them it would be a profitable investment. At first it did not look so promising, since they could not meet some of their early payments. But the Durango bankers extended the deadlines, based on the men’s past trustworthiness, and the [337] flocks were eventually profitable for them.114 This was yet another example of why ward members asked their bishop’s advice and often accepted it. They had come to trust “his sound judgment and his strong sense of justice and absolute fairness.”115
One problem that went away for the most part was the Carlisles. Over the past few years they had pulled their cattle operations out from the drought-stricken San Juan range and continued to negotiate with various people to sell their land. Some of the old hands, like Sheriff Gordon, stayed in Monticello or moved to Moab.116 The increasing number of Gentiles, as well as the carelessness of some of the Mormons, made the Monticello Ward increasingly difficult to manage. Cindy Nielson Hyde reported that while she was lying in bed soon after giving birth to her first daughter, two cowboys ran past her window and one shot the other dead. Their dances were still suspenseful since they never knew when cowboys might come in and take over.117 Bishop F. I. Jones almost resigned at the end of 1896 but instead kept trying to unite his people.118
Cowboys continued to pester Bluff as well, even if most of the rival cattle outfits were gone. A plague of horse thieves and cattle rustlers struck in 1895 and 1896. It got so bad that on one occasion Bishop Jones of Monticello proposed to Bishop Nielson that [338] they cooperate with the remaining cattle companies in organizing a vigilante force to rid the county of the outlaws. The bishop declined after getting advice from President Hammond that it was not for Saints to get mixed up in such matters; rather, they should let “the wicked slay the wicked.”119
The cowboy influence still had a strong hold on the town’s men and boys. France and Jens Peter were improving, but the draw of the saloons in Colorado and the rough life on the range were sometimes still too much for their morals. Some Bluff men and boys broke into the co-op twice during the holidays in 1894 to liberate the whiskey stored there from the gold rush.120 Freeman had helped operate the Grey Goose Saloon in an abandoned house in Bluff, an obvious attempt to imitate the parent institution in Monticello. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and even a traveling New York hypnotist found their way into the establishment. Some of the town’s girls also started acting too wild for decent opinion, not only riding bicycles and playing baseball, but doing it in bloomers. They were quickly counseled that “modesty in dress and deportment [were] becoming in women.”121
There were some signs of hope. “Joe Nielson returned home Saturday” from his mission in the Northern States, Wayne Redd wrote to his father in October 1895. “He looks ten years younger than he [339] did when he left. . . . It sure made a man out of him.”122 The whole town noticed the change in Joe. Jens had already read the difference in Joe’s letters and was impressed when Joe requested an extra six months in the mission field to make up for the first six months, spent studying the gospel and converting himself from cowboy to missionary.123 But the changes were more striking in person, as Joe occupied almost a whole meeting in church with an impressive speaking style, thanking those who had called him to serve a mission. The ward saw the change in how he mingled with the Saints the next evening during the grand reception thrown for him by the young ladies’ association. Joe had always been a friendly, open individual, but more than two years preaching without purse or scrip added substance to him. And he was only the first. Even before he came home, Jens’s son-in-law Wayne Redd along with Peter Allan and Frank Adams were called on missions. Wayne was up on Elk Mountain herding Bluff Pool cattle when Hans Bayles told him the news. It “made me feel blue for a while, as it looked as though it was impossible for me to get the means to go.”124 But he sold his saddle and enough cattle to meet his expenses, and all those called, with the help of relatives and ward members, found a way to go. Caroline and her baby moved back in with Kirsten when Wayne left.125 Maybe trying to straighten out a crooked world would straighten out Bluff’s range riders themselves.126 [340]
Bishop Nielson took further comfort when there was no trouble with whiskey in the holiday celebration at the end of the year. The ward held a “leap year” dance in which the girls got to choose and escort the boys to the occasion, but the bishop could live with that much tinkering with tradition. It helped that there were still a few close to his own age with whom he could talk. On December 30, Jens, Platte Lyman, William Adams, Father John Allan, visitor Pap Redd, and their wives sat down for dinner at Francis Hammond’s house. All of them were older than the Utah Territory, and they enjoyed “a real old time visit.”127
Changes
The wizened group may have noticed in the age of bloomers, bicycles, and leap year dances that Bluff had changed. There seemed to be less cooperation, for one. Their labor on the ditch was their ingrained, often futile salute to the traditional principle of self-sufficiency. Beyond that, these senior leaders still insisted that Bluff needed to unite to buy out the Carlisles, spruce up the co-op, and establish milling, tanning, and canning operations.128 But the opposite was happening. Politics and the depression were pulling the ward members apart, and the pool and co-op organizations were weakening. Fred [341] Adams even opened his own store.129 Perhaps the younger generation had not been schooled as thoroughly in the principles of cooperation or they had not developed the same instinctive attachment to them as the older pioneers. They mingled more with Gentiles in their business and worried more about the bottom line than the common good. The older settlers were not immune from these impulses, as their many failed attempts at cooperation in the 1870s showed, but at least they tried. Taken together, Bluff’s residents were beginning to act more like partisans and capitalists—like Americans, in other words.
The town’s population was different as well and had been since the gold rush. “We have scarcely held a meeting for two years,” observed Albert Lyman in early 1895, “except we have had some strangers present.”130 More outsiders came through to prospect or hunt relics. Bluff was not nearly what Monticello was in this regard and both were far behind Moab in back-country cosmopolitanism, but the Bluff census and ward list were no longer identical.131 There were Gentiles, such as Charles Lang, Melvin Dempsey, and the photographer Charles Goodman, who used Bluff as a base for their forays into the hinterland. These transplanted polymaths were accepted as residents in town and were appreciated for their many skills. In addition to Dempsey’s ongoing guitar lessons, Charles Lang led the San Juan Orchestra, and Charles Goodman took pictures of many people and places around Bluff. None of these men were fully integrated into a town whose life revolved around a religion they did not share. But Bluff was at least as [342] hospitable to them as it was to most outsiders; the town might have been clannish but never exclusive. When Lang moved to Moab in 1898, the people of Bluff threw him one of their customary surprise send-off parties.132
The town itself looked different. Besides the rock church and school, Kumen Jones and Bishop Nielson began to build more commodious houses out of sandstone and brick. Others soon followed. These fine homes, almost mansions in some cases, were a far cry from the crude log huts that ringed the old fort or the improved cabins they had lived in for so long. These new dwellings displayed the progress and permanence the San Juan settlers had improbably attained. They began to bring the comfort the inhabitants had lived so long without. But they also showed the increased privacy and affluence its residents had developed, characteristics that were more difficult to reconcile with their missionary goals and pioneer principles. Bluff was still distinct from other gentile and Mormon towns, but it was not as different as it once had been. As the old timers ate together at the end of the year, they might have reflected on the contrast between their more modern town and how it looked back when it was an outpost of Zion, holding the fort against the outside world.
Utah finally entered the union a week later, on January 6, 1896. The flag was raised at sunrise in Bluff amid the clatter of guns firing and bells ringing. Jens Nielson served as chaplain over the day’s festivities, as the state and town in which he lived [343] entered a new era.133
Modern Times
Medicine
Hannah Sorenson arrived in Bluff in August 1896. She had practiced obstetrics at the Royal Hospital of Denmark, which was very useful to her as well as her patients since she had ten children herself. But when she joined the Mormons, her husband abandoned her, and he took all the children with him. Hannah came to Utah, where she continued to study and practice medicine. Her errand in Bluff was to teach its residents about health and the “new hygiene.”134
Before her arrival, Bluff’s makeshift medicine had kept doing the best it could. Aunt Jody and Aunt Mary continued to be marvelous bedside presences in the town. Over the years Aunt Jody had helped almost everyone, and “all Bluff is obligated to her.”135 “It seemed quite unthinkable that anyone could die in Bluff, or be born, or have pneumonia, a broken limb or a broken heart without Aunt Jody being there to bear a generous part of the burden and offer her words of soothing and cheer.”136 Mary Jones received letters from grateful former patients addressed simply to “Aunt Mary, Bluff, [344] Utah.”137
These women and the people of Bluff continued to use whatever they thought might work for their many injuries and illnesses, whether it came from folk medicine, Indians, or mail-order catalogs. Sage tea might cure colds, or a concoction from the same plant might heal bruises, as might equal parts of turpentine, egg white, and vinegar. Milkweed was good for dropsy and cactus poultices helped just about anything. On one occasion Aunt Jody gave ill Francis Hammond a vapor bath that almost knocked him out. Melvin Dempsey treated the same man’s sciatica with an electric belt, which drove the pain from his hip to his shoulder. The great discovery of the late 1890s, however, was the “fountain syringe,” or the enema. After a few bouts with it, President Hammond confessed, “I begin to believe it almost a panacea for nearly all ills that poor mortals are afflicted with.” Albert Lyman later went one better by ordering a stomach pump.138 Dentistry continued to be agonizing. When Wayne Redd had a toothache, he burned the tooth all day with hot irons and carbolic acid, while Caroline applied hot packs. In the evening, Monroe Redd’s pliers slipped the first time he tried to extract the offending tooth, causing Caroline to flee to France and Leona’s home rather than witness more of her husband’s torture. Monroe got the tooth out on the second yank, but Wayne was still sore a week later.139 Frontier remedies were not just limited to people. On one occasion Aunt [345] Jody was summoned to save a bloated cow. She poured a dose of soda and water down its throat, and the beast survived to moo another day.140 Prayers and priesthood blessings continued to be vital components of Bluff’s medical system.141 Sadly, none of these saved Harriett Barton after complications following the birth of a boy. She was the wife of Judge Joseph Barton and the mother of seven other children, who took her death “pretty hard.”142 The baby boy died two weeks after his mother.
Everyone in Bluff had plenty to learn about medicine, however, as did most people in the United States around this time when insects and microscopic organisms were found to possess more than met the eye. People in Bluff got their water from shallow wells, they dealt often with manure, and all sorts of bugs buzzed around their outhouses. It was not a good sign when the custom was “the apostles will soon be here, so every body is burning trash.”143 And so Hannah Sorenson arrived to teach them the “new hygiene.” Most of the women in town took her class, which covered midwifery, physiology, hygiene, and the delicate subject of “What Women Should Know” as they approached marriage. These teachings included the idea that “the more sensitive of the two bed fellows will absorb the poison excretions from the body of the other. . . . Often the languor and nervousness with which certain individuals arise in the morning is directly [346] traceable to the influence of the companion during sleep.”144 But Sister Sorenson also taught important information on cleanliness. “The new hygiene, a subject which we accepted,” probably helped avert future tragedies, and earned Sister Sorenson the admiration of most Bluff residents by the time her classes concluded.
Education
Bishop Nielson had plenty to keep him busy in these years. He still supervised the ditch and watering turns.145 He was also involved in supervising school instruction. Earlier teachers had been drawn from among the settlers, but for a decade now Bluff had usually imported graduates from the Brigham Young Academy’s normal school.146 These teachers lodged with families in town and generally had one-year contracts. The school year started in late September or early October and went for three terms of ten weeks each, unless money ran out first, as it threatened to do in early 1895 and 1896.147 Despite Bluff’s sociability, this could be a lonely time for these teachers, so far away from their families and familiar surroundings. A few of these instructors, however, married someone in Bluff.148 Teaching so many students at once was also a difficult job. “Lots of cheating [347] goes on in school,” commented Albert Lyman at the opening of the 1896–97 year, “lots of noise and laughing.”149 On the teacher’s side, Miss Elliott recorded, “I must introduce percentage tomorrow to my eighth grade. I dread it.”150 So the bishop’s job consisted in encouraging the students and teachers alike in making the classes as good as possible. Jens continued to have a personal interest in the schools with five of his grandchildren attending. Sometimes the teachers and pupils could outdo themselves, as on George Washington’s birthday in 1897. The boys acted out scenes from colonial days, then forty-five girls represented the states in “a beautiful piece.”151
When his younger kids had finished the eighth grade in Bluff, Jens sent them to Provo for secondary schooling at Brigham Young Academy. Uriah attended when he was eighteen, and he and Annetta were still going in their early twenties, for the 1898–99 school year, along with sixteen other students from Bluff.152 While this was expensive for the bishop, it gave these children an above-average education at a time when finishing the eighth grade was considered being well-schooled.
In early 1897 the town lost a landmark. The old log schoolhouse, which had held such a variety of meetings over the years, had no practical purpose anymore. The new stone church and schoolhouse replaced it, so the settlers decided to pull it down. But before the pioneer building came down, Charles Goodman captured it on film. Bishop Nielson, Platte [348] Lyman, Kumen Jones, James Decker, and Francis Hammond stood in front of the old meetinghouse and had their portrait taken, “as a reminder of the style of public buildings in primitive days.”153 The integration of town life was dismantled more slowly than the old building. Bluff’s citizens used to learn, worship, and celebrate in the same structure. By 1898, there were two separate buildings for those purposes, and religious instruction could no longer be part of the public school curriculum. So the bishop sat on a new education board that oversaw a forty-five minute religion class taught before the public school day began.154 As Francis Hammond saw it, “The world is surely moving.”155 Bluff, in some ways, was trailing along behind it.
Drenched and Parched
The ditch was another remnant from primitive days, but still very much a concern. The main difficulty in 1896 was the continued drought. Even though the men got water into the ditch by the third week in March, a new record, it did not stay in. Neither Monticello nor Bluff raised much of a crop due to the dryness. But a ripping thunderstorm in mid-September announced a change in the weather. Hailstones the “size of walnuts, hard as rock” crashed down with sheets of rains, which continued to fall for days. Cottonwood Wash swelled to twenty feet deep and one hundred feet across, stranding Monroe Redd and three others on the far side; townspeople flung peaches and other food over to them. The lower part of Bluff flooded, and the Perkinses had [349] to be evacuated in the middle of the night. Cut corn, hay, and fruit were ruined. Once again land was washed away, roads flooded out, fences pulled down, fields strewn with sand and debris by the torrents in this startling end to the drought. In irony they had seen before, the flood destroyed their ditch. At that section called “the jump,” where the cribs had been put in years before, the bank was washed away to the rock cliff again. It looked as if it would cost as much to fix the ditch as it did to build it in the first place. Even people used to annual labor and disappointment felt “very much discouraged about their location here.”156
The bishop was discouraged as well, but he was not going anywhere. He had finished building a brick home for Elsie. Kumen Jones had finally moved Mary, May, and the children into what was probably the first full-sized rock home in Bluff back in March 1896. A stonemason named Tyndall had constructed it, and only after he finished it did he admit that: “this was the first house I ever built!” Others were progressing on their new houses as well. Elsie’s home was finished enough to throw a dance in by October, soon after the floods. And on January 15, 1897, just after a gloomy ditch meeting was held to survey the year’s prospects, the bishop threw a party and dedicated the home officially. He gave a short speech about how he had been blessed during its construction, then offered a prayer dedicating every part of it, from yard to foundation through the walls to the roof to serve its purpose. Finally, almost all the adults in the ward sat down to a “bountifully prepared feast.” “It was quite an event in our town as [350] there are only a few good houses.”157 Jens was also planning to build another one for Kirsten, this time out of sandstone.
Repairing the ditch in 1897 was just as difficult as everyone thought. People had to clear off their lands from the wreckage of the flood, and also work off a ditch tax of at least six dollars per acre, meaning that the average family needed to contribute about sixty days of labor. Plus they had to look after their stock and move them up to the summer range, and some men, doubting the chance of getting water to Bluff, had to get up to Monticello to put in crops there. The work was overwhelming. They dreamed of all sorts of things to ease their burdens. Charles Sitzer thought a windmill attached to a water wheel could raise the water. Francis Hammond in one of his journeys looked at a “curious kind of engine for pumping water for irrigation,” powered by some fuel called gasoline, which might do the job.158 In the end the intrepid men riprapped at least a mile of the bank to hold it in and blasted through the rock at the jump. They kept their upper lip stiff to the outside world. The happy story in the Deseret News was that although the floods had destroyed much of the ditch, “our good, old Bishop, Jens Nielson, who is full of faith in Bluff, rallied the brethren and went to work about a month ago, and now has the ditch about ready for use; estimated cost about $4,000.”159
The cost estimate was about right, but the harmony was more questionable. Two days after President Hammond wrote his optimistic report, a less optimistic Albert Lyman [351] groused, “The ditch here is pretty badly out of order (water not in yet), and it looks as though Bluff might yet be abandoned. I hope it is.”160 While part of this might have been the frustrations of a teenager, others in the town felt about the same. A quarter mile at the head of the ditch was gone. They could still get about eight inches of water to trickle down to the jump, but then it broke through the channel they blasted and went back into the river. They could try to dump in rock and brush along this stretch to create a channel, but it would take about a hundred wagonloads, and if the usual high waters rose in May, it would be washed away. Understandably, many of the “brethren feel a good deal like giving it up” and more went up to Monticello to plant their crops.161 There was no promise of anything in Monticello, either. Church leaders sent the townspeople a shipment of seed grain, since their crop had failed the previous year in the drought. The ward was “very careless and neglectful of their duties” as well.162 But hopefully the new reservoirs of water would make for a better year.
The San Juan writhed back to its southern bank, and for a while the men at Bluff tried to bring water from the Recapture. Their unbelievable efforts over the next three weeks brought one brief watering down to the town. They might get one cutting of lucerne; they would probably get a decent yield from their orchards; but there was little chance of getting anything else. Bluff’s inhabitants would have to import all their food beyond what they had stored from the year before. The bishop called for another meeting [352] on the ditch after church on June 13. Somehow the ditch committee was persuaded to go inspect the thing again, and enough men went out to get the water back three days later. But again it drained out just as fast, and residents started watering their trees by bucket. All hope for field crops or even vegetable gardens were gone. One last attempt in July got the water back in, but not a drop made it to town. The ditch was dead.163
Dubious Jubilee
Oddly enough it was time to celebrate. While Bluff struggled, most of the state was preparing to mark its jubilee. Fifty years had passed since the first Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. The Nielsons and most other adults in Bluff were going to attend the festivities in Salt Lake City. As they traveled north through Monticello and Moab, there were fields of crops, enough to make them at least a little jealous and perhaps enough to make them think about moving.
Jens and Kirsten arrived in Salt Lake on July 20. The city was indeed celebrating. Main Street was lit up from the corner of Temple Square a half-mile south, “a blaze of sparkling gems of every hue and color, all done by electricity.” Many beholders thought it “the best they ever saw.”164 The Brigham Young statue was unveiled, and there were concerts and plays to take in. The Nielsons may have gone out to the Saltair resort on the Great Salt Lake and seen the high-wire act amid the exotic minarets. There was a grand parade on the twenty-first, and over five thousand children marched on the twenty-second, dropping flowers [353] at the base of the Brigham Young statue to a foot deep. The next day, Jens and Kirsten watched with pride as the San Juan float came by in the parade of counties. Charles Lang had helped design it, and it showed cliff dwellers, relics, and Navajo blankets. In the afternoon there was an Indian Ghost Dance, bicycle tricks, hot air balloons, and even a skydiver. On the twenty-fourth, the grand anniversary officially started with a cannon boom from Fort Douglas at sunrise. About one hundred thousand people were in the city to celebrate. The parade started at eleven. The Twenty-fourth U.S. Infantry and the Ninth U.S. Cavalry filed by, followed by Governor Heber Wells and over forty survivors from the Mormon Battalion. President Wilford Woodruff followed in a carriage with Joseph F. Smith, and then the five hundred pioneer survivors filed past, greeted by enthusiastic cheers. The parade also featured a Pageant of Progress in Utah, showing development from wagons to telegrams and beyond. The fireworks were greater than anyone had seen: Brigham Young was portrayed in a thirty by fifty foot explosion. The finale featured hundreds of shells of flowers and diamond chains. The next day was Sunday, and Joseph F. Smith, Brigham Young Jr., and Marion Lyman commemorated the event in their discourses. The choir and congregation closed by singing the pioneer anthem “Come, Come Ye Saints.”165 It was a spectacular celebration, with six parades during the week.
The bigger event for Jens and the other leaders from San Juan happened on Monday, July 26, when they filed into the First Presidency’s office. Once again they asked Church leaders to pass judgment on Bluff. Bishop Nielson gave the case for the defense. They were called to settle Bluff City back when the Indians were very [354] troublesome and outlaws were likely to overrun the county. They had followed the advice of Erastus Snow and stayed there, in spite of having so little farmland and so little control over the water. Some had left the place, and others felt it was useless to continue trying to hold it. There were twenty-two families numbering about 185 souls still there. The ditch had cost anywhere from six to ten dollars per acre every year, but there had been compensations. Because of the difficulties, they had gone into livestock, from which they had profited about twenty-seven thousand dollars in the past year alone. Jens said “he did not think it would be a good thing to abandon the place, and Elder Brigham Young [Jr.] had promised them in times past that if they would hold the place they should be prospered more than if they moved away.” Jens believed “that they had been greatly prospered, notwithstanding the great difficulties they had contended with.”166
President Hammond stood next to give what he felt was the more reasonable position. He cataloged the hardships, the greatest of which was “the uncontrollable condition of the river.” There was only a little good land left. “It was a serious question whether there was sufficient good results to be achieved at so much expense to warrant a continuation of the struggle.” Some men had already voted by their actions in securing farms for themselves and their families elsewhere in the county. Kumen Jones spoke next and “supported the bishop’s view of the case entirely.” Lemuel Redd agreed with President Hammond’s position. Bluff had to import their grain and potatoes. There was little land and not enough water even for that, and if a few more settlers made a break “it would demoralize the place.” Still, if the Church leaders thought it was wise for [355] them to stay, “he was willing to try it a while longer.” The bishop remarked that if a majority of the people felt like Brother Hammond and Brother Redd, they ought to move somewhere else.167
Brigham Young Jr. broke in. As someone who had visited the town in its infancy and had passed through often, he felt it was indispensable. If Bluff were abandoned, renegades would occupy it, becoming a menace to the other settlements. Besides, it had become as developed as any other town its size. Its church, schools, and homes were just as good. He would not force anyone to stay, but the sooner Bluff’s citizens “settled down to the fact that Bluff was their home, and it was their duty to maintain it, the better it would be for them and that part of the country as well.”168
George Q. Cannon compared Bluff with St. George and settlements in Mexico and other places. Many original settlers became discouraged and left, but those who stayed enjoyed blessings and prosperity. “He admired the pluck of Bishop Nielson and those who had supported him in the determination to hold on, and he felt that the Lord was pleased with them for their integrity.”169
Joseph F. Smith asked what it would take to continue to hold Bluff against the river. The bishop answered that if they owned a pile driver, then they could secure the banks. He also remarked that it was not too long ago that President Hammond had gone to Washington, D.C., to keep the land from falling into the hands of the Indians. Now [356] “the same people who made that protest seemed to be willing to abandon the place themselves,” in spite of the twenty-five thousand dollars of improvements that had gone in since. Hans Bayles was skeptical that a pile driver would solve their problems. Even if they could pile seven miles of riverfront, the quicksand bottom would not hold, and it would be expensive to keep the machine in repair. Furthermore, the expense of just maintaining the roads was more than they could handle, since the county was almost bankrupt. Gentiles controlled their government because of the partisan voting of the Saints. Still, he admitted that President Smith’s promise had been literally fulfilled: they had been doubly blessed by sticking to Bluff. President Hammond reiterated that he was subject to the will of the Church authorities, but if left to himself he would move to Moab.170
At this point the bishop offered to step down if the authorities felt a younger man should be bishop. “But he did not wish to shrink nor resign unless it was thought better for him to do so.” After such free discussion the authorities decided to consider the matter at the meeting of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve in the Salt Lake Temple in three days.171
In that meeting the Church leaders were as divided as they had always been on Bluff. Francis Hammond had sent a letter, which was read, stating that those who wanted to leave were not going to leave the county, just the town. A letter from Marion Lyman urged that those who wanted to go should go. “He did not think that Bluff would go to pieces if all the settlers were given their liberty.” Brigham Young Jr. recited how much [357] better the Indians in the area were. The settlers, he felt, were no longer in danger from them. But the meeting deadlocked, and in the end the Church leaders determined to send a commission to the site to determine its fate again.172
When Bishop Nielson returned to Bluff, the dry fields told the tale. Many people still talked about moving and were disappointed the bishop brought no final word.173 It looked as if a fruit crop could be salvaged, but that was all. When Jens reported the condition of his ward at the stake conference in Monticello, he exaggerated when he said Bluff’s farmers raised a half-crop.174 The yields in Monticello and Verdure, on the other hand, never looked better. The farmers there were expecting forty bushels of wheat per acre and up to seventy bushels of oats.175 Meanwhile the residents of Bluff waited in suspense for the commission of General Authorities to arrive. The visit was delayed, however, due to the heat of the season and the poor health of some of the visitors.
In the meantime, Walter C. Lyman had returned to Bluff after an absence of seventeen years, and Platte’s half-brother had a dream. It was about White Mesa, the spot about halfway between Bluff and Monticello that Francis Hammond and others had tried to develop in 1885. Lyman saw a city there and had come south to build it. In September, Walter, Platte, and Jody Lyman, who had returned with his brother, scouted the mesa and staked their claims. Had the Carlisles still been in the county they would [358] have had something to say about it, but the drought of the previous years had driven them out, leaving the land uncontested again. This time the idea looked possible. As Albert Lyman put it, “I am infatuated with it,” especially when the alternative was the endless digging in the ditch in Bluff.176
The bishop could be comforted that not all the townspeople had given in to the gathering momentum of their impending release. Kumen Jones stood squarely behind him in maintaining the town. And the bishop’s son Joe refused to believe the approaching authorities were going to release them. He insisted the Apostles would tell them to stay, “and that is what he was prepared to do.”177
Finally the days of judgment arrived. Elders Brigham Young Jr., Anton H. Lund, and George Teasdale came to Bluff on Thanksgiving, soon after the quarterly stake conference in Moab, during which most wards reported such splendid crops that the Saints were advised to lay up a surplus. The visitors immediately inspected the ditch and Cottonwood Wash, then celebrated the holiday with the Saints at the schoolhouse. The next day, they called for meetings at two and six o’clock. After the congregation sang “Do What Is Right” to open the early meeting, Brigham Young Jr. looked them over and asked some pointed questions: “Why were the people called here if they were not wanted here? Why blessed and prospered above all other wards in the stake if they were not in the right place?” Their children were better off, he continued, for being raised in so [359] isolated a place with so few outsiders and apostates in it. Then he told them about his father, President Brigham Young, and the persecutions he had faced in his life. He had wanted a colony to be established between the Navajos and Utes, “to make friends with them and prepare them for the gospel when the time came.” Then the son taught the cooperative doctrines of his father: there were plenty of industries that could help the people of Bluff sustain themselves, such as a gristmill and a tannery. Some are dissatisfied when they aren’t allowed to “roam at [their] own sweet wills.” But the Saints were under obligations: if they could not forsake all, their faith was in vain. They would be judged for all their actions.178 The talk was a strong tonic or a bitter pill, depending on the disposition of those who heard it.
George Teasdale opened the six o’clock meeting with the subject “I want to be where the Lord wants me to be.” “You are here,” he told the Saints, “because the Lord wants you here. The Lord intended your children to be born here.” They should carry out the counsel of their president and bishop. At this point he “broke out and blessed Bishop Nielson for his integrity and blessed his numerous family.” “I prophesy . . . that those who want to remain at Bluff shall be blessed more than heretofore.” Anton Lund told them their mission was not a failure: they should look among themselves. There they were, all in the Church, without apostates among them. They were living in a place of refuge, not from persecution for polygamy anymore, but from sinful influences. “You need not fear you will be blessed here in Bluff . . . both spiritually and temporally.” [360] Brigham Young put the will of the conference into words as gently as he could. Echoing the phrase of his father above the site of Salt Lake City fifty years before, he declared, “This is the right spot.” If any wanted to leave, they could go, since no one should be held against his or her will. But Bluff was to be maintained. The ditch was useless, but they should study the issue: maybe a pump would work. “If united you can do all.” Then he called for the names of all those who were willing to remain and wrote them down in a notebook. Joe Nielson pinched John Rogers’s knee to remind him that was what he had predicted the Apostles would say.179 All present agreed to stay, some through choking emotions. They may not have liked it, but “there is, however, one consolation. That is that we know it is ‘the will of the Lord.’”180
Francis Hammond echoed Elder Teasdale’s theme. He wanted to be where the Lord wanted him to be. It seems he had been mistaken, he said, about the importance of Bluff. Now he felt converted to its cause. Brigham Young told them not to abandon the place to their enemies, but to raise their children in purity there. The Apostles blessed the congregation in the name of the Lord, the assembled Saints sang “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning,” and so ended the meeting.181
Church services the next two weeks were full of vigor. But when the ditch [361] committee met at the bishop’s house on the raw, chilly day of December 13, 1897, its members were not very enthusiastic. They still had no solution for their old, intimate problem.182 [362]
1. Francis A. Hammond, Journal, September 23, 1892; January 22, February 1 and 25, April 27 and 29, May 26 and 27, June 8, July 4, 1893; Francis A. Hammond, “Report from San Juan,” Deseret News, April 1, 1893, 470; Albert R. Lyman, Summaries of Each Year, 1893, book 1, pp. 84–85; Lambert, “Al Scorup,” 309; Peterson, Look to the Mountains, 104.
2. Hammond, Journal, July 23, 1893.
3. Albert R. Lyman, Summaries of Each Year, book 1, p. 137.
4. Hammond, Journal, January 15, 1895.
5. Hammond, Journal, July 23, 25, and 28, 1893; William B. Preston to Francis A. Hammond, July 1, 1893.
6. Hammond, Journal, July 17 and 20, August 9 and 14, 1893, hints at this, from which I have put together the plot. Francis Hammond may have tipped off the Monticellans, traveling there in early August.
7. Hammond, Journal, July 29, September 3, 1893, give both the quotes and the incidents; Albert R. Lyman, Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr., 56.
8. Hammond, Journal, July 30 to September 25, 1893.
9. Hammond, Journal, September 16 to December 9, 1893. My understanding of this medical episode was greatly aided by Dr. Peter Sundwall Sr.
10. Hammond, Journal, October 27, 1893; January 7, 1894.
11. Hammond, Journal, December 12 and 14, 1893.
12. Thirteen-year-old Albert R. Lyman’s journal for December 24, 1893, reads, “It is Christmas tomorrow but I do not expect any presents as the money panic is all over the United States, and it deprives us of the rights we would have with out it. Tonight is a very gloomy Christmas Eve. It is the only time I have wished that there was no Christmas.” The next day brought him two apples, a bunch of raisins, a package of candy, silk handkerchiefs, and a map of Colorado.
13. Hammond, Journal, December 25, 1893, to January 1, 1894.
14. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, December 5, 1893; January 6, 1894.
15. Hammond, Journal, January 27, 1893.
16. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 28, 1893.
17. Hammond, Journal, January 3, 1894.
18. Hammond, Journal, January 16, 1894; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, January 15, 1894.
19. C. L. Christensen, “Direct from San Juan,” Deseret News, December 22, 1894, 826.
20. San Juan Stake General Minutes, February 18, 1894.
21. Hammond, Journal, January 15, 1894; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, January 2, 1894.
22. “Utah Should Do Something,” Deseret News, February 9, 1895, in Journal History, February 9, 1895, 2–3; Hammond, Journal, March 9, 1897. Hammond proposed a law that would set San Juan County apart as a reserve “to prohibit people from resorting here for Indian relics and curios.”
23. Hammond, Journal, December 20, 1894.
24. Hammond, Journal, January 29, February 26, 1894.
25. See Hammond, Journal, April 11 and 20, May 3, November 15, 1894; April 17, 1895.
26. Hammond, Journal, March 3 to 12, 1894.
27. Albert R. Lyman, Summaries of Each Year, 1894, book 1, p. 98; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, February 20, 1896; Hammond, Journal, February 20, 1896.
28. Hammond, Journal, June 30, 1894.
29. Francis A. Hammond, “Homes in San Juan,” Deseret News, June 2, 1894, 763.
30. Silas S. Hammond, letter to Francis A. Hammond, July 25, 1892.
31. Hammond, Journal, April 17–18, 1894.
32. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, June 1, 1895. Peter Allan, “San Juan Stake Conference Report,” Deseret News, August 4, 1894, 210–11. Albert Lyman reported a sandstorm so thick in 1893 that he could not see a rod (16.5 feet) in front of him. See Albert R. Lyman, Journal, December 14, 1893. He also described a span of difficult days in March 1869 in this way: “Sun. 1. S[unday] S[chool] and meeting. It blowed all day and the sand blew. Mon. 2. School. Sand blew. Tues. 3. School. Sand blew. . . . I answered Joseph’s letter and sent for a pair of goggles.”
33. Allan, “San Juan Stake Conference Report,” 210–11.
34. Hammond, Journal, July 27, September 16 and 19, 1894.
35. Hammond, Journal, September 17, 1892.
36. Hammond, Journal, February 29, 1892.
37. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, July 23, 1895.
38. Albert R. Lyman, “Experiences and Impressions,” 1:142.
39. Albert R. Lyman, Indians and Outlaws, 100.
40. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, 1:30.
41. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, April 26, 1894. On occasion the tables were turned. Once when Lemuel Redd was on North Elk Mountain and could not find his sheep camp, Posey made him chop wood before he would give the disoriented man some food in his camp. See Arrington, Utah’s Audacious Stockman, 31.
42. Albert R. Lyman, “History of San Juan County,” 67.
43. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, 1892 summary; Albert R. Lyman, “History of San Juan County,” 75.
44. C. L. Christensen, “An Interpreter’s Experiences,” Deseret News, October 30, 1892, 657.
45. C. L. Christensen, letter to editor, Deseret News, May 20, 1893, 674.
46. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, vol. 1, pp. 36, 47, c. June 1893.
47. Hammond, Journal, August 4 and 25, 1893.
48. Hammond, Journal, September 12, 1893.
49. Hammond, Journal, February 11, 1891.
50. Hammond, Journal, October 20, 1891.
51. Hammond, Journal, February 21, 1892; November 11, 1893.
52. Hammond, Journal, August 15, 1893.
53. “Bluff Ward Manuscript History,” 1893.
54. Christensen, “Interpreter’s Experience.”
55. Hammond, Journal, February 10 to 20, 1894.
56. Francis A. Hammond, “Homes in San Juan,” Deseret News, June 2, 1894 (written May 6, 1894), 762.
57. Hammond, Journal, May 13, 1894.
58. Hammond, Journal, June 11, 1894; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, July 15, 1894.
59. Hammond, Journal, July 26, 1894.
60. Albert R. Lyman, “History of San Juan County,” 67. Moancoppy then demanded one hundred dollars in damages, which he never received.
61. Hammond, Journal, July 26 and 29, 1894.
62. Hammond, Journal, June 29, 1894.
63. Hammond, Journal, October 19, 1894.
64. Hammond, Journal, November 11, 1894.
65. C. L. Christensen, “Direct from San Juan,” Deseret News, December 22, 1894 (written December 2, 1894), 26–28; Willard Butt, “The Indian Invasion,” Deseret News, December 8, 1894, 795–96.
66. Christensen, “Direct from San Juan,” 26–28; Seymour B. Young, “The San Juan Situation,” Deseret News, December 15, 1894, 825–26; Butt, “Indian Invasion,” 795–96; “The Indian Invasion,” Deseret News, December 15, 1894, 804–5.
67. Reeve, “Lucinda Diantha Nielson Hyde,” 201.
68. Hammond, Journal, November 30, December 3, 1894.
69. Hammond, Journal, December 6, 1894; “The Indian Trouble,” Deseret News, December 6, 1894, in Journal History, December 6, 1894, 5–6; “The Indian Invasion,” Deseret News, December 8, 1894, 796; “Indian Invasion,” Deseret News, December 15, 1894, 804–5.
70. “Indian Invasion,” Deseret News, December 15, 1894, 804–5.
71. Hammond, Journal, December 12, 1894; “Indian Invasion,” Deseret News, December 15, 1894, 804–5.
72. Hammond, Journal, December 13, 1894.
73. Christensen’s recollections are quoted in McPherson, “Ute Invasion of San Juan County,” 49.
74. Eventually a bill passed Congress over Secretary Smith’s objections that allotted the Southern Ute Reservation to the Indians in severalty. This was carried out in 1899, but Ignacio and some others refused to do it. So the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation was created out of the western end of the previous reservation. See Thompson, “Unwanted Indians,” 196.
75. “Utes in San Juan,” Deseret News, December 22, 1894, 5; Hammond, Journal, January 10, 1895.
76. See Jensen, “Historical Study of Bluff City,” 94.
77. Kumen Jones, “Writings,” 188.
78. “San Juan Reopened,” Deseret News, November 7, 1895, in Journal History, November 7, 1895, 2.
79. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 2, 1896; Roring, Beautiful Bluff, 10.
80. Hammond, Journal, February 21 and 23, 1895.
81. San Juan Stake General Minutes, February 23, 1895; Roring, Beautiful Bluff, 3; Report of San Juan Stake Conference, Deseret Weekly, June 14, 1895, 805.
82. It is hard to tell if Jens leaned toward the Republicans or Democrats, though there are clues both ways. Francis Hammond lamented that many Democrats in the county could not vote due to the Edmunds Act. Father John Allan and William Adams were two who fit that category, so it may or may not have included Jens Nielson. On one occasion “Jens Nielson” gave a prayer at a local Democrat primary, but that is no guarantee he was a registered member. Also, his son Jens Peter was a Democrat, and sometimes he was referred to without his middle name, making it difficult to decide if it was the father or the son. Joe and Uriah Nielson were also Democrats. On the other side, the bishop probably subscribed to the Denver Republican, a partisan paper, and his son Francis became a strong Republican. See Hammond, Journal, July 1, 1893; September 18, 1896; September 1, 1898; Maxine Nielson, “Grandpa Uriah Nielson History,” 241.
83. Bluff Ward, General Minutes, July 19, 1891.
84. Hammond, Journal, July 1, September 2, October 13, 1893.
85. Hammond, Journal, November 7, 1893.
86. Hammond, Journal, April 14, 15, 27, 29, 1894.
87. Hammond, Journal, September 3 and 24, November 3 and 6, 1894.
88. Hammond, Journal, May 2, 1895.
89. Hammond, Journal, January 7, 9, 13, February 7, 1894; Platte D. Lyman, “Diary,” January 13, 1894.
90. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, September 7, 1895.
91. Hammond, Journal, November 1, 1895.
92. Palmer and Lisenby, “First Woman Elected,” 41.
93. Hammond, Journal, November 5 and 16, 1895.
94. Hammond, Journal, October 17, 1896; Palmer and Lisenby, “Law, Order, Print and Politics,” 66.
95. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 7, 1896.
96. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, February 22, 1896; December 13, 1897.
97. Peterson, Look to the Mountains, 104.
98. Utah District Court (San Juan County), Minutes, June 15, 1896.
99. Albert R. Lyman, “History of San Juan County,” 88.
100. See Hammond, Journal, March 9, 1896, in which the stake president tried to get Joe Nielson and Frank Adams to work out the solution to a financial disagreement outside of court.
101. See Albert R. Lyman, Journal, February 2, August 1902, for a case in which an Indian accused of stealing one of Sam Wood’s cow’s was let off for lack of evidence, and for an account of when Albert Lyman served on a jury in a trial for a sensational murder in La Sal. Also Albert R. Lyman, Journal, February 22, 1896, for the results of a case, probably in Bluff, in which two Gentiles were found innocent on charges of stealing one of Platte Lyman’s cows. Adelbert Raplee, a Gentile who sometimes made his home in Bluff, was the judge in the case. See also Austin and McPherson, “Murder, Mayhem, and Mormons,” 49; Utah District Court (San Juan County), Minutes, August 27, 1900; August 1902; April 21 and August 17, 1903.
102. Utah District Court (San Juan County), Minutes, September 27, 1897; Albert R. Lyman, “History of San Juan County,” 88.
103. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, April 23 to 28, 1896.
104. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, July, 1895.
105. Hammond, Journal, June 23, 1895.
106. Hammond, Journal, July 7, 1895.
107. Hammond, Journal, July 14, 1895.
108. Hammond, Journal, July 21, 1895.
109. Hammond, Journal, July 21, 1895.
110. Hammond, Journal, July 21, 1895.
111. Hammond, Journal, February 8, March 26, May 20, June 15, October 22, 1895; March 26, 1896; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, August 14, 1896.
112. Hammond, Journal, June 9, 1897.
113. Hammond, Journal, January 29, 1897.
114. Hammond, Journal, January 1 and 7, August 1, December 30, 1895; October 21 and 22, December 1, 7, and 8, 1896; Albert R. Lyman, “Bishop Jens Nielson,” 11; Amasa Jay Redd, Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr., 42, 51.
115. Kumen Jones, “Bishop Jens Nielson Sketch,” 21.
116. Hammond, Journal, February 25, 1895; August 23, 1896; “A Trip to Eastern Utah,” Deseret News, December 19, 1896, 28–29.
117. Reeve, “Lucinda Diantha Nielson Hyde,” 204.
118. Hammond, Journal, January 12, October 17, 1896.
119. Hammond, Journal, June 2, 1895.
120. Hammond, Journal, December 22 to December 26, 1894.
121. Hammond, Journal, June 2, August 1, 1895; Albert R. Lyman, “Experiences and Impressions,” 1:27, 124, 127; Albert R. Lyman, Summaries of Each Year, 1896, book 1, pp. 92, 117–18.
122. Wayne H. Redd, letter to L. H. Redd Sr., October 13, 1895.
123. Albert R. Lyman, “Hans Joseph Nielson,” 150.
124. Wayne H. Redd, Journal, September 1895.
125. Alice Redd, “Sketch of the Life of Caroline Nielson Redd,” 209.
126. Hammond, Journal, August 26, October 13, 14, 1895.
127. Hammond, Journal, December 30, 1895.
128. Hammond, Journal, August 24, 1895; March 22, November 9, 1896. See also Albert R. Lyman, Journal, May 28, 1896, in which he recorded that he “mended the bishop’s shoes, worked at them nearly all day. They were pretty badly to pieces, but I made them over.” The bishop was either practicing what he preached or tightening his belt during the depression. Most likely it was some of both.
129. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, May 27, 1896.
130. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, February 3, 1895.
131. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, February 3, 1895.
132. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, April 1898. See also Riis, Ranger Trails, 32–33. Riis was one of the first Forest Service rangers in the county. When he arrived in Monticello in 1907, he judged the people to be “clannish mountain folk” at first, and as a Gentile and government man he was “completely ignored in social functions.” But “in later years I came to know the true worth of those rugged Mormon settlers, an industrious, law abiding and loyal people whose friendship, once won, was well worth the price.”
133. Hammond, Journal, January 6, 1896; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, January 6, 1896.
134. McPherson and Mueller, “Divine Duty,” 336–37.
135. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, December 31, 1903.
136. Albert R. Lyman, “Josephine Catherine Chatterley Wood,” in Carter, Our Pioneer Heritage, 19:275. When Lyman’s wife had her first baby years later, the father reported that Aunt Jody “asked only $5.00 but however I got it I thought it worth ten.” Albert R. Lyman, Journal, December 31, 1903.
137. “‘Aunt Mary’ Nielson Jones.”
138. Hammond, Journal, June 7, 1892; March 13 to 18, 1894; June 9, 19, 1897.
139. Wayne H. Redd, Journal, December 12 to 18, 1898. Professionals were not much better when they came. The appropriately named dentist Dr. Pulford came to town in November of 1905. “Spent the forenoon having the live nerve bored out of that tooth,” Albert Lyman recorded, “and O My it did hurt.” See Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 16–18, 1905.
140. Albert R. Lyman, “Josephine Catherine Chatterley Wood,” 293, 299.
141. See McPherson, History of San Juan County, 271–72, for more San Juan home cures.
142. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, May 29, 1896.
143. McPherson and Mueller, “Divine Duty,” 350; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 20, 1897; April/May 1901; Hammond, Journal, June 8, 1888.
144. McPherson, History of San Juan County, 271.
145. Hammond, Journal, December 30, 1896.
146. Teachers in Bluff included Ida Lyman, 1880–81; Charles E. Walton, 1885–86; Thomas (J. L.?) Young, 1886–87; Emma Bayles, 1887–88; A. P. Sorenson, 1888–92; Peter Allan, 1892–93; William Allen, 1893–95; Vilate Elliott and Jennie Brimhall, 1895–96; Wilhelmina Isabel Wright, 1896–98 and 1899–1900.
147. See Martha Hammond, letter to F. A. Hammond, March 29, 1895.
148. Emma Bayles married Al Scorup, A. P. Sorenson married Mary Alice Hammond, and Isabel Wright married Joseph Hammond.
149. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, October 1896.
150. Elliott, Diary, October 30, 1899.
151. Hammond, Journal, February 22, 1897.
152. Hammond, Journal, March 20, 1899.
153. Hammond, Journal, February 11, 1897.
154. Hammond, Journal, January 24, February 4, 1898.
155. Hammond, Journal, January 16, 1896.
156. Hammond, Journal, September 18 to 24, 1896; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, September 18, 29, 1896.
157. Hammond, Journal, March 5, 1896; January 15, 1897; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, October 10, 1896.
158. Hammond, Journal, May 6, 11, 1897.
159. Francis A. Hammond, “News from San Juan,” Deseret News, May 1, 1897, 633.
160. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, April 18, 1897.
161. Hammond, Journal, April 29, 1897.
162. Hammond, Journal, May 13, 1897.
163. Hammond, Journal, June 13–17, 1897; Albert R. Lyman, Journal, July 19–30, 1897.
164. Hammond, Journal, July 19, 1897.
165. Hammond, Journal, July 20–25, 1897; Journal History, July 24, 1897.
166. Journal History, July 26, 1897, 2–3.
167. Journal History, July 26, 1897, 3–4.
168. Journal History, July 26, 1897, 4.
169. Journal History, July 26, 1897.
170. Journal History, July 26, 1897, 4–5.
171. Journal History, July 26, 1897, 5.
172. Journal History, July 29, 1897, 2.
173. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, July 25, 1897.
174. San Juan Stake General Minutes, August 23, 1897.
175. Hammond, Journal, August 21, 1897.
176. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, September 29, November 6, 1897.
177. Albert R. Lyman, “Hans Joseph Nielson,” 149.
178. The accounts of the visit of the Apostles and what they said are in Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 24 and 25, 1897; Hammond, Journal, November 24 and 25, 1897; and Bluff Ward, General Minutes, November 25, 1897.
179. Albert R. Lyman, “Hans Joseph Nielson,” 149.
180. Albert R. Lyman, Journal, November 25, 1897.
181. Hammond, Journal, November 25, 1897. See also Albert R. Lyman, “Bishop Jens Nielson: The Old Wagon,” 74. Lyman asserts in later accounts that the Apostles said those who settled on White Mesa were still considered as fulfilling their mission. There is no record of this in the contemporary sources, including his journal, President Hammond’s journal, and Bluff Ward, General Minutes.
182. Hammond, Journal, December 13, 1897.
